Hoping to submit your short film or video for Pangea Day? There’s still a month and a half before the deadline — plenty of time to get familiar with your new videocamera. From the Pangea Day site: We’re looking for films that will make us laugh, cry, and gasp. They can be fiction, nonfiction, real […]
Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, talks about our drive to overprotect our children — and spells out 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do. Allowing kids the freedom to explore, he says, will make them stronger and smarter and actually safer. This talk comes from TED University 2007, a pre-conference program […]
On May 10, 2008 -– Pangea Day -– we’re throwing a worldwide film festival. Screens in Cairo, Dharamsala, Kigali, London, New York City, Ramallah, Rio de Janeiro and Tel Aviv will be videoconferenced live to produce a 4-hour program of powerful short films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music. Pangea Day grew out of the wish […]
John Maeda (watch his 2007 TEDTalk) has been named the next president of the Rhode Island School of Design. An artist and a coder, Maeda is an enthusiastic connector of art and technology. In his supercool announcement video, he gives a sense of where he hopes to lead the school, saying: Technology has outpaced humanity, […]
In 2006, filmmaker Daphne Zuniga came to TED and made an independent movie about it — the talks, the hallway conversations, the connections and unmissable moments. Her film, The Future We Will Create, was released on DVD exclusively via NetFlix, where it became a hit, with more than 12,000 reviews so far. “I’ve kept it […]
This week, journalist Andrew Mwenda (watch his TEDTalk) launched a weekly newspaper, The Independent, in Kampala, Uganda. His journalism has been critical of the Ugandan government, and he writes in an email that the president warned off his first printer. From his email: we have been through a lot of hell. our launch was supposed […]
Lakshmi Pratury talks about letter-writing, and shares a series of notes her father wrote her before he died. This short talk may inspire you to set pen to paper too. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 4:09.) Watch Lakshmi Pratury’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it […]
Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, asks why we aren’t more compassionate more of the time. Through psychological experiments and a story of the Santa Cruz Strangler, he shows how we are all born with the capacity for empathy — but we sometimes choose to ignore it. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 13:13.) […]
Via the BPS Research Digest: A recent study on the long-term benefits of the Socratic method. In a study of 105 children, all around 10 years old, teachers spent an hour a week for 16 months teaching lessons based on philosophical inquiry. The philosophy-based lessons encouraged a community approach to “inquiry” in the classroom, with […]
In a lively performance, “mathemagician” Arthur Benjamin races a team of calculators to figure out 3-digit squares in his head, performs a massive mental calculation, and guesses a few birth days. How does he do it? He’ll be happy to tell you. (Recorded February 2005 in Monterey, California. Duration: 15:14.) Watch Arthur Benjamin’s performance […]
William Kamkwamba, a young Malawi man who designed and built a windmill for his family when he was 14 — and who spoke so memorably at TEDGlobal Africa this June — is profiled on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal in a story headined “A Young Tinkerer Builds a Windmill, Electrifying a Nation.” […]
Energy guru Amory Lovins lays out his plan for weaning the US off oil and revitalizing the economy in the process. It’s the subject of his book Winning the Oil Endgame, and he makes it sound fairly simple: On one hand, the deadly risks of continued dependency, and on the other, some win-win solutions. (Recorded […]
Artist Jonathan Harris (watch his TEDTalk) just launched his latest piece, The Whale Hunt. In this visionary, documentary work, Harris joins a family of Inupiat Eskimos on their annual whale hunt: I documented the entire experience [in] 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second […]
Philippe Starck talks about how life began in the soupe primordiale — but this week, researcher Helen Hansma of UCSB hypothesizes that molecules might have first turned into cells — life — while sheltered between sheets of mica dunked in that soup. Hansma’s “soup and a sandwich” theory was presented Tuesday at the annual meeting […]
Wielding laypeople’s terms and a sense of humor, Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann drops some knowledge about particle physics, asking questions like, Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones? Can the fundamental law, the so-called “theory of everything,” really explain everything? His answers will surprise you. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, […]
Legendary designer Philippe Starck — with no pretty slides behind him — spends 17 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question “Why design?” Along the way he drops brilliant insights into the human condition; listen carefully for one perfectly crystallized motto for all of us, genius or not. Yet all this deep thought, […]