Ushahidi’s new video explains how it crowdsources crisis information via text messaging and the web so citizens can easily access the latest reports (represented visually on GoogleMaps) and swiftly respond to crisis developments.

Initially a quick fix scraped together in two days to track violence following Kenya’s 2008 election, the open source platform has evolved to suit any location or situation — to spread news during the Gaza war, to audit elections in Afghanistan, to monitor medicine stockouts in Zambia, etc. For more on Ushahidi, check out co-founder Erik Hersman’s talk on reporting crisis via texting.

08 December 2009

Parallel universes and you: a short Q&A with David Deutsch

After his talk at TEDGlobal 2009, David Deutsch answered questions from TED Curator Chris Anderson. It was a short, but fascinating Q&A, so we thought we’d share it here on the TED Blog!

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

08 December 2009

A one-man world summit: Rory Bremner on TED.com

Scottish funnyman Rory Bremner convenes a historic council on the TEDGlobal stage — as he lampoons Gordon Brown, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and a cast of other world leaders with his hilarious impressions and biting commentary. See if you can catch a few sharp TED in-jokes. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 14:41)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/267J

Watch Rory Bremner’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.

04 December 2009

Meet Masahiro Kyushima, TED volunteer translator

In the next weeks, the TED Blog will shine the spotlight on the fantastic TED volunteer translators — offering a glimpse of the people whose efforts continue to enrich the Open Translation Project. Today, we’d like you to meet Masahiro Kyushima.

Tell us about yourself.

In my childhood, I was a trivia king, reading all image-attached entries of encyclopedias. Reading Hugo Gernsback, Jules Verne, and Sir Arthur C. Clarke got me into science fiction stories. The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey had a huge impact on me.

The Beatles broke up before I was interested in music, and my true musical god was Paul Simon. I copied his guitar styles a lot. In my college time, I got involved in a fusion music band as a drummer, so Steve Gadd became my second god. I also was an avid car driver participating in college rally car-racing events. Around the same time I discovered that I really enjoy fine arts at museums, and art became my true joy. So far I have been to about 100 museums, keeping up with all sorts of arts. I do a bit of painting myself as well.

I graduated from medical school and became a physician at Okinawa Chubu Hospital in Okinawa, Japan, where I have been working since. Now I am a cardiologist, and also the chief of medical informatics at our hospital. So I’m taking care of my patients at one time, and also watching screens of my Mac and Linux servers at another.

I also enjoy taking photographs, pottery-making and performing Japanese traditional tea service called “Chado” or “Sado.”

What drew you to TED?

While I was doing some research about the video podcast, I came across one of the TEDTalks, which was the TED Prize speech of James Nachtwey. I was shocked because, while dealing with humankind’s most serious and tragic events such as war, conflicts, health and environmental issues, his photographs were artistically beautiful. The discrepancy of tragedy and beauty living on a same image struck me, and introduced me to a taste of the framework of what the world really is all about. That shock drove me to dig into the TEDTalks more, and I became a regular viewer.

Personally, the intermingled existence of vast areas of knowledge at TED is a comfort to me, because I myself have fairly wide range of curiosity: technology (as an IT worker and a medical doctor), entertainment (as a musician), design (as a potter and a tea ceremony performer and an art enthusiast) and other areas. I feel this style of existence, of a broad spectrum of information mixed together, is very important in the era of the Internet, and will be the next style of knowledge. It’s the platform for inspiration and collaboration connected together.

Why do you translate?

I actually have two reasons to translate. One is just the same as TED itself: the talks are worth spreading. As a long-time networker and a person who wants to contribute to the Internet in some way, translating these ideas to my mother language and spreading them in Japanese society are a good practice of contribution.

Another reason is because I’m now preparing for a local TEDx event here in Okinawa, and I want to provide all the TEDTalks I will use with Japanese subtitles. In Japan, in order to spread these talks and ideas to the Japanese people, translation is essential. So, I’ve participated in the translation project myself, along with one of my friends who is bilingually fluent in English. While I was translating, I noticed that we needed a compact and active network of Japanese translators to systematically perform translations and reviews on mutual-aid basis. I started to volunteer for other translators’ reviews, and invited those translators to join in the mutual aid group which I made as a Google Group. One of my fellow translators, Akira Kakinohana, happens to be a programmer, and he wrote a couple of Perl scripts to handle the translation process on a shared Google Doc, which made our translations and reviews much easier than otherwise. Having the mutual-aid group and an efficient workflow using the shared Google Doc are the keys to how we handle the translation tasks fairly efficiently.

I am particularly grateful for those colleagues who joined my group and helped me by reviewing my translations.

As of today, we have about 170 Japanese translations done, and I feel I have enough TEDTalks to use in our TEDx. However, I can hardly stop translating more, because the contents of the new talks are really interesting for me personally. Now I’m translating them just for fun.

04 December 2009

Taking apart the art of puzzles: Scott Kim on TED.com

At the 2008 EG conference, famed puzzle designer Scott Kim takes us inside the puzzle-maker’s frame of mind. Sampling his career’s work, he introduces a few of the most popular types, and shares the fascinations that inspired some of his best. (Recorded at TEDIndia, November 2009, Mysore, India. Duration: 11:50)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/226Z

Watch Scott Kim’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.

03 December 2009

The ancient ingenuity of water-harvesting: Anupam Mishra on TED.com

With wisdom and wit, Anupam Mishra talks about the amazing feats of engineering built centuries ago by the people of India’s Golden Desert to harvest water. These structures are still used today — and are often superior to modern water megaprojects.(Recorded at TEDIndia, November 2009, Mysore, India. Duration: 17:14)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/216V

Watch Anupam Mishra’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.

02 December 2009

Cindy Gallop: Make love, not porn

ALERT: Talk contains graphic sexual language

At TED2009, audience member Cindy Gallop gave a 4-minute presentation that became one of the event’s most talked about. Speaking from her personal experience, she argued that hardcore pornography had distorted the way a generation of young men think about sex, and talked about how she was fighting back with the launch of a website to correct the myths being propagated.

Her talk’s graphic content means we can’t include it in the main run of full TEDTalks, which go by default to subscribers, including children. But we do think it’s worth posting here. Cindy is no prude, and not everyone will enjoy the graphic language on her website, MakeLoveNotPorn.com. But she has courageously (and wittily) raised an important issue, which we think deserves wider attention. Constructive comments welcome!

Embed this video: Use this code to post Cindy Gallop’s TEDTalk to your own site:

Tweet this talk: http://on.ted.com/206I

02 December 2009

Q&A with Cindy Gallop: Tackling porn, feminism and big dreams

Advertising whiz Cindy Gallop delivered one of the most talked-about talks at TED2009, so before it was posted the TED Blog had to snag her for an interview. Spirited as usual, she did not disappoint. Keep reading for answers on what people thought of MakeLoveNotPorn.com, Gallop’s bold position on feminism, her new project IfWeRanTheWorld and the story of her success.

What sort of feedback have you gotten on MakeLoveNotPorn.com? What do people think of it?

What MakeLoveNotPorn has in common with my other ventures is that when I encounter something that I feel very strongly about, I do something about it. Incidentally, that’s the whole point of my other venture IfWeRanTheWorld. It’s all about turning good intentions into action, being a very action-oriented person myself.

As I make clear in my talk, MakeLoveNotPorn is designed to address an issue that would never have crossed my mind if I had not encountered it within my personal life and specifically, because I date younger men who tend to be in their twenties, who are part of Generation Y. In this context, when I encountered this issue personally, I really felt that I wanted to do something about it. That is why I created MakeLoveNotPorn.com, and then welcomed the opportunity to launch it at TED.

I will say that I was extremely nervous before I gave my TEDTalk, and I was nervous for two reasons. The first is that I had absolutely no idea how MakeLoveNotPorn.com would be received. I talked to a few people about it in the process of conceiving the idea and then executing it, but predominantly friends of mine. It had received a generally very positive response, but I obviously still had no idea how the wider world would view it. The second reason I was nervous was I knew that in order to launch this I was going to have to really launch it, in the sense that I was going to have to be straightforward in order to have people understand why this was so necessary. I made a deliberate decision to be very frank in the language and the terminology that I used. This isn’t an issue that one can fence around if you want there to be complete clarity and understanding of what makelovenotporn.com is designed to address.

I was enormously gratified by the extraordinarily positive response I received at TED. The talk was obviously BoingBoing’ed immediately. Mark, from BoingBoing, told me it was the highlight of his first day at TED. The Twitter stream went mad. Robin Williams came up to me during the coffee break afterwards, told me how wonderful he thought it was and did an entire ten-minute comedy routine around it, which was terrific. But what I was really pleased about was that for the remaining three days of TED, loads of people came up to me and said it was fantastic. And they said it was fantastic in a number of contexts. Parents were particularly struck by it, and a lot of them said to me that they’d forwarded the site to their 16-year-old daughter or 18-year-old son. I think they particularly welcomed the fact that they could forward the link on without needing to have the conversation themselves, which is precisely why I began the site.

A number of people said that while they love the fact that TED covers science, art and technology, touching on the area of human relationships in the way that I did was really welcomed. A number of young people, and lots of the TED Fellows, said to me, “Oh my God! I love it. That is absolutely what I’ve encountered myself.” So, actually, the response at TED itself was absolutely wonderful in terms of having the audience understand and appreciate what this was intended to do.

Also, the site is very nascent at the moment. I put it up with no money. All you can do there is leave comments, send in your own porn world/real world ideas, and you can write to info@makelovenotporn.com. But judging by the comments that started appearing, I can see that MakeLoveNotPorn.com has achieved what I wanted it to, which is that it’s gotten to young people out in the mainstream, beyond the more TED intelligentsia-inclined audience. I’ve had a huge amount of submissions from people sending in their own porn world/real world ideas. These are very interesting to read, because while the vast majority of them are screamingly funny, some of them are also very serious and very heartfelt. One interesting thing, for me, was that I designed MakeLoveNotPorn to be deliberately gender-equal. It’s talking to men and women equally. A lot of men have submitted ideas that are much more about the male experience and the false expectations of men that porn engenders, which made me realize that when I do develop the site further, I will need to encompass the male experience more. I’ve got fantastic input there.

Also, MakeLoveNotPorn is very much a global concept. I work globally as a consultant, and I’ve encountered a great response to this from people in other countries. It’s absolutely reflected in the visitors to the site as well. I’m not actively promoting MakeLoveNotPorn at the moment because I don’t have the resources and I don’t have a lot to send people to yet. Nevertheless, I monitor it on Google and it pops up on French blogs, Chinese blogs, Greek blogs. One of the last emails I received was from a young guy in Morocco who wrote to me — by the way, when people write to info@makelovenotporn.com, they have no idea who they’re writing to and I identify as myself when I write back. Anyway, this young guy wrote to say, “Thank you so much. Young people in Morocco are like young people in the US, they are heavily influenced by porn. Now at last I can tell my friends how to make love to a girl, thanks to your wonderful website.” And I just love getting emails like that.

So, what’s next?

I have further plans for development and promotion based on finding far-sighted and broad-minded investors. For the time being I’m very pleased with the response that MakeLoveNotPorn has received, both in terms of overall recognition of the issue and in getting to exactly the audience I wanted to get to.

Your talk and this project seem to convey the words and ideas of a very empowered woman. Do you consider yourself to be a feminist?

I consider myself a rampant feminist. I deplore the shying away that can go on, within women, from the term “feminist.” I am, absolutely, all about being a feminist. My personal cause and platform, if you like, is women’s rights and women’s issues. In the context of my other web venture IfWeRanTheWorld (MakeLoveNotPorn is my secondary venture), if I ran the world, I would help the cause of women everywhere. Unfortunately, that embraces a huge spectrum of problems and issues, a very fractional amount of which I donate money to at the moment and which, when IfWeRanTheWorld is up and operational, I absolutely want to address myself.

Also, I like to describe myself as a proudly visible member of the most invisible segments of our society — older women. I’m 49. I make an active point of telling people how old I am, as often as possible, because I’d like to confound expectations of what an older woman should be, look and act like. I say that because it’s taken me 49 years to feel this good about myself. As women, from the moment we are born, everything around us, from a socio-cultural perspective, conspires to make us feel insecure about absolutely everything to do with ourselves — our looks, our bodies, whether people like us, whether boys like us. In many ways, an overarching wish of mine is that, if I ran the world I would give every woman the confidence that she deserves, to feel empowered to live her life the way she wants to live it. The fact is that girls are massively constrained in other parts of the world, but are constrained in First World countries as well. That desire infuses an awful lot of what I do.

I absolutely get involved in women-specific areas within my industry. I work with Advertising Women of New York, with Girls in Tech. I provide advice and help on a regular basis to many, many women on their personal lives, career, business ventures, particularly younger women who, very flatteringly, see me as a role model. I do everything I can to help them. That is something that I feel very strongly about. I’m a rampant feminist and proud to call myself a feminist.

02 December 2009

The hunt for a supermassive black hole: Andrea Ghez on TED.com

With new data from the Keck telescopes, Andrea Ghez shows how state-of-the-art adaptive optics are helping astronomers understand the universe’s most mysterious objects — black holes. She shares evidence that a supermassive black hole may be lurking at the center of the Milky Way. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 16:26)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/204M

Watch Andrea Ghez’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.

01 December 2009

Raise your awareness on World AIDS Day

Every year, on December 1, the globe comes together on World AIDS Day to learn more about the virus and to show support for those have been infected. Currently, there are approximately 33 million people living with HIV, while stigma and prejudice continue to cripple educational efforts in many countries.

To increase our awareness of the effect of the AIDS virus on the world and on specific individuals, and to help understand it’s spread and preventative measures, we’d like to offer three TED Talks, each capturing a different aspect of this global issue.

Hans Rosling on HIV: New facts and stunning data visuals

Kristen Ashburn’s photos of AIDS

Emily Oster flips our thinking on AIDS in Africa