TEDBlog March, 2011 Archive
11 March 2011
55 TEDTalks now on Hulu, with more to come …
Are you a Hulu fan? We’re adding the TEDTalks archive to Hulu’s great video library, starting with 55 TEDTalks — including the first talks released from TED2011 last week!
Head to hulu.com/tedtalks to browse, review and discuss — and stand by as we build the collection.
11 March 2011
How the market can keep streams flowing: Rob Harmon on TED.com
From TEDxRainier: With streams and rivers drying up because of over-usage, Rob Harmon has implemented an ingenious market mechanism to bring back the water. Farmers and beer companies find their fates intertwined in the intriguing century-old tale of Prickly Pear Creek. (Recorded at TEDxRainier, November 2010, in Seattle, WA. Duration: 08:47)
Watch Rob Harmon’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 800+ TEDTalks.
11 March 2011
Fellows Friday with Neha Gupta
Interactive Fellows Friday Feature!
Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via Facebook. This week, Neha asks:
Would you trust a machine to make decisions in your life ranging from movies you would like to watch, to deciding birthday presents, to choosing a place to work, or maybe even your future life partner?
Click here to respond!
Tell us about your online tutoring program, EachOneTeachOne.
EachOneTeachOne is based on the Facebook platform. People spend something like eight billion minutes on Facebook each day, and each day the number is increasing. Most of the time people are just browsing around, updating statuses and stuff like that.
If you are on Facebook and you add the EachOneTeachOne app, the application will send you a ping or request that such-and-such a person is online and he might need you as a tutor. So if you have time you can teach him. Basically, a Skype connection will open between you and the person and that’s how you’ll communicate. It’s on a completely ad hoc basis, and you can state your preferences about what you want to teach or learn. The system does the matching for you, and it connects the right kind of people together.
We are still working out the details on some issues like anonymity — particularly for the students, but also for the teachers. We don’t want students annoying teachers all the time if they keep pinging you. So we want to create a layer of anonymous IDs in between the student and teacher.
EachOneTeachOne is there on Facebook, but it’s not currently very active. I started it as an idea with a group of graduate students. It started off really well and people really liked it, but I could not devote a lot time to it after that. I’m already committed to my PhD program, and I want to finish that first.
It’s definitely an area with a lot of potential for education, though.
You’ve said you want to use IT and social media for social good. Has social media gone bad?
Yeah, I have really strong thoughts on that. I think Facebook is quite addictive and it’s quite a waste of time. One of my friends calls it “Fakebook.” I think people use it for personal propaganda. With Facebook we know every little thing that each person in our lives has done, and I think that affects how you make your decisions in your day-to-day life. I think you become more influenced by people, subconsciously or consciously. I believe it increases herd behavior.
EachOneTeachOne was developed to better utilize the time that you are on Facebook. EachOneTeachOne is not just on Facebook, though. Facebook is a platform on which it can be used, but EachOneTeachOne is independent.
10 March 2011
The birth of a word: Deb Roy on TED.com
MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language — so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son’s life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch “gaaaa” slowly turn into “water.” Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn. (Recorded at TED2011, March 2011, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 19:52)
Watch Deb Roy’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 800+ TEDTalks.
10 March 2011
WEF announces 2011 Young Global Leaders
The World Economic Forum has announced the selections of their 2011 Young Global Leaders. Young Global Leaders “represent the future of leadership, coming from all regions of the world and representing business, government, civil society, arts and culture, academia and media, as well as social enterpreneurs.” Among them, you’ll find several TED speakers and TED Fellows:
- Inventor Saul Griffith
- Development economist and TED Fellow Sophal Ear
- Social entrepreneur Shaffi Mather
- Activist Ory Okolloh
- Founder of Carolina for Kibera and TED Fellow Rye Barcott
- Author and TED Prize winner Dave Eggers
- Kiva.org co-founder Jessica Jackley
- Game designer and author Jane McGonigal
09 March 2011
Photo: JR hanging out onstage becomes a piece of abstract art
Photoblogging Mike’s picks: TED’s photo editor Mike Femia points us to this stunning shot of JR waiting around during rehearsals on the TED stage. Femia says: “The truly oversized onstage TED logo this year became like a piece of stage furniture. People could play with it like a physical object, as seen in this photo of TED Prize winner JR waiting backstage for his rehearsal. This is the photo exactly as it came out of Duncan’s camera.”
Photo: TED / James Duncan Davidson
09 March 2011
Let’s use video to reinvent education: Salman Khan on TED.com
Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises — and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do you “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help. (Recorded at TED2011, March 2011, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 20:27)
Watch Salman Khan’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 800+ TEDTalks.
08 March 2011
Join this TED Conversation: How will you take part in JR’s TED Prize wish?
TED curator Chris Anderson asks:
First, if you haven’t seen it yet, watch the amazing TED Prize speech given by French street artist JR. He’s initiating a spectacular global art project that anyone can participate in. But how? This is up to the creative imagination of people around the world.
Join this conversation with Chris and the members of the TED community >>
08 March 2011
More lo-fi photography from TED2011
In the middle of TED, I’m almost inseparable from my big Nikons. In the spirit of continuing my little lo-fi TED photography project, however, I kept snapped off a few frames every time I pulled out my iPhone to stay in touch with the rest of the media team during the event. Here’s a batch of nine from Long Beach.
James Duncan Davidson was the main stage photographer for TED2011 in Long Beach.
08 March 2011
Pics: TED viewing party in outer space
When we asked astronaut Cady Coleman to speak to TED2011 from the International Space Station, she asked us: “Will I be able to see a little bit of TED?” We thought: awesome! Our video engineer George Riley talked us through the options in an email thrillingly titled “Watching TED2011 in space?” He writes:
We coordinated with NASA to make sure that they could handle the video file format and had the required bandwidth to upload video files to the space station. Then NASA had to schedule the upload of this video ‘payload’ to the space station. As we were live-streaming the event, we captured the stream to disk in an mp4 file and uploaded it to our archive on Akamai immediately after the session was completed. We provided NASA with their own account to download the video file directly from Akamai via FTP. And then NASA uploads the video to space station.
It worked — and here’s proof. Shuttle crew members above: Commander Scott Kelly, Cady Coleman and Michael Barratt; below, Paolo Nespoli, Oleg Skripochka and Coleman.
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