TEDBlog August, 2011 Archive
09 August 2011
The great penguin rescue: Dyan deNapoli on TED.com
A personal story, a collective triumph: Dyan deNapoli tells the story of the world’s largest volunteer animal rescue, which saved more than 40,000 penguins after an oil spill off the coast of South Africa. How does a job this big get done? Penguin by penguin by penguin … (Recorded at TEDxBoston, June 2011, in Boston, Massachusetts. Duration: 11:44.)
Watch Dyan deNapoli’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 1,000+ TEDTalks.
08 August 2011
Remembering Ray Anderson
Ray Anderson, the advocate of sustainability in business, died on Monday at age 77. Share his powerful TEDTalk — in which he explores the personal, ethical and practical motives for building a responsible business:
The company he founded, the carpet manufacturer Interface, “set what may well be the highest sustainability benchmark of any industrial company,” writes Joel Makower in a tribute on Greenbiz.com. Anderson led the company to think about every step along the manufacturing chain, down to their standing offer to recycle used carpet at the end of its life.
In the past ten years, Anderson delivered more than 1,000 speeches on the business case for sustainability. His talk at TED2009 has been seen hundreds of thousands of times and translated into 17 languages. He often ended his talks (as he did his TEDTalk) with this poem: “Tomorrow’s Child,” written by one of his employees, Glenn Thomas.
Tomorrow’s Child
By Glenn Thomas
Without a name; an unseen face
and knowing not your time nor place
Tomorrow’s Child, though yet unborn,
I met you first last Tuesday morn.
A wise friend introduced us two,
and through his shining point of view
I saw a day that you would see;
a day for you, but not for me
Knowing you has changed my thinking,
for I never had an inkling
That perhaps the things I do
might someday, somehow, threaten you
Tomorrow’s Child, my daughter-son
I’m afraid I’ve just begun
To think of you and of your good,
Though always having known I should.
Begin I will to weigh the cost
of what I squander; what is lost
If ever I forget that you
will someday come to live here too.
08 August 2011
The shareable future of cities: Alex Steffen on TED.com
How can cities help save the future? Alex Steffen shows some cool neighborhood-based green projects that expand our access to things we want and need — while reducing the time we spend in cars. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 10:13.)
Watch Alex Steffen’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 1,000+ TEDTalks.
05 August 2011
Talk and survey: Are we seeing the demise of guys? Philip Zimbardo on TED.com
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo asks, “Why are boys struggling?” He shares some stats (lower graduation rates, higher rates of unemployment) and suggests a few reasons — and challenges the TED community to think about solutions. (Recorded at TED2011, February 2011, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 4:47.)
Watch Phil Zimbardo’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 1,000+ TEDTalks.
05 August 2011
Fellows Friday with Walid Al-Saqaf
Walid asks:
Can Internet censorship of any particular content be justified under certain circumstances? Explain.
Click here to respond on Facebook now! Or join Walid’s live Q&A on TED Conversations August 5, 1pm to 2pm Eastern.
How did your journey in resisting censorship begin?
I come from Yemen, and in 2007 I developed a website called YemenPortal.net. This website is a news aggregator similar to, but of course much smaller in scale than, Google News. It handles several news websites on Yemen, bringing in content from government, opposition, independent news websites, blogs, videos, you name it — all having to do with Yemen.
I come from a journalistic background, and I also hold a degree in computer engineering, so I thought maybe I could merge the two together, and build a website that dynamically collects, aggregates and sorts information on Yemen. I thought of it as a contribution to my own country, and as a means to get my Master’s degree. Within a short time, the website had thousands of readers because it was something that no one had done before for Yemen.
I had ambitions that YemenPortal.net would be something of importance in the future. Unfortunately, in 2008 the Yemeni government became disgruntled because I did not filter out strongly worded opposition articles from certain websites. These websites were mostly hosted abroad, so the owners weren’t really persecuted — their websites were just blocked inside Yemen.
If you go to my website, you can see summaries of articles from other websites. People would click on the article links from my website, and go nowhere, because the articles are blocked. However, I still thought it was important for everyone to know what other websites are talking about. My idea was to ensure that everyone is represented. I didn’t want to act like the government does, filtering some viewpoints, while allowing others to be read.
Eventually my website itself got banned by the government. In trying to help others’ voices be heard, my own site was silenced. I realized I needed to investigate circumventing censorship, because if I couldn’t help myself, no one would help me.
That was when my journey in resisting censorship started. I fell first as a victim, but then I became an advocate for freedom of expression online.
That led to you developing alkasir, your software to circumvent censorship. How does it work?
Alkasir, which is an Arabic word meaning “the circumventor,” is a series of applications to help people access censored websites in their country. Alkasir started as a plugin for Firefox and Mozilla, developed into a web-based proxy on my own website, and then developed into another application as a pilot version, alkasir 1.1. I later developed 1.2 which is a much more advanced version of it. I have about 30,000 users worldwide — compared to many circumvention solutions, it’s not many — but it’s pretty substantial number. I have users in over 70 countries.
04 August 2011
Are we filtering the wrong microbes? Jessica Green on TED.com
Should we keep the outdoors out of hospitals? Ecologist and TED Fellow Jessica Green has found that mechanical ventilation does get rid of many types of microbes, but the wrong kinds: the ones left in the hospital are much more likely to be pathogens. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 5:25.)
Watch Jessica Green’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 1,000+ TEDTalks.
03 August 2011
How language transformed humanity: Mark Pagel on TED.com
Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of “social technology” that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 20:11.)
Watch Mark Pagel’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 1,000+ TEDTalks.
02 August 2011
Tuesday TEDx playlist: Four big ideas
Hundreds of talks from independently organized TEDx events around the world are published on the TEDxTalks website daily.
Each Tuesday and Thursday, we’ll choose four of our favorites, highlighting just a few of the enlightening talks from TEDx community, and its diverse constellation of ideas worth spreading. Browse all TEDxTalks here »
By analyzing the content of 15 millions books digitized by Google, Erez Lieberman Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michel discover cultural trends related to the evolution of grammar, censorship and epidemiology.
At TEDxTokyo, Akinori Ito shows off his “magic” liquid that turns plastic trash into usable energy.
TEDxTraverseCity’s Ellen Gustafson wants to help change the global food system by re-framing the global food crisis and linking the obesity epidemic with famine.
And Taylor Conroy teaches TEDxJuanDeFuca the key ingredients for starting a successful charity drive.
02 August 2011
TED Books hit Apple’s iBookstore
Great news: TED Books are now available on Apple’s iBookstore. It’s an exciting time for publishing, and we’re glad to work with Apple to make TED Books available to as many readers as possible. TED Books, which launched earlier this year, are an imprint of short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution. Shorter than traditional books, TED Books run fewer than 20,000 words each–long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting. They are $2.99. They will also continue to be available for the Kindle and can be read on all devices that use the Kindle reader app (including the Mac, iPad, iPhone, PC, Windows 7 smartphone, Android, and Blackberry). TED Books available on the iBookstore include The Happiness Manifesto: How Nations and People Can Nurture Well-Being by Nic Marks; Weekday Vegetarian: Finally, a Palatable Solution by Graham Hill with Alex Estes; Media Makeover: Improving the News One Click at a Time by Alisa Miller; Beware Dangerism! Why We Worry About the Wrong Things and What It’s Doing to Our Kids by Gever Tulley; Make Love Not Porn: Technology’s Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior by Cindy Gallop; Homo Evolutis: Please Meet the Next Human Species by Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans; and Aftercrimes, Geoslavery, and Thermogeddon: Thought-Provoking Words from a Lexicographer’s Notebook by Erin McKean.
02 August 2011
Wireless data from every light bulb: Harald Haas on TED.com
What if every light bulb in the world could also transmit data? At TEDGlobal, Harald Haas demonstrates, for the first time, a device that could do exactly that. By flickering the light from a single LED, a change too quick to for the human eye to detect, he can transmit far more data than a cellular tower — and do it in a way that’s more efficient, secure and widespread. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 12:52.)
Watch Harald Haas’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 900+ TEDTalks.
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