23 October 2009

Start your own FabLab: $1,499

At TED2006, Neil Gershenfeld gave a fun and fast-paced introduction to the FabLab -- a miniature fabrication plant for making pretty much anything. Gershenfeld's pioneering FabLab at MIT cost a cool million bucks, thankyouverymuch. He's been spreading the idea of smaller FabLabs around the world -- from urban Boston to the Takoradi Technical Institute in southwestern Ghana.

But since this talk was given in 2006, it's also become more affordable to start a mini FabLab at home or school -- like the starter kit described in this blog post:

This Christmas season,you could buy a loved one an HDTV, a low-end MacBook, or a suite of tools that enable them to create anything they can imagine.

There's a 3D printer, a 2D plotter and a 3D mill (the Unimat 6-in-1 tool system). As blogger Joseph Flaherty says: "The educational applications of these tools are very exciting, and can help bridge the gap between Lego Mindstorms and having to wait for machine shops to provide parts for you." Check out the blog for more details: "For the price of a TV you can start a FabLab" >>

11 September 2009

Hypnotic music: Vishal Vaid on TED.com

Vishal Vaid and his band explore a traditional South Asian musical form in this mesmerizing improv performance. Sit back and let his music transport you. (Recorded at TED2006, in Monterey, California. Duration: 13:37)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/2y

Watch Vishal Vaid's performance 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.

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18 June 2009

Designing the classroom of the future on the Open Architecture Network

Via TEDPrize.org: 2006 TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair recently wrote to update us on the amazing success of this year's Open Architecture Challenge. The challenge was for teams of teachers, students, architects and designers to work together to design the classroom of the future for a school of their own choosing. Tens of thousands of participants and hundreds of schools from 45 countries submitted their designs.

The submission period ended on June 1 and will now go through a three step jury process. The winners will be announced in the fall.

Equally as exciting is the groundbreaking of the SIDAREC community center - the first winner of our OAN challenge - tomorrow in Kenya.

The Open Architecture Network is truly helping make innovative design more accessible.

09 March 2009

Design for the minds of the future -- a new contest!

Architecture for Humanity wants your ideas and designs for the classrooms of the future. Their 2009 Open Architecture Challenge invites students, teachers and architects to submit their designs for classrooms in the places that need them most. You don't have to be a licensed architect, just submit the best possible plans and they'll find you a team.

The plans must be site specific and the designer can partner with a school of their choice, but AFH offers three very deserving partners. Orient Global needs design solutions for classrooms in high-density, urban India. Modular Building Institute and Blazer Industries want to produce relocatable classrooms to get around traditional school district constraints. Finally, Building Tomorrow is asking for classrooms that would work in remote and rural areas of Uganda. Challenging scenarios all three, but bursting with possibilities.

From Cameron Sinclair: Register by May 4, and enter by June 1. The winning team receives $5,000, AND the selected school receives $50,000 to renovate their spaces to become more sustainable. Runners-up get $1K/$10K. If you have any questions on how to enter, feel free to email me or visit the site for more details.
Cheers,
Cameron

The competition is hosted through the Open Architecture Network that was born from Cameron Sinclair's 2006 TED Prize wish. To discover more about the organization and humanitarian design watch his 2006 TEDTalk:

15 November 2007

Time to get your XO laptop, and to give one

Since Nicholas Negroponte presented his idea for a "100-dollar-laptop" at TED2006, the project has been going through many ups and downs, enthusiasms and criticisms, and had occupied a lot of media space.

Xolaptop The XO laptop is now here. The cost at this stage is nearly double, but the machine is awesome. Mass production started earlier this month in a Quanta manufacturing plant near Shanghai, and while a few countries such as Uruguay and Mongolia will buy them bulk and distribute them in schools, you -- but only if you live in the US and Canada -- can also buy one until November 26. Actually, two: you can get one if you donate another one to a child in a developing nation. Smart idea. Total cost: $399 plus shipping, with $200 considered a tax-deductible donation. Go to the Give One Get One site. Twelve days to go. Expectations are that the first release of 25'000 will sell out pretty fast.

13 November 2007

Peter Gabriel's "Hub"

Witness, the non-profit led by Peter Gabriel (watch his TED2006 talk) has launched "The Hub", an online platform allowing anyone to use camcorders, cell phones and cameras to upload, share, and discuss human rights-related footage, as well as organize advocacy campaigns. A few months ago, announcing the project, Peter had described it as "a sort of YouTube + Wikipedia for human rights" intended to make human right abuses "not forgotten nor discarded".

12 October 2007

TEDsters talk about Al Gore's impact

As congratulations for Al Gore, 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner, pour in from the TED community, we asked people who saw Gore's TED2006 presentations to talk about the impact his talks had on them. This is the first in a series, to be posted throughout the day.

Al Gore's talk at TED 2006 was a turning point in my life. -- David S. Rose

I was actually crying for most of it; I could not believe I didn't know that our world was in jeopardy, I couldn't believe how much had already gone wrong without me knowing about it. -- Will Shipley

Al Gore’s talk at TED opened my eyes to what I needed to do for my grandchildren’s generation, and I now consider the impact we have on our earth in every venture we undertake. -- Howard L. Morgan

Gore's TED presentation on the climate crisis was at once riveting and inspiring -- his passion was so evident -- it prompted me to share the talk with our children, and our eldest, Charlie, now 11, has become a one-man global warming marketing machine. Charlie has created his own PowerPoint presentation, which he shares with virtually everyone he meets. -- Jeff Levy

Al Gore was the first to complement our work on Stormblade at his breakfast meeting, which was hugely encouraging and that really spurred me on to persevere, as a result of which we eventually got funding to continue the project which will in the end play a huge role in reducing global carbon emissions. -- Viktor A. Jovanovic

Al Gore's passion for spreading the word about man-made climate change is a signal that humanity still has a chance. -- Ann Willoughby

No one instance in my previous 53 years has clarified my thinking and simultaneously called me both to action and to an appreciation of the momentous importance of an issue like the TED night two years ago when Al Gore gave his Inconvenient Truth presentation. -- Jeff Studley

12 October 2007

Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize

This morning, Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change." Gore will be sharing his prize money with the Palo Alto-based Alliance for Climate Protection.

At TED2006, Gore delivered to a rapt audience the seminal slide show that would later that year form the core of his blockbuster documentary An Inconvenient Truth. He followed it up with a second talk at the end of the conference showing ways of turning climate concern into action.

Throughout the day we'll be offering tributes to the impact of that speech on those present at TED2006 -- and the way the impact has spread throughout the world.

08 October 2007

Speaker updates: Craig Venter, Jeff Han

Updates from TED speakers:

After a whirlwind of media speculation over the weekend following a story by The Guardian, biologist Craig Venter (watch his TED2005 speech) will announce today at the annual meeting of his institute in San Diego that his team has built a synthetic chromosome, using lab chemicals. "A giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes", writes the newspaper.
Mr Venter's autobiography, "A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life" is scheduled to be published in two weeks.

At TED2006 computer scientist Jeff Han demonstrated his prototype of a revolutionary multitouch screen (watch video). At TED2007 he brought along a larger, wall-size version that TEDsters could try out. The interactive media wall, built by Han's company Perceptive Pixel, will be sold by Nieman Marcus in the US. Price tag: $100,000 USD.

25 September 2007

MacArthur "genius" grant to TEDster Saul Griffith

Saul Griffith (watch his TEDTalk) has been awarded a 2007 MacArthur "genius" grant.

Griffith is one of the brains behind Instructables, a community website that lets users share directions for ... almost anything, from building your own home lathe to "How to Kiss." His think-tank design firm, Squid Labs, has invented an array of new devices and materials -- such as a "smart" rope that senses its load, or a machine for making low-cost eyeglass lenses through a process inspired by a water droplet -- and has now spun off several separate companies to dig deeper into some of the technologies it has pioneered, including Potenco, which makes the groovy pull-string power source for the XO laptop.

Look for other talks on TED.com from MacArthur grantees, including Majora Carter (2005), Anna Deavere Smith (1996) and Amy Smith (2004). With more to come ...

14 September 2007

10 May 2008: Pangea Day

When she was awarded the 2006 TED Prize, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim expressed a wish: a global acceptance of diversity, mediated through the power of film. (Watch her speech.)

The project is taking off, and its ambition level is spectacular. On May 10, 2008, Pangea Day, sites in New York City, Rio, London, Dharamsala, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Kigali will be video-conferenced live to produce a 4-hour program of powerful films, supplemented by visionary speakers, and global musicians.

The purpose: to use the power of film to promote better understanding of our common humanity. A global audience will watch through the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones. Yes, of course, movies alone can’t change the world. But the people who watch them can.

To start the process, a short Pangea Day trailer (2:30 min) has just been given front-page exposure on YouTube, inviting anyone to submit their films. Pangea is seeking films "that provoke, entertain and inspire". "Images are powerful to divide, but also to unite", says the trailer. Here it is:

17 August 2007

Low-tech, high-impact design at Amy Smith's IDDS

Not all inventions need to be grandiose, complex things, Amy Smith said at TED2006: sometimes they can be simple and smart ideas that just help a lot of people (watch her speech - read summary). That's the philosophy behind her first International Development Design Summit (IDDS), which just took place at MIT, where she teaches and heads the D-Lab (understand the "D" as placeholder for both Design and Development).

The IDDS is not a conference. It's a monthlong collaborative learning program, as Jonathan Greenblatt describes in a nice wrap-up he wrote for WorldChanging:

People from locales as disparate as Brazil, Ghana, Haiti, Pakistan, and Tibet converged on MIT for the program: a month of intensive collaboration and learning. Participants self-organized into teams and were paired with mentors from top-notch design firms such as Continuum and IDEO. IDDS's rich classroom experience involved case studies and lectures taught by MIT faculty, as well as development experts (...) IDDS put forth incredibly basic design criteria. Teams were required to create innovations to serve a clear development need, to use locally available materials and to do so at a low cost.

The end products offer fresh takes on old problems, including an off-grid refrigeration unit tailored for rural areas, a low-cost greenhouse from recycled materials, and microbial power sources (a list of all the IDDS projects is available here).

Greenblatt offers more details on a specific product designed to enable efficient and hygienic water transport:

Typically, women and children in rural settings often can journey up to six miles daily to retrieve water for their families. They frequently return to their homes carrying between 20 to 40 pounds on their backs or heads in unsound, unwieldy and often unclean vessels such as petroleum cans or ceramic pots. It's a ritualized behavior that sustains the cycle of disease, reduces human productivity and creates tremendous physical strain. An IDDS team created a striking device, SODIS Safiri, to deal with these challenges. (...) Water is carried in ergonomic, low-cost plastic pouches that can be worn like apparel. Imagine a "backpack" that can be manufactured for five dollars and efficiently bear up to four liters, or a poncho that can carry twice that amount at a cost of only seven dollars. Along with improving transport efficiency, the SODIS Safiri device capitalizes on the otherwise non-productive return journey: the transparent design facilitates solar disinfection (SODIS) of the water so that the water can be consumed upon arrival at the village. While some contaminants cannot be handled solely by ultraviolet rays, this zero-cost approach could be sufficient in many non-industrial locations where basic microbial contamination creates diseases.

Brilliant. Simple. Relevant. I can imagine Amy Smith smiling in the back of the room while the students presented this idea.

12 August 2007

Wired's Anderson on Lomborg's "Cool It"

Wired editor Chris Anderson got an advance copy of Bjorn Lomborg's upcoming book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, and his summary is: read it, but don't follow his advice.

Lomborg (watch his TED2005 speech) argues that although global warming is clearly happening and is human-caused, the debate over what to do about it has been polluted by way too much bad science, non-science, inflamed rhetoric and outright fibs.

In the book, the Danish political scientist offers numerous examples of how much of the rhetoric over the effects of climate change doesn't stand up to scrutiny (for example: the most likely effect of climate change would be to increase, not decrease, the amount of ice in Antarctica).

"It's time to put the debate over whether human-driven climate change is happening behind us and instead focus on technologies to decarbonize the economy," writes Anderson. But climate change is only one of three strong reasons to do this, he adds: the others are economics (rising direct and indirect costs of oil and carbon fuels) and geopolitics (oil revenues prop up bad governments around the world).

There is a fourth reason that Anderson forgets, and which has been convincingly put forth by Al Gore in his TED2006 speech: it's a moral imperative.

18 July 2007

"100-dollar laptop" could go commercial by September

Olpclaptop For all those who, seeing the first "100-dollar laptops," have wondered "when can I get one?" the answer is: sooner than expected.

One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte said this week during a speech in Geneva, Switzerland, that a retail version of the laptop may be commercially available in September 2007, according to a report published by local blog GenevaLunch. Negroponte presented the laptop project at TED2006 (watch video or read summary) and had already spoken of the possibility of a commercial rollout, suggesting however a longer time-horizon. The laptop may be sold under a "buy one, pay two" model (the second going to a kid in a developing country).

Currently, 7,000 of the computers are in use, said Negroponte. He expects to see this figure grow to 1 million by the end of the year. And being the ambitious visionary we know, he believes that within five years -- if not sooner -- OLPC could account for 20 percent of the world's computer production ... Rolling out large numbers of computers could be made easier by last week's announcement that OLPC and Intel -- which until then had pursued competing inexpensive computers for developing countries (OLPC's laptop is built around a chip by AMD, Intel's main competitor) -- have agreed to work together.

09 July 2007

Defeating aging: Aubrey de Grey's handbook

British biogerontologist, computer scientist and twice TED speaker Aubrey de Grey has just finished a book, "Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime", where he details his controversial claim that "we could defeat aging".

Cheat sheet: Aubrey went on stage at TEDGLOBAL05 (video) and then at TED06 saying (I'm oversimplifying) that aging, like a disease, can be cured; that it is essentially a set of accumulating molecular and cellular transformations in our bodies, caused by metabolism, that eventually lead to pathology and kill us. Therefore, it could be approached "as an engineering problem": identify all the components of the variety of processes that cause tissues to age, and design remedies for each of them. He calls the approach "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" (SENS).

The book, co-written with his assistant Michael Rae, will be released September 4 by St Martin's Press. We e-mailed with Aubrey last week.

Aubrey, are you feeling older than last year?

Not really -- and that's despite the fact that my schedule has become even more punishing. I think the fulfilment I derive from spearheading the push to save so many lives somehow gives me the vitality to cope.

How has your research progressed since your TEDGLOBAL05 and TED06 speeches?

The Methuselah Foundation has gone from strength to strength. The biggest development, among other donations, was the pledge of $3.5m from TEDster and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, which resulted from a dialogue that began at TED. Most of his pledge ($3m of it) is a 1:2 challenge, so our current goal is to obtain $6m from elsewhere to match that pledge in full.

OK, that's about the funding. But how's the research going?

It's been going really well too. We are currently sponsoring research by three teams (in Phoenix, Houston and Cambridge UK) on two of the most important SENS strands -- LysoSENS, the identification and exploitation of microbial enzymes to break down molecules that we cannot naturally degrade, and MitoSENS, the incorporation of modified copies of the mitochondrial DNA into the chromosomal DNA so that mitochondrial mutations will have no effect. Both these projects are going really well, results coming out of the LysoSENS project have already been presented at two meetings and a paper has been submitted for publication in a prominent journal.

What should readers expect to learn from the book?

They will learn all about the detailed science of SENS. The book is written (largely by my splendid research assistant Michael Rae) very much for a non-scientist audience, but without dumbing down the science at all.

05 July 2007

Why can't we grow new body parts? Alan Russell on TED.com

Alan Russell studies regenerative medicine, a breakthrough way of treating disease and injury by helping the body to rebuild itself. He shows how engineered tissue that "speaks the body's language" has helped a man regrow his lost fingertip, how stem cells can rebuild damaged heart muscle, and how cell therapy can regenerate the skin of burned soldiers. This new medicine comes just in time, Russell says -- our aging population, with its steeply rising medical bills, will otherwise (and soon) cause a crisis in health care systems around the world. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 19:37. Contains graphic medical imagery.) Read more about Alan Russell on TED.com.

Watch this talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

28 June 2007

Pogue tests the Apple iPhone

NYTimes tech columnist and TED06 speaker David Pogue has been testing the Apple iPhone, which will hit stores tomorrow Friday in the US, and he shows it all on video, feature by feature, dressed with classic Pogue fun. Or you can read his article. Summary: "much of the hype and some of the criticisms are justified. The iPhone is revolutionary; it’s flawed ... it does things no phone has ever done before; it lacks features found even on the most basic phones."

By the way, David has a book coming out in a few weeks about the iPhone - "iPhone: The Missing Manual".

19 June 2007

The string quartet Ethel plays "Blue Room," on TED.com

Ethel is, perhaps, the first 21st-century realization of the classical string quartet. An all-star foursome, Ethel is Cornelius Dufallo (violin), Ralph Farris (viola), Dorothy Lawson (cello), and Mary Rowell (violin), a mixed bag of players from classical, rock and downtown new-music circles. On TED.com, they perform the third movement from Phil Kline's four-part suite "The Blue Room and Other Stories," recorded on the quartet's 2003 album Ethel (Cantaloupe). Searching, questioning melodic lines slide from instrument to instrument, in a piece that shows off each player's deep and emotional musicality. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 03:55) Read more about Ethel on TED.com

Watch this talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

22 February 2006

Excitement building in Monterey ...

With just a few hours left till TED2006, the delicious anticipation is building. Truck after truck has unloaded the physical features of TED: dozens of Sony BRAVIA HDTV screens, hundreds of plush Steelcase couches and chairs, the makings of the Google cafe, the books for A Clean Well-Lighted Place. The Junipero Serra room has been transformed into the Simulcast Lounge. Fat gift bags are lined up for the taking. Strains of Aida can be heard from the Main Hall. And everyone has that look that says, "I'm ready to be inspired." It's definitely time for TED ...

11 December 2005

TED2006 Speaker Line-up Unveiled

This year's program, just posted, has already generated a blizzard of excited emails to TED HQ. Perhaps because it includes...
+ a former US vice-president
+ a rock music icon
+ the world's greatest aircraft engineer
+ a pastor whose book has sold more than 20m copies
+ an 11-year-old violinist
+ a Nobel laureate
+ America's leading motivational speaker
+ and 50 more scientists, architects, musicians, creatives, techies, comedians, pundits, artists, business leaders, activists, geniuses and mavericks
...and perhaps also because our web partners Macromedia have figured out a wonderful way to show off this remarkable group of people. Check it out.

TED2006 "The Future We Will Create" is February 22-25, 2006. Looks like we will sell out earlier than any prior year, but there are still some passes available.

Entries from TED Blog tagged with 'TED2006'

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