Hello. My name is Kate and I write things. Often.
Our supermarket produce aisles would look very, very bare without bees. As MacArthur Fellow Marla Spivak explains on the TEDGlobal stage, this is something we should all be extremely concerned about: the dramatic drop in bee populations that’s been taking place over the past seven years. (Read The New York Times’ take on the especially scary drop in […]
“Do you think it’s possible to control someone’s attention, or even their behavior? To me that would be the perfect superpower,” says Apollo Robbins at TEDGlobal 2013. “I’ve spent the last 20 years studying human behavior in an unconventional way: by picking pockets.” Robbins, whom The New Yorker called a “theatrical pickpocket” in their profile of […]
Sovereign credit ratings are kind of like Consumer Reports for nations — just as people read car magazines or washing machine reviews before buying, investors read ratings to determine how to invest their money. Sovereign credit ratings assess a country’s debt and its ability and willingness to repay it. And whether citizens of a country realize […]
In the immortal words of the Wu-Tang Clan, “Cash rules everything around me.” Then again, as Benjamin Franklin put it, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” So how are we to parse this thing — money — which shapes so much of our lives? This session will make you think again about economics, taking […]
Something special happens when you think again. All it takes is an insightful thought and — all of a sudden — your brain does a backflip and you see faulty assumptions underlying what you’d always taken to be true. The first day of mainstage talks at TEDGlobal 2013 brought so many of these paradigm-shifting moments […]
Elizabeth Loftus begins her talk at TEDGlobal 2013 with the tragic story of Steve Titus, who was arrested in 1980 because he sort of matched the physical description of, and drove a similar car to, a man who had raped a woman in his area. Looking at a photo lineup, the victim told police that […]
In the wilds of planet Earth, there exists a species so creative that it not only uses tools but is constantly rewriting the rules of what a tool can be, so cooperative that they build wildly complex systems to support each other and so consternating that its inconsistent behavior would make even the most seasoned […]
On a tablet, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes us on a walk through Edinburgh Castle, less than a mile from the TEDGlobal 2013 theater. With a swipe of his finger, we fly through the 15th-century castle — people and objects dissolving as we go — as if we were in a scene from a movie orchestrated by […]
“Athletic” is a term we use to describe human beings. But could it also be used to describe a machine? In a demo recorded yesterday in his robot lab at TEDGlobal 2013, systems engineer Raffaello D’Andrea shows us that the answer is yes. He demonstrates with quadcopters, mechanically simple flying robots with four propellers. Their […]
Classical guitar virtuoso Tariq Harb had a surprising major in college: finance. The Jordanian-born musician moved to Canada in 1999 to study at Concordia University. But after a few years in the financial sector, he found himself deeply unfulfilled. He decided to go back to the thing he loved when he was younger — music. Only he […]
Steve Howard has spent his life working toward sustainability. So on the TEDGlobal 2013 stage, he explains why he wanted to work for, of all places, Ikea. Howard, who now holds the delightful title of Chief Sustainability Officer at the Scandinavian furniture behemoth, says that the company is dedicated to sustainability because of three numbers: 3. […]
Shadia Ramsahye is a Mauritian-born digital media student living in Paris. She speaks four languages — Mauritian Creole, French, English and Urdu — and translates TED Talks into the latter, which she describes as “the language of poetry, the language of the heart.” “Translating for TED has helped me keep in touch with this language […]
If you sped up the scene at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre today, it would look like blurs of red and green streaks — the red from the TED logos on the T-shirts of the crew who are busily setting up for TEDGlobal 2013, and the green from the name badges worn by staff members […]
When TEDGlobal 2013 kicks off tomorrow, June 10, you’ll be able to “Think Again” with like-minded idea enthusiasts — al fresco and possibly with a picnic. As the conference begins, we’ll be airing TED Talks on big screens in eight cities around the world. And by big screens, we mean huge screens. Think: screens of […]
David Blaine is the master of the endurance stunt. In 1999, he was buried alive in a clear box underneath three tons of water. Over the course of seven days, about 75,000 people stopped by to watch him in his self-made tomb. In 2008, Blaine attempted to set the Guinness World Record for holding his […]
Catering a TEDx event can be — how do you say it? – costly. So we think it’s so cool that the organizers of TEDxSydney decided to crowdsource the food for the 2,200 people attending the event in May. All the food in the amazing spread above comes from community gardens and from plants grown […]