TEDGlobal’s attending bloggers offer great roundups of the two morning sessions, called “Tales of Invention” and “Health and Heroism.” Africa abounds in creative energy and innovation, a point made yesterday by Kwabena Boahen and elaborated today by two panels of inventors and health workers. As always, Ethan Zuckerman has the speaker-by-speaker accounts. Mweshi writes about […]
Day Three of TEDGlobal began with a series of pointed questions … “Where are the women inventors?” Bola Olabisi asked, as she walked around an international inventors fair, where she’d come on a slow afternoon in London, while pregnant with her fourth child and in need of distraction. She walked the hall all day, and […]
Those of you who’ve attended TED in Monterey know that when you hear the Elephant March from Aïda, it means the doors for the Main Hall have opened, and it’s time to scramble for a seat. (Over the years, this becomes a Pavlovian response; a single bar of that striding score touches off the rush […]
In the months before each TED, we ask speakers to fill in a short, casual questionnaire for the program guide, answering questions like “Who are your heroes?” and “Family apart, what are you most proud of?” Most speakers write a sentence or two for each. But for TEDGlobal 2007, iconoclastic Ghanaian economist George Ayittey took […]
Vik Muniz makes art from pretty much anything, be it shredded paper, wire, clouds or diamonds. Here he describes the thinking behind his work and takes us on a tour of his incredible images. [ted id=32] NEW: Read the transcript >>
Along the social absorption route, there is always a point where complex issues and inconvenient messages percolate into the pop-culture sphere and start being considered self-evident, possibly triggering changes in behavior and other individual or collective responses. For the climate crisis that point may be nearing. It may even have a precise date: this year’s […]
Barry Schwartz is a sociology professor at Swarthmore and author of The Paradox of Choice. In this talk, he persuasively explains how and why the abundance of choice in modern society is actually making us miserable. (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 20:22) Get TED delivered: Subscribe to the TEDTalks video podcast via […]
To continue on the movie-themed posts, I have always been enthralled by the powerful impact of sound and music in film. While a student at Stanford I took a great class entitled "The Physics of Music" which would have more appropriately been entitled "Really Cool Field Trips in Music." We visited Dolby Labs, Meyer Sound, […]
Everyone raves about the iPod’s design. Call me cranky, but I think it could be massively improved. Here are my top peeves: 1) Battery life. On every iPod mini, Shuffle and Nano that I’ve owned, it has been atrocious. Less than 4 hours. My five-year-old 6-gig PJB-100 MP3 player comfortably delivered 10. Apple advertises 14 […]