2008 TED Prize winner Neil Turok sends these great photos from the new AIMS Research Centre, which is set to open May 12 in Muizenberg, Cape Town, South Africa. AIMS — the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences — promotes math and sciences education throughout Africa. Its goal is, quite simply, to find the next Einstein […]
Hector Ruiz talks about his commitment to giving the world access to the Internet. Ruiz is the CEO of AMD, and through AMD’s 50×15 initiative, Ruiz and his company hope to connect 50 percent of the world to the Internet by 2015. Sharing his own extraordinary life story, Ruiz makes the case that access to […]
Tod Machover of MIT’s Media Lab invented the musical technology behind Guitar Hero, and here he talks about what’s coming next. Listen for some brand-new ways to interface with music — to play it, compose it, enjoy it. Machover then introduces Dan Ellsey, a composer with cerebral palsy who uses some new tools to write […]
Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, physicist Neil Turok speaks out for talented young Africans starved of opportunity: by unlocking and nurturing the continent’s creative potential, we can create a change in Africa’s future. Turok asks the TED community to help him expand the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences by opening 15 new centers across Africa […]
Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to engage with their local school. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own volunteer-driven, wildly creative writing labs. But you don’t need to go that far, he reminds us […]
Speaking at the first TED Conference, in 1984, Nicholas Negroponte talks about the converging fields of technology, entertainment and design. Years before anyone was using the word “convergence,” Negroponte was thinking about TV screens as the “electronic books of the future,” and computers as the future of education. In excerpts from his 2-hour talk (this […]
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session eleven.) Ben Kaufman, founder of Kluster, goes on stage to tell what he and his team have been doing — with the help of TED attendees and 1200 people around the world — since the beginning of the conference. Kluster is an online collaboration […]
This week at the Kluster lab in Monterey, TEDsters and contributors around the world brainstormed, designed and made a brand-new product in 72 hours — an educational game to raise cultural awareness (born out of inspiration of Dan Dennett’s 2006 TEDTalk). The rules: This game is linear in nature, all players start out at the […]
TED and Miro announce the TED Miro player — a free, downloadable, open-source media player that comes pre-loaded with TED’s channels and content guide. UPDATED link: Download the Miro player >> Using the channels, you can browse TEDTalks by Theme — “A Greener Future,” “Africa: The Next Chapter,” and many more. And you have access […]
John Maeda (watch his 2007 TEDTalk) has been named the next president of the Rhode Island School of Design. An artist and a coder, Maeda is an enthusiastic connector of art and technology. In his supercool announcement video, he gives a sense of where he hopes to lead the school, saying: Technology has outpaced humanity, […]
Ever since we started putting TEDTalks online in July 2006, all of the talks and performances on TED.com — more than 160 so far — were recorded at a TED event: at our annual gathering in Monterey; at TEDGlobal in Oxford, UK, and Arusha, Tanzania; or during one of our TED Salons. Now we join […]
Game publisher Electronic Arts has donated the original SimCity, Will Wright‘s groundbreaking 1989 computer game, to Nicholas Negroponte‘s One Laptop per Child initiative. It’s a wonderful example of using games as tools for learning. As EA’s Steve Seabolt said in yesterday’s press announcement, “SimCity is entertainment that’s unintentionally educational.” Back in March, OLPC’s SJ Klein […]
University of Chicago economist Emily Oster went on stage at TED2007 to say that most of what we know about AIDS in Africa is wrong — and proceeded to show data and graphs to make her case (watch the video of her speech — or read the summary). Now she’s applied her atypical lens to […]
South African singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela was a crucial artistic voice during the fight against apartheid, and now in the new modern-day nation. Here he dedicates the beautiful song “Thula Mama” to all women — with a special mention for his grandmother, who showed spine-tingling bravery in the face of apartheid-era police oppression. His story, voice […]
Patrick Awuah left a comfortable life in Seattle to return to Ghana and co-found a liberal arts college. Why? Because he believes that Ghana’s failures in leadership — and he gives several mind-boggling examples — stem from a university system that fails to train real leaders. In a talk that brought the TEDGlobal audience enthusiastically […]
In the spring of 2007, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, gave a legendary TED University talk: an ultra-fast-moving ride through the “100 websites you should know and use.” Six years later, it remains one of the most viewed TED blog posts ever. Time for an update? We think so. Below, the 2013 […]