“What makes you think that you have 80 or 90 years to live?” Laura Rozo posed this serious and almost morbid question to the audience at TEDxUNC in February 2013. She walked onto the stage confidently and calmly, soaking in the applause as the final, surprise speaker of the day. She wore a red turtleneck […]
Nature and investing. On the surface, these things do not sound like they have a lot to do with each other. But to TEDster Katherine Collins, the two are intrinsically linked. After 18 years at Fidelity Investments, and while enrolled at Harvard Divinity School to try to figure out what to do next, Collins found […]
By the TEDxYPU team In March, the ongoing conflict in Syria will enter its fifth year. Syrians have lost so much in that time — the Syrian who has not lost their life has lost several years of it because of a destroyed home, a faded business, or a family that has been torn apart by […]
As usual, the TED community has been very busy this past week. Below, some updates from TEDsters with news to share. Fresh takes on artificial intelligence. Machines that think: the best thing since the discovery of fire or the biggest threat to humanity since the atomic bomb? Responding to the annual Edge question, almost 200 […]
Every day, emergency room workers use triage to prioritize patient care — but exhausted personnel in under-resourced hospitals can easily make deadly errors in diagnostic tests and symptom scoring. South African emergency room doctor Mohammed Dalwai witnessed such avoidable tragedy firsthand while working with Médicins sans Frontières in Pakistan. He resolved never to let it happen again. Dalwai urged MSF to […]
Just like you, we at TED get inundated with email. And just like you, many of us think of an overflowing inbox as a guilt-inducing, anxiety-laden reminder of things left undone. As TED’s User Experience Architect, I like my inbox the same way I like my designs: simple, orderly, and communicating clearly what to do […]
When Justin Dowd worked as a food runner at a restaurant, he would sometimes doodle on the chalkboard in the kitchen. He had no idea that this skill — coupled with his ability to explain physics — would one day win him a trip to space. The science writer and animator who created the TED-Ed lesson “Could comets […]
It’s a piece of cake. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. Why add fuel to the fire? Idioms are those phrases that mean more than the sum of their words. As our TED Translator volunteers translate TED Talks into 116 languages (and counting), they’re often challenged to translate English idioms into their language. Which made […]
What if you could build a civilization from scratch, using tools that could also be built from scratch? In his talk “Open-sourced blueprints for civilization” at TED2011, Marcin Jakubowski introduced the Global Village Construction Set, open-source blueprints that would essentially allow anyone with a heap of scrap metal — and a few production tools — to make […]
The TED community has been busy in the past week. Below, a few TEDsters with news to share. Mapping by the millions. Frustrated by the inability to test his theories given the current technology, Sebastian Seung embarked on what many of his colleagues considered career suicide: he built a game to map all the neural […]
More than a million people took to the streets of Paris yesterday to show solidarity against extremism and terrorism. And their eyes were on the eyes of Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, who was killed in his office last week in a terrorist attack, along with 12 others. These eyes […]
Many people feel a burst of inspiration after watching a TED Talk. Some take action by volunteering their time or making a donation. Nigel Gordon, on the other hand, has an individual reaction: He writes songs about TED Talks he loves. A singer and songwriter, as well as an entrepreneur, Gordon got his introduction to […]