Did you know that across the United States, cameras are automatically taking pictures of your car’s license plate as you drive by, recording your plate number and your locations over time? In a chilling talk given at TEDGlobal 2014, civil liberties lawyer and TED Fellow Catherine Crump called attention to the ubiquity of mass surveillance technology […]Read more
You’ve probably heard of Area 51. But how about Area Zero? Area Zero is the flagship center of Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud, the idea that won him the 2013 TED Prize. It’s the final of Mitra’s labs dedicated to self-organized learning, and it opened this morning in Gocharan in West Bengal, India. A […]
We’re all looking for a tribe — a group of people we can talk with, bat around ideas with, make things happen with. And we’re all looking for inspiration — things to spark our imagination, send us off in new directions, and keep us buoyed when things get tough. One week each year, TED hosts […]
The TED community has been very busy in the start of this new year. Below, a few TEDsters with news to share. Landing a rocket on a boat: simple enough. Putting a man on the moon and a rover on Mars are exceptional feats, but that’s in the past. Elon Musk is now attempting a […]
When architect Joshua Prince-Ramus redesigned the Seattle Central Library, he and his team didn’t try to pinpoint the future of libraries or books. Instead, they rooted their blueprints in two foundational ideas: books are a form of technology, and the library is a social hub, as much as it is a house for media. Prince-Ramus […]
They’ve helped us experience the thrill of jumping from 128,000 feet above the earth, showed us what it’s like to be a fireman saving a kitten, and let us hang out with lions in South Africa. TED is seeking a talk, to be delivered at our 2015 conference, about the increasingly common practice of documenting extreme sports and […]
I manage TED’s online community from my home on the West Coast, and while many of my interactions are with people based all over the world, the majority of my colleagues are based across the country at TED HQ in New York City. As anyone who works remotely knows, attending meetings as a giant videoconferencing head-on-the-wall isn’t […]
Last week, I saw Barbara Walters’ list of “The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2014.” It included interesting thinkers like Elon Musk (watch his TED Talk) and George R.R. Martin (the author of Game of Thrones), along with crowd-pleasers like Taylor Swift and Oprah. But reading this list of almost exclusively marquee names made me think about some of the people […]
The TEDx community lost a beloved member this week. Giorgio Ungania, organizer and curator of TEDxDubai, passed away on Sunday at age 46. Giorgio was a force of life and an instrumental leader in our community, organizing his first event in 2009 and going on to organize many more events, including TEDxYouth@Dubai and TEDxDubaiChange. Giorgio was a […]
Around 39 million people in the world are affected by blindness — 80% of which could be avoided if people had timely access to diagnosis and proper treatment. The problem is that in many developing countries, most eye care providers are in cities, while the majority of patients live in hard-to-reach rural areas. To bridge this gap, London-based opthalmologist Andrew Bastawrous created Peek — an app […]
At the end of every December, we at the office get a little indignant that some of our favorite TED Talks from the year didn’t seem to do as well as we’d hoped. Some amazing talks, for whatever reason — whether they’re too absurd, niche or quirky, or simply were posted at a less than ideal time […]
On the day he was released from his cell, Vincent Cochetel sported a beard “that would be trendy today.” It was not a fashion decision. In 1998, Cochetel, the director of the Bureau for Europe for the UN High Commission on Refugees, was kidnapped in Chechnya and held hostage for 317 days, most of that time […]
We are thrilled to announce the new class of Fellows for TED2015. These 21 game-changing thinkers represent 15 countries—including, for the first time in our program, Vietnam, Romania and Tunisia. They work across disciplines, at the forefront of their fields. They include a South African physicist using lasers to target HIV and cancer; a German/Moroccan […]