Adam Spencer is a radio host in in Sydney during the morning commute. But he says he’s here not as a radio host or as a comedian, “But as someone who is was and always will be a mathematician.” He got bit in second grade when a teacher told him, “That would be like putting a […]
“80% of deaf people in the world,” says Mohamed Jemni, “do not have access to education.” Jemni, professor of ICT and Educational Technologies at the University of Tunis, Tunisia, is working with new technology to find ways of helping the deaf to communicate. His team has developed WebSign, an extraordinary set of applications, to “break the […]
No stranger to the TED stage, Raghava KK returns with exciting updates on his work. Raghava is experimenting with EEG headsets that use brain waves to bring new, dynamic perspectives into his work. His upcoming works include: Mona Lisa 2.0, whose face changes based on Raghava’s mood; a depiction of Gandhi that changes based on […]
A dolphin’s brain-to-body-weight ratio is second only to a human’s. They live complex social lives, can understand abstract concepts and even use tools. But as Denise Herzing asks in Session 8 of TED2013, “Do they have a language? If so, what are they talking about?” For 28 years, Herzing has been researching dolphins in the wild, spending five […]
More than 22 million text messages are sent across the world every day … many in truly terrible English. It’s the end of the world as we know it, many decry. The decline and fall of written language means the end for us all, right? Not so fast. Linguist John McWhorter has a great new […]
Hailing from the Talent Search salon in Bangalore, Ajit Narayanan is here to tell us about his work helping autistic children to communicate. One of the challenges that faces those working in this field: People with autism can sometimes find it difficult to understand abstraction or symbolism–and therefore they struggle with language. Much contemporary therapy involves the use […]
Saki Mafundikwa founded the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts, ZIVA, a Bauhaus-style school focused on African heritage. (“Vigital” denotes visual arts taught using digital tools.) It’s the first graphic design and new media college in the nation, and he wanted his students to understand the power of design–and in particular to understand “the long tradition of writing” […]
Communication in 2013 looks so different from what it ever has before. Will technology be the ruin of all that is good and true in language? We don’t think so. The speakers in this session explore how the future will bring even greater shifts in how we communicate — and it may well be for […]
Fever Picture is a collective of scribes and graphic facilitators who translate the words said in conferences into comic form. With this graphic method of note-taking, they’ve illustrated several talks given so far at TED2013, highlighting main points through speech bubbles and quotes. Here, we’ve gathered some of these illustrations from their Facebook page. And stay tuned to […]
Julian Treasure watches out for the ears. In the four TED Talks he’s given so far, he’s offered up “5 ways to listen better” and “Sound health in 8 steps.” At TED2013, we asked him: What speakers have given you the best auditory experience so far? It was nice to hear Jinsop Lee today talking […]
Last spring, Robyn Grobler shared a fascinating theory at TED@Johannesburg, one of the 14 stops on our worldwide talent search to find untold stories for TED2013. Her idea: that if she smiled, her patients felt less pain. She brought a PowerPoint presentation, but Grobler also tried illustrating her talk using Prezi, the cloud-based presentation software. (TED’s […]
Yesterday, during the session “Create!,” 15-year-old Dong Woo Jang delighted us with his tale of bow-making. I caught up with him after to discuss. Why did you choose bows? I just stumbled upon it. When I was a boy, I wasn’t allowed to play computer games, so I just went around looking for something to […]
Kibwe Tavares combines his training as an architect with his love of storytelling and animation to create futuristic 3D animated/live action films with social and political depth, creating incredibly detailed, vivid, and kinetic visual environments to entice audiences. His short film, Robots of Brixton, distributed on the internet, won a special jury prize at Sundance. And his […]
Where does education go from here? On Tuesday, Sugata Mitra accepted the 2013 TED Prize and offered a bold wish for the world: that we encourage children to explore questions about our world in self-organized learning environments. He proposed the founding of a School in the Cloud based in India, and encouraged TED community members, […]
The growing desert Allan Savory has dedicated his life to studying management of grasslands. And if that doesn’t sound exciting, just wait, because it touches on the deepest roots of climate change and the future of the planet. “The most massive, tsunami, perfect storm is bearing down on us,” is the grim beginning to Savory’s talk. […]
Architect Michael Green presents an interesting riddle: why are buildings made of wood only a few stories high when trees found in nature are remarkable for their height? Speaking in session 7 of TED2013, Green shares his deep love of wood — which he first discovered from his grandfather, a woodworker who taught him to […]