There are some questions an Internet search just isn’t so good at answering: What do I want for dinner tonight? How can I make a career change? Who is my ideal romantic partner? Asking a search engine any of these things will most likely result in a deluge of useless data rather than an excited […]
Just like school … not! TEDYouth is like a TED Conference for high school students, starring a lineup of speakers working at the top of their fields of culture, science, technology and art. You’ll hear about scientific discoveries and crazy art projects that will surprise you, make you laugh and blow your mind a little. […]
On the TEDGlobal 2012 stage this summer, guest curator Sarah Caddick hosted the session “Misbehaving Beautifully,” a deep dive into a near-taboo subject: mental health and mental illness. Today, Oct. 10, happens to be World Mental Health Day, and TED.com is premiering the final talk Sarah curated for the stage, Ruby Wax’s “What’s so funny […]
[ted id=1591 width=560 height=315] “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, is credited with saying this first — and in a fast-paced talk from TEDGlobal 2012 University, marketer Tim Leberecht takes Bezos’ observation as a jumping-off point. “Hyperconnectivity allows companies to […]
Are we becoming blank-eyed cyberzombies, thanks to the internet and all the tech tools we obsess about every day? Instead of asking whether the Web is making us stupid, Howard Rheingold turns that lens around and asks how digital media could actually improve our intelligence. In his new TED Book, Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make […]
In early September, data artist and TED Fellow Salvatore Iaconesi announced to the world that he had brain cancer. And he refused to let his medical records stay sealed. “They were in a closed, proprietary format and, thus, I could not open them using my computer, or send them in this format to all the […]
Happy 30th birthday, compact disc. The CD was introduced on October 1, 1982 — but in early 1984 it was still slowly rolling out to consumer markets. In this surprising demo onstage at the very first TED, in February 1984, Mickey Schulhof of the Sony Corporation describes and then demonstrates the use of “compact disc […]
Every day, 450,000 people log on to TED.com. But where are they located? And what are they watching—our newest offerings or our classic talks? In the spirit of visual data artists like Hans Rosling and David McCandless, TED web engineer Alex Dean created a map of the United States which shows when and where TEDTalks […]
It’s a complaint we’ve all heard about the internet: all the cat videos and incessant celebrity gossip sites are making us, as a culture, stupider. However, digital community expert Howard Rheingold, doesn’t think that’s the case. In fact, he believes that both designing and using digital media can actually improve our intelligence. As Rheingold sees […]
An overwhelming majority of our experience is guided by forces that are invisible to the naked eye. While we can easily see other people, we cannot see their thoughts, nor their genetic structure. And while we can easily rest our eyes on matter, we cannot see gravity, atoms, energy, gases, electricity, or radio waves. Ditto […]
Thomas Dolby, TED’s longtime musical director, has retired from his post. Dolby recently returned to recording after a break of nearly two decades, and has been enjoying a personal musical renaissance with the release of his new album, A Map of the Floating City, and a worldwide concert tour. Over the past 12 years, Dolby […]
The world as we know it is changing rapidly. Political and economic boundaries are shifting, sometimes to the point of erasure. Power structures are being realigned and, in some cases, dismantled. Disciplines of thought that used to seem divergent now appear to overlap. Our most basic assumptions are being called into question. And thus, TEDGlobal […]
If you are over the age of 18, feel free to tune out now — this message is for curious minds who are currently in the 9th through 12th grades. Applications are now open for TEDYouth 2012, a day-long event held in New York City, where more than 20 scientists, designers, technologists, explorers, artists and […]
The Internet has delivered an explosion of learning opportunities for today’s students, creating an abundance of information, knowledge, and teachers as well as a starkly different landscape from the one in which our ideas about school were born. Traditional educators, classrooms, and brick-and-mortar schools are no longer necessary to access information. Instead, things like blogs […]
As Sunni Brown explained in her TEDTalk “Doodlers, unite!,” doodling isn’t about distracting yourself from something boring — it actually improves comprehension and boosts creative thinking. And so we applaud graphic designer Dan Moyer for creating this awesome drawing while watching the proceedings at TEDxPittsburgh. Watch the talks it references at the event website, and […]
“I date younger men,” Cindy Gallop boldly proclaimed at TED2009. “When I have sex with younger men, I encounter very directly and personally the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography in our culture. … There is an entire generation growing up that believes that what you see in hardcore pornography is the […]