The daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Hannah Brock started playing the drums at her school in Beijing at the age of 3. By 4, she had started the piano and the guzheng, an ancient instrument that looks rather like a large zither and is played with plectrums taped to the fingers. Now […]
After rescuing his equipment from UK customs, where it had been stuck for several days, Boaz Almog take the stage to demonstrate his remarkable research. It uses a well-known phenomenon of superconductivity — a state of matter where the electrical resistance drops to zero. Normally, electrons moving through a conductor collide occasionally, losing energy to […]
MIT professor Ramesh Raskar starts his talk by showing the classic Doc Edgerton photograph of an apple being shot by a bullet. It demonstrated an exposure of a millionth of a second. Wonderful, right? he asks us, to wide agreement. Only now, 50 years later, technology advances mean we can photograph a million times faster […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson As an architect, Michael Hansmeyer asks, “What is the origin of the forms we design?” And he asks: “What kind of forms would we design if we had no bias, if we had no preconception? What kind of forms would we design if we could free ourselves from our education?” “How,” he […]
When he was a child, John Maeda‘s father came to a parent-teacher meeting and was told that his son was good at math and art. His father nodded. The next day, at his tofu store, his father told a customer that his son was good at … math. “That’s stuck with me all my life,” […]
A new word for a new profession Laura Snyder begins with a scene from June 24, 1833. It’s a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elderly man stands up to make a comment. It’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He stands up and demands, “You must stop calling yourselves Natural Philosophers.” He […]
Sarah Slean has made eight albums, the latest of which is a double album, Land & Sea, featuring original scores composed for a 21-piece string orchestra. She hasn’t brought quite that many musicians with her to TEDGlobal but together with the local Cairn String Quartet she starts off with a quiet piece for piano, a string quartet […]
Brief: Radical Openness through open source motion graphics. Welcome to be re-used and remixed. Director’s statement: “Motion graphic animations based on colors, patterns and schemes. Project these onto various surfaces which break the light coming from the projector. Think mirrors, glass, water etc. All the moving images we use to build our films are available […]
Click to view (and remix) the session-opening animation Progress comes, often, from forging ahead, striking out in a direction and discovering the unknown. But sometimes it comes from looking at a familiar problem, or a familiar solution, and looking at it in a new way. In this session we’ll look at a variety of familiar […]
The director of the Design Museum in London, Deyan Sudjic arrives onstage with a confession. “Designers have a tendency to answer the question they haven’t been asked,” he says. As such, he’s going to overlook the theme of the session, “The Upside of Transparency,” and instead focus on other aspects of the term. After all, […]
Heather Brooke starts her talk by telling us a fairy tale. It’s a tale of children, scolded for daring to question the authority of their parents. Then a man comes to town and shares some secret documents stolen from the parents and revealing — shock! — that the parents are terribly badly behaved themselves. It’s […]
Everyone can use technology. Everyone. Marc Goodman starts, cheerily, by saying, “I study the future of crime and terrorism. And quite frankly I’m afraid.” He want to believe that technology will be the utopia, as many hope. But he’s spent his life in law enforcement around the world, and that has given him a perspective […]
As the US’s first Deputy CTO, Beth Noveck founded the White House Open Government Initiative, which developed administration policy on transparency, participation and collaboration. She starts her talk by reminding us that in the old days, the White House was literally an open house. At the beginning of the 19th century, John Quincy Adams met a local […]
From Bihar to the World Bank Sanjay Pradhan grew up in Bihar, India’s poorest state. He came home one day, at 6 years old, to find a cart of sweets at the front door. He and his brothers greedily dug in — but when his father came home, he was livid. Those sweets, it turns […]
A list of regrets Jane McGonigal is a gamer, so she likes to have goals and special missions. For this talk, her goal is to increase the lifespan of everyone in the audience by 7.5 minutes. Our secret mission: How will we spend these bonus minutes? (To back that up, she has math! Well, science, that […]
Jason McCue takes the stage wearing a T-shirt reading “Free Yulia in Ukraine.” It’s a reference to the 2011 imprisonment of Ukrainian politician Yulia Tymoshenko and a hint of what’s to come in his talk: a discussion of terrorism and the law. “We are at war with a new form of terrorism,” he says. The traditional […]