This powerful wish asks us all to build the city that the future needs. Visit theCity2.Org to join in. Here’s the full text of this inspiring wish: I am the crucible of the future. I am where humanity will either flourish or fade. I am being built and rebuilt every day. I am inevitable. But […]
Photos: James Duncan Davidson [tweet https://twitter.com/TEDNews/status/175057722868371456%5D Vy Higginsen introduces the Gospel for Teens section of the Mama Foundation for the Arts, an organization she founded in 1998. The program is a way to teach teenagers the art of gospel music. “We want them to know who they are and where they come from musically,” she […]
Suja Lowenthal is the Vice Mayor of Long Beach, but she’s also involved in a major project on the other side of the world. She tells us, in the 2012 TED Prize session, a story of a city that is yet to be. Storytelling is a universal language that “survives through our voice and our […]
Eduardo Paes became the mayor of Rio de Janeiro in 2008. He shares his four commandments for ensuring that cities are a great place to live. 1. A city of the future has to be environmentally friendly “Every time you think of a city, you have to think green, green, green,” says Paes. “Every time you see […]
Ed Glaeser is a economist at Harvard, and the author of Triumph of the City, and as his business casual look he wears a bow-tie with ice-cream cones. He is also one of the world’s experts on the nature of cities, and he was invited to set the stage for the TED2012 wish. “At their […]
Three years ago Jill Tarter wished that everyone would become citizen scientists, and help take part in the quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. At TED2012, astronomer Arfon Smith presented a new part of the wish. The Allen Telescope Array is looking for signals from extra terrestrial intelligence on radio frequencies, and a […]
Cynthia Parr takes the stage to update us on a massive TED Prize project: The Encyclopedia of Life. Perhaps a quarter of TED talks feature living organisms. Whether it’s an urgent need for conservation or a creature that can teach us something, it’s obvious that you care deeply about biodiversity. And with your help we’ve made Ed Wilson’s […]
This year, the TED Prize has been given to a concept, The City 2.0. In this session, we reveal all, interspersed with a host of speakers who’ve dedicated their life and work to making our world’s cities as excellent as they can be. In this session: We heard updates on Jill Tarter’s wish to search […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson There are no words to describe Reggie Watts. His words appear to make sense, particularly on their own: “Fear is all around us. We also have anti-fear. It’s hard to measure.” Or, “but it is in our best self interest to understand the typography of our lives.” It’s not just because the […]
Marketing and brand strategist Steven Addis turns up to show the 15 most treasured photographs in his collection. But these are not the highly produced shots you might expect from one who works in visual communications. Instead, they are the father-daughter snapshots he started as a unwitting project when his child was born. Every year […]
“Hi, my name’s Frank, and I collect secrets.” That’s Frank Warren, the founder of PostSecret. He started with a crazy idea. In November 2005, he made 3000 postcards with simple instructions. It was blank on one side, and on the other instructions telling them to write an anonymous secret and mail it to him. He passed the […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America, an organization she describes as being like Peace Corps for geeks, “only instead of sending people to the third world, we send them to the wilds of City Hall.” The fellows’ mission, should they choose to accept it, is to […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Possibly the most meta speaker on the TED stage is Lior Zoref. He had a dream: to speak at TED. He shows a video of himself saying to his friend that he wanted to do that, and his best friend telling him it was impossible. But his Facebook and twitter friends encouraged […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Known as the “startup whisperer”, Reid Hoffman has invested in storied Internet companies including Flickr, Facebook and Zynga, companies that have helped deliver us from the “information” age to the “network” age. Interested in the social side of the Internet revolution, he is also the co-founder of LinkedIn, a company he started to […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson “I forget names,” says David Hornik. “I forget them all the time, every day. And I thought everyone did.” But he realized (after forgetting a very important name) that his name-blindness was actually a symptom of another condition: his dyslexia. And it made him think: What other disabilities do we have, […]
Now showing onstage at TED, a video on the eternal question: “Who’s your favorite? Mom or dad?”