A technical virtuoso with boundless imagination, Will Wright has created a style of computer gaming unlike any that came before, emphasizing learning more than losing, invention more than sport. With his hit game SimCity, he spurred players to make predictions, take risks, and sometimes fail miserably, as they built their own virtual urban worlds. With […]
Africa Cookbook ProjectOriginally uploaded by betumi Fran Osseo-Asare is a sociologist who studies (and loves) the food of Africa — check out Betumi: The African Culinary Network, and her blog, BetumiBlog. She’s found that, on this continent with so many regional cuisines, authentic cookbooks can be hard to come by. Which may seem like a […]
Emily Oster, a University of Chicago economist, looks at the stats on AIDS in Africa — and comes up with a stunning conclusion: Everything we know about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is wrong. We look for root causes such as poverty and poor health care — but we also need to factor in, say, the […]
Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web — so he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around out there. Here he presents “We Feel Fine,” a project that scours blogs to collect the planet’s emoti(c)ons, and the “Yahoo! Time Capsule,” which preserves images, quotes […]
It’s been a month since TEDGlobal 2007 rocked Arusha, Tanzania — bringing together Africans from all over the continent and the world, philanthropists and businesspeople, global citizens and key bloggers. The four days of the conference were up-all-night intense — and many bloggers signed off on the last day with promises to write more when […]
Alan Russell studies regenerative medicine, a breakthrough way of treating disease and injury by helping the body to rebuild itself. He shows how engineered tissue that “speaks the body’s language” has helped a man regrow his lost fingertip, how stem cells can rebuild damaged heart muscle, and how cell therapy can regenerate the skin of […]
Here’s one of those talks that can change your view of the world forever. Starting with the deceptively simple story of an ant, Dan Dennett unleashes a dazzling sequence of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of “memes” — a term coined by Richard Dawkins for mental concepts that are literally alive and […]
After lunch on Wednesday, 2:15pm-4pm, … AMD CEO Héctor Ruiz explained his company’s 50×15 initiative, which was established to enable affordable, accessible Internet connectivity and computing capabilities for 50 percent of the world’s population by the year 2015 … Herman Chinery-Hesse, founder of the software firm SOFTtribe … Nik Nesbitt founded KenCall, a call center […]
This week marks the one-year anniversary of TEDTalks — a year ago this Wednesday, our first five talks went live on TED.com. Since that time, more than 5 million people have seen a TEDTalk, either via TED.com, on this blog, through our video partners such as Google Video and YouTube — or through re-posting on […]
Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer and diver — who has invented robots and rebreathing equipment to let him plumb Earth’s deepest abysses — talks about his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa. The plan is to send the droid to bore through miles of ice and swim through a liquid […]
In a follow-up to his now-legendary TED2006 presentation, Hans Rosling demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He shows us the next generation of his Trendalyzer software — which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind mountains of stats. (Just days after this […]
William Kamkwamba, the 19-year-old self-taught engineer who built a windmill power system for his family’s home in Malawi, was a star of TEDGlobal 2007. As reported by Ethan Zuckerman, several TEDsters have pledged to help him further his education. Now you can follow William’s journey on his blog. Read about the windmill he built, his […]
Stephen Lawler, from Microsoft, takes us on a tour through the company’s new Virtual Earth project, which is, basically, an attempt to turn the entire planet into an interface to the web. Collecting and synthesizing massive amounts of data — bird’s-eye views, street-level photos, 3D wireframes — the Virtual Earth team are building a world […]
Ethel is, perhaps, the first 21st-century realization of the classical string quartet. An all-star foursome, Ethel is Cornelius Dufallo (violin), Ralph Farris (viola), Dorothy Lawson (cello), and Mary Rowell (violin), a mixed bag of players from classical, rock and downtown new-music circles. On TED.com, they perform the third movement from Phil Kline’s four-part suite “The […]
TED Curator Chris Anderson writes: If there had been no other outcome of TEDGlobal than the story below, I think the whole thing would have been worthwhile. This hit my inbox today… It’s from Yene Assegid, the founder of a development organization in Sierra Leone called Integral Africa. She was part of the Fellows program […]
Watch here a new "taste of TED" video documentary shot at this year’s conference, in March. In 7 minutes it gives a great sense of the atmosphere at TED and of the content of the conference. It is also available elsewhere on this site, and you can download it here (158 Mb). Another documentary about […]