The Fez River winds through the city’s medina — Fez’s historic medieval center and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Heavily contaminated, almost an open sewer, it was covered over with concrete to contain the smell; it was all but forgotten in recent decades. For much of the past 20 years, architect and engineer Aziza Chaouni has been battling to restore it. […]
Two weeks ago, hours after Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed to “wipe out” Twitter, his government blocked access to the platform across the country. It was just weeks before a hotly contended election, and Erdoğan was upset about tweets accusing him of corruption. A judicial ruling in Turkey called for Twitter to take […]
Adrianne Haslet-Davis performs the rumba at the end of Hugh Herr’s talk, “The new bionics that let us run, climb, dance.” Normally, this would not be a big deal for a professional ballroom dance teacher. But Haslet-Davis lost her left foot in the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013. This rumba was her first public […]
Geena Rocero did a pretty bold thing at TED2014: She came out. The transgender fashion model chose Vancouver to reveal to the world that she was assigned male at birth. “I am here exposed … to help others live without shame and terror,” she says in today’s talk. The trans community has had a spotlight […]
When creative scientist Kate Stone gave her talk at TED2013, her biggest worry was whether her paper DJ decks would work onstage. Something she didn’t think twice about: being “outed” as transgender. She didn’t want to detract from her work, and figured that her gender identity was her own personal business. But now, one year later, […]
Oculus VR may have won the headlines today by, you know, being acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. But last week it won the hearts and minds of the TED crowd. First, former NFL punter Chris Kluwe showed footage of a guy wearing an Oculus Rift headset and riding a virtual rollercoaster (video shown, bottom — jump to the […]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR2E9i3g0po&w=560&h=315%5D Predictions are a mug’s game. If they come true, you likely didn’t push your thinking hard enough. If they don’t come true, you risk looking like an idiot. Nonetheless, many speakers at the annual TED conference have taken the plunge and proffered thoughts of what the future might look like. The video above […]
by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google How will our minds be blown in the next 30 years? Well, that’s quite a long time, given the acceleration in history. Still, I’ll be brave and make six hypotheses. 1. Machine Intelligence I think that just as the Internet has been such a great driver of change across […]
One of the installations at TED this year challenged attendees to vote on ten potential drivers of change in the next 30 years. The crowd had their say via that enormously sophisticated piece of technology, the sticky note. As we could likely have predicted, there wasn’t much consensus among those in Vancouver, but the range […]
by Nilofer Merchant In the next 30 years, the full Star Trek story will actually come true. Already, we’ve seen many of the show’s far-fetched ideas come to fruition. Everyone now carries a communicator, aka the smart phone. We have medical devices that test for diseases with light, not by drawing blood (like new tests for anemia […]
by Andrew Blau, Deloitte Technology advances over the last 30 years mean that we have crossed an invisible threshold: for the first time in human history, we now live on a legible planet. What will blow our minds in the next 30 years is what it will mean when almost anyone can read and understand the world […]
At TED2013, Amanda Palmer gave a talk called “The art of asking” about her experience funding an album on Kickstarter; it quickly went viral on TED.com. A year later, Palmer was back for a panel at TED2014 covering crowd-funding creative projects. She was joined live by her husband, writer Neil Gaiman, and Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler, and through Skype by game […]
As the Fellows program turns five, we catch up with Iranian filmmaker Taghi Amirani – a member of the Fellows inaugural class and the first recipient of the TED Fellows Hero award – to get the scoop on the premiere of Amirani Media’s latest film, We Are Many (see the trailer, above) – a documentary on the February 15, 2003, global […]
Advertising for telephone companies is all around us. In the United States, AT&T commands us to “Rethink possible,” Verizon loves to ask “Can you hear me now?,” and T-Mobile calls for our attention with lots of hot pink. In Canada, it’s hard to escape ads for Rogers Wireless, Telus and Bell Wireless. And in the […]
Susan Cain is planning a Quiet Revolution. In her classic talk from TED2012, she spoke up for introverts, pointing out the many ways our culture encourages extroversion. “I wasn’t prepared for the intensity and voracity of response to these ideas,” Cain tells the TED Blog two years later. “There’s an enormous hunger for recognition, understanding and […]
For years now, Target has invited designers like Isaac Mizrahi (watch his TED Talk), Diane von Furstenberg (check out her TED playlist) and, most recently, abstract pattern-master Peter Pilotto to dream up collections. So when it came to creating the Target Design Café at TED2014, we knew it was going to be cool. The space […]