Image source: Laptop.org (OLPC) An article in MIT’s Technology Review reports on a surprising new use for One Laptop Per Child’s user interface, Sugar. From the article: The open-source education software developed for the “$100 laptop” can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to run aging PCs and Macs with a new interface […]
Today, eminent psychologist and TEDTalks star Philip Zimbardo (see his talks on evil and the paradox of time) agreed to answer TED’s Facebook fans’ questions on Absolutely Anything — and he did! Read on: Does time orientation influence which children become bullies? — Kathy Hermanv Interesting question, but there’s no research on this relationship. Bullies […]
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo says happiness and success are rooted in a trait most of us disregard: the way we orient toward the past, present and future. He suggests we calibrate our outlook on time as a first step to improving our lives. (Recorded at TED University 2009, February 2009, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 6:34) […]
Via TEDPrize.org: 2006 TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair recently wrote to update us on the amazing success of this year’s Open Architecture Challenge. The challenge was for teams of teachers, students, architects and designers to work together to design the classroom of the future for a school of their own choosing. Tens of thousands of […]
Surgeon and inventor Catherine Mohr tours the history of surgery (and its pre-painkiller, pre-antiseptic past), then demos some of the newest tools for surgery through tiny incisions, performed using nimble robot hands. Fascinating — but not for the squeamish. (Recorded at TED2009, February 2009, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 18:55) Watch Catherine Mohr’s talk from […]
Today, we posted Diane Benscoter’s revealing talk on being a Moonie and how cult thought can lead people to do the unthinkable. It’s a topic that’s not often talked about and that fascinates many, so, to bring you more from Diane the TEDBlog caught up with her for an interview. We talked about her time […]
Diane Benscoter talks about how she joined the Moonies — and stayed for five long years. She shares an insider’s perspective on cults and extremist movements, and proposes a new way to think about today’s most troubling conflicts. Watch Diane Benscoter’s talk from TED U 2009 on TED.com where you can download this TEDTalk, rate […]
NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to […]
While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics. (Recorded at TED@State, at the US State Department, June 2009, in Washington, […]
Jane Poynter tells her story of living two years and 20 minutes in Biosphere 2 — an experience that provoked her to explore how we might sustain life in the harshest of environments. This is the first TEDTalk drawn from an independently organized TEDx event, TEDxUSC, held at the University of Southern California. (Recorded at […]
A young and enthusiastic crowd packed the 92nd Street Y on Friday night to enjoy yet another reunion of science and art at the World Science Festival — an event that featured two stars of the SciFi Channel’s hit show Battlestar Galactica, two scientists in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence, and one futurist/transhumanist […]
The 2009 World Science Festival kicked off its third day of festivities on Friday with a truly original and delightful event called WSF Spotlight, which stripped away the trimmings of what you might think of as “traditional” science presentations (flat lighting? a vast echoey lecture hall? dry droning delivery?), and replaced them with a dramatically […]
Photographer Robert Leslie is sending TED some wonderful shots from the World Science Festival, happening right now in New York City. Check this Flickr set for more images from this celebration of science and curiosity … and if you’re inspired to catch an event (there’s a packed schedule of events running through tomorrow night), visit […]
Photo: Robert Leslie. Courtesy WSF Last night, the TEDBlog attended the World Science Festival‘s second night of proceedings, specifically the session titled “Nothing: The Subtle Science of Emptiness.” The evening began with a warm welcome for the illustrious journalist John Hockenberry, who described himself as our “launch vehicle into an area of sophisticated science.” He […]
The second year of the World Science Festival got off to a spectacular start last night at New York’s Lincoln Center, with a program star-studded from both science and the arts. We loved it here at TED, not just because it featured so many of our TED favorites — physicist Brian Greene (who co-founded the […]
Last week, we posted Jonathan Drori’s fascinating short talk about the Millennium Seed Bank — a massive effort to preserve the world’s threatened plant life within a global network of seed archives. It’s a big topic to cover in 3 minutes, so the TED Blog asked Drori if he had time to answer a few […]