Pranav Mistry is the MIT grad student behind Sixth Sense, a tool that connects the physical world with the world of data. He and his advisor at the MIT Media Lab, Pattie Maes, unveiled Sixth Sense at TED2009, and the Sixth Sense demo premiered yesterday on TED.com — and in both places, it has fired […]
Architecture for Humanity wants your ideas and designs for the classrooms of the future. Their 2009 Open Architecture Challenge invites students, teachers and architects to submit their designs for classrooms in the places that need them most. You don’t have to be a licensed architect, just submit the best possible plans and they’ll find you […]
Paola Antonelli is the design curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and a two-time TEDTalks star, with her TED2007 talk “Treating design as art” and her EG’07 talk “Design and the elastic mind,” a preview to the 2008 MOMA show of the same name. Today, SEED magazine premieres her next venture, a monthly […]
To celebrate March 8, International Women’s Day, we suggest these four TEDTalks gems from some amazing speakers — artists, scientists and economists who think deeply about the role of women. Author and activist Isabel Allende discusses women, creativity, feminism — and the power of passionate thinkers and doers: The former Finance Minister of Nigeria, Ngozi […]
Not without a struggle (and a measure of healthy angst), acclaimed pianist Eric Lewis is driving the next evolution of jazz — forging new musical alloys of classic blue note scuttles, delicate improvisations and heady alt rock hooks. Now, with a roster of sold-out shows and a growing list of celebrity supporters, his iconoclastic arrangements […]
In Willie Smits’ powerful TEDTalk, he describes his work to re-grow the rainforest in Indonesia — a triple-bottom-line effort that can benefit the local economy, the local orangutans and the green heart of the forest. The TED Blog asked Smits’ associate Richard Zimmerman, the director of Orangutan Outreach, to expand on the orangutan story: In […]
As many forms as outreach can take, it seems that today’s new TEDTalk luminary, Nalini Nadkarni, has done them all and then invented several of her own. This tireless champion of the canopy has embarked on projects involving poets, dancers, rappers, prison inmates and even Barbie dolls to bring attention to the plight of our […]
Willie Smits works at the complicated intersection of humankind, the animal world and our green planet. In his early work as a forester in Indonesia, he came to a deep understanding of that triple relationship, as he watched the growing population of Sulawesi move into (or burn for fuel) forests that are home to the […]
From a New Scientist photo gallery: Andrew Hicks used computer algorithms to generate the mirror’s bizarre surface, which curves and bends in different directions. The curves direct rays from an object across the mirror’s face before sending them back to the viewer, flipping the conventional mirror image. (Via Philebrity. Image by Andrew Hicks.)
Brenda Laurel spoke at TED in early 1998 — at a watershed moment. In 1997, she launched Purple Moon to make smart computer games aimed at girls. By 1999, the company had come to a much-publicized end. But between start and finish, Purple Moon marked a sea change in the girl-game market. The TED Blog […]
Today, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’ talk from TED2009 was posted and we all began to tweet, creating a labyrinth of self-reference. Here are a few choice selections from the day’s activity: Twitter State of the Union, courtesy of TED.com. Definitely an idea worth spreading. — tapdraw Watching @ev present at TED on video about Twitter […]
TED2009 favorite Eric Lewis is playing this Sunday at Joe’s Pub. This amazing improvisatory pianist (whom many people saw for the first time at TED) wowed the audience in two onstage sets and some legendary late-night gigs in Long Beach. Come see what the fuss was about, in New York this Sunday night. Tickets are […]
Three weeks ago, while Evan Williams was onstage at TED2009 talking about Twitter, his audience became an army of #TED tweeters, hunched over their mobile devices, simultaneously listening and creating a written narrative of @Ev’s 8 minutes onstage. Chris Anderson and Evan talked about this in their Q&A: the idea that while a speaker is […]
As published today in the journal Science, a dig near Ileret, Kenya, has uncovered early human footprints in a streambed — quite possibly, evidence of the first hominids who walked on two legs as a matter of course. In the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s well-reported story, “Footprints offer clue on path to modern man,” TED2009 speaker Nina […]
To say that Richard Pyle is a multifaceted personality is an understatement. He is a world-renowned diver, evolutionary biologist, dive technology pioneer, database developer and author. But all his talents have grown to facilitate one love — fish. His 2004 TEDTalk shows how he pushes the boundaries of diving in his endeavor to document new species. In […]
David Merrill is a grad student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. He and his fellow students in this group work on new technologies that give us more and better abilities to do things we want to do. At TED2009 he gave a demo of his main project, Siftables. Today the TED […]