Guest blogger Devlen Watkins handles IT for the Aspen Institute, but when he’s not running around solving technical problems during TED@Aspen, he’s been down at the AMD 50×15 / One Laptop per Child table, playing with the XO Laptop. He writes: OLPC, or as most of you know it One Laptop per Child, has really […]
Johnny Lee just gave a two-ovation demo at TED2008 of his amazing Wii Remote hacks — turning the Wii Remote into a whiteboard tool, a tracking device and even a multi-touch screen. Here’s a link to his site, where you can download the tools >>
This week at the Kluster lab in Monterey, TEDsters and contributors around the world brainstormed, designed and made a brand-new product in 72 hours — an educational game to raise cultural awareness (born out of inspiration of Dan Dennett’s 2006 TEDTalk). The rules: This game is linear in nature, all players start out at the […]
The big thought of the day, from the fertile mind and warm heart of Benjamin Zander: BTFI Words to live by, my friends.
From the TED stage in Monterey, explorer Robert Ballard announced that his Immersion Presents project will be running live from Monterey Bay March 2-7. Immersion Presents uses telepresence — satellite feeds and web links — to bring young kids into live research environments. In Monterey Bay, kids can explore one of the planet’s most spectacular […]
Last year on the TEDBlog we asked “what’s your Starck factor?” Prior to hearing him blow the roof off of TED2007 with his spectacular meditation on design and the universe and bloop-bloop, I found it very instructive to take an inventory of Mr. Starck’s influence on my existence. In all, I found I used four […]
E.O. Wilson made this TED Prize wish in 2007: Help me build the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life. Today, the Encyclopedia of Life website has launched, with the first 30,000 pages, each one describing a single species, with descriptions and photos contributed by scientists and […]
What would it be like to see life through someone else’s eyes? Film provides that opportunity. Watch the powerful new Pangea Day trailer, on YouTube, and share with your family and friends. This film is part of Pangea Day, May 10, 2008 — a four-hour film festival happening all around the world. It grew from […]
Alisa Miller of Public Radio International just gave an amazing short presentation on why, every year, we get less and less information about the world around us through the media — even though we want and need it more than ever. You can see Miller’s slides, read more about PRI’s study of global media — […]
The design firm Ideo has built a cool little question-asking widget to celebrate the theme of TED2008/TED@Aspen: The Big Questions. Download it to your desktop, and it will ask you a new question every day (and tell you the day and date): + Where will you walk today? + What are you looking forward to […]
In response to the unofficial movement to draft Larry Lessig to run for US Congress, Lessig has set up his own site, Lessig08.com, to help him decide if he should run for a seat in California’s 12th District. A 10-minute video on the site lays out his platform. Lessig08.com will also host Lessig’s yet-to-launch Change […]
From IEEE Spectrum magazine: Dean Kamen’s “Luke arm” — a prosthesis named for the remarkably lifelike prosthetic worn by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars — came to the end of its two-year funding last month. Its fate now rests in the hands of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the project. If […]
More presentation news: Garr Reynolds pulls examples from his favorite TEDTalks (Majora Carter, Hans Rosling, Sir Ken Robinson) for his new book, Presentation Zen — to help his readers refine, simplify and focus their own presentations and talks. What makes a great TED speaker? Passion, connection, a story to tell. As Reynolds points out, “If […]
The National Academies’ “Grand Challenges for Engineering” list, released yesterday, runs down the 14 most pressing issues we must face in the 21st century. Creating access to clean water … restoring our cities … engineering new medicines and new ways of providing care … the list is vast and inspiring. Look on the Next Steps […]
A timely item in the week before TED2008: Stephen M. Kosslyn, professor and researcher in mental imagery at Harvard, is out to empower PowerPoint users with lessons from cognitive science. Kosslyn spoke in Boston today at a meeting of the AAAS to share some quirkily titled guidelines (the Goldilocks Rule, the Rudolph Rule) that will […]
Earlier this week, TEDTalks favorite Aubrey de Grey visited Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report to promote his new book, Ending Aging. His controversial 2005 TEDTalk, in which he argued that we could one day extend the human lifespan by hundreds of years, continues to spur debate. Stephen Colbert on de Grey’s nonprofit Methuselah Foundation: “If […]