TEDGlobal 2007 speaker Binyavanga Wainaina has an opinion piece in today’s New York Times, “No Country for Old Hatreds,” that offers some backstory on the violent post-election crisis in Kenya. It’s not about “ancient feuds,” as some pundits have glibly summed it up. As he points out: Five years ago, we voted for a broad […]
Many TEDTalks speakers have answered the 2008 Edge Foundation question: What have you changed your mind about? Why? Among the more than 160 essays from leading thinkers — scientists, philosophers, artists — look for Wired’s Chris Anderson, Nick Bostrom, Stewart Brand, Richard Dawkins, Aubrey de Grey, Juan Enriquez, Helen Fisher, Neil Gershenfeld, Daniel Gilbert, Daniel […]
To help those of us making resolutions this week, here is a sampling of web tools for making a difference, inspired by TEDTalks speakers: + Share Ron Eglash‘s cool math tools, for studying math via breakdancing, Latin beats and cornrow braids + Dive into Richard Baraniuk‘s Connexions, a massive repository of open-source class materials + […]
Designer Ettore Sottsass died yesterday, at 90. The leader of a group of Italian designers who called themselves Memphis, he helped spark the postmodern design revolution, which mixed pure modernism with color and pattern, historic references and unabashed pastiche. Now-classic Memphis pieces such as his Carlton room divider rocked the design world in the early […]
Hoping to submit your short film or video for Pangea Day? There’s still a month and a half before the deadline — plenty of time to get familiar with your new videocamera. From the Pangea Day site: We’re looking for films that will make us laugh, cry, and gasp. They can be fiction, nonfiction, real […]
On May 10, 2008 -– Pangea Day -– we’re throwing a worldwide film festival. Screens in Cairo, Dharamsala, Kigali, London, New York City, Ramallah, Rio de Janeiro and Tel Aviv will be videoconferenced live to produce a 4-hour program of powerful short films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music. Pangea Day grew out of the wish […]
John Maeda (watch his 2007 TEDTalk) has been named the next president of the Rhode Island School of Design. An artist and a coder, Maeda is an enthusiastic connector of art and technology. In his supercool announcement video, he gives a sense of where he hopes to lead the school, saying: Technology has outpaced humanity, […]
In 2006, filmmaker Daphne Zuniga came to TED and made an independent movie about it — the talks, the hallway conversations, the connections and unmissable moments. Her film, The Future We Will Create, was released on DVD exclusively via NetFlix, where it became a hit, with more than 12,000 reviews so far. “I’ve kept it […]
This week, journalist Andrew Mwenda (watch his TEDTalk) launched a weekly newspaper, The Independent, in Kampala, Uganda. His journalism has been critical of the Ugandan government, and he writes in an email that the president warned off his first printer. From his email: we have been through a lot of hell. our launch was supposed […]
Via the BPS Research Digest: A recent study on the long-term benefits of the Socratic method. In a study of 105 children, all around 10 years old, teachers spent an hour a week for 16 months teaching lessons based on philosophical inquiry. The philosophy-based lessons encouraged a community approach to “inquiry” in the classroom, with […]
William Kamkwamba, a young Malawi man who designed and built a windmill for his family when he was 14 — and who spoke so memorably at TEDGlobal Africa this June — is profiled on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal in a story headined “A Young Tinkerer Builds a Windmill, Electrifying a Nation.” […]
Energy guru Amory Lovins lays out his plan for weaning the US off oil and revitalizing the economy in the process. It’s the subject of his book Winning the Oil Endgame, and he makes it sound fairly simple: On one hand, the deadly risks of continued dependency, and on the other, some win-win solutions. (Recorded […]
Artist Jonathan Harris (watch his TEDTalk) just launched his latest piece, The Whale Hunt. In this visionary, documentary work, Harris joins a family of Inupiat Eskimos on their annual whale hunt: I documented the entire experience [in] 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second […]
Philippe Starck talks about how life began in the soupe primordiale — but this week, researcher Helen Hansma of UCSB hypothesizes that molecules might have first turned into cells — life — while sheltered between sheets of mica dunked in that soup. Hansma’s “soup and a sandwich” theory was presented Tuesday at the annual meeting […]
At Nokia World in Nokia today announced its global partnership with Pangea Day, a unique event that will bring together millions of people around the world through the power of film on May 10, 2008. Pangea Day will be broadcast globally to millions on television, in digital theaters, online and via mobile devices. It will […]
This morning’s pair of announcements on human stem cell research marks a step forward for regenerative medicine — the study of regrowing or repairing body parts, using the body’s own processes. Alan Russell’s 2006 TEDTalk is a fascinating roundup of what regenerative medicine could bring: revolutionary treatments for heart disease, severe burns, even the loss […]