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 […]
The New York Times reported yesterday that the UN’s agency on AIDS dramatically overestimated its count of current and new infections: The agency, Unaids, will lower the number of people it believes are infected worldwide, to 33.2 million from the 39.5 million it estimated late last year. Much of the difference comes from new reporting […]
Since Nicholas Negroponte presented his idea for a “100-dollar-laptop” at TED2006, the project has been going through many ups and downs, enthusiasms and criticisms, and had occupied a lot of media space. The XO laptop is now here. The cost at this stage is nearly double, but the machine is awesome. Mass production started earlier […]
Consider it a bonus track to the great speech by Carolyn Porco last March at TED07, when she showed amazing images of Saturn and its moons. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) has just released video footage taken by the the onboard high-definition camera of their spacecraft Kaguya, showing extraordinary images of the Moon’s surface […]
TEDGLOBAL2005 speaker and GrameenPhone founder Iqbal Quadir is launching a new center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT, thanks to a $50 million structured gift from Legatum, a Dubai-based investment firm. The Legatum Center “will help MIT students start enterprises in developing countries, to foster organic and durable economic growth and more equitable societies”, Iqbal […]
Witness, the non-profit led by Peter Gabriel (watch his TED2006 talk) has launched “The Hub”, an online platform allowing anyone to use camcorders, cell phones and cameras to upload, share, and discuss human rights-related footage, as well as organize advocacy campaigns. A few months ago, announcing the project, Peter had described it as “a sort […]