As this amazing week of TEDGlobal 2013 winds to a close with Session 8: Altogether Now, the audience is still reeling from a shocking talk on the mighty roots of corruption by Charmian Gooch, founder of Global Witness. What better to help soothe the soul than the rich and sultry voice of Irish-born pop singer-songwriter […]
When we talk about corruption, certain types of individuals come to mind, says Charmian Gooch, co-founder of watchdog NGO Global Witness. She gives some familiar examples of the type. There’s the (former) Soviet megalomaniac — such as Saparmurat Niyazov, the all-powerful leader of Turkmenistan, whose indulgences included erecting a 40-foot-high gold-plated statue of himself that […]
“This was my cancer,” TED Fellow Salvatore Iaconesi begins his TEDGlobal talk, showing a slide of brain scans taken last summer, when he was diagnosed with brain cancer at age 39. Since the moment Iaconesi heard the word “cancer” come out of his doctors’ mouth, he noticed something — that the way people related to […]
Political philosopher Michael Sandel — the second “Michael from Harvard” this session — returns to TED in the last session of TEDGlobal, “All Together Now,” to address the marketization of our culture. These days there’s very little money can’t buy. If you ever wind up in jail in San Diego, CA, and you find your […]
Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter is here to make the case that business can help tackle social problems. Issues such as healthcare, access to water and climate change are bread-and-butter concerns for TEDsters in the room, who clearly agree with his early statement that we’re all very aware that these problems exist. Many of them also […]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65537NeYK8I&w=560&h=315] In a run-down school, children of all ages draw on blackboards and on the playground concrete in colored chalk. This video, created by Nessim Higson and David Altobelli to open the final session of TEDGlobal 2013, provides an uplifting feeling of closure — coming to rest on the words “All Together Now” scrawled as […]
TEDGlobal 2013 has come to a close, and we’ve reached the final session: All Together Now. Here a look at the speakers who appeared in the session. Click on the speaker’s name to read a recap of their talk. Michael E. Porter wrote the books on modern competitive strategy for business. Now he is thinking deeply […]
Could Social Impact Bonds change the way we tackle social problems? In a bold talk at TEDGlobal 2013, Toby Eccles shared how a marriage of private and public funds could be a win-win-win for the government, investors and populations in need of innovative social service programs, like those in prison or in the care of the […]
Stories of NSA spying have been rippling through the press in the past week or so, and Carnegie Mellon professor Alessandro Acquisti is here to tell us just how blurry the boundary between private and public has become in recent years. He begins by reminding us of the story of Adam and Eve, banished from the Garden of […]
Tim Exile was a child violinist. But the first time he heard house music, his life changed. All he wanted to do was to make electronic music. “I learnt the key skills and sat behind a computer with a mouse,” he says on the TEDGlobal 2013 stage. “And I totally lost this intimacy of playing […]
Indian novelist Abha Dawesar explores the self and technology’s — ahem — impact on the self in the penultimate session of TEDGlobal, “Tech Impact.” Dawesar reflects on how time-warping technology, like social media and mobile devices, has changed our perception of our own personal narratives and perception. We live, instead, in what she calls the […]
Anant Agarwal runs EdX.org, the Harvard-MIT open-education site, and he’s here to talk MOOCs, those “massively open online courses” that have generated both excitement and skepticism throughout the chattering world of the digital classes. Agarwal shows a picture of a lecture hall in MIT from 50 years ago. Then one of the scene from today. What has […]
Fifteen months ago, a small device called Raspberry Pi was put on the market. Despite the glut of gleaming, do-everything devices available today, this credit-card sized, £25, Linux-run computer with nothing but a microprocessor, 512MB RAM, some ports and an SD card slot has sold more than 1 mllion pieces since its launch. What’s it […]
“This is what happens when you take the addictive power of an LOLcat and apply it in a ceonsorship state,” says An Xiao Mina, a writer, technologist and researcher who studies Chinese memes. On the TEDGlobal 2013 stage, she shares the moment that led her to this unusual specialty. Two years ago, China’s government imposed a […]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahr5TVtWt2A&w=560&h=315] Eero Johannes Pitkänen introduces session 11 of TEDGlobal 2013 with a perfect synthesis of visual and sound effects. To a tinny metal drum-beat, colored Tetris blocks bounce up and down and in and out of shapes as each chord of sound has its impact. Describing himself as a “designer/illustrator during the day, musician during […]
Technology is such an integral part of everyday life, it can be hard to remember how far we’ve come — and how fast. This session at TEDGlobal 2013 introduces a cadre of technological innovators who are helping to change the world yet further–and thinking about the implications of technology on society at large. Here are […]