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 […]
“I write sci-fi novels, because if I wrote a white paper nobody would read it,” Daniel Suarez told a panel of translators at TEDGlobal 2013. The science fiction author and drone activist was taking questions during his Skype Open Translation session, in which he described a dystopic–and all too believable–future dominated by autonomous lethal drones. His […]
By Susan Zimmerman David Steindl-Rast has the honor of closing this year’s TEDGlobal. The Benedictine monk, whose words made an appearance in Louie Schwartzberg’s classic talk “Nature. Beauty. Gratitude,” is known for bridging Catholicism and Buddhism. In the book The Ground We Share, he reveals that the key to both faiths, when you boil it […]
The final full day of TEDGlobal 2013 comprised three jampacked sessions. “State of the Nations” included insights from China, the Middle East, and thoughts for fixing the dysfunctional global system of governance. “Forces of Change,” curated by TED Senior Fellows Erik Hersman and Adrian Hong, introduced us to fresh thinking about Africa, and provided a […]
TEDGlobal 2013 is steaming along, and our brains are bursting with new ideas as well as rebooted approaches to old ones. Here, some incredible images taken on site during days 2 and 3 of the conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. Enjoy.
Pico Iyer is a man without a land. He is 100 percent Indian in blood and ancestry, but he was born and grew up in England; he has lived the last 48 years in the U.S., where he sees his doctor and dentist, but for the last 25 years he’s spent as much time as […]
Musical relief in this session comes courtesy of the British pop and jazz-pop singer-songwriter Jamie Cullum, supported by his brother Ben on bass and Brad Webb on drums. The first song, he tells us, “is about a boy at school who couldn’t get noticed by any of the girls, so he decided to become very […]
Andras Forgacs is trying to grow meat. This is a concept he had to be talked into. See, Forgacs and his father, Gabor, co-founded Organovo, which 3D-prints human tissue. And as people found out what the company did, they would often ask: If you can grow human body parts, can you also grow animal products like meat and […]
“I read poetry all the time, I write about poetry frequently, and I take poems apart to see how they work,” says Stephen Burt as he takes the TEDGlobal stage. “I’m a word person. I understand the world best and most fully through words, rather than pictures or numbers. When I have a new experience, […]
When you’re an artist, everything you see can seem like a canvas, a blank page with the potential for something beautiful. Alexa Meade sees this quite literally, using actual people as both subject and canvas. Painting on a 1-to-1 scale, Meade takes real-life subjects and turns them into paintings, playing with the shadow and light […]
“In the middle of my PhD, I was hopelessly stuck,” confesses scientist Uri Alon. “Every research direction I tried led to a dead end. It seemed my basic assumptions stopped working.” Alon felt like a failure. And even though he got through it, the experience stuck with him … especially when it happened again. While […]