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 […]
Why do clouds get such a bad rap? In English, when someone’s sad or depressed, they’re “under a cloud.” When there’s bad news in store, there’s “a cloud on the horizon.” It’s everyone’s default doom-and-gloom metaphor. But, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, has one message for you: Clouds are awesome. Whatever happened […]
Mathemagician Arthur Benjamin says that there are three reasons we learn math: calculation, application and inspiration. Yes, inspiration. Math is the science of patterns, and learning it teaches us not just logic but creative thinking, says Benjamin. So why, when math is beautiful and exciting, is so much of what we learn in school about preparing for […]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFAcd9Y2v6w&w=560&h=315] To a techno beat, this video introduction to “Imagined Beauty” celebrates hip-hop dance. Body-popping in a black, white and grey world, the dancers’ movements create colorful shadows that stand out beautifully against the dreary background. This concept perfectly highlights the session, which includes talks from a cloudspotter, a poetry critic and the man who […]
Beauty is always a key theme at TED, and in this session, Imagined Beauty, there’s something for everyone, with speakers including a couple whose professions have required the coining of new words. Meet the “cloudspotter,” the “mathemagician,” and the others who presented to us in this session of TEDGlobal. Click on their name for a […]
“North Korea is often in the news, conjuring images of missiles, weapons, dictatorships and sometimes eccentric habits,” says Adrian Hong, TED Fellow and guest curator of Session 9, Forces of Change at TEDGlobal 2013. “But underneath all that bluster is a country racked by starvation, by oppression, by fear, by concentration camps. In many ways, […]
Former Deputy Prime Minister of Libya and engineering professor Mustafa Abushagur takes the stage at TEDGlobal 2013 to look at where the Arab Spring has been, and where it is going. The Arab world once led human civilization in culture, philosophy, mathematics and science, but in the last century the region found itself first under […]
Just a Band are … not at all just a band. During a key moment in their music video “Ha-He,” called by many Africa’s first viral video, a Blaxploitation-inspired superhero named Makmende is threatened by a man in a red tie who asks, “Are you a dreamer?” Let’s just say that Makmende leaves the victor of […]
The publisher and editor of the South African edition of Stuff magazine, Toby Shapshak is here to challenge our perceptions of his home continent. First, he asks us, who bought a pay-as-you-go SIM card on arriving in Edinburgh? Hands wave. “You’re using African technology,” he says proudly. “‘Pay-as-you-go’ was an idea pioneered in Africa by Vodacom […]