Talking as fast and fervently as a circus busker, TED Fellow Greg Gage introduces the world to RoboRoach — a kit that allows you create a cockroach cyborg and control its movements via an iPhone app and “the world’s first commercially available cyborg in the history of mankind.” “I’m a neuroscientist,” says Gage, “and that […]
There’s a question that’s been troubling journalist Sonia Shah since she was a child: What is malaria, and why is it killing so many people? This morning during the session “Listening to Nature,” journalist Shah looks at the complexities making it so hard for humanity to rid itself of this killer disease, which kills hundreds […]
Our supermarket produce aisles would look very, very bare without bees. As MacArthur Fellow Marla Spivak explains on the TEDGlobal stage, this is something we should all be extremely concerned about: the dramatic drop in bee populations that’s been taking place over the past seven years. (Read The New York Times’ take on the especially scary drop in […]
Bernie Krause is here to talk about soundscapes, the unique sound signatures he says are the foundation of every habitat, if only you know what you’re listening for. He certainly knows; the sound engineer has been recording in the wild for the past 45 years. “There was a time when I considered natural soundscapes to be […]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3hN36gQEeQ&w=560&h=315] Buzzing past a hummingbird with its beak in a flower, narrowly avoiding a lawnmower and peeking in on a couple getting intimate in the bedroom — all part of a day in the life of a bee, which introduces session 5 of TEDGlobal 2013. The natural scenes of this water-color animation come from Brett […]
This session asks us to pay closer attention to what nature has to tell us — both about itself and about the world around us. We’ll investigate a variety of sources — from the soundscapes of ecosystems to the neurons of cockroaches to the extraordinary sex lives of animals. Here are the speakers who appeared […]
Losing a passport shortly before an international flight probably wouldn’t strike most people as an obvious moment to reflect upon alternative currencies. Jennifer Healey, a research scientist at Intel, would likely argue otherwise. She lost hers right before flying to TEDGlobal to speak at the TED Institute. Instead of panicking and melting down at immigration, […]
Toby Eccles doesn’t believe that the private and public sectors have to operate separately for social change. And he and his colleagues at Social Finance have been working since 2010 to prove it — with a new financial instrument known as social impact bonds. They are, as Eccles says, “not a new intervention, therapy or […]
“Do you think it’s possible to control someone’s attention, or even their behavior? To me that would be the perfect superpower,” says Apollo Robbins at TEDGlobal 2013. “I’ve spent the last 20 years studying human behavior in an unconventional way: by picking pockets.” Robbins, whom The New Yorker called a “theatrical pickpocket” in their profile of […]
Governments’ role in spurring innovation is a controversial one. In rough terms, political debates about public spending usually go something like this: One side argues governments should only spend on the most basic public goods and do whatever they can to keep out of the way of the private sector that grows the economy and […]
Sovereign credit ratings are kind of like Consumer Reports for nations — just as people read car magazines or washing machine reviews before buying, investors read ratings to determine how to invest their money. Sovereign credit ratings assess a country’s debt and its ability and willingness to repay it. And whether citizens of a country realize […]
Risk economist Didier Sornette makes bold claims on Wednesday morning at TEDGlobal 2013, during the session “Money Talks.” According to Sornette, we have been operating under a few detrimental illusions that have landed us in our current economic state: One, we have been living in an age of never-ending growth and prosperity. Well, $30 trillion […]
The most important economic fact of our time, says Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats, is that we are living in an age of surging income inequality, a global phenomenon that includes the US and UK, certainly, but also Communist China, India, and, she says, “we’re even seeing it cozy social democracies like Sweden, Finland and […]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJng1RhCKEM&w=560&h=315] In this pastel dystopia, a group of headless and heartless beings manufacture money. The haunting soundtrack captures the essence of this cold and impersonal world and interprets the concept of “Money Talks”. Introducing speakers ranging from risk economists to gentlemanly pick-pockets, Greg Solenström and Kim Demåne illustrate the success of their collaboration in this […]
In the immortal words of the Wu-Tang Clan, “Cash rules everything around me.” Then again, as Benjamin Franklin put it, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” So how are we to parse this thing — money — which shapes so much of our lives? This session will make you think again about economics, taking […]
Something special happens when you think again. All it takes is an insightful thought and — all of a sudden — your brain does a backflip and you see faulty assumptions underlying what you’d always taken to be true. The first day of mainstage talks at TEDGlobal 2013 brought so many of these paradigm-shifting moments […]