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 […]
Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal is here to talk about stress. In particular, she’s here to make the case that stress might not, in fact, be the enemy we tend to think it is. To do this, she asks those assembled in the conference hall in Edinburgh to indicate how much stress they’ve felt in the past year. […]
Standing on the TED stage looking stunning in a blue dress, neuroscientist and author Sandra Aamodt reveals that three and a half years ago on New Year’s Eve, she made a decision: She gave worrying about her weight. Instead, she learned to eat mindfully — and lost 10 pounds. For Aamodt, who had been dieting […]
Who inspires you with their large-scale vision for change? Who offers a bold, unique solution to a global problem — and the capable leadership to make it a reality? The TED Prize is a $1 million grant, awarded annually to someone who is both a dreamer and a doer. And the best candidates invariably come from you. Perhaps you […]
“I don’t know how to introduce this, so I’ll just say, ‘Hetain Patel,’” says TED curator Chris Anderson. So no one knows what to expect, and that’s as may be, because this is some crazy right here. Patel walks onstage and crouches in a chair next to the dancer Yuyu Rau. He speaks a few […]
The end of “Exquisite Enigmatic Us,” the last session for today at TEDGlobal 2013, is appropriately rounded out by a former student of psychology, English pop singer Natasha Bedingfield. (Did you know she studied psych at university?) Popular for her hits “Unwritten” and “Pocketful of Sunshine,” Bedingfield performs “These Words” and debuts a newly written […]