I was there when Hans Rosling first shook the room at TED, and transformed tiresome medical statistics into an action-packed, live performance about real people’s lives on the line. He’s since been namechecked by Bill Gates. And he outlasted Fidel Castro – twice. Not merely mortally. In an interview on the TED Blog, Hans recounts […]
Bounding up on stage with the energy of 1,000 suns and his special extra-long pointer, Swedish professor Hans Rosling became a data rock star, dedicated to giving his audience a truer picture of the world.
TED and Wikipedia have teamed up in the spirit of open, accessible knowledge. “I firmly believe that nonprofit organizations should magnify their impact by collaborating wherever their aims align,” says Andy, one of TED’s Wikipedians-in-Residence. Andy works as a consultant, advising organizations about Wikipedia, Wikiquote and numerous other Wiki-projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, including […]
This week, Apple turned the iPhone into a medical research tool with the launch of ResearchKit. This open-source framework, described in the video above, lets a medical researcher set up a project to gather anonymous patient data on diseases like asthma, breast cancer and diabetes. Using their own smartphones, patients who join a project can […]
We live in a sea of data — and visualizations can help us understand the movement of individual waves. Great data visualizations can gather up enormous volumes of information, revealing the (sometimes sublimely beautiful) patterns underneath. Next week at TED2015, Manuel Lima (founder of Visual Complexity) will explore how one particular data representation — the […]
At first glance, the image above may look like an artistic tangle of worms. But it is actually a visualization of the words that appear most often in TED Talk descriptions. Each line corresponds to a word, and its snaking movement shows how its frequency of use has changed over time. Mouse over the word […]
. Artist Julie Freeman creates kinetic sculptures, compositions and animations from nature-generated data. Think: the motion of fish swimming, or the quiver of moths’ wings. This week, Freeman revealed a new piece of work from the TED Fellows stage. Called “We Need Us,” it’s an online, data-driven artwork that explores the nature of metadata. It’s now […]
Jean-Baptiste Michel has sold a small sculpture to the Whitney Museum of American Art. A major museum acquiring a piece—that’s a big moment for any artist. But this sculpture is the very first piece of art Michel ever created. Michel is the data researcher who showed what you can learn using Google’s Ngram Viewer at TEDxBoston in […]
What’s this galaxy-like cluster of dots and lines? It’s the TED Fellows Collaboration Network MAPP, a rich and interactive web that shows the patterns of cross-disciplinary collaboration among TED Fellows over the past four years. This rainbow visualization was created using MAPPR, a cloud-based network mapping tool that Eric Berlow demoed during TED2014. It allows anyone to make shareable, interactive network […]
Cartoonist (and former NASA roboticist) Randall Munroe illustrates the questions that keep you (or at least him) up at night. Whether that’s “What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?” or “How much of the Earth’s currently-existing water has ever been turned into a soft drink […]
By Jessie Scanlon In January 2011, Fred Villagomez, the head mechanical technician at a Mountain View-based satellite imaging startup, drove east, looping down and around the San Francisco Bay toward Fremont. His destination: an auto plant called NUMMI, a failed joint venture between General Motors and Toyota, whose assets were about to be auctioned off. […]
When Anne Milgram became the Attorney General of New Jersey in 2007, she was stunned to find out just how little data was available on who was being arrested, who was being charged, who was serving time in jails and prisons, and who was being released. “It turns out that most big criminal justice agencies […]
Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg focuses on using economic methods and data to prioritize the world’s problems. In 2005, he gave a TED Talk, Global priorities bigger than climate change, in which he challenged the audience to decide how they might spend $50 billion to solve the pressing issues of our time. Now he’s back, with […]
[ted id=1833] For the past week, Amy Webb has been inspiring people to calculate their own algorithm for love. Her laugh-out-loud TED Talk, about reverse engineering her online dating profile and, essentially, data-ing her way into her perfect relationship has gotten a lot of attention, including on The Frisky and Pop Sugar. As Webb’s talk […]
When yet another romantic relationship came “burning down in a spectacular fashion,” Amy Webb sought the advice of her friends and family, including her grandmother. “She said, ‘Stop being so picky. True love will find you when you least expect it,’” Webb recalls in her TED Talk. This advice struck Webb, who works with data for […]
It may be the age of big data, but it’s still very hard to know how many children were born in Bolivia or Botswana last year, or to know something as simple as which clinics in the developing world have medicine and which don’t. Until recently, there was only one way to find answers to […]