“Economic development is of the people, by the people and for the people,” declared entrepreneur and economist Iqbal Quadir on the TED stage back in 2005. In his talk, he offered a bold vision for bottom-up development and shared a searing critique of foreign aid — that it actually does more harm than good. His […]
It’s no secret that the world is on the alert for plans toward political and economic solvency. Strategic planner Thomas Barnett has released Great Powers: America and the World After Bush to address many of our most significant global crises. In a recent interview with Dan Hare, Barnett elaborated on the book, saying the US […]
Updates from TED speakers: After a whirlwind of media speculation over the weekend following a story by The Guardian, biologist Craig Venter (watch his TED2005 speech) will announce today at the annual meeting of his institute in San Diego that his team has built a synthetic chromosome, using lab chemicals. “A giant leap forward in […]
A few days ago TED2005 speaker Craig Venter (watch his talk) announced that his lab has finished sequencing a single human’s genome — his own. At his old company, Celera, Venter worked on sequencing his genome and four other genomes all mixed together, creating an anonymous composite. He told Newsweek: What we got this time […]
Wired editor Chris Anderson got an advance copy of Bjorn Lomborg’s upcoming book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, and his summary is: read it, but don’t follow his advice. Lomborg (watch his TED2005 speech) argues that although global warming is clearly happening and is human-caused, the debate over what to do […]
If you are planning (you should) to go see Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary “Manufactured landscapes“, which opened last week in theaters across the US after spending a year mesmerizing film festivals audiences and will soon arrive in Europe, make sure you get there in time, for nothing describes the scale and essence of today’s globalized industry […]
Developing the ideas he laid out in his 2005 talk at TED — where he asked, “What does technology want?” — Kevin Kelly posts a fascinating essay in the latest edition of Edge.org. He suggests that we can think of technology as another kingdom of life — call it the technium. And that, like all […]
The last “Bill Moyers Journal“, the weekly report on PBS, featured a long interview (video – transcript) by Moyers with biologist and TED Prize 2007 winner EO Wilson. The focus was very much on Wilson’s career — “No one in our time has added more to our understanding of Earth’s ecology than Ed Wilson” is […]
The New York Times may be cranky about the new trend in web comics. (They question the distinction between web comics and animation, and bemoan the “added headaches.”) But those of us who recognize that emerging media are, by definition, works in progress, find the new form fascinating. Our favorite: The Right Number by Scott […]