Philip Zimbardo knows evil inside and out. He led the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 and was an expert witness at Abu Ghraib, privy to graphic unseen images. At TED2008, Zimbardo explains how easy it is for the good to turn evil, and on the flip side, for inspiration to lead people to heroism. […]
In February 2008, Karen Armstrong won the TED Prize and made her wish — to create a Charter for Compassion, a document about the core shared value of every world religion and moral code, the Golden Rule. This document will be released to the world on November 12, the result of months of collaborative work […]
Today, eminent psychologist and TEDTalks star Philip Zimbardo (see his talks on evil and the paradox of time) agreed to answer TED’s Facebook fans’ questions on Absolutely Anything — and he did! Read on: Does time orientation influence which children become bullies? — Kathy Hermanv Interesting question, but there’s no research on this relationship. Bullies […]
YouTube’s Margaret Stewart shares her sketchbook notes from the TED2009 sessions — a lively, personal way to see TED through one creative person’s eyes. Click the image above to view the full set of sketchbook pages. We’re always interested in creative ways to take notes on TED and TEDTalks (check out Autodesk’s BigViz sketchbook, and […]
Yesterday, CERN announced that the Large Hadron Collider (which spectacularly failed last September) could be turned on again as soon as this August. In this short talk from TED U 2009, physicist Brian Cox shares what’s new with CERN’s supercollider. He covers the repairs now underway and what the future holds for the largest science […]
Watch Karen Armstrong make her audacious wish during the TED Prize session at TED2008:
As published today in the journal Science, a dig near Ileret, Kenya, has uncovered early human footprints in a streambed — quite possibly, evidence of the first hominids who walked on two legs as a matter of course. In the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s well-reported story, “Footprints offer clue on path to modern man,” TED2009 speaker Nina […]
The newest edition of UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger totes up 6,000 world languages — and counts 2,500 as endangered and 200 as completely lost. The interactive atlas, released today, ranks the 2,500 endangered languages by five levels of vitality: unsafe, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct. This free, browsable […]
At TED2007, Paul Rothemund gave TED a short summary of DNA folding (calling it a process akin to magic). Now, he lays out in clear, adundant detail the immense promise of this field — to create tiny machines that assemble themselves from a set of instructions. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 16:24.) […]
The TED2008 Gift Bag was the first product from a brand-new company, Rickshaw Bagworks. Made in San Francisco with sustainable fabrics and thoughtful details, the TED bags became a bit of a cult item — not least because they weren’t available for retail sale at the time of the ’08 conference. This week Rickshaw opens […]
As she accepts her 2008 TED Prize, author and scholar Karen Armstrong talks about how the Abrahamic religions — Islam, Judaism, Christianity — have been diverted from the moral purpose they share: to foster compassion. But Armstrong has seen a yearning to change this fact. People want to be religious, she says; we should act […]
You can now read journalist Andrew Mwenda‘s newspaper, The Independent, online. Based in Kampala, Uganda, the paper promises “uncensored news, views and analysis” — a promise that has already led to government threats against the paper’s printer. Mwenda spoke at TEDGlobal 2007 and was a panelist on the BBC debate hosted last week at TED […]
Photos: Andrew Heavens “Imagine Martin Luther King saying, ‘I have a dream … But I don’t know if the others will buy it.’” – Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, on the importance of persuasive leadership “Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying […]
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session twelve – closing session.) The session opens with the projection of will.i.am’s "Yes We Can" viral video based on Barack Obama’s speech. The two producers are in the audience. The video has been seen millions of times, a demonstration of the power of individuals […]
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session eleven.) Ben Kaufman, founder of Kluster, goes on stage to tell what he and his team have been doing — with the help of TED attendees and 1200 people around the world — since the beginning of the conference. Kluster is an online collaboration […]
Photo: Michael Brands/Aspen Institute Friday at TED@Aspen, we hosted live Talks from Walter Isaacson, the head of the Aspen institute, and the wonderful Ze Frank. Between TED sessions via satellite, we heard from David Gallo and William Lange of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Joy Mountford sharing amazing data visualizations, Ron Dembo and his ZeroFootprint […]