Margaret Heffernan thinks deeply about what makes businesses work, and her answers are often surprising. At TEDGlobal 2012, she shared why disagreement is vital for innovation. In today’s talk, given at TEDxDanubia, Heffernan turns her eye to willful blindness — the fact that people are primed to ignore evidence that something is amiss in their […]
Colorblind artist Neil Harbisson is an intrepid “eyeborg” wearer. That’s a device that converts color into audible frequencies, meaning that Harbisson gets to hear a symphony of color, instead of seeing a world only in grayscale. Below, Harbisson’s talk from TEDGlobal 2012 gets the graphic treatment in a beautiful chart that shows precisely which colors sound which musical notes for him. This is […]
[ted id=1518] Today, several US-based internet communities — including 4chan (watch Christopher “moot” Poole’s TED Talk), Mozilla (watch Gary Kovacs’ talk), Fark (Drew Curtis has given a TED Talk too), and Reddit (Alexis Ohanian has given a talk and created a TED playlist) — are rallying against NSA surveillance of the internet, as revealed by a whistleblower in June. Visit any of […]
In 1812, four men met for a “philosophical breakfast” at Cambridge University: Charles Babbage, John Herschel, Richard Jones and William Whewell. Over food and drinks, they debated the state of knowledge –- imagining a world in which thinkers drew conclusions based on data, where research was done for the good of humanity rather than for […]
“We may not yet have the flying car that science fiction promised us,” says Catarina Mota in today’s talk, given at TEDGlobal 2012. “But we can have walls that change color depending on temperature, keyboards that roll up, and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch.” As Mota demonstrates, smart materials will […]
Education is generally thought of as a domestic policy issue. But what can we learn by looking at education on the global scale? In today’s talk, given at TEDGlobal 2012, Andreas Schleicher introduces us to a test that measures school systems and student achievement in countries across the globe—PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment), […]
Economist Keith Chen starts today’s talk with an observation: to say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether […]
By Keith Chen How are China, Estonia and Germany different from India, Greece and the UK? To an economist, one answer is obvious: savings rates. Germans save 10 percentage points more than the British do (as a fraction of GDP), while Estonians and Chinese save a whopping 20 percentage points more than Greeks and Indians. […]
From ordering movie tickets to booking a dentist appointment, mobile and web apps have made the tasks of daily life easier. But there are some things that an app can’t do. Standing in line at the pharmacy is one of them. In today’s talk, Lee Cronin asks: “Could we make a really cool universal chemistry […]
Artist Julie Freeman uses data as a source material to make biologically inspired artworks — giving musicality to the movement of fish and expressing city lights in the quiver of moths’ wings. Now she’s finding ways to translate data so that we may gain new perspectives on what it’s trying to tell us. What do […]
Fashion designer and BioCouture founder Suzanne Lee harnesses the labor of microorganisms to grow clothing. Computational architect Skylar Tibbits — who’s setting up a lab at MIT focused on self-assembly technologies and programmable materials — examines biological systems to develop his methods. We asked them to discuss the directions they’re exploring, and the trends and […]
Secrecy and propriety used to define our cultural and professional lives. We kept trade secrets, held closed-door meetings, had whispered conversations and kept the details of our comings-and-goings to ourselves. That’s no longer the case. We have entered a new era — one characterized by openness — in which our world and our relationships have […]
Do you still know every word to Macy Gray’s lovesick ballad “I Try?” Us too. In fact, Gray’s chart-toppling album, On How Life Is, still sounds as refreshingly modern as it did when it was released in 1999. At TEDGlobal2012, Macy Gray took to the stage and got the audience on their feet with a […]
What is DNA barcoding, you ask? It’s a precise way of identifying plant species using their DNA (as opposed to external characteristics that might vary from plant to plant). In this video, Ellen Jorgensen — who gave today’s TED Talk “Biohacking, you can do it too” — heads to a remote region of Alaska to collect […]
[ted id=1568]“It’s a great time to be a molecular biologist,” Ellen Jorgensen says in today’s TED Talk, given at TEDGlobal 2012. The realm of biotechnology is growing fast, she says, and advances are coming down the pipeline at a rapid clip. And yet, scientists aren’t so good at communicating to the public what is going […]
All around the globe, people are feeling increasingly skeptical and mistrustful of their leaders. According to one global trust barometer, only 52% of survey respondents said that they trusted their government to do the right thing in 2011 and, in 2012, the number plummeted to 43%. As recent surveys reveal, only 18% of Italians believe their […]