TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

June 18th is Autistic Pride Day, a day to celebrate the neurodiversity of people on the autism spectrum. Too often, autistic people are viewed as only autistic, and it’s seen strictly as a disorder. As always, the full picture isn’t drawn in black and white: it’s complex, full of grays. At TED, scores of speakers […]

Forecasting the stock market has a storied past of unfruitful predictions. But in today’s TED Talk, Didier Sornette shares how he and his research team have successfully identified unstable market bubbles and even predicted when they’ll pop. His findings, if accepted, could quite literally change the way we do business, by shifting how banks, traders […]

From an unexpected reason why malaria has not been eradicated to a bold argument for why businesses can be a powerful force in solving the world’s problems, TEDGlobal 2013 brought so many opportunities for us to “Think Again,” as citizens of a global world. Here, some incredible images taken on site during days 4 and […]

He is a part of you. Whether you are close or not, whether he was a constant part of your life or not, he impacted who you are today. You love him – except maybe when you can’t stand him. For better or worse, he is your dad. Celebrate this Father’s Day with these nine […]

Chances are, you’ve heard Ghandi’s famous words: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Now, you have an opportunity to bring this famous adage to life by dreaming up a high-impact collaborative action for the global community. The TED Prize is an annual $1 million grant given to a bold leader with […]

It’s the last day of TEDGlobal 2013, which means goodbyes and premature reminiscing. Onward: In session 11, “Tech Impact,” we heard about the dangers and delights of our accelerated technological age. We’re doomed! No we’re not! Yes we are! And in session 12, “All Together Now,” we held mental hands and were reminded that, in […]

David Steindl-Rast is a monk, and a composed, serene figure to wrap up the last session of TEDGlobal 2013. His theme, gratefulness, is also appropriate for the end of a long and intense week. After all, he points out, we all share the same essential goal: to be happy. And gratitude provides the key. “We […]

As this amazing week of TEDGlobal 2013 winds to a close with Session 8: Altogether Now, the audience is still reeling from a shocking talk on the mighty roots of corruption by Charmian Gooch, founder of Global Witness. What better to help soothe the soul than the rich and sultry voice of Irish-born pop singer-songwriter […]

When we talk about corruption, certain types of individuals come to mind, says Charmian Gooch, co-founder of watchdog NGO Global Witness. She gives some familiar examples of the type. There’s the (former) Soviet megalomaniac — such as Saparmurat Niyazov, the all-powerful leader of Turkmenistan, whose indulgences included erecting a 40-foot-high gold-plated statue of himself that […]

“This was my cancer,” TED Fellow Salvatore Iaconesi begins his TEDGlobal talk, showing a slide of brain scans taken last summer, when he was diagnosed with brain cancer at age 39. Since the moment Iaconesi heard the word “cancer” come out of his doctors’ mouth, he noticed something — that the way people related to […]

Tim Exile was a child violinist. But the first time he heard house music, his life changed. All he wanted to do was to make electronic music. “I learnt the key skills and sat behind a computer with a mouse,” he says on the TEDGlobal 2013 stage. “And I totally lost this intimacy of playing […]

Political philosopher Michael Sandel — the second “Michael from Harvard” this session — returns to TED in the last session of TEDGlobal, “All Together Now,” to address the marketization of our culture. These days there’s very little money can’t buy. If you ever wind up in jail in San Diego, CA, and you find your […]

Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter is here to make the case that business can help tackle social problems. Issues such as healthcare, access to water and climate change are bread-and-butter concerns for TEDsters in the room, who clearly agree with his early statement that we’re all very aware that these problems exist. Many of them also […]

TEDGlobal 2013 has come to a close, and we’ve reached the final session: All Together Now. Here a look at the speakers who appeared in the session. Click on the speaker’s name to read a recap of their talk. Michael E. Porter wrote the books on modern competitive strategy for business. Now he is thinking deeply […]

Early yesterday afternoon, early results were published of the Peterborough prison pilot, a UK program aimed at lowering reoffending rates in short-term prisoners. Though the program won’t finish until 2014, these early results are promising. According to Toby Eccles, who spoke yesterday about launching the Peterborough pilot, the program showed a 23 percent decrease in reoffending […]

Stories of NSA spying have been rippling through the press in the past week or so, and Carnegie Mellon professor Alessandro Acquisti is here to tell us just how blurry the boundary between private and public has become in recent years. He begins by reminding us of the story of Adam and Eve, banished from the Garden of […]

Indian novelist Abha Dawesar explores the self and technology’s — ahem — impact on the self in the penultimate session of TEDGlobal, “Tech Impact.” Dawesar reflects on how time-warping technology, like social media and mobile devices, has changed our perception of our own personal narratives and perception. We live, instead, in what she calls the […]

Anant Agarwal runs EdX.org, the Harvard-MIT open-education site, and he’s here to talk MOOCs, those “massive open online courses” that have generated both excitement and skepticism throughout the chattering world of the digital classes. Agarwal shows a picture of a lecture hall in MIT from 50 years ago. Then one of the scene from today. What has […]

Fifteen months ago, a small device called Raspberry Pi was put on the market. Despite the glut of gleaming, do-everything devices available today, this credit-card sized, £25, Linux-run computer with nothing but a microprocessor, 512MB RAM, some ports and an SD card slot has sold more than 1 mllion pieces since its launch. What’s it […]

“This is what happens when you take the addictive power of an LOLcat and apply it in a ceonsorship state,” says An Xiao Mina, a writer, technologist and researcher who studies Chinese memes. On the TEDGlobal 2013 stage, she shares the moment that led her to this unusual specialty. Two years ago, China’s government imposed a […]