TED

Cyborgs from Sierra Leone: Polymath David Sengeh Brings Prosthetics to the People

David Sengeh tells me he'll have to delay our phone interview. “I am sorry to do this but there’s a last minute need for me to attend an Ebola meeting.” Sengeh is a multi-faceted kind...

The Conference Paradox: In-Person Matters When You Live on the Edge

Technology has advanced so much that we can now buy ice cream, deposit checks, chat with friends, find and apply for jobs, and share pictures of cats—all from our phones. We have Skype. We have...

A New Lab to Reinvent Mexico City

Five months ago, Gabriella Gomez-Mont launched Mexico City’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad, or Laboratory for the City, under the auspices of recently elected mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera. The Laboratorio, as its name suggests, is an...

Could We Lose Control of Drones?

Is any technology inherently “good” or “evil”? The deciding factor would be how it's used (or misused), right? Consider drones. Drones—unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or aircrafts without human pilots on board—have been around since the...

The Limits of the Virtual: Why Stores and Conferences Won’t Go Away

Last week we attended the Singularity Summit. During this two day celebration of all things technologically progressive, we enjoyed the summit’s signature cocktail of research, futurism, and metaphysics. Speakers speculated on topics ranging from virtual...

Open Online Courses: Higher Education of the Future?

I am "teaching" a MOOC, one of those massive, open, online courses through which Coursera and, more recently, edX offer people around the globe challenging learning experiences through a simple internet connection: video mini-lectures, machine-graded...