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Alwar Balasubramaniam’s sculpture plays with time, shape, shadow, perspective: four tricky sensations that can reveal — or conceal — what’s really out there. At TEDIndia, the artist shows slides of his extraordinary installations. (Recorded at TEDIndia, July 2009 in Mysore, India. Duration: 16:51) Watch A. Balasubramaniam’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate [...]

Via the Gates Foundation’s Foundation Notes blog: On Monday, Sept. 20, TEDxChange will look at the eight Millennium Development Goals set by the UN back in 2000 — and assess how close we are to reaching them by 2015. Melinda Gates made the video above to invite the world to watch online or at a [...]

Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think [...]

Chris Anderson, curator of TED, was born in Pakistan, and last week, he and the Acumen Fund’s Jacqueline Novogratz, his wife, spent several days in the flood zones there. They visited refugee camps and flooded villages, spoke to local aid workers and unusual volunteers, and collected many stories that simply aren’t being told by world [...]

As a 7.0 magnitude earthquake strikes New Zealand, and millions of people are being displaced by the monsoon flooding in Pakistan, we are reminded of Mother Nature’s powerful force and our lack of control over her moods. However, today’s playlist presents lifesavers: three speakers who have found ingenious solutions to the consequences of disaster. Some [...]

Mission Blue supporter Richard Rockefeller reports: Light winds, clear skies, a leisurely agenda and frequent laughter belie this group’s intensity of purpose. We are a collection of TEDsters, Bermudian government officials, scientists, media folk, and of course, Dr. Sylvia Earle, 2009 TED Prize Winner — spending a few days in the azure waters of the [...]

Rachel Sussman shows photographs of the world’s oldest continuously living organisms — from 2,000-year-old brain coral off Tobago’s coast to an “underground forest” in South Africa that has lived since before the dawn of agriculture. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2010, July 2010 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 14:09) Watch Rachel Sussman’s talk on TED.com where you can [...]

Bristol Baughan is a producer of award-winning films — including a documentary that received an Academy Award nomination — and a co-founder of Good Magazine.  Now experimenting with concepts like “commercials for ideas,” and “personal producing,” Bristol is discovering new ways of seeing herself and her work. Dedicated to finding lasting solutions for complex social [...]

After hitting on a brilliant new life plan, our first instinct is to tell someone, but Derek Sivers says it’s better to keep goals secret. He presents research stretching as far back as the 1920s to show why people who talk about their ambitions may be less likely to achieve them. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2010, [...]

His Holiness the Karmapa talks about how he was discovered to be the reincarnation of a revered figure in Tibetan Buddhism. In telling his story, he urges us to work on not just technology and design, but the technology and design of the heart. He is translated onstage by Tyler Dewar. (Recorded at TEDIndia, November [...]