Social
Julian Assange: Why The World Needs WikiLeaks
The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video. Founder Julian Assange, who’s reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED’s Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished — and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad. [...]
Laurie Santos: How monkeys mirror human irrationality
Why do we make irrational decisions so predictably? Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in “monkeynomics” shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too. Tags: choices, Innovation, Inspiring, irrational decisions, irrationality, Laurie Santos, monkeys, [...]
Legos for grownups
Lego blocks: playtime mainstay for industrious kids, obsession for many (ahem!) mature adults. Hillel Cooperman takes us on a trip through the beloved bricks’ colorful, sometimes oddball grownup subculture, featuring CAD, open-source robotics and a little adult behavior. Tags: CAD, Hillel Cooperman, Innovation, Inspiring, Lego, Social
The politics of fiction
Listening to stories widens the imagination; telling them lets us leap over cultural walls, embrace different experiences, feel what others feel. Elif Shafak builds on this simple idea to argue that fiction can overcome identity politics. Tags: Elif, fiction, imagination, Inspiring, Listening, Shafak, Social
The Art of Choosing
Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices — and how we feel about the choices we make. At TEDGlobal, she talks about both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones, and shares her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions. Tags: decisions, Design, Inspiring, Sheena Iyengar, Social
