Selected TED Talks

Karen Armstrong

As she accepts her 2008 TED Prize, author and scholar Karen Armstrong talks about how the Abrahamic religions — Islam, Judaism, Christianity — have been diverted from the moral purpose they share to foster compassion. People want to be religious, she says; we should act to help make religion a force for harmony. She asks the TED community to help her build a Charter for Compassion — to help restore the Golden Rule as the central global religious doctrine.

Jacqueline Novogratz

Jacqueline Novogratz is redefining the way problems of poverty can be solved around the world using microfinancing and small, scalable local industry. Local businesses, once started, can bring affordable clean water, housing and healthcare to poor people so that they no longer have to depend on the disappointing results and lack of accountability seen in traditional charity and old-fashioned aid.

Nicholas Negroponte

The founder of the MIT Media Laboratory describes how the One Laptop Per Child project will build and distribute the “$100 laptop.” These small, simple laptops are being produced and sold en masse to the developing nations of the world for the education of their children.

Iqbal Quadir

Iqbal Quadir tells how his experiences as a kid in poor Bangladesh, and later as a banker in New York, led him to start a mobile phone operator named GrameenPhone that now connects 80 million rural Bangladeshi.  Along the way he became a champion of bottom-up development and the power of enabling the poor instead of merely providing handouts.

Jeff Skoll

Jeff Skoll was the first president of eBay; he used his dot-com fortune to found the film house Participant Productions, making movies to inspire social change, including Syriana; Good Night, and Good Luck; Murderball; An Inconvenient Truth … His guiding principle: bet on good people to do good things.

Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements.

Hans Rosling

A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the developing world is on the same path toward health and prosperity as the west was forty years ago, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did then. You’ve never seen data presented like this.