Diane-Michel.com

TED 2010 is now going on.  Don’t miss out on learning from some of the most brilliant minds on the planet.  Here is a spreadsheet of all the speakers and their topics:   http://tinyurl.com/rc7llb

Topics of interest include:

• 15 ways to avert a climate crisis
• Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen
• Do schools kill creativity?
• Greening the ghetto
• When it comes to tech, simplicity sells
• Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better
• “Letting Go of God” (an excerpt)
• Designing the Seattle Central Library
• A secular, scientific rebuttal to Rick Warren
• Living a life of purpose
• TED Prize wish: Help stop the next pandemic
• TED Prize wish: Open-source architecture to house the world
• TED Prize wish: Unite the world on Pangea Day, a global day of film
• The vision behind One Laptop Per Child
• Unveiling the genius of multi-touch interface design
• Dazzling set by 11-year-old violinist
• Magical improv from 14-year-old pianist
• Simple designs that could save millions of childrens’ lives
• The power and beauty of organic design
• Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning
• How a ragtag band created Wikipedia
• How blogs are building a friendlier worl
• What’s so funny about the Web?
• Finding happiness in body and soul
• The science of love, and the future of women
• What is our place in the cosmos?
• The paradox of choice
• Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?
• My dream about the future of medicine
• Why we age and how we can avoid it
• Investing in Africa’s own solutions
• The power of the mobile phone to end poverty
• How to fix broken states
• Why a free press is the best investment

Resource: TED

“In the early 1980s, Kary Mullis developed the polymerase chain reaction, an elegant way to make copies of a DNA strand using the enzyme polymerase and some basic DNA “building blocks.” The process opened the door to more in-depth study of DNA — like the Human Genome Project. Mullis shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing this technique.

As he tells it, after winning the Nobel Prize, his next career move was to learn how to surf. It’s typical of Mullis, whose scientific method is to get deeply curious about a topic, work it out from first principles, and then imagine the next giant leap forward. As he puts it in his Nobel autobiography, revised several times since 1993, “I read a lot, and think a lot, and I can talk about almost anything. Being a Nobel laureate is a license to be an expert in lots of things as long as you do your homework.”

Most recently, he’s been taking a hard look at immunity; a recent patent from his company Altermune describes the redirection of an existing immune response to a new pathogen.”