(BG: Stephanie Bowman has been circulating the following text per e-mail among friends. I asked her permission to post it here -- thus taking her bid to the national stage. Stephanie has worked in politics and public affairs in Washington State for fifteen years.)

-- by Stephanie...

OK folks, wherever you are, get your calendar out and write down this under Saturday, May 10th: Pangea Day .

I just got the most recent progress report from the team organizing it, and it will be a remarkable event. You don't want to miss it. You don't want...

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California)

Last year was quite a year for former US vice-president Al Gore. He was awarded the Nobel prize for Peace (together with the IPCC), won an Oscar for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth and saw...

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California.)

Robert J. Lang is an origami artist (origami: the ancient Japanese art of
paper-folding). He uses maths to analyze folding patterns and create
origamis with hundreds of folds and sophisticated curves. Most people...

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California: TED Prize session)

Every year at TED, three exceptional people are awarded the TED Prize. They each receive US$ 100'000, but that's not the real prize: they also are granted a wish -- no restrictions -- that they...

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. For more, go to LunchOverIp)

TED2008 goes under the theme "The Big Questions", and it opens with THE big Shakespearian question: "To be, or not to be". Actor Michael Stuhlbarg offers a stunning interpretation of...

(Or, if you don't read French, as soon as it is translated. Seriously.)

It is increasingly difficult to provide a whole and appropriate context for the news that reach us. Consider just this sequence: last January, the Chinese used a ground-based missile to destroy one of their own satellites,...

Journalistic coverage of election campaigns is in need of reinvention. In many countries it has turned into a festival of soundbites, an endless exegesis of what a candidate says (speeches, position papers, televised debates) rather than who she is or what he does -- which are better predictors of future...

If you are planning (you should) to go see Jennifer Baichwal's documentary "Manufactured Landscapes", which opened last week in theaters across the US after spending a year mesmerizing film festivals audiences and will soon arrive in Europe, make sure you get there in time, for nothing describes the...

The other day at the end of my speech on citizen bloggers at the BlogCamp in Zurich, someone in the audience asked  for my opinion on the impact of blogs on the 2008 US presidential election ("blogs" is here used as shorthand for a whole palette of communication and...

Closing morning at the TED2007 conference in Monterey, California, with two sessions. I've blogged most of the speakers on the LunchOverIP blog. What follows are my unedited running notes from Bill Stone's speech:

Explorer...

Third day of the TED2007 conference in Monterey, California. Speakers ranged from "Lost" creator JJ Abrams to writer Isabel Allende, Participant Production founder Jeff Skoll, architect Elizabeth Diller, "Sims" creator Will Wright, economist Ed De Bono. I've liveblogged most of the sessions on the LunchOverIP blog. Here are...

At the TED2007 conference in Monterey, California, today was the day of the TEDprize. What follows are my unedited, real-time running notes of the Prize award session. For the other speakers of the day -- John Maeda, Alan Kay, Maira Kalman, Michel Pollan, John Doerr (whose speech was...

The TED2007 conference started today in Monterey, California. I'm liveblogging all sessions on the LunchOverIP blog, but here are my running notes (almost real-time and unedited, so apologies for the typos) of two of the speeches of this first day: psychologist Steven Pinker explaining how violence in the world...

One day to go. TED2007 starts tomorrow Wednesday (I will be liveblogging most of the conference on LunchOverIP and partially on the TEDblog and the HuffPost). The whole TED team is in Monterey, busy applying the final touches and extinguishing the inevitable last-minute fires. Time for a...

This morning I was testing a time-travel device and could journey a few days into the future. As I always do when visiting a new place, I picked up the local newspaper:

(Newspaper clipping courtesy of the clipping generator....

There is an assumption that many problems are so big and complex and cross-border (think climate change) that they cannot be solved by a single country, or by a group of countries, and that a sort of global governance is the only possible vehicle for solving them.

Letizia Moratti, the...

With "The Long Tail" Chris Anderson has written a book that will have a significant impact on the way we think about markets.

Or at least, about some markets.

Anderson posits that while we...

You've seen "An Inconvenient Truth" and heard plenty about it - about this documentary that manages to be both lucid and riveting while trailing Al Gore as he travels from city to city warning about climate change. You may even have seen the short portrait of Gore (part...

Sasa Vucinic announced it at TEDGLOBAL last Summer, raising both interest and skepticism: he wanted to sell "free press bonds." "If investors are willing to fund the US deficit, why wouldn't investors want to fund the press freedom deficit?," Vucinic said.

It's now reality: for the first time...