TEDx Photo Spotlight: 5 great shots from TEDx performances around the world.
(Top: TEDxSydney, Australia; Clockwise: TEDxReset, Turkey; TEDxAmsterdam, The Netherlands, TEDxDunkerque, France; TEDxTokyo, Japan)
In August 2010, I and a few friends and colleagues attended a TEDx event in the Netherlands.
As we left, a question bubbled up in us—a question we couldn’t ignore. Why is there no TEDx in Delft?Delft is a place of creators and creations, of Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek, of Senz umbrellas and Plakkies flipflops, of quantum mechanics and satellite experts. Delft has a top ranking University of Technology, a city centre that is a treasure of cultural heritage. Delft has Delft blue pottery, royalty, design. Delft knows how to win solar power races (or almost). Delft is all about ideas worth spreading. Delft is all about creating history.
None of us could come up with a good answer. “Because it takes time and effort,” was one attempt; “because there are other TEDx events already” was another.
So we decided to bring TEDx to Delft.
We’re glad we did.
—Rob Speekenbrink, organizer of TEDxDelft in the Netherlands, pictured above. Read more about the event at the TEDxDelft website: http://www.tedxdelft.nl/
A prelude to TEDx: The Hague’s local TED Club transforms into TEDxHague
In September 2008, before TEDx existed, now-TEDxTheHague organizer Yolanthe Smit asked her friend Ralph Oei if he was interested in starting a TED Club in their hometown of The Hague.
“I thought we could meet every month on Sunday afternoon to watch three TED Talks centered around a theme,” she said, “and invite a bunch of people to watch them with us and talk about what we saw.”
So they took over the attic of a local tennis club, discussing ideas worth spreading with friends and strangers.
“Our first meeting only drew one other person,” Yolanthe said, “A toastmaster with a Ph.D. in biomedical science — but quickly, our numbers grew.”
“We met on snowy evenings, with onion soup and piles of blankets; we met in the tennis club and in a local art gallery. We thrived on conversation and new ideas and our connection with our city and with the greater world.”
For almost a year, The Hague TED Club met once a month — on the second Sunday of every month. Then, in 2009, TED introduced a new program called TEDx, encouraging people across the world to host their own TED-like events, inspired by ideas worth spreading in their own towns, cities, countries.
“When TEDx was introduced, our meetings became official,” Yolanthe said. “We got a logo with an ‘x,’ and moved our now-named TEDxTheHague to Berg Kleijn Communicatie, an advertising communications agency in The Hague.
“Attendance has been growing steadily ever since,” she said, “[into] a diverse, international group of people sometimes coming from far beyond The Hague.”
Since their first TEDx event in 2009, TEDxTheHague has had event after event, with a count now in the double digits. A highlight for Yolanthe was their simulcast of TEDGlobal2011 in Edinburgh, for which they incorporated seven local speakers, transforming what once was simply a TED Club into a truly local TEDx.
Wednesday marked TEDxTheHague’s 30th TEDx event. For more information on TEDxTheHague, including information on attending one of their events, visit their Facebook page.
Paved roads are nice to look at, but they’re easily damaged and costly to repair. UV rays, weather, oxidation and constant traffic wear down paved surfaces, loosening rocks and creating dangerous potholes.
But are there better alternatives for paving roads than traditional asphalt? At TEDxDelft, civil engineer Erik Schlangen says yes. Here he demonstrates a new type of porous asphalt with an astonishing feature: When cracked, it can be “healed” by induction heating.
This “self-healing” asphalt is infused with tiny strands of steel wool (yes, that steel wool — the same used to scrub dishes), which clings to the binding of the asphalt, called bitumen. When Schlangen’s asphalt develops a crack, caretakers can use heat to melt the steel mixed in the bitumen, which then liquifies and flows into the road’s cracks, “healing” itself.
Onstage, Erik demonstrates this process by dropping a piece of his asphalt into liquid nitrogen, breaking it, and then heating it in a microwave to “heal it,” a process from which the asphalt reemerges fully formed. Out on the roadways, he and his team from the Delft University of Technology are working on a real piece of highway donated by the Dutch government, 400 meters of the A58, where they’ve discovered that this process really works, as Erik says in his talk:
“If we go on the road every four years with our healing machine — this is the big version we have made to go on the real road — if we go on the road every four years, we can double the surface life of this road, which of course saves a lot of money.”
Erik is also working with microbiologist Henk Jonkers to create a “self-healing” building concrete (pictured above, on bottom), which is infused with bacterial spores and a compound that feeds these spores — calcium lactate. “When the biomaterial is exposed to water (one of the many things known to contribute to the degradation of concrete),” says io9, “the bacteria set to work converting calcium lactate into calcite, which fills in surrounding cracks.”
We can’t wait to see what comes of these exciting new building materials, and until then, we’re crossing our fingers for self-healing smartphone screens.
(Bio-concrete photo via io9)
