Pop!Tech Pop!Casts (and Some New TED Talks)

Each Octo­ber, Pop!Tech brings togeth­er 550+ lead­ers in sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, busi­ness, social
entre­pre­neur­ship, the arts, cul­ture and media to “explore the social impact of inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies, break­through sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies and orig­i­nal approach­es to tack­ling human­i­ty’s tough­est chal­lenges.”  And quite nice­ly some of the major talks are cap­tured and made avail­able to you via video pod­casts (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). Among the down­load­able record­ings, you’ll find talks by Thomas Fried­man (New York Times writer and author of The World is Flat), Car­olyn Por­co (who leads the Imag­ing Sci­ence Team on the Cassi­ni mis­sion to Sat­urn), Richard Dawkins (where does­n’t this guy speak these days?), Chris Ander­son (author of The Long Tail and ubiq­ui­tous speak­er), and Mar­tin Mar­ty (a lead­ing com­men­ta­tor on reli­gion and cul­ture).

Just to give you a lit­tle more con­text, the lat­est con­fer­ence was orga­nized around the fol­low­ing agen­da:

What is a “dan­ger­ous” idea? It’s one that upends con­ven­tions, chal­lenges assump­tions and breaks taboos, reorder­ing our sense of the world and our place with­in it. It’s an idea, as Vic­tor Hugo said, whose time has come.… Here’s just some of what we’ll be dis­cussing:

• The nature of risk in the con­nect­ed age
• Bright green pos­si­bil­i­ties
• Globalization’s great sur­pris­es
• The role of faith and fun­da­men­tal­ism
• Pan­demics and their pre­ven­tion
• New approach­es to edu­ca­tion
• The cre­ative imper­a­tive
• New fron­tiers of explo­ration
• What tech­nol­o­gy wants from us
• Our con­struct­ed selves
• Con­flict, res­o­lu­tion and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of peace

Final­ly, it’s worth men­tion­ing that TED Talks, a rather sim­i­lar con­fer­ence that brings togeth­er the cognoscen­ti, has just re-launched its web site and also released videos from its April con­fer­ence. Though they’re not yet acces­si­ble on iTunes, you can grab these talks from the web site and feed. Tune in and give a lis­ten to Bill Clin­ton, E.O. Wil­son, Thomas Dol­by, Jeff Bezos and more.