IncTalks ...in association with TED

I was surprised to find this prestigious conference taking place in Lavasa near Pune. An achievement.

INK (Innovation and Knowledge) is an annual conference held in association with TED. It brings together influential thinkers and doers from around the world and in a variety of disciplines, including art, architecture, dance, design, music, science, social entrepreneurship, sports, and technology. What originated as TEDIndia in 2009 is now continued as the INK conference.

http://www.inktalks.com/

A related video
http://www.ted.com/talks/alexander_tsiaras_conception_to_birth_visualized.html

The Internet and Democracies ...A Delusion ....

Are the insurgencies spawned in the "Arab Spring" riding a wave borne by the Internet, or are the new information technologies more likely to subvert those very movements? 

Evgeny Morozov, Internet-savvy analyst of social protest, doubts that the new media necessarily represent "technologies of freedom." Instead, he argues in his new book The Net Delusion that repressive regimes may use social networking sites and other digital media to track and subvert popular

causes. Jillian York writes and speaks regularly about free expression, politics and the Internet, with a focus on the Arab world and particularly Morocco and parts of North Africa. Her work has been published in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Foreign Policy and Bloomberg. On November 17, Dissent magazine and the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues' Center for Research on Social Change and the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative will feature Morozov and York in a forum on what democratic movements all over the world can expect from the new technologies.