Mohammed Sameer's Online Aggregator

Bi Kidude , the 93 year-old queen of Taraab music, honors us with her presence on the TED stage. Leading the ensemble astride a meter-long Msondo drum, accompanied by two other drummers and give dancers, she sounds like a woman a third her age. (Ndesanjo tells me that both the drum and the dance are called “Msando”.

Simon Mwacharo of Craftskills is dedicated to bringing power to the poorest corners of Africa. He sees the key problem as the high cost of power transmission, the difficulty of getting power from hydroelectric generation facilities to the people who need it.

Alieu Conteh is a Gambian entrepeneur who has been deeply involved with the Democratic Republic of Congo, even during some of the nation’s darkest days. Under the Mobutu government, he was a coffee exporter, purchasing beans, roasting them in Kinshasa and flying it to London for export.

Google is one of the three major sponsors for TED Africa, alongside AMD and GE. They hosted lunch today for a group of attendees to feature the company’s work in Africa, both through the corporation and Google.org, the foundation formed with 3 million shares of Google stock. Larry Page talked briefly about his interest in Africa and his naive desire to see Google hire 10,000 Africans. He quickly discovered that “multinationals are allergic to Africa” in part because it’s very hard to hire in Africa due to some labor and anti-corruption laws.

Ron Eglash has an odd job title - he’s an ethnomathematician whose has built his career studying fractals in African architecture. He starts by explaining fractals, walking us through George Cantor’s subdivision of lines to infinity by eliminating the middle third of each line. The result, on an infinite line divided into a set of points larger than infinity, literally drove Cantor mad. But other mathematicians built additive fractals like the Koch curve.

The Sliced Menu allows menus to be sliced into a block per level. It behave like primary link with no level limitation.

If a menu with four levels (depth) is sliced, four blocks will be available in the administer block section. Each block will contain a level of the chosen menu. If a menu item is selected, the next level is visible. If item doesn't have sub items, the block won't be displayed.

Long-time TEDster Jay Walker uses a three minute talk to issue a challenge to the TED community: help figure out how to create at least ten million new jobs. He argues that “if you’ve got capital tools, you’ve got jobs”, suggesting that a person with a sewing machine rapidly becomes a sewing business. Mobile phones are a capital tool with a billing platform built in, which have already sold 1 billion units. What sort of services can people with mobile phones and no training sell to the world? Storytelling? Jokes? Interpretation? Language practice?