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TED Blog | The INK Conference 2011 Jaipur, India

Artists, scientists, entrepreneurs and technologists are gathered in Jaipur, India to attend the second year of the INK Conference — an experience hosted by TEDster Lakshmi Pratury and with its roots in the 2009 TEDIndia conference. The’ Power of the Journey’ is the theme of this year’s conference, held from Thursday December 8 to Sunday December 11. Through their partnership with India Times, watch all the incredible talks live here.

Anguish in India

After a devastating fire kills over 90 people in one of India’s most advanced private hospitals the Advanced Medical Research Institute hospital in Kolkata, Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir sent this message on Twitter: “Every time I see incidents like #AMRI I’m convinced we really are a 3rd world nation with delusions of greatness.”

The Times of India writes:

Pradip Sarkar had been pacing up and down near AMRI late on Thursday night when he saw smoke billowing out. The guards asked Sarkar not to raise an alarm and assured him it was a minor blaze.

“The utter callousness of the authorities and the guards was shocking. They made no effort at all to hasten things up. We could hear patients screaming from the floors above. Some were even banging on the glass windows and trying to break them open. The guards should have swung into action immediately. Instead, they kept warding us off, giving us false hopes. My father-in-law and scores of others could have been saved had they acted promptly,” alleged Sarkar, holding back tears.

The Future of British Architecture

Heatherwick Studio’s Seed Cathedral’s interior, lit by daylight filtered through its hundreds of optical strands. He makes pavilions from seeds and breathes life into buses. More Intelligent Life meets Thomas Heatherwick, whose quirky style points to a new kind of architecture …

More DFR

Darcie Chan, lensed by Allison Michael Orenstein for The Wall Street JournalSelf-Publishing Success for Darcie Chan

“Nobody was willing to take a chance,” says Ms. Chan, a 37-year-old lawyer who drafts environmental legislation for the U.S. Senate. “It was too much of a publishing risk.”

How Darcie Chan went from having her “The Mill River Recluse” manuscript rejected by a dozen publishers and more than 100 literary agents before self-publishing it and selling 400,000 copies online for 99 cents is the focus of WSJ’s in-depth look at self-publishing today.

Reality is that growing numbers of self-published authors are landing on best-sellers lists. Last year, 133,036 self-published titles were released, up from 51,237 in 2006, according to Bowker, a company that tracks publishing trends.

Thirty authors have sold more than 100,000 copies of their books through Amazon’s Kindle self-publishing program, and a dozen have sold more than 200,000 copies, according to Amazon. E-book sales totaled $878 million in 2010, compared to $287 million in 2009, according to the Association of American Publishers. Some analysts project that e-book sales will pass $2 billion in 2013.

The article is a valuable read because it walks us through some pretty specific steps that Darcie Chan took on the way to self-publishing success. Read on at The Wall Street Journal.

The Generous Marriage

Hammerpress

New research on marital generosity, the latest installment in a superb ongoing research project called “State of Our Unions” report from the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project, doesn’t displace 1. sexual intimacy and 2. commitment as the top predictors of a happy marriage among parents. But generosity among spouses joins the top three, according to the latest survey. Read on at The New York Times.