Lucinda Williams (born January 26, 1953) is an American rock, folk, blues and country music singer and songwriter.

She recorded her first albums in 1978 and 1980 in a traditional country and blues style and received very little attention from radio, the media, or the public.

She has since become much more well-known, for obvious reasons. If you don't know who she is or what those reasons are, you will  after you listen to this tune…

TED and TEDx conferences are the ultimate intellectual/cultural/creative idea fests. Everyone I know who has been exposed to TED, TEDx or TED talks almost immediately becomes a fan.

(In case you don't what TED is, learn the basics here, and see some cool examples of TED Talks here. And a word of advice: whoever you are, wherever you are, register for the next and closest TEDx event within reach –  the worldwide list is here.)

But nothing, not even TED, is perfect.

Like most conferences, TED suffers a dearth of women speakers on its worldwide stages. That’s an issue. But it’s also an opportunity.??

TEDx events in particular are ideal vehicles for making giant grassroots steps to solving the problem, because their gender parity record is worse than that of the main TED events, which average of 20 – 40% women speakers.

A few months ago, I randomly selected a group of 10 TEDx events from around the world, and looked at the female to male ratio in their speaker lineups.

Camryn Manheim (born March 8, 1961) is an American actress known primarily for her roles as attorney Ellenor Frutt on ABC's The Practice and Delia Banks on CBS's Ghost Whisperer and as Elvis Presley's mother in the 2005 mini-series Elvis.

Manheim was born Debra Frances Manheim in Caldwell, New Jersey, but grew up in Peoria, Illinois.

Lynn Rachel Redgrave, OBE (8 March 1943 – 2 May 2010) was an English actress.

A member of the well-known British family of actors, Redgrave trained in London before making her theatrical debut in 1962. By the mid-1960s she had appeared in several films, including Tom Jones (1963), and Georgy Girl (1966) which won her a New York Film Critics Award and nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award.

In 1967, she made her Broadway debut, and performed in several stage productions in New York while making frequent returns to London's West End.

She performed with her sister Vanessa in Three Sisters in London, and in the title role in a television production of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1991. She made a return to films in the late 1990s in films such as Shine (1996) and Gods and Monsters (1998), for which she received another Academy Award nomination.