29 February 2008
A moment which totally knocked my hat in the creek
The big thought of the day, from the fertile mind and warm heart of Benjamin Zander: BTFI
Words to live by, my friends.
29 February 2008
TED2008: Visual blogging
While many people at TED blog away in words and photographs, two artists -- Kevin Richards and David Sibbet -- are immersed in another form of conference blogging. They are the magic hands (and, given the intensity of this conference, brains) behind the TED BIG VIZ, a project to visually record and synthetize the ideas of TED speakers. Kevin and David create in almost-real-time spontaneous sketches of the speeches using the Autodesk Sketchbook Pro software on Wacom Cintiq graphic tablets. Their drawings are then presented and organized on a Perceptive Pixels big multi-touch computer screen (Perceptive Pixels is the company founded by past TED star speaker Jeff Han). Here are some of their drawings:
They can be navigated in multiple ways, expanded, enlarged, etc:
Here is their "visual post" on Craig Venter's speech:
And here what they did with Amy Tan's:
29 February 2008
TED2008: What Stirs Us?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session ten.)
Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies romantic love -- its evolution, its biochemical foundations, and its importance to human society. She gave a talk at TED2006 (watch the video). Her current research is on why we fall in love and how.
In the jungle of Guatemala, she says, stands a temple. It was built by the king of the Mayas, who was buried under it when he died. Mayan inscription proclaims that he was deeply in love with his wife, so he built a temple on her honor facing his. The sun rises behind one and sets behind the other: after 30'000 years these two people still kiss from their tombs. Anthropologists have not find any society that doesn't know love.
Have you ever been rejected by somebody you really loved? Have you ever dumped someone who really loved you? About 97% of people, men and women, say yes to those questions. Romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations on Earth. We are currently looking at the data of brain scans of people that have just been dumped, and we find alot of activity in the region associated with romantic love. We found activity in other brain regions also, in one associated with calculating gains and losses.
What have I learned? Romantic love is a universal human drive -- not the sex drive -- that it allows you to focus your energy into a single energy. Of all the poems, Plato: "the God of love lives in the state of need". Love is a need, like hunger and thirst. I have come to believe that romantic love is also an addiction. It has all of the characteristics of an addiction, you focus on a person, you obsess about him/her, you need to see more of her/him. Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth.
Animals also love. There is not a single animal on this planet that would copulate with anything that comes along, unless you're stuck in a lab cage. I've looked at 100 species and everywhere in the wild animals have favorites.
Our newest experiment -- putting people who report they're still in love in a long-lasting relationship into the functional MRI. And we find the same data, that region of the brain still becomes active 25 years later.
Why do you fall in love with one person rather than another? Match.com came to me three years ago and asked me that question, and I've researched it ever since. Psychologists tell you that we tend to fall in love with people with the same general level of intelligence, good looks, values, social status, but we don't know what makes two personalities really stick together to form a stable couple. I've concocted a questionnaire to analyze -- through biochemical analysis -- who chooses whom to love.
David Griffin is the director of photography for the National Geographic magazine -- the Vatican of photography. On his blog, Editor's Pick, he discusses the creation of the extraordinary photos published in the magazine.
He starts by showing some great -- truly awesome -- pictures by NG photographs, including the iconic portrait of the "Afghan Girl", Sharbat Gula (picture right) photographed by Steve McCurry and who did the NG cover in 1985.
Last year NG has added a section to their website ("Your Shot") where anyone can submit photographs to be considered for publication -- and it has been a runaway success. Everyone of us has one or two great photographs in us, but to be a great photojournalist you need to take great photos all the time.
Griffin goes on to tell great stories of photojournalism: in African national parks, in Indian slums, underwater in Baja California and New Zealand, in Chinese jellyfish markets, in the military medical system in Irak, etc.
Photography can be used to address our biggest issues. But sometimes photojournalism is just plain interesting or fun. Photography can make a real connection to people, and can be employed as a positive agent to understand the challenges and opportunities facing us today.
Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize and advocate of the private exploration of space.
When I met Stephen Hawking (who spoke on Wednesday at TED), he told me his dream was to travel into space. I told him I could not take him there, but I could take him to weightlessness. The way to do so is through parabolic flights (fly up, then go into free fall, which gives you a few dozens seconds of weightlessness). And so we brought Stephen Hawking there (picture left - see video).
Chris Abani is a Nigerian writer and political activist (twice imprisoned and tortured in his country). His 2004 novel "GraceLand" is a bitterly funny tale of a young Nigerial Elvis impersonator in Lagos. Abani was a speaker at TEDGLOBAL in Tanzania, last year.
My search is to find stories of everyday people that transcend us, that don't look away at the reality: we are never more beautiful than when we are ugly. What I've come to learn is that the world is never seen in the grand gestures, but in the accumulation of the simple, soft, selfless acts of compassion. In South Africa they say "Ubuntu": the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. Which means that there is no way for us to be human without other people.
So Abani tells stories of people. People standing up to soldiers wanting to kill them. People being compassionate. People being human, reclaiming their humanity, recognizing that we are surrounded by amazing people, who offer all of us the mirror to a whole humanity.
Benjamin Zander has been for almost 30 years the conductor of the Boston Philarmonic -- and a speaker on leadership. He uses music to help people open their minds.
"There are people that think that classical music is dying, and others who think that we haven't seen anything yet. Rather than going into statistics of orchestras dying, we should do an experiment." He is on stage with a piano, and uses it to play Chopin and tell stories of musical
learning and amazement, walking around on stage and down into the
audience, and at the end of his speech, he gets the TEDsters to stand and sing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". (They distribute the text written phonetically, but as a German speaker, I can't read it -- I'd never realized that if you speak a language, it's very difficult to read its phonetic rendering -- so I have to look up the original text: "Freude, schöner Götterfunken...")
29 February 2008
TED2008: What will tomorrow bring?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session nine)
Jim Marggraff gives a demo of the Livescribe smartpen, which looks like a big pen but has two microphones to record sound, a speaker to play it back, a small display and the capacity to capture handwritten notes and drawings in digital form. So it can record what you write and simultaneously it captures the surrounding sounds/voices. It requires a special paper with "buttons" and navigational tools. It can also be loaded with other features, like on-the-fly translation (click on a word in a language and the pen spells it out on the display and by voice in the other desired language), interactive books, and more.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the author of "The Black Swan", one of the most influential current books (first chapter available here). In it, he argues that it's the random, unlikely and unexpected events ("black swans") that generally have the most extraordinary impacts on the future and our ability to model and decide what the future will be -- and that our blindness with respect to this randomness has a price. Taleb -- a former Wall Street trader -- classifies numerous events as part of the "black swan" phenomenology, including the emergence of Google and the 9/11 attacks, Viagra and the Macintosh, the Beatles and Harry Potter.
"The law of large numbers tells you that when the number is very large, no single element can make a difference. That's why if you take 1000 persons chosen randomly and add the heaviest person in the world, that person will represent only a tiny fraction of those 1001 people's total weight. But take 1000 persons randomly chosen, and add the richest person in the world: that person would represent almost all the wealth in that group of 1001. This is the difference between mediocristan (the former) where things fit neatly under a bell curve, and extremistan (the latter) where extreme phenomenons are dominant.
Why are we moving into extremistan. The information age will be dominated by winner-take-all effects. Take books: a few dozen of them represent half the sales. We have to have alot of respect for the unobserved. Experts often can't predict because they miss on large deviations, that extreme outcomes and major discontinuities are so rare that we can almost ignore them.
I advocate the following: don't disturb a complex system, don't mess with it. Complex systems know about probability more than us. Consider WW2 or Irak: we don't see the link between action and consequences. We don't understand nature. This advocates conservatism.
Plato and Karl Marx tried to teach us to use our knowledge to make decision; and I'm trying to convince them to use our lack of knowledge -- our ignorance and our awareness of it -- to make decisions. We're never gonna understand the world, or the climate: all we can is focus on our decision process and try not to mess with complex systems.
Chris Anderson -- the editor of Wired magazine -- has just published a must-read cover story on "Free", which is a sort of preview of his next book, about "Freeconomics". He talks 3 minutes about developing small, cheap (less than 100 USD) blimps, fitted with sensors, infrareds, etc, that can fly indoors."
Peter Schwartz is a specialist in drawing roadmaps of the future. He is
a co-founder of the Global Business Network think-tank. His last book,
"Inevitable Surprises", champions quick thinking and adaptability in a
world in flux.
"The future isn't what it used to be. I'm amazed that many of the most prosperous, most successful people in the world have become pessimistic about the future. People have lost confidence. Why have we lost confidence in the future? The future is more uncertain. There are really 4 big questions for the future and if we find an answer we can have a better sense of the future:
- War: Will there be a big world war involving US/China/islamic world/India/Russia? (Schwartz's answer: war is unlikely, too much common interests among countries)
- Prosperity: Will the global economic growth we have seen in the second half of the 20th century continue? (Yes, says Schwartz, but it's the spread of knowledge and the ability to use that knowledge productively that mattes, yet he makes his point by comparing Singapore and Nigeria, which of course aren't really comparable)
- Equity: Will the fruits of economic growth be relatively evenly spread? (Yes, he says, hundreds of millions of people are likely to climb out of poverty in the next 15 years in BRIC countries)
- Environment: Will we be available to achieve growth in an ecologically sustainable manner? (Schwartz answers through Paul Ehrlich's equation: environmental impact = population x affluence x technology (i=pxaxt). Population won't double again, will reach 9 billion and plateau. Affluence is going to go up. So the real lever is technology; Craig Venter is the James Watt of our era, Stamets' fungi in the previous session was very inspiring, we will see a transition to a bioindustrial era, there is a good chance that we will be able to make the world richer without destroying the environment).
Gregory Petsko is a professor of biochemistry at Brandeis University, gives a 3-minutes speech. Unless we do something, he says, over the next 20 years we are going to see an epidemics of neurologic diseases -- because of population aging. Neurological diseases for which we don't have a cure yet (such as Alzheimers) already cost half a trillion dollars, and that cost will improve rapidly.
In Western countries, few women die of cervical cancer: regular exams
catch it early. But in poorer countries, it's one of the top causes of
cancer death for women. Harvard's Sue Goldie applies decision science
and cost-benefit analysis to finding ways to model public health
scenarios and make decisions about where to best spend limited
resources.
Consider three viruses of public health importance: HIV, Hepatitis B and C, and Human Papilloma Virus. HPV, which leads to cervical cancer, is the most common viral sexually-transmitted disease in the world. Fighting it has been a success in some countries in the world, and a failure in others, mostly poor. There are several alternatives: low-tech screening, high-tech screening, vaccine (which is the most expensive). What's the optimal program? Her model for cervical cancer, which she describes in details, shows that a
simple exam done once in a patient's lifetime would reduce the death
rate by a third. But the consequences of delaying access to cures will be enormous (million of deaths).
TEDster Felix Kramer, founder of the California Cars Initiative, gets 3 minutes to talk about plug-in hybrids. Electricity is cheaper, cleaner and domestic (BG: as long as it is produced from renewables). We can have plug-in hybrids today, with no new technology, just converting existing cars by adding a battery, that you can charge overnight from an ordinary socket, and if you want to go to the mountains you still have the fuel engine. The planet can't wait for perfection.
Larry Burns of GM presents the self-driving Chevy SUV that has won
the Darpa Urban Challenge last year (see this previous post or the
Wikipedia page). He shows a video of the car, and it's really impressive. It's on display at TED:
Walter Isaacson, the director of the Aspen Institute, has written a few magistral biographies of great men: Benjamin Franklin and, more recently, Albert Einstein. He's speaking from TED@Aspen, which the Institute is hosting in its Doerr-Hosier Center.
What could the future hold for the art of narration? Narration is about making sense of the world, connecting the dots. In the past 15 years narrative has been dismissed, as in "imposing a narrative on events". But those of us that believe in narrative think that we are weaving a narrative. It works not only in novels and fiction, but in all sectors of life. One of the salient characteristics of most narratives is that they tend to be chronological. In fact, perhaps the greatest of all narratives begans with the most simple three words, "In the beginning" (Bible). So they tend to be linear. Now that we are entering a digital -- interactive, hypertextual, collaborative -- age, how do we preserve the beauty of narrative? A long time ago, narrative was interactive and collaborative storytelling process, and over the years and decades the story evolved, and that applies to most great narratives of the ancient times (the Song of Roland) to plays (the interplay between actors and public at the Globe theatre), etc. Then something happens, the invention of the printing press, and that makes narrative less collaborative, less iterative, less interactive process. It makes narrative more carved in stone (or written on paper). So this notion of a broadcast-type phenomenon, where we have a centralized production of a narrative that goes out to a mass audience, begins with the invention of the printed press. The same with movies, with broadcast television. With the digital age, can we restore the great qualities of narrative of time past? So far, alot of what we have done is old wine poured into old bottles. As wonderful as YouTube can be is still people producing videos and finding a new distribution channel. Likewise most websites. We haven't really changed the essence of what narrative can be in the digital age. Where do we see glimmers of the new narrative? In the wiki phenomenon, where people collaborate. My next book will be an experiment in this, not only a multimedia product but also which allows people to add their own thoughts and informations, an always-evolving book. No idea what the business model will be, but that's probably how the Iliad and the Odyssey were written.
Comedian Zé Frank closes the session with a hilarious standup routine.
29 February 2008
TED2008: What's Out There?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session eight.)
"What's out there?" is the question of this session. First to try to give an answer is particle physicist Brian Cox, from the University of Manchester. He also work on the CERN's LHC ATLAS, part of one of the most ambitious scientific experiments currently taking place in the world, the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (see my notes and pictures from a visit to the LHC last year, including explanation of the science involved) and spends alot of time trying to make heady scientific concepts understandable to the public.
The Large Hadron Collider will be switched on later this year. It is a particle accelerator 27 km in circonference, being built at an average depth of 100 meters under the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It is fitted with several giant detectors (ATLAS is the one in the photo above, notice the man in the foreground for scale) that are essentially digital cameras, trying to capture the collision of particles as they travel at high speed in opposing directions. With the LHC scientists are trying to re-create the conditions that were present less than one-billionth of a second after the Big Bang. Why do so? Particle physicists are ambitious, and the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything is made of and why it sticks together.
Way back in the early times of the universe, things -- we believe -- were very simple. It's made of 12 particles of matters (quarks, protons, gluons, neutrinos, electrons). These particles has been discovered in the last century. The first one, the electron, in 1897. One of the greatest achievements of the XX century is the "standard model", which is a beautiful mathematical equation that explains the universe. Except that there are several "H" in there, which stands for the Higgs particle, that hasn't been observed yet. It's a theoretical particle, a prediction for the existence of one. What the Higgs does, it gives mass to the fundamental particles (refer to my earlier post for more). The whole universe is full of Higgs fields. That's what the LHC is been built to search for. It can also discover other things, including possibly giving evidence to a theory called supersymmetry that suggests that the forces of nature unified together back at the Big Bang.
Particle physics and cosmology has given us a beautiful narrative, almost a creation story, from where the universe started 13.7 billion years ago. (Brian does a two-minutes "history of the universe" based on the image above). The artifacts that surround us are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years -- and the right laws of physics. If you believe this story, our civilization has emerged purely as the creation of the laws of physics.
Over the last 49 years ocean explorer Robert Ballard has made more than 120 deep-sea expeditions, developing and using cutting-edge technologies to find shipwrecks and unearth their lost histories -- including the Titanic and the Bismarck.
"The US has two exploration programs: NASA, tasked with exploring the space, and NOAA, the national oceanic administration. If you compare NASA's budget, it's 1600 times bigger than NOAA's. Why are we ignoring the oceans, 72% of our planet? Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more ships down there during Captain Cook era than now. I've built several submarine vehicles. On a good day we may have 4 or 5 human beings at the average height of the Earth. In 1975 we went down 9000 thousand feet into the ocean floor, the eternal darkness where you don't have photosynthesis, therefore no plant life, and little animal life -- or so we thought. We discovered that there are tens of thousands of active volcanoes. We discovered a profusion of life that should not exist. Giant tube worms. Large clam beds. Then we started creating robots for accelerating the exploration. And we could find incredible limestone formation, upside-down pools, etc. Recently, diving off in the Gulf of Mexico, we found pools of water, volcanoes of methane, flows of lava. There is more than natural history under the oceans, there are shipwrecks: we realized that the deep see is the largest museum on Earth, ships that sank transporting fabulous artifacts. Fortunately we've been able to convince the US Congress and we could get a NOAA ship, and its mission is to go where NOAA has not gone yet, the islands in the Pacific that are under US control -- we have maps of Venus but not of the ocean in that regions. The beauty of all this, is that we can disseminate it to children. Through the Jason Project, every year over 1 million students are connected to explorers and scientists, participating live in explorations. We want to create the classes of tomorrow. tech that allows people to follow along as he explores the seas
Andreas Heinecke, a human rights activist from Germany who focuses on overcoming cultural and communication barriers, talks about "Dialogue in the Dark”, an exhibition where participants experience darkness and blind people teach them how to see.
Mycologist Paul Stamets believes that mushrooms could an intergalactic colonizing species. Well, almost. He believes that fungi, and particularly the mycelium (the vegetative part of mushrooms) contains solutions for some of the Earth's environmental and health-related problems. For instant, fungi produce strong antibiotics; they can be used against flu viruses; mycelium can be used to naturally "clean up" petroleum-saturated soils; revamp pesticides; and generating ethanol (he has patented many of these mushroom-related technologies). Preserving the genome of fungis is absolutely crucial for human health.
Animal behaviorist Joshua Klein is a biological hacker (he also hacks computers), and he talks about crows.
Some species are hyperadaptive to the conditions created by humans -- think at rats becoming immune to the poisons we produce. Crows aren thriving. They're found everywhere on the planet except for the Poles. Crows are intelligent, their brains are proportional in the same way that chimpanzee's are. He shows a crow that tries to pull something out of a glass, and can't, so it bends a stick into a crook. Another showing a crow "using" passing cars to crack nuts (putting the nut on the road and waiting for a car to drive over it). Moreover, it turns out that after a while the crows started teaching each-other and imitating each-other how to do these things.
Exploiting the fact that crows are attracted to shiny things, Josh built a machine that trains crows in several stages to pick up lost change and deposit it in a slot in return for peanuts (photo right). The device tests the intelligence of the birds, and Josh wonders whether "they could for example be trained to pick up garbage after sports events" of similar things -- the idea being that "we could find useful tasks for these fast-multiplying animals, instead of trying to limit or exterminate them".
Richard Preston is one of the few humans to have climbed Hyperion, a nearly 115-meter-tall redwood tree that is the tallest thing living on Earth. Discovered in 2006, it is located in a remote area of the Redwood National Park in California (the exact location has not been disclosed to protect the tree's ecosystem). He is the author of "The wild trees", about the still-not-well-known forests of the American Northwest.
The north coast of California has rainforests. Sequoias (photo left) are the tallest organisms on Earth, these are trees that could stand out in midtown Manhattan. The oldest living redwoods are perhaps 2500 years old, roughly the age of the Parthenon. In the 1970s to the early 1990s, most of that forest has been cut down in bursts of logging. Now about 4% of the original rainforest remains -- and it's still under-explored. About 30 feet (10 meters) is the diameter of a big redwood, articulating itself upwards into space for over 330 feet (110 meters). This species moves at "redwood time". To us they seem to be immobile, but they continue to move, to develop. Preston began climbing these threes with his children, sleeping there, discovering a whole ecology in their branches (Preston calls it "canopy soil") with growing complexity, flying buttresses (redwoods grow back into themselves to strengthen the crown of the tree), a fractal-like capacity to reiterate (to repeat their shape again and again), but also deadly parasites that are killing off trees and possibly a whole ecosystem of Eastern hemlocks in the Northwest.
What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? They can tell us about human time, the flickering and the shortness of it.
29 February 2008
Robert Ballard's Immersion Presents starts March 2 in Monterey Bay
From the TED stage in Monterey, explorer Robert Ballard announced that his Immersion Presents project will be running live from Monterey Bay March 2-7.
Immersion Presents uses telepresence -- satellite feeds and web links -- to bring young kids into live research environments. In Monterey Bay, kids can explore one of the planet’s most spectacular biodiversity hotspots, with 100-foot-tall kelp forests, whales, sea otters and a diversity of life found in few other places on earth. The idea (as with the JASON Project, Robert Ballard's project with National Geographic) is to connect kids with real scientists, and help them truly know the wonders of the planet.
29 February 2008
TED2008: How do we create?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session seven.)
This is about the point in the program where all the attendees start to talk about TED as an endurance sport. We're mid-way, but it's so intense that it feels like it has been going on for weeks...
The session, on "How do we create?", which will be moderated be TED's June Cohen, opens with inventor-collector Jay Walker -- who, as I already said in previous posts, has lent several dozen objects from his personal library to TED for the creation of this year's stage -- showing a few pictures of his fabled "library of the imagination", a 3-stories-high trove designed like an Escher painting, with glass bridges connecting upper levels, walls covered with ancient manuscripts, and incredible artifacts of human creation. Here a picture, possibly never seen before:
If you've seen and enjoyed "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Star Wars"
(episodes I and II), a large part of your enjoyment was due to visual
effects wizard John Knoll of Industrial Light and Magic. Incidentally,
he's also one of the co-inventors of graphic-editing software
Photoshop. So John knows his way in the alleys of creativity.
Visual effects in the script are what you can't go out and shoot, sometimes because it doesn't exist, or because it's too dangerous (incredible stunts) or just not possible to do in any other way (he shows examples). There are different techniques to overcome this problem: matte paintings (an old technique for creating virtual sets where they painted landscapes on pieces of glass, superposing them on the original footage; now it's done digitally of course), miniatures, blue/greenscreen composites, and computer graphics. John compares images from 1954's "20'000 Leagues Under The Sea" with "Pirates": ships, sea battles, sea monsters scenes, simulation of water and waves.
Over
the past decade San Francisco-based designer Yves Béhar and
his firm Fuseproject have produced game-changing designs for cell phone
headsets (Jawbone), shoes (Birkenstock), computers (OLPC's XO laptop)
or table lamps (Herman Miller's "Leaf"). A while back Fast Company
magazine published a great profile of Yves.
His mother is Swiss, his father Turkish, he grew up in Switzerland, and he shows some of the objects that were around the home -- furniture, carpets. "I realized that objects tell stories -- and storytelling has been a big influence on my work. Then there was another influence, from my teen passions, ski and windsurfing -- so I combined them into a contraption for surfing over frozen lakes. Then, design school, where I asked alot of questions -- do people really need the caps-lock key on a computer keyboard? -- and found this quote: "Advertising is the price companies pay for being un-original". I moved to SF, created my own firm, and started working on projects -- watch, furniture, etc. The "Leaf" lamp was meant to create a new experience of light, giving a choice for the user to go from a glowing moonlight to a very bright worklight, and everything in between -- we designed both the lamp and the bulb. All of these projects have a humanistic side to them.
Jawbone -- the Bluetooth headset (photo below left) -- has a humanistic side: it feels you skin and knows when you're talking and when you're talking it filters out the other surrounding noises. But it's also about taking out the techie stuff and make it beautiful -- if it isn't beautiful, it really doesn't belong on your face.
Design is never done -- you have to do all this other stuff, packaging etc -- and continue to touch the user. We developed a bottle for a vitamin-infused organic drink targeted at kids: the bottle is symmetrical from every side, and can have a second life as a toy using connectors. And because "why?" is one of the questions that kids ask more often, we called it Y Water (photo right):
His most recent project: NYC Condom, launched on Valentine's day. The Dept of Health in NY needed a way to distribute 36 million condoms for free. fuseproject worked on a dispenser, which needs to be easily seviceable etc. They're being installed all over the city. fuseproject also designed the condoms (and Béhar throws a handful of them into the audience...)
If we all work together in creating value and keep in mind the values of the work that we do, maybe we can change the world.
Robert J. Lang is an origami artist (origami: the ancient Japanese art of paper-folding). He uses maths to analyze folding patterns and create origamis with hundreds of folds and sophisticated curves. Most people still think that origami is flapping birds made of paper, but it's really become something much more sophisticated -- thank to mathematics. Origamis, Lang explains, revolve around crease patterns, and they all have to obey four laws: colorability (you can color them so that two colors never touch), always even folds (the number of folds always varies by two), alternate angles; and layer ordering (no matter how you stack a sheet, it can never penetrate a fold). If you obey these laws, you can do amazing things. And indeed, here are some of the origamis showed by Lang -- they're all single-sheet folds:
This has also allowed the creation of origami on-demand, including graphics, ads, and commercials. This for example is a video ad for Mitsubishi: everything in the ad is an origami, except the car:
The "extreme folding" structures developed for origamis turn out to have applications in medicine, science, and engineering: things like packing airbags, heart implants and spaceship and space telescope parts into the smallest possible places. "An origami, someday, may even save a life".
Writer Amy Tan -- American of Chinese
descent -- has written a series of bestselling novels, including "The
Bonesetter's Daughter" and "The Kitchen God's Wife". She's also
written children books and has appeared in The Simpsons. She focuses on
the creative process, journeying through her childhood and family history looking for hints of where her own creativity comes from. The value of nothing: out of nothing comes something. That's an essay she wrote when she was 11 and got a B+. How do we create? She shows a triangle with corners at Nature, Nurture and Nightmares. Some people would say that we're born with it; others that creativity may be a function of some neurological quirk; part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis (why I am not Black like everything else in my school class?), with childhood traumas, with expectations. "This led to my big questions: why do things happen, how do they happen, and how do I make them happen? When I look at creativity, my inability to repress associations with everything about me is key". She goes off doing a comparison between quantum mechanics and creativity: "you've alot of unknown; dark energy and dark matter; the observer effect -- if you try too hard what you're hoping to find by serendipity at the end is no longer there; ambiguity; multi-dimensions. Much has to do with intention. You notice disturbing hints from the universe, and then in a way I knew that they've always been there. What I need in effect is a focus. When I have a question, I have a focus, and all these object go through that question. You think that there is some coincidence or serendipity that your'e getting all this help from the universe, but it really is that now you've a focus. Why am I here? When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous, it seems so obvious, and yet it is not. We all hate moral ambiguity, and yet it is so necessary in writing a story, it's the place where I begin. Luck, chance of course, and accidents also play a role, often a mysterious role. How do I create something out of nothing? By questioning, and acknowledging that there are no absolute truths. By thinking about luck and fate, coincidences and accidents, God's will and the synchrony of mysterious forces. By thinking about our role. By imagining fully and becoming what is imagined. And that's how I find particles of truth. So there are never complete answers. Or if there is one is it to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that's good. And if there is a more complete answer, it is to simply imagine. Imagination is the closest thing to feeling compassion".
She carried a bag on stage at the beginning of her speech. She opens it now to reveal what's in the bag: her dog, who trots out of stage .
June shows a clip from Marjane Satrapi's animated movie "Persepolis", based on her autobiographical novel of the same name about a young girl coming of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution.
Tod
Machover is the Head of the MIT Media Lab's Hyperinstruments/Opera of
the Future Group (now that's a job title). He has composed five operas
and invented several musical technologies, including "hyperinstruments"
-- an approach that extends virtuosity. (Yo-Yo Ma and Prince among others have
adopted it).
"We all love music, but it's more powerful if you don't just listen to it but make it. Everybody in the world has the power to be part of music in a very dynamic way. At the Media Lab we've been engaged in an approach called Active Music. We started by making hyperinstruments that have all kind of sensors built in, so the instrument knows how it is been played. We asked ourselves: why can't we make instruments like those for everybody -- and that produced the Brain Opera, and Guitar Hero. Music is very transformative, can change your life, your body, your mind.
Music, even better than words, is a powerful way to explain who we are. If I was playing cello here I could share things about myself that I can't do in words. Music is a very powerful interface". Machover shows the "Chandelier", a central set piece in a new opera he's written called "Death and the Powers" which will premiere in Monaco in September 2009: it's both a sculpture and a new kind of musical instrument (picture right).
Most recently, Machover has focused on using music in therapy
for the physically and mentally handicapped and on developing
technologies to allow them to compose and perform music . What if I could make an instrument that adapt to I really am, to my real capacities, Machover asks, and he calls up on stage Adam Boulanger, a PhD student working with him, and Dan Ellsey,
a cerebral palsy patient in a wheelchair. Dan
communicates via a computer-controlled "talking box". Boulanger and Machover developed technology allowing Dan to use his limited possibilities of expression to create and perform music by using both
brain waves and small movements of his face and eyes. Dan performs his composition -- and the music is great, and it gets a standing ovation.
29 February 2008
What's your Behar factor?
Last year on the TEDBlog we asked "what's your Starck factor?" Prior to hearing him blow the roof off of TED2007 with his spectacular meditation on design and the universe and bloop-bloop, I found it very instructive to take an inventory of Mr. Starck's influence on my existence. In all, I found I used four Starck designs in my daily life, and could easily justify lusting after another two.
In about an hour at TED2008 we'll have the pleasure of hearing from another remarkable designer, Yves Behar. So what's your Behar factor?
My Behar factor is One. Unfortunately, I only have one Behar design in my life, but I could imagine owning many more, such as his Leaf lamp or the XO laptop.
But what of the one? It's the Jawbone headset, a product that's enhanced my daily routine in many ways.
I never drive while on the phone, so I end up using the Jawbone mostly while I'm at work. It is a handy tool for spreading memes: I keep it in my left ear, allowing me to take right-handed business calls with my Cisco IP phone, and stay on hold with United Airlines via my mobile phone on the left. Borg-like? Yes. Productive? Yes. A way to have some more cool design in my life? Most certainly!
What's your Behar factor?
29 February 2008
We're cooler: Notes from TED@Aspen Day Two
Photo: Michael Brands/Aspen Institute
As Jill Sobule pointed out from stage yesterday, "We're cooler in Aspen." Amazing conversations are happening here, both in person and in the huge number of bloggers and Twitterers commenting on the sessions and on the between-session action. Before the afternoon sessions, we answered another Big Question for TED@Aspen: Losing your virginity -- how'd that work out for you?, answered in 6 words or less. An oddly eager crowd rushed the stage to talk about it. Best answer: "Mother in audience; still a virgin."
This morning we're doing breathing exercises, setting up for an amazing talk from David Gallo, and getting ready for a snowball fight and (possibly) a prank.
28 February 2008
TEDPrize.org launches today
The TED Prize has a brand-new homepage, where you can read all about our 2008 winners, and find out ways to start helping their wishes come true.
Look here for wishes from Dave Eggers, Neil Turok, and Karen Armstrong.
Take a look and start granting these wishes big enough to change the world >>
28 February 2008
TED Prize 2008: Dave Eggers and Tutoring, Neil Turok and the next African Einstein, Karen Armstrong and the Charter for Compassion
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session six - TED Prize)
Every year at TED, three exceptional people are awarded the TED Prize. They each receive US$ 100'000, but that's not the real prize: they also are granted a wish -- no restrictions -- that they can express in front of the TED audience, asking for help to turn it into reality.
2007 Updates
Last year, former president Bill Clinton, photographer James Nachtwey and biologist EO Wilson received the TED Prize. What happened since:
- Clinton asked for help in developing a "high quality rural health system for the whole country" of Rwanda: teams have been sent to the country, technology is being developed, and funds have been raised.
- Nachtwey solicited help for reporting and spreading "a story that the world needs to know about", related to public health: many partners have given a hand, and the story will be released in September in "Time" magazine, on billboards, through public events and communication campaigns, etc.
- EO Wilson wanted help in creating the Encyclopedia of Life, an online resource with an indefinitely expandable page for each species, contributed to by scientists and amateurs: the EOL is now under development and the first version of the site is live.
The three wishes still need support to be completed. See a detailed update here.
2008 Winners
This year's TED Prize winners are writer David Eggers, physicist Neil Turok, and religious scholar Karen Armstrong.
Eggers is an author of many bestselling books, including the recent "What is the what" about a Sudanese refugee, a publisher of books and literary magazines, and a teacher-at large: In 1998 he founded in San Francisco 826Valencia, a very successful writing and tutoring lab for young people from the neighborhood, which has since been cloned in five other American cities.
He tells in a very funny way and with great pictures the story of 826Valencia, of the adjoining store (a mad trove of delightful things), of the chapters in other cities, and -- his TED Prize wish -- he wants now to go farther than that, because "empowering a child with writing is the essence of democracy". He asks the conference's attendees -- and anyone else who's in a position to help -- to "find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area" and then share the story of their involvement on the OnceUponASchool website, hoping in their inspirational effect to start a virtuous cycle, "so that within a year we have 1000 examples of transformative partnerships".
The site went live minutes ago, offering guidelines for partnering with schools and providing a space for receiving people's pledges and stories of involvement (there are already several telling stories of literacy and writing programs). Many things are needed to make Dave's inspiring wish a reality: personal engagement by the largest possible number of people, of course, but also very practical things such as funding and web hosting.
Interested in supporting Eggers' wish? See an implementation plan and a list of needs here and a discussion board here.
Neil Turok is a South-African born physicist at Cambridge, and a close collaborator of Stephen Hawking, with whom he speculated that the Big Bang wasn't the beginning, that the universe existed before the Bang and that there may be Bangs in the future, and that we may live in an endless universe.
In his spare time, Turok is the founder of the African institute for mathematical sciences (AIMS), hosted in a converted hotel in Cape Town, minutes from the beach (which helps in attracting top lecturers...). "If you don't have math, you are not going to enter the modern age, he says. We emphasize problem-solving, working in groups. Everyone lives together in the hotel, lecturers and students, so it's not surprising to find impromptu tutorials at 1am. We specially emphasize areas of great relevance to African development." Turok tells stories of AIMS students (who come from three dozen countries) who went on to Masters and PhDs, and brings two of them up on stage.
Rarely a TED wish has been expressed more unequivocally than Turok's:
Help me, he says, make sure that the next Einstein will be African, by "unlocking and nurturing scientific talent" across
the continent, because The only people who can fix Africa are talented young Africans".
His wish is a crisp, yet very ambitious vision, and to realize it he has a plan: building 15 centres of excellence across Africa, possibly modeled on AIMS but specialized in different areas of science, recruiting outstanding students and teachers, developing fellowship and entrepreneurship programs, attracting both private and public support, etc. Turok plans to start with Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda and Madagascar; he has already obtained political support, and local scientists will be leading the way. "The institutes have to be relevant, innovative, cost-effective, and high quality, because we want Africa to be rich."
Interested in helping out? At this point, everything is needed, from building a website for what Turok named the "Next Einstein From Africa" program to teaching equipment and more. Plan and list of needs here, discussion board here.
Religious thinker Karen Armstrong is a former nun and has written more than 20 books on faith and the major religions, and is a powerful voice for ecumenical understanding.
She tells how she "encountered" Judaism and Islam while reporting a story for British TV in Jerusalem. In that tortured city, where the three faiths jostle so closely, you understand what religion can be. It led me, she says, to look at my own religion in a different way, and found things that were incredible: unproven, abstract doctrines. Belief, which we make such a fuss about today, is actually a recent enthusiasm, it surfaced in the 17th century in the West. Previously, belief only meant love. "Credo" didn't mean to accept certain acts of faith: it meant I commit myself, I engage myself.
If religion is not about believing things, what is it about? It's about behaving differently, in a committed way -- and then you begin to understand the truths of religions. You understand religious doctrines only when you put them into practice. In each of the major world's faiths, compassion is not only the test of any true religiosity, also the way to get into the presence of the divinity. In compassion we remove ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. Every major tradition has put at its core a "golden rule": do not do to others what you do not want be done to you.
But look at our world. We are living in a world where religion has been hijacked, where terrorist sing Koranic verses to justify their atrocities, where we have Christians judging other people. We have a talent as a species for messing up wonderful things.
The traditions also insisted that you could not and must not confine your compassion to your own group. You must have concern for everybody. Love your enemies. Honor the stranger. We formed you into tribes and nations so that you may know one another, says the Koran.
There is also a great deal of religious illiteracy. People seem to equate faith with "believing things", and very often secondary goals get pushed into first place instead of the golden rule, compassion, because the golden rule is difficult. A lot of religious people prefer to be right, rather than compassionate.
Since 9/11 I've travelled all over the world and found everywhere a desire for change. Recently in Pakistan hundreds of people came to my lectures, especially young people, asking what they can do to create change.
It seems to me that our current situation is so serious that any ideology that doesn't promote a sense of global understanding and global appreciation of each other is failing the test of the time. The golden rule should be applied globally, we should not treat other nations in ways that we would not like to be treated ourselves. It's time that we move beyond the idea of toleration, and towards appreciation of the other.
Armstrong's TED Prize wish sits right in the middle of some of today's most profound global tensions: help me, she asked, "with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion", to be crafted by a group of twelve inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and "based on the fundamental principles of universal justice and respect".
Bridging the divide among the three prevalent monotheistic faiths, which all claim Abraham as part of their religious history, using the lens of compassion, will require more than scholarly preeminence and good will. It will call for the creation of a totally new narrative, stepping beyond hatred and defensiveness and, in Armstrong's own words, "making the authentic voice of religion a power in the world that is conducive to peace". It will demand a subtle effort that engages everybody. It will necessitate operational support (which will come from the UN Alliance of Civilizations, but also from individuals). Mostly, it will depend on the participation of many and on finding the right answer to the key question: Who are the spiritual leaders of these three religions who should be solicited to participate in the group of twelve?
Interested in supporting Karen to turn her very ambitious and very necessary vision into reality? Plan and list of needs, and discussion board.
A performance by South African singer Wusi Mahlasela closes the session.
The videos of today's three TED Prize speeches will be released on TED.com in a couple of weeks.
28 February 2008
TED Prize 2008 session live now
The 2008 TED Prize winners, Dave Eggers, Neil Turok and Karen Armstrong, are on stage now at TED in Monterey, giving their speeches and expressing their wishes. The session is webcast live here (5:15pm-7:30pm, California time).
28 February 2008
Encyclopedia of Life launches!
E.O. Wilson made this TED Prize wish in 2007: Help me build the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth's biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life. Today, the Encyclopedia of Life website has launched, with the first 30,000 pages, each one describing a single species, with descriptions and photos contributed by scientists and naturalists and people around the globe. Within a decade, it'll have more than 1.5 million pages, each for a single species.
The New York Times has a great story giving more background on this wish >>
(Please note -- the site is going to be very busy tonight!)
28 February 2008
TED2008: Will Evil Prevail?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session five.)
Will evil prevail? This promises to be a hard session -- there will be moments that are hard to watch and listen to, looking evil right in the eye -- but discussions of evil will mix with experiences of good.
The best person to start this session is certainly social psychologist Phil
Zimbardo. In 1971, he conducted the Stanford prison experiment, a study
of human responses to authority and captivity. In a mock prison setting
built in the basement of a Stanford University building, volunteers
(students) played the roles of both guards and prisoners -- and showed
such a rapid adaptation to their roles that Zimbardo had to interrupt
the experiment early, after only 6 days, because a sizable portion of the "guards" started
developing abuisive behaviour and sadistic tendencies, while some of
the "prisoners" showed signs of emotional trauma (website here, video -- a version of which Zimbardo shows during his speech -- here).
What makes people go wrong?. "The line between good and evil is movable and permeable. Good people can be seduced through that line. Good and evil are the yin and yang of the world; God's favorite angel was Lucifer, which God punished by sending to Hell -- paradoxically, it was God who created evil. Evil is the exercise of power to intentionally harm people psychologically, destroy them physically and commit crimes against humanity." When in 2004 the Abu Ghraib scandal of prisoner torture and
abuse in a US prison in Baghdad was revealed, Zimbardo saw many
parallels to the Stanford experiment (and wrote a book about them: "The
Lucifer Effect", which he calls "a celebration of the human mind's infinite capacity to make us behave kind or cruel, nice or bad, etc."). He has been a witness expert in one of the cases
brought to court, which gave him access to all investigation and
background reports -- including images that the Pentagon refused to
release publicly, and that Zimbardo shows during his speech. Purely horrific pictures. Zimbardo
disagrees with the official position putting the blame on "a few bad
apples", and contends instead that the Abu Ghraib scandal stem from
systemic problems -- that the environment encouraged some people to
become perpetrators of evil. "All of the things they did at Abu Ghraib
were somehow "authorized" by the hierarchy in their memos on using
sleep deprivation or threatening prisoners with dogs. They added the sexual abuses, and the
photos -- nobody had told them to take pictures". All of the abuses, btw,
happened during the night shifts -- the soldiers that were operating within the "environment" of the daily shifts didn't commit the abuses.
So instead of asking who is responsible, Zimbardo asks what is responsible. Psychologists generally understand the transformation of human character as dispositional (inside the individual) or situational (exernal), but Zimbardo argues that it can also be systemic, and that's what happened at Abu Ghraib.
Zimbardo recalls several experiments by another great social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, studying how people will commit evil obeying authority. The same is demonstrated by the mass suicides by cult members, and other examples.
There are, he says, seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil:
- mindlessly taking the first small step
- dehumanization of others
- de-individualization of self (anonymity)
- diffusion of personal responsibility
- blind obedience to authority
- uncritical conformity to group norms
- passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference
- and that particularly in new or unfamiliar situations
Power without oversight is prescription for abuse. it was the environment created at Abu Ghraib that contributed to this abuses, says Zimbardo, and the fact that it went unnoticed for months. So there is a paradigm shift needed. Since the Inquisition we've been dealing with problems at an individual level, but that doesn't work.
The very same siuation that can inflame hostile imagination and inspire perpetration of evil can inspire others to intervene, be heroes, to stop evil. So Zimbardo suggest a "psychology of heroism" as antidote to evil (and to passive inaction) promoting "heroic imagination" in kids, making visible that people do extraordinary moral deeds in certain situations. "Are we ready to take the path to celebrate ordinary heroes?"
Despite a very necessary music intermezzo -- personal coach Laura Trice doesn't have an easy job following Zimbardo's charged presentation. In a 3-minutes speech, she advocates clarity: If you really told people close to you what you really want, asked them what they need, you both will be happier.
Irwin Redlener, a public health doctor and a leading voice in disaster medicine (Katrina etc) and in pointing out America's lack of preparedness. Are we at risk of a nuclear attack, he asks. And: could we permanently eliminate the nuclear threat? Since we first developed nuclear weapons, we've lived in a dangerous world characterized by two phases. First, the US in 1945 developed the atomic bomb and used it to end the second world war. In 1949 the URSS got the bomb. From there to 1991 there was an extraordinary buildup of nuclear weapons capacity (with a beginning of disarmament after 1985). Those yeas were characterized by a superpower arms race, US vs URSS, in a fragile standoff, depending on MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). There was a high level of public awareness. But even though we knew that there could be a civilization obliteration, America and URSS engaged in a series of responses planning -- preparing for destroying the world -- doing delusional things like teaching schoolkids to duck and cover, or telling people to build a bomb shelter in their basement, and relocation planning.
Then we entered chapter 2 of the nuclear threat era: after URSS broke up in 1991, the idea of an all-out nuclear war has diminished and he idea of a single event of nuclear terrorism is what we have instead. Although the situation has changed, we haven't changed our mental image of what a nuclear war would be.
- Global nuclear weapons aren't uniformly secure and fissionable materials are relatively availablee (From 1993 to 2005 IAEA documented 175 cases of nuclear theft)
- Nuclear know-how is accessible, there is detailed informations on how to assemble nuclear weapons
- Evil-doers are organized, dedicated, "stateless" and therefore "retaliation-proof" (and they're not only foreigners)
- High-value US targets are accessible, soft and plentiful ("the level of preparedness in the US is unbelievably inadequate")
So, it could happen. Anyone who dismisses the thought that a nuclear detonation could happen is delusional. What would it mean, and who would survive? Redlener shows footage of what would happen if a nuclear bomb went off in a US city. One can survive a nuclear blast. The difference between information on what to do personally and no information can save you. So response planning is both possible and essential. But as of today there is no single US city that has developed effective plans to deal with a nuclear detonation disaster. In part because public officials and emergency planners are paralized by the terrible images of total destruction.
Nuclear war is less likely than before, and is not survivable. Nuclear terrorism is more likely than before, but it is survivable. Here is what you should do in case you find yourself where a bomb goes off, and you're alive after the blast:
Eboo Patel is the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based NGO working to bring mutual comprehension among religiously diverse young people. He gives a short, 3-min speech. "The world is divided between totalitarians and pluralists; people who seek to suffocate diversity and people who seek to embrace it."
TED is also trying to do something to change the conversation. Actress Goldie Hawn is one of the many public figures around the world supporting Pangea Day, a project that was voiced as a "wish" by 2006 TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim, when she wondered if it would be possible to create a "day when you have everyone coming together from around the world and sharing a communal experience of watching a film all together, all at the same time, from Times Square to Ramallah to the side of the Great Wall of China". That day is going to happen, on May 10, when four hours of programming -- films, user-generated videos, speakers, music, hosted by CNN's Christiane Amanpour -- will take place in several locations and broadcast by TV channels, shown on theatres, distributed over cell phones, streamed online, screened in village places and private homes all over the world. That's Pangea Day. Movies alone can't change the world: but the people who watch them can. "We will see sameness and not the differences", Goldie Hawn says. The Pangea Day website is here, with informations on hosting an event or finding one to attend, backgrounders, etc. The event will be globally supported by Nokia. (A side note: the picture on the Pangea Day homepage shows one of the greatest annual moments of cinematic communion in the world: the evening screenings on the Piazza Grande at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where up to 10'000 people gather to watch movies under the summer sky).
PangeaDay is an invitation to see things differently, to consider also the other's point of view. Here is an example, a video that's been produced for PangeaDay, based on the images of the famous scene of the unarmed young man carrying shopping bags who stood in front of the tanks on Tienanmen Square, on 5 June 1989, blocking them. The young man has remained anonymous. So did the soldier driving the tank.
Harvard political scientist and writer Samantha Power is tasked with
the closing speech. 
She wrote a book on genocide, and a new one (just out) called "Chasing the flame", a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN envoy in Baghdad who was killed in the first suicide bombing in 2003 (book cover left). She is a powerful
proponent of bringing human rights back to US foreign policy -- see her
essay on "The Human-Rights Vacuum", arguing that the erosion of US
influence around the world has created "a void in global human-rights
leadership". She may get her voice heard by the next president: she's
an adviser to Democratic candidate Barack Obama (she wears an Obama badge on stage).
On April 31st, 1994, in the middle of the Rwandan genocide, the NYT reported that 200 to 300'000 people had already been killed. An American congresswoman from Colorado met that day with a group of journalists, and one asked why there is so little response out of Washington, no hearings, no denouncing. She said: "It's a great question All I can tell you is that in my congressional offices in Colorado and in Washington we are getting hundrds of calls about the endangered apes and gorilla populations in Rwanda, but no one is calling about the people". The truth is that while we have developed endangered species movements, we don't have an endangered people movement, we have a Holocaust museum but we haven't really created the movement-of-never-again. Now, almost out of nowhere there is an anti-genocide movement, it grew up in response to the atrocities in Darfur, there are more than 300 anti-genocide chapters in universities in the US (bigger than the anti-apartheid movement) and the idea that not being an up-stander, but being a by-stander, has a price. This has led to the referral of the crimes in Darfur to the international criminal court etc. But evil lives on, people in refugee camps are surrounded by janjaweed militias. We have achieved alot, but still far too little. Why? Several reasons. The movement such as it is stops at America's borders, it's not a global movement (BG: that's not exactly true, there are movements in other countries, the UK government has been a key player in trying to broker peace, etc). Second, US has a credibility problem in international circles, it's difficult to remain credible when you denounce genocide on Monday, declare waterboarding as acceptable on Tuesday, and ask for troops on Wednesday, as the current US administration is doing.
She turns to Sergio Vieira de Mello. He was a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy. He was ingenious, spoke 7 languages, was successful with women; and one could never tell if he was a realist masquerading as idealist, or the other way around (BG: I met him twice, and that's an accurate description of him). He worked for the UN in Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Kosovo, East Timor and many other countries. "He was the cutting edge of our experimentation with doing good with limited resources". Four lessons from his life on how to prevent evil from prevailing:
- His relationship to evil is something to learn from. Over the course of his career he changed alot, he had alot of flaws but he was very adaptive. He started as someone who charged, attached, accused. Then in Southern Lebanon in 1992 he said to himself that he would never use the word "unacceptable" again. He became almost obsequious, even negotiating with the Khmer Rouge. But towards the end of his life he had achieved a balance, don't ignore history, don't ignore what the wrongdoers have done but go into the room and discuss with them.
- He espoused and exhibited a reverence for dignity that was really unusual. At a micro-level the individuals around him were visual, he saw them. At a macro level, dignity was at the center of his action.
- He talked alot about freedom from fear. Fear is not a concept that we want to walk away from, but let's calibrate our relationship to the threat. Let's not hype it, let's see it clearly. Fear is a bad advisor.
- Because he was working on all those hard place, he was very aware of their complexity, humbled by it, but not paralyzed by it. We, there seem to be a temptation to pull back from the world. We can't afford to pull back, it's a question on how to be in the world.
If we want to see change, we have to become the change.
28 February 2008
Watch the new Pangea Day video here
What would it be like to see life through someone else's eyes? Film provides that opportunity. Watch the powerful new Pangea Day trailer, on YouTube, and share with your family and friends.
This film is part of Pangea Day, May 10, 2008 -- a four-hour film festival happening all around the world. It grew from the TED Prize wish of 2006 winner Jehane Noujaim.
28 February 2008
TED2008: Is beauty truth?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Fourth session.)
After music by Jill Sobule live from Aspen, and by Thomas Dolby's band in Monterey, the TED's fourth session, hosted by Director of TED MediaJune Cohen, is on "What is beauty?", on the existence and the hidden meanings of beauty.
Anchor speaker Nancy Etcoff, evolutionary psychologist and author of "Survival of the prettiest", had unfortunately to cancel because of a flu. June introduces the session by summarizing Etcoff's views: Beauty matters to us. We are constantly scanning for it, evaluating it, responding to it. But what do we find beautiful and why? Etcoff contends that beauty is an evolutionary advantage and argues that not only culture determines what is beautiful, but that we have an innate understanding of it, and the perception of beauty is therefore a human universal.
Designer
Isaac Mizrahi is probably best known for bridging the gap between
"high" and "low", for creating couture collections (sketch at left) for
both luxury brands (Liz Clairborne) and affordable retailers (such as
the US' Target). He's also a performer, talk-show host, designer of
theatre and opera costumes, and much more. He has written a book that
will be out in a few months, "How to have style", where he expounds on
his belief that inspiration leads to creating a personal style.
"I'm gonna talk about my process, but it's difficult, I don't know where it started. Process has alot to do with physique: who you are physically. I dont' sleep much, for years I've been sitting up, and i think that my creativity is greatly motivated by this kind of insomnia. I lie awake, I walk around -- actually I also walk during the day and follow people that are interesting. As a matter of fact, a lot of my design comes from the tricks of the eye. I don't know where inspiration comes from: it comes from lying awake and thinking. For me, it doesn't come from research. One of the funniest things I've always done it was this past Christmas, at the Guggenheim in NY, I read "Peter and the Wolf" with kids, and that's my own kind of research. I'm really lazy about research. Your creativity should be like a bodily function. Sure, if I'm commissioned to do costumes for an opera, I do research, because it's interesting. I watch alot of movies, and trying to find balance of irony and earnestness. Balance is really what it is about, that's part of my process. I go back to color all time. Natural colors are just so beautiful. How can I ever make anything that is as beautiful as Greta Garbo? That's what makes me lie awake at night. I also go to astrologers and tarot readers, and do what they tell me to do. If I only do one thing at a time, I get bored very easily, so I do alot of things, and try not to look back.
Sigfried Woldhek calls himself a "dreamcatcher". He gets three minutes on stage to tell about a discovery that he made about the face of Leonardo da Vinci. "We know all about Leonardo's research, but we don't know his face. There is controversy even about his self-portrait. I looked at all of his drawings, several hundreds, searching for self-portraits. By elimination, I shortened down the list to three: the self-portrait, the young "Musician", and the "Vitruvian man". If you zoom into these three faces, and map them chronologically, and compare them with the Verrocchio statue for which Leonardo posed as a teenager, the evidence is compelling: This is the face of Leonardo:
In museum circles, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation Thomas Krens has a controverisial reputation. He has challenged the definitions of high art with exhibits such as "The art of the motorcycle" (1998), rewritten the book on how to run a museum, and transformed the Guggenheim into a global brand, with currently five museums (NY, Venice, Las Vegas, Berlin and the Frank Gehry Bilbao museum) and one to be added in Abu Dhabi.
He picks 27 more-or-less random images that demonstrate that beauty is truth: an Egyptian sculpture, a Chinese bronze, Michelangelo, paintings by Leonardo, Rubens, Picasso, Matisse, Vermeer, Warhol, sculptures by Beecroft, Richard Serra, and more. All these are objects of beauty: how do you tie them together? How do we experience art, truth and beauty? How do we consume culture? How do we contain/communicate the richness of our culture? Truth and beauty don't reside in the objects themselves, but in the nature of the communication between the object and the viewer. The public art museum is an 18th century idea, the idea of an encyclopedia, presented in a 19th century box, an extended palace, that more or less fulfils its structural destiny sometime toward the end of the 20th century. André Malraux (1952): "Our museums conjure up for us a Greece that never existed". So the museum was an artificial space. Moreover, until recently most art museums have focused only on European and American art. Museums have to understand that all institutions change. Cultural narrative are infinite and endless. There is also a political dimension: museums need to become cultural agitators, while keeping being curators of collections. Plus: audience matters; art is for the masses. We need to make sure that the objects can tell a story and that story can be communicated. At the Guggenheim we think of museums as platforms and networks of exchange. Our buildings are based on the idea that 1+1=3. (Krens also talks about the Guggenheim projects for new museums that weren't built). The current Guggenheim proposition: bridges to the Middle East, with the Abu Dhabi project. AD is mostly desert, but unlike Dubai is made of many islands, and the local government is planning to develop one with a big cultural district "that will become one of the biggest concentrations of culture in the world". There will be a Guggenheim, a Louvre, a performing art center, various other museums, a Yale University campus, a Biennale platform, etc built by star architects (Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel etc). There are also plans to extend the concept of the museum out into the desert. 
June Cohen gives an update on TED.com, the platform through which TED distributes since mid-2006 the videos of the conference's speakers. It's currently running at over 3 million video views a month -- that's 100'000 a day. June announces new channels: Miro, Adobe's Media Player, and soon even on the inflight entertainment system of Virgin Atlantic. The pace of release will also be increased to daily, and sometimes later this year TED talks will be available with subtitles.
Next year, TED will celebrate its 25th anniversary. It was founded in 1984 by designer and information architect Richard Saul Wurman, who sold it a few years ago to Chris Anderson. Chris now runs it as a non-profit. The two men go on stage. It's a very emotional moment for them and for the TED community. Wurman retells how the idea for a conference about the convergence of technology, entertainment and design came to be, how the format of the event evolved over time, etc. He then introduces his new project: 192021.org, a study (leading to books, exhibits, and more) of 19 cities in the world that will have over 20 million people in the 21st century with a common methodology -- because although today the world is more a network of cities than of countries, there is no way currently to gather comparable data on global cities.
The final speaker in the session is Garrett Lisi. Most of the year, he
is a surfer. But last year he published online an "Exceptionally simple
theory of everything" that has attracted lots of controversy -- his
work is clearly on science's speculative outposts -- but also lots of
diligent attention in the scientific community. This is the first time
he talks publicly about his theory.
Here is the abstract of the
theory, that tries to give a coherent, beautiful (Murray Gell-Mann, at
TED last year, pointed out that in fundamental physics, beauty is a
successful criterion for choosing the right theory) and unified
explanation of all known fundamental interactions in physics:
"All
fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal
bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2
and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2)
x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations
of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these
1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are
described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base
manifold".
E8 is a mathematical shape with 248 symmetries -- a
large, complex but elegant bundle (at left an illustration from
Lisi's paper). Lisi believes that the relationships between the symmetries represent known particles and forces, including gravity, and hopes that the Large Hadron Collider, the new particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva that will go online later this year (Brian Cox will talk about it tomorrow) may offer indications on whether his theory has legs. I am not sure that I fully understand it. If you're like me, refer to the
Wikipedia page, or to the full paper (31 pages, PDF).
28 February 2008
Twitter @ TED2008
A guest post from blogger and Twitter-er Jim Stolze:
Twitter?
If you don’t know what Twitter is, you may have missed one of the most exciting new tools on the web. It’s social, it’s relevant, it’s sometimes useless, it’s fun, it runs on any platform: mac, windows, mobile, chat, mail, and it’s completely free!
So, who’s with us?
To point out who is twittering at TED I picked a selection of tweets from some TEDizens. Hope you like it and that you give Twitter a try -- and don’t forget to put the #TED (hash) in your message, so that it will automatically show up in the feeds.
With many thanks to:
* pierre
* chris
* mitch
* tara
* michael
* josh
* gia
* and everyone who is twittering but I forgot to mention
See you at TED!
28 February 2008
Upcoming TEDs: Africa, Europe, India
Three upcoming TED conferences have been just announced from the TED stage:
TEDAfrica: Cape Town, South Africa, 29 September - 1 October 2008. Theme: "What If?". Information and registration here.
TEDEurope: Oxford, UK, 22-24 July 2009. Theme: "The Substance Of Things Not Seen". Registrations will open soon. The first TEDGlobal was held in Oxford in 2005.
TEDGlobal: Mumbai, India, November 2009. Details will follow.
28 February 2008
TED2008: What is life?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Third session.)
Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, introduces the session with a 3-minutes talk on how America perceives the rest of the world and how the news shape the way the US sees the world. She pulls up a map of the number of minutes that American TV networks dedicated to news in January: there is basically only the US, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and China. "The news networks have reduced the number of their foreign bureaus by half. Covering Britney Spears is cheaper. We can do better, and we cannot afford not to do so".
Inventor-collector Jay Walker presents some of the items displayed on stage from his private library: one of the remaining original seven Sputnik satellites; a Gutenberg Bible (picture right); a small flag that was carried to the Moon and back by the Apollo astronauts; etc. Needless to say, he's been asked by hundreds of TEDsters yesterday
Craig Venter, the scientist who first sequenced the human genome in
2001, announced recently that with his team they have created the first
synthetic bacterium -- "the largest man-made DNA structure" (photo below) -- along
the way to create microorganisms that can produce alternative sources
of enegy. Needless to say, his research is controversial.
"We've been digitizing biology, and now we're trying to go from that code to designing biology. We've tried various approaches, paring it down to basic components, digitizing it, now we're trying to ask: can we regenerate life or create new life out of this digital universe? The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially. Our ability to write genetic code has been growing more slowly. Turns out synthesizing DNA is difficult. In a biological system the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate. How do we boot-up a synthetic chromosome? We can do a transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it. We may be about to create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, where there is massive new speciation (the formation of new and distinct species) based on this digital design. We have now a database with about 20 million genes, and we like to think of them as the design component of the life of the future. We now have techniques to do combinatorial genomics, to build a robot that can make a million chromosomes a day.
We're now focusing on fourth-generation designer fuels. Curent biofuels aren't the solution. The only way that biology can have an impact on fuel without incrising the price of food, it's to start with CO2 as the feed stock -- create new energy out of CO2, and we think we will have something within the next 18 months. Future uses of this technology: increase the basic understanding of life; replace the petro-chemical industry; become a major source of energy; enhance bioremediation. We're changing the evolutionary tree with new bacteria and species."
Follows a Q&A with Chris Anderson and with the audience:
Question: With all the biodiversity out there, can't you use existing organisms rather than create new ones?
Craig Venter: We're indeed finding a lot of biodiversity. For example we found organisms in the environment that produce octane. But not on the scale that we need to cover our energy needs.
Q: Right now, is it possible on a computer to say what a
CV: We are using software to design pathways, metabolic mechanisms, so it's real biological design. We're trying to do it not only by trianl and error, but by direct design. Alot of people like to think in terms of Genesis and we're creating life from scratch. But we're really using the 3 million years of evolution, trying to take it over and take it to the next stage. We will see an increasing pace in the sophistication of the organisms.
Q: I could make the case that you and your company are the most dangerous humans on Earth. What do you do for security?
CV: It's a question that has been raised from the very beginning. Fortunately there aren't many people wanting to do harm with these tools. Very few biological agents that we work with could be weaponized.
Q: One of your slides says "suicide gene", what's that?
CV: It means that if it got out of the lab we could trigger the destruction of that organism.
Q: Can you talk about the intellectual property rights and how you fund your work?
CV: Institute has about 100 million dollars budget a year. About 70% from the government, the rest from private donation.
Q: How efficient can the photosynthesis of CO2 be?
CV: CO2 is a source of carbon. The photosynthesis we see with plants is not very efficient. Algaes are more efficient. We can engineer those to capture CO2 and instead of sequestrate it we think we can convert it back into energy.
Q: When you were asked if you were playing God, you said "we are not playing".
CV: I got very depressed being at Davos this year, it was clear that most of business executives there, buying into the CO2 issue is a pain for them, I had the impression that nothing's gonna change in the next 40 years because of entrenched interests. We're running a hell of an experiment on this planet, we need real solutions, I hope that some of these developments yield results in time, the urgency is not really there.
Paul Rothemund presented some of his work at TED last year, showing nanometer-size artwork created using strands of DNA and folding them into desired shapes.
"People argue about the definition of life. Life involves computation. Take a computer program, boot it up in a cell and it will result in a person; with a small change it will result in another person, etc. There are lots of similarities between genetic programs and computer programs, including a sensitivity to small changes -- single mutations -- that result in "meaningful" large changes. Biology demonstrates the power of molecular programming. We use DNA and proteins. How small is the smallest organism that will function? How few molecules?"
Paul's approach, he calls it "DNA origami": folding DNA using long single strands of DNA and combining them with other helixes. He shows how he created smily patterns, the shape of China, all by folding DNA strands. Then he discusses an approach -- "tiles" -- to make something much bigger.
Preventive medicine advocte Dean Ornish gives a short talk on recent
research that shows how adopting healthy lifestyle and eating habits
can affect a person at a genetic level.
"One way to change our genes is to make new ones, as Venter does The other is to change our lifestyle. When you live healthier, eat better, exercise, and love more, your brain cells actually increase. Your skin and heart and sexual organs get better blood flow. We're about to release new findings that healthier lifestyle can turn off disease-provoking genes and turn on the good ones. Our genes are not our fate. They are predispositions, but if we make these lifestyle changes we can actually change how genes are expressed."
The work of British psychologist Susan Blackmore focuses on the nature of consciousness and on memes. She took Richard Dawkins intuition about memes (ideas that, like genes, that take a life of their own) and turned it into a fully-fledged theory.
"Cultural evolution is a dangerous child for every species to let loose on this planet. By the time you realize what's happening, it's too late to put it back into the box. We humans are the Earth's Pandoran species. Mimetics is founded on the principles of unversal Darwinism. His idea was so simple, and yet it explains all design in the universe. What Darwin said was something like this: if you have creatures that vary, and if there is a struggle for life such that nearly all of these species die, and if the very few that survive pass on to their offsprings whatever helped them survive, than these offsprings must be better adapted to these circumstances than their parents were. You just need those three principles: variation, selection and heredity. If you have those, you MUST get evolution, or "design out of chaos without the aid of mind". What's this to do with memes? Darwin didn't know about genes, but the principle of universal Darwinism is that everything that's copied with variation and selection will evolve. Information that's copied from person to person is information copied with variation and selection. That's a meme. A meme is not an idea, is "that which is imitated", information which is copied from person to person. If you copied an information from someone else, it's a meme. But why do they spread? They are copied if they can. Some because they're true, useful, beautiful. Some even if they're not. Here is a curious meme: you go to your hotel, check into your room, go to the bathroom, and what do you see? A folded end of the toilet paper. It's a meme that spread all over the world. What is that about? it's supposed to tell you that somebody cleaned the place. Think of it this way: imagine a world full of brains and memes using them (you and me) to propagate. Why is this important? it gives us a completely new wiew of what it means to be human. All these things that make us unique -- language etc -- are based on genes. But there are two replicators now on this planet: from the moment our ancestors began imitating, there was a new replicator, the meme, alongside the gene. And you get an arms race between the genes (which want a smaller, efficient brain) and the memes (which want a bigger brain). All other species on this planet are gene machines, we only are meme machines. We need a new word for