30 March 2008
"Bad Voodoo's War" on Frontline April 1 and online
Deborah Scranton's latest "virtual embed" documentary film, Bad Voodoo's War, premieres April 1, 2008, on PBS's Frontline and online. From the Frontline site:
In June 2007, as the American military surge reached its peak, a band of National Guard infantrymen who call themselves "The Bad Voodoo Platoon" was deployed to Iraq. To capture a vivid, first-person account of the new realities of war in Iraq for Frontline and ITVS, director Deborah Scranton (The War Tapes) created a "virtual embed" with the platoon, supplying cameras to the soldiers so they could record and tell the story of their war. The film intimately tracks the veteran soldiers of "Bad Voodoo" through the daily grind of their perilous mission, dodging deadly IEDs, grappling with the political complexities of dealing with Iraqi security forces, and battling their fatigue and their fears.
The show airs on New York's Channel 13 on April 1 at 9pm, and April 5 at 5am. Find air dates in your area, and watch the preview >>
For more background, check out Deborah Scranton's TEDTalk about The War Tapes, her groundbreaking "virtual embed" documentary about Charlie Company, a team of National Guardsmen during Operation Iraqi Freedom, as filmed by Sergeant Steve Pink, Sergeant Zack Bazzi and Specialist Mike Moriarty.
Titles for Bad Voodoo's War were created by TEDster Jakob Trollbäck, whose own TEDTalk will be appearing on TED.com this month.
29 March 2008
Fair play for Kenya farmers' market
Ode Magazine writes of the inspiring efforts of TEDGlobal Fellow and agriculture activist Thomas George to build fair-play marketplaces for poor farmers in Kenya. His organization, Vipani, is a resource for workers on small farms -- people without credit, connections or know-how -- to access networks of other farmers, buyers, suppliers and lenders.
George's work -- which he plans to expand to Rwanda and Uganda -- will resonate with fans of Eleni Gabre-Madhin, who spoke on Ethiopian commodities markets at TEDGlobal Africa in 2007, and Iqbal Quadir, who talked about empowering communities by connecting farmers with mobile phones.
"A thriving rural economy," says George, "will benefit not only farmers, but everyone in the community." -- Matthew Trost
27 March 2008
18 minutes with an agile mind: Clifford Stoll on TED.com
Clifford Stoll could talk about the atmosphere of Jupiter. Or hunting KGB hackers. Or Klein bottles, computers in classrooms, the future. But he's not going to. Which is fine, because it would be criminal to confine a man with interests as multifarious as Stoll's to give a talk on any one topic. Instead, he simply captivates his audience with a wildly energetic sprinkling of anecdotes, observations, asides -- and even a science experiment. After all, by his own definition, he's a scientist: "Once I do something, I want to do something else." (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, California. Duration: 17:50.)
Watch Clifford Stoll's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
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25 March 2008
The biology of religion
At TED 2006, Dan Dennett spoke out for the unbiased study of religion as a natural, biological phenomenon. His hope may come true. The Economist writes of recent headway made into understanding of religious belief -- in particular a new project called Explaining
Religion, the "largest-ever scientific study of the subject." EXREL's goal is to integrate research on religious faith in biology, anthropology and psychology. It is funded by the European Commission and tethered to the University of Oxford research community.--Matthew Trost
25 March 2008
See inside your brain in real time: Christopher deCharms on TED.com
From last month's TED conference: Neuroscientist Christopher deCharms demos an amazing new way to use fMRIs to watch the brain in action. Using this technology, if you move your arm, get angry, feel pain, you can see what it looks like in your brain as it happens -- and then you can learn to control it. The applications for real-time fMRI start with pain management and run on into the realm of science fiction, but this technology is very real. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 3:56.)
Watch Christopher deCharms's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
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24 March 2008
Ben Saunders plans to break another record
Ben Saunders, who spoke at the 2005 TED Conference about his solo trip to the Geographic North Pole, is heading north again in an attempt to set a world speed record. From Ward Hunt Island in Canada he'll ski against bitterly cold winds across the Arctic Ocean's frozen, fluctuating surface. He hopes to complete the trip in 30 days. "More than geographic exploration," says his website, "Ben is exploring the limits of his own human potential."
Watch Saunders' inspiring video announcement:
.
-- Matthew Trost
24 March 2008
Building on the green agenda: Sir Norman Foster on TED.com
From the DLD Conference in Munich: Architect Norman Foster discusses his own work to show how computers can help architects design buildings that are green, beautiful and "basically pollution-free." He shares projects from throughout his career, from the pioneering roof-gardened Willis Building (1975) to the London Gherkin (2004). He also comments on two upcoming megaprojects: a pipe to bring water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, and Beijing airport's brand-new and groundbreaking Terminal 3, which becomes fully operational this week, March 26. This talk was filmed at the DLD (Digital Life Design) Conference, in Munich. DLD, hosted by publisher Hubert Burda and Israeli investor Yossi Vardi, and covers digital innovation, media and design. (Recorded January 2007 in Munich. Duration: 31:57.)
Watch Norman Foster's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
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21 March 2008
More slo-mo gecko video from Robert Full
Robert Full (watch his TEDTalk on gecko feet) and his team at UC Berkeley have uncovered more oddly-worth-knowing facts about geckos and how they move.
It turns out that, along with their amazing sticky paws, geckos use their tails as a kind of fifth limb to help them balance while they climb walls. The team also filmed geckos in free-fall inside a wind tunnel, and found out that falling geckos use their tails as a rudder to help them fall safely -- along the way, capturing "the most rapid, zero-angular momentum air-righting response yet measured." Watch this video report from New Scientist >>
In the abstract of the paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and online, the team, headed by lead author Ardian Jusufi, writes that these new facts about the gecko's tail
... have provided biological inspiration for the design of an active tail on a climbing robot, and we anticipate their use in small, unmanned gliding vehicles and multisegment spacecraft.
Photos courtesy PNAS/NAS 2008.
21 March 2008
Phantom limb pain at Walter Reed: Mirror therapy works
A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine offers new details on how mirror therapy addresses phantom limb pain -- a topic covered by Vilayanur Ramachandran in his 2007 TEDTalk.
Inspired by Dr. Ramachandran's work, a team of researchers from military hospitals tested a group of 22 patients with amputated lower limbs, and found that:
After 4 weeks of treatment, 100% of patients in the mirror group reported a decrease in pain (median change on the visual-analogue scale, –24 mm; range, –54 to –13), but two patients had brief reactions (<2 minutes) of grief on viewing the reflected intact lower limb.
A story on CNN.com this week tells the story of one of the authors of the study, Navy researcher Dr. Jack Tsao, in accessible, fascinating detail. Read the CNN story >>
20 March 2008
Finding the next Einstein in Africa: Neil Turok's TED Prize wish on TED.com
Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, physicist Neil Turok speaks out for talented young Africans starved of opportunity: by unlocking and nurturing the continent's creative potential, we can create a change in Africa's future. Turok asks the TED community to help him expand the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences by opening 15 new centers across Africa in five years. By adding resources for entrepreneurship to this proven model, he says, we can create a network for progress across the continent -- and perhaps discover an African Einstein. To brainstorm on this wish and get involved, visit TEDPrize.org >> (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 24:44.)
Watch Neil Turok's TED Prize talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
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19 March 2008
Help bring compassion back to religion: Karen Armstrong's TED Prize wish on TED.com
As she accepts her 2008 TED Prize, author and scholar Karen Armstrong talks about how the Abrahamic religions -- Islam, Judaism, Christianity -- have been diverted from the moral purpose they share: to foster compassion. But Armstrong has seen a yearning to change this fact. People want to be religious, she says; we should act to help make religion a force for harmony. She asks the TED community to help her build a Charter for Compassion -- to help restore the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") as the central global religious doctrine. To brainstorm on this wish and get involved, visit TEDPrize.org >> (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 21:27.)
Watch Karen Armstrong's TED Prize talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
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18 March 2008
Once Upon a School: Dave Eggers' TED Prize wish on TED.com
Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to engage with their local school. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own volunteer-driven, wildly creative writing labs. But you don't need to go that far, he reminds us -- it's as simple as asking a teacher "How can I help?" Share your own volunteering stories at his new website, Once Upon a School. To brainstorm on this wish and get involved, visit TEDPrize.org >> (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 24:29.)
Watch Dave Eggers's TED Prize talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
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14 March 2008
A non-trivial holiday
The TED office is running in circles trying to get the word out about Pi Day, that special day for number nerds that only comes around once a year. We'd love to hear what TED fans are doing to celebrate -- whether watching Pi, baking a pie or taking an irrational out to dinner.
If you've chosen to circumvent the fanfare, however, keep in mind that March 14th is also Talk Like a Physicist Day. (It's Albert Einstein's birthday, after all.) TEDTalks can help you brush up on your non-Newtonian oratorical skills with lessons from Murray Gell-Mann, Martin Rees and David Deutsch. -- Matthew Trost
14 March 2008
Visualizing TED2008 with BigViz
At TED2008 in Monterey, two sketch artists captured the Big Questions live as they happened -- watching each speaker, sketching their impressions, and feeding everything into a groundbreaking new system for sharing and connecting ideas. Autodesk's BigViz system is an interactive way to record and synthesize big ideas in a collaborative environment -- what better place to show it off than at TED?
Two visual cartographers, David Sibbet and Kevin Richards, made more than 700 sketches in the Steelcase Simulcast room using Wacom tablets and Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro, highlighting memorable quotes ... great questions ... unexpected connections. Their sketches of TED2008 have been turned into a 200-page book, available for download as a PDF. Visit the Autodesk site to learn more about the tag-team process of sketch-blogging and the groovy touchscreen from Jeff Han's Perceptive Pixel.
13 March 2008
Defending a vision of architecture: Frank Gehry in 1990, on TED.com
From the TED archives: Speaking at TED2 in 1990, the not-yet-legendary architect Frank Gehry takes a whistlestop tour of his work to date, from his Venice Beach house to the under-construction American Center in Paris. Over the course of this 45-minute slideshow (before TED's 18-minute limit), Gehry explains the site-specific nature of his buildings -- context he felt was lost in the discussions of his then-controversial work. In this candid and funny talk, he exposes his own messy creative process ("I take pieces and bits, and look at it, and struggle with it, and cut it away...") and the way he struggles with problems ("This model on the left is pretty awful. I was ready to commit suicide when this was built ... If any of you have ideas on it, please contact me. I don't know what to do"). (Recorded March 1990 in Monterey, California. Duration: 44:32.)
Watch Frank Gehry's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances, including Gehry's conversation with Richard Saul Wurman from 2002.
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12 March 2008
Stroke of insight: Jill Bolte Taylor on TED.com
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness -- of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:44.)
Watch Jill Bolte Taylor's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Read more about Jill Bolte Taylor on TED.com.
TRANSLATIONS:
Read the talk in German here (in the "Hintergrund") >>
Read the talk in Portuguese here >>
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12 March 2008
Cassini buzzes Enceladus today, closer than ever
The Cassini mission to Saturn (see Carolyn Porco's stunning TEDTalk on this mission) today makes its closest flyby yet of Enceladus, a geologically active moon. With its frozen surface and plumes of ice, Enceladus is a fascinating body, and the Cassini probe will be imaging the moon in several areas with many different instruments. From the mission notes:
At 17:40:12 UTC ... UVIS will scan across the disk of Enceladus to measure the ultraviolet albedo of the surface and look for oxygen in the environment around Enceladus which may have dissociated from water molecules in the plumes.
The Cassini probe is set to pass through one of Enceladus' ice plumes as it passes closest to the surface of the moon -- flying by at about 70 km, or 50 miles up.
11 March 2008
Four TEDsters named 2008 Young Global Leaders by WEF
[Updated 3/12, 10am] Crusading journalist Andrew Mwenda and think tank leader James Shikwati -- both stars of TEDGlobal Africa last summer -- as well as TEDGlobal Fellow Paul Van Zyl and architect Cameron Sinclair, winner of the 2006 TED Prize, have all been named Young Global Leaders for 2008 by the World Economic Forum.
Each year, the World Economic Forum selects around 250 leaders under 40 to work on a grand vision for the world of the future. Mwenda, Shikwati, Sinclair and Van Zyl will work with the other young leaders on a strategic plan to solve critical problems facing the world, such as climate change, genocide, state aid and microfinance.
11 March 2008
Tonight in L.A.: Jill Sobule
The wonderful Jill Sobule is playing at Largo tonight in LA, then swings back to NY to play at Ethel's 10th birthday party on March 20, along with Rives. But honestly, we were mainly looking for an excuse to share this great photo of Jill (left), taken 10 days ago at TED@Aspen...
11 March 2008
Opening the TED archive (beginning with Negroponte, circa 1984)
Today we're throwing open the door to our back archive, beginning with Nicholas Negroponte's talk from TED 1. Yes, TED 1. 1984.
TED founder Richard Saul Wurman had the foresight to record every conference he held. And I can't tell you what a thrill it was to see the full archive for the first time: Richard had transferred all the original (Beta) tapes to DV; nearly all the talks -- hundreds of them -- were still intact. What a treasure trove!
Some of the footage requires restoration; and of course, the quality on the earliest talks isn't what it is now. Still, what a thrill! To watch Frank Gehry's talk from 1990, before the buildings he's known for had been built ... when he was still defending his work. Or to watch Nicholas Negroponte in 1984, before the MIT Media Lab had a proper home, before anyone was uttering the word "convergence."
Negroponte's talk -- which hasn't been seen for 24 years -- was particularly meaningful for me to watch. Speaking for a full two hours (the famous 18-minute rule didn't evolve till later), he waxed prophetic on our computer-mediated future, strongly foreshadowing CD-ROMs, websites, service kiosks, voice-recognition technology, computer-generated animation, the touchscreen interface of the iPhone, and his own One Laptop per Child project. Though the technologies he referenced are largely defunct (optical discs, etc.), the concepts are shockingly relevant.
The other shock in Negroponte's talk -- for me anyway -- was to realize just how advanced his team's work was at MIT in the '80s, and how unaware we were of it elsewhere. Watching Negroponte's talk put my own career in context: I worked on a few prominent projects in the early '90s (one of the earliest multimedia magazines in '91; HotWired.com in '94), and many of us were shockingly unfamiliar with the early work that had been done at MIT. But then, we had few ways of learning about it. We didn't have the web in the '80s and early '90s; we didn't even have Wired magazine yet. No wonder the world needed TED.
And now, for those of us who didn't get to attend those early, formative years -- and even for those of you who did -- we're bring the TED archives alive. Today, we're releasing Negroponte's first TEDTalk, from 1984 (actually, we're releasing 25 minutes of key excerpts; the full two-hour talk will ultimately be made available for download, but must be restored in places). Later in the week, we'll release Frank Gehry's 1990 talk. And over time, look for more of the legendary talks that made TED what it was -- and is: from Benoit Mandelbrot to Billy Graham, Herbie Hancock to Kai Krause. We hope you're looking forward to it as much as we are!
11 March 2008
Nicholas Negroponte's 1984 TED Talk: 4 predictions for the future (3 of them correct)
Speaking at the first TED Conference in 1984, Nicholas Negroponte waxes prophetic on the converging fields of technology, entertainment and design. Years before anyone was using the word "convergence," Negroponte was thinking about TV screens as the "electronic books of the future" and computers as the future of education. In excerpts from his 2-hour talk (this was before TED's 18-minute time limit), he foreshadowed web interfaces, touchscreen kiosks, the multitouch interface of the iPhone, and his own One Laptop per Child project. Oh, and there's also a fascinating project called Lip Service, which ... well, let's just say it's still ahead of us.
Negroponte's full 2-hour talk will be made available for download, but parts of it must be restored.
(Recorded at the first TED conference, February 1984 in Monterey, California. Duration: 25:23.)
Watch Nicholas Negroponte's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
06 March 2008
On the verge of creating synthetic life: Craig Venter on TED.com
"Can we create new life out of our digital universe?" asks Craig Venter. And his answer is, yes, and pretty soon. He walks the TED2008 audience through his latest research into "fourth-generation fuels" -- biologically created fuels with CO2 as their feedstock. His talk covers the details of creating brand-new chromosomes using digital technology, the reasons why we would want to do this, and the bioethics of synthetic life. A fascinating Q&A with TED's Chris Anderson follows (two words: suicide genes). (Recorded March 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 32:52.)
Watch Craig Venter's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Read more about Craig Venter on TED.com.
05 March 2008
Host a party on Pangea Day, May 10
Pangea Day's Saralena Weinfield writes: With two months until May 10, planning for Pangea Day is in full swing. And we are still glowing from the wonderful reception we received at TED!
We hope you'll get involved by hosting a viewing party on Pangea Day. You'll be in good company: People all around the world are becoming Friends of Pangea Day by hosting events. Register your event today at www.pangeaday.org/events.php.
Don't watch alone! As Goldie Hawn said at TED last week: "We will see ourselves in these films. Let's weave a web of compassion."
05 March 2008
Your brain on improv
Two Johns Hopkins researchers have isolated the part of the brain that is most active during improv -- the part that Jennifer Lin accesses during her TEDTalk performance, and that Robin Williams used the other night during the BBC debate at TED in Monterey.
Setting up six right-handed jazz pianists inside an fMRI, researchers Charles Limb and Allen Braun recorded them playing, first, a jazz composition they had memorized, then an improvisation on that same piece. Essentially subtracting the first brain scan from the second, Limb and Braun isolated the brain activity associated with improv, and found that:
a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.
The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.
Look for more details in the original journal article -- including audio files, brain scans, and notes on the custom non-ferromagnetic piano keyboard playable inside an MRI.
04 March 2008
Alan Kay on TED.com: An infectious idea for teaching ideas
With all the intensity and brilliance he is known for, Alan Kay gives TEDsters a lesson in lessons. Kay has spent years envisioning better techniques for teaching kids, and in this talk, after reminding us that "the world is not what it seems," he shows us how good programming can sharpen our picture. His unique software lets children learn by doing, but also learn by computing and by creating lessons themselves. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 20:37.)
Watch Alan Kay's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Download this talk in 480p high-def >>
Read more about Alan Kay on TED.com.
04 March 2008
TED loves classical music
Photo: Andrew Heavens/TED
As Megan Barnett writes on Portfolio.com:
I'm ready to buy my first classical music CD, after the boundlessly energetic Benjamin Zander brought the audience to tears with a Chopin piece before bringing it to its feet while belting out the Ode to Joy.
Plenty of TEDsters came away from Monterey and Aspen with the same feeling. If you're new to all this, here are a few good places to start:
+ The Chopin piece that Benjamin Zander played is the Prelude in E Minor, Op. 28: No. 4 -- and YouTube offers more than 70 interpretations of this classic piece. Listen to a few, and decide who is playing on one buttock. >>
+ The "Ode to Joy" comes from Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Though Zander's own recording of Beethoven's 9th, with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, is out of print, it is fascinating to read his thoughts on the way the 9th should be played >>
+ You can find Zander's recording of Beethoven's 5th and 7th Symphonies with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London here >>
+ TEDster and blogger John La Grou at Microlesia muses on Schiller's lyrics to the "Ode to Joy" >>
+ A comment on Microlesia points to a fascinating new documentary project, Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven's Final Symphony, an exploration of the global scope of this great romantic work. Read more here and add your comments >>
+ TED's own June Cohen was struck by this thought:
I keep thinking to myself: What a TRAGEDY that we can't invite Beethoven to TED! I want to MEET him. I want to TALK to him. I want to understand where the music came from.
+ A friend of TED suggests moving on to Mahler's Symphony No. 5 -- which Benjamin Zander recorded in 2001 with the Philharmonia Orchestra. A reviewer says, "Every section plays with edge-of-the-chair commitment." Sound familiar?
04 March 2008
Andrew Mwenda's newspaper, the Independent, now online
You can now read journalist Andrew Mwenda's newspaper, The Independent, online. Based in Kampala, Uganda, the paper promises "uncensored news, views and analysis" -- a promise that has already led to government threats against the paper's printer. Mwenda spoke at TEDGlobal 2007 and was a panelist on the BBC debate hosted last week at TED in Monterey.
In today's Independent, a headline reads: "Andrew Mwenda summoned to CID" -- the Uganda police's Criminal Investigations Department. More on this story as it develops.
03 March 2008
A new meme unfolds
Photo: David Geller/whatcounts
Memeticist Susan Blackmore uses the hotel-bathroom toilet-paper fold as an example of a useless meme -- a meme that has spread throughout the world, even though there is no human reason for it to exist. The persistence of this meme easily disproves the comfortable notion that we humans only spread ideas that are useful or interesting -- it shows that, once a meme takes on life, it spreads itself.
Inspired by Blackmore's research, origamist and TEDster Bruno Bowden created a combinatorial meme -- linking Blackmore's ideas with the sophisticated folding techniques discussed by origami master Robert J. Lang onstage at TED. See photo at left.
+ To learn more about dangerous memes, listen to
Dan Dennett's awesome 2002 TEDTalk >>
+ To learn more about toilet-paper origami, check out this devoted student of the art >>
+ To see what happened when Ze Frank was attacked by this meme on Day 4 of TED@Aspen, visit our Flickr set >>
02 March 2008
TED2008: Days 3 and 4 in Quotes
Photos: Andrew Heavens
“Imagine Martin Luther King saying, ‘I have a dream ... But I don’t know if the others will buy it.’” - Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, on the importance of persuasive leadership
"Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it. Well, I’m Bob and I’m an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people." - Musician and activist Bob Geldof (above)
“Why are we ignoring the oceans? Why does NASA spend in one year what NOAA will spend in 1600 years? Why are we looking up? Why are we afraid of the ocean?” - Ocean explorer Robert Ballard
"I think it's the dopamine." - Anthropologist Helen Fisher, explaining to Chris Anderson why she's still optimistic about love, despite understanding its chemical and biological basis
"Relative to the universe, it's just up the road." - Physicist Brian Cox, after referring to Chicago as 'just up the road' from Monterey, CA
“If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix ... Take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.” - Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis
“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind’s worst disease.” - Jonathan Haidt, quoting Sent-ts’an, from 700CE China
"The job of the C is to make the B sad." - Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, deconstructing a piece by Chopin
“How do we give credible hope to the billion poorest people in the world? It requires compassion to get ourselves started, and enlightened self-interest to get serious... If economic divergence continues, combined with global integration, it will build a nightmare for our children.” - Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion
“In order to solve the climate crisis, we need to solve the democracy crisis.” - Al Gore, urging citizen involvement not only on a personal level, but also on a political level
“How dare we be pessimistic? Maybe the future is better than it used to be.” - Peter Schwartz, co-founder of the Global Business Network
“It's important to leave the security of who we are, and go to the place of who we are becoming. I encourage you to let yourself out of any prison you might find yourself in. Because we have to do something now. We have to change now.” - Environmental advocate John Francis (below), who went 17 years without speaking
01 March 2008
Connections and collectives: TED@Aspen Day 4
Photos: Michael Brands/Aspen Institute
For the final sessions of TED@Aspen, we packed into the main hall of Doerr-Hosier for the Kids' Table Collective -- Rives, Jill Sobule, Ze Frank and the Raspyni Brothers (special appearance by Jennifer O'Donnell). Thrilling stunts and comedy and a standing ovation from the kids in Monterey capped off a week of conversation and connection. Our large Australian contingent presented the Ozzie version of the Big Questions (though -- did Chris Anderson really call Australians "the greatest threat to TED ... as we know it"?), and a couple of Aspenites a-a-almost won a stage prize. But more than anything, Day Four was a day to reflect on what we created here, in the first year of TED@Aspen: a community of people forming our own traditions around some Ideas Worth Spreading. Watch for reflections in the weeks to come from our TED@Aspen bloggers.
Overheard on the final day of TED@Aspen:
Putting together the big idea that links David Gallo and Bill Lange's work at Woods Hole, Robert Ballard's talk on undersea exploration, and the WorldWide Telescope:
"[Forget] outer space -- when do we get Google Ocean?"
In a reflective mood on the shuttle to the airport:
"There was one missing question: To be, or not to be? To have the tenacity to do something great, or to quit?"
During rehearsal for the Kids' Table Collective:
"I'll take the mushrooms and the double-stick tape and figure something out."
Via Twitter, onepinktee writes:
"another big question for TEDizens: what will you do next? #TED"
01 March 2008
TED2008: And The Point?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session twelve - closing session.)
The session opens with the projection of will.i.am's "Yes We Can" viral video based on Barack Obama's speech. The two producers are in the audience. The video has been seen millions of times, a demonstration of the power of individuals to inflect the political debate:
John Francis calls himself a "planetwalker". From 1983 to 2005, he
walked around North and Nouth America carrying a message of respect for
the Earth -- and for 17 of those years, he did so without speaking (all
while learning a degree in environmental studies and a PhD in land
resources). (A profile of him in Sierra magazine).
I've been silent for 17 years. When I first spoke, I turned around to hear my own voice. I want to take you on this journey, even though this one is kind of unusual I want you to think of your own. My journey begain in 1971 when I witnessed two oil tankers collide under the Golden Gate bridge and half a million gallons of oil spilled out. It so disturbed me that I decided to give up driving cars -- and that's quite a big thing in California. People would ask me "What are you doing" and as I said that I was "walking for the environment" they said: "No, you're just doing that to make us look bad, feel bad". I argued so much about that that on my 27th birthday I decided I would give it a rest, and stop talking for one day. It was very moving, because I began truly listening, and it was very sad for me because I realized that until then I had not really been learning. So I decided to do it for another day, and another day, until finally I promised myself that for one year I would keep quiet, and then on my birthday reassess what I had learned. That lasted 17 years. During that time I walked and played the banjo and wrote my journal and tried to study the environment by reading books and go to school. So I did, I walked to Oregon -- 500 miles -- and went into the registrar office and in two years I graduated with my first degree. And then I started walking again, to Washington, then to Montana. I'd written to the University of Montana two years earlier telling them that I would like to go to school there and I would be there in two years. They helped me, figuring out ways for me to get grades despite I didn't have the money and I didn't speak. I went on to the University of Wisconsin, and spent two years there writing about oil spills. And something happened: I was the only one in the US writing about oil spills. I went on, it took me 17 years and 1 day to walk around the US. My journey kept going on. I wrote for the US Coast Guard, I wrote oil spills regulations.
I started talking because I had studied environment at a formal level, but there was an informal level, about people, and what we do and how we are. And environment changed from being about species and trees to be about how we treat ourselves and each other. So I had to spread that message. I still didn't ride motorized vehicles. In my heart I had become a prisoner. The prison I was in was the fact that I did not drive or use motorized vehicles. When I started it seemed very appropriate to me. But at every birthday I asked myself about silence, but I never asked myself about my decision to use my feet. I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me, and I was gonna have to change -- and was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who just walked, that I didn't know who I would be. But I knew I needed to change. Alot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we've gotten to, but there is another place we have to go to, and we have to leave behind the security of who we have become and go go the place of who we are becoming.
Designer Stefan Sagmeister gives a 3-minutes talk about "Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far".
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written possibly one of the most
insightful books of the recent years. In "The Happiness Hypothesis", he
brings neuroscience and evolutionary psychology together with some of
the biggest ideas of philosophers and religious thinkers of the past,
trying to over come the idea that today we know better, and that those
great teachers had already discovered some of the true secrets of
happiness and of the meaning of life -- and that they are quite
coherent with modern science.
He studies morality and emotion in the
context of culture: why did we evolve to have morals, and to have
different morals? And what about the moral foundations of politics?
Ideology and openness to experience is a discriminant of the way people behave.
What is morality and where does it come from? The worst idea in all psychology is that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Truth is that we come to life already knowing alot. Nature provides a first draft, which then experience revises. Five foundations of morality:
- Harm/care, that makes really bond with ohers, care for others
- Fairness/reciprocity
- Ingroup/loyalty, only among humans very large groups can join together and collaborate
- Authority/respect
- Purity/sanctity
If these are the five best candidates for what's written in the first draft of our moral mind But as kids grow up, how is this first draft being modified? We've put a questionnaire online asking how people (conservatives and liberals) relate to these foundations of morality. Turns out that conservatives consider them very similarly; liberals are more attentive to the first two, less to the other three.
What makes Ingroup, Authority and Purity moral? Order tends to decay. Loyalty is not enough, you need some sort of punishment to get people to cooperate in large group. Traditional morality uses every tool in the toolbox (including suppressing carnality etc) to make people collaborate, seek a higher end. Liberal morality rejects I/A/P. Liberals want change and justice even at risk of chaos; conservatives speak for institutions and traditions, and want order even at some cost for those at the bottom. So both liberals and conservatives have something to offer. Are conservatives and liberals like Yin and Yang? "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease" (Sent-ts'an, c. 700 CE). Compare that to George Bush "with us or against us".
Our righteous minds were "designed" by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams, and to blind us to the truth. As we heard from Samantha Power and her story of Sergio Vieira de Mello, we can't just charge in. Alot of problems we have to solve require that we change other people, and if we want to change them, we need to understand our design, cultivate moral humility, and turn our understanding into a better future for us all.
British rockstar Bob Geldof is the closing speaker. In the late 1970s, Geldof was the leader of the Boomtown Rats, a British punk band. In the 1980s, he became a global activist, organizing Band Aid (to raise funds for the famine in Ethiopia), then, later, LiveAid. In 2005, he threw another giant global concert, Live8, trying to raise awareness for debt relief and poverty reduction. Since, he's become active in alternative fuels and hybrid vehicles, and sees a link between fuel dependency and poverty-creating regimes. He calls TED "the Olympics of unreasonable people".
There can't be evolution of thought without differences, without challenges. Society needs to constantly test itself in order to get that change. Science can take us only so far. In the modern age, people are made a fetish of progress almost as an antidote of nihilism; we must believe that we're moving forward, but sometimes science only adds a twist to a normal madness. I encountered that normal madness back in 1984, millions of people dying of poverty and hunger. In Europe, we paid taxes to produce food that we would never eat, and to destroy it. Eight miles south of Europe lied Africa, and 30 million people were dying of want, most very young. I was shocked, and I just thought that it wasn't enough to do the usual dollar-in-the-box- I travelled around Africa and then went on TV and said that dying of want in a world of surplus was morally repulsive and also economically illiterate. The lingua franca of the planet is not English, it's rock and roll, so we began that dialog in 1985. If the impulse of one human being to help another is not critical to the human spirit, then what is? The act of putting a dollar in the save-the-children box is a political act. It's almost the political equivalent of the butterfly effect. If there are enough dollars, policy changes. If we are de-sensitized to the suffering of others something withers, something's gone, some part of humanity is lost. But it drove me mad, there was no need for this to happen; poverty is an empirical condition.
Africa will transform itself through technology, and the tech that will do it is the mobile phone.
All of these things that happened to me are wrapped up in this idea: back in 1985 I trawled across the misery of others. I was in Niger. A politician told me: there were 300 separate languages here, and they're gone. We can't let that continue (see also Wade Davis' speech). There is a great mapping of mankind to be undertaken, and that's what I'm gonna do, with photos, music, film, text, and then we're going to map the unfolding narrative of us, and we will watch ourselves unfold. Culture is the narrative of man, not politics. Human cultural diversity is as important to the life of the intellect as biological diversity is to nature. I want to build a Dictionary of Man, I want you to help me do so.
This is the last TED in Monterey. Final show of TED2008, live from TED@Aspen, with singer Jill Sobule and comedians Rives, Zé Frank and the Raspyni Brothers.
The next TEDs:
TEDAfrica: Cape Town, South Africa, 29 September - 1 October 2008. Theme: "What If?" Information and registration here.
TED2009: Long Beach, California, 4-7 February 2009. Theme: "The Great Unveiling". It's already sold out.
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.
What a week! Time to pack and off to SFO. Find all my posts from TED2008 here -- and of course those of the other TED bloggers. Bye!
01 March 2008
TED2008: How dare we be optimistic?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session eleven.)
Ben Kaufman, founder of Kluster, goes on stage to tell what he and his team have been doing -- with the help of TED attendees and 1200 people around the world -- since the beginning of the conference. Kluster is an online collaboration and decision-making platform. 
They set out Wednesday morning to develop a product, with some basic guidelines but "we didn't know what it would be". They set up a studio in the conference's venue, and got 208 ideas submitted in 24 hours. Collaboratively, it was decided that it would be an education board game; the content for it was developed; a name chosen ("OverThere" -- the logo was submitted by a participant online); the rules set; a tagline developed; a full prototype developed (photo). 72 hours, 1200 participants, a board game "of social awareness" collectively invented, developed and prototyped: a pretty awesome piece of work.
Johnny Lee does research on human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University -- and explains it via videos on YouTube. He goes on stage for a short talk explaining how at the tip of the Nintendo Wii remote controller there is a rather sophisticated infrared camera, and Johnny shows how, by pointing it to a projection screen or LCD display, you can create a low-cost white board; because the camera can see multiple dots, it becomes a multitouch screen as well. The audience goes: "wow!", and indeed what Johnny does is really cool. See the demos on his site.
Economist Paul Collier has written one of the most interesting books of
last year, "The Bottom Billion", identifying the traps that keep many
countries in poverty and outlining new ways to development through a
mix of direct aid and investment. He is the director of the Center for
the Study of the African Economies at Oxford.
A billion people have been stuck living in economies that have been stopped for 40 years. So the question is: how can we give credible hope to that billion people. That's in my mind the fundamental challenge of development. Two forces that change the world for good: and enlightened of self-interest. Compassion because a billion people are living in societies that can't offer credible hope; enlightened of self-interest because of that economic divergence continues for another 40 years it will lead to disaster.
What does it mean to get serious about providing hope for the bottom billion? A good guide is: what did we do last time the rich world got serious about developing another region of the wold? That goes back to the 1940s: the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Europe, financed by the rich US. It was not only compassion: it was also enlightened self-interest by America, because in Europe country after country was falling into the Soviet sphere of interest. What else did America do? Before the war the US had been very protectionist; after the war, total reversal of trade policy with the general agreement on tariffs and trade. Before the war, US had an isolationist security policy; after the war, posted troops in Europe. Before the war, the US treated national sovereignty so stringently that it didn't even want to join the League of Nation; after the war, position reversed.
Aid, trade, security, and governance. That frontier is still there. We need to be at least as serious as we were there.
Let's focus on governance. The opportunity we're going to look to is a genuine basis for optimism about the bottom billion: the commodity boom. It's pumping an unprecedented amount of money into many -- not all -- of the countries of the bottom billion. Partially because community prices are high, partly because there is a range of new discoveries and explorations. Between them, these new revenue flows dwarf aid. How is that gonna help development? What is the relationship between high commodity prices of exports and the growth of commodity-exporting countries. In the short time, the first 5-7 years, it's great. Everything goes up. But in the long run, it reverses -- "the resource curse". The critical issue is the level of governance. In fact, if you got good enough governance, there is no resource curse: you go up in the short term, and even more in the long run. Nigeria is worst off than if it never had oil. There is a threshold level of governance. Is the bottom billion above or below that threshold? Maybe we can be more optimistic
Democracy makes even more of a mess of the resource boom that autocracies. There are two distinct aspects of democracy: electoral competition, that determines how you acquire power, and checks and balances which determines how you use it. What the countries at the bottom billion need is very strongly checks and balances. They have elections, but not c-and-b. We should have some international standards, which would be voluntary but would spell out the basic needs. We know these standards because we already have one: the international extraction revenues transparency. It requires that governments report to their populations the revenues of extraction.
What would the content be of these international standards? How to take the resources out of the ground, how to sell the rights for resource extraction. Now, a company flies in, make a deal with a minister, that's great for the company and often for the minister, but rarely for the country. There is a piece of institutional technology that can work: verified auctions. Like the British Treasury sold wireless 3G licenses back in the early 2000 (the full story of that auction here - PDF). If we can create such standards, we can help the people in these societies.
And yet, we've not got these rules. If you think about, the cost of promulgating international rules is very low. Why are they not there? Because until we have a critical mass of informed citizens in our own societies, politicians will get away with gestures -- things that look good but don't work. We have to go through the business of building an informed citizenry. That's why I wrote an economic book that you can read on a beach.
Eric Kuhne, architect and planner from London, gives a short talk about a new city project in the Middle East, where symbolism and urban planning interact. Architecture has become a new diplomacy. We want to restore the storytelling qualities of cities. A city has been and always will be the greatest work of art.
Singer-songwriter-producer-activist Nellie McKay is next, toying with antique genres yet producing music that's unequivocally contemporary.
Three-minutes speech by Andy Hobsbawm is one of the founders of The Green Thing, a London-based online community that encourages people to behave more sustainably, one small step at a time, through information and fun. I've already blogged it here and here.
Last year was quite a year for former US vice-president Al Gore. He was awarded the Nobel prize for Peace (together with the IPCC), won an Oscar for his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth", and saw the theme of climate change gain center stage in the political and social discussion. He has spoken previously at TED, in 2006 (watch the video).
He has a new speech related to his last book, "The Assault On Reason", which will also be turned into a documentary.
"I was reminded by Karen Armstrong's presentation that if religion is not really about belief but about behaviour, maybe we should say the same thing about optimism. Optimism is often represented as an intellectual posture -- Gandhi's "You must be the change you wish to see in the world". But when we change our behaviour in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the democracy and citizen part. In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis, and we have one. There is a bridge between the climate crisis and the crisis of extreme poverty in our world. We have to find a unified Earth theory. The struggles of climate change and extreme poverty and diseases are connected to the problems of overconsumption, wastefulness, economic transformation. We have to approach this as a unified challenge. Local, regional, global conflicts: each level requires a different allocation of resource, organizational model, etc. The climate crisis is the rare and strategic global conflict, we have to organize our response accordingly (BG: I partially disagree). What we do with the poorest countries matters to all of us. We have to act. Since that post-war economic boom, one aspect of the engine of economic growth was a pattern of consumption that morphed into overconsumption. The solution to the climate crisis requires that we replace that engine -- consumption without overconsumption. We need a worldwide movement. But the political will needs to be mobilized in order to mobilize the resources.
Gore discusses (and shows convincing images about) the melting of the Arctic icecap and the thawing of permafrost in the North; peak fishing; emissions.
Venus and the Earth have roughly the same size. On Earth, carbon is trapped. On Venus, it's in the atmosphere -- and temperatures reach 855 degrees F.
The majority of Americans now think that climate change is a problem, that warming is real. But there still isn't a sense of urgency. (He shows a video -- a frame at left -- with elephants falling from the sky, "every year the US emits CO2 for the equivalent weight of 1.2 billion elephants: It's time to stop ignore 1.2 billion elephants in the room").
Solution: put a price on carbon. We need a CO2 tax, revenue-neutral, to replace taxation on emplomyent, which was invented by Bismarck and some things have changed since. In the poor world we have to integrate responses to poverty with solutions to the climate crisis. Responses can make a huge difference. Think of the "energy super grid" with solar energy produced in North Africa by solar and the energy sold to Europe (picture below). If you invest in tar sands, you have a subprime portfolio.
780 US cities are now supporting Kyoto.
We heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so commonplace that it becomes banal routine. What we need is another hero generation. Those of us who are alive in the US today, but also in the rest of the world, have to somehow understand that history has presented us with a choice. Just as Jill Taylor was figuring out how to save her life while she was distracted by the amazing stroke that she was witnessing.We now have a culture of distraction but we have a planetary emergency. We need to find a way to create a sense of generational mission. We have the capacity to do it. I'm optimistic, because I do feel very deeply that the kind of moving spirit that is celebrated in so many of the sessions that we've all been moved by here is alive in all of us. I believe we have the capacity at moments of great challenge to set aside the causes of distraction and rise to the historic challenges. Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying "this is so terrible, what a burden". Let's reframe that: how many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts, a challenge that can pull from us more that we knew we could to. We ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generational about which 1000 years from now orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying: they swere the ones that found within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future. Let's do that.
Chris Anderson asks Gore whether he is excited by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's environmental plans. Gore: We should feel grateful that both of them and John McCain, all three have a position on the climate challenge, have offered leadership and an approach very different from the current administration. But the campaign dialog -- often sponsored by the "clean coal" industry btw -- has not laid the basis for the kind of bold initiative that is really needed. They're saying the right things, and whoever of them is elected may do the right things. But when I came back from Kyoto in 1997 with a great feeling, and then confronted the US Senate and only a handful were willing to ratify that treaty: whatever the politicians say needs to be alongside what people say. The climate challenge is part of the fabric of our life. Changing the pattern is beyond anything we've done in the past. Change light bulbs, but change the politics too. I do believe that between now and November it is possible that the debate will get bolder. We can change things, actively. What's needed really is a higher level of consciousness, and it's hard to create, but it's coming. As the African say: if you want to go quickly go alone, if you want to go far go together. We have to go far quickly.
01 March 2008
AMD and One Laptop per Child
Guest blogger Devlen Watkins handles IT for the Aspen Institute, but when he's not running around solving technical problems during TED@Aspen, he's been down at the AMD 50x15 / One Laptop per Child table, playing with the XO Laptop. He writes:
OLPC, or as most of you know it One Laptop per Child, has really taken the ball and run with it in the construction and programming. One of the greatest features this machine offers is the ability for children to learn to program in Python. Learning this programming language is not very easy, but I guess they believe that as, with most languages, if taught young it's easier to grasp.
Along with the ability to learn such a great program, these machines come with a built-in webcam for video chat, and several instrumental applications that allow children to play and compose music. OLPC has really thought of the children when they developed this wonderful device. Where else can you purchase a laptop for $200 that will not only allow you to connect to the Internet but teach your child at the same time?
Now time to play some more ...
01 March 2008
Johnny Lee's Wii Remote demo link
Johnny Lee just gave a two-ovation demo at TED2008 of his amazing Wii Remote hacks -- turning the Wii Remote into a whiteboard tool, a tracking device and even a multi-touch screen.
Here's a link to his site, where you can download the tools >>
01 March 2008
A brand-new game from Kluster
This week at the Kluster lab in Monterey, TEDsters and contributors around the world brainstormed, designed and made a brand-new product in 72 hours -- an educational game to raise cultural awareness (born out of inspiration of Dan Dennett's 2006 TEDTalk). The rules:
This game is linear in nature, all players start out at the beginning of the route, the route consists of 21 stops. The goal of the game is be the first player to reach the end. the route will consist of spaces coloredto correspond to three separate type of cards. each color will represent a different type card to be taken by the player upon landing on that tile. results will determine if player moves forward.
We will develop topics for cards, which will raise awareness for different subjects/crisis’. Every organization can have their own set of cards for this game to raise awareness for their cause. as an example, if we were creating a game set which raises awareness about the global water crisis three different types of card could possibly look like:
Chances: your town hand pump just broke and the closest expert who can service it is two weeks away, move back 3 spaces
Actions: tell your competitors how you believe the best way to mass purify water without a large consumption of power
Questions: what % of the world population lives further than one mile from their nearest pure water source?
Check out Kluster build photos here >>
01 March 2008
Lost in the stars: TED@Aspen Day 3
Photo: Michael Brands/Aspen Institute
Friday at TED@Aspen, we hosted live Talks from Walter Isaacson, the head of the Aspen institute, and the wonderful Ze Frank. Between TED sessions via satellite, we heard from David Gallo and William Lange of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Joy Mountford sharing amazing data visualizations, Ron Dembo and his ZeroFootprint carbon calculator, Reto Schnyder and his thoughts on Max Frisch's I'm Not Stiller, and the Raspyni Brothers -- who put on a completely terrifying show that risked the life of the world's greatest poker player, as they juggled bowling balls over Phil Gordon's head.
The TED Prize lunch at Aspen Meadows was buzzing with great ideas, with a rich cross-pollination and connection among the three winners and their wishes. After we rocked the entire Doerr-Hosier Center with the "Ode to Joy," we rode the Silver Queen gondola, 3,000 feet up Aspen Mountain into an amazing starry sky, for dancing, drinking and more amazing conversation.
Photo: Michael Brands/Aspen Institute
See TED's flickr set for more portraits from TED@Aspen >>
01 March 2008
TED2008: Day 2 in Quotes
"There have been bangs in the past. There will be bangs in the future. We may live in an endless universe." - Physicist and TED Prize winner Neil Turok
“I have the modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry." - Craig Venter, on his work creating synthetic lifeforms to generate alternative energy sources
"The line between good and evil is movable and it's permeable." - Psychologist Philip Zimbardo
“They’ve lowered the transaction cost of stopping genocide.” - Samantha Power on 1-900-GENOCIDE
“Chris Anderson is a computer-fabricated artifact.” - Paul Rothemund, joking about his work manipulating DNA, as if it were a computer program
"A lot of religious people prefer to be right, rather than compassionate." - Religion scholar and TED prize winner Karen Armstrong
“ 'Temes' [technology-enhanced memes] don’t care about us - they simply want to create more of themselves. Don’t think we created the internet for our own benefit - think about temes spreading for themselves because they must.” - Susan Blackmore
“Beauty and truth do not reside in the object themseles, but rather in the nature of the exchange between the object and the viewer,” -Thomas Krens
“Whoa dude, nice equations!” - Garrett Lisi, the "surfer dude" physicist, introducing his talk by displaying an enormously complex equation on screen. He went on to explain his controversial "theory of everything" without using equations
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