TEDBlog April, 2009 Archive
30 April 2009
Find the TEDTalks in the Time 100
Some familiar TED faces appear in the new Time 100 list, listing the world’s most influential people. As always with this great list, look for short, punchy profiles by some well-matched writers and subjects: Bill James on Nate Silver; Bill Gates on Jeff Bezos; Ashton Kutcher on the Twitter Guys … If you want to dig a little deeper on 10 of these fascinating people, check out their TEDTalks, all linked below:
TEDTalks from the Time 100′s “Builders & Titans” list: The Twitter Guys … Indian software executive and visionary Nandan Nilekani (he spoke at TED2009; watch for his TEDTalk online very soon) … and Zipcar visionary Robin Chase.
TEDTalks from the Time 100′s “Artists & Entertainers” list: architect partners Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio … the astonishing young conductor and El Sistema prodigy Gustavo Dudamel
TEDTalks from the Time 100′s “Heroes & Icons” list: pastor Rick Warren … Amazon head Jeff Bezos
TEDTalks from the Time 100′s “Scientists & Thinkers” list: energy expert Amory Lovins … Dan Barber … Shai Agassi … Nate Silver
30 April 2009
Q&A with Laurie Garrett: "This is a huge wake-up call"
TED took 20 minutes with Laurie Garrett this afternoon to follow up on her TEDTalk from 2007, posted today, about pandemic flu. Garrett is the author of The Coming Plague, and a fellow on the Council for Foreign Relations who studied global health and emerging diseases. (As you can imagine, she is very busy this week.) We asked Garrett: What has changed since the last pandemic panic, 2007′s avian flu? What does she worry about now? And really, should we not wash our hands?
Did the avian flu scare of two years ago prompt real action from the government?
Yeah, I think actually there’s been a serious maturation in not only US response but all over the world and within the WHO. We’re in a different era in terms of how the public is getting information. The CDC even has a Twitter account — hundreds of thousands of people are twittering the CDC.
So the situation of 2007 has changed?
Yes, we’re way beyond that now. All the thought processes that went on, all the practices and drills — and criticisms from people like myself — has paid off.
The WHO seems much more open now — with daily briefings on the web, news releases, the announcement today that we’re not longer calling it “swine flu” …
That was because the pork industry went bananas. They’ve seen countries ban US and Mexican pork products. It’s affecting the US meat industry in ways that couldn’t be predicted. It’s what we saw in the chicken industry with H5N1 [avian flu].
But it’s really important to understand — in the big picture, stepping away from the immediate situation — it’s not coincidental that we’re looking at a virus that seems to have elements genetically from at least three species of host, human, bird and pig, and even the pig pieces seem to come from a minimum of six different input points. This is the most deeply mosaiced virus that we’ve seen circulating in humans. And it has erupted from the pork industry. So we have these giant industrial-scaled pork plants where the pigs are literally snout to snout — you have an infection start at one end, and it just zips through the whole darn place.
One of our Facebook commenters noted this — that “packing 500,000 animals in a space of the size of a football field is a recipe for disaster.”
Pigs are passing their viruses to humans, but more significantly, humans are passing their viruses to pigs. H1N1 appears to have been a human virus that passed through pigs, through birds, back through pigs, it took a few more turns, and then back to humans.
We have these new ecologies that are complete artificial and completely bizarre. Imagine a row of neatly stacked dominoes all stacked in the same way. Think of the pork industry as the dominoes. You’re creating these perfect environments for disease. We know it’s better to have a heterogeneous population, and this is a huge wake-up call.
Do you feel differently now than you did then about any of the points you made — about masks or handwashing, for instance?
I think the primary purpose of a mask is to scare the heck out of the people you’re talking to, and then they stay 5 feet away. They don’t keep viruses away, they keep people away.
For those who are health professionals and first responders, who have to get up close and personal with people, I remain convinced that only an N95 mask, a fitted N95 mask, offers the proper protection.
For the average person, I really think the primary person of the mask is to scare other people. Although, if you are sick and you cough, most of the droplets do end up inside the mask, so you are protecting other people.
And handwashing?
Well, I think handwashing is going to help, and you should wash your hands.
But the interesting thing is, Why do we have flu so late in the year? Usually the flu season has been over for quite some time, so this is a very unusual situation. And one of the things that’s interesting about why flu is seasonal, and is the sort of bad-news endpoint of the paragraph I am now uttering: When flu is coughed or you sneeze it, the virus is suspended in a liquid environment. Ideally an environment with lots of polysaccharides and sugars, an environment like mucus. Suspended in mucus, the virus can go from your hand to a doorknob, from a doorknob to another person’s hand; it can go onto the surface of a telephone … all those things are contagious to others. Mucus also protects the virus from ultraviolet rays. One reason flu is seasonal — as the temperature rises, these things tend to dry out. So in the summer, it’s very, very unusual to see flu virus circulating. The bad new is, if this virus has indeed taken hold, it will move to the Southern hemisphere for their winter, and it will come back to us, possibly in a different mutation, this fall. As our temperatures drop, we may see a return. This is the ominous issue.
30 April 2009
Final day to vote for TED.com to win some Webbies
It’s the final day to vote for TED.com and Pangea Day in the Webby People’s Voice Awards. TED has been nominated in 3 categories for 2009. TED.com is in the running for Best Use of Video or Moving Image and Podcasts. And a 2008 TED Prize project, Pangea Day, is nominated in the Movie and Film category. Pangea Day is the progeny of TED Prize and Razorfish Inc., maintaining a site alive with amazing short films, documentaries and performances.
In 2008, TED won 3 Webby Awards. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for another clean sweep …
30 April 2009
What can we learn from the 1918 flu pandemic? Laurie Garrett on TED.com
In 2007, as the world worried about a possible avian flu epidemic, Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, gave this powerful talk to a small TED University audience. Her insights from past pandemics are suddenly more relevant than ever. (Recorded at TED U 2007, February 2007, in Monterey, California. Duration: 21:05.)
Watch Laurie Garrett’s talk from TED U 2007 on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks.
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29 April 2009
Race and the city: An exclusive interview with Nate Silver
In his TEDTalk, blogger and statistics whiz Nate Silver explained how race may have affected the 2008 election. In this interview with the TEDBlog he further explores the relationships between urban spaces, race and President Obama.
Here’s an excerpt:
I see Obama as being our first urban president in a long time. His racial heritage is mixed, he was raised by a single mother, he’s lived in several places, from Indonesia to Hawaii to the Midwest. For many people living in our cities, especially in their 20s and 30s, this is normal. I think urban-ness is the real factor.
Read the full interview, after the jump >> (more…)
29 April 2009
Find TED on reddit.TV, launching today!
If you’re as addicted to reddit as we are here — visit the brand-new reddit.TV to channel-surf through reddit’s Best of the Web video, or browse by category: Music, Geek, Sports …
And you’ll see a nice red button that will bring up the hottest TED videos on reddit at the moment. We’re thrilled to be partnering with reddit for the launch of this great new video toy.
29 April 2009
One woman, eight hilarious characters: Sarah Jones on TED.com
In this hilariously lively performance, actress Sarah Jones channels an opinionated elderly Jewish woman, a fast-talking Dominican college student and more, giving TED2009 just a sample of her spectacular character range. (Recorded at TED2009, February 2009, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 21:00.)
Watch Sarah Jones’ talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks.
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29 April 2009
Adopt a line of Miro player code
We love the free, open-source Miro player. If you do too, consider supporting the player by adopting a line of Miro code. Visit the Miro Adoption Center to make a small donation and support the team’s constant efforts to improve this player.
TED.com was a premier partner for Miro when it launched in January 2008. We recommend the Miro player for viewing TEDTalks in many uses:
+ for educators (Miro offers smooth and dependable download and playback in the classroom)
+ for use over slower connections
+ for computers whose built-in players don’t support the MP4 format
+ for users who want to queue up a playlist
And of course, the Miro player offers thousands of other videos and many more podcast channels, including HD and torrent feeds. If you haven’t tried it yet, consider downloading Miro 2.0 for Windows, Mac or Ubuntu, and check it out. Or get the Miro source code.
28 April 2009
Q&A on swine flu with virus hunter Nathan Wolfe: "We've created a perfect storm for viruses"
Swine flu has made this a busy week for virus hunter Nathan Wolfe, who spoke at TED2009 about preventing the next pandemic. His groundbreaking Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (supported by grants from Google.org, the Skoll Foundation and others) monitors people in close contact with animals (such as subsistence hunters in central Africa) to catch new diseases before they spread. We caught up with Wolfe yesterday by phone, before his appearance on CNN with Anderson Cooper (who plays a cameo role in Wolfe’s TEDTalk), and asked him about this latest outbreak.
SARS, avian flu, swine flu … what’s going on here? Why are we suddenly seeing so many more outbreaks of viruses from animals?
Viruses have always passed from humans to animals. In fact, the vast majority of human diseases have animal origins. But the human population is different from what it once was. For most of our history, we lived in geographically disparate populations. So viruses could enter from animals into humans, spread locally and go extinct. But the human population has gone through a connectivity explosion. All humans on the planet are now connected to each other spatially and temporally in a way that’s unprecedented in the history of vertebrate biology. Humans — as well as our domestic animals and wild animals we trade — move around the planet at biological warp speed. This provides new opportunities for viruses that would have gone extinct locally to have the population density fuel they need to establish themselves and spread globally.
We’ve created a “perfect storm” for viruses. And we’ll continue to see — as we have in the past few years — a whole range of new animal diseases as outbreaks in human populations. But we have to stop being surprised by them. Right now, global public health is like cardiology in the ’50s — just waiting for the heart attack, without understanding why they occur or the many ways to monitor for them, detect them early and ultimately prevent them. Swine flu is not an anomaly. We know that swine flu — like the vast majority of new outbreaks — comes from animals. We should be monitoring those animals and the humans that come into contact with them, so we can catch these viruses early, before they infect major cities and spread throughout the world.
Can we stop swine flu? Or is it too late?
If you catch one of these outbreaks early on, there may be the potential to do what we call containment, where you limit the outbreak to a particular site. But the reality is: By the time swine flu got on the radar screen of global public health, it had already spread. It was already in the States, it was in Mexico, it was in New Zealand. By the time it reaches that point, you’ve lost the ability to contain it. There are ways to decrease the spread of the pandemic, but by that point, it can’t be contained. (Editor’s note: See Larry Brilliant’s 2006 TEDTalk for more on the importance of early containment.)
The more fundamental question is: How do we prevent these pandemics from occurring? There are commonalities among all the pandemics that occur, and we can learn from them. One commonality is that they all come from animals. And the other commonality is that we wait too long.
At the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, our approach is to take it a step back. If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage — when they’re first entering human populations, preferably before they’ve had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they’ve had a chance to spread — we can head off pandemics altogether.
Swine flu may or may not end up being an important human pandemic. But it’s a perfect illustration of the need for a paradigm shift in the way we approach global disease control.
In your TEDTalk, you lay out plans for monitoring humans who have close contact with animals in African jungles and Asian “wet markets.” Should you be monitoring pig farms as well?
Absolutely. What we do is all of the above. We monitor people with contact with wild animals as well as domestic animals. Chickens, ducks, pigs, monkeys … wherever people have contact with animals, that’s where we want to be, so we can catch potential pandemics at the moment that they’re born.
The good news is: For a variety of reasons, the percentage of the human population that’s in direct contact with animals is decreasing. So that gives us the potential to put a substantive percentage of that population into regular monitoring. Maybe we won’t catch everything, but we can create a much more substantive safety net for capturing these things before they go international or global.
READ MORE: Nathan Wolfe talks about why swine flu victims are dying in Mexico but not yet in the US; how swine flu is a “cosmopolitan virus”; and more … (more…)
28 April 2009
Exploring the re-wiring of the brain: Michael Merzenich on TED.com
Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich looks at one of the secrets of the brain’s incredible power: its ability to re-wire itself. He’s researching ways to harness this plasticity to enhance our skills and recover lost function. (Recorded at TED2004, February 2004, in Monterey, California. Duration: 23:07.)
Watch Michael Merzenich’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks.
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