TEDBlog October, 2009 Archive
08 October 2009
Optical illusions show how we see: Beau Lotto on TED.com
Beau Lotto‘s color games puzzle your vision, but they also spotlight what you can’t normally see: how your brain works. This fun, first-hand look at your own versatile sense of sight reveals how evolution tints your perception of what’s really out there. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 16:31)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3m
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08 October 2009
3 TEDTalks for National Poetry Day
Today is National Poetry Day in the UK, and why not everywhere? We found out about it in the stateless world of Twitter trending topics. If you’re in the mood to celebrate, watch a few of these TEDTalks about, or featuring, poetry:
“War child” Emmanuel Jal tells the story of his amazing life in words and lyrics:
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Helen Fisher studies the poetry of the brain in love:
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
And TED’s house poet, Rives, does 9 minutes of lyrical origami around the wee small hour of the morning:
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Find all dozen-and-a-half TEDTalks about poetry >>
07 October 2009
The danger of a single story: Chimamanda Adichie on TED.com
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 18:49)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3k
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06 October 2009
TEDTalks embeds in WordPress now even easier
We’ve tweaked our “Share” feature to make it even easier to embed a TEDTalk in your WordPress blog. Below the video window, for any talk on the site, click the red “Share” button, and notice the new feature: an embed code just for WordPress:
For more details — though not too many more, because it’s very easy — visit the WordPress support page.
06 October 2009
TEDxSaoPaulo integrates TED's Open Translation Project
TEDxSão Paulo has launched a sleek new website and used the TED Open Translation Project to feature TEDTalks subtitled in Portuguese. It’s a great blend of the contributions of two passionate groups from the TED community.
To learn more about TEDx, where x= independently organized events, find events to attend in your region or even apply to organize an event, click here >>
To learn more about the Open Translation Project, find talks translated in your language or to become a volunteer translator, click here >>
06 October 2009
Tribal leadership: David Logan on TED.com
At TEDxUSC, David Logan talks about the five kinds of tribes that humans naturally form — in schools, workplaces, even the driver’s license bureau. By understanding our shared tribal tendencies, we can help lead each other to become better individuals. (Recorded at TEDxUSC, May 2009, Los Angeles, California. Duration: 16:40)
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05 October 2009
How food shapes our cities: Carolyn Steel on TED.com
Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world. Understanding the flow of food will help us reconnect with what we eat. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 15:41)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3d
Watch Carolyn Steel’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 500+ TEDTalks.
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04 October 2009
Iran's nuclear program: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita predicts no nuclear weapons will be built
Only on the TED Blog: In The TED Lens, each Sunday a TED speaker offers a new look at the week’s big news stories. This week, political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita explains the negotiations currently taking place between the US, the UN and Iran, as Iran’s nuclear program is being called into question.
This week, Iran stated that they refuse to discuss their “nuclear rights” at the UN Security Council. What are the ramifications of making a statement like that? Politically, what does that mean for them and what does that mean for their interactions with the rest of the world?
Good question. Let me put their statement into a bit of context. Let me start with what I said at TED, back in February, which is that they will develop enough weapons-grade fuel so that the world will know that they know how to make a bomb, but they won’t go ahead and make a bomb, and relate that to the New York Times front page Iran story on September 9th — the lead international relations story in the Times that day — the first paragraph of which says that the intelligence community has informed the White House that Iran has made a spring towards the nuclear bomb but has deliberately stopped short of making one. And they explicitly used the word “deliberately.” That is, they didn’t run into a stumbling block or something; they chose to stop, which is exactly the outcome that was predicted at TED.
Let me push that forward to their current statement. I have not actually seen this statement in print, but I’m going to assume that you’ve stated it precisely, because what you said had very important meaning the way you said it. Their rights, under the non-proliferation treaty — and President Obama has acknowledged that this is their right — is to develop nuclear energy for civilian uses. This is a right for all signatories under the NPT. So, if what they said is that they will not be discussing their rights, that’s just the right to make civilian nuclear energy. It does not include, inherently, all discussion with regard to enrichment. Enrichment is beyond what is necessary for nuclear energy and beyond their rights under the treaty they have signed. So, I think they made a very carefully phrased statement. This does not rule out discussing other aspects of their nuclear program. However, there’s a great deal of evidence that they’ve gone beyond civilian nuclear energy. You don’t need to enrich uranium for civilian energy. There are other ways to make civilian nuclear energy — you can do it by enriching, but they seem to have gone beyond that. They do not seem, by this statement, to have precluded discussion of that.
I expect that this dance over how to resolve the issue is not going to be settled in one conversation. But, I’m hearing in that statement that they’ve left the door open and I imagine that the people at the State Department who have looked at this statement and understand exactly what their rights are under the non-proliferation treaty will see just the way I have expressed it. Not to say that they will say that publicly.
Now, I’ll address the terms of public standing within Iran. The civilian nuclear energy aspect of the program is very popular in Iran. But, the aspects of the program that seemingly go beyond civilian nuclear energy are very unpopular because the Iranian people see this as harming their economy and putting them at risk, neither of which they’re keen on. And the Iranian leaders surely understand that, because they went through the wrenching experience in June, when, for the first time since the revolution, the supreme leader was publicly challenged — not only by mass demonstrations, but also by the khoum clerics, and by very prominent politicians such as (Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi) Rafsanjani and (Seyed Mohammad) Khatami and so forth.
I think it’ll take another year or two to play out, but in the next year or two we will see a shift away from a strict theocratic government to something much closer to what (Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi) Khomeini had in mind originally, which was a government where politics and theocrats — the religious leaders — were more separated — a government that basically evolves into a little bit of a petty military dictatorship that is heavily influenced by a group called the Bonyads, who control a lot of the money in Iran, and who, because they are concerned about making money and so forth, are likely to move Iran in a more pragmatic direction. That won’t be a nice government necessarily, but will be a government, at least, that people can live better in.
President Obama has also made reference to sanctions as a possible response to Iran developing their nuclear program further. How effective do you think US sanctions would be in this situation?
I’m going to try to answer this very precisely, because there’s a very important distinction to be made between the threat of sanctions and the enactment of sanctions. The threat of sanctions can be very effective if the Iranian leaders calculate that the cost of the concessions being asked for is smaller for them than the cost that sanctions will impose, and to avoid sanctions they will make concessions in negotiation. And so, threatening sanctions is a very good thing to do at this stage as negotiations get going. On the other hand, if the Iranian leaders calculate that the cost of the threatened sanctions when imposed is smaller than the benefits that they gain when maintaining the policy that we’re trying to change, then they’ll maintain the policy and the sanctions won’t work. And so, generally, except for calculation error, the threat of sanctions can be effective. Once sanctions are implemented, that’s a pretty good indicator that the target of the sanctions has made the calculation that they can bear the cost of the sanctions better than they can bear the consequences of making the concessions, and they won’t work. That’s a subtle distinction, but an important distinction.
It’s also important to distinguish between sanctions that are aimed at the general economy of Iran and sanctions that are leader-specific, that are aimed specifically, for example, at tying up the leadership’s access by the leadership to their money or their funds. Sanctions of the latter type, leader-specific, are more likely to get them to decide up front to make concessions, rather than pay that price. Sanctions of the other type, aimed at the general country, are more likely to either form an opposition to the regime which, if they anticipate, will produce concessions beforehand, or to consolidate support for the regime, sympathy for the regime internally, in which case they would backfire. I’ve not analyzed what the likely consequences are along those lines, but those are the questions from a strategic perspective that one would have to work out. The threat is, in any event, a good thing because the threat forces the Iranians to make these calculations and therefore to reveal, through the negotiations, whether they have concluded that the sanctions really would be costly to them or not.
Sanctions at our end are typically more or less cheap talk because they don’t really cost the United States a lot. It doesn’t cost us a lot not to buy oil from Iran since we currently don’t buy oil from Iran. So, we’re not really giving up much. And tying up their bank accounts doesn’t really cost us much. It costs a little credibility to our banks, but that’s about it. Sanctions are also more effective if they are politically costly to the people imposing the sanctions, because then it’s an announcement that they view the issues as so important that they are willing to pay a price. So far, we have not shown that.
There are also the negotiations around the three Americans who are being held by Iran at the moment …
They’re a bargaining piece on the Iranian side. They’re something that the Iranians can give up to make themselves look nice, thoughtful, considerate. And presumably they are going to try to extract something of value. It’s actually quite funny — Ann Curry of NBC interviewed (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad, a week or so ago, and brought up these three alleged hikers, and he indicated that Iran was open to releasing them when the United States released several diplomats that we were holding in Iran and Iraq. She informed him that we had released those diplomats in July. He obviously didn’t know that, so he found himself in this awkward position. So now, he’s got to presumably look for something else to get.
That anecdote has an important element to it. The American media spend much too much time paying attention to Ahmadinejad. He is not a big power in Iran. Khomeini and the Supreme Council and the Guardian Council — these people are important. They’re the ones who run the show. He can’t wander very far form what they want and get away with it. Look at after he was installed, and attempted to appoint a cabinet that Khomeini didn’t like. Khomeini just said, “No.” So Ahmadinejad got a cabinet that he doesn’t like, instead. Ahmadinejad just doesn’t have that big a say.
Watch Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s TEDTalk from February 2009, where he makes predictions about Iran’s nuclear future:
Read more TED Blog Q&As on current events:
+ Jonathan Haidt on the US healthcare debate
+ Clay Shirky on Twitter, social media and the Iran election protests
+ Laurie Garrett on H1N1 swine flu and our preparedness for pandemic
+ Nathan Wolfe on H1N1 swine flu and the “perfect storm” for viruses
02 October 2009
Q&A with Garik Israelian: "Your lab should be the vacuum between stars"
Astronomer Garik Israelian (watch his TEDTalk) explained the secrets of spectrography yesterday. And last night, he answered a few of our followup questions by email — including some questions from TED’s Facebook fans:
Tell me about your latest work with lithium and its significance for planet-bearing stars.
Since year 2000, our group has been working very actively to study peculiarities in the chemical composition of planet host stars, with dozens of papers in this field. We have proposed a “Li-6 test” to study planet engulfment and/or planetary matter accretion processes in sun-like stars. Up to now, we had not found a single chemical element with a different behavior in planet-bearing stars, as compared with similar stars without planets. In the new paper, which will appear soon, we present the first such case. We present results on Lithium content for a sample of about 500 stars, including 100 planet host stars, and we find that for planet host solar analogs (stars very similar to our Sun), and only for this kind of star, there is a peculiar behavior in the Li abundance. These stars have on average less than 1% of their initial Li content. Like our Sun, these stars have been very efficiently destroying Lithium. Why? We do not really know. Maybe this is related to their rotational history, strongly influenced by the presence of planetary systems. This is not the case of solar-analog stars in the comparison sample (“single” stars without known planets), where a large fraction preserves a much higher Li abundance — about 10 times more.
Our “single”-star sample has been monitored by the most precise spectrograph, called HARPS (located in Chile), for years and no planet has been detected. Let me mention that not all sun-like stars host planets — perhaps about 30% of them are planet-builders. It’s not so easy to form a planet!
Our results clearly indicate that solving the long-standing problem of the Li depletion in the Sun, which has been a puzzle for 60 years and has promoted the development of many transport and mixing theories, will require a proper understanding of the interaction of a planetary system with its planet host star.
We find that solar analogs with low Lithium content have a higher probability of hosting planets, and therefore searches of planetary systems can increase their efficiency by performing a spectroscopic observation of Lithium.
And finally, we suggest that the Sun is “Li-poor” because it hosts a planetary system.
How do you like the new Gran Telescopio Canarias so far? What are some of the questions you’re working on there?
It’s too early to speak about GTCs performance. I think we need a year or two to see the first results. The most interesting instrument for planet-hunters is the camera called CanariCam — a mid-infrared imager with spectrogroscopic, coronagraphic and polarimetric capabilities. CanariCam works in the thermal infrared between ~7.5 and 25 microns. Planet-hunters plan to conduct a search at 10 microns with CanariCam for substellar objects (brown dwarfs and massive giant planets) around many stars in the northern hemisphere. We keep our fingers crossed!
How soon will you be able to build the new 42-meter E-ELT you talked about, to detect Earth-like planets around sun-like stars?
E-ELT is planned to be operational in 2018, while the telescope site will be selected next year. One of the first light instruments may be the high-resolution spectrograph called CODEX. The high resolution and long-term stability of CODEX, coupled with the large collecting area of the E-ELT, provides an unequaled facility for measuring stellar radial velocities at the few cm/s level. This precision will allow detecting Earth-mass planets in the habitable zone around solar-type stars.
However, recent technological developments open a new window for us. We may discover Earth twins much before the E-ELT era, The so-called “laser frequency grid” (or Astro Comb) technique may allow to hunt other Earths before 2015. The super-precise HARPS-NEF (or HARPS-NORTH) spectrograph is under construction by collaboration between Harvard’s Origins of Life Initiative, New Earths Facility, and the HARPS team of the University of Geneva, and is expected to start operation soon after 2011. Our team in Canary Islands is collaborating with astronomers in Harvard and Geneva to install this instrument on the 4.2 meter William Herschel Telescope in La Palma. HARPS-NORTH will use the Doppler technique to discover and characterize Earth-like planets from candidates identified by NASA’s Kepler mission, launched on March 6 this year.
Reader Sameena asks three questions:
Is it always right to assume that other forms of life in another planet must have the same beginnings as us — tectonic plates with volcanic activity, oxygen and water?
No, I do not think that we have to always assume that. This is more a question for biologists. If they tell us, astronomers, that new life forms may exist under x conditions, breathing sulfur (for example) and somehow producing xenon (for example), then we will model the biospheres of those planets and will find out which spectral lines will/may indicate the presence of that form of life. So our task is to carry out very precise spectroscopic analysis of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. We can infer their chemical composition, physical conditions etc. We may find then some “strange” chemicals indicating the presence of other forms of life. This will be fun!
How do you convince yourself/your peers/the world that one unusual peak on your spectroscopy is not through error?
This is more a technical question. Spectra have some noise produced by a detector and other sources. This noise can be modeled and calculated. We always know the level of the noise. Anything considerable above that level is a real signal.
How do sound waves (which need a medium) travel through space?
They don’t. But we can still study them in the atmospheres of stars. Imagine observing a volcano on the Earth from Mars. If you have a spectrograph, you can study the motion of the Earth’s upper atmosphere triggered by the explosion. Your spectrograph will give you the velocities of gas particles in the atmosphere. If you have a good knowledge of gas-dynamics, physics, etc., you can calculate the sound produced by this volcano at a given distance. This is not so difficult. But the point is this: You are far away observing a motion of gas particles (velocities), their emission (they radiate too) and therefore the state of the matter in the atmospheres. You use those observations to compute the amplitude and frequency of sound waves responsible for those motions. It’s pure classical physics.
Reader Mike Ho asks this question: I’ve read that there is spectroscopic evidence of cellulose elsewhere in the universe; is that accurate? How reliable is spectroscopy for detecting large molecules?
This is true. This was reported in Nature, in 1978. Tholins have been detected as well (I think by Carl Sagan).
There are many unidentified bands in the spectra of stars. Wide bands are produced by some complex molecules in the interstellar space. It’s really hard to identify them for two reasons:
1. observational
2. theoretical
Observational — because the spectra are full of absorption lines of stellar origin, and when you have a smooth, weak and extended absorption (such as a diffuse molecular band or DIB) in the spectrum covering some 30-50 angstroms, it’s almost impossible to see it unless you are able to carefully eliminate the spectral lines produced by a star and fit the stellar continuum (using models). Your DIBs are hidden under the stellar spectra! There are well-known diffuse molecular bands — about 200 have been identified. However, the most complex ones, produced by even more complex molecules, are still unidentified.
There is a theoretical difficulty too. One has to make quantum mechanical calculations (N-body) of very complex molecular structures and compute their spectra (thousands of lines). There are lots of approximations in this “game,” and you have to be very careful because it’s impossible to check them in the lab. (Your lab should be the vacuum between stars!)
My colleagues at the IAC in Canary Islands have detected naphthalene in the interstellar medium, a molecule that, in combination with water, ammonia and ultraviolet radiation, produces many of the amino acids fundamental to the development of life. They have also discovered fullerenes (C320 and C540). This is a terrific field of research, and I believe the interstellar medium hides a lot from your eyes. It’s full of mysteries and enigmas — free-floating planets, isolated stellar mass black holes, and all sorts of stuff.
You suggest that a planet harboring life might decide to change its chemical signature to send a message to other planets. Do you think Earth should be signaling the universe? If so, what should we do to let other planets know we exist?
Yes, technologically advanced civilizations can handle this. I don’t think we can do that (and we’d better not try — the Sun is still clean). I have not done this estimate by myself: how much of this or that chemical element we need to put in the atmosphere of the Sun so that an alien civilization will fix this as a “signal” of an intelligent (or not intelligent!) life in the solar system. Obviously, we need to use an element which is absent in the solar atmosphere (there are quite a few). But then, I can imagine that we will need few thousand tons. Let me do this calculation for an “interesting” element …
02 October 2009
The power of time off: Stefan Sagmeister on TED.com
Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.(Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK.Duration: 017:40)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3b
Watch Stefan Sagmeister’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 500+ TEDTalks.
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