TEDBlog April, 2011 Archive
09 April 2011
Saturday: Join a live Q&A with Morgan Spurlock on TED Conversations
At noon Eastern / 9am Pacific on Saturday, jump into our question-and-answer session with filmmaker Morgan Spurlock — maker of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. You’re invited to use TED Conversations to ask questions for Morgan to answer. (We just had fun doing one of these Q&As with Hans Rosling.) It’s a chance to ask a longer, more considered questions than in a typical livechat, and to dive into the issues that Morgan explores in his new movie — about how branding and advertising are changing world culture.
At noon Saturday, come to the front page of TED Conversations and join in! And if you want to know more about “the greatest movie ever sold,” here’s the man himself:
08 April 2011
Basetrack revisited: A TED Fellow tells war stories from inside
Groundbreaking media experiment Basetrack sought to rejig how America’s wars are reported. TED Fellow Teru Kuwayama harnessed the communication tools of our time to present embedded reportage in a whole new way. Following the deployment of 1/8 – 1st Battalion, Eighth Marines – to southern Afghanistan, Basetrack’s embedded media team collaborated with soldiers to tell the stories of their daily lives, funnelling photos and updates onto an interactive online map. Enhanced with a live newsfeed, Twitter, and Facebook, dispatches were bidirectional, information-rich, and intimate, connecting Marines and Corpsmen to their families and the public. Basetrack provided an unprecedented platform for those the media typically overlook in war – combatants and their families.
Basetrack promised a real shift in the way soldiers’ experiences are conveyed to the world, but in early February, the Marine Corps pulled the plug on this experiment in layered communication. Though perplexed, Basetrack’s participants and supporters believe it’s only a matter of time before the platform’s value is recognized and accepted.
Undeterred, Teru and his team now plan to insert themselves within one of the more consequential constituencies in their area of operations – the Afghan civilian population. We await their forthcoming tour of duty with anticipation.
Image: Teru Kuwayama in Afghanistan, October 2010. Photo by Tivadar Domaniczky, Basetrack
08 April 2011
Jackson Browne: “If I Could Be Anywhere” — a song for Mission Blue
A year ago this week, Mission Blue Voyage set sail. This TED Prize-inspired trip brought together scientists, activists and funders around one of the biggest issues we face: how to stop the degradation of the ocean. Read Chris Anderson’s report on what was accomplished onboard >>
Sylvia Earle, when making her TED Prize wish, asked us to use all means at our disposal to spread the word. Jackson Browne, onboard the National Geographic Endeavor, began writing this song. And he finished in time for TEDxGreatPacificGarnage Patch, a November conference that focused on plastic pollution in the oceans and on land (watch Van Jones’ talk from TEDxGPGP).
On the anniversary of Mission Blue Voyage, we’re thrilled to present this beautiful song from Jackson Browne.
At TEDxGPGP, Jackson Browne plays “If I Could Be Anywhere,” a song he started writing last April aboard Mission Blue Voyage, the Sylvia Earle-inspired trip to brainstorm ways to save the endangered ocean. “If I could be anywhere,” he sings, “anywhere right now, I would be here.” (Recorded at TEDxGPGP, November 2010, in Sante Monica, CA. Duration: 4:09)
08 April 2011
Looking past limits: Caroline Casey on TED.com
Activist Caroline Casey tells the story of her extraordinary life, starting with a revelation (no spoilers). In a talk that challenges perceptions, Casey asks us all to move beyond the limits we may think we have. (Recorded at TEDWomen, December 2010, in Washington, DC. Duration: 15:34)
Watch Caroline Casey’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 900+ TEDTalks.
08 April 2011
Fellows Friday with Sarah Jane Pell
Interactive Fellows Friday Feature!
Join the conversation by answering the TED Fellows weekly question on Facebook. This week, Sarah Jane asks:
“How could we use diving and performing arts to transform science education? Or art & environment?”
Click here to respond!
Are you really going to live in an underwater community?
Yes, the Atlantica Expedition is a very exciting project that will commence operation in July of 2012. It’s a 90-day, undersea habitat mission. The mission commander is Dennis Chamberland. He’s an Aquanaut and a seasoned explorer with a background as a NASA bioengineer. It’s his dream that we are building, and this is a first step towards permanent undersea colonization.
The mission will work continuously and comprehensively towards diagnosing ocean health. The Atlantica Expedition will be a large-scale laboratory. We are pleased that we have this opportunity to create a different kind of thinking. We would like to teach a zero-waste policy, for instance. And we’re developing education programs to link with the expedition itself. We’re looking at ways we can take the aquatic-stewardship thinking to a school environment and connect with communities around the world, particularly at primary school community levels. Included is another Australian, Lloyd Godson, and we are looking at creating a “Down Under” program, connecting with schools live via the Internet while we’re underwater.
I will be participating as an in-water Aquanaut, being able to dive and live underwater with the core Aquanauts. Of course, as with my Aquabatics Research Team Initiative, I’m interested in exploring human performance potentials. I’m particularly interested in how we can look at adapting the body physiology. How can we increase oxygenation to the body? How can we best perform for long duration without sunlight? How can we work more effectively within a confined space? And how can we keep good humored, express ourselves, and have fun and play through the marriage of aquatic arts and sciences?
This will be a big change from the environment you were diving in when you came to TED2010.
Yes, this is unlike the diving I was doing on the west coast of Tasmania. Tasmania is a really unique environment. Macquarie Harbor for instance is black — it is completely black water. It is stained by the tannin, which comes from the local tea tree and buttongrass. It boarders a pristine World Heritage wilderness area. So it’s not dirty at all, you can drink it. But it’s like a very black tea, literally stained. I was exploring the creative potentials of zero-visibility diving on the human body whilst working for local industry as a contract diver.
The water in the Florida lagoon where the Atlantica Expedition will commence is what you traditionally think of when you think of the ocean — it’s blue and full of life. It’s near the Gulf Stream so it has a vast area of changing marine life that flows through it. So it’s particularly important that we work there, so that we can provide essential monitoring for that flow.
At TED, while talking about my work, one of the many extraordinary people I met, Ronnie Rubin, said, “Sarah, it’s very important that you come up to the light.” She said, “Literally, you’re working in darkness. You’re working underwater in zero visibility. And metaphorically and physically, it’s really important that you start to surface and come to the light.” It was an unusual perspective and an extraordinary challenge that was given to me.
I returned to regional Tasmania after having attended TED, and those words stuck with me.
Almost four months later, I had the opportunity to attend the Singularity University at NASA-Ames. I joined 80 extraordinary professionals from all over the world to look at all kinds of accelerating technologies. We had a really vast and intense program where we studied everything from biotechnology, bioinformatics, robotics, artifical intelligence, nanotechnology, entrepreneurship, space and physical sciences, computing, neuroscience, medicine, etc.
We explored how we, as a group, could start to make the connections to learn how these technologies could begin to solve some of the world’s “grand challenges.” We looked at the challenges of five areas: space, water, upcycling (a form of recycling), energy, and food.
I came back to Australia with not only a whole different set of insights and connections, but also a renewed sense of priority.
Since returning back to Australia, my challenge has been to look at how I could use accelerating technologies in my own field, in both the art sector and also the underwater technology sector. Specifically, underwater habitation as a means of addressing some of the world’s grandest challenges, and looking at the way we can make a significant contribution to the future.
Another Singularity University participant, Connor Dickie, and I set up an incubator platform for futurist thinking called BEST. It stands for Biological Enhancement Space Technologies. With the BEST initiative we are looking at ways in which we could work to contribute different kinds of innovative design thinking and solutions that address global challenges. We are developing creative platforms for the next generation of tools that might be required for a sustainable future in extreme environments.
We were most interested in the field of space, polar, and ocean territories. While polar and ocean territories are of course more accessible to us, we understand that the work we do in those areas is an analog to a space environment. As we’re thinking about the future, and the possibilities for future, we recognize that the responsibilities that we have for developing not only the exploration and the technology, but also the kind of thinking and philosophy that might be required to develop a sustainable, responsible future.
In regards to the Atlantica Expeditions, the BEST team will be looking at art and science opportunities to work with technologies and approaches that help us to become self-sufficient underwater. This includes looking at 3-D printing technologies that we might be able to use, using underwater local resources. We want to be able to create and build things without coming to the surface, and without introducing, for instance, heavy plastics and things into the environment.
Has the BEST initiative spawned any major projects?
Perhaps the most exciting one, developed in collaboration with TED Senior Fellow Saeed Taji Farouky, is a rather bold mission to join The Arctic Circle Expeditionary Residency program. We’ve been accepted, so this September, we will board an ice-class sailing vessel to the Arctic Circle. There are only three ice-class sailing vessels in the world. It’s lovely to think how we will have the romance of a beautiful sailing ship in this extreme, pristine territory.
We are going to try to imagine what we would take with us as new frontier explorers. In this day and age when we have access to so much technology and information and tend to live vicariously through our media, how do we experience the riches of the Arctic environment? And how could we best capture those experiences to share with people?
The purpose of the expedition is for artists and scientists to collaborate. We have proposed that we will use the experience as a testing ground, and imagine ourselves as new explorers of an analog to say, a polar Mars. So we have been brainstorming and preparing tools for our journey as contemporary nomads, and methedologies for recording the impacts of the experience towards a new documentary, a new performance and an exhibition of our experience.
As in the Atlantica Expedition, we are developing a 3D ice printer to build tools using the locally sourced materials. This is the kind of thinking that would be required if we were ever going to live in another climate. And it links very much to the ingenuity of the Inuits and the kinds of tools and solutions that they’re able to come up with in those kinds of environments, working with what they have.
We’re also looking at taking remotely controlled vessels that we’ll be able to put under water to take photos and collect small microbial samples. We’re looking at again using the local resources to perhaps build that out of pykrete. Pykrete is a material developed during World War II. It is made from compressing ice and fibrous pulp. Together, they become stronger than concrete.
We’re very excited about this expedition and how we can learn to deal with other realities of the expedition: the confined space of the crew, the experiences that we share together, the shock that our bodies have in the extreme conditions … we want to be able to prove that we can work to create and sustain life in the extreme environment. But we do not necessarily go there as explorers to conquer. We want to stroll around the edges of human experience. We want to be able to capture what it might mean to be a true explorer, without leaving a devastating impact, and without disrupting the environment too much. If we are disrupting it, we at least want to be measuring that disruption and understanding that disruption as we go.
Are you working on any other projects?
And I’m currently working to support a Melbourne-based kindergarten community on a project called “EcoCubby.” Children approximately the age of three are working with architects and their school communities to design and create an environmentally friendly cubby house. This will help these children and their communities embrace concepts of sustainability, and get really early age children starting to thinking about what they can create and what they can contribute.
I’m also working on a project called Liquid Uni. I’m interested in designing underwater cinematic tools for immersive education. I’m developing a platform looking at how we can integrate 3D virtual technology into a training environment underwater.
I originally wondered, “How can I have an underwater planetarium? How can I have a big dome space underwater, where people can be swimming around, looking at the stars? Wouldn’t that be beautiful?” From there, we could start to open up what full-bodied education might be. How we could learn in a completely new way, so that it’s not just about learning from a screen. It’s about learning from a truly immersive space, and understanding the teaching through the entire bodily interaction. And so the project began to form ….
It must be difficult to find the appropriate check-mark box when filling in “occupation” on standard forms! What does your family think of your work?
Well, I think they’ve come to expect the extraordinary. And they understand that I don’t do ordinary very well. Nothing surprises them anymore. My father and my grandfather were both divers. So they understand that drive and that passion. My mother painted, my aunt and cousins are professional musicians, and my great grandmother both painted and performed, so they understand the artistic drive. Combined, I think they get it. I know they worry about the lack of stability it brings. In some ways, they wish that I had a normal nine-to-five job. But that’s what families do — they care for you.
But otherwise, they get excited. And often a little bit nervous for me. [Laughs].
There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation blog.
I think I’d have to say make sure that you are organized and focused enough to make sure that it’s sustaining. That you’re able to create projects and follow your passion in a way that has a life of its own, that has longevity as well. And that you are able to maintain a certain momentum, so that you can keep your energy high through the good times and the tough times. And you’re able to see it through.
So set yourself up with the tools — whether it be emotional or administrative — really spend time cultivating your little toolkit to empower yourself to be able to maintain that energy and that vigor and that rigor that comes with following through on a dream.
I say this because I have to remember it, too. I find myself in situations for months and months on end where I don’t have the resources to be able to do what I’d like to do. And I have to pare everything back and work it step by step by step and just do the best I can with what I have. And at the same time, make sure I have enough energy at all times to keep sight of the big picture and not be daunted.
I don’t necessarily have a pathway that’s laid out for me. I make it up as I go along. I’m treading new territories and making things happen. And it is genuinely important that I don’t just propose things but that I follow through and do them. If I could do anything differently it would be probably making sure that I had an income while I did that. Or that I could support myself better through that.
The ways that I’m successful in that is I try to create a bit of a balance. I make sure that I’m in the environment everyday, to clear my head, to change my thinking, to connect again. I try to make time for the physical, spiritual, intellectual and other aspects of my personality.
For example, I love, love dancing. I find time for it. I love everything from tango to salsa to contemporary dance … you put the music on and I will dance. In fact, I think we should be dancing underwater to remind us how precious the ocean is, and how fragile our life support is. Aquabatics celebrates and champions this awareness.
08 April 2011
Watch “Sleep,” Eric Whitacre’s new work with 2,000 voices
Watch the full-length version of “Sleep,” Eric Whitacre’s new work, sung by a YouTube-powered choir of more than 2,000 singers from around the world. The nine-minute work was premiered last night at the Paley Center in New York — and on YouTube.
And watch Eric Whitacre’s TEDTalk, where he talks about his creative process and the artistic challenges of conducting a choir as big as the Internet …
07 April 2011
Sunday: Watch TEDxEarthquake9.0 live
An extraordinary group-curated TEDx event is coming together around the tragic events in Japan in the past month: TEDxEarthquake9.0. From the site:
A comprehensive journey from Japan’s resilience and history of overcoming past disaster to the challenges the nation faces today — passing by the actual response and relief efforts in the field. Join us and be part of the future of Japan and the world’s response. Through five inspiring hours of short talks, speakers from all over Japan will share their experiences overcoming disaster, the extension of the disaster, their successful disruptive initiatives for disaster relief and response and the recovery, rebuilding and shaping the future of Japan.
You can watch TEDxEarthquake9.0 via livestream, in both Japanese and English, on Sunday, April 10, 1-6pm Japan Standard Time (GMT +9 hours) at http://www.tedxearthquake90.com/live.
07 April 2011
The lyricism of science: Q&A with Janna Levin
Onstage at TED2011, physicist Janna Levin talked about how gravitational wave detectors are about to produce revolution in astronomy and cosmology: instead of simply seeing the universe, we’ll now be able to hear it as well, the ripples of spacetime itself. In addition to being a groundbreaking cosmologist, she’s a novelist, memoirist and artist.
We caught up with her in California to talk about supernova sounds, how the experimenters try to trick each other, and the connections between art and science.
Do you have a favorite sound you want to hear?
The black hole/black hole pairs, because they can’t be seen. They really are completely dark. It’s the only way we’d catch them. You can see other compact binaries, like white dwarf/white dwarf binaries, or neutron star/neutron star binaries, and that would be completely interesting, but we can at least see those. For those, the possibility of seeing them with light is going to be a great advantage, but it would be amazing to see something you absolutely could not see any other way.
Also supernova explosions that aren’t perfectly spherically symmetric will lead to a really nice, cool, whale-song-sounding thing.
Listen here: (courtesy of Cornish, Ott, and Burrows)
I wish I could have played more sounds in the talk. It would be great to give a better sense that this is a totally different perspective on the cosmos, that it will be totally different than any other kind of history that we have, it’s not just another telescope which is picking up just another band of light — which isn’t to imply that telescopes are trivial things, but I mean this is really kind of a paradigm shift. If this becomes extremely effective, and we start getting tons of detections, it will become commonplace, just like Hubble photos are commonplace, that we’ll have recordings of a cosmic ocean full of unexpected nuances.
What are some things we might learn from studying these signals, beyond the sheer excitement of hearing them?
There’s things that we already know we should be able to glean, and other things we can’t foresee. Obviously, it’s the latter category that’s much more exciting. But who knows, maybe there’s nothing else out there, maybe we’ll be disappointed.
In terms of things that we have a pretty good shot at detecting, we’ll be able to do straightforward astronomy, the same way everyone does astronomy with radio telescopes to the Hubble Space Telescope. The more information we gather, the more we’ll know about black hole formation, their populations, and how often they form and when they form and all that kind of stuff. So, we’ll be able to tell if black holes are rapidly spinning, if they’re slowing down, if there are magnetic fields threaded through them; if some of the very energetic events we see in the universe are caused by black holes swallowing and rupturing neutron stars. There’s a lot of straightforward astronomy that can be done once we are able to really mine the data. There’s also things like cosmology. We might be able to make distance estimates, and add to ways that we try to measure dark energy by measuring the expansion of the Universe.
With the Big Bang, it could be really interesting, because it’s possible that the earliest ringing of spacetime was just kind of washed away. The Universe expanded so quickly that a lot of that stuff got wiped out early in the Universe’s history that no remnant would be detectable today. So, we might look for things that happened later. There’s all kinds of peculiar details that could be from the early universe if we were lucky enough to be in a situation where they hadn’t been wiped out. You can imagine a universe with extra spatial dimensions, or that went through transitions from one high energy state to another high energy state, all of these things could leave some kind of record, some kind of ringing behind.
One of the exiting things about fundamental research is that you really don’t even know what the chance is of seeing some of these objects.
Well, these experiments, for example LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory), would not have been build if the chances were not very good that we’d see compact binary events. In fact, if we don’t, there’s something wrong with what we understand about the universe. So, there’s always a safe bet, otherwise they don’t get built.
LIGO’s proposed space-borne counterpart, LISA, for sure will see things like white dwarf/white dwarf binaries. In fact, LISA will have a problem with having so many events that it might be really noisy out there.
There’s always a safe bet, and something you might get really lucky on. So, to not detect them would mean there’s something seriously wrong, either with how we understand the universe or with the detectors.
I was about to say that’s a very exciting thing itself, but half of that is very exciting.
Right! You know, the detectors are doing amazingly well. Recently there was something called a blind injection. The experimentalists made a detection; they heard something, they analyzed it, they came to a conclusion of what it was. But, they also knew that some of the higher-ups — a couple of the people high up in the 800-person collaboration — can trick them with what’s called a blind injection, a false signal. They want to know how well the algorithms will do with detecting it, and not tell them whether it’s a real detection or not.
Last week, it was revealed that what they were calling “big dog,” because it was in Canis Major, was not a real detection, but a blind injection.
So, the experiments are doing incredibly well at picking up what they’re expecting to pick up. They haven’t yet detected gravitational waves, but they didn’t expect to. It would have been just incredibly lucky, something going off just so perfectly that we could see it now. What we’re really hoping is that the advanced detectors in about four years will be making regular detections.
Now, when you talk about the sounds of the universe, what exactly is ringing, and what is making the sound?
So, if you’re watching a sci-fi film, and the cosmonaut gets expelled out of the space station screaming, you don’t hear his screams. There are not sound waves in empty space; this is not compression of air.
What it is, is the compression of spacetime itself; spacetime squeezing and stretching, lengths and distances changing because the space is changing.
This is a lot like the idea of banging on a drum in vacuum. The air doesn’t get compressed, but the drum is ringing out a song. So what you could do is record the waveform on a drum, and then plug that result into a stereo system, and ask that stereo to play that waveform. And it will play out a song — the song you couldn’t hear in the absence of the air.
And so, in that sense, gravity waves are very closely tied to notions of sound. They’re not compressions of air, they’re not human anatomical notions of sound, strictly, but they’re much more like sound than like pictures.
You seem to have an affinity for tragic figures in science history; you wrote a novel about Alan Turing and Kurt Goedel, and in your talk, you mentioned Karl Schwartzchild, who died as a result of fighting in World War I.
Yeah, he died within a year of writing that paper.
What draws you to these almost Greek-mythic figures?
Oh, that’s probably exactly it! Greek tragedy. It’s part of our storytelling history, that we’re drawn to the tragic hero. The person whose very qualities that make them great is also their downfall. There’s something that resonates with human beings about that.
What’s fascinating to me is how rarely scientists and science-oriented people talk about this. There is almost a fetishization …
Yeah, there is an aggrandizement, and a kind of a simplistic hero-worship. But I think the real stories are more interesting. More complex, and more evocative of our sympathy, our curiosity, and more ambiguous. I mean, ambiguity is very interesting in writing; it’s not very interesting in science.
There is a certain sense in which certain scientists — I guess the ones I wrote about — it’s almost as if they laid their lives down. We live with the repercussions of their discoveries without really ever paying any service to their accomplishments. I mean, somebody like Goedel, who is quite obscure in mainstream thinking, and yet is somehow fundamental to the way the whole world operates now, in some subtle way is behind computer science and developments in artificial intelligence, yet he kind of goes unknown. I think it’s kind of interesting to review what that intellectual history was that led us to where we are now.
You were scientist-in-residence at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art for a while.
Yeah, that was fun.
Do you find working in the arts influences the kind of science you do?
I would say the connection between art and science is very tenuous for me. It’s just that I’m interested in both. I don’t think that my interest in art affects the kind of science that I do. There is something that drives the questions that we ask that has to do with our individual disposition. There are many scientists in the world who work on incredibly different topics, and somehow our own personality quirks have driven us to these particular topics. So, there’s something that drives me about certain questions — about the origin of the universe, about the large structures of black holes — something about those questions is personal, oddly. Questions I’m drawn to I’d like to believe has some very big-picture implication, ultimately. Even if, in my scientific research, it looks extremely detailed and mathematical and like a small piece of the puzzle, one hopes that it really is pointed toward some bigger connection to what nature is and the miracle that we can understand nature at all.
In art, my tastes are completely different. I like things that are whimsical and funny, not necessarily tragic or melodramatic at all.
I do tend to find some aspects of the two personalities kind of cohesive — though some completely disparate, right? — but some completely the same: being a little outside of social norms, maybe, a little off the mainstream, not quite getting what some people think is so important about pop culture. That kind of stuff tends to be really comfortable between artists and scientists. They can look each other in the eye and have a little moment of recognition.
You referenced Battlestar Galactica in your talk; are you a science fiction fan?
I’m not. I’m a huge fan of fiction, and I love it when there’s science in the books, but not exactly science fiction.
As for the nexus of science and art in my own work, that’s where they meet, is in writing. I think there’s a certain lyricism in the telling of a scientific story. I don’t know if it came across in the talk, but there’s a certain poetic feeling about the whole experience. An event happens a billion light-years away and we’re still evolving, and it’s on its way to us, and then we’re doing cave painting and it’s right outside our door and we’re still not ready, and then there’s the natural revolution and we’re scrambling. There’s something poetic about that story.
07 April 2011
The invention that unlocked a locked-in artist: Mick Ebeling on TED.com
The nerve disease ALS left graffiti artist TEMPT paralyzed from head to toe, forced to communicate blink by blink. In a remarkable talk at TEDActive, entrepreneur Mick Ebeling shares how he and a team of collaborators built an open-source invention that gave the artist — and gives others in his circumstance — the means to make art again. (Recorded at TEDActive 2011, March 2011, in Palm Springs, CA. Duration: 7:50)
Watch Mick Ebeling’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 900+ TEDTalks.
06 April 2011
The greatest TED Talk ever sold: Morgan Spurlock on TED.com
Much of the TV, video, film and sport we watch is sponsored by a brand, a product, a corporation. But … why? With humor and persistence, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock dives into the hidden but influential world of brand marketing, on his quest to make a completely sponsored film about sponsorship. And yes, the onstage naming rights for talk were sponsored too. By whom and for how much? He’ll tell you. (Recorded at TED2011, March 2011, in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 19:28)
Watch Morgan Spurlock’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 900+ TEDTalks.
THIS SATURDAY: Join a Q&A with Morgan Spurlock! Meet us online at 9am Pacific on TED Conversations >>
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