TEDBlog May, 2011 Archive
31 May 2011
Audio problem with the TED app for iPad? Here’s what the problem is …
We’ve received a lot of reports today from iPad users saying they have no audio when watching talks from the TED iPad app. In most cases, not only are talks silent, but there’s no volume slider showing in the full-screen controls.
If you’re seeing this, it’s very likely that your iPad is muted.
Depending on how you’ve configured your iPad, there are different ways to turn mute on and off. The first is the hardware switch on the right side of your iPad, directly above the volume buttons. If the switch is down, you should see an orange dot above the switch, which could mean the device is muted. You can confirm this by flipping the switch back up. If it’s configured to control sound, you’ll see the speaker symbol appear on your screen.
The hardware switch might be configured to control the orientation lock, however. In this case, you control mute in the multitasking tray. You can show the multitasking tray by double-clicking the home button on your iPad. Swipe to the right until you see the volume controls. If you see a speaker icon with a line through it, your iPad is muted. As you can see in the screenshots below, when the device is muted, the volume control disappears from view. By turning mute off, you’ll restore audio on your iPad, and the volume control should reappear.
31 May 2011
A day at the Green School in Bali
The Green School is hiring science and physics teachers. To learn more, visit the Green School website. And watch John Hardy’s TEDTalk from TEDGlobal last summer.
In the shade of the open-air bamboo warung (the Balinese equivalent of a small cafe), I listened to the buzz of the cicadas rather than the buzz of fluorescent bulbs, and sipped on a frozen strawberry lemonade drink made with fresh fruit and raw cane sugar grown just across the path. I watched as children rushed in to order a morning treat, which came atop a small basket of banana leaves (instead of paper napkins), swallowing down fresh fruit juice out of glass cups (instead of plastic). The morning went by slowly and gracefully; parents sat in the warung for hours, talking with each other and with me, eager and anxious to find human connections anywhere and everywhere.
The Green School, the soul-child of John and Cynthia Hardy, sits on 23 acres of lush, tropical landscape. The bamboo classrooms (which house pre-K through 11th grade) seem to nearly sprout right out of the ground. The Heart of School is the most stunning; currently the largest bamboo structure in the world, it comprises two swirling vortexes that collide to create a third, double vortex in the middle. The Heart of School houses the library, the administrative offices, and a few classrooms. As we take our tour, we walk by skilled Balinese men sitting cross-legged on the floor building lockers out of, you guessed it: bamboo. In fact everything is made of bamboo, from the shoe cubbies to the dry-erase boards to the beautiful beams engraved with names of the school’s supporters.
Delicious smells waft throughout the open-air building as the cooks throw delectable pieces of local meat onto the BBQ and prepare salads and potatoes from produce grown right there on the school’s land. Surrounding the Heart of School are gardens bursting with ripe, red tomatoes, shaggy heads of lettuce, fruits of all shapes and colors. In fact, every classroom is responsible for its own garden.
“The idea is that the gardens roll right up to the edge of everything,” explains John. “The Earth is here for one reason: that’s to produce food for people and for animals. If kids figure out that the Earth is for food, maybe then they’ll think twice about bulldozing it.” As we walk, John points out each tree as we walk by: banana, jackfruit, cacao, clove, tapioca, papaya. Suddenly we are surrounded by a soft cloud of dragonflies. “Proof that there aren’t any pesticides,” remarks Cynthia with a smile, for they’re eating the bugs that would otherwise be wiped out by farming chemicals.
But it’s not just food that excites John and Cynthia about this place. It’s the bamboo. “Bamboo is really magical,” John says lovingly. He references a Vietnamese proverb: When the bamboo is old, bamboo sprouts appear. And indeed, bamboo can grow forever.
We stop and speak to a woman who is splitting bamboo seedlings, and John and Cynthia explain their program to spread the growth of bamboo. This woman processes more than 400 seedlings a day, which can then be split again in a few months, reaping hundreds and thousands of tiny future shoots of bamboo. They take these seedlings to surrounding villages and give them to the farmers to plant, which allows the plant to suck up more CO2 and deliver more oxygen. “After 5 years when the bamboo is fully grown,” Cynthia points to a piece of bamboo wider than my thigh, “we’ll go back and buy the bamboo from them.”
Bamboo is also being used to help teach the students about their own effect on the environment. John and Cynthia seek to create a carbon-positive community. The students will look at their travel, the amount of gas they burn, and the amount of electricity they use to calculate their own carbon footprint. They can then understand how much bamboo they will need to plant to not just offset their carbon footprint, but to send their effect into the positive.
The real magic of the Green School, though, happens inside (and outside of) the classrooms. It is obvious to me, as Carina Hardy, their middle daughter, trots past us donning an enormous Monty Python costume, chanting silly words which explode into giggles, that these children are excited to be at school: they are alive, empowered and challenged by the idea that they can influence the world around them in a very profound way.
The school’s mission statement reads “Empowering global citizens and green innovators who are inspired to take responsibility for the sustainability of the world.” The administration is constantly finding new ways to incorporate new ways of thinking and seeing into the students’ curriculum. Not far on the horizon, Cynthia hopes to be able to incorporate more physical interaction with the land: “Kids will take responsibility over pieces of land,” Cynthia says. “They will work the land, cultivate seedlings, plant the seedlings, weed the rice fields. When the rice is fully grown, they will cut it, thresh it, take it to the mill. They will see brown rice and compare it to white rice. They will look at the weight, the cost, the world price versus the subsidized price, how many hours it took to make, how nutritious it is.” Students also learn how to make soap from coconuts, chairs and charcoal from other natural resources. This is the vision: a complete, sustainable and experiential learning experience that takes advantage of what’s been provided here on Earth, and using that to both create and conserve.
John and Cynthia’s daughters have embraced the greater responsibility and entrepreneurial spirit that comes with being a student at The Green School. Their youngest daughter, Chiara, recognized a need for new computers at the school and kickstarted an “Ice Cream for iPads” program in which she sells cups of gelato during breaks and lunchtime for 20,000 rupiah (a little less than $2.50). So far, Chiara’s initiative has put 4 iPads in the library! 15-year-old Carina Hardy takes on leadership positions of all kinds as well; as a sophomore she is now co-directing the school’s spring play, The Wizard of Oz. John’s eldest daughter, Elora, was never a student at the Green School, but she shares her father’s passion for change and runs Ibuku, a design firm responsible for the sustainable design and construction of both the Green School and their newest pursuit, Green Village, a community of staggering open-air homes made entirely from bamboo.
As we finish our tour, we walk by the initial model for the Heart of School. “This is how it started,” says Cynthia. “It started as a sketch, and then it became little sticks glued together, and then it became this.” She gestures around her. “It is the product of our collective imagination.” Indeed, as my eyes wandered from the tiny model building to the giant swirling weave of bamboo above my head, I could feel the reality of the place. There’s no theory or proposal here: this is the real deal. Things are happening quickly, thoughtfully and profoundly.
John expresses his gratitude for TED as we leave. “When they published my talk, everything at this school took off like a rocket ship.” John referenced a student body of 120 in his TEDTalk last summer; since then that number has doubled, as has the number of countries represented by the students. Their new challenge: finding teachers who are committed to teaching the most basic of concepts in the most exciting of ways.
Photos by Benny Haddad and Rachel Tobias.
31 May 2011
This is your telescope: A Q&A with TED audition speaker Jane Rigby
The honor of kicking off the evening of TED Full Spectrum auditions fell to Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and deputy project scientist for operations for the James Webb Space Telescope (the planned successor to the Hubble Space Telescope). Together with fellow NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn, she put together a slide-blizzard — a rapid-fire series of images — to illustrate the extraordinary beauty and scientific power produced by space telescopes.
We caught up with her after the talks to ask about the audition experience.
How did the night feel for you?
It was really fun. I thought all the talks were interesting. Some of them I need to go think about. I think they were really profound, so I had a blast.
How did you put your audition video together?
I saw the call, and thought that would be something different. We’ve been thinking about how to reach different audiences, how to break out of what we’re doing and experiment with social media and different ways of connecting with people.
We through it together on a Friday, before the deadline, in a couple hours. Some of the artists here have amazing skills at editing things, and making these beautiful videos, and we did a Keynote presentation, that’s our technical skill.
We thought it was a long shot, but we also thought it was a compelling story. Humans made space telescopes and we wanted to talk about that.
Have you done a lot of outreach and public speaking about the James Webb Space Telescope before?
I just joined Goddard in September, but I do a lot of public speaking. I think there’s a duty for a scientist who takes public money — astronomical research is funded by tax dollars — there’s a duty to talk about what we’re doing, what we’re discovering, what we’re learning, and to talk about that in a really personal way. That’s a very serious part of what we do. It’s not an afterthought, it’s core to what we do. If we don’t explain what we’re doing, and if the public doesn’t think it’s important, then we’ll stop doing it.
So, I do a lot of public talks, but this was a little unusual. I was not used to the loud rap music before hand — it was awesome.
In your talk, you said anybody can send in a proposal to use the Hubble Space Telescope?
Last year there were proposals from 40 countries, and 43 states, so almost the whole USA and a lot of the world. There were observations last year of Hanny’s Voorwerp ‑ Voorwerp means ‘object’ in Dutch’. It is a strange object that was discovered by a high school teacher in the Netherlands though a project called Galaxy Zoo. She posted in Dutch, “I have discovered a weird object.” So, Hanny’s Voorwerp is this really weird thing that’s happening in a galaxy, and Hubble observed it last year. So, that’s an observation that was inspired by amateur astronomers. That’s not the only one. There was an eruption in the Orion Nebula that was discovered by amateurs.
So, anyone can apply, and I think that’s very noble. NASA and Europe built Hubble, but we don’t want to restrict it to scientists in those countries. We want everybody who has ideas.
What’s your favorite Hubble image?
My favorite is one we took on March 1st. It’s not public yet. We’re going to do a press release this summer. It’s of a lensed galaxy that I’ve been studying. A galaxy that’s been gravitationally lesned by the mass of a cluster of galaxies. This galaxy appears seventeen times brighter than it normally would be, and stretched across the sky seventeen times more than it would be. It is crazy bright and huge, and we’re using it to study what galaxies were like seven billion years in the past.
30 May 2011
A speech to graduating Harvard architects
Image courtesy Harvard Graduate School of Design
Last week, TED’s curator, Chris Anderson, addressed the 2011 graduating class of architects from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His advice to them?
Don’t pursue your passion directly. At least not yet. Instead … pursue the things that will empower you. Pursue knowledge. Be relentlessly curious. Listen, learn.
Read the text of Chris’ commencement address >>
Read the Harvard Gazette‘s coverage >>
30 May 2011
Meet Full Spectrum speakers Onyx Ashanti and Virgil Wong
Onyx Ashanti. Photo: James Duncan Davidson
Two more in our continuing series of Q&As with Full Spectrum speakers:
The astonishing Onyx Ashanti took the stage with an iPhone strapped to his arm, a brick-size controller in each hand and with a tube extending from his mouth like scuba gear — and proceded to improvise beats and loops and an orchestra of instrumentation (and explain the whole thing simultaneously in a series of PowerPoint slides). Paul Spinrad writes more about Onyx’s gear on the MAKE blog >>
CR: How did you feel about your amazing presentation?
OA: I felt really good. You never know with improvisation how it’ll go because you’re making it up.
CR: Do you think it went better than you expected?
OA: It went better than I expected. Most of the time it goes well. I feel like the ideas I wanted to translate, translated well [to the audience].
CR: What do you hope the audience walked away with?
OA: I hope that they see that with the possibilities we have now being created by technology and information, how we can pull all of this information to realize things within us. We can say, “Hey, I want to make some musical rollerblades.” There’s enough information out there that you can piece together all the information you need to help you realize that.
CR: How did you discover our TED Auditions, Full Spectrum?
OA: A friend of mine in Berlin said, “Hey check this out!” I immediately thought, “Oh yes, yes, this is way too good to pass up.” TED was like my pie in the sky thing for two years down the road. So when I heard about the video auditions, I was in. I literally just got the prototype version of this [his gear for the presentation] working at that point.
Meet medical visualizer Virgil Wong — who told a moving story of making medical data personal, using sensitive portraiture overlaid with the kind of opaque-looking medical data that becomes an intimate part of your story during a major illness. He told the story of his own mother and her recovery from near-blindness …
CR: How did you feel after presenting at TED Full Spectrum?
VW: I really enjoyed it. It was great to have a chance to present it in a more conversational mode. What I love about TED is that it’s still such a great humanistic experience. It’s really about the human side to all the great design, technology, entertainment aspects of the world. I feel that’s what’s so unique and that’s what I was hoping to encapsulate.
CR: What were some of the challenges you encountered while preparing for Full Spectrum?
VW: I think just sort of making it more personal as opposed to something that was showy was really important to me. Part of what I’m constantly struggling with is how do you have a high level of engagement, but at the same time fill it with the clarity of information that doctors want. How do you have this data driven piece that is as accurate and empirical as possible, but human at the same time? It’s not just about making it pretty, but about making it human too.
CR: What’s the goal of your talk?:
VW: I really wanted to make medicine, or at least health, more fun, engaging, and not just something you don’t want to think about because it’s obligatory.
CR: I think you did.
Virgil Wong. Photo: James Duncan Davidson
27 May 2011
Shooting the Full Spectrum speaker portraits
Keeping with the spirit of the Full Spectrum Auditions earlier this week, TED photo editor Mike Femia and myself—photographer Duncan Davidson—decided to add something a bit new and different to our photo coverage of the event. The result is a set of speaker portraits that we made in the break between the afternoon rehearsals and when the doors opened.
The amazing Reggie Watts. Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson
The speakers were brimming with energy and excitement about what was to come. Before making their portrait, Mike and I spent a couple of minutes talking with each of the speakers, and their passion for their subjects was palpable. Every single one of them was ready to give their all onstage and thrilled to have a chance to participate in the auditions.
Performer Joshua Walters. Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson
Space and time were limited for our little experiment. We didn’t have the luxury of bringing in a bunch of lighting gear and backdrops to set up a temporary studio. Instead, we embraced our constraints and found a spot on the balcony of the Hiro Ballroom that provided an interesting background composed of the illuminated paper lanterns hanging over the main ballroom. For my primary light, I used a single remotely triggered Speedlight on a lightweight stand.
Surprisologist Tania Luna. Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson
The lighting may have been simple and battery powered, but the speakers provided everything else needed to make a great portrait with their own high-energy output. You can see it in the photos above of Reggie Watts, Joshua Walters and Tania Luna. All three of these wonderful expressions came out within seconds of the speaker stepping in front of my camera. Full spectrum, indeed.
See the full set of speaker portraits >>
See the rest of the photographs from the Full Spectrum Auditions >>
See some of Duncan’s personal work on his Flickr stream >>
27 May 2011
Fellows Friday with Perry Chen
Interactive Fellows Friday Feature!
Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via Facebook. This week, Perry asks:
If you aren’t satisfied by what you’re doing, why are you still doing it?
Click here to respond!
How did you get the idea for Kickstarter?
I wanted to put on a late night show during the 2002 Jazz Festival of New Orleans, but it was going to cost $20,000. Because of this, the show never happened; but the experience led me to start thinking about funding, which led to the initial idea for Kickstarter.
Kickstarter has been described as the Medici family for modern-day DaVincis.
The kind of system Kickstarter uses has been used for hundreds of years. Unlike Medici-style patronage, where the richest people in town give large amounts of money, Kickstarter’s system relies on the general public for funding projects, and rewards those backers. Beethoven, Mozart, Walt Whitman and other artists like them were known to use this technique for the production of first-run books and concertos. The supporters of these artists would receive rewards for their contributions like having their name in the first edition, or first access to the work. Kickstarter follows a similar formula where the backers get rewards from the creators.
What’s a recent cool project that has come out of Kickstarter?
There’s a really cool pop-up restaurant in downtown Manhattan called, “What Happens When.” For this project, the organizers took over a space and built a restaurant where every month backers are treated to a new dining experience: menu, décor, everything is changed over the course of one year.
And what’s a really cool reward you personally have signed up for?
There’s one project called “Girl Walk.” It’s a film where people are going to dance to the Girl Talk album. It’s going to be one very long take of people dancing in New York City: on the Staten Island Ferry, on subway cars, everywhere.
I chose the reward of going to the wrap party with the cast and crew. I’m definitely looking forward to it.
27 May 2011
“From one to millions”: Chris Anderson in the Sydney Morning Herald
TED’s curator, Chris Anderson, gave a thoughtful interview via Skype to Tim Dick of the Sydney Morning Herald, just posted today, talking about the growing power of web video. From the story:
Anderson thinks web video represents a fundamental shift … the potential of which is unimaginable.
”There is something mysterious, magical and incredibly powerful when a group of humans watch another human teaching or speaking,” he says. ”They see things that the text alone can’t convey. And for the first time in history, that kind of communication can scale from one human to millions.”
Read the story and watch the video here >>
26 May 2011
The death of Zé Cláudio
Ze Claudio with a giant chestnut tree (illegal to cut) on his land that he used to call ˜Her Majesty." Photo: Felipe Milanez.
Yesterday, Juliana Machado Ferreira shared this awful news on the TED Fellows blog:
On feb 8th 2011 I wrote a post at this blog about Zé Cláudio, a Brazil nut collector in Pará, Brazil, who was fighting the illegal timber industry. The people who Zé Cláudio was denouncing and fighting against are big time criminals, the same ones who murdered Sister Dorothy Stang and are still free, destroying our biodiversity and getting richer. And these criminals made it clear that Zé Cláudio wasn’t going to last much longer.
I wrote as a cry for help, I wanted to bring Zé Cláudio’s situation to light. I wanted the world to see his fight because he was fighting for us all.
Well, in the morning of tuesday, May 24th 2011, Zé Cláudio and his wife were murdered in their home in Nova Ipixuna, Pará. And I know we all have their blood on our hands. We let it happen.
Now I urge the world to not let their death be in vain. It is time we stop turning our heads to what is happening in the Brazilian Amazonia because of diplomacy. And it is time we stop thinking we have nothing to do with this situation. We have the duty of knowing where the wood products we buy are coming from. Are you giving money and profits to the same people who murdered Zé Cláudio, his wife, Sister Dorothy and are continuously raping our biodiversity? It is your money that makes all this profitable. It is your responsibility to be aware of what you are buying.
UPDATE: Read this personal story from Barbara Soalheiro, a journalist and curator of TEDxAmazonia >>
UPDATE: Read TEDxAmazonia’s commemoration of Zé Cláudio >>
UPDATE: A third rainforest activist has been killed. Read the Huffington Post’s report. Juliana is compiling reports and interviews now … watch for news.
Watch Zé Cláudio’s talk from TEDxAmazonia:
And read more in Xeni Jardin’s post at Boingboing.net >>
26 May 2011
We all speak ball: Q&A with Full Spectrum speaker Kevin Carroll
Kevin Carroll was one of 17 presenters at Tuesday evening’s Full Spectrum Auditions in New York. He brought along beatboxer Shamik Dynamic (you can just see Shamik’s head at left in the photo above, or see the gorgeous double portrait below) to help him tell the story of how his life had been saved by a ball — and of his work now, going around the world spreading a message of peace and play. Check out his book Rules of the Red Rubber Ball for more, or watch the archived livestream to see the show.
The TED Blog caught up to Kevin after his talk.
CR: How did you feel about your presentation?
KC: I’m always my biggest critic. Shamik and I got a wonderful opportunity to do a lot of rehearsing and practicing around it. To cull down your passion into 3 minutes is challenging. But I really love that challenge. I had to be direct. I had to be very succinct. I had to be very clear about the message around a ball can change the world.
CR: What do you hope the audience took from your presentation with Shamik?
KC: I felt like it was important for people to get that and understand that a ball saved my life. So, I really was selective about the things I wanted to share. I’m hoping that people took pause, changed their perspective a little bit and all the things that I tried to inject in that short pithy message.
CR: What does Shamik bring to the table with your presentation? What was the purpose of the collaboration?
KC: Selfishly, I’m a lover of The Roots. I’m from Philly. So my roots are all about Philly soul, R&B and hip-hop. I’ve always been a person that has tremendous respect for those genres. Music is apart of me and allows me to express myself and enjoy myself even more.
When I met Shamik, we met at a TEDx in Vancouver. We didn’t know each other. Now, fast-forward two years later and we’ve done an event in Philly with 10,000 people. We did my one-man show together and now TED Full Spectrum. TED is about building relationships and creating those moments, so TEDxVancouver created this for us. When I heard this wisp of a man beatboxing and all those sound coming out of him, I thought it was ultra cool. He’s my Roots.
Watch the archived video of Kevin and Shamik’s Full Spectrum talk >>
Speaker Kevin Carroll (left) and beatboxer Shamik Dynamic, at the portrait session for TED Full Spectrum Auditions, May 24, 2011, New York, NY. Credit: James Duncan Davidson
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