TEDBlog June, 2011 Archive
07 June 2011
Announcing the 2011 TEDGlobal Fellows!
Via the TED Fellows blog:
The TED Fellows Team is ecstatic to announce the remarkable individuals that comprise the 2011 TEDGlobal Fellowship class! This group of extraordinary people will join us at TEDGlobal 2011 in Edinburgh, UK. Among them you’ll find: an stellar astronomer; a Jordanian comic creator and social media entrepreneur; an artist who uses weather data to create sculptures and music; and an scientific artist who is developing a unique strain of mushroom that decomposes and remediates toxins in human tissue — just to name a few!
Find a complete list of the TEDGlobal 2011 Fellow here >>
And if you’re interested in becoming a TED Fellow, mark your calendars for July 13, 2011 — TED2012 Fellowship applications will open that morning.
07 June 2011
Building a dinosaur from a chicken: Jack Horner on TED
Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He’s found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he’s taking living descendants of the dinosaur (chickens) and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits — including teeth, tails, and even hands — to make a “Chickenosaurus”. (Recorded at TED2011, March 2011, in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 16:37)
Watch Jack Horner 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 June 2011
Watch TEDGlobal 2011 via webcast
You can watch all 12 sessions of TEDGlobal 2011 on webcast through our Associates webcast membership. The high-def video stream costs $500 for four days of amazement, and you can watch with (and split the cost among) up to 10 people. ($500 / 10 / 4 = $12.50 per day of mind-blowing live TED.) More details here >>
The satellite webcast offers crisp TV-quality viewing on high-bandwidth connections, and three more levels of quality for all connection speeds. Watch our test feed here to see what works for you. You’ll be watching the same live feed we send to TED’s simulcast lounge, a professionally switched feed from our nine-camera shoot.
As part of the Associates webcast, you’ll join a lively moderated chat stream, and you’ll have access to a constantly updated video archive for time-shifted viewing of every session at your convenience. Then, a few weeks after the conference, you’ll get access to a high-def, DVD-quality viewing archive (with chapters) of the entire conference, including content not available on the livestream, such as TED University and the TED Fellows presentations — four more sessions of TED inspiration and wonder.
Watch TEDGlobal 2011 from anywhere in the world — at a time convenient for you and your friends, students, coworkers. Or give it as a gift to your favorite student or teacher.
Learn more about the TEDGlobal Associates webcast >>
05 June 2011
“Organizing a #TEDTalk video night …”
Yesterday, Twitter user @ademoor wrote:
Thinking of organizing a #TEDtalk video night w/ some friends. What’s your absolute favorite must-see talk?
Great question! We RT’ed on @TEDNews. And the replies are worth sharing:
@WackyFiasco: I really appreciated Dan Gilbert’s talk on happiness …
@ozteethtweet: hans rosling, can’t get enough, all the world’s problems explained with some amazing graphics, what’s best, gives you hope!
@Cathy_Blackler: the danger of relying on a single story – so powerful for my continuation HS students
@CTStorytelling: a single story when many are needed was awesome!
@lukaszpira: #AimeeMullins is great… #DavidBlaine : whaow ! both give good lessons of life.
@MichaelEasom: Philip Zimbardo and Richard Dawkins TED talks.
@florisvc: the Neil Gershenfeld talk about fablab
@archsaraf: Sir Ken Robinson on Education and Shashi Tharoor on Soft Power
@adfurlan: A must see #TEDtalk: The car for the blind driver by Dennis Hong
@DerMoosealini: David McCandless “The beauty of data visualization” always cheers me up
@jeffpiazza: Sagmeister’s “Power of Time Off“
@rozilevi: sarah kay, helen fisher, elif shafak
@garb: favorite TED talk? I have to say Jill Bolte Taylor‘s stroke of insight talk. Also Hans Rosling at TEDWomen.
@ZeeshanSuhail: anything by hans rosling, the one with the woman suffering paralysis attack and lived to recover, and the one by reddit founder
@ChristopherM00: my favorite #TED talk is @CameronHerold‘s lets raise kids to be entrepreneurs
@joeknape: Roger Ebert: Remaking my voice
@3treescoffee: The first Ken Robinson
@jclynnlynn: @DVHeld @3treescoffee @ademoor Sir Ken Robinson +1
@DVHeld: @jclynnlynn @ademoor Yeah, the 3 listed in his TED profile are awesome and inspiring
Is this blog post missing your favorite? Reply to @ademoor, or comment below …
04 June 2011
Everyone speaking at TEDGlobal 2011 who tweets
The speaker lineup for TEDGlobal 2011 includes perhaps our highest-ever percentage of Twitter legends — use our curated list to find and follow!
03 June 2011
TEDx speaker Zé Cláudio killed. What actions can we take now?
On the morning of Tuesday, May 24, 2011, Zé Cláudio and his wife Maria were murdered in their home in Nova Ipixuna, Pará. Cláudio spoke at TEDxAmazonia about the forest where he lived, harvesting nuts from the ancient trees and protecting his land from illegal loggers. In his talk, he predicted that he would be killed by the forces trying to take his land. Sadly, he was proved right. Sadder still, in the two weeks following these murders, three more have taken place, reports TED Fellow Juliana Machado Ferreira. The fight has turned lethal.
The TED Blog asked Juliana: What can we do? She sent these suggestions
1. Make sure the wood/wood products you buy are legal.
At the end of his TED talk, Zé Cláudio made one appeal: that we stop buying illegal timber, wood and wood products which may have come from illegal logging activities. This is what supports the illegal loggers and make their scheme profitable. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to have control over such a huge industry and the sole mechanism we have is buying only certified wood. Certification is still far from ideal but buying only certified wood most definitely increases the difficulty for the illegal products to reach the market. And for Ze’s murderers to profit from it.
2.Give voice to “the other Ze Claudios”
In the last eleven years, 42 people were murdered in conflicts in rural areas of Para. The deaths are mainly driven by conflicts between extractivist settlers and illegal loggers and charcoal producers.
We are putting together a team to go to Nova Ipixuna to shoot a documentary with the other 30 names on the list of most threatened persons made by the Pastoral da Terra. Ze and Maria were on this list. They are gone. But all the others are still alive, and we have a responsibility towards them, amplifying their voice, showing their faces, turning the world’s, and hopefully, our government’s attention to the conflicts on that area. We will launch the documentary in the crowd-funding website http://catarse.me/en and we count with everyone to let them tell their stories. (The TED Blog will publish the link as soon as we upload the project.)
3. Help us get the settlers connected
This is a plea to TED donors and sponsors. The settlers are very isolated. Phones signals are unstable and internet is a distant reality. Actually, having more access to communications might have saved Ze’s and Maria’s lives. We just heard from Felipe Milanez, who is on the ground in Nova Ipixuna, that in the weeks previous to the murders, Ze and Maria had been receiving numerous death threats – more than usual – and were scared of the people showing up in their property. A week before their death, some armed men were walking around Ze’s property, shooting to the sky, and then killed Ze’s dog. A week later they were ambushed when going to the city. Maybe if they had a way to ask for help from their house, they might have escaped.
To fight the lack of communications infrastructure on the region, we are putting together a project, following what Nokia did in Manaus. We want to arm the people there with cell phones through which they could send text messages that would reach both the IBAMA office directly and a website, via which we could keep an eye on the denounces and threats, and demand actions from the government. In order to accomplish this we need the help of companies that have the means and expertise to set all this infrastructure up. We are ready to sit down and talk to anyone who can help us in this path.
4. Help Ze’s and Maria’s family
Ze’s and Maria’s family are terrified because they too know the names and identities of the illegal loggers and charcoal producers and the people and companies who buy these illegal products. They too are a valuable source of information. For this reason, they had to leave the reserve and cannot collect nuts to support themselves anymore. They are in desperate need of all kinds of help. All sorts of communication with them is very difficult, and we are still assessing exactly what kind of help they need, but at this moment here is some information we know for sure:
One of Ze’s sisters, who lives in Tocantins, has a disease which no doctor until today could explain or treat. Ze was very concerned and even borrowing money from friends to try to get her private care (here in Brazil public health care is a sad joke). It would mean a lot to their family if a hospital or a health group could take over her treatment.
Also, Ze and Maria not only had a 15-year-old son who they made sure went to school, but they were the ones supporting Ze’s younger sister so that she could keep attending a Forestry undergraduate course. We would wholeheartedly welcome contributions in terms of sponsorships and scholarships that would allow them to finish their studies.
If you can or would like to help with any of the projects described above, please write to sempremajestade@gmail.com
– Juliana Machado Ferreira and the TEDxAmazonia curators group
Photo: Felipe Milanez
03 June 2011
Fellows Friday with Rose Shuman
Rose Shuman designed Question Box to spread the benefits of the Internet in the developing world. At the push of a button, villagers could get answers to any query — from banana plant viruses to HIV/AIDS — in their local language. Now Rose is building software to scale the model and track callers’ question trends in real time.Interactive Fellows Friday Feature!
Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via Facebook. This week, Rose asks:
We’re developing software to help community organizations in the developing world better reach their local population. How can we find these organizations and explain the tool to them?
Click here to respond!
You’ve dedicated much of your life to development issues. What got you started on this track?
My stepmother is Nicaraguan, and when I was 18, we all went to Nicaragua for Christmas. We took a side trip to the garbage dump of Managua and arrived at a giant mesa of garbage — the size of a multi-story apartment building. The garbage trucks there were like tanks with little claws on the wheels to claw themselves up the garbage. They would climb to the top, and then spill out a waterfall of garbage. Boys and men immediately began scrambling all over it, clawing through it. There was a community of about 1,000 people who literally lived in the trash dump.
I jumped out of the truck and sank into the garbage — I was wearing boots – and I saw a naked syringe by my feet. Then I noticed that all those boys only had cheap plastic flip-flops on their feet.
I think that people tend to have formative experiences between the ages of 17 and 21 — that trip was mine. I couldn’t really reconcile what I had seen in Nicaragua with my life in suburban Washington, D.C. So I spent the next six or seven years actively trying to understand why that world existed, and why my world existed. That involved me spending a lot of time living in places like Tamil Nadu, India, in an orphanage, and running a school in Honduras in a fishing village for half a year. I also spent time with the UN in refugee camps in Northern Uganda.
How did these experiences influence the creation of Question Box?
About five years ago I was thinking about how much the Internet has changed the way we live our lives in the developed world, and how mobile phones were really starting to revolutionize the developing world. I thought, “In a world where a billion people can’t read, how can you start to bring some of the benefits of the Internet to them?”
Question Box came out of an instinctive sense of how people interact with technology, what kind of information they need, what people would respond positively to, and what technologies would not make people feel dumb. Sometimes people who design technologies assume that end-users want to deeply explore new gadgets and systems. But in reality, for a successful adoption — in both the developing and developed world — people need to have good experiences with the new technology quickly. A good experience means the technology works in an easy, intuitive manner.
When it came to Question Box, I was thinking from a human-centered perspective. I thought of the people I knew, worked with, lived with, and washed clothes alongside. What would be something that they would find empowering, fun and helpful? What would help them understand their world better? They had helped answer my questions and I thought I should be able to help them answer their own.
02 June 2011
Struggling with quantum logic: Q&A with Aaron O’Connell
On stage at TED2011, Aaron O’Connell talked about building the largest object ever put into a quantum mechanical state, a vibrating piece of metal (called a mechanical resonator) — work he completed in the lab of professors John Martinis and Andrew Cleland, and working closely with Max Hofheinz and many others. Now he’s interested in starting a science company with the potential for dramatic impact on the world.
The TED Blog talked with him about his research, the nature of physics, and the differences between academia and the corporate world.
You made an object that’s an enormous breakthrough in physics, and then you have a huge challenge to try to explain to non-physicists why it’s a big deal. Where does that disconnect come from?
A lot of the impact of the experiment is that it forces you to change your perception of the world, and in such a way that you need to develop a new logic system. So, there’s two basic types of logic. There’s classical logic where things are either A or B, but they’re not A and B at the same time, and then there’s quantum logic which says that all the future possibilities are realizable today. That they actually exist in the present. You don’t have to wait for future contingency to realize the possibility now.
That’s a really tough concept.
How do you use your current classical logic system to get to the question of it possibly not being the only one you could use? And why is that important? Those things are really hard to wrap your head around.
Before Aristotle, when people thought about logic, they thought that all things in the future were true in the past. The argument goes like this: If you suppose there’s going to be a fight tomorrow, then necessarily in the past there was also going to be a fight on that day, so therefore it has to happen, because anything in the past that is true, has to be true.
And then Aristotle came along and said, “You guys are all nuts, man.” He said these events are neither true nor false. They’re not verifiable until the event actually happens. You have to actually wait until the event to see which one becomes the reality.
So, that was classical logic, but then quantum mechanics forced people to think differently. So you have these two possibilities, there could be a fight or there could not be a fight, and Aristotle said we have to wait. Quantum mechanics says you have to wait until the outcome, but you can influence it right now, because both of those possibilities are real things in the present. They’re not just an abstract concept, but they exist now.
This is something we have no intuition for. I know I studied wavefunctions for years and I still don’t know what these things are; there’s no visceral part to it.
Yeah, you make up some mental constructs, and then you go with them. But you don’t experience it too often. I mean, we do in the lab sometimes. I try to make the point that if you play with it every day, and it doesn’t behave quantum mechanically or probabilistically, then you think something’s wrong, it doesn’t sit right with you. If every time you make a measurement you always find your object in the excited state, then something’s wrong, because half the time it should be decaying, so it feels funny.
Do you ever find it bleeding over, and start wondering why your chair is where it’s supposed to be?
No, actually I don’t.
My outlook on the whole thing is that people have models of reality, and those models are descriptions, but they don’t get you any closer to the truth. I sort of believe that the truth is experiential, it’s “this is what is happening.” If I realize that actually there’s quantum mechanics happening around us all the time in some macroscopic, interconnected way, then that doesn’t change my perception of it, that doesn’t change my interaction with it, it just changes how I view my interaction.
And of course it might allow you to do some cool new stuff, like build new devices with that knowledge.
Yeah, what can you do with the mechanical resonator, or any large quantum object?
That’s hard to say right now, because it was a proof-of-principle experiment. So, practical applications are difficult to conceive of.
A lot of the things are tangentially related. Like, we made the world’s most sensitive motion detector, inadvertently, by doing this. It’s many orders of magnitude more sensitive than anything else that’s ever been built.
But what do you use that for? You could put chemicals on top of it, and the chemical reactions make it vibrate a little bit, and you could listen to the chemicals as they pop apart or join together. That was branded the quantum microphone.
It’s not practical, but one other interesting thing you could do is take a virus or bacteria, some very small living or questionably living thing, and put it on top of the resonator, it’s a big object. And then just re-do the experiment and put it in a superposition, bring it back together and then wake the bacteria. That would be interesting philosophically: whether quantum delocalization somehow affects the abilities for life processes to occur.
That’s amazing. That’s a philosophical question people have been posing for years, and you’re saying you can just directly test it.
Yeah, the definition of “living” is hazy. I’m not a biologist, I don’t know what people would agree upon. But you can look at the area of the vibrating resonator, and you can actually make it a lot bigger. I just chose that size because it happened to be the size I was working with. I’ve made them much larger and much smaller and they basically all work the same doing the classical tests. I only did the quantum tests with that one, but there’s no reason they wouldn’t all work the same.
You broke the previous limit on how big they could be. Is there a limit on how big you can make them?
I don’t see any limit — it just becomes technically more challenging as you try to make larger and larger objects. People are working on larger ones now for different reasons. Motion sensing is part of it, it’s intimately connected. For the gravitational wave experiments they have relatively large, kilogram-size objects that they would like to get into the quantum limit. So, they’re actively working toward putting those into quantum superposition states, but from a different angle.
Part of it is that it has to be disconnected from the rest of the world, or else it has the tendency to stay in one particular state, and not behave quantum mechanically. The larger the thing you have, the harder it is to do that.
One thing people ask me about is human teleportation. One aspect of our experiment is that an entangled quantum state was created between another object and the mechanical resonator, so when the macroscopic state was measured it broke the entanglement in a very similar way to a teleportation experiment.
It’s an interesting question, because you’d have to be very, very cold, so it probably wouldn’t work out for you.
You’d have to be within a Kelvin of absolute zero, right?
And in vacuum, yeah. And neither of those conditions is particularly good for humans. So it doesn’t particularly open a gateway to any sort of Star Trek-like teleportation.
What are you looking forward to seeing in macroscopic quantum objects?
In general: quantum computing. Half of this work was on quantum computation. The main part of this experiment was using one of their specially developed devices — a quantum bit, or q-bit — to read out the position of the mechanical resonator.
Another way to pitch the whole thing we did with the mechanical resonator is that it’s a quantum memory device. We had previously done experiments with electrical resonators, which are very similar, but they just store photons in them, one unit of energy. Those we developed specifically for memory devices for the q-bits. They’re quantum memory. You can drop your state in there and it’ll hang out for a while. It’s basically quantum RAM.
This mechanical resonator is another example of this quantum memory, except the way you store the memory is you store it in the vibration, and not the photon state. So I’d like to see that develop.
You’ve left academia for the corporate world. Are there any differences that stand out for you?
Yeah, every group of people has their cultural identity. Scientists and academics in particular focus on detail and the minutiae. When they talk to each other they usually don’t focus on the broad ideas; they don’t focus on social interconnectedness. They focus on the task that they’re doing.
Other fields tend to ask more the question: how can we work together? Or how does our work impact each other’s work? The scientific community does that as well, but those questions aren’t asked as frequently. It’s usually left to people to figure out how their work fits in with other people’s, as opposed to sitting down and having a dinner and discussing how we could work together to make things happen.
The one huge counter-example to what I just said is the experimental particle physics community, because they all work together in these gigantic groups to, you know, build CERN, and other things. But that’s rare.
And if you look at the author list from one of those experiments, there’s like a thousand authors on one of the papers, which is good because everyone contributed. But it’s still broken up individualistically; you have all these authors who’ve contributed, but they don’t really have a group identity. They don’t just put “The CERN Group” on it. So the focus is still on individual accomplishments as opposed to creating social groups that do work.
I personally see that as not beneficial for the scientific community to embrace this elevation of the individual. I think it would be more beneficial to the projects to have more of a group structure.
02 June 2011
Making sense of a visible quantum object: Aaron O’Connell on TED
Physicists are used to the idea that subatomic particles behave according to the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics, completely different to human-scale objects. In a breakthrough experiment, Aaron O’Connell has blurred that distinction by creating an object that is visible to the unaided eye, but provably in two places at the same time. In this talk he suggests an intriguing way of thinking about the result. (Recorded at TED2011, March 2011, in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 7:51)
Watch Aaron O’Connell’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.
02 June 2011
Meet the TEDGlobal 2011 speakers
Announcing the speaker lineup for TEDGlobal 2011 — happening July 11-15, 2011, in Edinburgh, and via webcast around the world. The 12 sessions of TEDGlobal expand on the overall conference theme, “The Stuff of Life,” with session titles such as “Bodies,” “Bad Guys,” “Coded Patterns” …
TEDGlobal is hosted by Bruno Giussani, TED’s European Director, and Chris Anderson, TED’s Curator, and as in Long Beach this year, two sessions will be guest-hosted: Session 5, “Emerging Order,” is hosted by rational optimist Matt Ridley (watch his TEDTalk from last year, about ideas having sex). And Session 8, “Embracing Otherness,” will be led by media pioneer Pat Mitchell, the co-host of last year’s TEDWomen conference.
Speakers include:
David Adjaye, Architect
Nadia al-Sakkaf, Journalist
Asaf Avidan, Singer/songwriter
Julia Bacha, Filmmaker
Michael Biddle, Plastic recycler
Phillip Blond, Political theorist
Paul Bloom, Psychologist
Alain de Botton, Philosopher
Karol Boudreaux, Economist
Joe Castillo, Sand artist
Pauline Chen, Transplant surgeon
Lee Cronin, Chemist
Danielle de Niese, Soprano
Anna Mracek Dietrich, Co-creator of a flying car
Hasan Elahi, Transparency artist
Peter Fankhauser, Roboticist
Niall Ferguson, Historian
Markus Fischer, Designer
Jeremy Gilley, Founder, Peace One Day
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Artist/designer
Malcolm Gladwell, Writer
Misha Glenny, Crime expert
Ben Goldacre, Science writer
Alison Gopnik, Child development psychologist
Robert Gupta, Violinist
Harald Haas, Technologist
Justin Hall-Tipping, Science investor
Jo Hamilton, Singer
Balazs Havasi, Pianist
Charles Hazlewood, Conductor
Yasheng Huang, Economist
Mikko Hypponen, Cyber-security expert
Robin Ince, Comedian
Allan Jones, Neuroscientist
Ben Kacyra, Digital preservationist
Cynthia Kenyon, Expert on ageing
Todd Kuiken, Biomedical engineer
Jae Rhim Lee, Artist
Neil MacGregor, British Museum director
Rebecca MacKinnon, Media activist
Jarreth Merz, Filmmaker
Pamela Meyer, Deception detective
Elizabeth Murchison, Cancer specialist
Maajid Nawaz, Anti-extremism activist
Thandie Newton, Actor
Svante Pääbo, Geneticist
Mark Pagel, Linguist
Annie Murphy Paul, Science writer
Eddi Reader, Singer
Yves Rossy, Jetman
Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy, Educator
Alice Russell, Singer
Josette Sheeran, Director UN Food Program
Shohei Shigematsu, Architect
Kevin Slavin, Algoworld expert
Paul Snelgrove, Marine biologist
Rory Stewart, Politician
Pavan Sukhdev, Banker
Marco Tempest, Techno-illusionist
Karen Tse, Anti-torture activist
Abraham Verghese, Writer and doctor
Vertigo Dance Company
Geoffrey West, Theorist
Richard Wilkinson, Public health researcher
Daniel Wolpert, Neuroscientist
Yang Lan, Media mogul
Paul Zak, Neuroeconomist
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