TEDBlog July, 2011 Archive
29 July 2011
5 ways to listen better: Julian Treasure on TED.com
In our louder and louder world, says sound expert Julian Treasure, “We are losing our listening.” In this short, fascinating talk, Treasure shares five ways to re-tune your ears for conscious listening — to other people and the world around you. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 7:50.)
Watch Julian Treasure’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.
29 July 2011
Fellows Friday Q&A with Candy Chang
Candy asks:
If you could ask one question to all of your neighbors, what would you ask?
Click here to respond on Facebook now! Or join Candy’s live Q&A on TED Conversations, Monday, August 1, 3pm-4:30pm Eastern, at http://on.ted.com/ChangQA.
You have so many public art projects going on. What are you working on right now?
Well, my Civic Center colleagues and I just launched Neighborland. It’s a tool to help residents shape future businesses and services in their neighborhoods. It developed from a public art project I did called “ I Wish This Was,” which was inspired by vacant storefronts. Everybody passes by vacant storefronts and has ideas for what they’d like in them. My neighborhood in New Orleans, for example, doesn’t have a full-service grocery store. What if we actually had some power to influence the kinds of businesses that enter our neighborhood?
I created fill-in-the-blank stickers that say “I Wish This Was _____” and posted them on vacant storefronts. People wrote things like “a butcher shop,” “a community garden,” and “a taco stand.” It was kind of a lovechild between urban planning and street art. But there’s only so much you can do on a sticker. Some people wrote on each other’s stickers with things like “me too” and “3 votes for that.”
Some of these conversations needed to move to a more constructive space. So we developed the website Neighborland. It will hopefully connect residents who want things with likeminded people, initiatives, and resources. It’s a valuable poll for civic leaders and developers to assess what residents want in different areas. And it promotes entrepreneurship by revealing neighborhood demands and proving there’s a viable customer base for new businesses to open.
28 July 2011
Ending hunger now: Josette Sheeran on TED.com
Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN’s World Food Program, talks about why, in a world with enough food for everyone, people still go hungry, still die of starvation, still use food as a weapon of war. Her vision: “Food is one issue that cannot be solved person by person. We have to stand together.” (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 19:10.)
Watch Josette Sheeran’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.
27 July 2011
The importance of deep pleasure: Q&A with Paul Bloom
Psychologist Paul Bloom, author of How Pleasure Works, studies the nature of pleasure. At TED Global he gave a witty and riveting talk on how knowing the history of an object (or a relationship with a person) can profoundly affect our enjoyment of it or them. After the conference, TED’s Ben Lillie caught up with him to talk about why that is, and whether knowing about our essentialism should change how we experience our own pleasure.
You laid out this wonderful case that humans are fundamentally essentialists. Do you have a sense of why? Why is the origin of things so deeply important to us?
It’s a really good question. I think essentialism is, in general, a biological adaptation. It’s a particularly clever and important adaptation that drives us to focus on the deeper aspect of things. For a lot of things, the capacity to go beyond the surface makes a big difference. It matters, when you look at people, not to be entirely moved by what they look like, but to also be influenced by what you believe to be their histories and their hidden properties. For food, it matters where it came from and what it touched. For animals, you want to know what they can do to you and how they behave, not just their surface appearance. For these reasons, I think we’ve evolved to have an essentialist bias.
Having said that, a lot of the specific phenomena I talk about are what scholars like Stephen Jay Gould call “spandrels”— biological accidents. They’re built from an innate basis, but they aren’t themselves adaptive.
As an example, in my talk I discuss briefly about our attraction to objects that have been in contact with celebrities, such as George Clooney’s sweater. I don’t think that that’s an adaptation in any sense of the term. I certainly don’t think that those individuals in the past who liked objects that were touched by celebrities reproduced more than those who didn’t. My view, then is that the general bias towards essentialism is an adaptation, but some of its most interesting manifestations are accidents.
I’m always fascinated by these wine studies you cite — that how expensive we think it is influences how much we enjoy it. Is there an element of pleasure that is not tied to our notion of where things came from? Are there two elements of it or is the history the essence of what it is?
I would answer by saying: Both. I wouldn’t deny that a lot of what matters about wine is its chemical composition. After all, if somebody hands you a glass of gasoline, you’re not going to like it—even if they also tell you that it’s from a $1,000 dollar bottle wine.
So, plainly we have sense organs that give us information about things. Plainly the reason why we like things more than others is because of their superficial qualities. It would be crazy to deny that. The strong point that I’m making, though, is that for all of our pleasures, even those that seem the most sensory — like the taste of wine or sexual orgasm or stepping into a hot bath– your beliefs about the true nature of these experiences will always make a difference.
So wine is a good example. Like I said, part of your response to wine is based on its chemical properties But how you experience it will always be affected by your beliefs about what you are drinking. Now this opens you up to being fooled. Given that we’re creatures who respond to the history of things, we can be exploited. You could be lied to about the price of wine, you could be lied to about where your sweater came from, you could be lied to about whether your painting is an original or a forgery, and so on. This is the bad news. On the other hand, our essentialism opens up a world of pleasurable experience that no other creature has. Our essentialism is why we have art, for instance. Other creatures might respond to colorful patterns, but they can’t be moved by an act of creation because they aren’t essentialist.
Here’s another case: We find a face more attractive if we like that person. So, is that stupid? Is it a cognitive illusion? I don’t think so. Yes, if you start with a core belief saying the only thing that should matter about attractiveness is bone structure and facial geometry and the clarity of skin and so on, then it’s a mistake to respond on the basis of liking. But who says that it’s only the superficial that should matter? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a pleasure that goes deep.
Does knowing that this is where our pleasure comes from change how we “should” approach our pursuit of pleasure?
I’ve often wondered that, I think it does in a couple of ways. For one thing, if I’m right, it makes respectable some aspects of pleasure that people have often been ashamed of. Art is a good example. Some people think that to prefer original artwork or to be interested in who created the art is a sign of some sort of moral or intellectual laziness or snobbery. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think caring about who the artist is and how the painting was created and where it came from is just part and parcel of what it is to be a human being who is reacting to art. At the very minimum, then, what you learn from the science of pleasure can help you have a better understanding of your own pleasures.
The only practical implication I can think of for this work is: if you want to enhance the pleasures of your every day life, one way to do so is through knowledge. If you want to enjoy wine more, the trick is to learn more about wine. If you want to enjoy art more, the trick is to learn about art. The more understanding you get, the richer your experiences will be. I think music is the perfect example of this. For young kids most classical music sounds terrible (and for some people it will always sound terrible). But the more you listen to it, the more you will understand it, and the better it will sound to you. Like everything else I talk about, this a real visceral phenomenological change. It’s not like you say, “Oh this music is boring and unpleasant but now I know a lot about it.” It’s that “It no longer sounds boring and unpleasant; it sounds rich and nuanced and exhilarating.”
That feeds into that old question about whether learning the science of biology kills the beauty of the flower. You would argue that it enhances it quite a bit.
I would. Now many people do worry that science kills beauty, but I don’t think this is true at all. It is just not true that studying something from a scientific point of view diminishes the richness of it. It’s just not the case that scientists who study sex lose interest in sex or evolutionary biologists find that they no longer love their children. [Laughs]
It’s funny to present as an empirical claim, which clearly it should be, but rarely ever presented that way.
Yes, and I do think it’s worth studying. My own view is along the lines of what Richard Dawkins said in his book “Unweaving the Rainbow”—it will turn out that the serious study of someone enhances one’s appreciation of its beauty, it doesn’t diminish it. Certainly this is true when you look at the human mind. When you start to explore research into psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science, it turns out that the mind is just so much cooler than you could have ever imagined.
A personal example I can think of actually comes not from psychology, but from cosmology. I was once in a terrible mood, and I just happened to stumble on a book by Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, about the origin of the universe. I bought it with me on a hike, and read it while stopping for lunch—and man, I just thought it was incredible. It cheered me up so much. It struck me that the scientific ideas he talked about it were so much cooler than, say, the religious ideas. The religious ideas of creation of the universe are basically that some big guy made it. Religions have held these ideas because they’re natural and intuitive and commonsensical, but the cosmological ideas aren’t any of that. They were just gorgeous.
When I read work by someone who has thought deeply about something, it could be a scientist or philosopher or theologian or art critic, I end up with more of an appreciation of that thing. As a rule, studying something, knowing a lot about it, enhances your pleasure, it doesn’t reduce it. I don’t think Robert Ebert hates movies.
You talk about how we don’t like forgeries because the history isn’t what we thought it is, but do you know of people who get attracted to the idea of forgeries and who collect good forgeries?
Yes. My claim is that history matters. And in the normal course of things an original is worth more than a forgery, because an original is more creative and so on. But you can think of exceptions. In fact, we’ve had laboratory studies showing that even your normal person under the right circumstances will find the forgery more valuable than an original.
As a real world example, take the Supper at Emmaus. When it was discovered not to be by Vermeer, but to be a forgery, its value dropped horrendously. I looked for where it ended up when I wrote my book and I found it was in a traveling exhibit on forgeries. It would never regain its value. On the other hand, it will develop its own special value because it now has a distinct history as a famous fraud.
We find the appeal of negative history in other studies— I talked about the George Clooney sweater study, but we also did a Bernie Madoff study. We asked people to name somebody that they really don’t like and asked what they would pay for a sweater that was worn by them. Now some people say, “Absolutely nothing.” They don’t want anything to do with it. But others will pay a lot. There’s also something called murder-abilia, where people want Jeffrey Dahmer’s sweatshirt and John Wayne Gacy’s finger painting and so on. I think that that sort of history can be valuable too, at least for some people
Much of what I end up doing for a living involves studying fairly subtle laboratory effects. But one thing I like about this topic is that the effects aren’t subtle at all—our intuitions concerning forgeries and history are so often incredibly strong. There are Vermeers right now on sale that people worry are van Meegerens. Nobody says “Who cares?”. The difference is an extraordinary amount of money, a deep shift in our emotional and aesthetic responses.
There’s a wonderful story of this person who had his Picasso tested to see if it was forgery; and found out the paints were from a period they couldn’t be made from, so it had to be a mistake. In fury, he destroyed it, smashed it up, and threw it in a dumpster. He discovered later that the person who tested it was mistaken.
You can’t see me, but that produced a visceral reaction at the thought of that that painting being destroyed.
But if the story had ended that he threw out the painting and it actually was a forgery, you’d think “Yeah, well ok…”
Yeah, exactly.
Once you start thinking of the history of things, there’s no end to examples.
One of the many cool things about being at TED is the people you get to meet. After my talk, this guy came and we had a fascinating discussion about Rolex watches, something that he was an expert on. He pointed out that you can buy, in New York, a perfect duplicate of Rolex. Now you can buy something cheap for 50 bucks, but if you’re willing to pay a few thousand you can buy something that looks so much like a Rolex that only an expert would be able to tell the difference – and that would take time. Now, the question is, with those perfect duplicates on the market, why is Rolex still in business? And the answer is because people want a Rolex. They want the product made by the Rolex people, not one that looks perfectly like it.
That’s just such a cool fact about people.
This presumably applies to things that aren’t objects as well. Does the fact that I know you’re a Yale professor giving this TED talk affect my perception of your talk and your ideas?
Yes. I think that it does. The issue here is messy, because there are all sorts of considerations having to do with status and association that don’t work in exactly the same way as for paintings and Rolexes. But certainly, your belief about where an idea comes from will affect how you evaluate it and how you appreciate it. The same idea from two very different people will be interpreted in two very different ways, based on what you know about the people.
It seems like that has immediate implications in policy, more than anywhere else.
It does, and in part it’s common sense. If we’re talking politics and I say, “my friend told me such and so” versus “A Nobel Prize winner told me such and so” you would respond differently. The value of an idea is so strongly related to who you think has it.
There’s a nice study by Geoffrey Cohen who told people about imaginary welfare policies. One of them is insanely generous by American standards and the other insanely strict. He told the subjects that they were either by Republicans or Democrats. It turns out that the subjects didn’t care at all about the merits of the policy, whether it’s strict or lax; they just cared who said it. If you’re a Democrat and think it is a democratic policy you’ll say “Oh, this is terrific. This is so smart.” You won’t even know this is why you like it; you’ll think that you are moved by the merits of the proposal itself. We’re influenced in ways we don’t know by the source of things.
Is there a way of thinking about that fact without me getting incredibly depressed?
[Laughing] Why would you get depressed about it?
At face value, it tells me I’m not nearly as capable of making a rational evaluation of things as I think I am. Then it leads me to think that maybe there is, if I extrapolate this probably past where I should, maybe there isn’t a lot of rationality going into our policy decisions at any level.
A lot of people draw that conclusion. You’re right, we subject to a lot of these biases to some extent. Some of these biases are benign or even good, like seeing someone you know as more positive than a stranger. Others are sinister and stupid and terrible.
But here’s the thing: we are such smart creatures that when we’re troubled by a bias, we can change the world so as to exclude the contaminating factors we are worried about.
Here’s an example: When people listen to auditions from a symphony orchestra, music sounds different from a woman than from a man. It doesn’t sound as good from a woman. But this perceived difference isn’t due a real difference in skill; it has to do with unconscious sexist biases. The solution here is fairly clear, and it’s what they’ve done in symphony orchestras— you have men and women audition behind a screen. Once you do that, the problem disappears.
So maybe a conclusion is we need to think more about the fact that this happens so we can put the screen up when it’s called for.
Yes, exactly. But in some cases, you choose not to put a screen up. One could have a museum and decide not to tell anybody where the paintings came from, but I don’t think that’s the right way to do things. I think it’s worthwhile knowing whether it’s a Chagall or a Picasso or whoever. Now, people might disagree. But in any case, we’re smart enough that if we find some sort of influence morally troubling we can work to make this influence go away.
Was there anything that you wanted to talk about, that you really wanted to get across that didn’t make it into the talk?
I think the one thing that I wish I could have discussed is that the depth of pleasure is a good thing. It makes it possible to get pleasure from art. It makes it possible to enjoy fiction, which is a topic I didn’t touch on at all in my talk. I think it enhances the pleasures of sex, the pleasures of food, the pleasures of music.
I think that the presence of essentialism in humans and the absence of it in other creatures is something that really matters. The life of a chimp, for instance, is much less pleasurable than a human’s can be, because a chimp can’t appreciate things in an essentialist sort of way. This is the good news. The bad news is that humans can experience miseries that no other animal can appreciate.
27 July 2011
The origins of pleasure: Paul Bloom on TED.com
Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists — that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an illusion, but as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 16:17.)
Watch Paul Bloom’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.
26 July 2011
The sameness of organisms, cities, and corporations: Q&A with Geoffrey West
On stage at TEDGlobal 2011, Geoffrey West talked about the universal mathematics that govern cities and corporations. Knowing only the population of a city, he can predict the number of patents, the crime rate, the average walking speed and many other features of a city.
Before the conference, TED’s Ben Lillie reached him in his office at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, to talk about how this is connected to his previous research in biology, and how it might be extended to corporations, and even conferences.
You’ve done a lot of work on finding universal laws in biology and other subjects. Should I be surprised that there are such universal laws?
Yes, I think you should. After all, we believe in natural selection and the Darwinian process. That means that each organism, each component of an organism, each organ of a mammal, even each cell type, each mitochondria and each gene has evolved with its own unique history and its own environmental niche so to speak. Therefore what results is historically contingent and that’s one of the major points of natural selection. So if you look at any kind of physiological variable, from the classic ones like metabolic rate or the rate at which oxygen diffuses across a cell, or any life history event like how long do you live, how long does an organism take to mature, etc.. You would expect these, if you looked at them across a spectrum of sizes, it would be all over the map. You wouldn’t expect very significant regularities if you took the view that everything was determined purely by some kind of random interactive process. Quite the contrary, what you see is an extraordinary regularity, which implies that there are a whole bunch of constraints that are in play during natural selection.
Interesting, so this shows us that natural selection is operating within a set of constraints and maybe those constraints are stronger than we previously thought?
Yes, I think that’s true. If you go back and read The Origin of the Species, Darwin makes remarks to this effect at a couple of points. He doesn’t talk about what they are, but he just simply says it’s not totally random – there are all kinds of other things that are at play implying that there’s physics and chemistry and all these other things that are at work. I think the viewpoint that I take, anyway, is that in some ways an emerging property from natural selection that there would be these kind of constraints. Some of them are external, but they really come out of natural selection because they are, at least in the work I’ve been involved in, the constraints are the properties. These regularities are reflection of the network systems that sustain life at all scales, whether intracellularly or within you and me or in ecosystems or within a city for that matter. You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism – with an enormous number of components – without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient. This is a very important point: if you want long term sustainability, susceptibility, resilience, and yet have adaptation and evolvability laws kind of have to emerge for that to happen. And so it isn’t all just random, it’s not arbitrary. From our viewpoint the natural construct for that are networks. If you have a million citizens in a city or if you have 1014 cells in your body, they have to be networked together in some optimal way for that system to function, to adapt, to grow, to mitigate, and to be long term resilient. Life is extraordinarily resilient. It’s been around for over billion years.
That ties in with a fascinating observation of yours: when you look at cities, very few cities failed or really gone away. That’s somehow an even stronger form of resilience than an individual organism.
Yes! The two questions that motivate me in this part of the work are “Are cities and companies, for that matter, just an extension of biology?” Are they biological – is New York a great big elephant? Microsoft a big anthill? We use those because, we can laugh at it, and we do, but the fact of the matter is biological metaphors are continually used in socioeconomic situations – the DNA of a company, the metabolism of a city. The question is, is that just a metaphor or is there something substantive about it? In what way do cities and companies behave as if they are all organisms? And in what way is there some new kind of dynamic, new kind of system evolved after man and woman started talking to one another, developed language. But then a subsidiary question to that is the one that you raised – if that’s the case, how come cities never seem to die? It’s very hard to kill [a city], we know classic cases of course, but of the millions of communities that have grown on the planet, almost all of them are still with us. My classic example is that you can drop an atom bomb on a city and 30-40 years later it’s thriving. It’s unbelievable. If you drop the equivalent of an atom bomb on Google and it will be dead, for sure. So to understand what is the underlying mechanism and what are the principles that are governing these kinds of phenomenon.
You base a lot of this work on the analysis of networks and the behavior of networks, is this something you can apply to just about anything that’s networked, say large international conferences or something like that?
Oh you could, absolutely. The worked I’ve been involved in, of course, has been biology and from intracellular levels up to ecosystems – you know, forests, and so on – and now cities and that’s clearly networked. It is networked in a much more subtle way. There’s the obvious networks of the roads and electrical lines and all the rest. But really what’s driving a city is the virtual network: the social interactions, the way individuals interact in clusters and interact with each other. So it’s kind of a network system. But you could expand that it to things like NGOs or conferences or TED. Or, not TED, what it would really be are things like TED – all the various gatherings like this. It would be very interesting to note are there any kind of commonalities and regularities as you look at the different scales at these kinds of events. I’ve wondered a little bit, if you go to Davos, TED, Techonomy, and these various conferences, they’re very different scales. But if you hang out it’s clear there are commonalities even though each one is different and has it’s own quite distinct character. It’s obvious there are a bunch of common features because they are a network of people. There are people interacting and there’s universality to the way people interact – no matter where you are in the world. That’s really where we are at the moment. It’s developing the conceptual framework and trying to put that stuff into a mathematical framework, which we did in biology, and is turning out to be more challenging.
Your background is in physics, and you attacked this from a very physics perspective. Clearly that’s one reason why this was new research and the people working in biology hadn’t done it before. Do you have thoughts on other reasons why?
Very long story short, one of the main reasons I got interested in this was the demise of the SSC [the Superconducting Super Collider]. I got kind of angry at the whole thing, the way in which physics was somehow being sidelined. The great adulation of biology, I thought, was certainly correct in terms of it being the science of the 21st century. My concern was that it didn’t look very much like science to me, for a physics perspective. It wasn’t quantitative – I mean areas of course are – but a lot of it wasn’t.
I was also getting interested in the question of aging. What motivated this work originally was — I said to myself as an arrogant high energy physicist — if biology were a real science you would be able to predict, or at least understand, not just the mechanism of aging, but where in the hell does a 100 years for the lifespan of a human being come from? Why isn’t it a 1,000 years or a billion years or six months? We believe everything is molecular whether its genes or respiratory complexes or whatever, but those have molecular time scales. How the hell do those things build up to 100 years? What upset me is that I would read in the gerontological literature at that time they would say that lifespan is genetically controlled. I would say that’s an explanation of nothing. In fact, the great mystery of health is how the molecules know a 100-years. And not only that how do the same molecules, if they’re in a mouse, know its 2-3 years?
And so then in just thinking about that and doing a little bit of literature search, I came across these scaling laws [such as the fact that an organism's lifetime is determined by it's size. Bigger animals live longer according to a very accurate mathematical relationship]. When I first saw them I was astounded because they were so good. I started looking at it, and no one had done anything; all they had done was collect this marvelous data. In fact it had been quite an active field up until the 50’s by many of the famous biologists. Then of course the molecular revolution took over, so it was kind of forgotten. There were people that did recognize that there was something remarkable about scaling laws, but then it kind of devolved into just being a curiosity. It amazed me that biologists weren’t struck by the fact that this is potentially an extraordinary window into underlying principles – which is what it is in physics. Scaling has played a critical role in physics, certainly did in the development of high energy physics.
So, I started to think about it and that’s what got me involved and I realized the tremendous difference of a physicist looking at the problem versus a traditional biologist. I started working on this, a skeleton of a theoretical framework, but I was extremely fortunate in coming together with my colleague, Jim Brown, who is a very distinguished ecologist who had been thinking about these things from an ecological viewpoint. This guy is a traditional biologist in the sense that he does a lot of fieldwork and has a huge number of students and post docs and he’s very well known in his field. He is totally mathematically changed, but he has amazing intuition. We were brought together through the Santa Fe Institute and that’s how I really started getting connected with him. He was very traditional, but at the same time he had a non-traditional mind that was incredibly important in terms of me being able to kind of put it all together.
I must say that just as a physicist coming into that field in a rather informal way, I was struck, not just by those scaling laws, but by the fact that biologists had not appreciated how extraordinary they were. That this was saying something very general and I actually believe quite deep about biology. A lot of biologists have bought into that, and a lot don’t get it or are threatened by it. One of the interesting things about this has been this cultural difference between biology and physics in terms of what constitutes scientific explanation, what do you focus on. Roughly speaking, I now make a total cartoon of it, biologists don’t believe in theory and they don’t believe that there are any general principles other than natural selection, nothing else. I just find that bizarre, actually. I still do. I mean, many of the best ones don’t feel that at all.
Moving into the social sciences, it’s been interesting there because the analogy to the problem with biologists has been the problem with some economists. (Not all, Paul Romer, an economist at Stanford has been a big admirer, which is very nice.) Many have a similar kind of funny reaction that some biologists do, but the thing that has been really encouraging and really delightful is that urban geographers, urban designers, urban planners, architects — people who are doing it have been extremely positive. That has been very encouraging.
26 July 2011
The surprising math of cities and corporations: Geoffrey West on TED.com
Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities — that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city’s population. In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 17:33.)
Watch Geoffrey West’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.
25 July 2011
Update: TED2012 Fellows applications extended until August 1
Apply now to join the TED2012 Fellows class, and attend TED2012: Full Spectrum in Long Beach. Artists, scientists, inventors, change-makers … Learn more about the amazing TED Fellows program >>
UPDATE: Application deadline is Monday, August 1, 2011, 11:59pm US/Eastern.
25 July 2011
Time to end the war in Afghanistan: Rory Stewart on TED.com
British MP Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan after 9/11, talking with citizens and warlords alike. Now, a decade later, he asks: Why are Western and coalition forces still fighting there? He shares lessons from past military interventions that worked — Bosnia, for instance — and shows that humility and local expertise are the keys to success. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 20:30.)
Watch Rory Stewart’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.
22 July 2011
Wow: SmartBird in the wild, swarmed by seagulls
This video was shot by Flickr user ldrose two hours after the live demo of SmartBird inside the auditorium at TEDGlobal. Festo engineers brought the bird outside to Holyrood Park, in central Edinburgh, and sent it up into the sky. Eyewitnesses tell us that, almost immediately, out of an empty sky, SmartBird was swarmed by seagulls, dozens of them, each taking a turn to dive at the giant bird. The video tells the story … and YouTube user finesoftwarewritings captures the whole sequence in the 4-minute clip below:
Here’s another SmartBird swarm video, from Paul Kemp-Robertson at Contagious magazine …
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