TEDBlog October, 2011 Archive
19 October 2011
Positive outlook for first malaria vaccine
Results from clinical trials released yesterday show that a new malaria vaccine has been able to reduce malaria by 58 percent in 6,000 infected sub-Saharan African children aged five to 17 months. These results are the newest development in the effort toward the world’s first effective vaccine against malaria. The trials are the result of a partnership between the global health nonprofit PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative and GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, with funding provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people a year globally, and as Bill Gates reminded us in his 2009 TEDtalk, it is our responsibility to recognize the importance of these deadly problems and to provide continued support toward finding effective solutions.
19 October 2011
Visit the Ads Worth Spreading channel on YouTube — comment and enter!
Via the YouTube Blog: Last year, TED kicked off a challenge to the advertising industry called Ads Worth Spreading, our global search for innovation, ingenuity and intelligence in advertising. This year, we are delighted to announce that we’re now accepting entries to the current challenge through our Ads Worth Spreading channel on YouTube. The YouTube channel will help promote and showcase submissions, as well as spark conversation.
Even if you’re not an advertiser, you can visit the channel and comment on your favorite campaigns: Which ads are thought-provoking, funny, honest, warm, informative or creatively brilliant? We want your feedback, and the channel is our medium for hearing your voice.
Read the full story on the YouTube Blog >>
19 October 2011
How cyberattacks threaten real-world peace: Guy-Philippe Goldstein on TED.com
More and more, nations are waging attacks with cyber weapons — silent strikes on another country’s computer systems that leave behind no trace. (Think of the Stuxnet worm.) At TEDxParis, Guy-Philippe Goldstein shows how cyberattacks can leap between the digital and physical worlds to prompt armed conflict — and how we might avert this global security hazard. (Recorded at TEDxParis, January 2010, in Paris, France. Duration: 9:24.)
Watch Guy-Philippe Goldstein’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 1,000+ TEDTalks.
18 October 2011
Video: Meet TEDx in a Box version 2.0
TEDx in a Box is a toolkit with all the gear needed to host a TEDx event in the developing world — projector, speakers and more, packed in a shippable box. The TEDx in a Box program launched last year with 10 boxes, powering events in India, Bangladesh, South Africa, Brazil and Ecuador. (Among them were TEDxGawair, in the Gawair slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh, organized by Masarat Daod, and TEDxKliptown in South Africa, in a community that does not have formal housing, running water or electricity.)
For phase two of the project, TEDx teamed up with IDEO.org to rethink TEDx in a Box. IDEO.org fellows Emily Friedberg, Marika Shioiri-Clark and Robin Bigio interviewed the first class of TEDx in a Box event organizers and found six key things they wanted:
more help explaining TEDx to their community
to cater to bigger audiences
to be able to create their own content
a simpler box technology
help planning the event beyond just setting up the box
a more easily transported box
Visit the TEDx blog for photos of the brainstorm and buildout … and the IDEO.org Blog for running notes from Emily, Marika and Robin.
The result, TEDx in a Box 2.0, is a multi-use organizational system with color-coded, icon-specific graphics that make it easy to set up a TEDx event anywhere. The box includes a projector, a PA system, a DVD player, a battery and inverter, two camcorders and a tripod, a power strip and an SD card. The Quickstart Guide guides the event organizer to charge the system, set it up to watch a TEDTalk and host live speakers, with or without slides.
Watch the demo video to see how it works >>
The next step? Build a few boxes, and send them out to TEDx communities around the globe.
Follow the IDEO.org fellows on their TEDx in a Box creation journey on the IDEO.org Blog >>
18 October 2011
Rethinking ‘normal’ in technology: Q&A with Justin Hall-Tipping
On stage at TED Global 2011 Justin Hall-Tipping set forth a bold agenda for funding innovation – one that makes room for radical changes and complete re-thinking of what’s possible. TED’s Ben Lillie tracked him down to follow up on the process of innovation, and his plans for the future.
You made this point that we often get stuck on this idea of what normal is. Do you think that really impedes our sense of progress? If we have too strong a sense of what normal is, or if we have a normal thing available — like the example of if we have serviceable solar cells — does the fact that we have those available keep us from reaching further and making them better?
Yes, I think it does. I think this sense of normal is something that we all grow up with and that we live. What you know is what shows up to you as normal. And I think it then dictates a large part of how you think.
If you look back in history with the advent of the automobile, at that time, everybody was moving around either by walking or on horses. And when the automobile came out, somebody said the theoretical maximum speed an automobile can go is 25 miles an hour, and any speed above 25 miles an hour, the human body is literally going to shake apart. And that was the limiter. Well, nobody had driven a car faster than 25 miles per hour so nobody knew. And so some prognosticator comes out and says that, and that is accepted as normal. And that’s a perfect illustration of the problems that we face, which is when you’re given something new, you instantly default to what you know. And I translate the new into what I know. And I can’t actually take it for what it might be.
And I think your parallel to the solar cell is the same way. I’m using the solar cell as a frame of reference to the boiler in my basement, to power X amount of power for my house. But the solar cell may be ultimately completely different from anything that we’ve known to date.
Is there a sense in that that the biggest challenge really is learning to live with change and understanding that change is a normal part of our life?
Yes. And of course, what they say is you don’t make change until there’s real pain, and the pain of staying is more than the pain of changing. And you can translate pain into whatever it is, either personally, resources, financially, whatever you want. But people have this tendency to sit until the cost of sitting is too much versus the cost of changing or moving.
Do you see a way of getting past that, of us getting to the point where we’re so used to change that we actually become quite good at it?
Well I think over time we’re doing it. If you look at us as a race comparatively over however many hundreds of thousands of years we’ve been around, the speed with which we embrace things is changing on us. What our grandparents did, to what our parents did, to what we do, to what our children are doing are night and day difference. Not only in what they do, but what they accept as okay, are fundamentally different just over four generations. So yes, I think we do it better, but I still think we face this issue of we can’t imagine anything other than the status quo or status quo with a bit, with these speed limits that are artificially imposed. And then suddenly somebody comes along that says, “Well why do you think that way? That speed limit is no longer in effect.”
And so I’m in the process of saying — and why Nanoholdings was built – just because everybody else says it’s a certain way and the speed limits are such and such, what if it’s not the case? And maybe put jigsaw pieces together such that the picture that emerges is something that radically changes everything that we think and do and how we live. And that innovation is going to come, not equally distributed all over the world, it’s going to come from select people in institutions that can think in these terms, where there’s no real penalty for failure. Which is why we go to universities, one of the greatest institutions in the world, where people are not penalized for being wrong. Learning, huge amounts of learning, comes in the place of being wrong.
Having come out of that environment, that’s a little surprising of a statement. There’s this tremendous pressure to publish results and to make them not big leaps. At least that’s the complaint of the people in academia that I know, that most of the progress still happens in these very small steps.
I agree in a large part to what you say, and I am saying what I say in comparison to corporations. Because inside corporations, what I have got the sense of is, when science is being done, there are a lot of old processes and protocols where, “No we tried that five years ago. It doesn’t work. We’re going in this direction, because we’ve got to get a product out by this date” that in some sense shrinks down the edge of the envelope of what is possible. It is that blue sky time that I think, in a university environment, is a special place.
You showed an amazing idea for generating power from a pair of transparent films. How many pieces away are you from having a functional power generator?
I would say, from our perspective – now I’m not talking about mass-market – we’re within a couple of years of having all those pieces together. Because enough of them are working together by themselves that, unless there’s something that none of us know about – which I don’t think that’s going to crop up – I think you already know how it all goes together. There’s enough empirical evidence that tells you that.
And once they’re working, the idea is that there’s enough power available that – how much energy are we talking about generating here? Is this orders of magnitude more than we have?
That’s a great question. Because, again, I think we’re thinking in terms of a solar cell. And so what the world has taught us in solar cells is: I’m going to go pay X, and it’s going to sit on my roof, and it’s got to have this footprint, and the total install cost per house is 50 to 100 thousand bucks with inverters and the whole bit. So now you’re thinking in terms of, well for a house then, my payback is roughly 20 years. And then everybody says, well, hang back. My average ownership of the home before I move, this current decade not withstanding, is, say, five years. Why am I bothering to put a solar cell on my house? Because it’s got a 20 year payback, and I’m only here for five years. That’s the kind of thinking that I think goes on in people’s minds.
So I say, “Well okay, what would you want to be able to do?” One, you drive it from a price point, I need to add something that is essentially Saran Wrap that would go on a window. It needs to be applied as easily as that. And maybe it only needs to last three years, because it’s inside the window, stuck on, and I can rip it off and put another one on.. Because if it’s flexible, I can put it on any surface. And if I don’t have to make it last 30 years outside, maybe I have a different business proposition entirely.
What you’re describing to me sounds like something that would provide the energy requirements of a house if you applied it to the house, or something like that. But we’re not talking about an order of magnitude more, where all of a sudden we have more energy than we know what to do with.
No, but again, I think you’re right in that place, but then it does open up your mind to saying, “Well hang about, but what if I’m not there? What do I do with that energy? I mean, I’m generating it on my window.” That electron, in some sense, has been freed from the traditional distribution mechanism. Well where have we heard that story before? You’ve heard that whereby the physical unit of something was released from its underlying distribution mechanism – we’ve seen that in telephony; we’ve seen that in computers; you’ve seen that in media; you’ve seen that in music. And look at what happened to every single one of those industries when the distribution mechanism, or whatever it was, was released and the ownership of the medium became individual.
So the hope is this is going to be a truly disruptive innovation, that this will change completely how we view energy?
Well for 200 years, we as a society have thought of our energy as energy derived from combustion. And the only question that I ask is, and how’s it doing for us? Not so great. The culmination of humanity’s intellect of many hundreds of thousands of years when presented with this problem of “how do we stay warm in winter?” is basically to burn our environment.
If you release the constraint of “I don’t have to burn everything, and is there a better way?” you’re already seeing inklings of it that, yes there is, you actually can do this differently. That if we try and copy nature – which seems to be what we all ought to do, because when we do it we’re a lot smarter – nature does energy by chemical transformation. They don’t do it by burning. So you’re only changing what shows up into something that’s usable. And so I think if you want to go look for answers, you look for a whole bunch of answers in places that doesn’t involve just burning that damn thing.
When you had this transformation in the music industry, there was an enormous push back from the vested interests. Do you see something similar happening here?
Well yes, I don’t see how you could sit there – just the sort of logical part of me says, whenever anything in society is very, very different, you do get almost everybody saying, “Hang about. That’s different. It feels really uncomfortable. And I don’t like that” as your first inclination. We’re all creatures of habit. And so yes, you saw it in the music industry. And the vast majority of people said, “No.” And then Apple said, “Yes, and it’s 99 cents.” And everybody suddenly realized you can make a lot of money at 99 cents. And then 99 cents didn’t seem quite so bad.
So in the face of big change, there are some people that are way out on the edge of the bell-curve, which say, “Okay, change is good. How am I going to use this change to my advantage? How am I going to embrace it? How am I going to solve things?” And ultimately, if the change that you’re offering answers some very big issues, then I think you can get more people moving over very quickly.
So we’re about finding answers at Nanoholdings to the very big problems. Like energy — and for example water, we’re simply going to run out of fresh water. You better get answers in the timeline you’ve got, because the human body after five days starts to go into shock without water. So this is not optional. It’s only a question of when. And so we’re about finding those answers from the kind of creative minds that have the ability to deliver the solutions.
Do you have a sense of how to get past that?
Ultimately, I think that if you do things that are right, they find acceptance, because they are inherently right. I don’t know that that’s necessarily the job of an individual or the job of a company. I think it is a collective movement. And I think the way you get a sense of that is what you see our younger generation doing now. They’re a lot more socially conscious. Go back only seven months, and if I had told you prior to seven or eight months ago that you could take a pen to the countries in the Middle East and just tick off the dictatorships that were going to be eliminated – I obviously jumping to a vast generalization – but the use of social media to galvanize nations largely driven by young people, and I was going to tell you it’s going to start here, and it’s going to roll across North Africa, through the Middle East, heading out towards China, and I was going to say, “And this is what’s going to happen,” I think most people in the world would have said, “I don’t think so, Justin. You’re not quite right there.” And yet, the speed of change is dizzying.
So I choose to bet on the side of the next generation coming along seem to be a lot smarter than this generation and the previous generations as to what they think should happen with the world.
18 October 2011
Freeing energy from the grid: Justin Hall-Tipping on TED.com
What would happen if we could generate power from our windowpanes? In this moving talk, entrepreneur Justin Hall-Tipping shows the materials that could make that possible, and how questioning our notion of ‘normal’ can lead to extraordinary breakthroughs. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 12:45.)
Watch Justin Hall-Tipping’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 1,000+ TEDTalks.
18 October 2011
TED introduces 10 new podcasts on iTunes
If we could recommend one superb TEDTalk about music a week, what would it be? What about business? Technology?
Here at TED.com we are always looking for new and better ways to bring together the voices of TED speakers and TED viewers. This week we are launching themed iTunes podcasts, to bring more topics of interest directly to you. Along with receiving your daily TEDTalk, subscribing to one of our specially curated podcast channels means you will receive a weekly talk recommended by the TED team in the category (or categories!) of your choice: Art, Business, Education, Health, Kids + Family, Music, News + Politics, Science + Medicine, Society + Culture and Technology. When you subscribe this week, you’ll start with 10 TEDTalks we think you’ll like.
Any other themes you’d like to see? Want more than one talk a week? Feeling love in our general direction? Leave us a comment below or write to contact@ted.com.
To start receiving talks from your favorite TED topics, subscribe now >>
17 October 2011
Learning from a barefoot movement: Bunker Roy on TED.com
In Rajasthan, India, an extraordinary school teaches rural women and men — many of them illiterate — to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors in their own villages. It’s called the Barefoot College, and its founder, Bunker Roy, explains how it works. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 19:08.)
Watch Bunker Roy’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 1,000+ TEDTalks.
15 October 2011
Archive gem: Dave Meslin on redefining apathy
Today’s gem from the TEDTalks archives: Local politics — schools, zoning, council elections — hit us where we live. So why don’t more of us actually get involved? Is it apathy? Dave Meslin says no. He identifies 7 barriers that keep us from taking part in our communities, even when we truly care. (Recorded at TEDxToronto, October 2010, in Toronto, Ontario. Duration: 7:05)
Watch Dave Meslin’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 1,000+ TEDTalks.
14 October 2011
Speaker lineup for TEDYouth (and application deadline extended)
Just announced: TEDYouth’s speaker lineup (so far) includes a MythBuster, an oceanographer turned viral video star, the “Science Babe,” and a roboticist who studies flying geckos — plus poets, musicmakers, geeks and writers — among the 20+ speakers who’ll join us November 19, 2011, at the Times Center in New York City.
The theme for TEDYouth is “Play, Learn, Build and Share.” 300 students from the New York area — and many more watching the livestream — will be inspired and challenged by these passionate speakers, who’ll inspire creativity, share mind-shifting stories, and engage the in-person and virtual audience in ways that every student deserves. Here’s the speaker lineup confirmed to date:
Adam Savage is a maker of things, building everything from spaceships to buddhas, from puppets to rifles, from sculptures to toys. He’s best known for his role as co-host of the TV show MythBusters on the Discovery channel. (Watch his talk on TED.com)
Robert Full studies cockroach legs and gecko feet. His research is helping build the perfect “distributed foot” for tomorrow’s robots, based on evolution’s ancient engineering. (Watch his TEDTalks)
David Gallo is pioneer in ocean exploration and an enthusiastic ambassador between the sea and those of us on dry land. (Watch his TEDTalks)
Brad Meltzer is a best-selling author whose writing focuses on political thrillers. Most recently, he is the co-host of the History Channel’s Decoded.
Déborah Berebichez, also known as “The Science Babe,” studies the science behind everyday life, like the physics of wearing high heels. (Watch her talk from TEDxEast)
Lemon Andersen is a Tony-winning performer and spoken-word artist who is also the subject of a newly released documentary film about his life called Lemon.
Leah Buechley is an MIT designer who mixes high and low tech to create smart and playful results.
Juan D. Martinez is a National Geographic Explorer who dedicates his energy to grassroots campaigns from health care and housing discrimination, to creating garden space where he grew up in South Central L.A.
Greg Gage has combined invertebrate preparations with off-the-shelf electronics, to create a kit that could provide insight into the inner workings of the body, specifically the brain. He is a TED2012 Fellow.
Arianne Cohen is the author of The Tall Book, where she shares the pros and cons of living life as a 6’3″ woman.
Steve Stoute is one of the most influential voices in pop culture. His work examines how hip-hop has transformed a new generation, conquered the global marketplace, and rewritten the rules of the new economy.
Jason Munshi-South is a researcher at Baruch College who studies the behavioral, ecological and evolutionary impacts of humans on the inhabitants of New York City parks.
Daniela Schiller is an assistant professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying emotional control.
Garth Sundem is a mathematician who uses mathematics to answer everyday questions, such as whether to goof or study.
Chris Anderson is the curator of the TED Conference. (Watch his TEDTalks)
Ish Islam, Justin Long-Moton and Carvens Lissaint come from New York City’s Urban Word program, and are three of its finest young poets.
If you’re a student or an educator in the New York area, apply to attend the Manhattan event — we’ve extended the application deadline until midnight October 22. Students outside the city are welcome to apply, but you might also look to see if there is a TEDxYouthDay event in your area — 85+ amazing events are happening around the world November 19-21. And many of these events will be livestreamed — including our own!
Videos from the TEDYouth program will become part of the amazing TED-Ed video archive, to be premiered in 2012.
Interested in applying to attend TEDYouth? Here’s how:
– Fill out the application (www.ted.com/TEDYouth) as best as you can
– Turn in your application by midnight, October 22.
On November 1, 2011, we will notify all applicants on the status of their applications. If you are a student who needs assistance with your application or have any questions about your application, please contact Nick Weinberg at (212) 346-9333 or nick@ted.com.
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