A note from TED Prize winner Jill Tarter…

At TED last February, Chris Anderson told the audience that without a White Knight stepping up to support my SETI observing program on the Allen Telescope Array, the antennas would soon be put into a safe hibernation mode in preparation for shutting down the array. That’s because our University of California Berkeley partner was no longer able to find federal and state funds to pay for operations of the Hat Creek Observatory where the array was built. No White Knight materialized; hibernation commenced April 15. Since April, the cryogenics have been kept running to protect the delicate low noise amplifiers in the innovative feed/receiver systems on the antennas, physical security has been maintained, our extraordinary computing equipment has been stored in our Mountain View lab for safekeeping, but the weeds on site grew unchecked, and no data were taken from the sky.

But we never lost the dream of re-starting. Recovery was a three-part process: first, working with UC Berkeley to forestall the immediate site remediation activities that would be required at the cessation of the US Forest Service land use permit; second, find a new task for the array and a partner to maintain and operate it while sharing time with SETI; and third, find support for my SETI team to restore our observing capabilities and once again begin exploring the sky. It hasn’t been easy, and the future is still a bit uncertain, but as of September 1, we were back on site, greasing antenna bearings, reinstalling computers, rewriting software to accommodate new modes of operating, fixing a frozen compressor on the old HVAC system, and yes, mowing down the weeds. We have a short-term contract to assess the utility of the Allen Telescope Array as part of the US Air Force’s important space situational awareness mission, and we hope this will turn into a long-term partnership. We are working with the Forest Service to have the land use permit transferred. We also experimented with crowdfunding to raise the money needed for my team to do the work involved in getting the array and our SonATA signal detection system up and running again -– thousands of wonderful SETI Stars from around the world came to our aid on SETIStars.org, meeting the 40-day funding challenge we set -– WOW!

In a delightful coincidence, we were finally ready to relaunch our SETI exploration of the 1,235 exoplanet candidates announced last February by the Kepler mission (the worlds that we had been targeting prior to hibernation), and the date of our relaunch was yesterday; the opening day of the First Kepler Science Conference! We started observing again and the Kepler team announced the discovery of Kepler 22b, the first Earth-size planet in orbit within the habitable zone around a star like our Sun -– not quite Earth 2.0, but getting close. And by the way, they also gave us another 1000+ exoplanet candidates to explore.

So for the next two years or so, we know exactly what we need to do, and where we want to look. Planets are real, planets are plentiful, and some of the systems are starting to look a bit familiar. What a great time to be doing SETI! Federal and institutional funding sources have brought the search for life elsewhere in the galaxy to an exciting threshold. My astrobiology colleagues will be trying to search for biosignatures from exoplanets circling other stars, and at the Center for SETI Research we are moving forward with the public’s quest to know whether there is any intelligent, technological life on these worlds. As always, the funding for the SETI effort needs to be found: about $100,000 a month, every month, every year. We are going to repurpose and evolve SETIStars.org to allow supporters to more closely follow our progress, to interact with us in ways that keep them involved and motivated. The setiQuest community that launched as part of my 2009 TED Prize wish is already helping us with the technical challenges of our work. This is humanity’s search, and we cannot do it without global support — some of which I hope will come from the TED community.

Having been on the TED stage, it’s like introductions precede you. People know about you before meeting you in a way I have not experienced before. People say, “I’ve seen your TEDTlk!” Oh, OK then, I don’t have to introduce myself! People already know answers to the first questions, so that we can move right on to the important things that we want to talk about.

What have you been doing since your first TEDTalk? What’s new?

My 2009 TEDTalk on surgery was primarily about abdominal surgery and making it better. Since then, we have been going from hair follicles to toenails, looking at all the different places in the body where we can bring robotic surgery. It is a really interesting and fun thought process, and it led to my current thinking, which is what I tried to articulate in my TEDMED talk yesterday: Places where we are looking for a gap between what we can do currently with our existing technologies and what we’d like to be able to do for the patients IF ONLY — if only we had better diagnostic tools, if only we had better therapeutics, better drugs. Putting everything into that framework allows you to really make a decision on where technology like robotics could make a real difference in patients’ lives.

You were an engineer for a while and then you went to medical school — was it a complete change? And are you looking forward to moving on and taking the next stage, and if so what is it?

I would actually not say that it was so much of a complete change, because I took my engineering knowledge with me to med school, and I applied it. One of the things I talked about in my TEDMED talk yesterday was how experts gather a lot of expertise and they get a worldview that is very, very good at filtering between what they do and what they see as irrelevant. And once you’ve build up that filter for a while, you also get very good at filtering out disruptive technologies, things that don’t currently fit the way you think treatment should happen. Thinking about that, eventually I will be stale in what I am doing. I will be too highly trained to be able to be responsive to new things that will happen. So I will need to retrain in some way. I don’t know what it will be. I still feel like I am on a steep part of a learning curve, and you know, in medicine, there is always more to learn.

What’s happening with your green house, which you gave a TED U talk about?

We moved in! We’re doing a lot of stuff in permaculture and landscape gardening, and finally had our rainwater caching system, and the greywater wetlands, so everything is up and running. We’ve been in the house for almost a year now; at a year, I am going to analyze all the data on the house for the first year, and I’ll update the blog at that point with: ‘Well, I had these assumptions on what the house was going to be like, and what is it now compared to the assumptions.’ It will be really interesting to do analysis after a year and project what the house is going to be like. Will I get the payback that I calculated in my talk?
One of the interesting things for me is, I saw all kinds of projections and analysis, but nobody ever closed the loop and actually said how much did it really save you compared to what you had estimated.

How does it feel to live in that house? :)

It’s lovely. It certainly has something to do with sustainability and the feel-good aspect of it. And it is the space we’ve created for our family and it is designed the way we like to live.

[From August 2, 2011, 5:21pm] The next phase of setiQuest, the result of Jill Tarter’s 2009 TED Prize wish, will be unveiled in 2012. It will allow anyone, anywhere to contribute to the search for signals of intelligent life in the universe. But in the meantime, tough economic times have forced a major extraterrestrial data collector to lie dormant.

In April 2011, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) was placed into a state of hibernation due to a funding shortfall. Today, the ATA’s 42 radio telescopes are on stand-by, unable to scan the sky; the array can no longer hunt for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations and insight into the nature of our cosmic origin.

To get the ATA back online, the SETI Institute is making an appeal to the power of human collaboration. Last month, the crowdfunding site SETIstars launched to recognize and rally support from the community to help fund the SETI Institute’s operations and that of the Allen Telescope Array.

The first fundraising goal is $200,000, and with four days to go, they’re almost there. If you’d like to help get the array searching again, learn more >>

– Casson Rosenblatt

The company he founded, the carpet manufacturer Interface, “set what may well be the highest sustainability benchmark of any industrial company,” writes Joel Makower in a tribute on Greenbiz.com. Anderson led the company to think about every step along the manufacturing chain, down to their standing offer to recycle used carpet at the end of its life.

In the past ten years, Anderson delivered more than 1,000 speeches on the business case for sustainability. His talk at TED2009 has been seen hundreds of thousands of times and translated into 17 languages. He often ended his talks (as he did his TEDTalk) with this poem: “Tomorrow’s Child,” written by one of his employees, Glenn Thomas.

Tomorrow’s Child
By Glenn Thomas

Without a name; an unseen face
and knowing not your time nor place
Tomorrow’s Child, though yet unborn,
I met you first last Tuesday morn.

A wise friend introduced us two,
and through his shining point of view
I saw a day that you would see;
a day for you, but not for me

Knowing you has changed my thinking,
for I never had an inkling
That perhaps the things I do
might someday, somehow, threaten you

Tomorrow’s Child, my daughter-son
I’m afraid I’ve just begun
To think of you and of your good,
Though always having known I should.

Begin I will to weigh the cost
of what I squander; what is lost
If ever I forget that you
will someday come to live here too.

Today, Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe’s book Practical Wisdom hits bookstores and ereaders. In an intimate talk at TED’s office this winter, Schwartz shares a few big questions from this book (video is embedded above) — and you can download this sample chapter to learn more.

Watch Barry Schwartz’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 800+ TEDTalks.

Onstage at TED2009, Tod Machover talked about his boundary-shaking musical projects (including the gorgeous Hyperscore demoed by the composer Dan Ellsey) — and hinted about a “really crazy project” called Death and the Powers, a blend of opera and robotics that was going to turn the entire stage into a robotic musical instrument, using new performance tech from the MIT Media Lab. Next week, the robotic opera premieres live, playing Sept. 24-26 in Monte Carlo, Monaco. US dates will follow in 2011; follow on Twitter for more details. Gearlog might have put it best: they call it “The Singularity. In Opera Form. With Robots.”

Answer this question in no more than 100 words, and you could win a pass to TEDGlobal, happening July 21-24 in Oxford, UK. TEDGlobal 2009 sponsor IBM is offering the pass to one lucky Wired UK reader. From the offer:

For inspiration, visit www.ibm.com/think/uk, then mail your entry, along with your name, address and phone number to wiredcompetitions@gmail.com, with the word TED in the subject line. The competition closes at 9am BST on July 15, 2009.

Get full details >>

See the full program lineup for TEDGlobal 2009 >>

Please note: this competition is only open to residents of the UK and Eire. Terms and conditions >>

Below is the content from the original blog post:

Our posting this morning of Chris Hughes’ mini-TEDTalk from TED@PalmSprings has prompted a flurry of aggrieved responses [GIF] from the open source software community.

The talk was a two-minute demo of “augmented reality” software (in which real-world video is combined with computer-generated graphics). Hughes showed it working inside a browser using Flash and won enthusiastic applause from the live audience. But when we posted the video today, commenters felt he was claiming too much personal credit for the software and had not mentioned the two development projects on which it was based, Papervision 3D and the FLARToolkit.

To be fair to Chris:

+ He had not come to TED prepared to give a demo. Instead, he had been showing the software privately, but the excitement it generated prompted a request for an impromptu demo. In two minutes, there is not a lot of time to give out a credit-roll.

+ In an interview he gave right afterward, he acknowledged the toolkit on which his demo was based, describing it as “unbelievably awesome.”

+ On his blog, he has also clarified the extent of his contributions, and has published the code.

Given the controversy, he has agreed that it makes sense to remove the video from the Talks section of the TED.com and repost a new version here on the blog with attributions added. Here it is:

His efforts have brought the excitement and potential of augmented reality to a much wider audience, and We are eager to showcase this technology in more depth at a future TED. Our thanks to all who’ve helped us navigate through this issue.

Sincerely,
Chris Anderson
TED Curator

We’re always interested in creative ways to take notes on TED and TEDTalks (check out Autodesk’s BigViz sketchbook, and everythink’s stream-of-consciousness sketches, from TED2008). If you’ve got some TED notes to share, email contact@ted.com or make a comment below.