24 April 2009

Picking apart the puzzle of racism in elections: Nate Silver on TED.com

Stats whiz Nate Silver suggests answers to controversial questions about race in politics, such as: Did Obama's race hurt his votes in some places? Stats and myths collide in this fascinating talk that ends with a remarkable insight on how town planning can promote tolerance. (Recorded at TED@PalmSprings 2009, February 2009, in Palm Springs, California. Duration: 09:17.)

Watch Nate Silver's talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks.

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07 February 2009

Interview with Jason Hackenwerth, balloon artist

The TED Blog sat down with Jason Hackenwerth, Palm Springs' balloon artist-in-residence to talk about the challenge of being an artist.

What's your biggest challenge, as an artist?

Getting your work recognized is the biggest and hardest part. I think it requires a certain kind of venue or a certain kind of persistence, and making the work even though it may not be seen or it may be rejected or there may be obstacles to getting it out there. And then once you are getting it out there, or are in the process of trying to do that, how do you pay for your living, how do you pay for the materials in order to get it out there if no one's paying you to do that. So in order to have money to make the work, if the work isn't paying for itself, first you have to find a creative way to pay yourself or earn money so you can make this work.

Why balloons?

I was going to art school. My mother taught me how to twist balloons for street performance. Originally she made me a clown outfit and I made poodles and swords on the street for kids. And I started doing that in '89.

I was doing that for years and years. Even just this past January, you know, from time to time I had to go out to Times Square and twist balloons in freezing weather for grocery money. There have been years when I've made great money with installations around the world. A lot of times when I'm doing events that are fantastic, I'm not necessarily getting paid. But the exposure is good.

So the balloons are something that I'd been using for years, and I had very intimate knowledge of this material, but with a background in fine art and a masters in painting and a curious mind, using these balloons with a lot of down time, I started using them in the subway in New York City. I was amazed at peoples' response to them. I realized that I was on to something, and a way of making people smile and feel so happy.

There's something magical, but also impermanent, about balloons.

They're temporary. They are. Which is nice in a way because it creates this metaphor, and an urgency, and a rarity, which I think is just like you and just like me. If someone wants to know you they'd better get over here and know you. Once they're gone, there might be a snapshot or something, but we have a limited time.

Photo: TED / Michael Brands

Posted by Matthew Trost | Permalink

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06 February 2009

Palm Springs only: Meet Seth Aylmer and Jose Serrano-Reyes of TrustArt.org

Seth Aylmer and Jose Serrano-Reyes took the TEDDIY stage today to tell us about TrustArt.org, a new organization whose goal is to bring a microfinance model into the art world. As says their website, "Artists introduce their big ideas for works of social art on this site. Shares to fund each project are immediately up for grabs, and are offered henceforth at one dollar per share. The shares are redeemable in a public auction of the finished work one year later. The proceeds of the auction are shared 50/50 between the artist and the network of shareholders, aligning the two groups."

The TED Blog talked to them just after Friday's TEDDIY session:

Let's say you got an extra minute on the TEDDIY stage. What would you say?

We would have talked about some of the actual projects. You can see many of our projects on our site. There's a documentary starring everybody in the world that's going to debut at Grand Central Station. It features 700,000 photographs. They created an algorithm so they can represent 6.7 billion people. They'll play it for about 12 days in a row to represent everybody that's on the face of this planet. There's a worldwide commercial campaign launching in Ghana and all over the world to spread the idea of bamboo bikes and manufacturing them. They're trying to spread the idea that people should be riding plants. One artist is creating a home completely out of garbage. An artist is working on a perfumed water fountain. She's going to Mexico and bringing all her shareholders into the project. There's a performance artist doing healing rituals at the most polluted sites.

What do you say to the cynics?

Watch. Sit back and watch. These are cool projects. This isn't for everybody, but keeping an open mind for now -- This is the time to try things out that are not the most straightforward. This is definitely a risk. We're taking a risk ourselves. But it's worth trying, whatever this is. And for the cynics ... we have an ad agency on board that's helping us. [Laughs] This is a way for people to propose their big idea and see if this microfinance model can help make it a reality.

What's Gawker going to say to this?

[Laughs] Gawker needs to renew themselves. This "creative underclass" bullshit is not going to last much longer. It's like people sniping from the commenting section, and it paralyzes you. If people read Gawker -- it makes people think that everybody is a hater and that if you try anything in this world, somebody's going to hate it and you're going to fail, and it's going to appear on Gawker. It paralyzes creativity. It paralyzes people taking creative risks. And, whatever. Nick Denton and I know each other, so ... he knows how I feel about it. If there's people sniping and showing cynicism, we'll turn that into a beautiful thing. We've done that before. We're taking this idea of turning a financial market into a beautiful thing.

Photo: TED / Michael Brands

Posted by Matthew Trost | Permalink

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06 February 2009

If Arthur Benjamin got an extra minute on stage ...

The TED Blog caught up with Arthur Benjamin after his talk on why we should stop mandating that students learn calculus in school -- to ask him what he would have done with an extra minute on stage. Here's what he had to say:

Arthur Benjamin: If I had an extra minute, I'd also talk about how we shouldn't only show the mathematics that's useful -- and statistics is useful for being an educated consumer and citizen. We could replace a lot of the drudgerous mathematics that's being taught with math that's purely fun, with no real promise of "you're going to use this," but just "this is beautiful stuff."

You can go ape over patterns in Pascal's triangle, in the Fibonacci numbers, in chaos, in fractals. These things that are just positively inspirational. We don't make -- I mean, I'm listening to this music. It's inspirational. But I didn't have to be drilled with how to draw my notes properly and learn all this music theory before I got exposed to that kind of music. I think the same sort of thing could happen in mathematics.

Why not give them a taste of beautiful mathematics in addition to the useful stuff?

Photo: TED / Michael Brands

Posted by Matthew Trost | Permalink

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