19 February 2009

Thomas Barnett on the post-Bush world

It's no secret that the world is on the alert for plans toward political and economic solvency. Strategic planner Thomas Barnett has released Great Powers: America and the World After Bush to address many of our most significant global crises.

In a recent interview with Dan Hare, Barnett elaborated on the book, saying the US must admit that it no longer has control over globalization -- or the global economy. Here's a quote:

As we're demonstrating now through the overhang we've created financially, I want readers to realize that we're the one country that can truly destroy globalization. That's why I think it's absolutely essential -- and why I wrote the book -- to make Americans aware that this globalization is a many-decades-long project that began with how we started this country and ultimately with how we seek to run this complex world -- with rules but not a ruler.

Also check out Barnett's 2005 talk on rethinking the US Military.

Posted by TED Staff | Permalink

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08 October 2007

Speaker updates: Craig Venter, Jeff Han

Updates from TED speakers:

After a whirlwind of media speculation over the weekend following a story by The Guardian, biologist Craig Venter (watch his TED2005 speech) will announce today at the annual meeting of his institute in San Diego that his team has built a synthetic chromosome, using lab chemicals. "A giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes", writes the newspaper.
Mr Venter's autobiography, "A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life" is scheduled to be published in two weeks.

At TED2006 computer scientist Jeff Han demonstrated his prototype of a revolutionary multitouch screen (watch video). At TED2007 he brought along a larger, wall-size version that TEDsters could try out. The interactive media wall, built by Han's company Perceptive Pixel, will be sold by Nieman Marcus in the US. Price tag: $100,000 USD.

Posted by Bruno Giussani | Permalink

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12 September 2007

Reading the books of Craig and Jim

A few days ago TED2005 speaker Craig Venter (watch his talk) announced that his lab has finished sequencing a single human's genome -- his own. At his old company, Celera, Venter worked on sequencing his genome and four other genomes all mixed together, creating an anonymous composite. He told Newsweek:

What we got this time was a diploid genome—a genome that includes both sets of chromosomes from both my parents. We were surprised at how much variation between individuals there was.
You mean there's more genetic difference between one person and the next than we previously thought?
Absolutely. It's quite comforting to me as an individualist that we're not very close to being clones of one other. (...)
Why did you choose to decode your own genome?
It goes back to the government's notion that genetics has to be secret and anonymous. But there's really nothing anonymous with your genetic sequence—it's the ultimate identifier. I thought it was showing proper leadership—to show that I don't think there's any risk in it. I don't know if there's any scientist in this field that wouldn't want to have his own genome known.
(Read the full interview)

Nobel laureate (for co-discovering the double-helix structure of DNA), and fellow TED2005 speaker (watch his talk), James Watson couldn't probably agree more: he also had his genome fully sequenced three months ago. "Project Jim", as it was called, took 67 days of sequencing time and cost around USD 1 million. (More in this Newsweek story from June.)

The raw sequencing data of both Watson and Venter are publicly available in the US National Center for Biotechnology Information's Trace Archive.

Posted by Bruno Giussani | Permalink

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12 August 2007

Wired's Anderson on Lomborg's "Cool It"

Wired editor Chris Anderson got an advance copy of Bjorn Lomborg's upcoming book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, and his summary is: read it, but don't follow his advice.

Lomborg (watch his TED2005 speech) argues that although global warming is clearly happening and is human-caused, the debate over what to do about it has been polluted by way too much bad science, non-science, inflamed rhetoric and outright fibs.

In the book, the Danish political scientist offers numerous examples of how much of the rhetoric over the effects of climate change doesn't stand up to scrutiny (for example: the most likely effect of climate change would be to increase, not decrease, the amount of ice in Antarctica).

"It's time to put the debate over whether human-driven climate change is happening behind us and instead focus on technologies to decarbonize the economy," writes Anderson. But climate change is only one of three strong reasons to do this, he adds: the others are economics (rising direct and indirect costs of oil and carbon fuels) and geopolitics (oil revenues prop up bad governments around the world).

There is a fourth reason that Anderson forgets, and which has been convincingly put forth by Al Gore in his TED2006 speech: it's a moral imperative.

Posted by Bruno Giussani | Permalink

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29 July 2007

Ed Burtynsky's beautifully monstrous "Manufactured landscapes"

If you are planning (you should) to go see Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary "Manufactured landscapes", which opened last week in theaters across the US after spending a year mesmerizing film festivals audiences and will soon arrive in Europe, make sure you get there in time, for nothing describes the scale and essence of today's globalized industry more tellingly than the opening scene: a seven-minutes tracking shot of the floor of a boundless Chinese factory, row after row after row of disciplined workers and efficient repetition that Stanley Kubrick could have filmed.

"Manufactured landscapes" is based on the work of photographer -- and 2005 TED Prize winner (watch his speech) -- Ed Burtynsky, whose camera has captured stunning images of man-transformed landscapes around the world.

Burtynsky is not much interested in micro: his focus is on vastness, on the scale of the environmental scars and transformations brought forth by industry, energy production and transportation. The documentary (trailer) is a hybrid: it's a meditation that makes very little use of words, leaving it to images and situational sounds and noises to tell the story, and at the same time a convincing illustration of the monstrosity of today's global trade. Although Baichwal shows images from Canada, California and Bangladesh -- and makes generous use of Burtynsky's TEDPrize speech -- the movie's main character is China, the "manufacture to the world": there, Burtynsky, followed by Baichwal's cameras, has shot factories, huge container ports, quarries, the Three Gorges Dam, electronics graveyards, the rapid urbanization of Shanghai. (Another great movie, recently, has shown some of this within a fictional frame: Gianni Amelio's "The Missing Star").

Burtynsky's work (see his books) can be unsettling. He extracts beautiful, sometimes poetic images from outrageous alterations and destructions of the environment. He calls himself an artist -- not a reporter -- and refrains from judging what he photographs or from politicizing it, wanting, as he said at TED, to "make people think harder about our planet's future" without suggesting them a direction. As the film goes I find myself thinking of painters: Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Salvador Dalì because, respectively, Burtynsky's photos of a computer components dump, the stacks of containers in the port of Tianjin, and the lunar shipbreaking beach of Chittagong (Bangladesh) oddly remind of their artworks.

The photographer has a rationale for aestheticizing this devastation: that's a way to gain access. Most of what Burtynsky photographs is on private land: "My work is mostly negotiation, with some photography thrown in", he said half-jokingly at the premiere in San Francisco. There is a scene in the movie where he is shown with his assistants and an interpreter trying to talk Chinese officials into opening the gates to a neverending coal yard, and the key sentence is "we will make it beautiful". Asked how he convinced factory managers to gather all their thousands of employees on a street for the picture that makes the poster of the movie (see image), Burtynsky explained that what Westerners see as a robotization of workers, the Chinese proudly consider an organizational and industrial achievement.

This discrepancy echoes throughout the documentary. It powerfully reminds us that "stuff" doesn't just happen, that it comes from somewhere, although we tend to forget or ignore it (thought of the impact of the extraction industry lately?) And it illustrates how, as we transform nature, we redefine who we are and our relationship to the planet.

Posted by Bruno Giussani | Permalink

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21 July 2007

Kevin Kelly: Technology as a teenager

Developing the ideas he laid out in his 2005 talk at TED -- where he asked, "What does technology want?" -- Kevin Kelly posts a fascinating essay in the latest edition of Edge.org. He suggests that we can think of technology as another kingdom of life -- call it the technium. And that, like all other life, it grows.

He says,

I tend to think of the technium like a child of humanity. Our job will be to train the technium, to imbue it with certain principles because, at a certain level and at a certain age, it will basically become much more autonomous than it is now. It will leave us like a teenager who goes on to live alone: although he or she will continue to interact with us and will always be part of us, we have to let it go.

To succeed in this, though, he warns:

We need to have a deep sense of our values, what we stand for. In a deep irony, the more technology advances, the less sure we are of who we are and what we stand for as a species and as individuals.

Watch Kevin Kelly's TEDTalk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, and join a wide-ranging discussion.

Posted by TED Staff | Permalink

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13 July 2007

E.O. Wilson on PBS: Why should we care if the woodpecker goes?

The last "Bill Moyers Journal", the weekly report on PBS, featured a long interview (video - transcript) by Moyers with biologist and TED Prize 2007 winner EO Wilson. The focus was very much on Wilson's career -- "No one in our time has added more to our understanding of Earth's ecology than Ed Wilson" is how Moyers described him -- but Moyers took the opportunity to also ask questions about the Encyclopedia of Life. The EOL is Wilson's TED Prize wish (video - summary - text): It's a vast project aimed at documenting all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth, and those yet to be discovered ("We're maybe today about 1/10 through the discovery of species", says Wilson). Efforts towards an EOL have been underway since January 2006, but Wilson's TED2007 speech has significantly accelerated the process, with the McArthur Foundation leading a US$ 50 million funding commitment, leading scientific institutions including Harvard University and the Smithsonian teaming up, and agency Avenue A/Razorfish creating a first design concept for the Encyclopedia and a video to explain the ambitious vision behind the initiative, using photography by Frans Lanting (watch his TED 2005 speech) and others.

Moyers is a great interviewer. At a certain point, he asks Wilson: why should we care if the woodpecker goes? I mean, we've lost---how many species have we lost?

Wilson: How many species going extinct or becoming very rare do you think it takes before you see something happening? We now know from experiments and theory that the more species you take out of an ecosystem like a pond, a patch of forest, a little bit of marine shallow environments, the more you take out the less stable it becomes. If you have a tsunami or a severe drought or a fire, it is less likely that that ecosystem, that body of species in that particular environment, is going to come back all the way. So it becomes less stable with fewer species. And then we also know it becomes less productive. In other words, it's not able to produce as many kilograms of new matter from photosynthesis and passage through the ecosystem. It's less productive. It sure is less interesting, though, isn't it? And more than that: we lose the services of these species.

Moyers: The services of these species.

Wilson: Yes, services of these species to us. Like pollination and water purification.

Moyers: That we get free from nature.

Wilson: Yeah. Here's an easy way to remember it.

Posted by Bruno Giussani | Permalink

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14 September 2005

Web comics? NYT says "Ick." TED says "Slick!"

The New York Times may be cranky about the new trend in web comics. (They question the distinction between web comics and animation, and bemoan the “added headaches.”) But those of us who recognize that emerging media are, by definition, works in progress, find the new form fascinating. Our favorite: The Right Number by Scott McCloud (TED2005).

Posted by June Cohen | Permalink

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