14 December 2009

Q&A with Loretta Napoleoni: The ever-changing face of terrrorism

At TEDGlobal, Loretta Napoleoni gave a fascinating talk on her exclusive opportunity to speak with members of the secretive Italian terrorist group, the Red Brigades, and the startling insight she's gained over decades of studying the economics of terrorism. Before her talk posted, she chatted with the TEDBlog and shared a little more of her unusual knowledge of the world of terrorism.

The direct interactions you had with the Red Brigades were fascinating. Since that time, have you had that kind of direct interaction with other terrorist groups?

Oh, yes. I wrote a book on Iraq. In fact, it’s called Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation. To write that book, which came out in 2005, I actually interviewed members of the Al-Zarqawi group. These were people who were very close to insiders in Iraq. I interviewed people in Amman, and some of them had met him before when he was growing up, some of them had met in prison, and it all helped me to get an idea of his personality. I also interviewed people in Spain who came mostly from Syria and they were part of the Salafi movement, which was also close to this group.

Of course, these interviews were conducted in a different way from the Red Brigades interviews. I interviewed the Red Brigades when their armed struggle was finished, so I did those interviews in prison. Obviously, the atmosphere was very different because I had a legal kind of access. I was allowed inside the prison where I was allowed to talk to them, whereas the interviews with the Al-Zarqawi group were done in secret, often through an intermediary who also was a translator. A lot of interviews were conducted by email.

The interesting thing is that there was a sort of personality profile that became evident. Now, I am not saying that there is one single type of individual who is a better type of terrorist than another. What I am saying is that the circumstances that push certain individuals over the edge, to become terrorists, are generally very, very similar. There are of course, people that resist this kind of temptation and people that don’t. I found a lot of similarity between Al-Zarqawi and his inner group and some members of the Red Brigades, for example. That, from a psychological point of view is very interesting.

Now, a lot of armed organizations will talk to me, and I have had contact with others in a less detailed and in-depth context. Once you have been allowed to discuss certain issues with one armed organization, then a sort of trust is built, and so other armed organizations will talk to you.

In order to establish trust, did you sometimes have to withhold information? Essentially, are there things you know that you can’t tell the world?

Not really, because they will never tell you anything that they shouldn’t tell you. The interviews are always conducted about issues that belong to the past or that are already known. They’ll never tell you confidential information, because they don’t know you.

Also, I wouldn’t ask these kinds of questions. I would never ask, “Did you actually mastermind the bombing of the Amman hotels in 2005?” I would never do that, because that would put me in a very awkward situation. I’m more interested in the way they actually operate and also in the root causes and ideology of their group. They’re very happy to talk about that. They want to tell you why they’re doing what they’re doing.

I never met one single member of an armed organization that was a psychopath, somebody that really wanted to kill for the pleasure of killing or somebody that was motivated only by vengeance. I never met anybody like that. There was always a very strong political background, and this is what they want to talk to you about.

Another TED speaker, Diane Benscoter, talks about her time in a cult and there are moments when you are talking about the people who make good terrorists that sound very similar to what she describes when talking about people who make good cult members. Do you see similarities here as well?

Yes. I think generally the heads of terrorist groups are very, very smart people. They’re also great manipulators. I would presume that cult leaders are identical. These sort of individuals are very strong, they have very strong charisma.

I have a story that I think is very interesting from this psychological perspective. While I was interviewing the Red Brigades, I met this guy who had learned how to paint in jail and showed me a few of his paintings. The paintings were beautiful. You looked at the paintings and couldn’t believe that the person who did them had also killed people. There was a certain kind of sensitivity, there was also a certain kind of peaceful message in these paintings. So, I became interested and spoke a lot with him, and I found him to be an incredibly gentle person. You would not have believed that this guy was actually a terrorist. Then, later on, I met somebody else from his specific group, recruited more or less at the same time, and this other member of the Red Brigades told me that everybody within that group knew that this guy had been lured into terrorism by the leader of that region. The leader of that region was a very charismatic individual and he realized that that guy was easily manipulated, and he used him.

It was quite a sad story from the human point of view. The life of this individual was now completely destroyed, because he had to spend over twenty years in jail when he really is, basically a non-violent individual. Later on, he realized that. He realized his mistakes and he told me, “If I could go back, I would never do what I did again.” Now, very few of them actually said that.

Really?

Oh, absolutely. Most of them won’t say that at all.

So, the ideology is so strong for most members that they don’t regret violent behavior?

Well, I don’t think it’s the ideology. I think that anybody can become a terrorist. That’s my point of view. But, not everybody can actually kill. In order to reach that level, you have to be deeply convinced. So very few people -- even when they give up the armed struggle, end up in jail or whatever and abandon that part of their life -- very few question their position, because if they did their lives would be totally destroyed.

Now the individual I was speaking about from the Red Brigades was a particularly gentle and sensitive individual. I think he could have been easily manipulated by his sect. All he wanted was to be part of something, to belong to something, to be accepted by the others. He found a way to achieve all of these goals, and it happened to be the Red Brigades. It could have been anything. It could have been any sect that fulfilled these goals for him.

What are some of the most economically powerful terrorist groups in the world today and what are some of the traits they have in common?

Well, today I think the most powerful group is the Taliban. Al Qaeda is also very powerful, but the Taliban is slowly but surely taking back Afghanistan, so that there is now a sort of mix that exists there of both Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Another very powerful group is the Colombian FARC, which has merged with the Colombian cartel.

The new type of terrorist we’re seeing today is a terrorist that is linked to narcotics traffickers, and whose primary source of economic power is actually narcotics. That’s different from 9/11. You see, before 9/11 it was very different because you had somebody like Osama Bin Laden, who was very wealthy and had sponsors -- he had money diverted from the Gulf to fund Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was born in the 1980s, a sort of offspring of the first mujahideen. There was a different history there, and funding primarily came from sponsors or people who were a part of the organization and who were very wealthy. Today, we’re dealing with a completely different animal. Now, we have this mix of classic criminal behavior and terrorism and that is actually quite dangerous. These guys are not only fighting for an ideal or to achieve a certain goal, but also to maintain a certain kind of economy within the criminal economy. This also makes them harder and harder to track down.

The day that the Taliban manages to re-conquer Afghanistan, hypothetically, they are not going to become something different. And now, they are criminals and not only in the sense of being terrorists. That is a degeneration of the criminal and terrorist models, linked of course to globalization, that I think is going to make things much worse in the future.

17 November 2009

Science-inspired design: Mathieu Lehanneur on TED.com

Naming science as his chief inspiration, Mathieu Lehanneur shows a selection of his ingenious designs -- an interactive noise-neutralizing ball, an antibiotic course in one layered pill, asthma treatment that reminds kids to take it, a living air filter, a living-room fish farm and more. (Recorded at TEDGlobal University 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 18:04)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/8B

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13 November 2009

The surprising spread of "Idol" TV: Cynthia Schneider on TED.com

Cynthia Schneider looks at two international "American Idol"-style shows -- one in Afghanistan, and one in the United Arab Emirates -- and shows the surprising effect that these reality-TV competitions are creating in their societies. (Recorded at TEDGlobal University 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 5:38)

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11 November 2009

Photographing the landscape of oil: Edward Burtynsky on TED.com

In stunning large-format photographs, Edward Burtynsky follows the path of oil through modern society, from wellhead to pipeline to car engine -- and then beyond to the projected peak-oil endgame. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 3:40)

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09 November 2009

The refugees of boom-and-bust: Cameron Sinclair on TED.com

At TEDGlobal U, Cameron Sinclair shows the unreported cost of real estate megaprojects gone bust: thousands of migrant construction laborers left stranded and penniless. To his fellow architects, he says there is only one ethical response. (Recorded at TEDGlobal University 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 3:06)

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30 October 2009

Giving the euphonium a new voice: Matthew White on TED.com

The euphonium, a tuba-like musical instrument, is rarely heard outside of traditional brass bands. Young euph prodigy Matthew White uses hip-hop rhythms and a wild new vocal technique to bring a fresh sound to this underappreciated horn. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 2:21)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/5l

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28 October 2009

The year I was homeless: Becky Blanton on TED.com

Becky Blanton planned to live in her van for a year and see the country, but when depression set in and her freelance job ended, her camping trip turned into homelessness. In this intimate talk, she describes her experience of becoming one of America's working homeless. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 07:10)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/4U

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23 October 2009

Navigating our global future: Ian Goldin on TED.com

As globalization and technological advances bring us hurtling towards a new integrated future, Ian Goldin warns that not all people may benefit equally. But, he says, if we can recognize this danger, we might yet realize the possibility of improved life for everyone. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 7:07)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/4F

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22 October 2009

1.3 million reasons to re-invent the syringe: Marc Koska on TED.com

Reuse of syringes, all too common in under-funded clinics, kills 1.3 million each year. Marc Koska clues us in to this devastating global problem with facts, photos and hidden-camera footage. He shares his solution: a low-cost syringe that can't be used twice. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 4:46)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/4D

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21 October 2009

Lead like the great conductors: Itay Talgam on TED.com

An orchestra conductor faces the ultimate leadership challenge: creating perfect harmony without saying a word. In this charming talk, Itay Talgam demonstrates the unique styles of six great 20th-century conductors, illustrating crucial lessons for all leaders. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 20:52)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/4C

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16 October 2009

The 4 ways sound affects us: Julian Treasure on TED.com

Playing sound effects both pleasant and awful, Julian Treasure shows how sound affects us in four significant ways. Listen carefully for a shocking fact about noisy open-plan offices. (Recorded at TEDGlobal University, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 5:47)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/48

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15 October 2009

Q&A with Rory Sutherland: An advertarian's take on the world

The TED Blog caught up with ad man Rory Sutherland the evening before we posted his TEDTalk. Drawing on the work of behavioral economists, Nobel Prize winners and others, he talked at length about his personal philosophy of Advertarianism, about President Obama and the healthcare debate, and even threw in some analysis on the future of media use and advertising. Not bad, considering it was well past bedtime in the UK.

You call yourself an "Advertarian." Would you like to explain what that means?

Now, there’s a thought experiment that behavioral economists perform, one in which a man invents a brilliant new way for scanning X-rays -- so you can do cancer scans and X-rays at one tenth of the previous cost and at twice the speed -- and everybody heralds him as a hero. Then, it’s revealed that there isn’t any clever technology. All he does is scan the X-rays and then email them off to the Philippines, where highly trained, low-cost employees do the actual scanning of the X-rays manually, just as before, only at one tenth of the salary. And the argument that’s used by economists is that people are absolutely scandalized by this, everyone thinks is this absolutely outrageous, and "What a terrible man!" Yet, bizarrely, the effects are identical. The effect of offshoring to a low-wage economy is the same as a technological innovation. Indistinguishable. You might even argue that the second course is better, at least if you’re a Filipino in need of a reasonably well-paid job. But, interestingly, we judge them morally on a very different level. We’re very subjective about that, and the means and the intentionality make a big difference.

And I have a parallel example, where I say, “Imagine there’s a device that costs about 50p per household, per year, and if you install it in your house, it decreases the chance of a house fire by 30 percent.” And everybody goes, “That’s an absolutely brilliant idea. I want to buy one of those. And, actually, I think the government should pay for it and they should issue one to all households.” But, it’s not technically a device: it’s actually a TV commercial. To run the ad costs about 50p per household, per year, and it actually decreases the likelihood of household fires by 30 percent. There is a TV commercial that’s had precisely that effect. And then people go, “No, that’s not quite the same.” And the question you have to ask is, “Why is it not the same?” In other words, why do we regard solutions that involve, to a small extent, tampering with our heads or just supplying information or supplying persuasion ... why do we regard those solutions as lesser value than those that involve technology, for example?

It’s not that marketing-driven or advertising-led solutions can solve everything. That’s absolutely not true. What seems strange to me, though, is that people don’t at least try them first. Instead, governments try to solve their problems by compulsion. My view is that we should try and solve the problem by persuasion, and if that fails we can try compulsion or harder-level nudging. For this reason, I think the book Nudge is one of the most important books of the last five to ten years.

One of the small successes of my TEDTalk is that it’s now Conservative Party policy to spend no more money on speed cameras, but to spend the money on those vehicle-activated signs instead. So, I’ve had a small amount of advertarian success, with at least the prospective next government here in Britain. I’m purely philosophical about this. I’m not an advertarian in the sense that I believe that all problems can be solved this way. But, I think it’s best just to try.

Technology makes for easier persuasion and nudging -- what B.J. Fogg at Stanford calls persuasive technology -- and makes it far more potent. So, the British government’s Central Office of Information, they’ve said, “Look we’ve tried advertising with seatbelts for years. It didn’t really work. And so, we made it illegal not to wear a seatbelt and everybody wore one.” It’s interesting, of course, that at the time when we made it compulsory to wear seatbelts, there wasn’t the technology cheaply available to make a car go “bing” for 60 seconds, or even indefinitely, if you didn’t put your seatbelt on. Now, I would argue that making it a legal requirement that all new cars go “bing” for 90 seconds if you don’t put your seatbelt on when you drive off is a nudge, but it’s not really an infringement of liberties.

Senior people in government spend years getting their hands on very large budgets with which they want to do very big things, and quite often there’s a disproportionality, as the things that make an enormous difference are actually quite trivial. For example, Terminal 5 at Heathrow is magnificent. As a piece of architecture, it’s fabulous. But, the signage is dreadful. It’s a Kafka-esque nightmare of really appalling directions and confusion.

All large organizations need a Director of Trivia or a Director of Detail -- a very senior person with a large budget and great powers, but whose job is actually to take care of little irritants. Most board directors and government ministers, their sense of self-aggrandizement is too great for them to actually get involved here. You haven’t spent all those years becoming a government minister to improve form design, yet what Nudge would say is that if you want people to follow your policy, designing really attractive forms and interfaces is probably a better way of achieving your end than spending loads of time legislating or creating expensive incentives. The world needs people going around and sorting out little interface issues. If pelican crossings (crosswalks) had “Cancel” buttons, they would be more efficient. The thing is, you press the button and then realize there’s a gap in the traffic, you jaywalk across, and then all the cars have to stop for no one to cross the street. All you need there is a simple “Cancel” button so that if you decide to make a run for it you don’t stop all the traffic. And there are hundreds more little problems like these that are unnecessary irritants in our daily lives.

The Advertarian philosophy doesn’t solve all this; it’s just a little thing I made up. But, I do think that you should always try to solve a problem first through voluntary means or persuasive means before resorting to heavy-handed compulsion.

When you bring up advertising and government, the first thing that comes to mind is President Obama’s campaign last year. What did you think of his campaigning style, as well as what he’s doing in government right now? Is there anything you think he should be doing differently?

It’s very interesting. I think he ran a brilliant campaign using both social media and mass media. It’s actually a much more conventional advertising campaign than a lot of people have said. There was an enormous amount of money spent on advertising. And, it was interesting that to some extent he portrayed himself as the underdog, even though he was better funded than anyone. He played that off very cleverly. Because he wasn’t a long-time politician, he could play this game of “little old me” when actually, he had bucketloads of money to campaign with.

What’s peculiar in this case is that he’s failed to take the American people with him on health reform in the way that he undoubtedly co-opted them and created a popular movement around his election campaign. It must be remembered that, in the United States, there are immensely powerful lobby groups who weren’t in action against his election in the same way.

But, Obama did have the amazing effect of getting the British to rise up in defense of the National Health Service. The British are mostly critical of the health service and spend a lot of time complaining about it, but when various things came out in the United States more or less suggesting that we have committee meetings to decide whether you die or not, people found that such a ridiculous misrepresentation of the situation that they leapt to the defense of the system.

Now, just bear in mind that by European standards I’m quite right wing. Not by American standards, but by European standards I’m thought to be quite libertarian and quite keen on free-market solutions. But, there is a simple fact that, strangely, you can’t point out to Americans, which is that when you go to Canada, it’s not like everybody’s dying. They pay vastly less for prescription drugs, because they’re purchased centrally.

Incidentally, what no one actually says is that the United States spends an insane amount of money on health. A brutally statistical discovery, as found by the statistician Robin Hanson, claims that, above a certain level of expenditure, there is no correlation between money spent on healthcare and longevity. So, actually, when you spend above a certain amount per person on health, longevity doesn’t actually improve. And, Hanson’s theory is that excessive intervention by medicine outweighs the benefits of overfunding.

Most people think that the more you spend on healthcare, the better your healthcare is, but it’s not true. Now, it’s not that every heart surgeon is going, “Oh yes, a couple more of these heart operations and I’ll be able to pay for a yacht.” Rather, if you’ve spent 40 years practicing heart surgery and becoming a brilliant heart surgeon, you are unusually biased towards seeing solutions in heart surgery, just as legislators are overly biased to seeing solutions in legislation and people who are engineers are overly biased to seeing the solutions to the world’s ills lying in engineering. And so, overmedication and excessive intervention by doctors in the United States is probably a downside of how much money is poured into healthcare. The bias to intervention is always there in a case where you can either do nothing or do something. People always prefer something. The doctor’s recommendation of “Actually, I’d just leave it. It’ll probably go away,” is never one with which people are comfortable.

However, the inordinate amount of money spent on healthcare in the United States has enormous spillover benefit for other countries. The research and pharmaceutical development that’s funded by the large percentage of GDP devoted to US healthcare ultimately benefits the rest of the world enormously. So, in some ways, as a Brit, I would be quite keen for the United States to carry on with its current barking level of health expenditure.

The fundamental problem that Obama has in this -- and the British also had this for the previous 100 years -- is that when you’re top dog nation, you don’t think that anything could be better anywhere else. I mean, if France had come to us and said, “Actually, you ought to drink wine and not beer,” we would never have accepted that. The very idea comes across as unpatriotic. I’ve met Americans who themselves are quite chippy about the United States, but if you ever go and actually say, “I think your restrictions on drinking out-of-doors are a bit silly,” they get quite jumpy about it. In truth, there are 50 million Italians who sit outside drinking wine, in the open air, and their incidence of alcoholism is probably lower than the US.

I think Paul Romer has the answer, in truth. I thought Paul Romer’s speech at TED was actually magnificent. The idea of charter cities: absolutely fascinating. To change something at a national level is impossible. What you need to do is create cities that operate on new models and new institutions, and trial the new thing at that scale and then, effectively, let it spread outwards. That’s an interesting question, whether you should try it state by state in some form.

Is your advice to Obama that he should sit and have a talk with Paul Romer?

Yes, exactly that. I think so.

It’s a fundamental question about making change happen. In truth, much as people in central government love to issue strategy because it’s what they’re there for, a lot of important change happens from the bottom up. Where Britain’s conservatives have been quite good is in looking round the world for good ideas, in the sense that there are some very good Swedish ideas on education involving starting your own school that they’re currently looking at.

14 October 2009

Life lessons from an ad man: Rory Sutherland on TED.com

Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider “real” value -- and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 16:39)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/40

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08 October 2009

Q&A with Beau Lotto: On seeing yourself see

Neuroscientist and artist Beau Lotto joined the TED Blog for a short Q&A after his 2009 talk from TEDGlobal. He covered some of the fascinating, perception-bending projects he wasn't able to cover in his talk -- an iPhone game that substitutes sound for sight; a new way for composers to experience their music synesthetically -- and detailed an ingenious education project that gives children the chance to participate in real science experiments.

I see your studio has created a game called Bing Bong. Tell me about that.

Bing Bong is an iPhone game. It's a video game in sound. In the game, the player has to catch a ball, but they must do so without seeing it. They must position a paddle to catch the ball, but they can only hear the ball falling, relative to where the paddle is.

Hopefully, Bing Bong is fun in and of itself -- all of my projects have to work at the immediate level, whether that be aesthetic or fun -- but, more deeply, it's a game that's about getting people to experience the process of having an experience, of seeing themselves see. In doing that, people can better understand how intimately tied they are to their environment, and their interaction with their environment -- in other words, their ecology.

How does Bing Bong fit in with your wider research?

Bing Bong is part of a larger program of research, which is sensory substitution or sensory augmentation.

When I say to people that the light that falls onto our eyes is meaningless, people find that really hard to believe. You open your eyes, you look around, you see nothing but meaning; you ask yourself, How could it be meaningless? But that's of course because you're not seeing the light that falls onto your eye, but your brain's perception of that light. You're seeing that light in the context of the millions of years of evolution that our brains have gone through.

But if I translate that light into sound, and you instead hear the visual information, you directly experience the meaninglessness of it.

Then, through interacting with the world through sensory substitution, you experience yourself literally making sense of it. You begin to hear patterns. Those patterns start having a meaning for you. You're actually an observer of yourself as you do this.

Through sensory substitution, we can create prosthetics for the visually impaired -- to make the world navigable. But we can also do things like make music from color, which is an element that I touched on during my TEDTalk.

The brain almost doesn't seem to care what type of information it receives -- it just starts decoding any information it is given. Do I have that right?

The most fundamental thing the brain does is it evolves to evolve. It adapts to adapt. The brain is wonderfully plastic. Now, it's a plastic of different levels of flexibility -- the brain couldn't function without some stability as well.

The reason why we survive in the world is not because we evolved to see the world as it is; it's because we evolved to be able to adapt to a changing world -- and to continually redefine normality. And that process even exists at the level of evolution. Evolution itself has evolved to have something called evolvability.

In my lab's research, we not only work on networks of the brain, but also networks of genes, and networks generally. In doing that, we evolve what we call artificial life systems, or artificial life agents.

If you give these artificial life agents an environment, and in the environment there is a problem, the agent that evolves the solution to the problem faster will out-compete the one that evolved it slower. Both evolved the solution, but the one that did it faster was better. The successful agent is actually more evolvable. Its evolvability helped it survive.

There is evidence that organisms have evolved to be evolvable. They have evolved to be adaptable. This quality is something that is relevant to any adaptive network -- not merely the brain.

The aim of much of your work seems to be making science and art accessible to everyone. Talk a bit about that.

As far as I'm concerned, science is nothing more than playing games. And in that case, everyone does science. There's nothing special about science or the people that do it. The only thing that makes scientists different is that they formalize the process; they have access to certain tools that other people don't have access to.

In the education center we're trying to build, we want to give people access -- and the confidence -- to do real scientific experiments. The education center will be fundamentally about discovery. It might be discoveries that no one else has made. Or it might be just discoveries that are relevant to each individual that participates.

What's a specific example of the sort of discovery you mean?

The Mother program is about enabling musicians to use musical instruments as an interface to a computer. And what happens is the musician can play the instrument, and the music they play gets visualized -- not in the way that, say, iTunes visualizes music; the Mother visualizations are far more complex than that.

The significance here is that the musician can develop an intuition about the visual images that will be created by the way they gesture, the way they move their hands, the way they play their instrument. And what can then happen is, the musician can now create music not just according to what it sounds like, but also according to what it looks like. And that itself can feed back and alter the kind of music that the musician plays. They discover new music by being able to experience their playing through senses other than hearing.

You mentioned an education center. Talk a bit about your current work on education.

I'm doing a project with a friend and collaborator, Dave Strudwick. His background is working with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, whom he calls "excluded" kids.

I came to him with this concept of "seeing yourself see." I told him we were exploring this concept in the context of architecture and art. I asked, "What might we be able to do with this, in education?" The premise is that education is fundamental to everything. It's not just school: it's everything that humans do. That question led to a series of conversations and meetings about creating a framework for education that we call My School. We call it My School because the people in the school have ownership of the school.

My School is all about education that is specific to the individual. The aim of the education program is to create a curriculum in architecture grounded in the idea of seeing yourself see, emphasizing everything that the education system does -- what we call the five Cs: compassion, choice, community, creativity and confidence. Seeing yourself see leads to these five Cs.

The education system is about facilitating people to become aware of how they're shaped by their experiences. The point is that when our kids are our age, they will be dealing with careers 90% of which do not exist now. They're going into a world that is incredibly dynamic, unpredictable, uncertain. So, really, the program is about celebrating uncertainty, which was the point of my TEDTalk: giving people the agility of thought to adapt and to thrive in that kind of uncertainty, and to create.

Can you give a specific example of the sort of work you're doing now with kids?

One particular project is taking the bumble bee arena -- we've had it as an installation in the Hayward Art Gallery and various other places -- and taking it to a school, and going through a process of experimentation with the kids where it's very much them-led: the kids lead the process.

We started getting them to think about questions such as, "If you were asking someone a question, but they couldn't communicate an answer except through their behavior, how would you find the answer?" We created games and puzzles to help them figure out how they might solve a problem like that.

We showed them that they can do this sort of puzzle not just with people, but also with other creatures, such as bumble bees. We got them thinking about what kinds of questions they might want to ask a bumble bee if they could. In doing so, they had to put themselves in the perspective of a bumble bee: What's important, what might be interesting to a bumble bee?

The kids came up with a list of questions. They collectively decided on one of those questions. Then they designed a set of experiments to ask that question of a bumble bee using the bee arena.

We installed the arena in an old Norman church next to their school, and I carried out their experiments over the next two weeks. The process is still going on; in total, it's been about three and a half months. The actual experiment took about two and a half weeks. The experiments took place on Sundays during church services. There was a funeral at one point. The whole community got involved. People from the community would come up. Parents would come by before and after school.

We got the data, and then the kids analyzed the data. Then they began writing up the paper. I would open up my laptop and say, "What do we write?" We've now just finished the paper. Everything is in kid-speak. For instance, they wanted to start the paper with "Once upon a time," which we've done. In one of the methods sections, they had to describe the second test for the bumble bees, and they said [ominously] "Bum bum bummmmmmm!" So, that's in there too.

All the figures are hand drawings in crayon.

We'll be submitting it for publication by the end of this week. If it's published, there will be 25 authors, all of whom are 8 years old or younger. If it's published, it means they should all get master's degrees, because by definition they've all made a unique contribution to science.

It will be interesting to find out whether, in fact, their paper will be published. Being someone who does bee research, I know the findings are unique. But a "real" science paper has references in it. You contextualize the study. You say, "This is what's been done before, this is what we've done, and this is what it now means in the context of what other people have done." Of course, as this is a paper by 8-year-olds, they don't have that context. They don't know the literature.

Will the community publish a paper with genuine results, but without the contextualization? It's an interesting question. Their introduction to the paper is what led them to do the experiment. Their discussion is what the results of the experiment might mean to them, and what it might mean to the bumble bees. So, the paper might never get published because it's in kid-speak and it's not contextualized -- but the data is strong.

I wanted to switch gears and circle back to your work on perception. Several TEDTalks feature illusions. How do you respond to artists and scientists who use illusions to show that you can "hack" the human mind?

There's an artist -- I won't bother naming him -- who was up for a prize, and he often used illusions in his work. One critic said his work demonstrated the "fragility" of the human senses. Artists and others often use illusions to demonstrate how our senses are susceptible. But, as I said in my TEDTalk, if our senses were fragile, we wouldn't be here.

The whole concept of an illusion is predicated on a misconception. The misconception is that we evolved to see the world as it is, and that to see the world differently from "as it is" is an illusion. But the point of my TEDTalk is that we actually can't see the world as it actually is. We have no direct access to the physical world. All we can ever do is see it the way it was once useful to see.

Illusion is more a state of the world than it is a state of mind. What's being presented to you is an unusual situation. What you see is what would have been useful, given that situation in the past. That's significant because artists often use context in order to manipulate what people see. But they often don't go beyond that.

The far more interesting question is not that "context matters" -- not that we see illusions -- but why we see them. When you see illusions, you're entertaining two realities at the same time. You're seeing one reality (two gray squares look different) but you also know another reality (that the gray squares are, in fact, physically the same).

You're in the position, at that moment, of actually experiencing yourself having an experience.

Do you find that your work is in conflict with philosophy on perception or consciousness? Are angry philosophy students knocking on your door?

Well, first of all, philosophy isn't going to answer many of these questions about perception.

I have a very good friend, Tom Polger, who is a philosopher, and he and I have written a paper on why we see four colors. He was a great person to talk to -- a very interesting person, generally. The debates were complimentary.

If anything, my research is about taking these concepts in philosophy and trying to ground them. One idea is as good as any other -- but if you can ground them in true, real experiences, and then share these experiences with the public in a way that is intuitive.

So no, my work isn't in conflict with philosophy in that way. I don't get very many angry philosophy students.

What's the takeaway from your work, as a whole -- the big lesson you want your art and science to teach?

The lesson is that the brain evolved to continually re-define normality, and that understanding that creates the capacity for compassion and creativity. What's true at the simplest level, seeing lightness -- it doesn't get any simpler than seeing lightness; even jellyfish see lightness -- has got to be true all the way up.

Find more Q&As on the TED Blog:
+ Oliver Sacks on neurological curiosities
+ Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Iran's nuclear program
+ Garik Israelian on the secrets of spectroscopy

07 October 2009

The danger of a single story: Chimamanda Adichie on TED.com

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 18:49)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3k

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05 October 2009

How food shapes our cities: Carolyn Steel on TED.com

Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world. Understanding the flow of food will help us reconnect with what we eat. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 15:41)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3d

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02 October 2009

Q&A with Garik Israelian: "Your lab should be the vacuum between stars"

Astronomer Garik Israelian (watch his TEDTalk) explained the secrets of spectrography yesterday. And last night, he answered a few of our followup questions by email -- including some questions from TED's Facebook fans:

Tell me about your latest work with lithium and its significance for planet-bearing stars.

Since year 2000, our group has been working very actively to study peculiarities in the chemical composition of planet host stars, with dozens of papers in this field. We have proposed a "Li-6 test" to study planet engulfment and/or planetary matter accretion processes in sun-like stars. Up to now, we had not found a single chemical element with a different behavior in planet-bearing stars, as compared with similar stars without planets. In the new paper, which will appear soon, we present the first such case. We present results on Lithium content for a sample of about 500 stars, including 100 planet host stars, and we find that for planet host solar analogs (stars very similar to our Sun), and only for this kind of star, there is a peculiar behavior in the Li abundance. These stars have on average less than 1% of their initial Li content. Like our Sun, these stars have been very efficiently destroying Lithium. Why? We do not really know. Maybe this is related to their rotational history, strongly influenced by the presence of planetary systems. This is not the case of solar-analog stars in the comparison sample ("single" stars without known planets), where a large fraction preserves a much higher Li abundance -- about 10 times more.

Our "single"-star sample has been monitored by the most precise spectrograph, called HARPS (located in Chile), for years and no planet has been detected. Let me mention that not all sun-like stars host planets -- perhaps about 30% of them are planet-builders. It's not so easy to form a planet!

Our results clearly indicate that solving the long-standing problem of the Li depletion in the Sun, which has been a puzzle for 60 years and has promoted the development of many transport and mixing theories, will require a proper understanding of the interaction of a planetary system with its planet host star.

We find that solar analogs with low Lithium content have a higher probability of hosting planets, and therefore searches of planetary systems can increase their efficiency by performing a spectroscopic observation of Lithium.

And finally, we suggest that the Sun is "Li-poor" because it hosts a planetary system.

How do you like the new Gran Telescopio Canarias so far? What are some of the questions you're working on there?

It's too early to speak about GTCs performance. I think we need a year or two to see the first results. The most interesting instrument for planet-hunters is the camera called CanariCam -- a mid-infrared imager with spectrogroscopic, coronagraphic and polarimetric capabilities. CanariCam works in the thermal infrared between ~7.5 and 25 microns. Planet-hunters plan to conduct a search at 10 microns with CanariCam for substellar objects (brown dwarfs and massive giant planets) around many stars in the northern hemisphere. We keep our fingers crossed!

How soon will you be able to build the new 42-meter E-ELT you talked about, to detect Earth-like planets around sun-like stars?

E-ELT is planned to be operational in 2018, while the telescope site will be selected next year. One of the first light instruments may be the high-resolution spectrograph called CODEX. The high resolution and long-term stability of CODEX, coupled with the large collecting area of the E-ELT, provides an unequaled facility for measuring stellar radial velocities at the few cm/s level. This precision will allow detecting Earth-mass planets in the habitable zone around solar-type stars.

However, recent technological developments open a new window for us. We may discover Earth twins much before the E-ELT era, The so-called "laser frequency grid" (or Astro Comb) technique may allow to hunt other Earths before 2015. The super-precise HARPS-NEF (or HARPS-NORTH) spectrograph is under construction by collaboration between Harvard's Origins of Life Initiative, New Earths Facility, and the HARPS team of the University of Geneva, and is expected to start operation soon after 2011. Our team in Canary Islands is collaborating with astronomers in Harvard and Geneva to install this instrument on the 4.2 meter William Herschel Telescope in La Palma. HARPS-NORTH will use the Doppler technique to discover and characterize Earth-like planets from candidates identified by NASA's Kepler mission, launched on March 6 this year.

Reader Sameena asks three questions:

Is it always right to assume that other forms of life in another planet must have the same beginnings as us -- tectonic plates with volcanic activity, oxygen and water?

No, I do not think that we have to always assume that. This is more a question for biologists. If they tell us, astronomers, that new life forms may exist under x conditions, breathing sulfur (for example) and somehow producing xenon (for example), then we will model the biospheres of those planets and will find out which spectral lines will/may indicate the presence of that form of life. So our task is to carry out very precise spectroscopic analysis of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. We can infer their chemical composition, physical conditions etc. We may find then some "strange" chemicals indicating the presence of other forms of life. This will be fun!

How do you convince yourself/your peers/the world that one unusual peak on your spectroscopy is not through error?

This is more a technical question. Spectra have some noise produced by a detector and other sources. This noise can be modeled and calculated. We always know the level of the noise. Anything considerable above that level is a real signal.

How do sound waves (which need a medium) travel through space?

They don't. But we can still study them in the atmospheres of stars. Imagine observing a volcano on the Earth from Mars. If you have a spectrograph, you can study the motion of the Earth's upper atmosphere triggered by the explosion. Your spectrograph will give you the velocities of gas particles in the atmosphere. If you have a good knowledge of gas-dynamics, physics, etc., you can calculate the sound produced by this volcano at a given distance. This is not so difficult. But the point is this: You are far away observing a motion of gas particles (velocities), their emission (they radiate too) and therefore the state of the matter in the atmospheres. You use those observations to compute the amplitude and frequency of sound waves responsible for those motions. It's pure classical physics.

Reader Mike Ho asks this question: I've read that there is spectroscopic evidence of cellulose elsewhere in the universe; is that accurate? How reliable is spectroscopy for detecting large molecules?

This is true. This was reported in Nature, in 1978. Tholins have been detected as well (I think by Carl Sagan).

There are many unidentified bands in the spectra of stars. Wide bands are produced by some complex molecules in the interstellar space. It's really hard to identify them for two reasons:

1. observational
2. theoretical

Observational -- because the spectra are full of absorption lines of stellar origin, and when you have a smooth, weak and extended absorption (such as a diffuse molecular band or DIB) in the spectrum covering some 30-50 angstroms, it's almost impossible to see it unless you are able to carefully eliminate the spectral lines produced by a star and fit the stellar continuum (using models). Your DIBs are hidden under the stellar spectra! There are well-known diffuse molecular bands -- about 200 have been identified. However, the most complex ones, produced by even more complex molecules, are still unidentified.

There is a theoretical difficulty too. One has to make quantum mechanical calculations (N-body) of very complex molecular structures and compute their spectra (thousands of lines). There are lots of approximations in this "game," and you have to be very careful because it's impossible to check them in the lab. (Your lab should be the vacuum between stars!)

My colleagues at the IAC in Canary Islands have detected naphthalene in the interstellar medium, a molecule that, in combination with water, ammonia and ultraviolet radiation, produces many of the amino acids fundamental to the development of life. They have also discovered fullerenes (C320 and C540). This is a terrific field of research, and I believe the interstellar medium hides a lot from your eyes. It's full of mysteries and enigmas -- free-floating planets, isolated stellar mass black holes, and all sorts of stuff.

You suggest that a planet harboring life might decide to change its chemical signature to send a message to other planets. Do you think Earth should be signaling the universe? If so, what should we do to let other planets know we exist?

Yes, technologically advanced civilizations can handle this. I don't think we can do that (and we'd better not try -- the Sun is still clean). I have not done this estimate by myself: how much of this or that chemical element we need to put in the atmosphere of the Sun so that an alien civilization will fix this as a "signal" of an intelligent (or not intelligent!) life in the solar system. Obviously, we need to use an element which is absent in the solar atmosphere (there are quite a few). But then, I can imagine that we will need few thousand tons. Let me do this calculation for an "interesting" element ...

02 October 2009

The power of time off: Stefan Sagmeister on TED.com

Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.(Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK.Duration: 017:40)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3b

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01 October 2009

Updated: Garik Israelian at the opening of the Gran Telescopio Canarias

Astronomer Garik Israelian spoke at TEDGlobal on Wednesday, July 22, about spectroscopy -- the art of examining the spectral signature of a distant object in the universe, and inferring its qualities and behaviors. When I asked him during rehearsal if he could stay for the whole conference, he said he had to leave early -- for a great reason: he'd be at the inauguration of the largest telescope in the world, the Gran Telescopio Canarias, that Friday. He promised to record a video greeting from the event -- and sent it over just as TEDGlobal wrapped up:

01 October 2009

How spectroscopy could reveal alien life: Garik Israelian on TED.com

Garik Israelian is a spectroscopist, studying the spectrum emitted by a star to figure out what it's made of and how it might behave. It's a rare and accessible look at this discipline, which may help us an Earthlike planet friendly to life. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK.Duration: 15:52)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3Z

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30 September 2009

Lewis Pugh's next cold-water swim: Everest

Lewis Pugh, the epic cold-water swimmer and climate-change activist, has announced his next swim: a kilometer-long lap across a glacial lake at the top of Everest, in a pond of meltwater 17,000 feet up. He told me the swim will highlight climate-change issues in two massive countries bordering Everest, China and India. With their large populations and messy industries, the two giants have long been called on to act (see our Q&A with Parag Khanna for Khanna's take on this). Realizing the effects of climate change on the pristine environment of Everest shocked him, Pugh said. The lake he'll swim in, atop Khumbu Glacier, "shouldn't even be there."

The swim is set for April 2010. Get more details >>

Watch Lewis Pugh's TEDTalk from Oxford this summer >>

29 September 2009

Design thinking about climate change: IDEO's new LivingClimateChange.com

Launching today, the design firm IDEO presents LivingClimateChange.com, a clearinghouse for design thinking about the environment. Watch Tim Brown's TEDTalk, just posted today, for some inspiring examples of design thinking that solved big problems of the past. In the same spirit, IDEO's LivingClimateChange.com collects ideas looking forward. From the site:

Living Climate Change is a place where the most defining challenge of our time is explored through design thinking. It's also a place to show, discuss, and share compelling and provocative thoughts and ideas about the future.

Check out LivingClimateChange.com >>

Also quite interesting: Linda Tischler from FastCompany interviews Tim Brown about how design thinking can improve democracy >>

26 September 2009

Q&A with Victor Chan of the Dalai Lama Center, host of the Vancouver Peace Summit

Tomorrow at 1pm PDT, watch Karen Armstrong talk with the Dalai Lama and other Nobelists in a live webcast from the Vancouver Peace Summit. To learn more about the summit, and the extraordinary group that is hosting it, start with this interview with Victor Chan, a founder of the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education, which created the Vancouver Peace Summit. In the latest issue of design mind, Chan talks with Kristina Loring about His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the possibility of world peace. From the story:

How do you get peace to resonate with people? It can be such a lofty topic.

To people living in times or areas of conflict, war and peace are more than concepts: They are often a brutal, painful reality. We can continue to talk about war and peace in abstract terms, but we have the means of telling the stories about the lives that are affected by war and violence, and about people who are suffering. At the same time, we can also talk about people who are making a difference. Peace is often considered in light of political and economical solutions, but we can also look at it in terms of our own spiritual and emotional well-being. I’d like to think that personal peace is more than the absence of conflict. It is a place where we develop a yearning to help others.

Read design mind's Q&A with Victor Chan >>

Watch Karen Armstrong talk with the Dalai Lama tomorrow, live on the web at 1pm PDT >>

Photo courtesy Victor Chan / design mind

24 September 2009

Photographing secret sites: Taryn Simon on TED.com

Taryn Simon exhibits her startling take on photography -- to reveal worlds and people we would never see otherwise. She shares two projects: one documents otherworldly locations typically kept secret from the public, the other involves haunting portraits of men convicted for crimes they did not commit. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, in Oxford, UK. Duration: 17:32)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3L

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24 September 2009

TED Salon in London: Leadership, design and the criminal underworld

Fields Wicker-Miurin, co-founder of Leaders' Quest in London, trains business leaders by connecting them to other leaders. Yes, it sounds rather common - but her leaders live in the Amazon forest or are advocates of HIV education in India or collect and display artifacts related to uneasy periods in Chinese history: they are leaders that face the real challenges of our time.

Wicker-Miurin (in the photo at right) was one of the featured speakers on Monday at a TED Salon in London. She spoke forcefully and inspiringly about Benki, a young tribesman from deep in the Amazon, facing the threat of deforestation, which not only has an impact on climate change, but also, much more immediately, on the existence of his people. Becoming a leader very early in life, he recognized that the environment, the animals, the rivers, the air he breathes and his tribe's existence were in danger. That's when he took a step out of the Amazon and traveled 3000 km to the Earth Summit in Rio -- to tell the world outside about the world inside the forest, and connect the two worlds. He spoke, but he also learned a lot, and brought those learnings home. Almost 20 years have past and the Ashaninkas (Benki's tribe) have reforested 25% of their territory, created schools, brought satellite Internet to the village, and more.

After describing other profiles from around the world, Wicker-Miurin summarized the seven characteristics of the "new leaders": they go away from what they know; build bridges and walk across them; have a sense of the great arc of time; know that they depend on others; remember that “it’s not about them, but it starts with them”; and have humility.

The TEDSalon was organized around the release of a special edition of design mind, the magazine published by TEDGlobal partner frog design -- who also created the awesome TEDGlobal program guide. design mind is fully devoted to the recent TEDGlobal2009 (the mag, 100 pages of great coverage, interviews, original essays and photos, is available here). Hosted by TED European director Bruno Giussani and by the magazine's editor-in-chief Sam Martin, the event was attended by 125 people (Flickr photostream) including many of those featured in the magazine, together with TEDsters past and new, speakers and TED Fellows.

Another speaker was Fabio Sergio, the creative director at frog, who explored the possibilities of using data produced by the human body to educate the human mind. His main proposition goes like this: We live in a world of data. From keeping track of our household expenses to sharing our running data with the community at Nike+: What would happen if we extend this to more areas? He sees four intersecting opportunities: Access to our own data streams and services to accrue and store our bitcrumbs forever; individual and collective aggregations to reveal hidden patterns; well-designed interactive tools of self-reflection to visualize, manipulate, and shape raw data into meaningful information; and social networks that encourage and sustain virtuous behavior by treating it as social currency.

The evening also featured an interview of Misha Glenny, the underworld investigator (author of "McMafia") who sat down with Giussani for a follow-up to his remarkable TEDGlobal speech. Glenny discussed very openly, and with genuine humour, his research methods, the encounters with his sources, and some behind-the-scenes episodes. Andreas Raptopoulos, founder of FutureAcoustic, gave an exclusive technology demo of reactive soundscapes. And singer/songwriter Lou Rhodes concluded the program with a stunning "unplugged" live performance.

(Photos: Robert Leslie)

21 September 2009

TEDGlobal in 100 pages

Our partners at frogdesign have published today the latest edition of their magazine design mind, and it's devoted to TEDGlobal 2009, which took place in Oxford in July. At right is the mag's cover -- that's Bjarke Ingels onstage with a white speech bubble on his black T-shirt; asked what should go on it, he said: "TED is more."

This issue of design mind captures key moments of the conference -- among them talks by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, author and philosopher Alain de Botton, and Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -- and features interviews with and essays from many of the most intriguing TEDGlobal speakers, TED Fellows and attendees. The magazine contains behind-the-scenes impressions of the "making of" TEDGlobal, as well as observations from the social gatherings at the conference. Completing the whole is an hour-by-hour timeline of the conference in photos and tweets posted by the attendees.

The team at frogdesign also worked with us to create the awesome TEDGlobal 2009 program guide. For the realization of this remarkable issue of design mind -- which was guest-edited by TED European Director Bruno Giussani -- we granted them exceptional access to TEDGlobal, with the aim of documenting the conference and extending the conversation beyond it.

The magazine was unveiled last night at an event in London, with the participation of many of the people featured in it and talks from designer Fabio Sergio and leadership expert Fields Wicker-Miurin, music from British singer Lou Rhodes -- and Bruno's Q&A with crime expert Misha Glenny. The magazine is available in select bookstores and online. As Bruno writes in the editorial, "The ideas featured in this magazine are all worth spreading. So please don't hesitate to discuss them, build on them, make them yours, and pass them on."

21 September 2009

The Web as random acts of kindness: Jonathan Zittrain on TED.com

Feeling like the world is becoming less friendly? Social theorist Jonathan Zittrain begs to difffer. The Internet, he suggests, is made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, in Oxford, UK. Duration: 19:52)

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18 September 2009

Imogen Heap plays "Wait It Out"

Imogen Heap plays a powerful stripped-down version of "Wait It Out," from her new record, Ellipse. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, in Oxford, UK. Duration: 3:58)

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14 September 2009

Investigating global crime networks: Misha Glenny on TED.com

Journalist Misha Glenny spent several years in a courageous investigation of organized crime networks worldwide, which have grown to an estimated 15% of the global economy. From the Russian mafia, to giant drug cartels, his sources include not just intelligence and law enforcement officials but criminal insiders. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, in Oxford, England. Duration: 19:30)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/32

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09 September 2009

Swimming the North Pole: Lewis Pugh on TED.com

Lewis Pugh talks about his record-breaking swim across the North Pole. He braved the icy waters (in a Speedo) to highlight the melting icecap. Watch for astonishing footage -- and some blunt commentary on the realities of supercold-water swims. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, England. Duration: 18:54)

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08 September 2009

Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss: James Balog on TED.com

Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, England. Duration: 19:22)

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04 September 2009

A leap from the edge of space: Steve Truglia on TED.com

At his day job, Steve Truglia flips cars, walks through fire and falls out of buildings -- pushing technology to make stunts bigger, safer, more awesome. He talks us through his next stunt: the highest jump ever attempted, from the very edge of space. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, England. Duration: 14:36)

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03 September 2009

Making sound visible through cymatics: Evan Grant on TED.com

Evan Grant demonstrates the science and art of cymatics, a process for making soundwaves visible. Useful for analyzing complex sounds (like dolphin calls), it also makes complex and beautiful designs. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, England. Duration: 4:40)

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02 September 2009

Q&A with Cary Fowler: Saving seeds to protect our food supplies

Before Cary Fowler's TEDTalk posted on Monday, the TEDBlog caught up with him in Norway, via phone. We asked the difficult questions and he provided calm, leveled answers on the food crises of today. He's taken on a challenging role, as director of the largest seed bank in the world and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, but his hope and enthusiasm were enough to inspire faith in the largest of skeptics.

What was TED like for you?

I met some extraordinary people, both other speakers and people in the audience. Some people I think I’ll keep in touch with for a long time. But what was really special was being there with my son. You know, all TED speakers can bring one person, and I brought my son. He was the youngest person in the audience. It was wonderful to see it through his eyes. He came away saying, “Everything is possible.”

How does one come to do what you do? Why did you decide to make saving seeds your life’s work?

Well, it was not the result of some sort of logical thought process. It was a combination of personal factors. To begin with, I’ve always known that I was a little bit different. And, I have a lot of relatives who own farms. I grew up in the American South where political issues and issues of justice were at the forefront. What I do now is a combination of all these factors.

The drive behind what I do is really to make sure that people don’t go to bed hungry. It’s not just that I have a love of diversity, it’s the importance of the uses of that diversity.

I first went into social services, and when I did my PhD I looked at intellectual diversity rights as they apply to biological material. At the time, I never thought of what I’m doing now as a career. I thought I wouldn’t find employment doing this.

How often do you go to the remote seed vault in Norway and how much time do you spend there?

Not long. I go up maybe four, five, six times a year for about a week to 10 days. The facility is designed to run by itself. We need to go up there to check on things and to place seeds in the vault, but that’s it. We coordinate the shipments so that we’re not hanging out, waiting for the seeds to arrive. It’s designed to work without human beings and that’s one of the integral functions.

Wow. I admit that a facility that functions without people conjures up images of the end of the world or Armageddon for me.

A lot of people ask about Armageddon, but really it’s just an insurance policy for all the different seed banks in the world. We don’t need Armageddon to make this a useful facility. Unfortunately, we’ll probably have to use it quite frequently.

But, the facility is a sign of hope, not hopelessness or fear or dread about the future. We know that there are problems, my sense of despair comes when I know we’re not addressing the problem.

Speaking of addressing problems, in your talk, you mentioned the goal of finding crops that could weather climate change. How far out are we from doing that?

We have a long way to go because we’re going to have to do it for the every crop. The means for adaptation are also very complicated. Not only is the temperature going to rise but, for example, in Southern Africa we’re going to have a big increase in very hot days, so that will reduce the growing season of the crops. There are many ways to address this. One of the things heat does is to kill pollen, so maybe the plant needs to flower earlier in the day, before the pollen dies. We have a lot of work to do just to identify these traits. Sometimes it will be earlier flowering, sometimes a different leaf structure. There are a lot of things we need to learn about how plants adapt to less water and more heat.

24 August 2009

The surprising science of motivation: Dan Pink on TED.com

From last month's TEDGlobal 2009: Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 18:36)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/2U

Watch Dan Pink'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 475+ TEDTalks.

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07 August 2009

The music of a war child: Emmanuel Jal on TED.com

For five years, young Emmanuel Jal fought as a child soldier in the Sudan. Rescued by an aid worker, he's become an international hip-hop star and an activist for kids in war zones. In words and lyrics, he tells the story of his amazing life. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 18:03)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/2G

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04 August 2009

Turning filthy water drinkable: Michael Pritchard on TED.com

Too much of the world lacks access to clean drinking water. Engineer Michael Pritchard did something about it -- inventing the portable Lifesaver filter, which can turn the most revolting water drinkable in seconds. An amazing demo from TEDGlobal 2009. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 09:32)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/29

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28 July 2009

A kinder, gentler philosophy of success: Alain de Botton on TED.com

Fresh from last week's TEDGlobal 2009: Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 16:52)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/21

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27 July 2009

TEDsters trek to WOMAD

Immediately after TEDGlobal 2009, a group of TEDsters took off for WOMAD at Charlton Park -- the three-day world music festival founded by TED speaker Peter Gabriel (watch his talk from 2006). Sleeping in teepees, rocking all night ... the pictures tell the story. Above, twilight bubbles, photographed by TED's Lara Stein, director of the TEDx program.

Below, Peter Gabriel dropped by the TEDGlobal Internet Cafe tent. (Photo: Gary Shainberg)

At the Internet Cafe tent, Lara Stein hangs out with Cara Muñeca (in the pink wig). (Photo: Laura Galloway)

And of course: the music! Youssou N'Dour, Rokia Traoré (who played at TEDGlobal 2007), blues legend Solomon Burke ... Lara's picks: "Rachael Unthank and the Winterset was incredible! Hypnotic Brass Ensemble; Rokia, the Black Arm Band, Dhoad Gypsies of Rajasthan, Shlomo and the Vocal Orchestra. And of course Peter Gabriel.... And many more. There were 4 stages with acts playing from 11am-12 midnight." (Photo: Laura Galloway)

27 July 2009

Post-TEDGlobal: Roundups and reminiscences UPDATED

However you experienced TEDGlobal 2009 -- live, on the web feed, or via Twitter and the TED Blog updates -- this week is about reviewing, reliving and moving forward. As Arturo Ania tweeted earlier today:

First thought this morning: How can I inject my team with the inspiration and energy from #TED in Oxford?

We're collecting roundups and reminiscences right here. Check out the posts below, and comment below or email the TED Blog if you'd like to add your work to the list.

Jessica Griggs blogged TEDGlobal for the New Scientist:

So four days of TED -- what have I learnt? What a card flourisher is, that Stephen Fry thinks it's absurd when people ask where he watched the moon landing (either on his TV set or from the lunar lander, surely?), that even TED speakers like to drop a bit of dubious life-affirming psychology into their talks, and that the best theremin player lives in Oxford (Lydia Kavina, granddaughter of the instrument's inventor. ...

Carole Cadwalladr reports for the Observer:

It's true, it's addictive learning new things at TED. There's Garik Israelian, a spectroscopist who explains why he believes that we will find signs of extraterrestrial life within 10 years. Then there's Rebecca Saxe's remarkable talk on the RPTJ region of the brain which, if targeted with a magnetic pulse, can actually change people's moral judgments.

"Don't you have the Pentagon calling?" Anderson asks her.

"I do," she replies. "I just don't take their calls." ...

The astonishing Maria Popova tweeted, blogged and photographed from the audience. (I sat next to her for one session and just watched the flow -- wow.) Check out her gavel-to-gavel coverage on her blog, brainpickings.org, and her Twitter feed, @brainpicker:

In a surprising impromptu performance, crowd favorite Emmanuel Jal kicked up the afterparty with an electrifying act that transformed TEDsters into a mosh pit of dancers doing Jal's signature dance in sync and singing his chorus for a phenomenal collective experience. ...

Sound engineer (and TED U professor) Julian Treasure blogged all 4 days on his site, Sound Business:

Session 8 - In the Shadows A dark and scary session. Taryn Simon showed her superb but unsettling photographs of forbidden or hidden places and of wrongly-convicted people; Misha Glenny gave a tour (de force) of his amazing McMafia book, scaring the pants off me (organised crime is 18% of global GDP!!); Ed Burtynsky showed photographs of man's effect on land; Loretta Napoleoni suggested that terrorism had indirectly caused the credit crunch (US flooded the market with bonds to fund the $7bn war on terror, so interest rates were artificially reduced to increase yields, leading to the sub-prime market); and former child soldier Emmanuel Jal rapped for peace and had the whole house dancing and in tears at the same time. ...

Chikwe Ihekweazu has started the blog Multiple Stories to collect his thoughts about TEDGlobal 2009. The name of his blog is inspired by Chimamanda Adichie's talk on Thursday night, where she talked about "the vital importance of multiple stories in making sense of our shared humanity":

Okay..I'll confess...I struggled with some sessions - Astronomer Garik Israelian's talk on Wednesday about spectroscopy - the art of examining the spectral signature of a distant object in the universe, and inferring its qualities and behaviours - must have been excellent. But with my simple brain trying to figure out how to solve the apparently simple problems of the continent I call home....it was challenging.

Julie Lasky at Design Observer writes:

... Even better were presentations solicited with a view to the topic that might never have otherwise seen the light of TED: The astronomer Andrea Ghez positing the existence of a black hole at the center of our galaxy — and every other galaxy in the universe. The photographer Taryn Simon presenting images of off-limit facilities — a place where white tigers are bred, the rooms at JFK airport where contraband is stashed — then proceeding even deeper into the heart of darkness with a portrait series of men who were imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. ...

And Elaine Morgan recaps her standing-ovation TED appearance for WalesOnline:

The talks were delivered in the Oxford Playhouse, and I kept thinking “This is my last attempt to get anyone to listen. If I can’t put my ideas across to this lively, open-minded young audience, I may as well throw in the sponge and take up flower arranging.”

Comment below or email the TED Blog (subject: "TEDGlobal Roundup") to add your work to this list -- and we'll add more as we find them.

Photo: TED volunteer Karen Eng (left) watching TEDGlobal 2009 at the Oxford Playhouse. Oxford, UK, July 21-24, 2009. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

26 July 2009

Thomas Dolby's notes on TEDGlobal music

On his lively blog, TED's music director, Thomas Dolby, collects his thoughts on the music of this past week. From the post:

As TED’s music director I have the enviable task of selecting the musicians that appear here, and helping them tune their performances to fit the context. It’s an honour for me and for the musicians that play here to be able to add a little fairy dust that help these amazing ideas grow.

Read the whole post >>

Photo: Imogen Heap at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 12: "Connected consequences," July 22, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

25 July 2009

How to watch TEDGlobal in California

Bruce Johnson sends us the waking and sleeping schedule he set up in order to watch the four days of the TEDGlobal 2009 Associates feed -- resetting his body clock to catch the sessions that started at 8:30am BST, eight hours ahead of West Coast time in the United States.
He lays out the plan:
12:12am GMT-8 get up just after midnight in SF to see first session
2:55am GMT-8 take a nap after 2nd session and wake up just before 3am for 3rd session of day
5:56am GMT-8 get up "after lunch" to see 5th session of day
7:34am GMT-8 turn off the feed and get ready for work

25 July 2009

Scenes from the Associates feed

Some 300 people watched the TEDGlobal 2009 Associates feed -- including 100 of our founding volunteer translators, past TED Fellows and TEDx hosts. We loved seeing photos of people around the world watching the feed, and share a few below:

Theodor K writes: "Here is Klara, Theodor, and Isak from Denmark watching the windmill built by William. The best kind of upbringing is inspiration, so thank you TED'sters":

Down in Sydney, Remo Giuffre reports: "It's been hard to get my REMO warehouse elves here in Bondi to concentrate on their work come 5.30PM. That's when we turn on the webstream."

Thanks to all who watched and tweeted the TEDGlobal Associates webcast.

24 July 2009

Brother Paulus Terwitte at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 12

Brother Paulus Terwitte takes the stage and immediately confronts the two questions he says everyone always asks. The first is, "Are you a real monk?" When he asked that, his usual reply is "Are you real?" The second is: "What do you do?" His answer to that one is, "Nothing." He says that he does nothing because he wants to find the answer to the most important question in life, one that you can read on the first page of the Bible. We still don't know what this question is, so he tells us that there’s a little machine used all over the world to remind us of this question -- it's the cell phone that everybody calls to say “Where are you?” And that was what God asked, "Adam, where are you?" Brother Terwitte asks, "Where are you with your thoughts and your feelings? Are you at home or all over the world?"

He says that he was talking to someone the other day, when their phone rang, and the person took his mobile and walked away. It happens all the time, he notes. The phone rings, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of sharing ideas and people go away like the President is calling. Brother Terwitte says he eventually left the area after five minutes of waiting on this person, thinking he must not be so important.

He says that he spends three hours of an organized, scheduled doing nothing every day at his monastery. He explains that they want to find the inner voice of their being, and that every man wants to find the inner sense of things. We all want to get the whole world in our hands, he says, and you have to decide how you will do this thing. He declares that God made a paradise, and in the middle of it he put Google, and said, "If you want to find something don’t use Google. You are a human being, so go to your neighbor, not a machine."

Brother Terwitte recounts how many followers he has on Twitter, friends on Facebook and other connections on other social media. "Is it possible that humans can have 300 friends? Is it possible to contact 600 Twitterers?" he asks. He wants to know what are we looking for. We have become primitive hunters and gatherers, he says. We are gathering information. We think that what we have is what we are. He reminds us that primitive hunters and gatherers moved forward when they began to paint. They painted the animals and all that they saw so that when there was a long winter they where happy, because they could look back on what they had seen in the world.

That’s what we friars are doing all over the world, Brother Terwitte says. He tells us that we’ve seen many things and many ideas at this conference and now he wants to give us 15 seconds to think about this alone. The room is quiet for 15 seconds.

When he speaks again, he says that now we are in a time when human beings are taught to go away, to travel, volunteer here and there, to go to Venice and New York and gather all the things you can gather. Then at the end, you can say now I have made enough experiences, I can decide what I want to do. But when you look at your life you haven’t decided the most important things, you haven’t looked for them. What you have found you have found on the street, in a party, in a book and then splash, it’s over.

He tells us that the world is not made for us such that the world has to fulfill us. We have to become astonished about the world. There is a voice in all things that we can see. No-one can show us, but we can hear it with our hearts. It is necessary to begin to realize that we have the inner sense of the world in our life. Every man has the inner point of everything in themselves. He says that if we were to take 15 minutes to meditate, to go on vacation without our mobiles, to make it one day without the Internet we would find that we are all creative human beings and we would find the source that connects us all.

Photo: Brother Paulus Terwitte at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 12: "Enquire within," July 24, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

24 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Brother Paulus Terwitte asks, "Where are you?"

A Capuchin friar and a household name in Germany, Brother Paulus Terwitte looks at the possibility of a simple, contemplative spiritual life -- in a world laden with distractions and complications. Is posting a Twitter Snapshot slightly ... ironic? Twitter users meditated on this, and other questions:

Google is the new forbidden apple.. Brother Terwitte.. -- Gabelapagos

Terwitte on why we engage in "organized doing nothing" (pray, meditate, etc.). "We want to find the inner voice of things." -- brainpicker

Brother Paulus Terwitte: "We have again become primitive hunter gatherers - we are gathering information" #TED -- WiredUK

now Monk dude is listing how many friends and followers he has on facebook and twitter etc haha AWESOME -- grumblemouse

Paulus Terwitte providing an interesting perspective on social media and contemplating the world - what really matters? #TED -- bwdumars

Paulus Terwitte: gives the audience 15 seconds in silence to think (and conducts this by holding up his hand). Felt like a century. -- kokoe2

If you're on Twitter, share your own ruminations under the tag #TED.

24 July 2009

Daniel Birnbaum at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 12

Daniel Birnbaum is a curator and is especially known for curating the Venice Biennale. He begins by answering the question, "What does a curator do?" He says that a curator is someone who shows things, puts things on display. "What a strange career!" he exclaims. He explains that if the curator is very successful, the he or she should not be so visible.

There was a time, Birnbaum says, when it was easy to say what art is. He shows slides of a show in Vienna of the history of frames. We used to be able to say that art was the thing inside the frames, he points out, but the frames themselves have become art. Now, he says, modern art has seen a disappearance of the frame. The framing seems to have become bigger and is now the gallery the salon, the museum. In a show like the Venice Biennale or any other big show it's not longer clear what the art is and maybe the framing device is the city itself.

He has a brief clip to show that curating isn’t an exact science. One of the artists participating in the Venice Biennale, Mike Bouchet, brings a typical American house to Venice and floats the suburban home on the water of the canals. It's a bizarre and fascinating image, and in the end, the house sinks. Birnbaum describes the American house sinking into a Venetian canal as a disaster in logistics but a memorable performance in art.

He says that the world of contemporary art used to be small and bohemian, and now it has become very large and global. The world of art is now also governed by fashion, lifestyle and huge amounts of money. He shows a clip of a piece by Mark Rothko being auctioned, and the bidding is continuing well over $35 million. Birnbaum stops the clip and tells us that eventually it went for $45 million. This might make us think that art world is drenched in money. But as someone who teaches art, he assures us that its not always like that. His Venice Biennale is not really about collection like this, but about production.

An exhibition, Birnbaum says, is not just flat pictures on a screen so you can't look at it on the Internet. It's a medium in itself. It’s a bodily experience. He shows clips of the work of another Biennale artist, Yona Friedman, who wants to build things, who is an anti-totalitarian architect and wants to provide the tools for all of us to build our own life. His work looms overhead, tangles of wires and large suspended objects.

Birnbaum also notes that the Biennale used to be a very Western affair, but now there are artists from all areas of the world. In fact, non-Western artists in are now playing very key roles. It's become a little bit like the Olympics of art, where the artists come to represent their nations. He says that these pieces are about the world, about you, and about an art piece that has been waiting for your arrival.

Photo: Daniel Birnbaum speaks at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 12. Oxford, UK, July 21-24, 2009. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

24 July 2009

Itay Talgam at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 12

Itay Talgam begins by inviting us to imagine that we are sharing his magical moments of conducting. You get on the stage, the orchestra is warming up and you get on the the podium. In front of all the noise, he says, you make a small gesture and suddenly you get order out of that noise. Now, Talgam says, it would be nice to think it’s just him that creates that order out of noise, but he's tried making the same movements out in the regular world and it doesn’t work.

He shows a clip of an orchestra playing with a vibrant conductor at their head. "Was that nice?" he asks, "If that was a success who should we thank?" There were several parts contributing, he explains. The musicians played beautifully, then there was the clapping audience taking part in the music (which is not normal in Vienna) and is being happy. He’s spreading happiness. The joy of conducting, Talgam says, is about enabling other people’s stories to be heard -- the story of the orchestra, the story of the audience. the story of each person in the orchestra, the story of those who built the concert hall. And, he notes, all those stories are being told at once.

Next, he shows a clip of Riccardo Muti, describing him as one of the great conductors. When the clip is over Talgam adds that even though it was very short you could see a completely different feeling. It was so commanding and so clear, he says. Then he explains that he is going to conduct the audience at TEDGlobal. He makes everyone sing a note and then stops them by holding up a finger. So, you see I can stop you with a finger, he declares. He repeats the exercise, but this time to stop the audience from singing he makes a huge movement similar to Muti's and then jokingly gestures like he’s going to choke someone. He describes Muti's approach as "It’s Mozart as I say it." Then he tells story about Muti saying that even though he is one of the greatest conductors, three years ago he received a letter form all 700 musicians in his orchestra saying: You’re a great conductor, please resign. This, Talgam says, is because he didn’t let them develop.

He shows a clip of another conductor, Strauss. In this clip the conductor barely moves, and looks almost bored. Talgam explains that when Strauss was 30 he wrote 10 commandments for conductors. The first was that if you are sweating by the end of the performance, you've done something wrong, and the second was never to look at the trombones, it only encourages them. To him, Talgam says, it was not about his story, it was only about yours and he gave his orchestra room to explore their story. He did not interfere at all.

Then, he shows another clip of a conductor, this one the German Herbert von Karajan. At the end of the clip, Talgam remarks that this one is more subtly different but that it does look different in a way. Karajan's eyes are closed and his hands are flowing. Talgam conducts the TEDGlobal audience again, once like Muti and then like Karajan. The crowd doesn't seem to able to follow the Karajan style of conducting. Let me tell you, Talgam says, even the philharmonic looked at Karajan and then they had to look at each other. He explains that Karajan's philosophy was that the worst damage he could do to his orchestra was to give them clear instructions because that would prevent them listening to each other.

Talgam shows another clip of a German conductor, this time Carlos Kleiber. He interprets the clip by saying that in this one Kleiber's dramatic movements may look very different form the other conductors, but he is controlling his orchestra in the same way. He’s making the gesture of the music. It is another layer, another story. It’s like being on a rollercoaster -- there are no instructions but the process itself makes you do something. Kleiber creates the rollercoaster in the players heads. It’s very exciting for those players, Talgam says. He shows clips of Kleiber correcting mistakes, showing that when it's needed, authority is there. In the last clip of Kleiber, he is conducting Mozart and Talgam says he’s not there commanding the music but enjoying it. Control is no longer zero-sum game, its about partnership.

Then he show a clip of the conductor Lenny Bernstein, who he says always started from the meaning of the music. After the clip, Talgam asks "Did you see Lenny’s face?" He explains that the pained expression on his face is there because the meaning of this piece is pain. He’s suffering, but in a good way. Talgam calls it "enjoying in a Jewish way."

For the last clip, he shows us a conductor that makes no body movements, but communicates to the orchestra using only the expressions on his face.

Photo: Itay Talgam at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 12: "Enquire within," July 24, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

24 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Itay Talgam conducts better leadership

Conductor-turned-business motivator Itay Talgam showed a collection of enlightening and amusing clips of famous conductors doing what it really is that they do best: lead. The process of drawing out beauty from a brigade of musicians is a powerful metaphor with real applications for anyone who manages people. Our prolific #TEDsters captured the best moments:

Rule #4 of conducting: Conductor Itay Talgam at #TED: Don't look at the trombones; it only encourages them. -- griley

Conductor culture is fascinating. Silly sense of humour. -- Alli7on

conductor Itay Talgam is using classical music and conducting as a metaphor for leadership. Funny guy. Muti, Strauss and Karajan. -- emilkang

Talgam: Trying unsuccessfully to conduct the TED audience again but making a pt of how diff condctor's behaviors produce diff responses -- pragzter

Talgam.. doing without doing.. orchestra directing.. with a smile.. and a nod.. -- Gabelapagos

24 July 2009

Dan Pink at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 12

Dan Pink, once a speechwriter for Al Gore, is now a career analyst beginning a revolution in the workplaces of the world. This morning at TEDGlobal he begins by noting that a little over 20 years ago, he did something that he regrets. He went to law school. He didn’t do very well. Pink jokes that he graduated in the part of his class that made the top 90 percent possible. He never practiced law a day in his life as he wasn’t allowed to. But today, against his better judgment, he says, he wants to use some of those legal skills. He wants to make a case for rethinking how we run our businesses.

Pink shows a slide title "The candle problem," a psychological experiment created by Karl Duncker in 1935. A person is brought into a room and given a candle, a box of thumbtacks and matches and asked to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax doesn’t drip on to the table. The person who can solve the candle problem is one who, rather than seeing the box as receptacle for the tacks, sees it as something that can be used in the solution. The box is tacked to the wall and the candle placed on it.

This experiment is used to learn about incentives, Pink explains. Two groups of people are offered the problem -- the first group is simply timed and the second group is offered rewards. It takes the second group three and and a half minutes longer than the first group, on average, to solve the problem. "That’s not how its suposed to wrk! I’m an American. Incentives work!" Pink exclaims. But, he says, this experiment has shown that incentives actually dull thinking and block creativity and he notes that this is not an aberration. It’s been shown over and over again. It’s one of the most robust findings in social science and also one of the most ignored. There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.

Another experiment was done with the problem presented in a slightly different way. Th tacks were taken out of the box, and then the incentivzed group did much better than the other. Pink says this is because it’s an easy problem. For these types of tasks of narrow focus, where you can see the goal right there, rewards work really well.

However, he points out that around the world, white collar workers are doing less of this second type of work and more of the first. Narrow tasks have become fairly easy to outsource and to automate and right-brain conceptual tasks have become more important. Everybody in this room, Pink says, is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. And for those people the if-then rewards don’t work. "This is not a feeling. I'm a lawyer, I have no feelings. This is not a philosophy. I'm an American, I don't believe in philosophy," he says. This is a fact, Pink asserts.

He draws on the a study by Dan Ariely and his colleagues. Ariely et al found that once the given task in one of these experiments was only a mechanical skill, rewards would mean better performance, but if any rudimentary cognitive skill was needed, a larger reward would mean a worse performance. The study was retested in India to control for cultural differences and they found got the same results. Studies at the London School of Economics have also found that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on performance.

So, Pink says, to get out of the messes of the 20th century, we don't need to do more of the wrong things. We need a new approach, one that includes three basic elements: Autonomy, mastery and purpose. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system. Today, he says he's going to talk about autonomy. The traditional notions of management are great if you only want compliance, he explains. But for creative thinking, we have to approach things differently.

He points to the software company Atlassian -- a few times a year, they tell their engineers to go off for 24 hours and work on anything that is not their regular job. Then they all come back together and present their work. They call these Fedex days, because they have to deliver something overnight. Atlasssian has taken also implemented the 20 percent time rule that Google has, where employees can take that 20 percent of their time at work to work on whatever they want. Pink says that about half of Google's products have come from that time.

Pink also advocates results only work environments (ROWE) where there are no schedules, people don't have to work in the office, employees can work wherever and whenever they want and meetings are optional. When companies implement ROWE policy, he says, productivity always goes up and turnover goes down.

For more evidence, he discusses two different models that were posed for creating a digital encyclopedia. The Microsoft model which included hiring researchers and experts and extensive planning, and the Wikipedia model where people would participate because they were interested. Pink asserts that 10 years ago, you could not have found two economists who would have said that the Wikipedia model would work better, but it does.

Science knows that motivators only work to solve narrow problems, Pink declares, but they destroy creativity. Maybe, he says, if we can increase productivity in solving the candle problems everywhere, we can change the world.

Photo: Dan Pink at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 12: "Enquire within," July 24, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

24 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Dan Pink contests carrots and sticks

Dan Pink, former speechwriter for Al Gore, is now hoping to spark a right-brain revolution in business and management. The spark clearly caught on with several of Twitter's most familiar #TEDsters.

Pink on psychology research: "There's a mismatch between what science knows and business does." -- brainpicker

Pink: "Rewards by their very nature narrow our focus, concentrate the mind." Work only for concrete problems, not abstract -- brainpicker

Daniel Pink: monetary incentives don't work or often do harm. The most solidly verified theory in social sciences -- lucadebiase

Dan Pink says rewards work well w narrow work and narrow goals...at Acumen, rules and envs are complex so if-then rewards don't work... -- jnovogratz

Pink: Dan Ariely experimnts w/ MIT students; then with villagers in India (WOOT MIT and India). higher incentives lead 2 worse prfrmnce -- pragzterv

24 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Magnus Larsson has a wall to build

Magnus Larsson is an architect with a blueprint to build a wall across Africa. A wall made with bacillus pasteurii (microorganisms that create sandstone) to help provide shelter for individuals and curb the destruction of sandstorms. Support for this project was widespread from TEDsters on Twitter:

Magnus Larsson wants to build a sand wall across Africa - extraordinary practical imagination -- sfbassociates

Architect Larson takes our childhood fantasies (and expertise) of building sand castles -- into reality at the Sahara Desert! -- Idit

Today's speakers are hammering home the theme that humanity has created massive problems that require creative solutions & CHANGE. -- ruthannharnisch

Larsson - hope you get a TED Wish for your efforts in building the sand structure using bacteria. -- rom

I'm developing an even greater respect for architects. They are id'ing the massive problems AND creative solutions. -- Alli7on

Photo: Magnus Larsson at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 11: "Cities past and future," July 24, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

24 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Bjarke Ingels thinks big

Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, principal of BIG charmed the crowd at TED Global 2009 with his talk on his optimistic and innovative projects. He also showed his "Yes Is More" manifesto, a 130 meter long cartoon strip designed to encourage big thinking. Those on Twitter were super complementary of Ingels' talk:

Ingels: Denish architect with a GREAT sense of humor - rare phenomenon! -- Idit

... Some of his talk is untweetably funny, kinda a "you had to be there" moment. -- ruthannharnisch

... Ingels features building designs that will WOW you! Thinking why can't architects in UPD do something similar? --rom

Ingels is the FIRST architect who creates sustainable green architecture fun and desireable to live in.. the next Gehry !!! -- Idit

I want to be an architect. Bjarke Ingels is a rock star. No wait better: he's an architect. -- nauiokaspark

24 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Carolyn Steel asks how to feed a city

Carolyn Steel is a food urbanist, meaning she can explain what we all take for granted- our food and how it gets to us. In her talk today at TED Global 2009, she presented frightening stats about where food demand is headed in addition to gripping historical context about how the food chain has evolved. Here's how TEDsters on Twitter grappled with this question:

... How do you feed a city? One of the great questions of our time, yet rarely asked. We assume food will be there, magic. -- ruthannharnisch

Steel disagrees with Romer from yesterday – we have to stop building, we can't feed megacities. -- brainpicker

... The world is desperate to embrace the Western Diet. SO True. I see this all the time; it makes me sad. So unsustainable -- pragzter

OH - Carolyn Steel could have given this talk every ten years for the last 400 years. -- ruthannharnisch

... Half the food currently made in the US is thrown away. Anyone know if the figures for the UK are similar? -- id

Carolyn Steel: "Sitopia" = "food place" (from Greek sitos, food + topos, place) or simply a better word for utopia :-) -- TEDIndia

24 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Constanza Ceruti explores above and beyond

TED Fellow Constanza Ceruti provided a captivating look at her work as a high-altitude archaeologist. Her talk included breathtaking pictures of the Andean mountains and details of what she's learned from mummies. The Twitter feedback proved fascinated:

Ceruti lived inside the crater of an open volcano for over 3 weeks. WOW. -- brainpicker

Constanza Cerruti, dedicating her talk to mentor who died suddenly while she was enroute 2 TEDGlobal. God Bless him. what a protege! -- pragzter

... for peace she just climbs to remote high elevation mountains! -- Gabelapagos

Constanza Cerruti is AMAZING. Found 3 incan children mummies on the world's highest archeological site. Research showed Incan diets. -- pragzter

Ceruti - Peruvian archaeological adventures at 19,000 feet . Hard to believe this unassuming, sweet person is Superwoman. -- ruthannharnisch

You can find out more about the TED Fellows program here.

24 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Eric Sanderson rediscovers "Mannahatta"

The last day of TEDGlobal 2009 kicked off with landscape biologist Eric Sanderson, who gave a thrilling look at the Mannahatta Project- a re-envisioning of Manhattan in its original, 17th-century glory. This Google Earth of ancient New York definitely wowed the TEDsters on Twitter:

Eric Sanderson: Amazing how many water sources have disappeared from NYC since Revolutionary Days. He looks for lost features of NYC. -- ruthannharnisch

Eric Sanderson doing a marvelous job of historical mapping. Great use of GIS, anthropology, history and ecology. A world that once was -- pragzter

Sanderson should get funding to map the world before we destroy it! We owe it to our kids! Cmon TED give him support! -- rom

Eric Sanderson opens Session 11, "Cities Past and Present," with fascinating maps on optimal citibility -- brainpicker

Amazing talk by Eric Sanderson: Manhattan as you've never seen it. Beautiful. -- nauiokaspark

If you've got something to say about one of the speakers and you have a Twitter account, please make sure you're using the #TED hashtag or replying to @TEDGlobal.

24 July 2009

Running notes: Thursday night bonus session

From last night: Felix Thorn talks about his instrument, Felix's Machines -- a bank of analog instruments wired to two Mac laptops to play a haunting music. It sounds like the singing voice of a lonely robot.

More notes from the bonus session on our Twitter feed, @TEDGlobal >>

Photo: Felix Thorn and Felix's Machines at TEDGlobal 2009, during the Bonus session at the Sheldonian theater, July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

23 July 2009

The future beckons. Meet it at TEDIndia.

Photo: Lakshmi Pratury speaks about the upcoming TEDIndia conference at TEDGlobal in 2009. Oxford, UK, July 21-24, 2009. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

TEDIndia director Lakshmi Pratury took the TEDGlobal 2009 stage to give a glimpse of what is on offer for the TEDIndia conference, which is only months away.

The conference, whose theme is "The Future Beckons," comes at a time when, increasingly, India, China and the rest of Asia are making their presence felt globally in new technologies, design brilliance and countless instances of cultural and economic innovation.

As an attendee, you'll enjoy a delicious cultural experience as the context of four days of jaw-dropping TED magic.

Registration for the one-of-a-kind TEDIndia Conference this November 4-7 in Mysore, India is now open.

Register now >>

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Karen Armstrong and the charter for compassion

Minutes ago, religious scholar Karen Armstrong, winner of a 2008 TED Prize, spoke about her wish, The Charter for Compassion, to the audience at TEDGlobal 2009. The Charter aims to bring the golden rule back into a global focus. Currently, religious leaders of many faiths are working together in crafting this document for peace, which launches in September here on TED. The crowd documenting the conference over on Twitter appeared very supportive of Armstrong and her wish.

About to hear Karen Armstrong's talk. She is why I came today. Love her work. -- Olasofia

Armstrong is great - she's speaking about how the media affect peoples perceptions of others, especially the youth. Too darn right! -- v_voicebox

Armstrong wants to do 2 things: Educate and stimulate compassionate thinking. An idea worth spreading! -- brainpicker

Karen Armstrong is my hero, a model of truth and love. Can you help her TED Prize wish come true? armstrong@ted.com -- ruthannharnisch

Karen Armstrong: People want to be "right" rather than "compassionate". Sadly I couldn't agree more... -- pragzter

Karen Armstrong's Charter of Compassion - I'm thinking that I might prefer it to a Pledge of Allegiance. -- ruthannharnisch

For more on Karen Armstrong, here's her previous TEDTalk. Also, remember to keep sending your responses to @TEDGlobal.

23 July 2009

Parag Khanna at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes on Session 10

Parag Khanna asks: Do we live in a borderless world? Our world has over 200 countries. He suggests that those of us watching TED live in "TEDistan" -- a world we feel is defined by cities -- a world that looks like the image of the world at night from space. But for 90% of the population, that's not true, not real. They live within borders. And often they deal with violence.

Border conflicts justify so much of the world's military-industrial complex. This is why we need a deeper understanding of how people, money, power, religion and culture interact to change the map of the world. We need to be able to anticipate the changes that will affect where the world goes.

He starts with the world of 1945. At that time, there were about 100 nations. In the following decades, waves of de-colonization took place, adding more states. The end of the Cold War added yet more nations. The entire planet is now covered in sovereign states. But does someone's gain have to be someone's loss?

He shows a map featuring Russia and China. Russia is the largest country; China is the most populous. What you don't see on a map is that most of Russia's population is concentrated in its eastern provinces, and its population is declining by millions and millions. That population has begun to move to the west. Then there is Mongolia, what some call "Mine-golia," sandwiched between. (China, he says, isn't going to conquer Mongolia -- it's going to buy it, mostly in the form of mines.)

Global warming will thaw out Siberia, making it useful for farming. And in record numbers Chinese people have been "voting with their feet" by moving north, and selling the resources there back to China. But ... surprise! Khanna isn't showing a contemporary map -- he's showing a map of 700 years ago. "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

How should we look at this region in Asia? No matter what the borders tell you, what you have is hubs of commerce that form a more "fluid" sociopolitical zone. What lines on the map should we then focus on? It's our choice, but clearly the commercial lines are really what is shaping the eventual political lines.

Khanna turns to the problem of state building. He asks us to consider Iraq. In the north, the Kurds have been waging a struggle for independence for 3,000 years. The oil pipelines in the region, since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, may finally redeem them. They are now using their control of oil pipelines as a political bargaining chip. If they control the pipelines, they can control their destiny.

What about Palestine? 30 years of rose-garden diplomacy hasn't delivered peace. So what can supply peace? Khanna suggests infrastructure: roads, commuter rails, ports. That would allow for a viable economy, and thereby peace. Infrastructure, the curvy lines on Khanna's map, cross the "straight lines" of the national borders.

The question in the United States is no longer "How will we use their oil?" It's "How will they use their oil?"

Europe, to shift focus, has now become a single currency bloc, rather than disjointed individual nations. This is also shaping the future of world policy. But what is the EU's future? Europe is divided by countries that are dependent on the rest of Europe, and those that have other connections for support.

What is the lesson? Khanna says geopolitics is an "unsentimental discipline." It's shaping the world -- like climate change. We're searching for equilibrium, but we also fear changes -- death tolls, wars. But infrastructure is slowly bringing us toward a truly borderless world.

Photo: Parag Khanna at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 10: "Worldview rethink," July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Parag Khanna on the appearance and disappearance of borders

Geopolitical expert Parag Khanna examined the historic and present-day implications of nation-state borders. Borders may be popping up on the atlas year after year, however, in practical human interactions, borders seem to be vanishing. A critical component to guiding this trend in a benevolent direction is building infrastructure. Followers on Twitter were receptive to Khanna’s ideas:

Great presentation by Parag Khanna at #ted on the dangers of clinging to existing arbitrary national borders -- nauiokaspark

Parag Khanna http://bit.ly/cHgLX gives a tour d'horizon of the world's proximate future -- TEDxCambridge

Turkey does not have to be member of EU, it is already member of Euro-Turkish superpower by pipelines said Parag Khanna @paragkhanna -- nanoturkiye

Parag Khanna, geopoliticalist: 100 new countries since WW2. World fragmenting. Conflict can be overcome with crossborder infrastucture. -- pangy_twit

Let us know what you think on Twitter: @TEDGlobal.

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Bertrand Piccard wants to fly sans fossil fuel

Balloonist Bertrand Piccard flew around the world in 1999. He stated today in his talk that the next time he goes he will make sure he completes the journey without consuming any fossil fuels. This determination is the reason he promotes Solar Impulse, which intends to design a one-seat, long-range solar plane. And here's the Twitter reaction to this intrepid goal:

Bertrand Piccard - Building a plane to fly around the world on solar power. Fantastic goal to motivate people to reduce energy use. -- bwdumars

Tim brown of IDEO explains that great design begins with the human not the technological. Bertand Piccard is going where no one has gone... -- erwinmcmanus

Latter-day Lindbergh, Bertrand Piccard, plans to fly around the world in a solar-powered aircraft with 64 m wingspan. -- DesignObserver

Bertrand Piccard - Wonder if his childhood ambition was "Professional Balloonist?" (He's called a "solar adventurer") -- ruthannharnisch

wooooow, another great highlight: Bertrand Piccard, fan-tas-tic talk -- vangeest

You can see the feedback as it roles in by searching for the #TED hashtag.

Photo: Bertrand Piccard at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 9: "Revealing energy," July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

23 July 2009

TED's volunteer translators weigh in on Session 9 and 10: Now in Greek!

Here are unedited running notes for Sessions 9 and 10 from our crack team of Open Translation Project translators, taken as they watch the live webcast of TEDGlobal 2009!

Click through to view the running notes for Session 9 and 10 in ...

Ελληνικά

23 July 2009

Eric Giler at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes on Session 9

Running notes from TEDGlobal 2009, Session 9.

Eric Giler is working on bringing wireless transmission of electric power to a commercial scale.

Early visions of wireless power were first conceived by Nikola Tesla about 100 years ago. He, in fact, didn't know why anyone would want to transfer power using wires. But we love electricity so much that we've dragged hundreds of millions of miles of copper wiring all over the earth. It's a huge drain on resources to create the infrastructure. In fact, in contemporary parlance, Eric Giler says "wires suck." (So do batteries, he says.)

Enter wireless electricity: MIT physicists recently invented technology that can light a 60-watt light bulb at several meters. The concept of "resonant energy transfer" -- where the same principles used in electrical transformers are used to send electricity over a long distance -- was created when a professor was awoken three nights in the row by a cell phone whose battery was dying. He wondered "Why can't all this electricity in the walls just come out and power my phone?"

"WiTricity" works using the principle of inductance, where an electric charge is stored in the form of a magnetic field in a coil of a conductor. Two such coils, resonating at the same frequency, can exchange charge across space. This is not radiative power transfer -- since it uses only magnetic fields. The technology also limits power transfer to other objects. It's completely safe and, Giler assures us, won't to the sort of thing we heard about Rebecca Saxe's talk (where a magnetic burst interferes with the brain's processing).

Giler sees unlimited applications for WiTricity -- powering electric cars (who, he asks, really wants to have to plug in a car?), appliances of all sorts, industrial manufacturing equipment ... even an electrically heated dog bowl. (A business person recently approached Giler to ask him if wireless electricity could do such a thing.)

Giler then does a live, on-stage demo of his system. With a a rectangular conducting frame less than a meter wide mounted on a person-sized stand, and a base transmission unit plugged into a normal power strip, he powers on a regular, commercially available TV screen.

People often ask Giler, "But how small can you make this system?" Taking the example of a cell phone battery running out of charge, he takes a G1 phone and holds it near the transmitting coil -- and the phone turns on automatically. He then does the same with an iPhone -- and, sure enough, the green "battery charging" symbol appears on the screen.

Photo: Eric Giler at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 9: "Revealing energy," July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Eric Giler shows off wireless energy

"Wires suck" was how electrician and innovator Eric Giler validated the motivation behind his startup WiTricity, which he demonstrated today in his talk at TEDGlobal 2009. Naturally, the main response was from people very eager to give it a try:

Eric Giler on the fantastic prospect of wirelessly charging our devices! (Would come in handy in simulcast lounge where outlets =gold) -- ruthannharnisch

Eric Giler's "Wireless Electricity" gives me hope for a greener future. Can't wait for him to demonstrate the technology. -- techramblers

I am indeed. In heaven. And Eric Giler is full of win. -- kn0thing

Eric Giler: live demo of tv powered completely wirelessy. Also electric cars won't need to be plugged in. Witricity - fantastic -- brenthoberman

Wireless connectivity to charge your electronics! Awesome! ... -- sangco

23 July 2009

Steve Cowley at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes on Session 9

Running notes from Session 9 at TEDGlobal 2009

When will we get fusion energy? We've known about fusion for a long time, but harnessing it as an energy source has been elusive. Steve Cowley is concerned about the rate at which we're using up resources on Earth. And the realm of energy today is dominated by finite resources. "I'm the only one who enjoys it when Mr. Putin turns off the gas, because my budget goes up."

But in the future, we won't make energy from resources. We'll make it from knowledge. In the future, the base load energy drivers will be fission, solar energy ... and fusion. Solar is difficult, but being worked on. Many new nuclear reactors are being built right now in the UK and in China.

But fusion is clean, safe ... and virtually inexhaustable. But there's a catch: It's extremely hard to do. We've been trying to do it for 50 years. (Note: Cowley researches "hot" fusion, not its discredited room-temperature counterpart.)

How nuclear energy works: Small elements want to join together to make bigger elements. In stars, for example, hydrogen joins to create helium, and then helium atoms fuse, and so on. But it has to happen under high heat and pressure. We are looking for an easier way to create fusion energy by colliding lithium and tritium in the right configuration. Lithium, which is in sea water, would last for 30 million years as fusion fuel -- unlike the other energy sources which may run out shortly. The price of fusion would be the same price as current energy creation sources.

To create fusion energy, you must hold gas at 150 million degrees. People say "fusion is always 30 years away." But it's already been done. The JET fusion experiment got 16 megawatts of power in 1997, and the same device will break records when it's fired up in the next years. But that's not in the form of usable electricity yet. His estimate says that we'll have real electric power from fusion in 2030.

His final statement: We need to push that date forward as quickly as possible.

Photo: Steve Cowley at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 9: "Revealing energy," July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Steve Cowley says we'll have fusion soon

Theoretical physicist Steve Cowley acknowledged today that while fusion is really hard to do it's also the planet's best shot of having a clean and safe renewable energy source. Twitter seemed to be shaken by this desirable concept:

Okay that woke me up (Steve Cowley) -- RichMulholland

Steve Cowley's fusion talk is making me as excited about fusion as when I first unlocked it in SimCity -- kn0thing

Fusion. Want it now. 150 million degrees makes it happen. So what's preventing it? Not " cold fusion" nonsense. EU Power awaits in 2030 -- joeltalks

the best form of energy isn't the SUN, it is the one that you save... -- leeander

Can't tweet the nuclear physics talk from Steve Cowley. Requires my full attention. -- ruthannharnisch

Remember that those of you watching the live feed can share your reactions directly to @TEDGlobal.

23 July 2009

Nick Veasey at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 9

Running notes from TEDGlobal 2009, Session 9.

Nick Veasey uses X-rays to create photographs that reveal the inner workings and structure of objects such as shoes, a city bus, a tractor, a bat ... and men's briefs. (He calls the men's briefs "exquisite.") Instead of focusing on solely biological entities, he also looks into (looks through) technology. But nature is Veasey's greatest inspiration. Design and architecture, he notes, are both related deeply to nature.

He takes his X-ray photographs in a shed with a door of lead and steel and thick concrete walls. He uses a high-powered X-ray machine. But instead of looking for disease, he looks for beauty. Since he wants to display his pictures in large format, and since today's typical X-ray technology only takes lower-resolution photographs, he uses a drum X-ray from the 1980s, often photographing one component at a time in order to execute his larger photographs.

He spent three months X-raying an entire 747 in an aircraft hangar.

He also adds coloring to his X-ray photographs now. The coloring is not accurate to the actual information gotten from the original X-ray image, but it adds a beautiful quality to the photographs. (Coloring also helps his 2D images look 3D.) He then shows a short video of him at work in his lab, as he X-rays objects such as toy dolls, boots, and a multi-story home complete with inhabitants.

As radiation is highly dangerous, Veasey X-rays cadavers to produce the human elements of his photographs. Veasey himself has already been exposed to a dangerous amount of radiation. He wears a device that measures the amount of radiation he's been exposed to.

It's work that encourages us to consider the unseen inner workings of our world.

Nick Veasey at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 9: "Revealing energy," July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Nick Veasey reveals what's on the inside

Nick Veasey creates art with x-rays to expose the hidden interiors of everyday objects, including clothing, dolls, computers, leaves, and even… cadavers! Veasey reveals the surprising beauty and intricate structure of the mundane. His newest project: sawing a MINI Cooper in half and pasting inside a compilation of x-ray images of all of the parts! Twitterers were wowed, to say the least:

Nick Veasey: takes x-rays of ordinary objects -- his shoes, a bus! (using a cargo scanning x-ray), a bulldozer! -- kokoe2

X-ray fashion from Nick Veasey - "it doesn't matter if it's me or Kate Moss wearing it - it'll look the same." -- WiredUK

Wooow, x-rays of nature for architecture -- vangeest

Nick Veasey's X-ray photography is phenomenal: http://www.nickveasey.com -- brainpicker

Nick Veasey waits in the queue for dead bodies to use in his X-ray art. There's a queue? Who knew? -- digitalronin

Veasey points out child's doll xrayed looks like robot, humanistic but also spookily futuristic with pins holding limbs to torso -- Thandelike

What do you think? Share with us on Twitter: @TEDGlobal.

23 July 2009

Ross Lovegrove at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 9: Revealing Energy

Running notes from TEDGlobal 2009, Session 9.

As a young boy, Lovegrove says, he lived near a cliff shore, where the outgoing tide would reveal fossils that had washed against it. Since that age, he was driven by speculation, by thinking, and the deep inspiration of the forms of nature. Although we call him an industrial designer, his current job, he says, isn't making things, but "walking, thinking, dreaming."

Lovegrove unveils his new project, Lovegrove Genesis, which imagines combining ancient biological designs with the modern production of objects. He imagines a spherical "membrane" out of which might be born any form we want to create.

He presents a slide filled with images of ancient biological forms such as diatoms, intermixed with contemporary designs such as a briefcase or a table. By conceptually combining different forms along this grid using what he calls "neural paths," he finds new types of products that he might be able to generate. For example, a designed object might, over its lifetime (or span of ownership) change its own properties the way a living creature would.

Lovegrove seeks to create a "textural beauty" to his objects, the same kind of beauty natural objects have. There is no "unused side" to any of his designs -- you can't look at the bottom of one of his tables, for example, and find it unvarnished. He shows a video of "single-surface deformation," which shows how a simple, flat form can evolve to fold and contort into three dimensions to suit a particular need -- such as a table. Lovegrove uses computer models to test various designs.

Lovegrove shows the world's lightest suitcase. Last year, 3.2 billion seats were sold on aircraft, and so lightness of luggage is a very important factor. The suitcase has no lining, but was created as a single mold by a large Japanese company that, he found later, took interest in his project because they were interested in learning new molding techniques.

A humorous moment: "If you keep a straight face, you can get exactly what you want in Japan." When he designed JAL, he proposed putting a bonsai tree on every seat. Instead of saying no, the firms there did two months of serious research and concluded that they "could not keep bonsai trees alive in a cabin environment."

Lovegrove points out: "Our ancestors made everything." They had to make tools and objects that were light enough that they could carry them around everywhere with them. "Lightness is a human objective."

50% of Lovegrove's studio's time is spent on pure research on projects that attempt to achieve these human objectives.

Photo: Ross Lovegrove at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 9: "Revealing energy," July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Ross Lovegrove's organic, elegant designs

Industrial designer Ross Lovegrove delved into his design philosophy of organic essentialism. Lovegrove strips down his designs to their essence to create, he jokes, “good, sensible Welsh stuff”, alluding to his Welsh upbringing that emphasized economy and efficiency. Lovegrove extricates himself from the fear of failure and seeks out the impossible in his designs. The Twitter audience appreciates the simple beauty of Lovegrove’s philosophy and designs:

Ross Lovegrove is speaking freshly about his approach to organic design, at #TED Global. More captivating than other times I have seen him. -- markwhiting

"I don't know why people paint things" Ross Lovegrove at #TED - an approach I quite like. The elegance of what is there. :-) -- markwhiting

Ross Lovegrove: a bicycle called SKIN viewed from above looks like a strange insect. The bike has a cover over the open spaces! -- kokoe2

"If you keep a straight face long enough in Japan, you get whatever you want." Sounds *awesome*. -- nothingelseis

Lightweight bags that look like they have been formed by having air blown into them. Who would have thought luggage could be so cool -- WiredUK

Check out Ross Lovegrove’s previous talk on organic design on ted.com. Also, let us know how your thoughts compare on Twitter: @TEDGlobal.

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: The Radio Science Orchestra with Lydia Kavina

The Radio Science Orchestra united with Lydia Kavina, great-niece of Leon Theremin who invented the eponymous electronic instrument in 1920, to deliver a stellar performance at the start of Session 9: Revealing Energy. Kavina and the RSO played several futuristic selections, albeit without actually touching a physical instrument, but rather by interacting with the theremin’s electromagnetic field! Kavina and the RSO certainly captured the wonder of the audience on Twitter:

Incredible. Lydia Kavina acts as if she is plucking the air & using her fingers as bowstrings. Amazing spectacle as well as aural treat -- jobsworth

Radio Science Orchestra. Makes me feel like a naive child - how do they make music from air? -- FrankiesFancies

Radio Science Orchestra rocking the Doctor Who theme but are the TEDsters up in the aisle dancing again? -- WiredUK

Niece of the creator of the Theremin playing Dr. Who themesong at #TED. Serious geekfest moment. http://yfrog.com/7hmkzsj -- davetroy

Dr Who on the Theramin. Madder than a box of frogs but perfect for 1st session after lunch. http://twitpic.com/bbmx7 -- MarkLittlewood

How did your impression of Lydia Kavina and the Radio Science Orchestra measure up with the above viewers? Share with us on Twitter (@TEDGlobal)!

23 July 2009

TED's volunteer translators chime in on Session 8: Now in Greek and Hungarian!

Here's Session 8's unedited running notes from our crack team of Open Translation Project translators, taken as they watch the live webcast of TEDGlobal 2009!

Click through to view the running notes for Session 8 in ...

Ελληνικά - Hungarian

23 July 2009

Emmanuel Jal at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 8

Emmanuel Jal at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 8: July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Emmanuel Jal, a tall, dreadlocked young man takes the stage and introduces himself as a rapper. It's unusual to have a rapper at TED, but as Jal tells his story it's obvious that he's not your usual rapper.

Jal was born in Sudan, he explains, and he calls himself a child of war. His youth was characterized by violence. As he starts to tell the stories of his childhood, the audience is palpably silent. He says that he watched his aunt raped, his mother was "claimed by the war" and his brothers and sisters scattered everywhere. He does not know where any of them are now. At eight, he became a child soldier because he was angry. He wanted to avenge his family, his mother.

Now, he chants a powerful poem about his time as a child soldier, that begins "My dreams are like torment ..." The audience is transfixed.

After the poem, he continues speaking. He says that what kept him going was the music. He never had access to therapy. Music was his therapy. He says that music can can influence the way you live without knowing it. "Music is the only thing that can enter your sound system, then your head, your heart, your soul," he declares. The power of music is the power of love, he continues. He explains that he found a way to bond to with Arabs after everything, through listening to Arab music.

Then, this well-off rapper explains to the audience that today is his 233rd day where he only eats one meal a day, at dinnertime. He donates his breakfast and lunch to his charity, Gua Africa. Also, he says, no-one in his village can eat breakfast or lunch, and so he won't either until they can. He says that people have been donating to the cause, sometimes as little as 20 cents, and he appreciates it all.

Jal explains that to him, education is so important that he's willing to die for it. As a nation, he says, Sudan has been crippled for so many years. If anybody wants to help, he encourages that they give tools not aid. Invest in education, he pleads, so that they can have strong institutions for the new generations. "All those old men who are creating wars in Africa they will die soon," he declares.

Then, he announces that he is going to perform a song dedicated to Emma McCune, an aid worker who he says, "is the reason I am here." McCune rescued over 150 child soldiers during her short life, and Jal was one of them. Jal makes the audience stand and instructs them to dance. He gives a highly energetic, rousing performance of the song, thrashing his dreadlocks and chanting with a poignant mixture of joy and reverence for the woman who changed his life. It's more than enough to bring a person to tears.

Chris Anderson joins him on stage for quick Q&A. Jal explains that McCune smuggled him out at great risk. "I’m going to build a school in honor of her in my village," he says.

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Emmanuel Jal sings for peace

Hip-hop artist Emmanuel Jal started his talk today on a poignant note by recounting his life as a war child in Sudan. Jal's outlet for his inspirational life and desire for peace has been channeled into his music (he performed after talking). Everyone tweeting on the #TED hashtag seemed genuinely touched:

moving and very authentic talk by Emmanuel Jal. great! --vangeest

TED made me cry again -- samfromwgtn

Not sure why Emmanuel Jal insists on being called a hip-hop artist – he's an inspired, profound poet -- brainpicker

TED is a purportedly a place for inspiration, not for a danceparty - Emmanuel Jal showed it can be both. He's absolutely inspiring -- kn0thing

not one to be emotional. In fact my wife thinks i'm half Vulcan. But Emmanuel Jal has managed to bring a lump to my throat -- jonfildes

Great seeing Tedsters united through dance and music -- SlickTweets

Jal is the voice of others. He speaks for the dead, for the living without voices. -- ruthannharnisch

Don't miss these reactions as they happen. Be sure to follow @TEDGlobal on Twitter for the latest updates from the conference.

23 July 2009

Loretta Napoleoni at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 8

Loretta Napoleoni at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 8: July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Macroeconomist Loretta Napoleoni is here to talk about how terrorism interacts with our daily life. Fifteen years ago she was asked if she would like to interview the Red Brigades -- a terrorist organization in Italy from 1980s who never spoke to anybody except their own members. In 1993, they drew a list of people who they would talk to, and she was one of them. One of the women in the brigade was her childhood friend and had put her name forward.

Napoleoni had just had a baby and wasn't sure it was the right time to be interviewing terrorists. But, she says, she wanted to know what had turned her best friend into a terrorist and why she had never tried to recruit her. Napoleoni discovered that she failed the psychological profiling of a terrorist, as sh was too opinionated but her friend was good at following orders and had even embraced violence.

She also discovered that the life of a terrorist was not ruled by politics or ideology, but by economics. They were constantly searching for cash. Terrorism, she explains, is actually a very expensive business -- arms, vehicles, explosives. If you live underground, it's very hard to produce this amount of money. Most people were extremely reluctant to talk about politics, because they had no ideas. The ideology is decided by leadership of a terrorist organization, all the others do is search for money.

Napeoloni began thinking that there might be commercial links between organizations. It was when she interviewed Mario Moretti, the head of the group, she realized that terrorism is actually a business. When she talked to him, she realized that he thought like a banker or fellow economist. Now, Napoleoni wanted to investigate the economics of terrorism, but could not find funding. So, she sold her company and funded the research herself.

She found in terrorism a parallel economy, that had been around since the close of World War II. It has followed step by step the trends common to any other economy. First, there was state sponsorship. During the Cold War there was a fully funded mix of legal and illegal entities, and she also points to the contras in Nicaragua. During the 1970s and 1980s, some groups carried out privatization. They gained independence and started funding themselves.

An even greater change came with globalization. Napoleoni says that now, organizations were able to link with each other and started to do serious business with crimelords. This is when we see the birth of Al Qaeda, an organization able to source money in many countries and operated in many countries. This she says, is rogue economics, which is constantly lurking in the background of history. Politics loses control of an economy and economy becomes a rogue force acting against us.

Until 9/11, the bulk of all the money produced by terrorism was in US dollars and flowed into US. This was a vital injection of cash. Napoleoni says that, since the 1960s, a growing number of dollars have leaving the US never to come back. These was money taken out by criminals and money launderers to fund the growth of terror and criminal economies. As a result, the US was the country that funded the reserve economy of the world. The US was borrowing against the growth of the terror and illegal economies.

Then came the "war on terror" and with it the Patriot Act. Napoleoni explains that there is a section in the Act that refers specifically to finance that prohibits US banks from doing business with offshore banks. It also gave US authorities the ability to monitor any banking activity in the world. So criminals got out of the dollars. People moved their money laundering activities away from the US to Europe. In six months, she says, Europe became the epicenter of the money laundering activities of the world.

Terrorism can affect your pockets, your wallets, Napoleoni asserts. The "war on terror" has cost the US about seven trillion dollars and it did not have that kind of money. So, a decision was made to use government bonds on international capital market to fund the war and the best way to make bonds competitive is to lower the interest rate. Interest rates went from 6 percent on eve of 9/11 to 1.2 percent in the summer of 2003 (at the "end" of the war in Iraq). These created the ideal conditions for the sub-prime mortgages crisis, Napoleoni says. This is the genesis of the credit crunch.

She concludes by urging us to understand that there is a world that goes well beyond the headlines of the newspaper. She says, "You’ve got to question everything that is told to you, including what I told you. It will be scary and frightening but it will enlighten you and abve all its not going to be boring."

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Loretta Napoleoni on rogue economics

Today at TEDGlobal 2009, macroeconomist Loretta Napoleoni explained her fascination with the underworld of crime and terrorism in a large, global context. On Twitter, people had a lot to say (and ask) about this dark subject.

... Heavy... 'The international budget of terror is 1.5 trillion dollars' #TED - Bloody 'eck! Is it money well spent? -- TarikF

Loretta Napoleoni - step into the dark side for enlightenment. Almost kabbalistic -- citizenrobert

we are deep "in the shadows" tough stuff this morning at TED; organized crime, terrorism, oil, and other bad things. Painful. -- Idit

Napoleoni - "Question everything you are told, question everything I have told you today." Great Quote. -- bwdumars

... Napoleoni: "Terrorism is actually a very expensive business." does it mean we shld hv deep pockets to fight it? -- vacantparkbench

23 July 2009

Misha Glenny at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 8

Misha Glenny at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 8: July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Journalist and underworld investigator Misha Glenny starts by addressing the financial crisis. "These are grim economic times, so I want to cheer you up with one of the greatest commercial success stories of the last 20 years," he says. What is it? Organized crime. Criminal activity now accounts for over 15 percent of the world’s GDP, Glenny explains. In the last two decades, it has experienced massive growth.

He begins to tell the story his life investigating organized crime. First, there was collapse of communism and, at the time he had been smuggling books across the Iron Curtain. He started writing about what was going on around him and eventually became the BBC ‘s chief correspondent. He was ecstatic but also worried about the some of the things lurking behind the wall. Glenny explains that it took him a little while to understand that some of the people who wielded power before, continued to do so.

He points to the slide behind him of a weightlifter in his prime. He explains that these men used to win gold Olympic medals and were great celebrities. Then he shows another slide of large men with heavy gold chains around their necks. These are the same guys after their 1989 makeover, he says. When communism collapsed it was also the state that collapsed. So how did a business man make sure his deals would be honored? Privatized law enforcement, Glenny says, otherwise known as mafia.The weightlifters now became a big part of that. In Bulgaria, they were soon joined by 14,000 ex-members of the armed forces -- people trained for smuggling, building underground networks and killing people, with no jobs. Glenny realized that the same people organizing paramilitaries were the same people that were operating organized crime.

This is when he decided to travel around the world, talking to policeman, consumers of illicit drugs and particularly the criminals themselves. The Balkans was a good place to start. As they say in reals estate, he declares, it was location, location, location. It was a vast transit zone for illicit goods and services, most of which were heading to the European Union, which was now the most affluent consumer market in history. A significant minority enjoyed spending their spare cash on sleeping with prostitutes, doing cocaine and other illicit pastimes.

Glenny explains that even in the criminal world there are zones of production, distribution and consumption. The production and distribution tend to lie in the developing world and are often threatened by appalling violence and bloodshed. He points to Mexico and to the Democratic Republic of Congo where five million people have died since 1998. Mafias around the world cooperate with the local paramilitaries to seize supplies of coltan. The Western desire to consume is the primary drive of organized crime.

Glenny shows a video of a speedboat smuggling in cigarettes to the European Union. The boat is worth one million euros, he says, and there are about 20 of these boats smuggling at any time. The Italian police have only two boats that can go at the same speed. Sometimes, the smugglers bring women with them to be trafficked for prostitution and hurl them into the sea so that the police are forced to save them and stop chasing the boat.

Globalization has led to liberalization of international financial markets. Markets around the world are competing for criminals' trade, Glenny says. There a lot of licit bands that are happy to accept their money, no questions asked, but offshore banking is at the center of it. At last, he says, there is someone in the White House who has consistently spoken out. Now, he says, let's take a look at Bernie Madoff. He stole $65 billion. He is the Olympus of gangsters but he did this for decades in the heart of Wall street. So how many Madoffs are there? Quite a few.

Then, Glenny shows marijuana farm photos in British Columbia. This is one of tens of thousands of mom and pop grow ups. He shows photographs of regularly confiscated goods in the trade: -- a speed boat and a helicopter. By the polices' admission confiscating these goods does not make a dent in the profits. The global narcotics market has expanded enormously, but there has been no concomitant increase in the resources afforded to police forces.Canada has become a key area for the production of ecstasy and other synthetically produced drugs. That's a game changer, he notes. Production has shifted into the Western world. The trend has been set to overwhelm our policing.

Organized crime has also already adapted very well to the recession. Glenny says he's not surprised as it is the most adaptable business in the world. It has shifted operations, as people not are not smoking as much dope or sleeping with as many prostitutes, and shifted to financial centers through cyber crime. Now he shows photographs of a Pringles can rigged to pick up some sort of signal and hooked up to a laptop. He says he watched a cyber criminal use this can-laptop rigging to penetrate the security system of a major Brazilian band in 5 minutes.

Glenny points out that it's easy to persuade people to do things with their computers that are not in their interest -- viruses. He shares the example of the “I love you” virus. He got it from an ex-girlfriend who hated him so he knew it wasn't real. The Internet is even assisting malarial mosquitoes. There are drugs that can destroy malaria, but the malarial parasite is developing resistance because cheap drugs bought over the internet have only low doses of the active ingredient.

Organized crimes affects us all -- our bank accounts, our pension funds, the foods that we eat and our governments, Glenny concludes It's a major economic force and we need to take it very very seriously.

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Misha Glenny digs into the mystery of organized crime

Journalist Misha Glenny expounded upon the ideas presented in his book McMafia, on how organized crime has run rampant in Western society. TEDsters reporting via Twitter were abuzz with this talk, especially Glenny's stat that states organized crime accounts for "15% of the world's GDP."

Apparently it is the western world that fuels global organised crime. I can believe that! -- TarikF

... Underworld Investigator Misha Glenny "organized crime accounts for 15% of the world's GDP." This is remarkable -- meetforeal

Misha Glenny on organised crime - Fascinating - although i knew about the reach of organised crime had never put it all together - Wow -- mojonojo3

... Misha Glenny: Organised crime equals 15% of global GDP #TED (yet crackdowns reserved for young, mentally ill, addicts...) -- neilsonandrew

Misha Glenny was an engaging, entertaining, informative speaker - a standout for me (even tho we read "McMafia" already). -- ruthannharnisch

23 July 2009

Taryn Simon at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 8

Taryn Simon at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 8: July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Taryn Simon is a photographer whose subjects are often as fascinating as her images. This morning, she launches into a series of photographs from her amazing collection An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. She has managed to take shots of decomposing bodies studied by forensic anthropologist and a federally funded marijuana growhouse. She notes that if she seems to jump from governement to science to religion, it's on purpose. She wanted to cover all these areas.

Simon shows more photos: translatlantic cables carrying millions of voice conversations, a braille edition of Playboy magazine (it only includes the the text), imported birds undergoing quarantine and a caged white tiger. She stops again to note that all living white tigers are the result of genetic inbreeding. Mothers are bred with sons, brothers with sisters and so the majority are not born in a "saleable state" and then killed at birth. It's a violent business, she sighs. Then she announces that the next photo is of an object from George Lucas’ personal archive -- the Death Star, which in reality measures about 4 feet by 3 feet.

Then she comes to a photograph taken at Fort Campbell in Kentucky of the World Church of God. It's supposed to be a generic site of worship. Along with another artist she manipulated the image to put a wall around the church and superimpose images of a suicide bomber and crowds to make a statement about the situations in the Middle East. To round out the collection, she shows images of a live HIV virus and more.

She moves on to show her heart-wrenching series of portaits titled The Innocents which depict men convicted of crimes they did not commit. The primary reason that these men were convicted was misidentification. Simon notes that after exposure to many photos and sketches, eyewitness testimony can change. The men in her series were convicted of serious crimes, including burglary, kidnapping, rape, sodomy, and murder. Some of them served time for over a decade before their innocence was discovered. In one case, she says, the key witness in the case was found to be perpetrator of the crime.

Simon finishes with a self-portrait. She shows two identical and inverted black and white photos of herself. Then, she flips the photographs and its obvious that one has a mustache and shadows over her eyes, while the other does not. She leaves us with the thought, "Distortion is a constant and our eyes are easily deceived."

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Taryn Simon shows the hidden and unfamiliar

Photographer Taryn Simon goes to places few people ever get to see. She's photographed everything from a white tiger breeding facility to abortion clinics. Her shocking talk astounded the crowd on Twitter:

Taryn Simon's talk is dense with details on the background of her photos. The context is the story. Eclectic. -- bwdumars

Incestuous white tigers? This is just getting more and more interesting... -- TarikF

Simon: Her photographs reveal truth that might be uncomfortable for some ... -- ruthannharnisch

Taryn Simon just rocked my world -- kn0thing

I deeply thank Taryn Simon for her courage and information through her thoughtful photography -- Idit

If you're watching the live stream, make sure you're tweeting on the #TED hashtag and joining the discussion.

23 July 2009

TED's volunteer translators weigh in on Session 7: Now in Hungarian and Greek!

Here's Session 7's unedited running notes from our crack team of Open Translation Project translators, taken as they watch the live webcast of TEDGlobal 2009!

Click through to view the running notes for Session 7 in ...

Ελληνικά - Hungarian

23 July 2009

Tim Brown at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes on Session 7

Tim Brown at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 7: July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Designer Tim Brown of IDEO begins his talk by posing the question, "What happens if you move from design to design-making?" He sees a profound difference between the two. He explains that when he first began working as a designer he had a small view of design. He shows his first projects: a woodworking machine and a fax machine. In both cases, he put a prettier casing around an existing object and in both cases the companies were out of business within months.

He thinks that his small view was influenced by more recent trends in design. But, he says, design used to be big. He shows a slide of Isambard Brunel, and introduces him as one of the great designers. Brunel was responsible for the Great Western Railway and wanted to achieve for passengers the experience of floating across the countryside, which meant creating flattest gradients ever. He imagined an integrated transportation system where a passenger could embark on a train in London and take that straight through to a ship to New York City.

Brown explains that design thinking begins with integrative thinking. Opposing ideas and opposing constraints create new solutions. It's a matter of balancing desirabilty with feasibility and viability. But then, he says, design became a priesthood of black turtlenecks and designer glasses focusing on an ever smaller campus and creating pretty but not necessarily useful objects.

Today, he thinks design is beginning to think big again. Design has returned to being human-centered, meaning that it starts with what humans need, which is more than good ergonomics. Brown expands by saying that good design is often about understanding culture and context.

Then he describes the main characteristics of good design-making. First, he says, one must begin learning my making and building in order to think. Prototypes speed up the process of innovation. One has to put products into the world to see their successes and failures. Then, instead of making our primary objective consumption, we must see it as participation. Brown thinks the design of participatory systems is going to be the major theme for design and for our economy. Design has greatest impact when put in the hands of everyone. At this point, Brown gives an example of nurses at Kaiser Permanente designing new system to increase patient comfort using in-depth conversations with the patients.

Now, Brown returns to speak about Brunell. He says that connection is change and that in times of change we need new alternatives and new ideas. Brunell proposed change in the industrial age. Industrial systems have run their course and we need another massive change. We need new choices. Design thinking gives us a new way of tackling problems. It takes a divergent approach that allows us to explore new ideas.

What is the question we’re answering today? Brown explains that he's also working on safe drinking water for the world’s poorest, along with Acumen Fund. He teamed designers with eleven water experts across India. Then, they hosted a competition and had winners develop their ideas. The solutions were participatory and Brown thinks we can continue to use models like these to tackle bigger and more interesting questions.

23 July 2009

Rob Hopkins at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 7

Rob Hopkins at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 7: July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Rob Hopkins is one of the leaders of a new movement of people living as fossil fuel-free as possible called the Transition Movement. He explains that he teaches people how to grow their own food and build their own homes. Before he began his current work, he worked with the current global economic growth model, but then he says, he came into contact with something that changed him. At this point, he unveils a liter of oil. He tells us that this bottle of oil contains the energy equivalent of five weeks of human labor by 35 strong people.

Hopkins says that our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability. We will not have oil forever. For every five barrels we consume, we only gather one. There are 98 oil producing nations but 65 have already passed their peak. "Is our brilliance and creativity going to evaporate?" he asks. The answer he gives is no, but he says that our options have to be realistic and mentions that climate change scientist have an increasingly terrified look in their eyes.

He asserts that our society seems to have the idea that technology will solve everything, pointing out that this idea is always popular at TED. But, Hopkins says, we can’t create new lands and energy systems at the click of a mouse. There are still people mining coal, as we speak. We live in a world of real constraints and demands. Energy and technology are not the same thing.

Hopkins outlines the qualities of the transition response: iviral, open-source, self-organizing, solutions-focused, sensitive to place and scale, learns from its mistakes and is a joyful process. It’s not about winning the argument, he says, it’s about changing the climate. Transition depends on the idea of resilience, which he thinks is a more useful concept than sustainability. Sustainability wants the supermarket to be more energy efficient, while resilience questions the vulnerability of depending on the supermarket.

Then, Hopkins walks us through how one of the transition projects are realized. It begins when you have a group excited by the idea. That group then runs an awareness-raising program, looking at how this might work in their town. They form more groups from which projects start and then continue to spread. There are over 2,000 transition projects around the world at the moment and thousands more in the mulling stage. There are community agriculture schemes, community energy schemes, groups promoting recycling, garden-shares and even alternative currencies. There are also groups designing energy descent plans, in case there is not more growth in the world, but less.

Hopkins noted that the Transition handbook he has written was the fifth most popular book that Brits took on holiday. The Leicestshire and Somerset transition communities have become involved in local government. He says they're not changing things, things are inevitably changing and we just have to work creatively with that.

We’ve been astonishingly lucky, Hopkins tells us, but he also asks us to honor what it has bought us. By loving and leaving all the oil age has done for us, he thinks we can begin a world of more resilience where we are fitter, more skilled and more connected to each other.

23 July 2009

William Kamkwamba at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 7

William Kamkwamba at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 7: July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

William Kamkwamba took the stage this morning to tell the story of his young and remarkable life. He explains that two years ago he stood on the TED stage in Arusha, Tanzania and spoke about a windmill that he built himself. That experience, he says, changed his life. Before that, he had never left Malawi and he had never seen the Internet. Kamkwamba tells the audience that in his first appearance at TED his English was not good enough to share his story himself. He recalls saying only a few words

He begins to tell us about his life. "I was just a simple farmer in a country of poor farmers," he says. There were seven siblings in his family, and he was the only boy. In 2001, there was an awful famine in Malawi. His family ate one meal per day, at night. "We dropped down to nothing," he explains. In Malawi they must fees to attend secondary school. Kamkwamba's family could not afford it, so he was forced to drop out. "It was a future I couldn’t accept," he says. Determined to do anything to receive education, he went to the library and borrowed books, especially those on physics. He couldn’t read much of the English, so he studied the diagrams.

Eventually, he found book called “Using Energy” that described windmill, and decided that this could be used to help his family. He went to the scrap yard to find material. Kamkwamba laughs that many people, including his mother, said he was crazy. He used a bicycle frame, PVC pipes and all manner of other odds and ends and built his windmill. It powered one light at first, and then he installed three more as well as a circuit breaker and switches.

Soon, he says, queues of people started lining up at his house to charge their mobile phones. "I could not get rid of them," he smiles. The lines led to bloggers, to reporters and finally to TED. "I had never seen an airplane before and never slept in a hotel.

Kamwaba has a poignant final message. He ends his talk by saying, "To all the people out there like me -- to the Africans, and the poor, and the struggling, maybe one day you'll watch this on the Internet: Trust yourself and believe. Whatever happens, don’t give up."

23 July 2009

Michael Pritchard at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 7

Michael Pritchard at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 7: July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Inventor Michael Pritchard's talk involves a strange prop -- a large aquarium filled with cloudy water. After being introduced, he explains that he's here to talk about water. He asks how the water at the conference has been and points out that audience is probably sure it's from a safe source. "But what if it wasn’t?" he asks. Then, he declares that half the conference would suffering from diarrhea. He thinks that its that scale of the problem that overwhelms governments and aid agencies. Since he's been speaking, he tells us, 13,000 people in the world have been suffering with diarrhea and four children have died because of unclean water.

Pritchard says that he invented the Lifesaver bottle because he got angry while watching the tsunami in Thailand play out and watching people forced to drink contaminated water or face death. He points out that, months later, Hurricane Katrina hit and he hoped for the US to do better. It took five days to get water to the Superdome. So, he began spending a lot of time in his garage and kitchen over the next weeks and months to develop a product that could help.

Before the Lifesaver, he says, the best filters could only filter particles larger than 200 nanometers, which is the size of the smallest bacteria, so some bacteria got through. And, the smallest virus is 25 nanometers. The Lifesaver's pores are 15 nanometers. Nothing gets through, Pritchard declares.

Then, he begins his demo. He points to the aquarium, which he says contains water from nearby rivers, like the Thames. Then, he pulls out another container and adds water from his pond at home. Then he adds run-off from a sewage plant, other “bits an piece” and a “gift” from a friends rabbit and gives it a stir. He scoops the filthy water up and pours it into the Lifesaver bottle, which looks quite like any regular plastic sports water bottle. He replaces the top, pulls out a hidden pump mechanism and gives it a few pumps. He pours clear water from the bottle into a glass and hands it to Chris Anderson to have a taste. Anderson does, and declares it completely potable.

Pritchard says that the filter in the Lifesaver is good for 6,000 liters. When it expires, the system will shut off to protect the consumer. In a crisis, he explains, we ship water and people are forced to got to camps to get water where diseases spread and the problem intensifies. By shipping these instead, people can stay put.

Now doesn’t require a natural disaster for this to work, he continues. We could use the Lifesaver bottle or the same technology on larger scale where people routinely have no access to clean water and it costs 1/2 cent per day to run. Mothers and children would no longer have to walk four hours to get their water. According to his calculations, with only $20 billion we can have safe water for all. Pritchard reminds us that the UK alone spends $12 billion on aid each year.

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: William Kamkwamba in Session 7

William Kamkwamba spoke at TEDGlobal 2007, as a shy young man who'd built his family a windmill from scrap. His story captured the world's attention. Today he walked onstage with confidence to tell his story from that point to this.

@herbkim Google 'William Kamkwamba' - sat next to him at dinner last night having no idea he was gonna blow me & the TED audience away this morning

@CosmoCat William Kamkwamba telling how he decided to built his own wind-powered pump to get water and save himself and his family from starving

@beckyblanton Michael Kamkwamba had a dream, made it happen, self-taught in libraries - built his own windmill from scrap. Hope always finds a way.

@frogdesign And the crowd goes wild. Incredible story about hope and invention in Africa from William Kamkwamba.

@ruthannharnisch #TED Fellow William Kamkwamba tells his powerful story - you'll have to buy his book, "The Boy WHo Harnessed The Wind"http://bit.ly/OQPUG

Photo: William Kamkwamba at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 7: "Radical development," July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

23 July 2009

Marc Koska at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 7

Marc Koska - MiniSlot at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 8: July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Twenty-five years ago, Marc Koska read a newspaper article that said one day syringes would be the main vehicle for spreading the AIDS virus and the thought of this preventable tragedy never left him. Today, he tells us, syringes kill 1.3 million people a year.

He begins his talk with pictures of a young girl and boy in India who got AIDS from syringes, and where then thrown out of their home by their parents because of the stigma attached to it. Koska describes skilled and unskilled practitioners blindly giving injections around the world. People trust the doctor to do the right thing, and they’re not. To prove his point, he shows a video, shot undercover, of nurses in India giving a series of injections over a 30 minute period, using only two syringes.

The problem is certainly not isolated. Koska goes on to go show photos of children in in Pakistan picking up syringes behind hospitals to re-sell them. Of course, during the collection process they get injured, so that infection becomes very possible. Koska explains that at one point their father pricked his finger and then burnt the cut with match saying that that would stop HIV infection. Next are photos from China of syringe recycling on massive scale. And, in Indonesian schools there are toy vendors on playground that sell syringes with still visible traces of blood in them, which the children use to squirt water, sometimes into their mouths.

Koska presents his solution -- a very normal looking syringe, but after the plunger has been pushed all the way down once, if someone tries to reuse it, it locks and breaks. It even costs the same as regular syringe. It's a simple but brilliant idea and the audience applauds loudly. Additionally, he's begun an information charity in India called Safepoint that educates people on the dangers of reusing syringes.

23 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Inventors of Session 7

A thread runs through this session, captured best here:

@Thandelike When inventors "get mad" about the world's disasters they get to work. Love that.

Economist Paul Romer unveils a plan for Charter Cities -- brand-new places where the economic rules are reset. It could create opportunity for people now trapped in badly managed regimes (the people Paul Collier calls the bottom billion).

@lucadebiase: Paul Romer: building charter cities with the right rules that help sustainable development where people can opt-in

@citizenrobert Paul Romer's Charter Cities reminiscent of New Lanark Mills

@citizenrobert Guantanamo can be the new Hong Kong - Romer

@tedtochina Paul Romer has a talk at the Long Now Foundation on the same topic some months ago: http://bit.ly/3SG4qq

Next, TEDster Marc Koska talks about the idea that got him mad: the plague of re-used syringes in poor regions. He plays undercover footage that shows a busy clinic where used syringes are dropped into a tray -- and then picked right up again to inject another person.

@ruthannharnisch: People trust doctors, injections so valuable, people wiiling to risk the dirty re-used syringe.

@ruthannharnisch: People think u can stop spread of syringe-borne HIV by lighting a match and burning the spot where needle pierced skin.

@pangy_twit: New syringe whose plunger breaks after use to stop infection from reuse. 64% injections in India unsafe.

@CosmoCat: Marc Koska showing his invention: The one-use syringe! When you try to reuse it, it breaks!! Thank you Mark!

Water engineer Michael Pritchard got mad about the problem of dirty water in developing countries. So what did he do? Invent a portable device that turns the filthiest sludge into sterile drinking water. His short, peppy demo drew groans of horror from the audience as he stirred up a disgusting brew of dirty water:

@ruthannharnisch: Got water from River Thames, brought pond water (makes cameraman smell the stench), pours sewage runoff into river water. Ugh

@Mach3te: Pritchard demos bottle on stage: Dumps sewage, rabbit waste into tank, filters w/ bottle, produces clean, sterile water. Drinks it!

@pangy_twit: Michael Pritchard: new water bottle to filter 25mn (Polio virus is 50mn) at source costs just $0.05. World cost $20bn. UK spend $12bn

@jobsworth: Michael Pritchard keeps costs low by designing to process water at the point of use. A principle we should use in many other cases. #TED

@ruthannharnisch: People can make their own sterile drinking water and stay put to rebuild lives instead of bcmng refugees seeking water.

@ruthannharnisch: @tedchris tastes the water that comes from the LifeSaver bottle. If anything happens to him, we will hunt Pritchard down like a dog.

Photo: Paul Romer at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 7: "Radical development," July 23, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

23 July 2009

Paul Romer at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 7

Paul Romer is a Stanford economist with radical ideas for new global growth. The first to the stage this morning, he has a little difficulty with his slides and jokes, "My work is about how wonderful technology is."

When the first slide does appear he urges us look at the picture of African students doing their homework under streetlights because they have no electricity in their homes. He zeroes in on one of the students and christens him Nelson. "I’ll bet Nelson has a cell phone," Romer remarks. He then asks the audience why Nelson would have a cutting edge technology like a cell phone but no access to electricity. His answer -- rules. Romer explains that in this country the electric company has to provide electricity at a subsidized price, and so cannot make profit. They have no incentive or ability to reach more customers. The president has tried to change pricing but protests broke out from businesses and the public.

"How can we change rules? " Romer asks. He answers his question by saying that we can do so by giving more choices to people and leaders (who he notes in many countries are also people). If you give to only one side you have tension, but giving choices to both will produce a set of rules for changing the rules.

He shows a picture from NASA of the Earth at night, clearly showing the electric lights of cities and town. He points out that North Korea looks like a black hole compared to neighbors, and reminds us that North Korea and South Korea began identically but made choices that led to very divergent paths. He points to the Caribbean. He shows how dark Haiti is compared to the Dominican Republic and that they're both dark compared to Puerto Rico. Haiti warns us that rules can also be bad when governments are weak, as opposed to the strong government of North Korea.

He moves our attention to China. China, he says, demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of working with rules. They developed steel and gunpowder, but never developed rules for spreading those. Then, they developed rules that cut them off while other countries were zooming ahead. However, in the late 1970s, growth took off in China. Something changed. Romer shows that the brightest spot in China is Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a small bit of China that for most of the 20th century operated under a different set of rules, that were copied from working market and under the care of Great Britain. Hong Kong, he says, became a model people could copy when the rest of mainland moved to the market model. The demonstrated successes there led to a consensus on a market model move throughout the economy.

Romer asserts that we must preserve choices for people and operate on the right scale. A village is too small and a nation too big. Cities give you the right balance. The proposal is he conceives of is a charter city with investors to build infrastructure, firms to hire people and families who will raise children there. All he wants is some good rules, uninhabited land and choices for leaders, which he thinks should translate to partnerships between nations

He notes that some of the audience might be starting to think is this bringing back colonialism. Romer urges everyone not to let the emotions that come up get in the way and shut down new ideas. He says that colonialism involved coercion and condescension -- this model is about choice, which is the antidote to those two.

He proposes charter cities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (calling Canada to take a partnership there) and throughout Africa. He says that most leaders he's talked to get the idea. They understand that they can make more credible promises to long-term investors if they do it with a partner nation. Romer claims that only a failure of imagination will keep us from delivering a global win-win solution. The power of ideas will do it, he says. We can share ideas and we all get more. We must keep moving progress forward so Nelson and his friends don't have to study under street lamps.

At the end of the talk, Chris Anderson does a quick audience poll by a show of hands. "What do you think? Mad or exciting?" Anderson asks. Overwhelmingly, the hands say exciting.

22 July 2009

Elaine Morgan at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes on Session 6

Why is the human phenotype so different from the chimpanzee, even though experts constantly point out how similar the genotypes are? Why are we bipedal while they walk on four legs? Why are we hairless while they are hairy? Elaine Morgan seeks to look beyond what she thinks are the utterly incorrect answers proposed by evolutionary biologists. If we're so different than the other higher primates, something must have happened to make us so. So: what happened?

Morgan is intrigued by evidence that shows that savannah habitats -- long thought to be a driving force behind the way humans evolved -- didn't exist at the time when the adaptations happened. This indicated that a paradigm was about to radically change. She says, What do scientists do when paradigms fail? They continue working on the paradigm as though nothing happened!

But finally a new paradigm was about to emerge. In the '60s, a scientist wondered whether human evolution was shaped by a more "aquatic" lifestyle. But the idea was ridiculed by scientists for years -- although now the theory is beginning to enjoy some favor. There is a set of questions that, in particular, throw doubt on the conventional story of human evolution:

Why are we hairless? The other mammals that are hairless are mostly aquatic -- dolphins, whales. But what about elephants?, we might ask. Morgan says it's been discovered that elephant ancestors were aquatic. While not all aquatic mammals are naked, like seals, all animals that are naked have so far been discovered to have had aquatic ancestors.

Why are we bipedal? There is only one situation in the mammalian world where mammals walk around on two legs: when they are in water.

Why do we have the layer of fat under our skins, unlike other primates? Aquatic mammals include a layer of fat, and a layer of skin. Humans can become obese in a way that is physically impossible for other primates.

Why can we control our breath? The only animals with conscious control of the breath are animals that spend time in water.

Why do we have streamlined bodies? Perhaps, Morgan suggests, to optimize us for mobility in water.

Morgan has struggled her whole life to show that perhaps the prevailing theory of human origins is wrong. After all, she says, history is riddled with instances where theories proved to be wrong. She says Dan Dennett, David Attenborough and other prominent scientists and thinkers have come to agree that the aquatic ape theory is important. To laughter and applause, she encourages TED to "come on in, the water's fine."

Morgan looks forward to a new point in science where conventional ideas about human evolution can be synthesized with the aquatic ape theory -- but, for now, the "rival" theories live apart.

Photo: Elaine Morgan at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 6: "Curious and curiouser," July 22, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

22 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Elaine Morgan believes in aquatic apes

Octogenarian scientist Elaine Morgan became the oldest speaker in TED's history (at the sprightly age of 90) at TEDGlobal 2009 when she presented her addition to evolutionary science: the theory of aquatic apes. Here's how the excited crowd on Twitter responded to her vibrant talk:

Elaine Morgan talking pure sense at #TED about paradigm shift and aquatic ape theory - and in a Welsh accent too. -- rorysutherland

Of all the big ideas at TEDGlobal, Elaine Morgan's radical theories on the aquatic ape evolutionary theory are most challenging yet. -- shanehegarty

Elaine Morgan aquatic ape theory has been miscategorised as lunatic fringe! It's not lunatic fringe! -- izahoor

Someone get this woman a #TED prize. 'soon' Elaine Morgan rocks. -- casinclair

LOVE IT! Elaine Morgan ended her TED talk with, "Never be afraid to rock the boat." She got a LOT of cheers over that! Loved her talk! -- beckyblanton

Wow, Elaine Morgan's talk was exactly what #TED is all about. Brave, intelligent, and f***ing hard to ignore. Brilliant! -- RichMulholland

On Elaine Morgan, I'm impressed by people who follow their passion and refuse to give up, even if everyone else calls you foolhardy -- jenbrea

Elaine Morgan has just convinced me that we are fishpeople -- ladysatin

22 July 2009

Garik Israelian at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 6

Israelian explores distant objects in the universe using spectroscopy. By looking at the spectral signature of distant object, he can infer the qualities and behaviors of the objects. He thinks spectroscopy will be how we finally discover whether there is life elsewhere outside of our solar system.

Israelian discovered that stars sometimes swallow their planets -- not by direct observation of the event, but by looking at the spectral signature of a star, which indicated that lithium was present in the star. (Lithium, we know from physics, is not normally present in stars without them having devoured another type of object.) "The power of spectroscopy was actually discovered by Pink Floyd," he joked.

We do not yet understand the spectrum of the Sun. 15% of the spectral lines we see from the Sun are not understood.

Supernovae, the largest disasters in space, are the only places where the elements required for planets -- and for life itself -- are created. We owe our existence to the existence of supernovas.

A colleague showed Israelian an interesting spectrum that included a huge amount of oxygen. This amount of oxygen had never been seen before. And the conclusion was that a supernova had occurred in a star system, and that explosion had created a black hole.

Our galaxy also includes some "alien" stars -- they are stars that have come from other galaxies. When galaxies collide, some stars are left behind, and spectroscopy allows us to detect which ones are "foreign."

He also looks at a binary star with a phenomenon called a "super flare." What causes extremely large super flares? No one knows -- but he hopes that the mystery of super flares will be finally explained by spectroscopy.

But first, we need to understand the whole evolution of the universe, and how the objects have been producing and recycling various chemical elements. It's an extraordinarily complex study, and occasionally some anomalies appear. Those anomalies, Israelian thinks, may help us discover other life elsewhere in the universe. Biomarkers such as oxygen and ozone may indicate whether a planet is hospitable to life. In fact, water and methane have already been detected on distant planets outside of our solar system.

Photo: Garik Israelian at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 6: "Curious and curiouser," July 22, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

22 July 2009

Marcus du Sautoy at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 6

Mathematician and science communicator Marcus du Sautoy began his talk with the story of Evariste Galois, a Paris revolutionary who died in his brother's arms. The night before, Galois had stayed up all night trying to explain his mathematical ideas before his duel the next day. He was trying to explain symmetry.

Symmetry helps us understand the world: crystals, microbiology. Swine flu virus is a symmetrical object, and uses symmetry to its advantage as it attacks. Symmetry communicates genetic information. We perceive symmetry in human faces as beautiful. Symmetry is helping in uncovering the nature of fundamental particles. Scientists and artists both are interested in symmetry, although artists' relationship with it may be more "ambiguous," quips Sautoy. Artists set up expectations of symmetry, and then break them. 14th-century Japanese essays say "Uniformity is undesireable."

But ... what is symmetry? Galois asked whether by knowing one symmetry, we know all of them. One characteristic of symmetry is that by fixing an object at a point and rotating it in some way, that rotation can happen without it seeming that the object has rotated.

A "twisted, six-pointed starfish," for example, can be rotated by thirds or fifths of a turn, and still look the same. But after the rotations you can do something besides rotation. You can "pick it up and put it down again." Galois called this the "zero" symmetry. A triangle has the same property. It can be rotated -- and also "reflected."

Math is not a spectator sport, says du Sautoy. You have to actually do it to understand it, to enjoy it.

The interaction of the symmetries is different from the symmetry itself. In other words: "Are the symmetries themselves symmetrical?" He uses a grid of rows and columns representing the points of a symmetrical figure to illustrate whether it matters what order of rotations you can perform on a given figure. This allows us to explore how the symmetries between different objects are fundamentally different. This allows us to determine whether two different symmetrical objects have the same underlying abstract symmetry.

For example, there are only two objects with six symmetries: the twisted six-pointed starfish and the equilateral triangle from the original example.

But Galois' language for symmetry allows us to understand the symmetry of objects that we cannot actually see. Du Sautoy works on symmetrical objects in high-dimensional spaces.

Du Sautoy presented TED with a new symmetrical object he was working on the previous night, and offered any TEDster a chance to have their name as the name of the symmetrical object. To win, they had to say how many digits are in the number of symmetries a Rubik's cube has. Speaker Andrea Ghez won the contest.

Photo: Marcus du Sautoy at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 6: "Curious and curiouser," July 22, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

22 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Marcus du Sautoy on symmetry

Marcus du Sautoy used his math and science skills to open Session 6 with a thorough talk about symmetry. Reactions to this talk on Twitter seemed to range from amusing to challenging, but to be fair, Marcus du Sautoy did challenge the audience first.

You know you're at #TED when mathematicians get cheers on stage. :) -- christinelu

Marcus du Sautoy talks about symmetry and likes the Alhambra (which happens to be my view right now :-) -- TEDxCambridge

Thinking about symmetries giving me a slight headache :-) -- liaonet

Sorry, has to be for me --> "mathematics is not a spectator sport" says Marcus du Sautoy -- Thandelike

"Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting" quotes Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. Next article from me will be half written. -- WiredUK

@TEDGlobal has the insider perspective on the conference, make sure you're following!

22 July 2009

TED's volunteer translators weigh in on Session 5: Now in Hungarian and Traditional Chinese!

Here's Session 5's unedited running notes from our crack team of Open Translation Project translators, taken as they watch the live webcast of TEDGlobal 2009!

Click through to view the running notes for Session 5 in ...

Hungarian - 繁體中文

22 July 2009

David Deutsch at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 5

Unedited running notes from TEDGlobal 2009.

Our ancestors wondered what stars are. Humans have always yearned to know more -- it is a survival instinct. "How can I be warmer, cooler, safer, in less pain?" Prehistoric cave artists may have wished to draw better. But although they wished for more knowledge, for progress, they failed. The world did not improve for a long, long, long time.

What makes stars shine? We only really knew why as recently as 1899. We made many important discoveries and advancements in the 40 years that followed, so why did we not discover this in the 100,000 years before? Our ancestors had brains of the same design as we have. But somehow they stagnated, while we have driven our knowledge and technology forward at a staggering pace. Deutsch asks, Why? What event revolutionized the human condition?

The scientific revolution is where we should start to look for answers. Ever since then, our knowledge of the physical world and how to adapt it to our wishes has grown. The revolution was based on the fact that "It is possible to know." But what is that notion itself based on?

It was thought, in more primitive times, that "all that is important to know is already known." People believed that ancient scrolls and dogma were all the truth we needed. But starting to actually make progress away from that is not as simple as just "rejecting authority." Authorities have been rejected many times before, with no scientific progress resulting.

Promoting observation is important, but, as we learned today, perception does not offer a direct channel into "absolute reality." It's not like equations are carved into mountains. And if they are, it's because we carved them there. (He says: "By the way, why don't we DO that? What's WRONG with us?")

How do we know things? Empiricists would say: induction. How do we know spacetime is curved? "Looking at an eclipse, and seeing a dot here rather than there." How do we know evolution is true? "Looking at rocks." A creationist would say, "Ah! Gotcha! You're using guesswork." But they fail to see that their understanding of their ancient religious texts is also based on guesswork.

So is testability, as Karl Popper would say, the key to advancement? No. Even cranks can make theories that are "testable."

What is the one thing that allows for scientific advancement, for progress, rather than stagnation? Deutsch's answer comes from a Simpson's clip. In the clip, Lucy Lawless, actress who played Xena in Xena: The Warrior Princess answers geeky fans' questions about plotholes and inconsistencies with one answer: "If you see any plothole, remember that a wizard did it." Deutsch says, interestingly, this type of explanation is not problematic because it contradicts a different explanation -- it's just about it being a bad explanation. In the clip, character Professor Frink asks for an explanation. Lucy Lawless offers a poor explanation. (Does it make sense to argue about what happened off stage in fiction?) The reason Lucy Lawless' explanation doesn't work, according to Deutsch, is because the "Wizard" entity that provided the explanation could easily be substituted for any other entity.

Easy variability is a sign of a bad explanation.

Look for explanations that can't be easily varied, which still explain the phenomenon. In the case of our explanation of seasons, the tilt of the Earth's rotation has many specific characteristics, any given one of which when challenged would affect everything about the theory. That's why it is powerful. But if the activities of fickle gods were what the changing seasons where attributed to, any given detail could be changed about the gods -- they created spring as a revenge! vs. spring returned as a sort of godly marriage blessing! -- without actually affecting the end result.

Deutsch's final conclusion: The truth consists of hard-to-vary assertions about reality.

Photo: David Deutsch at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 5: "Hidden algorithm" July 22, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

22 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: David Deutsch boggles minds

Quantum physicist David Deutsch is at TEDGlobal talking about how the stars shine, reality as conjecture and parallel universes. It's fascinating, but some of us are a little mentally intimidated and Twitter reflected that.

Day 2 @ TED. Settling in for a talk by quantum theorist David Deutsch. Is my mind ready fir this one? -- afar_diaz

will virtually hug the first tweeter to tweet the 'what makes stars shine' formula ;-) in David Deutsch's talk -- iamhelenharrop

David Deutsch "The Nature of Scientific Explanation" is beyond my twit-ability, sorry. Must. Focus. Brain. Hurts. -- ruthannharnisch

Chris Anderson asks physicist David Deutsch how the whole parallel universe thing is going. -- shanehegarty

David Deutsch talking about how we should look for the explanation that is the hardest to vary in order to progress in knowledge. -- tweodor

Well then, there's a reason for all the headache.

22 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: James Geary and the patterns of metaphor

Aphorist James Geary took the stage at TEDGlobal 2009 this morning. Recognize a pattern? It was his second appearance on the TED stage for the conference and he took the opportunity to discuss metaphors and pattern. Twitter lit up, creating yet another pattern.

Watching James Geary talking about metaphors. My favorite way of explaining things. -- hecatomber

James Geary talking about Elvis Presley the King of Metaphor -- grumblemouse

Metaphor is a creation of patterns as well as the detection of patterns, James Geary -- izahoor

James Geary on metaphors and its' mathematics (hint X=Y) -- casinclair

Geary: Metaphors matter because they create expectations, influence decisions, + open the door to discovery. Yes! -- DesignObserver

Remember to follow Geary on Twitter for more metaphor!

Photo: James Geary at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 5: " Hidden algorithm," July 22, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

22 July 2009

Manuel Lima at TEDGlobal 2009: Running notes from Session 5

Unedited running notes from TEDGlobal 2009.

An interaction designer at Nokia, Lima looks at how complex interconnectedness can be understood. He is compelled by the divide between information and knowledge. So he looks at information visualization. He built a visualization tool called Blogviz that helps display how word-of-mouth information travels from person A to person B.

To understand how to visualize info, Lima started collecting hundreds and hundreds of examples of visualizations of complexity, which he compiled onto VisualComplexity.com. Subjects the visualizations deal with include social networks, computer systems, biology, transportation networks, food webs ... Now he tracks close to 700 projects.

Networks are omnipresent. They're in brains, in cells, power grids, ecosystems. This is why it is important to try to map networks. He studied Warren Weaver, who wrote on complexity, and "problems of simplicity." There are problems of simplicity, problems of disorganized complexity, and problems of organized complexity.

How do we connect interconnected and interdependent components of systems? In collecting visualizations, he's found some very interesting trends. How do we map the blogosphere? Nodes are not placed abstractly, but in an organized way, for example, according to geography. He shows a snapshot of the entire blogosphere, called "Hyperbolic Blogosphere."

Lima also tracks photo-sharing sites, i.e. Flickr, semantic structures of tags used in Flickr. He even tracks the most popular paths that people take through a particular city.

Using a network of GPS receivers which each collect paths, we can create "GPS drawings" that show traffic lines. Children using GPS have created drawings. He has also anchored GPS information to emotions, so you can find out what types of places in a certain city are associated with which emotions.

Later in the day he will show some video of visual complexity.

Photo: Manuel Lima at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 5: " Hidden algorithm," July 22, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

22 July 2009

Twitter Snapshot: Manuel Lima's new way to see networks and data

Interaction designer Manuel Lima was a last minute addition to the TEDGlobal program, but he made an impact by showcasing his new method for displaying data and networks. Needless to say, the crowd and the Twitterverse was engaged and enthralled:

listening to manuel lima and hearing about data vis that is actually useful and not just something marketing people like -- clemo

People are using Flickr to plot the most popular tourist pathways in cities. Derivative and hidden data is amazing and a bit scary. -- liaonet

noticing that my favourite #ted talk seems to be 'whatever talk I'm watching right now' - Manuel Lima's *definitely* my fave tho -- iamhelenharrop

Check out visualcomplexity.com amazing way to see networks -- liaonet

"[Data visualization] is becoming the syntax of a new language." <-- Right on. [yep!] -- brainpicker

Manuel Lima is one of the many TEDGlobal speakers you can follow on Twitter.

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