Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week. First, happy (late) World Poetry Day! Celebrate the occasion with 8 talks from spoken-word poets.

Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly ... and cooperate
Just when you thought Vijay Kumar’s robots that fly and cooperate were creepy enough, he and his team have developed a drone that can pick up objects at high speed using a bird-like claw. [The Verge]

A piece by Ed Yong takes an in-depth look at new findings on the mechanics of swarming, a phenomenon that has baffled scientists. Awesome quote: “Cannibalism, not cooperation, was aligning the swarm.” [Wired]

Beautiful photos from Christo’s “Big Air Package” — which is being called the “largest indoor sculpture in history” — being installed at the Gasometer Oberhausen, due to premiere in December 2013. [This is colossal]

Ed Boyden: A light switch for neurons
Congrats to Ed Boyden, who was named one of the winners of the 2013 Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize earlier this week for his work on optogenetics. Watch Boyden’s 2011 talk, about using fiber-optic implants to control specific neurons in the brain. [MIT news]

What is it like growing up in a futurist household? Veronique Greenwood’s mother, a technology consultant, was touting the rise of mobile social networking years before the iPhone had come out and before Facebook had a “Like” button; she had pens printed with the slogan “Remember when we could only hear each other?” a decade before Skype. [Aeon magazine]

Stewart Brand: The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready?

More Ed Yong? Yes. Yong takes a look at the pros and cons of de-extinction (a big topic in these parts after Stewart Brand’s TED2013 talk). [National Geographic]

Congratulations to TED Fellow Durreen Shahnaz, whose company, Impact Investment Exchange, has been nominated for the Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Innovation Award.

Timo Arnall’s thoughtful critique of the growing trend to encourage “invisible” interaction design. [Elastic space]

Jehane Noujaim wishes for a global day of film

More congrats are in order, to 2006 TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim, who just completed a Kickstarter to raise money for postproduction on her Sundance Award-winning documentary The Square. [Kickstarter] Read more about The Square.

A father overhears his son talking about coming out of the closet to his mother and him, then leaves him this note. [Twitter] More details from Gawker.

A cute hello from the Axosoft TED Live event from TED2013. Watch for some tasty-looking carrots. [YouTube]

Egyptian filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize in 2006 with a wish to bring the world together for one day using the power of film. Her most recent work, The Square, saw her heading back to Cairo to track events in Tahrir Square as the Hosni Mubarak regime fell. While there, she filmed a group of local revolutionaries who had also been drawn to the tumultuous events, including the actor Khalid Abdalla and Aida El-Kashef, a cofounder of Mosireen, a media center dedicated to creating citizen journalism during the revolution. The documentary tracks the charismatic group of individuals through their time at the height of the revolution, and continues to tell their stories even after many of the other revolutionaries had moved on from Tahrir Square.

The Square won the Sundance Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary category earlier this year, and Noujaim and her team are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the post-production of the film, including editing and further filming. After all, this is a story that is far from over.

I caught up with Noujaim and the film’s producer, Karim Amer, to talk about the film, the achievements of the revolution, and what’s still to come in this newborn democracy.

What are you hoping to achieve with the film?

Jehane Noujaim: I hope people see this is not only a story about Egypt. This is a story about struggle and about fighting for your beliefs and putting everything on the line to fight for what you believe in. That story is interesting when the big news cameras cover it, when you have the entire country behind you — but when the cameras go away and most of the country and state television are calling you prostitutes and thugs and are not behind you, that can be some of the most interesting footage. It really shows what has to be sacrificed.

Are you hopeful for the revolution?

JN: Definitely. But this is a very difficult time right now, and it’s going to be a long process. I don’t think that we’re going to see some of the results for 5, 10, 15 years. This was a fairytale, to expect that in 18 days or two weeks, people in a square were going to be able to bring down a dictator and his entire regime. In a way, by bringing down Mubarak, a lot of the people that were fighting lost the symbol of what the revolution was fighting for. So it became even more difficult after Mubarak stepped down. But what they’re fighting against is the removal of a regime, and that means changing the system. That means dealing a major blow to the entrenched systems that are in place, and that includes the army, the police state, the  former regime, and the Muslim Brotherhood … not because of religious reasons, but because what the Brotherhood tried to do when they got into power was a massive power grab, and so it’s really been a fight against another dictatorship.

You first started working on the film in 2011. In The Square it’s apparent that since then there’s been a change in morale among the revolutionaries. Can you talk a little about that?

JN: The revolution goes in waves. There are times in the film when our characters are completely depressed. There are wins and then there are many times when they feel like the battle’s been lost, and they have to keep reminding themselves that it’s a long struggle. Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.

Karim Amer: I think a lot of people we’ve spoken to from Western media outlets are kind of gloomy on the revolution’s outlook, but when we talked to our characters … it took over 30 years to make people realize what Mubarak’s regime was doing and to galvanize enough of a movement to get him out of power. It took over a year and a half to do that with the military. Now, the Muslim Brotherhood’s in power with the first freely elected president, and less than 6 months later, people are back in the streets. Our characters see it, and we see it, as progress. People are starting to react much more quickly to acts of injustice. That’s the new Egypt that many of the people in this movement and in our film are shaping and paving.

So uprising and violence are actually signs that things are improving?

KA: We’re not saying that violence is a sign that things are improving. What I’m saying is that reactions to injustice leading to massive action of people showing their power…

JN: Ideally nonviolent.

KA: …is an act of improvement. You’re going to try to jam the constitution through illegally? Well, we’re not going to stand for that. The action-to-reaction time is improving.

JN: Before Mubarak stepped down, when a massive injustice took place, if you tried to have a conversation with somebody in the street, with a taxi driver, anybody, people would not even speak about it. People were afraid to give their opinions even though they knew that there were massive injustices happening. And even after he stepped down it took a year [for conversations to start happening.] You see in the film, the army was torturing people in the Egyptian museum, but it still took people about 8 months to stand in the street and to say to their army that they would not stand for this any more. And then when Morsi did his power grab, it took them, what, two weeks? Two weeks to go down into the streets. That is a massive change from the Egypt I grew up in.

KA: It is a complete paradigm shift in terms of the mentality of the people. People are no longer living in a culture of fear.

How have things in Egypt changed since you were young?

JN: Probably the biggest change is really seeing people realize that the government is supposed to work for them, rather than them having to be victims of whatever the government decides to do.

KA: Egypt is an epicenter of centralized states. Egypt is the land of the Pharaohs. We’ve been living under a Pharaonic-type of society for 5,000 years. What changed was a huge shift in people’s expectations of their leadership and their expectations of  the future they want to live. That’s why we know that regardless of the short term outcome, the revolution has been successful.

Clearly not everyone from the revolution is pleased with Morsi. Do you think he’ll stay in power?

JN: Right now there aren’t the checks and balances that are in place in the United States or other democracies, so the people gathering in protest around the palace are Morsi’s checks and balances. My hope is that people will continue to express themselves and educate the rest of the country on their rights. But I don’t think that Morsi is about to be ousted anytime soon.

KA: The goal isn’t, like, the continual ousting of people. We’re trying to create a system. Right now a new social contract is being formed. The goal is that any attempts for Morsi to become a dictator are curbed, and that he recognizes the power of the people. If he fails to do that, then I think, yeah, he will not last. But I think that the outpouring of pressure against him is really making him check this again, especially because the Muslim Brotherhood is losing so much support from their own people, who are very disappointed.

JN: In the film, one of our characters starts something called Mosireen, which means “adamant,” and basically it gets cameras out to people to film injustices. One very powerful piece that they filmed later was at a protest at the presidential palace when Morsi did his power grab. A number of Brotherhood supporters trashed the tents in front of the palace, took people, and tortured them. Somebody managed to videotape it. In these torture videos, the Brotherhood supporters were saying, “Who’s paid you to be here? You’re a thug.” That was Mubarak’s exact playbook.

As we watch this happen again, the feeling you get is not that Morsi himself is going to be the savior and change things, but that people are going to keep fighting against the dictatorship and against this kind of rule.

Jehane, I know you spent some time in jail during the filming. What were some other personal challenges that you both faced in making the film?

KA: Of course, Jehane was arrested 3 times throughout the process.

JN: Everybody on the team has been arrested, shot at, or chased by soldiers or police.

KA: Cameras confiscated I don’t know how many times.

JN: We’ve had many cameras confiscated, a lot of footage taken, so that’s probably the most obvious, but we still managed to get all of the footage out of the country and to put a film together.

KA: When you’re documenting something that’s so close to home, what’s at stake for everyone in the film, the whole team, is your country. Your country is being reshaped and redefined, and you have the ability, hopefully, to make some kind of impression of that through the film. So there’s a lot at stake, and there’s a lot of emotion. One of the characters, Ahmed, told us that this film to him is the truth that must be preserved. He said, our generation and our parents’ generation grew up in a country where history was written by whomever was in power, and they could write and say whatever they wanted. This film is our ability to show an alternative version, to preserve the truth of what happened in this square, and he said, if this film succeeds, then our kids will live in a country that’s free.

And I’m like … okay … that’s a lot to put on the film. [Laughs] I mean, we’re happy it means so much, but that’s a huge burden.

Jehane Noujaim wishes for a global day of film

Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim — who won the TED Prize in 2006 and wished for a global day of film — seeks to tell the story of these protestors in her new documentary, The Square. The film combines the shocking and powerful footage taken by the protestors themselves, along with Noujaim’s interviews. The Square premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday and received a standing ovation. It is in the running for the film festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition.

But Noujaim does not want The Square to be a closed book. She has taken to Kickstarter to raise funds to finish the film.

“The Square is a film about a group of young Egyptians brought together by a revolution, and who — together — find a new sense of hope for their country … [But] two years in, the revolution is far from over,” the Kickstarter page explains. “We are asking you, the Kickstarter community, to help finish our film. There are so many ways we want to make sure this film really comes to life after it debuts at Sundance … in Egypt, in the USA, and really around the world … Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movementAt this very moment our team members are on the ground in Egypt, continuing to capture footage of history as it unfolds — to be included in the final final edit of the film. We  wrapped up our Sundance edit only days ago, but we have more work to do. Your funding will help.”

The Square isn’t the only film of Noujaim’s to show at Sundance this year. Her documentary Rafea: Solar Mama is showing as a part of the festival’s “Stories of Change” program this week. This film follows a Jordanian woman who attends Bunker Roy’s revolutionary Barefoot College in India, the subject of his 2011 TED Talk.

In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim made her TED Prize wish: that for one day, the world would band together for the shared experience of watching film. “As the world is getting smaller,” she said onstage, “it becomes more and more important that we learn each other’s dance moves, that we meet each other, that we get to know each other, that we are able to figure out a way to cross borders, to understand each other.”

Now, Noujaim’s newest film, Solar Mamas, follows Rafea, a Jordanian woman who attends the revolutionary Barefoot College in India.

As the school’s founder, Bunker Roy, explained in his 2011 TEDTalk, “Learning from a barefoot movement,” the college teaches rural women and men – many of them illiterate — to become engineers, artisans and doctors. There are only two rules for enrollment — you must be poor to attend and you must take your learnings home to your village. Rafea is chosen, along with 26 other mothers and grandmothers, to get a free education in solar engineering.

But while Solar Mamas gives an insider’s glimpse at Bunker Roy’s Barefoot College, it also examines a bigger question: “Are women better at getting out of poverty than men?”

Solar Mamas is part of “Why Poverty?,” a multimedia film festival featuring 30 short and 8 full-length movies from filmmakers across the globe. Produced by the nonprofit Steps International and funded in part by the Gates Foundation and Skoll Foundation, the series will air on TV channels around the world, as well as online, with the goal of reaching 500 million people.

“Why Poverty?” short films are being released all through November. Meanwhile, the initiative’s eight longer offerings will air beginning on November 25. Check WhyPoverty.net for the broadcast schedule to see when Solar Mamas is playing in your country.

Author and activist Isabel Allende discusses women, creativity, feminism — and the power of passionate thinkers and doers:

The former Finance Minister of Nigeria, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, talks about one key opportunity to grow African economies — by investing in women and the businesses they start:

(For more, watch Jacqueline Novogratz >>)

Scientist Nalini Nadkarni explores the world of the forest canopy — and shares her findings with the world below, through dance, art and bold partnerships. She’s working to inspire the next generation of women scientists:

The wonderful Nellie McKay sings “Mother of Pearl” (with the immortal first line “Feminists don’t have a sense of humor”) and “If I Had You” from her sparkling set at TED2008:

Find these four and many more astonishing women (including the legendary primatologist Jane Goodall, oceanographers Sylvia Earle and Tierney Thys, games theorist Brenda Laurel, Zipcar inventor Robin Chase … ) on TED.com >>

+ In 2007, biologist E.O. Wilson wished that we would help him build a comprehensive catalog of life on Earth. The Encyclopedia of Life launched this spring and is growing — with many ways for both scientists and non-scientists to contribute. Create an account on the site to hear about the latest updates and opportunities — including the debut of a tool for uploading your own photos. Find out more about The Encyclopedia of Life and EOL.org>>

+ In 2005, photographer Edward Burtynsky wished for new ways to teach kids about environmental stewardship. Working with WGBH in Boston, his web cartoon show, The Greens, just celebrated its first anniversary and seventh episode. Watch shows online and download art and music, take a movie quiz and share the site with kids you know. Find out more about The Greens >>

+ At TED2008, physicist Neil Turok wished for the TED community’s help in developing math and sciences talent all over Africa, though the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS). Our next Einstein, he says, could be African. At NextEinstein.org, learn more about AIMS, watch video interviews with students, and find many ways to help in this drive to open 15 math and sciences academies in Africa and fund scholarships for the best and the brightest on the continent. Find out more about NextEinstein.org >>

+ in 2008, writer and activist Dave Eggers gave a hilarious TED Prize talk about his wish: that we will all become personally involved in our local schools, and tell a story about it. Whether you volunteer with a chapter of Dave’s 826 National foundation, or on your own, sign in at OnceUponASchool.org and share your story. Find out more about OnceUponASchool.org >>

+ In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim made an audacious wish: to connect the world for one day through the power of film. Last weekend’s Pangea Day was a moving 4-hour festival — and you can replay the day on PangeaDay.org. Watch the films, speakers and music you missed, find ways to take action, and discuss each film on the site (click on “Comments” to expand the discussion). Find out more about PangeaDay.org >>

+ In 2006, Cameron Sinclair asked TED to help him build an open-source platform to help architects connect with communities in need of designs. The result was the Open Architecture Network — a successful website that acts as both a clearinghouse for building plans and a vibrant social network, allows its users to sample, remix and customize design work for their needs. To help Sinclair’s wish come true, join the community at the Open Architecture Network’s website.

+ In 2006, Dr. Larry Brilliant wished to start a global early warning system to prevent the spread of infectious disease. The organization that grew out of this wish, Innovative Support To Emergencies Diseases and Disasters (InSTEDD) is a venue for humanitarian collaboration with a focus on those involved in disease tracking and disaster response. You can help Dr. Brilliant now by test-driving an alpha version of their crisis assistance directory.

And it’s not too late to submit your film for the February 15, 2008, deadline! Submit a film. Share a story. The world will be watching. Find out here how to submit your short film or video >>

We’re looking for films that will make us laugh, cry, and gasp. They can be fiction, nonfiction, real life, animation, or your own unique mixture. But they should hold our attention for every second. And above all, they should tell a story that someone else on the other side of the world will be able to relate to.

As you plan your film, try to imagine millions of people in different countries gathered around in the flickering light, waiting in hushed silence for your tale to start. What story will you tell? What images will you show them?

Submit a film. Share a story. The world will be watching. Deadline for submission is February 15, 2008. Find out here how to submit your short film or video >>

Then on May 10, 2008 -– Pangea Day -– join the worldwide film festival! Screens in Cairo, Dharamsala, Kigali, London, New York City, Ramallah, Rio de Janeiro and Tel Aviv will be videoconferenced live to produce a 4-hour program of powerful short film and video, visionary speakers and great music.

Watch the trailer now — with subtitles in 20 languages! Working with dotSUB, a web-based translation tool, you can choose subtitles in Arabic, French, Chinese, German, Hindi, Korean … and register on dotSUB to translate it into even more languages.

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion, while uniting millions of people to build a better future. There are many ways to get involved:

Submit your own short film
If you had the world’s attention for just a few minutes, what story would you tell? On May 10, 2008, the opportunity is yours. Submit a film. Share a story. The world will be watching. Deadline for submission: Feb. 15, 2008. Find out how to submit your short film >>

Host a screening
People are signing up to host screenings all over the world — in homes, parks, schools, and more. More than 200 screenings in 46 countries are listed on our Google Map, and we’ve just begun! Sign up to host a screening >>

Pangea Day will be broadcast globally to millions on television, in digital theaters, online and via mobile devices. It will be a live 4-hour program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music. The goal of Pangea Day is to create greater understanding among different people and cultures, and to form a global community focused on improving the future for all people.

“From the earliest days of movies, film has had the power to bring people together. But today, Internet technology is allowing film to bring together not only neighbors, but an entire global community,” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia president and CEO (pictured at right). “Nokia is proud to work with Pangea Day as we embark on this important shared mission of connecting people across the globe.”

For many people today, especially in developing markets, the mobile phone is providing their first Internet experience.

“Perhaps Nokia’s greatest contribution to Pangea Day is the ability of our technology to give a voice to people who previously were unable to take part in the global community that is the Internet,” Kallasvuo said. “By integrating the power of wireless technology into Pangea Day, we can help it meet its goal of bringing together people from around the world.”

Nokia and Pangea Day will work with aspiring filmmakers in disadvantaged areas and conflict zones to make it possible for their stories to also be told. By distributing video-enabled mobile devices to these filmmakers, their works can be captured and shared globally, demonstrating how wireless technology can not only provide a platform for people of diverse backgrounds to express themselves, but also to bring them together.

“Pangea Day was created by TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim. One of the core goals of the TED Prize is to recognize a new generation of global citizens,” says Chris Anderson, Curator of TED. “Jehane’s work has shown how powerfully film can help us understand and connect with other people.

For more information on Pangea Day, visit www.pangeaday.org.

About Nokia
Nokia is the world leader in mobility, driving the transformation and growth of the converging Internet and communications industries. Nokia makes a wide range of mobile devices and provides people with experiences in music, navigation, video, television, imaging, games and business mobility through these devices. Nokia also provides equipment, solutions and services for communications networks.