TED Blog » TED2007

A new kind of creature … brought to life

Kate Torgovnick — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 22:31:08 +0000

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At TED2007, artist Theo Jansen shared his work creating a new form of life — which can actually survive on its own — from plastic tubes and bottles. In this 3D-animation film, David Lance imagines Jansen’s creature walking through a park, morphing into metal and becoming a spider-like form that can jump cars, fly and, eventually, talk.

Deborah Scranton's "Earth Made of Glass" dissects the meaning of forgiveness

bgiussani — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:25:07 +0000

In her TED 2007 talk, director Deborah Scranton detailed how she put cameras in the hands of soldiers fighting in Iraq to realize her acclaimed “The War Tapes” documentary.

For her new film, “Earth Made of Glass“, which will premiere on April 26th at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York (Film’s trailer – Facebook group – Director’s statement – Premiere tickets info), Scranton has focused on a post-war situation, that of Rwanda, where in the 1994 genocide at least 800’000 people were killed, according to estimates.

The film powerfully casts the Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, fighting to expose the truth of what happened in 1994 (including the hidden role played by the French government) while trying to lead his country through a delicate reconciliation process — and to put in place the conditions for economic and social development. And an ordinary man, Jean Pierre Sagahutu, a genocide survivor scouring the countryside to find clues about his father’s unsolved murder.

As each relentlessly pursues the truth, they find themselves faced with a choice: to enact vengeance, or forgive. Scranton’s careful narrative succeeds in dissecting their struggles to uncover the foundations of what it means to forgive — as an individual, and as a nation — and to try to end hatred and violence.

The design genius of Charles + Ray Eames: Eames Demetrios on TED.com

Emily McManus — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:45:10 +0000

The legendary design team Charles and Ray Eames made films, houses and classic midcentury modern furniture. Eames Demetrios, their grandson, shows rarely seen films and archival footage in a lively, loving tribute to their creative process. Demetrios also talks about how his own work has been influenced by his grandparents’ legacy. (Recorded at TED2007, February 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 15:09)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/1O

Watch Eames Demetrios’ 2007 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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Erin McKean launches Wordnik — the revolutionary online dictionary

Shanna Carpenter — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:14:42 +0000

Today, Erin McKean realized the idea behind her 2007 TEDTalk with the launch of Wordnik.com, a dictionary that evolves as language does. On Wordnik, users can add new words and meanings, tag words with related expressions, see real-time search results for words from Twitter and Flickr, discover how many Scrabble points each word is worth — all on one page.

Here’s what it looks like when we search the word “blog”:

To further understand this amazing project and its implications, the TEDBlog talked with Erin this afternoon. In the middle of a hectic launch day, she gave the following excited interview:

We love Wordnik here at the TED office. Some of us may have spent the majority of the morning playing with it.

That’s great! We’ve been joking that we’d like to be so addictive that IP managers ban us.

So, how long has this been in the making? You talked about a similar concept in your TEDTalk from 2007, but when did it start concretely?

We consider Leap Day of 2008 our real start date. It was almost a year after the TEDTalk that we got together the money and the team.

We’ve heard that Wordnik.com may have had its beginnings at TED? Can you confirm this rumor?

Yes, yes! It was after the talk at TED that Roger McNamee said, “Let’s have lunch.” I had lunch with him and his wife Ann. We started with the idea that we could use language analysis techniques to help other companies. But as we were discussing it, we realized that it wouldn’t be all that different to start this as a stand-alone being.

Then Roger brought in Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures. Steve gave a lot of advice on the practical end, which was great, because my career as a dictionary editor did not completely prepare me for my new role as a start-up CEO. I found Grant Barrett and Orion Montoya who I worked with at Oxford University Press. Steve and Roger then found Tony Tam, who became our head of engineering. And that was the beginning of our staff.

Without TED this would not have happened. There’s zero chance that I would have met Roger McNamee, and even less of a chance that I would have had 20 minutes to speak at him. The TED video was also a great recruiting tool because when I needed to explain my idea I could just email the link. You know, for when people ask, “Who’s Erin? What does she want to do?” I could just direct them to the talk.

Everyone at TED has been so helpful. Tom Rielly has given me so much support. And I had a conversation with June (Cohen) this morning where she offered to add the transcripts for the TEDTalks to our text examples. So when you look up a word like “synecdochically,” which I mention in my talk and probably isn’t found in many other places, there will be a reference. And, because the transcripts link to the actual video, people can hear the words for which we didn’t have a link to the pronunciation.

That’s another thing about this system — people who are contributing don’t even know they are. If you tweet a word, we’ll link to your tweet on Wordnik, so you don’t even have to go out of your way.

We love that you included Twitter and Flickr elements. How did you decide on pulling these in? It doesn’t seem to be an immediately intuitive decision, but is so helpful to understanding a word’s use and meaning.

It’s funny because it’s completely intuitive to dictionary editors. How can we show how a word is really used? The other day I tried to find out if “pants” was being used as a suffix and I found a tweet for “awesomepants.” Twitter is like overhearing people’s conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.

Flickr — well, if you’ve looked at dictionary illustrations you know that they tend to be uninteresting, and so small. With Flickr, you get a lot of abstractions too. What dictionary would have pictures of “honor”? When you look “honor” up on Wordnik, you get pictures of women named Honor, which tells you that it’s also used as a proper noun. You also get images of flags and different symbols of the military. Now you can see what feelings words evoke.

READ MORE: Erin McKean on sourcing text examples, swine flu tags and coming to your own conclusions on wordsInteresting. We were also wondering what the source was for the text examples of words …

Right now the majority are from the Gutenberg e-text — these are books that all out of copyright. But we’re working with partners on getting bigger feeds. We’re not really worried. There’s a 400-year-old tradition of example sentences in dictionaries being treated as fair use. Also, if we use somebody’s work and they’re not happy, they can call us and we’ll take them out of the history of the English language.

What words are you looking forward to people adding?

I’m really looking forward to seeing Twitter used to invent new words. I’m more interested in seeing how people deepen and expand the network of words than seeing any words in particular. I really can’t wait to see what will happen with the tagging function. Already, if you look up the swine flu tag, you find words like “aporkalypse” and “hamdemic.” You would never find these in a regular dictionary! We’re trying to make the ephemeral more permanent. And, again, it’s less about the individual word and really about expanding how words are connected. After all, we don’t speak in one-word exchanges.

As a last question, I’d like to ask how you came to your theory on words — that, as a dictionary editor, you would rather be someone who gathers all words than someone who keeps “bad” words out of the dictionary?

I guess I was thinking about it as a lapse in critical thinking. Brilliant people would come to me and say, “Is this right, or this?” And then I’d give them the evidence on both sides and say, “Now, make up your own mind.” And they’d say, “No, I want the answer.”

Now, these were people who would never consider doing this in any other area of life. For anything else, they would use the evidence to come to their own conclusions. These were people who probably wouldn’t take my recommendation on a restaurant. But in this respect, they were willing to accept whatever answer I gave them. Instead of this, we want to give everybody access to the words, to make up their own minds.

Also, whether words are right or wrong can vary according to use. I might say to a friend , “That movie was awesomepants!” But I would not lead into a movie review in The New York Times with the word awesomepants. That would be inappropriate. People expect that one size fits all with words, when that doesn’t work in any other area of their lives. I hope that we can change that view.

Q&A with Laurie Garrett: "This is a huge wake-up call"

Emily McManus — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:00:00 +0000

TED took 20 minutes with Laurie Garrett this afternoon to follow up on her TEDTalk from 2007, posted today, about pandemic flu. Garrett is the author of The Coming Plague, and a fellow on the Council for Foreign Relations who studied global health and emerging diseases. (As you can imagine, she is very busy this week.) We asked Garrett: What has changed since the last pandemic panic, 2007′s avian flu? What does she worry about now? And really, should we not wash our hands?

Did the avian flu scare of two years ago prompt real action from the government?

Yeah, I think actually there’s been a serious maturation in not only US response but all over the world and within the WHO. We’re in a different era in terms of how the public is getting information. The CDC even has a Twitter account — hundreds of thousands of people are twittering the CDC.

So the situation of 2007 has changed?

Yes, we’re way beyond that now. All the thought processes that went on, all the practices and drills — and criticisms from people like myself — has paid off.

The WHO seems much more open now — with daily briefings on the web, news releases, the announcement today that we’re not longer calling it “swine flu” …

That was because the pork industry went bananas. They’ve seen countries ban US and Mexican pork products. It’s affecting the US meat industry in ways that couldn’t be predicted. It’s what we saw in the chicken industry with H5N1 [avian flu].

But it’s really important to understand — in the big picture, stepping away from the immediate situation — it’s not coincidental that we’re looking at a virus that seems to have elements genetically from at least three species of host, human, bird and pig, and even the pig pieces seem to come from a minimum of six different input points. This is the most deeply mosaiced virus that we’ve seen circulating in humans. And it has erupted from the pork industry. So we have these giant industrial-scaled pork plants where the pigs are literally snout to snout — you have an infection start at one end, and it just zips through the whole darn place.

One of our Facebook commenters noted this — that “packing 500,000 animals in a space of the size of a football field is a recipe for disaster.”

Pigs are passing their viruses to humans, but more significantly, humans are passing their viruses to pigs. H1N1 appears to have been a human virus that passed through pigs, through birds, back through pigs, it took a few more turns, and then back to humans.

We have these new ecologies that are complete artificial and completely bizarre. Imagine a row of neatly stacked dominoes all stacked in the same way. Think of the pork industry as the dominoes. You’re creating these perfect environments for disease. We know it’s better to have a heterogeneous population, and this is a huge wake-up call.

Do you feel differently now than you did then about any of the points you made — about masks or handwashing, for instance?

I think the primary purpose of a mask is to scare the heck out of the people you’re talking to, and then they stay 5 feet away. They don’t keep viruses away, they keep people away.

For those who are health professionals and first responders, who have to get up close and personal with people, I remain convinced that only an N95 mask, a fitted N95 mask, offers the proper protection.

For the average person, I really think the primary person of the mask is to scare other people. Although, if you are sick and you cough, most of the droplets do end up inside the mask, so you are protecting other people.

And handwashing?

Well, I think handwashing is going to help, and you should wash your hands.

But the interesting thing is, Why do we have flu so late in the year? Usually the flu season has been over for quite some time, so this is a very unusual situation. And one of the things that’s interesting about why flu is seasonal, and is the sort of bad-news endpoint of the paragraph I am now uttering: When flu is coughed or you sneeze it, the virus is suspended in a liquid environment. Ideally an environment with lots of polysaccharides and sugars, an environment like mucus. Suspended in mucus, the virus can go from your hand to a doorknob, from a doorknob to another person’s hand; it can go onto the surface of a telephone … all those things are contagious to others. Mucus also protects the virus from ultraviolet rays. One reason flu is seasonal — as the temperature rises, these things tend to dry out. So in the summer, it’s very, very unusual to see flu virus circulating. The bad new is, if this virus has indeed taken hold, it will move to the Southern hemisphere for their winter, and it will come back to us, possibly in a different mutation, this fall. As our temperatures drop, we may see a return. This is the ominous issue.

What can we learn from the 1918 flu pandemic? Laurie Garrett on TED.com

tedstaff — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:35:23 +0000

In 2007, as the world worried about a possible avian flu epidemic, Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, gave this powerful talk to a small TED University audience. Her insights from past pandemics are suddenly more relevant than ever. (Recorded at TED U 2007, February 2007, in Monterey, California. Duration: 21:05.)

Watch Laurie Garrett’s talk from TED U 2007 on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks.

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Bumptop launches!

tedstaff — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:54:00 +0000

Via Mashable and ReadWriteWeb: Anand Agarwala’s Bumptop, a viral demo from TED2007, has gone live (for Windows). From Mashable’s report:

Two years ago, a bright engineer, Anand Agarawala, gave a presentation at the TED conference about a new technology he and a team were working on that showed how they believed the desktop should work. Just like how people use a real desk, they believed that the user should be able to interact with desktop items in 3D, pin up photographs, pile related items into stacks, and more.

Today, that dream has become a reality with the launch of BumpTop for Windows (Mac version coming soon), a gorgeous desktop application that transforms the desktop from a cold, vertical interface into a dynamic 3-dimensional room …

Right now, the site Bumptop.com seems to be swamped. So until you can check it out in person, here’s Anand Agarwala’s demo of Bumptop at TED:

James Nachtwey speaks in Rio to mark World TB Day

tedstaff — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Photographer James Nachtwey, whose TED Prize wish was to raise awareness of TB and the mutant strain XDRTB, will speak in Rio de Janeiro today to mark World TB Day. The Stop TB Partnership is twittering live from the meeting, and it’s being webcast live, with yesterday’s sessions available for viewing as well.

See James Nachtwey’s powerful photographs of the XDRTB epidemic:

The immense promise of DNA folding: Paul Rothemund on TED.com

tedstaff — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:00:00 +0000

At TED2007, Paul Rothemund gave TED a short summary of DNA folding (calling it a process akin to magic). Now, he lays out in clear, adundant detail the immense promise of this field — to create tiny machines that assemble themselves from a set of instructions. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 16:24.)

Watch Paul Rothemund’s 2008 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 285 TEDTalks — including many more talks from MacArthur “genius” grant winners.

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The center of our minds: Vilayanur Ramachandran on TED.com

Emily McManus — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:00:00 +0000

Brain researcher Vilayanur Ramachandran talks about how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He discusses three specific syndromes: phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 23:46.)

Watch Vilayanur Ramachandran’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.