Some employees can work 9am to 5pm, five days a week. Others are available on evenings and weekends. But in today’s talk, filmed at the TEDSalon in London, entrepreneur Wingham Rowan describes another type of worker — one who has a highly unpredictable schedule.

“Think of someone who has a recurring but unpredictable medical condition, somebody who’s caring for a dependent adult, or a parent with complex childcare needs — their availability for work can be such that it’s ‘[I can do a] few hours today’ and ‘Maybe I can work tomorrow, but I don’t if and when yet,’” says Rowan. “It’s extraordinarily difficult for these people to find the work that they so often need very badly. Which is a tragedy because there are employers who can use pools of very flexible, local people booked completely ad hoc.”

Rowan says that he is encouraged by websites like Task Rabbit, which allow people to pick up odd jobs. But he pictures a far more wide-reaching effort to employ flexible workers, beginning with his website Slivers of Time.

His big idea: instead of giving people at the bottom of the economic order online tools that are essentially glorified classifieds, could they use complex analytic tools –  more like what a Wall Street trader deals with — to chart their economic opportunities? And could governments help on this front? Rowan reveals that there is actually a precedent for this — lottery systems, which governments across the globe have approved. To hear how flexible employment would work on the same model, watch this talk.

Below, more TED speakers with big ideas on hiring.

Misha Glenny: Hire the hackers!
Hackers are, generally, thought of as common criminals. But there is another way to treat coders who use their talents to point out flaws in cyber-security measures rather than to steal money, says underworld investigator Misha Glenny. At TEDGlobal 2011, he suggests a bold reversal: instead of prosecuting hackers, engage them and even put them to work.

Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs?
With unemployment high, people are very concerned with the question, “Are robots and computer programs taking over jobs that people could be doing?” At TEDxBoston, Andrew McAfee admits that, yes, they are. But this is no reason to despair, McAfee says. Because human beings will always excel in one area that digital technology cannot compete: coming up with new ideas.

Maria van der Heijden: Jobs for 1 million women
In India, an estimated 700 to 800 million people live on less than two dollars a day. Maria van der Heijden, who founded Women on Wings, shares a vision for how to change this equation — by hiring women for jobs that pay a living wage. In this talk from TEDxDelft, van der Heijden shares how she hopes to employ a million women by connecting their handiwork with global markets.

Majora Carter: 3 stories of local eco-entrepreneurship
Brenda Palms-Barber of Chicago, Illinois, took an interesting approach when she started a line of skincare products made from honey. She hired ex-convicts to care for the bees. The idea was to give them employment experience and teach them life skills that could keep them from returning to prison. In this talk from TEDxMidwest, Majora Carter looks at Palms-Barber’s approach — as well as the approaches of two others — to work toward a greener planet and, in the process, hire local workers.

Heiko Fischer: The future of work
A stunning number of people don’t feel like they have any control over how things work at their place of employment, says Heiko Fischer. In this talk from TEDxKoeln, he shares a vision for turning human resources on its head and thinking about employees as resourceful humans. Because companies need their best work — and innovative ideas — in order to stay competitive.

Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration
There are two ways to accomplish a business goal, says Clay Shirky at TEDGlobal 2005. You can build an institution with employees, and then layers on top of those employees to manage them. Or you can build a mechanism that allows for collaboration, and harness the spirit of hobbyists and volunteers. In this talk, Shirky explores the upsides and downsides of hiring versus coordinating.

Today’s TED Talk, however, might actually convince me to give meditation another shot.

“We live in an incredibly busy world. Our pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, and we’re always doing something,” says Andy Puddicombe at the TEDSalon London Fall 2012. “The sad fact is that we’re so distracted that we are no longer present in the world in which we live. We miss out on the things that are most important to us. The crazy thing is, people assume that’s just the way life is. But that’s not really how it has to be.”

In this talk, Puddicombe — who is as equally as turned off by incense as me — shares the fascinating story of how he become a monk, and gives a convincing argument for why it is worth it to take 10 minutes a day to refresh the mind.

“Most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it’s much different than that,” says Puddicombe. “It’s more about stepping back, seeing the thought clearly — witnessing it coming and going — without judgment, but with a relaxed, focus mind.”

To see a demonstration, with juggling, watch this surprising talk. And after the jump, four recent scientific studies that bear out that there might actually be something to this meditation thing.

For years, meditation fans have said that the practice keeps them healthy. But a new study, published in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes in November 2012, actually tested this. For the study, 201 people with coronary heart disease were asked to either (a) take a health education class promoting better diet and exercise or (b) take a class on transcendental meditation. Researchers followed up with participants for the next five years and found that those who took the meditation class had a 48% reduction in their overall risk of heart attack, stroke and death. It’s an initial study, but a promising one. [Time]

Is meditating a good way to increase creativity? Maybe, but it depends on what kind. Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands looked at the way two types of meditation — focused-attention (for example, focusing on your breath) and open-monitoring (where participants focus on the both the internal and external) — affected two types of creative thinking — the ability to generate new ideas and solutions to problems. In a study published in April 2012 in Frontiers in Cognition, they revealed that the participants who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show improved results in the two creativity tasks. However, those who practiced open-monitoring meditation did perform better at task related to coming up with new ideas. [Meditation Research]

Researchers at UCLA wanted to study the brains of people who had been meditating for years, versus those who had never meditated or who had only done it for a short period of time. They took MRI scans of 100 people — half meditators and half non-meditators. They were fascinated to find that long-time meditators showed higher levels of gyrification (a folding of the cerebral cortex that may be associated with faster information processing). In a study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in February of 2012, they shared that, the more years a person had been meditating, the more gyrification their MRIs revealed.  [UCLA Newsroom]

Distractions are everywhere. But can meditation help a person better navigate through them? A computer scientist at the University of Washington teamed up with a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona to test this. The pair recruited 45 human resources managers, and gave a third of them eight weeks of mindfulness-based meditation training, a third of them eight weeks of body relaxation training and a third of them no training at all. All the groups were given a stressful multitasking test before and after the eight weeks. In a study published in the Proceedings of Graphics Interface in May of 2012, they showed that the mindful-mediation group reported less stress as they performed the multitasking test than both of the other groups. [Washington.edu]

So, how do you feel about meditation?

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“Mosquitos have killed more humans than any other creature in human history,” says Haydn Parry in today’s talk. “The mosquito has killed more humans than wars and plague.”

Every year, about a million and a half people succumb to malaria — even with technologies to prevent and treat the disease — while 50 to 100 million people a year are infected with dengue fever, a disease sometimes called “breakbone fever” that has grown 30 fold in the last half century. Spread by a species of mosquito from northern Africa — Aedes aegypti — the disease has skyrocketed because this mosquito and its eggs are so good at hitchhiking as human beings travel the world.

Traditionally, there have been two ways to control mosquitos in addition to nets and wearing covering clothing — larvicides, which kill mosquito eggs, and a variety of products designed to kill mosquitos as they fly. Both options are, however, difficult to deploy and can damage the environment, not to mention harm humans. Meanwhile, a single female mosquito can lay 500 eggs in her lifetime.

Parry’s company, Oxitec, has an idea to stop the rapid spread of dengue fever: genetically engineering male mosquitos to make their offspring unviable.

“There are two features of mosquito biology that really help us. Firstly, males don’t bite,” explains Parry. “And second — males are very, very good at finding females.  If there’s a male mosquito that you release and there is a female around, the male will find the female … If that male is carrying a gene that causes the death of the offspring, then the offspring don’t survive. Instead of having 500 mosquitos running around, you have none.”

Parry shares that small initial field trials of this method show that, in as short as four months, a mosquito population can be depleted by as much as 85%. If further research goes well, these altered mosquitos can be shipped, cheaply, around the world.

To hear more about this promising approach, watch Parry’s talk. Here, four more talks on mosquito madness.

Neuroscientist Molly Crockett has a secret to share: if you want to make better decisions, eat a grilled cheese sandwich.

In today’s talk, filmed at the TEDSalon in London, Crockett shares how she accidentally had a part in circulating this message. Several years ago, Crockett and her fellow researchers set out to study how serotonin would effect reactions when a person felt that they were treated unfairly. They manipulated serotonin in a study by giving participants a beverage designed to deplete the brain of the amino acid tryptophan, which gets converted into serotonin. The study found that, when tryptophan was low, people were more likely to seek revenge when they felt mistreated.

“That’s the study we did. And here are some of the headlines that came out afterwards,” says Crockett, revealing these doozies:

• “A cheese sandwich is all you need for strong decision making,” The Hindustan Times (June 6, 2008)
• “Eating cheese and meat may boost self-control,” Discover Magazine (June 6, 2008)
• “Official! Chocolate stops you being grumpy,” The West Australian (June 10, 2008)

“At this point you might be wondering, ‘Did I miss something? Cheese? Chocolate? Where did that come from?’” says Crockett. “I thought the same thing when these things came out, because our study had nothing to do with cheese or chocolate — we gave people a horrible-tasting drink. But it turns out that tryptophan also happens to be found in cheese and chocolate. And when science says that cheese and chocolate help you make better decisions, well that’s sure to grab people’s attention.”

This kind elision happens all the time as the press reports on neuroscience. From there, manufacturers latch on to overblown claims as they develop new products.

“Neuroscience is turning up more and more in marketing,” says Crockett. “Do you want to sell it? Put a brain on it.”

Crockett stresses that neuroscience is advancing quickly and leading to some truly amazing discoveries.

“I am more excited than most people for the potential of neuroscience to treat mental illness and even maybe make us better and smarter,” says Crockett. “But we’re not there yet … We have to be careful that we don’t let overblown claims detract the resources and attention away from the real science that’s playing a much longer game.”

For a primer on how to spot what Crockett calls “neuro-bunk,” “neuro-bullocks,” or “neuro-flapdoodle,” watch her engaging talk. And below, a selection of headlines that readers should be wary of. Note: Inclusion here doesn’t mean that the science behind a study is bad, or that a news source intentionally overstated a claim. It’s simply that these pieces give conclusive answers to concepts that scientists are only beginning to understand. As Crockett says, “The answers shouldn’t be simple because the brain isn’t simple.”

“You Love Your iPhone. Literally,” The New York Times (Sept. 30, 2011)

In her talk, Crockett debunks this op-ed, about a study in which 16 subjects were shown audio and video of a ringing iPhone while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to map their brain activity. The article notes a “flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion.” Crockett says to be very skeptical of claims that a brain scan can show emotions or thoughts. Yes, there might be activity in the insular cortex — but this region is also associated with memory, language, attention, anger, disgust and pain. Says Crockett, “By the same logic, I could equally conclude, ‘You hate your iPhone.’ When you see activation in the insula, you can’t just pick and choose your favorite explanation off the list.”

“Study: ‘Love hormone’ roused by social media,” Fox News (July 12, 2012)

Oxytocin is often referred to as the “love molecule” or “moral molecule,” because it’s associated with trust, cooperation and bonding. But any articles that refer to it as such should be taken with a grain of salt, says Crockett. According to Crockett, studies on oxytocin “are scientifically valid and they have been replicated, but they’re not the full story.” She explains, “Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy, it increases gloating. Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups.”

“Hormone Oxytocin May Keep Men Faithful,” ABC News (Nov. 14, 2012)

Last month, a flurry of articles appeared based on a study in which male participants were given “a sniff” of oxytocin before being introduced to an “attractive” experimenter. The study found that men in monogamous relationships who received said sniff kept their distance from the researcher. The hormone didn’t appear to have an effect on single men. So what’s the problem with this study circulating in the press? That it is a very big leap to say that oxytocin might “keep men faithful.” Keeping physical distance from an attractive woman in a single situation is hardly a measure of fidelity.

“Neuro boosts minds, moods and more — A drink review,” Lifenut.com (Sept. 26, 2011)

Neuro is a brand of beverages that makes bold claims on its bottles. “Using the power of science, each Neuro enhances the body’s reaction to all the ways you live your life in color,” reads their website, “from providing the spark that ignites your passions and stimulates your mind, to the fuel for your dreams and inner peace.” Naturally, Crockett is skeptical about this brand and, with it, any positive reviews. “When this came up in my local shop, naturally I was curious about some of the research backing these claims. I went to the company’s website looking to find some controlled trials of their products — but I didn’t find any,” says Crockett. “Trial or no trial, these claims are front and center on their products.”

“Brain scans can detect lying,” PreventDisease.com (undated)

This article quotes research that could “put the lie detector machine out of business.” It shares the results of a study in which fMRI was used to scan students’ brains as they were asked to lie and tell the truth in a lab setting. And when they were lying, subjects showed increased brain activity. While this study is interesting, much more research needs to be done before this headline could be considered true. Jumping to this conclusion is dangerous, as the issue of whether to use brain scans as evidence courtrooms is currently being debated.

“Red wine and chocolate can boost your brain power,” The Telegraph (May 6, 2011)

As Crockett notes in her talk, the media flocks to science that says decadent food and beverages have benefits for the brain. The claims are usually overstated — or made through tangential facts — as happened with Crockett’s study that morphed pro-chocolate in the press. In general, headlines like these should always set off warning bells.

Below, a few other recent headlines which have us wary of neuro-bunk:

• “All that stress is shrinking your brain, new study finds,” NBC News (Nov. 26, 2012)
• “Internet pornography can make you lose your memory,” The Independent (Dec. 17, 2012)
• “Go take a hike — it’s good for your brain,” Chicago Tribune (Dec. 19, 2012)
• “Study: Sex can make you smarter,” CBS Local (Sept. 14, 2012)

And some more great reading on the bounds of extrapolating from neuroscience research:

• “Neuroscience Fiction: What neuroscience really teaches us and what it doesn’t,” The New Yorker (Dec. 2, 2012)
• “Winter of Discontent: Is the hot affair between neuroscience and science journalism cooling down?” Knight Science Journalism Tracker (Dec. 3, 2012)

Ben Saunders spent 10 weeks walking from the north coast of Russia to the North Pole, and around to the north coast of Canada. For a full 72 days in 2004, Saunders was the only human being within a span of 5.4 million square miles, surviving an average temperature of -35C in conditions described by NASA as “the worst since records began.”

So Saunders, a polar explorer, was a little taken aback when a reporter asked him earlier this year: “If it is being done somewhere by someone — and we can participate virtually — why leave the house?”

His answer is simple: “The scenery that I saw for nearly three months was completely unique to me. No else will ever, could ever, possibly see the views and vistas I saw. That to me is the finest argument for leaving the house.”

In today’s talk, given at the TEDSalon London, Saunders looks at the space between ideas and action — from the perspective of someone who has spent 2% of his life in a tent in the Arctic Circle.

“To try, to experience, to engage, to endeavor rather than to watch and to wonder, that’s where the real meat of life is to be found. It’s the juice that we can suck out of our hours and days,” says Saunders. “If I’ve learned anything from 12 years now of dragging heavy things around cold places, it’s that true, real inspiration and growth only comes from adversity and challenge, from stepping away from what’s comfortable and familiar and stepping out into the unknown.”

Saunders admits that polar exploring has, for him, been addictive. So naturally he has another trip on the books. This spring, he will embark on a four-month walk to the South Pole and back, completing the expedition that beat explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his team 100 years ago.

To hear more about what Saunders’ next expedition will entail, watch his talk. Below, six more talks about amazing walks

John Francis: I walk the earth
John Francis witnessed two oil tankers collide under the Golden Gate Bridge in 1971. The image was so shocking that he decided to give up motor vehicles altogether and to use the transportation mode he was born with — his feet. For three decades, Francis walked the globe, spreading a message of environmental respect. In this talk from TED2008, he shares what he learned from his walks and from staying completely silent for 17 years.

Ray Zahab treks to the South Pole
In 2009, extreme runner Ray Zahab broke the world record for the fastest trek to the South Pole, shaving five days off the previous record. In this talk from TED 2009, Zahab describes how he approached this trek, which was uphill the entire way.

William Ury: The walk from “no” to “yes”
William Ury studies conflict negotiation. In this talk from TEDxMidwest, he shares a technique he thinks could solve a wide slew of disagreements — taking a walk together. “Walking is what made us humans,” says Ury. “When you walk, you walk side-by-side in the same common direction.” Walking together could not only make strides in family disagreements — it could work for conflicts as deep-seeded as that between nations in the Middle East. By walking the path of Abraham’s life together, Ury believes that common ground could be found in this fractured region.

Eythor Bender demos human exoskeletons
Is there a way for wheelchair users to walk again? At TED2011, Eythor Bender demonstrates two exoskeletons — HULC and eLEGS — robotic add-ons that could one day allow those without use of their legs to stand up and walk.

Lee Swan: What I lost on the way to the North Pole
Lee Swan was not the most likely candidate to participate in the Polar Race, a 650 kilometer footrace over the frozen Arctic Ocean. A chocoholic who loves high heels, Swan shares why she was compelled to enter this race. At TED@Johannesburg she explains how she navigated her way through it … and won, becoming the first South African woman to make it to the magnetic North Pole. 

Philippe Petit: The journey across the high wire
Philippe Petit is a legendary tightrope walker, who put one foot in front of the other on a wire more than 1300 feet in the air, strung between the Twin Towers. In this talk from TED2012, he recounts how his love for magic led to his first step on a tight rope.

When an earthquake shook Costa Rica in September of 2012, it took 60 seconds for the tremors to travel 250 kilometers north to Managua, Nicaragua. And yet just 30 seconds later, the first message about the earthquake appeared on Twitter.

In today’s talk, filmed at TEDSalon London 2012, Markham Nolan of Storyful.com shares why this represents a major shift in the dynamics of news media.

“As journalists, we interact in real-rime. We’re not in a position where the audience is reacting to news—we’re reacting to the audience,” explains Nolan. “We’re actually relying on them. They’re helping us find the news and they’re helping us figure out what is the best angle to take.”

Every minute, 72 more hours of video are posted to YouTube and, every second, 3500 more photos go up on Facebook. As Nolan shares, “The problem is when you have that much information, you have to find the good stuff—and that can be incredibly difficult.”

This has changed the way journalists must think about their job. Explains Nolan, “It becomes filtering all this stuff … Instead of going and finding the information and brining it back to the reader, you are holding back stuff that is potentially damaging.”

In this fascinating talk, Nolan shares how he and his team weed out doctored photos, determine the veracity of video footage and build rosters of credible Twitter users. To hear real-life examples of how they’ve done this with media created during the Arab Spring, Hurricane Sandy and the conflict in Syria, listen to Nolan’s talk. In it, he shares the hidden clues that Storyful investigators traced in order to parse the credible from the fake.

Below, Nolan reflects on how YouTube is increasingly becoming the place to go for news.

After giving his TED Talk, Nolan took to his personal blog to explain why he believes YouTube will soon overtake traditional news sources. For him, three recent events underscored to him that a major shift is underway. Writes Nolan:

Last Wednesday I told a TED audience of 250 people that the YouTube video platform was becoming the most important repository of documentary evidence about humankind in existence. It’s a bold statement, but I think it stands up.

YouTube is now becoming a real-time window on world events through live streaming. It is already the host of the world’s biggest, most accessible video archive of life on earth – from the mundane to the spectacular. Some of that is real-time documentation, and some of it is retrospective material. And it is growing at a phenomenal rate. By the time my short TED talk ended on Wednesday, there were 864 more hours of video on YouTube than when I started.

Three things this year changed how I view YouTube.

The first epiphany was the Democratic conventions in the US. I wanted to watch the event unadulterated, without commentary, without the partisan hackery or faux-objectivity of the networks. YouTube had a page dedicated to the conventions, where I could browse in and out of the live action as it happened, or, when things became a little dull, review videos from speeches I had missed.

What startled me about my own behaviour was that I hadn’t checked the TV stations to see how they were covering it and subsequently dismissed them, but that I made an innate choice that YouTube would be my first stop. I didn’t even consider Fox or CNN – YouTube was naturally the first place I went to watch the elections. I didn’t reach for the remote, I grabbed the iPad. That was a big shift. YouTube had always been the first place I’d go to for footage in retrospect, but for it to be my instinctive choice for ongoing news, as it was happening – that was HUGE.

Felix Baumgartner’s edge-of-the-atmosphere parachute jump was the second. Eight million people logged on to watch that little hop live via YouTube. News channels couldn’t devote the adequate time to it and would skip in and out, but Red Bull’s YouTube channel streamed the entire thing. The last minutes of the ascent were mesmerising. Joe Kittinger’s halting instructions to Felix in his pod were endearing and highly stressful. I hooked a laptop up to the TV to super-size my YouTubing, and watched the plummet, wondering if TV coverage of live events was on a similar, plunging trajectory.

The third  is the ongoing war in Syria.  Footage from Syria and the Arab Spring in general falls into a different category to most YouTube uploads- it is, arguably, evidentiary material. An entire war, to which external media were NOT welcome, has been documented via the clenched, phone-holding fists of citizens, soldiers and activists. And last week, the UN said that one particular event could, if validated, be considered a war crime. The evidence lay largely on YouTube servers.

We are now the most-chronicled generation in history.  There has never been a greater level of unfiltered documentation of humanity (caveats coming) in history. It also gives us a window into countries that old-school news would never have shown. Through YouTube you get to see past media stereotypes to get candid glimpses from Saudi Arabia, central Russia, caucus states, Pacific islands and elsewhere. It must be said, however, that documentation falls short of being global. Swathes of the planet are not represented for reasons of culture or connectivity. We know, in Storyful, that there are ‘black holes’ for YouTube footage, due to connectivity, etc. Coverage from certain countries in Africa is abysmal. When we’ve gone looking for footage of news events in Congo, Mali or anywhere in the centre of Africa, it’s simply not there. Iraq is a dead zone for YouTube content. On the other hand, I’ve been involved in helping Google curate video from elections in Nigeria, Senegal and currently Ghana, all of which have been very active, and creative, in how they cover news. Given its need for decent upload speeds, a per-country/region comparison of video footage tallies could very well be an interesting benchmark for a global connectivity study.

The problem with YouTube being a gigantic and ever-growing haystack of video is that most people approach it looking for needles, and the means by which you find what you’re looking for haven’t matched the pace of the growth in volume. Organising the stack is crucial to make it navigable, useful, and potentially, to allow it blast a lot of TV into insignificance by making more content accessible to everyone, everywhere. The greater focus on channels, much vaunted of late, will hopefully begin to make this a reality.

How does this relate to the mainstream media? The media houses that recognise that organising YouTube into usable channels early are the ones will thrive. You can already see how some are adapting. Check out the New York Times, with their Timecast videos and wall-to-wall election coverage. See how the Weather Channel delivered non-stop Sandy via YouTube for the duration of the storm & aftermath. And look at the Wall Street Journal which has succeeded in integrating relevant, timely web video reporting seamlessly into what was a traditionalist financial newspaper.

News orgs can’t think of themselves as TV channels, or newspapers (with website) anymore. They have to think of themselves as content generators, connecting with the audience via whatever format people makes sense for them as they go about their daily lives.

Saunders was one of ten speakers featured at the event, which took place at the Unicorn Theatre, supported by TED partners Intel and frog. The evening’s theme was “Exploring Possibilities,” and the 220 attendees heard stories of exploration in an eclectic set of fields: from Saunders’ extreme geographies to the frontiers of science, from the writing of a new national constitution to the creation of new markets.

Hosted by TED’s European director Bruno Giussani, the Salon was opened by NY-based designer E Roon Kang, a TED Fellow who pointed to the “chain reaction of complications” that we bring into our lives and work as a byproduct of our quest for efficiency. (Ever thought of whether your smartphone, besides expanding the scope of your possibilities, has also made your life more complicated and stressful?) His design projects are informed by this paradox, for example when developing the new visual identity for the MIT Media Lab. For that project, with his collaborators, Kang took into account fluidity and ambiguity by avoiding a “fixed” institutional logo in favor of an algorithm that creates, based on set criteria, a different logo for each staffer.

In times of crisis, a general concern is how markets can create new economic opportunities. The second speaker, British policy entrepreneur Wingham Rowan, suggested that in order to expand opportunities, we also need to create new markets. He argued that there is a well of untapped economic potential in online marketplaces where people at every level of the skill scale and with spare hours to “sell” could meet the micro-demand for anything from last-minute warehousing personnel to teaching. Sure, websites likes Craigslist are doing some of this matchmaking already. But they have none of the sophistication, automatization and legal framework of, say, financial electronic markets. “Why only some — rather than all — can benefit from this kind of market infrastructure, where qualified offer and demand can meet and match immediately?” he asked.

Speaking of crisis, while a lot of attention is focused on the Southern edge of Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal), up north a small country is digging its way back from a dramatic 2008 financial meltdown: Iceland. One of the answers that the country gave to that crisis was to re-write its Constitution from scratch. (Side note: Unlike most other countries, the UK, where the TEDSalon took place, does not have a document called a “Constitution”: its constitutional law is disseminated across many written and unwritten sources, from treaties to royal prerogatives.) The third speaker was one of the people who led that effort, political scientist Silja Bara Omarsdottir, from the University of Iceland. The new text is ready for a final parliamentary discussion, and it was developed in a very open way, with a citizen assembly, hundreds of proposals submitted, a committee coordinating and having meetings on live webcast, online feedback loops to which every citizen could participate, and more. “It wasn’t crowdsourced,” Omarsdottir said: the committee held control of the text. But it was transparent, open and participatory at an unprecedented scale. “People felt involved, they felt ownership.”

Azerbaijani violin virtuoso Sabina Rakcheyeva was next to take the stage, with a cross-genre performance fusing Eastern and Western influences.

Every year, Intel, one of the TEDSalon’s partners, organizes the world’s largest pre-university science competition, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Millions of high school students around the globe take part, and the event plays a major role in motivating young people towards science. The winner of the 2012 Fair, Jack Andraka, is 15, and was awarded first place for developing a new method to detect pancreatic cancer. He explained how he researched the illness on the Web after a close family friend died of it, and hit upon a potentially interesting approach after smuggling into biology classes (“a stifler of innovation”) a science article about carbon nanotubes. Andraka said he wrote 200 letters to professors before finding someone willing to give him a chance and access to a facility at Johns Hopkins University. It took him many months, “and a lot of mistakes,” but he did succeed in creating a new, better, cheaper, simpler and more effective “sensor” for pancreatic cancer.

The Salon took place the day after the US presidential election — a big news day. The news ecosystem has been shaken up in recent years by ubiquitous cellphone/Twitter/YouTube reporting. Many important recent stories have been reported this way, from war zones, catastrophe areas and more. In many cases, however, the source of information may not be immediately recognizable or verifiable. Markham Nolan, editor of Storyful, spoke about methods to validate crowdsourced news. He detailed an example related to a gruesome piece of video footage filmed in Hama, Syria, showing dead bodies being thrown into a river from a bridge — and how via the aerial images of Google Maps and a series of other online tools it was possible to identify with certainty the place and verify the credibility of one of the three sources. “But while tools and algorithms can check and channel all this information, truth is fluid and human — and will forever remain a uniquely human trait.”

Geopolitical analyst Parag Khanna was next, introducing the concept of “Hybrid Age,” the age in which we are living, which is characterized by the blurring of traditional boundaries — between disciplines, between cultures, between political structures, between biology and technology. Earlier this year Khanna co-authored a TEDBook on this topic, Hybrid Reality, and in his talk he explored the impacts of these developments on work and political systems, advancing the idea of the TQ, the “Technology Quotient,” measuring an individual’s (or an organization’s, or a State’s) adaptability and preparedness for emerging technologies and the need to integrate and leverage them. After his talk, while answering questions from Bruno Giussani, he discussed North Korea, which he recently visited, and the massive railroad projects that — with Chinese financial backing — may in a not-so-distant future link up Eurasia, the landmass that goes from Europe to Vladivostok and Singapore. It is the biggest landmass on Earth and includes most of its inhabitants.

UCL neuroscientist Molly Crockett took the stage with a cautionary talk about the nature of the recent advances in her discipline, and how in particular brain scan images and data can be used and misused. Newspapers publish daily stories based on neuroscience results. But Crockett pointed at products sold with brain images on them that actually have no science to support the marketers’ claims, and at hand-picked study results used to support theories (and news stories) that the same results could also disprove. “The promise of neuroscience has led to high expectations and unproven claims. But we haven’t yet found a ‘buy’ button in the brain. We cannot tell if someone is in love by looking at their brains. Brain scans cannot read people’s minds. We have to be careful not to let these sorts of claims take away from the actual science of neuroscience.”

A performer who is very adept at exploring the future of music followed: Tim Exile. On top of creating a special performance for the TEDSalon, Exile also brought back Sabina Rakcheyeva for a surprise duet between two virtuosos, one playing the violin, the other playing an impressive array of electronic tools, creating a mesmerizing musical moment.

Back to science — to using genetic engineering to fight one of the deadliest viruses, dengue fever. Dengue affects tens of millions of people every year, and is becoming increasingly lethal as it travels north. A British company, Oxitec, believes it has found a technology that’s more effective and much less damaging to the environment than the currently used chemicals and pesticides: They genetically modify male mosquitos so that they cannot procreate. It’s controversial, like every time the words “genetic engineering” are used. But CEO Hadyn Parry calmly described the problem, and his team’s solution: while genetically modified crops are about giving crops an advantage, Parry said, “we use the same techniques for the exact opposite end: to introduce in the insects a big disadvantage — basically, birth control for mosquitos”.

The closing speaker was TED Fellow Rachel Armstrong, a doctor working at the intersection of biology and architecture at the University of Greenwich. She offered an exploration of designing and manufacturing with living materials. And she did so using a clever rhetorical device. “How might we design a chicken?” she asked. A metaphorical chicken, of course. But that allowed Armstrong to detail the principles of design that would apply to living materials — materials “that know what they are to become.”

Giussani took the opportunity of the TEDSalon to announce the publication of the newest issue of Design Mind magazine, published by TED partner frog and completely devoted to the TEDGlobal 2012 conference, which took place last June in Edinburgh, and to its theme of “Radical Openness.” The magazine, which is available online, expands on the theme through interviews, essays and graphics, including a debate about the connected world between Clay Shirky and Don Tapscott. TEDGlobal 2013 will take place June 10-14, 2013, in Edinburgh.

(Photos by Robert Leslie. TEDster Nesta Morgan was in the audience and sketched some of the attendees).

More than 8 million children live in orphanages worldwide. But as Georgette Mulheir shares in today’s brave talk, given at TEDSalon London Spring 2012, an estimated 90% of them are not true orphans. These children are sent to orphanages because a single parent is not adequately able to care for them, because of rampant poverty at home, or because they have a disability or special needs.

This is something that Mulheir’s organization, Lumos (interesting fact: it was founded by JK Rowling), hopes to change, because children who grow up in orphanages do not integrate seamlessly into larger society. As Mulheir shares, children raised in orphanages are 10 times more likely to be involved in prostitution, 40 times more likely to have a criminal record and — shockingly — 500 times more likely to commit suicide.

Mulheir has visited hundreds of orphanages in 18 countries, and notes a similar feedback loop at work in each — children have limited contact with caregivers and don’t get the stimulation they need for optimum development. They develop self-soothing behaviors — like self-harming — that get them labeled as disabled and keep them in institutions long term. This is not necessarily because orphanage personnel are bad people — it’s because they simply have too many kids to care for.

In her talk, Mulheir wonders if there is another way and calls for a radical resource redistribution. She points out that giving support — both financial and otherwise — to desperate parents and foster families would cost governments far less than maintaining large care institutions. With the saved funds, better services could be created for children who need them.

“Children are amazingly resilient,” says Mulheir. “We find that if we get them out of institutions and into loving families early on, they recover their developmental delays and go on to lead normal happy lives.

How bad can orphanages be? Listen to the vivid description in Mulheir’s talk. And after the jump, Mulheir shares a blog post she wrote as she visited an orphanage in November 2009.  She’s happy to report that the last of the children moved out of the institution by summer of 2012.

Mulheir writes: 

The first thing that greets you is the smell: it is a specific stench that, unless you’ve experienced it, is hard to define. It is a combination of stale urine, boiled cabbage and fear.  It remains with you long after you leave the building. And, no matter how much they wash, it is a smell that remains on many children for weeks after they leave an institution and move into a family home.

This residential special school is a three-hour drive from the capital. It is remote, isolated and inaccessible. It is typical of everything that is wrong with the institutional system of caring for children.

The main building is familiar to me even before we arrive – an immense, grey, concrete block, like so many others in the former Soviet bloc. I know the layout immediately, because they were all designed in the same way. I imagine that a factory in some former Soviet republic produced all the institutions for children, in the same way that all trams were produced in what was Czechoslovakia and all the parachutes in what is now Transnistria. An identikit building, designed to homogenise an entire population, and to raise a generation of children loyal to the Party and the State.

Such thoughts are reaffirmed as I enter the lobby of the building: 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, we are greeted by a bust of Lenin. I have been visiting this country for 10 years and I have never seen such open homage to the old regime, whatever people may think privately.

The Director is also there to meet us, eager to show us around her empire. We walk to her office through corridors that are dark and dank. The floors are wet and, as we walk around the institution, 20 metres ahead of us there is always the same elderly woman mopping the floor furiously. Those children we pass do not raise their eyes to look at us. Even when we try to engage them in conversation, their gazes are fixed, firmly, to the floor.

We are taken to the Director’s office for the obligatory discussion about the institution’s history and its incredible success as a school.

“We have 120 children here,” she tells us. “They all have special educational needs and we do our very best to provide a good education for them. But more than that, many of these children come from terrible families. Here we provide them with the care they need – we are their parental home.”

I think about the stench, the damp, the deadened eyes of the children and wonder what sort of home this is.

“We opened in 1956,” she continues, proudly, “and since then more than 5,000 children have come through this institution. We have many successes to be proud of: some of our ‘graduates’ have established their own families and now their children are living here with us.”

There is no irony in her statement. She appears to believe this is a genuine measure of success.

“Our children have many problems, illnesses and terribly difficult behaviours,” she explains. “So many of them have enuresis, but the doctor gives them pills to treat it.”

Enuresis – or bedwetting – is a common problem for children in institutions. Here, it is exacerbated by the toilet situation. I am sure the Director had hoped we would not visit the toilets when she showed us around the building, but we do. The floors are sparkling and, bizarrely, covered in brand new rugs. The stench, however, cannot be hidden. And when I enter each of the five cubicles I find that each is covered in old excrement: none of them is functioning.

It is clear that there are no toilets here that work. For the 120 children who live here, going to the toilet means visiting the latrine outside. In winter, the temperature falls to minus 25°C. No wonder that so many of the children wet the bed.

The next stop on our guided tour is the kitchen. Here, two cooks are preparing a chicken dinner for the children. This, I’m later reliably informed, is a rare occasion. The children don’t often receive meat. As we’re there, a piece of meat falls on the floor. One of the cooks picks it up, hesitates, looks at me, and even though she sees that I’m watching, she throws it back into the pot.

The dining room is next door — dark, dank, huge and Dickensian. Row upon row of bare tables and wooden benches.

We move on to the classrooms. Here we meet some of the children and see them at their lessons. The six and seven year olds are so small. My colleague bends down to speak to one the girls.

“What are you working on?” she asks.

“I want my mum,” she responds, her eyes filling with tears.

Several of the other children also look on the verge of tears. I sit next to one little boy and try to engage with him. He turns away, refusing to make contact. He is terrified.

We enter another classroom, filled with 10- and 11-year-olds. They cope better with our visit. They answer our questions, jump up and say a few words in English, and offer to help me improve my Maths. They are all bright kids. I have yet to see one child who I think would need special education. Again, though, there is a girl looking sad. She sits in the corner, on her own. My colleague asks the Director what is wrong with her.

“Oh, she was at home with her mum for a month,” the Director responds loudly, “but she came back to us yesterday and she isn’t used to it yet.”

The girl begins to cry.

After visiting several more classrooms we are taken to a room you would find hard to imagine. It’s clearly a type of bathroom, dank and dirty, with rusting pipework and chipped and broken tiles on the wall. In the middle of the room is an odd contraption: half shower, half primitive bidet.

“What’s this room for?” I ask.

“This is the female hygiene room,” a member of staff responds. “The girls come here to clean themselves when it is their time of the month.”

A flustered member of staff tries to demonstrate the contraption, but the water is turned off and the boiler is broken. So we move on.

Next are the bedrooms. They are not too large, with eight to ten beds per room. There are brand new blankets on the beds. Their colours are so vivid that the contrast to the rest of the building is almost an assault on the eyes. There is, however, nothing personal in the rooms. There are no personal spaces. There are no personal possessions.

There are just a couple of broken-down cupboards and a shelf. One toothbrush, one tube of toothpaste and one bar of soap sit on the shelf. All of them are still in their packaging, unopened.

There are three corridors of bedrooms, with 40 children on each corridor. For some bizarre reason, there are boys’ and girls’ bedrooms on each floor.

“How many members of staff are on duty at night?” I ask.

The answer is three. They are untrained and unqualified. The Director refers to them as babysitters.

How can one member of staff ensure the protection and safety of 40 children? How easy is it for one child to distract the staff member, while others sneak into bedrooms so they can bully those more vulnerable?

I have seen it before in institutions where I have made unannounced visits. The staff members are drunk or asleep. The children do what they want. The law of the jungle prevails.

Finally, we’re taken to the piece de resistance: the hall where the children ‘play’. A feast has been prepared for us. So much food. So much variety. I am sure the children never see anything like this. I feel sick. We try to refuse, but in the end we must take a small bite to eat. We do, however, successfully refuse the Director’s invitation to a drink of vodka. It is only 10.30am, but she is clearly disappointed.

“What do you think of the reform process and the future of these institutions?” we ask her.

“The reform is a very good thing,” she responds. “We support the reform, but you can’t just leave these children with such terrible families. And if they closed our school, where would our children receive such a good education? We agree with the reform, but only when the community is ready to look after children.”

I know there is no point explaining to the Director that the educational outcomes of her institution are appalling and that studies show repeatedly that children raised in institutions in this part of the world do not do well as adults. I hold my tongue, because I know that I will never convince this Director of the truth.

Thankfully, the local county council agrees with us that this institution has to go. They asked us to visit because they want to close it and they want to know if we can help them do this.

As she leads us to the door, we pass a huge sign on one of the walls. It summarises the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: Children’s right to family, to a good education and healthcare. Their right to speak up and be heard.

We thank the Director for her hospitality and say goodbye to Lenin and his young charges.

This place must close. These children deserve better. After our visit, the County Councillor agrees a date for us to meet very soon in order to finalise the plans for closing this institution, so that she can convince all of her colleagues.

By the summer, we hope to able to start finding families for these children. So they have a place they can truly call home.

To hear more about what’s it’s like to grow up a “ward of the state,” listen to Lemn Sissay’s powerful TEDTalk, “A child of the state.”

Nesta Morgan is a storyboard artist. And while in the audience at a TED Salon in London in May, she found herself so inspired by several speakers that she took to sketching them — and their ideas —  as they spoke. Above, see Nesta’s sketch of today’s TEDTalk, “Pam Warhurst: How we can eat our landscapes.”

“I particularly enjoyed Pam’s talk, because I’m creating a vegetable patch myself, at home in London,” Nesta says. “The sketch shows our energy pods, the seeds of the future lighting our lives with their halo effect and the archway to the future where ‘every egg matters.’“

Below, see some of Nesta’s sketches from last year’s TED London Salon, matched with the TEDTalk to inspire your own creative interpretation …

Photographer Erik Johansson shares “impossible photography”
Explains Nesta, “I loved Erik’s fantastic work retouching images. Viewing his footage, I imagined dipping my toes into the water as a fish — not unlike putting a photo into developer fluid.”

Ad guru Rory Sutherland gives the talk “A Wiki Conversation”
Says Nesta, “A great discussion that I could just characterize with humor.” (Watch Rory’s talk “Perspective is everything.“)

CEO Lisa Harouni gives “a primer on 3D printing”
Nesta says of her sketch, “The drawing? Supported by a skeleton of bones, shaped like china and bejeweled — our eye contact processes the imagination.”

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To see more of Nesta’s work, head to her website Art4Film.com. Also, Nesta does sketch reports of film festivals — from the Cannes to Discovering Latin America — on her blog at the website FilmFestivals.com.

If you walk into the cemetery in Todmorden — a small town in northern England — you will find vegetables and herbs defiantly growing. Ditto if you examine the strips of land in the middle of the town’s roads, the area in front of its elder-care home, or the landscaping around its railroad station.  You will find corn as high as an elephant’s eye in front of Todmorden’s police station, and fruit trees planted around its health center. Everywhere you turn in Todmorden, edible plants abound.

In this talk given at TED London Salon, Pam Warhurst explains why this is the case — because three and a half years ago, several citizens decided to plant herb gardens in public spaces, permission be damned. The effort blossomed into Incredible Edible, a revolution not only in the way the town eats, but also in the way they think about public space. Everyone is encouraged to plant — on their own property and in public — and anyone is welcome to pick the food and cook it for dinner. The effort has not only brought in “vegetable tourists,” but has been copycatted in 30 towns in England, as well as by communities in America, Japan and New Zealand.

“So many people don’t really recognize a vegetable unless it’s in a bit of plastic,” says Warhurst in this talk, which got a rousing standing ovation. “We have a motto: If you’re eat, you’re in.”

In honor of Warhurst, here a look at 9 other TED speakers who see incredible potential for change in vegetables.

Stephen Ritz: A teacher growing green in the South Bronx
Stephen Ritz’s students may grow up in the poorest Congressional district in America, where obesity is an epidemic. But he is working hard to change their relationship to food while increasing their options for employment in the future. Ritz and his students have created “edible walls,” chock full of vegetables and herbs, which have been installed in 100 New York City schools as well as many office buildings — even in New York’s Rockefeller Center. Check out our playlist of 10 talks from inspiring teachers, an ode to Ritz’s work.

William Li: Can we eat to “starve” cancer
Can bok choy, kale, artichokes and parsley stave off cancer? At TED2010, Dr. William Li explains that cancer cells start out as microscopic, harmless nests that can’t grow because they don’t have blood vessels supplying them with nutrients. Li gives an overview of anti-angiogenesis, the strategy of preventing the growth of blood vessels to a tumor by eating these cancer-fighting foods. Notice how many are vegetables.

Suzanne Lee: Grow your own clothes
What, you ask, is vegetable leather? Fashion designer Suzanne Lee reveals her work creating a leather-like fabric from green tea, sugar and microbes — and shows the beautiful designs she’s created using it.

Terry Wahls: “Minding Your Mitrochondria”
In this incredible talk, Dr. Terry Wahls explains how she used her diet to cure herself of MS and leave her wheelchair behind. She wants everyone to eat nine cups of fruits and vegetables a day — including three cups of B vitamin-rich greens, three cups of sulphur-rich mushrooms and cabbages, as well as three cups of colorful, nutrient-rich veggies.  (Filmed at TEDxIowaCity.)

Graham Hill: Why I’m a weekday vegetarian
The founder of TreeHugger.com, Graham Hill is well aware that meat causes more emissions than all transportation combined, and that beef production uses 100 times the water than vegetables do. And yet, giving up meat is too extreme for him. Here, he ekes out a solution — relegating meat to the weekends and increasing vegetable consumption during the week.

Forever Body Transformation
Seafood is one of our healthiest protein options, but overfishing is severely harming our oceans. Here, chef Barton Seaver suggests a simple way to keep fish on dinner table for years to come. As your mom would say, “Eat your vegetables!”

Roger Doiron: My subversive (garden) plot
Gardening isn’t just for old ladies, says Roger Doiron — it’s a subversive action about taking back power over our diets, over our health, and over our bank accounts. Here he explains why a vegetable garden can do more than save you money — it can save the world. (Filmed at TEDxDirigo.)

Yes, mushrooms are technically fungi. But they’ve gotten a lot of love from TED speakers in the past, too:

Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world
Paul Stamets believes that mushrooms can save our lives, restore our ecosystems and increase our health. In fact, he holds the patents for 22 mushroom-related technologies. Here, he shares his work with the Northwest’s native fungal genome, mycelium.

Jae Rhim Lee: My mushroom burial suit
Artist Jae Rhim Lee wants to commit herself to a cleaner, greener Earth — even after she dies. In this talk, she explains why she plans to be buried in a suit seeded with mushrooms, which have the power to gobble pollution.

Eben Bayer: Are mushrooms the new plastic?
Do we need planet-destroying plastics? In this talk, Eben Bayer explains how his team is creating a compostable packing material derived from mushrooms. He hopes that, soon, the mushroom material will be used to protect furniture, computers and more as they are shipped cross-country.

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And a bonus: Below, check out the musical stylings of the Vegetable Orchestra, who craft their own instruments from carrots, eggplants, cucumbers, squashes and more and then use them to make very beautiful music.