02 July 2008
Rickshaw Bagworks opens shop online
The TED2008 Gift Bag was the first product from a brand-new company, Rickshaw Bagworks. Made in San Francisco with sustainable fabrics and thoughtful details, the TED bags became a bit of a cult item -- not least because they weren't available for retail sale at the time of the '08 conference.
This week Rickshaw opens its online store, selling the TED-style bag (they call it the "med commuter messenger") along with other styles, including a baby bag that benefits Healthy Child Healthy World.
11 June 2008
Millions watching lectures? Who knew?
TED.com picked up three Webbies on Tuesday night at the 2008 Webby Awards ceremony in New York City. Which means that June Cohen (left), Director of TED Media, got 15 words total to thank the academy and our millions of viewers. Her first five-word speech: "Millions watching lectures? Who knew?"
TED.com's awards: Best Podcast; Best Navigation/Structure; and Best Visual Design - Function.
We're honored to be chosen for these awards -- and even more honored by the fact that so many people are sharing these Ideas Worth Spreading.
25 April 2008
4 ways to get more out of TEDTalks
These 4 tools can help you get more from TEDTalks:
The TED Miro player: This free, open-source player lets you easily download TEDTalks, store them and play them offline. Talks are arranged in channels based on our most popular Themes. The TED Miro player comes in especially handy for educators who want to ensure reliable playback when using TEDTalks in the classroom. And if you're on a PC that has trouble with MP4 playback, the TED Miro player usually does the trick!
Transcripts: We've been working on transcribing all our TEDTalks, and as we complete each one, it is stored here on the TED Blog. This is the first step in a much larger project for subtitling and transcribing our talks.
See all transcribed talks here >>
Newsletter: You can subscribe to the weekly TED newsletter by scrolling to the bottom of this page and entering an email address into the little white box that says "Newsletter." It's a great way to make TEDTalks a habit -- and to stay involved in other events of interest, such as Pangea Day, happening on May 10, 2008, around the world. We never sell our email addresses to third parties, and it's easy to unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of the newsletter.
RSS feeds: You can subscribe to a feed for all new TEDTalks video, or for this blog, where we announce all the new TEDTalks and other TED news.
Subscribe to the TED Blog RSS feed >>
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25 April 2008
Dean Ornish's 2008 TEDTalk temporarily offline
Dr. Dean Ornish's 2008 TEDTalk has been temporarily taken offline for technical reasons -- we'll announce when it has been replaced. Sorry for this inconvenience.
In the meantime, you might check out Dr. Ornish's 2005 TEDTalk on America's killer diet -- or one of these related TEDTalks and Themes:
+ Dr. Ernest Madu on reinventing health care to serve the poorest communities >>
+ Aubrey de Grey on why we age and how we can avoid it >>
+ The theme Medicine Without Borders, collecting talks on the boldest frontiers of medicine and health >>
08 April 2008
New thinking on climate change: Al Gore's new slideshow premieres on TED.com
In Al Gore's brand-new slideshow (premiering exclusively on TED.com), he presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of "generational mission" -- the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement -- to set it right. Gore's stirring presentation is followed by a Q&A in which he is asked for his verdict on the current political candidates' climate policies and on what role he himself might play in future. (Recorded March 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 27:54.)
Watch Al Gore's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Read more about Al Gore on TED.com.
Download this talk in 480p high-def >>
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02 April 2008
Watch Robin Williams' improv at TED2008's BBC debate
During the BBC World Debate hosted at TED2008 last month, a brief technical delay threatened to become an awkward, show-stopping break. Then a heckler stood up in the crowd. As Wired's Epicenter reports:
... a voice behind me spoke up, presumably a heckler, and began speaking loudly as if he were conducting a live news feed, joking that he was reporting live from TED but ... was "wondering why at a technology conference everything is running so shittily" (at least that's the word I think he used; it was hard to hear the last word through the audience's laughter).
It was Robin Williams, and he ran onstage to do a 10-minute improv in front of Queen Noor, Sergey Brin and the rest of the BBC panelists. Video or it didn't happen, you say? Here's Robin Williams' improv, or 2+ minutes of it, from the BBC website >>
Missing, though, is the TED Blog's favorite quote from Williams:
Before the Web, there was just one guy running around saying "I KNOW!"
01 April 2008
Is this the face of Leonardo Da Vinci? Siegfried Woldhek's discovery, on TED.com
Unveiled at TED2008: We all know Leonardo Da Vinci's life and work -- but until now, we have not known what he looked like as a man. Illustrator and activist Siegfried Woldhek used some thoughtful image-analysis techniques to find what he believes is the true face of Leonardo. Announcing his discovery for the first time at last month's TED conference, he walks us through exactly how he did it. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 04:18.)
Watch Siegfried Woldhek's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Read more about Siegfried Woldhek on TED.com.
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25 March 2008
See inside your brain in real time: Christopher deCharms on TED.com
From last month's TED conference: Neuroscientist Christopher deCharms demos an amazing new way to use fMRIs to watch the brain in action. Using this technology, if you move your arm, get angry, feel pain, you can see what it looks like in your brain as it happens -- and then you can learn to control it. The applications for real-time fMRI start with pain management and run on into the realm of science fiction, but this technology is very real. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 3:56.)
Watch Christopher deCharms's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Read more about Christopher deCharms on TED.com.
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20 March 2008
Finding the next Einstein in Africa: Neil Turok's TED Prize wish on TED.com
Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, physicist Neil Turok speaks out for talented young Africans starved of opportunity: by unlocking and nurturing the continent's creative potential, we can create a change in Africa's future. Turok asks the TED community to help him expand the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences by opening 15 new centers across Africa in five years. By adding resources for entrepreneurship to this proven model, he says, we can create a network for progress across the continent -- and perhaps discover an African Einstein. To brainstorm on this wish and get involved, visit TEDPrize.org >> (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 24:44.)
Watch Neil Turok's TED Prize talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Read more about Neil Turok on TED.com.
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19 March 2008
Help bring compassion back to religion: Karen Armstrong's TED Prize wish on TED.com
As she accepts her 2008 TED Prize, author and scholar Karen Armstrong talks about how the Abrahamic religions -- Islam, Judaism, Christianity -- have been diverted from the moral purpose they share: to foster compassion. But Armstrong has seen a yearning to change this fact. People want to be religious, she says; we should act to help make religion a force for harmony. She asks the TED community to help her build a Charter for Compassion -- to help restore the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") as the central global religious doctrine. To brainstorm on this wish and get involved, visit TEDPrize.org >> (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 21:27.)
Watch Karen Armstrong's TED Prize talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Read more about Karen Armstrong on TED.com.
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18 March 2008
Once Upon a School: Dave Eggers' TED Prize wish on TED.com
Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to engage with their local school. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own volunteer-driven, wildly creative writing labs. But you don't need to go that far, he reminds us -- it's as simple as asking a teacher "How can I help?" Share your own volunteering stories at his new website, Once Upon a School. To brainstorm on this wish and get involved, visit TEDPrize.org >> (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 24:29.)
Watch Dave Eggers's TED Prize talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Read more about Dave Eggers on TED.com.
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12 March 2008
Stroke of insight: Jill Bolte Taylor on TED.com
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness -- of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:44.)
Watch Jill Bolte Taylor's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Read more about Jill Bolte Taylor on TED.com.
TRANSLATIONS:
Read the talk in German here (in the "Hintergrund") >>
Read the talk in Portuguese here >>
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06 March 2008
On the verge of creating synthetic life: Craig Venter on TED.com
"Can we create new life out of our digital universe?" asks Craig Venter. And his answer is, yes, and pretty soon. He walks the TED2008 audience through his latest research into "fourth-generation fuels" -- biologically created fuels with CO2 as their feedstock. His talk covers the details of creating brand-new chromosomes using digital technology, the reasons why we would want to do this, and the bioethics of synthetic life. A fascinating Q&A with TED's Chris Anderson follows (two words: suicide genes). (Recorded March 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 32:52.)
Watch Craig Venter's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
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02 March 2008
TED2008: Days 3 and 4 in Quotes
Photos: Andrew Heavens
“Imagine Martin Luther King saying, ‘I have a dream ... But I don’t know if the others will buy it.’” - Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, on the importance of persuasive leadership
"Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it. Well, I’m Bob and I’m an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people." - Musician and activist Bob Geldof (above)
“Why are we ignoring the oceans? Why does NASA spend in one year what NOAA will spend in 1600 years? Why are we looking up? Why are we afraid of the ocean?” - Ocean explorer Robert Ballard
"I think it's the dopamine." - Anthropologist Helen Fisher, explaining to Chris Anderson why she's still optimistic about love, despite understanding its chemical and biological basis
"Relative to the universe, it's just up the road." - Physicist Brian Cox, after referring to Chicago as 'just up the road' from Monterey, CA
“If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix ... Take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.” - Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis
“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind’s worst disease.” - Jonathan Haidt, quoting Sent-ts’an, from 700CE China
"The job of the C is to make the B sad." - Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, deconstructing a piece by Chopin
“How do we give credible hope to the billion poorest people in the world? It requires compassion to get ourselves started, and enlightened self-interest to get serious... If economic divergence continues, combined with global integration, it will build a nightmare for our children.” - Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion
“In order to solve the climate crisis, we need to solve the democracy crisis.” - Al Gore, urging citizen involvement not only on a personal level, but also on a political level
“How dare we be pessimistic? Maybe the future is better than it used to be.” - Peter Schwartz, co-founder of the Global Business Network
“It's important to leave the security of who we are, and go to the place of who we are becoming. I encourage you to let yourself out of any prison you might find yourself in. Because we have to do something now. We have to change now.” - Environmental advocate John Francis (below), who went 17 years without speaking
01 March 2008
Connections and collectives: TED@Aspen Day 4
Photos: Michael Brands/Aspen Institute
For the final sessions of TED@Aspen, we packed into the main hall of Doerr-Hosier for the Kids' Table Collective -- Rives, Jill Sobule, Ze Frank and the Raspyni Brothers (special appearance by Jennifer O'Donnell). Thrilling stunts and comedy and a standing ovation from the kids in Monterey capped off a week of conversation and connection. Our large Australian contingent presented the Ozzie version of the Big Questions (though -- did Chris Anderson really call Australians "the greatest threat to TED ... as we know it"?), and a couple of Aspenites a-a-almost won a stage prize. But more than anything, Day Four was a day to reflect on what we created here, in the first year of TED@Aspen: a community of people forming our own traditions around some Ideas Worth Spreading. Watch for reflections in the weeks to come from our TED@Aspen bloggers.
Overheard on the final day of TED@Aspen:
Putting together the big idea that links David Gallo and Bill Lange's work at Woods Hole, Robert Ballard's talk on undersea exploration, and the WorldWide Telescope:
"[Forget] outer space -- when do we get Google Ocean?"
In a reflective mood on the shuttle to the airport:
"There was one missing question: To be, or not to be? To have the tenacity to do something great, or to quit?"
During rehearsal for the Kids' Table Collective:
"I'll take the mushrooms and the double-stick tape and figure something out."
Via Twitter, onepinktee writes:
"another big question for TEDizens: what will you do next? #TED"
01 March 2008
TED2008: And The Point?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session twelve - closing session.)
The session opens with the projection of will.i.am's "Yes We Can" viral video based on Barack Obama's speech. The two producers are in the audience. The video has been seen millions of times, a demonstration of the power of individuals to inflect the political debate:
John Francis calls himself a "planetwalker". From 1983 to 2005, he
walked around North and Nouth America carrying a message of respect for
the Earth -- and for 17 of those years, he did so without speaking (all
while learning a degree in environmental studies and a PhD in land
resources). (A profile of him in Sierra magazine).
I've been silent for 17 years. When I first spoke, I turned around to hear my own voice. I want to take you on this journey, even though this one is kind of unusual I want you to think of your own. My journey begain in 1971 when I witnessed two oil tankers collide under the Golden Gate bridge and half a million gallons of oil spilled out. It so disturbed me that I decided to give up driving cars -- and that's quite a big thing in California. People would ask me "What are you doing" and as I said that I was "walking for the environment" they said: "No, you're just doing that to make us look bad, feel bad". I argued so much about that that on my 27th birthday I decided I would give it a rest, and stop talking for one day. It was very moving, because I began truly listening, and it was very sad for me because I realized that until then I had not really been learning. So I decided to do it for another day, and another day, until finally I promised myself that for one year I would keep quiet, and then on my birthday reassess what I had learned. That lasted 17 years. During that time I walked and played the banjo and wrote my journal and tried to study the environment by reading books and go to school. So I did, I walked to Oregon -- 500 miles -- and went into the registrar office and in two years I graduated with my first degree. And then I started walking again, to Washington, then to Montana. I'd written to the University of Montana two years earlier telling them that I would like to go to school there and I would be there in two years. They helped me, figuring out ways for me to get grades despite I didn't have the money and I didn't speak. I went on to the University of Wisconsin, and spent two years there writing about oil spills. And something happened: I was the only one in the US writing about oil spills. I went on, it took me 17 years and 1 day to walk around the US. My journey kept going on. I wrote for the US Coast Guard, I wrote oil spills regulations.
I started talking because I had studied environment at a formal level, but there was an informal level, about people, and what we do and how we are. And environment changed from being about species and trees to be about how we treat ourselves and each other. So I had to spread that message. I still didn't ride motorized vehicles. In my heart I had become a prisoner. The prison I was in was the fact that I did not drive or use motorized vehicles. When I started it seemed very appropriate to me. But at every birthday I asked myself about silence, but I never asked myself about my decision to use my feet. I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me, and I was gonna have to change -- and was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who just walked, that I didn't know who I would be. But I knew I needed to change. Alot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we've gotten to, but there is another place we have to go to, and we have to leave behind the security of who we have become and go go the place of who we are becoming.
Designer Stefan Sagmeister gives a 3-minutes talk about "Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far".
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written possibly one of the most
insightful books of the recent years. In "The Happiness Hypothesis", he
brings neuroscience and evolutionary psychology together with some of
the biggest ideas of philosophers and religious thinkers of the past,
trying to over come the idea that today we know better, and that those
great teachers had already discovered some of the true secrets of
happiness and of the meaning of life -- and that they are quite
coherent with modern science.
He studies morality and emotion in the
context of culture: why did we evolve to have morals, and to have
different morals? And what about the moral foundations of politics?
Ideology and openness to experience is a discriminant of the way people behave.
What is morality and where does it come from? The worst idea in all psychology is that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Truth is that we come to life already knowing alot. Nature provides a first draft, which then experience revises. Five foundations of morality:
- Harm/care, that makes really bond with ohers, care for others
- Fairness/reciprocity
- Ingroup/loyalty, only among humans very large groups can join together and collaborate
- Authority/respect
- Purity/sanctity
If these are the five best candidates for what's written in the first draft of our moral mind But as kids grow up, how is this first draft being modified? We've put a questionnaire online asking how people (conservatives and liberals) relate to these foundations of morality. Turns out that conservatives consider them very similarly; liberals are more attentive to the first two, less to the other three.
What makes Ingroup, Authority and Purity moral? Order tends to decay. Loyalty is not enough, you need some sort of punishment to get people to cooperate in large group. Traditional morality uses every tool in the toolbox (including suppressing carnality etc) to make people collaborate, seek a higher end. Liberal morality rejects I/A/P. Liberals want change and justice even at risk of chaos; conservatives speak for institutions and traditions, and want order even at some cost for those at the bottom. So both liberals and conservatives have something to offer. Are conservatives and liberals like Yin and Yang? "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease" (Sent-ts'an, c. 700 CE). Compare that to George Bush "with us or against us".
Our righteous minds were "designed" by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams, and to blind us to the truth. As we heard from Samantha Power and her story of Sergio Vieira de Mello, we can't just charge in. Alot of problems we have to solve require that we change other people, and if we want to change them, we need to understand our design, cultivate moral humility, and turn our understanding into a better future for us all.
British rockstar Bob Geldof is the closing speaker. In the late 1970s, Geldof was the leader of the Boomtown Rats, a British punk band. In the 1980s, he became a global activist, organizing Band Aid (to raise funds for the famine in Ethiopia), then, later, LiveAid. In 2005, he threw another giant global concert, Live8, trying to raise awareness for debt relief and poverty reduction. Since, he's become active in alternative fuels and hybrid vehicles, and sees a link between fuel dependency and poverty-creating regimes. He calls TED "the Olympics of unreasonable people".
There can't be evolution of thought without differences, without challenges. Society needs to constantly test itself in order to get that change. Science can take us only so far. In the modern age, people are made a fetish of progress almost as an antidote of nihilism; we must believe that we're moving forward, but sometimes science only adds a twist to a normal madness. I encountered that normal madness back in 1984, millions of people dying of poverty and hunger. In Europe, we paid taxes to produce food that we would never eat, and to destroy it. Eight miles south of Europe lied Africa, and 30 million people were dying of want, most very young. I was shocked, and I just thought that it wasn't enough to do the usual dollar-in-the-box- I travelled around Africa and then went on TV and said that dying of want in a world of surplus was morally repulsive and also economically illiterate. The lingua franca of the planet is not English, it's rock and roll, so we began that dialog in 1985. If the impulse of one human being to help another is not critical to the human spirit, then what is? The act of putting a dollar in the save-the-children box is a political act. It's almost the political equivalent of the butterfly effect. If there are enough dollars, policy changes. If we are de-sensitized to the suffering of others something withers, something's gone, some part of humanity is lost. But it drove me mad, there was no need for this to happen; poverty is an empirical condition.
Africa will transform itself through technology, and the tech that will do it is the mobile phone.
All of these things that happened to me are wrapped up in this idea: back in 1985 I trawled across the misery of others. I was in Niger. A politician told me: there were 300 separate languages here, and they're gone. We can't let that continue (see also Wade Davis' speech). There is a great mapping of mankind to be undertaken, and that's what I'm gonna do, with photos, music, film, text, and then we're going to map the unfolding narrative of us, and we will watch ourselves unfold. Culture is the narrative of man, not politics. Human cultural diversity is as important to the life of the intellect as biological diversity is to nature. I want to build a Dictionary of Man, I want you to help me do so.
This is the last TED in Monterey. Final show of TED2008, live from TED@Aspen, with singer Jill Sobule and comedians Rives, Zé Frank and the Raspyni Brothers.
The next TEDs:
TEDAfrica: Cape Town, South Africa, 29 September - 1 October 2008. Theme: "What If?" Information and registration here.
TED2009: Long Beach, California, 4-7 February 2009. Theme: "The Great Unveiling". It's already sold out.
TEDEurope: Oxford, UK, 22-24 July 2009. Theme: "The Substance of Things Not Seen". Registrations will open soon. The first TEDGlobal was held in Oxford in 2005.
TEDGlobal: Mumbai, India, November 2009. Details will follow.
What a week! Time to pack and off to SFO. Find all my posts from TED2008 here -- and of course those of the other TED bloggers. Bye!
01 March 2008
TED2008: How dare we be optimistic?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session eleven.)
Ben Kaufman, founder of Kluster, goes on stage to tell what he and his team have been doing -- with the help of TED attendees and 1200 people around the world -- since the beginning of the conference. Kluster is an online collaboration and decision-making platform. 
They set out Wednesday morning to develop a product, with some basic guidelines but "we didn't know what it would be". They set up a studio in the conference's venue, and got 208 ideas submitted in 24 hours. Collaboratively, it was decided that it would be an education board game; the content for it was developed; a name chosen ("OverThere" -- the logo was submitted by a participant online); the rules set; a tagline developed; a full prototype developed (photo). 72 hours, 1200 participants, a board game "of social awareness" collectively invented, developed and prototyped: a pretty awesome piece of work.
Johnny Lee does research on human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University -- and explains it via videos on YouTube. He goes on stage for a short talk explaining how at the tip of the Nintendo Wii remote controller there is a rather sophisticated infrared camera, and Johnny shows how, by pointing it to a projection screen or LCD display, you can create a low-cost white board; because the camera can see multiple dots, it becomes a multitouch screen as well. The audience goes: "wow!", and indeed what Johnny does is really cool. See the demos on his site.
Economist Paul Collier has written one of the most interesting books of
last year, "The Bottom Billion", identifying the traps that keep many
countries in poverty and outlining new ways to development through a
mix of direct aid and investment. He is the director of the Center for
the Study of the African Economies at Oxford.
A billion people have been stuck living in economies that have been stopped for 40 years. So the question is: how can we give credible hope to that billion people. That's in my mind the fundamental challenge of development. Two forces that change the world for good: and enlightened of self-interest. Compassion because a billion people are living in societies that can't offer credible hope; enlightened of self-interest because of that economic divergence continues for another 40 years it will lead to disaster.
What does it mean to get serious about providing hope for the bottom billion? A good guide is: what did we do last time the rich world got serious about developing another region of the wold? That goes back to the 1940s: the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Europe, financed by the rich US. It was not only compassion: it was also enlightened self-interest by America, because in Europe country after country was falling into the Soviet sphere of interest. What else did America do? Before the war the US had been very protectionist; after the war, total reversal of trade policy with the general agreement on tariffs and trade. Before the war, US had an isolationist security policy; after the war, posted troops in Europe. Before the war, the US treated national sovereignty so stringently that it didn't even want to join the League of Nation; after the war, position reversed.
Aid, trade, security, and governance. That frontier is still there. We need to be at least as serious as we were there.
Let's focus on governance. The opportunity we're going to look to is a genuine basis for optimism about the bottom billion: the commodity boom. It's pumping an unprecedented amount of money into many -- not all -- of the countries of the bottom billion. Partially because community prices are high, partly because there is a range of new discoveries and explorations. Between them, these new revenue flows dwarf aid. How is that gonna help development? What is the relationship between high commodity prices of exports and the growth of commodity-exporting countries. In the short time, the first 5-7 years, it's great. Everything goes up. But in the long run, it reverses -- "the resource curse". The critical issue is the level of governance. In fact, if you got good enough governance, there is no resource curse: you go up in the short term, and even more in the long run. Nigeria is worst off than if it never had oil. There is a threshold level of governance. Is the bottom billion above or below that threshold? Maybe we can be more optimistic
Democracy makes even more of a mess of the resource boom that autocracies. There are two distinct aspects of democracy: electoral competition, that determines how you acquire power, and checks and balances which determines how you use it. What the countries at the bottom billion need is very strongly checks and balances. They have elections, but not c-and-b. We should have some international standards, which would be voluntary but would spell out the basic needs. We know these standards because we already have one: the international extraction revenues transparency. It requires that governments report to their populations the revenues of extraction.
What would the content be of these international standards? How to take the resources out of the ground, how to sell the rights for resource extraction. Now, a company flies in, make a deal with a minister, that's great for the company and often for the minister, but rarely for the country. There is a piece of institutional technology that can work: verified auctions. Like the British Treasury sold wireless 3G licenses back in the early 2000 (the full story of that auction here - PDF). If we can create such standards, we can help the people in these societies.
And yet, we've not got these rules. If you think about, the cost of promulgating international rules is very low. Why are they not there? Because until we have a critical mass of informed citizens in our own societies, politicians will get away with gestures -- things that look good but don't work. We have to go through the business of building an informed citizenry. That's why I wrote an economic book that you can read on a beach.
Eric Kuhne, architect and planner from London, gives a short talk about a new city project in the Middle East, where symbolism and urban planning interact. Architecture has become a new diplomacy. We want to restore the storytelling qualities of cities. A city has been and always will be the greatest work of art.
Singer-songwriter-producer-activist Nellie McKay is next, toying with antique genres yet producing music that's unequivocally contemporary.
Three-minutes speech by Andy Hobsbawm is one of the founders of The Green Thing, a London-based online community that encourages people to behave more sustainably, one small step at a time, through information and fun. I've already blogged it here and here.
Last year was quite a year for former US vice-president Al Gore. He was awarded the Nobel prize for Peace (together with the IPCC), won an Oscar for his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth", and saw the theme of climate change gain center stage in the political and social discussion. He has spoken previously at TED, in 2006 (watch the video).
He has a new speech related to his last book, "The Assault On Reason", which will also be turned into a documentary.
"I was reminded by Karen Armstrong's presentation that if religion is not really about belief but about behaviour, maybe we should say the same thing about optimism. Optimism is often represented as an intellectual posture -- Gandhi's "You must be the change you wish to see in the world". But when we change our behaviour in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the democracy and citizen part. In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis, and we have one. There is a bridge between the climate crisis and the crisis of extreme poverty in our world. We have to find a unified Earth theory. The struggles of climate change and extreme poverty and diseases are connected to the problems of overconsumption, wastefulness, economic transformation. We have to approach this as a unified challenge. Local, regional, global conflicts: each level requires a different allocation of resource, organizational model, etc. The climate crisis is the rare and strategic global conflict, we have to organize our response accordingly (BG: I partially disagree). What we do with the poorest countries matters to all of us. We have to act. Since that post-war economic boom, one aspect of the engine of economic growth was a pattern of consumption that morphed into overconsumption. The solution to the climate crisis requires that we replace that engine -- consumption without overconsumption. We need a worldwide movement. But the political will needs to be mobilized in order to mobilize the resources.
Gore discusses (and shows convincing images about) the melting of the Arctic icecap and the thawing of permafrost in the North; peak fishing; emissions.
Venus and the Earth have roughly the same size. On Earth, carbon is trapped. On Venus, it's in the atmosphere -- and temperatures reach 855 degrees F.
The majority of Americans now think that climate change is a problem, that warming is real. But there still isn't a sense of urgency. (He shows a video -- a frame at left -- with elephants falling from the sky, "every year the US emits CO2 for the equivalent weight of 1.2 billion elephants: It's time to stop ignore 1.2 billion elephants in the room").
Solution: put a price on carbon. We need a CO2 tax, revenue-neutral, to replace taxation on emplomyent, which was invented by Bismarck and some things have changed since. In the poor world we have to integrate responses to poverty with solutions to the climate crisis. Responses can make a huge difference. Think of the "energy super grid" with solar energy produced in North Africa by solar and the energy sold to Europe (picture below). If you invest in tar sands, you have a subprime portfolio.
780 US cities are now supporting Kyoto.
We heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so commonplace that it becomes banal routine. What we need is another hero generation. Those of us who are alive in the US today, but also in the rest of the world, have to somehow understand that history has presented us with a choice. Just as Jill Taylor was figuring out how to save her life while she was distracted by the amazing stroke that she was witnessing.We now have a culture of distraction but we have a planetary emergency. We need to find a way to create a sense of generational mission. We have the capacity to do it. I'm optimistic, because I do feel very deeply that the kind of moving spirit that is celebrated in so many of the sessions that we've all been moved by here is alive in all of us. I believe we have the capacity at moments of great challenge to set aside the causes of distraction and rise to the historic challenges. Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying "this is so terrible, what a burden". Let's reframe that: how many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts, a challenge that can pull from us more that we knew we could to. We ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generational about which 1000 years from now orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying: they swere the ones that found within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future. Let's do that.
Chris Anderson asks Gore whether he is excited by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's environmental plans. Gore: We should feel grateful that both of them and John McCain, all three have a position on the climate challenge, have offered leadership and an approach very different from the current administration. But the campaign dialog -- often sponsored by the "clean coal" industry btw -- has not laid the basis for the kind of bold initiative that is really needed. They're saying the right things, and whoever of them is elected may do the right things. But when I came back from Kyoto in 1997 with a great feeling, and then confronted the US Senate and only a handful were willing to ratify that treaty: whatever the politicians say needs to be alongside what people say. The climate challenge is part of the fabric of our life. Changing the pattern is beyond anything we've done in the past. Change light bulbs, but change the politics too. I do believe that between now and November it is possible that the debate will get bolder. We can change things, actively. What's needed really is a higher level of consciousness, and it's hard to create, but it's coming. As the African say: if you want to go quickly go alone, if you want to go far go together. We have to go far quickly.
01 March 2008
Lost in the stars: TED@Aspen Day 3
Photo: Michael Brands/Aspen Institute
Friday at TED@Aspen, we hosted live Talks from Walter Isaacson, the head of the Aspen institute, and the wonderful Ze Frank. Between TED sessions via satellite, we heard from David Gallo and William Lange of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Joy Mountford sharing amazing data visualizations, Ron Dembo and his ZeroFootprint carbon calculator, Reto Schnyder and his thoughts on Max Frisch's I'm Not Stiller, and the Raspyni Brothers -- who put on a completely terrifying show that risked the life of the world's greatest poker player, as they juggled bowling balls over Phil Gordon's head.
The TED Prize lunch at Aspen Meadows was buzzing with great ideas, with a rich cross-pollination and connection among the three winners and their wishes. After we rocked the entire Doerr-Hosier Center with the "Ode to Joy," we rode the Silver Queen gondola, 3,000 feet up Aspen Mountain into an amazing starry sky, for dancing, drinking and more amazing conversation.
Photo: Michael Brands/Aspen Institute
01 March 2008
TED2008: Day 2 in Quotes
"There have been bangs in the past. There will be bangs in the future. We may live in an endless universe." - Physicist and TED Prize winner Neil Turok
“I have the modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry." - Craig Venter, on his work creating synthetic lifeforms to generate alternative energy sources
"The line between good and evil is movable and it's permeable." - Psychologist Philip Zimbardo
“They’ve lowered the transaction cost of stopping genocide.” - Samantha Power on 1-900-GENOCIDE
“Chris Anderson is a computer-fabricated artifact.” - Paul Rothemund, joking about his work manipulating DNA, as if it were a computer program
"A lot of religious people prefer to be right, rather than compassionate." - Religion scholar and TED prize winner Karen Armstrong
“ 'Temes' [technology-enhanced memes] don’t care about us - they simply want to create more of themselves. Don’t think we created the internet for our own benefit - think about temes spreading for themselves because they must.” - Susan Blackmore
“Beauty and truth do not reside in the object themseles, but rather in the nature of the exchange between the object and the viewer,” -Thomas Krens
“Whoa dude, nice equations!” - Garrett Lisi, the "surfer dude" physicist, introducing his talk by displaying an enormously complex equation on screen. He went on to explain his controversial "theory of everything" without using equations
29 February 2008
A moment which totally knocked my hat in the creek
The big thought of the day, from the fertile mind and warm heart of Benjamin Zander: BTFI
Words to live by, my friends.
29 February 2008
TED2008: Visual blogging
While many people at TED blog away in words and photographs, two artists -- Kevin Richards and David Sibbet -- are immersed in another form of conference blogging. They are the magic hands (and, given the intensity of this conference, brains) behind the TED BIG VIZ, a project to visually record and synthetize the ideas of TED speakers. Kevin and David create in almost-real-time spontaneous sketches of the speeches using the Autodesk Sketchbook Pro software on Wacom Cintiq graphic tablets. Their drawings are then presented and organized on a Perceptive Pixels big multi-touch computer screen (Perceptive Pixels is the company founded by past TED star speaker Jeff Han). Here are some of their drawings:
They can be navigated in multiple ways, expanded, enlarged, etc:
Here is their "visual post" on Craig Venter's speech:
And here what they did with Amy Tan's:
29 February 2008
TED2008: What Stirs Us?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session ten.)
Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies romantic love -- its evolution, its biochemical foundations, and its importance to human society. She gave a talk at TED2006 (watch the video). Her current research is on why we fall in love and how.
In the jungle of Guatemala, she says, stands a temple. It was built by the king of the Mayas, who was buried under it when he died. Mayan inscription proclaims that he was deeply in love with his wife, so he built a temple on her honor facing his. The sun rises behind one and sets behind the other: after 30'000 years these two people still kiss from their tombs. Anthropologists have not find any society that doesn't know love.
Have you ever been rejected by somebody you really loved? Have you ever dumped someone who really loved you? About 97% of people, men and women, say yes to those questions. Romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations on Earth. We are currently looking at the data of brain scans of people that have just been dumped, and we find alot of activity in the region associated with romantic love. We found activity in other brain regions also, in one associated with calculating gains and losses.
What have I learned? Romantic love is a universal human drive -- not the sex drive -- that it allows you to focus your energy into a single energy. Of all the poems, Plato: "the God of love lives in the state of need". Love is a need, like hunger and thirst. I have come to believe that romantic love is also an addiction. It has all of the characteristics of an addiction, you focus on a person, you obsess about him/her, you need to see more of her/him. Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth.
Animals also love. There is not a single animal on this planet that would copulate with anything that comes along, unless you're stuck in a lab cage. I've looked at 100 species and everywhere in the wild animals have favorites.
Our newest experiment -- putting people who report they're still in love in a long-lasting relationship into the functional MRI. And we find the same data, that region of the brain still becomes active 25 years later.
Why do you fall in love with one person rather than another? Match.com came to me three years ago and asked me that question, and I've researched it ever since. Psychologists tell you that we tend to fall in love with people with the same general level of intelligence, good looks, values, social status, but we don't know what makes two personalities really stick together to form a stable couple. I've concocted a questionnaire to analyze -- through biochemical analysis -- who chooses whom to love.
David Griffin is the director of photography for the National Geographic magazine -- the Vatican of photography. On his blog, Editor's Pick, he discusses the creation of the extraordinary photos published in the magazine.
He starts by showing some great -- truly awesome -- pictures by NG photographs, including the iconic portrait of the "Afghan Girl", Sharbat Gula (picture right) photographed by Steve McCurry and who did the NG cover in 1985.
Last year NG has added a section to their website ("Your Shot") where anyone can submit photographs to be considered for publication -- and it has been a runaway success. Everyone of us has one or two great photographs in us, but to be a great photojournalist you need to take great photos all the time.
Griffin goes on to tell great stories of photojournalism: in African national parks, in Indian slums, underwater in Baja California and New Zealand, in Chinese jellyfish markets, in the military medical system in Irak, etc.
Photography can be used to address our biggest issues. But sometimes photojournalism is just plain interesting or fun. Photography can make a real connection to people, and can be employed as a positive agent to understand the challenges and opportunities facing us today.
Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize and advocate of the private exploration of space.
When I met Stephen Hawking (who spoke on Wednesday at TED), he told me his dream was to travel into space. I told him I could not take him there, but I could take him to weightlessness. The way to do so is through parabolic flights (fly up, then go into free fall, which gives you a few dozens seconds of weightlessness). And so we brought Stephen Hawking there (picture left - see video).
Chris Abani is a Nigerian writer and political activist (twice imprisoned and tortured in his country). His 2004 novel "GraceLand" is a bitterly funny tale of a young Nigerial Elvis impersonator in Lagos. Abani was a speaker at TEDGLOBAL in Tanzania, last year.
My search is to find stories of everyday people that transcend us, that don't look away at the reality: we are never more beautiful than when we are ugly. What I've come to learn is that the world is never seen in the grand gestures, but in the accumulation of the simple, soft, selfless acts of compassion. In South Africa they say "Ubuntu": the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. Which means that there is no way for us to be human without other people.
So Abani tells stories of people. People standing up to soldiers wanting to kill them. People being compassionate. People being human, reclaiming their humanity, recognizing that we are surrounded by amazing people, who offer all of us the mirror to a whole humanity.
Benjamin Zander has been for almost 30 years the conductor of the Boston Philarmonic -- and a speaker on leadership. He uses music to help people open their minds.
"There are people that think that classical music is dying, and others who think that we haven't seen anything yet. Rather than going into statistics of orchestras dying, we should do an experiment." He is on stage with a piano, and uses it to play Chopin and tell stories of musical
learning and amazement, walking around on stage and down into the
audience, and at the end of his speech, he gets the TEDsters to stand and sing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". (They distribute the text written phonetically, but as a German speaker, I can't read it -- I'd never realized that if you speak a language, it's very difficult to read its phonetic rendering -- so I have to look up the original text: "Freude, schöner Götterfunken...")
29 February 2008
TED2008: What will tomorrow bring?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session nine)
Jim Marggraff gives a demo of the Livescribe smartpen, which looks like a big pen but has two microphones to record sound, a speaker to play it back, a small display and the capacity to capture handwritten notes and drawings in digital form. So it can record what you write and simultaneously it captures the surrounding sounds/voices. It requires a special paper with "buttons" and navigational tools. It can also be loaded with other features, like on-the-fly translation (click on a word in a language and the pen spells it out on the display and by voice in the other desired language), interactive books, and more.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the author of "The Black Swan", one of the most influential current books (first chapter available here). In it, he argues that it's the random, unlikely and unexpected events ("black swans") that generally have the most extraordinary impacts on the future and our ability to model and decide what the future will be -- and that our blindness with respect to this randomness has a price. Taleb -- a former Wall Street trader -- classifies numerous events as part of the "black swan" phenomenology, including the emergence of Google and the 9/11 attacks, Viagra and the Macintosh, the Beatles and Harry Potter.
"The law of large numbers tells you that when the number is very large, no single element can make a difference. That's why if you take 1000 persons chosen randomly and add the heaviest person in the world, that person will represent only a tiny fraction of those 1001 people's total weight. But take 1000 persons randomly chosen, and add the richest person in the world: that person would represent almost all the wealth in that group of 1001. This is the difference between mediocristan (the former) where things fit neatly under a bell curve, and extremistan (the latter) where extreme phenomenons are dominant.
Why are we moving into extremistan. The information age will be dominated by winner-take-all effects. Take books: a few dozen of them represent half the sales. We have to have alot of respect for the unobserved. Experts often can't predict because they miss on large deviations, that extreme outcomes and major discontinuities are so rare that we can almost ignore them.
I advocate the following: don't disturb a complex system, don't mess with it. Complex systems know about probability more than us. Consider WW2 or Irak: we don't see the link between action and consequences. We don't understand nature. This advocates conservatism.
Plato and Karl Marx tried to teach us to use our knowledge to make decision; and I'm trying to convince them to use our lack of knowledge -- our ignorance and our awareness of it -- to make decisions. We're never gonna understand the world, or the climate: all we can is focus on our decision process and try not to mess with complex systems.
Chris Anderson -- the editor of Wired magazine -- has just published a must-read cover story on "Free", which is a sort of preview of his next book, about "Freeconomics". He talks 3 minutes about developing small, cheap (less than 100 USD) blimps, fitted with sensors, infrareds, etc, that can fly indoors."
Peter Schwartz is a specialist in drawing roadmaps of the future. He is
a co-founder of the Global Business Network think-tank. His last book,
"Inevitable Surprises", champions quick thinking and adaptability in a
world in flux.
"The future isn't what it used to be. I'm amazed that many of the most prosperous, most successful people in the world have become pessimistic about the future. People have lost confidence. Why have we lost confidence in the future? The future is more uncertain. There are really 4 big questions for the future and if we find an answer we can have a better sense of the future:
- War: Will there be a big world war involving US/China/islamic world/India/Russia? (Schwartz's answer: war is unlikely, too much common interests among countries)
- Prosperity: Will the global economic growth we have seen in the second half of the 20th century continue? (Yes, says Schwartz, but it's the spread of knowledge and the ability to use that knowledge productively that mattes, yet he makes his point by comparing Singapore and Nigeria, which of course aren't really comparable)
- Equity: Will the fruits of economic growth be relatively evenly spread? (Yes, he says, hundreds of millions of people are likely to climb out of poverty in the next 15 years in BRIC countries)
- Environment: Will we be available to achieve growth in an ecologically sustainable manner? (Schwartz answers through Paul Ehrlich's equation: environmental impact = population x affluence x technology (i=pxaxt). Population won't double again, will reach 9 billion and plateau. Affluence is going to go up. So the real lever is technology; Craig Venter is the James Watt of our era, Stamets' fungi in the previous session was very inspiring, we will see a transition to a bioindustrial era, there is a good chance that we will be able to make the world richer without destroying the environment).
Gregory Petsko is a professor of biochemistry at Brandeis University, gives a 3-minutes speech. Unless we do something, he says, over the next 20 years we are going to see an epidemics of neurologic diseases -- because of population aging. Neurological diseases for which we don't have a cure yet (such as Alzheimers) already cost half a trillion dollars, and that cost will improve rapidly.
In Western countries, few women die of cervical cancer: regular exams
catch it early. But in poorer countries, it's one of the top causes of
cancer death for women. Harvard's Sue Goldie applies decision science
and cost-benefit analysis to finding ways to model public health
scenarios and make decisions about where to best spend limited
resources.
Consider three viruses of public health importance: HIV, Hepatitis B and C, and Human Papilloma Virus. HPV, which leads to cervical cancer, is the most common viral sexually-transmitted disease in the world. Fighting it has been a success in some countries in the world, and a failure in others, mostly poor. There are several alternatives: low-tech screening, high-tech screening, vaccine (which is the most expensive). What's the optimal program? Her model for cervical cancer, which she describes in details, shows that a
simple exam done once in a patient's lifetime would reduce the death
rate by a third. But the consequences of delaying access to cures will be enormous (million of deaths).
TEDster Felix Kramer, founder of the California Cars Initiative, gets 3 minutes to talk about plug-in hybrids. Electricity is cheaper, cleaner and domestic (BG: as long as it is produced from renewables). We can have plug-in hybrids today, with no new technology, just converting existing cars by adding a battery, that you can charge overnight from an ordinary socket, and if you want to go to the mountains you still have the fuel engine. The planet can't wait for perfection.
Larry Burns of GM presents the self-driving Chevy SUV that has won
the Darpa Urban Challenge last year (see this previous post or the
Wikipedia page). He shows a video of the car, and it's really impressive. It's on display at TED:
Walter Isaacson, the director of the Aspen Institute, has written a few magistral biographies of great men: Benjamin Franklin and, more recently, Albert Einstein. He's speaking from TED@Aspen, which the Institute is hosting in its Doerr-Hosier Center.
What could the future hold for the art of narration? Narration is about making sense of the world, connecting the dots. In the past 15 years narrative has been dismissed, as in "imposing a narrative on events". But those of us that believe in narrative think that we are weaving a narrative. It works not only in novels and fiction, but in all sectors of life. One of the salient characteristics of most narratives is that they tend to be chronological. In fact, perhaps the greatest of all narratives begans with the most simple three words, "In the beginning" (Bible). So they tend to be linear. Now that we are entering a digital -- interactive, hypertextual, collaborative -- age, how do we preserve the beauty of narrative? A long time ago, narrative was interactive and collaborative storytelling process, and over the years and decades the story evolved, and that applies to most great narratives of the ancient times (the Song of Roland) to plays (the interplay between actors and public at the Globe theatre), etc. Then something happens, the invention of the printing press, and that makes narrative less collaborative, less iterative, less interactive process. It makes narrative more carved in stone (or written on paper). So this notion of a broadcast-type phenomenon, where we have a centralized production of a narrative that goes out to a mass audience, begins with the invention of the printed press. The same with movies, with broadcast television. With the digital age, can we restore the great qualities of narrative of time past? So far, alot of what we have done is old wine poured into old bottles. As wonderful as YouTube can be is still people producing videos and finding a new distribution channel. Likewise most websites. We haven't really changed the essence of what narrative can be in the digital age. Where do we see glimmers of the new narrative? In the wiki phenomenon, where people collaborate. My next book will be an experiment in this, not only a multimedia product but also which allows people to add their own thoughts and informations, an always-evolving book. No idea what the business model will be, but that's probably how the Iliad and the Odyssey were written.
Comedian Zé Frank closes the session with a hilarious standup routine.
29 February 2008
TED2008: What's Out There?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session eight.)
"What's out there?" is the question of this session. First to try to give an answer is particle physicist Brian Cox, from the University of Manchester. He also work on the CERN's LHC ATLAS, part of one of the most ambitious scientific experiments currently taking place in the world, the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (see my notes and pictures from a visit to the LHC last year, including explanation of the science involved) and spends alot of time trying to make heady scientific concepts understandable to the public.
The Large Hadron Collider will be switched on later this year. It is a particle accelerator 27 km in circonference, being built at an average depth of 100 meters under the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It is fitted with several giant detectors (ATLAS is the one in the photo above, notice the man in the foreground for scale) that are essentially digital cameras, trying to capture the collision of particles as they travel at high speed in opposing directions. With the LHC scientists are trying to re-create the conditions that were present less than one-billionth of a second after the Big Bang. Why do so? Particle physicists are ambitious, and the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything is made of and why it sticks together.
Way back in the early times of the universe, things -- we believe -- were very simple. It's made of 12 particles of matters (quarks, protons, gluons, neutrinos, electrons). These particles has been discovered in the last century. The first one, the electron, in 1897. One of the greatest achievements of the XX century is the "standard model", which is a beautiful mathematical equation that explains the universe. Except that there are several "H" in there, which stands for the Higgs particle, that hasn't been observed yet. It's a theoretical particle, a prediction for the existence of one. What the Higgs does, it gives mass to the fundamental particles (refer to my earlier post for more). The whole universe is full of Higgs fields. That's what the LHC is been built to search for. It can also discover other things, including possibly giving evidence to a theory called supersymmetry that suggests that the forces of nature unified together back at the Big Bang.
Particle physics and cosmology has given us a beautiful narrative, almost a creation story, from where the universe started 13.7 billion years ago. (Brian does a two-minutes "history of the universe" based on the image above). The artifacts that surround us are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years -- and the right laws of physics. If you believe this story, our civilization has emerged purely as the creation of the laws of physics.
Over the last 49 years ocean explorer Robert Ballard has made more than 120 deep-sea expeditions, developing and using cutting-edge technologies to find shipwrecks and unearth their lost histories -- including the Titanic and the Bismarck.
"The US has two exploration programs: NASA, tasked with exploring the space, and NOAA, the national oceanic administration. If you compare NASA's budget, it's 1600 times bigger than NOAA's. Why are we ignoring the oceans, 72% of our planet? Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more ships down there during Captain Cook era than now. I've built several submarine vehicles. On a good day we may have 4 or 5 human beings at the average height of the Earth. In 1975 we went down 9000 thousand feet into the ocean floor, the eternal darkness where you don't have photosynthesis, therefore no plant life, and little animal life -- or so we thought. We discovered that there are tens of thousands of active volcanoes. We discovered a profusion of life that should not exist. Giant tube worms. Large clam beds. Then we started creating robots for accelerating the exploration. And we could find incredible limestone formation, upside-down pools, etc. Recently, diving off in the Gulf of Mexico, we found pools of water, volcanoes of methane, flows of lava. There is more than natural history under the oceans, there are shipwrecks: we realized that the deep see is the largest museum on Earth, ships that sank transporting fabulous artifacts. Fortunately we've been able to convince the US Congress and we could get a NOAA ship, and its mission is to go where NOAA has not gone yet, the islands in the Pacific that are under US control -- we have maps of Venus but not of the ocean in that regions. The beauty of all this, is that we can disseminate it to children. Through the Jason Project, every year over 1 million students are connected to explorers and scientists, participating live in explorations. We want to create the classes of tomorrow. tech that allows people to follow along as he explores the seas
Andreas Heinecke, a human rights activist from Germany who focuses on overcoming cultural and communication barriers, talks about "Dialogue in the Dark”, an exhibition where participants experience darkness and blind people teach them how to see.
Mycologist Paul Stamets believes that mushrooms could an intergalactic colonizing species. Well, almost. He believes that fungi, and particularly the mycelium (the vegetative part of mushrooms) contains solutions for some of the Earth's environmental and health-related problems. For instant, fungi produce strong antibiotics; they can be used against flu viruses; mycelium can be used to naturally "clean up" petroleum-saturated soils; revamp pesticides; and generating ethanol (he has patented many of these mushroom-related technologies). Preserving the genome of fungis is absolutely crucial for human health.
Animal behaviorist Joshua Klein is a biological hacker (he also hacks computers), and he talks about crows.
Some species are hyperadaptive to the conditions created by humans -- think at rats becoming immune to the poisons we produce. Crows aren thriving. They're found everywhere on the planet except for the Poles. Crows are intelligent, their brains are proportional in the same way that chimpanzee's are. He shows a crow that tries to pull something out of a glass, and can't, so it bends a stick into a crook. Another showing a crow "using" passing cars to crack nuts (putting the nut on the road and waiting for a car to drive over it). Moreover, it turns out that after a while the crows started teaching each-other and imitating each-other how to do these things.
Exploiting the fact that crows are attracted to shiny things, Josh built a machine that trains crows in several stages to pick up lost change and deposit it in a slot in return for peanuts (photo right). The device tests the intelligence of the birds, and Josh wonders whether "they could for example be trained to pick up garbage after sports events" of similar things -- the idea being that "we could find useful tasks for these fast-multiplying animals, instead of trying to limit or exterminate them".
Richard Preston is one of the few humans to have climbed Hyperion, a nearly 115-meter-tall redwood tree that is the tallest thing living on Earth. Discovered in 2006, it is located in a remote area of the Redwood National Park in California (the exact location has not been disclosed to protect the tree's ecosystem). He is the author of "The wild trees", about the still-not-well-known forests of the American Northwest.
The north coast of California has rainforests. Sequoias (photo left) are the tallest organisms on Earth, these are trees that could stand out in midtown Manhattan. The oldest living redwoods are perhaps 2500 years old, roughly the age of the Parthenon. In the 1970s to the early 1990s, most of that forest has been cut down in bursts of logging. Now about 4% of the original rainforest remains -- and it's still under-explored. About 30 feet (10 meters) is the diameter of a big redwood, articulating itself upwards into space for over 330 feet (110 meters). This species moves at "redwood time". To us they seem to be immobile, but they continue to move, to develop. Preston began climbing these threes with his children, sleeping there, discovering a whole ecology in their branches (Preston calls it "canopy soil") with growing complexity, flying buttresses (redwoods grow back into themselves to strengthen the crown of the tree), a fractal-like capacity to reiterate (to repeat their shape again and again), but also deadly parasites that are killing off trees and possibly a whole ecosystem of Eastern hemlocks in the Northwest.
What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? They can tell us about human time, the flickering and the shortness of it.
29 February 2008
TED2008: How do we create?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session seven.)
This is about the point in the program where all the attendees start to talk about TED as an endurance sport. We're mid-way, but it's so intense that it feels like it has been going on for weeks...
The session, on "How do we create?", which will be moderated be TED's June Cohen, opens with inventor-collector Jay Walker -- who, as I already said in previous posts, has lent several dozen objects from his personal library to TED for the creation of this year's stage -- showing a few pictures of his fabled "library of the imagination", a 3-stories-high trove designed like an Escher painting, with glass bridges connecting upper levels, walls covered with ancient manuscripts, and incredible artifacts of human creation. Here a picture, possibly never seen before:
If you've seen and enjoyed "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Star Wars"
(episodes I and II), a large part of your enjoyment was due to visual
effects wizard John Knoll of Industrial Light and Magic. Incidentally,
he's also one of the co-inventors of graphic-editing software
Photoshop. So John knows his way in the alleys of creativity.
Visual effects in the script are what you can't go out and shoot, sometimes because it doesn't exist, or because it's too dangerous (incredible stunts) or just not possible to do in any other way (he shows examples). There are different techniques to overcome this problem: matte paintings (an old technique for creating virtual sets where they painted landscapes on pieces of glass, superposing them on the original footage; now it's done digitally of course), miniatures, blue/greenscreen composites, and computer graphics. John compares images from 1954's "20'000 Leagues Under The Sea" with "Pirates": ships, sea battles, sea monsters scenes, simulation of water and waves.
Over
the past decade San Francisco-based designer Yves Béhar and
his firm Fuseproject have produced game-changing designs for cell phone
headsets (Jawbone), shoes (Birkenstock), computers (OLPC's XO laptop)
or table lamps (Herman Miller's "Leaf"). A while back Fast Company
magazine published a great profile of Yves.
His mother is Swiss, his father Turkish, he grew up in Switzerland, and he shows some of the objects that were around the home -- furniture, carpets. "I realized that objects tell stories -- and storytelling has been a big influence on my work. Then there was another influence, from my teen passions, ski and windsurfing -- so I combined them into a contraption for surfing over frozen lakes. Then, design school, where I asked alot of questions -- do people really need the caps-lock key on a computer keyboard? -- and found this quote: "Advertising is the price companies pay for being un-original". I moved to SF, created my own firm, and started working on projects -- watch, furniture, etc. The "Leaf" lamp was meant to create a new experience of light, giving a choice for the user to go from a glowing moonlight to a very bright worklight, and everything in between -- we designed both the lamp and the bulb. All of these projects have a humanistic side to them.
Jawbone -- the Bluetooth headset (photo below left) -- has a humanistic side: it feels you skin and knows when you're talking and when you're talking it filters out the other surrounding noises. But it's also about taking out the techie stuff and make it beautiful -- if it isn't beautiful, it really doesn't belong on your face.
Design is never done -- you have to do all this other stuff, packaging etc -- and continue to touch the user. We developed a bottle for a vitamin-infused organic drink targeted at kids: the bottle is symmetrical from every side, and can have a second life as a toy using connectors. And because "why?" is one of the questions that kids ask more often, we called it Y Water (photo right):
His most recent project: NYC Condom, launched on Valentine's day. The Dept of Health in NY needed a way to distribute 36 million condoms for free. fuseproject worked on a dispenser, which needs to be easily seviceable etc. They're being installed all over the city. fuseproject also designed the condoms (and Béhar throws a handful of them into the audience...)
If we all work together in creating value and keep in mind the values of the work that we do, maybe we can change the world.
Robert J. Lang is an origami artist (origami: the ancient Japanese art of paper-folding). He uses maths to analyze folding patterns and create origamis with hundreds of folds and sophisticated curves. Most people still think that origami is flapping birds made of paper, but it's really become something much more sophisticated -- thank to mathematics. Origamis, Lang explains, revolve around crease patterns, and they all have to obey four laws: colorability (you can color them so that two colors never touch), always even folds (the number of folds always varies by two), alternate angles; and layer ordering (no matter how you stack a sheet, it can never penetrate a fold). If you obey these laws, you can do amazing things. And indeed, here are some of the origamis showed by Lang -- they're all single-sheet folds:
This has also allowed the creation of origami on-demand, including graphics, ads, and commercials. This for example is a video ad for Mitsubishi: everything in the ad is an origami, except the car:
The "extreme folding" structures developed for origamis turn out to have applications in medicine, science, and engineering: things like packing airbags, heart implants and spaceship and space telescope parts into the smallest possible places. "An origami, someday, may even save a life".
Writer Amy Tan -- American of Chinese
descent -- has written a series of bestselling novels, including "The
Bonesetter's Daughter" and "The Kitchen God's Wife". She's also
written children books and has appeared in The Simpsons. She focuses on
the creative process, journeying through her childhood and family history looking for hints of where her own creativity comes from. The value of nothing: out of nothing comes something. That's an essay she wrote when she was 11 and got a B+. How do we create? She shows a triangle with corners at Nature, Nurture and Nightmares. Some people would say that we're born with it; others that creativity may be a function of some neurological quirk; part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis (why I am not Black like everything else in my school class?), with childhood traumas, with expectations. "This led to my big questions: why do things happen, how do they happen, and how do I make them happen? When I look at creativity, my inability to repress associations with everything about me is key". She goes off doing a comparison between quantum mechanics and creativity: "you've alot of unknown; dark energy and dark matter; the observer effect -- if you try too hard what you're hoping to find by serendipity at the end is no longer there; ambiguity; multi-dimensions. Much has to do with intention. You notice disturbing hints from the universe, and then in a way I knew that they've always been there. What I need in effect is a focus. When I have a question, I have a focus, and all these object go through that question. You think that there is some coincidence or serendipity that your'e getting all this help from the universe, but it really is that now you've a focus. Why am I here? When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous, it seems so obvious, and yet it is not. We all hate moral ambiguity, and yet it is so necessary in writing a story, it's the place where I begin. Luck, chance of course, and accidents also play a role, often a mysterious role. How do I create something out of nothing? By questioning, and acknowledging that there are no absolute truths. By thinking about luck and fate, coincidences and accidents, God's will and the synchrony of mysterious forces. By thinking about our role. By imagining fully and becoming what is imagined. And that's how I find particles of truth. So there are never complete answers. Or if there is one is it to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that's good. And if there is a more complete answer, it is to simply imagine. Imagination is the closest thing to feeling compassion".
She carried a bag on stage at the beginning of her speech. She opens it now to reveal what's in the bag: her dog, who trots out of stage .
June shows a clip from Marjane Satrapi's animated movie "Persepolis", based on her autobiographical novel of the same name about a young girl coming of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution.
Tod
Machover is the Head of the MIT Media Lab's Hyperinstruments/Opera of
the Future Group (now that's a job title). He has composed five operas
and invented several musical technologies, including "hyperinstruments"
-- an approach that extends virtuosity. (Yo-Yo Ma and Prince among others have
adopted it).
"We all love music, but it's more powerful if you don't just listen to it but make it. Everybody in the world has the power to be part of music in a very dynamic way. At the Media Lab we've been engaged in an approach called Active Music. We started by making hyperinstruments that have all kind of sensors built in, so the instrument knows how it is been played. We asked ourselves: why can't we make instruments like those for everybody -- and that produced the Brain Opera, and Guitar Hero. Music is very transformative, can change your life, your body, your mind.
Music, even better than words, is a powerful way to explain who we are. If I was playing cello here I could share things about myself that I can't do in words. Music is a very powerful interface". Machover shows the "Chandelier", a central set piece in a new opera he's written called "Death and the Powers" which will premiere in Monaco in September 2009: it's both a sculpture and a new kind of musical instrument (picture right).
Most recently, Machover has focused on using music in therapy
for the physically and mentally handicapped and on developing
technologies to allow them to compose and perform music . What if I could make an instrument that adapt to I really am, to my real capacities, Machover asks, and he calls up on stage Adam Boulanger, a PhD student working with him, and Dan Ellsey,
a cerebral palsy patient in a wheelchair. Dan
communicates via a computer-controlled "talking box". Boulanger and Machover developed technology allowing Dan to use his limited possibilities of expression to create and perform music by using both
brain waves and small movements of his face and eyes. Dan performs his composition -- and the music is great, and it gets a standing ovation.
29 February 2008
What's your Behar factor?
Last year on the TEDBlog we asked "what's your Starck factor?" Prior to hearing him blow the roof off of TED2007 with his spectacular meditation on design and the universe and bloop-bloop, I found it very instructive to take an inventory of Mr. Starck's influence on my existence. In all, I found I used four Starck designs in my daily life, and could easily justify lusting after another two.
In about an hour at TED2008 we'll have the pleasure of hearing from another remarkable designer, Yves Behar. So what's your Behar factor?
My Behar factor is One. Unfortunately, I only have one Behar design in my life, but I could imagine owning many more, such as his Leaf lamp or the XO laptop.
But what of the one? It's the Jawbone headset, a product that's enhanced my daily routine in many ways.
I never drive while on the phone, so I end up using the Jawbone mostly while I'm at work. It is a handy tool for spreading memes: I keep it in my left ear, allowing me to take right-handed business calls with my Cisco IP phone, and stay on hold with United Airlines via my mobile phone on the left. Borg-like? Yes. Productive? Yes. A way to have some more cool design in my life? Most certainly!
What's your Behar factor?
29 February 2008
We're cooler: Notes from TED@Aspen Day Two
Photo: Michael Brands/Aspen Institute
As Jill Sobule pointed out from stage yesterday, "We're cooler in Aspen." Amazing conversations are happening here, both in person and in the huge number of bloggers and Twitterers commenting on the sessions and on the between-session action. Before the afternoon sessions, we answered another Big Question for TED@Aspen: Losing your virginity -- how'd that work out for you?, answered in 6 words or less. An oddly eager crowd rushed the stage to talk about it. Best answer: "Mother in audience; still a virgin."
This morning we're doing breathing exercises, setting up for an amazing talk from David Gallo, and getting ready for a snowball fight and (possibly) a prank.
28 February 2008
TED Prize 2008 session live now
The 2008 TED Prize winners, Dave Eggers, Neil Turok and Karen Armstrong, are on stage now at TED in Monterey, giving their speeches and expressing their wishes. The session is webcast live here (5:15pm-7:30pm, California time).
28 February 2008
TED2008: Will Evil Prevail?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session five.)
Will evil prevail? This promises to be a hard session -- there will be moments that are hard to watch and listen to, looking evil right in the eye -- but discussions of evil will mix with experiences of good.
The best person to start this session is certainly social psychologist Phil
Zimbardo. In 1971, he conducted the Stanford prison experiment, a study
of human responses to authority and captivity. In a mock prison setting
built in the basement of a Stanford University building, volunteers
(students) played the roles of both guards and prisoners -- and showed
such a rapid adaptation to their roles that Zimbardo had to interrupt
the experiment early, after only 6 days, because a sizable portion of the "guards" started
developing abuisive behaviour and sadistic tendencies, while some of
the "prisoners" showed signs of emotional trauma (website here, video -- a version of which Zimbardo shows during his speech -- here).
What makes people go wrong?. "The line between good and evil is movable and permeable. Good people can be seduced through that line. Good and evil are the yin and yang of the world; God's favorite angel was Lucifer, which God punished by sending to Hell -- paradoxically, it was God who created evil. Evil is the exercise of power to intentionally harm people psychologically, destroy them physically and commit crimes against humanity." When in 2004 the Abu Ghraib scandal of prisoner torture and
abuse in a US prison in Baghdad was revealed, Zimbardo saw many
parallels to the Stanford experiment (and wrote a book about them: "The
Lucifer Effect", which he calls "a celebration of the human mind's infinite capacity to make us behave kind or cruel, nice or bad, etc."). He has been a witness expert in one of the cases
brought to court, which gave him access to all investigation and
background reports -- including images that the Pentagon refused to
release publicly, and that Zimbardo shows during his speech. Purely horrific pictures. Zimbardo
disagrees with the official position putting the blame on "a few bad
apples", and contends instead that the Abu Ghraib scandal stem from
systemic problems -- that the environment encouraged some people to
become perpetrators of evil. "All of the things they did at Abu Ghraib
were somehow "authorized" by the hierarchy in their memos on using
sleep deprivation or threatening prisoners with dogs. They added the sexual abuses, and the
photos -- nobody had told them to take pictures". All of the abuses, btw,
happened during the night shifts -- the soldiers that were operating within the "environment" of the daily shifts didn't commit the abuses.
So instead of asking who is responsible, Zimbardo asks what is responsible. Psychologists generally understand the transformation of human character as dispositional (inside the individual) or situational (exernal), but Zimbardo argues that it can also be systemic, and that's what happened at Abu Ghraib.
Zimbardo recalls several experiments by another great social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, studying how people will commit evil obeying authority. The same is demonstrated by the mass suicides by cult members, and other examples.
There are, he says, seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil:
- mindlessly taking the first small step
- dehumanization of others
- de-individualization of self (anonymity)
- diffusion of personal responsibility
- blind obedience to authority
- uncritical conformity to group norms
- passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference
- and that particularly in new or unfamiliar situations
Power without oversight is prescription for abuse. it was the environment created at Abu Ghraib that contributed to this abuses, says Zimbardo, and the fact that it went unnoticed for months. So there is a paradigm shift needed. Since the Inquisition we've been dealing with problems at an individual level, but that doesn't work.
The very same siuation that can inflame hostile imagination and inspire perpetration of evil can inspire others to intervene, be heroes, to stop evil. So Zimbardo suggest a "psychology of heroism" as antidote to evil (and to passive inaction) promoting "heroic imagination" in kids, making visible that people do extraordinary moral deeds in certain situations. "Are we ready to take the path to celebrate ordinary heroes?"
Despite a very necessary music intermezzo -- personal coach Laura Trice doesn't have an easy job following Zimbardo's charged presentation. In a 3-minutes speech, she advocates clarity: If you really told people close to you what you really want, asked them what they need, you both will be happier.
Irwin Redlener, a public health doctor and a leading voice in disaster medicine (Katrina etc) and in pointing out America's lack of preparedness. Are we at risk of a nuclear attack, he asks. And: could we permanently eliminate the nuclear threat? Since we first developed nuclear weapons, we've lived in a dangerous world characterized by two phases. First, the US in 1945 developed the atomic bomb and used it to end the second world war. In 1949 the URSS got the bomb. From there to 1991 there was an extraordinary buildup of nuclear weapons capacity (with a beginning of disarmament after 1985). Those yeas were characterized by a superpower arms race, US vs URSS, in a fragile standoff, depending on MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). There was a high level of public awareness. But even though we knew that there could be a civilization obliteration, America and URSS engaged in a series of responses planning -- preparing for destroying the world -- doing delusional things like teaching schoolkids to duck and cover, or telling people to build a bomb shelter in their basement, and relocation planning.
Then we entered chapter 2 of the nuclear threat era: after URSS broke up in 1991, the idea of an all-out nuclear war has diminished and he idea of a single event of nuclear terrorism is what we have instead. Although the situation has changed, we haven't changed our mental image of what a nuclear war would be.
- Global nuclear weapons aren't uniformly secure and fissionable materials are relatively availablee (From 1993 to 2005 IAEA documented 175 cases of nuclear theft)
- Nuclear know-how is accessible, there is detailed informations on how to assemble nuclear weapons
- Evil-doers are organized, dedicated, "stateless" and therefore "retaliation-proof" (and they're not only foreigners)
- High-value US targets are accessible, soft and plentiful ("the level of preparedness in the US is unbelievably inadequate")
So, it could happen. Anyone who dismisses the thought that a nuclear detonation could happen is delusional. What would it mean, and who would survive? Redlener shows footage of what would happen if a nuclear bomb went off in a US city. One can survive a nuclear blast. The difference between information on what to do personally and no information can save you. So response planning is both possible and essential. But as of today there is no single US city that has developed effective plans to deal with a nuclear detonation disaster. In part because public officials and emergency planners are paralized by the terrible images of total destruction.
Nuclear war is less likely than before, and is not survivable. Nuclear terrorism is more likely than before, but it is survivable. Here is what you should do in case you find yourself where a bomb goes off, and you're alive after the blast:
Eboo Patel is the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based NGO working to bring mutual comprehension among religiously diverse young people. He gives a short, 3-min speech. "The world is divided between totalitarians and pluralists; people who seek to suffocate diversity and people who seek to embrace it."
TED is also trying to do something to change the conversation. Actress Goldie Hawn is one of the many public figures around the world supporting Pangea Day, a project that was voiced as a "wish" by 2006 TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim, when she wondered if it would be possible to create a "day when you have everyone coming together from around the world and sharing a communal experience of watching a film all together, all at the same time, from Times Square to Ramallah to the side of the Great Wall of China". That day is going to happen, on May 10, when four hours of programming -- films, user-generated videos, speakers, music, hosted by CNN's Christiane Amanpour -- will take place in several locations and broadcast by TV channels, shown on theatres, distributed over cell phones, streamed online, screened in village places and private homes all over the world. That's Pangea Day. Movies alone can't change the world: but the people who watch them can. "We will see sameness and not the differences", Goldie Hawn says. The Pangea Day website is here, with informations on hosting an event or finding one to attend, backgrounders, etc. The event will be globally supported by Nokia. (A side note: the picture on the Pangea Day homepage shows one of the greatest annual moments of cinematic communion in the world: the evening screenings on the Piazza Grande at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where up to 10'000 people gather to watch movies under the summer sky).
PangeaDay is an invitation to see things differently, to consider also the other's point of view. Here is an example, a video that's been produced for PangeaDay, based on the images of the famous scene of the unarmed young man carrying shopping bags who stood in front of the tanks on Tienanmen Square, on 5 June 1989, blocking them. The young man has remained anonymous. So did the soldier driving the tank.
Harvard political scientist and writer Samantha Power is tasked with
the closing speech. 
She wrote a book on genocide, and a new one (just out) called "Chasing the flame", a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN envoy in Baghdad who was killed in the first suicide bombing in 2003 (book cover left). She is a powerful
proponent of bringing human rights back to US foreign policy -- see her
essay on "The Human-Rights Vacuum", arguing that the erosion of US
influence around the world has created "a void in global human-rights
leadership". She may get her voice heard by the next president: she's
an adviser to Democratic candidate Barack Obama (she wears an Obama badge on stage).
On April 31st, 1994, in the middle of the Rwandan genocide, the NYT reported that 200 to 300'000 people had already been killed. An American congresswoman from Colorado met that day with a group of journalists, and one asked why there is so little response out of Washington, no hearings, no denouncing. She said: "It's a great question All I can tell you is that in my congressional offices in Colorado and in Washington we are getting hundrds of calls about the endangered apes and gorilla populations in Rwanda, but no one is calling about the people". The truth is that while we have developed endangered species movements, we don't have an endangered people movement, we have a Holocaust museum but we haven't really created the movement-of-never-again. Now, almost out of nowhere there is an anti-genocide movement, it grew up in response to the atrocities in Darfur, there are more than 300 anti-genocide chapters in universities in the US (bigger than the anti-apartheid movement) and the idea that not being an up-stander, but being a by-stander, has a price. This has led to the referral of the crimes in Darfur to the international criminal court etc. But evil lives on, people in refugee camps are surrounded by janjaweed militias. We have achieved alot, but still far too little. Why? Several reasons. The movement such as it is stops at America's borders, it's not a global movement (BG: that's not exactly true, there are movements in other countries, the UK government has been a key player in trying to broker peace, etc). Second, US has a credibility problem in international circles, it's difficult to remain credible when you denounce genocide on Monday, declare waterboarding as acceptable on Tuesday, and ask for troops on Wednesday, as the current US administration is doing.
She turns to Sergio Vieira de Mello. He was a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy. He was ingenious, spoke 7 languages, was successful with women; and one could never tell if he was a realist masquerading as idealist, or the other way around (BG: I met him twice, and that's an accurate description of him). He worked for the UN in Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Kosovo, East Timor and many other countries. "He was the cutting edge of our experimentation with doing good with limited resources". Four lessons from his life on how to prevent evil from prevailing:
- His relationship to evil is something to learn from. Over the course of his career he changed alot, he had alot of flaws but he was very adaptive. He started as someone who charged, attached, accused. Then in Southern Lebanon in 1992 he said to himself that he would never use the word "unacceptable" again. He became almost obsequious, even negotiating with the Khmer Rouge. But towards the end of his life he had achieved a balance, don't ignore history, don't ignore what the wrongdoers have done but go into the room and discuss with them.
- He espoused and exhibited a reverence for dignity that was really unusual. At a micro-level the individuals around him were visual, he saw them. At a macro level, dignity was at the center of his action.
- He talked alot about freedom from fear. Fear is not a concept that we want to walk away from, but let's calibrate our relationship to the threat. Let's not hype it, let's see it clearly. Fear is a bad advisor.
- Because he was working on all those hard place, he was very aware of their complexity, humbled by it, but not paralyzed by it. We, there seem to be a temptation to pull back from the world. We can't afford to pull back, it's a question on how to be in the world.
If we want to see change, we have to become the change.
28 February 2008
TED2008: Is beauty truth?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Fourth session.)
After music by Jill Sobule live from Aspen, and by Thomas Dolby's band in Monterey, the TED's fourth session, hosted by Director of TED MediaJune Cohen, is on "What is beauty?", on the existence and the hidden meanings of beauty.
Anchor speaker Nancy Etcoff, evolutionary psychologist and author of "Survival of the prettiest", had unfortunately to cancel because of a flu. June introduces the session by summarizing Etcoff's views: Beauty matters to us. We are constantly scanning for it, evaluating it, responding to it. But what do we find beautiful and why? Etcoff contends that beauty is an evolutionary advantage and argues that not only culture determines what is beautiful, but that we have an innate understanding of it, and the perception of beauty is therefore a human universal.
Designer
Isaac Mizrahi is probably best known for bridging the gap between
"high" and "low", for creating couture collections (sketch at left) for
both luxury brands (Liz Clairborne) and affordable retailers (such as
the US' Target). He's also a performer, talk-show host, designer of
theatre and opera costumes, and much more. He has written a book that
will be out in a few months, "How to have style", where he expounds on
his belief that inspiration leads to creating a personal style.
"I'm gonna talk about my process, but it's difficult, I don't know where it started. Process has alot to do with physique: who you are physically. I dont' sleep much, for years I've been sitting up, and i think that my creativity is greatly motivated by this kind of insomnia. I lie awake, I walk around -- actually I also walk during the day and follow people that are interesting. As a matter of fact, a lot of my design comes from the tricks of the eye. I don't know where inspiration comes from: it comes from lying awake and thinking. For me, it doesn't come from research. One of the funniest things I've always done it was this past Christmas, at the Guggenheim in NY, I read "Peter and the Wolf" with kids, and that's my own kind of research. I'm really lazy about research. Your creativity should be like a bodily function. Sure, if I'm commissioned to do costumes for an opera, I do research, because it's interesting. I watch alot of movies, and trying to find balance of irony and earnestness. Balance is really what it is about, that's part of my process. I go back to color all time. Natural colors are just so beautiful. How can I ever make anything that is as beautiful as Greta Garbo? That's what makes me lie awake at night. I also go to astrologers and tarot readers, and do what they tell me to do. If I only do one thing at a time, I get bored very easily, so I do alot of things, and try not to look back.
Sigfried Woldhek calls himself a "dreamcatcher". He gets three minutes on stage to tell about a discovery that he made about the face of Leonardo da Vinci. "We know all about Leonardo's research, but we don't know his face. There is controversy even about his self-portrait. I looked at all of his drawings, several hundreds, searching for self-portraits. By elimination, I shortened down the list to three: the self-portrait, the young "Musician", and the "Vitruvian man". If you zoom into these three faces, and map them chronologically, and compare them with the Verrocchio statue for which Leonardo posed as a teenager, the evidence is compelling: This is the face of Leonardo:
In museum circles, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation Thomas Krens has a controverisial reputation. He has challenged the definitions of high art with exhibits such as "The art of the motorcycle" (1998), rewritten the book on how to run a museum, and transformed the Guggenheim into a global brand, with currently five museums (NY, Venice, Las Vegas, Berlin and the Frank Gehry Bilbao museum) and one to be added in Abu Dhabi.
He picks 27 more-or-less random images that demonstrate that beauty is truth: an Egyptian sculpture, a Chinese bronze, Michelangelo, paintings by Leonardo, Rubens, Picasso, Matisse, Vermeer, Warhol, sculptures by Beecroft, Richard Serra, and more. All these are objects of beauty: how do you tie them together? How do we experience art, truth and beauty? How do we consume culture? How do we contain/communicate the richness of our culture? Truth and beauty don't reside in the objects themselves, but in the nature of the communication between the object and the viewer. The public art museum is an 18th century idea, the idea of an encyclopedia, presented in a 19th century box, an extended palace, that more or less fulfils its structural destiny sometime toward the end of the 20th century. André Malraux (1952): "Our museums conjure up for us a Greece that never existed". So the museum was an artificial space. Moreover, until recently most art museums have focused only on European and American art. Museums have to understand that all institutions change. Cultural narrative are infinite and endless. There is also a political dimension: museums need to become cultural agitators, while keeping being curators of collections. Plus: audience matters; art is for the masses. We need to make sure that the objects can tell a story and that story can be communicated. At the Guggenheim we think of museums as platforms and networks of exchange. Our buildings are based on the idea that 1+1=3. (Krens also talks about the Guggenheim projects for new museums that weren't built). The current Guggenheim proposition: bridges to the Middle East, with the Abu Dhabi project. AD is mostly desert, but unlike Dubai is made of many islands, and the local government is planning to develop one with a big cultural district "that will become one of the biggest concentrations of culture in the world". There will be a Guggenheim, a Louvre, a performing art center, various other museums, a Yale University campus, a Biennale platform, etc built by star architects (Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel etc). There are also plans to extend the concept of the museum out into the desert. 
June Cohen gives an update on TED.com, the platform through which TED distributes since mid-2006 the videos of the conference's speakers. It's currently running at over 3 million video views a month -- that's 100'000 a day. June announces new channels: Miro, Adobe's Media Player, and soon even on the inflight entertainment system of Virgin Atlantic. The pace of release will also be increased to daily, and sometimes later this year TED talks will be available with subtitles.
Next year, TED will celebrate its 25th anniversary. It was founded in 1984 by designer and information architect Richard Saul Wurman, who sold it a few years ago to Chris Anderson. Chris now runs it as a non-profit. The two men go on stage. It's a very emotional moment for them and for the TED community. Wurman retells how the idea for a conference about the convergence of technology, entertainment and design came to be, how the format of the event evolved over time, etc. He then introduces his new project: 192021.org, a study (leading to books, exhibits, and more) of 19 cities in the world that will have over 20 million people in the 21st century with a common methodology -- because although today the world is more a network of cities than of countries, there is no way currently to gather comparable data on global cities.
The final speaker in the session is Garrett Lisi. Most of the year, he
is a surfer. But last year he published online an "Exceptionally simple
theory of everything" that has attracted lots of controversy -- his
work is clearly on science's speculative outposts -- but also lots of
diligent attention in the scientific community. This is the first time
he talks publicly about his theory.
Here is the abstract of the
theory, that tries to give a coherent, beautiful (Murray Gell-Mann, at
TED last year, pointed out that in fundamental physics, beauty is a
successful criterion for choosing the right theory) and unified
explanation of all known fundamental interactions in physics:
"All
fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal
bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2
and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2)
x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations
of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these
1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are
described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base
manifold".
E8 is a mathematical shape with 248 symmetries -- a
large, complex but elegant bundle (at left an illustration from
Lisi's paper). Lisi believes that the relationships between the symmetries represent known particles and forces, including gravity, and hopes that the Large Hadron Collider, the new particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva that will go online later this year (Brian Cox will talk about it tomorrow) may offer indications on whether his theory has legs. I am not sure that I fully understand it. If you're like me, refer to the
Wikipedia page, or to the full paper (31 pages, PDF).
28 February 2008
Twitter @ TED2008
A guest post from blogger and Twitter-er Jim Stolze:
Twitter?
If you don’t know what Twitter is, you may have missed one of the most exciting new tools on the web. It’s social, it’s relevant, it’s sometimes useless, it’s fun, it runs on any platform: mac, windows, mobile, chat, mail, and it’s completely free!
So, who’s with us?
To point out who is twittering at TED I picked a selection of tweets from some TEDizens. Hope you like it and that you give Twitter a try -- and don’t forget to put the #TED (hash) in your message, so that it will automatically show up in the feeds.
With many thanks to:
* pierre
* chris
* mitch
* tara
* michael
* josh
* gia
* and everyone who is twittering but I forgot to mention
See you at TED!
28 February 2008
Upcoming TEDs: Africa, Europe, India
Three upcoming TED conferences have been just announced from the TED stage:
TEDAfrica: Cape Town, South Africa, 29 September - 1 October 2008. Theme: "What If?". Information and registration here.
TEDEurope: Oxford, UK, 22-24 July 2009. Theme: "The Substance Of Things Not Seen". Registrations will open soon. The first TEDGlobal was held in Oxford in 2005.
TEDGlobal: Mumbai, India, November 2009. Details will follow.
28 February 2008
TED2008: What is life?
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Third session.)
Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, introduces the session with a 3-minutes talk on how America perceives the rest of the world and how the news shape the way the US sees the world. She pulls up a map of the number of minutes that American TV networks dedicated to news in January: there is basically only the US, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and China. "The news networks have reduced the number of their foreign bureaus by half. Covering Britney Spears is cheaper. We can do better, and we cannot afford not to do so".
Inventor-collector Jay Walker presents some of the items displayed on stage from his private library: one of the remaining original seven Sputnik satellites; a Gutenberg Bible (picture right); a small flag that was carried to the Moon and back by the Apollo astronauts; etc. Needless to say, he's been asked by hundreds of TEDsters yesterday
Craig Venter, the scientist who first sequenced the human genome in
2001, announced recently that with his team they have created the first
synthetic bacterium -- "the largest man-made DNA structure" (photo below) -- along
the way to create microorganisms that can produce alternative sources
of enegy. Needless to say, his research is controversial.
"We've been digitizing biology, and now we're trying to go from that code to designing biology. We've tried various approaches, paring it down to basic components, digitizing it, now we're trying to ask: can we regenerate life or create new life out of this digital universe? The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially. Our ability to write genetic code has been growing more slowly. Turns out synthesizing DNA is difficult. In a biological system the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate. How do we boot-up a synthetic chromosome? We can do a transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it. We may be about to create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, where there is massive new speciation (the formation of new and distinct species) based on this digital design. We have now a database with about 20 million genes, and we like to think of them as the design component of the life of the future. We now have techniques to do combinatorial genomics, to build a robot that can make a million chromosomes a day.
We're now focusing on fourth-generation designer fuels. Curent biofuels aren't the solution. The only way that biology can have an impact on fuel without incrising the price of food, it's to start with CO2 as the feed stock -- create new energy out of CO2, and we think we will have something within the next 18 months. Future uses of this technology: increase the basic understanding of life; replace the petro-chemical industry; become a major source of energy; enhance bioremediation. We're changing the evolutionary tree with new bacteria and species."
Follows a Q&A with Chris Anderson and with the audience:
Question: With all the biodiversity out there, can't you use existing organisms rather than create new ones?
Craig Venter: We're indeed finding a lot of biodiversity. For example we found organisms in the environment that produce octane. But not on the scale that we need to cover our energy needs.
Q: Right now, is it possible on a computer to say what a
CV: We are using software to design pathways, metabolic mechanisms, so it's real biological design. We're trying to do it not only by trianl and error, but by direct design. Alot of people like to think in terms of Genesis and we're creating life from scratch. But we're really using the 3 million years of evolution, trying to take it over and take it to the next stage. We will see an increasing pace in the sophistication of the organisms.
Q: I could make the case that you and your company are the most dangerous humans on Earth. What do you do for security?
CV: It's a question that has been raised from the very beginning. Fortunately there aren't many people wanting to do harm with these tools. Very few biological agents that we work with could be weaponized.
Q: One of your slides says "suicide gene", what's that?
CV: It means that if it got out of the lab we could trigger the destruction of that organism.
Q: Can you talk about the intellectual property rights and how you fund your work?
CV: Institute has about 100 million dollars budget a year. About 70% from the government, the rest from private donation.
Q: How efficient can the photosynthesis of CO2 be?
CV: CO2 is a source of carbon. The photosynthesis we see with plants is not very efficient. Algaes are more efficient. We can engineer those to capture CO2 and instead of sequestrate it we think we can convert it back into energy.
Q: When you were asked if you were playing God, you said "we are not playing".
CV: I got very depressed being at Davos this year, it was clear that most of business executives there, buying into the CO2 issue is a pain for them, I had the impression that nothing's gonna change in the next 40 years because of entrenched interests. We're running a hell of an experiment on this planet, we need real solutions, I hope that some of these developments yield results in time, the urgency is not really there.
Paul Rothemund presented some of his work at TED last year, showing nanometer-size artwork created using strands of DNA and folding them into desired shapes.
"People argue about the definition of life. Life involves computation. Take a computer program, boot it up in a cell and it will result in a person; with a small change it will result in another person, etc. There are lots of similarities between genetic programs and computer programs, including a sensitivity to small changes -- single mutations -- that result in "meaningful" large changes. Biology demonstrates the power of molecular programming. We use DNA and proteins. How small is the smallest organism that will function? How few molecules?"
Paul's approach, he calls it "DNA origami": folding DNA using long single strands of DNA and combining them with other helixes. He shows how he created smily patterns, the shape of China, all by folding DNA strands. Then he discusses an approach -- "tiles" -- to make something much bigger.
Preventive medicine advocte Dean Ornish gives a short talk on recent
research that shows how adopting healthy lifestyle and eating habits
can affect a person at a genetic level.
"One way to change our genes is to make new ones, as Venter does The other is to change our lifestyle. When you live healthier, eat better, exercise, and love more, your brain cells actually increase. Your skin and heart and sexual organs get better blood flow. We're about to release new findings that healthier lifestyle can turn off disease-provoking genes and turn on the good ones. Our genes are not our fate. They are predispositions, but if we make these lifestyle changes we can actually change how genes are expressed."
The work of British psychologist Susan Blackmore focuses on the nature of consciousness and on memes. She took Richard Dawkins intuition about memes (ideas that, like genes, that take a life of their own) and turned it into a fully-fledged theory.
"Cultural evolution is a dangerous child for every species to let loose on this planet. By the time you realize what's happening, it's too late to put it back into the box. We humans are the Earth's Pandoran species. Mimetics is founded on the principles of unversal Darwinism. His idea was so simple, and yet it explains all design in the universe. What Darwin said was something like this: if you have creatures that vary, and if there is a struggle for life such that nearly all of these species die, and if the very few that survive pass on to their offsprings whatever helped them survive, than these offsprings must be better adapted to these circumstances than their parents were. You just need those three principles: variation, selection and heredity. If you have those, you MUST get evolution, or "design out of chaos without the aid of mind". What's this to do with memes? Darwin didn't know about genes, but the principle of universal Darwinism is that everything that's copied with variation and selection will evolve. Information that's copied from person to person is information copied with variation and selection. That's a meme. A meme is not an idea, is "that which is imitated", information which is copied from person to person. If you copied an information from someone else, it's a meme. But why do they spread? They are copied if they can. Some because they're true, useful, beautiful. Some even if they're not. Here is a curious meme: you go to your hotel, check into your room, go to the bathroom, and what do you see? A folded end of the toilet paper. It's a meme that spread all over the world. What is that about? it's supposed to tell you that somebody cleaned the place. Think of it this way: imagine a world full of brains and memes using them (you and me) to propagate. Why is this important? it gives us a completely new wiew of what it means to be human. All these things that make us unique -- language etc -- are based on genes. But there are two replicators now on this planet: from the moment our ancestors began imitating, there was a new replicator, the meme, alongside the gene. And you get an arms race between the genes (which want a smaller, efficient brain) and the memes (which want a bigger brain). All other species on this planet are gene machines, we only are meme machines. We need a new word for technological memes, let's call them temes, because the processes are different. Our brains are becoming like temes, faster, etc. We are at this cusp now to have a third replicator in our planet. But it's dangerous: temes are selfish replicators, they use us to suck up more resources to produce more computers and more things. Don't think we created the Internet, that's how it seems to us. How to pull through? Two ways: one is that the temes turn us into teme-machines, with implants, merging of humans and machines, because we are self-replicators. The other: teme-machines will replicate by themselves. In that case, it woudl not matter if the planet would no longer be liveable for humans."
Christopher de Charms brielfy shows some video of real-time brain imaging. He's the CEO of Omneuron, which has developed a machine that scans brain activity and allows to watch it in real time -- "I've seen inside my brain, you will be able to do it soon. When you will, what will you like to do and control? We are the first generation that's gonna be able to enter into the human mind and brain".
Documentary filmmaker David Hoffman's studio burned down 9 days ago. He lost his archive, 100+ films, most of his work is gone. "But you need to take bad and make some good out of it. I called my friends, come dig, dig it up I said, I want pieces", and turned that into his next project, a life in bits and pieces.
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is a US presidential biographer -- she
has written books on all the great acronyms that have occupied the Oval
office (JFK, LBJ, FDR) and on Abraham Lincoln. She's hence an authority
on looking at history through the leses of a single person's life. Her
speech focuses on Lincoln and Lindon Johnson and on some lessons that we can draw from their
life.
"Lincoln life suggests that ambition is a good thing. Not ambition for power or office, but for making the world a better place. Lincoln was a curious boy. His mother died when he was still young, telling him "am going away and won't return", which convinced him that when we die our life is swept away; but later he realized that if you accomplish something worthy, that outlives you. During a period of depression, he said "I would die, right now, but I haven't not yet done anything that would make any human being remember me" -- he would go on to sign the emancipated proclamation. Kearns says that when he was about to put his signature on the document, his hand was trembling because he had shaken thousands of hands that morning. So he put down the pen, waiting for his hand to be steadier, because he thought that, had he signed a trembling signature, future generations would think that he had hesitated."
"LBJ: I met him when I was selected as a White House fellow, then worked in the WH. He was a great storyteller, but there was a problem with his stories: half of them weren't true. ... Because he was so sad and vulnerable, he opened up with me. From the surface LBJ should have had everything in the world to feel good: president, money, owned a spacious ranch, boats, and he had a family who loved him deeply. Yet years of concentration solely on work and individual success means that in his retirement LBJ could find no solace. It was as if the hole in his heart was so large that without work he could not fill it. He regretted not having spent more time with his children and grandchildren. He was alone when he died. Even the sphere of love requires some form of commitment. So deep was Lincoln love of Shakespeare for instance that even in the most difficult times I went to the theatre."
28 February 2008
WorldWide Telescope TEDTalk -- now on TED.com!
Science educator Roy Gould and Microsoft's Curtis Wong give an astonishing sneak preview of Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope -- a technology that combines feeds from satellites and telescopes all over the world and the heavens, and builds a comprehensive view of our universe. (Yes, it's the technology that made Robert Scoble cry.) Download this TEDTalk in high-def >> (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 06:48.)
Watch the WorldWide Telescope tech preview, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Read more about speaker Roy Gould on TED.com.
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27 February 2008
TED2008: Day 1 in Quotes
"Who are we? We're just an upright, walking, big-brained, super-intelligent ape. " - Paleontologist Louise Leakey
"The first thing we do when we're born is we breathe in, and we cry. And the last thing we do when we die is we breathe out, and other people cry." - Spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, before leading an exercise in breathing and meditation
"Western science is a major response to minor needs." - Wade Davis quoting Mattheiu Ricard
"Why do I believe that it is transformative? It enables you to experience the universe. You can tour it, with astronomers as your guides. It will enable a new generation of stories and storytellers." - Astronomer Roy Gould, while previewing Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope
"I think it is quite likely that we are the only intelligent civilization within several hundred light years" - Stephen Hawking
"I'm not blaming anyone. This is just who we are right now". - Photographer Chris Jordan, whose large-format works illustrate statistics of modern life, like the 40 million paper cups used by Americans every day
“You go in as an individual, but emerge as a community which reaffirms its sense of place on the planet.” - Wade Davis, describing a traditional run through the Peruvian mountains, taking in peaks of 11,000 and 15,000 feet in 36 hours
"It's as if my consciousness had shifted away. I could no longer define the boundaries of my body. Then I realize: I'm having a stroke. And my left hemisphere tells me: Wow, this is so cool; how many brain scientists have the chance to study that from the inside?" — Jill Taylor
"Before the Web, there was just one guy running around saying 'I KNOW!'" - Robin Williams, ad-libbing, after taking the stage during a technical problem in the BBC World Debate
27 February 2008
TED2008: Funny interstitials
(Running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California.)
Short videos -- funny, interesting, spectacular -- are used at TED as interstitial between speeches or between sessions. Here two that the TED audience got to see today.
"Frozen Grand Central", by ImprovEverywhere (listen carefully, towards the end, to what the guy in the cart has to say):
¨
Monster.com's advertising "There is a perfect job for everyone", by BBDO:
27 February 2008
How'd you get that scar? Notes from TED@Aspen Day One
Before the formal opening of TED2008, TED@Aspen-ites gathered early in the gorgeous Doerr-Hosier Center to answer their own Big Question. Today's question: How'd you get that scar? Lining up on either idea of the stage, TEDsters rushed up to tell their stories in 30 seconds or less (at :30, the music comes up and cuts you off, Oscars-style).
We heard about emotional scars, body scars and the weird childhood injuries of several Australians. (There's a huge Aussie contingent at TED@Aspen, it turns out.) At left, hosting committee member Taylor Milsal tells the story of a scar she got on a blind date.
Then we settled in to watch Rives lives on stage -- and the awe-inspiring show from Monterey.
27 February 2008
TED2008: What is our place in the universe?
(Running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Second session.)
The second session of TED2008 asks "What is our place in the universe?" and it cogently opens with a sneak preview of an amazing piece of technology under development at Microsoft: the World Wide Telescope, a powerful new web-based tool for exploring the universe (for the geeks among you, this is the unnamed piece of new tech that made blogger Robert Scoble weep recently). It functions like a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from actual ground and space (Hubble) telescopes. Roy Gould and Curtis Wong are up on stage demo-ing it. Gould, who's an astronomy educator, says that the WWT "produces a holistic view of the universe and it's going to change the way we do astronomy and teach it, and the way we see ourselves in the universe. Why do I believe that it is transformative? It enables you to experience the universe; you can tour it, with astronomers as your guides; and you can create your own tours and share them with friends. It will enable a new generation of stories and storytellers". The WWT is indeed impressive, providing an amazing, seamless, very detailed navigational experience in the depths of the universe. Since this has not been seen in public so far, here three screenshots:
The WWT is not live yet -- it's announced for sometimes later in the Spring and will be free for downloading -- but a couple of promo videoclips and background information can be found here.
A telescope of another kind is in Partricia Burchat's curriculum: she's a member of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project, which will allow scientists to monitor exploding supernovae and determine how fast the universe is expanding. As a particle physicist at Stanford University and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Burchat studies the basic ingredients of the universe -- dark matter and dark energy.
"The questions at the smallest and largest scale are actually very connected. Recently we have realized that the ordinary matter of the universe -- you, me, the planes, the galaxies -- makes up only a few percents of the content of the universe. Almost a quarter of the mass in the universe is invisible: it doesn't absorb, reflect or interact with the electromagnetic spectrum. We know it's there -- "it" is dark matter -- because of its gravitational effects.
You saw many images of galaxies in the previous WWT demo. In galaxies most of the mass is concentrated in the center of it. Logically, it would appear that stars that are closer to the mass in the middle rotate at higher speeds. Instead, when measurements are made we find that speed is constant as a function of distance -- which means that there is a gravitational pull from matter that we don't see.
The universe is expanding. The distance between galaxies is getting bigger because the universe is getting bigger. After the Big Bang, space expanded rapidly. But then, instead of slowing down the rate of expansion has been speeding up. This is a surprising scientific result, and there is no persuasive explanation for why it is happening, except for the presence of "dark energy"."
John Hodgman is the resident expert on Comedy Central's "Daily Show". He's an expert on everything -- and on nothing, really, since his expertise is mostly of the comedic kind. His hilarious book "The areas of my expertise" features, among other fakeries, lobster conspiracies and US presidents with hooks for hands. He's also the guy playing "the PC" in the "Mac vs PC" funny ad series (see the one on viruses and the one on spyware). He does a very funny piece on "where is everybody?" and "was Enrico Fermi an alien?" (above left the picture Hodgman used) and his "close encounters".
Contrary to Hodgman, Peter Ward's areas of expertise are multiple and real. A paleontologist and astrobiologist and co-author of "Rare Earth", he has studied mass extinctions and has theorized that complex life forms are so rare that it's possible that Earth is the only place in the universe that has any -- while simple life may exist elsewhere and possibly be very common. He tells a medical/scientific/detective story.
"What does it take for a planet to be liveable, and for sustain complexity. We have to start thinking about what is a good planet and what isn't. Our planet is good because it has water. Mars is a "bad" planet but still good enough for us to go there and live in its surface if protected. Venus is a bad-bad planet, where we couldn't survive (high temperature and clouds of sulfuric acid). Earth, if we are lucky enough (if we are not blasted by a supernova), will live long. But what if there is an accident such as mass extinction? Many researchers believe that cosmic detritus probably caused at least four of the five largest mass extinctions in the last 600 million years. The animals that generally survive mass extinction are cold-bloods, crocodile-like creatures, with a couple of tiny mammals hiding in the fringes. But what if there was no impact?"
There are microbes that produce hydrogen sulfide, that can stop complex life from existing. Ward tells how he learned that mammals, including humans, when inhaling hydrogen sulfide (H2S), go into suspended animation, a sort of coma. They can be "frozen" and then revived hours later (think of the
implications for people hurt in an accident -- "this is going to be a revolution"). Why? The only reason mammals could have developed this capacity must have to do with previous periods in history with severe climate changes happened. "Many of the mass extinctions were caused by lowering oxygen levels and H2S being produced out of the oceans. Can this happen again?".
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (picture right) is not the legendary sitar virtuoso. He's an Indian anti-stress and meditation guru. He emphasizes breathing as the link between body and mind. (He will lead two early-morning meditation sessions for TED attendees tomorrow and Friday).
"Life is to create a "wow". Everyone can experience the "nirvana" Jill Taylor was talking about earlier. When we die, the first thing is that breath will stop. The first thing we do when we are born is breathing. But rarely we take the time to think about that. Breath hold the secret to our mind, to our inner life, and there are patterns in our breath that link us to the universe. If you remember this morning when you woke up, what was the state of your mind? And one hour later, what was the state of your mind? As the sun rises and sets, the patterns of your breathing change. If you breath through the left nostril, there is more right-brain activity. When you're breathing through your right nostril, there is faster metabolism, you understand things better, your perception is better, logic is better. By learning breathing techniques, you can get over tendencies of depression, alcoholism, stress, confusion, learn to defeat negative emotions. We have to see ourselves in a biggest context, the context of the universe."
Closes the session Kaki King, with a show of her extended guitar techniques (watch her on Youtube).
27 February 2008
TED2008: Who are we? Answers from Louise Leakey, Wade Davis, Jill Taylor, Stephen Hawking and Chris Jordan
(Running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. First session.)
TED2008 goes under the theme "The Big Questions", and it opens with THE big Shakespearian question: "To be, or not to be". Actor Michael Stuhlbarg offers a stunning interpretation of the entire soliloquy from "Hamlet":
To be or not to be, that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them.
Etcetera. Stuhlbarg is a rising star among Shakespearian actors. This next summer, he will play Hamlet in Shakespeare in the Park, in New York's Central Park.
And then Chris Anderson, TED's Curator, introduces Louise Leakey. She is the third generation of her family to dig for humanity's past in East Africa. Last August, with her mother Meave as part of the Koobi Fora Research Project, she dug up Homo Habilis bones dated 1.5 million years back, that may rewrite the hominids' evolutionary timeline. 
"Who are we? We are just an upright, walking. big-brain, superintelligent big ape. We belong to the family called Hominidi. We are the species called Homo Sapiens Sapiens. We are one species of about 5500 mammalian species that exist on Earth today, one of probably 16 upright-walking apes that have existed, and the only one (except for the bonobos) that exist on Earth today. We evolved from common ancestors with the gorilla, the chimpanzees and the bonobos. We have a common past and we have a common future, and it's important to remember that all of these great apes have come from an interesting evolutionary journey as we have. It is this journey that has been the focus of the past three generations of my family searching for fossils in Africa. When we find a fossil, we mark it with GPS coordinates, take digital pictures, then begin to excavate it slowly using picks and brushes. Let me take you back to Africa 2 million years ago, to the Rift Valley (If you want to become a fossil, you want to die in a place like the Rift Valley, where flows bring sediments that bury you fast, and later move the terrain so that your bones resurface for people like me to find them). Two million years ago, one of our ancestors lived along Lake Turkana. Homo Erectus (she shows a skull) lived alongside three other species there (picture above). Members of his species later started moving north and east, leaving Africa (90'000 generations ago) and beginning his spread across the globe. Until 30'000 years ago at least three species of hominids lived on Earth.
Who are we today? We are certainly a polluting, wasteful, nasty species, with a few nice things thrown in perhaps. We have a much larger brain than our ape ancestors. Is this a good evolution, or will it lead us to be one of the shortest-living species on Earth? What makes us different is our collective intelligence. We have reached an extraordinary number of people on this planet. We are certainly the only animal that makes conscious decisions that are bad for our species. It's important to remember that we all have an African origin. We have a common past and share a common future. Evolutionarily speaking we are just a blip, sitting on the edge of a precipice. But we have the tools and the technology to communicate what needs to be done to hold it together. Will we do that?"
Jay Walker is next. In the 1990s he founded Priceline.com (and made millions), but last time I asked him how he would define himself, he said "inventor" -- his company Walker Digital owns indeed many patents -- but probably "Renaissance man" fits him, too. The TED2008 stage is furnished with several dozen items from Jay's personal library -- "artifacts of the history of human imagination", he calls them -- including one of original Sputniks made in 1957, an Enigma encryption machine from World War II, precious manuscripts (and a page from a Gutenberg Bible), fossils, and other amazing items.
Anthropologist Wade Davis is probably one
of the most influential western advocates for the world's indigenous
cultures (and has already given a speech at TED in 2003, watch it
here). A National Geographic explorer, Davis has been particularly
vocal about the rate at which cultures and languages "at the edge of
the world" are disappearing.
"Culture is the product of imagination. By the time Neanderthal disappeared in Europe 27'000 years ago, there was already art. I spent two months studying the caves in southern France. Clearly at some point we are all of an animal nature, and at some point we aren't. The most amazing thing about upper-Paleolithic art it's that it lasted 20'000 years. If we all are brothers and sisters and share the same genetic material, then we all share the same genius and creative acuity. All people are simply cultural options, different visions of life itself. Let's go to Polynesia. Tens of thousands of islands. I recently sailed with the Polynesian navigators. These are the people that can name 250 stars in the sky. I made a film called "The Buddhist science of the mind". Matthieu Ricard once said "Western science is a major response to minor needs". The Tibetan monks told us: we don't really believe that you went to the Moon, but you did; you don't believe that we can achieve enlightenment in a single life, but we do." Wade takes the audience on a tour of some of the world's cultural customs and metaphors and initiation rituals and baroque spiritualities and cosmic beliefs -- from Latin America to the Inuits -- and how many of these cultures cannot understand why Westerners do what they do to the world. "None of these peoples are disappearing. Actually, the world is not flat, it remains a rich tapestry, a rich topography of the spirit. They are unique answers to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human. When I ask that question they respond with 6000 voices. Our industrial society is scarcely 300'000 years old. That short lifespan should not let us believe that we have all of the answers. There is indeed a fire burning over the Earth, taking not only plants and animals, but some of the world's brilliance. 50% of the world's 6000 languages are no longer taught to children. If we are the engines of cultural destruction, we can also be, and must be, the facilitators of cultural survival".
This year, TED is experienced by two audiences: the attendees in
Monterey, and a smaller group -- about 300 -- who are watching it from
Aspen, in the walls of the Aspen Institute, with TED producer Kelly
Stoetzel playing host. Some of the speakers and performers are actually
in Colorado, and the first to be piped into the TED main hall via
satellite is standup poet Rives (see three of his past performances here).
Photographer
Chris Jordan focuses his lenses on the consequences of human behaviour,
and particularly on how we consume. A series of photos he did a few
years back examines the "Intolerable beauty" of the vast amounts of
stuff we make and consume, from mountains of discarded cell phones and
electronic waste to skyscrapers of containers or crushed cars.
His work focuses on the behaviour we all engage in unconsciously, and when millions of people engage in these behaviour, then it can add up to serious consequences. His
newest series, "Running the numbers", gives a dramatic visual life to
statistics of American consumption, things like 11'000 Americans dying from smoking every day; the 2.3 million inmates in US prisons; 320'000 visits to hospital emergency rooms that are due to abuse and misuse of prescription drugs Chris' pictures are incredibly powerful. Seen from a distance, they amount to beautiful pieces of art. But then you zoom in, and the texture reveals itself. For instance, statistics say: "In 2006 every
month 32'000 breast augmentation surgeries were performed in the US".
It's becoming a popular high-school graduation gift. Chris illustrates it like this:
Zoom in:
Zoom in again, and you discover he used 32'000 Barbie dolls to create this picture:
"The reason why I do this is that we aren't feeling enough, and part of the reason is because the information we have to work with is made of gigantic numbers, and these are numbers that our brains have difficulty in understanding and processing. That's why I try to translate these numbers into visual messages that can be felt, in the hope that they help each of us to face the big question: how do we change, as a culture, and how do we each, individually, take responsibility for our own behaviour. I'm not blaming anyone. This is just who we are right now".
After a brief and brilliant intermezzo by musician Sxip Shirey, Chris Anderson introduces a surprise speaker who was not mentioned in the program is next: physicist Stephen Hawking, author of "A brief history of time".
The keynote has been recorded just a couple of hours ago, from Hawking's home in Cambridge, UK (photo right). Hawking,
who's almost paralyzed by the incessant progression of ALS and speaks through a synthetic voice, offers a short history of the universe and asks whether we are alone in it ("I think it's quite likely that we are the only intelligent civilization in several hundreds light years").
Jill Bolte Taylor is incredible: she's a neuroanatomist (brain scientist) who has suffered a stroke and studied it "from inside", as it happened, while her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness. It took her eight years to recover, and to become a spokesperson for the possibility to come back.
"I studied the brain because I have a brother who's been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals diagnosed as "normal" and those diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder? On the morning of December 10 1996, I got my own mental illness: in the course of four hours I watched by brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process information. I could not walk, talk, think.
If you've ever seen a human brain (she shown a real human brain -- picture above): it has two hemispheres. The right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while the left emisphere functions like a serial processor. So they process information differently, they think about different things, they care about different things, and I would say that they have very different personalities. Our right hemisphere is all about this very moment, righ here right now. It thinks in pictures, Information in the form of energy sterams in simultaneously through all of our sensory system and then it explodes into what this present moment feels like. I'm an energy being connected to the energy alla around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. And through that we are all connected. And in this moment we are perfect, whole, and beautiful.
Our left hemisphere is a very different place. It thinks linearly and methodically. It's all about the past and about the future. It's designed to take that collage of the present moment, and pick out details after details, categorize them, associate them with all of what we have learned in the past, and project into our future possibilities. It thinks in languages. It's the internal chatter that connects us to the external world. It's the calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. And most important it's the voice that tells me "I am". And as soon it says that, I become separate from you. That's the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.
On that morning I woke up to a pounding pain on the back of my eye. It just gripped me, then released me, then gripped me, then released me. I got up trying to perform my usual routine, jumping on my exercise machine, and I realize that my hands look like claws. It's like as if my consciousness had shifted away. I got off the machine and walked and realized that my body had slowed down, every step was very rigid. I stood in my bathroom ready to go into the shower and looked down at my arm and realized I could no longer define the boundaries of my body, of where I begin and where I end, the molecules of my arm were like blended with those of the wall, am all I could detect was energy flowing. Then the chatter in my brain went silent. For a moment I was shocked to be in the total silent. Then in an instant my left hemisphere came back online, and I realized that I needed help; then I drifted out again, into "la-la-land"; then in again. I was walking around my apartment, telling to myself: I have to get to work. Then I realize: I'm having a stroke. And my left hemisphere tells me: wow, this is so cool, how many brain scientists have the chance to study that from the inside? But I need to get help. I get to my office, I pick up a card, I can't figure out what's on it, my brain is back in la-la-land. Then I have a wave of clarity. Drifting in and out. (She goes on describing the difficulties of dialing a phone number and communicating to get help, unable to read the number, "because the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background"), and then I would wait for a wave of clarity. It took me 45 minutes to find the right number.
I'm in an ambulance towards the hospital and I realize that I'm no longer the choreographer of my life. Maybe the doctors will give me a second chance, maybe not. And right there, I just feel my spirit surrender -- I say goodbye to my life.
When I awoke, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. My life was now suspended between two strains of reality: information streaming in but I could not pick voices out from the background noise. Sounds were so loud and chaotic. I just wanted to escape because I could not identify the position of my body in space. I felt enormous and expansive, and my spirit soaring. I found nirvana. I remember thinking: there is no way that I can squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside my tiny body. But then I realized: I am still alive. And if I found nirvana, then anyone who's alive can find nirvana. And I pictured a world full with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate people who knew that they can come to this space at any time. What a gift a stroke can be to the way we live our lives. That motivated me to try to recover.
Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and removed a blood clot the size of a tennis ball. It took me eight years to completely recover. So who are we? We are the life horsepower of the universe, and we have the power to choose moment by moment who we want to be in the world, we can choose the consciousnesses of our right hemisphere or that of our left hemisphere. These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe the more time we spend choosing the peace of our right hemisphere, the most peace we will project into the world and more peaceful our planet will be."
27 February 2008
TED2008: A bag and its contents
(Running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California.)
The conference will be on in just a couple of hours. Attendees are lining up at the registration desk to get their badges. Then some head for the Google Café for a free latte, but most get into a new line in front of another station, to fetch their "gift bag".
In conference circles, the TED gift bag is the stuff of rumors and legends, and every year TED's partnerships director (and resident fun guy) Tom Rielly and his team manage to outdo themselves. As a result this year every TEDster is receiving what is possibly the best bag ever given away at a conference -- I should know, I've attended hundreds of them -- produced by Mark Dwight and Rickshaw Bagworks and co-sponsored by design firm IDEO. Using 32 different design fabrics from Designtex, five body colors and five binding colors, Rickshaw came up with 800 different color combinations, and produced two pieces of each for TED. So each TEDster's bag has a twin somewhere else in the audience. Mass customization at work, and of the sustainable kind: the fabrics are made from 100 percent recycled beverage bottles. And the leftover fabrics have been used to create an assorted wallet and iPhone case. The bag features a computer compartment, numerous pockets in the right places, and a very comfy shoulder strap. To top it off, IDEO added a conversation-starter tag featuring provocative questions, which exists also as a downloadable widget (get it here). These are gonna be iconic bags. Here (thx to Emily McManus for the pictures) is how they look:
The cute animal on the right is the first thing that jumps out of the bag when you open it. It's the TED polar bear, from the World Wildlife Fund -- I've never seen so many grown-ups so excited about stuffed animals! And the bag is full of other items: a special edition of Microsoft's Zune media player (with a custom engraving on the back and pre-loaded with TEDtalks and music performances from TED artists); an incredibly stylish Jawbone noise-cancelling Bluetooth headset by Aliph, created by star designer (and TED speaker) Yves Béhar; a voucher for a pair of eco-friendly sneakers from Keen; CDs from TED2008 artists such as Kaki King and Rufus Cappadocia, and from African musicians interpreting U2 songs (am listening to it while I write this post) and DVDs from Sony ("Surf's Up" on Blue-Ray) and the Discovery Channel (the stunning documentaries of "Planet Earth"); the official TED black t-shirt from down under, by Remo General Store, featuring the "big questions" (this year's TED theme) on the front, and the answer on the back; a digital tire gauge from BMW; discounts vouchers on items ranging from 23andMe personal genetic testing to Sony Bravia flat screens to Steelcase chairs to Lexus hybrid cars to Lynda's software-training sites; plus crucial conference items such as peppermints, beverages, vitamin tablets, pens and USB drives. (And I'm probably forgetting something: apologies).
Now I just have to find out who got my bag's twin.
26 February 2008
What's your big question?
The design firm Ideo has built a cool little question-asking widget to celebrate the theme of TED2008/TED@Aspen: The Big Questions. Download it to your desktop, and it will ask you a new question every day (and tell you the day and date):
+ Where will you walk today?
+ What are you looking forward to telling your grandchildren about?
+ How could you inspire someone to ride a bike?
Some of these questions appear on the TED2008 gift bag tag (left) -- and via the Ideo website, you can also submit your own questions.
25 February 2008
It's time for TED
It's time for TED 2008. Most of the TED team -- helped by a vast contingent of electricians, decorators, and other skilled craftspeople -- is in Monterey, California, preparing the conference, which will start on Wednesday. Our colleagues are in Aspen doing the same (see previous post): in a TED first, the two locations will be linked by satellite, and several speakers will be addressing the Monterey audience from Colorado.
This year we will be asking "The Big Questions": Who are we? What is our place in the universe? Is beauty truth? Will evil prevail? How do we create? And more. Questions that hopefully will be answered by the speakers:
In Monterey, while the content team gathers in hourlong meetings to fine-tune the fabulous program -- there will be a couple of surprise speakers -- the trucks are unloaded and the conference center transformed:
In another room, the signage is getting readied (there will be, as you can see, a "bloggers alley", which will probably be taken over by Ethan Zuckerman and myself):
The legendary TED gift bags have been filled and are ready to be distributed to the attendees. The bags themselves, created in 800 different color combinations by Rickshaw Bagworks (mass customization at work!) out of entirely recycled materials, are truly amazing, imho (and I've attended hundreds of conferences) the best conference bags ever made. More details in another post tomorrow. In the meantime, see if you can spot the cute animals trying to escape from the bags:
One of the off-stage top attractions of the TED 2008 will certainly be the self-driving Chevy Tahoe, full of advanced electronics (cameras, sensors, radars, lasers, etc) that Carnegie Mellon University and GM, together with other partners, built to win the Darpa Urban Challenge last November -- an amazing tech achievement, making the car navigate a 60-miles urban route autonomously, with no remote steering:
More tomorrow, and starting on Wednesday I will be liveblogging the whole conference on both the TED Blog and on LunchOverIP, as well as posting daily updates on The Huffington Post. When the conference starts I will also be providing links to other TED bloggers. For backgrounders on TED, you can read the About TED page on the conference's website or this post I wrote before last year's conference, or all the posts from TED 2006 or from TED 2007. There is also an inspiring 7-minutes video, "A taste of TED".
A TED session will be webcast live, on Thursday 28 February, 5:15 to 7 PM California time: The winners of the TED Prize 2008 -- writer Dave Eggers, religious historian Karen Armstrong and physicist Neil Turok -- will be speaking and unveiling their wishes. I'll post the link for the webcast page ahead of time.
25 February 2008
Setting up for TED@Aspen
The TED@Aspen team is busy setting up the gorgeous Doerr-Hosier Center at the Aspen Institute. A few behind-the-scenes pics, from top left: rigging the lighting; Matt, Kelly and Sean go over the schedule; the view from Blogger's Alley; a new TED friend.
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Get involved: TED Prize wishes
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TED Bloggers
Chris Anderson | Curator
June Cohen | Director of TED Media
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Bruno Giussani | TED European Director
Jason Wishnow | Director, Film + Video
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Matthew Trost | Editorial Assistant, TED.com
Blogs we watch
>> TEDPrize.org | Updates on the 2008 TED Prize winners and wishes: Dave Eggers' wish blog; Karen Armstrong's wish blog; Neil Turok's wish blog
>> Thomas Dolby | TED Musical Director, blogging at ThomasDolby.com
>> Bruno Giussani | TED European Director, blogging at LunchOverIP.com
>> Emeka Okafor | TEDAfrica Director, blogging at Timbuktu Chronicles and Africa Unchained
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