Lunch over IP

One of the best speeches you will hear this year: Jill Bolte Taylor at TED

The video of Jill Bolte Taylor's amazing speech at the TED 2008 conference two weeks ago -- a neuroanatomist experiencing and observing her own stroke and using the story to explain the functioning of the brain (I liveblogged it here) -- is now available online (you can download it here). It's doubtlessly one of the best speeches you will hear this year, complete with the most audaciously cool prop: a real human brain.

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 (image below) 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". (Her slides are here)

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."

Readings the books of Craig and Jim

A few days ago TED2005 speaker Craig Venter (watch his talk) announced that his lab has finished sequencing a single human's genome -- his own. At his old company, Celera, Venter worked on sequencing his genome and four other genes genomes all mixed together, creating an anonymous composite. He told Newsweek:

What we got this time was a diploid genome -- a genome that includes both sets of chromosomes from both my parents. We were surprised at how much variation between individuals there was.
You mean there's more genetic difference between one person and the next than we previously thought?
Absolutely. It's quite comforting to me as an individualist that we're not very close to being clones of one other. (...)
Why did you choose to decode your own genome?
It goes back to the government's notion that genetics has to be secret and anonymous. But there's really nothing anonymous with your genetic sequence -- €”it's the ultimate identifier. I thought it was showing proper leadership, €”to show that I don't think there's any risk in it. I don't know if there's any scientist in this field that wouldn't want to have his own genome known.
(Read the full interview)

Nobel laureate (for co-discovering the double-helix structure of DNA), and fellow TED2005 speaker (watch his talk), James Watson couldn't probably agree more: he also had his genome fully sequenced three months ago. "Project Jim", as it was called, took 67 days of sequencing time and cost around USD 1 million. (More in this Newsweek story from June.)

The raw sequencing data of both Watson and Venter are publicly available (but it's stuff for specialists only) in the US National Center for Biotechnology Information's Trace Archive.

EO Wilson: Why should we care if the woodpecker goes?

The last "Bill Moyers Journal", the weekly report on PBS, featured a long interview (video - transcript) by Moyers with biologist and TED Prize 2007 winner EO Wilson. The focus was very much on Wilson's career -- "No one in our time has added more to our understanding of Earth's ecology than Ed Wilson" is how Moyers described him -- but Moyers took the opportunity to also ask questions about the Encyclopedia of Life, the ambitious project aimed at documenting all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth, and those yet to be discovered ("We're maybe today about 1/10 through the discovery of species", says Wilson), which I've already blogged about when it was launched in May.

Moyers is a great interviewer. At a certain point, he asks Wilson: why should we care if the woodpecker goes? I mean, we've lost -- how many species have we lost?

Wilson: How many species going extinct or becoming very rare do you think it takes before you see something happening? We now know from experiments and theory that the more species you take out of an ecosystem like a pond, a patch of forest, a little bit of marine shallow environments, the more you take out the less stable it becomes. If you have a tsunami or a severe drought or a fire, it is less likely that that ecosystem, that body of species in that particular environment, is going to come back all the way. So it becomes less stable with fewer species. And then we also know it becomes less productive. In other words, it's not able to produce as many kilograms of new matter from photosynthesis and passage through the ecosystem. It's less productive. It sure is less interesting, though, isn't it? And more than that: we lose the services of these species.

Moyers: The services of these species.

Wilson: Yes, services of these species to us. Like pollination and water purification.

Moyers: That we get free from nature.

Wilson: Yeah. Here's an easy way to remember it.

Defeating aging: Aubrey de Grey's handbook

British biogerontologist and computer scientist Aubrey de Grey has just finished a book, "Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime", where he details his controversial claim that "we could defeat aging".

Cheat sheet: Aubrey went on stage at TEDGLOBAL05 (video) and then at TED06 saying (I'm oversimplifying) that aging, like a disease, can be cured; that it is essentially a set of accumulating molecular and cellular transformations in our bodies, caused by metabolism, that eventually lead to pathology and kill us. Therefore, it could be approached "as an engineering problem": identify all the components of the variety of processes that cause tissues to age, and design remedies for each of them. He calls the approach "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" (SENS).

The book, co-written with his assistant Michael Rae, will be released September 4 by St Martin's Press. We e-mailed with Aubrey last week.

Aubrey, are you feeling older than last year?

Not really - and that's despite the fact that my schedule has become even more punishing.  I think the fulfilment I derive from spearheading the push to save so many lives somehow gives me the vitality to cope.

How has your research progressed since your TEDGLOBAL05 and TED06 speeches?

The Methuselah Foundation has gone from strength to strength. The biggest development, among other donations, was the pledge of $3.5m from TEDster and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, which resulted from a dialogue that began at TED. Most of his pledge ($3m of it) is a 1:2 challenge, so out current goal is to obtain $6m from elsewhere to match that pledge in full.

OK, that's about the funding. But how's the research going?

It's been going really well too. We are currently sponsoring research by three  teams (in Phoenix, Houston and Cambridge UK) on two of the most important SENS strands - LysoSENS, the identification and exploitation of microbial enzymes to break down molecules that we cannot naturally degrade, and MitoSENS, the incorporation of modified copies of the mitochondrial DNA into the chromosomal DNA so that mitochondrial mutations will  have no effect. Both these projects are going really well, results coming out of the LysoSENS project have already been presented at two meetings and a paper has been submitted for publication in a prominent journal.

What should readers expect to learn from the book?

They will learn all about the detailed science of SENS. The book is written (largely by my splendid research assistant Michael Rae) very much for a non-scientist audience, but without dumbing down the science at all.

The Encyclopedia of Life is born

A group of leading scientific institutions (mostly, for now, American) including Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution have announced this morning in Washington the launch of the Encyclopedia of Life.

It's a vast project aimed at documenting all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth, and those yet to be discovered, which was outlined at the TED2007 conference last March by biologist EO Wilson (author of "The diversity of life"), one of the recipients of the TEDPrize. He made it his "TED wish". Indeed, efforts towards an EOL have been  underway since January 2006 (one million pages of scientific literature have already been scanned), but have accelerated after Wilson gave that speech (summary - video) and the McArthur Foundation decided to lead a US$ 50 million funding commitment.

At TED, Wilson called the Encyclopedia "a key tool to inspire preservation of the Earth's biodiversity", and spoke of "an indefinitely expandable webpage for each species".

"For the first time in the history of the planet, scientists, students, and citizens will have multi-media access to all known living species, even those that have just been discovered", states the official announcement. The encyclopedia will be "built on the scientific integrity of thousands of experts around the globe" but live in a "moderated wiki-style environment" -- an elegant way of saying that this won't be an edit-as-you-wish Wikipedia.

In the few weeks since TED, agency Avenue A/Razorfish visualized a great design concept for the Encyclopedia (see a screenshot of a test page above) and created a video to explain the ambitious vision behind the initiative, using photography by Frans Lanting and others: see it here. 

Now the work starts.

How to stop bleeding quickly, unclog the Internet and what to do in Rome

-- by guest blogger Michele Bowman

(Bowman is the chairman of the Association of Professional Futurists and co-host of the podcast FringeHog)

While I’m not a fan of re-blogging, Technology Review’s “10 Emerging Technologies 2007” list (featured in their March/April edition) deserves some (digital) ink if only because the articles tend to be, shall we say, heavy on the geek factor. So, here is the cheat sheet.

Peer-to-Peer Video
The Problem: The Internet is headed toward a giant data traffic jam. Today video content and applications account for more than 60 percent of Internet traffic; some say that figure could climb as high as 98 percent in just a few years, causing downloads to slow to a crawl. In short, the information superhighway is increasingly being clogged up by bandwidth-guzzling SUVs in the form of “Lost” reruns, YouTube videos and webisodes of beer commercials. The Solution: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) “mesh” networks which distribute data across a networks of user’s PCs rather than through a content-owner’s central server, saving bandwidth in the Internet’s core.  P2P networks such as Gnutella, Kazaa and BitTorrent have been hugely successful with users – and maligned by content owners who see them as just another word for piracy.  But several projects underway including Pittsburgh-based start-up Rinera Networks are developing new models, such as adding a “toll booth” for P2P networks for heavy users, that aim to stabilize the traffic flow and ensure smooth surfing.

Quantum Dot Solar Power
The big idea: Quantum dots – tiny crystals of semiconductors just a few nanometers wide – could finally make solar power cost-competitive with electricity from fossil fuels. Arthur Noziak, a senior research fellow at the DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory calculates that a photovoltaic device based on quantum dots could have a maximum efficiency of 42 percent, far better than the 31 percent achieved by silicon semiconductors used in today’s PV cells. (Ted Sargent discussed quantum dots at the TED conference the other day, see this previous post).

Neuron Control
Key to understanding the chemical imbalances underlying depression and other neurological disorders is identifying which cells are responsible. Researchers have developed a novel way of doing just that by literally lighting up specific neurons in the brain. Karl Deisseroth and his team at Stanford Medical Center have genetically engineered neurons to produce a protein which, when exposed to light, triggers activity in the neurons (literally turning them ‘on’). The “light switch” lets scientists turn selected parts of the brain on and off may open the door to precisely targeted treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders.

Nanohealing
The ability to control bleeding in an operating room or at an accident site would represent a paradigm shift in medicine, saving thousands of lives and making surgery faster and safer. Today about 50 percent of the time spent in a typical surgery is trying to control bleeding, and the methods doctors use today – such as clamps, cauterization and vasoconstriction – are invasive and often cause collateral damage. Which is why researchers at MIT and Hong Kong University are excited about the potential of a simple biodegradable liquid which has been shown to stop bleeding in wounded rats in seconds. When the liquid, composed of protein fragments called peptides, is applied to open wounds, the peptides self-assemble into a nanoscale protective barrier gel that seals the wound and halts bleeding. Once the injury heals, the nontoxic gel is broken down into molecules that cells can use as building blocks for tissue repair. While the research is considered very preliminary, if tests go well it could be approved for human use in three to five years.

Augmented Reality
You’re in Rome, staring at a centuries-old sculpture that has obvious historical significance – but the plaque describing the piece isn’t in English and your high school Italian is more than a little rusty. What to do? Well, if you happen to have a prototype of Nokia’s Mobile Augmented Reality smart phone in your hand, you’re in luck. The prototype sports a GPS sensor, a compass, and accelerometers. Using data from these sensors, the phone can calculate the location of just about any object its camera is aimed at. Users can then download additional information, such as the name of the sculpture (in your native tongue) as well as the location of nearby souvenir shops that sell replicas. While Nokia’s system uses locative sensors to superimpose digital information on the real world, other applications in development use a different approach; Total Immersion in Suresnes, France and Google’s recently-acquired Neven Vision are betting on image-recognition software to do the trick. After decades of lab research “augmented reality” apps are ready to hit the street. Coming soon to a phone near you: your world, annotated. (Note: While TR’s piece focused on Nokia, the company is just one of the players in the emerging field known as “collaborative cartography”)

Personalized Medical Monitors
MIT researchers are developing algorithms to help doctors efficiently interpret electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms and other ever-growing masses of medical data and quickly perceive patterns that might otherwise be buried.  Future applications include personalized medical monitors which can sense – and stop – an oncoming seizure in an epilepsy patient.

Compressive Sensing
Using a technique known as compressive sensing, Rice University engineers have developed a camera that uses a single image sensor to collect just enough information to let a novel algorithm reconstruct a high-resolution image. The technology could produce MRI systems that capture images up to 10 times as quickly as today's scanners, and tiny mobile-phone cameras that produce high-quality, poster-size images.

Metamaterials
Artificially structured metamaterials (composites made up of precisely arranged patterns of two or more distinct materials) are opening up an entirely new approach to optics. By manipulating electromagnetic radiation (including light) metamaterials have the potential to transform a range of industries such telecommunications, data storage and even solar energy. 

Optical Antennas
Who needs Netflix? Researchers have created light-focusing optical antennas that could lead to the development of DVD-like discs that store 3.5 terabytes of data – the equivalent of 750 of today’s recordable DVD’s. 

Single Cell Analysis
Norman Dovichi’s lab at the University of Washington is pioneering the science of single cell biology.  The techniques he and his colleagues have developed to isolate cells and reveal specific molecules inside are exposing the differences between individual cells and could lead to better, more precise diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

TED2007: An artist gets news better than publishers, another builds beautiful wind-powered creatures

Running notes from the TED2007 conference in Monterey, California - Session 4 (TED site; backgrounder; past TED videos; other bloggers at TED)

Erin McKean is a lexicographer and the editor of Oxford's American dictionaries and of Verbatim magazine (and author of an unrelated blog about unusual dresses, A dress a day, where she chronicles the "secret lives of dresses"). People think that  the dictionary stands for the language, that dictionaries are a complete map of languages. But there are many languages that don't appear in dictionaries -- mostly because dictionaries are limited, “books are the wrong shape for the dictionary". But lexicography is not rocket science (and even if it was, rocket science is done by amateurs these days). She she calls for an open-source dictionary, to make the dictionary the whole language. With the participation of all, we could put in all the words, all the meanings, and we can make THE dictionary. Through the Internet of course: the Internet is made of words and enthusiasm, which are the ingredients for good lexicography. What I'm really hoping for, she says, is that my son, who's now 7 months old, in the future won't even remember that the dictionary used to come in the form of a book.

Jonathan Harris is a 28-year-old Internet artist and designer that describes his work as "the exploration and understanding of humans, on a global scale, through the artifacts and footprints of self-expression they leave behind on the Web". So he writes software that tries to capture some of these footprints and make sense of them. One of these projects is called We Feel Fine, a tool harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs (instances of "I feel" and "I am feeling") creating a searchable database of sentences and/or pictures. Here one of the results of this "passive observation" of people, a breakdown of their feelings as expressed in blogs around the world in the last few hours:

Another of his projects involves a more explicit observation: a time capsule, a collective portrait of the world (there is a description here but the project is no longer online). And Lovelines explores the boundaries of love and hate through blog analysis.
Harris unveils his new project, "Universe", which uses the metaphor of the starry sky where every "star" represents news from around  the world, and as the cursor goes over the stars shapes and words emerge, and clicking on a word makes it become the center of the universe, with all the related items swirling and reorganizing around it. There is no end, it goes infinitely. As Harris clicks through it, I realize that he has developed, as an art project, one of the most innovative ways of accessing, organizing and displaying news online that I've seen, around people, images, events, geography, timelines, quotes, general topics and more, real-time. The site will go live in a few days (at universe.daylife.com) and at that moment it will be mandatory for every publisher and news(wo)man to have a close look at it. It remains an art project, but way more innovative than anything publishers have been putting online so far, showing a better understanding of the interrelations among and between disparate pieces of information (news online are more about connections, organizations, movement within and among sets of information) and how they can be made visible.

Actress Julia Sweeney and singer Jill Sobule met at TED2006 (where Julia read from her one-woman-show "Letting go of God" - watch video - and Jill composed a "happy song about global warming" - here to download and listen) and decided to collaborate. The result is a combination of music and comedy, tackling politics, Oprah, and more, which they perform for the TED audience.

Canadian nanotechnologist Ted Sargent ("The dance of molecules") believes that the world of IT is very powerful. A single microchip allows us to do incredible things. That which is perfect and pure: silicon -- the basic component of semiconductors. But this perfection comes at a cost (energy). So: are purity and perfection the only paradigm? There is another kind of optimization that is equally powerful. A tree leaf converts 60% of the light power into chemical energy. Yet leafs are all different, gooey, and far from perfect. Where there is perfection in the leaf is at the scale of the molecule. The  human eye is another astonishing organ, although it looks like a chaotic mass.
So perfection is not the only paradigm for great functionality. The dream of the nanotechnologists: to use this idea of perfect molecules building incredibly functional, optimized entities for our use, for the benefit of society. For example to harness the Sun's power efficiently enough, and cheaply and simply, and convert it into electricity. Sargent is the inventor of the paintable plastic solar cells, semiconductor quantum dots; they don't allow yet for energy harvesting but are a first step in that direction. "Perfection scales beautifully, but scales down; molecular design instead scales up. So when you think of nanotech, think that small may become big".

TEDster Steve Beshara, founder of Turbochef, has developed a very fast oven - called the Speedcook Oven - that he demonstrates, by cooking a chocolate soufflé (and having two people in the audience eating it - they say it tastes great) in less than 3 minutes (soundtrack for his demo: the "Mission Impossible" theme). If I understand it correctly, the oven (which from the outside looks a bit oversized but otherwise pretty normal) includes a combination of currents of heated air and microwave (the one he used for the demo is then given away in a drawing).

Dutch artist Theo Jansen talks about (and shows) his artificial animals -- "Artifauna" - skeletons made of plastic tubes, which are designed to move autonomously, pushed by the winds, on beaches (you can see some of them on the Strandbeest website):

Jansen's structures are handmade, but computer-designed: to come up with "legs" that can walk is not trivial. It means combining several pieces of tubes of perfect size and proportion -- what he calls the "genetic code" of its creatures.

Nathan Myhrvold became famous as Microsoft's chief technology officer until the late 1990s. Since leaving the company, among other things he has become a dinosaur hunter (well, he digs out their skeletons) and has founded Intellectual Ventures, a controversial entity that considers itself a force for innovation but is seen by many as a "patent troll", herding patents for future exploitation. He doesn't discuss this, but uses his session to tell people how he spends his time. Interesting (because he is who he is, and has the money he has) but, well, just about one inch deep. Here is what he said. I am in Chile, and I have this picture up in my screen, and a woman comes up and asks whether that's a Jackson Pollock painting, but no, it's a picture of penguin shit on rocks. I've just been in the Falkland Islands taking pictures. A few hours before I had downloaded a scientific paper about the speed and pressure of penguin defecation (an absurd piece of scientific research that got an IgNobel Prize -- the figure at right is from the original scientific paper). At what point she stops me and asks: who are you? What do you do? And I was stuck, because I had no way to tell easily what I do. Here is some of what I do. I travel around the world and study archeologic sites. Recently I was in Easter Island, which is full of moai statues (about 800 of them). Why they did these statues? Basically these people committed ecological suicide to create more of these statues (see Jared Diamond's book "Collapse"). I have embarked in a project to digitize all the Easter Island moai.
Another thing I do is, I invent stuff. I design nuclear reactors. Not a joke. We do stuff in nanomaterials, in biomedical. I'm also a French cook, and was part of a team that won the world championship of barbecue (he shows a picture of a cooker he has developed, which looks very complicated, although he promises that it makes great ribs). I work on search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI): the movie "Contact" with Jodie Foster,  most characters in the movie were inspired from real people, which I support: the SETI Institute is building an array in California. And I do work on dinosaurs.

TED2007: Serious people seriously scared about climate change, and Africa is open for business

Running notes from the TED2007 conference in Monterey, California - Session 3 (TED site; backgrounder; past TED videos; other bloggers at TED)

The first session of the day opens (like several TED sessions) with Thomas Dolby and his House Band, which provide the live soundtrack of the conference.

Iconic Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr (he's invested in Google, Amazon, Sun and others) talks about greentech, around which Silicon Valley seems to be reinventing itself, leaving behind the "dotcom/I-have-a-business-plan" era and moving anew into engineering real tech (see these stories in the San Francisco Chronicle).
I'm scared. I don't think we're gonna make it, he says. Shortly after I saw Al Gore's speech at TED last year (original post; video), I had a conversation over dinner with friends on global warming, and when it came to my 15-year-old daughter, she said: "I'm scared and I'm angry; your generation created this problem, you better fix it". I didn't know what to say. Maybe there are times when panic is the appropriate response, and we may have reached that time. (BG note: this reminds me of the "good ancestor principle"). We cannot afford to ignore this problem. We must act decisively. For me everything changed that evening. My partners and myself (at VC firm Kleiner Perkins) mobilized, and the more we learned, the more concerned we grew.
The first lesson is that companies are really powerful. When Wal-Mart last year made "going green" a top priority, committing to reduce energy use in their stores -- it matters because it is massive. They are the largest employer in the US, have the largest private fleet on the roads, andwhen they declare that they can "go green" and be profitable, they can have a big effect on other companies. If they achieve reducing 20% energy consumption, that will matter.
But it won't be enough. The second thing we learned is that individuals are powerful. We should all switch to fluorescent lightbulbs. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel plastic and glass (a car) to go to the store to buy bread. It is stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here. As long as we pretend that CO2 is free, we won't be able to create change. The third lesson is that policy matters. The most important thing right now is to make it clear to politicians to have a system that caps and mandates reduction of greenhouse gases. Doerr mentions his (and others') lobbying for a law that was passed recently in California, mandating 25% reduction of greenhouse gases by 2020. But that's not enough. Here is a story about national policy: we went to Brazil, to meet the producers of ethanol. Brazil's government mandated that every gas station in the country carry ethanol, and every vehicle run on ethanol. 85% of their cars run on flex fuels. But even Brazil ethanol policy is not enough. I'm afraid all of the best policies we have are not enough.
Every year 1.5 million people die of malaria around the world. A team from Berkeley is designing a new way to make anti-malaria drugs, to make it 10 times cheaper -- through synthetic biology. What has this to do with green? This technology can be used to make better biofuels. This is a really big deal: it means that we can precisely engineer the molecules and design them the right way. In 2005, 600 million USD were invested in these new techs; 1.2 billion in 2006. But we need much more. It is almost criminal that we are not investing more in energy research in the US.
So despite Wal-Mart, ethanol, cutting-edge biologists, I'm afraid it's not enough. The wild card in this is China. China's CO2 emissions are passing those of the US. But the Chinese say: "why should we sacrifice our growth, so that the West can continue to be profligate and stupid?". I don't have an answer to that.
Green technology is bigger than the Internet. It's the biggest economic opportunity of the XXI century. If the trajectory of all the world -- companies, individuals, policies, innovation -- is not gonna be enough, what are we going to do? Make "going green" your next big thing. Become carbon neutral (BG note: I have my doubts about carbon offsets). Lobby for green legislation. Use your personal power to push your company to go green. Because if we do (Doerr stops talking, he is getting visibly emotional, and starts to cry) I can look forward to the conversation I will have with my daughter in 20 years. (His daughter is in the room and stands up to hug him).

TEDster Ron Dembo is on stage for three minutes. He's an expert in mathematical modeling and risk analysis, CEO and founder of ZeroFootprint in Toronto, which works towards sustainability by guiding users to "green" products and services or through things like carbon offsetting. He agrees with all Doerr has said. He says that over 40% of total US greenhouse gases comes from operating buildings, and suggests that a possible solution to the problem is to promote ground source heating.

Robin Chase is the founder of Zipcar, the US' leading car-sharing company (which was founded after similar companies in Europe) is also scared -- scared that we won't be able to dramatically reduce CO2 within the required time frame to avert catastrophic effects. It's not a movie. It's happening. Her speech is about using market-based pricing to affect demand for car mobility, and wireless technology to create more efficiency. People just say: let's use fuel-efficent cars. But even if we start today, we may reduce consumption by a few percent, that's not enough. She explains how Zipcar (carsharing) works, and what social results it produces: 100'000 members sharing 3'000 cars, and driving much less on average than car owners, because people respond quickly to prices: if you know that picking up the Zipcar car to go buy an ice-cream at the mall costs you 8 dollars for 1 hour of car driving, you may reconsider it, buy the ice cream when you do your weekly shopping. That drives consumption down.
She talks about her new venture: GoLoco.com, which is an attempt at developing ridesharing. 75% of all trips in the US today are single occupancy vehicles. Sharing rides will transform the way we travel, with huge social benefits, from fewer cars congesting the highways to less demand for parking to more efficiency of fuel use (spread over several people), to a reduction of the portion of our income that goes into cars. Why do we drive too much: because car travel is underpriced, so we consume alot. We need to put price tags on car travel. When will we start to charge people what it really costs to drive? And what kind of wireless tech are we going to use to enable more efficient use of cars? She suggests ad hoc peer-to-peer self-configuring wireless networks (aka "mesh networks") where every device contributes to expand the network. Low-cost devices, with zero ongoing communication costs, highly scalable (just keep adding devices), resilient and redundant networks. How do we create a big network? By putting wireless in cars. Imagine if we put a mesh network device in every single car across America. We could have a coast-to-coast free wireless communication system, possibly accessible to everyone with open standards. As a major side effect, we could have a new tool for creating energy efficiency in every sectors. I believe this is as important to our economy as electrification. (BG note: cars seem to me the wrong place to put a good idea -- mesh networks -- because they move. Cars should be the "clients" of the network, which could be built along roads).

Anand Agarawala is a student at the university of Toronto who has created Bumptop, an evolution of the computer's desktop metaphor to make it more "natural" (piling up documents on a corner for later use, flip through them, etc). After Jeff Han's demonstration yesterday, this is the second computer interface innovation that made me think (and I'm not alone in this) "I want one". He shows Bumptop -- just click "play" to see a demo (6 minutes):

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Finance and Foreign minister of Nigeria, known for her tough policies on corruption and debt reduction, is next on stage -- she provides somehow a link to the upcoming TEDGLOBAL in Tanzania next June. There are stories about Africa that you hear all time: the Africa of poverty, violence, HIV/AIDS, disaster. But there is an Africa that you don't hear often about, the Africa that's changing, the Africa of people that are taking their destiny into their hands. In Sept 2005, the governor of one of the richest oil states in Nigeria, was arrested in London because of money transfers in the millions that went into an account that belongs to him and his family. Today he is in jail. This is not trivial: people in Africa are no longer willing to tolerate corruption from their leaders. People want their resources managed properly for their good, not stolen by the elites. In some countries people and governments are fighting corruption. There is still a long way to go, but there is a will there. Figures show that the trend is downwards in terms of corruption, and governance is getting better.
There is a will for reform. Africans are tired of being the subject of everybody's charity. We are grateful, but we know that we can take charge of our destiny if we have the will to reform. No one can do it but us. We can invite partners that can support us, but we have to start, reform our economies, change our leaderships, become more democratic and open. Nigeria has 140 million chaotic people but very dynamic people. We put forward a comprehensive reform program which we developed ourselves (not the World Bank or others). A program that would get the state out of businesses it should not be in, because it is often inefficient and incompetent. At the end of 2003 we started privatizing markets. We had a telecom company that had developed 4500 land telephone lines in its whole life. After liberalization of the telecom market, we went to 32 million GSM mobile phones. The other thing we have also done is to manage our finances better. In Nigeria the oil sector had the reputation of being corrupt. We introduced a fiscal rule that de-links our budget from the oil price, and began to budget at a price lower than the oil price. It was very controversial, but it took out the volatility from the system, and we are able to save and create reserves. Brought inflation down to 11%, GDP growth up to 6%. We want to get away from oil and diversify. Most of our growth came from non-oil sectors.
There is a new wave in the continent, of democratization and reform. Not everything is perfect, but the trend is clear. The average rate of growth in the last three years has moved from 1.5 % to 5%. Things are changing. Conflicts are down. The best way to help Africans today, is to help them to stand on their own feet, by helping in creating jobs. There is no issue in fighting malaria, of course. But imagine the impact if the parents can have jobs and buy the drugs to fight the disease themselves. And some of the best people to invest in on the continent are the women.
She concludes by mentioning the Africa Open for Business documentary featuring African entrepreneurs. 

My colleague June Cohen, TED's Media Director, goes on stage to give a preview of the new TED website, which will be launched in a couple of weeks. She tells how last year TED decided to "open up" and distribute the talks of its speakers online, in video, for free (thanks to a generous sponsorship by BMW). It has been an unexpected success: TEDtalks have been downloaded or streamed over 6 million times since last summer, almost one million a month, trend growing. They're currently distributed on TED's website and blog as well as on YouTube, Yahoo Video, Google Video, AOL, iTunes, etc. We have been adding two-three new talks every week, and will continue to do so, including of course all the talks from this year's conference, and we are partnering with other conferences as well. The new website will be structured around the TEDtalks, and will allow everyone to create a personal profile, comment on the speeches, and more. Here is how it will look (still a work in progress):

June adds her belief that the newest digital technologies are returning us to the most ancient form of media — one in which a natural order is restored; our individual stories take center stage, with the rest of the world as a backdrop.

Poet Rives -- a wordsmith with an engineering background -- offers a comedic break with a verbal riff about "4 in the morning". Sorry I can't possibly summarize it, but you can see his previous TEDtalk recorded in New York last November.

Larry Lessig (blog), professor at Stanford and co-founder of Creative Commons, which is his way of fighting what he calls "the overregulation of 21st-century creativity and innovation" produced by the copyright system (which was crafted in the 19th century), tells three stories about user-generated content.
First story: 1906 John Philip Sousa traveled to Washington to talk about the "talking machines" (records) that, he said, "are going to ruin artistic development of music":

"These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape"

If this makes you smile, Lessig takes it very seriously. Sousa's remarks were certainly romantic, but basically what he was saying is that before music was recorded people participated in a read-write culture. Since, the "machines" have created a top-down, read-only culture, where some produce and the mass consumes.
Second story: land is property. Trespass law protects the land, including up and down (underground and sky). Until the airplane came along: were they trespassers? Justice decided that the doctrine was against common sense, and that airplanes were not trespassers.
Third story: When broadcast came along, the first conflicts over access to music happened. ASCAP, who was then controlling copyright, raised the fees that it charged to broadcasters by more than 400 percent between 1931-39. Broadcasters began a competing organization, BMI, pushing even music by black musicians and putting music in the public domain. ASCAP predicted that "people would revolt", but that didn't happen, and BMI changed music consumption forever.
Lessig's argument: the most significant thing is to recognize that what the Internet is doing is the opportunity to revive the read-write culture that Sousa romanticized. User-generated content celebrating amateur culture, by which I don't mean amateurish culture, but culture that people produce for the love of what they do and not for the money. He shows some examples of anime music videos and other amateur-made videos, remixes, etc. It is important to emphasize that this is not piracy (taking other people's content in wholesale and distribute it without the permission of the content's owner). The importance of this is not the technique that you see here. The importance is that the technique has been democratized. Now everybody with access to a computer can take images and sounds and words and create with it. These tools are tools of literacy. This is what your kids are.
The law has not greeted this new use of culture through digital technologies with much common sense. Instead, the architects of copyright law are produced the presumption that this is illegal. If copyright protects from copy, the problem is in the digital domain every single use of culture produces a copy. We are seeing a growing extremism from both sides in this debate: one side wants to build new technologies that allow, for example, to take automatically down copyrighted content from sites like YouTube. On the other side, there is a growing copyright abolitionism. Both extremisms in this debate are just wrong. The balance that I try to fight for, is a solution that can legalize what it means to be young again.
How does this connect to our kids? We have to recognize they kids different from us. We watch TV, they make TV. It is technology that has made them different. We can't kill the instincts that tech produces, we can only criminalize them. We can't make our kids passive again, we can only make them "pirates". We live in a strange time, like a new age of prohibition, our kids live lives against the law. This is extraordinarily corrupting. In a democracy we ought to be able to do better. At least for them.

TED2007: The beauty of particle physics theory, a code beyond genetics, and an interaction wall

Running notes from the TED2007 conference in Monterey, California - Session 2 (TED site; backgrounder; past TED videos; other bloggers at TED)

Murray Gell-Mann won the Nobel prize in physics in 1969 for his work on the theory of elemental particles and the discovery of the quark, one of the two basic constituents of matter. More recently, he's researched complex adaptive systems. He states: What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics, beauty is a very successful criterion for choosing the right theory. In 1957 some of us put forward a theory of the "weak force", in disagreement with the results of seven experiments. The theory was beautiful - so it had to be right, and indeed it turned out that the experiments were all wrong. Einstein was famously indifferent to suggestions that his basic ideas were contradicted by experiments.
What do we mean by beauty and elegance? Why is beauty or elegance a successful criterion in choosing the correct theory in fundamental physics? Is there any role of human beings and human thinking? (Short answer to the latter: no). A theory appears beautiful or elegant (or simple if you prefer) when it can be expressed concisely in mathematical terms (maths is very simple). Nature obeys laws, and in Newton's words "the business of natural philosophy is to find out those laws". The basic law really takes the form of an unified quantum theory of all the fundamental forces and all the elementary particles. Since it is quantum-mechanical, it predicts probability (some of which are near certainty) for future events, given past ones. The history of the universe is co-determined by fundamental laws and by the many accidents, outcomes of chance events.
Physicists approach that much-desired unified theory, working our way to smaller and smaller distances or higher and higher energies and accuracies, getting closer and closer to this fundamental law. As we peel these skins of the onion, we see that each skin has something in common with the previous and the next one. That is a property of the basic law. The manifestations of the law at different scales exhibit approximate self-similarity. Newton called it "nature conformable to herself". The result is that newly encountered phenomena are described rather simply, and therefore elegantly, by mathematics that is very similar to that of the previous (or the next) "skin". That's why it's so elegant. We believe there is a unified theory and there are three principles that are emergent property of the fundamental laws of physics: the conformability of nature to herself; the applicability of the criterion of simplicity; and the "unreasonable effectiveness" of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality. You don't need something more to explain something more.

TEDster Allison Hunt gets 3 minutes on stage. She's the president of Hatch, a branding research firm in Canada and twists the name of the session into "Hipiphany", because she recently got a hip replacement - and after walking on stage on crutches she tells (with comedic accents) the story of how she got this new titanium part of her body.

Jonathan Widom, cell biologist at Northwestern university, has been in the news recently for his discovery, together with several colleagues, of an additional layer of information superimposed on the DNA coding known so far, different from it. A "code beyond genetics". In short: the genetic code specifies all the proteins that a cell makes. This second layer of code sets the placement of the nucleosomes, miniature protein spools around which the DNA is looped, controlling access to it (slide from his dense speech at right). The biological question they're trying to answer: How different kind of cells get their distinct entities. If confirmed, the discovery could lead to a re-evaluation of the way the genome is structured and how it operates.

Last year Jeff Han came to TED, set up a contraption that looked like a table, turned it on, started moving his hands on it, and the audience let out a collective "wooow!" A a researcher at New York University, Jeff has developed a multi-touch computer interface that, basically, dispenses with the common desktop metaphor, replacing it with an intuitive, open-ended space through which users navigate freely with their fingertip (see the video of his TED2006 unveiling of the tech, read my original post, or a feature on Jeff in Fast Company magazine). In the meantime he has created Perceptive Pixel Inc. to commercialize the technology, and is back at TED with his fellow multi-touch-pioneer Phil Davidson to show the next stage of his research: an interaction wall. Here are Jeff and Phil using it:

It's an amazing thing: enlarging a picture requires only touching it with two fingers and moving them apart -- with the file following their movements and spreading on the screen. There is basically no structured interface to his device: they just " navigate" in the information, zooming in and out of maps or tilting them or adding graphic elements or redistributing images on the screen just by moving their fingers on them.  They add layers of images -- a map on top of a map, for example, where the one on top acts as a "lens". They have built in dozens of applications, and functionalities that make it even more effective: drawing a circle for example initiates a menu, etc. "The most interesting thing is that when people first use this, they tend to go with one finger, then retract it: we basically have to un-teach people what they have learned so far about computing, and convince them that they can use several fingers, that several people can work on the screen at once, that you can actually use a random number of touchpoints, etc". The Apple iPhone, when it comes out, may help: it will also come with a multitouch screen, although it's so small that it won't make for a very interesting multitouch device (Jeff's "wall" is 8 feet wide). This is a mindboggling breakthrough technology.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a tall tall tall former basketball star (2m19, or 7 feet 2 - picture), one of the most amazing champions this sport has ever had -- I remember following him and "Magic" Johnson when I was a teenager and they were playing for the Lakers.
He's working on a book called "On the shoulders of giants". He tells his story of being born and raised in Harlem, a place of big hopes and changes thanks to the civil rights movement and the Harlem Renaissance. He tells of the teachings of Martin Luther King, of how that inspired him to look inside and explore his own soul -- "and now I hope that the world sees me not 7 feet 2 inches tall, but 7 feet 2 inches deep". He offers the audience his "three most important principles of success". Integrity: for me integrity is best explained through jazz music; musicians that have integrity pursue their vision, not just what the public might want; integrity requires confidence: in our vision, in our capacities. Learning system: focus must be not on how many points you score, but on the system. Execution: you must know your competition, your potential, your strengths, and how to play to your strengths and weaknesses; execution is about preparation, timing, knowing your enemy (strategy) and knowing your enemy's sword (what tools he has).

TEDster Jok Church gets his three minutes on stage. He's a cartoonist and author from San Francisco, he writes for children and the author of “You Can With Beakman" a syndicated newspaper comic strip for kids. He tells a personal story: Jok is openly gay, and as a student he got bashed. A teacher intervened to defend him. Then they lost touch. Until she called him many years later -- from her deathbed -- asking him to travel to Ohio to visit her. He and his partner did, and they assisted her in her last days. "It's like closing the circle: she saved my life, we saved hers".

The session (and the first TED day) ends with blind songwriter and singer Raul Midón, his flamenco-jazz guitar and captivating voice (among others, he sings a song on the "meaning of technology").