Lunch over IP

TED2006: Wrap-up (and a cut-off namebadge)

TED2006 ended on Saturday with a beach party and lots of discussions about the many great (and ambitious) ideas that were expressed during the week, from Larry Brilliant's plan for a global early-warning system to Peter Gabriel's intention of using cell phones to expand the reach of witness.org, from Alan Russel's inspiring work on regenerative medicine to Jehane Noujaim's wish for a unite-the world Pangea Cinema Day and so much more.

I've blogged most of it, just check out the fifteen or so previous posts: or refer to the writing of my twin liveblogger and friend Ethan Zuckerman; other have also posted on TED: Kate Trgovac, Tom Guarriello, Sam Perry, Ori Okolloh, John Flowers, Loic Le Meur, Renee Blodgett, Bill Liao and Lars Hinrichs, and of course June Cohen and two guestbloggers at the conference's own TEDblog, which includes also a great flickr photogallery of the event. (The San Francisco Chronicle  published a long report by Tom Abate yesterday, too).

And then there is Al Gore (picture). Who really played a key role in this conference, with a convincing wake-up call on the first day, a sequel during the closing session, and a constant presence and input throughout the event.

Al was also the main character in one of the untold behind-the scenes anecdotes of TED2006. Everyone at TED wears a badge, including recognizable faces such as Google's co-fonder Sergey Brin, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, actress Meg Ryan or former vice-prez Al Gore. But speakers are asked to take off their badge when they go on stage for the needs of video production - every speech is videotaped for the purpose of archiving them and for DVDs that will be sent to the participants in a couple of months. Well, Al forgot to take off his namebadge, and as he was walking on stage for his speech one of the stage technicians noticed it and tried to remove it. But the badge's cord was tangled up with the wire of the head-mounted microphone, and by pulling the first the technician was about to rip off the other. Al was walking, the audience was watching, and the introductory music was already playing. So without hesitation, the technician reached into his pocket and pulled out a Swiss army knife and just cut off the cord of the badge. That's a knife, albeit a friendly one, close to the neck of a former US vice-president...

Al smiled thankfully, walked on stage - and gave a great speech.

(tags TED2006 - TED 2006) (TED site  - flickr photos)

TED2006: An EarthWitness site and other futures

Twelfth (and closing) session of TED2006 (background): running notes.

Jamais Cascio: "the future we will create is a future we could be prout of", he says. He's the co-founder in 2003 of Worldchanging.com, a great collective blog focusing on a more sustainable and equitable future, with an intentional emphasis on solutions and practices. He starts saying that "we can build a better world, right now: we have the tools, we have the knowledge and we have the motives". So he outlines a vision for an "EarthWitness" website, somehow inspired by Peter Gabriel's Witness, that would make use of tools such as cellphones, cameras, sensors, online maps and more to create "a bottom-up, collaborative chronicle of what's happening to the environment around the world". He describes a system allowing anyone to collect information and data on environmental problems, upload and share them. That would give a voice to people affected by these problems, as well as allow anyone else to get better information and to act upon it. And in Worldchanging ethos, the site would not only look at environmental problems, but also at possible solutions.

Majora Carter is a Bronx resident and the director of Sustainable South Bronx. That's a New York neighborhood that has an incredible concentration of environmental and urban burdens (waste treatment plants, chemical facilities, power plants, distribution centers, highways, etc) and health and social issues (one out of four children have asthma, 25 % of residents are unemployed, Majora grew up with a crack house on the other side of the street). "Environmental degradation creates economic degradation which creates social degradation", she says, and that's the framework within which SSB acts: creating parks, running ecological restoration projects, installing green roofs, figuring out ways to make traffic less taxing - and in the process, creating jobs: "we are seeding the area with 'green collar' jobs, people who have both an economic interest and a personal stake in their environment".
Although Majora is clearly fighting "bad planners and developers that hyper-exploit vulnerable communities for profit", she's realistic: "we are an urban reality, not a natural preserve, and I don't expect governments or corporations to make the world a better place because it is right or moral", but because it makes economic sense: "you can make a fortune on sustainability".

Al Gore is the closing speaker of TED2006. He spoke the other evening forcefully about global warming. He walks on stage and goes personal and tells (in a very funny way) tales of life after the vice-presidency. And then he addresses the question that many have been asking him here after his speech: What can we - individuals - do about the climate crisis? He draws a blueprint in 14 points:

• reduce emissions from your home (installations, better design)
• reduce emissions from cars (hybrids etc)
• be a green consumer ("you have choices with everything you buy, from appliances to food")
• live a "carbon neutral" life ("it's easier than you think: use the carbon calculator, then reduce, and offset the rest")
• make your business carbon neutral ("it's not as hard as you think")
• integrate climate solutions into all your innovations, independently of your sector of activity
• invest sustainably, "in companies and funds that are part of the solution"
• become a catalyst for change, learn, teach others
• raise awareness by promoting "An Inconvenient Truth" (the documentary that follows Gore as he travels around the world warning about greenhouse gases; it will come out in May)
• send someone to Nashville who can learn how to give my slideshow in your community ("I'm going to conduct a course this Summer to a group of people that can then use and remix my slides and my talk in their commmunity")
• become politically active, "speak up, make democracy work"
• urge the US to join the rest of the world community in capping and trading carbon emissions (the Kyoto treaty)
• help with the mass persuasion campaign when it launches this Spring
• let's rebrand global warming (he suggests "climate crisis")

And then he outlines a vision to "finally measure reliably in what direction we are going": "We know the amount of energy that comes into Earth, but we have no clue of the amount of energy that Earth radiates; if we could put a satellite between the Earth and the Sun, at a specific point (the L-1 point between the Earth and the Sun) that would allow us for the first time to measure energy-in and energy-out in real time". Such a satellite actually does exist, it has been built in 1998 under the name Triana, it was supposed to be launched in February 2001 but the program was canceled one month before and now the spacecraft sits in a warehouse.

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley legend (he was the first CEO of Sun Microsystems), gets a three-minutes talk and he uses his time to discuss ethanol-powered cars. The rising price of oil (and the impression that we're getting close to the point of declining production) and environmental concerns are making biofuels and bioenergy mainstream topics. Vinod reminds the audience that Brazil has adopted ethanol-fueled cars in the 1980s, with the fuel produced from refining sugarcane, and now 70% of all new cars sold there run on "flex fuel" (ethanol in combination with unleaded gasoline). Volkswagen is apparently considering the phaseout of gasoline-powered cars in Brazil (which is the tenth-largest auto market in the world). Ethanol, says Khosla, is cheaper, environment-friendly, sustainable, and provides an easy way for the car industry to switch from one fuel to another. Vinod is now the co-chair of an initiative in California to get the State to add an oil extraction tax that could raise up to 400 million a year to fund alternatives such as flex fuel cars. He is clearly very passionate about this: on his website there is a whitepaper he wrote last month (it's here in Word format) titled "A near-term energy solution". it starts like this: "We don't need oil, and we definitely don't need hydrogen for our cars and light trucks. We don't need new engines, new fuel distribution and storage, and we don't need a lot of money or time" to solve the energy problem.

And off we go for the hilarious conference wrap-up by comedian Tom Rielly. TED2006 closes here; TED2007 will take place from 7-10 March.

(tags TED2006 - TED 2006) (TED site  - flickr photos)

TED2006: On tidy canvases and animal copyright

Eleventh session of TED2006 (background): running notes.

Fellow Swiss Ursus Wehrli is the cleaning man of canvases and the author of "Tidying up art", a book where he takes the elements of paintings and "cleans them up". For example, he walks into Van Gogh's "Bedroom" (here at right) with Photoshop and tidies up everything onto and under the bed ("this room hadn't been cleaned up since 1888", the year it was painted). Speaking with a Swiss-German accent, Wehrli is very funny. He shows the work he has done with works by Picasso, Bruegel's village square (which looks deserted "after I sent everyone home"), Niki de Saint-Phalle, Keith Haring, Paul Klee (he shows his 1930 coloured chalkboard Farbtafel: "you see that the artist had no idea how to use colors, or maybe he was in a hurry"), Jackson Pollock ("I decided to go all the way and just put the paint back into the cans"), and many others. He ends showing his most recent work: tidying up national flags. He claims that tidying up art is somehow an art in itself, and indeed it is.

Controversial British biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey of Cambridge University claims to have created a roadmap to defeat biological aging ("to save lives", he calls it) so that humans can live for hundreds or even thousands of years. "Aging is the greatest embodiement of our faliure as a species; if we figure out how to defeat aging (if we were to live 1000 years) we would have more ambitions than we have now and solve the big problems of the world". Basically de Grey believes that aging is a set of accumulating molecular and cellular transformations in our bodies, caused by metabolism, that eventually cause pathology and kill us. That could be approached "as an engineering problem", he says: identifying all the components of the variety of processes that cause tissues to age, and then design remedies for each of them. Needlessly to say, de Grey (a spillover speaker: he spoke already at TEDGLOBAL last July) is not universally respected in scientific circles.

Education and creativity expert Ken Robinson is the author of "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative": "We have no clue how the world will be in five years, yet we are educating our children for that world". "All kids have tremendous creative potential, and we are squandering it: schools educate kids out of creativity - the process of having innovative ideas that have value - because mistakes are stigmatized - and if you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original". "Creativity is now as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status". "Our education systems is predicated on the idea of academic ability (math is considered more important than, say, dance), and encourages you to stay away from the things you liked as a kid" ("dance doesn't pay rent" - for most people anyway). "Our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology: our education system has mined our minds for specific capacities (pretty much like we have mined the Earth for specific resources, oil, minerals, to the edge of depletion) and we can't keep doing it".

Gregory Colbert is a Canadian photographer who has spent the last fifteen years on a unique artistic and human project: to reconcile through pictures the world of people and that of animals which, from past harmony, have progressively become separated and even confrontational. Colbert is not an animal-rights advocate or a cat-hugger: he dances with whales underwater, creates a sense of spirituality by making children "dialogue" with elephants, and so on.
His exhibit "Ashes and Snow" is a must-see: a triumph of beauty, a celebration of an out-of-time nature-man communion. For a dozen years, Colbert has travelled to the end of the world, to deserts and jungles and under the surface of oceans, in search of images capable or representing this harmony. A couple of years ago he showed some of his work at Venice's Biennale. Then he asked Japanese architect Shigeru Ban to conceive a "nomadic museum", and Ban came up with a majestic recyclable cathedral made of ship containers where Colbert's pictures are hanging, hand-printed on gigantic sheets of Japanese paper, in a paradoxical overlapping of metal and poetry (I saw the exhibit in New York a few months back; the museum is currently in Santa Monica and soon the pictures will be shown in Vatican City - the first non-religious exhibit there in 2000 years - and travel around the world). Colbert's images, which he claims to realize without artificial light, without computer graphics nor digital tricks, and without employing tamed animals (this last claim is controversial) revisit and reveal a forgotten world of human-nature osmosis. His are not images of nostalgia: they are a bestiary of poetry, a celebration of beauty and of emotions - and the fact that we marvel at these images is by itself a statement on their necessity. "For the last 15 years I've been an apprentice to nature, collaborating with 35 species", he says, and then he shows his awesome pictures and movies. Here are three of his photographs:

Colbert comes back on stage: "It is standard practice in our world to compensate people for use of their intellectual property. Until now that has not been the case for nature and animals: for years corporations have used nature and animals to promote their products". So Colbert announces that he will shortly launch the Animal Copyright Foundation, a non-profit entity that will exist "to serve and preserve species and habitats around the world". The foundation will seek "to collect 1 percent of all media buys that use animals" in advertising and commercial communication, and distribute these funds to conservation organizations around the world. He believes that this organization could raise 600 million dollars a year. How to make it happen? Through an ingenious and shrewd use of market pressure. There will be a logo, a sort of "animal copyright seal" (image left: a mockup created by Ethan Zuckerman) to display on ads and billboards - and Colbert counts on the fact that corporations may "feel the backlash" from consumers if they don't display it and are therefore perceived as exploiting the animal world. The idea is crazy enough that it miight well work. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this - and in any case, go see Colbert's exhibition if you ever get a chance. "On behalf of the elephants, thank you for listening", he says closing his speech.

(tags TED2006 - TED 2006) (TED site  - flickr photos)

TED2006: War and love

Tenth session of TED2006 (background): running notes.

Jim Crupi thinks that in the new world of warfare "intelligence is everything". He's a military strategist, and goes on stage at TED to talk about "the future of war". To illustrate it he offers a scary simulation (a fake radio broadcast after a biological terrorist attack in California), a list of nextools of war (ant robots, non-lethal weapons that incapacitate without killing, bio/nuclear, and of course code, artificial intelligence and nanotech), and a framework for understanding today's conflicts: "the battleground is moving from the physical to the ideological", Al Qaeda is a virtual nation, war is beliefs- and issues-based, and its objective in the future won't be to win, but to protect one big idea (or several) such as freedom, democracy, or faith. In this context, "intelligence is everything". During the Vietnam war, he reminds us, the Americans were bombing bridges so that the Vietnamese could not cross certain rivers, and sending airplanes on daily recognition flights to make sure that the bridges were not being rebuilt, "yet thousands of Vietnamese crossed the rivers". How? They built the bridges six inches under water, so that they could not be seen. "The future of war is about intelligence and out-thinking the adversary".

He leaves the audience in a sort of state of grim suspension, into which comes actress Julia Sweeney, and in her amazing way she lights up everyone again with a hilarious fragment from her monologue "Letting go of God", about faith and growing up. There is a recording of parts of it on Chicaco Public Radio's website.

Helen Fisher is an anthropologist of relationships and love. She talks of "what is to love?" (when a person starts taking on a special meaning). She scanned the brains of 32 people "in love" (15 of which had been rejected) and came to the conclusion that "romantic love is not an emotion: it is a drive, a craving more powerful than sex drive". She asks "why do we fall in love with one person rather than another?" and answers through proximity, mystery, and the tendency "to gravitate towards people with complementary brain systems". "We are now returning to an ancient form of marriage: one based on equality and symmetry (...) If there were ever a time in human history when we had the opportunity to make good marriages, it's now."

Nat Irvin speaks on a background of loud music, and at times he sounds like a preacher. He has a great insight: a new social identity is emerging among urban young black people. He calls them "the thrivals": those who are switching from seeing themselves and their families/communities as victims of the forces of history ("survival"), to shaping those same forces ("thrival"). But for the whole speech I keep waiting for examples and more details, and he never produces them. (UPDATE 27 February: Nat has seen this post and sends me an elegant e-mail, saying among other things: "here is what you wished I had shared" (PDF format). Indeed, it's a great article. Thanx Nat.)

The end of the session sees a child go on stage: 11-year-old violinist Sirena Huang. And I'm at loss for words to describe her virtuosity and the magic of her music, so watch out for her first record (she recently made her professional solo debut with the Taiwan Symphony Orchestra).

(tags TED2006 - TED 2006) (TED site  - flickr photos)

TED2006: New Lens

Ninth session of TED2006 (background): running notes.

Ten years ago Clifford Stoll (astronomer, hacker, and more) published a book, "Silicon snake oil" in which he heretically questioned the benefits of computers ("get computers out of schools!"). But that's not the topic of his speech. Frenetically jumping about the stage, going erratically on and off many topics (which, in order not to forget them, he has written on his left hand; cheat-sheet lines like "one side", "all truth", "kids"), he gets many times close to making a point just before drifting off again. He doesn't use powerpoint but actual pictures on an overhead projector, measures the speed of sound through an oscilloscope, says that he believes in "thinking locally and acting locally", shows Klein bottles. And gives a piece of advice: "If you really want to know what society is going to be like in 20 years, don't ask a technologists like me: ask kindergarten teachers. They are the ones that know what society is gonna be like in one generation".

Designer Rob Forbes, founder of Design Within Reach, is on a mission to promote quality design in public spaces: "the first job of design is to serve a social purpose". During his speech he shows hundreds of pictures he has taken while travelling to cities from Amsterdam to Buenos Aires, picking up urban patterns - both intentional and casual. He shows a picture of a "typical street corner in San Francisco" desorderly full of neewspaper boxes and other such items and calls it an example of "urban spam: when private industry makes a mess of public areas". Shows Chicago sidewalks with flower boxes and Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park to stress the importance of urban environments as cultural settings (he actually singles out Chicago and its mayor Daley for leading the renewal of urban design.

For a quarter century Phil Borges, a dentist by training, has been travelling the world documenting endangered indigenous cultures. Here is a picture he took in Tibet:

Borges' life project is to promote and preserve cultural diversity. His photographic work has the force of beauty and the infinite depth of the human spirit. "Of the 6000 languages spoken in the world today, 3000 are not spoken by the children, which means that we are halving our linguistic diversity", he says starting his speech. "Every week an elderly goes to the grave taking along the last spoken words of that culture", he adds. He shows examples (Tibet, the Kalash in Pakistan, etc) and explains how this led to the creation of Bridges to Understanding, a project electronically linking children from around the world through digital storytelling. He ends showing a moving film made by a student in Guatemala, "Mis Sentimientos" (QuickTime), about a village destroyed by a mudflood.

Musician Vishal Vaid offers a hypnotic voice performance; he's been reinventing the traditional 13th-century Indian artform of "ghazal" with infusions of world music and electronica.

Self-help guru, motivational speaker and besteller author ("Awaken the Giant Within" etc) Tony Robbins is next. A proponent of neurolinguistic programming, he's known for his seminars during which participants walk barefoot over hot coals - a way of demonstrating that only fear holds back people from achieving their goals, including skilled people (one doesn't need many skills to fire-walk, but needs mental strenght to overcome the fear, or the "inner doubts" as Tony would say, and act). He is an imposing and energetic presence on stage. "The invisible force of internal drive, if activated, is the most powerful force in the world", he says. He offers two "master lessons in life": the science of achievement (how you take your dream and make it happen), and the art of fulfillment (that's about appreciation and contribution). Why is it that some people who are been given everything spend their life in despair? And why people who have a much tougher life (picture of Nelson Mandela goes up behind him) are among the strongest contributors to society? Because "decision is the ultimate power. When people fail to achieve something, the reasons they give are always related to their perception of lack of resources" (time, money, technology, etc - "I didn't have the Supreme Court", says Al Gore from the room, getting an collective laughter and an applause). "But that may not be the defining factor", says Robbins: "the defining factor is never resources, it is resourcefulness" (creativity, determination, love and caring, curiosity, passion, resolve, etc). "Decision is the force that shapes destiny. What is your target, what are you after? That's different from your desires: it's about your beliefs and your needs". He identifies six human needs: certainty; uncertainty/variety; significance; connection and love; growth; and "contribute beyond ourselves" ("it's not about me, it's about we" he says, sounding like a non-religious version of Rick Warren, who spoke yesterday).
"There are 6000 words in the English language for human emotions, yet most people experience only a dozen or so, many of which negative", he says in conclusion. "The quality of our lives is the quality of our emotions". 

(tags TED2006 - TED 2006) (TED site  - flickr photos)

TED2006: The magic to come

Eighth session of TED2006 (background): running notes.

Saul Griffith is presented in the TED guide as innovator and adrenaline junkie who uses cartoons to teach science, found a way of producing eyeglass lenses inexpensively, and has an open-source website showing how to make stuff. "Who am I? I do hardware: clean water, clean energy and cleaner, more functional materials", he says. His speech is about how we make things and how we will make them in the future - things like autonomous self-assembling, self-replicating computers (there are already some basic applications in the toy industry) or electronic ropes (which know the load at any point in the rope).

Videogames pundit and "Enter the Matrix" (after the eponymous movie) game designer David Perry is next on stage. He runs through some vgames statistics (see this previous post; the synthetic real estate market is valued at 800 million dollars a year) and through some history, with a video that takes us from "Pong" (1972) to the newest basketball, starwars or driving games, and beyond, and then he shows a video by student Michael Highland on his vgame-addict life. "Games are starting to make me feel", says Highland. What's next? There are currently 350 colleges and schools around the world teaching videogames. "On the surface, games seem simple entertainment, but they can upen up new frontiers and help us think big".

New tech, because it's new, needs to be explained and made understandable, and that's what people like David Pogue, the New York Times' tech columnist, do. He starts sitting at the piano singing a funny song on being on hold, computers crashing and other "Sound of silence" tech moments of contemporary daily life (he sings over Simon and Garfunkel's classic notes). "People feel overwhelmed, there is too much technology, and it is too complex and confusing". Why is the tech overload crisis feel like it's accelerating now? Because gadgets are getting smaller (but fingers are still the same size...); because software keeps being upgraded and complexified (he calls it the "upgrade paradox: if you improve a piece of software enough times, you finally ruin it"); and so on. He talks about writing a column on trying to reach Dell's customer support hotline, and how within a few hours 700 readers sent in "me-too" e-mails.
David's is a call for simplicity in design of technology, and particularly of computer and devices interface design. He runs through many examples of absurd design, sings two more funny songs (on Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) and then heralds the iPod as the icon of simplicity, and Google's homepage interface, and SanDisk's USB-friendly flash memory cards (so we can stop carrying around tangles of cables). And he commends software firm Nuance: when they released version 8 of their "Dragon NaturallySpeaking" speech-recognition software, "they added no new feature: they just made the software work better!".

To close, a bit of good entertainment (T-E-D): Dynamo, the young magician from Bradford/UK,  shows a few amazing card tricks (accompanied by rap music).

(tags TED2006 - TED 2006) (TED site  - flickr photos)

TED2006: Tales of invention

Seventh session of TED2006 (background): running notes.

Zach Kaplan and Keith Schacht of Inventables open the session with a three-minutes "new materials alert" and distribute to all attendees a sample bag of "crushable electroluminescent sheet" (picture). What's that? Here is what the tag says:

This is an incredibly flexible electroluminescent light (EL). In the past, most EL was printed on semi-rigid polyester sheet. It would fail if it was creased and it was not very tolerant of moisture. This EL is a foldable, washable, moldable polyurethane envelope.

It requires power, but has interesting possible uses: on clothes and shoes for lighting that is flexible and washable; or inside a children's blanket to serve as a night light that feels soft and flexible; on the inside liner of a purse to make it easy to find keys; or on an umbrella "that glows in your closet when there is rain outside", reminding you to pick it up before going out. (the picture is from curiouslee's flickr stream - thanx).

There are many efforts underway to break the (very expensive) monopoly of government-financed spatial exploration. So far, about 450 astronauts have been in space: all backed by public money, except two: the pilots of SpaceShip One, the rocket launched twice in October 2004 from Mojave desert. Engineer and pilot Burt Rutan is the man behind SpaceShip One. He speaks at TED about exploration and inspiration and fast progress: "In 1908 there were only a dozen airplane pilots; by 1912, there were hundreds of aircraft types in 39 countries". He points out that most aviation pioneers of the 20th century were kids during that dawn of aviation (which implies that they were inspired by it). But now "Houston, we have a problem: We're entering the second generation of no progress". He's talking about governmental space flights of course ("Not counting SpaceShip One, in 2004 there were only two manned missions in space, Russians going to the International Space Station: less than forty years before"). So he argues that the next progress in space exploration will be paid for by private money. "There is a capitalists' space race" going on" which will "make it easy, safe and cost-effective for people to go to space, starting with suborbital flights" (putting a ship in orbit requires propulsion five times faster than sub-orbital, and that has significant safety and cost implications). "This will be a high-volume industry: we think that 100'000 people will fly in space by 2020".

Not all inventions need to be grandiose, complex things. Sometimes they can be simple and smart ideas that help alot of people. That's what Amy Smith (from MIT's D-Lab) talks about: a simple solution to one of the world's main causes of death among children in the world  (breathing fumes from indoor wood-burning stoves - 2 million deaths a year) and a way to fight deforestation. She shows a picture of deforestation in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere: people cut down forests to cook and produce charcoal (look at the picture - that's a NASA aerial view of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic; Haiti is to the left, the DR is the greener area to the right) and that sets in motion a cycle of further resource depletion, soil erosion, droughts etc. What are alternative cooking fuels? "It's extremely important to design from within the community", Amy says to indicate the need to seek solutions locally. With her students they came up with ways to use "bagas", the waste from refining sugar cane, and turn it into charcoal briquettes. In India many people use cow dung as fuel, which also creates lots of fumes: wheat straw (bound by only a bit of cow dung) could be a cleaner alternative, but the briquettes didn't burn as long as wood charcoal, and tended to crumble - until the students figured out that they could compress them, and they're now better than the commercially available wood charcoal. In Ghana they experimented with corn cob charcoal, which "don't require compression: they come naturally briquett-ized". She pulls some out of her pocket and passes them around, saying that "this is about the most exciting thing in my life right now".

Joshua Prince-Ramus is the architect of the Seattle Central Library (picture right, from the Seattle Times) and the New York director of Rem Koolhaas' firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Prince-Ramus and his colleagues are creating a methodology that clashes with the traditional view of the architect as an artist, focusing instead on what he calls an "hyper-rational" process based on refusing conventions and accepting (and actually building upon) the specific constraints and conditions of each project. He talks about how the Seattle project developed around the idea of "compartimentalized flexibility" (the library is organized around five platform/compartments) in order to take into account future developments that can't be predicted today. And about the new Dallas Performing Arts Centre that OMA is currently designing. For decades, that theatre worked in a provisional space, "which means that they could tear down a wall or so, or work with various formats". The challenge is "to come up with a new building that would allow for continuing this experimentation and flexibility". Their response: a highly flexible/modular "acustic enclosure" that can take many shapes and forms.

Comedian Charles Fleischer closes the session with a hilarious, impossible-to-blog performance.

(tags TED2006 - TED 2006) (TED site  - flickr photos)

TEDprize global ambitions: Activist design, Pangea Cinema Day, and Early Disease Detection

Sixth session of TED2006: running notes.

This is the session where this year's winners of the TEDprize will express their wishes (that's their prize, on top of money - see the background post, with updates on last year's winners).
The winners of this year's TEDprize, are: Cameron Sinclair, the founder of "Architecture for Humanity"; public-health advocate Larry Brilliant (his most recent work is on bird flu), who was just named two days ago executive director of the Google foundation; and Jehane Noujaim, the filmmaker behind "Control Room", the controversial documentary following events at Al Jazeera at the beginning of the Irak war. The prize is presented by Peter Gabriel.

Cameron Sinclair tells his story. In 1999 with a friend he started the organization "to get architects and designers involved in humanitarian work: not only in disaster relief, but in systemic issues. We believe that innovative architecture and design can really make a difference". They worked on housing for returning refugees in Kosovo: they started a website, put out a call, and in a few weeks received dozens of entries from around the world from designers and architects. By 2004, through several projects and "design competitions", the movement grew touching every corner of the world. "At a certain point we couldn't manage the number of people that wanted to help anymore, so we decided to embrace an open-source model of business: everybody in the world could start a local chapter and get involved locally. We used meetUp and other Internet tools, and ended up having 40 chapters and thousands of architects involved in over 100 countries". "There is a grassroots movement of socially responsible designers that believe that we have the opportunity of really get involved and making change". The total staff of AFH is 3 people, all runs through the website. He runs through a few of the projects. Kosovo: transitional shelters that can last 5 to 10 years; design ideas ranged from inflatable house to redesigned shipping container, using rubble from destroyed homes to create new homes. Africa: "within three days of being there we realized that the problem was not housing, it was HIV/AIDS", so they started engaging locals in trying to come up with mobile healthcare clinics, extending them to community centers, or with shelters for HIV-positive kids that are also youth sports centers. Hurricane Katrina: 370 USD easy-to-assemble shelters (compare that with the billions spent by the US government for trailers), 1500 volunteers rebuilding homes, working with residents.
So here comes Cameron's TEDprize wish: "I wish to develop a community that actively embraces innovative and sustainable design to improve living conditions for all". It's a huge vision. "I'm fed up with talking about making change: it's time to do it". Sun Microsystems has already committed to support this project.

Jehane Noujaim is then presented the prize. "What we would like is world peace", she says, but she's not naive. "I would like to talk about a way for people to travel and meet people in a different way". She refers to photography and movies. She tells how she realized, as a teenager, the power of images. And she recounts her motivation for doing the  "Control Room" documentary (in the picture: Josh Rushing, one of the characters in the film, a spokesman who then left the US military and took a job with Al Jazeera). She says she was overwhelmed by the response to the film. "I don't know if a film can change the world, but I believe it has the ability to take you across borders, into another world, and maybe that has the ability to transform". 
How can we use this feeling of transformation to create a movement through film, Jehane asks. Which leads to her TEDprize wish: "Imagine 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. If we can create this global day of film, it can create momentum and provide a platform for independent voices and independent filmmakerrs to get out there". She suggests that the day the world comes together through film could be called Pangea Cinema Day - from the time when all the continents were still together in one single landmass.

Third winner: Larry Brilliant. This is how he summarizes his biography: "I'm the luckiest guy in the world: I got to see the last case of smallpox in the world, and recently in India I may have seen the last cases of polio". How did smallpox get eradicated? "Mass vaccination was not sufficient: early detection and early response are key" - the same applies to polio. Dr Brilliant discusses bird flu, for which, since we don't have a vaccine, early detection and warning systems are crucial. "If the disease evolves to human-to-human transmission, that's not like Katrina: the world as we know it will stop, there will be no airplane flying". He did a private survey of epidemiologists: 15% said that they think there would be a pandemic of bird flu within three years, and 90% that there would be a pandemic in our children or grandchildren's lifetimes.
His TEDprize wish is about early detection and early response: "It is so obvious that the only way to deal with these diseases is to find them early and contain/respond, so my wish is for you to help build an Internet-based global early-warning system to protect us against humanity's worst nightmares. A transparent, non-governmental, open, non owned by any single country or company, multi-lingual system, hosted in a neutral country, built around the existing Global Public Health Intelligence Network GPHIN. Call it INSTEDD: International System for Total Early Disease Detection, and let it be a moral force in the world".

UPDATE 1st March:  a full video webcast of the session is available on the TED site.

(tags TED2006 - TED 2006 -  TED prize) (TED site  - flickr photos)

TEDGLOBAL 2007 will take place in Tanzania

TED has announced today that the next TEDGLOBAL (the conference that I produced in Oxford last year) will take place from the 3rd to the 6th of June 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania. It will go under the theme Africa: the good news. A scolarship will be offered to 100 people from Africa "who are doing the right thing on the ground", in the words of TED curator Chris Anderson. And a fund "of at least 5 million dollars" will be raised for investments in those "right things", managed by Acumen Fund.

TED2006: Skeptics and believers

Fifth session of TED2006 (background): running notes.

Michael Shermer is the editor of Skeptic magazine, a great publication focusing on debunking claims of any kind (para-scientific, religious, commercial, conspiracies, etc) and seeking reasonable clarifications. He's also the author of a book on "Why people believe weird things" and that's the topic of his speech, in which he runs through a number of examples, including absurd beliefs (the Virgin in the cheese sandwich and similar things) and subliminal messages (such as those to be found at Reversespeech).

Follows a musical break with the provocative/funny lyrics of songwriter Stew.

From him to the next speaker the transition is a weird one: because up comes pastor Rick Warren (picture below left) who's probably currently one of the most powerful people in the US after his book, "The purpose-driven life", sold more than 30 million copies - and keeps selling one million tomes per month (TED attendees received a free copy in the "gift bag"). Many people consider him one of the leaders of the US Christian right, but he says that he's also good friend with John Kerry and other Democratic leaders. "A bird needs both wings to fly", he says. (Applause).
He starts his speech saying that he believes the success of the book is due to the fact that "spiritual emptiness is a universal disease". "Many people exist - they fill their life with work, stress, parties, etc - but they don't live". "Questions of meaning are not religious issues: they are human issues". Warren comes across as modest and genuine despite the book-derived riches, fame and power. He says he didn't expect the success, "I don't even consider myself a writer".
But "when the book became the number-one bestseller in the world, I had to ask myself: what is the purpose of this?". He and his wife started by taking five decisions on what to do with the money: not use it on themselves (they still live in the same house and drive the same car); he stopped taking a salary from the church where he is a pastor, and actually added up what he had received in the last 35 years and gave it back; they set up three foundations working on literacy, poverty and pandemic diseases; "and we started reverse tithing", giving away 90% of what they earn: "a good life is not about being good, it is about doing good; significance in life comes from serving, from giving". Then he had to figure out what to do with the notoriety and the attention. He refers back to a passage of the Bible encouraging to speak up for those who have no influence. "What's in your hand?" he asks referring to the Bible verse. "What have you been given - education, creativity, health, income, intelligence, talent, influence, identity - and what are you doing with that? The answer to this question is the purpose of life. It's not about you, it's about making the world a better place". ("It's not about you" is the first sentence in the book).

On for another difficult transition: Dan Dennett is an American philosopher (and professed atheist) who's done some groundbreaking thinking on the nature of consciousness. He goes on stage and says that religions are natural phenomena that have been domesticated and redesigned and adapted over time. "Today's religions are brilliantly designed". But they lack context: "democracy depends on an informed citizenship". He advances a policy proposal: "give education on all the world religions to all children in all schools - a fact-based curriculum about all religions in the world - as we teach reading and writing and maths". With this contextual background "anyone can profess his/her own creed" in an informed way.
Dennett turns to Warren's book: "It's a great book; a brilliant redesign of traditional religious themes, updating them and quietly dropping obsolete parts". But: "I see one problem: the truth will set you free, and some of the bits in the book, I don't think they are true. Some are a difference of opinion: for example, we don't need a belief in God to be good, or to separate right from wrong; there are many good, committed, engaged atheists and agnostics, like there are many believers who hide themselves behind their faith". Warren, says Dennett, seems also "to be arguing that if you want to be moral you have to deny the theory of evolution. Others are not differences of opinion: they're just false", for example the way in which para-scientific language is misused.
Unfortunately Rick Warren has already left the conference to fly back home, so no reply from him.

But Al Gore, who's in the room, stands up to underscore a detail: "Rick Warren was one of 85 evangelical leaders who stood up, broke with president Bush and called for bold policy action to change the government attitude in the fight against global warming".

(tags TED2006 - TED 2006) (TED site  - flickr photos)