Lunch over IP

We're made for zooming

It its newest issue, Newsweek publishes a detailed story on Microsoft's Seadragon technology and the man behind it, Blaise Aguera y Arcas (who premiered it at TED07 last March, watch his speech) and discusses what it calls the "zoom interface":

The Internet, it seems, doesn't take advantage of how humans best process information. Evolution granted Homo Sapiens a high degree of visual acuity ... Scrolling and linking are inferior modes of taking in information. "Humans are incredibly good at spatial navigation and incredibly bad at navigating through a list of generic icons or generic text." ... These limitations are not lost on the technology giants and forward-thinking entrepreneurs working to commercialize a new way to take in information visually: the zoom interface. In its simplest form, it displays information all at once - all the photos in an album, say, or all the files on a PC, or all the entries in a database, or all the items retrieved in a search - and when you spot something of interest, you zoom down into it. In this way, zooming represents an upgrade from the second- and third-best methods for accessing information (scrolling and linking) to the best option: displaying information like a landscape, and giving people the chance to zoom down to the details ... Only recently have engineers had the advances in display technology, broadband connections and video processors capable of coping with a zoom interface. As a result, prototype zoom interfaces are now up and running in labs around the world.

And are arriving on the market. Think of Google Earth's zooming capabilities, of the iPhone, of Jeff Han's PerceptivePixel multi-touch wall (watch his speech at TED06), of Zumobi's zooming interface for cell phones, and many others.

Read the full Newsweek story.

Oster: Cable television is good for women in India

ChicagoU economist Emily Oster went on stage at TED2007 to say that most of what we know about AIDS in Africa is wrong -- and proceeded to show data and graphs to make her case (watch the video of her speech - read the summary). Now she's applied her atypical lens to the effect of the introduction of cable television on gender attitudes in rural India, coming up again with surprising results.

In a recent draft paper (full text in PDF) that she wrote with Robert Jensen of Brown University after a three-years study, she argues that "the introduction of cable television is associated with improvements in women's status" and finds "significant increases in reported autonomy, decreases in the reported acceptability of beating and decreases in reported son preferences", this last point being about sex-selective abortions (rural families prefer boys). They also found "increases in female school enrollment and decreases in fertility (primarily via increased birth spacing)."

The effects are large, the two researchers argue, "equivalent in some cases to about five years of education" within the surveyed population.

These changes are "accomplished despite there being little or no direct targeted appeals" such as public-service announcements. Which brings Oster and Jensen to speculate that "it may be that cable television, with programming that features lifestyle in both urban areas and in other countries, is an effective form of persuasion because people emulate what they perceive to be desirable behavior and attitudes".

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.

A taste of TED, or two

Here is a newly released "taste of TED" video documentary shot at this year's conference, in March. In 7 minutes it gives a great sense of the atmosphere at TED and of the content of the conference. You can also download it here (158 Mb). The first videos of the TED2007 speeches are being released on ted.com.

Another documentary about TED, "The future we will create: Inside the world of TED", which was shot at TED2006, is been shown this coming Saturday night at the Maui Film Festival. Producers Daphne Zuniga and Steven Latham got full access to the conference, and used it wisely to take the viewers behind the scenes -- on top of showing speakers ranging from Al Gore to Peter Gabriel. The full-feature documentary (74 minutes) had a premiere screening in New York a few weeks ago and later in Los Angeles. It has been released on Netflix (US only) last week.

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.

INSTEDD status report: first pilot project

A little over a year after Google.org's Larry Brilliant presented his vision for a network-based global tracking, early warning and rapid-response system for epidemics and disasters (codename INSTEDD - see this previous post for the whole backstory), things are now moving. Brilliant posted last month an update, saying that he has now a staff of 25 at the for-profit/non-profit Google.org, including some real heavy hitters (via Seekerblog). He says:

We are "looking to better understand the inextricable linkages among climate change, global public health and economic development, and the impact of global warming on the poor. We want to fund projects that are making a difference and that are effective on a large scale".

One of those projects is indeed INSTEDD (International Networked System for Total Early Disease Detection). Peter Carpenter, a former executive director of Stanford University Medical Center, has been named INSTEDD president, and Judy Kleinberg its director -- she started by setting up an office in Palo Alto, travelling to the United Nations to enlist partner agencies, and thinking about possible names for the dot-org company, to replace what the Mercury News calls "a tortured acronym". The company has $2.5 million from Google.org this year to get off the ground. The staff members, some of whom work pro bono, are dispersed around the world.

I recently met Larry Brilliant in Oxford and asked him why he has abandoned the idea of building INSTEDD on top of the already-existing Canadian system GPHIN, which he pointed out as the model during his original TED2006 speech (see video or read summary). He told me that he had realized he could build something "way more powerful" in a shorter time by relying on the Google resources and on those of many partners, including technology companies and organizations active in disaster prevention and response.

According to a status report posted on the TED website after the last TED conference, the new system is currently undergoing its first pilot project. Working with the Rockefeller Foundation and NTI (Nuclear Threat Initiative), six countries along the Mekong River (Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Hunan region of China) will do a tabletop exercise about how they would react to a pandemic flu.

Google and sword-swallowing demographer team up to think outside the X and Y axes

Google has acquired Hans Rosling's Trendalyzer software, which the Swedish demographer and his team at Gapminder have developed since 2005 to generate more useful visualizations of facts and figures. Rosling has met the Google founders at TED2006, where he gave a thought-provoking speech on the nature of statistics and the general misinterpretation of them (see short summary and video of that speech). At TED2007 ten days ago he gave another insightful speech, ending it with the now-famous sword-swallowing moment (yes, Rosling is a serious demographer but also -- another deadly serious activity -- one of the few sword-swallowers active in Sweden). Photo Robert Leslie/TED:

Marissa Mayer of Google comments the acquisition on their blog: "Gathering data and creating useful statistics is an arduous job that often goes unrecognized. We hope to provide the resources necessary to bring such work to its deserved wider audience by improving and expanding Trendalyzer and making it freely available to any and all users capable of thinking outside the X and Y axes." The Trendalyzer team will join Google in Mountain View to work on developing the tools; the non-profit Gapminder Foundation -- whose goal is to "to promote a fact-based worldview by bringing statistical story-telling to new levels" -- will instead continue operating out of Stockholm.
(Via IHT Metamedia)

Technorati Tags: Hans Rosling, Google, Gapminder, TED2006, TED2007

TED2007: Conference interstitials

During the TED2007 conference (which took place last week in Monterey -- see all my posts on it) some of the best ads and commercials of the year are traditionally shown as "interstitials" between sessions. Here are two that have been shown this year. First, an Indian tale:

And here the colorful follow-up to one of last year's videos:

TED2007: On doing big and bigger things for love

Running notes from the TED2007 conference in Monterey, California - Session 12: closing session (TED site; backgrounder; past TED videos; other bloggers at TED)

TEDster Eric Kuhne, owner of CivicArts in London, a design and architecture firm involved in major projects around the world, describes a project for a "City of Silk" in Kuwait -- a new city that would house 700'000 people and including a 1001 meters tower. Another TEDster, Steve Nelson of ClearInk, shows the TED venue that was recreated in the synthetic world SecondLife (if you're a secondlifer, here is the SLURL).

Katherine Fulton, president of the strategy consultancy Monitor Institute, talks about "the new philanthropy". Philanthropy is being taken over by a new spirit of creativity and passion. The current philanthropic system is fragmented, frustrating for givers and recipients alike, and no longer attuned to the challenges of the present time. Philanthropy needs to become open, big, fast, connected and geared for the long term.
This is a moment in history when the average person has more power than ever. Five categories of experiences that challenge the traditional assumptions of philanthropy.

1. Mass collaboration (ex: Wikipedia; WIserEarth, the Open Architecture Network launched here at TED on Thursday, etc)
2. Online philanthropy marketplaces (GiveIndia, Kiva, DonorsChoose, GlobalGiving, etc)
3. Aggregate giving (Warren Buffet giving his money to the Gates Foundation instead of going the traditional way that every giver should have his/her own foundation: see this previous post on the "first global philanthropic superpower")
4. Innovation competitions (X-Prize; Earth Challenge: betting that a contest can attract talent and money to some of the most difficult challenges, and speed up the solution)
5. Social investing (Xigi.net: tackles the artificial separation between business and philanthropy)

There are other categories (starting with the Clinton Global Initiative and the TEDprize). Not only philanthropy is reorganizing itself, but also other sectors: business is reorganizing itself. There is a new moral hunger that is growing. We don't have the words to describe this development. "Philanthrocapitalism", "venture philanthropy", "blended value", "natural capitalism", etc are the concepts flying around. She suggests "social singularity", borrowed from the idea of technological singularity where a number of trends follow a path of exponential growth and converge. It may be that social singularity may be something that we fear -- epidemics and migrations and climate change etc all coming together. Because our ability to confront the problems that we face has not kept pace with our ability to create them. Is there a positive, desirable social singularity? Yes, there are seeds of it all around us. What if the philanthropic innovations can combine with each other (and other forces of good) to become catalytic and create lasting breakthroughs to respond to challenges? What if we could really do big and bigger things for love? (She refers here to a quote by Clay Shirky that goes something like this: we used to do small things for love and big things for money; now we are at a time when big things are  also done for love). 

After a comedic interlude by Rives and Ben Dunlap's storytelling performance (he's the president of Wofford College in South Carolina),  the indescribably funny Tom Rielly is tasked (like every year at TED) with the closing wrap-up satire. With his deadpan style, using props and wordplays, Tom leads the audience back through the week and across a half-hour of pure, unadulterated, happy laughter:

Standing ovation. TED2007's over. TED2008 will take place February 28 - March 1 in Monterey.

TED2007: On travelling far without the fuel to come back

Running notes from the TED2007 conference in Monterey, California - Session 11 (TED site; backgrounder; past TED videos; other bloggers at TED)

They Might Be Giants is an American alternative rock duo consisting of John Linnell and John Flansburgh, that has been around for almost 25 years. They play experimental pop with a techie edge, and don't shy away from podcasting their music for free -- their performance opens the fourth day of TED2007.

Explorer Bill Stone is one of those guys that go where others haven't yet: he has founded and led for almost 30 years the US Deep Caving Team (cave exploration - that's him in the picture at right) but he's also an inventor of underwater mapping systems, of autonomous robotic spacecrafts, and wants to mine resources on the Moon.  He takes the audience in an awesome tour of the underworld. Technology has enabled humans to go to places that were previously unexplored and unknown. We can now descend thousands of meters under the Earth, relatively without risk. When he picks people for his team, he looks for competence, discipline, endurance and strength, "but we also value esprit de corps". The deeper you go, the more you run into a conflict with water (underground waterfalls, lakes, siphons). Next year he plans to lead an expedition to the deepest cave of the Americas -- Sistema Cheve in Mexico. It has already been explored down to more than 1 km deep, but they plan to take the exploration to a depth of 2600 meters, 30 km from the entrance of the cave, with the lead crew remaining underground for 30 days straight.
Stone is also involved in the exploration of space, in particular the planned autonomous exploration (by robots) of the sub-surface oceans of Europa, one of the Moons of Jupiter. Because of this hypothesized ocean beneath the ice sheet that covers its surface, Europa is considered one of the most likely places in the solar system to possibly host primitive forms of extraterrestrial life.
Exploring these oceans in space can only be done by autonomous (robotic) probes of course, capable of automated detection, mapping, etc. Which are being developed and tested. For example for the exploration of the world’s deepest known water-filled sinkhole, Cenote Zacatón in Mexico, at a depth of 1000 meters. He shows a clip of the first fully autonomous robotic exploration underground -- producing a 3D rendering of a gigantic underground cave.
By 2016 Stone expects a probe to be sent into Europa. "By 2019 we may have the first evidence of extraterrestrial life". (BG note: the vision is interesting but this seems to me excessively confident). There are three underpinnings for working in space: requirements for transport and places to stay in orbit (both of which are under development), and the final missing piece: a refueling station on orbit. If it existed, it would change all space travel planning and design. Because everything you do in space, you pay by the kilogram. Bringing a bottle of water in orbit costs 10'000 dollars. For further space exploration, we need to figure out ways to move large volumes of payload across space. Stone mentions a little known mission launched by Pentagon 13 years ago to the Shackleton crater on the south pole of the Moon, the floor of which could potentially contain huge quantities of hydrogen in water or ice form.
The traditional approach to space exploration, says Stone, has been to carry all the fuel you need, and to carry everybody back in case of emergency. But to prime the pump, boldness is required: "the first expeditionary team must travel to Shackleton crater without the fuel to come back, and produce it there. It can be done in 7 years, and I intend to lead that expedition. There was a time when people did bold things to open new frontiers. We have collectively forgotten that. Now we are at a time when boldness is required again".

By day Steve Jurvetson (blog) is a Silicon Valley VC but in his spare time he launches rockets. Apparently in the US there is a whole community of rocket hobbyists (that's him on the right in the picture). Dozens of people going off to deserts on weekends to launch homemade rockets (small ones, and big ones, five meters in length). Rockets with significant technology built in, using advanced fuels, etc. Some of them succeed in getting the rockets into orbit. Others fail. He shows pictures and videos of one of these gatherings -- including one of a rocket launch failing, and the rocket coming back smashing into the ground.

Multientrepreneur Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Megastore, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Mobile, and Virgin everything if it was up to him (his group encompasses more than 300 companies, for a total 25 billion USD in revenues and over 50'000 employees) sits down for an interview with TED curator Chris Anderson. They discuss the different businesses, Branson's exploration bug, the risks he has taken (trying to cross the ocean in a hot air balloon for example, and barely surviving), family life, capitalist philanthropy (Branson last year pledged to invest US$ 3 billion into clean energy research, and is involved in projects in Africa and elsewhere). Branson tells anecdotes -- he's funny -- and discusses his approach to business. "I love learning, I'm incredibly inquisitive, I like taking the status quo and turning it upside down. If I fly somebody else's airline and don't like the experience, like it was 20 years ago, I wonder whether I can maybe create the airline that I would like to fly with".
His most recent venture is called Virgin Galactic and wants to take paying customers into space starting in 2009 (their spaceport in New Mexico is designed by another of this year's TED speakers, Philippe Starck).

Neurologist Vilaynur Ramachandran (he goes by "Rama"). How do you study the brain, a "three pounds mass of jelly", out of which comes human consciousness? One way is to study patients with damages to small parts of it, and map that against functions. He discusses his research into brain injuries that leave all functions intact except that you lose the ability to recognize people's faces; or that you feel a presence of a missing arm ("phantom limb"); or you sense numbers as colors or combine other neurological senses (synesthesia).