Lunch over IP

50 million TEDTalks

TED.com, the site of the TED conferences, has just past a major milestone: in the two years after its inception, it has "served" 50 million videos of speeches from TED and from partner conferences. Undoubtedly, as the TED blog says, TEDTalks have become a cultural force and a powerful platform for sharing ideas that matter (changing, in some cases, the speaker's lives: just read this NYTimes story about Jill Bolte Taylor, or this Time entry about Jeff Han -- the "presentation" mentioned was his TEDTalk).

Here are the top 10 TEDTalks so far (there are about 300 more on the TED site, for watching and downloading for free) and, below, a video with highlights of the same talks:

1. Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight
2. Jeff Han: Touchscreen demo foreshadows the iPhone
3. David Gallo: Underwater astonishments
4. Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo
5. Arthur Benjamin: Lightning calculation and other "Mathemagic"
6. Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
7. Hans Rosling: The best stats you've ever seen
8. Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better
9. Al Gore: 15 ways to avert a climate crisis
10. Johnny Lee: Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote

Even if you've seen all these talks, this highlights video is well worth a watch.

A free 200-pages visual account of TED2008

At the TED 2008 conference two weeks ago, visual artists David Sibbet and Kevin Richards worked relentlessly on visualizing the ideas presented by the speakers as part of Autodesk's BIGVIZ project (I blogged about it here).

Their 700 drawings -- in fact, a real-time visual account of the whole conference -- have now been collected into a 200-pages PDF book. You can download it here for free (Caution: it's 50 MB).

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.

InSTEDD update: Building the technologies of outbreak containment and humanitarian action

(Running notes from the InSTEDD update breakfast at TED2008) (UPDATED 10 March 08)

InSTEDD was imagined as his "wish" by TED Prize 2006 winner Larry Brilliant (speech summary and video), when he said that he wanted to "build a powerful early-warning system" which would make use of the Internet and other technologies to detect disease outbreaks, early signs of famine, environmental degradation, water poisoning, bioterror, etc. His goal was to "have the earliest possible warning of all bad things" so that they could be "contained with early response". He called it INSTEDD, for International System for Total Early Disease Detection.

Quite a challenge -- both technologically and socio-politically. Two years have past, and many things have happened in the meantime (including dropping the example that Brilliant had mentioned in his original speech, a Canadian system called GPHIN, and starting tech developments from scratch). Last week, Brilliant and the InSTEDD team hosted a breakfast at TED to update on the idea's progress. The lower-case "n" is not a typo: the project has been renamed Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters, becoming a tech lab for technologies in this field -- and they're working on several of them -- and since January it has been run by Eric Rasmussen, a former US Navy physician and commander with significant disaster-relief experience. (Larry Brilliant is the CEO of Google.org, which is backing InSTEDD).

Running notes on Rasmussen's presentation (thanx PM):
The recent US National Intelligence Council's "Mapping the Global Future" report identified HSN1 -- avian flu -- as a major global risk.
After we assembled the team we talked to a lot of people about their problems/challenges and we found common threads including: geo-referenced imaging, language and translation, unreliable communications, cultural acceptance, lacking essential data. I am going to focus on work around emergent strategic collaboration. To figure out the collaboration, we decided you have to get out on the ground with the people you are working for so you can see what they are dealing with -- if you don't go, you don't know. Collaboration in outbreak containment and humanitarian action is the critical task. You can abbreviate an absolute disaster. People in the field know exactly what they need to do. They don't have the technical wherewithal to do it or the money to hire people who can do it for them. People cannot talk from the places where bad things are happening, because of language and technology issues.

The response/relief agencies can collaborate, if you can give them a way to communicate. (He shows a photo of massive rubble in Banda Aceh.) There are 30,000 bodies in this photo. The only communication we had was SMS, there was only one cell phone tower standing and it took days to get more.

InSTEDD is in the field testing new technologies. Working with the Rockefeller Foundation on the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance Program, assisting efforts in SE Asia (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Yunan Province of China)  to prevent, predict and respond to emergent infectious diseases through improved  information flows. Working in Mekong Basin in Northern Cambodia. Steung Treng Province. It takes 4 hours by dirt road, impossible in monsoon season. Their only ways to communicate: Bikes, on foot, by boat. These people are just as intelligent as anyone in this room, but have no access to communication.
(He mentions last fall's Golden Shadow field simulation in the Bay Area that tested several tools InSTEDD is developing).

Rasmussen goes on to describe several of the technologies being developed/tested:
1. SMS from the field displayed on Google Earth with sender's GPS coordinates; it shows up as a dot on map with a mail icon. Click on that and you can see the full message and/or respond.
2. We put people on rooftops where there isn't cell service with equipment to communicate online via satellite. Use a Ricoh camera with built-in GPS and wireless. The images go straight into the laptop and up on the map.
3. We are working with WHO's Early Warning and Response Network (EWARN), testing synchronizing information for the EWARN database via SMS (using a tool Microsoft has developed that allows cellphone-laptop, laptop-cellphone communication). In many regions with no Internet access, SMS is the fastest channel to get the data out.

4. (He shows a photo of  GATR, an inflatable satellite communications device - photo above) It looks like a beach ball, goes in a backpack and is inflated with a small pump. When I first saw it, I thought there's no way that will stand up in rough conditions. But it does. (Popular Science wrote about his use of it last year). It is not something for long term use, but it's great for short-term emergency outbreaks. We will be taking it soon to Laos. When we went to Banda Aceh, our satellite communications were delayed a few days because we couldn't get the rigid antenna on the (little) plane.
5. Simultaneous IM translation. Works now in 17 languages. Accuracy "not terrible" but improving: around 65-68 percent. But it is IM, so if it is garble, you just message back send again. It is now in use in Iraq and Afghanistan for military and civilian purposes.
6. Spot tracker (bright orange satellite personal tracker, see picture below). Uses GPS. Once activated, it sends a ping every 10 minutes, mapping your movements on Google Maps. Each is numbered. It tells who, what, where and when and it has an emergency"help" button. It can work in a backpack, so you can hide the bright orange color if you need to. The technology costs $150; the subscription, $150 a year. That's nothing.

What we need to do: Solid science is developing around indicators. We need to evaluate these very large data sets we're beginning to assemble.

Rasmussen wraps up with a pitch for a sponsor for a vehicle they want to launch to get this info out, which will be called the Humanitarian Technology Review and will be an electronic newsletter. He says people are willing to help produce it, but they need a sponsor to publish and distribute.

UPDATE 10 March - Mary Jane Marcus, program manager at InSTEDD, gave a speech on "Technologies for Early Disease Detection and Rapid Disaster Response" at the Texting4Health conference at Stanford University on February 29. Her slides, which cover much of the above in details, are now available (PDF 4.3 MB).

TED2008: And The Point?

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session twelve - closing session.)

The session opens with the projection of will.i.am's "Yes We Can" viral video based on Barack Obama's speech. The two producers are in the audience. The video has been seen millions of times, a demonstration of the power of individuals to inflect the political debate:

John Francis calls himself a "planetwalker". From 1983 to 2005, he walked around North and Nouth America carrying a message of respect for the Earth -- and for 17 of those years, he did so without speaking (all while learning a degree in environmental studies and a PhD in land resources). (A profile of him in Sierra magazine).
I've been silent for 17 years. When I first spoke, I turned around to hear my own voice. I want to take you on this journey, even though this one is kind of unusual I want you to think of your own. My journey begain in 1971 when I witnessed two oil tankers collide under the Golden Gate bridge and half a million gallons of oil spilled out. It so disturbed me that I decided to give up driving cars -- and that's quite a big thing in California. People would ask me "What are you doing" and as I said that I was "walking for the environment" they said: "No, you're just doing that to make us look bad, feel bad". I argued so much about that that on my 27th birthday I decided I would give it a rest, and stop talking for one day. It was very moving, because I began truly listening, and it was very sad for me because I realized that until then I had not really been learning. So I decided to do it for another day, and another day, until finally I promised myself that for one year I would keep quiet, and then on my birthday reassess what I had learned. That lasted 17 years. During that time I walked and played the banjo and wrote my journal and tried to study the environment by reading books and go to school. So I did, I walked to Oregon -- 500 miles -- and went into the registrar office and in two years I graduated with my first degree. And then I started walking again, to Washington, then to Montana. I'd written to the University of Montana two years earlier telling them that I would like to go to school there and I would be there in two years. They helped me, figuring out ways for me to get grades despite I didn't have the money and I didn't speak. I went on to the University of Wisconsin, and spent two years there writing about oil spills. And something happened: I was the only one in the US writing about oil spills. I went on, it took me 17 years and 1 day to walk around the US. My journey kept going on. I wrote for the US Coast Guard, I wrote oil spills regulations.
I started talking because I had studied environment at a formal level, but there was an informal level, about people, and what we do and how we are. And environment changed from being about species and trees to be about how we treat ourselves and each other. So I had to spread that message. I still didn't ride motorized vehicles. In my heart I had become a prisoner. The prison I was in was the fact that I did not drive or use motorized vehicles. When I started it seemed very appropriate to me. But at every birthday I asked myself about silence, but I never asked myself about my decision to use my feet. I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me, and I was gonna have to change -- and was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who just walked, that I didn't know who I would be. But I knew I needed to change. Alot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we've gotten to, but there is another place we have to go to, and we have to leave behind the security of who we have become and go go the place of who we are becoming.

Designer Stefan Sagmeister gives a 3-minutes talk about  "Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far".

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written possibly one of the most insightful books of the recent years. In "The Happiness Hypothesis", he brings neuroscience and evolutionary psychology together with some of the biggest ideas of philosophers and religious thinkers of the past, trying to over come the idea that today we know better, and that those great teachers had already discovered some of the true secrets of happiness and of the meaning of life -- and that they are quite coherent with modern science.
He studies morality and emotion in the context of culture: why did we evolve to have morals, and to have different morals? And what about the moral foundations of politics?
Ideology and openness to experience is a discriminant of the way people behave.
What is morality and where does it come from? The worst idea in all psychology is that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Truth is that we come to life already knowing alot. Nature provides a first draft, which then experience revises. Five foundations of morality:

• Harm/care, that makes really bond with ohers, care for others
• Fairness/reciprocity
• Ingroup/loyalty, only among humans very large groups can join together and collaborate
• Authority/respect
• Purity/sanctity

If these are the five best candidates for what's written in the first draft of our moral mind But as kids grow up, how is this first draft being modified? We've put a questionnaire online asking how people (conservatives and liberals) relate to these foundations of morality. Turns out that conservatives consider them very similarly; liberals are more attentive to the first two, less to the other three.
What makes Ingroup, Authority and Purity moral? Order tends to decay. Loyalty is not enough, you need some sort of punishment to get people to cooperate in large group. Traditional morality uses every tool in the toolbox (including suppressing carnality etc) to make people collaborate, seek a higher end. Liberal morality rejects I/A/P. Liberals want change and justice even at risk of chaos; conservatives speak for institutions and traditions, and want order even at some cost for those at the bottom. So both liberals and conservatives have something to offer. Are conservatives and liberals like Yin and Yang? "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease" (Sent-ts'an, c. 700 CE). Compare that to George Bush "with us or against us".
Our righteous minds were "designed" by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams, and to blind us to the truth. As we heard from Samantha Power and her story of Sergio Vieira de Mello, we can't just charge in. Alot of problems we have to solve require that we change other people, and if we want to change them, we need to understand our design, cultivate moral humility, and turn our understanding into a better future for us all.

British rockstar Bob Geldof is the closing speaker. In the late 1970s, Geldof was the leader of the Boomtown Rats, a British punk band. In the 1980s, he became a global activist, organizing Band Aid (to raise funds for the famine in Ethiopia), then, later, LiveAid. In 2005, he threw another giant global concert, Live8, trying to raise awareness for debt relief and poverty reduction. Since, he's become active in alternative fuels and hybrid vehicles, and sees a link between fuel dependency and poverty-creating regimes. He calls TED "the Olympics of unreasonable people".
There can't be evolution of thought without differences, without challenges. Society needs to constantly test itself in order to get that change. Science can take us only so far. In the modern age, people are made a fetish of progress almost as an antidote of nihilism; we must believe that we're moving forward, but sometimes science only adds a twist to a normal madness. I encountered that normal madness back in 1984, millions of people dying of poverty and hunger. In Europe, we paid taxes to produce food that we would never eat, and to destroy it. Eight miles south of Europe lied Africa, and 30 million people were dying of want, most very young. I was shocked, and I just thought that it wasn't enough to do the usual dollar-in-the-box- I travelled around Africa and then went on TV and said that dying of want in a world of surplus was morally repulsive and also economically illiterate.  The lingua franca of the planet is not English, it's rock and roll, so we began that dialog in 1985. If the impulse of one human being to help another is not critical to the human spirit, then what is? The act of putting a dollar in the save-the-children box is a political act. It's almost the political equivalent of the butterfly effect. If there are enough dollars, policy changes. If we are de-sensitized to the suffering of others something withers, something's gone, some part of humanity is lost. But it drove me mad, there was no need for this to happen; poverty is an empirical condition.
Africa will transform itself through technology, and the tech that will do it is the mobile phone.
All of these things that happened to me are wrapped up in this idea: back in 1985 I trawled across the misery of others. I was in Niger. A politician told me: there were 300 separate languages here, and they're gone. We can't let that continue (see also Wade Davis' speech). There is a great mapping of mankind to be undertaken, and that's what I'm gonna do, with photos, music, film, text, and then we're going to map the unfolding narrative of us, and we will watch ourselves unfold. Culture is the narrative of man, not politics. Human cultural diversity is as important to the life of the intellect as biological diversity is to nature. I want to build a Dictionary of Man, I want you to help me do so.

This is the last TED in Monterey. Final show of TED2008, life from TED@Aspen, with singer Jill Sobule and comedians Rives, Zé Frank and the Raspyni Brothers.

The next TEDs:

TEDAfrica: Cape Town, South Africa, 29 September - 1 October 2008. Theme: "What If?" Information and registration here.

TED2009: Long Beach, California, 4-7 February 2009. Theme: "The Great Unveilling". It's already sold out.

TEDEurope: Oxford, UK, 22-24 July 2009. Theme: "The Substance Of Things Not Seen". Registrations will open soon. The first TEDGlobal was held in Oxford in 2005.

TEDGlobal: Mumbai, India, November 2009. Details will follow.

What a week! Time to pack and off to SFO. Find all my posts from TED2008 here -- and of course those of the other TED bloggers. Bye!

TED2008: How dare we be optimistic?

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session eleven.)

Ben Kaufman, founder of Kluster, goes on stage to tell what he and his team have been doing -- with the help of TED attendees and 1200 people around the world -- since the beginning of the conference. Kluster is an online collaboration and decision-making platform. They set out Wednesday morning to develop a product, with some basic guidelines but "we didn't know what it would be". They set up a studio in the conference's venue, and got 208 ideas submitted in 24 hours. Collaboratively, it was decided that it would be an education board game; the content for it was developed; a name chosen ("OverThere" -- the logo was submitted by a participant online); the rules set; a tagline developed; a full prototype developed (photo). 72 hours, 1200 participants, a board game "of social awareness" collectively invented, developed and prototyped: a pretty awesome piece of work.

Johnny Lee does research on human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University -- and explains it via videos on YouTube. He goes on stage for a short talk explaining how at the tip of the Nintendo Wii remote controller there is a rather sophisticated infrared camera, and Johnny shows how, by pointing it to a projection screen or LCD display, you can create a low-cost white board; because the camera can see multiple dots, it becomes a multitouch screen as well. The audience goes: "wow!", and indeed what Johnny does is really cool. See the demos on his site.

Economist Paul Collier has written one of the most interesting books of last year, "The Bottom Billion", identifying the traps that keep many countries in poverty and outlining new ways to development through a mix of direct aid and investment. He is the director of the Center for the Study of the African Economies at Oxford.
A billion people have been stuck living in economies that have been stopped for 40 years. So the question is: how can we give credible hope to that billion people. That's in my mind the fundamental challenge of development. Two forces that change the world for good: and enlightened of self-interest. Compassion because a billion people are living in societies that can't offer credible hope; enlightened of self-interest because of that economic divergence continues for another 40 years it will lead to disaster.
What does it mean to get serious about providing hope for the bottom billion? A good guide is: what did we do last time the rich world got serious about developing another region of the wold? That goes back to the 1940s: the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Europe, financed by the rich US. It was not only compassion: it was also enlightened self-interest by America, because in Europe country after country was falling into the Soviet sphere of interest. What else did America do? Before the war the US had been very protectionist; after the war, total reversal of trade policy with the general agreement on tariffs and trade. Before the war, US had an isolationist security policy; after the war, posted troops in Europe. Before the war, the US treated national sovereignty so stringently that it didn't even want to join the League of Nation; after the war, position reversed.
Aid, trade, security, and governance. That frontier is still there. We need to be at least as serious as we were there.
Let's focus on governance. The opportunity we're going to look to is a genuine basis for optimism about the bottom billion: the commodity boom. It's pumping an unprecedented amount of money into many -- not all -- of the countries of the bottom billion. Partially because community prices are high, partly because there is a range of new discoveries and explorations. Between them, these new revenue flows dwarf aid. How is that gonna help development? What is the relationship between high commodity prices of exports and the growth of commodity-exporting countries. In the short time, the first 5-7 years, it's great. Everything goes up. But in the long run, it reverses -- "the resource curse". The critical issue is the level of governance. In fact, if you got good enough governance, there is no resource curse: you go up in the short term, and even more in the long run. Nigeria is worst off than if it never had oil. There is a threshold level of governance. Is the bottom billion above or below that threshold? Maybe we can be more optimistic
Democracy makes even more of a mess of the resource boom that autocracies. There are two distinct aspects of democracy: electoral competition, that determines how you acquire power, and checks and balances which determines how you use it. What the countries at the bottom billion need is very strongly checks and balances. They have elections, but not c-and-b. We should have some international standards, which would be voluntary but would spell out the basic needs. We know these standards because we already have one: the international extraction revenues transparency. It requires that governments report to their populations the revenues of extraction.
What would the content be of these international standards? How to take the resources out of the ground, how to sell the rights for resource extraction. Now, a company flies in, make a deal with a minister, that's great for the company and often for the minister, but rarely for the country. There is a piece of institutional technology that can work: verified auctions. Like the British Treasury sold wireless 3G licenses back in the early 2000 (the full story of that auction here - PDF). If we can create such standards, we can help the people in these societies.
And yet, we've not got these rules. If you think about, the cost of promulgating international rules is very low. Why are they not there? Because until we have a critical mass of informed citizens in our own societies, politicians will get away with gestures -- things that look good but don't work. We have to go through the business of building an informed citizenry. That's why I wrote an economic book that you can read on a beach.

Eric Kuhne, architect and planner from London, gives a short talk about a new city project in the Middle East, where symbolism and urban planning interact. Architecture has become a new diplomacy. We want to restore the storytelling qualities of cities. A city has been and always will be the greatest work of art.

Singer-songwriter-producer-activist Nellie McKay is next, toying with antique genres yet producing music that's unequivocally contemporary.

Three-minutes speech by Andy Hobsbawm is one of the founders of The Green Thing, a London-based online community that encourages people to behave more sustainably, one small step at a time, through information and fun. I've already blogged it here and here.

Last year was quite a year for former US vice-president Al Gore. He was awarded the Nobel prize for Peace (together with the IPCC), won an Oscar for his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth", and saw the theme of climate change gain center stage in the political and social discussion. He has spoken previously at TED, in 2006 (watch the video).
He has a new speech related to his last book, "The Assault On Reason", which will also be turned into a documentary.
"I was reminded by Karen Armstrong's presentation that if religion is not really about belief but about behaviour, maybe we should say the same thing about optimism. Optimism is often represented as an intellectual posture -- Gandhi's "You must be the change you wish to see in the world". But when we change our behaviour in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the democracy and citizen part. In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis, and we have one. There is a bridge between the climate crisis and the crisis of extreme poverty in our world. We have to find a unified Earth theory. The struggles of climate change and extreme poverty and diseases are connected to the problems of overconsumption, wastefulness, economic transformation. We have to approach this as a unified challenge. Local, regional, global conflicts: each level requires a different allocation of resource, organizational model, etc. The climate crisis is the rare and strategic global conflict, we have to organize our response accordingly (BG: I partially disagree). What we do with the poorest countries matters to all of us. We have to act. Since that post-war economic boom, one aspect of the engine of economic growth was a pattern of consumption that morphed into overconsumption. The solution to the climate crisis requires that we replace that engine -- consumption without overconsumption. We need a worldwide movement. But the political will needs to be mobilized in order to mobilize the resources.
Gore discusses (and shows convincing images about) the melting of the Arctic icecap and the thawing of permafrost in the North; peak fishing; emissions.
Venus and the Earth have roughly the same size. On Earth, carbon is trapped. On Venus, it's in the atmosphere -- and temperatures reach 855 degrees F.
The majority of Americans now think that climate change is a problem, that warming is real. But there still isn't a sense of urgency. (He shows a video -- a frame at left -- with elephants falling from the sky, "every year the US emits CO2 for the equivalent weight of 1.2 billion elephants: It's time to stop ignore 1.2 billion elephants in the room").
Solution: put a price on carbon. We need a CO2 tax, revenue-neutral, to replace taxation on employment, which was invented by Bismarck and some things have changed since. In the poor world we have to integrate responses to poverty with solutions to the climate crisis. Responses can make a huge difference. Think of the "energy super grid" with solar energy produced in North Africa by solar and the energy sold to Europe (picture below). If you invest in tar sands, you have a subprime portfolio.

780 US cities are now supporting Kyoto.
We heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so commonplace that it becomes banal routine. What we need is another hero generation. Those of us who are alive in the US today, but also in the rest of the world, have to somehow understand that history has presented us with a choice. Just as Jill Taylor was figuring out how to save her life while she was distracted by the amazing stroke that she was witnessing.We now have a culture of distraction but we have a planetary emergency. We need to find a way to create a sense of generational mission.   We have the capacity to do it. I'm optimistic, because I do feel very deeply that the kind of moving spirit that is celebrated in so many of the sessions that we've all been moved by here is alive in all of us. I believe we have the capacity at moments of great challenge to set aside the causes of distraction and rise to the historic challenges. Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying "this is so terrible, what a burden". Let's reframe that: how many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts, a challenge that can pull from us more that we knew we could to. We ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generation about which 1000 years from now orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying: they were the ones that found within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future. Let's do that.
Chris Anderson asks Gore whether he is excited by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's environmental plans. Gore: We should feel grateful that both of them and John McCain, all three have a position on the climate challenge, have offered leadership and an approach very different from the current administration. But the campaign dialog -- often sponsored by the "clean coal" industry btw -- has not laid the basis for the kind of bold initiative that is really needed. They're saying the right things, and whoever of them is elected may do the right things. But when I came back from Kyoto in 1997 with a great feeling, and then confronted the US Senate and only a handful were willing to ratify that treaty: whatever the politicians say needs to be alongside what people say. The climate challenge is part of the fabric of our life. Changing the pattern is beyond anything we've done in the past. Change light bulbs, but change the politics too. I do believe that between now and November it is possible that the debate will get bolder. We can change things, actively. What's needed really is a higher level of consciousness, and it's hard to create, but it's coming. As the African say: if you want to go quickly go alone, if you want to go far go together. We have to go far quickly.

TED2008: Visual blogging

While many people at TED blog away in words and photographs, two artists -- Kevin Richards and David Sibbet -- are immersed in another form of conference blogging. They are the magic hands (and, given the intensity of this conference, brains) behind the TED BIG VIZ, a project to visually record and synthetize the ideas of TED speakers. Kevin and David create in almost-real-time spontaneous sketches of the speeches using the Autodesk Sketchbook Pro software on Wacom Cintiq graphic tablets. Their drawings are then presented and organized on a Perceptive Pixels big multi-touch computer screen (Perceptive Pixels is the company founded by past TED star speaker Jeff Han). Totally cool. Here are some of their drawings:

They can be navigated in multiple ways, expanded, enlarged, etc:

Here is their "visual post" on Craig Venter's speech:

And here what they did with Amy Tan's:

TED2008: More video interstitials

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California.)

Short videos of various nature -- be it art or ads -- but all interesting or original or fun or surprising -- or all of the above -- are used at TED as interstitials, between speeches or between sessions. I posted two the other day. Here a few more that were showed since:

Dove's "Onslaught" for their Campaign for Real Beauty:

Guinness' "Tipping Point Domino", by Rube Goldberg (like the Honda Accord ad of a few years ago, inspired by the great Fischli&Weiss "The Way Things Go" of twenty years ago)

Sony Bravia's "Rabbits" ad:

Sony's "Walkman" ad, by agency Fallon:

TED2008: What Stirs Us?

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session ten.)

Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies romantic love -- its evolution, its biochemical foundations, and its importance to human society. She gave a talk at TED2006 (watch the video). Her current research is on why we fall in love and how.
In the jungle of Guatemala, she says, stands a temple. It was built by the king of the Mayas, who was buried under it when he died. Mayan inscription proclaims that he was deeply in love with his wife, so he built a temple on her honor facing his. The sun rises behind one and sets behind the other: after 30'000 years these two people still kiss from their tombs. Anthropologists have not find any society that doesn't know love.
Have you ever been rejected by somebody you really loved? Have you ever dumped someone who really loved you? About 97% of people, men and women, say yes to those questions. Romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations on Earth. We are currently looking at the data of brain scans of people that have just been dumped, and we find alot of activity in the region associated with romantic love. We found activity in other brain regions also, in one associated with calculating gains and losses.
What have I learned? Romantic love is a universal human drive -- not the sex drive -- that it allows you to focus your energy into a single energy. Of all the poems, Plato: "the God of love lives in the state of need". Love is a need, like hunger and thirst. I have come to believe that romantic love is also an addiction. It has all of the characteristics of an addiction, you focus on a person, you obsess about him/her, you need to see more of her/him. Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances  on Earth.
Animals also love. There is not a single animal on this planet that would copulate with anything that comes along, unless you're stuck in a lab cage. I've looked at 100 species and everywhere in the wild animals have favorites.
Our newest experiment -- putting people who report they're still in love in a long-lasting relationship into the functional MRI. And we find the same data, that region of the brain still becomes active 25 years later.
Why do you fall in love with one person rather than another? Match.com came to me three years ago and asked me that question, and I've researched it ever since. Psychologists tell you that we tend to fall in love with people with the same general level of intelligence, good looks, values, social status, but we don't know what makes two personalities really stick together to form a stable couple. I've concocted a questionnaire to analyze -- through biochemical analysis --  who chooses whom to love.

David Griffin is the director of photography for the National Geographic magazine -- the Vatican of photography. On his blog, Editor's Pick, he discusses the creation of the extraordinary photos published in the magazine.
He starts by showing some great -- truly awesome -- pictures by NG photographs, including the iconic portrait of the "Afghan Girl", Sharbat Gula (picture right) photographed by Steve McCurry and who did the NG cover in 1985.
Last year NG has added a section to their website ("Your Shot") where anyone can submit photographs to be considered for publication -- and it has been a runaway success. Everyone of us has one or two great photographs in us, but to be a great photojournalist you need to take great photos all the time.
Griffin goes on to tell great stories of photojournalism: in African national parks, in Indian slums, underwater in Baja California and New Zealand, in Chinese jellyfish markets, in the military medical system in Irak, etc.
Photography can be used to address our biggest issues. But sometimes photojournalism is just plain interesting or fun. Photography can make a real connection to people, and can be employed as a positive agent to understand the challenges and opportunities facing us today.

Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize and advocate of the private exploration of space.
When I met Stephen Hawking (who spoke on Wednesday at TED), he told me his dream was to travel into space. I told him I could not take him there, but I could take him to weightlessness. The way to do so is through parabolic flights (fly up, then go into free fall, which gives you a few dozens seconds of weightlessness). And so we brought Stephen Hawking there (picture left - see video).

Chris Abani is a Nigerian writer and political activist (twice imprisoned and tortured in his country). His 2004 novel "GraceLand" is a bitterly funny tale of a young Nigerial Elvis impersonator in Lagos. Abani was a speaker at TEDGLOBAL in Tanzania, last year.
My search is to find stories of everyday people that transcend us, that don't look away at the reality: we are never more beautiful than when we are ugly. What I've come to learn is that the world is never seen in the grand gestures, but in the accumulation of the simple, soft, selfless acts of compassion. In South Africa they say "Ubuntu": the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. Which means that there is no way for us to be human without other people.
So Abani tells stories of people. People standing up to soldiers wanting to kill them. People being compassionate. People being human, reclaiming their humanity, recognizing that we are surrounded by amazing people, who offer all of us the mirror to a whole humanity.

Benjamin Zander has been for almost 30 years the conductor of the Boston Philarmonic -- and a speaker on leadership. He uses music to help people open their minds.
"There are people that think that classical music is dying, and others who think that we haven't seen anything yet. Rather than going into statistics of orchestras dying, we should do an experiment." He is on stage with a piano, and uses it to play Chopin and tell stories of musical learning and amazement, walking around on stage and down into the audience, and at the end of his speech, he gets the TEDsters to stand and sing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". (They distribute the text written phonetically, but as a German speaker, I can't read it -- I'd never realized that if you speak a language, it's very difficult to read its phonetic rendering -- so I have to look up the original text: "Freude, schöner Götterfunken...")

TED2008: What will tomorrow bring?

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session nine)

Jim Marggraff gives a demo of the Livescribe smartpen, which looks like a big pen but has two microphones to record sound, a speaker to play it back, a small display and the capacity to capture handwritten notes and drawings in digital form. So it can record what you write and simultaneously it captures the surrounding sounds/voices. It requires a special paper with "buttons" and navigational tools. It can also be loaded with other features, like on-the-fly translation (click on a word in a language and the pen spells it out on the display and by voice in the other desired language), interactive books, and more.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the author of "The Black Swan", one of the most influential current books (first chapter available here). In it, he argues that it's the random, unlikely and unexpected events ("black swans") that generally have the most extraordinary impacts on the future and our ability to model and decide what the future will be -- and that our blindness with respect to this randomness has a price. Taleb -- a former Wall Street trader -- classifies numerous events as part of the "black swan" phenomenology, including the emergence of Google and the  9/11 attacks, Viagra and the Macintosh, the Beatles and Harry Potter.
"The law of large numbers tells you that when the number is very large, no single element can make a difference. That's why if you take 1000 persons chosen randomly and add the heaviest person in the world, that person will represent only a tiny fraction of those 1001 people's total weight.  But take 1000 persons randomly chosen, and add the richest person in the world: that person would represent almost all the wealth in that group of 1001. This is the difference between mediocristan (the former) where things fit neatly under a bell curve, and extremistan (the latter) where extreme phenomenons are dominant.
Why are we moving into extremistan. The information age will be dominated by winner-take-all effects. Take books: a few dozen of them represent half the sales. We have to have alot of respect for the unobserved. Experts often can't predict because they miss on large deviations, that extreme outcomes and major discontinuities are so rare that we can almost ignore them.
I advocate the following: don't disturb a complex system, don't mess with it. Complex systems know about probability more than us. Consider WW2 or Irak: we don't see the link between action and consequences. We don't understand nature. This advocates conservatism.
Plato and Karl Marx tried to teach us to use our knowledge to make decision; and I'm trying to convince them to use our lack of knowledge -- our ignorance and our awareness of it -- to make decisions. We're never gonna understand the world, or the climate: all we can is focus on our decision process and try not to mess with complex systems.

Chris Anderson -- the editor of Wired magazine -- has just published a must-read cover story on "Free", which is a sort of preview of his next book, about "Freeconomics". He talks 3 minutes about developing small, cheap (less than 100 USD) blimps, fitted with sensors, infrareds, etc, that can fly indoors."

Peter Schwartz is a specialist in drawing roadmaps of the future. He is a co-founder of the Global Business Network think-tank. His last book, "Inevitable Surprises", champions quick thinking and adaptability in a world in flux.
"The future isn't what it used to be. I'm amazed that many of the most prosperous, most successful people in the world have become pessimistic about the future. People have lost confidence. Why have we lost confidence in the future? The future is more uncertain. There are really 4 big questions for the future and if we find an answer we can have a better sense of the future:

• War: Will there be a big world war involving US/China/islamic world/India/Russia? (Schwartz's answer: war is unlikely, too much common interests among countries)
• Prosperity: Will the global economic growth we have seen in the second half of the 20th century continue? (Yes, says Schwartz, but it's the spread of knowledge and the ability to use that knowledge productively that mattes, yet he makes his point by comparing Singapore and Nigeria, which of course aren't really comparable)
• Equity: Will the fruits of economic growth be relatively evenly spread? (Yes, he says, hundreds of millions of people are likely to climb out of poverty in the next 15 years in BRIC countries)
• Environment: Will we be available to achieve growth in an ecologically sustainable manner? (Schwartz answers through Paul Ehrlich's equation: environmental impact = population x affluence x technology (i=pxaxt). Population won't double again, will reach 9 billion and plateau. Affluence is going to go up. So the real lever is technology; Craig Venter is the James Watt of our era, Stamets' fungi in the previous session was very inspiring, we will see a transition to a bioindustrial era, there is a good chance that we will be able to make the world richer without destroying the environment).

Gregory Petsko is a professor of biochemistry at Brandeis University, gives a 3-minutes speech. Unless we do something, he says, over the next 20 years we are going to see an epidemics of neurologic diseases -- because of population aging. Neurological diseases for which we don't have  a cure yet (such as Alzheimers) already cost  half a trillion dollars, and that cost will improve rapidly.

In Western countries, few women die of cervical cancer: regular exams catch it early. But in poorer countries, it's one of the top causes of cancer death for women. Harvard's Sue Goldie applies decision science and cost-benefit analysis to finding ways to model public health scenarios and make decisions about where to best spend limited resources.
Consider three viruses of public health importance: HIV, Hepatitis B and C, and Human Papilloma Virus. HPV, which leads to cervical cancer, is the most common viral sexually-transmitted disease in the world. Fighting it has been a success in some countries in the world, and a failure in others, mostly poor. There are several alternatives: low-tech screening, high-tech screening, vaccine (which is the most expensive). What's the optimal program? Her model for cervical cancer, which she describes in details, shows that a simple exam done once in a patient's lifetime would reduce the death rate by a third. But the consequences of delaying access to cures will be enormous (million of deaths).

TEDster Felix Kramer, founder of the California Cars Initiative, gets 3 minutes to talk about plug-in hybrids. Electricity is cheaper, cleaner and domestic (BG: as long as it is produced from renewables). We can have plug-in hybrids today, with no new technology, just converting existing cars by adding a battery, that you can charge overnight from an ordinary socket, and if you want to go to the mountains you still have the fuel engine. The planet can't wait for perfection.

Larry Burns of GM presents the self-driving Chevy SUV that has won the Darpa Urban Challenge last year (see this previous post or the Wikipedia page). He shows a video of the car, and it's really impressive. It's on display at TED:

Walter Isaacson, the director of the Aspen Institute, has written a few magistral biographies of great men: Benjamin Franklin and, more recently, Albert Einstein. He's speaking from TED@Aspen, which the Institute is hosting in its Doerr-Hosier Center.
What could the future hold for the art of narration? Narration is about making sense of the world, connecting the dots. In the past 15 years narrative has been dismissed, as in "imposing a narrative on events". But those of us that believe in narrative think that we are weaving a narrative. It works not only in novels and fiction, but in all sectors of life. One of the salient characteristics of most narratives is that they tend to be chronological. In fact, perhaps the greatest of all narratives begans with the most simple three words, "In the beginning" (Bible). So they tend to be linear. Now that we are entering a digital -- interactive, hypertextual, collaborative -- age, how do we preserve the beauty of narrative? A long time ago, narrative was interactive and collaborative storytelling process, and over the years and decades the story evolved, and that applies to most great narratives of the ancient times (the Song of Roland) to plays (the interplay between actors and public at the Globe theatre), etc. Then something happens, the invention of the printing press, and that makes narrative less collaborative, less iterative, less interactive process. It makes narrative more carved in stone (or written on paper). So this notion of a broadcast-type phenomenon, where we have a centralized production of a narrative that goes out to a mass audience, begins with the invention of the printed press. The same with movies, with broadcast television. With the digital age, can we restore the great qualities of narrative of time past? So far, alot of what we have done is old wine poured  into old bottles. As wonderful as YouTube can be is still people producing videos and finding a new distribution channel. Likewise most websites. We haven't really changed the essence of what narrative can be in the digital age. Where do we see glimmers of the new narrative? In the wiki phenomenon, where people collaborate. My next book will be an experiment in this, not only a multimedia product but also which allows people to add their own thoughts and informations, an always-evolving book. No idea what the business model will be, but that's probably how the Iliad and the Odyssey were written.

Comedian Zé Frank closes the session with a hilarious standup routine.