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Post TED thoughts - Sunday 8th of February

It is all over - TED@Palm Springs is over for another year and this is the time to reflect on the experience.

I have met some great people and hopefully some of those connections will continue post the conference. My own view is that the venue isn't quite as 'intimate' as last year somehow, the production was slicker than last year although the speakers maybe weren't quite as enlightening and entertaining somehow. THis could just have been that I had very high expectations or that things are never as good the second time around!

I am so glad that I didn't go to Long Beach as from all the reports that we had was that it was too bid which means that the conversations don't flow as easily as they do in the smaller venue. There was a real energy at Palm Springs and certainly I felt part of 'the crowd'.

Whether I will blog next year is an interesting question - is it of value> I am not sure - I guess I do it for me rather than others, however I have been averaging around 200 - 300 per day visiting the site. This year the blog has been much more stream of consciousness and I haven't had time to do the insight bit at the end of the day as I did in Aspen last year. Maybe I will get round to that later this week.

Will I come next year when I have to pay for it myself? I will book on Monday.

TED is one of the only places that you can get exposure to this level of thinking and these type of people. I am contemplating also attending TED in Oxford in July although at $4500 it is expensive - it will depend I guess if I have any work when I return to the UK in June!

What are your thoughts?

Post TED thoughts - Sunday 8th of February

It is all over - TED@Palm Springs is over for another year and this is the time to reflect on the experience.

I have met some great people and hopefully some of those connections will continue post the conference. My own view is that the venue isn't quite as 'intimate' as last year somehow, the production was slicker than last year although the speakers maybe weren't quite as enlightening and entertaining somehow. THis could just have been that I had very high expectations or that things are never as good the second time around!

I am so glad that I didn't go to Long Beach as from all the reports that we had was that it was too bid which means that the conversations don't flow as easily as they do in the smaller venue. There was a real energy at Palm Springs and certainly I felt part of 'the crowd'.

Whether I will blog next year is an interesting question - is it of value> I am not sure - I guess I do it for me rather than others, however I have been averaging around 200 - 300 per day visiting the site. This year the blog has been much more stream of consciousness and I haven't had time to do the insight bit at the end of the day as I did in Aspen last year. Maybe I will get round to that later this week.

Will I come next year when I have to pay for it myself? I will book on Monday.

TED is one of the only places that you can get exposure to this level of thinking and these type of people. I am contemplating also attending TED in Oxford in July although at $4500 it is expensive - it will depend I guess if I have any work when I return to the UK in June!

What are your thoughts?

TED@Palm Springs 2009 - Day 3 Saturday

The last day of the TED conference and surprisingly we have rain again! ANother amazing evening last night at the Palm Springs Museum where we watched a documentary on a Fixer in Afghanistan which was funded through the Gucci Foundation. It was disturbing in many ways but also provocative.

There was a short discussion on the future of TED - how it should evolve for next year.

This morning Session 11 is on the topic of PREDICT.

Nate Silver is a statistician who developed a system using baseball stats who is now using the system to predict many other areas including the election.

Barack Obama got more popular votes than any other election in history. What is the matter with Arkansas? When voting was Race a factor in exit poles from the election people were asked if race was a problem in Louisiana 21% said it was a factor meanwhile in California only 3% said it was a problems.

The question is is Racism predictable? In deciding your vote for the president what factors have predictive relationships - Education - low education has an impact on racism, the second factor is whether they are living in Rural or Urban communities - if you live in a rural community racism is more likely to be a factor.

One question was around interracial marriage - where there are mixed race communities they is less resistance to this.
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Alex Taborrak from George Mason University who is an Economist.

The future of economic growth. Look beyond our current events by looking at the past. The beginning for the century had the first world war, the recession, the second world war, the rise of the communist state - these all threw up walls. It wasn't until the second half of the twentieth century that we broke these wall down and we started to globalize and collaborate. All of this has been tremendous for the world - trade is booming, growth is now extending to almost all parts of the world.

China growing at 10% pa and has the biggest poverty reduction program. Africa has been the most resistance to growth. The best is yet to come and it is new ideas that are driving growth - coupled with reducing manufacturing growth.

One apple feeds one man, one idea can feed the world!

Larger Markets saves Lives - particularly in drug production and prevention.

If India and China were as rich as the US the incentive for cancer drugs would be huge.

How can we maximize the advantage - one idea can serve one world, one market.

How can we generate more ideas? In the world today less than 1/10th of 1% of the population is a scientist or an engineer. The US has become less of an idea leader.If the world was as wealthy as the US there would be five times as many.

If we think if the world as a mass of potential processes then up to now many of them have been off-line, however we are starting to see China and India coming on-line. The economy of ideas is stimulated as other countries become rich, this creates the demand for ideas and the new talent creates the creation of solutions.

Looking at the great depression. Growth washed away the great depression. If you had predicted from prior to the 1930's you would have forecasted a particular modest growth, however although it went through a cliff edge the actual growth is significantly great than could have been predicted through normal growth.

Keep globalizing world markets and keep investing in education. If we are going to stimulate and capitalize in ideas we need to invest in these two areas.

Be optimistic, spread the ideas, spread the light.
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Pete Alcom - Apples iTunes Directory leader.

We are now 150 years from a new enlightenment - the world will top out at 10 billion by the end of the century and then will probably decline. Few people on a lot of land will make investment in property a bad thing. Declining population means less labour which increases demand particularly for those in poverty.

Most of our current heritage is based on looking to the past. Human civilization is a slide from the good old days and we will start romanticizing the future again. Fear for the future leads to some rash decisions. Our great, great grandchildren will be planning for a 22nd future of enlightenment.
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Bruce Bueno de Mesquita about predicting the future.

This is a transcript only and certainly I found the presentation very annoying!

If you can predict the future you can change the future. Predictions are done by many ways and all of them don't work.

How to predict based on how Iran is going to do over the next few years. We are going to use science and hen we can engineer it. Using Game Theory by using Math. It assumes that people

• are rationally self- interested,
• have values and beliefs,
• face limitations.

What is rationality? Most people are rational apart from two year olds!

Who has influence in the world - if you show corporations what is in it for them they will do whatever you want. There is a whole hierarchy of the influencers when you consider the president at the top of a pyramid of influencers.

What do we need to know we predict. Who has a stake in the decision, what do they say they want, how focussed they are on the problem in hand, how big a deal is it to them. By using these factors we can predict they care about the outcome and they want to get credit for whatever it is they have done or are going to do.

What don't we need to know is history.

Where do we get this information - Internet, experts, economists etc.

In Iran it looks like that there will build enough weapons grade fuel to know that they can do it but not enough to build a bomb by the beginning of 2010. So there will probably be enough political power to build a bomb by 2011.

There are groups within the political landscape which are starting to resist the changes in the country.

Everything is not predictable, however most complicated negotiations are predictable through Game Theory.

If you can predict what people can do, you can engineer what they do, and you can get better results and maybe change the world.

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Nicholas Negroponte in 1982 suggested the one laptop per child idea

The Netbook will soon be responsible for 50% of the market. What is happening with the OLPC project. Feb 2009 status - 750,000 in the hands of kids today. Kids are teaching there parents how to read and write. Commercial markets will try and stop you!

Next phase is to build something that everyone copies within the next 3 years. open source hardware from beginning to end. OLPC > olpc.

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The next and last main speaker of the session is author of 'predictable irrational', Dan Ariely.

Predictable Irrationality his interest started when he was burned very badly and spent a lot of time in hospital. He watched how nurses took bandages off - the nurses thought that it was ripping off the bandage rather than taking time - and therefore less pain for him.

Three years later he started studying at University and if you have a question you can address this through abstract ways. He went to the hardware store and bought a vice and squidged peoples fingers and asking people how much pain there was and which did they prefer. The outcome was that he found that the nurses in the hospital were wrong - they should have started at the face which would have been more painful and then moved to the legs to give a sense of things getting better over time.

Cheating is a topic of interest. He gave people a blank sheet of paper and give them 20 questions and not enough time to complete it and paid $1 per right answer. He then asked people top shred the paper after they had finished and tell him how many they got right - on average they told him twice as many as they had actually got right. They were cheating. Was the risk a factor? Was the amount of money they got a factor?

What could be going on? We want yo feel god about ourselves and if we cheat we still want to feel good about ourselves. We called this the fudge factor. How could this be measured he asked people to remember 10 books and the 10 commandments. With the books people cheat with the 10 commandments they never cheated.

He put coca-cola in registers in MIT and watched how many coke cans were taken, he repeated the experiment with $1 bills - no bills were ever taken. However people were selling the cans for cash - they felt one step removed from cheating.

Where someone from our 'group' or 'tribe' is seen to cheat it becomes OK for the rest of the group to cheat. If someone outside our group or tribe cheats we cheat less. When you think about this in terms of the stock market - when we remove the actual cash from the transaction by calling it stocks or derivatives etc. people are more likely to cheat - particularly if their 'tribe' is seen to be cheating.

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Session 12 the last session of the conference is on the topic of ENGAGE.

Jay Walker talks about mania's

• Beetle mania - teenagers screaming
• Sports Mania - get the ball in the net
• Religious Mania - Visions, Rapture

These can be good, Alarming or deadly

the world as a new mania - a mania for learning english. Two billion people are trying to learn English - on China, India, Latin America. In China you have to start learning English by the third grade by law. China by the end of this year will be the largest speaking country in the world. The intensity to learn english is amazing.

Is this good or bad? The world now has a common language to solve its common problems!
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Jamie Cullum a Jazz Re-vitalizer

This is the last musical performer of the event. Jamie is an English performer who is revitalizing jazz - bringing some of the classic jazz numbers alive again with an edge. He brings a real energy to stage and uses voice, percussion, and of course the piano to create new renditions of classic favorites.
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Gerver Tulley who talked on the 5 things you should let your kids do at TED.

He runs tinkering school when the kids arrive they are confronted by lots of stuff and real tools. A six day immersive experience for kids - the goal is a better sense of a how to make things and you can figure things out by fooling around. Starting from doodles and sketches and plans and then start building - other times they just start building. Failures are celebrated and analyzed - when faced with difficult setback they resort to decoration!

All materials are available for use - even the mundane. The things that they build amaze even themselves.

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Barry Schwartz - Pshycologist

Practical Wisdom and the remoralization of professional life. The president in his inauguration said we must give our best to overcome the the current crisis. Put aside childish things and he appealed to virtue which an old fashioned word - what does it mean?

Why Obama is right about virtue
Job characteristics typically does not involve other people - hospital janitors were the example - when interviewed much of their time is about people. This doesn't just make people feel better but makes the hospital work and a better place. Kindness care and empathy are all key attributes but are not in the job description. They figure out what doing right means. A wide person knows when to how to make the exception to every rule, knows how to improvise,. Wisdom is a 'morel jazz', A wise person is made not born - based on experience you need time to get to know people and time to fail.

You don't need to be brilliant to be wise - but without wisdom brilliance is not enough.

Rules and procedures may be dumb but they help you avoid thinking.

By appealing to rules and incentive we are chipping away at morel wisdom.

We don't trust our teachers enough to deliver lessons we give them scripts so that every teacher says the same thing and we loose a sense of achievement other than finishing the script.

Incentives and the war on moral will - motivational competition. When incentives are introduced we only play to personal gains rather than moral value. Any incentive system can be subverted - reliance on incentives causes people involved to loose morality.

What can we do? A few sources of hope - we should try and re-moralize work. Don't teach more ethics courses!

• Celebrate moral exemplars - people are inspired by moral heroes. As practitioners we should also strive to be moral heroes.
• Ethics as lived, not as taught (Knowledge Is Power P) We are always teaching - the camera is always on.

The thing that people need to learn is to respect themselves, learning, the teachers, the family.

Obama appealed to virtue and he is right - and the virtue we need is practical wisdom. he appealed for hope - people want to need to do the right thing.

We need to develop wisdom and not suppress it.

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Liz Coleman who titles herself a College President at Burlington College is the next speaker of the morning.

Coleman discusses the need for U.S. educational institutions to awaken a sense of active citizenry in students. The Liberal Arts - an education designed to foster students broadest intellectual and deepest ethical potential.

Under the communist regime wanted to increase the impact of the academic community - they chose liberal arts to talk with people most closely aligned to the subject. Liberal Arts genuinely doesn't exist in the US - we no longer provide a broad landscape of education - we have professionalized it. We are de-constructing everything.

What kind of world are we making, should we be making, can we be making.

We no longer create a sense of empowerment but a learned sense of helplessness. We have over simplification of civic engagements, idealization of the experts, fragmentation of knowledge, Technical mastery.

Our public education once a model for the world, has now become impotent. Half the US population don't believe in evolution. No-one was drawing connections to the body politic and what is happening in the countries leading educational establishments. We are playing with fire.

"If a nations expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be" - Thomas Jefferson

The reality is that no one has the answers. Everyone has the responsibility.

New Liberal arts
Rhetoric, Design, Mediation, Improvisation, Quantitive Reasoning, Technology.

"We intend to turn our intellectual and imaginative power, passion and boldness or our students, faculty and staff on developing strategies for acting on the most critical challenges of our time..."

"We cannot have a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians and spectators"

"Obama and hist team cannot do it alone!"

ENGAGE
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The conference ended with an improv 'drama' from Palm Springs. A parody on the Wizard of Oz - watch for it out on TED.COM

Jamie Cullum rounded off with a rendition of Imagine.

THE END!

TED@PalmSprings 2009 Friday afternoon 3

Session 9 GROW

The afternoon starts with Natasha Tsakos who performs a one woman show

Theatre awakens our senses and our ability to imagine makes is creative and innovative - makes us what we are. She was commissioned to put together a show called 'Up-Wake' Technology is an instrument that allowed her to bring her show together in High Definition on stage. The projected images are partners on stage rather than just images.

One of the things that she has found is that being human is an art form, if you wear a mask people are more likely to interact with you - theatre can heal. She started a campaign last year called REACT which encouraged kids to turn off the TV and other electrical things from 7:53 to 8 p.m. every evening.

This is a time of communication, connection and creative evolution.

We are not here to challenge the possible we are here to challenge the impossible!

One company. Twitter, has expanded 1000% this year - Evan Williams CEO of Twitter.

Four years ago he announced ODEO at TED- one of the guys he hired had the idea of passing small information about what you are doing with friends. He was also the drier about Blogger. He has twittered that he is speaking at TED and 60,000 people will get a message. TWitter can be useful in major events such as wildfires and the authorities used the technology to communicate to people,

Politicians have started twittering - 47 members of congress and the president. It was designed as a broadcast medium and users are shaping how it develops. Such ideas as a plant that needs water or an unborn baby which kicks. There is now a search capability on Twitter - when there was a gas shortage in atlanta when users twittered on where gas was available and how much it was.

During his talk there was 50 Tweets about the talk he was giving at TED.

Christan

Basic rules of improvisation.

• The first rule of improv is to answer YES!
• Second rule is to heighten and expand whatever information you are given
• Third Rule - make and maintain eye contact.

One of Pattie Maas students, David Merrel, is about to start a new company based on Siftables a small computer the size of a cookie.

Think when you were a child when you used blocks this teaches spacial reasoning. The company has built computers the size of a cookie which react together and are aware of themselves and movement. Using these Siftables you can use normal activities such as pouring color from one to another. There is possibilities to use the Siftables for math and for making words etc. Another application is an interactive cartoon game where the characters can interact by moving the Siftables.

The most recent application is an interactive music application where you can build a sequence and there are other Siftables which are tempo and volume.

Rosamund Zander, a therapist and coach, has written a book about why many of us haven't grown up.

Reframe upsetting experiences as Memories - we will all grown older but will we ever grow up. We have a lot of inner-voices - some masterful, some belong at kindergarten and some are boringly responsible. There is no guidance for us once we come of age - we can only learn to cope. We are told as children to always excel and to hide our vulnerabilities no one tells us what the new rules are. How do we shed those patterns that have held us back.

Her nearly finished book - Manual for Adults will give some thoughts and instructions for our adult lives.

The next speaker Dickson Despommier - a vertical farmer for sustainable urban agriculture.

We now create waste and this waste has to find a home - from cradle to cradle to cradle to grave. If you are born as a human being you are entitled to 2.3 liters of safe drinking water and 2000 calories of safe food. the big challenges

• Food security and safety
• Safe and abundant water supply
• Engaging society in environmental sustainability
• Reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

Our population continues to grow from the 7 billion on the planet today. In 40 years there will be another 3 billion people to feed. We farm 80% of earth arable land and we need more land to feed these extra people than the 20% that is left. We also use 70% of the fresh water and 20% of fossil fuels in agriculture to produce food. Agriculture run-off is 75% of the problem for the oceans.

Can we provide a sustainable safe water supply and food for the 10 million people that will be on the earth? The future of agriculture is growing soilless - Hydroponics, Aeroponics and Drip Irrigation. If we now apply what we have learnt in indoor agriculture to growing food in buildings located within the urban landscape.

Advantages of vertical farming

• No agricultural run-off - all recycled
• Year round crop production
• No crop loss to severe weather events
• Uses 70% less water than we use outdoors - no pesticides, no herbicides
• Restoring the damaged ecosystem by giving land back to acre.

Ann Marie-Thomas an educator.

She had the opportunity to teach a class on dynamics and decided to use a circus lab which teaches dynamics through circus skills.

Willie Smits from Borneo if an expert in Orangutang and conservationist.

Thirty years ago he started his life in Borneo as a forester. One day he found an Orangutan and this changes our life and he has now saved over 1000. Their habitat is being harvested of forests to plant oil palms for bio-fuels. With the forests disappearing he decided to create a reserve called Samboja Lestari, it was one of the poorest district possible - it was biologically sterile but now there is jobs for 3000 people, 137 bird species, 30 species of reptiles and much more.

Fire is the biggest problem for the forests - they are doing it will the local people. They create a ring of sugar palm around the forest which provides a fire resistance barrier. They have created a mixed forest rather than a monoculture - fast growing trees and then slowly growing trees underneath then bring in Fungi to compost the leaves etc. as soon as they fall. Every tree is monitored from space.

Eric Lewis ends this session with a piano recital.

The last session of the day is entitled DARE - Session 10

The first segment is from Capacitor a dance troupe. They gave a world premiere of a new expressionist dance 'routine'.
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'Where the Wild things are' is one of the favorite children's books. We had a preview clip of a new movie of the book which is due for release in the fall 2009 - this was the first public preview.
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Greatest practitioners of wing-suit flying Uli Gegenschatz

He started flying paragliding and then went on to skydiving at a fall-rate at 120 mph. He then went on to free-flying where the fall rate of 150 -200 mph, he then tried Skysurfing where the fall rate is 120 - 180 mph. Obviously the next step is wing suit flying by using his body to tense the suit and the fall rate is only 45 mph although the forward speed is 120 mph.

BASE jumping was the next adventure and is the ultimate feeling of being in free fall. He was the first to jump from the Matterhorn - in 2005 Jungfrau and Eiger. in 2008 he jumped the Eiffel tower in paris.

His next project is to break the record for cliff jumping with a wing suit.

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Mary Roach a writer who has written on the Mortuary and Sex (not together).

Ten things you didn't know about orgasm.

• You were having them in the womb
• You don't need genitals to have an orgasm
• You can have them when your dead - these can be triggered with electrical stimulus to the right nerve
• Orgasm can cause bad breath
• And cure hiccups
  
• Doctors once prescribed orgasm for fertility - sucking up the semen!
  
• Pig farmers still do prescribe orgasm for fertility.
  
• Female animals are having more fun than you think
  
• Studying human orgasm is not easy
  
• But it sure is entertaining

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Lena Marie Klingvail is a painter, athlete, author and singer who was born without arms

She was born hands-free! Most of the handicaps we all have are invisible - hers is visible. She has a very positive attitude to life and doesn't mind people looking at her - she even likes it sometimes. Her parents raised her as any other child - when her friends used her hands she uses her feet.

At 6 she could swim and loved the backstroke and uses her body like a fish! She won 3 silver medals as the Swedish games and this was a turning point in her life and she was selected to swim for Sweden - and in 1987 won four gold medal in Paris at the Paralympic European games.

So what is everyday life is like? She can so almost everything without arms and hands. She uses her toes to text and type and she writes calligraphy again with her toes. She uses a stick with a hook in the end which allows her to get dressed on her own. Having to adapt to a society of others has made her creative and strengthened her character. She passed her driving test at 18 and drives with her feet and has taken a motorbike tour of europe with her ex husband.

She is a professional singer today and gives her courage, energy and she wants to use singing to change the world.

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The last performer of the session is Herbie Hancock - 'a national treasure'

He performed at the very first TED 25 years ago and se he was invited back for TED's 25 birthday.

TED@Palm Springs 2009 Day 3 Morning

After being told that Palm Springs only has four days rain a year on Tuesday when we did the nature hike trust our luck to get one of the days. What you do get however is an amazingly smell - everything seems to so clean and fresh and the mountains this morning are particularly stunning.

This mornings session starts with TED University which is a number of short presentations and demonstrations from 12 or 13 people in the audience locally each presentation lasts 8 minutes. Then we join the main conference at 10am where the first theme is DISCOVER.

Erin Digman

Ex 'rock star' runs a think tank in Soho New York now uses Guitar Hero which makes him think of his past. There are around 15 million people in the world using Guitar Hero. But his mother says 'its not a real guitar" - however the definition of instrument is:

2. Music any of various devices that can be played to produce musical sounds

In in essence that is what the Guitar Hero is. You can now create content using the device. What followed was a demonstration by Erin of Michael Jackson's Beat it to great applause. Then he showed Ben a 9 year old boy from Denver - is this the future of the orchestra?

Al Myers

In the movie the last Samurai there is a quote "a man can do what he can until his destiny is revealed". He talked about the contrast between how we live our lives and how we teach our kids. Our lives are full media and connectivity and our schools are still using models from the 70s. Al's proposal was experiential learning of civilizations and world history through a 'video game'.

Jim Fallon

Neuroscientist at the University of California studies behavior and also interest in Creativity by studying artists and musician. Now working in Stem Cells and developed a way of mobilizing your own stem cells to heal your brain for instance following a stroke. He has been lecturing on the brains of Psychopathic Killer which he had been researching looking for differences and identifying possible factors and genes. Every murderer has some form of brain damage - particularly in the from cortex just behind the eyes. They also identified a gene which is on the X chromosome which we get from the mother and is to do with too much serotonin in development - which could explain why there are more male serial killers than women. If you have the Gene and see a lot of violence - and as these tend to be in communities which concentrates the effect. On his fathers side his cousin was Lizzi Borden and the the first case of Matricide in the US was also a relation and seven more men on his father side were all murderers.

So people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones!

OpenCauses.org

OpenCauses.org - greed is powerful, it powers creativity although it does have a downside as we have seen in the financial sector. Greed can also be used for good the concept is Cause credits through donations on the OpenCause platform. These credits can be exchanged with others and the goal is to spread generosity throughout the world. So someone can sell me something and in exchange I donate something to charity. This can be talked about and is visible on sites such as Facebook etc.

Glenda (www.23me.com)

Unveiling of the Genomic Tribe - this is the DNA testing service that was offered last year. The company has faced many challenges since last year including no spitting in New York! They have now created a chomosonal canvas to allow people to understand their DNA make up.

M.A Greenstein

In honor of Darwin's birthday and unveiling the Unveiling of Mobility. The story of evolution is of mobility - movement changes position and access to location and change in thinking. We now all love speed and what access does that give us. How do we provide appropriate environments for the 300 million people with disabilities. Intelligent Mobility International from CalTech looking to create affordable mobility solutions in partnership with NGO's around the world. They are also working on Micro Finance solutions to fund these technologies around the world. One idea is to take two bikes to make a wheelchair!

GOSH

One of the greatest innovations of all time - 27 tom computer Aniac and had less computer than your remote control. Today's laptop computer is 1 million time more powerful. He showed Ski Dubai and talked about the power of see possible futures. Construction techniques in general has not evolved. A new initiative to transform housing around the world GOSH - global open source home.

Jenny Morel

Life on the Edge - venture capitalist are getting a bad rap. She talked and showed a video about the Martin Jetpack - the testing and manufacture after 27 years of development.

Jill Sobel

Gave us a song about Jet Packs!

Jacob

Used to be a sailor and deep sea diver and is now involved in technology stuff. He talks about rowing and got involved in the 2nd Atlantic Ocean Trade Winds expedition 2900 miles in less than the record of 31 days. This is all done with human power - rowing 2 hours on and 2 hours off continuously! Lots of tests were done prior to selection - this was an unsupported journey other than the occasional whales and dolphins.

On the 10th day they lost there rudder and they had to ask for help and were picked up by a Russian ship. People were very disappointed that they had not completed as they had only completed 1000 miles. They are now building a new boat and hope to finish in lest that 30 days and will start the new journey soon.

TrustArt.org - Launch of a massive social movement

Creating a stock market for art - trust art a stock market for cultural revolution. There are 10 projects on the website which people can invest i, the art will be created this year and then at the end of the year the pieces will be auctioned off and the proceeds will be split between the artist and the 'capitalist'. This is about investing social capital lending their name etc. to the piece of art.

Sebastian

He wants to relieve us of a fear - of coming up with original stories using the word Buffalo. You can say the word as much as you want and you will always have a sentence - an animal, a place and intimidation.

Elaine Parker

Learning for Life - one pixie cup at a time. What skills make for success - there are lots of things but it all leads to Self Sufficiency. How are our children learning these skills? Many of these can be learnt in the kitchen at home so she showed us ideas for recipes to make the kitchen a spell room. Using traditional ingredients and turning them into magical elements using the power of storytelling to mix ingredients to make food.

Tony Driscoll said:

Wow...I just woke up and was having an Elizabeth Gilbert moment. Something passed through me and I managed to catch it by the tail

Here is what it said:

I came here wondering how it would BE.
With NO IDEA how much it would change ME.

I have two kids they're SIX AND THREE.
I worry a lot about how their WORLD WILL BE.

These last two days I've realized.
There is HOPE for all who ARE ALIVE.
Ideas can come from YOU AND ME.
TED is here to SET THEM FREE.

Ideas make the world GO ROUND.
From PARADISE LOST to BLUE HEART found.
Technology can change the COURSE OF TIME
From NOW to THEN like Brad and Ben.

So THANK YOU TED for having me
And filling me with so much GLEE
But most of all, MY THANKS TO YOU
For being YOU and believing TOO....

That WHO WE ARE and WHAT WE DO
can CHANGE THE WORLD and make it NEW.

Apparently tis just 'appeared' at 4:30 this morning!
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TED in Oxford on the Playhouse was presented which is going to be in July this year. Registration in open and there are only 220 places left. There is also a TED conference this year in India in . TED talks have now been watched 100,000,000 times since launch. TED will be rolling out a TED translation program with subtitles in many languages - the idea is an open interface that will allow anybody to translate it into their own language - this will also include text of the talks - including a search function.

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The start of the main session 8 which is entitled DISCOVER

What real life figure inspired Frank Baum to create the Wizard of OZ. From research he has found that there are parallels to Edison, althouth there are also parallels that it could be Jonny Rockerfeller but when Toto pulled back the curtain the wizard was unveiled as a fraud and this could lead to P.T.Barnum. He also Swami Vive Kamanda preached world peace at the Worlds Fair. The wizard is actually a composite of all these characters.

Thelma Golden director of the Museum of Harlem - how did she discover art?
Through an inspired teacher who showed that you can discover the world through the museums of New York. However the game Masterpiece which included cards which were reproductions of art pieces and blue tack and used them on the wall - her first curatorial exercise.

Her understanding of art and culture has come from studying artists. Her project was specifically about black art and how art impacts culture and how we think about ourselves.

She was interested in why and how a new narrative in art history could be created by seeing how artists work and see the studio as a laboratory. In 1994 she created an exhibition called Black Male which included over 20 artists looking at black masculinity - as a catalyst in the exhibition she understood how powerful images can be in understanding each other.

Harlem now - looking backwards and forward, people speak always about what it was and what it will be not about what it is now. Studio Museum in Harlem working on what art could be - think about artists not about content providers but as catalysts. She is seeking to define the young black artists in this new environment - question, in this point in history, as seeing art as a catalyst. What does it mean right now about being African American and how can art help define this.

She has been continually amazed at how artists can look at race and how they are prepared to represent this through their art. Thinking about the creative spirit and how it can be nurtured - creating a network of real artists from around the world who were all born in Africa.

What she has discovered about art is that she has discovered herself.

Jennifer Mather a Psychologist who discusses Non -Terrestrial Intelligence: Octopuses

Octopuses are different from us - they are mollusks and therefore their intelligence must be different from us - how have they evolved it must have been different from us.

THey have very good brains and amazing senses. THey are real chameleons but this is not going to be covered today but how they brains work. they have eyes which are similar in some respects to mammalian eyes, they have wonderful manipulative capability with their arms and suckers.

How do we understand intelligence? Do they find things out in similar ways to us through personalities, play and problem solving.

Personalities.
They all have different personalities. They react to divers in completely different ways and therefore they have personalities. Octopuses in aquariums are typically given names by their keepers because of their behaviors. To find out if they have personalities you expose them to different situations and them monitor their behavior - when looking at the data when they are threatened there are three dimensions to their character: Active, Reactive and Avoidant. Does personality show intelligence.

Play
For Octopuses - play is out of context, fragmentary and or repetitious, not immediately adaptive and most of all simple. You wont play unless you are well fed, comfortable and bored. They decided to put a pill bottle into the tank to see if they would play with it it - firstly they tried to eat it but a couple of them started to do something interesting. They sat at one end of the tank they had a water jet and the octopus sat at the other side and 'blew' the bottle towards the jet and let it float back and then 'blew' it back - play.

Problem solving
How are octopuses getting into clams which is a major food source, however the clams are getting stronger. They tended to eat clams that have 'low resistance' when opening - they have a swiss army knife at their disposal - strong arms, a strong beak and an acidic saliva which allows them to 'drill' the harder to open species. What does this have to do with intelligence - it is what you are doing with it!

They are now working on self awareness and an attentional spotlight to solve problems. How do octopuses show intelligence? They have a big brain but no big central nervous system. Will they compete with us - no. They will give us a chance to discover intelligence - compare them and us as they have evolved in a different environment in different ways.

The next speaker Nalina Nadkami at nine wrote her first book 'Between the ground and the Birds' which only one copy ever produced.

The tree canopy is the last frontier. On the forest floor it is very dark, there is no room, constant temperature and water. In the high canopy the conditions are very different - much more like an open field.

There are 10,000 species of ants and 4,000 of those live in the forrest canopy. Epiphytes are plants that grow in trees - there are over 28,000 species and grow in the canopy. they take nutrients from the mist and moisture form the atmosphere and have no 'connection' to the tree other than for physical support. The canopy colonies are very fragile and if destroyed take many years to regenerate and may in fact never fully recover.

From the canopy and look down you can also see forrest destruction and there are many people who have never had the experience of spending time with trees.

She has created Tree Top Barbie targeted at getting children interested in trees and the canopy. She has also been working with artists to bring art to and from the canopy. They have also brought musicians to the canopy to play and create music from Rap to Orchestras. THis lead to a project called Sound Science which is getting people involved in the forest and using that experience to inspire music which they record and cut onto CDs.

She has been looking at how to grow mosses to stop us destroying the forest mosses which are being collected for flower arranging etc. She has been working with Prisoners on this project to research which mosses grow quickest and therefore feed the need of the commercial world rather than strip it from the forest. This is spreading from one prison now out to three other prisons in Washington State.

"It is time for scientists to reach outwards and for those outside to reach into academia"

When you look at the human body we see branches and trees in our blood vessels - the shapes and structures are the same.

Bonnie Bassler a molecular biologist

there are around 1 trillion human cells who make us who we are, however there are 10 times that many bacteria on or in us all the time. At the best you are 10% human - 99% bacterial!

They keep us alive by keeping bad things from us and give us an invisible shield against the world. There are also a potpourri or notorious bacteria in the world that are harmful to us. There is a bacteria that is bioluminescence and what was interested was not whether they make light or not but when they reached a particular concentration. They communicate with each other using chemicals.

The bacteria get in you they start growing and when they get to the right cell count they have enough mass to attack the host - they do this by sensing each other. There is also intra-species communication - each bacteria uses a particular molecule to count their siblings. They don't live in isolation they tare many bacteria around at any time, however they have a generic enzyme which is the trade language of bacteria 0 the inter-communication signal - a sort of bacterial esperanto!

By restricting the bacteria from sensing could this be a new way of killing bacteria and stopping them from launching virulence. The first idea is to jam inter-communication sensing and secondly jam the intra-communication sensing.

Bacteria talk to each other, they use chemicals as there words and are multi cellular. Bacteria can distinguish self from each other just as we can.

Virus Hunter, Nathan Wolfe is new to TED and finds it an incredibly intimidating thing presenting thing.

Exploration of unknown life and we grow up we look to the stars. But the talk is to the Micro-Cosmos the if you were to write a encyclopedia on our planet 27 of the 30 volumes would be viruses. The HIV virus, initially from chimpanzees, was first reported in 1929 but it wasn't until the 1980s that the virus was discovered. the vast majority of diseases and viruses come from animals. Most human viruses have animal origins.

Nathan has been studying people who have frequent contact with wild animals - particularly blood. Bush meat is the eating of wild game - our children was going to ask why we hadn't prevent our closest relatives go extinct and also why we thought the responsibility for our futures is with the people who hunt the wild animals for food.

There is a whole range of challenges in this work - just by getting trust of the local people in Central Africa. During the ten years that this work has being going on there have been many discoveries - they have found new viruses in the blood of these people including new retro-viruses like HIV. These viruses do travel around the world so it is important that these viruses are discovered and tracked.

Different people from around the world have different contact with these wild animals and it is important that they catch the virus before they hit blood banks and sexual spread.

Ho studying the micro-cosmos we suffer from surface parochialism yet when we dig down we fine life at great depths, heat and pressure. The origins of life may not have come from above but have bubbled up from the deep - this may change our thoughts of where life might be on other planets - rather than is there life on mars is there life in mars? Is there the possibility that there is non DNA/RNA based life on this planet - we do not know.

TED@Palm Springs - Day 2 Thursday afternoon

Session 6 INVENT

Daniel Libeskind the architect who designed the replacement for the World Trade Center was the first speaker of the afternoon session.

Wonder is not precisely knowing and precisely knowing not - Emily Dikenson

 Anything that has been made can be made better!

Architecture is

• Optimism vs. Pessimism that the future can be better. We now have evangelistic customers who want more. He doesn't like neutrality we need expression in the city to give meaning to architecture.
• Radical vs Conservative - architecture is a living connection - radical architecture conserves tradition and confronts our own senses.
• Emotion vs Cool - there is no life without emotion. This is an important dimension to be introduced into city life.
• Inexplicable vs Understood - architecture shouldn't follow rules - building should have a story but should not be explainable in words. Connect themselves into the lives of the people and the city.
• Hand vs Computer - the computer should not be the glove iof the hand - the hand is driven by sources that are not explainable.
• Complex vs Simple - architecture is complex - space is complex and cannot be reduced. Needs to reflect complexity of our lives.
• Political vs Evasive - The Invasion of the political sphere - every building makes a political statement about us as a society. There needs to be interaction with the history beyond our normal expectations.
• Unexpected vs Habitual - buildings need to be unexpected there should not be the false stability of the shackles our limitations
• Raw vs refined - raw is the naked experience of raw materials - rawness in space refracted to our desired. 
• Pointed vs Blunt - Architecture needs to leverage our experience of what could be done. In every public space in every private space there should be a pointed view - nit a blunt instrument to the sense.
• Memorable vs Forgettable - buildings should be memorable and leave some imprint on memory.
• Communicative vs Mute - architecture should communicate and should not be silent - cities should be vibrant and full or vibrations.
• Risky vs Safe - if it is Safe it is not moving us forward. Architecture should be risk 
• Space vs Fashion - architecture is about space and should not be a fashion - it should have permanence. Carving out a space where nature can enter a city or a density.
• Democratic vs authoritarian - buildings should be democratic and should encourage interaction.

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Kevin Surace what we did last summer - the invention of a drywall factory. 52% of CO2 is associated with Building - he wanted to reduce the CO2 of drywall by 82% and they have achieved it. There was 5000 attempts to get the right mixture - no Gypsum is in the board. First drywall board came of the production line in September - we must change everything - chairs, tables etc. if we are going to solve the problem. Do the best YOU can do!!! Reduce your carbon footprint NOW.
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John Lagrou talks about fire safety innovation - fire alarms do not prevent fires and one of the main sources of home fires is electricity - usually faulty overloaded and misused appliances. The circuit breaker was invented  by Thomas Edison over 150 years ago. The ideas was to out a data tag in the plug and a small reciever in the outlet and if a problem arrises the system will shut itself down. With their outlet power is always off until a data coded plug is inserted. There are significant power savings using this system - there are 10 billion power outlets in the US.

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Shai Agassi green auto pioneer is our second speaker of the afternoon. How would you run the whole country without oil? If you could convert a whole country to electric cars than this could be a solution. 99% of the population must be able to use the idea for it it be effective. Needs to be as good as any car you have today.

• The key idea is to separate the battery from the car - you charge the car whenever you stop - cars tend to drive for 2 and sit for 22 hours. Power stops everywhere
• The second factor is range - today is around 120 miles. The idea is to have battery exchange programs - battery swaps everywhere
• If the battery is left what is the impact? Created a new consumable eMiles which equates to 8c/mile. They follow an inverse Moores law as they will get cheaper over the coming years down to 2c/mile by 2020 as battery technology gets better.

In Israel the prime minister told Shai that if he could find the money he could use the country to deploy the technology. They then decided to scale the project up - the next country was Denmark who changed the tax system so that there was tax on petrol cars and no tax on electric cars (thirty percent cheaper). Next Australia, Hawaii and will then made to San Francisco.

In the US there is no real incentive to move towards electric vehicles. The US car industry is looking at putting the technology in the car not in the infrastructure. Car 2.0 will be cheaper than petrol cars - in Denmark the cars will be driven by Windmills in Israel they are using solar all the projects are not using oil.

Cars represent 25% of the worlds CO2 emissions.

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Catherine Morhr an engineer who who is now working in the operating theater bringing robotics into surgery. What is Surgery? Surgery is around Healing. In history trephen-ation was practiced in many countries we don't know why this was done but we know that the patients lived. In the middle ages and beyond surgery became a sort of performance art done by barber surgeons. Typical surgery had to take less than 2 minutes so that the patient could survive.

Anesthesia brought about a revelation in 1847 in surgery and gave the freedom to delve deeper and spend time trying to cure things that they couldn't have attempted before. What did kill people was infection following surgery. the next big leap was sterilization - washing hands before the surgery was more important than washing them after! Mortality dropped significantly.

The era of the big surgery big incision had arrived. So the question came is can we do these types of surgery with small incisions? Laparoscopy has been arrived for some time however it has now become common practice. These techniques were harder to learn and harder to perform - the surgeon is off his/her center line and the instruments actions are reversed. Using a DaVinci robot puts a wrist in between the surgeon and the instruments. With this you can actually do surgery inside a beating heart.

One of the robots are very high cost but once installed soon start to pay for themselves, both financially and in terms of comfort and convenience for the doctor and patient. Today it is common for prostrate surgery is done with Da Vinci robots.

The new invention is to introduce all the tools needed through a single tube - this brings the next revolution in surgery as it introduces flexibility. One of the problems being addressed now is vision - cancers for instance are difficult to see as they are often hidden so they are now using markers injected into the cancer or bloodstream and then use special cameras to see where to cut. This has been possible historically but has typically used radiation.

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Daniel Kraft is a researcher who brought some bone marrow which he has been doing research in this area. The procedure to harvest bone marrow has not changed in a 100 years. The new invention, Marrow Miner, is a new instrument which only requires one insertion instead of up to 200 punctures in the old system. This is now done under a local rather than general anesthetic and is done as an outpatient rather than an inpatient.

Marrow derived stem cell is useful in many areas and it will be possible for people to harvest stem cells when they are young for use in older age.

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Robert Full from Berkley on Bio-mimetics taking into biomutialism. An association between biology and other disciplined such as engineering.

A gecko has millions of tiny hairs on each toe ad this has been created by mimicking the hair structure and made a self cleaning adhesive. One of the students used this technology to climb a building wall using pads made of the Gecko type 'technology'. They have now created a robot which mimics the technology of the robot 'StickyBot' One of the interesting things was that the robot had to have a tail, if they didn't they fell off the wall. So they were asked what do tails do - they provide stability - particularly when the tail is active. In the Gecko the tail is used as a fifth leg!

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Sarah Jones a Tony award winning actress who has a confession - a British accent might help, a great unveiling - she is interested in the invention of self, to what extent do we self invent. What and who could we be?  She brought a couple of her characters to show how we can be different people.

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The last session, session 7, is entitled DREAM.

This session starts with an update on last years TED Wish prize winners:

Dave Eggars wish update - engaging with public schools in your area. Hot Studios help create a website which encourages children to contribute their stories - Once Upon a School. Make it easy to publish and make it easy to be connected to public schools in the US.

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First 2009 prize winner introduced by Richard Branson. Humans have been asking are we alone since time began - Jill Tarter an Astronomer is developing a systematic approach to trying to find an answer to the question. So are we alone? From the stone-age to the Information-age everything that has happened they have all happened here on earth - we live on a fragile island of life in a universe of possibilities.

Is it really just us? If we are, its an awful waste of space! Would the discovery of an older cultural passivisation out there change our perspective. Fifty years ago SETI began to look for extraterrestrial life - looking for other peoples technology in the universe - looking for radio or optical signals of life. We can now ask the question what is and what should be believed? 400 billion stars, 100 billion galaxies and this week a new star has been found which is just twice the size of the earth.

Much of the vast universe may be more habitable than we imagined when we look at the life we find in nuclear reactors, ice, hot gas vents etc. The nearest galaxy is 2.5 million light years away and therefore any signal we receive tells us about there past. In the history of the earth there are possible signs of life 3.5 billion years ago - interesting when the earth only formed 4.5 billion years ago.

We are not the pinnacle of evolution - we are one outcome of a continuing adaptation process. We are one small leaf on the tree of life. We talk about the ascent of man - this is a sense of privileged that the universe doesn't recognize.

All of the SETI activity is like scooping a single glass of water out of the sea and then observing that there are no fish in the sea! The team has now got bigger glasses and new tools (more hands in the water) to look wider - The ATA-42 telescope uses many small antenna linked together the plan is to get to 350 antenna. Next month the Kepler Spacecraft will launch to continue to look for life. Next year is going to be the year of Astronomy which will bring focus to the initiative.

"I wish that you could empower earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company."

We have only ever seen ourselves as part of one tribe - the earth tribe, we must see ourselves as part of a bigger tribe.

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Neil Turrock has the wish to enable the next Einstein to come from Africa. There are many initiatives to bring high quality education to Africa with the objective of creating the next Einstein.

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Sylivia Earle an Oceanographer is the last 2009 TED prize winner. There are changes in the sea that matters - we have eaten more than 90% of the large fish in the last 10 years - I am haunted by the thought of tomorrow's child asking why didn't we do something on our watch?

Health to the ocean is about health for us. As a scientist it began in 1953 trying Scuba - in 1970 she led a team of aquanauts living under the ocean, she has used more than 30 types of submarines and started many companies and a non-profit heloing people have access to the undersea world.

We need to learn everything we can to support our life support system - our earth, our ocean. We have been using our natural resources quicker than nature can replace them. Ninety seven percent of life on earth lives in the sea. new technologies are helping us understand the nature of nature and our impact on the planet.

Google has recently put the ocean on Google Earth we can now see what the whale see under the ocean. The deepest part of the ocean is 7 miles down and only two people have ever visited this area. In the arctic just 10 years ago she stood on the ice and by the end of this decade there may be none there - not only is this increasing the level if the see but also changing the salt levels in the sea which has a negative effect on coral reefs etc.

National Marine Sanctuaries are established and there are more than 400 around the world but this only protects 0.18% of the ocean. The Arctic is protected but the oceans around it is not protected as is the Galapagos and in Argentina all these areas have protected land but sees that have been ravaged. To cope with climate change we need new ways to generate power and to feed the planet - we need to do for the ocean what Al Gore did for the atmosphere.

"I wish to use all means at your disposal to ignite public support for a network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet"

For tomorrows child - now is the time!

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Quincy Jones introduced the next prize winner to Doctor Jose Antonio Abreu from Venezuela. He has  spearheaded one of the greatest human experiments in the world. The program for at risk youth - kids living in fear and now more than 700,000 children have passed through his program - takes the poorest kids from Caracas and given them musical instruments and created choirs and orchestras - "his work has lead us to an affluence of the spirit".

I wish you would help create and document a special training program for at least 59 gifted young musicians passionate for  their art and for social justice, and dedicated to developing El Sistema in the US and in other countries.

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This is the end of a long and tiring but very stimulating day which fill you with hope for the future.

Friday's program starts at 8:30 and the sessions include - DISCOVER, GROW and DARE

TED@Palm Springs - Day 2 Thursday morning

I forgot one of the important facets of the TED conference from last year - I can't sleep! There is so much stimulation both from the speakers and the attendees that my mind fills up with great ideas - result no sleep. So I apologize in advance if today's blog postings are a little muddled - I will clean them up at the end of the day of they are too bad!

Today is a packed day and the topic areas are SEE, UNDERSTAND, INVENT and DREAM with some great speakers as usual.

Session 1 - SEE

The first speaker of the day is Oliver Sacks talking about seeing with the brain - often called imagination - our inscapes, but there are hallucinations and this is what he going to talk about today. He was called to a nursing home to see a 95 year old patient who had been seeing things and was very started and bewildered. She was blind and had been for 5 years - but she had been seeing things people in eastern dress walking up and down stairs and also animals - cats and dogs walking towards her - a lot of children walking up and down stairs. She also sometimes sees pink and blue squares on the floor - is it like a dream? no it is like a silent movie. She was perfectly sane, had no medical problems and seems OK.

She had Charles Bonnet syndrome which is something that people with this type of blindness sometimes experience. Many people who are deaf also hear music. She asked what is going on - when parts of the brain associated with sight or hearing stop getting stimulation the brain starts to become overactive. The hallucinations can be geometric (the primary visual cortex in involved) and the most common are faces (these use a higher part of the visual cortex the infotemple), often deformed and interestingly very many are of a cartoon nature. Part of the brain is activated when looking at cartoons even drawing of cartoons - other parts of the brain are activated when we see faces, landscape, buildings. Research has found that we may even have cells that are very specific to very particular things - cars, maybe even Aston Martins!

A different patient had a tumor in the brain which affected the parts which are responsible for sight - she saw cartoons of Kermit the frog - she had no link to these cartoons but for some reason this was her hallucination. Very often the people, animals, cartoons etc. have big teeth or exaggerated features.

People with these hallucinations are seeing a film that has nothing to do with them. It is only when you are blind that you get an anarchic activity which result in these hallucinations. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of blind people who have these symptoms - they are fascinating as it gives an insight into the mind.

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Joanne Kuchura-Morin is the next speaker who is the creater of Allosphere at the University of California Santa Barbara - three story metal sphere which is isolated. Scientist and artists can stand inside this and see information. This has been created by scientists, artists and engineers. One project is maping MRI data inside the sphere which allows scientists to 'fly' through the brain, a second project is artificial nature which is researching self-assembly allows researchers to inject bacterial code - this is an amazing visualization facility.

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The glass artists Dale Chihuly started experimenting with glass and tapestries and one day put some stained glass in a kiln, blew a bubble in the glass and then decided he wanted to be a glass blower. He went to Alaska to become a fisherman to fund his education in glass - he also trained in Venice and came back to the US to set up a glass blowing facility.

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Olafur Eliasson a sculpture of light and space works out of a studio in Berlin. He showed a series of colored geometric shapes on the screen and then when he took the shape away there was a persistence in a complimentary color - produced by the brain. By playing these shapes as a series or film when the shapes are removed we create our own image to 'replace' it - we co-create the film - things that we see externally and things that we see internally.

Interesting that he calls his art installations experiments - trying to understand the relationship between art and place. Summer in New York he installed the Waterfall project - there is something about falling water - you can judge distance etc. by the speed of water - it is a way of measuring space. This installation gave the city a sense of consequence, space and being together. Art and culture has proven that one can create a space which is sensitive to individuality and community - linking thinking and doing with experience sitting between the two. Experience is about responsibility

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Don Levy, head of Sony's animation group - the magic of the movies is painted with light and shadow, colors and sound. In 1999 Stuart Little was presented at TED - in Polar Express in 2004 used the same animation technique basically adding cells - both labor intensive and computer dependent. The new improvement is to now be able to light animated characters called global illumination.

One of Sony's upcoming movies - Cloudy with a chance of meatballs was a preview which is due out in September demonstrated the technique.

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Ed Ulbrich visual storyteller who runs Digital Domain studio who has been working with a team over the last four years called  The Curios Case of Benjamin Button and for the first hour of the movie the main character from the neck up is completely computer generated. The challenge was to use a single actor to play the main character from old to young throughout the whole film. Using Brad Pitt as the main character there was no room for error as he is a well known icon.

In 2004 the studios commissioned a screen test to prove the concept of using a computer generated head on an actors body. The first step in the creation of the character was to admit that you had a problem! Step two is to break down the problem - in this case age brad pit 45 years and create a character that could interact with the environment - light etc.

The character had to do everything that a human can do. The technique that was developed by walking away from technology of the day, motion capture, by using different fields they came across a technique from the 70's called Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and a technology called Contour using phosphorescent make-up which gave very fine coding of the facial contours. They used these techniques to map Brad's face to create a catalog of every expression he could make. Next they mapped Brad's face at different ages. They then used body actors wearing blue hoods to allow them to superimpose the computer generated heads on the body actors.

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The next speaker Ray Zahab who a month ago at the geographic south pole - breaking the record to take the 650 mile journey without skis dragging a sled with 175 pounds of gear. The journey is uphill all the way as the south pole is at 10,000 feet not at sea level. The journey started after running across the desert and they saw the problems that people were having with the lack of water. The idea came about that they shoudl journey to south pole blogging all the way about the impact of global warming - somtimes having 20 hour days. Students asked questions along the way - how many batteries did you take, vurtually none all equipment was charged by solar.

"What do you take from this journey is that in fact we can make the impossible possible."
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The final speaker of this section is Golan Levin an audio visual artist and engineer. The mouse is probably the smallest straw to suck human expression through! He is looking to expand our interaction with our whole human body.

People associate word and sounds with shapes - he has been experimenting that speech casts shadows and creates shapes - called Re:Mark. It is interesting to compare this work with the Benjamin Button speaker earlier which had taken 150 people 4 years to produce and this work has consumed a couple of people for a couple of months.

He showed a video of live subtitles being generated using an example of reading a poem. His current attention is focused on gaze and how people could interact with machines with their eyes - a project which tracks the eyes of people looking at things and then playing this back to the next people looking at the screen.  He has brought a robot to the Long Beach site which is opto isolator and replicates your  gaze and blink etc. A new project called Snout which is an 8 foot tube with  a Googly eye on the end of a robot arm - it does a double take when it 'sees' you

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June Colin from TED hosted this session on Understanding.

The first speaker of this session is Nina Jablonski an Anthropologist. Two hundred hears ago Charles Darwin was born - a remarkable man known for his accomplishments at around 50 when he wrote the Origin of Species. He was born a lightly pigmented man in a moderately pigmented world - in his 20s he ventured on the Beagle and the observations he made went into his thinking on evolution. It wasn't until much later in his life that he talked about human evolution. Skin color is one of the things that differentiated people - dark skinned people live near the equator and lighter skinned people live nearer the poles. He wrote that these differences that skin pigmentation was correlated to climate.

Today NASA maps the UV radiation on the earths surface - and this can then be correlated to skin color. It is interesting that out ancestors evolved in the high UV areas. Darkly pigmented skin is highly protective under intense UV regimes - melanin is a highly effective sunscreen. As humans migrated toward the poles the amount of UVB is dissipated and therefore there is no ability for this to create Vitamin D in their skin and therefore lost their pigmentation. 

During the slave trade darkly pigmented people were moved to low UVB areas which had not only social consequences but also health consequences. Doctors have been good at getting lightly pigmented skin to protect their skin from UVB but little advice has been given to darkly pigmented skin moving to low UVB areas - particularly Vitamin D deficiency.

How can we - 200 years after Darwin was born we have the first moderately pigmented skin as President - he is very emblematic of highly mixed societies.Skin color is the most visible product of evolution by natural selection and we should celebrate it!

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The Mathamagition Arthur Benjamin is up next and gave a 3 minute slot on mathamagic. All the education in maths builds to a pinnacle of Calculus but his view is that we should be working towards statistics rather than calculus - nobody uses calculus in their everyday lives. We all use probability and statistics every day and if taught properly can be fun.

The world has changed from analogue to digital and maths should follow the same trend.

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Hans Rosling talks for 6 minutes on the global spread of HIV aids. He used bubble charts to track the spread of HIV using size and color over time to track the spread - tracking the % of adults with HIV against dollars per person. Tracking the spread over time shows that where people die in the poorest countries - only by stopping the spread will be the most cost effective approach to HIV. It is very different in Africa - there is not ine Africa there are many different elements to Africa and each element has different conditions. At a Marco level the more income the most HIV - however even in the provinces in a country like Kenya has very different profiles of HIV.

Circumcisn of men has a positive effect on the reduction of HIV spread - sme of these countries have a culture where this is commonly practiced. THere are other factors such as multiple partners, use of contraceptives, drug use etc. which all have an impact on HIV infection. In Arica there is 4% of population and 50% of AIDS.

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Louise Fresco, a true Polymath talks to us about bread. Bread is the mainstay of human life around the world. Two loaves of bread are shown a prepackaged 'Wonderloaf' and a handmade wholemeal loaf - asking the audience who prefers which the majority of people choose the handmade wholemeal load which represents a good life and good traditions.

In the 10,000 years since agriculture evolved most people have been involved in agriculture - it is however a mythical past. It is only 200 years ago that we had an industrial revolution which brought mechanization, fertilizers and increased production. It also brought supermarkets which bring food from around the world. The real relevant bread is actually  the white Wonderloaf as it is affordable and plentifull has changed the world. We have more food available that we have ever had in history - as food became plentiful it also meant that we decrease the number of people working in agriculture - in the US only 1% of people are farmers. Never has the responsibility to feed the people of the wprld been in the hands of so few people.

Bread is not associated with obesity - it has transformed from the principle food and it has now transferred to the moddle eastern countries and has become a source of modernity.  There is now a movement to move away from the mass produced bread to the local traditional farming and bread. Small scale is not the solution to world hunger, go back to local food, we do not want to relagate urban poor to starvation.

World food production needs to double by 2030 - primarily animal protein - meat. Can we find a solution to the problem - yes we need clever low key mechanization. We must feed 3 billion people in cities, low incomes and need cheap affordable sustainable food. The proposition is to to develop closed regional eco-systems - we need more and good science. Think dispassionately about large and small scale and re-examine lifestyles - have greenhouses on apartment blocks, fish farms in car parks and heating provided by locally produced biomass.We all need to understand our own food-chain and where our food comes from - food is about respect. There are many people who are struggling for their daily food.

"For those who have to go without two meals a day, God can only appear as Bread" - Ganghi 1931

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Elizabeth Gilbert author and writer is trying to understand the creative process. Her latest book 'Eat Pray and Love' has been an international best seller and has made her recalibrate her thoughts about writing. What is it about creative ventures that makes us nervous and afraid about our careers. 

We have come to accept that creativity and suffering is somehow linked? We should be encouraging our creatives to keep living. It is highly likely that her greatest success is now behind her and this could lead to a downward trend - she has recognized that she need to find new models to have better and saner ideas from other civilizations. 

In ancient Greece people believed that creativity was some divine entity and invisibly helped the artist or genius. This was good and if you 'bombed' you could blame the 'divine entity' so it had a positive effect. It wasn't until the Renaissance that people became the center of the world. The question is can we go back to the more esoteric approach to creativity?

Lots of creatives have told about the 'divine' interjection of something that channels through them to result in something that is made of done. The realization of this approach has helped many by releasing anxiety and helping the creative process.

"We should see the creative skills and capabilities that we have as on loan to us rather than within us and just show up for work everyday and let whatever it is channel through you."

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Jacek Utko a newspaper designer is the next speaker and asks the question can design saves newspapers? People don't want to pay for yesterdays news. There is no practical reason for newspapers to survive in the current media surplus world.

One day he saw Cirque du Soleil in London and he thought can he bring the same approach, taking a boring act and make it artistic and beutiful. He wanted to design posters not newspapers and he brought that graphic 'style' - treating the whole newspaper as a whole, like a piece of music. As design got better the circulation increased by 35% in three years.

What did this - Strategy + Design + Content was the new approach to.

• Design can change not just your product but also your company
• To be good is not enough.

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Nigel Holmes gave a presentation at TED 10 showing the size of US graph which was at 3 trillion dollars. Today the national debt is 10 trillion dollars - 1 Billion is around the thickness of our badges in relation 10 trillion is around 10 feet.

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Figurer Margaret Wertheim is using crochet with her twin sister to build a coral reef which is amazing ly beautiful and is now extending across three continents. Most of this has been done by women around the world. The project was started in 2005 when there was much in the press around coral reefs and their decline - they set themselves a challenge of crocheting a reef. When she put something on a website asking for people to help and they had a call from the Warhol museum - these calls continued and she had a call to fill a 3,000 sq ft gallery. Going into crochet overdrive in 8 months they did fill the gallery. They had much help from local people by teaching them to create reefs and it took on a viral dimension.

The idea has morphed into this whole movement which has got a life of its own. Why crochet and reef? The only way scientists/mathematicians have found for modeling the coral structures is through crochet! 

When people moved away from traditional mathematical models by introducing change the crocheted forms become to look more organic an more real. They started to look like sea cucumbers, lettuce leaves and other organic forms. Through their Figuring Institute they have created a Kindergarten for Grown-ups to 'teach' us to become childlike - she proposes a play tank for people to play with hard scientific ideas!

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END OF THE MORNING SESSION I am going to split the post into morning and afternoon as it is getting cumbersome!

TED Day 1 - all day

Palm Springs is bathed in sun this morning - I guess it is this way most mornings but coming from chilly Connecticut it is especially appealing to feel the warmth. The party last night went on late although I retired early as it had been a long day. Again met some great people from all corners of the globe.

The proceedings this morning commence at 10am with the TED-dy session till 11am and then the main conference starts. I am hoping they have a bloggers lounge as they had last year so I can blog and not annoy people with the click of the keyboard.

Breakfast calls so i will catch up later with the posts from TED@palm Springs 2009

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The hosts, Rives and Kelly Stoetzel started the session who are going to 'manage' the conference in Palm Springs and provide the linkages to Long Beach where the main conference is being held.

Mathamagician Arthur Benjamin started the day and built a magic square using one of the audiences birth dates creating a magic number - which of course had to be 42! Basically any combination of numbers - corners, central square etc all added up to 42.

Brian Andreyaz one of the Palm Springs audience after last year had created a guide how to explain science and technology using stories. Stories will trump science and technology for ever, the story matters more than the science!

• Tell it likes you are telling it to a friend - stories okay to to your 'child self' and tend to use small words and are understandable.

• "Tell me some pictures Dad" - stories are used to get the pictures across to people - use very descriptive pictures.
• "Help me discover the pattern - your experience in a pattern that makes sense to use - the pattern doesn't have to be true but it has to make sense"

A dummies guide to how to tell stories - people will sit at your feet and offer food an sex

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I once got caught..... an improv session using name tags from the audience was the next segment. A little difficult to blog on as it is pretty unstructured but I will have a go!

"Whose line is it anyway - but with name tags!" Nancy got caught defacing a church in Ecuador, Cooper founder of motherhood.com - got caught being a mother, Errol got caught pool hopping in someone's swim pool and lost his underwear which was returned the next day by the neighbor, "Got busted by security guards at Playboy mansion for swimming in the pool", "Got caught spreading hamburgers and fries over someone's lawn", "A guy got caught crying at a Kevin Cosner film in a group of 'guys'", the Balloon sculpture visited New York city with his girlfriend and got caught having a 'blow job' on the Statin Island Ferry, "Melanie from Portland got caught leaving shoes in the kitchen - the answer to a school test was written on the inside of the shoe", Rosemary got caught half naked when her top came down whilst taking a business school photo".

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The main conference in Long Beach commences with the overture from Aida.

Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, started the main conference by celebrating 25 years of TED - people from 51 countries, 400 in Palm Springs. Are we ready from TED 2009? "People have put in so much time and passion into what we are going to see".

Reboot - Session 1

Juan Eriquez - author, sailor, Harvard professor starts TED 2009. "The big elephant in the room is the economy - the key to managing crisis is to keep and eye on the log term - while your dancing in the flames" What does the reboot of the economy look like? Commercial bank leverage has a 9x - a normal investment back has 15 x - bank of America had a leverage of 32x! This is why the public are making generous donations to the financial institutions. The Government is acting like Santa Claus. Mandatory spending in the US is going to be a reality in 2017 - we are going to have to pay the debts off now and not leave them to our kids!

We need to pay attention to the deficit or we are going to loose the dollar. In Zimbabwe a ten trillion dollar note is worth less than $8 - this is what happens when you loose control of your currency. People think 'when hell freezes over' - in December it snowed in Vegas!

The consequence of not dealing with this stuff is that the Dow will be worth 3500 in 2026.

 The first fully programmable cell was shown last year, at MIT they have built a 'Radio Shack' for biology - they engineered what is good for you in red wine and put it in beer! A few years ago Cliff Tabin had managed to grow an extra wing on a chicken - now the Axolotl a nearly extinct creature has the ability to regenerate itself and this technology is being investigated to grow human teeth. Human windpipe was been grown from stem cells - re-growing ears and bladders is now possible. A team last year managed to grow the cells of a heart from mouse stem cells -  last year they managed to reboot skin cells to stem cells which allows this re-growth.

The third trend is robotics - robots were created for a flat world - todays robots are being created to operate in a curved world. Boston Dynamics have created 'big dog' which almost overcomes the physical turin test - does it operate like a mammal? The integration of robotics and mammals is starting to happen - engineering eyes to see light and dark, hearing implants rather than hearing aids.

We need to keep an eye on the future - next year is 200 anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. Humankind continues to evolve - species of hominids have overlapped in history - so what's next?

The future is a different species of the hominid the Homo Evolutis "Hominids that take direct and deliberate control over the evolution of the species - the ultimate reboot!"

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Jill Sobel performed a song about a visit to the desert in Palm Spring.

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Pete W. Singer a military analyst who has just published called 'Wired for War'. In Iraq the IOD, roadsides bombs, have killed more soldiers than any other - the hunters for these devices are called EOD - Iraqi dissidents place a bounty on the head of each EOD soldier of $50,000. Now rather than humans being used to look for these devices, called Pacbots, now are being used in war. He showed pictures of how machines are being used in war - killer applications takes on new meaning in the war space. Tens of thousands of robots will be in 'our' war spaces - Moores Law is 'active' in the area of robotics and this is evolution in robotic sense.

When historians look at this period they will document a revolution in war fighting - robotics change the experience of war and the identity of the players in war. Ripple effects are being seen - the future of war is not going to be purely an American one, other civilizations are working on military robotics - how do we move forward in this revolution with the state of manufacturing and teaching - warfare has gone 'Open Source'. Good guys AND bad guys can create robotics systems. The power of individuals against Governments will be reinforced. Robots don't need convincing to blow themselves up!

When war is costless in terms of human life it is easier to justify it. New technologies also link us closely to war through technologies such as YouTube which connects us to the conflict. War can be turned into entertainment - called by the soldiers as War Porn - death set to music. Watch war - experience less!

How does this play out with the war of insurgencies. The thing that scares people is 'our' technology - a sogn of the cold hearted by sending out machines - not fighting as real men. A new type of warrior - a cubicle warrior - drone pilots from great distances - going home in the evening and never going into the theatre of war. War is becoming a video game - we do things in the video world we wouldn't do face to face.

Robots are emotionless they see an 80 year old grandmother in a wheelchair the same as a tank - how do we move our twenty year old thoughts of war to the technological war that is unveiling itself today. Are we going to face the reality of a technology enabled war. What are the ethics when it comes to robots.

Is it our machines or is it us that is wired for war?

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Forrest North and Yves Behar collaborated after last years TED to create an alternative power motorbike. Twice the range of any other motorbike - Mission One - 150 mph, 0 - 100 in 5.9 seconds.

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Naturally 7 - introduced by Thomas Dolby. This group of 7 guys from New York do amazing things with the human voice and have just got into the UK charts with their first album. They call it Vcal Play by creating instruments with voice.

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David Hanson - bringing robots to life - building robots with character. Robots that can start to model feeling and start to understand people. Moved into robotics from Disney creating walking biped robots similar to Asimo from Honda with Hanson's 'Intelligence' - speech recognition, facial tracking, naturally language processing etc. Emulating all major facial expressions the goal to create sentience in machines.

Combining the perception of people and the facial interaction to make you believe the robots are 'alive'. A new 'toy' called Zeno has been developed to become a companion for children - $299 in stores later this year.

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Bill Gates, philanthropist, also spoke at TED in 1992 talking about the software industry. He wrote a letter last week about the problems with the Gates Foundation to try and draw people in to the problems. He admits to being an optimist - he feels this way by looking ta the past - lifespan has doubles overt the last 50 years, the number of children who die before the age of 5 have been cut in half since 1960. A few key breakthroughs have had a huge impact on these figures - the next breakthrough is to cut these figures in half again.

The first problem - how do we stop a deadly disease that has been spread by mosquitoes - Malaria. This was a huge problem in the early 1900's it was first addressed by DDT to kill the mosquitoes the second to treat with Quinine. The disease has been eliminated in the developed countries - this is now mainly only in the poor countries - there is more money put into baldness drugs than put into malaria! Transmitted by mosquitoes - one tool is bed nets which prevent mosquitoes getting to mothers and children in the poor countries. The parasite and the mosquitoes evolves and therefore tools become ineffective - local eradication can occur but eventually tools become ineffective and there is now focus on the problem and therefore death rates are going down.

The second question how do you make a teacher great. Why is this important - all of us had great teachers and a great education. In the US the teaching system is pretty good - the top 20% is still good, however the balance of education is not good. Over 30% of kids in the US never finish high school - for minority kids it is over 50%. Even if you graduate and low income you have a higher chance of going to jail than getting a degree.

Having great teachers is seen as the key thing that needs to be addressed. A top quartile teacher will increase the student's test scores by at least 10%. "If we had all top quartile teachers then math achievement gap will close gap with Asia". What are the characteristics of these top quartile teachers? Surprisingly teaching quality is not affected by a masters degree in education, math major has a slight effect but overwhelmingly its the past performance is the key. On average the slightly better teachers end up leaving the system as they are not rewarded or valued.

KIPP:Houston High School the attitude is very different to normal schools. High energy levels are observed - very dynamic environment. They take disadvantaged kids and turn them into high achieving students. Teachers in normal schools are not told how well they are doing. In some States in the US it is illegal to use teacher performance when discussing tenure.

Lots more problems to address and he skill set required to tackle these problems is very broad. "It is going to take people like those attending TED to solve some of these problems".

The video of the Bill Gates speech is available here (Video)

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Session 2 - Reframe!

The afternoon session started with music by Gamelan X and ArcheDream which is a dance ensemble using highly decorative fluorescent costumes and expressive 'oriental' thematic music performing on a black stage. The whole dance experience was created online prior to the event and brought together for TED this was a first performance of this piece.

The Rickshaw bags this year's TED bag is made out of recycled coca-cola bottles - the bags this year are backpacks rather than courier bags and on the 'large' sides. Remo have provided t-shirts and ICebreaker provided merino wool t-shirts, Network for Good is a website where you can give money away to charity of your choice, 'actionmethod by behance' is a get things done website, Toms shoes are providing shoes and also give one to someone who doesn't have shoes - and much more.

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The first speaker of the afternoon is Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor and 'founder' of the World Wide Web. Tim's topic is a new reframe - 1989 he wrote a memo asking to create a hypertext system which was the concept of the World Wide Web - he did this out of frustration because at the time every system in the lab he was working was different - different hardware, different systems, different languages. He wanted to bring together all the manuals for these different systems and applications.

The community that got behind the hypertext concept was what drove the viral nature of the World Wide Web. There is still a frustration around data on the web.

Tim wants to think about where everyone puts there data on the web - he calls it Linked Data. URL's have moved away from just documents and are now referencing people, products and many other things. There are now Linked Data Standards being created the data - the roots of the information can be linked in many different ways. A new program called dPpedia - a wikipedia for data. This is another area where a community is getting behind the concept and driving it forward. He is asking for Raw Data Now rather than the processed data we are used to - people come up with many excuses for why they shouldn't give up there data.

The people who are going to solve some of the big problems of the worlds - global warming, cancer, Alzheimer's etc. have data on their machines but they don't share it. the power of Linked Data is that the underlying power of the data can be accessed by many people. Linked Data is about relationships.

OpenSTreetMap is a web site where users can annotate maps - he uses this as an example of Linked Data - each person doing their bit to populate and create data.

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Yair Landaw talks about Mass Animation following TED last year. Wiki and social network platforms used for encouraging mass creativity. Mass Animation was started from a Facebook page which allows the audience to comment on storyboards, create characters  - the final film has 50 animators from 17 countries around the world. The story is about an electric guitar and is told through the medium of music.

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The next speaker from Infosys is Nandan Nilekani who has written a new book 'Imaging India' which has just been launched which documents a journey of self discovery in India. It covers the rise, fall and rise of India. Books can be written from events, as a biographical or as a series of ideas -

• Ideas that have arrived,
• ideas in progress,
• Ideas in conflict and
• Ideas in anticipation.

In India there are six ideas that have shaped the country -

• People - moving from seeing them as a burden to a human capital - becoming and being seen as engines of growth.
• Entrepreneurs - used to be seen as exploitive - from villains to role models
• English - From Language of the colonizers to the language of jobs - has become aspirational
• Technology - From man vs Machine to Man and Machine. India sells 8 million pre-paid mobile phones per month!
• Globalization - From Bombay Plan to Bombay House - where Indian companies moving abroad they have become more confident
• Deepening of Democracy - From party rule to 13 party rule.

Ideas in Progress

• Education - Universal access to primary education
• Infrastructure - Connecting the Nation - electricity, water and roads
• Cities - Engines of Growth, innovation and creativity
• Single Market - Smooth, seamless flow of goods across states.

Ideas in Conflict

• Conflicting political ideologies - leading to policy making gridlock
• Labor reforms - Job protection hampering job creation
• Higher education - state controlled or private funding?

Ideas in anticipation - learn from the West

• e-Governance
• Health - avoiding disease and prosperity
• Pensions and entitlement - taking care of the future - put in place modern systems 
• Environment - can india growth be clean?
• Energy - Driving growth around new energy models

Why does this matter - one sixth of the worlds population - its important that we demostrate good practice as there is rapid growth Because of this growth we all need to be concerned about what happens in India.

Pattie Maes from MIT media lab talks about a new project in the lab which is looking at the data that we have accumulated in history which is becoming increasingly available online. Can we develop a sixth sense which can give us access to the meta data that is all around us. We don't have access to systems that allow us to get at this information. She unveiled a new 'system' which combines a webcam, a small pico projector with a mirror and a cell-phone. With this system users can approach any surface and interact with the data that the system has access to. The system users gestures by hand gestures, using colored things attached to your fingers.

This device can act as your sixth sense - for instance when shopping the system can 'sense' what you are picking up and give you signals such as by picking up a book the amazon rating can be projected on the front of the book. Projecting video onto a newspaper in real time.

Al Gore presented at TED last year where he showed slides that the ice-cap has shrunk. This year he showed the permanent ice-cap over the last 25 years where it has shrunk significantly - this is a problem because methane is created where the ice melts and microbes colonize the unfrozen land and water. In the Antarctic  there is rapid melting and in the Himalayas there is massive melting of the glaciers a problem as these have historically provided drinking water form many people. In the last 5 years 70 million tons of Co2 added to the atmosphere every day - one of the major contributors is coal fired power stations. Although some new power stations have been cancelled there is massive advertising by the power industry to try and convince people that coal is clean.

"If you want to go quickly go alone if you want to go far go together to solve the sustainability problem we have to go far quickly"

Ray Anderson who is a sustainable business pioneer talked on reinventing the industrial system looking to lead the industrial world to "take nothing and do no harm". There must be an alternative to the Take, Make, Waste approach we have used over the last 100 years. He is CEO of a carpet manufacturing company which has historically a carbon intensive industry has now been transformed - reducing carbon impact by 82%. His new product - cool carpet called Flor is environmentally friendly carpet and carpet tiles. His company has a target of having Zero impact in the planet by 2020 - this has not only been a good thing for the planet but has also been very positive on the bottom line of the company. he then read a peom which was written by one of his employees in 1996:

Tomorrow's Child

Without a name; an unseen face
and knowing not your time nor place
Tomorrow's Child, though yet unborn,
I saw you first last Tuesday morn.

A wise friend introduced us two,
and through his shining point of view
I saw a day which you would see;
A day for you, and not for me.

Knowing you has changed my thinking,
for I never had an inkling
That perhaps the things I do
might someday, somehow, threaten you.

Tomorrow's Child, my daughter-son,
I'm afraid I've just begun
To think of you and of your good,
Though always having known I should.

Begin I will to weigh the cost
of what I squander; what is lost
If ever I forget that you
will someday come to live here too.

Glenn Thomas, ©1996

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Demo at Palm Springs by Chris Hughes a technologist showed us a 2D barcode which interacts with software he has written which when showed to a camera on the computer is replaced with a video or whatever - augmented reality using nothing more than a web browser and a computer. If the barcode is moved back the video zooms and pans etc. An amazing demonstration! Chris is also the guy who has cracked the iPhone.

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Session 3 - Reconnect

Saul Griffith builds experimental boats and kites. Kites are more than 1000 years old and can lift men in 1827 pioneered kites pulling buggies in the UK. Kites was the forerunner of powered human flight and he is proposing the use of kites above 300 feet to produce clean energy. Uses robots to fly the kites for long duration flights - a single kite can produce enough power 5 households. A kite the size of a 747 could generate 50 Megawatts. Within two years he plans to have hundreds of machines (kites) in the sky.

Seth Godin marketer and author asks the question 'what do we do for a living?" - we try to change the status quo. He told a story about Nathan in San Francisco who works for he SPC chartered to get rid of stray dogs and cats off the streets. He transformed the community and made San Francisco as a 'no kill' zone for cats and dogs - everyone has a home.

We are at a point at where the concept of where ideas are created and we are now in the situation where we change things through leadership. Mass Marketing requires average ideas and plenty of ads - we have tried to hypnotize everyone into buying our products and services. We are now about tribes - work tribes, social tribes - tribes are everywhere. The internet allows people to connect - to join and form tribes. Tribes can change our world - they are what we do for a living. Find something worth doing and then create a tribe which hopefully creates a movement. You don't need everyone you just need 1000 people who cares - the true believers.

The Beatles did not decide to create teenagers they just chose to lead them. Leaders very often don't have the idea they just choose to lead and create a movement - they are heretics and choose to challenge the status quo. They say I can't do this by myself I need people to help me - by leading and creating a movement.

Three questions

• Who are you upsetting - if not your not your not challenging the status quo?
• Who are you connecting?
• Who are you leading?

Leaders: Challenge the status quo, they build a culture, they have curiosity, they connect people to one another, they often have charisma - you don't need to have it to lead but leading gives you charisma, and they commit.

Jake Eberts a producer as a child was in a boat with his Uncle and saw a beluga whale just in front of the boat - this experience has stayed with him. He started his working life as a sewage analyst in Sweden and it wasn't until the 70s that he became a film producer (he quipped that the transition wasn't difficult!). He has been recently working on a film called Oceans which took two years of pre-production and four years of filming.  To get the shots in the film a whole new tranche of technologies had to be developed. They created 300 hours of footage at a cost of $75m and they are now editing it down into a feature film - this will be released by Disney in the US and Pathe in France in 2010. Jake showed 9 minutes of the footage for the first time - the final film is going to focus on the inhabitants of the sea in the environment they should be in - the beuty and the joy and their freedom - the joy of being a fish. The film also covers the damage man is inflicting but the focus will be on the positive. The film will give us hope!

Photographer, Yann Arthus-Bertrand uses images to try and inspire people to think bigger. His work is to show our impact in the planet - the problem is that we don't want to be what we know. We use three times more oil than we find every year. THere is a new passage opened through the ice between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Kilimanjaro is now without Ice which is interesting as I climbed this in 2004 and there was still ice there then.

He shows his picture in the streets - the next exhibition is in New York. He is now using a different approach and interviewed 5000 people about 'who am I' - 'what is family'.  the project is called "6 billion others' the website is www.6billionothers.org.

For the last three years he has been shooting a movie about the state of the planet. A story about life on the earth. We depend on waterm forrests, deserts, fishing, breeding, farming what binds us together is more than divides us. I the last 50 years we have altered the planet more than in the previous 6 million years since we first walked upright. The movie is called HOME and was filmed in 50 countries around the world and is going to be distributed free and will have no copyright and can download the film on the Internet on the 5th of June this year.

"It is too late to be pessimistic - we need to be bold."

Ted showed the film from YouTube called Where the Hell is Matt - a guy from Seattle who does a dance all over the world and has an amazing following from all over the world. You can't watch the film without feeling good and wondering where the hell he is - he is in Palm Springs with us. The videos are about connecting people - what we are all about. He is now taking dance from different cultures to other cultures - in Hong Kong teach people to Tango - this an idea but not a plan. He want to teach everybody two moves he learnt in India - he is anticipating a fascinating disaster. 

The last 'speaker' of the day was born in Moscow, Regina Spektor, she is a new singer/songwriter and sang for us a new song which brings her traditional classical training to her contemporary songs bringing piano and her amazing voice together to create a 'beguiling' picture of everyday life - stories about ordinary life.

A long but amazing day - my apologies for the long blog but this is my record of the event - I can look back over the next few weeks and months to reconnect myself with the 'energy' that TED creates.

The TED Journey commences

Tuesday 3rd February

Well TED 2009 has arrived although at 3:45 this morning I wish it hadn't!

My 4:30am pick up arrived at 4am and proceeded to ring the doorbell which certainly got my attention - I just hope that he didn't ring my neighbors doorbell as well. So rather rushed start and more worryingly rushed final packing - I just hope I have everything, but Palm Springs is not the Amazon and I know I have my credit card.

My flight is a 6:30am United flight down to LA and then pick up a shuttle flight from LA to Palm Springs, hopefully arriving at 11:40am (lets hope they don't loose my luggage as they have done the last two times I have flown United). I say hopefully as I have an 'activity' book at 12:30 (more of this later!). It looks a good program this year and hopefully will meet some of the people I met last year at TED@ASPEN - it is a very diverse audience and it is amazing what connections people have when you get talking.

My intention is to live blog the event as I did last year which I found a great experience in two respects - you had to listen and listen hard, and secondly the blog audience went from around 80 views per day up to several thousand.

Update

Amazingly the flight arrived in LA an hour early so I get chance to sample the delights of LAX before my next flight to Palm Springs. I was impressed by the United AIrlines service as even in economy there was plenty of leg room although you have to pay for food I don't mind as I had a healthy (ish) plate of fresh fruit and cheese. The journey gave me time to prepare a few blog entries - one on the role of Foresight post recession and the second on a great service I came across last night called yourfonts.com which takes your handwriting and converts in into a True Type font - great service and its free!.

Nature Hike and arial tramway

After arriving at the hotel it was a quick dash to join the afternoon excursion - one of three organized by TED to get people talking to each other - and it sure did its job!. I chose a trip on the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway up Mountain San Jacinto with a nature walk at the top to view the pines and get a view of the valley from the Desert View Trail and the Nature Trail.

It was a short coach ride from the Hotel to the bottom of the Aerial Tram which holds around 80 people and was opened in 1963. The ride takes you from 2643' above see level to 8516' and at the top there was plenty of snow!

We had been told to take warm clothes - even hats and gloves but in reality it was chilly rather than cold.

We spent around an hour walking around the route in yellow on the map on the right - pausing to take photos at the Desert View and the Valley View lookouts.

After a welcome cup of coffee we returned to the hotel for the evenings Shindig.

The old magic of TED is still alive and it was pleasing to find an eclectic group of people to engage with from Architects, to Artists, Teachers, Non-Profits, Bee Keepers, specialist Consultancies, and Film Makers and these are just the ones I had conversations with this afternoon! Conversations ranged from Storytelling through Sign Language to Language Translation, the role of Place in peoples lives, the impact of multiculturalism on Architecture, Social Networking right down to Lunar Cycles and Lay Lines. WoW!

Over the next few days I will post during the day on the various speakers as well as highlighting interesting people and conversations I meet and have along the way. Please check back and see what is happening!

A truly amazing service - and it's FREE!

I picked up from LifeHacker.com last night a link to Yourfonts.com. Apparently, this site has been around for a while but has suddenly hit the blogosphere.

The idea behind the site is that you submit a copy of your handwriting and the site converts it to a true type font – including your signature. The concept itself is amazing but what is even more surprising is that this is a completely free service!

You fill in a template that you download from the site and then once you have filled it in in your handwriting you scan the template and save it as an image (JPEG, PNG etc.). You then upload the image to the yourfonts web site and within a few minutes you receive a 'ttf' font file which you install on your system.

The site is extremely clear and well presented. When I used it last night I had to wait quite a while before I could upload it, as the site was very busy as people wanted to create their own fonts. One downside is that the font is not web compatible so that is why I have created this blog as an image.

Check it out you won't be disappointed!

This blog post in "Howards Font"