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Reversing into the Future

I recently posted a piece on using different techniques to stimulate thinking about alternate futures - the topic of that post was using False Constraints to force people to think differently. To follow up on that I propose that we now consider Reversal or Opposites as a way of challenging our thinking.

This technique is one which can get a bit annoying when first used as it just seems like contradiction and is   reminiscent of a Monty Python Sketch (the argument). In the first post I talked about only delivering on Tuesdays and using this technique we would deliver every day except Tuesday. Or if the status quo is that we deliver to every house once a day - using this technique we would deliver to no houses.

So taking this last example of non-delivery what would the infrastructure be like to support that model? Well there would be less staff although there would probably be a large number of collection points - either owned or franchised with some sort of PO Box type service to allow for segregation of mail. People would be expected to collect their mail on a daily/weekly basis and with entreprenuership a private delivery service would probably spring up.

This concept would reduce costs significantly and could offer the added advantage of centralised recycling as people could recycle mail at the collection centres rather than at their homes. Any mail not collected would be automatically recycled after 6 weeks and a fine levied on the recipient maybe.

As I hope you can see this technique offers the advantage of turning a current model upside down and hopefully gets you to see the situation from a different angle.

As I mentioned in my previous post of you would like to find out more about using innovation and creativity techniques get in touch.

Using constraints to map the future

In the last couple of weeks I have been working with a large FMCG company looking at Innovation – particularly around R&D and Products. This focussed me on looking at some of the Creativity and Innovation techniques I developed whilst putting together the Royal Mail Innovation Lab in the early noughties.

What struck me was the opportunity to use some of these techniques to think about the future of the   delivery business in the UK. So over the next few weeks I will use some of the tools to develop possible future scenarios for delivery services in the UK.

Many of the techniques and tools were developed to get people out of ‘stuck’ thinking and help them position themselves in different futures – some linear and some non-linear. I will post a list of all the techniques on this blog for reference if people are interested.

The first technique I propose to use is ‘false constraint’ – in this approach a constraint is applied which alters the way the service is delivered – an example would be that all mail is delivered next day or that mail is only delivered on Tuesdays. In this example the constraint is used to shape the service that is required to deliver it. Clearly the infrastructure that would be required to deliver every piece of mail the next day is very different from that which would be required to only deliver on Tuesdays. This is a useful way of taking people away from what is in place today and getting them to think about alternate futures.

So for the purposes of this short exercise the ‘constraint’ is that mail is only delivered on Tuesdays. To deliver this service there are some assumptions that need to be identified – volume of mail, availability and flexibility of staff, urgency of mail, availability of alternate communication channels – but for the purposes of this post lets assume that mail volumes have fallen to 50% of what they are today, unemployment is high so that staff are available as required, urgent communications are delivered electronically and every household in the UK is connected via broadband (you can introduce any assumptions you like in here).

To deliver this service the number of delivery offices would reduce significantly and mobile delivery offices would be introduced – implemented in the back of 40’ trailers which would provide ‘localised’ facilities on Monday evenings only – where this was not economic, public halls and other available space would be used to undertake the final sortation and provide a focal point for delivery staff.

Staff would be recruited on a part time basis and would work a 2-shift system from 10pm Monday evening to 4pm on Tuesday when all the mail would be delivered. Any mail not delivered in this timeframe would be ‘mopped’ up by a rapid response team on motor scooters or similar transport. The staff would have a renewable retainer contract and be guaranteed work on a 6 monthly basis. As employment patterns would have changed the concept of a ‘portfolio’ career will probably be the norm with people having multiple jobs – although it is probable that high unemployment rates would make this approach attractive for some.

For the purposes of this post I don’t intend to go much deeper into the ‘scenario’ but I hope from the above you can see the benefit of the ‘false constrain’ approach to thinking about the future.

If you want further information or are interested in using this approach please get in touch.

Which comes first the answer or the question?

I have over the last few weeks been involved with a number of companies and individuals with new products and services in the identity and information security space. I have seen some amazing products and services   promoted by some of the most enthusiastic people I have come across for some time - in the current depressive state of most of UK business this has been a pleasant change.

As I sit and listen to the 'pitch' one question keeps floating to the top of my mind "is this trying to solve yesterdays problem or is it answering tomorrows question?" Invariably the answer is that it is solving yesterday's, or if I am luck todays problem. Of course this will be the answer as that is all we know about. 

The problem with that approach is that we keep wedded to the past and we are never prepared for the future. We spend our lives fire-fighting the problems as they come up, rather than pr-empting the problems before the occur. 

So how can we start to even think about problems we know nothing about - how can we envisage what tomorrows questions could be? 

As we face continued economic problems the focus has moved away from thinking about tomorrow and much of business has become myopic in its approach - worrying about the next 12 weeks rather than think about the next 12 years. This approach is OK but it leads to fire-ficghting being a way of life. 

There is, however no magic bullet to the question of tomorrows questions, there are techniques though that can help and people who can help you with the thinking. I have posted on this blog previously about Scenario Planning and the concept of futureScaping both of which will help you envisage different futures, OK the chances are that the future you envisage today will be based on what you know - but at least you will, hopefully, start to think a little differently and I can almost guarantee that you will find new questions.

So the next time you are sat listening to a presentation or reading something in the press ask yourself the question "is this answering yesterdays' problems" and if so ask "what will tomorrows question be?"

Future Workforce - The Millennial Effect

Our traditional view of the workforce is set to change as the Millennial generation
  (those born between 1978 and 2000) hit the workforce. These new workers, the children of the Baby boomers, have very different expectations and experiences and have lived in a world touched by technology all their lives. How are companies going to attract, reward and retain this new generation and how are they different?

Download the latest white paper on Millennials below:

Download Future Workforce – the Millenial effect V2

TED Global 2009 - Oxford - Day 4 Session 2

The last session of the conference is entitled 'Enquire Within'.

Dan Pink - "Bidding adieu to his last "real job"as Al Gore's speechwriter, Daniel Pink went freelance to spark a right-brain revolution in the career marketplace."

Candles, Carrots and the Future. At Law school he didn't do very well - he graduated in the bottom 10% of his class.  He is going to dust off his legal skills. He is going to make a case for rethinking how we run our businesses. He showed the candle problem - I bring you onto a room and give you a candle, some thumb tacks and some matches - not of the simple solutions work - the solution is to use the box from the thumb tacks to stick to the wall and put the candle in the box.

If you want people to work reward them - but when use use this technique with the candle problem the reverse happens. If you try and motivate people to solve the problem quickly they take longer than if you don't. there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. A similar candle experiment was done where the tacks were taken out of the box before the student was asked the question - in this situation the motivated students were significantly faster. 

The routine left brain work is being outsourced and given to machines to complete - the have a clear set of rules. What you need to solve the candle problem is a more right brain conceptual approach. " as long as a task only required a mechanical skill then rewards worked - when the task 'even rudimentary cognitive skills' a larger reward led to poorer performance - in eight out of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments higher incentives led to worst performance" (Dan Ariely 2005). " we find that financial incentives ... can result in negative impact on overall performance (LSE 2009)

We need a whole new approach to motivation. 

Autonomy 

Mastery

Purpose - the yearning to do what we do for a greater purpose

In the twentieth century we invented management - great if you want compliance, not if you want engagement. One company in Australia task there staff for 24 hours they are given time to do anything they want - they are called Fedex days as they have to deliver something overnight. Google are famous for gibing their staff time to do things they are passionate about.  An example Microsoft started Encarta - an encyclopaedia developed very professionally and tasked etc. - later an encyclopaedia started in Wikipedia with no purpose other than sharing knowledge and data with no rewards other than the value you are creating.

We need to bring our views of motivation into the 21st century and change our view of rewards and recognition to change the world maybe!

Itay Talgam - "After a decade-long conducting career in his native Israel, Itay Talgam has reinvented himself as a conductor of people in business."

When you go to see an orchestra the only person you don't hear is the conductor but when you see the CD the picture of of the conductor. When the conductor gets in front of the orchestra when it is tuning etc. he makes a small gesture and there is suddenly calm from the chaos. When we hear a great piece of music who is responsible - is it the players, is is the audience - what about the conductor he was happy! The joy is about from other peoples stories - the orchestra, the individuals, the audience. All the stories are being heard at the same time.

Some conductors are commanding - very different from the first example he shows. Some conductors use a finger - others use a fist! The second example was asked to resign from LaScale by the members of the Orchestra. Authority is not enough to make people your partners. It is about being in control in a very special way - the individual soloists are in control of their own world and the conductor is in control at a different level.

"If you love something give it away" 

Daniel Birnbaum -  "He works to reveal the nature of contemporary art -- and to explore the way art and philosophy underlie one another."

How does the experience of art push forward. What does a curator do - he puts things on display! He is doing an exhibition in Venice a beautiful city. He talked about what is art and it was initially thought that it was what was in a frame, however there is an exhibition in Vienna of frames - when seen in isolation the frame itself is beautiful. 

The framing device in exhibition such as in Venice is maybe the city itself. In the UK more people go to museums than soccer matches. 

Brother Paulus Terwitte  - "In a world laden with distractions and complications, Brother Paulus Terwitte is leading a new generation into a simple, contemplative spiritual life."

The first question is are you a real Capuchin monk - his answer is are you real! The second question is what do you do - his answer is nothing - he is trying to find the meaning of life. He was talking to someone at TED and as he was talking the others persons phone rang and the person walked away to answer the phone - Paulus waited for 5 minutes and then walked away, he felt that he was less important than the person on the phone.  We have become dependent on machines for information - we have forgotten to find out information from people. Is it possible that people can have 300 friends (outside Facebook) - what are we looking for? We have become primitive hunters and gatherers of information. What we have - that we are. What was the step we went from primitive hunter gathers - we painted what they saw, they painted the animals. They were happy because there was a long winter and they cold look at what they had seen on the world with the paintings.

The Capuchin Monks are doing nothing to find the inner point of all the difference. We have this week seen many different ideas and concepts. When have you thought about this alone? It is hard to think about this - human beings are now taught to go away - gather all the things you can gather. At the end, no-one knows where the end is, you can gather all the things you can - you can decide what you want to do. The most important things you found were the small things that flashed by.

We have to change our mind - we can't take the whole world in our hand - we need to have the inner sense of the world in our lives. If you take 15 minutes a day for meditation, to be alone, go on holiday without your mobile, one day without the Internet - See what the world has given to you. You will realise that it is not enough to take many things and to gather many things but to see what the world truly is.

Tom Rielly - "Traditionally, Tom Rielly closes the TED Conference with a merciless 18-minute monologue,  skewering all the speakers with his deadpan delivery, spot-on satire and boundary-less performance (complete with PowerPoint, pratfalls and partial nudity)"

This the end of the TED Global 2009 - it has been a great event although my own thoughts are that it was not quite as good as some of the US ones I have attended. The presentations were not quite as deep as those from the US in Palm Springs in February this year or Aspen the year before. I will blog on my thoughts from TED and comment on what I got from it as the information filters through my head.

TED Global 2009 - Oxford - Day 4 Session 1

One of the great things about TED is the people that you get to meet in breaks and over meals. I have met entrepreneurs who are using their money to plough back into philanthropic services, a theoretical physisist who is a world expert on quantum computing, many inventors and people with amazing ideas who carry their prototypes in their pocket or on the laptop. What they all have is an innate curiosity and a passion to find out more - to expand their minds and see the world through other peoples eyes - oh and not to forget the film stars and TV personalities! I don't know where else you could meet these sort of people - this is a unique forum and a great simulative environment.

The first session of the day is entitled Cities Past and Future.

Eric Sansderson - "Armed with an 18th-century map, a GPS and reams of data, Eric Sanderson is re-plotting the Manhattan of 1609, just in time for New York's quadricentennial."

He grew up out west and studies landscape ecology - the study of how does the land make space for plants and animals. On his trips back he returns to New York - how does the city of New York make space for plants and animals - people like us. New York was the first Mega city. He came across a map of New York made by the British at the end of the American Revolution. There are features on the map that no longer exist. He decided to geo-reference this map and find these hidden and lost features.

He wanted to look underneath the streets and buildings and see how the city functions as an ecological landscape. He mapped the 55 different ecological landscape types - Manhattan had more ecological areas than any of the more famous National Parks such as Yosemite. He has rebuilt a map of the landscape of Manhattan 400 years ago - look at the ecosystem the animals and plants that you would find there. he showed some amazing images of how the landscape would have looked.

He is using these maps to understand how we can look to the past to build a model for future sustainability for the city of New York.

Constanza Ceruti is a high altitude archaeologist - when we think about ancient cities in South America we  think about Machu Pichu. the heart of the Inca civilisation was Cusco and the Inca Priests would start their processions from here into the mountains to perform their rituals and sacrifices. Her role is to study these high altitude archaeological sites - in very remote areas - sometimes having to walk 100 of kilometres to get to the sites. 

In Argentina they excavated an Inca platform at 22,000 - the worlds highest archeology site where they discovered 3 frozen bodies of Inca children which are considered the best preserved Inca mummies in existence. They performed a variety of non-invasive analysis - with just one hair they can find out what the children were eating in the last weeks of their lives.

Climate changes are affecting all these high altitude sites and the people who live in the areas and use them as part of their religious ceremonies are no longer to be performed.

I don't climb to be higher - I climb to be closer.

Carolyn Steel "Food is a shared necessity but also a shared way of thinking, argues Carolyn Steel, and it offers an unusual and illuminating way to explore how cities evolved"

Why are cities designed the way they are? How do you feed a city? We take it for granted that if we go into a shop there will be food available. Its remarkable that cities get fed at all as the infrastructures required to provide and dispose of the food resources is incredible. It takes 10 times as much grain to produce the meat  we eat than it does to feed a human.

• 19 million of hectares of rain forest lost each year
• Half the food produced in the US is thrown away
• It takes 10 calories to produce each calorie that we consume

As we move into cities we are adopting a Western diet. What can we do about it? 

In History it was the Temples that distributed the grain and the harvest that sustained the Cities. How did Rome feed the citizens - it had ancient food miles - Rome waged war on neighbouring countries to get hold of their grain stores. Rime used to import Oysters from London. Typically carried over the sea and rivers as the roads were longer and more prone to attack and damage. 

the way Cities were design were around the food distribution and the routes that were taken to get it into the cities. The Industrial revolution - particularly rail changed the way Cities were developed. They were no longer governed by geography and could grow. After trains came cars and then the city was no longer governed by the food distribution as we can just go to get food in our cars. We don't really value food anymore. Cities have actually distanced us from nature - for the food we eat.

Definition of Utopia - 'Good Place" or 'No Place' She has come up with a new word Sitopia = 'Food place'

What does this look like? Family centric food - we need people who can recognise food - food is part of the social part of the city. there are many projects that are trying to reconnect us with our food - particularly connecting our children with where food comes from. We need to understand how food needs to shape the cities of the future.

Bjarke Ingels 'Theory meets pragmatism meets optimism in Bjarke Ingels' architecture. His big-think approach is informed by a hands-on, ground-up understanding of the needs of a building's occupants and surroundings.'

He has investigated how can you tell the stories behind the scenes of architectural projects and he came up with the concept of a comic book - 'Yes is more' . Question the idea that the Architect is always rebelling against the establishment - rather than revolution he is thinking about evolution. Darwin is a good model for the way the designers and architect works - through a process of architectural evolution the design emerges. Gradually an idea evolves and solidifies.

Sometimes a mutant idea forms and these are put on a shelf for reuse later. How can a sustainable city enhance our lives rather than hurt it - a typical neo-Protestant view. He looked at the parallels between Copenhagen and Shanghai - both are have relied on bicycles and in the Danish Pavilion at an Expo they proposed to put 1000 bikes on the stand so people can visit the other stands - they also decide as they were both port towns and he proposed to take water from the Copenhagen harbour to the Expo so people at the expo can take a plunge in fresh, clean water.

A project in Copenhagen, The Mountain, provides a new look at an apartment block by integrating car parking and south facing apartments with gardens and outside space to provide a take on sustainable living. They used the size of holes in the cladding in the building to represent artwork of an image of Everest.

Ideas evolve from one project to the next and develop into new concepts.

Magnus Larsson - He hopes to build new structures in the desert -- by using bacteria to turn shifting sand into a solid mass.

He is proposing a 6000 mile wall of compressed sand across the desert of Africa. 1 Billion grains of sand are born everyday from the mountains and sandstone's of the world. Dry areas cover 1/3rd of the worlds surface - we are facing desertification af many lands, particularly Africa and China and it is threatening the lives of many people. This leads to forced migration and border disputes and wars the Sahara is swallowing arable land at 1 metre per day currently. Sand dunes only cover 1/5th of our deserts. Green wall Sahara is a project to plant a wall of trees across North Africa to stop this desertification, however the challenge of this is that the people who live there are so poor that they chop down the trees to raise an income.

His proposal is to create a solidified wall of sand - one challenge is how to glue the sand particles together. His proposal is to a bacteria to stick the grains together and creates a form of sandstone. How much with this cost - for each cubic metre of concrete it would cost $90 - if we use the bacteria it would only cost $11. These new solid 'dunes' can be habitable and also provide a home for shade and food plants and trees. His wish is to build a long narrow city in the desert.

"Nothing is built on stone, everything is built in sand but we must build if the sand is stone"

TED Global 2009 - Oxford - Day 3 Session 4 - Worldview Rethink

The fourth session of the day is entitled 'WorldView Rethink' and the four speakers are Parag Khanna, Geoff Mulgan, Rory Bremner and Karen Armstrong.

Parag Khanna "is a Geopolitical expert who foresees a future where American influence is waning, and the new powerhouses (and threats) may not be the players you'd expect." He was asked to bring a map and point out the things that we do not see.

Do we live in a border-less world - a contemporary political map shows over 200 countries. 90% of the world economy lives in one of 40 'places' in the world. Border conflicts can define how we live and how we see the world. In 1945 there were only 100 countries in the world - as we move to 1989 there were 50 new countries created. At the end of the cold war and this provided a further 20+ countries - toady there are over 200 sovereign states. Russia is the largest and China is the most populous - what we don't see is that Russia's population is concentrated in the Western side of the country and only 40 million people live in the East of Russia.In the Russian far east which is twice the size of India there are only 6 million people, however this is where there are many mineral deposits which China is mining by buying the land.

Every single year 600,000 move from China into Russian Mongolia to take advantage of the resources that are there - they are not conquering it they are leasing it. How is China re-establishing itself in the far eastern region there is ever stronger trade links with Japan, Korea and Australia - it has signed military agreements with local countries - it has become a centre for Diplomacy.

In the Middle East countries are very uncomfortable about the borders left by the colonial ancestors, For 3000 years the Kurds have been fighting for independence - today they are trying to control the pipelines that cross their territory - if they control these then they control the transport of its oil. It is landlocked and therefore it has to remain friends with its neighbours.

In Israel and Palestine what is needed here is infrastructure a link from Palestine to the sea could provide viability for a separate state. 

If we look at the former soviet union the 'Stans' - many of these are oil rich and it is very important to them as it is to us. For many countries in this area having a oil/gas pipeline is about being part of the global energy market. the new 'silk roads'. 

In Europe the borders were in place to keep Germany in its place - on average it has grown at an average of 1 country per day - 12 countries and 450 million people. the former Soviet Union countries are not part of the Eu yet however many use the Euro as a currency and are reliant on the EU for trade.

Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iran - the post colonial changes is changing very rapidly and it will only continue apace. In the Arctic Circle Greenland voted themselves self Governing rights from Denmark and will benefit from the oil and gar resources beneath the arctic.

We need to focus less on the borders and look to become a border-less world.

Another short talk from the Richard Bernstein - TED is al about sharing ideas - "The empires of the Future are the empires of the mind" - Sir Winston Churchill.

Share and Share alike - an effective bridge between businesses and the genuine causalities of societies. The idea is for companies to create and give shares to charities where they can sell the and raise capital. He has given £90,000 of shares in his company to charity and had a huge affect on the charities that have received them.

Geoff Mulgan  "is director of the Young Foundation, a centre for social innovation, social enterprise and public policy with a 50-year history of creating new organisations and pioneering ideas in fields as varied as aging, education, healthcare and poverty reduction."

Talking about Mamon and Capitalism - his presentation is called CTRL+ALT+DELETE - what is the landscape on the other side of the crisis and what can we expect. As a student at Oxford University a lot of his fellow teenagers were facing growing unemployment - they had no hope, no jobs and no prospects. Why is capitalism so good at some things and so bad at others.

To every complex solution there is a simple solution - and its usually wrong. The longer you commute the less happy you will be. Another phase of unemployment is with us today where there will be over a million unemployed teenagers on the market this year.

There is a proliferation of things like Urban Farming, alternative currencies and other way to use the resources that are becoming spare. Much of the work that Governments do is about fixing the past not building for the future.

What will be the biggest sectors in the next 10 years - it wont be the sectors that have received the handouts it will be healthcare, education and environmental resources. We know our societies need to radically change - it is only through experiment that we will learn how to run an environmental efficient city, take care of an older population etc. We invest in science but there is no similar investment in social issues. 

You should also take No as a question and not as an answer

We need to use Social Innovation to change the world. All over the world people are coming together to create social innovation - we need to do this as well as technology innovation. The US have just launched an office of Social Innovation. What about a new goal of generating a Billion extra years of life for its citizens. Value comes from what you do with others and not what you sell to others. The future will be very surprising for many people - the future will be about society and not about the economy.  The crisis is deepening around us - are we just peddling furiously to get back to where we are or to reboot and do things differently.

Michelle Borkin - the way to see things not unseen.  ring radio astronomy and radiology together you can start to see new insights that allow us to see new things. Should you be an interdisciplinearean - YES! You don;t know where you get your next idea from.

Rory Bremner "One of the UK's sharpest funny men, Rory Bremner exposes the lunacies of modern politics with devilishly clever political satire and spot-on impressions of leaders from around the world."

Rory did an excellent and entertaining diversion from the deluge of information and thoughts that we had had during the day. Using observations of our political leaders mixed with thoughts from the last 2 days of TED he managed to get everyone laughing - although some of the jokes I think went over the heads of the non-brits. An excellent session

Karen Armstrong  " is a provocative, original thinker on the role of religion in the modern world."

TED Global 2009 - Oxford - Day 3 Session 3 - Revealing Energy

The first session of the afternoon is on revealing Energy and has talks from Ross Lovegrove, Nick Veasey, Steve Cowley, Eric Giler and Bertrand Piccard

The first session is a musical event based around the Theremin played by the niece of the inventor - Lydia  Kavina - who is based in Oxford and is accompanied by the radio science orchestra. She played three pieces which relate to the past, present and future.  The second song was one written by Thomas Dolby to celebrate the Sputnik - the first satellite in space 52 years ago. The third piece was the theme from Doctor Who which I guess was the first experience most people had of the Theremin although they probably didn't realise how the music was being played. A quick search on Google reveals that there are many kits available to make your won machine and even a Wii application to use the games platform as a Theremin!

Ross Lovegrove is an industrial designer known as Captain Organic - he embraces nature as the inspiration for his free design - each object he creates - be it a bottle, chair, staircase or car - is reduced to its essential elements - his pieces offer minimal forms of maximum beauty. Ross comes from Wales and where he was brought up the beach was covered with amazing designs in the forms of fossils. He walks, he dreams and he thinks. He is rarely in the now.

He demonstrated Lovegrove Genesis meaning an origin or renewal of something. He works through association and she showed an images which he has either designed or things that has inspired him and he uses associations of these objects in association to create new things. He wants to share with us some principles:

1. Organic essentialism - He takes the objects which are associated with this and associates them to think about things in new ways. He designs on computer and tests things out on everyday objects like tables and chairs. In nature most colour comes from surface texture rather than pigment.
2. Lightness - Again he forms a neural pulse where he takes objects which are related - he  developed the worlds lightest suitcase at 1.3kg. The case has no lining as it would add 400 gms to the weight the case has a feeling of pressurisation - it looks as if it has been inflated.
3. Netification - the idea that you can reduce the mass of objects by reducing the supporting structures. An example he used is lighting in Japan which is a cross fluorescent light
4. Natural Energy

Unfortunately Ross went over his time and had to be pulled off the stage - not literally.

Nick Veasey "Logging countless hours behind an X-ray machine, Nick Veasey illuminates the labyrinthine secrets hidden beneath the exteriors of everyday objects" Revealing the energy of the X-Ray.

He showed a number of x-ray images including an X-Ray of a bus including all the  people on it - it was just one person replicated in the image. Using large scale X-Rays using cargo scanners. He is inspired by nature. He has a new purpose built X-Ray shed - where he uses a lot more radiation than you would normally used in hospitals. He still uses film as the digital world hasn't caught up yet with the large format X-Rays. 

Colouring adds another level of interest to the images. the most difficult things to X-Ray are the lightest things. A commercial application of Nicks work is the advertisement for Lucozade below.

Steve Cowley "Steven Cowley directs the UK's leading fusion research center. Soon he'll helm new experiments that may make cheap fusion energy real on a commercial scale"

He is talking today about Nuclear Physics - when are we going to get Fusion? When it was explained to him that we are eating up our resources he got very worried - energy today is dominated by resource. Countries that have things buried beneath them have things that people want - mainly energy sources. We are using energy faster and faster today - we need to make energy in the future is from knowledge - not resources.

The UK Government are going to out in 16 Nuclear power stations in the coming years - Nuclear Fission. What we really need is a small source, no environmental impact and no harmful waste. The most stable nucleus is Iron - Deuterium and Tritium come together and they briefly make lithium⁶ and that releases Helium and a Neutron - what comes out of this is energy. Tritium doesn't exist in nature so you have to make it. How much fuel have we got left - oil has somewhere between 10 - 60 years, Gas 10 - 600 years, however Lithium we have 1000 - 30 Million years basically held in sea water..

How do you hold something at 150 million degrees - by holding it in a magnetic field. There is only one machine in the world which can make fusion and that is JET which created 16 megawatts of power in the 1960s. They is a new project to build a new facility which will be switched on in 2013 to prove whether Fusion is a realistic source for power in the future.

Eric Giler runs a company that has developed a method for transmitting power wirelessly. We humans love electricity - and we love batteries which we dispose of 40 billion batteries every year. Wires suck - batteries suck when we dispose of them they disintegrate and then they go for landfill and pollute the land. MIT Physicists created WiTricity in - the first experiment lit a 60w bulb over a 200m range. This used resonant energy transfer using an oscillating magnetic field around a resonant coil. This is a non-radiative power transfer - uses magnetic near field which are about the same as the earthy magnetic field.

They have developed a wide range of applications - electric cars that park on a mat that charges the car, robot vacuum cleaners, medical devices and heated dog bowls.

Jason Sol is a TEDster that does card magic - he envisaged card flourishing - the fanciful manipulation of playing cards. The art flourished via social media - a youtube video teaching people how to do it has had over 300,000 views.

Betrand Piccard circumnavigated the Earth in a hot-air balloon. Now he wants to circle it in an airplane powered only by solar energy.

The last speaker of this session is Betrand Piccard circumnavigated the Earth in a hot-air balloon. Now he wants to circle it in an airplane powered only by solar energy.

He starts with what can he tell us other than hot air and wind! Like in life balloons are pushed by the winds - if we want to change our direction in life or in balloons we have to change altitude. In balloons when you change altitude we drop ballast - we should see this as a metaphor for changing our lies - our ballast is dogmas paradigms our baggage. We need to explore all the ways we can go, all the ways we can think before we choose the direction we want to go in.

He has believed these things for a long time but had to go round the world in a balloon to get invited to talk about it! If you get at the wrong altitude you may go faster but end up in the wrong direction - "Do you want to go very fast in the wrong direction or slow but in the right direction!"

His next project is a solar powered plane that he plans to circumnavigate the world in the next few years. the plane is a symbol - it will never carry passengers but this is a start, an example - a symbol of what we can achieve, when we believe the impossible can be done. 

They are getting invited to speak around the world by leaders and governments to talk about the solar project - this alone is creating a belief that the impossible is possible.

Which is the ballast you wish to throw overboard - which is the altitude you want to be at and what do you have to do to get there?

TED Global 2009 - Oxford - Day 3 Session 2 - The Shadows

The second session of the third day is on the topic of 'The Shadows'. Speakers for this session are Taryn Simon, Misha Glenny, Loretta Napoleon, Emmanual Jal.

Taryn Simon "With a large-format camera and a knack for talking her way into forbidden zones, Taryn Simon photographs portions of the American infrastructure inaccessible to its inhabitants."

Ninety percent of her photographing is not taking photos but is writing letters trying to get into places to be able to take photos. Following 9/11 she wanted to look not outside of America but inside the country - the hidden and unknown. 

She has an amazing ability to capture the unseen and unreachable. 

Another project called the 'innocents' - she travelled across the US recording people who had been convicted wrongly for things they hadn't committed. She aimed to understand how photography has been used to wrongly convict these people. Photography can be a distortion and our eyes can be easily deceived.

Misha Glenny  "Journalist Misha Glenny leaves no stone unturned (and no failed state unexamined) in his excavation of criminal globalisation"  

His book McMafia shows tenacity and perseverance. He is talking about organised crime - in the last 2 decades it has seen unprecedented growth - it is now responsible for 15% of the worlds GDP. Going back to the collapse of communism in Europe - when 425 million people were allowed to choose their own government he was ecstatic. After the revolution people who had had power prior to the 'revolution' continued to want to retain their power.

It wasn't just communism that collapsed it was also the states that collapsed - the police etc. This encouraged the rise of private security companies - the Mafia. In Bulgaria there were 14,000 people who had previously worked for  the security services were now out of work. He started in the Balkans - it had turned into a transit zone for illegal things from around the world - drugs, prostitution and illegal migrant labour heading for Europe Union.

In Mexico 6000 people have been killed there in the last 18 months as a direct result of the Cocaine trade. It is the Western desire to consume which is the prime driver of organised crime. What were people doing with all the money they were making from this illegal trade. There was massive money laundering going on with both offshore and onshore banks. 

Looking at Narcotics - there are many Mom and Pops cannabis farms in many places around the world. The global narcotics market has exploded over the past few years but there has been no similar growth in the law enforcement resources available to tackle them. 

The recession - organised crime has adapted well to the recession. They have shifted the operation to cyber crime and counterfeit goods. The key to Cybercrime is social engineering - or in other words 'there is one born every minute'!  It is amazing how easy it is to get information from people with the promise of Sex and Love.

Organised crime is now getting into counterfeit drugs and goods and we need to take it very very seriously.

Edward Burtynsky is the next short talk speaker. He takes large format pictures of industrial landscapes. He has  just finished a series on the landscape of oil - there is extraction and refinement, how we use it the final section is the end of oil, tyres etc. His photos look at how we use oil as a society and hopefully makes us think about our impact on the planet.

Loretta Napoleoni "She made her name following the dollars in terrorist networks, but now Loretta Napoleoni is on the trail of something far more sinister -- the gray zone where crime and unregulated credit meet."

Aim to show us how terrorism interacts with our daily life. Fifteen years ago she received a call from a friend who was looking after the Red Brigade who were in jail and was asked if she wanted to interview them. One of the Red Brigade leaders had been a childhood friend of Loretta. She wanted to know why her childhood best friend had turned into a terrorist and why she hadn't been recruited - she was too single minded and too focussed. The terrorists life was not ruled by ideals but by economics as they are constantly short of cash.

When she interviewed the leader of the Red Brigade she realised that terrorism is really business. She felt she was talking to a business man, an economist or a banker and she decided to find out the economics of terrorism. She found there was a parallel economy run by organised crime - it has followed the same path as western capitalism and has followed the following:

• State sponsorship of terrorism
• Privatisation of terrorism
• Globalisation of terrorism

Very often these organisations ran some of day to day infrastructure - in Northern Island the IRA effectively ran the taxi services across the country so every time we used a taxi we were effectively finding the IRA.

Organised crime/illegal economy is worth about $1.2 trillion dollars. Prior to 9/11 most of this money was in US$ - a vital injection of funds into the US economy. Since the late 1960s there was a growing amount of dollars leaving the country illegally - in suitcases, containers etc. This was organised crime. 

After 9/11 the 'war on terror' introduced the patriot act which includes an anti money-laundering clause which effectively stopped them to monitor any transaction in dollars aound the world. There was a subsequent move of activities and economy to the Euro and into Europe as there was no similar legislation in Europe.

How can terrorism affect your pockets and wallets - the so called war on terror has cost $7 trillion and it didn't have the funds available so it used government bonds to raise the money. So in order to be competitive you lower your interest rate which is what has happened - 6% on the 9/11 and 1.25% at the beginning of summer of 2003. this created the ideal conditions for the sub-prime market and was the genesis of the current recession. there is a world that goes beyond the headlines of the news media - you need to question everything including what she told us today. 

Emmanual Jal "Emmanuel Jal's hypnotic voice rises from hellish origins as a beacon of hope for those caught in seemingly endless cycles of war and despair." A rapper for peace.

He tells a story of his life - he was a child soldier. He is doing this for an old lady in his village who has no way to project his voice to the people of the world. He was born in a war - he saw his village burnt down, his aunty raped when he was 5 - seeing people die every day - all this made him think of himself as a war child. He became a child soldier and he wanted to kill Muslims and Arabs - he wanted revenge for all the killing he had seen.

He realised it wasn't the Muslims or the Arabs that were causing the problems it was someone somewhere that was manipulating the system in the name of religion for the oil and diamonds that the country had.

What energised him and kept him going was his music - his therapy, where he can se heaven and be a child again. Music is the only think that has power to enter your mind, your spirit and influences the way you live without knowing it. The power of music is compared to the power of love although music does not see colour.

THe importance of education to Emmanuel he is willing to die for and has for the last 252 days has been donating his breakfast and lunch to a charity he has set up and is only eating dinner. the charity is aiming to set up a school is Sudan for ex child soldiers. The only way to help Sudan is to educate the woman and the children - he wants to celebrate Emma an aid worker who rescued him from being a child soldier. He sang his song 'what would I be' asking the audience to dance along although most of them seemed very uncomfortable!!!!! 

Lunch today is in the Randolph Hotel where the Simulcast lounge is.

TEd Global 2009 - Oxford - Day 2 Session 4

Session 4 of the second day is on the topic of Curious and Curiouser. A session about scientific riddles this session has four speakers

Markus de Sautoy  is Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Maths at Oxford University. Oxford's newest science ambassador Marcus du Sautoy is also author of The Times' Sexy Maths column. He'll take you footballing with prime numbers, whopping symmetry groups, higher dimensions and other brow-furrowers.

Symmetry is natures language to explain the world around us. Symmetry in facial structures is seen as beauty and attractive as it says we have good genes. Artists too are fascinated by Symmetry - they like to set up models of Symmetry and then break them. What is Symmetry? Galois a French mathematician provided a language for explaining Symmetry and produced a series of tables to explain how the Symmetries act. 

It is the unanswered questions that makes mathematics exciting. 

Garik Isrealian's stargazing on the Canary Islands has led to high-profile discoveries about space's big disasters -- including the first evidence that supernova explosions make black holes.

He specialises in Spectroscopy to search for new planets - he feels that Spectroscopy can answer the question "is there anyone out there?". He spent 8 months studying the profile of an event of a planet crashing into a star - he did not observe the crash but studied Lithium 6 which can only be seen in planets and comets etc.

They have found that there are alien stars in our galaxy - stars from other galaxies which are captures when galaxies collied or pass close to each other. Two Alien stars have been found in our galaxy. Back to the question "is there any our there" - there is no life without Tectonic and Volcanic activity so we need to look for evidence of Thorium. If the earth is investigated from space using Spectroscopy you can detect signs of vegetation and they have found signs on a planet outside our solar system.

Audience talk from Candy Chang asks are we alone in our neighbourhood. Residents are chock full of information about our neighbourhood and as we don't connect with these people we can tap into this knowledge. By using post it notes etc. she is finding things out about her neighbourhood and passing information on to the residents. All these 'conversations' re the unseen conversation in your neighbourhood and consider how analogue and digital channels can work together.

Elaine Morgan Elaine Morgan is an octogenarian scientist, armed with an arsenal of television writing credits and feminist instincts, on a mission to prove humans evolved in water. 

Why did humans diverge from our chimpanzee ancestors many years ago? Why are we so different from the Chimpanzees - we are told that we are so close to them genetically. We were taught that the apes went up into the trees and humanoids went to the plain and this shift 'forced' our evolution to the upright, bipedal hairless people we are today. However this has since been proved wrong although there hasn't been a sensible answer re-proposed. 

In the 1960s there was a theory that our ancestors had a more aquatic existence than had been previously thought. Most of the mammals that have lost their hair have been aquatic ones - but what about the elephant - maybe they had an aquatic origin and it has been proved now that they did. What about bipedality - all the apes and monkeys are capable of walking on two legs - the only time they do is when they are in water. 

What about the fat layer - we have a layer of fat under the skin unlike any other primate - humans can get very obese unlike any other primate. We are streamlined - if we dived into water we don't make a splash - try this with a gorilla.

The scientists are not staving off the aquatic theory because they have their own theory - it is because there is a vacuum. If you look back at the beginning of the century there was a clash between Darwins theories and Hardy's ideas - hopefully we will see a blending of these ideas. She hopes that sometime people will take on the concept and do further research - and it should be sometime soon! As she says Gorge Bernard Shaw when he was younger than Elaine that he didn't even buy green bananas!

She received a standing ovation by the TED crowd.

Sophie Hunger Indie newcomer Sophie Hunger's haunting vocals -- at once fragile and soulful -- carried her  wistful, blues-dappled acoustic folk from intimate cafe appearances to extraordinary word-of-mouth success and cross-Europe tours.