Continuing my synopses of TEDGlobal presentations, Sasa Vucinic began the second morning session of Day Three. Vucinic is a media entrepreneur from the former Yugoslavia. Fully 85% of the planet's population lack access to independent media and Vucinic spoke passionately of his experiences in raising and distributing funds in Eastern Europe and Russia. His foundation, the Media Development Loan Fund, finances anything a media organization would need, from presses to computers. What we need, Vucinic says, is a Morningstar-like rating system for not-for-profits who solicit funds, so donors could be confident that their money is going where they want it to. Good idea.
Alex Seffren reprised his Pop!Tech presentation of his work at Worldchanging.com. The possibilities exist, Seffren says, for Southern cultures to leapfrog the industrial age technologies and implement greener, sustainable ones. Seffren showed one of the most potent images of the conference: a woman drinking river water through a "life straw" that filters any water to make it potable in the time it takes to get to your lips.
James Cameron closed out the morning with a talk about his Climate Change Capital Fund. Cameron, about whom a Financial Times article appeared on the day of his presentation, believes that "brilliant design engineers will solve the global climate change problem; there will be statues of these people." I love this kind of optimism, and Cameron's definitely putting his money where his mouth is. He started a fund trading in carbon futures to allow investors to begin to participate in the post-Kyoto energy economy. Will this work? No one knows, but Cameron's claims about ROI were healthy enough to attract all but the most skeptical. Interesting point: on February 28th, China issued the world's most far-reaching environmental laws. Companies like GE are taking advantage of the opportunity to get behind sustainable energy production and will definitely lead the charge in China and beyond.
Before the formal session began, Jay Walker stepped up for a three-minute TEDster talk about imagining solutions to global poverty. Iqbaql Quadir's cell phone presentation had piqued Walker's interest, so his question to the audience was: how can we turn the cell phone into jobs in the developing world? He'd return later in the conference to report his findings.
Thursday afternoon's presentations began with Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia's head of design, who definitely wins the TEDGlobal "Most Fashionable Presenter" Award for his brick red Mao suit. Ahtisaari said that while styling and form are interesting, he prefers to focus on what he called, "social fundamentals, or primitives." His list for cell phones included: Gifts, Signaling, Photostream, Peer Productivity, Hacking, Remixing, Tuning Out. Explanation: every culture has Gifts; Signaling is sending short, "I'm here" messages to others; Flickr = Photostream; the Wiki = modern Peer Productivity; eliminating the negative connotation, the ability of human beings to complete a product (software, hardware)= Hacking; content oriented hacking = Remixing; and, Tuning Out = creating ways of being "sometimes off" in an "always on" world, ways that make returning to the world easier and better (still no design aids that make this easy). His question: which of these is most likely to slip into the mobile platform to drive growth? All this, plus an overriding need for Simplicity. Thought provoking presentation.
The audaciously provocative Aubrey DeGrey followed, with his proposal to "defeat aging." We should defeat aging because it kills people, DeGrey begins. Our common excuses for not "curing" aging are unimaginative: old = boring; how would we pay pensions?; what about children? ("who are we to impose our values [e.g., having children] on the future?") Aging in a nutshell for DeGrey: metabolism eventually causes pathology. Understanding the ongoing damage caused by metabolism is the key. Aging can be cured in stages, DeGrey hypothesizes. By adding 30 years to the life-expectancy of a 55 year old, it would be possible to add years in chunks as therapies become available. Here's his work. I believe he's slightly mad, but that doesn't say anything about the feasibility of his work, only the limits of my imagination.
Kari Stefansson then spoke about his genetic research in Iceland. The country's extraordinary homogeneity and thorough record keeping have made Iceland a geneticist's haven. He has been looking at common diseases, caused, he says, by an interaction between genetic predispositions and the environment (not, as DeGrey claims, "dramatic damage," he pointed out.) It turns out that people who reach 90 years of age are significantly more related to one another genetically than those who do not reach 90. One "good" gene, he says, is the source of this variance, regardless of the number of "disease genes" one inherits. In mapping that gene, two chromosomes that express themselves in the brain turn out to be particularly interesting. This work appears very practical and important to me.
Craig Venter presented his current work on synthetic genetics. As he put it: "we are now moving from reading to writing genetic code." Genetic sampling continues in the world's oceans and New York City in this attempt to build, "software that builds its own hardware." His predictions: we will construct synthetic bacteria within two years, with "designer viruses" over a decade away. Interesting aside: we have ethical clearance from religions for making life because nothing in their scripture prohibits it. It's overwhelmingly impressive to hear Venter report on his group's progress at TED. I certainly hope he continues to do so.
Royal Cosmologist Sir Martin Rees followed with a talk I did not connect with. Rees is deeply worried about the future of Earth, and believes we only have a 50-50 chance of surviving this century. I think I was simply brain-weary during this presentation.
Eve Ensler wrapped up Day Three with some thoughts about "security." The illusive, inevitability of insecurity keeps us fixed in a locale as a way of staying free from doubt and change. I found these thoughts less compelling than those she shared about women in Cairo opening a safe house for victims of violence or the story of a Minnesota high school student who was suspended for wearing a "I [heart] My Vagina" T-shirt, only to have 150 of her friends, including (did I remember this correctly?) several members of the football team, sport similar shirts ("I [heart] Her Vagina") in support. The result: new sex education classes in that high school. Most distressing fact: one-third of all women on the planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime.
Chris Anderson wrapped up the day by asking us all to complete the following sentences: "I am fearful that...", or, "In the near future I believe that..." Several attendees spoke of their fears, with this one resonating most for me: "I am fearful that the world will continue to become more and more asymmetric."
Comments