The TrueTalk Blog

Swarms and Pipelines

Charles Leadbeater was one of my favorite speakers at TEDGlobal in Oxford last month.   Here's what I wrote about his talk.  Yesterday, while poking around this amazing Internet world we're creating together every day, I came across a presentation Leadbeater made at a conference in Amsterdam last March.  Here's the conference site, and here's the QuickTime movie of Leadbeater's talk. 

Leadbeater's talk presents another fascinating view of the new open source, collaborative approach to innovation at the heart of Linux, eBay, The Sims, etc.  He  distinguishes the innovation that takes place in traditional organizations, "pipelines," from that which takes place in these pro-am, prosumer, distributed networks, or "swarms."  By the way, John Seely Brown used the same term in his excellent talk at Supernova, available on a podcast from Doug Kaye's incredibly valuable IT Conversations (which, for all you non-geeks, also presents great ideas outside of IT.) 

While innovation pipelines rely on special people ("creatives") in special places ("departments") doing special things, swarms provide open opportunities for users to create adaptive applications of the "kernel" presented by an originator.  That, plus a set of rules for self-monitoring (viz. Wikipedia) presents broad swaths of territory for large numbers of innovators.

Here's a teaser slide ("Swarm Innovation: Assumptions") from Leadbeater's PowerPoint presentation (also available at the conference site):

• Innovation is social and dynamic
• Authorship joint, complex and evolutionary
• Knowledge created by interaction
• Use is creative
• Organized without being an organisation

I particularly like the fourth point.  In pipelines, the innovators assume that they have determined the nature and purpose of their innovation.  In swarms, users take up the innovation in a creative fashion and adapt it to their own wants, needs and desires; their own way of being-in-the-world.  Use in itself, then, is a creative enterprise.

If you have 20 minutes or so, watch Leadbeater's presentation.  You won't be sorry.

TEDGlobal - Day Four (Part Two)

OK, let's wrap up the TEDGlobal summaries with the final session, kicked off by Nick Bostrom, of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute.  Another big thinker, Bostrom challenged the attendees to think beyond our current understanding of human nature, to imagine what he called Humans+ and Humans++.  This would enable us to confront what he sees as the three biggest problems for humanity:

1. Death - usually not viewed as a problem because it is, "too familiar and too big"
2. Existential risk - the substantial probability that humanity will not survive the 21st century
3. Life isn't usually as wonderful as it could be - we're very familiar with the things we don't want--the absence of bad--but not all that clear about what positive things we do want.

We've heard these points before, which means these memes are being validated as legitimate points of intellectual discourse, not the work of crackpots.  What would we have to change?  Only human nature.  Currently we try to change human nature through a wide range of methods and actions: clothing, mood modifiers, vaccinations, anaesthetic, cosmetics, contraceptives, brain-reprogramming techniques (e.g., reading, arithmetic).  In the future we'll use: rejuvenative medicine, IT, nootropics, mood enhancers.  These will improve our: health span, intellectual capacity, modality and special faculties (e.g., music, humor, spirituality, aesthetics, emotions, nurturing/caring), body functioning, affective self-control, conscientiousness/sympathy, .  This will lead to greater subjective well-being, better ability to switch between relaxation and activity, greater capacity to choose emotions.  This is when we will become Human+ and ++.  Wow...I was impressed then and practically speechless now.  I know it's difficult to imagine these enhanced human capabilites (which go far beyond DeGrey's), but it does my heart good to see someone thinking on this level, if only to continue to help us to dream.

Neil Gregory then did a three minute TEDster talk he entitled, "The Future Is Wet."  Biology.  In his words, "Professor Wang (I think the name is correct) has just invented the transistor"; that is, therapeutic cloning is close at hand.  Gregory's predictions: 1) commercial application of biology within five years, 2) leadership in the individual application of biology will not take place in the US, 3) highly lucrative market ("how much money would you be willing to spend for rejenerative therapies?")  Very provocative remarks.

So, speaking of dreaming, Peter Diamandis wrapped up the conference.  The founder of the X Prize Foundation, Diamandis spoke of his life-long fascination with space.  It is, he says, our "moral imperative" to explore space.  Why?  Curiosity (the weakest rationale), fear (someplace to go if things get really bad) and wealth (there's gold in them there asteroids!).  Of course, the government will no longer be able to fund rapid space exploration; at $1 billion per shuttle launch, it can no longer take the risks.  Once again, it's entrepreneurs vs. dinosaurs.  The key metric is the cost of getting into orbit, Diamandis says, since 2/3 of the cost of getting anywhere in space is expended escaping Earth's gravity. Today that cost is $20 million per person; Diamandis believes he can do it for $100.  How?  Prizes!! 

Diamandis wants to continue to use the prize model (you don't pay if no one wins) to skip the usual steps in attaining extraordinary goals (get people to believe, face ordeals, convince others, raise funds, deal with bureaucracies, failure), and instead cut to the chase using prizes.  Going beyond sub-orbital space flight Diamandis wants his foundation to offer prizes for: orbital flight, energy conservation, genetic sequencing, water, medicine and social entrepreneurship.

Once again, it's exhilirating to see imagination on this scale.

So, overall TEDGlobal impressions?  A few outstanding speakers, several very good ones and a couple of duds.  As good as Monterey?  Just about.  Liked the questions from the audience, enjoyed the more geographically and professionally diverse attendees, and wish Chris could loosen up just a little bit more (a couple of his comments seemed unnecessarily strident, especially his "quips" to the Oxford folks invited in free on the last day).  Despite a few quibbles the venue was very good.  Would I attend another TEDGlobal?  Yup. 

Next scheduled brain expansions: Semi-Permanent in New York in September, Pop!Tech in October, and TED in February.  Watch this space for reports!

TEDGlobal

TEDGlobal - Day Four (Part One)

My synopsis of the beginning of TEDGlobal's final day. 

IDEO's Paul Bennett kicked off the morning.  "Small Is The New Big," or at least that's what the green wristband distributed at the door said.  Bennett, a graphic designer by training, explained that the challenge for design is to reconcile what the "big" (nation, company) wants with what the "small" (individual) wants.  One way: bring together the small to create the big.  Bennett organized his presentation around four points:

1. Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious - key to great design: pay attention.  He demonstrated the principle with examples from an engagement in which a hospital asked IDEO to answer the question: "What is our patient experience?"  Their client presentatin began with a 20 minute video of the view of the acoustic tile ceiling from a patient's bed.  Obvious, indeed.  Key: always look from the person-out, not from us-in.
2. Find Yourself In The Margins - look wide and use your peripheral vision. I especially like this one. I'll often take my glasses off when looking at something to get a more marginal perspective; did psychotherapy that way for almost 20 years. 
3. Have a Beginner's Mind - great story of designing a storage system for kids for Ikea.
4. Pick Battles Big Enough To Matter and Small Enough To Win - this was the money point, for me, with ramifications far and wide.

Vijay Vaitaeeswaran of The Economist was next.  His topic: the micro-power revolution.  Vaitaeeswaran's story is another in the growing paean of movement from the mass, centralized world to the power of the distributed grid.  This time, it's literal: micro-power (in the form of solar, micro-turbines, fuel cells and co-generation plants) will someday be bigger than mega, Vaitaeeswaran says.  What we will have will be self-healing (vs. brittle), smart (vs. hard-wired), reliable (vs. blackout prone), digital (vs. analog) power networks.  This will come about because of liberalization of markets, increasing environmental awareness and a continuation of the technical revolution.  This will create a "leapfrog" opportunity (NB - this is clearly a loudly buzzing meme) for the developing world just when it needs it most.  Very solid talk.

Jay Walker then returned with the results of the "turn cell-phones into jobs in the developing world" suggestions.  Top three:

1. Senior citizen contact/visits - call a friend idea for 15 or 20 cents/minute.  Many different friends a day.
2. Children calling hospitalized children - kids love to talk with other kids from different places.
3. Practice another language - not learn, but practice Mandarin, Spanish, etc.

The globally disruptive Niklas Zennstrom closed out the first session.  All he's done in the past few years is create Kazaa and Skype.  Many excellent points:

• Small is fast, and today, fast beats slow.  Incumbents create opportunities that can be exploited by immature players without baggage.
• The network effect is accelerating.  In its first 18 months, ICQ got to 10 million subscribers; Skype got to 30 million in its first 18 months.
• Peer to peer enables very disruptive business models
• Goal: mimimize average revenue per user.  This is exactly the opposite of most business models.  This enable you to get more people into the network, like eBay did.
• Skype implications: carriers can't charge for phone calls anymore; VOIP driving broadband sales; one cost-efficient network will soon drive all services (telephony, TV, music, images)
• Incumbents always fight that which helps them most.  The biggest boon to the music industry was free radio; to movie industry, home video.

I have a sneaky feeling this kid might go far!

TEDGlobal

TED Global - Day Three (Part Two)

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."

TEDGlobal

TED Global - Day Three (Part One)

One week after TEDGlobal's conclusion, I pick up my summary with Day Three's highlights.

One of those highlights was Yochai Benkler.  Benkler's been studying the sociology and economics of sharing, and the Internet has provided him with plenty of fertile ground.  The reduction in cost of production of information to something approaching zero reverses a 150-year trend in industrial information technology (newspapers, radio, television).  This has led to a radically-decentralized environment for information (due to reduced costs for computation),  knowledge (storage) and culture (communication).  Echoing Dan Pink, Benkler says that in our new world, creativity, intuition, experience are the non-fungible sources of value.  Open-source development decentralizes the authority and capacity to create value using this tools, providing new opportunities for toolmakers to create revolutionary products like Firefox, Skype and Wikipedia.  I now need to read Benkler's article, (PDF warning) "Sharing Nicely."

Speaking of which, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, spoke next.  Wales told the story of creating this amazing knowledge storehouse.  With a virtually all-volunteer staff, Wikipedia has developed 600,000 articles in English, and over 2 million articles in 100+ languages; only 1/3 of its hits are English language.  Wales described the elegantly simple quality control process: (volunteers monitoring the "neutral point of view" policy; the "recent changes" and "watchlist" pages) for article submissions and updates.  Governance is equally simple.  But "simple" does not equal "easy," and the Wikipedia community is demonstrating the power of its guiding social methodology: consensus, democracy, aristocracy (reputational history is everything in a community like this), and monarchy (Jimmy as final arbiter).  These principles clearly have enormous relevance for the kinds of social structures we'll use as the 21st century unfolds.

The very witty, entertaining Charles Leadbeater followed.  Described in the program as, "one of Tony Blair's favourite thinkers," Leadbetter spoke about the role of users and consumers in collaborative creativity.  "Who invented the mountain bike?," Leadbeater asked.  Answer: Northern California enthusiasts, who'd tricked out their bikes (creating what they called, "clunkers") to accommodate their trail needs, thereby creating a $58 billion a year industry.  This leads to a logical question: "how do we organize ourselves without being organized?"  Modern collaborative creativity challenges the old model of product development conducted by special people, in special places, having special ideas delivered to passive users.  Two-way interactivite collaboration allows users to be ahead of producers in developing the kinds of radical innovation at which established organizations (by necessity incremental because of a need to protect existing products) are poor.  This invariably leads to serious organizational implications between those who work on "next," and those who are responsible for "now."  Tell me about it!  Parenthetically, Leadbetter points out that many of today's inventions are developed without clarity about their ultimate purpose. This challenges our current model for patents, in which a purpose must be declared.  It also begs the question of surviving totally on volunteers for innovation.  There are signs of "intelligent closed organization" (i.e., corporations) moving toward open collaboration with their customers.  All in all, an excellent talk.

As was Clay Shirky's.  Shirky began with a simple question: how do groups get anything done?  For peak efficiency: put cooperation into your infrastructure.  Take Flickr, for example.  If one were to search Flickr's tags for photos of the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade, one would find almost 3,400 submitted photos, including this one.  Usually, organizations solve coordination problems via management, which necessitates overhead, exclusionary policies and the establishment of a professional class.  But a cooperative infrastructure sheds institutional costs by replacing planning with coordination.  By agreeing to tag all photos (or most photos, or an increasing number of photos) of this event as "MermaidParade," the Flickr community has utilized Flickr's built-in cooperative infrastructure to manage its content.  And, in doing so, the community has encouraged the development of "mass amateurization," one of the major devlopments of our time.  And so, a person submitting one photo of the parade can contribute at no incremental cost to the community than that of someone posting 100 photos.  The system, then, enables contribution rather than being an obstacle to it.  Of course, institutions are reacting badly to these developments (a Paris bus company is currently suing car poolers for lost revenue!), going through what Shirky cites as a Kubler-Ross-like process of denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance.  But the genie is out of the bottle.  It took 200 years for institutional society to go from the invention of the printing press to chaos; Shirky predicts it will take 50 years for the same journey on the Web.  Superb presentation.

For my money, these speakers made up the conference's best session.

TEDGlobal

TED Global - Day Two (Part Two)

More from Oxford.

Carl Honoré, author of In Praise of Slowness, spoke about his book.  We've been, "marinated in the culture of speed," Honoré says, to our detriment.  Our linear concept of time, the fleeting, "time is money" (thanks, Ben Franklin!), "you snooze, you lose" approach that drives our rat race world, causes us no end of distress.  All well and good, but I suspect our ability to singularly unplug from this time machine in any sustainable way is pretty limited.  Trying to do things at, "the right speed" -- a pace appropriate to the task -- is my takeaway.

Next, Barry Schwartz reprised his Pop!Tech presentation of the key ideas from his book, The Paradox of Choice.  Barry didn't engage the criticisms of his work, which makes sense.  I believe he overstates the impact of mundane choices on most people (particularly young people), but I do think the bigger, existential choices cause young people lots of distress.

Dawn Denby followed with a talk on "sustainable design."  An attractive and appealing young woman, Denby is part of a growing group of designers who thing "green" by instinct.  Acknowledging that most sustainable design is a "metaphor" (examining deeply the global consequences of local design decisions often reveals their limited impact - which I've been calling, "light green" in conversations with my design clients)  she demonstrated ways in which heavy impact items like disposable printers could be manufactured in a more environmentally sensitive manner.  One big point: "designers are now being tasked with choreographing the system, not just maximizing sales."  This means designers have greater opportunity to interact with marketing, manufacturing and, most importantly, customers, to design sustainable systems.

Stefano Boeri,  Bill McDonough and Bob Neuwirth closed out Day Two.

Boeri, architect and Editor of Domus magazine began with the question: "how can one best represent the process of globalization?"  This complex presentation showed how Google Earth presents images that are at once "familiar and uncanny."  He described Domus' recent exploration of the surreal Pyongyang, North Korea, cityscape.  Boeri speaks of a place that creates, "anguish and surprise"; a place in which wide roads with few cars and no bikes, bordered by no signs, ads or shops, partoled by manneristic traffic police, lead to giant buildings that appear to have been created in Photoshop.  Pyongyang's "crowning achievement" is the Ryugyong Hotel, a 1,100 foot tall structure, built to house 5,000 guests.  Today it stands empty; structurally unsound, at the center of a city Domus calls, "a capital between the Middle Ages and science fiction." 

Boeri contrasts this building with the Bilbao Guggenheim, which he calls one of a family of "superplaces; celebrity places."  The Guggenheim, along with the Queen Mary 2, and Ground Zero (all shown from Google Earth satellite images as he spoke) are connected with the media world.  The truth of urban globalization lies somewhere between these two extremes, Boeri says.

Then, a three-minute TEDster talk by Nat Irwin.  Irwin is the son of a preacher, and plays the part well in talking about the need to spread the "Thrival" meme.    Thrivals are young black youths who "see the world through global lenses."  This new global identity finds its archetypes in Nelson Mendala and the Dalai Lama, and seek to transcend traditional ethnic/racial/national stereotypes.  What energy and commitment!   Irwin's drive will make the word "thrival" sound less odd in the coming years.

Next, Bill McDonough reprised his TED presentation, yet again.  Bill is a driving force in the sustainable architecture movement.  I look foward to a new presentation the next time I hear him speak.

Finally, Bob Neuwirth spoke about the "cities of tomorrow," the Shadow Cities springing up all over the globe.  These are squatter cities like Quibera, outside Nairobi, its analog near Mombai, or Favela adjacent to Rio de Janeiro.  These are huge, sprawling places with no services or permanent structures.  His images were stunningly disturbing; millions living in unimaginable squallor.  Soon there will be one billion people living in these conditions.  Two hundred thousand per day migrate to live there.  Still another problem of unthinkable complexity.

So, Day Two of TEDGlobal ends as so many do here, with challenges to our conventional ways of thinking and everyday lives.

TEDGlobal

TEDing Home

At the Starbuck's at Heathrow, on the way to JFK.  TEDGlobal was very good.  Some of the presenters (David Deutsch, Juan Enriquez, Clay Shirky, Steve Pinker, John Lloyd, Charles Leadbeater and several others) were excellent.  Met some terrific people.  Many of the ideas were fantastic.  The setting, inspiring.  Very glad I came.  Looking forward to Monterey in February.

I'll do more of the wrap-up in the next few days.

Meanwhile, there's nothing that quite matches the chaos of an international departure terminal at one of the world's busiest airports!

TEDGlobal - Day Two (Part One)

Day Two of any TED is demanding.  You arrived a couple of days ago, the jet lag is wearing off, and you think you're fine.

Wrong.

Day Two is the first full day of TED.  This is no wimpy, "we start at 2:00" day, it's "be here at 8:30 sharp and have your brain ready."  TEDGlobal's Day Two didn't break pattern.

We began with Alison Jackson, a UK artist whose photos of celebrity "look alikes" have caused quite a stir in Britain, as they did here today.  Jackson spoke of her work as an attempt to explore our "fixation with celebrity and celebrity culture," a fixation that was born with the death of Princess Diana.  I laughed heartily while Jackson showed her images of British royalty, pop culture stars and athletes.  But I found myself hesitate when she flashed her images of George Bush and Tony Blair chuckling over maps of Iraq, Bush & Rumsfeld partying while looking at Abu Gahrib photos, and Saddam Hussein with American flags in his jockey shorts.  It was then that I saw the potentially propagandistic value of her images and  understood emotionally the  distress many feel with her work.  The point is, Jackson is a serious artist and her videos and photos are an important contribution to our understanding of our relationship with fame.

Type designer Erik Spiekerman was up next.  Speaking about his arcane art, Spiekerman said, "I design the dough, somebody else bakes the bread."  And later: "I paint speech."  Showing a sample of text in what was obviously  Marlboro's font, Spiekerman said, "we often say a picture is worth a thousand words; I say it is the other way around."  Soon, he says, we'll get email from companies and individuals using their own signature type so that we'll instantly know whose words we're reading.

TED has a tradition of showcasing creative entrepreneurial approaches to conventionally intractable problems.  Iqbal Quadir embodied that tradition by presenting the story of Grameen Phone.  Quadir built this company on a simple idea:  Bangladesh's poor could be helped by allowing them to sell GSM cellular phone service using the same model they used to sell their cow's milk.  When he began work in 1993, Bangladesh had one cell phone for every 500 people.  Quadir reasoned that since connectivity = productivity, he could turn the delivery of cellular service into an economic engine.  Today, 115,000 women are retailing phone service in that country, making about $2/day.  Meanwhile, Quadir's company delivered a 2004 net profit of $120 million.  Up next: an electricity project with TEDster Dean Kamen.

OK, this is where I stopped yesterday...it's now the end of Day Three of TEDGlobal, but I'll keep commenting on yesterday, and then get to today, and, damn, it's hard to do this at TED, as I learned in February. 

That said, Steven Pinker was next.  Brilliant, precise and challenging, as always, Pinker spoke on "language as a window into human nature," the focus of his upcoming book.  Because language emerges from human interaction, verbs are its key; "the chassis of the sentence."  Deciding (and, that may not be the best word to use because of its calculative connotations) which verb construction to use turns out to be enormously complex.  I was particularly interested in Pinker's ideas about the ways in which language functions as a way of negotiating relationship types.  Those types are: communality, dominance, reciprocity, and sexuality.  Despite indirect speech acts that are designed for ambiguity, we are almost infallible in our ability to understand true relationship intentions in phrases such as, "come on up and see my etchings," or "nice store you got there; it'd be a shame if something should happen to it."  There is much more to say about Pinker's presentation, but I think I'll wait for the book so that I can do it justice.

Ze Frank did a great bit on airline safety cards, some of it, brilliant.  Much better than February.

Oxford statistician Peter Donnelly followed.  His work focuses on modeling genes (which allowed him to tell a funny story about his wife telling a friend that her husband's occupation was, phonetically speaking, "modeling jeans").  Donnelly demonstrated the central importance of randomness and chance in life by citing work on differences in disease suseptibility.  "If a test for a disease is 99% accurate, and you test positive for the disease, what is the chance you actually have that disease?", he asked.  Yup, it's not 99%.  It depends on the incidence of the disease.  If the disease occurs in, for example, 1 in 10,000 people, your chance of actually having the disease is (don't hold me to this), but like .098%, even if you do test positive.  Takeaways: 1) we all commit huge errors of logic when reasoning with uncertainty; 2) as the recent Sally Clark UK SIDS case demonstrates, these errors can ruin people's lives; and 3) we need to think about the role of uncertainty and randomness in our use of DNA evidence in criminal cases.

Next, Dan Gilbert, "happiness" researcher, promised to teach TEDsters, "how to do exactly the right thing at all times."  Alright!  How?  Simple; follow Jakob Bernoulli, who wrote an equation to demonstrate that:

Expected Value = odds of gain x value of gain

(Hey, you didn't think I was gonna use algebraic notation, did ya?)

Simple, huh?  Umm, no.  Because we people are horrible at estimating both of these things.  As for odds, Gilbert demonstrated that while it's easy for us to estimate the odds of seeing a dog or a pig on a leash in Oxford, it's pretty hard for us to actually know whether there are more words with the letter "R" in the first or third position, and really hard for us to compute lottery odds.

In estimating value, we make even greater errors than we do with odds.  Why?  We usually compare estimated value with the past rather than with the possible.  So, if we bought a stock at $30, and it goes down to $5 (this is hypothetical example I'm making up, not Gilbert's, so it might be wrong!), we'd be reluctant to sell it if it went back up to $28, because, hey, we were still "losing money."  We also get sucked in by stupid comparisons, time distortion, and lots of other mind traps around value. 

As for big takeaways:  our biggest problem is that we underestimate future pain and overestimate present pleasures.

And that's the end of Day Two, Part One.  Stay tuned, more to follow.

TEDGlobal

TEDGlobal - Day One

This is your brain.

This is your East-bound five-hour jetlagged brain on TED Global!

OK, very brief, inadequate summary of Day One. 

Richard Dawkins, admonished by Chris Anderson to stay away from the kind of religious comments that both electrified and polarized TED two years ago, gave a perspective-grounding talk on our lives in "middle world," in which our brains have evolved to view anything too small, too large or too fast for it to perceive/comprehend as "queer."  The universe, however, is "queerer than we can suppose."  Quotable line, "drink a glass of water and you will undoubtedly consume one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell."  Later, Richard did manage to make a comment on religion.  Good for him.

Steve Levitt presented the material from his New York Times Magazine article of last Sunday on children's car seats.

Seth Godin made the most of his three-minute TEDster presentation.  His focus: storytelling and its side-effects.  Although we've become experts at telling stories, we only tell them incompletely, leaving out the darker parts.  His admonition: tell the whole story.  His questions: 1) what are you working on?; 2) what's the story you're going to tell.  NB - he did not use the words "lie" or "liar" once.

Jacqueline Novogratz spoke on the need for developed countries to go beyond aid to developing, "sustainable, scalable systems" in poor countries.  Great story about connectivity: she gave away a sweater (after developing breasts, you had to be there!) and seven years later jogging in Kigali, Rwanda and seeing a boy wearing that very sweater.  I wanted to ask her a question about Edward de Bono's recent comment that we help the people of poor countries to learn to think creatively rather than simply giving them aid.  My question: what kind of thinking does she believe holds people in poor countries back, and how would she suggest helping them learn new thinking skills?

Ashraf Ghani then spoke about the need to mobilize capitals (plural intended) for state-building.  A courageous veteran of Afghanistan's thirty-plus years of military, political and religious conflict, Ghani's claim is that despite capitalism's and democracy's dominance on the world stage, most of the global population has not felt their effects.  For most, capitalism = extractive industries.  Living in one world, not three, demands inclusion of the huge pockets of population that are currently excluded.  This will require a substantial infusion of seven types of capital: physical, institutional, human, social, financial, security and infrastructure.  With $1 of investment equalling $20 of aid, the consequences could be extraordinary.  Major problem: corruption.  Fighting this scourge will require changes of assumptions ("oh, that's just how they are"), tax laws ("put the consequences of extractive policies on the books"), and simplification ("burearcracies are evil" - well, not his quote exactly, but my note!)  The best models, in his estimation, for these kinds of simplifications, are large global corporations.

Juan Enriquez previewed ideas for an upcoming book that looks like a blockbuster.  The books central question: why do successful countries fall apart?  Guess who's in the crosshairs on this one?  Chronicalling the history of the decline of great countries and empires, Enriquez makes the case that the stable borders, flags and anthems we take for granted today are merely vulnerable myths.  He asks the provocative question: how many stars will the US flag have in 50 years?  His answers range from 45 to 55 with credible logic for either extreme.  Key point: the gap today between promise and reality determines a country's fate 50 from now.  Houston, we have a problem.  (What will happen to Texas will apparently be a theme in the book.)

Hans Ulrich Obrist spoke about the future of the museum in ways that were fundamentally incomprehensible to me.  I'm sure there were brilliant ideas there.  I simply couldn't understand them.

Irshad Manji, an openly lesbian Canadian Muslim, spoke of changing Islam from the inside.  The biggest problem todayh in Islam (or any religion): "literalism."  Islam, she pointed out, has a lost tradition of inquiry, "ishtihad," which it needs to recover.  She publicly showed a video interview of the Gaza head of Islamic Jihad, in which she asked the question, "where in the Koran is it suggested that you can take your own life and have that be called martyrdom."  The gentleman equivocated and squirmed for 25 edited minutes before producing a half-baked answer.  But, does it matter?  This meme, Koran-based or no, is now wildly alive in the Muslim world, and it seems to me that putting this genie back in the bottle will take more than a scripture quiz.

The remarkable David Deutsch spoke next.  Wow.  A brilliant Oxford physicist, Deutsch presented two "known truths": 1) Earth, the solar system, our galaxy, is uniquely suited to sustain our evolution and survival; outside of this area, the universe is implicitly hostile (this is the "spaceship Earth" notion); and, contradictingly, 2) humans are not the hub of existence in the universe, but, according to Hawking's characterization, chemical scum on a typical planet, in a typical galaxy, etc.

Wrong on both counts, says Deutsch.

First, typical?  No.  Look around and we don't see other places like this at all.  Everything around is is dark, cold and empty.  We create knowledge of physical structures unlike ourselves, which does make us a hub.  (If any of this sounds dumb, it is, I assure you, my reporting, not his thinking).  We have, in our neighborhood, a concentration of matter, energy and evidence (wanna prove gravity exists? hang around, something will fall).  Everywhere else: cold, dark, empty;  remember?

But, here's the kicker, those terms are only defined from our point of view!  Thank you, Heideggerian conceptualization of consciousness!  Like Dawkins said, above, it's all relative to our own "middle world" perspective. 

The big kicker here was his idea about global warming.  He starts by saying, "hey, I'm no expert, but..."; this means, hold your wallets, folks.  It's already too late to do anything about this in terms of current knowledge (it was probably already too late before we even knew we had a problem; say mid 70s.)  So, stop trying to prevent warming and start trying to develop knowledge of how to fix warming.  Ah, Grasshopper, there are two tablets, he told us (OK, without the Grasshopper part): 1) problems are solvable; 2) problems are inevitable.  Put it right, don't waste time doing penance. 

A big idea talk to close Day One, for sure.

See ya tomorrow.

TEDGlobal

Pre-TED Tour

I just returned from a delightful tour of Exeter College conducted by Frances Carincross, the college's Rector.  She was a most enthusiastic and gracious hostess, providing interesting background and context for the college, which was founded in 1314.

Most of the heavy historical lifting was left to John Maddicott, Head of Medieval History Studies at Exeter.  I can't begin to recount all the details he spoke of.  He is soon to retire, a fact which, understandably, causes Ms. Cairncross no end of anxiety.

We were accompanied on the tour by the Priscilla Tolkien.  Ms. Tolkien is the only daughter and youngest of J.R.R. Tolkien's four children.  It was delightful to hear her speak of her recollections of her father and of his experiences as a student at Exeter.  Amazingly, she personally typed several of the early chapters of Lord of the Rings from her father's longhand; the ones, she says,  she always remembers best.  No wonder!

Great start to what promises to be an extraodinary few days.