TED Blog

07 December 2012

In Short: An app of robot demos, a ruling on eyewitness testimony

Can’t get enough robot demo videos? Neither can we. The new IEEE Robots app for the iPad is full of walking, grasping, tea-making robots. Each one gets a stat sheet, a 360-degree view and an action video. With games and a daily robot news feed, this app looks like it could entertain a robot-curious kid for a good long while. But should you still want more ‘bots, check out our playlist How to Live With Robots.

It’s the year in photos. In Focus at The Atlantic has selected the 135 images that define 2012. Check out the beautiful and often unsettling collection, broken into part 1, part 2, and part 3.

The Oregon Supreme Court made a unanimous decision last week, downgrading the reliance on eyewitness identification in criminal trials. The New York Times reports that the court now calls for eyewitness testimony to be treated as trace evidence. For more on this, watch Scott Fraser’s TED Talk “Why eyewitnesses get it wrong.”

Lucy McRae, who gave the talk “How can technology transform the human body?,” exists in the Venn diagram overlap of art, fashion, technology and the body. Her work is provocative and grotesquely beautiful. In this new video, “Make Your Maker,” McRae imagines a bizarre experiment where bodies are repackaged for consumption.

Good neuroscience doesn’t necessarily make for good headlines. The New Yorker takes a look at why brain imaging is not nearly as conclusive as it may sound.

Everyone knows the rage that builds waiting for a bus that won’t come. An Italian conceptual artist had a fascinating idea — leaving bubble wrap at bus stops to let people relieve their stress while passing the time. As Robert Krulwich of NPR shares, the effort was so successful that the phrase “happy bubble wrap popper” might be warranted.

Drinking tea was once considered reckless for women. This Smithsonian Magazine blog post will make you wonder what thing we think of as a big no-no is actually benign.

Thanks, Lifehack! The site has come up with 20 TED Talks that will improve your productivity.

07 December 2012

New TED Book: Tell Them I Built This

Tell-Them-I-Built-This In 2009, author Emily Pilloton moved to Bertie County, North Carolina — the poorest county in the state with a population of just 20,000. There she and her partner Matthew Miller launched Studio H, a design and build program meant to engage the creativity of high school students while bringing design innovation to the area. Pilloton told the story at TED Global 2010 in the talk, “Teaching design for change.” In the new TED Book, Tell Them I Built This: Transforming Schools, Communities, and Lives with Design-Based Education, Pilloton expands greatly on the experience, digging more into the who, what and where.

Through the eyes of her students, Pilloton tells the story of the group’s hopes, failures and triumphs. According to Pilloton, we can dramatically revamp vocational education and build the change we wish to see in the world. And she should know: ultimately her students were given the key to the city by their mayor for initiating, designing, and building three public chicken coops and a 2000-square-foot public farmer’s market structure. In Tell Them I Built This, Pilloton offers tools for building change in communities, tips for turning a vision into meaningful work, and clear and inspiring directions on how to get it done. Tell Them I Built This dramatically shows how creativity, critical thinking, citizenship and dirt-under-your-fingernails construction can radically transform both high school education and the local community where the students live.

Tell Them I Built That is available for the Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone, and get a subscription with a new TED Book every two weeks.

07 December 2012

Ronda Carnegie talks Ads Worth Spreading, and why advertising is far from dead

AdsWorthSpreading Advertising doesn’t have to be about convincing you to buy things. Great ads, just like great movies, can inspire thought. That’s why TED created Ads Worth Spreading, an initiative dedicated to advertisements that push the boundaries, from Chipotle’s stunning “Back to the Start” commercial to L’Oreal Paris’ spot starring model and athlete Aimee Mullins. As TED begins to think about next year’s winners, who will be announced at TED2013 in Long Beach, the innovation-focused website PSFK asked TED’s head of global partnerships, Ronda Carnegie, more about the program. Below, some highlights of the interview.

How did the idea for Ads Worth Spreading come about?

Ads Worth Spreading was born out of our search for compelling advertising. We want to feature campaigns that are as fascinating as our talks. All our ads run as post-roll (after the talks), and we want our viewers to choose to watch those ads because they’re interesting, engaging, funny or beautiful. It’s hard to find ads that good, but it shouldn’t be.

We launched Ads Worth Spreading in 2010 as a clarion call to brands that want to communicate authentic and interesting ideas to their consumers in the same way that TED wants to communicate with its audience — by sharing powerful ideas. We want to reward companies that have invested in creating advertising that values human attention and intelligence, and takes the time to tell a thought-provoking story.

Is advertising dead? In what ways do these concepts reflect the evolution of thinking in advertising?

No, advertising is far from dead. New media, new devices and more discerning audiences present challenges to the industry, but with every new challenge comes opportunity. At TED, we have benefited greatly from the intellectual evolution of the audience. Six years ago, the industry would not have predicted massive popularity for online talks on math, science, design and technology – but we recently reached one billion video views on TED.com alone.

As smart content becomes more popular, audiences expect more than ever from advertisers. Through Ads Worth Spreading, we’re seeing that people appreciate long-form advertising that is idea-driven, with meaningful storytelling and high production values. Viewers want to experience an emotional connection.

Read the full interview >>

07 December 2012

TED Fellow and space archaeologist Sarah Parcak heads to ancient Rome

Rome_s_Lost_Empire

TED Fellow Sarah Parcak is a “space archaeologist” who uses infrared technology coupled with satellite imagery to discover previously hidden ancient structures and cities. In this exciting talk from TED2012, she shares how she helped unearth an unknown Ancient Egyptian city through satellite imaging.

Now, Parcak is turning her attention to Ancient Rome in a new special for the BBC, Rome’s Lost Empire, which premieres this Sunday, December 9. For the show, Parcak pairs up with historian and presenter Dan Snow (above) and uses space archaeology technology to excavate secrets from the Roman Empire. Watch the trailer and find showtimes >>

See, this vast Empire stretched far beyond the Pantheon and Colosseum. In the documentary, Parcak pursues lost cities across the deserts of Africa and the Middle East as well as in the mountains and rivers of Europe. Through this adventure, Parcak and Snow give a new view of this once mighty world power.

Parcak has other news, too. She was recently presented with the National Geographic Innovation Challenge Award and will be teaming up with Louise Leakey, who gave the TED Talk, “Digging for humanity’s origins.” Parcak and Leakey connected at TED. Together, they will use the remote sensing to map early hominid sites throughout Kenya, while simultaneously teaching this innovative method to local budding archaeologists at a field school.

07 December 2012

Touching the directions: Fellows Friday with Camille Seaman

Native American photographer Camille Seaman devotes years to her subjects, revealing the unfolding of reality over time. For the last decade, she has traveled repeatedly to the Arctic and Antarctic to take portraits of polar ice, witnessing the beauty and loss of a part of Earth most of us will never see.

How do your projects evolve? Do you get commissioned to go out and take pictures, or do you simply start producing photographs?

I knew from the beginning that I was not good at having someone standing over my shoulder and saying, “We need a picture of this, and could you get it from this angle?” I’m not someone’s puppet. I needed to do what was interesting to me. So the way that it worked in my case — and I’ve discovered that for every photographer there’s a different way — it was all very serendipitous and based on my curiosity. Anything that I’m curious about, I just go, “Ooh, I’m going to go check that out.”

For example, Tibet. For many years, I saw bumper stickers on cars here in Berkeley: “Free Tibet.” But I didn’t really know what that meant. So one day I was just like, “That’s it, I’m fed up. I don’t understand what these stickers are about and I want to know.” I arranged to go to Tibet and get a sense of what was going on. And why “Free Tibet”? What does that mean? What are the issues? I ended up falling in love with the place. But, pursuing curiosity this way, I have pictures that go nowhere. Nothing has happened with the Tibet work yet, and I went every year for four years. That’s the other thing that I decided: I like long-term projects. I don’t like to just go in and do something for a couple of days or a week or so. I like things that take years.

Why years?

One of my mentors photographically is Steve McCurry, who’s a National Geographic photographer. He’s famous for the Afghan girl with the green eyes. I traveled with him in Tibet in 2004, and we became good friends, and I consider him my photographic father. He really took the time to remind me that photography really is all about being incredibly sensitive to quality of light. You can have the best composition, best subject, but if you want to have an image that is going to resonate for a long time, you have to have this sensitivity to light.

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Breaching iceberg, Greenland 2009. Photo: Camille Seaman

But one of the other things he said to me, which I find is true, is, “You can’t fake time,” in reference to people who do go in and make a couple of images and say, “Okay, that was the Iraq War,” in three days. You put that person’s work next to someone who has been in and out of Iraq for a decade or two or even three, and you’ll see just how many holes there are in the work that was done in just a few days or weeks. When you dedicate that much time to a project, things reveal themselves. You might go one time, and think, “Oh, this is the truth and this is reality and this is how I feel.” And that’s all you get. If you go back again, it may be the same, or you may realize, “Wow, I am experiencing something completely different.” So I think it’s really important to put time into something and not just do hit-and-run photography.

So did the polar work come about out of a sense of curiosity, too?

The polar work was really where I was called to do something unique. At the age of 32, this little switch came on inside me and I knew I wanted to be a photographer. That was what I was going to use to make a statement about life on this Earth and the importance of appreciating what we have here. With that intention, a lot of opportunities opened themselves to me. I lived in the jungle with some people in Panama, just documenting. I was really interested in cultures and people that were on the verge of a massive shift in their lives and their way of living. I really thought I was going to be a people photographer.

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07 December 2012

10 spoken word performances, folded like lyrical origami

Spoken word artist Lemon Andersen begins today’s talk with the poem, “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans,” written by Reg E. Gaines in 1994.

My Air Jordans cost a hundred with tax.
My suede Starter jacket says Raiders on the back.
I’m stylin’, smilin’ looking real mean,
Cause it ain’t about bein’ heard.
Just about bein’ seen.

For Andersen, hearing this poem was a click moment. As he shares in today’s talk, given at TEDYouth 2011, this poem showed him the power of spoken word. After hearing it, he began following Gaines obsessively.

“I thought poetry was just self expression,” explains Andersen. “[Gaines] handed me a black-and-white printed out thesis on a poet named Etheridge Knight and ‘The Aural Nature of Poetry’ … What Etheridge Knight taught me was that I can make my words sound like music. Even my smalls ones, the monosyllables — the ifs, ands, buts, whats. The gangsta in my slang could fall right on the ear.”

To hear Andersen tell his story with beautiful lyrical flow, watch his talk. After the jump, some others who’ve performed spoken word on the TED stage.

Rives remixes TED2006
Rives’ poem “Mockingbird” is never the same twice. At TED2006, he freestyles a recap of the entire conference with his mockingbird’s lullaby.

Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter
This performance from Sarah Kay got two standing ovations at TED2011. Listen as she shares her poems “B” and “Hiroshima,” and explains how “tricking” teenagers into writing poetry can help them connect with their inner lives and with each other.

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06 December 2012

Public Interest Design names its top 100, including 16 TED alums

Great design doesn’t just look good — it has the potential to make lives easier and to enhance the public good. Public Interest Design, the website dedicated to examining how, has created a list of 100 makers, educators, connectors, policymakers and visualizers in the U.S. who are doing incredible work at the intersection of design and service. Among the list, we noticed several TED Fellows and TED speakers. Below, check out their moving talks.

Yves Behar talks “Designing objects that tell stories” and gives a look at “supercharged motorcycle design”
Majora Carter on “Greening the ghetto” as well as sharing “3 stories of local eco-entrepreneurship“
TED Fellow Candy Chang poses the question “Before I die I want to…”
TED Fellow Jane Chen shares a “Warm embrace that saves lives”
Bill Clinton on “Rebuilding Rwanda”
Robert Hammond talks “Building a park in the sky”
David Kelley on “Human-centered design” and on “How to build creative confidence”
Tim Brown “Urges designers to think big” and shares “Tales of creativity and play”
TED Fellow Juliette LaMontagne offers “Breakthrough solutions”
Amy Smith shares “Simple, lifesaving design”
Jennifer Pahla on “Coding for a better government”
TED session curator Chee Pearlman goes inside “The Design Studio”
Emily Pilloton on “Teaching design for change”
Timothy Prestero warns to “Design for people, not awards”
Paula Scher “Gets serious”
Cameron Sinclair sounds a “Call for open-source architecture” and introduces us to the “Refugees of boom and bust”

06 December 2012

A TEDx dedicated to ideas for rural communities

Main-Guatavita

The TED stage features a red circular carpet and light-up letters, the look far more sleek than rustic. But at TEDxGuatavita, the stage was decorated with bales of hay, farming tools and boots with plants sprouting out of them.

Guatavita, a small town in the heart of rural Colombia was the home of the first TEDx event in Colombia focused on the issues facing rural communities. Themed “Hay Campo en el Campo” which in English translates to, “There is space and opportunity within rural areas,” TEDxGuatavita’s ideas filled up their stage almost as much as the haystacks.

“It took us 7 months to prepare TEDxGuatavita,” said organizer Felipe Spath. The biggest issue: many residents of Guatavita had never heard of TED before.

“It was a great challenge to express the nature of an event of this kind, and the immense opportunities deriving from it,” said Spath. “We had to meet several times with them to explain what TEDx was all about, choose the speakers, and prepare the [talks]. At the end, eleven speakers where chosen, eleven ideas which can inspire people from rural areas, and the city, to create sustainable models at the countryside.”

Fortunately, volunteer TEDx’ers worked day and night to make TEDxGuatavita a reality.

“People [worked] so hard, by heart, to build the magic performances and spaces which planted a seed for change in Guatavita and other Colombian rural areas,” said Spath. “Massive migration to the cities is the ongoing tendency in Colombia; young people don’t see opportunities to develop economically, culturally or professionally in the countryside … So inspiring ideas, accompanied by a platform which can capture new thoughts, and implement them, is crucial for rural transformation.”

Their biggest setback, however, was in promotion. “These kinds of events are normally spread through social digital networks,” Felipe said, “[but] here we had to use different, local, alternatives. We used the church radio station, went to rural schools and [met] with teachers and students.”

TEDxGuatavita volunteers even installed a pop-up billboard (below) in Guatavitan fields, a “rural cinema” screen inviting local farmers to the event.

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06 December 2012

5 ideas for streamlining the way we test pharmaceuticals

TED Fellow Nina Tandon has engineered human heart tissue in the lab — that actually beats. Though it may sound like a plot from a science fiction universe, someday, surgeons could use this tissue in the same way that mechanics use spare parts in cars.

But there is another potential use for this lab-created tissue — it could be used to test pharmaceuticals.

The process for testing new drugs is clunky at best. As Susan Solomon shares in her TED Talk, below, drug discovery on average takes 13 years, costs $4 billion, and has a 99% failure rate. Drugs are tested in the lab, then in animals, then in human trials that often aren’t big enough to be conclusive. Human beings have a near infinite number of differences — a truly amazing thing, until different bodies start reacting in unpredictable ways to the same treatment.

In today’s talk, filmed at TED Global 2012, Tandon explains that induced pluripotent stem cells — essentially, cells that have been tricked into acting like embryonic stem cells — can be grown into skin tissue, brain tissue, heart tissue, you name it. This means that a model of a person’s body could be stored on a chip. In the future, clinical trials could be conducted on these chips.

The reason we currently test on animals, usually rats, is because each creature is a complete ecosystem, which allows researchers to see how a drug for the heart may affect the liver and how an antidepressant might affect the lungs. But Tandon shares that tissue engineering is beginning to team up with microfluidics, and that researchers are starting to build maps of the human body that will allow examination of the same interactions.

Once a drug is approved, engineered tissues could have another application — helping to create personalized treatments. Because a patient’s tissue samples could exist on a chip, doctors could test exactly how different drugs would work for them. In the future, we could have a world where patients will be able to pick out treatments the way they do a pair of jeans that work best for them.

“Tissue engineering is poised to help revolutionize drug screening at every single step of the path,” says Tandon in her talk. “Disease models making for better drug formulations; massively parallel human tissue models helping to revolutionize lab testing, reduce animal testing and increase human testing in clinical trials; and individualized therapies disrupting what we even consider to be a market at all. We’re dramatically speeding up that feedback between developing a molecule and learning how it acts in the human body.”

To hear more about this fascinating area of research, watch Tandon’s talk. And after the jump, four more talks with ideas for bettering the medical research process.

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05 December 2012

Does the internet have a brain? Highlights from our chat with TED Book author Tiffany Shlain

Brain-Power-Ted-web New parents talk to their babies constantly — not because the babies will understand, but because they want to encourage brain development. Tiffany Shlain offers a fascinating idea in the TED Book Brain Power: does the global brain of the internet need similar prodding? In the book, which is accompanied by this short film, Shlain draws parallels between neuroscience and tech development. In a TED Blog Q&A last month, Shlain shared how she got interested in this topic. She said, “A mentor began to share research on child brain development with me. I quickly discovered that the language neuroscientists used — connections, links, overstimulation — and the strategies early childhood development specialists used to describe brain development in the early years of life are similar.”

On Tuesday, December 4, Shlain sat down for a live Q&A with the TED Conversations community about the ideas in her book. Read the full discussion — and see some of the most interesting interactions below.

Robert Sagal asked:

What, in your opinion, could we each be doing to help shape a more developed internet? Is regularly going offline a part of this, or is it more in how we choose to spend our time when we are online?

Shlain responded:

I definitely think unplugging weekly is very important. Try it — I promise you will love it.

When we are online, we need to be mindful that everyone you follow is influencing the connections in your brain. So we need to be mindful of who and what ideas and which connections we are making happen. That’s all for us personally.

And our minds, of course, plug into this larger global collection of minds. On that front, I feel very strongly that we need to bridge the digital divide so we can get as many different perspectives and wisdoms participating in these global conversations.

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