TED Day 3 - highlights

DAY 3 – I was sick today & so had to spend a whole heap of time in the hospital whilst they were working out what to do with me. They finally decided that my new side effects aren’t life threatening & so I was allowed to go home. I saw the first session live & then had to watch the rest delayed when I got home. I REALLY wish the hospital had wifi so I could have watched it from my bed - at least I got my favorite room, with a lovely view over Black Mountain. My sister & I were so bored we played pictionary - trying to guess different elements from the periodic table :-)

Here are my highlights...

- Philip Zimbardo - a great psychologist who gave a “3 min talk”, that wasn’t 3 mins at all - the Demise of Guys (dropping out of school, committing suicide, 5 times more likely to have ADHD). Why – because of arousal addictions (to internet, gaming & porn). Boys brains are being digitally rewired for action, change, novelty. “What’s the solution –not my job, I’m here to alarm, not to calm.”

- Dennis Hong (Roboticist) – developing a robotic car for DARPA & a robotic car for the blind. (called Brian) – using non-visual user interfaces The side effects of the blind car program is technologies that can be used in other situations. I so wish my good friend Connor was here – he wants to be a robotic engineer – he would find this stuff exciting.

- Sebastian Thrum (from Google & Stanford) – won the DARPA robotic car challenge. He wants to save 1 million people a year, by creating a car that is autonomous (he had a good friend die in a car accident when he was 18). The cars are at the TED conference & you can “drive” them – that would be fun.

- A live cross to TED Active in Palm Springs (yay, hello Steve from TEDx Canberra) - elevated .org – to get students more involved in education. Talking the ideas behind the TED talks & turning them into TED walks. This reminds me that I’ve been looking at the Khan Academy website today & it looks really great.

- Ai Weiwei (artist, architecht & activist) – Weiwei is critical of Chinese authorities & how they stifle artists & more importantly people in general. He is constantly under surveillance. He talked about living in a society in which freedom of speech is not allowed. Weiwei is trying to connect art & social change. Recently had his studio demolished in Shanghai. Got a standing ovation!! I struggled with this talk a lot. I admire him as a rights activist, and as an artist in general, but find his controversial works just so confronting (he took 6,000 year old Han dynasty urns and took photo’s of him smashing them – he’s also taken Neolithic pottery and ground it to dust & put it in a glass jar). Such rare precious & unreplaceable piece of antiquity being destroyed like that is painful to see. You can see his work here http://dailyserving.com/2010/07/ai-weiwei-dropping-the-urn/

- Eli Pariser – founder of MoveOn (the US version of GetUp). Google & facebook have started filtering things it thinks we want to see, rather than what we need to see – eg if different people do a search for Egypt in google, they will get different responses, depending on their browsing history. There used to be human gate keepers (news editors), now they are digital (algorithmic) - & those online filters don’t have the ethics that human ones do- they don’t take their civic responsibility seriously to give out important information – merely what is “most relevant”. We need to make sure that the algorithms coded into them a sense of civic responsibility, so that we can decide about what information is important.

- Eythor Bender (Berkley Bionics) – This team has made a bionic suit to give extra strength, to help with balance for US soldiers. The average US soldier on average carries 100 pounds of gear on their back, causing back & other injuries. They have made an exoskeleton to help carry this load. They are also working in other areas – There are 68 million wheelchair users world wide (I am 1 of them), which is 1% of the total world population. They have made Elex – an exoskeleton similar for the US military, to help paraplegics . They got Amanda to demonstrate (she has been paralysed from a skiing accident 19 years ago) – she was able to walk for the first time in 19 years!! Amanda got a standing ovation – she looks so incredibly happy to be walking! She asked the MC for a hug – commenting that it was great to do it face to face – when you are in a wheelchair you miss being at eye level with everyone (you get sick of looking at crotches and bellybuttons). It was wonderful to be a part of that moment for Amanda.

- Juan Enriquez (futurist) – I thought it was amazing that they can do so much with silk – to be able to make artificial bones, veins, cups to hold water, store medication so that it is stable etc – a wonderful new use of a very old product. In a way this talk reminded me of Chef Homaro Canto talking about how he makes food (by pushing all the boundaries of nature).

- Daniel Tammet (Linguist, educator, savant) – I love this guy, he is fascinating. It was a pleasure to hear him speak, and to have some sort of insight into what it is like living with such a gift. I think he is probably the closest thing we have to a superhero – with his amazing abilities.

- Janet Echelman – It is so wonderful to see someone who became such an influential artist without going to Art School (she applied to 7 art schools & they all turned her down). Her work is beautiful and so inspiring – we need someone in Australia like her!

- Ed Boyden (controlling brain circuits with light)- being able to control seizures and other brain problems with light instead of medication is exciting – the side effects of those medications are nasty, so it is great to hear about what he is doing.

- TEAM FUN was the nickname of the last session, & they were a lot of fun - it was great to have something to help my brain recover - it's getting a lot of exercise listening to all these amazing speakers.

- Beatrice Coron (papercutter & artist) – I think it is amazing to see what this lady can make with a sharp knife and a piece of paper. Have a look at her work, it is phenomenal - Check out her work here www.beatricecoron.com

- Sarah Kay (performance poet) – this was cool. It reminds me of the poetry slam I went to at the Greenbelt festival in England in 2009. It was great she got a standing ovation!

- Bruno Boden – this is the guy who made Santa Tracker!!! We had a lot of fun with this when we lived in the US (our neighbors kids loved it & introduced it to us, it really brought Santa alive for them).

- Jennifer Pogue (plastic surgeon) –she compared making her daughters Halloween costumes to doing plastic surgery. This was fun, but a little weird and gross.

- Kate Harpen (artist, technologist & communicator) – this lady was hugging a glacier & making interfaces for plants to send twitter messages. She was fun, but bat cr*p crazy. How does she make enough money to eat?? I suspect she must work in other types of art as well, and this is her whimsical side, brought to TED to give our brains a bit of a break and a boost from all the mind bending stuff from the earlier sessions.

- Loved the VW car ad with the force (one of the ads that they are showing as a part of a competition they are running for inspiring and illuminating advertising ). Our friend Steve Jamieson showed this to us a little while ago, & it is a lot of fun. This is the ultimate parental wish fulfilment.

- Shea Hembry (contemporary artist) – (described by the MC as a lunatic). This guy was great. He is often frustrated with the contemporary art world (for not being accessible to people, and not being of high enough quality in technique) & so he decided to organise his own biennial. When he couldn't find artists he was happy with exhibiting, he decided to invent 100 artists from around the world making bio’s and backgrounds for the artists, in various different styles, and then made the works himself. He “introduced” 27 of these artists – the works were amazing in skill, & the bio’s and background stories were really in depth, and very playful. Ok, this guy is kind of bat crap crazy as well (lunatic is a good label), but really interesting, & has mastered so many different styles of art. Either this guy is satirising artists & the art world, or he has his own alternate reality. This was fun, although very left of centre. I hope we were laughing with him & not at him. This guy really deserved his standing ovation – he was great and has a huge amount of skill as an artist (and as a bullsh*t artist as well - the stories of all his invented artists were very engaging).

- Bruno Giussani – head of TED global (which I am hoping to go to in July if I am well enough). His plug for TED global got me excited about the possibility of going.