TED gets 'off the chart' ratings

Lest some of you think I am unduly euphoric after a TED conference, I would hasten to assure you I belong to a large club. In a post-conference survey, 44% of Long Beach attendees rated TED as fantastic. An equal number gave it an even higher rating of 'off the charts'. Guess which box I ticked!

By the way, if my recent post on Kahneman's talk intrigued you, it's now online at the TED site.

Fixing a Broken Legal System

Philip Howard broke all the rules. TED speakers don't stand in one place; they rove the stage. Not Howard. They don't read from notes. Not Howard. They have strong, sometimes stunning, visuals. Not Howard. Yet his talk was one of my favourites at TED. You have to love someone who writes a book called Life Without Lawyers. Of course the title of the book is ridiculous, because we'd have nothing left to joke about.

Howard voiced the concerns of many Americans who feel their legal system is out of control. The cost of torts there is 2% of the GDP. But the most pernicious cost is the way it impacts people's behaviour and inhibits their ability to deliver their best.

He started with some anecdotes from a teacher who said that threat of litigation had crippled her ability to deliver high-quality education, because she had to sacrifice the best interests of the whole class in deference to the few disruptive ones she could no longer discipline.

He argued that the legal system must be changed so that matters are judged based on their benefits to society rather than to individuals. Supposedly Canada's system is more attuned to this point of view, yet we can see some of the same tendencies creeping in here. Certainly the opening stories about the educational system resonate with some I've heard about the Canadian system.

But enough of a summary. Go and listen to his wonderful talk.

When does a nerd turn into an autistic?

That was a priceless line from Temple Grandin's TED talk as she argued that autism is a continuum. Grandin gave us a glimpse into how her mind works: "I think in pictures", she stated in her brusque no-nonsense manner. Where normal people (her term, not mine) see the big picture, she sees the detail.

This focus on visual detail has been crucial in her career of working with animals. She has seen, where others haven't, what spooks an animal. To most people, a person walking and a person sitting on a horse are conflated to the same thing. But not to an animal. And not to an autistic with a focus on the detail rather than the big picture. Such insights have been the key to Grandin's successes in humane livestock handling.

It was interesting to see Grandin talk quite soon after seeing her interviewed in the movie The Horse Boy. To my chagrin, I'd missed the movie at Toronto Hot Docs, where it was known as Over The Hills And Far Away. The movie chronicles the story of an autistic boy Rowan Isaacson, for whom being with animals was about the only thing that could soothe him. His family takes him on a pony trek in Mongolia to visit shamans, after which he reaches a new level of behavioural calmness.

Grandin's also the subject of an autobiographical movie, named simply Temple Grandin, that aired recently on HBO. Must keep an eye out for that one. It got great reviews.

How to Make a Movement - a TED Lesson

What makes a movement take off? Is it the existence of a leader with the courage to stand up for a new idea? Derek Sivers argues that it's the first follower who makes the movement take off. Until then, the initiator just looks crazy. Sivers illustrated this with a cute video of a crazy guy dancing in a park. At least, he looked silly until the first person had the courage to join him dancing. Within minutes, the hill was crowded with dancing people.

Sivers is also responsible for another of my favourite short talks on TED.com, in which he talks about seeing the flip side. Americans name locations by street names, whereas Japanese name locations by the blocks. This can lead to puzzlement and it's an interesting way of explaining how cross-cultural communication can be derailed.

In my innovation courses, I hammer the necessity of questioning assumptions to have any hope of creative innovation. The hardest assumption to challenge is the one you don't know you're making. Sivers' talk does a great job of pointing out one assumption most of us have never questioned.

Information is Power

TEDsters were joined this year by TED Associates in 75 countries watching a live stream of the conference. We were treated to a surprise talk by David Cameron streamed live from the London associate event. It was fitting to have this talk immediately after Kahneman because Cameron, like Obama, has sought policy input from behavioural economists.Cameron (click here to see his talk online) focused on the challenge of improving society without spending more money. He argued that the way to improve wellbeing was to give power to the people. And the formula for devolving that power was through transparency, choice and accountability, including making lots of data available online. Free access to information allows people to turn it into information.

We heard of this theme of open information from Tim Berners-Lee last year at TED when he talked to us about a new age for the Web, when numerical data would be linked the way text has been. When you have the raw data, you can freely manipulate it and integrate different data sets to elucidate relationships.

Berners-Lee discussed an example of just how quickly this can happen - just two days after the UK Department of Transport published data on the locations of bicycle accidents in Britain, The Times had published an interactive zoomable map showing the locations.

The US and the UK have already started to publish such data, in the interests of open government, and many have hopes for improved political accountability through these efforts.

Berners Lee closed with a stunning time-lapse of Open Street Map's map of Port au Prince. OpenStreetMap.org provides a completely open source world map, where users can update and enrich data, just like in Wikipedia. Before the disaster, there was paltry information on Port auPrince, but volunteers fleshed out the map very quickly. Note the locations of the symbols for the encampments for the homeless on the map below.

Innovate to Zero - an energy imperative

The necessity for carbon-free energy
Bill Gates' incisive talk on energy was one of my favourites this year. His acute analysis went step by step through his thinking with startling clarity. (In fact, if you want a template for a perfectly formed presentation, you could do worse than use this model.)

The Gates Foundation is working on vaccines and seeds. But climate is more important to the very poor than anything else. And the price of energy is critical to them too. In order to arrest climate change,we need to do more than just reduce carbon - we have to Innovate to Zero, from the current 26B tons of carbon/year (of which the US is responsible for 20B tons).

Carbon math is inescapable

Carbon = Population x Services/person x Energy/service x Carbon/unit of energy

Gates dryly pointed out the simple mathematical fact - if you want carbon to go to zero, then one of the terms of this equation has to go to zero. We can take the terms one at a time. Population is going to rise to 9B before leveling off. Services per person are rising as huge numbers reach for the middle class. Efficiency can drive down Energy per service, but realistically, not to zero. That leaves Carbon/unit of energy as the only factor that can be driven to zero. That requires a miracle. And we need to achieve that miracle by 2050.

Next, Gates identified five candidates for that miracle:

• carbon capture and storage
  
• nuclear
  
• wind
  
• solar photovoltaic
  
• solar thermal.
  

Each approach has unsolved problems and concerns, and would take major breakthroughs to deliver the miracle. We need thousands of people working on all these challenges and he exhorted that work to begin.

The potential of nuclear
Gates pointed to nuclear as a strong contender in this race. The current technology in nuclear power plants dates back to the 1950s and uses rare enriched uranium. Furthermore, the process is quite inefficient and produces a lot of waste, without a sound plan for its disposal.

Gates disclosed that he is backing an initiative out of Intellectual Ventures, run by his friend and former CTO of Microsoft, Nathan Myrvold. Terrapower's uses U25 (i.e. spent uranium that is now considered nuclear waster) as fuel, rather than U28. It has the potential to use all that nuclear waste we now worry about so much. Even better, the process takes place in a sealed reactor in the ground, which you fill once every 60 years, eliminating the risks of accidents associated with refuelling. This approach has the potential to meet the deadline, through 20 years in development and 20 years for wide deployment. (Gosh, as much as I admired Gates' analysis, I wouldn't go so far as to put him in charge of a deadline!!)

The Gates talk is one of the first to go up on TED.com here. It's well worth watching.

Other TED talks on nuclear
Nuclear wove its way through a couple of other TED talks. Stewart Brand, an early environmentalist and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog has come to the conclusion that nuclear is the only answer. The risks of nuclear are less than the risks of climate change. And TerraPower's approach reduces those risks further. He outlines his reasoning in his new book Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. He participated in a debate about nuclear power against Mark Jacobson, a Stanford civil and environmental engineer, whose most persuasive argument against nuclear power was that it couldn't come online fast enough to make a difference, mostly because of regulatory delays. That's the 20 years Gates allows for deployment after development has proven the concept.

And of course one couldn't help but link the Countdown to Zero movie (described in an earlier post) with Innovation to Zero. Using nuclear power creates a market for the uranium in all those weapons that should be dismantled).

Kahneman on Happiness

It’s a TED tradition to open the conference with a Nobel Prize winner, and this year it was Daniel Kahneman, the founder of behavioural economics, which is certainly the science du jour these days. Kahneman has written many books on happiness and took us through how difficult it is to measure. In this opening Mindshift session, he said there are two separate measures of happiness, the happiness you actually experience versus the happiness you remember of that experience.

We experience events that result in happiness as they occur. That happiness is felt by our 'experiencing self'. Later, we remember these events, and our 'remembering self' feels happiness. The happiness of our remembering self might be either greater or lesser than that of our experiencing self. He uses the simple example of enjoying a lovely musical recording, which ends with an ugly screech at the end. The experiencing self would have had several minutes of happiness with a few seconds of displeasure at the end. However, the entire memory of the event will be coloured by those last few seconds. The remembering self is a powerful filter for our experiences.

Kahneman described research on people undergoing colonoscopies, who give feedback about their varying discomfort level in real time. This measures the response of their experiencing self. Later they were queried about the procedure, essentially querying the remembering self. Their memory of the discomfort depended almost entirely on how they felt at the end. So extending the treatment artificially so that it ends with low pain, determines the patients’ assessment of their overall pain, no matter their total experience.

During a two-week vacation, you’ll experience twice as much happiness as during a one-week vacation, but you don’t remember twice as much happiness. In fact, there is only a .5 correlation between the happiness of the experiencing and remembering self. So our happiness (which is about memories) is not equal to well-being (which has to do with experiences).

This has an impact on anyone trying to determine policies which will increase well-being: do you try to maximize well-being (the experience) or the remembered happiness (which is how, say, the voters will judge you). In US research, people’s ‘happiness’ rises as incomes rise to $60,000, and then plateaus, even thought you could argue that well-being continues to rise. The lack of money can make you unhappy, but beyond a relatively modest point, more doesn’t make you happier.

Judging by the number of later speakers who referred to the difference between the experiencing and remembering self, this was an insight that resonated with a lot of people.

Countdown to Zero at TED

Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA operative exposed in a Washington Post column and part of the scandal that was to be dubbed Plamegate, was a surprise addition to the TED program. After her forced departure from the CIA, she became increasingly concerned about the dangers of nuclear disaster. Although the Cold War is over, and people have become complacent, the three dangers JFK outlined decades ago - accident, miscalculation, or madness - are still with us today.

The film Countdown to Zero describes these risks in chilling detail. There are 23,000 operational nuclear weapons still in existence. It is easy to make the actual bomb; it's the acquisition of highly enriched uranium that's tricky. Although you could make the HE uranium, the best tactic would be simply to head to Russia, where there are vast amounts of completely insecure nuclear material, and venal people who are willing to sell it. One Russian interviewed in the movie explained nonchalantly that he stole enriched uranium for quite modest goals - a fridge, stove and better car. He didn't have a political agenda. However,when it was pointed out that in the hands of a terrorist, many people could have been killed by this uranium, he was disturbingly unrepentant because after all it would only be Americans who would be dead.

Countdown to Zero is produced by Lawrence Bender for Jeff Skoll's company Participant Media and it was a treat for us to see only the second screening (after its unveiling at Sundance). Jeff Ivers, Executive VP of Participant, whom I met at Friday's Final Gala, explained to me how big a deal it was for them to get the film in front of this audience and how thrilled they were that hundreds of people turned up for the last-minute addition to the program. The documentaries are pretty well all losers (with the exception of Inconvenient Truth). As he says about The Cove, the movie that won Best Film at Toronto Hot Docs Festival, once people find out dolphins are going to be killed, it's hard to draw a crowd!

A Lesson about Show Biz from TED

In the movies, the director can fire the writer. In TV, it's the writer who can fire the director. That was the lesson I learned from Shonda Rhimes while we were waiting for the movie Countdown to Zero to start. I'd opened the conversation with "So what do you do?". "I'm a writer", responded Shonda. As I drew her out, she modestly admitted that she is the Creator and Executive Producer of Grey's Anatomy, and Private Practice. She's obviously a powerhouse in the TV business, but she describes herself as a writer, and her bio on TED underlines her passion for writing.

We talked a bit about how unusual it must have been for her to pitch these successful series (I'd noticed that she was both female and black), and she thought that she'd benefited from naivety. Not knowing how hard it should be to pitch a TV series took all the pressure off. Interesting how that was also equally true for me in the technology industry in my early career. We shared a great bond across age, industry and background.

A Terrific Jam Session

Another great day at TED, topped off by a really good party. I managed to have a number of really interesting conversations.

Then, on arriving back at the hotel, there was a sound system set up in the lobby and a crowd of people sitting/standing around. There was a jam session with most of the musicians from the conference, joined by a flamenco guitarist who was apparently playing in the hotel.

The session was hosted by the totally charming and completely endearing Jake Shimabukuro, who has astonished with his virtuoso ukelele playing. During his TED presentation, he'd showed off his range by playing flamenco music, Ave Maria and Bohemenian Rhapsody. I walked in as he was playing While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

He was joined by the string quartet Ethel, who has been playing musical interludes all conference with Thomas Dolby.
Then there was the incomparable Robert Gupta. At Juliard at 14, graduated from Yale at 20 and now the youngest violinist in the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he is one of the TED Fellows, who essentially win a 'scholarship' to attend TED. He delivered an amazing talk at TED University, describing his relationship as violin teacher to Nathaniel Ayers, the violinist befriended by the LA Times journalist and subject of the movie The Soloist. It was a powerfully delivered and emotionally charged talk. He has since played a couple of interludes of exquisite classical music that could make you cry. Another TED Fellow sitting beside me tonight says he is as delightful a person as he is musician.

Then, in pop two of the dancers from the dance troupe LXD (The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers) with mindblowing modern dancing. This was dancing street style and totally blow-away.

As Jake was trying to close the session down, resisting an enormous chorus of bravos and whistles and calls for 'one more', in waltzes Natalie Merchant who had magnificently closed out this afternoon's session. She delivered a lyrical and luscious version of that old World War II standard "Every time we say goodbye". That still didn't satisfy the crowd, and Jake delivered one final wonderful number, before we scattered to our rooms.

I always get to listen to musicians I'm not familiar with at TED, and see dancers I wouldn't have seen. This year was a particularly rich selection. Thomas Dolby is amazing in putting together an incredible selection of artists. But to hear them up close in a jam session in the lobby is a thrill I won't soon forget.

TED 2010 - Reason, Provocation, Invention and Breakthrough

The second day of TED was awesome. I still have a dinner to go to, a special movie screening that's been added, an extra music party, and to pick up my new Nexus Google phone. Besides, if I were to start blogging now, it would be so gushing it might give you indigestion.

My rating system for TED talks runs: Good, Great, Partial Standing Ovation, Full Standing Ovation, and Thunderous Standing O. Admittedly, this is based on entire audience reaction rather than my personal opinion, but I seldom disagree. Today was a day with 7 Partial Standing Os, 1 Full Standing O, and 3 Thunderous Standing Os. And this is a crowd with high expectations. A stirring day, to say the least. And I managed to fit in a visit to Paradise Alley, where they have the wondrous Vosges chocolate and the masseuses!

It's interesting how this year has been just that much more jam-packed that I can't envisage doing the blogging during the actual conference. At least, that's my story - it has nothing to do with age!

TED 2010

What a magnificent day at TED
Countless brilliant things were said
They're floating freely in my head
I'll blog before the thoughts have fled
But that's for later, now to bed.

TED's off and running

TED is off to a good start.

Met Katie Ford in the registration line-up. Formerly head of Ford Modeling Agency, largest modeling agency in the world, she is now involved in trying to stop human trafficking. She works with Free the Slaves, whose leader Kevin Bales is a speaker here. Katie uses the experience and knowledge from arranging logistics for models from all over the world, to help in her new endeavour. I hope I get to see more of her at the conference.

Then I bumped into Melanie Kittrell waiting for the light to change and ended up eating brunch and talking. She is Executive Director at Merck running a group that enables and supports innovation throughout the commercial side of Merck. She was fascinating, and talked about all the issues that I teach about in my MBA courses. I'll definitely be trying to seduce her into a guest lecture at Queen's, which is coming up soon.

I'm off now to a tour of Digital Domain. Last year, there was a talk about their work on Benjamin Button which was astonishing. People who took their tour last year raved about it. I managed to get on the tour this year and am really looking forward to it.

It's that time of year when the blood starts to tingle with anticipation of the upcoming TED conference, carefully nurtured by a string of messages from the TED group about the delights that await us.

This past year, I've relived earlier TEDs through the wonderful TED web site and enjoyed many new speakers. I've noticed more and more people discovering TED, and enjoying the stimulation of TED talks online.

The theme for this year's conference is WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW. The program introduction talks about the many complex and discouraging problems facing the world - climate change, health care or the global economy. There seems to be little to celebrate. TED hopes to 'have a different kind of conversation', with incredible people with powerful ideas. Well, we've always expected that from TED. But the hope is that these ideas, if given half a chance, could make a long-term difference to our futures. TED's not afraid of making big promises.

This year's speaker line-up looks great. There's a cluster of presentations by medical people - a couple of epidemiologists, a cancer researcher, a physician, a molecular geneticist, and a chemist developing a lab on a chip. Sir Ken Robinson is coming back, a favourite from the past. Add to that philosophers, designers, technologists, philanthropists, activists, scientists and mathematicians, and I don't think I'll be bored.