Sylvain Zimmer

“Irrational choices” was my favourite  session so far. It began with Sheena Iyengar talking about our misconceptions on choice. She demonstrated extremely well that contrary to our assumptions, choice is not always beneficial to our performance or happiness and that sometimes having no choice (example of parents with comatose babies having to choose when to unplug them from life support) is the best way to go. All of it was supported by experiments mostly comparing U.S. test subjects (for who ‘choice’ is almost sacred) to other people from France, Japan and Russia. Illustrative joke: “Research shows we can’t make the difference between Coke and Pepsi. But of course you and I know Coke is the better choice.”. It was a well-presented talk and I was stuck by the focus and clarity of her voice even if she was a bit static on stage but some TED speakers are sometimes. But then at the end I realized she was actually blind! (which hadn’t been obvious because we were at the upper level of the playhouse and we were so focused on her talk anyway) Impressive talk definitely.

Then Laurie Santos talked about how despite being incredibly smart, the homo sapiens was still capable of huge stupid mistakes. Two theories for explaining that: is it because of the overly-complex environments we created (for instance the financial markets) or because our minds are somehow fundamentally flawed? To find which was right, she started experimenting on monkeys, and training them to use money to see if they reproducted our mistakes! Which is of course at first unbelievable but in true TED spirit she goes on to show the results and develop from there. So here they are: we saw videos of monkeys trading coins for food, understanding notions such as price, stealing coins (!), and most importantly reproducing a classic human incoherence: not taking the same risks when faced with a possible bonus or malus, although they are both equal in absolute value.  Like human, they play safe for bonuses and take risks for maluses. Astonishing! So there’s a design flaw in our minds that dates way back… The good news is that being aware of these flaws may help us bypass them. This talk and the previous one had some shared ideas with the book How we decide.

Mark Helliott, a pastor, made a short talk on miracles or more exactly the perception we have of them. 80% of the U.S. believes in miracles. He was also funny: “I’m a pastor, I’m in the miracle-believing business”.

Lewis Pugh who talked at TEDGlobal last year went on stage again to talk about his new endeavor at the exact limit between insane and… well, just insane actually :) After swimming for 18 minutes in the North Pole a few years ago, this year he climbed to swim on top of the Everest. He shared his near-death experience with us, what’s like to begin drowning in a sub-0°C water at 5300m, because his usual way to prepare for these swims was to be overly energized. Went better when he humbly calmed down in front of the elements and was able to swim calmly. He made a parallel with our own behavior with Global Warming: we need a to take a radical shift and be humble.

Jamil Abu-Wardeh talked about standup comedy in the Middle-East. Axis of Evil comedy tour aims to reverse the urban legend that all muslims are terrorists. “Righting Writing Wrongs”.

Then came on stage Maz Jobrani, an Iranian-American, for what would turn up to be the funniest moment of the whole day. As one third of the Axis of Evil, he made jokes without taboos on cultures or religions which were incredibly funny because we’re not used to jokes on these topics. Huge audience reaction. Congrats to him for such a good moment of (T)E(D)ntertainment.

Yesterday the first session “Found In Translation” began with Ethan Zuckerman who talked about the biases of the media and how the web can fix them. We suffer from “imaginary cosmopolitanism”. Described a few “xenophiles”. His talk was well done and did a good job of introducing the challenges his non-profit Global Voices is trying to tackle.

Then writer Elif Shafak talked about her very international childhood (from France to Turkey to the U.S. from what I remember) and her life as a turkish storyteller who was prosecuted for writing fiction. Not the fiction you’d expect.

David MacCandless showed us that “Information is beautiful”. We had already seen a beta version of his talk at TEDxBrussels and the improvement was really impressive. That mean congrats to Bruno and Chris for a good coaching ;-) Describing himself as a “data detective”, he likes to find patterns and highlight them in smart graphs. “Data is the new soil”. “Let the dataset change your mindset”. He’s putting a book together with his best graphs. Recommended for all fans of data porn ;-)

Mor Karbasi sung a few songs in spanish and other languages, very nice voice.

Finally Ian Hutchinson showed us how his plastic surgeries helped disfigured patients to have normal lives again. After showing quite graphic images of before/after surgeries, he explained that the future was in tissue engineering. It was interesting for us TEDxers (who also have to coach speakers) to have been at the playhouse earlier during his rehearsals, to see him discuss the graphic content with Bruno and Chris: they didn’t censor it but tried to find the best way to use the pictures without shocking people too much, like not keeping them on the giant screen for minutes while he was talking ;-)

After a very cold wait in line outside of the Oxford Playhouse, we were finally seated with good places. The playhouse holds a striking likeliness to our very own TEDx PARIS venue, Le théatre Pierre Cardin. After a good introduction from Bruno Giussiani (TED Europe), Chris Anderson made his usual quote : “And now, it’s time for TED!”. And so it begun :-)

First was Joseph Nye speaking about geopolitics : power transitions, power diffusion, the rise of NGOs (both Oxfam & Al-Qaida, which did more casualties in NYC than Japan in Pearl Harbour), how cheap worldwide communications impact geopolitics. His good news was that “smart power” is officially one of the main diplomatic focuses of the Obama administration.

Next Sheryl WuDunn spoke about women rights and issues. She says 100M women are “missing” in the 3rd world from what we could expect from regular demographic data. She mentioned that the prices of slaves in history had never been so low :-/ She left us with a powerful quote : “We’ve all won the lottery of life”, and it’s our responsibility to use the means we’re gifted with to give all the help we can.

Naif Al-Mutawa showed is “the 99″ project, which is a crossover between Islam and comic books. After comparing superheros with prophets (most of them have lost their parents, have messages from above, …) he showed how his series of comic books were trying to undo the harm done by those who twist religion for their own purposes. It was the first standing ovation of TEDGlobal, rightly so :-)

Then Nic Marks talked about happiness. “I have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare”. Hollywood likes to love this theme with apocalyptic movies like The Road. Environmental movements should also stop using fear. Quoted Robert Kennedy saying that “GDP measures everything but what makes life worthwhile”. He then demonstrated the first great graph of the day in a very Hans Rosling-esque fashion : A graph of dots for each country with the axis being “Happy life years” and “Ecological footprint”. The “winner” was surprisingly Costa Rica, at the delight of Roberto from TEDxPuraVida. He ended his talk with the results of a research about 5 ways of achieving happiness : Connect, Be active, Take notice, Keep learning, Give. Of course he pointed out that the ecological footprint of those 5 things is zero.

Finally to conclude this first “Global Century” session, Patrick Chappatte came to show a lot of his (mostly) political cartoons. They were just hilarious, and the whole talk was very, very well done with the ideal mix of humour, intelligence and perspective about the Danish caricatures controversy. Bonus joke : “Do you know newspapers? They are paper-based readers.”. He was actually so great that our mission for the evening was to book him for the next TEDx PARIS :)

Then after a short break when I went to buy some Paracetamol (the TED lag! too much data for my brain…), the second session was on, this time about “Human systems”. I spent this session in the simulcast area because I needed a more horizontal seating ;-)

Matt Ridley talked about “When ideas have sex”. Exchange of objects is unique to mankind. He graphed the work time needed to buy one hour of nighttime reading light (from 1800 candles – 6 hours, to 2010 lightbulbs, 0.5 seconds). Explained how trade allowed for high specialization that were the basis of progress. “Louis XIV probably had 500+ people preparing his meals, and now we all actually do too!”, when taking in account all the supply chain. Trade is 10 times older than farming. “There is nobody on the planed that knows how to fully build a computer mouse!”. Collective brain : we’re all neurons! Incredibly interesting stuff, loved this talk.

Steven Berlin Johnson explained how the architectures of coffeehouses made them a really good place for collaboration, new ideas and innovations. Ideas are born in chaos.

Peter Molyneux, famous game developer, went on to demo Kinect from Microsoft in his upcoming games. After a provocative “TV/Movies/Books are rubbish! They don’t involve me.”, we followed the interactions of a player with the Milo character. The tech was working, but I felt there was an opportunity missed here to go further in the demo which was a bit too linear for a control system so “unlimited”.

Finally, Annie Lennox came on stage to perform a couple of songs alone on the piano. Big reaction from the crowd and her hit “Sweet dreams” as an encore. She seemed to have a good time and was hanging around with the other participants the other day anyway. That’s one of the great things about TED, there’s really no limit on who you’re going to talk next ;-)

After the sessions wrapped up we went straight to the Grand Opening party, which was similar to yesterday night in awesomeness :) I met again with incredible people : former Head of Music for MTV, a producer for many Justin Timberlake music videos, a couple more TED Fellows (they are everywhere!), a few Frenchies I hadn’t noticed before, plus giving direct feedback to past speakers which was a really easy way to engage in insightful conversations with them.

Then we moved to the Late Night party in a beautiful location, where the TED Fellows were greatly applauded. I had the chance to meet even more members from the TED team, they told me they are around 50 now, up from 25 a few years ago. Congrats on that, I hope it will give them the means to deal with the great challenges ahead with TED and TEDx. The night finished with a few amazing magic tricks by Jason Soll and yet more chatting with random TEDsters ;-)

Today was the second part of TED University. We somehow managed to get in time to Keble College (by the way, thanks Sleep Cycle!) and watched the session from the upper floor in the simulcast area.

“Professors” included Lee Hotz on Antartica. Favourite quotes : “It’s so cold researchers have to dig themselves out every day”, or on working with delicate ice samples : “In the coldest place on Earth, they work in a refrigerator”. Since going to the Antartica museum in Chirstchurch I was a bit curious about Antartica and this talk made a good job of highlighting the challenges researchers face there, and what their research is about.

Then Helio Mattar talked about the Mathematics of individual impact on the ecosystem. He showed in numbers (and you had to trust him on the data) that even one man, over the course of his lifetime, can save dozens of tons of waste or tens of olympic swimming pools of drinkable water just by being smarter. Favourite figure : if 22 amercians cut their water consumption by 50%, they will save the equivalent of one minute of the Niagara falls (complete with a dramatic flyover of the falls ;-).

Joseph Ellis talked about his sculptures of clay and ice in China. David Gurman records real-time data (bombings with seismic captors, civilian casualties in Irak ..) and feeds it to artistic projects to raise awareness and making people feel more connected to the issues.

One big highlight followed : our fellow TEDxBasqueCountry organizer Caroline Phillips showed us another of her many talents : she explained and performed with a Hurdy Gurdy, while singing (beautifully) in Basque. Just amazing! We’re starting an effort to get her on the main stage later in the week.

Peter Ma showed his yet-to-be-released iPhone app to make people move more. Jeffrey Mann showed examples of big companies still being able to be cool. Andrea Lucard showed a successful “smart school” community in East L.A. where mexican people stayed true to their roots.

Then Ron Dembo explained the basics of risk thinking. I really liked this one : he explained that the two main types of problems : deterministic and stochastic ones, each had their own optimal solution : execution (of the “best” solution), and hedging, respectively. He then showed examples of stochastic problems not being hedged and how it was a bad call. One other example he gave was that “Faced with the stochastic problem of oil prices in the next 20 years, Toyota hedged 1 billion on the Prius”. And they happened to be right. Simple, but very clearly presented stuff.

I’m missing some of the TED University talks but I didn’t take notes for all of them so I prefer not to be wrong :-)

So today was my first “real” TED day, and what a blast! The day begun with a workshop for TEDx organizers where Michel spoke about the lessons we learned from the previous 3 TEDx PARIS editions. We learned a lot more though from the experiences of all the other TEDx organizers, for instance TEDxVolcano which was organized by the TEDxLondon team in just 24 hours while everybody was blocked in London by the April 2010 Volcano eruption. Or TEDxOilSpill which gathered an impressive lineup of experts (and the anonymous man behind the infamous @BPGlobalPR). Or the experience of one guy who picked up one of his speakers at the airport, was while talking with him in his car that he wasn’t going to be good on stage, then decided to make him spend 4 hours with a coach right away, and he went on to make the best speech of this TEDx event. Incredible stuff ;-)

Then there was TED University, which is basically a series of short TED Talks made by participants. I took notes for all of them and I might compile them in a later post but the talk that I liked most was from a VP of marketing at Google who talked about what Marketing can learn from Physics, which was his primary education. Both the content and the visuals (the slides were hand-drawn) were simply outstanding.

We went on to the party in the Keble College garden, which was the best time of the day for me, meeting a never-ending stream of great people and beginning to understand what makes the “TED spirit” so famous. It’s hard to make a list, but just to give an idea, in a few hours, I spoke with many people from the TED team, countless other TEDx organizers, had a very long chat with David Axmark (cofounder of MySQL) about his experience & open source business models, spoke with one of the board members of Kickstarter about Diaspora, met at least 10 TED Fellows and talked about their inspiring projects, had some good laughs with TED star Rives (including a flash party in a local graveyard…), met Flore Vasseur who did a high-profile documentary about TED for the french network Canal+, and met so many other new inspiring people.

General feedback I had on TEDGlobal, which I can now confirm myself, is that it’s quite true to its name : it’s a global conference with people coming from all over the world and not just the U.S. (compared to 80% of U.S. participants at TED). I have spoken 3 different languages tonight (well, the 3 I know…) with people from Venezuela, Austria, Poland, Sweden, South Africa, Brazil, India, Australia, … I think this diversity really contributes to the general atmosphere, it was a bit like iCommons or Wikimania in some ways : a flourishing, truly global community with people contributing locally or globally to a set of goals and values, all for the greater good.

Tomorrow after the second half of TED University we have the first actual TED Talks… Looking forward to it! :)

First evening at TEDGlobal was spent in the Keble College student bar, watching the World Cup finale in a nice relaxed atmosphere. What struck me was the general friendliness all around, and instead of wondering “What’s the total net worth of all the people here?” like you could do in some circumstances, it was more like “How much good are these people going to do around the world in the next 10 years ?”.

So it was nice to hang around with a few speakers and members of the staff. But I have to admit the main interest was the Spain-Netherlands game, and after the really late Spanish victory (not that there was any doubt on who would win) we went to the city center of Oxford, filled with crazy spanish students :)

It’s now Monday morning, we’re registering, picking up our infamous TED Gift bags and we’ll begin in an hour with the TEDx Workshop :-)

Not so much blogging these days, but next week will be a very, very special one for me and my 2 fellow TEDxParis friends Michel and Xavier.

We’re going to TEDGlobal 2010, which is the british edition of TED happening in Oxford. From what I’ve heard the quality of the talks is the same as the “real” TED but in a quite different and unique atmosphere. I certainly hope so and will try to blog a bit if I find the time in what promises to be a busy week for our brains ;-)

Highlights other than the talks should be a workshop for TEDxers, the World Cup final with other early attendees on Sunday night, the big guesthouse we rented for the week in Oxford, and I guess a few visits of the city plus other social events with the attendees.

So that’s it! I hope to come back home full of ideas, both for the world and for  TEDx PARIS 2011, planned for end of January 2011 ;-)