Sylvain Zimmer

It has been 10 days since we left Oxford, time for a definite wrap-up ;-)

My recaps and highlights for each session

• Day 1 TEDx Workshop, Welcome Party
• TED University Session 2 Lee Hotz on Antartica, Ron Dembo on risk-taking
• Sessions 1 & 2 cartoonist Patrick Chappatte, Matt Ridley on “When Ideas Have Sex”
• Session 3: Found In Translation Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices
• Session 4: Irrational Choices Sheena Iyengar on choice, Laurie Santos on banker monkeys, Maz Jobrani stand-up
• Session 5: Healthier Together John Hardy on the Green School
• Session 6: Different By Design Miwa Matreyek’s performance, Eben Bayer on growing packagings, plus our acclaimed performance of “Sweet Hurdy Gurdy Dreams”
• Session 7: Creatures Great And Small Marcel Dicke on eating insects
• Session 8: Adventures In Fairness Jessica Jackley from Kiva, Auret Van Heerden and Peter Eigen
• Power outage: The ED Conference Maz Jobrani returns
• Session 9: The Unknown Brains Sebastian Seung “I am my connectome”
• Session 10: Who’s the Teacher? Sugata Mitra on unsupervised learning, Chris Anderson on crowd accelerated innovation
• Session 11: The Tiny Blue Dot Jason Clay from WWF, Ze Frank, Dimitar Sasselov on exoplanets
• Session 12: Waging Peace Surprise speaker Julian Assange from Wikileaks

Other resources

• TED Blog posts about TEDGlobal 2010
• Official photos from TED
• Flickr photos
• Videos of the talks as they come online (17 as of now)
• A few more quotes from the speakers

Final thoughts

My first TEDGlobal was astounding. And that is despite my extremely high expectations and all the TEDx events I’ve attended and organized. The whole mix of genius and openness found at TED is much, much more than the sum of its parts. It will take weeks if not months for everything I saw and learned to settle. Ideas have power to change the world we live in, and TED is all about sharing them and accelerating this change. It is about empowerment. Our empowerment. It is up to us now to use these ideas the good way, or help them spread them even further as we’ll try to do in the next TEDx PARIS ;-) I hope I’ll meet a lot of fellow french TEDGlobal attendees there, and for the others… see you at TEDGlobal 2011 next year ;-)

The last session began with a surprise speaker: Julian Assange from Wikileaks. Chris interviewed him about his achievements so far, including shifting 10% of the vote in the 2007 Kenyan election and lately the release of the infamous Bagdad shooting video. Why leak such material? “There are illegitimate secrets” Julian answered. “People in Bagdad, they don’t need to see the video. They see it everyday.”. Then he talked about Iceland who is becoming a safe heaven for free press. They are also working on a Nobel Prize for free press. At the end Chris asked the audience who thought of Julian as a modern hero or as a dangerous troublemaker. Modern hero won and even if I think “hero” may be a bit too much, you have to respect the guy for his courage and commitment. By the way, his talk was one of the first to be published on TED.com!

Next, Stefan Wolff talked about ethnic conflicts and civil wars. He wondered if all the pictures of current conflicts he showed on screen were to be pictures of the past. He argues there has been a decline in the number of conflicts since the 90s, due to institutional design, leadership and diplomacy. The subject was interesting but frankly the presentation a bit underwhelming because Stefan kept reading his notes too closely.

Then Eric Berlow did a short talk about the difference between complex and complicated. He showed how it was possible to find simple answers by raising complexity. He took as an example the NYT-leaked diagram for reaching popular support for the Iraqi government. An unholy mess of arrows but as he increased complexity and represented the graph in 3D, a simpler way to resolve dependencies emerged. Nice one!

William Perrin, the ex-CTO of the Blair administration from what I understood, talked about his neighborhood in London, which although very central seems to have been deserted by law enforcement. He showed how he managed to return to some kind of local civic democracy by launching a low-tech blog, and making people join forces. He argued governments should pledge to make the Internet the first means of communication with people.

Mallika Sarabhai, who opened TEDIndia, danced and sung. Some parts of it I liked, some others not.

Finally, Zainab Salbi talked about her childhood under missile strikes. She emphasized the importance of women in wars and most importantly in peace.

This last session closed TEDGlobal 2010, we unfortunately had to leave without going to the final BBQ party because of travel constraints. Next year maybe! ;-)

Johan Rockström, a sustainability expert, talked about how humans overwhelm the planet with their growth and way of life. He was a participant in the BBC program recorded the day before, along with Maz Jobrani and Ethan Zuckerman.

Jason Clay is a VP for WWF. I thought WWF was all about saving pandas but it has actually been renamed World Wide Fund for Nature. So it’s not only about Wildlife anymore and it made a talk I had expected to skip intellectually actually one of the best of this last day of TEDGlobal. Jason explained how we can hope to continue living on a finite planet. Example of Ben&Jerry who launched Rainforest Crunch but failed. “You can’t wake up a person who’s pretending to sleep”. We’re currently living on the resources of 1.3 planets :-/ The average domestic cat in Europe has a bigger footprint than most africans. We obviously have to use less resources. Can we leave the choice between “regular” and “sustainable” products to the consumer? 1.8 seconds are spent choosing a product in a supermarket shelf on average in the U.S. 3.5s in Europe. The current proportion of sustainable food is incredibly small, we have to accelerate change. This is where Jason makes a difference, much like Auret Van Heerden does in its field: he leverages the biggest companies of the world to make dramatic changes happen quickly. He sampled 15 basic commodities like soja, coffee, cocoa, and realized that only 100 companies deal with 25% of the demand and 40 to 50% of production, worldwide!

I’m so in love with these moments when you realize that damn, if we do things right we still have a chance to turn things around. Jason seemed very pragmatic. Not the kind of person I would have expected to work at WWF at all, and I’m happy to have been mistaken ;-) His previous achievements include getting 60% of the salmon production to be durable. He’s now pressing the 100 companies mentioned earlier to update their policies, and already got 40 of them signed! He explained that Mars (yes the chocolate bars) is sequencing the genome of Cocoa to make production more efficient. He also stressed that consumers should pay the right price of products, adjusted to their total footprint (for instance the cost of water input is often unaccounted for). Adding 3 more billion people and having global resource consumption double in the next 40 years because of developing countries would mean tripling global resource use. Not possible, we have to make a hard turn before hitting the wall and Jason seems to be a leading force on the wheel. Bravo!

Rachel Sussman showed us a few of her photographs about the oldest living things on Earth. Trees, lichens and other unusual organisms, all from 2000 to 600k years old!

Rachel Armstrong talked about programmable chemical complexes, built with carbon which is very abundant and has a cycle of its own.

Another highlight: Ze Frank. He’s an artist who seems to specialize in what I’d call “crowd-art”, making people collaborate around one of his projects. He showed a few of them: Earth Sandwitches, Dressed vaccum cleaners, YoungMeNowMe, Ray’s remixes (hilarious!), Childhood walks, 52to48, Angrigami, “Hey you’ll be fine” chorus from all around the world (my favourite). Both fun and inspiring.

Dimitar Sasselov talked about exoplanets and life in the universe. We may be on the verge of completing the Copernican Revolution. The NASA Kepler telescope give us more precise tools to detect exoplanets, and to prove the assumption that planets of the size of the Earth (hence with a higher probability of hosting life as we know it) are the most common. This wasn’t supported by any evidences up until now because of the bias the old detection methods had towards bigger planets. He expects 60 “roughly habitable” planets to be discovered by 2012. Capable of analyzing basic biochemistry remotely. He finished his talk with a very interesting remark, using his tie as a ruler. Life is very small in size in the universe (the tie being the universe, life would be smaller than an atom), but not so small in time (he pointed at the middle of his tie which represented the lifespan of the universe). Well done sir!

Just when the ninth session was about to begin, there was a power failure at the Playhouse. We were at the TEDx Club at the time but when we heard Kelly saying that the session was going to be delayed we rushed to the Playhouse because I suspected that Bruno or Rives would come on stage and make “filler jokes” ;-)

When we arrived a minute later, cameras, screens and mics seemed to be down. Bruno told the crowd they would need 15 minutes to get it fixed and Chris, at our delight, did what I expected: he called somebody on stage for an impromptu session. All the video system being down, that was going to be exclusive for us so we were actually quite excited ;-) In the 20 minutes or so they took to fix the system 3 people came on stage:

Genevieve Thiers who I didn’t know at all sung a couple of Opera pieces without any preparation nor mic.. really impressive! Of course the audience received this performance extremely well and it seemed like nobody in the audience was too impatient to have the power fixed ;-)

Then Maz Jobrani came on stage again with some hilarious material which in my opinion confirmed his title of funniest man at TEDGlobal this year! His quote will probably go down in TED’s history : “Whoa. For a minute, we didn’t have any technology here. We were just … ED.”. I absolutely love this guy and hope he will perform in Paris sometime soon (some of his videos on YouTube aren’t as funny as what we saw though).

Finally TED Fellow Ivie Okoawo came on stage to perform one poem. She had already sung at the fellows afterparty, she does have a beautiful voice. With power restored the ED Conference ended and Session 9 began but it was definitely one of the most memorable moments of TEDGlobal this year. It confirms the fact that when you have so many intelligent and talented people in a room, nothing can go wrong ;-)

Bonus: still laughing from his set, we allowed ourselves some fan time with Maz at the pause ;-) (notice my unusually large smile…)

Sugata Mitra talked about his various unsupervised learning projects with children. Showed us how they can learn english, answer anything from simple questions to complex questions about biotech (!!!) if given proper tools for exploration and collaboration. He also told us about his “granny cloud”, a network of grandmothers who spend one hour a week on skype answering questions or making these children learn english. Love it. More on his experiments on his wiki. Standing ovation.

Conrad Wolfram did a talk we had already seen at TEDxBrussels in 2009 about why we should stop teaching calculating and start teaching real maths. Use computers where they beat us and focus on the other, more interesting parts of solving math problems. There was much less Wolfram Alpha demos this time and more focus on education, which was nice.

Ralph Simon did a short talk on the lives of 2 great songs, from Doug Fieger and Bobby MicFerrin. Nice anecdotes.

Tom Chatfield talked about the power of virtuality and how gaming is spreading into a lot of our activities and even jobs. Crowdsourcing problems through gaming. Want + Like = Engagement. Reward schedule. Spoke about how Everquest players collaborated to create Dragon Kill Points.

Finally TED’s own Chris Anderson talked about Crowd Accelerated Innovation. In full Prezi steam, he showed why video is a powerful media enabling circles of improvements: people successively watching and improving. Light + Crowd + Desire. With video everyone can be the teacher.  We’re about to launch a new learning cycle in history, and TEDTalks are only a small part of this unstoppable movement. Everything was extremely well presented (of course everybody had high expectations…) and Chris made a perfect final, unveiling a duplex with TEDxKibera that was both highly relevant to his topic and very emotional. Full standing ovation and my own congrats to Chris for inspiring us for a few more years in just one talk ;-)

Session 9 was another big highlight of TEDGlobal for me. Gero Miesenböck tries to break the code of the brain. There are just too many neurons in our brain to understand it directly even if we managed to record all their activity. So his approach is to try controlling a few of them in order to experimentally find what their purpose is. He manages to activate some neurons by using light, I’m not exactly sure how. Anyway, he showed a video of headless flies (yes there was obviously some jokes about that) flying whenever they’re stimulated with a specific light. General process is to narrow down these “controlled” neurons to find our which are responsible for actions, critics and decisions. Still a big way to go…

Heribert Watzke explained that our teeth are made for cooked foods (and vice-versa). He calls us “coctivors” (not coined by him). Our brain represents 2% of our body mass but uses 25% of our energy. “A tale of two brains”: he explained that in many aspects, our gut could actually be considered as our second brain. It’s very closely linked to our “upper brain”, digestive comfort playing an important part, like hunger/satiation. “Gut feelings” may actually exist ;-) So our gut is more important than we think, so let’s care more about cooking. “Coquo Ergo Sum”.

While on the topic of finding second organs, Gina Rudan came to speak about the 2nd G-Spot. She got everybody really excited but the G was actually for “Genius”. She talked about how the intersection of passions/value/creativity with skills/strength/expertise created this “genius zone”. A bit too “motivational” for me.

Stefano Mancuso argued that we are underestimating the plants. He showed plants eating, moving, sleeping, playing, communicating, and tried to find a brain inside them. Evidences of electrical currents in some roots. Neurons also use electricity… He said that like the Internet, the roots of a plants were designed to withstand aggression (remove 90% of it and it can continue working somehow). “Plantoids” ?

Then Sebastian Seung came on stage for one of the best talks of TEDGlobal on “I am not my genes / I am my connectome”. After making everyone repeat that and joking that we didn’t even know what a connectome was ;-) He explained that it’s the map of the connections between all our neurons. Quite a big graph. They successfully mapped one of a worm a few years ago but ours would be billion times more complicated (but it’s the “holy grail”). What is stored in our connectome? Memories? Personality? Sebastian explained a technique for 3D-mapping of neurons, slice by slice on a very small portion of the brain. Partial connectomes could help prove “I am my connectome”. Twin brothers have different connectomes because synapses and neuros evolve, mostly because of actual brain activity. He compared our brain to a stream of water: there’s always water flowing (mental activity), and as molecules of water flows, the bed of the river slowly evolves: “stream of consciousness”? Could we read memories from connectomes? Total length of wiring in the brain: millions of miles. Search for mental disorders in connectomes. If we are our connectomes, then death would be the destruction of our connectome? To know if people freezing themselves will actually be resuscitated one day, we could inspect the connectome of their brains to see it they are still intact. Amazing stuff.

Another great session at TEDGlobal this year. Tim Jackson wondered if our choice was to “Crash the system or trash the planet?”. Where to look for hope in front of the maths that seem to make us hit the wall in a few decades? Is 2% annual GDP growth sustainable? How deep is the human need for novelty? Does it makes us happy? He showed a few ideas that could change how we could continue to prosper within the limits of a finite planet. Demoed ecosia, a search engine that saves 2 square meters of rainforest for each search. Sustainability doesn’t mean we have to go back to the caves : investment can be a solution.

Jessica Jackley is the charming cofounder of Kiva, the microlending champion. She described her journey over the years, from her education to donate to poor people, to her life-changing encounter with professor Yunus after which she went to Africa to meet $100 entrepreneurs who actually taught her a lot about finance (at the time I didn’t even know the difference between revenue and profit). This experience would lead to the creation of Kiva with her partner Matt, the rest is history. Kiva is now lending $100M+ a year which is ridiculously impressive. Other impressive sidenote she didn’t mention on stage: PayPal has granted free transaction fees to Kiva. Never satisified, Jessica is now launching profounder which I understood to be a Friends & Family fundraising platform. The end of the talk was very emotional and visibly overwhelmed she said that more that everything else, it is believing in each other that will make tomorrow better than today. Jessica is a very talented and impressive individual: she really made a sizable contribution to the world and yet she remains easy-going and very humble. As I learned at my delight when talking to her afterwards, she also speaks some french! Good news for TEDx PARIS 2011 attendees? Can’t say more ;-)

Next talk from Auret Van Heerden also stuck me. He talked about the “contamination” of most consumer supply chains by slaves, corruption, and catastrophic landfills at their end. The fact that this supply chain has gone global in the last decades makes its inspection a very hard problem because governments, most of the time corrupted in these countries, just don’t care for global good. And when they’re not corrupted they’re just overwhelmed by the daunting size of the task. He then proceeded to explain how we can fix this broken system by using private contracts to ensure the quality of the whole supply chain. It’s much more efficient for one big company to impose strict standards to its suppliers than to work with tens of government agencies along the chain. He’s envisioning the beginning of a new way of regulation and human rights enforcement, using the power of our biggest private companies. Being a self-confessed cold cartesian, I like this approach very much because with a single intelligent strike it leads to huge, world-changing results. Repeat with the next bigco and within years every supplier will be forced by the market to be clean.

Finally Peter Eigen was introduced with great praise by Chris. He’s the founder of Transparency International. He talked about geopolitics and how it’s almost expected that in a such competitive global economy, some governments will fail. He estimates the sustained bribe economy worldwide to reach 1 trillion dollars each year. One. Trillion. Dollars. However good news may be that the time of the civilian society has finally arrived. His fight against corruption has led him to bring together NGOs, companies and governments to the table. Very impressive.

Adrian Dolby talked about organic farming. I have to be honest here and say that I missed this talk because I didn’t wake up early enough :-/ Sorry, will try to watch it online! Next, Christien Maindertsma talked about the lifetime of pigs, most particularly after their death, in consumer products. She has a book that lists all the uses of different pig parts: soap, bread, low fat butter, cellular concrete, paint, sandpaper, paint brushes, beer, cigarettes, collagen, bullets, heart valves, … Scary stuff but quite efficient: 185 different products can be made out of 1 pig.

Thomas Dolby, the music director at TED, crossed the line this year and performed a few country songs with his band. Toni Frohoff showed us just how intelligent whales and dolphins are: “There’s more than a drop of humainty in a sea of whales”. They are self-aware in front of mirrors. Once, a dolphin stole an underwater camera from one man in his crew, and returned it the next day! Doesn’t surprise me that much though because having swum once with two dolphins in Australia I experienced first-hand their playfulness and intelligence ;-)

Finally Marcel Dicke talked about insects. 6 million species (80% of total), all have 6 legs, their total biomass is greater than mankind. After bringing us up to speed on that, he explored a more unusual topic: nutrition. Westerners already eat insects, about 500g/year (compared to 80kg/year of meat). However, insect production is much more efficient than livestock, which uses 70% of all agricultural land! He showed that simple mathematics about worldwide growth made it clear that in one form or another, we’ll all have to eat insects. It’s already taking off in the Netherlands. He went on to bring some products on stage and made Bruno eat one. I don’t know if this was rehearsed or not, but Bruno did it ;-) Half the food of the next break was made of insects so that everybody at TEDGlobal could check what their future will taste like ;-)

Miwa Matreyek started the session by an unusual visual performance, playing with shades, 2 projectors, and a beautiful soundtrack. She got a standing ovation and quite frankly she deserved every bit of it.

Neil Gershenfeld talked about how computers haven’t evolved in their basic design since the 40s. They still have a memory, a processor, inputs, outputs, … He hopes computing will once again merge with pure physics, that programs will become structures hence objects (like proteines). He also highlighted the trends of fabbers and their possible consequences on the world. A decent talk on a subject I know quite a bit and that should indeed see dramatic shifts in the next few years.

Tan Le demoed Emotiv, her overhead mind-capturing device. Even with everybody’s cortex being folded differently like a fingerprint, her headset is capable of training and then recognizing thoughts. I tried it in the demo space and was indeed able to move a cube on the screen left and right just with a thought. The implications of this kind of technology are just too big to list here! But it’s the kind of moments you realize we’re living in the future…

Anne Quito made a short talk about discoveries in plain sight and how she finally noticed the art gallery that was spread all around her office.

Eben Bayer told us about plastics and their dangers to both nature and us. He’s using mushrooms (nature’s very own recycling system) to engineer an alternative to the extremely polluting Styrofoam. He’s actually growing protection materials for shipped goods, out of mycelium. Impressive!

Derek Sivers showed evidence that telling someone your goals make them less likely to happen, perhaps because then our minds feel they are already done. Quite true! A good reason to keep your future projects secret ;-)

David Bismark explained how we could make voting much more secure and transparent with a smarter voting system based on a paper ballot with some kind of unique hash/2D barcode.

Finally Emily Pilloton talked about Berty Country, where she lives, in North Carolina. It was a “deserted rural ghetto” but now by smarter design, she’s able to improve education which in turn benefits the whole community.

After this last talk we went directly to the party at the Ashmolean museum:

Lots of good drinks and again, top class networking. Then we went to eat at the Living room where I ate with a NASA economist and a lovely couple from Baltimore. I was finally able to put my U.S. culture to good use as we talked about Elon Musk, Curb your enthusiasm, Hairspray, … After the dinner we went back to our house for a french afterparty where even if less people than expected turned up, we had loads of fun recording the video below, a tribute and a mashup of a few sessions of TEDGlobal2010. “When ideas have sex in the new salons, the Hurdy Gurdy makes sweet dreams”. Enjoy (and sorry)!

Inge Missmahl started this fifth TEDGlobal session with her experience of being a psychanalist in hell, Afghanistan in that case. Annie Lennox then came again on stage this time not to sing but to talk about her contribution to the fight against HIV/AIDS together with Nelson Mandela and his 46664 campaign.

Mitchell Besser explained that one of the features of HIV is that it is also a social disease. He explained PMTCT (Prevention of Mother-To-Child Transmission) and why it was so important considering that there are 1.4M pregnant women with HIV each year. Stressed that it was a full package and not just drugs. There are still 1100 children a day born with HIV, 90% of them in Africa. Importance of all the non-medical followup and of the empowerment of women.

Karsu Donmez came to perform a few of her songs on the piano. She’s been described as the new Norah Jones and was also featured previously at the excellent TEDxAmsterdam.

Arthur Potts Dawson is a green chef. 1 calorie eaten = 10 calories needed for production. Food is one of the most wasteful industries on Earth. He showed the green feature of some restaurants he built. His new and young project is called The People’s Supermarket. Good luck!

Last talk of the session and my favourite, John Hardy told us how “An Inconvenient Truth” changed his life. “Thanks, Al!” . He showed us the Green School he built in Bali, a truly amazing little village where classrooms have no walls and almost everything is made from bamboo.  He explained why bamboo is an ideal construction material and said about the main building: “when the scafholding came down, we realized we had a cathedral”. It is indeed said to be the most beautiful building in the world made of bamboo. They are in their 3rd year and are already hosting 160 children. Education is suited to the challenges children will face in 2025. He invited everyone to join his initiative. Plus, he had the coolest business cards of TEDGlobal, fully made from bamboo! Standing ovation at the end.