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 ;-)