The second day of TED2009 was somewhat more interesting. Oliver Sacks, probably most known (if at all) by the masses for his book Awakenings, upon which the synonymous movie was based. His presentation kickstarted the day focusing on syndromes that affect people with limited vision. One symptom is the creation or fusion of vision with imaginary constructs, sometimes geometric shapes, others tokens from one’s imagination or things that the person has experienced/seen recently.
The next talk was by Olafur Eliasson. To me, It was a bit of a disappointment: I found his presentation arrogant, fluffy and somewhat pretentious and his work since The Weather Project uninteresting.
Ed Ulbrich, from Digital Domain followed, talking about the work behind the recent movie (and specifically the protagonist) (The Curious Case Of) Benjamin Button. The work was good and I was impressed by how frank he came across regarding the deficiencies of his company in this field. I can’t say I was very impressed by the result, but it was a decent presentation. While watching Ed’s presentation I thought that the work presented in this video could more or less help in the automated creation of any actor’s face, somewhat simplifying the workflow process in the future. There’s clearly a lot to be done in the field and I’m sure that Digital Domain, along with others, will play their role in this.
While Ed carried himself well as a representative of a corporation dealing with ‘art’, Golan Levin, an experimental audio-visual artist presented an impressive body of art that involved computing as opposed to traditional media. He had some nice ideas, and interesting implementations that we got presented in short video clips.
The first session was closed by Deepak Ram, an Indian flutist covering Coltrane. His performance was great — I’m very much looking forward to listening to his work.
Elizabeth Gilbert, a writer gave an impressive presentation on the notion of ‘genius’, inspiration, creativity. The talk was captivating, not necessarily due to the subject at hand, but the qualities of Elizabeth as a speaker.
Louise Fresco talked about food, how modern western society takes it for granted and how industrialised agriculture — as opposed to the increasing trend for all-natural organic ingredients — can really help reduce poverty and maintain output. I found her talk flawed for a number of reasons, but mostly because she confused mechanised agriculture (e.g. using technology, not necessarily biology however) to increase output and make agriculture easier, and natural, healthy eating: You don’t have to eat ‘Wonderbread’ to support high technology agriculture; you can have an organic loaf of bread, produced from wheat that was cultivated and harvested using the latest in technology. When biology comes into the picture things change considerably. Arguably, it’s not a luxury to oppose controversial products from companies like Monsanto, but a moral imperative, if not a wise choice, even if they increase output. Her talk didn’t differentiate between those two aspects at all, which significantly detracted from her presentation.
Due to connectivity problems we missed Jacek Utko’s talk which is a shame as I was looking forward to seeing what he had to say. I also missed Margaret Wertheim’s presentation for the same reason.
Nina Jablonski talked about fair and tanned skins, how people moved from the equator towards the poles and how sunlight affects Vitamin D in the body. Not exactly new stuff there.
Libeskind was probably the greatest dissapointment of TED. A pretentious, blathering talk, full of grandiose concepts and pompous words that appealed (and failed miserably) to fundamental notions. The talk had very little of essence besides praising and justifying Libeskind controversial æsthetics and was accompanies by slides featuring a bunch of extremely ugly buildings, interrupted by others presenting (false) dichotomies. “Ugly vs. Beautiful” came to mind more than once.
Shai Agassi had an interesting, grounded presentation on his vision of all-electric vehicles. I found his talk convincing, while at the same time approachable and captivating. Electric cars, ‘removable batteries’ and sustainability. Exchanging battery packs at ‘refuelling stations’, providing charging outlets in parking spaces, paying for ‘kilometres’. Interesting concept, great potential, but then again it’s not the ideas that matter in such cases, but execution. Can he sell it to the world?
Catherine Mohr presented some of the innovations in the world of surgical robots. Apparently in a few years (once the FDA gives its approval) surgeries will take place using miniature robots that can move to different parts of the body, in contrast to the almost 10-year old robotic technology used today around the world (not in Hellas I’m afraid) that can only penetrate the body in a single place. Fascinating technology, let’s hope it becomes mainstream soon. Her presentation turned annoyingly didactic near in the end, but the work seemed great and I’m pretty positive of its value.
Robert Full showed his robotic geckos. Building these must have been fun, but the highlight of his talk was his description of how a cycle between biology and engineering allowed him to understand more about different elements of geckos (e.g. the role of the tail) than he would have if he had stuck to engineering alone.
Finally Sarah Jones presented five or six different personas, in different costumes and accents etc. She’s undoubtedly very talented, although I failed to see how her talk fit in TED.
I left before the TED Prize started (it was getting close to 04:00 again) so there’s not much I can write about the three presentations that followed.
I skipped the third day, partly due to fatigue, obligations and the fact that few of the presentations seemed interesting enough to merit another late night session. There were lots of speakers, some of which you can find in the schedule here.
Yesterday I attended the first of the two sessions planned for the last day. I was very interested in watching Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s presentation.
Nate Silver gave a nice talk on how the environment affects opinions regarding race. Lots of coloured maps, graphs etc., but stuff that is more or less common sense; that’s not to say it’s not worth studying them, only that they were somewhat unimpressive.
Alex Tammarok gave his take on globalisation, free trade, growth etc. It was funny to see someone in a professorial academic position to have such flawed, biased views on the state of the world economy. Tammarok focused on Real GDP Per Capita, growth, ‘wealth’, etc.. He forgot why all those things he mentioned are not an accurate indicator of wealth, of well-being, or quality of life. He forgot to mention how in so many of the countries whose economies ‘grew’ between 2000 and 2008, the actual wealth concentrated in the hands of very few. How, despite China’s and India’s growth it is projected that those countries may never reach the quality of life the average U.S or E.U. citizen takes for granted for their citizens (again taking averages). In India and China there are still hundreds of millions of people way below the poverty line while at the same time there are pretty obvious cultural and social problems. I guess free-market naïvety still exists and so do Mickey-Mouse economics.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita gave his talk on predicting of complex business or political negotiation outcomes, actions, events etc. The topic is fascinating, his presentation was mediocre. His whole talk seemed like a reiteration of what he’s going to present and the actual presentation fell short of giving any meaningful information on what or how he predicts anything. What a disappointment.
Finally, one of the most surprisingly good talks (at least to me) was that of behavioural economist Dan Ariely. His talk had so much to do with experimentation upon the subject of cheating, an investigation of our own mental image of ourselves, externalities affecting that image, and how someone could be encouraged (or discouraged) to cheat in different situations. An excellent talk although I am not exactly sure how he can tie this with actual economic research (e.g. the stock market, an example he did mention).
Before closing this post off, I think I need to mention Nicholas Negroponte’s comeback; after royally screwing the OLPC project up, he returned eager to take credit for the ‘Netbook’ phenomenon and reinstate the OLPC — now renamed the ‘olpc’ — as a project worthy of anyone’s attention. I have written about the project several times; it was a project with great potential that largely failed for a number of reasons. Negroponte’s talk was 80% nonsense and 20% brilliance: the latter being due to his announcement that the next olpc will be an open source hardware design. That’s a fantastic proposition, truly reinstating the project as an token of openness. The potential is huge, for regional and local economies, and — coupled with open source — it may end up gaining massive momentum and realising Negroponte’s original dream. In effect it takes him out of the loop — a great thing — and will allow others to leverage the project’s brainy design (if there’s any of that left anymore) and manufacture, evolve and sell it globally. Sadly, most of the people that would’ve been able to create a reference hardware platform have already left the project.
That’s where my TED experience ended for 2009. I’m looking forward to watching some of the talks I missed and keeping an open eye for 2010.
