TED 2011: Eythor Bender, Human Exo-Skeletons

Score: 7 Balloons

Eythor Bender of Berkeley Bionics brings onstage two amazing exoskeletons, HULC and eLEGS -- robotic add-ons that could one day allow a human to carry 200 pounds without tiring, or allow a wheelchair user to stand and walk. It's a powerful onstage demo, with implications for human potential of all kinds.

About Eythor Bender

Eythor Bender is the CEO of Berkeley Bionics, which augments humans with wearable, powered and artificially intelligent devices called exoskeletons or "wearable robots.

 See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED2011: Sarah Kay, Performance Poetry

Score: 9 balloons


Sarah Kay shared her experiences as an underage fan of poetry readings, and her use of poetry as a teacher to connect with students. She also performed her original works to a standing ovation. Her talk was widely viewed as a surprise highlight of this year's TED. Her work is animated and sharp, reaching young and old alike. Just listen...



 See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Janna Levin, Soundtrack of the Universe

This review was written by Nina Khosla.

Score: 6 balloons


Janna Levin was TED's first speaker of the conference, and a physicist who focused on exploring and discovering a particular phenomenon - the sounds of space. While much of physics has focused on light - "most of what we know about the universe," she explained, "comes from light." But what about the sounds of space? What would space sound like if we could hear it? “The universe has a soundtrack, and that soundtrack is played on space itself," she began.

Levin took us on a journey to black holes, starting with the basic science of black holes. In particuar, black holes are interesting because you can't "see" a black hole using traditional methods - light tends to pass through a black hole rendering it all but invisible. From there, Levin shared with us the music and noises that a black hole would make in various situations - the drumbeat of black holes on space itself.



 See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED2011: David Brooks

This review was written by Nina Khosla.

Score: 8 balloons





David Brooks has a certain, calm demeanor and stood up on stage in the presentational equivalent of being stark naked - it was just him, in front of a podium, sharing with us his insights from many years as a journalist and observer of human nature.

In a thread continued from many of his columns, and as an introduction to the ideas in his new book, Brooks asked and explored a perplexing mystery: when did our views of human nature become so flat-minded, particularly in the way we approach it from an economic or political point of view? This revolution is slowly happening, as we begin to understand more about human nature, and this is being particularly driven by new scientific insights.

What particularly caught my imagination was Brooks' descriptions of the kinds of things that are unmeasurable, but predict so much of our success. While we would like to be able to measure the human capital available in our economic institutions through SAT and IQ scores, the human mind and potential incorporates much more depth. He describes a few of these factors, for example, the human capacity for "mind sight," which   describes our ability to empathize, to place our selves in another's mind and imagine the world from their perspective. Other intangibles include things such as our ability to work in a group - "it's not the IQ of the group, it's how well they communicate," that defines success in groups, and our sensitivity to our physical environment, which encapsulates our ability to notice things from around us and see patterns.



 See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Deb Roy's Unusual Home Movies

Score: 9 balloons

The MIT Media Labs Cognitive Machines Group's director Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with 11 videocameras and 14 microphones to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 7 million words spoken in 90,000 hours of home video to hear "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Founder of free online Khan Academy

Salman Khan
Score: 8 balloons

This first-hand account of the creation and rising popularity of Khan Academy was widely considered a highlight of TED.

Salman had started making math videos as a favor to his cousins, but they became so popular on YouTube that he decided to quit his job at a hedge fund and record thousands more videos across diverse subject areas. His intellect, light style and generosity have seeded a tremendous online educational resource.



 See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

Wall Street Journal, Come Join the 21st Century

I made the mistake last week of turning my attention to the Opinion pages of the March 2 Wall Street Journal. I was suddenly reminded of the newspaper’s common ownership with FOX News.

The top essay, The Decline of US Naval Power, laments our shrinking navy, but fails to make me care. According to the author Mark Helprin, 20 seaward ships at a time are insufficient to “project military power”. Completely ignoring common sense, he implies that a larger navy would have prevented Somali pirates from killing four American tourists. And he declares with surprising certainty that if the trend continues, “China will be driven even faster to construct a navy that can dominate the oceans.” Really? That seems counter-intuitive.

And of course Helprin ignores the issue of cost, except to conclude that, “A technological nation with a GDP of $14 trillion can afford to build a fleet worthy of its past...” Hasn’t he read the news lately? The GDP is large, but we’re running the largest deficit of any nation in history, with enormous, unfunded liabilities looming. How do we afford a shiny new navy?

As a taxpayer I'd much rather see my tax dollars spent on modern warfare such as cyber capabilities. Deploying a cyberworm that undoubtedly cost less than 0.001% of the cost of operating (let alone buying) a single battleship for one year, the US and Israel (allegedly) disabled Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility for three years, and did so without loss of life on either side. By pursuing military objectives using immensely cheaper cyber assets, we can allocate some of that whopping GDP to restore some of our healthcare and education.

The second essay that day was In Defense of the Defense of Marriage Act, which objects to President Obama's recent decision to stop enforcing the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act. This Act somehow aimed to revoke the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution when it comes to gay marriage so that the gay marriages are not recognized by the federal government or any states that don't license same sex unions.

According to the essay's authors, the Full Faith and Credit Clause shouldn't apply because "marriage is unlike any other government benefit. License to marry carries with it far more than mere permission...marriage is an affirmative statement of societal approval." And since "large majorities of Americans [sic] still oppose recognition of same-sex marriages," Congress decided that federal law should "clearly establish a preference for traditional marriage."

What a stunning, hateful argument. By their logic, mixed-race marriages should also be subject to each state's "societal approval."

But don't get the wrong idea -- the authors deny that they are ignorant, homophobic rednecks; they merely insist that Presidents must enforce all laws passed by Congress, no matter how disgusting or obviously unconstitutional.

Funny, though: the Wall Street Journal never published opinion pieces condemning President Bush Sr for declining to enforce affirmative action for broadcast licensing, or President Reagan for declining to enforce the independent counsel law and the law permitting one-house legislative vetoes of executive actions.

And get this -- the co-authors of this opinion piece, Rivkin and Casey, served as attorneys in both the Reagan and Bush Sr administrations. Hey guys, why didn't you complain back then?

TED 2011: Anthony Atala Prints Organs

Score: 9 balloons

This was the most fascinating technology demo of TED. Dr. Atala uses a 3D printer (which is already awesome cool in itself) to lay down layers of stem cells in order to create organs for transplant. The unit he brought with him printed out a kidney!

Now the kidney he showed us doesn't yet work. For that step he'll have to hire someone like TED Fellow Nina Tandon, a Columbia University researcher who shared her progress in using electrical current to activate stem cells (e.g. she can make heart cells start beating).



 See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Wael Ghonim, Egyptian Activist

Score: 10 balloons

This rabble-rousing Googler hero shares his inspiring first-hand account of the Egyptian revolution. Wael delivered his TED Talk from Cairo, where one of 70 TEDx groups participated virtually in this year’s conference.


See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Wadah Khanfar, Director General of Al Jazeera

This review was written by Nina Khosla.

Score: 9 balloons



Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera, seemed to be a polarizing talk - many believed that his perspective was illuminating and Al Jazeera had played a crucial role in the extraordinary events taking place in the Middle East; and many others that the talk was a token attempt by TED to incorporate something, anything, about these world-changing events, and that the role of Al Jazeera was not particularly central to precipitating the occasion.

I personally fall somewhere in the middle: was Al Jazeera the thing that sparked a thousand revolutions? Absolutely not. Still, Al Jazeera sat with the cameras on, and embraced a new generation that, as Khanfar emphasized multiple times, effused a new set of "global values." According to Khanfar, this new generation created these revolutions, and sculpted a new view of the world to inspire their countrymen. Khanfar seemed to be enthralled with the word "connected," but not in the way we find ourselves captivated by this word in the west. This is a society that needs to present this new view of the world so that individuals can understand that they are not alone, but part of a movement of others embracing a new view of society. Al Jazeera took this and captured it on camera, sharing and perpetuating this view.



 See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

JR, Winner of the 2011 TED Prize

Score: 6 balloons

This year TED awarded its prize to JR, a unique kind of street artist. I have never understood how TED selects its winners (Karen Armstrong? Jamie Oliver?) and JR is no exception. What about those speakers who are eradicating polio, malaria and slavery? But based on the standing ovation and web site comments, the TED community found him to be "courageous and inspiring". So I will defer to TED.com's description of JR:

JR, a semi-anonymous French street artist, uses his camera to show the world its true face, by pasting photos of the human face across massive canvases. At TED2011, he makes his audacious TED Prize wish: to use art to turn the world inside out. Learn more about his work and learn how you can join in at insideoutproject.net.

 See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

Your Guide to TED Talks 2011

I had the great fortune this week to attend my fifth TED Conference in Long Beach, along with Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Demi Moore, Al Gore, Jason Mraz, Mark Pincus, and too many other fabulous TEDsters.

As in prior years, I've compiled a resource to help you select which TED Talks to watch online. The main-stage talks -- which I've classified below -- will link to my reviews and to the videos as they become available throughout March. Each TED Talk has been rated on a 1-to-10 scale by a panel that includes me, my sister Jill, and Nina Khosla, an 8-year TEDster and blogger who graciously reviewed the Tuesday sessions that I missed. Nina co-founded Teethie, an online community platform set to launch this summer.

The 2011 speaker lineup lived up to prior years. You can never tell beforehand which ones will be the classics; this year the standouts turned out to be General Stanley McChrystal, dinosaur hunter Jack Horner, transplant surgeon Anthony Atala, Slate columnist Kathryn Schulz, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, poet Sarah Kay, Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, and fourth grade teacher John Hunter.

Invention

  9   Anthony Atala, printing organs

  9   Deb Roy, 24/7 home movies

  8   Aaron O’Connell, human scale quantum mechanics

  6   Fiorenzo Omenetto, cool uses of silk

Directed Evolution

  9   Jack Horner on making a dinosaur

  8   Harvey Fineberg, Neo-evolution

  7   Eythor Bender, human exo-skeletons

Cognition

How we think

10   Kathryn Shulz, Being Wrong

  8   David Brooks, Emotion precedes reason

  8   Ed Boyden, Illuminating the brain

  7   Antonio Damasio, Cognition of Self

  4   Daniel Temmet, autistic cognition

Revolution
How information networks are transforming military conflicts in the Arab world.

10   Wael Ghonim, Egyptian activist
10   General Stanley McChrystal on leadership
  9   Wadah Khanfar, Director General of Al Jazeera
  5   Ralph Langner, Stuxnet cyberworm

Education
Creating more engaging curricula for the diversity of kids in our schools.

10   John Hunter on World Peace, and other 4th Grade Achievements
  8   Salman Khan on Khan Academy

Smart Cars and Roads
The future of mobility

  9   Sebastian Thrun, Google's driverless cars

  8   Bill Ford, the future of mobility

  7   Dennis Hong, driving blind

Deciphering the Past

  8   Rajesh Rao, Cracking the Indus code
  7   David Christian, history of entropy
  6   Edward Tenner, unintended consequences

Discovering New Life Forms

  8   Edith Widder, bio-illuminescence
  8   Felisa Wolfe-Simon, arsenic-based life forms

Shameless Promotion

10   Morgan Spurlock, Best TED Talk Ever Sold
  3   Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsi
  2   Christina Lampe-Onnerud, modular batteries

Performance Artists

10   Jason Mraz
  9   Bobby McFerrin
  9   Sarah Kay, poet
  7   Julie Taymour, designs musicals like Spiderman
  6   Handspring Puppet Company
  3   Maya Beiser cellist
  2   Antony, vocalist

Social Art

  9   Paul Nicklen, Arctic photographer
  8   Thomas Heatherwick, large scale artist
  7   Shea Hembrey, artist
  6   JR, TED Prize Winner
  5   Eric Whitacre, virtual chorus
  5   Sunni Brown, gamestormer
  4   Kate Hartman, funny hats
  4   Janet Echelman, fishnet sculptures
  3   Beatrice Coron, papercutter

Other

  9   Roger Ebert, finding his voice
  8   Al Weiwei, Chinese activisit
  7   Eli Parisi, the internet echo chamber
  6   Amina Az-Zubair, fixing Nigeria
  6   Janna Levin, black hole physicist
  5   Bruce Aylward, eradicating Polio


<-- TED2010