thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

It’s true I’m a TEDhead and if we’ve met it would be unusual if I didn’t mention the TED conference videos at some point.

One of the incredible delights of the today is that even though we read less; if we can find time to watch an 18 minute video – paradoxically we have even greater access to some of the best minds in the world  via TED and sites like it.

In my house we call it Teducation and personally I just love being able to get an idea of what the best subject matter experts in the work are thinking about their chosen topics and what they actually care about.

Even better when they have only 18 minutes to express their passion (which is the standard TED format) that is short enough to be useful but not too long if the presentation sucks.

This week TED announced A TED Fellows programme for this year and buried away in the detail was the name Sean Gourley described as  Physicist/military theorist; Rhodes Scholar. New Zealand

Sean has been away in the UK on a Rhodes Scholarship for the past few years but his background from Canterbury University is

Bachelor of Science with Honours and Master of Science in Physics
Sean researched nano-scale blue light lasers for his first-class BSc(Hons) degree in Physics and self-assembled quantum nano-wires, for his MSc before enrolling for a DPhil at Oxford University, researching complex adaptive systems and collective intelligent systems.

Over on younoodle it says that Sean is a

“New Zealander, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, PhD in Physics specializing in ‘networks and complexity’, just finished a research fellowship at Oxford in the quantitative analysis of war and terrorism. “

So what is the Ted Fellow award and how can we be involved?

I think we can all be involved in scouting for the unusual suspects. Anyone can become a member of TED. As at today’s date there are apparently 908 NZ linked members on the network. My TED profile is here but anyone can join – check the joining TED blurb here.

Getting into a conference and paying the $US6k in fees plus the travel and other costs of getting there and back each time takes some serious effort for most of us so it is fantastic that there is a TED fellows sponsorship programme.

Go Sean Gourley @ TED .  For more detail download the TED fellows PDF and check page 21 of 45. Some of the other Fellows like Patrick Awuah we have seen in action before and I have also spent time on Jennifers Brea‘s blogs in the past as well. Her work on Africabeat is worth reading.

If you read this Sean – make sure all of those guests know that NZ is not just a rock in the Pacific or Fiji with snow – but a really vibrant community of creativity and world class thinking.

Update:4th Feb We are following Sean via his twitter feed in the top right sidebar / see comments.

Sean says

• Talk to me about – Politics, Venture Capital and innovation, Mathematics, Physics, running, single malt scotch, the latest book I have to read or movie I should go see.

For background on the Fellowship programme:

Ted Fellows

“Introducing TED Fellows, our new international program that will bring 50 eclectic, up-and-coming world-changers to our Long Beach and Oxford conferences each year….

All TED Fellows will receive special benefits including pre-conference programs, training from world-class communications professionals, the opportunity to give short TEDTalks at TED University, the opportunity to spread their ideas on TED.com, a private social network and more. Of course, TED will cover their conference fees, travel and lodging.

We’re targeting individuals aged 21-40 from all of TED’s many disciplines, including of course, technology, entertainment and design but also science, humanities and the arts, entrepreneurs, NGOs and political and community leaders. We’re focusing on candidates from five regions of the world: Africa, Asia/Pacific, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. However, anyone 18 and over is welcome to apply. The first application cycle begins February 23rd, 2009.

These men and women were selected for their achievement but especially for their promise. Each of them shows real potential to create positive change in their field — whether it’s technology, entertainment, design, music, art, science, business or the NGO community — in their country, and even around the world.”

However ;  I can’t help thinking that some of our brightest TED prospects are now outside the university systems especially in the creative sectors.

What do you think -?  Who would you nominate as a representative of your sector, company, organisation or country. Who are the unusual suspects?

Here is hoping that Sean enjoys his time at TED and reports back.

TED 2009 Conference starts 3 Feb (today – depending on your timezone.)

If I was at the conference I’d be keen to see Daniel Lebskind, Oliver Sacks, Herbie Hancock, Dan Ariely and Liz Coleman for starters. Jacek Utko thinks good design can save the newspaper? He will be presenting on that — and good luck with that one from me.

For more on the TED Conference 09  speakers

Really I’d love to be at TED one day but the next best thing is helping a smart New Zealander make it there. Lets nominate some more TED fellows for next year and trust that Sean will have a great time this trip.

The third best thing to being at TED are the T shirts. Premo purveyor of T’s to the thoughtful REMO Generalstore is the TED T-shirt supplier so Australia are already doing their bit for TED.

Founder Remo Giuffré is at TED – Remo on twitter

Footnote: As always if you are at TED 09 – feel free to add a comment here or contact me via TED or LinkedIn.

We really enjoyed David Cowan‘s posts from TED last year (Check the Dave Eggers post) and Brian Sweeney’s notes before that.

The TED prize is webcast live at Thursday 5th Feb at 5 pm US Pacific Time. LA time is currently

For NZ – this makes local time of 2 pm Friday 6th or Friday Feb 6 12 noon for Sydney, NSW readers. For your location you may want to double check the meeting planner.

TED prize winners this conference are deep ocean explorer Sylvia Earle, astronomer Jill Cornell Tarter, maestro José Antonio Abreu.   I’m sure they are all great but I especially like the sound of :

Jose Abreu, a retired economist, trained musician, and social reformer founded El Sistema (“the system”) in 1975 based on the conviction that what poor Venezuelan kids needed was classical music. After 30 years and 10 different political administrations, El Sistema is now a nationwide organization of 102 youth orchestras, 55 children’s orchestras and 270 music centers.

Update: Some of this post have also been added to Idealog Blog

About 8 or 9 years ago there was a real glut of conferences on the impact of the internet and most presenters felt obliged to talk about Moores law which applied then mostly to hardware.

In fact we are surrounded by lots of “business cycles” and ripple effect such as the innovation cycle – start something new, refine it by bringing down costs and so on over time, while expanding and changing markets in new and interesting ways.

Increasingly more people are realizing that there are parallel and social effects in other technology related areas like software and business cycles for instance.

Two of the thinkers I really like on the wider tech implications are Paul Graham and David Cowan.

Paul has a large number of very helpful essays and this one from October ’07 really caught my eye – he was talking about The Future of Web Startups.

(This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.)

There’s something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper.

It’s a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there’s some device that’s very expensive and made in small quantities. Then someone discovers how to make them cheaply; many more get built; and as a result they can be used in new ways.

Computers are a familiar example. When I was a kid, computers were big, expensive machines built one at a time. Now they’re a commodity. Now we can stick computers in everything.

This pattern is very old. Most of the turning points in economic history are instances of it. It happened to steel in the 1850s, and to power in the 1780s. It happened to cloth manufacture in the thirteenth century, generating the wealth that later brought about the Renaissance. Agriculture itself was an instance of this pattern.

Now as well as being produced by startups, this pattern is happening to startups. It’s so cheap to start web startups that orders of magnitudes more will be started. If the pattern holds true, that should cause dramatic changes.

David Cowan recently speculated in a video that we are now at the stage where perhaps every 18 months or so it becomes half as expensive to roll out an application to the web in some kind of echo of Moore’s law.

The mathematical element is not as important as the key point that many more thousands of developers, entrepreneurs and business people everywhere are using the latest software tools and technologies to accelerate just about everything.

From my perspective many of these observations come across like that ancient story of the blind men describing an elephant. The elephant is large and each man describes a different part of what sounds like more than one animal.

As a creative generalist myself with extremely diverse interests and training in multiple disciplines I recognize many of these perspectives all being part of the same large elephant – as it were.

So where is all this heading? On the Paul Graham essay already mentioned he thinks:

10. Faster Advances

There’s a good side to that, at least for consumers of technology. If people get right to work implementing ideas instead of sitting on them, technology will evolve faster.

Some kinds of innovations happen a company at a time, like the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution. There are some kinds of ideas that are so threatening that it’s hard for big companies even to think of them. Look at what a hard time Microsoft is having discovering web apps. They’re like a character in a movie that everyone in the audience can see something bad is about to happen to, but who can’t see it himself. The big innovations that happen a company at a time will obviously happen faster if the rate of new companies increases.

In New Zealand there is a temptation to invent something new because we can’t find an obvious answer. It is now becoming much harder to do that and go global as many of these opportunities are already driving entrepreneurs simultaneously in multiple timezones at warpspeed. There are still advantages to be had from this though.

As David Cowan suggests it much better to come clean and stimulate the discussions by leveraging the wisdom of crowds.

The other great point in his video is that now it is possible and even desirable to move down the pyramid to innovate and invest outside of the top few large companies.

Now with the rate of change and ease of deployment across the internet it is becoming easier and more necessary to be able to provide new products and services in smaller and medium sized businesses.

In the last post I mentioned that the TED prize broadcasts were going to be live so that anyone could see the video as it happened from the TED conference.

There were 3 sessions plus a musical performance. It was great to get an idea of the conference in real time even though one of the presentations in my view wasn’t up to scratch.*

In my opinion the most inspiring TED prize presentation was by Dave Eggers.

Dave has found a very practical and inspiring way of improving educational outcomes and helping teachers and parents with the Valencia 826 project which has now morphed into a national and international project now called Once upon a School.

A few days ago the video from that presentation was released and you can now view and download it.

The genius of this idea is that it provides a new model for adults to get involved in some very practical ways to support teachers, parents and of course – the kids themselves.

Dave’s wish and how you can help out.

Ironically the reason it has taken so long to finish this post is that my local school has a musical fund raising event called the Little Day Out and we have used a blog based system to provide a full website for the event.

Consequently in the past 6 weeks there has been the equivalent of 30 content posts from all the different teams involved so it’s been a bit busy! If you are in Auckland, NZ on April 5th feel free to come along – kids under 12 are free and full details are on the LDO website.

Working together with lots of volunteers is exciting and it is that same combination of focus and community passion that drives the Once Upon a School idea.

Dave tells a great story about how Valencia 826 came about, why they had to sell pirate supplies for the working buccaneer and how this project has become the model for six other innovative mentoring / tutoring centres.

There are now 1400 tutors in SF and Valencia 826 is now working with multiple schools to the point where they have been given classrooms to use directly for the programme.

As noted on the TED site Dave

“Dave Eggers’ first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was a memoir about becoming the official guardian of his 8-year-old brother at the age of 22. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; the New York Times called him a staggeringly talented new writer.

Since then Dave has written a number of other books, including You Shall Know Our Velocity!, followed by a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry, and his latest book, What Is the What, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award…..

Much more recently he co-wrote, with Spike Jonze, the film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.”

Dave Eggers – Author, philanthropist and literary entrepreneur
“When we think about kids and education, we have to get back to the basic undeniable that kids are individuals, they learn in a thousand ways, and there are undeniable steps to greater education for all: better salaries for teachers, smaller class sizes, and more one-on-one attention.”

and here is a quick history of some of the flow on effects of the project from their website.

About 826 National

We started with after-school tutoring as the foundation of 826 Valencia in San Francisco.
But the volunteer corps grew so quickly and broadly — within a year we had 1100 tutors, from hundreds of occupations — that we were able to dream of many other ways to work with students, schools, teachers, and parents.

With an abundance of support, we were able to do much more than we intended.
We were able to begin hosting daily field trips where students learned story writing, editing and bookmaking. We were able to send tutors into schools all over the city at a teacher’s behest. We were able to host nightly workshops, open to all, taught by professionals.

We were able to give four yearly college scholarships and a monthly teacher award (attached to a monetary grant). We were able to publish paperback and hardcover books of student work, in addition to producing dozens of newspapers, chapbooks, student films, plays, radio shows and websites.

The essence of the program is that it’s like school, but it’s not school.
The students come to 826 because it’s fun, it’s warm, it’s full of people who care — but who don’t HAVE to care. That is, the average students knows his teacher has to help with his schoolwork, and he knows his parents have to help.

But there’s something very new and transformative about meeting a member of the community — a professional journalist, a radio disc jockey, a graduate student, an advertising copywriter, a software developer, a retired lawyer — and have that person give them 2-3 hours of undivided attention.

Almost without exception, student achievement and understanding leaps when they are given this concentrated one-on-one attention. Teachers and parents love the help, and the students get to ask a hundred questions until they truly understand a concept.”

The reason that the first store sells pirate supplies is that the zoning required some form of retail activity and by fortuitous chance they decided on pirate supplies almost as a joke.

At the beginning this confused a few people and parents weren’t so keen on the idea but incredibly that part of the store now pays the rent while the tutoring centre does the real work.

“At San Francisco’s only independent pirate supply store, we offer a variety of goods, including lard, flags, eye patches, mops, glass eyes and the like.

All proceeds from the store go toward the writing center resting directly behind it.”

For those who want to know more about the TED conference David Cowan has posted an extensive series of very entertaining posts for each day of the conference. I have include the list below along with a few of his comments. Thanks David – almost as good as being there.

Thursday, February 28, 2008
TED 2008

“Having said that, there is still one conference I try to never miss. TED”

Friday, February 29, 2008
TED Thursday Morning: Life Origami

“Particle physicist Garrett Lisi closed the session. Garrett is an avid surfer who lives and works in a van on the beaches of Maui. He compares physics experiments to startups, since they hold great promise but they usually don’t work.

The connection to beauty is that Lisi is pursuing the grand unified theory of physics by advocating a mathematical model of the universe that isn’t proven, but it’s so elegant and beautiful that physicists like Lisi believe that it’s most probably correct. (As Dr. Suess wrote about Horton’s egg, “It should be, it should be, it should be like that.”) ”

Saturday, March 01, 2008
Helpful Tips To Survive a Nuclear Explosion

“Dave Eggers, author of several non-conventional books, the best of which is (in my humble opinion, but apparently not his) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. TED recognized Eggers for his campaign to build several inner city tutoring centers staffed by writers.”

David is also surprised by one of the TED prize winners. Karen Armstrong. I was too. I think she should give the prize money back. Her presentation lacked clarity and real vision in my opinion.

Saturday, March 01, 2008
TED Friday Morning: Music, Shrooms and Crows

An example is “I then got to hear novelist Amy Tan after all. I wasn’t expecting much, but somehow she still disappointed. As far as I can tell, the entire point of her talk was “How did I come to be such a creative genius?” The possibilities seem to include “God’s will, synchrony, or mysterious forces.” And finally her Big Question: “Did someone intend for me to be this way?” My big question: Who Has Time For This?”

Tuesday, March 04, 2008
TED Friday Afternoon: Shining Eyes

Title refers to the Benjamin Zander session.

Thursday, March 06, 2008
TED Saturday: Thank You For Being Here

All of these posts by David Cowan are great examples of how blogging can get to the heart of an event as it is filtered by an engaged participant.

Note: * The TED presentation by Karen Armstrong was unconvincing to me. Granted – the topic is a difficult one and the intention is good but I would have given the prize to someone else like Majora Carter who is unquestionably outstanding by way of contrast.