Carla enjoyed Danny Hillis' presentation at TED2013. Here's how he began the talk:

So, this book that I have in my hand is a directory of everybody who had an email address in 1982. (Laughter) Actually, it's deceptively large. There's actually only about 20 people on each page, because we have the name, address and telephone number of every single person. And, in fact, everybody's listed twice, because it's sorted once by name and once by email address. Obviously a very small community. There were only two other Dannys on the Internet then. I knew them both. We didn't all know each other, but we all kind of trusted each other, and that basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network, and there was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things.

So just to give you an idea of the level of trust in this community, let me tell you what it was like to register a domain name in the early days. Now, it just so happened that I got to register the third domain name on the Internet. So I could have anything I wanted other than bbn.com and symbolics.com. So I picked think.com, but then I thought, you know, there's a lot of really interesting names out there. Maybe I should register a few extras just in case. And then I thought, "Nah, that wouldn't be very nice."

Danny Hillis: The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B

Amanda Palmer commands attention. The singer-songwriter-blogger-provocateur, known for pushing boundaries in both her art and her lifestyle, made international headlines this year when she raised nearly $1.2 million via Kickstarter (she’d asked for $100k) from nearly 25,000 fans who pre-ordered her new album, Theatre Is Evil.

But the former street performer, then Dresden Dolls frontwoman, now solo artist hit a bump the week her world tour kicked off. She revealed plans to crowdsource additional local backup musicians in each tour stop, offering to pay them in hugs, merchandise and beer per her custom. Bitter and angry criticism ensued (she eventually promised to pay her local collaborators in cash). And it's interesting to consider why. As Laurie Coots suggests: "The idea was heckled because we didn't understand the value exchange -- the whole idea of asking the crowd for what you need when you need it and not asking for more or less." Summing up her business model, in which she views her recorded music as the digital equivalent of street performing, she says: “I firmly believe in music being as free as possible. Unlocked. Shared and spread. In order for artists to survive and create, their audiences need to step up and directly support them.”

TED2013 -- Amanda Palmer: The art of asking

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Amanda Palmer: Asking is connecting

Before Amanda Palmer got her alt-rock band Dresden Dolls off the ground, she was an 8-foot living statue for five years. She says her work as a street performer gave her the ability to directly connect with her music fans, which she did by hanging out with them, inviting them up on the stage with her, and getting to know them on a personal level. This unconventional relationship between performer and audience allowed her to turn the music industry's business model on its head. She decided to give her music away for free, and in exchange, she would receive things she needed - a piano, food, a place to crash - just by asking. When she asked for $100,000 on kickstarter, she received $1.2million. By asking people, you connect with them, and by connecting with them, they want to help you. "When we really see each other, we want to help each other. People have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, 'How do we make people pay for music?' What if we started asking, 'How do we let people pay for music."

Phil Hansen: Embracing limitation drives creativity

After years of creating beautiful works of detailed pointillism, Phil Hansen developed a debilitating tremor in his hands. His method of doing art had caused him irreversible nerve damage. At first he dropped out of the art world. But then he decided to take his neurologist's advice and "embrace the shake." Now Hansen finds ways to create masterpieces without having to draw a straight line, such as painting with the sides of his hands in a karate chop fashion, or using scribbles to create portraits. What he realized is that too many options paralyze his creativity, but placing limitations on a project make creativity limitless.

Richard Turere: Listening to our youth can take us far

13-year-old Richard Turere fits all three categories of this year's TED theme: The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered. He comes from a rural part of Kenya near a national park that's home to wild animals, including lions that were killing his neighborhood's livestock. In retaliation, people were killing the lions at a devastating rate. At age 9, during his time spent between taking care of the cattle and teaching himself electronics (by taking apart things like his mother's radio), Turere had a brilliant idea: "lion lights." Lions are afraid of lights, so why not create an electric fence that flashes lights when it detects movement? This would protect both the livestock and the lions at very little cost. He turned his solution into a reality and now people all over Kenya are using his invention to protect their animals.

(Photo courtesy of Sugata Mitra)

Sugata Mitra: Sparking curiosity moves minds.

"Curiosity is the vitamin of learning," says Sugata Mitra, who doesn't believe that our present way of teaching is preparing kids for the future. After noticing that the rich kids in India who used computers were considered "gifted" while the slum kids without computers "were not," Mitra decided to conduct experiments as part of his "Hole in the Wall" project. He set an English-speaking computer down on the street in a remote village in front of Tamil-speaking kids. When he returned several months later, the kids were all using the computer. When he asked them how this could be, they said they taught themselves English so that they could play the computer's games.

After repeating and refining this experiment with different subjects, his project proved that kids learn best when their curiosity is aroused, and not when they are threatened with tests and punishments, which cause the brain to shut down. All they need is a little encouragement, and their curiosity will motivate them to explore on their own. Mitra won this year's TED Prize of $1,000,000, which he is going to use to build A School in the Cloud - a physical facility based on his findings. He said his wish was for the TED audience to help him design the future of learning by helping him build this school - and he meant it. He was seriously taking down ideas and contact information from anyone who wanted to be a part of his plan. For more information visit TED's page about Mitra. And spread the word.

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Living between Washington DC and California, Ryan, 31, works with his brother Hays, 29, as the duo BLUEBRAIN, where they experiment with interactive music in big ways. After a few busy days at TED we finally connected for a Q&A.

Do you and your brother write the music for your "location-aware albums?" If so, do you walk around the spaces that the music is intended for before writing it? I guess what I really want to know is how the process works between creating the music and figuring out the space that it will fit into.

Yes, all of the music is written and produced by Hays and me. Although we've had a number of great collaborators, from string players and drummers to opera singers and software engineers. The process of writing music for a park like the National Mall is kind of a strange one. The walls of our recording studio are covered with giant maps that we use to sort of plan out the various ways the music can unfold. It helps to visualize it as we're writing. But then a lot of the process is spending time in the park itself, walking back and fourth testing both the accuracy of the GPS in addition to mapping out the music.

What gave you guys the inspiration to write for environments?

I think we've been talking about the idea for years, after seeing and experiencing the work of artists like Phil Kline and Janet Cardiff, both of whom have explored audio and space with their work. But I think for us we were really inspired by how these new technologies are allowing people to dream up new ways to augment your physical surroundings by adding virtual layers on top. Generally it's used to provide restaurant reviews or walking directions, but we really loved the idea of using these tools in a more surreal way, designing a musical score that responds to the architecture of a landscape.

Have you started your album for Pacific Coast Highway yet? What part of PCH and how long of a stretch will the album cover?

So right now, my brother and I are spending time in the Bay Area as visiting artists at Stanford University's Experimental Media Arts Department, which has been a great base to launch from. But we're still at the very early stages of the project, which we're still not entirely sure how to do. Last month, we packed a car full of musical equipment and drove down PCH to Hearst Castle, which was the first pass we'd done. But honestly, we're still figuring out what this will be like! The composer John Cage famously wrote music that takes a hundred some years to perform -- when I think about writing music for the entirety of highway one, I sometimes feel like it might take us that much time to write it! Maybe the whole thing is just an excuse to spend time driving up and down one of the most beautiful stretches of road in North America. I dunno.

This is a little off subject, but can you tell me about your walk-through installation in the abandoned funeral home?

The Living House! That one was a lot of fun. So the background here is that there's a three story building in Washington DC that had operated as a funeral home until the city found out that the owner was embalming people without a license and shut it down. It's become part of DC lore. But it's sat pretty much dormant for the last 10 years and much of the equipment is still lying around. It was a little eerie walking through it while we were building out the installation. But anyway, we used the building to make a 15-minute walk-through piece of music, where each room was equipped with a speaker and played a different track from a larger piece. So think: a choir, with a different voice in every room, the entire house harmonizing together. Or an electronic beat where the entire upstairs and downstairs are engaged in a call and response, back and forth. We had speakers stuffed in fireplaces. A subwoofer in a bathtub.

The entire building was completely dark and filled with fog. Visitors, who had to make a reservation in advance, were equipped with flashlights and could sort of explore this walk-through composition. That was a really fun one.

I really enjoyed your talk on Monday. How was your experience speaking as a TED Fellow, and how are you enjoying your week at TED?

Thanks! It was great getting to talk to the TED crowd, and especially nice to get to do it at the beginning of the week and just spend the rest of the time enjoying everyone else's talks. I'm still processing everything I've heard, but I'm pretty sure Stewart Brand's bringing back dinosaurs at some point.

See all TED2013 coverage]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/01/ted2013-bluebrains-soundtra.html/feed 11 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/27/ted2013-my-top-3-wednesday-te.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/27/ted2013-my-top-3-wednesday-te.html#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2013 03:44:49 +0000 Carla Sinclair http://boingboing.net/?p=215840 Today's TED2013 line-up was once again filled with amazing people with super-charged ideas and skills. I really can’t pick any bests out of the bunch, but here are three talks that stood out for me.

Black: Yo-Yo Performance Artist

Wow! Never has yoyo-ing seemed so elegant, exciting, and dare I say, beautiful. Black is a cross between an amazing yo-yo champion, graceful gymnast, and gasp-inducing magician. He got his first yo-yo when he was 14 and spent hours with it every day. By age 18, after 10,000 hours of practice, he became the world’s yo-yo champion in 2001. But then he quit and became an engineer, thinking that taking the title of World Champ was as far as he could go. He couldn’t, however, squash the yo-yo passion that lived inside him, and by 2007 he was back at it, this time winning World Champion in the Artistic Performance category.

When Black performs, the yo-yo goes from being a toy to a spectacular prop. Wearing black sensei garments, he is precise with his choreography, dramatically moving his yo-yo in time with music that combines percussions with sounds of nature. Later he shoots his yo-yo out towards a nearby table, and suddenly the yo-yo grabs and holds a white cloth napkin, which he reels in with one quick snap. Later the yo-yo is spinning while Black is contorted into a backbend that makes his body seem hardly human.

This video is from the 2011 TEDx Tokyo and only shows a fraction of what he did today. But at least it will give you a peek.

Stewart Brand: Animal De-Extinction

Stewart Brand began his TED talk today with the statement, “Biotechnology is about to liberate conservation.” Before I had a chance to process what that meant, he went on to list a number of birds and mammals that have become extinct in the last few centuries, including the passenger pigeon, which was killed off by hunters in the 1930s. For a moment my mood plunged, as it always does with conversations of human-caused animal extinction. And then he asked the question, “What if DNA could be used to bring a species back?” I felt a tsunami of awe and excitement barrel through the audience. This was as exciting as his declaration about the digital world in 1984 when he said, “Information wants to be free.”

The idea behind de-extinction is to plant DNA of an extinct animal into the egg of a closely related living animal. For instance, in 2003 scientists had their first success in bringing back an extinct animal when they cloned a bucardo -- which had been wiped off the earth three years earlier -- by inserting its DNA (which they got from frozen bucardo skin) into goat eggs. A cloned bucardo was born, and then died just ten minutes later. Around the same time, scientist Robert Lanza took tissue from a Javan banteng (not yet extinct), and inserted it into an egg cell of a closely related cow. The cow gave birth to the exotic banteng, which is alive and thriving.

Brand told us he’s been having private meetings with de-extinction scientists from around the world, scientists who had all been working for the same cause but had been working alone until he helped bring them together. Now with his Revive and Restore project they are working on bringing back specific extinct species such as the European Aurochs, the Tasmanian tigers, the California condor, and even the woolly mammoth.

“Humans made a huge hole in nature,” he said towards the end of his talk. “And we have a moral obligation to repair the damage.”

On March 15 this year, Revive and Restore is teaming up with National Geographic Society to hold TEDx DeExtinction, a one-day event in Washington DC.

Dong Woo Jang: 15-Year-Old Bow Maker

According to 15-year-old Dong Woo Jang, school in Korea is a pressure cooker. “And in the face of constant pressure, I connect with bows.” Jang is a self-taught bow maker who demonstrated his craft and skill for us today. His passion for bows may have started because his parents wouldn’t let him play computer games. So instead of relieving school pressure by zoning out in front of a screen, Jang began to explore the outdoors around his house. He was interested in hunting skills and decided to make himself a bow of his own design out of an interesting tree branch that he had found. But one bow wasn’t enough. He ventured farther away from his house and began to smuggle axes and saws in his backpack to school so that when school let out he could gather his bow materials. In the privacy of his room he’d carve and polish his bows to perfection.

Since his early days of bow-making (not that long ago!) Jang has researched Korean history and has found that the designs he thought were his own are actually very similar to his Korean ancestors. This realization has brought him closer to his heritage.

Making bows for Jang has gone from passion to a kind of magic. “You need to communicate with your materials and have harmony with them to make a perfect bow,” he said. “The bow resembles me and I resemble the bow.”

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One of the biggest charmers at TED2013 so far has been Romo the Robot, who rolled and whizzed around the stage with one of his creators, Keller Rinaudo. With large bubbly eyes, four fang-like teeth, and a happy alien voice, it's easy to forget that this animated robot is actually just an iPhone mounted on a rolling platform.

"We wanted to build a robot that anyone can use, whether you're eight or eighty," Rinaudo told the audience. So he and his two friends - Peter Sodd and Phu Nguyen - all from Phoenix, created Romo, who you can control from an iPad, computer, or another iPhone after downloading its free app. The three twenty-somethings then started their company, Romotive, where you can purchase Romo for $150. I spoke to them after the talk.

What's the purpose of Romo?

Rinaudo: He's just a robot that anyone can program and hack. He's also just fun to play with. You can invite anyone to control Romo from anywhere in the world. We think of him as a robot, but a lot of people buy him for kids, especially because when kids create behaviors for him and they try to train Robo how to do things, they are actually learning about computer science. It's a really cool way to get kids excited about technology and robotics and coding.

How did you create your first prototype?

Peter Sodd: He [pointing to Nguyen] called me on the phone and said, "What if we could build robots that used smart phones as their brain?" Two weeks later I built the first prototype, and it worked.

Rinaudo: We built 100 of them by hand - at first. Then we built 2,000 of them.

By hand?

RK: Yes. Now we're building 2000 of them per week. But not by hand.

What can you do besides hit the [touch-screen] joystick and make him move around?

Romo has a bunch of autonomous behaviors, which means he can interact with his environment, he can track you, and he can also use computer vision not only to track your face but also to recognize different glyphs. Something we're working on is the ability to hold different glyphs in front of Romo - we call it Romo glyphs - and what that allows people to do is program him. Romo knows that each card means something different and by holding cards in front of him you can create a program. And by changing the order of those cards and holding them in front of him again you can change the program. So that's our attempt to make programming accessible to kids who are even just six or seven years old - make it tangible, make it easy, and make it interactive with a robot that is actually going to show kids what they are creating in real time.

Is your primary audience kids?

We built Romo for 12-year-old versions of ourselves because we thought that advanced robotics shouldn't only be in research labs and factories - we wanted to figure out a way to get those robots into homes. It's in much the same way the first personal computers were called toys, and they appealed to kids and hackers who were sitting on the floors of their garages hacking on these things, getting them to do cool stuff. Same thing with Romo. But we don't think about whether the robots are for kids or adults. We build robots we think are awesome and that appeal to all ages of people.

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Yesterday I linked to a video of Baile Zhang's "invisibility cloak," which was demoed at TED2013. The video was hosted by Dropbox, which killed the link (too much traffic). Here's a YouTube version of the same video, courtesy of Ben Kellogg.

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I'm here at TED2013 in Long Beach, jacked up on amazing coffee and mind-blowing ideas from today's 4-minute TED fellow talks (the longer 18-minute talks start tomorrow).

I was only part-way through the first day when I had to take a moment to track down Baile Zhang, an assistant professor of physics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who had demonstrated his "invisibility cloak." Now I'll admit, when I first heard of Zhang's invention, I pictured - against common sense - an invisibility cloak similar to the one Professor Dumbledore gave to Harry Potter. So I was a little surprised when the cloak looked more like a tiny clear plastic box just a few inches high, reminding me of a magic trick prop my 9-year-old daughter might have. Nevertheless, the cloak's ability to conceal an object so that both the cloak and the object become invisible was astonishing. Zhang placed the cloak over a bright pink Post-it note and voila! Nothing! The pink paper disappeared. And the cloak itself wasn't really visible in the first place.

I found 31-year-old Zhang in the auditorium, watching other TED Fellows talk. He told me the cloak is made out of two pieces of calcite, or optical crystals - found in nature - that are cemented together. The calcite bends light and suppresses shadows, creating the effect of, well, nothingness. When I asked him what his big plans were with this reality-bending invention, he said it had no purpose. He just created it for fun. He does, however, plan to make it bigger. How big? "As large as possible." The idea came to him in 2010, and today was the first time he's shown it to a live audience.

Above: a video of the invisibility cloak taken before today. I have to say, today's demonstration was even more spectacular, but this is still pretty amazing.

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