This was the top session of the conference so far….

Kicked off by Nina Jablonski we enjoyed a fascinating combo of history and science.  The history of human evolution has been written in our skin and Nina took us through what this astounding assertion really means. 

Next up was Louise Fresco who bravely baked bread while delivering her TED talk. She talked about authenticity in our food and how removed we have become from what our bread really is.  This drives many people to advocate a return to small scale farming and the growing popularity of farmers markets is a part of this.  However, Louise’s argument is that if we embraced a return to this type of farming on a universal scale we would essentially be relegating the third world to poverty.  This is a luxury solution for us but is damaging for them. 

Instead world food production needs to increase rapidly.  And what we need to do this is clever low-key mechanisms.  She urged the audience to lobby government for an integrated food policy and that as individuals we need to understand our own food chain - where our food comes from.  I don’t really understand what an integrated food policy for NZ might look like or whether we have an issue with this in NZ but it has certainly sparked my interest in the role of food in the world economy.

I loved the book Eat, Pray, Love and had high anticipation that Elizabeth Gilbert would be talking about her next book.  Instead she provided a thought provoking discussion of genius and creativity.  She asked ‘Is it rational that anyone should be afraid of the work they feel compelled to do?’  And this is the curse that many creative people are burdened with.  One suggestion is to create a protective emotional construct  - that genius is something we have, not something we are.  And the implication of this is that genius is both on loan and also that we cannot get too attached our marvellous creations because they are not entirely from us.

I don’t feel blessed with genius - I don’t draw or paint; I write a little but only in a purely functional working sort of a way.  But maybe it’s ok to keep playing with some of the things that interest me because it’s my job even though I might not be the most talented person in the world - or even on the second, third, fourth or lower teams.  Great talk!

Jacek Utko, through great design, has revitalised newspapers in eastern europe.  This talk reinforced the utility+significance equation for great products or services.  Jacek extended it further by combining strategy+content+design.

Who would have thought that crocheting could be compelling and scientifically revealing?  Even I enjoyed the maths in this talk and I now understand hyperbolic geometry - present in lettuce, sea slugs and crocheting.  What was extremely cool about this talk wasn’t just that we learnt about how Margaret Wertheim is crocheting coral reefs - quite frankly I think this would have left me cold - but rather the significance that she drew from this.  What’s at stake is:

• the importance and value of embodied knowledge
• the ability to make abstract concepts real
• the use of modes of play to help us deepen our understanding of the world around us.

Seth Godin threw down a leadership challenge to get us started.  There was lots of stuff here from his latest book, Tribes. 

Key questions from Seth were:

• Who are you?
• Who are you connecting?
• Who are you leading?

Interestingly he used the story of Tom’s shoes - with Tom’s shoes, for every pair of shoes a person buys Tom’s gives one to a person in a poor country. What is interesting about this model is how ’sticky’ the story is.  If a person comments on someone else’s Tom’s shoes then quick enough the owner of the shoes is telling the story.  This is a fantastic way to get an idea spreading!

I’m bundling the next two speakers together: moviemakers Jake Ebert and Yann Arthus-Bertrand.  Both showed clips from their forthcoming movies…Oceans and Home.  Nice looking movies…the sessions themselves were not provocative or interesting enough to stop me looking at my watch.

One for the Information Managers first up!

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, presented on linked data.  The useful takeaway on this is that if everyone does their bit we can extend the use of the WWW beyond documents and into a huge resource for discovery and research.  So linked data is not just for scientists and big research labs.

His interesting observation was the lack of interoperability between social networking sites - makes it hard to link data stored in these.

Nandan Nilekani talked about India - what it has been and what it could become and how.

Most useful takeaway:

There are four kinds of ideas:

• Ideas that have arrived
• Ideas in progress - accepted ideas that have not yet been implemented
• Ideas in conflict
• Ideas in anticipation

Pattie Mae gave a part presentation/ part recorded demo of what ubiquitous computing might really be like.  Using a device built for $350 we were shown how an ordinary person can use their hands to interact with information using any surface.  The moment where the penny really dropped for me was when the research drew a circle on his wrist - just a gesture from his other hand - and the time appeared.  Like the Reboot sessions earlier this seemed very sci-fi to me but it’s here - or very close anyway.

The surprise of the session was Ray Anderson.  Ray is a businessman who has built a profitable organisation manufacturing and selling flooring.  His commitment to sustainable business was real, realised and impressive.  And if an industrial manufacturer can do it then that presents a challenge to the rest of us.  A very understated, modest and compelling presentation.

It was a curious start to TED with Juan Enriquez providing humour and provocation in equal measure.  The presentation was very engaging but also a little strange.  He started off with comments about the economic crisis and some interesting stats about mandatory government spending.  He appeared to be calling for smaller government but I’m not sure whether I picked this up correctly or not. Anyway, it would be interesting to see some similar stats for NZ.

Then he moved on to three big ‘reboot’ themes:

• The first fully programmable cell
• Bio parts - this was very freaky … scientists are growing human teeth in petri dishes as well as regrowing windpipes, ears, bladders and presumably all imaginable types of body parts.  It felt a little yuck to be honest.  I can see that if I lost an ear I’d like to grow a new one but it was all very sci fi!
• Robotics - this was also scary.  The footage of the Boston Dynamics ‘Big Dog’ robot was both compelling and repulsive.  This robot really moves like a creature and it was shown in the clip as moving through snow in an extremely lifelike way.

This was a good segue into P.W. Singer’s talk about war and specifically about the use of robots for war.  He had lots of examples of the scary machines that are being built but was most interesting when he talked about the ethical isues:

• Watching more but experiencing less
• Losing the context, strategy and humanity

Most telling was the anecdote about drone pilots.  These guys fly drones in war zones from the U.S. - a bit like playing a video game.  So after an 8 hour day of war they drive home, join the family for dinner and help the kids with their homework.  Apparently their rates of PTSD are higher than for normal soldiers because of the psychological balancing of experiences that has to occur.

Thank goodness for Bill Gates who was the last speaker in the Reboot Sessions.  Bill is not the most engaging speaker but his messages are.  He talked about the work that his foundation is doing in health and in teaching and really only scatched the surfaced.  I could see his passion when he talked about these being interesting problems - especially interesting because they are currently unsolved and complex.  I thought Chris Anderson, the TED curator was a little strange in the Q & A with Bill afterwards, ‘joking’ about Microsoft bugs and asking about epitaphs but maybe they have a different off-screen relationship.

The takeaway from this talk was that while it might appear that by reducing disease in 3rd world countries this contributes to population growth what happens within a generation is that population growth drops as parents no longer need to have lots of kids so that they can be looked after in their old age.  Great information.