Ignite Boston 4 -- Videos Uploaded

Ignite Boston 4 was an interesting and insightful event. We have many things to take away as we plan our next event for January. One of the themes, which was re-crystalized in my mind, was to do work on things that matter - things of substance and World importance! Following that line of thinking, Voting is one of those things that we cannot take for granted and then complain when a new administration gets into office and enacts policies that affect us all. Join us all on trying to 'get the vote out' by talking to folks about our historical vote coming soon. Regardless of your affiliation, vote and get people to vote.

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Daniel Suarez: Bot-Mediated Realities

I enjoy exposure to new world views, the feeling of one's brain being stretched to fit a new frame. For that reason, I enjoyed Daniel Suarez's talk to the Long Now Foundation, entitled "Daemon: Bot-Mediated Realities". You can listen to the talk as I did, or read Paul Saffo's summary.

Suarez sees a world in which bots run everything from airplanes and cars to economies and financial systems, and we have decreasing control over them. The automated systems are good for us, enabling us to do more with fewer people, but Suarez reminds us of the downsides: the specialization of knowledge combined with exploitability of software and the easily-imagined situation of still-running code the workings of which nobody understands. It's certainly changed the way I look at the things around me: inside every intelligent object I wonder, "who knows how these algorithms work? How long will it live?". Not in a paranoid tinfoil helmet conspiracy way, just becoming aware of the fragility of the software I took for granted.

It was at this point that Suarez's talk took a turn for the wishful. His solution to the possible nightmarish future of mankind at the mercy of bots that can't be repaired or replaced was "let's recreate the Internet, only with strong crypto and human-vouched IDs, and we'll only permit bots that a quorum of humans have read and validated the source code to, and ..." and I had to ask, "dude, have you ever worked with security people?". The 9/11 terrorists had government IDs, and it's easy to imagine malicious code doing so in the future. Reading the source code is time-consuming, therefore expensive, and no panacea--bugs can still exist in code that has been audited. The solution to fragile technology isn't more fragile technology unless you can failover in a redundant array of inexpensive Earths.

I think the greatest value of his talk was from the long view of software: we're creating actors that live beyond us, and we (software developers and society, the users of the bots) aren't planning for succession or failure. Come for the world view, but leave early to avoid the questionable solutions.

Energy Savings, Strange Attractors, ...

... the Intrinsic Cost of State Change, Orbiting Alien Voyeurs, and 200 Square Kilometers of Solar Panels Somewhere in Texas

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Berkeley National Labs recently published the results of their first Data Center Demonstration Project (pdf). (Disclosure: My colleague Teresa Tung of Accenture R+D labs was the report's principal author). The study follows up on last year's publication of the EPA's report to Congress (pdf) on data center energy consumption. That report, among other things, estimated the range of savings that data center operators could achieve with varying degrees of technology and practice improvement. This more recent report is based on real world studies and was intended to validate the estimates in the EPA report.

Both reports are good reads if you are interested in reducing the megawatts being consumed in your organization's silicon (though the EPA report has been criticized as being a bit toothless). However, I should warn you that they are fairly long and detailed so the bedside table might not be the best home for them if you want to get through them, at least until the manga versions are released.

The EPA study estimated that "state of the art" technology and processes in the data center might cut energy usage by 55%, the more readily achievable "best practices" come in at 45% savings. State of the art includes a range of approaches including better server utilization through virtualization, better cooling techniques, improved power distribution, sensor networks, etc.

The more recent study, testing those techniques in working data centers, validates the EPA's estimates but also offers the initially surprising conclusion that legacy data centers can be retrofitted to achieve efficiencies close to that of new builds. That conclusion follows from the less surprising finding that the most bang for the buck comes from improvements on the "IT" side of the energy draw (energy efficient servers, virtualization, etc.) rather than from the harder to retrofit "site" side (cooling systems etc.). The dog wags the tail after all and if you can reduce the direct power consumption by the IT equipment, you will simultaneously reduce associated cooling costs whether in an old building with relatively inefficient HVAC or a shiny new one.

The last finding that I'll mention here is that it doesn't look like the time is right yet for widespread adoption of more advanced load management techniques outside of niche applications. The demonstration project had facilities that experimented with them, but the risk aversion that stems from high reliability requirements in production data centers has these experiments mostly restricted to centers that serve R+D rather than production functions.

Maybe one of the most interesting things about the report is what it doesn't (can't) say.

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An ESB for the Web?

I spend a great deal of my time encouraging "enterprise people" to think more like "web people." Focus on adoption, use platforms to enable emergent capability, build the "generative enterprise," and that sort of thing.

So, imagine my surprise when I saw the web acting a bit like the enterprise with the launch of Gnip.

As the web moves toward a network of widespread transactional API's, each with it's own vocabulary, it is starting to look a lot like a legacy enterprise writ large or maybe like an industry eco-system. So we shouldn't be surprised to see web developers turning to solutions that their enterprise colleagues would find familiar.

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in the enterprise world talking about SOA in the last five years (or spent time building "trading platforms" for industry consortiums prior to that) has probably drawn a picture on a whiteboard that looks something like this (see, almost identical):

Whether you have integrated line of business applications inside the enterprise or connected trading partners within an industry, that N squared connection problem will resonate with your experience. Webs of poorly documented point-to-point integrations are expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and impossibly brittle when the business changes.

And now the N squared problem seems like it might be beginning to resonate with web developers too now that they have to integrate to an ever growing population of API's. Plus, on the web, the additional limitations of a port 80 based infrastructure add to the nightmare by throwing the expense of constant API polling into the mix.

So, what to do?

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What A Tiger Can Do

This past weekend I watched a superhero fall to incredible lows and rise to unbelievable heights. I wasn't watching one of the manufactured Marvel superheroes on the big screen. I was watching Tiger Woods live on TV. I was watching him create one of the most compelling stories ever in sports. Late Saturday afternoon, I began watching Tiger fight his way into the lead of the tournament as he hobbled around on a bad knee. I wasn't intending to watch much more than a few minutes but I watched until the close of play on Saturday, tuned in again on Sunday for every minute as Tiger lost the lead and then fought back to tie the leader, and then I could not possibly miss the eighteen-hole playoff on Monday. I was not alone on Monday. I saw a report that trading volume was down 9% on Monday, and it was attributed to the distraction of this playoff match. Who could work when Tiger was playing? Who could not be drawn into this story and find themselves completely swept away by the ups and downs, all the while wondering how it would turn out?

Tiger's adversary was Rocco Mediate, a delightful forty-five year old player ranked 158th in the world. Commentators said Rocco was the crowd favorite, and no one could root against Rocco. He was the everyman, given a special opportunity to "play the best player on the planet, one on one." No one truly expected him to win but he played well, fighting back after falling behind by three shots. He had to overcome his own nervousness and settle in to his own game. Incredibly, he had a one shot lead going into the 18th hole. Somehow, it became believable that Rocco might just win.

As much as I liked Rocco, I found myself pulling for Tiger again and again, as he fought back to tie on Sunday and at the end of eighteen holes on Monday. I have always identified with the underdog, and everything about Rocco made me pull for him. (I have rooted for the Dodgers and Red Sox, never the Yankees, who usually won in the end.) Yet, I realized part-way through the tournament that Tiger wasn't simply a favorite; he had become a superhero. I wanted him to win.

On the Monday broadcast, Johnny Miller remarked after Tiger hit an amazing shot out of a fairway trap: "That's a Tiger shot." It's like Tiger called on super-powers. I certainly wanted to believe he had such powers. What's more, Tiger's round of golf revealed a level of vulnerability that made yourself question if you believed in him. He grimaced after shots because of sharp pain in his knee. He was limping down the fairways. It was never automatic that Tiger would win. As the storyline developed, he heroically summoned his own strength, managed to overcome the physical pain, and obtain a victory. In the end, the real battle was not Tiger vs. Rocco; it was each man against himself, as the game of golf isolates for us to see so clearly.

Yesterday, we learned that Tiger won't play the rest of year, as his knee problems were more severe than he let on; he needs additional surgery followed by a long recovery period. It's bad news for golf and for the people who run tournaments. However, Tiger is not merely an action-hero and his accomplishments carry beyond the golf course.

According to Nike's ads, which feature Tiger's father, Earl Woods, Tiger's special strength is his mental toughness. His father says: "'I promise you that you will never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life.' And he hasn't. And he never will." David Brooks writes about Tiger in Tuesday's New York Times, adding that Tiger has become "the beau ideal for golf-loving corporate America, the personification of mental fortitude."

Tiger is the best. You want to watch "best"; you want to see what "best" does; you want to learn from "best". Even the best is not perfect, you realize. You wonder how you measure up against the best and you hope, like Rocco, you don't do too badly.

Does Woods vs. Mediate bring to mind the presidential race: Obama vs. McCain? There's the obvious: black/white, young/old, prodigy/warrior. Both seem worthy for different reasons. But, in the words of the old Exxon ad, who has a Tiger in his tank? I hope that we elect a leader who understands our vulnerability and summons our strengths. I hope that person can find the focus and determination to meet the challenges ahead and see us through to the end. I'd like to believe that one of them will prove to be a Tiger and inspire our confidence. I want the best to lead.

Phone in the Toilet?

My friend Sara sent me an email: "Linda, Sorry that I'm not able to call you back. My phone fell into the toilet."

We live in a world where phones can fall into toilets because our phones are following us everywhere. Untethered. Free. Free to fall into the toilet.

Last week, a high school sophomore told me that she brings her phone into the shower with her--in a Ziploc bag. She didn't want to miss an incoming text message. When I asked her if, in her sleep, she had missed life-altering messages, she looked at me blankly.

We are better at rationalizing what we do than being rational about what we're doing.
Untethered technology gives us the freedom to do nearly anything, anytime, anywhere. It can also enslave us when we feel compelled to use it wherever it is. Technology is neutral. How, when and where we use it is up to us.

When I recently visited an old high school friend in Ipswitch, Mass., I witnessed something unusual for most families today. Everything had a place. Cell phones were used at people's desks. Computers were used at desks. The kitchen was a place for meals and family fellowship. Family members were fully present for conversations--enjoying eye contact, listening and a meaningful exchange.

I mentioned this to a friend living in the Silicon Valley area, a former high-tech executive. She approved. "I moved the computer out of my kitchen. Now it's in the office. The office is an office, and the kitchen is a kitchen. I love it."

"Freedom" [free-d uhm] is the absence of or release from ties, obligations, etc. The promise of a phone that could go anywhere was and is the promise of freedom--freedom from being tethered to a place.

"Enslave" means to bring into servitude. Our phones have enslaved us even as they set us free.

How is this also true? Because we can, we do! Because we can, the phone accompanies us to the toilet, to the shower and to bed. Because it rings, we feel compelled to see who is calling and, often, to pick up. Because we can be accessible, we feel we must be accessible.

Is "freedom" just another word for nothing left to lose? Let the phone keep ringing the next time someone calls and you're in the midst of something else. When the caller later asks you why you didn't answer or where you were, you can smile and say: "I'm free. Free. I'm free to enjoy being in the moment."

And that's when you will become more powerful than any gadget on the planet.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

WordSpy as Collective Intelligence

I've long been a fan of WordSpy, Paul McFedries' site that features definitions and first use of new words and phrases. It's a great trendspotting tool. The words we use give surprising insight into popular consciousness. Many of them, like junk sleep, silent disco, free-range kid, or Blackberry prayer illustrate new social trends, while others like phantom load or quake lake are terms of art that have entered popular consciousness, and still others, like naked street are like deli.cio.us links to things you've never heard of, but could end up being important or useful.

Paul used to offer the service by email, but discontinued it years ago, and as a result my use of the site declined. I was delighted to see that he recently re-instituted email delivery of the new daily WordSpy entry. And of course, there's RSS, and I just talked Paul into adding a WordSpy twitter feed as well.

I twittered about this, and Erin McKean pointed to another great word site, doubletongued.org.

Unexpected Pleasures in Gates/Ballmer interview at D Conference

In the joint interview with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer at D last week, I loved some of the stories about the early Microsoft, especially Ballmer talking about how Gates wouldn't let him hire anyone unless he could prove that they would pay for themselves. Gates was incredibly conservative, and always wanted to have enough cash on hand to keep people employed for a year even if sales fell off a cliff. Everyone thinks about Microsoft as the gorilla of the industry, but it was great to see that view of them as an early, scrappy startup. And that kind of financial conservatism is great advice for startups.

I also liked the description of how they worked together. It's great to have a partner in running a business, and they did a great job of complementing each other's strengths. A CEO/COO partnership can be really great. (We have that now at O'Reilly, and it's been fabulous.)

It was also great to see how relaxed Gates was. He was happy to let Steve take point, had a slightly bemused smile on his face a lot of the time. It was definitely the face and body language of a man who had let go and was ready to move on. It's nice to see, in an era of aging, driven corporate titans, someone who can step aside. As Lao Tzu said, "To retire when the task is accomplished is the way of heaven." Microsoft may still need to reinvent itself, but Bill is done.

I wanted to add a comment by Linda Stone that I overheard in the hallways, namely, that it seemed like a real missed opportunity on the part of Walt and Kara that there wasn't some kind of effort to honor Bill Gates for his enormous contributions to the industry. They acted like this was just a panel like any other. Despite my many criticisms of Microsoft, I truly respect the company and what they have achieved. They played a huge role in the commodification of computing, and made so much possible (even the rise of open source and the internet), and a huge part of that was the vision and talent of Bill Gates. I'm glad he's now focused on a new "big hairy audacious goal" beyond Microsoft (eliminating diseases like Malaria.) Even if I think that Microsoft has had trouble finding a new BHAG, it's clear that Bill himself still thinks big.

P.S. Despite what I said about "aging, driven corporate titans" above, I have to admit to being very impressed with both Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller. Both are brilliant, forceful, and surprisingly candid. You could have knocked me over with a feather when Murdoch came out and all-but endorsed Barack Obama. I love it when people don't fit your preconceptions. (I was twittering this live, but twitter managed to have an outage so all my notes were lost. Glad there's video -- even better, though you don't get to see my amazement and delight.)

It was also fabulous to hear Barry Diller talk about Carl Icahn and Yahoo! and the responsibility of management to maximize shareholder value. I loved the way Barry said that he feels a deep responsibility to do well for his long-term shareholders, but that he feels absolutely no obligation to make money for short-term speculators (and presumably that Jerry shouldn't feel any responsibility to folks like Carl Icahn either.) All shareholders are not created equal.

These guys are blunt and insightful, afraid of no one, and still having fun. Great role models for any entrepreneur.

A Successful Experiment

During Web2Open yesterday, we ran an experiment that turned out to be a big success. Because it felt like a model that could be extended and used by others--but it hasn't been blogged about widely--I'll explain here what we did.

We started with the idea that we wanted to hold a conference speed-dating event. But we didn't have a natural set of pairs who'd want to meet, like VCs and entrepreneurs, or writers and agents. What we did have were a number of well-known experts and a bunch of thoughtful attendees. So we ran small speed Q&As with the experts: we set up five tables, one each for programmers, designers/UI specialists, marketing/community experts, businesspeople and undeclared, and then we had five experts--Clay Shirky, Kara Swisher, Matt Cutts, Saar Gur and Tim O'Reilly--each hold a nine-minute informal Q&A at a table. Every nine minutes, the experts switched tables until they'd hit them all. The whole thing took 50 minutes, plus lots of lingering afterward. It had great energy, and people were smiling the entire time.

Why'd it work? It was intimate (about a dozen people gathered at each table), engaged and informal. All which provided a nice contrast to the general conference. And it required no prep on the part of the experts (except their life work, of course): they just showed up and chatted.

What would we do differently next time? At least two things. 1) We didn't have a bell to signal the 8-minute mark or that it was time to switch tables--so we shouted. That was too much like we were yelling at people. 2) Afterward, Tim said, "That was great, but I wish I'd had time to ask the participants questions." Good point. It would be cool to increase the time per table to at least fifteen minutes and let the experts do some asking--or possibly make it all questions from the experts. (Update: Clay adds two more good suggestions: Make it an hour, with four 12-min sessions, and spend 12 minutes at the beginning introducing the speakers, to give them time and context for the initial questions.)

How would you adapt and use speed Q&A?

GSM Cracking: Coming Soon to a Computer Near You via a Web Service

A web service that will make it easy and inexpensive to crack the GSM A5/1 encryption protocol, quickly enough for a call that is still in progress, is slated to launch at the end of April. Living right at the intersection of open hardware, open source software, software as a service, and cryptography, the service will reduce the cost and effort of cracking GSM call encryption by at least an order of magnitude.

The service is being developed by members of the GSM Software Project and demonstrates just how much things have changed in the world since the GSM system was designed. Various approaches to cracking both A5/1 (the European standard) and A5/2 (the weaker US standard) have been available for some time but this one is unique in that it should be available to researchers and hackers at the end of April in hosted api form instead of pdf.

Back in 1997 this overview of the GSM system declared that "Enciphering is an option for the fairly paranoid, since the signal is already coded, interleaved, and transmitted in a TDMA manner, thus providing protection from all but the most persistent and dedicated eavesdroppers." After all, such a radio encoding scheme made the signals invisible to typical radio band scanners.

Today, however, the availability of the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), an open hardware software defined radio that sells for about $700, combined with work being done at GNU Radio project to codify the GSM waveform (also targeted for the end of this month), makes this once reasonable point of view seem quaint. Good encryption is now a must and it appears that A5 no longer qualifies.

With USRP and GNU Radio making the waveform and encrypted frames cheaply accessible and the A5 Hacking Project's service easily breaking A5/1, anyone will be able to make a cheap GSM scanner. Today neither the complexity of the waveform or the encryption in use is adequate to keep a GSM call private.

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You Become what You Disrupt - (part two)

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users.

This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop.

The problem is that it's not particularly clear at what point a disruptive innovation becomes a utility. As innovators it's important that we recognize that this point will arrive and prepare for it. I believe that we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the technologies we create, and to take responsibility for protecting people who come to rely on those technologies to live their daily lives. When we fail to do that, we may find ourselves being cast as either fools or villains who must be regulated and controlled.

Ultimately, I think we will evolve a set of safety standards very similar to building codes. For instance, it appears that a multi-datacenter strategy would have prevented the GrandCentral outage. (As I've said many times before: Datacenters are a Single Point of Failure!)

Cofounder Craig Walker writes: "I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service."

Will better industry standards, best-practices, and independent certifying authorities emerge for these new utilities without innovation-stifling regulation? I hope so.

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The "New Privacy"

There was a great session on Online Privacy on NPR's Science Friday today, including a guest spot by Emily Vander Veer, the author of O'Reilly's Facebook: The Missing Manual. You can subscribe to the podcast or download today's episode directly.

The discussion here is yet another independent confirmation of the new definition of privacy that's emerging in American culture. We used to fight for the right not to reveal information about ourselves. The "new privacy" is about fighting for the right to spread your personal information all over very public forums but still control how it's used. It's an almost Escher-esque redefinition of language. To quote my own earlier writing: "If you paint something on the city wall, don't expect it to be hidden."

Daniel Weitzner made a big point on the show of the parallels between protection for the kind of information we display on Facebook and legislation to protect medical and financial information. He missed a crucial difference: the medical and financial information protected by those laws prevents information that must be revealed in one context (to your doctor or banker) from leaking out into other contexts. But, if you posted your bank and credit card details and medical records on a public web site for the world to see, people might accuse you of being stupid, but they wouldn't claim that we need tighter legislation on the use of information.

Trendalyzer view of the banking crisis

The team at "And Still I Persist" has created their own version of Hans Rosling's "Trendalyzer" (see: Radar post) to visualize the current US banking crisis.

"First lets look at the top 8 banks and their mortgages that are 90+ days late. Below is a flash charting system, feel free to use the controls and experiment. We chart the total assets of the bank along the horizontal axis, the value of loans that go 90+ days late on the vertical, and the size of the circles represent the total loan portfolio for that bank. You can set the charts in motion by hitting the “Play” button and stop them at any time. Hovering over a circle will show you the value for that data point.

Our charts step forward in time for Q1-2002 one quarter at a time, reading directly from the bank’s own FDIC reports. "
Bank Portfolios - 90+ Days Late

See the original article for more about this visualization and the team that created it.

Update: Bruce Henderson invites anybody interested in working with a larger data set to take a look at the OSG Boomerang tool.

Simplicity

I got a chuckle out of this comic on app simplicity and usability. So true, so painfully painfully true.

Jill Bolte Taylor's amazing TED talk

At least three of this year's TED talks were flat-out amazing: Tod Machover's, Benjamin Zander's, and Jill Bolte Taylor's. The first of them has just been posted:

Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, eavesdropped on her own stroke. As I wrote the day of her talk, she walked us through what she felt and thought while her brain was going wild, from the borderline-metaphysical ("I can't define where I begin and where I end") to the borderline-hilarious ("I'm a busy woman. I don't have time for a stoke"). Her description of her time in that strange state, caught between two worlds, the rare researcher who has been able to chronicle a brain-changing event from the inside, was astonishing.

And now you can see and hear it, too:

The brain she's holding there is a real one, by the way.

We'll alert you to the other two classics when they're published.

@ETech: Tuesday Morning Keynotes

Saul Griffith started the day with a sober, but ultimately hopeful, talk about energy literacy. The subtitle of the talk was "know what you can do, do what you can," and the core of his talk (we'll point to the slides when we get 'em) was the steps we need to take, individually and collectively, to be able to have a rational conversation about energy.

1. We need to understand the link between CO₂ and climate
2. Based on that understanding, make a temperature choice. The planet is warming. The question is how much. Where do you want to stabilize the earth temperature? He set the dial at different levels and sketched out the different consequences we have to accept at each level.
3. Based on the temperature we choose, we have to decide just how much carbon that allows us to release. He pointed out that temperature stabilization can take 100-300 years.
4. Based on the amount of carbon we choose to release, we have to decide how much fossil energy we can use.
5. Based on the usable fossle energy we can use, we have to decide what clean energy sources we need to supplement the fossil fuel.
6. Based on what clean energy sources we have access to, we have to determine a new energy mix -- and how we'll engineer.
7. Then -- and Griffith acknowledged that this "might be the hardest part" -- we have to turn off our use of existing carbon fuels."

He then showed how he is trying to change his lifestyle based on his decisions during those seven steps. He pointed out what we know already -- that even reasonable, moderate people in the developed world have a big carbon footprint -- and something I, for one, didn't know -- that public carbon-footprint calculators give low estimates.

As he listed the changes he's trying to make, Griffith noted that the things he wants to do to lower his carbon footprint are things he wants to do already (eat less, travel less, etc.). If you're optimistic about your ability to change, you can be optimistic about how we gets to his new life -- and how we can.

Then Megaphone founders Jury Hahn and Dan Albritton delivered a fascinating phone-game demo. Their combinations of tiny mobile devices with simple games those devices play on a big, communal screen were both technically interesting and fun to play. Albritton promised us something "really, really weird," and he delivered. You really haven't lived until you've sat next to someone next to you in a dimmed conference room standing up, yelling "ribbit" like a frog, and looking to see if his perfect match responds.

Eric Rodenbeck, CEO of Stamen Design walked through some of his firm's more high-profile visualization projects. Trulia Hindsight maps homes over time, but also reveals more (like where pollution is); Oakland Crimespotting reveals both patterns of crime -- and patterns of crime enforcement; a project for mySociety shows how multiple variables -- home prices, commute time -- can be elegantly combined in a single interactive visual.

Rodenbeck spent some time showing how information visualization, while it may be hot right now, nothing new. He displayed some century-old pre-computer infovis examples that were"both beautifully arranged and scientifically valuable." Then, as now, the best information visualizations are those where cool and useful overlap, where story and headline overlap. This dovetailed nicely with an obvservation Griffith made in his earlier talk, when he cited an 1896 article by one Svante Arrhenius that linked carbon with warming. We keep discovering the same things!

Sun Microsystems chief gaming officer Chris Melissinos, was there to talk about the company's J2SE-based, open source (via GPL v2) game-development platform Project Darkstar, but he had plenty of provocative one-liners and observations:

* "If we calculated the carbon footprint for World of Warcraft, we'd all vomit."
* "This is the first generation of gamers raising gamers."
* "Women over 35 comprise the largest segment of online game players."

Finally, Elizabeth Churchill, of Yahoo Research, reported on studies she made of public multi-touch displays, emphasizing how the real and the virtual interact. In particular, I was taken by her descriptions of how people learn to be part of communities of practice by watching -- or as the online world calls it, "lurking," an activity that is often dismissed. But Churchill maintained, "Lurking is an important practice. What we reveal in the virtual serve as the icebreaker for real life."

I'm only giving a quick taste of a strong, diverse session, but I want to get back into the breakout sessions, which have started already...

@TED: Best of Day 4 and a Wrap-Up

The last day at TED is a combination of exhaustion, anxiety, and wistfulness: exhaustion because we've been neglecting our sleep, anxiety because we remember how much work awaits us after the event is over, and wistfulness because we realize we can't live like this all the time.

Perhaps because the programmers knew that we'd be pulled in multiple directions, the last half-day of TED was stuffed with talks that demanded our full attention. Here are some of the best moments from today:

* Johnny Lee Chung showed his jaw-dropping Wii Remote hacks, which create, for less than $50, an interactive whiteboard. (Jesse Robbins covered it previously on Radar.) When comparing it to a real, multi-thousand-dollar interactive whiteboards, Chung said of his project, "you get 80% of the way there for 1% of the cost."

* Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, looked to a historical analogy to consider how to get countries out of poverty. The last time the rich world did something serious about developing another region, he stated, was in the late 1940s, when the U.S. needed to develop a devastated Europe. We can learn from what the U.S. did then -- providing aid, reversing a protectionist trade policy, moving its security policy from isolation to engagement, and abandoning some notions of national sovereignty to create the United Nations -- as a model for what we need to do now.

* Al Gore, who debuted his "Inconvenient Truth" presentation at TED two years ago, delivered a run-though of a new talk he's developing. This time out, he seems less focused on alerting us to climate change -- he's done that already -- and more on what to do about it, not only at a personal level but at a national level. As he put it, "changing the laws is more important than changing light bulbs." During his talk, I kept creating an alternate history in my head. Regardless of your political point of view, there's no doubt that the world -- and the U.S.'s place in the world -- would be far different now if we were in the last months not of the second Bush administration but the second Gore administration. Perhaps Gore did more good outside of the White House than he could have inside.

There were two other talks from yesterday that I wanted a bit more distance from before I tried to write about them.

The first was from MIT's Tod Machover, who spoke in the abstract about how music has power in people's lives -- and then proved it. His talk peaked when he brought out , Dan Ellsey, a longtime cerebral palsey patient from Tewksbury Hospital, outside Boston, to show how even someone with a profound disability can create music. Then Machover moved from talking about composition to talking about performance, and Ellsey, thanks to a system developed at the MIT Media Lab, was able to "play" one of his songs. Strapped to chair, imprisoned by his illness, Ellsey and his work were completely, miraculously alive. My words can't express the drama of the moment. Perhaps when this talk makes it to the TED website, you can see for yourselves.

It's also hard to describe what conductor Benjamin Zander achieved last night. The Boston Philharmonic conductor also spoke of music, connected his notions of music to inspirational ideas about leadership (and, it seemed at the time, everything else in the universe), and led a devastating experiment that had the entire audience singing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" in phonetic German, with him urging us to take our amateurish singing higher and higher. I won't even try to describe what he accomplished (again, the filmed talk will do that for itself), but I do want to share with you -- despite this being a family blog -- the term he introduced that everyone was talking about last night: BTFI.

Zander told of a cellist auditioning to be in an orchestra. Zander, helping the musician, told him he was holding back: he had to do more. The cellist didn't get the job because, he reported to Zander, he was still holding back. But then the cellist said "fuck it," made himself audition for a better job at another orchestra, and got it. Zander's lesson: to excel, you have to get BTFI, "beyond the 'fuck it'." It's an idea he and his wife Rosamund Stone Zander explore in their brief and wonderful The Art of Possibility. (You can read the Google Book Search excerpt from his book, on the origin of BTFI, here.)

Most of the speakers at TED were people who had seen problems -- in themselves, in an industry, in society -- and had decide to get BTFI. That encapsulated TED and it's an appropriate note to go out on. Until next year...

@TED: Best of Day 3

The joke among TEDsters is that, around the third day, it becomes an endurance sport. It's one thing to be in a room listening to spectacular insights for a few hours. It's another to be doing so for half a week. Nonetheless, part of the experience you get from being at events like TED is that feeling of being overwhelmed: someone just said what feels like the smartest thing you ever heard -- and then the next speaker says what feels like the smartest thing you ever heard -- and then ... well, you get the idea. It's intellectually exhausting, but it's also thrilling.

Here are some of the best moments of Day 3:

* The "What's Out There" series of talks was pretty, er, out there. Particle physicist Brian Cox walked us non-particle-physicists confidently through the importance of the Large Hadron Collider, soon to open near Geneva. It was one of several talks in that section in which the enthusiasm of the speaker was so great that we all thought about dropping our careers and becoming particle physicists.

* The "What's Out There" panel was especially strong, but there were two talks that knocked me out. Joshua Klein, an animal behaviorist, talked about species that have adapted to human behavior. In particular, he talked about crows. He described his project to build a vending machine for crows and he showed short films about ways crows can take advantage of civilization: for example, dropping nuts onto boulevards so cars can crack them open. And author Richard Preston reported on his (and others') adventures high in the Redwoods, the unexpected ecosystems discovered up there, and the ecological threats they face. I don't want to simplify his rich argument -- his book The Wild Trees is a must-read -- but he does a great job of connecting the fate of the Redwoods and the fate of us.

* During the "What Will Tomorrow Bring?" session, the other Chris Anderson spoke not about his provocative "Free" thesis (on the cover of the new Wired) but about his less-than-$100 blimp, which he showed off, the product of his desire to make a "minimum unmanned aerial vehicle." Chris and the blimp will also be at ETech on Tuesday.

* Peter Schwartz argued that Wikipedia is a leader in the battle against poverty: it brings knowledge and possibility to places not getting them any other way.

The series of talks that most engaged me was the first one of the day, entitled "How Do We Create?"

* Designer Yves Behar urged us to question basic assumptions in out work. "Why do we have a CapsLk key on our computers"? he asked. "As a designer, I don't want to just slapping a new skin over existing technology." He certainly didn't do that when he designed the XO Laptop, which, among other delights, doesn't have a CapsLk key.

* Robert Lang, origami artist and mathematician, talked about how creativity depends on learning from those who came before us, even if we're taking lessons in ways the originators never intended. His best of many aphorisms: "the secret to productivity is letting dead people do the work for you."

* There was one particularly moving presentation during that session, from MIT's Tod Machover, which I'll give its own post after I have a bit more distance from it. (Benjamin Zander's great climax last night will get a shout-out, too.)

About that that anti-TED meme flying around the blogosphere that I mentioned last time...

Some of it has been cranky (such as a high-profile tech blog publishing the attendee list and vetting it), but at least one post -- from the usually very thoughtful Umair Haque, deserves to be addressed. His argument is that TED does more harm than good. I disagree. There are some things a reasonable person could argue against TED -- the inevitable elitism that comes with the high entry fee and the occasional self-congratulatory tone come to mind -- but by adopting a web-centric "ideas worth spreading" meme, I believe curator Chris Anderson has worked hard to make the ideas expressed at TED as available as possible. Most TED talks are available for free on the TED website. An official blog is reporting the events of the conference in near-real-time, as are a dozen or so unvetted ones. Haque's argument seems to be that TED does more harm than good because it hasn't saved the world (he denies that in the comments, but it seems to be his argument). Sure, it hasn't. No mere conference can. (Indeed, the even more elite Davos conference this year seemed to be full of leaders just throwing up their hands.) But while I suspect Anderson's goal is transformational change, the simple act of sharing transformational ideas -- first to a room of elites and then to the growing percentage of the world with Internet access -- lets them take root in unexpected places. That is definitely far more good than harm.

And now, off to the final day...

@TED: Best of Day 2

It was a day of extremes at TED, ranging from an extended session examining the pervasiveness of evil to an evening celebration of some of the most life-affirming ideas possible. It also ranged from the sober (how to survive a nuclear attack) to the self-referential and self-congratulatory (a brief sit-down with TED's originator, Richard Saul Wurman). Here's a quick rundown of some of the long day's many high points:

* There was a late-morning series of talks on the topic "Is beauty truth?", but it was in another session that we saw how truth brings with it some sense of beauty. Alisa Miller, president of CEO of Public Radio International, used the remarkable information visualizations of Worldmapper to illuminate what news stories get covered and what don't. (You can see her slides and hear her talk here.) In the end, she notes, "covering Britney is cheaper" than considering the more important stories.
* While interviewing Craig Ventner, TED curator Chris Anderson remembered an exchange they had a few years back. Anderson had asked, "Can you be accused of playing God?" Ventner's reply: "We're not playing." It was a joke, but Ventner took is as an opportunity to deliberate on how we're "supposed to use our knowledge to improve humanity." He also contrasted the optimism of TED with the pessimism of Davos
* In a brief talk, Dean Ornish gave his standard talk on why "our genes are not our fate," detailing the importance of lifestyle change. It was an interesting complement to Ventner and others showing how our fate could be in creating new genes.
* Philip Zimbardo, top researcher of the classic 1971 Stanford prison study and an expert witness for Abu Ghraib guard, showed some photos from the Iraqi prison that were more graphic and troubling than what's been in the mainstream press, and hammered on the parallels between his landmark study and what is happening today. Countering the "bad apple" theory of people who behave terribly when placed in unsuperivised positions of complete power over others, he stated, "it's the barrel that's bad, not the apples." As intense as that session was, it kicked off with a brief clip about the just-ended next-generation DVD wars that managed to be both hilarious and offensive.
* While accepting their TED prizes, novelist David Eggers delivered a tour-de-force tour through his 826 writing and tutoring project, and Neil Turok shared his double life as a physicist (he's not so sure the Big Bang started everything) and as a founder of the African school for math and sciences.

And that doesn't even include Samantha Power's stirring talk about diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello ... or Susan Blackmore's sharp application of Darwinian principles to everything ... or Isaac Mizrahi's star turn ... or 100 other fascinating moments. And the best news is that this event is only half over.

Finally, I've noticed an anti-TED meme flying around the blogosphere this morning. I'll address that tonight, when I write my post about today's events.

@TED: Best of Day 1

If nothing else, TED is a trip. The veteran conference has gone through many permutations. Under curator Chris Anderson, TED is still full of technology, entertainment, and design, but it has really lived up to the change-the-world rhetoric that was always a bit more under the surface during Richard Saul Wurman's ace stewardship. Al Gore's talk about global warming turned into An Inconvenient Truth after a movie producer saw him deliver the talk at TED; Pangea Day, an ambitious attempt to create a world-wide one-day film festival (it's coming May 10) came out of TED as well. And this week E.O. Wilson is debuting the first iteration of his Encyclopedia of Life, funded by a TED grant. Indeed, the change-the-world attitude is so great that the only truly negative feedback I heard at last year's event was over how wasteful the opulent gift bags were. So this year the bags are constructed from 100-percent post-consumer recycled beverage bottles by Rickshaw Bagworks.

The conceit of this year's TED, now in its final installment in longtime home Monterey before a move to Long Beach, is "The Big Questions." I'll chronicle some of the high points of the conference here. For more detailed coverage, the official TED blog is offering blow-by-blow coverage. And the event, while aiming to be iconoclastic, has become so iconic (and expensive and exclusive) that it has inspired its own barcamp alternative, as noted by Jerry Michalski.

Some of the choice moments of the first day:

* Third generation paleoanthropologist Louise Leakey explaining what you need to do to if you want your remains to be found as a fossil (there's lots of luck involved if you want to be preserved for millenia), and how "technology removes barriers to population growth"
* Priceline founder Jay Walker demonstrating how it takes a lump of coal to transmit a megabyte of data across the Net
* Photographer Chris Jordan talking us through "Running the Numbers," a series of dramatic information visualizes focusing on consumption in the U.S. He learned that, for example, one million is the number plastic cups used on planes in the U.S. every hour and delivered a devastating visualization of that data point.
* * Guitarist Kaki King channelled Preston Reed and the ghost of John Fahey in a surprising and thrilling manner
* Roy Gould and Curtis Wong debuted Microsoft's WorldWide telescope, which may, as Gould put it, "change the way we do astronomy." Simply, it allows us to see the sky -- and what lurks beyond the sky -- in an entirely new way (the talk is already on the TED site).
* The presentation from the day that burned itself immediately into my long-term memory came from Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who showed us a real human brain -- and spent most of her talking describing her own stroke and what she felt and thought while her brain was going wild, from the borderline-metaphysical ("I can't define where I begin and where I end") to the borderline-hilarious ("I'm a busy woman. I don't have time for a stoke"). Her description of her time in that strange state, caught between two worlds, the rare neouroanatomist who has been able to chronicle a brain-changing event from the inside, was astonishing.

And that's just cherrypicking from the first day, a half day of talks. There are 2-1/2 more days coming...

(There are always fun interstitial film clips between talks. You can't beat a harmonica-playing Darth Vader.)