TED 2014 ‘pre’ opening with reclaimed river, reforesting the world, open source molecular animation software, and a quantum butterfly

Today, March 17, 2014 TED opened with the first of two sessions devoted to the 2014 TED fellows. The ones I’m choosing to describe in brief detail are those who most closely fall within this blog’s purview. My choices are not a reflection of my opinion about the speaker or the speaker’s topic or the importance of the topic.

First, here’s a list of the fellows* along with a link to their TED 2014 biography (list and links from the TED 2014 schedule),

Usman Riaz Percussive guitarist
Ziyah Gafić photographer + storyteller
Alexander McLean african prison activist
Dan Visconti composer + concert presenter
Aziza Chaouni architect + ecotourism specialist
Shubhendu Sharma reforestation expert
Bora Yoon Experimental musician
Aziz Abu Sarah entrepreneur + educator
Gabriella Gomez-Mont Creativity Officer, Guest Host
Jorge Mañes Rubio conceptual artist
Bora Yoon Experimental musician
Janet Iwasa molecular animator
Robert Simpson astronomer + web developer
Shohini Ghose quantum physicist + educator
Sergei Lupashin aerial robotics researcher + entrepreneur
Lars Jan director + media artist
Sarah Parcak Space archaeologist, TED Fellow [part of group presentation]
Tom Rielly Satirist [received a 5th anniversary gift, a muppet of himself from group]
Susie Ibarra composer + improviser + percussionist educator
Usman Riaz

Aziza Chaouni is an architect based in Morocco. From Fez (and I think she was born there), she is currently working to reclaim the Fez River, which she described as the ‘soul of the city’. As urbanization has taken over Fez, the river has been paved over as it has become more polluted with raw sewage being dumped into it along with industrial byproducts from tanning and other industries. As part of the project to reclaim the river, i.e., clean it and uncover it, Chaouni and her collaborators have created public spaces such as a playground which both cleanses the river and gives children a place to play which uncovering part of the city’s ‘soul’.

Shubhendu Sharma founded Afforestt with the intention of bringing forests which have been decimated not only in India but around the world. An engineer by training, he has adapted an industrial model used for car production to his forest-making endeavours. Working with his reforestation model, you can develop a forest with 300 trees in the space needed to park six cars and for less money than you need to buy an iPhone. The Afforestt project is about to go open-source meaning that anyone in the world can download the information necessary to create a forest.

Jorge Mañes Rubio spoke about his art project where he creates travel souvenirs, e.g., water from the near a submerged city in China. The city was submerged in the Three Gorges hydro dam project. For anyone not familiar with the project, from the Wikipedia Three Gorges Dam entry (Note: Links removed),

The Three Gorges Dam is a hydroelectric dam that spans the Yangtze River by the town of Sandouping, located in Yiling District, Yichang, Hubei province, China. The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest power station in terms of installed capacity (22,500 MW). In 2012, the amount of electricity the dam generated was similar to the amount generated by the Itaipu Dam. [2][3]

Except for a ship lift, the dam project was completed and fully functional as of July 4, 2012,[4][5] when the last of the main turbines in the underground plant began production. Each main turbine has a capacity of 700 MW.[3][6] The dam body was completed in 2006. Coupling the dam’s 32 main turbines with two smaller generators (50 MW each) to power the plant itself, the total electric generating capacity of the dam is 22,500 MW.[3][7][8]

The one souvenir he showed from that project featured symbols from traditional Chinese art festooned around the edges of white plastic bottle containing water from above a submerged Chinese city.

Janet Iwasa, a PhD in biochemistry, professor at the University of Utah and a molecular animator, talked about the animating molecular movement in and around cells. She showed an animation of a clathrin cage (there’s more about clathrin, a protein in a Wikipedia entry; looks a lot like a buckyball or buckminster fullerene except it’s not carbon) which provides a completely different understanding of how these are formed than is possible from still illustrations. She, along with her team, has created an open source software, Molecular Flipbook, which is available in in beta as of today, March 17, 2014.

The next session is starting. I’ll try and get back here to include more about Robert Simpson and Shohini Ghose.

ETa March 17, 2014 at 1521 PST:

Robert Simpson talked about citizen science, the Zooniverse project, and astronomy.  I have mentioned Zooniverse here (a Jan. 17, 2012 posting titled: Champagne galaxy, drawing bubbles for science and a Sept. 17, 2013 posting titled: Volunteer on the Plankton Portal and help scientists figure out ways to keep the ocean healthy.  Simpson says there are 1 million people participating in various Zooniverse projects and he mentioned that in addition to getting clicks and time from people, they’ve also gotten curiosity. That might seem obvious but he went on to describe a project (the Galaxy Zoo project) where the citizen scientists became curious about certain phenomena they were observing and as a consequence of their curiosity an entirely new type of galaxy was discovered, a pea galaxy. From the Pea Galaxy Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),

A Pea galaxy, also referred to as a Pea or Green Pea, might be a type of Luminous Blue Compact Galaxy which is undergoing very high rates of star formation.[1] Pea galaxies are so-named because of their small size and greenish appearance in the images taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

Pea Galaxies were first discovered in 2007 by the volunteer users within the forum section of the online astronomy project Galaxy Zoo (GZ).[2]

My final entry for this first TED fellow session is about Shohini Ghose, as associate professor of physics, at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Canada). She spoke beautifully and you** think you understand while the person’s speaking but aren’t all that sure afterwards. She was talking about chaos at the macro and at the quantum levels. The butterfly effect (a butterfly beats its wings in one part of the world and eventually that disturbance which is repeated is felt as a hurricane in another part of the world) can also occur at the quantum level. In fact, quantum entanglement is generated by chaos at the quantum scale. She was accompanied by a video representing chaos and movement at the quantum scale.

* ‘fellow’ changed to ‘fellows’ March 17, 2013 1606 hours PST
** ‘iyou’ changed to ‘you’ Nov. 19, 2014.

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