Tag Archives: TED 2014

Surprise: telepresent Ed Snowden at TED 2014′s Session 2: Retrospect

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The first session (Retrospect) this morning held a few surprises, i.e, unexpected speakers, Brian Greene and Ed Snowden (whistleblower re: extensive and [illegal or nonlegal?] surveillance by the US National Security Agency [NSA]). I’m not sure how Snowden fits into the session theme of Retrospect but I think that’s less the point than the sheer breathtaking surprise and his topic’s importance to current public discourse around much of the globe.

Snowden is mostly focused on PRISM (from its Wikipedia entry; Note: Links have been removed),

PRISM is a clandestine mass electronic surveillance data mining program launched in 2007 by the National Security Agency (NSA), with participation from an unknown date by the British equivalent agency, GCHQ.[1][2][3] PRISM is a government code name for a data-collection effort known officially by the SIGAD US-984XN.[4][5] The Prism program collects stored Internet communications based on demands made to Internet companies such as Google Inc. and Apple Inc. under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.[6] The NSA can use these Prism requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the Internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier,[7][8] and to get data that is easier to handle, among other things.[9]

He also described Boundless Informant in response to a question from the session co-moderator, Chris Anderson (from its Wikipedia entry; Note: Links have been removed),

Boundless Informant or BOUNDLESSINFORMANT is a big data analysis and data visualization tool used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). It gives NSA managers summaries of the NSA’s world wide data collection activities by counting metadata.[1] The existence of this tool was disclosed by documents leaked by Edward Snowden, who worked at the NSA for the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.[2]

Anderson asks Snowden, “Why should we care [about increased surveillance]? After all we’re not doing anything wrong.” Snowden response notes that we have a right to privacy and that our actions can be misinterpreted or used against us at any time, present or future.

Anderson mentions Dick Cheney and Snowden notes that Cheney has in the past made some overblown comments about Assange which he (Cheney) now dismisses in the face of what he now considers to be Snowden’s greater trespass.

Snowden is now commenting on the NSA’s attempt to undermine internet security by misleading their partners. He again makes a plea for privacy. He also notes that US security has largely been defensive, i.e., protection against other countries’ attempts to get US secrets. These latest programmes change US security from a defensive strategy to an offensive strategy (football metaphor). These changes have been made without public scrutiny.

Anderson asks Snowden about his personal safety.  His response (more or less), “I go to sleep every morning thinking about what I can do to help the American people. … I’m happy to do what I can.”

Anderson asks the audience members whether they think Snowden’s was a reckless act or an heroic act. Some hands go up for reckless, more hands go up for heroic, and many hands remain still.

Snowden, “We need to keep the internet safe for us and if we don’t act we will lose our freedom.”

Anderson asks Tim Berners-Lee to come up to the stage and the discussion turns to his (Berners-Lee) proposal for a Magna Carta for the internet.

Tim Berners-Lee biography from his Wikipedia entry,

Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA, DFBCS (born 8 June 1955), also known as “TimBL”, is a British computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989,[4] and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid November.[5][6][7][8][9]

Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web’s continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).[10] He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI),[11] and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.[12][13]

The Magna Carta (from its Wikipedia entry; Note: Links have been removed),

Magna Carta (Latin for Great Charter),[1] also called Magna Carta Libertatum or The Great Charter of the Liberties of England, is an Angevin charter originally issued in Latin in June 1215. It was sealed under oath by King John at Runnymede, on the bank of the River Thames near Windsor, England at June 15, 1215.[2]

Magna Carta was the first document forced onto a King of England by a group of his subjects, the feudal barons, in an attempt to limit his powers by law and protect their rights.

The charter is widely known throughout the English speaking world as an important part of the protracted historical process that led to the rule of constitutional law in England and beyond.

When asked by Anderson if he would return to the US if given amnesty, Snowden says yes as long as he can continue his work. He’s not willing to trade his work of bringing these issues to the public forefront in order to go home again.

Nicholas Negroponte and Chris Hadfield at TED 2014’s Session 1: Liftoff

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Nicholas Negroponte opened the first TED conference in 1984 and has come back for the 30th anniversary. Here’s his TED biography,

The founder of the MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He’s the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world.

media.mit.edu

Negroponte discusses what has changed over the years. When he first started in the 1970s no one thought you’d ever use a touchscreen and putting your fingers on the screen was considered silly. This sort of thinking (touchscreens) is what went into the development of MIT’s Media Lab. He seems to be highlighting some of the high points of his thinking. He finds some of today’s internet of Things thinking to be pathetic (he references some of the sessions earlier today). He (?) started Wired magazine. Negroponte has gotten more interested in computers and learning over the years. He compares iteration to learning and mentions One Laptop Per Child. There was virtually no international aid for that project, the money came from the countries that used the program. After that project, he worked on an initiative where they dropped off computers to children (in Ethiopia and ?) with no instruction. Within days, the children had figured it out and within six months they hacked Android. He now wants to connect 100M people (on the African continent?). He predicts that in 30 years, we will ingest information (swallow a pill where the information travels through the bloodstream and on into the brain).

For some reason, they thought it would be amusing to play the Joe Canadian commercial. Chris Hadfield is then introduced. Here’s his TED biography,

Tweeting (and covering Bowie) from the International Space Station last year, Colonel Chris Hadfield reminded the world how much we love space.

Hadfield (who has a guitar on stage with him) talks about danger (asks the audience what’s the most dangerous thing theyu’ve done) and notes that space travel is dangerous. He then  describes in detail what it’s like to get into a space shuttle and head for the space. He says that a space shuttle is the most complicated machine (?) ever built. He next shows a shuttle launch and  describes being on the International Space Station. You see a sunrise every 25 minutes due to the speed at which you are travelling. He describes his first space walk when his left eye went blind. His left eye teared up while he continued work outside the station.

In space your tears don’t fall, they build up until there’s enough force to push them across the bridge of your nose and land like a small waterfall in your right eye. When the tears wooshed over to his right eye, he became completely blind.

Hadfield asks the audience again about danger and talks about overcoming fear and dealing with real danger as opposed to perceived danger. One of the ways astronauts deal with their fear and danger is to practice until they’ve changed their primal fear.

Hadfield plays a guitar and covers David Bowie’s Space Oddity and ends his talk with these words “Fear Not.”

I am done for today and I hope there aren’t too many mistakes in this post.

Nano-enabled conference ID badge for TED 2014

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Apparently Nanotech Security Corp. (I last wrote about the company in a Jan. 31, 2014 posting) was selected to produce a high tech security component for the TED 2014 conference. From a Mar. 17, 2014 news item in the Wall Street Journal,

Nanotech Security Corp. (TSX-V: NTS) (OTCQX: NTSFF) is pleased to announce that it has been selected to design and produce an exclusive event access ID and branding solution for the TED2014 and TEDActive 2014 conferences. Nanotech’s next-generation KolourOptik(R) nanotechnology will be integrated as a security feature on each participant’s ID badge for both events.

The March 17, 2014 news item can also be found on TechVibes,

The public company’s KolourOptik nanotechnology will be integrated as a security feature on each participant’s ID badge for both events; the feature is a combination of TED’s iconic logo and ultra-high resolution lettering recognizing TED’s 30-year milestone delivering “Ideas Worth Spreading.”

KolourOptik technology produces intense optically variable images that can be applied to virtually any surface for anti-counterfeit and branding purposes. These fully customizable images result from billions of nano-scale surface holes per square centimeter which capture and reformulate light waves into brilliant colours without use of any pigment or dye. The commercial terms of the contract were not announced.

I think that in addition to the obvious branding aspect of this badge, there is the high tech nature of a nanotechnology-enabled security feature enhancing TED’s brand as a place where you’ll find new ideas and things. More than one fellow introduced a new piece of software or hardware today.

ETA March 24, 2014: There’s a bit more information about KolourOptik’s technology in a March 18, 2014 news article on securing.com,

The approach using an electron beam to drill holes smaller than the wavelength of light into a material so – when light catches the holes at the right angle – a bright, flickering image is revealed. The KolourOptik technology requires no pigment or dye, said the British Columbia-based company.

For TED, the security feature (pictured [on the securing.com site]) shows the organisation’s logo and high resolution (50,000 dpi) lettering “recognising TED’s 30-year milestone delivering ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’,” it added.

The article also notes the TED is the company’s first commercial client.

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

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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.