TED 2011: The Rediscovery of Wonder, Day 3

Embracing chaos, 57 things Google knows about you, and how to 3D-print a kidney.

This week, we’re reporting live from TED 2011: The Rediscovery of Wonder. So far, we warmed up with 5 must-read books by some of this year’s speakers, synthesized highlights from Day 1 and Day 2, and spotlighted an inspired urban intervention by designer and TED Fellow Candy Chang. Today, we’re back — on the brink of our sleep budged — with highlights, photos and notable soundbites from Day 3 — dig in.

Historian Edward Tenner

Culture and technology historian Edward Tenner showed statistical evidence that the greatest time for game-changing innovation in modern history was actually The Great Depression, which had a paradoxically stimulating effect on creativity. He argued that one of the grand questions of our time is how to close the gap between our capabilities and our foresight.

Our ability to innovate is increasing geometrically but our capacity to model those innovations is linear.” ~ Edward Tenner

Tenner’s excellent 1997 book, Why Things Bite Back: Technology & the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, will change the way you think about adversity, opportunity and innovation.

Chris Anderson presenting the winners of the Ads Worth Spreading contest.

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

TED announced the 10 winners of the inaugural Ads Worth Spreading contest, seeking to reframe commercial communication from an interruption to inspiration.

Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org fame, author of the excellent forthcoming The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, delivered a stride-stopping and timely curtain-pull on our modern information diet and what we’re being force-fed by the powers of the Internet. Google, apparently, looks at 57 data points to serve us personally tailored search results.

We’ve moved to an age where the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.” ~ Eli Pariser

Which raises the question of responsibility: Is the responsibility of those who serve information to give us more of what we already like and believe, or to open our eyes to new perspectives? And if it’s all algorithmically driven, is there even a place for such responsibility? Our key takeaway from Pariser’s talk, one particularly relevant to our own credo, is that human information curators will have an increasingly important role as moral mitigators of algorithmic personalization efficiency.

Eli Pariser 'We need the new information gatekeepers to encode a sense of civic responsibility into algorithms.'

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

We need the Internet to introduce us to different ideas and different perspectives.” ~ Eli Pariser

Virginia Tech’s Dennis Hong is building the world’s first vehicle for the visually-impaired. and recently made history with the Blind Driver Challenge.

Dennis Hong 'We need the new information gatekeepers to encode a sense of civic responsibility into algorithms.'

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

High-functioning autistic savant Daniel Tammet opened the door to his fascinating view of the world. He used synesthesia, the strange neurological crossing of the senses, as an example of how the world is often richer than we think it to be.

Daniel Tammet shows us the world through the eyes of an autistic savant.

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Tammet’s Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant is one of the most fascinating perspective shifts you’ll ever read.

Google's Sebastian Thrun 'We took a driverless car from San Francisco to LA, and no one even noticed there was no driver.'

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

The idea behind the Stuxnet worm is quite simple: We don’t want Iran to get the bomb.” ~ Ralph Langner

Security consultant Ralph Langner 'Mossad is responsible for Stuxnet. But the real force behind that is not Israel, it is the only cyber force: The U.S.'

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

In one of the day’s most jaw-dropping demos, the kind that restores one’s faith in humanity, Berkley Bionics‘ Eythor Bender showcased the incredible eLEGS exoskeletons, which enable the paralyzed to walk again, and HULC, which enables ordinary people to carry up to 200 lbs. Bender was joined onstage by a soldier, who demoed HULC, and a paralyzed woman who walked for the first time in 18 years thanks to eLEGS.

Eythor Bender on stage with paraplegic Amanda Boxtel, ecstatic in her new non-invasive exoskeleton legs.

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Biomedical engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto is developing amazing non-invasive implants made of silicon and silk.

Fiorenzo Omenetto shows a disposable cup made of silk, a biodegradable, biocompatible alternative to the highly unsustainable styrofoam.

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

There was no shortage of astounding demos today. Anthony Atala, whose work in 3D organ printing is an unbelievable next frontier in medicine, literally “printed” a kidney on the TED stage as 1,700 of the world’s smartest people gasped in awe, speechless.

Anthony Atala 'prints' a kidney to a collective gasp.

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

The remarkable papercut artist Béatrice Coron, whose stunning artwork we’ve spotted on the New York subway, echoed some of our own beliefs about combinatorial creativity:

I’m influenced by everything I read, everything I see. In life and in paper cutting, everything is connected: One story leads to another.” ~ Beatrice Coron

Watch Coron’s creative process and swoon like we did:

Keep an eye on our live Twitter coverage and come back here tomorrow evening for highlights from the final day.

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Bill Gates on Vaccines: An RSA Animation

We’re big fans of The RSA and their wonderful sketchnote illustrations of big ideas by big thinkers. Despite the signature fun format, their latest installment deals with a very serious issue surrounded by a tragic amount of public misinformation: Vaccines. The 4-minute animation distills the gist of Bill Gates’ 24-page annual letter, which focuses on the Gates Foundation’s vaccination advocacy as well as their work in HIV/AIDS, malaria, agriculture and education.

I like to say that vaccines are miracles. They’re miracles because giving children a couple of drops or a shot in the arm can prevent some of the worst childhood diseases for a lifetime. And that, for me, is a miracle.” ~ Bill Gates

Polio cases are 99% down. There are only 4 countries in the world where polio's transmission has never been stopped: Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nigeria. Vaccination has the power to make polio the second disease in the history of humanity, after small pox, to be fully eradicated.

For more on the subject of vaccines and misinformation, we highly recommend the excellent new book The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear — a bold debunking of the misguided anti-vaccine movement, rooted in equal parts science and social psychology to reveal how media sensationalism and PR-hungry health authorities are obscuring some of modern medicine’s greatest achievements to a dangerous effect.

via Tactical Philanthropy via @simonmainwaring

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The Best Apps of 2010

Social magazines, Victorian tablets, and what 100-year-old educational traditions have to do with analog photography.

After spotlighting the year’s best books in in Business, Life & Mind, Art, Design & Photography and the top children’s literature, we’re back with the 10 most interesting, innovative and plain useful apps launched in 2010.

FLIPBOARD

Yes, Steve Jobs named it the best app of the year. Yes, TIME picked it as one of the 50 best inventions of 2010. And, yes, we happen to be a featured stream on it. But mainstream acclaim and ego flattery aside, Flipboard is, quite simply, absolutely brilliant. The sleek iPad app turns your social streams — content your Facebook friends and Twitter follows are sharing — into a beautiful visually-driven magazine, padded with extra interesting content from curated channels around your passion points.

Oh, and it’s free.

A HUMUMENT

From British artist Tom Phillips comes A Humument, combining 367 stunning full-color illustrations from Phillips’ artist book, based on and a contraction of the title of the Victorian novel A Human Document, with an ingenious interactive oracle function that will cast two pages to be read in tandem using a chosen date and a randomly generated number. A Find wheel lets you navigate the pages visually. You can share oracle readings with friends via email and post individual images to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Design Observer called it “one of the most successful artist’s books ever published” and we won’t disagree — it does for the iPad what Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes does for the bound book.

A Humument was first published as a private press edition in 1973, with several subsequent print editions and spinoffs. But the iPad app is the pinnacle of it all, weaving an immersive, non-linear narrative and featuring 39 new, original pages not available elsewhere. It’s the epitome of harnessing the full potential of a new publishing platform to engage in a different, more compelling way, rather than merely repurposing the print experience to a tablet screen.

A Humument is available for $7.99 which, given it’s more a book and art project in one than it is an app per se, is an absolute steal.

RAPPORTIVE

Rapportive is your personal social media detective. The clever Gmail extension pulls a rich profile of the sender to the right of each email — everything from social media presence to location to job titles past and present.

Rapportive is free and available for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Mailplane.

INSTAPAPER FOR IPAD

Sure, Instapaper, the ingeniously simple app for saving web pages to read them later, has been around since 2008 as an iPhone app. But the Instapaper iPad app, launched in March, completely changes the relationship between the reader and the digital page. With its stripped-down, minimalist aesthetic sprawled gloriously on the wide iPad screen, the app turns your favorite online reads, sans the annoying ads and the distracting meta-links, into the perfect companion for everything from your train commute to your cardio workout at the gym.

Instapaper is the brainchild of Tumblr cofounder Marco Arment. The iPad app is available for $4.99 and triple-worth every penny.

TED

It’s no secret we’re big TED fans here, so the October launch of TED’s free iPad app was an absolute treat. It tailors TED’s familiar brilliance — powerful punches of inspiration by some of the world’s most remarkable thinkers and doers — to the touchscreen experience, offering some nifty iPad-exclusive features. An “Inspire Me” button lets you find the perfect dose of inspiration based on the amount of time you have to watch; curated playlists offer thematic insight on topics like “How We Learn” and “The Power of Cities”; smart tags break down the 800+ TEDTalks into 250 easily navigable categories.

The app was developed by a former Apple developer who worked on the first iPhone SDK — and it shows.

WORDLENS

With real-time translation as the next frontier of the web and augmented reality as easily the most buzzed about mobile technology this year, it’s no surprise that the marriage of the two would be a win. WordLens is a new real-time translation app that turns your iPhone into “the dictionary of the future,” using optical character recognition and augmented reality to translate text captured with the phone’s camera. From t-shirt slogans to street signage, its applications for globe-trotters are astounding and its implications for the future of language learning and cross-cultural communication remarkable.

The app itself is free, with various language pairs available for in-app purchase. The first pair released is Spanish-English, with more coming soon.

DESIGN OBSERVER

Design Observer is the world’s premiere online design journal and their new iPhone app puts today’s most important conversations about design in your pocket. From photography to architecture to to urbanism to sustainability and beyond, the sleek app lets you browse the entire spectrum of visual culture and social innovation by channel, topic or author. A special Mondrian view allows you to scan articles visually by thumbnails of key images.

The app is free and highly recommended.

INSTAGRAM

Visual lifestreaming is one of the most rapidly growing branches of new media storytelling. Instagram takes your hum-drum iPhone photos, runs them through some retrotastic filters, and churns out gorgeous images oozing Lomo charisma and vintage goodness. What makes the app interesting is that it comes with a built-in mobile-only social network: You get to follow friends and interesting users on Instagram, much like you would on Twitter, with the option of liking or commenting on images, but there’s no web version whatsoever — you can only engage with your stream within the app. (Though you can, of course, share instagr.am links to individual images on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere.)

The app is free and one of our most recent (now full-blown) obsessions.

FOODUCATE

Navigating the torrents of marketing hype, nutrition labels, overwhelming ingredient lists and questionable health claims can take the joy out of food shopping. Fooducate is a smart app that helps you see behind the veil of healthspeak and make better choices at the store. The app, developed by a team of dietitians, uses the iPhone’s camera to scan barcodes and pull up product highlights, both good and bad — including stuff manufacturers don’t want you to see, like excessive sugar, hidden trans fats, additives and preservatives, artificial coloring and more. It currently features a databse of 160,000 products, growing daily.

Fooducate is free and a solid investment in your health.

MONTESSORIUM

The Montessori method is easily the best-known system of self-directed learning in formal education. This year, Montessorium put the 100-year-old educational tradition at the fingertips of today’s children with two simple yet brilliantly executed mobile apps that let kids learn the basics of language and mathematics. Minimalist yet engaging, the sleekly designed app makes self-directed learning what it should be: Fun, simple, yet effective.

Montessorium comes in three varieties — math, letters and writing — each available for $4.99. The folks at Montessorium have kindly offered 10 free downloads of the brand new writing app to Brain Pickings readers, so if you’d like to try it out, say so in the comments below and we’ll email the first 10 a promo code. [UPDATE 12/27/10: All 10 invitations have been claimed!]

In 2010, we spent more than 4,500 hours bringing you Brain Pickings. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right and helps pay the bills.

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