Kenyan Pundit

Those of you who were following my blogging from TED 2006 can now get a much better sense of the TED experience (which is coming to Africa next June!)

Via the TEDTalks website, “Each year, TED hosts some of the world’s most fascinating people: Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. The talks they deliver have had had such a great impact, we thought they deserved a wider audience. So now, for the first time, we’re sharing them with the world at large… Each week, we’ll release a new talk to inspire, intrigue and awaken the imagination. For best effect, plan to listen to at least three, start to finish. (They have a cumulative effect.) If you have a curious soul and an open mind, we think you’ll be hooked.”

The six talks that have been posted up so far (you can either watch video or listen to the podcasts) were among my favorites. If I had to pick two must-listens, I’d recommend Majora Carter for sheer INSPIRATION and Sir Ken Robinson because he reminded me of the joys of learning and because I dream for the day when we will see creative learning encouraged in schools across Africa. And Hans Rosling you gotta watch, not listen. His graphics were amazing. And David Pogue who writes a tech column for the NY Times was funny.

OK, just check all of them out

(fantastic job June!).

Theme: Tales of Invention

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” - Winston Churchill

1) Speaker: Dr. Amy Smith (low-tech designer with MIT’s D-Lab).

- Another profile of her at World Changing .
- About 2 million kids die from respiratory diseases caused by indoor smoke from burning charcoal/wood when cooking.
- Works on alternative cooking fuels to reduce this problem. Produces environmentally-friendly charcoal from agricultural waste materials. Is also working to improve access to safe drinking water by low-cost water testing and treatment systems e.g. solar water disinfection (hey AfroM).
- Her presentation had me thinking about the local Jua Kali industry and how little we are doing to scale that up and harness that.
- Focus on enabling communities to create value for themselves (don’t try and design outside the community) and educating people not to stop being farmers but to stop being poor farmers.

2) Speaker: Joshua Prince-Ramus (Architecht)

Been in the works for the last few months and finally announced at TED.

When I was on the PopTech Africa panel last year, one of the things I brought up was a desire to see a Poptech-like event in Africa. Unbeknownst to me at the time, a couple of TED staffers who were in the audience had been thinking about the same thing…we ended up connecting and having conversations about the idea. TED is now going to make this a reality and I’m so thrilled.

The conference will be in Arusha, Tanzania from June 3-7 2007. The theme will be Africa: The Good News. TED will be providing 100 scholarships to make it possible for (young) African thought-leaders, entrepreneurs, activists, creative souls, bloggers etc., from the continent and the diaspora. They also hope to get those extraordinary individuals in the continent with deep pockets (they do exist) and about several hundred members of the existing TED community to come together and both experience the possibilities of the continent and think of creative new ways to unleash Africa’s (immense) unfulfilled potential.

Stay tuned for details.

OK. I’m blogged out. Off to search for a glass of wine.

This year’s TED Prize Winners

1. Cameron Sinclair (Director Architecture for Humanity and Eternal Optimist).
- All problems are local, all solutions are local.
- Focus is on social responsible design.
- They have a staff of just three – shows the power of a website. Started with $700 and a website.
- They advocate for good design; they instigate; they implement.
- His role is a conduit between the design world and the humanitarian crisis.
- Open source model e.g. designs in the developing world licensed with a special Creative Commons license that allows it to be replicated anywhere for free.
- His mantra: Design like you give a damn

2) Jehane Noujaim (Filmmaker)
- Thinks that as the world becomes smaller it is really important to learn from each other/building bridges. The biggest challenge facing the world is understanding the other.
- How to make this a reality? The power of the image. Connecting people through film – getting independent voices out there. How do you give power to independent voices to tell their stories?
- Her wish: Global Day of Film – platform for independent films to get out there and have a global audience; bringing the world together through film

3) Dr. Larry Brilliant
- His TED wish is to build an early global warning system to protect against pandemics.

First, Ethan and Bruno are also liveblogging TED and doing a much more comprehensive job than I am so be sure to check them out.

Then yesterday, I forgot to mention Jeff Han and his uber-cool multi-touch interaction thingy. Be sure to check out the video.

The first session was focused on life sciences.
Speaker 1 - Alan Russell (from my alma mater!).
Was late for this so couldn’t blog it, but he’s doing really neat stuff with regenerative medicine.

Speaker 2: Joe Derisi (molecular biologist with focus on infectious diseases and developer of the virus chip
Focus of his talk was on using technology to improve diagnosis.

Eh, I think I need some caffeine in my system.

Interlude feature this Amazing African grey parrot - Einstein.

Speaker 3: Neil Gershenfeld (blogged about him before during Poptech).
- We’ve won, we have the digital revolution. What comes next after computers?
- Computer science is one of the worst things that ever happened to both computers and science because it froze computation in the fifties.
- Neil and his colleagues at the Center for Bits and Atoms are trying to figure out how to move forward. The link covers the first part of his talk.
- Neil started teaching a class called “How to Make (almost) Anything.” Focus is on personal fabrication. Technology for the market of one. As part of the programs outreach requirement, started Fab Labs – cost is about $25,000. They exploded around the world; this wasn’t expected. For all the attention to the digital divide, they’d find unused computers in all these places. Labs about empowerment-> education -> problem solving -> job creation -> invention. Eight year olds in Ghana are inventing designs that are better than those by MIT students on their own.
- Barrier is getting development community to think about letting people create technology rather than consume technology. They all want to talk about the work Neil is doing but won’t fund it. Social engineering and organizational engineering is required. Technology is seen as top-down mega projects. Message coming from Fab Lab aren’t that the rest of the world can create their own projects.

Speaker 4: Penelope Boston (cave researcher).
- Should life forms be transported to Mars?
- Chance of life in Mars is one in four. Thinks life is underground.
- How do you look for ET-life and how do we know when you find it?
- Why would Martian life be hard to find? Probably microscopic, probably hiding, may be very different in its fundamental chemistry – size, chemistry, speed of activity. We are guided by our limited experience. Talked about using experience with cave research in Mars.