Brian Cox: What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider

Dave Eggers took home a piece of this year’s TED Prize, winning $100,000 and a wish. In his acceptance speech, he speaks about 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing workshop and tutoring center in San Francisco started by Eggers and run by various writers, educators, and do-gooders. He frequently mentions the transformative effect the organization has had not only on the children, but the community as well.

There’s something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one on one, getting all this attention. They finish their homework, they go home — they’re finished. They don’t stall. They don’t do their homework in front of the TV. They’re allowed to go home 5:30, enjoy their family, enjoy other hobbies, get outside, play and that makes a happy family. A bunch of happy families in a neighborhood is a happy community. A bunch of happy communities tied together is a happy city and a happy world, right? So, the key to it all is homework.

His wish? Once Upon a School:

I wish that you–you personally and every creative individual and organization you know–will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you’ll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within one year we have 1,000 examples of innovative public-private partnerships.

The other two TED Prize winners were Neil Turok (Finding the next Einstein in Africa) and Karen Armstrong (Help bring compassion back to religion).

Mentioned previously, neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor spoke at TED on waking up one morning in the winter of 1996 after a blood vessel in her brain exploded. She chronicles the next four hours of her life from that point as she undergoes a massive stroke, slowly losing the ability to define the boundaries that separate one’s self from the infinite surroundings.

And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. Then I realized, “Oh my gosh! I’m having a stroke! I’m having a stroke!” And the next thing my brain says to me is, “Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?”

And then it crosses my mind: “But I’m a very busy woman. I don’t have time for a stroke!” So I’m like, “OK, I can’t stop the stroke from happening so I’ll do this for a week or two, and then I’ll get back to my routine, OK.”

So I gotta call help, I gotta call work.

Luckily, Dr. Taylor was able to get to a hospital, and survived the stroke. Awakening after the surgery, though, she was shocked to find herself still alive, and still feeling some of the effects of the blood loss.

Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Harmonic. I remember thinking there’s no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.

Read the transcript or watch the video above.

(Bad puns are the milk and honey of bashing TED, right?)

The recently departed TED 2008 (February 27 to March 1) was home to a number of fascinating and informative talks. But besides inspiring “ideas worth spreading”, the conference also breathed new life into a long-standing argument. Is TED elitist? Is TED a waste of time? Or worse, more harmful than good?

That last question comes from Umair Haque, who argues that TED “is even more damaging than mere elitism”. Bringing together so many innovators for a closed forum is, at best, neither good nor bad: nothing gets done, but no one is hurt in the process. However, add the opportunity cost of the endeavor, and the conference becomes a waste of time and money.

Let me put it even more sharply. There have been gatherings like TED for hundreds of years. But the vast majority of the world continues to live in bone-crushing poverty, misery, and fear.

Think about that for a second.

That’s an existence proof the size of the Milky Way that stuff like TED isn’t part of the answer - it’s part of the problem. It’s a negative equilibrium: all that great thinking is directed to the place where it’s least productive.

Unfortunately, Haque is liberal with his criticisms, providing no real stepping stone between TED as unproductive and TED as a damaging problem. That the world’s problems exist despite TED speak to its ineffectiveness, not any harmful influence. (Also, I want to call bullshit on Haque for adding a postscript about he is not “bashing” TED. Saying the conference actually contributes to the poor conditions around the world is nothing but bashing.)

However, Haque’s toned-down argument is hardly off base, and he’s not alone in his thinking. Sarah Lacy writes in Business Week why she’s fed up with TED:

This is a sentiment that goes far beyond sour grapes. I care passionately about many of the change-the-world issues discussed at TED. And I am encouraged that next year, the conference is moving from Monterey, Calif., to a larger, more accommodating venue in Long Beach, where the attendee list will be at least a little larger.

Still, I question whether even the loftiest ideas lose some relevance when they’re aired in so rarified an arena. Given how oversold and profitable the conference is, I can’t help but wonder whether there’s a vulnerability that someone else might exploit. Why not a TED for the rest of us? Imagine: a conference that explores the complex fabric of humanity, while actually allowing it in the door.

The biggest problem with TED seems to be how closed its doors really are. If (IF!) you are invited, entry will cost you $6000, a price tag much higher than what many of the people who should be there can reasonably afford. TED reserves 50 seats for people who will pay either $2000 or nothing, but that is 50 out of 1450 attendees! 96.5% of the attendees still pay the entire $6000.

Hating on TED is not a minority activity, either. These arguments have been prominent enough to warrant a Is TED Elitist? page on the TED.com FAQ. I commend TED’s attempts to assuage concerned visitors, but any thoughtful consideration of their response makes the page seem more like a list of reasons detractors are correct.

Why charge so much money?

Without the high fee we wouldn’t spend as much as we do on the conference itself, with state-of-the-art staging, lighting and audiovisual, and generous social events. But even after these expenses the event, is still highly profitable. And we’re delighted it is — because this means we can afford to invest in taking TED’s content free to the world. The process of editing and hosting scores of videos and building a highly trafficked website is expensive. Which is why few other conferences have attempted it on the same scale.

Cutting the price would also impair our ability to fund the TED Prize, expand the TED Fellows program and invest in taking TED into developing countries. And it would turn an already long waiting list into one that was unmanageable.

Firstly, I am all but offended that they would even try to pass off expenses as a reason for the high barrier to entry, and then in the next breath casually mention the high profits (”at least $2 million” every year, by the way). Admittedly, I am wholly ignorant when it comes to the money needed to organize a three-day conference, but this year’s attendance rate of 1,198 should have garnered TED over $7 million from ticket prices alone. Considering that, I am sure that “at least $2 million” figure is very conservative.

And “impairing their ability to fund the TED Prize”? The TED Prize, for those who don’t know, is a $100,000 grant given to three winners each year. So, as it stands now, less than 4% of the profits go toward funding the TED Prize. Where the rest goes, I do not know, but the TED Global conferences are presumably profitable as well, and the website is probably somewhere between $100,000 to $200,000 a year AT MOST.

So the long waiting list is the only excuse that is almost reasonable (though that just brings us full circle to the original complaint). Of course, getting rid of the many actors, actresses, and other useless audience members would make the waiting list more manageable. I love John Cusack to death, but did he really need to be on this year’s list of TED attendees?

It seems foolish to completely disregard the good possible by bringing so many intellectuals together, but the process could definitely do with a lot of improvement. For example, the conference could provide more opportunities for collaboration among attendees, or expand the TED Prize to be either larger or include more winners.

No matter what, though, the conference will remain worthwhile in my eyes as long as TED.com exists. On its own, TED is arguably nothing more than an elitist circle jerk, but the freely available videos will hopefully go a long way to inspiring tomorrow’s innovators.

…and it’s not very good.

Almost a year ago, biologist E. O. Wilson brought into existence the Encyclopedia of Life, an exhaustive source of information on all the world’s various species. The site “launched” last year, but just to show the eventual layout and UI. Now the site is up for real (disregarding all the times the server crashes from too many visitors), but not for real real. There are only 25 “complete” pages, and still tons of interface problems.

But still! Though the EOL is now live, it is in beta (so to speak), and basically is live so as to figure out what all those interface problems are. And since they asked for it, criticisms were happily rendered. The verdict? Not so good. Basically, the site suffers from four main problems at the moment.

(1) There is a glaring lack of information, and the information that is there thus far is mismanaged at best:

I think the first release of EOL should have, at a minimum, provided at least as much information that I can get from iSpecies and Wikipedia. Why didn’t EOL? If the argument is that they want authenticated content, then this doesn’t wash. Their authenticated content is minimal, and waiting for authentication will, in my view, cripple EOL.

(2) Where is the hypertext! If I can manage a “related articles” field, then surely so can the EOL.

(3) Poor search capabilities on a site like this practically render the project useless. How do you wade through a billion pages without a good search engine?

It gets worse if I search on “Tyrannosaurus rex”. EOL doesn’t do dinosaurs, and so doesn’t contain anything on T. rex, but the search results tell me that The following 116 search results contain ‘Tyrannosaurus rex’. Nope, none of them do.

The search engine is poorly done, it fails to rank results sensibly, incorrectly reports what it does find, and has no support for spelling mistakes.

(4) Lastly, but not leastly, where’s the openness? Where are the tools necessary for actually using the data on the site?

There is a ton of structure on the site, but no support for semantics (where is the RDF?), or microformats. There is no RSS feed for a specific species or for the latest species to be added. there is no place to have a discussion. There is no API. As we leave what we knew as “web 2.0″ behind, it should be clear to anyone designing a web resource that in the absence of programmatic interactions, a site will languish. In the absence of community, the site will die. I hope EOL addresses these issues ASAP. In the absence of structured information, I’d love to be able to pull the data from EOL into Freebase, mirroring the structure and building relationships. GIVE ME AN API!!!

None of these problems are intractable, but they are disheartening considering how much time and money has already been put into the project. I hope the EOL takes to heart the constructive criticism its first offerings have brought, and implements the necessary changes. A year and $10 million should at least be enough to get the project on the right track.

TED: Technology Entertainment Design

An annual conference held in Monterey, California and recently, semi-annually in other cities around the world. TED describes itself as a “group of remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of incalculable value”. Its lectures cover a broad set of topics including science, arts, politics, global issues, architecture, music and more. The speakers themselves are from a wide variety of communities and disciplines and have included such people as former US president Bill Clinton, Nobel laureate James D. Watson, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The list goes on, but even more noteworthy is the TED Prize, introduced in 2005. Every year, TED awards three individuals $100,000 and grants them “a wish to change the world”. Past winners include Larry Brilliant (with a name like that…), E.O. Wilson, and Bill Clinton.

This year’s winners?

Neil Turok - Cosmologist and education activist
Dave Eggers - Author, philanthropist and literary entrepreneur
Karen Armstrong - Authority on comparative religions

It is great to see the organization so strongly focusing on education this year. Turok and Eggers have both done great work in Africa, and Eggers also has wonderful educational philanthropy throughout the United States (love or hate his books, it is hard to discredit his compassion and influence). Armstrong is a former nun turned “freelance monotheist” who has done much to educate others on the expansive spiritual similarities between Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even Buddhism.

Further tastes of TED:

Mathemagics - In a lively performance, “mathemagician” Arthur Benjamin races a team of calculators to figure out 3-digit squares in his head, performs a massive mental calculation, and guesses a few birth days. How does he do it? He’ll be happy to tell you.

Beauty and truth in physics - Wielding laypeople’s terms and a sense of humor, Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann drops some knowledge about particle physics, asking questions like, Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones? Can the fundamental law, the so-called “theory of everything,” really explain everything?

How creativity is being strangled by the law - Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of three stories and an argument. The Net’s most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the “ASCAP cartel” to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you’ve ever seen.

The Encyclopedia of Life has launched.

Now, for those who want some back story:

TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) is a yearly conference held in California, dedicated to bringing together some of the world’s greatest thinkers and doers. Over four days, 50 speakers discuss science, business, the arts, and all the big global issues facing our world. The conference has been selling out a year in advance lately, and is invite-only otherwise, but a collection of past talks is available at the TED site.

Along with the TED conference, the organization introduced the TED Prize two years ago. The prize, $100,000 and a wish to change the world, is given to three winners each year:

Three winners are chosen each year. They could be anyone with worldchanging potential: inventors or entrepreneurs, designers or artists, visionaries or mavericks, story-tellers or persuaders. But they must be people who the judges believe have the ability to inspire others to do something great for the world.

This year, one of the winners was biologist and naturalist E. O. Wilson. His wish? An Encyclopedia of Life.

From Wilson’s acceptance speech at TED2007:

Sadly, our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is even discovered. For example, about 200,000 species of all kinds of organisms are currently known from the United States, and the number could easily exceed 500,000 even without including microorganisms. Only about 15 percent of the known species have been studied well enough to evaluate their status. Of the 15 percent evaluated, 20 percent are classified as imperiled to some degree.

We are in short flying blind into our environmental future. We urgently need to change this, We need to have the biosphere properly explored so that we can understand and competently manage it. This should be a Big Science project, equivalent toe the Human Genome project. It should be thought of as a biological moonshot with a timetable. So this brings me to my wish for TEDsters and to anyone else around the world who hears this talk. I wish that we will work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life. The Encyclopedia of Life. What is it? It is an encyclopedia that lives on the Internet and is contributed to by thousands of scientists around the world. It has an indefinitely expandable page for each species. It makes the key information about life on earth accessible to all on demand.

This is not the first attempt at such an endeavor (see: Wikispecies, Catalogue of Life), but it absolutely the one with the best potential to succeed. It has the most presence, especially within the scientific and intellectual community, and has started to get funding. Furthermore, it has plans to be amazingly comprehensive (or encyclopedic, if you will), with the ability to show as much or as little information necessary for the intended audience (from novice to expert). Looking for simple information? Visit the polar bear page. Want something more technical? Visit the ursus maritimus page. (See the demonstration pages for what I mean.) The encyclopedia’s ability to be not only be an expansive resource for scientists, but also accessible to the public, will be the source of its success and power.

Supplemental to Wilson’s TED speech is a page on the EOL site that gives a more in depth discussion of the encylopedia’s necessity and benefit:

At the end of the day and at a deeper level, the all-species encyclopedia will transform the very nature of biology. The reason is that biology is primarily a descriptive science. Although it depends upon a solid base of physics and chemistry for its functional explanations, and upon the theory of natural selection for its evolutionary explanations, it is defined uniquely by the particularity of its elements. Each species is a small universe in itself, from its genetic code to its anatomy, behavior, life cycle, and environmental role, a self-perpetuating system created during an almost unimaginably complicated evolutionary history. Each species merits careers of scientific study and celebration by historians and poets. Nothing of the kind can be said (at the risk of stating the obvious) for each proton or inorganic molecule.

Taxonomy, the scientific study and practice of classification, is foundational to the all-species encyclopedia. However, it is still one of the most underfunded and weakly developed biological disciplines. Worldwide as few as 6000 biologists work within it. Most people are surprised to learn that most of biodiversity is still entirely unknown. They assume that taxonomy all but wound down generations ago, so that today each new species discovered is a newsworthy event. The truth is that we do not know how many species of organisms exist on Earth even to the nearest order of magnitude. Those formally diagnosed and given Latinized scientific names are thought to number somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8 million, with no exact accounting having yet been made from the taxonomic literature. Estimates of the full number, known plus unknown, vacillate wildly according to method. As summarized in the Global Biodiversity Assessment (1995), they range from an improbable 3.6 million at the low end to an equally improbable 100 million or more at the high end. The commonest order-of-magnitude guess is ten million.

As fascinating as all of this is, I could go on quoting forever, but if you’ve managed to stay with me this long, just visit the site.