Airborne Losing Altitude

Airborne, the miracle cure to the common cold, has just lost a class action lawsuit by customers for deceptive advertising, with $23 million in damages. Aw, what a shame.

Thank you to the more than 100 readers who sent me an email alerting me to the news. Many asked if I had something to do with the lawsuit. Not directly, but I'm guessing that the plaintiffs submitted into evidence the Scientific American column featuring my blog post on Airborne's deceptive marketing.

And now that there's a scandal to report, suddenly people are paying attention to the experts. "Have you heard?" "It's all over the news." "Omigod! I can't believe it!" "It's true, I saw it on E!" The very pop science that elevated Airborne to a billion dollar company is now sending this rocket crashing back to earth. Here's what a popular Hollywood news site reports:

Airborne is shit!!!! The company has just settled a class action lawsuit for $23 million!!!!

"There's no credible evidence that what's in Airborne can prevent colds or protect you from a germy environment," David Schardt, a nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said in a written statement this week. "Airborne is basically an overpriced, run-of-the-mill vitamin pill that's been cleverly, but deceptively, marketed."

We feel lied to!!!!!

Over the last two years I have received endless emails and blog comments (most of which, I confess, I "moderated" away) maligning the FDA as corrupt for refusing to approve "non-Western" medicine. Now that they can spin conspiracy theories around a new villain (a certain second grade school teacher's billion dollar corporation), perhaps they will acknowledge that the FDA has good reason not to approve scammy, new age, bullshit medical claims.

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TED Saturday: Thank You For Being Here

This is my final post on TED 2008. If you've made it this far, thank you for being here.

Oxford economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, offered some clear advice on how to help developing nations transform natural resources into long-lasting social benefits. Obviously some nations have squandered their windfalls of oil, diamonds, copper, etc. while others have managed to leverage their advantages into broad, robust economies. The distinguishing factor is, according to Collier, the establishment of checks and balances in the nation's systems of governance. Populations will rise to the occasion if given the chance, as happened in Nigeria when a freed press led to skyrocketing newspaper sales. This advice is timely for Uganda, which just discovered oil, and Angola, which now sells about $50 billion a year of oil.

Collier's prescription is to establish a global agency that monitors and rates nations for best practices, in the same way, I guess, that Institutional Shareholder Services rates corporations for their governance practices. One example of a best practice is to sell national resources (oil rights, mining rights, frequency spectrum, etc.) through verified auctions rather than secret deals cut by the finance minister.

Vice-President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore was next. In a sure sign that he is NOT running for president, he blew a kiss to the flamboyant and flirtatious Tom Reilly. Gore's message was all about the need for civic activism. "I'm a big advocate of changing the light bulbs, but it's more important to change the laws." (I suppose this message justifies Gore's regular use of private jets.)

As we have come to expect, Big Al had some compelling slides with him:

• half the polar ice cap has melted in the past 25 years, and the rate of loss is increasing. Last year the ice caps lost an area the size of the eastern U.S.

• 68% of Americans believe that human activity causes significant global warming, and yet they rank global warming near the bottom of the 20 most important political issues.

• In the last year, the reporters from CNN, NBC, ABC, FOX and CBS were each televised asking the presidential candidates 956, 844, 601, 481, and 319 questions, respectively. For each network, no more than two of those questions related to global warming.

• Now that Australia has ratified Kyoto (responding to severe droughts), the US stands alone in opposition to the global treaty.

Al's final call was to put a price on carbon consumption. No brainer.

Chris Anderson: "Does it hurt that you're not in a political position to effect this yourself?"

Al: "You have no idea."


Jonathan Haidt, who claims an expertise in happiness and morality, spoke of conservatism and liberalism as the yin and yang. He cautioned us not to get too worked up in our opposition to the other side. What a wimp. Skip this talk.


Saturday's best speaker is a banjo player, watercolor artist, founder of www.planetwalk.org, and writer of Coast Guard oil spill regulations...

One day, at the age of 27, John Francis decided to take a break from talking. He was surprised at how much he learned that day. He decided not talk another day. And another... (This continued for 17 years). In 1971, the day two oil tankers collided and spilled half a million gallons into the San Francisco Bay, John Francis resolved to stop driving and riding in motor vehicles.

So he quietly walked to Ashland, Oregon and registered to study for a 2-year environmental degree. When he graduated, Dad said "You're gong to have to talk and ride in cars now." But instead he walked to another school in Montana. He had no money to register, so the Dean himself paid the $150 needed for one credit, and told John he could take the remaining courses and have the grades escrowed until he can pay for them. John got his master's degree there, and even taught a class by gesticulating and writing on the board.

John walked to Wisconsin where he got a PhD and wrote a lot about oil spills. When the Exxon Valdes spilled its charge, John's expertise was needed so he walked to the east coast. Later, when he worked for the UN, he sailed to Venezuela and walked the countryside to visit the prison town El Dorado. You can get a feel for John's unique story in this video.

In 1990, on the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day, he resumed talking, to a crowd gathered in Washington, DC. Here's what he said to them: "Thank you for being here."

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TED Friday Afternoon: Shining Eyes

Friday afternoon at TED2008 culminated in TED's shining moment...

Jim Macgraff, founder of Livescribe, demonstrated the $149 pen-based computer that his startup will soon launch. Me want! It remembers what you write, along with the concurrent audio. A small, embedded LED display can be used for applications like real time language translation while you write.

Next we heard from author (and former arbitrage trader) Nassim Taleb. Nassim wrote Fooled by Randomness and the Black Swan (thank you, Chini, for first introducing me to both those books), each of which explains a common cognitive pitfall in human reasoning. In this talk Taleb discussed Black Swan, a metaphor for the statistical outliers that invariably arise. The point of his book is that some outliers are safe to ignore--a hurricane that disrupts a store's weekend sales, for example, is a one-time event that doesn't threaten a business. But other outliers are too important to ignore--such as the hurricane that actually destroys the store. Too many people congratulate themselves for success, up until the inevitable point that inherent risk catches up with them.

Taleb reminded me of another book which, I think, better portrays the hubris that grips successful risk-takers--When Genius Failed, Roger Lowenstein's true story of Long Term Capital's demise. Eight years ago, at the peak of The Bubble, my partner (and Harvard professor) Felda Hardymon sent this book to me and our other partners at Bessemer as a cautionary tale.

Chris Anderson (no relation to the TED curator) came next, sharing his enthusiasm for building cheap Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. His first attempt was a LEGO Mindstorm drone, assembled for $1,000. His second attempt, at a $500 cost, was a model airplane with a cellphone attached that supplied all the electronics for processing, communications and imagery. His latest attempt is a mini-blimp that comes in at a $100 cost.

Professional Optimist Peter Schwartz, who wrote The Long Boom, asserted the contrarian position that in the coming century the world will become a better, safer place to live. The crux of his (un-compelling) argument is that things have to get better this century because there are no world wars brewing, billions of poor Asians are joining the middle class, and the economy should steadily grow as it has over the last century.

Ironically, the very next speaker took the stage to caution us that if we don't aggressively divert our scientific resources toward staving off neurological diseases, that they will reach dangerous, epidemic proportions over the next fifty years (primarily due to longer life spans). In the meantime, while we develop treatments, he advised us to consume caffeine (staves off Parkinson's) and fish (prevents Alzheimer's). He also cautioned us to maintain low blood pressure and to exercise our minds.

Larry Byrnes of General Motors gave a presentation on The Boss, a driverless car that won last year's DARPA challenge. To win, the GM Boss had to navigate to a destination through several miles of real urban streets, complete with complex intersections. One day, cars will not need drivers so we can finally write Blackberry emails without getting so distracted by the road. And oh yeah--no more accidents either.

Former Time Editor Walter Isaacson presented on the future of Narration in the digital age. I recommend you skip this one.

Harvard public health scientist gave a talk on the rise of STD viruses and the measures we can take to curtail them. I'd skip this one, too.

Helen Fisher's book Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love must be good because Richard Dawkins endorsed it. Fisher reports the clinical results of brain scans that show similar pathways among those who are in love as those who have just recently been dumped. The conclusion is that the "love chemicals" remain activated for some time after terminating a relationship--in fact they can even strengthen amidst unrequited love.

Other points of interest:

• the brain regions activated during thoughts of love are the same regions activated during the contemplation of highly risky behavior;
• a broken heart manifests the same physical symptoms as any other physical addiction; and
• all animals in the wild (not in captivity) are discriminating in their choice of mate (except perhaps those slutty, cheating crows).

X Prize founder Peter Diamandis, who took me on a zero-gravity flight last year, shared a slide show of his Zero-G flight with Stephen Hawking.

Author, poet and dissident Chris Abani was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured by Nigerian authorities. Some of his childhood tales are too awful to repeat. According to Abani, the Nigerian word for rape and marriage are the same word. Abani also told some wonderful stories about simple acts of kindness.

The last session of the day was the best of TED2008. Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, resolved to make every last TED attendee love classical music. He deconstructed a Chopin piece, playing it on the piano as a 7, 8, 9 and 10 year old would, so that we could appreciate the increasing nuance of play. Zander exudes enormous energy and charisma, reminiscent of Roberto Benigni in Life is Beautiful. As a conductor he assumes the responsibility of energizing his musicians, inspiring them to feel the music. He know he is getting their best only when he sees their shining eyes. Success in life, he shared, "is not about wealth and fame and power. It's about how many shining eyes I have around me."

Quickly he warmed up the audience, and handed out lyrics so that soon enough every single person stood up and belted out Ode to Joy in the original German! Everyone loved it--we cheered and danced around as if at a rock concert. There were shining eyes everywhere.

If you watch no other TED session, watch Ben Zander, preferably on a big screen with big-ass speakers. It's the only session that TED Curator Chris Andersen dared not cut off at the 18 minute mark.

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TED Friday Morning: Music, Shrooms and Crows

A work-related call kept me from Friday's first TED session, which I had thought was author Amy Tan. Unfortunately the speaker I missed was actually John Knoll, co-inventor of Photoshop and ILM's visual effects wizard behind several Star Wars and Pirates of the Carribean films. Everyone loved it. Damn! I'll have to watch the DVD.

Designer Yves Behard promoted the integration of product architecture, design and marketing. Regarding his jawbone bluetooth earpiece: "If it isn't beautiful it doesn't belong on your face." (Then how do you explain my nose?) Yves also co-designed the $100 Laptop, a climate-resistant, wireless, multimedia , brightly colored laptop-on-a-string. Yves talked about his packaging of the NYC Condom (tagline: "Get Some"), as well as Y water, a healthy kids' drink packaged in a creative toy.

Robert Lang is a mathematician and origami artist. This was a fascinating talk--a definite highlight of the day. Origami was once a cute little art, but in the last century it has been changed qualitatively by mathematicians like Lang.

Lang showed how the development of a formal language for describing the folds of a paper and Euclidean-like rules have created a rich platform for people to build creations upon creations, "putting dead people to work for you." The four simple rules yield valid origami (the specific rules went by too fast for me, but they have to do with the size of folds, the intersections of lines, the ability to maintain a 2-color map, and the sums of the various angles). With this basis in place, complexity emerged from the system in beautiful, incredible ways (photos show three sculptures, each folded from a single sheet of paper). Lang has even developed a CAD tool that renders any two dimensional stick figure drawing into a single sheet origami, making complex structure easy and limitless.

The punch line is that the mathematics developed for origami has in fact turned out to apply to medicine, electronics, and space exploration. Origami was used to design an air bag, as well as a heart stent that travels unfolded through the arteries and then unfolds at the point of blockage. Lang also shared schematics--and photos of prototypes--of a 100 meter diameter lens for Lawrence Livermore that can be deployed in space by unfolding it from within the delivery satellite. (The lens is designed to point both outward and inward!) Meanwhile, Japan has already launched a satellite with an origami solar sail.

I then got to hear novelist Amy Tan after all. I wasn't expecting much, but somehow she still disappointed. As far as I can tell, the entire point of her talk was "How did I come to be such a creative genius?" The possibilities seem to include "God's will, synchrony, or mysterious forces." And finally her Big Question: "Did someone intend for me to be this way?" My big question: Who Has Time For This?

The next talk was another highlight of the day, in a very surprising way. MIT Media Lab's Tod Machover, inventor of Guitar Hero, demonstrated new technologies for musical expression, such as toys that are also instruments, and a simple composing software tool called Hyperscore that anyone can use without knowing musical notation. Tod talked about the health benefits of music (though oddly, he seems to have missed the news that the Mozart effect was a scam), and about his team's contribution of time and technology to Tewksbury Hospital, where disabled patients have learned to compose and perform music using Hyperscore.

And then it got really interesting. Tewksbury patient Dan Ellsey, a quadraplegic, was wheeled onto stage. Dan is paralyzed below the neck and cannot speak. But Dan can communicate in the same way Hawking does, and he uses his mouth movements to control Hyperscore. With only one exception, Dan had never before left Massachusetts, but TED sponsor Bombardier Flexjet flew him across the country to perform a symphony at TED that he had composed using Hyperscore. Dan was beaming, bobbing his head back and forth with excitement. Using facial movements, he proceeded to engage the software in a laptop set before him, which somehow allows the user to act as the conductor of the score. Dan's symphony was interesting, coherent, even stirring. and when he finished, he smiled and literally moaned for joy as the crowd leapt to their feet in a long round of applause. Dan's euphoria was contagious.

Physicist Brian Cox delivered yet another talk about the elementary particles that physicists hope to find in the Hydron supercollider.

We then got a fascinating video tour of the ocean depths from geophysicist Robert Ballard, who delivered a provocative talk on our society's negligence of oceanic exploration. According to Ballard, 72% of the planet and 50% of US-owned territory is underwater, and yet we have better maps of Mars than our ocean floors. 99% of the planet's volcanoes, rich in minerals, are underwater. The Great Rift Valley mountain range covers 23% of the planet's surface area, and yet we explored the moon before we got there.

Ballard's video tour of the places he has explored (before anyone else in the world) include geothermal geysers, giant clams that host chemo-synthetic bacteria (because there's no light to support photosynthetic plants), methane volcanoes, and the remains of the Titanic, the Bismarck, and a shipwreck from 750 BC.

So, Ballard asks, why aren't we responding to the threat of rising oceans and dwindling land masses by preparing to build and colonize sea-based platforms? It's far more feasible and affordable than space colonization. Perhaps because NASA's budget is 1,600 times the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Next, a South American entrepreneur described a mind-opening exhibition he has developed in which blind people usher non-blind people through completely dark exhibits, reversing the advantage.

Paul Stamets has got to be the world's leading Mycologist (mushroom expert). Convinced that mushrooms hold the key to solving our biggest environmental challenges, Stemats cultivates various fungi that naturally kill pests, that pull CO2 from the atmosphere, that transform rocky landscapes into fertile ones, and that repair damage from toxic waste.

Little known mushroom facts: the largest living organism known to exist in the universe is a 2,200 acre field of mycellium fungus in Oregon. Mycellium fungus was the first organism on earth to migrate to land, where it paved the way for others by breaking down the rocks. It's now the fibrous binding agent in soil, and so, living underground away from light, it harvests radiation as its energy source. This means that if we ever do find alien life, it is more likely to resemble mycellium than human beings. And if we don't, we can export mycellium to other planets which could, according to Stamets, terraform them for human life.

Next came Joshua Klein, the "Crow Guy". Like rats and cockroaches, crows have evolved to live near people--it's extremely rare for crows to mate more than 5 miles from human settlement. They're also smarter than they look. We watched a film of one laboratory crow who hungered for food at the bottom of a vial, so the bird wrapped the end of a stick around the vial, and then used the curved portion to hook the food. (This was a new behavior that the bird, and the scientists, had never seen before.) Crows will remember the faces of the scientists who captured them, even for a day, and then incessantly caw at them years later on campus. (Now Joshua wears a mask.) Adulterous female crows will emit a false distress call so that when her mate flies off, she can have a secret rendezvous. We saw crows trained to find coins outside in the dirt, and insert them into a peanut vending machine. But here's the smartest behavior of all, which you can see for yourself in the video on the right: There is a Japanese city in which the crows have learned a way to crack nuts--they drop the nuts into a busy pedestrian crosswalk, the cars break the nuts open, and then the crows wait on the curb for the red light so they can safely walk into the street to collect the booty.

The next speaker, Hot Zone author Richard Preston, loves Redwoods so much that he and his family sometimes sleep at the tops of the trees, suspended in hammocks. Redwoods can grow 38 stories high, and live thousands of years. They are the tallest organisms in the world. Unfortunately, 96% of California's Redwoods have been clear cut in the past 30 years.

Bottom line: All good talks (except Amy Tan). The highlights were Robert Lang, Tod Machover, and, allegedly, John Knoll.

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Helpful Tips To Survive a Nuclear Explosion

Will Evil Prevail? described the next set of sessions, Thursday afternoon at TED.

Dr. Irwin Redlener, public health specialist and author of Americans at Risk, is a pioneer in the field of disaster medicine--the medical care needed after natural and man-made catastrophes. Redlener's talk focused on our lack of readiness for the likely day when terrorists attack our cities with nuclear weapons.

Is such an attack likely? Consider that: (i) The International Atomic Energy Agency has reported 18 instances of stolen plutonium or highly enriched uranium from the former Soviet Union. Only 13 pounds of plutonium or 25 pounds of highly enriched uranium is needed to build a bomb equivalent to the ones that destroyed Hiroshima. (ii) The schematics of nuclear bombs are readily available online. (iii) Organized but stateless terrorist organizations are retaliation-proof. And (iv) Russia cannot account for 84 of their 132 suitcase bombs.

To prepare for what would be a much more devastating nuclear attack during the Cold War, the US employed delusional defenses--Bert the Turtle told school kids to Duck and Cover! And FEMA prepared an urban evacuation plan that unfortunately required 4 days notice of a missile launch.

A terrorist attack would be far less damaging, but it's also far more likely to happen and there isn't a single US city prepared to respond because, Redlener speculates, city workers are still thinking about Cold War-style attacks in which the outcome was too devastating to even ponder. His job is to change that, but in the meantime he offered these Helpful Tips To Survive a Small Nuclear Explosion for anyone not vaporized:

• Avert your eyes from the blast
• Keep your mouth open (lest your eardrums pop)
• To avoid the fallout cloud, you have 10 to 20 minutes to walk at least a mile away from the blast, preferably heading cross wind and keeping your face covered.
• If you cannot reach that distance in time, seek shelter in either a basement or the upper stories (at least the 10th floor) of a building.

Next we heard from Phil Zimbardo, the social psychologist who conducted the famous Stanford Prison Experiment in which college students displayed a 90% disposition to exact torture others when instructed by an authority. In his book The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo describes the short list of factors needed to turn most any nice person into an Abu Ghraib Prison Guard. Zimbardo also discussed his current work on the factors needed to turn someone into a hero who defies risk in adverse situations to help others. His examples of everyday heroes included the Abu Ghraib whistle blower, and the grad student who forced Zimbardo to terminate the Stanford Prison Experiment--a heroine whom Zimbardo later married.

Harvard political scientist Samantha Power, author of A Problem From Hell, raised our consciousness of Rwandan genocide, lamenting the apathy among our population and media. Just like it happened in 1941, the first American reports of widespread genocide in Rwanda were indeed covered by The New York Times, but not on the front page. Power's congressional representative reported that her office received hundreds of calls from constituents worried about the Rwandan apes, but none who mentioned the people.

The remainder of the day was dedicated to the TED Prize. The three winners were:

1. Dave Eggers, author of several non-conventional books, the best of which is (in my humble opinion, but apparently not his)  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. TED recognized Eggers for his campaign to build several inner city tutoring centers staffed by writers. The first one, named 826 Valencia in Dave's hometown of San Francisco, was sited in a storefront that had to sell something due to the neighborhood's zoning laws. So Dave and his friends sold Pirate Supplies (peg legs, planks, etc.), which, surprisingly, paid the rent. In the same spirit, their storefront operations in other cities sold  things too, such as Brooklyn SuperHero Supply (capes, secret identities, manuals...) and The Time Travel Store ("Whenever You Are, You're Already Then"). Since each prize winner also gets a wish, Dave's wish was to recruit 1,000 people to personally help their local public school in some meaningful way.

2. Neil Turok, particle physicist and co-author of Endless Universe, has advocated a theory that ascribes the Big Bang to a collision of two universes. TED recognized him for his founding a math and sciences university in Africa, where Neil grew up. Neil's wish was that the next Eisntein would hail from Africa, and enlisted TED's help to increase his university's enrollment across all the nations of that continent.

3. Karen Armstrong is listed as a "religious thinker." Hmmm. No doctorates, no helping kids. TED seems to be recognizing her with a $100,000 prize because she's a former nun turned TV exec (after she was fired from English teaching post), and she likes to write about religion. I'm not making this up. "Religion isn't about believing things," she said. "It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness." (What does that even mean? I think I need to suck on a Holymeter, or test my blood for Sacredness to see if I've got intimations.) Karen hailed the Golden Rule as the basis of the three Abarahamic religions, and directed us not to think about all the other commandments and rules, or all those beliefs, none of which have ever really been very important to religion. (Again, I'm not making this up.) Her wish was to enlist some Jewish, Muslim and Christian clergy in signing a document that calls for Compassion. (NOT making this up.)

What a letdown after an otherwise thrilling day at TED. Appropriately, the day closed with some stirring music by Vusi Mahlasela. You think you got
the blues? This veteran of Ladysmith Black Mambazo sings ballads about his war-torn African childhood that would make Dick
Cheney cry.

Bottom line: Redlener and Eggers were the highlights.

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