Who Has Time For This?

Ken Robinson on Passion and Creativity

2011-11-09T22:33:00.001-08:00

Tonight Sir Ken Robinson addressed a crowd of over 1,000 parents that spilled out into the parking lots surrounding the auditorium at Sacred Heart in Atherton. In a performance that topped even his 10-balloon TED Talk, he delivered a lecture with equal parts inspiration and humor.

I was bummed that "Sir" Ken showed up with no sword and without any armor AT ALL. But he does wield a mighty pen that has inked two books on the importance of helping kids find their passions (The Element) and of adapting our educational system to prize creativity over conformity (Out of our Minds: Learning to be Creative).

Here's the basic arc of his message: most people are miserable in their jobs, drudging through work in anticipation of the weekend. Only those of us who have found our passions love to work. Everyone has talents and interests to ignite, but usually schools have pushed them aside in favor of standardized academic curricula and tests. At a time when our economy has moved beyond factory jobs, we need creative, entrepreneurial citizens. That all happens only in personalized programs, where kids are encouraged to follow dreams. As Steve Jobs liked to say, people change the world by following their dreams, not a standard formula for success.

Sir Ken cited many examples, like Paul McCartney and George Harrison, who went to school together and loved music but didn't enjoy music class. Their music teacher never thought they had potential as musicians. "He had half the Beatles in his class and missed it. That was a bit of an oversight, if you don't mind my saying."

Here are some snippets from the talk:

"It's a mistake to confuse standardizing with raising standards."

"I asked the girl what she got out of her dancing class. 'I got a B' she answered."

"We should be teaching students, not subjects... Schools are more like organisms than mechanisms. Teaching ismore like gardening than engineering."

"We cannot predict what will happen, where people will go andhow they will develop. We have to let them find their way, and encourage themto trust that they can follow their passions. If we do this we may not be able to predict the future, butwe will create a future that we all want to live in."

In the audience I saw nearly every school principal in town nodding along with Sir Ken's talk, as though they already follow his advice in their schools! I know some who do, but if they all did, then where's the problem?

Meanwhile, Ken sets an example of great teaching by keeping his audience in stitches. For example:

"I was shocked to hear that my TED Talk was downloaded 10 million times. But then I learned that two cats jumpingaround on YouTube was downloaded 50 million times."

“I started my dissertation in the 70;s and finished it in the 80’ s largely because of what happened in the 70’s. it was a great decade, or so I’m told.”

"I’m now working on the sequel to The Element, called Findingyour Element. People keep asking me how to find it. Now I wish I had never startedthis whole thing. How do I know? YOU find it, leave me alone. No, seriouslyit’s coming out next year and it’s going to be terrific."

Dinner with Mork

2011-11-07T11:48:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the invitation of an old friend, two weeks ago I had the great pleasure of a 2 hour dinner with Robin Williams, who IMHO ranks among the greatest comedic actors of my lifetime, alongside Richard Pryor, Woody Allen, Steve Martin, Bill Murray and Gene Wilder.

I think I expected to meet someone much more frenetic and, frankly, obnoxious. But Williams is gracious, and listens sincerely to the people around him. He came with his gorgeous fiancé Susan whom he married last week.

Williams shared some stories about his career, starting with his high school years studying drama at Juilliard. His big screen break was a cameo on Happy Days as Mork the alien, which later spun off. Perhaps his best known and appreciated film is Good Morning Vietnam.

As I enjoyed the Cornish Hen at Jardiniere, we talked about some of his films, like my favorite Dead Poets Society, where he learned from the director that listening can be as expressive as speaking. (My wife has told me the same thing.) It surprised me that Williams cited the creepy One Hour Photo as one of his favorites. He told us a lot about making Awakenings, including the challenge of acting alongside actual mental patients. We also talked about Cadillac Man, The World According to Garp, and Mrs. Doubtfire, which my kids were back home watching at the time.

I learned that Williams has gone to Afghanistan three times to perform for the troops, and heard about many other international trips to raise money for charity. He's an active advocate of gay rights, and an atheist, though he was reluctant to say so (there are some things so shocking that even Robin Williams won't say them).

Often Williams broke into character, spinning up hysterical and poignant characters in the middle of conversation. "I'm so hairy," he improvised, " Coco the Gorilla tried to take me out back. She actually signed, Let's you and me go back and get busy."

On Pseudonyms: Transparency and Free Expression are Not Mutually Exclusive

2011-09-06T10:40:00.000-07:00

I originally wrote this as a guest post for TechCrunch, but based on some good comments, I have modified the proposal. So here is my improved version of that post...

The debate on pseudonyms persists today in the NY Times, as Google continues to eject pseudonymous accounts from Google Plus. Google crafted its Common Names Policy in order to promote trust and transparency, hoping to mitigate spam and flame wars. But the backlash has been strong from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (in this eloquent statement) and others as they advocate for those who need pseudonyms to express themselves without fear of being ostracized, fired, arrested or physically targeted.

Google has promised to review its policy and develop new ways of addressing these concerns. Until then, Google Plus remains irrelevant not only to Arab Spring revolutionaries but to anyone whose life is not completely an open book. Google's policy stifles gay teens, victims of workplace harassment, medical patients seeking information and compassion, and any others who challenge the politics or religion around them.

However, the debate need not dwell on the relative importances of transparency and free expression. We must have both, and I believe we can. If Google seizes the opportunity to get this right, it will further distinguish Google Plus from Facebook as the safe, intelligent platform for sharing.

So Brad and Vic, if you're listening, please consider that you can enable free and transparent expression on the Internet by establishing Google as the source of authenticity for all profile names. I shouldn't pretend that I have thought through all the product ramifications, but roughly speaking here's what I would suggest you do...

Classify each profile name as either: Private for self-proclaimed pseudonyms; Unverified, for new profiles with allegedly "real" names; People Verified for those profiles that reach a certain degree of social activity without any indications of fraud or other reputational issues; Bank Verified for those profiles linked to an active credit card in that same name; and Google Verified for those "celebrity" profiles for whom Google vouches through their manual authentication procedures, as Twitter does.

Once Google does that, I can decide how to interact with Google Plus profiles of varying verification. Furthermore, if you allowed other web sites to also discriminate based on type of profile name, I expect that "Google Verified" would quickly leapfrog Facebook Connect and Twitter 0Auth as the preferred Login replacement.

For example, any community that reaches out to the disenfranchised can be liberal in their policy of expression, while others can exclude, or at least moderate, content from Private and Unverified users. Any statement or request from a Private profile can be considered in light of the person's anonymity. Commercial standards would develop around escalated levels of authentication; for example, commerce sites and banks might accept only Bank Verified logins.

Having cracked the code on how to share intelligently among my different Circles, Google Plus is the perfect platform for bridging transparency and free expression. Let me craft a different profile for each Circle, so I can use my Bank Verified profile at work, and my Private profile as I publicly criticize scary fundamentalists.

There is nothing dishonest about a pseudonym, so long as it's presented as one. Rather than fight anonymity, Google should simply help us recognize it - not only on Google Plus, but across the web.

EarlyBird Hatches the Term "European Comeback"

2011-09-05T11:12:00.000-07:00

The following was originally published as a guest post for TechCrunch.

I just couldn’t keep my big Tweeter shut. When I publicly dismissed the soundness of his widely hailed report on European VC, Jason Whitmire of Earlybird Venture Capital challenged me to openly discuss the facts in a dialogue exceeding 140 characters. So I guess I owe him a response.

Based on the work of their summer intern,Jason and his partner Hendrik Brandis have published a “report” (actually, aslide deck) on Earlybird’s web site exposing a scandalous cover-up: the EuropeanVC asset class is actually on fire, far outpacing VC returns in the US. And lest you think I exaggerate theconspiratorial, us-versus-them tone of their presentation, the headline onslide 28 reads:

Reprehensible

...that you areonly now reading about the Comeback, but then again: Visibility on European VCFunds for investors is highly limited and prejudiced…

Now unlike Earlybird, my firm Bessemer Venture Partners has no agenda here. We’re a global, $3 billion VC that investsmost of our capital outside the US – anywhere we find great opportunities forstartups. Indeed, we have found itcompelling to fund several European startups – Skype, Criteo, Intego, AxisNetwork, Intego, several others – and hope to find many more. To inform our geographic allocation ofcapital, we constantly seek and compile sound data; so I was naturallyintrigued to read Earlybird’s report, and just as disappointed to find insteada glossy brochure.

To be clear, I’m not saying that the authors are wrong aboutEurope’s fertility for venture investment. I’m just saying that I can’t possiblydraw a conclusion from this presentation, which has clearly been crafted topitch a message, rather than discover one through critical analysis.

The reports presents data on slides 3 through 7 to back upthe claim that European VCs outperform US VC’s. The authors latch on to a few allegedly favorable metrics, such as themultiple returned on exits over $100m, the growing number of European exits, andthe ratio of distributions to new commitments in venture capital.

But like an investment bank crafting the competitive slideof its pitch deck, they limit the data to a narrow slice of history –specifically 2009 and 2010, the aftermath of the catastrophic, US-centeredfinancial crisis. During this time, US IPO markets seized up. (I’d bet thatcontrarily in 2011 the data will not reflect favorably on Europe’s financialmarkets.) Measuring venture capital returns requires a longer period ofassessment than two years – every VC cycle is characterized by long periods ofinvestment punctuated by bursts of liquidity. The US finds itself on the cuspof such a burst, with monster IPOs coming (Facebook, Zynga, GroupOn…) that willeclipse their Continental counterparts. The $15 billion of European capitalgains touted in this report - as well asthe $30b of US gains – will be relatively immaterial as LP’s in 2013 reviewtheir managers’ performance over periods of time consistent with the life of aVC fund.

Indeed, home run outcomes play a critical role in venturereturns. And yet Earlybird reports the median exit multiples to compareperformance. The median outcome of any venture portfolio is irrelevant – whatmatters is the capital-weighted arithmetic mean, driven invariably by a handfulof winners.

The report even goes so far as to celebrate Europe’s lowerhome-run stats:

”Germany has a unique model where, in a different twist to the hugelysuccessful VC-funded start-up ecosystem of Silicon Valley, the industry is notas much reliant on a handful of blockbusters or even a closely networkedstartup environment, but rather one where a high number of regionallydiversified quality opportunities correspond to increasing levels ofentrepreneurial activity.”

I’m not sure what the last part means, but the spin onSilicon Valley suggests that outcomes like Google and Facebook create some kindof unhealthy dependency, as though no one else can thrive. (Tell that to Redpoint.)It reminds me of the Airborne tagline “Created by a Second Grade Schoolteacher!” that turned lemons into lemonade.

Other problems with the numbers presented in this report:

Incomplete data – the authors have noperformance data on 85% of Europe’s VC industry.

The report talks only of multiples without anymention anywhere of IRR. If the US exits (which included more internetcompanies) grew faster, a lower multiple may have easily yielded a higher IRR.

Other comparisons in the report between Europeand the US are even less relevant, such as the post-IPO performance ofventure-backed companies.

Several slides in the report (e.g. 38) imply orexplicitly assert that Europe’s metrics outperform others without showing anynon-European data. Slide 12 claims that “Europetoday has the largest inequilibrium of venture capital availability on the planet,” without any comparativedata at all. Slides 20 and 21 also lackany data on the US venture industry, as if US-based VCs haven’t also seenincreased deal flow in the last two years.

The presentation also makes bold generalizationsthat better fit an infomercial than an analytical study:

“Forget the charts!”

“What has emerged from the post-bubblestruggle for existence is nothing less than some of the strongest VentureCapital firms in the world.”

“Just one example: German Venture Capital…” (exceptthat Germany is not just one example – it’s by far Europe’s best performingcountry)

"Inaddition to highly misleading published historical industry data for EuropeanVC which lead to a negative bias in official statistics, there is almost noreported performance of post-bubble vintages (which effectively started only2004/2005) – these funds are significantly better performing and, as evidencedby recent exits across top- tier funds, are now at the inflection point”

That last statement, from slide 30, actually accompanies a chart showingalmost no liquidity for European funds since 2005. As far as I can tell, thereport offers this as proof that based on some anecdotal exits, Europe’s fundsare doing much better than what THEY are telling us.

Well if there is a conspiracy, I’m not a part of it. Iactually share Earlybird’s hopes and intuition that Europe’s entrepreneurs willgenerate attractive VC returns even in these turbulent times for the continent,and I look forward to seeing some compelling data. It’s too bad that Earlybird’s report wasn’tmore balanced, because I’m open to the argument that European startups areunder-funded.

I only hope that when Europe does make its comeback, Jasonwill still invite me to co-invest with Earlybird!

2011-08-22T13:45:00.000-07:00

Here's what comes from sending my kid to summer camp in L.A....

Buying an Electric Car

2011-08-01T14:42:00.000-07:00

This is a reprint of my recent guest post to TechCrunch / Washington Post.

After 3.5 years, I’ve finally re-joined the community of car owners.

Between February 2008 and last week, I was car-less. I borrowed and rented cars, took taxis and Zip cars, and occasionally biked. I also bummed a lot of rides (thank you very much – you know who you are). It had started when the warranty on my fancy German gas guzzler expired; I sold the thing, and never really found the time to shop around for a replacement - Who Has Time For This?

I felt a lot more excited about the prospect of driving an electric sedan, which should be greener, potentially faster, simpler to operate, and cheaper to fuel. Most importantly, I’d never have to kill ten minutes stopping for gas - Who Has Time For This? So I put my name down on the lists for a Tesla Model S, Fisker Karma, Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt, deciding to wait for one to be built. Three years later, I got calls from Fisker, Nissan and Chevy, and it was time to decide.

After examining the options and driving the cars, it was a pretty easy decision to buy the Leaf for these eight reasons:

   1. Compared to the others, the Leaf gets twice the range from a battery charge: 100 miles, or 85 miles with the AC cranking. (Plugging the car in and out adds about 15 seconds a day to your daily routine, or 5 minutes a month - about half the time we spend at gas pumps.)

   2. With a pure electric motor (not a hybrid gasoline engine) the Leaf is nimbler, less fragile, and legal to drive in California’s carpool lanes so I can bypass the Highway 101 traffic jams - WHTFT?

   3. Driving in electric mode (without the help of a hybrid gasoline engine) is wonderfully quiet and smooth (no transmission). Even at 80 miles per hour the acceleration is immediate and impressive.

   4. The Leaf steers as smoothly as a Lexus, and the small wheels turn on a dime.

   5. Only the Leaf has open, comfortable seats with ample head room in front and leg room in back (a must if you have kids)

   6. Only the Leaf carries 5 passengers (a must if you have THREE kids!)

   7. The Leaf has the largest trunk, and the back seats fold down for more cargo space.

   8. The Leaf costs 3/4 as much as the Volt, and 1/3 as much as the Karma. You get at least $7500 in tax credits, offset by the $2,000 expense of a home 220 volt charging station.

These reasons explain why the Nissan Leaf now the outsells the pack. I can think of only three good reasons why you might wish to buy one of the other cars:

1. The Leaf’s pure electric motor is not a problem for two car families – on that rare day once a month when you drive more than 100 miles, you can always take the gas guzzler instead (Honda Odysseys are awesome). But without that fallback, one-car households will find the Volt more practical (albeit expensive and cramped).

2. If you love driving enormous, heavy sports cars that sit low to the ground and you’ve got $100k to burn (like these guys), then you might prefer the gorgeous design of the Karma. It has the look and feel of a luxury muscle car with a growling engine, bucket seats, and beautiful wood/leather interiors. (The Leaf is all plastic.) Having said that, the Karma performs like a sports car at lower speeds but on the highway I found it downright sluggish compared to the Leaf. The Karma handled highway acceleration nearly as well as the Leaf only when in Stealth Mode which means that the gasoline engine is off. (You may be as disappointed as I was to learn that people can still see you in Stealth Mode.)

3. Stephen Colbert will mock you for driving a Leaf.

All three cars come chock full of gizmos we all love (rear view camera, navigation, keyless entry, XM radio, Bluetooth, heated seats…) so there’s no reason to stick with gasoline. The Leaf even comes with a cool iPhone app for remote operation of the charger and climate control.

So I’ve been zipping around in my Leaf for a week now and absolutely loving it. Even after three years, it was worth the wait.

A Logic Puzzle

2011-06-23T08:50:00.000-07:00

My son passed the time today on the Chunnel crafting a logic puzzle. He has graciously offered it to me as blog content...

Alice, Bob, Charlie, Diana and Ed live in 5 one-garage homes on a street, each numbered 1 through 5 (but not necessarily in that order). They drive a Ford, Honda, Nissan, Toyota and Mercedes – also not necessarily in that order. Based on the following clues, who drives which car?

The women drive only Japanese cars.

The Honda is not in Garage 2.

Edward and Alice have adjacent garages.

Even-numbered homes contain only Japanese cars.

Ed and Bob live next door to each other, and Diana’s address is higher than theirs.

Charlie doesn’t like Japanese cars.

The addresses of the Toyota, Ford and Honda are prime numbers.

Alice’s address is more than twice Charlie’s.

The Ford and Nissan belong to next door neighbors.

Having shared logic puzzles before, I know the following disclaimer is necessary: this is a logic puzzle, and not a social or economic statement relating to what women drive or the quality of Japanese cars, so don't bother commenting on off-topic elements. (For the sake of this puzzle, Nissan, Toyota and Honda are the Japanese car manufacturers.)

Enjoy, and try to be the first to submit the right answer!

Update: evan submitted the first right answer. Hemang Gadhia, Boomer, judic and Harit also submitted correct answers before I published any correct answers in the comments section. Don't read the comments if you wish to still solve this yourself.

Father's Day in London

2011-06-19T23:12:00.000-07:00

The view from the London Eye...

From 221B Baker Street...

In the London Dungeon...

Daughter and I sing "Feed the birds" by "the steps of St. Paul"

And she clowns around with Flying Karamazov Brother...

Aspiration

2011-06-19T18:48:00.000-07:00

My daughter thinks she can do ANYTHING.

"I Want to Meet a Partner!"

2011-06-09T18:51:00.000-07:00

This is a "reprint" of a post I originally authored for TechCrunch.

Over the years I’ve heard many legitimate gripes from entrepreneurs about the way venture capital firms treat them while fundraising. I must confess an imperfect record of courtesy myself, though I do try to be respectful, and to incorporate feedback. For example, I once resolved never to keep entrepreneurs waiting long for me in our lobby, and I think I live up to that.

But I often hear one particular gripe from those who simply fail to think through the issue practically: For their first pitch to a large venture capital firm, entrepreneurs are often invited to speak or meet with someone other than a partner of the firm. Some interpret this as an insult, a waste of time, and a lack of substantive interest in their startups. And they are partially right.

They are right that in any first meeting or conversation, the VC is less interested than the entrepreneur. Not zero interest, but less. This is true for every pitch meeting that has ever taken place in history. In the second meeting there is more interest, and by the time a venture investor wires the money, the firm is just as excited as the founders.

They are wrong, though, about the insult. And the numbers prove incontrovertibly that it is not a waste of time.

The experienced partner you want as a lead investor probably has a lot of board seats. He or she spends most of the day at company meetings (board and otherwise), in interviews, and with the limited partners who actually provide the capital. I, for one, always try to reserve time in my week for hearing pitches, but it is scarce, and so if I took every first meeting myself, I’d be much less likely to actually meet the entrepreneur whose startup I wish to fund.

Also, as a seasoned VC I’m a lot dumber now about new markets than 15 years ago when I had fewer obligations. Researching all thewild tangents and nuances of cloud infrastructure, cyber security, social commerce, scalable data processing, etc., is a full time job. Who Has Time For This? Not I, but I can hire people smarter than me who do!

So if you’re an entrepreneur interested in partnering with a smart, successful, well capitalized venture investor, you have many aspects of character, competency and chemistry to consider. Is the audience’s seniority at your first pitch really the most important?

Think it through before you snub a meeting with that associate, analyst, principal or vice-president. That’s who’s most likely to get what you’re doing, and to be your champion through the process. (Indeed, the last five investments I made arose from first meetings that the founders had with James Cham, Trevor Oelschig or Ethan Kurzweil.) Consider it an opportunity to scope out the firm and to polish your pitch before you meet the partners.

And please understand that the intention is most definitely not an insult. Anyone in our orbit knows that many VCs fully appreciate the talent, courage, energy and genius of the entrepreneurs we meet. It is only because we wish to meet more of you that we have the process and organization that we do.

Now I’ve got to get going——the two engineers whom Sunil met on Thursday just showed up in my lobby.

Langner calls US a Cyber Bully. I hope he's right.

2011-05-30T00:24:00.000-07:00

Score: 5 balloons

German security researcher Ralph Langner was the first to decode and publish the inner workings of Stuxnet, a Windows-based computer worm that successfully targeted Iran's nuclear enrichment facility, setting back their nuclear weapons program by three years (according to the public statements of several authoritative sources). Although no one has claimed credit for creating Stuxnet, it has been widely attributed to a collaboration between Israeli and US intelligence agencies.

I had come into his TED Talk with high expectations, but I was disappointed -- not by the science but by Ralph's political commentary. What started as an interesting (though simplified) explanation of a ground-breaking cyber weapon devolved into a naive, self righteous rant against the US that appealed to TED's liberal audience. (I normally share that liberal viewpoint, but I overcame my bias with actual knowledge, having connected with my hacker friends at the last DEFcon, and having just read two well documented books on cyber warfare by Jeff Carr and Richard Clarke.)

Langner's first pot shot was his characterization of the US as the only superpower in cyberspace. Apparently Langner is not familiar with Russia and China's far more developed and extensive cyber militaries, which they supplement with privately contracted cyber gangs. Furthermore, Russian and China have far more experience than the US in waging cyber warfare, as evidenced by repeated, successful, multi-day attacks on the government and civilian electronic infrastructures of South Korea, Chechnya and Georgia during the last decade.

Langner's second, more damning accusation was aimed at the US for unleashing Stuxnet on the world, since it can now be repurposed as a weapon against anyone, including our own computer networks. The implication was that just as we did in 1945, the US is once again developing non-conventional weapons that threaten global stability.

But Stuxnet is not what exposes our digital infrastructure to attack. No, we opened that door long ago when we put the computers in charge. Is Langner -- or anyone -- really so naive as to think that without Stuxnet we wouldn't have to defend our networks from cyber attack?

What really irked me, though, was that at no point did Ralph question the wisdom of sharing all his findings publicly (which certainly aids and abets anyone who might wish to repurpose Stuxnet). Nor did he express any hesitation in reaching out to the Iranians to help them overcome this nasty infection. Was I the only person in the audience who thought, "Wait a minute, shouldn't we be thanking the creators of Stuxnet, instead of the guy who stopped it?"

If ever there was a time when US aggression was called for, this was surely it. Ahmadinejad has stated very clearly that Iran supports Jihad on the United States, and that he fully intends for Iran to destroy "the Zionist State" at his earliest convenience. The dictator of Iran holds the Presidential title despite having lost the election, and having brutally crushed the political dissidents who protested. Now who among you really think that stopping the nuclear ambitions of a raving, rogue, belligerent madman is a poor use of our tax dollars?

International pressure has not worked. Economic sanctions have not worked. Sure, we could have used conventional missiles to disable this dictator's Jihad machine, but that would have killed Iranians, possibly spread radiation, jeopardized the lives of our soldiers, cost hundreds of millions, provoked military reprisals, and it may not have even worked. If indeed our intelligence community helped develop and launch Stuxent, then I for one am grateful.

On the final day of the conference, one TEDster was so fired up by Langner that he got up on stage to denounce the people behind Stuxnet for their evil ways, demanding that the US bring them to justice for their illegal aggression and for exposing our country's infrastructure to Stuxnet variants. The audience applauded loudly.

Except that cyber warfare is NOT illegal. (Though unlike Russia and China, the US does prohibit citizens from computer hacking.) Cyber warfare is, however, fast, effective, precise, virtually free, stealthy and usable without loss of life. If we can't altogether rid the world of conflict, our species is surely better off fighting cyber wars than conventional ones.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Kathryn Schulz, Wrongologist

2011-05-04T01:07:00.000-07:00

Score: 10 balloons

In one of the best TED Talks ever, Slate columnist Kathryn Schulz exposes human nature. It doesn’t feel good to be wrong, and so we naturally inflate the confidence we have in our convictions. (My personal theory is that we grow addicted to the endorphnis our brains produce when we’re right, in order to drive the back error propogation fine tuning our neural networks.) A 60% likely belief swells to 90% in our minds. This simple observation that we try to avoid the feeling of ignorance explains a lot of screwy things in the world.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Harvey Fineberg on Neo-Evolution

2011-05-04T00:53:00.000-07:00

Score: 8 balloons

Medical ethicist Harvey Fineberg shows us three paths forward for the ever-evolving human species: to stop evolving completely, to evolve naturally -- or to control the next steps of human evolution, using genetic modification, to make ourselves smarter, faster, better. Neo-evolution is within our grasp.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

Name-Calling Ninny Loose in Los Altos

2011-04-19T09:30:00.000-07:00

So just now I was waiting patiently on the side of the road in the car line to drop off my son at school when a jogger comes running towards us right along the CENTER DIVIDER LINE with iPhone buds in his ears. Apparently he decided to cut in front of me to get to his left side (shouldn't joggers stay to their right?), but I hadn't used my ESP to leave him lots of room in front of my car. So right there in front of all the school kids (and my son) he yells "Idiot!"

Is this you? Claim your profile!

TED 2011: Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir

2011-04-05T07:43:00.000-07:00

This review was written by Nina Khosla.

Score: 5 balloons

Eric Whitacre, a well-known composer, began his talk with a personal story. He described how one day, he logged onto his computer to find a YouTube video recorded by a teenage girl who was singing one of his songs. The young singer, Britlin, left a message for Whitacre:

Britlin's message to Mr. Eric Whitacre... I was REALLY nervous!!! but hopefully he will see this video and see how thankful I am for him... he is the one who inspired me to compose!!! I hope to talk with him or meet him one day... wouldn't that be a dream come true!!!!!

It was this video that gave Whitacre the inspiration for his latest experiments - virtual choirs. He realized that by having individuals record each of the parts of a song, he could stitch them all together, creating a complete recording. This allowed him to connect all these individuals through music.

Whitacre put a call out for submissions on his website, and has received thousands of submissions. He shared two videos and the process used to construct them: his first virtual choir, Lux Aurumque, and a reveal of the beginnings of his second, in-progress virtual choir.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Sebastian Thrun on Google's Driverless Cars

2011-04-05T07:13:00.000-07:00

Score: 9 balloons

Here's a tasty 4 minute TED snack on how and why Google promises to vastly improve the nature of automotive transportation.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Eythor Bender, Human Exo-Skeletons

2011-03-26T15:37:00.000-07:00

Score: 7 Balloons

Eythor Bender of Berkeley Bionics brings onstage two amazing exoskeletons, HULC and eLEGS -- robotic add-ons that could one day allow a human to carry 200 pounds without tiring, or allow a wheelchair user to stand and walk. It's a powerful onstage demo, with implications for human potential of all kinds.

About Eythor Bender

Eythor Bender is the CEO of Berkeley Bionics, which augments humans with wearable, powered and artificially intelligent devices called exoskeletons or "wearable robots.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED2011: Sarah Kay, Performance Poetry

2011-03-18T09:21:00.000-07:00

Score: 9 balloons

Sarah Kay shared her experiences as an underage fan of poetry readings, and her use of poetry as a teacher to connect with students. She also performed her original works to a standing ovation. Her talk was widely viewed as a surprise highlight of this year's TED. Her work is animated and sharp, reaching young and old alike. Just listen...

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Janna Levin, Soundtrack of the Universe

2011-03-15T23:03:00.000-07:00

This review was written by Nina Khosla.

Score: 6 balloons

Janna Levin was TED's first speaker of the conference, and a physicist who focused on exploring and discovering a particular phenomenon - the sounds of space. While much of physics has focused on light - "most of what we know about the universe," she explained, "comes from light." But what about the sounds of space? What would space sound like if we could hear it? “The universe has a soundtrack, and that soundtrack is played on space itself," she began.

Levin took us on a journey to black holes, starting with the basic science of black holes. In particuar, black holes are interesting because you can't "see" a black hole using traditional methods - light tends to pass through a black hole rendering it all but invisible. From there, Levin shared with us the music and noises that a black hole would make in various situations - the drumbeat of black holes on space itself.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED2011: David Brooks

2011-03-15T07:56:00.000-07:00

This review was written by Nina Khosla.

Score: 8 balloons

David Brooks has a certain, calm demeanor and stood up on stage in the presentational equivalent of being stark naked - it was just him, in front of a podium, sharing with us his insights from many years as a journalist and observer of human nature.

In a thread continued from many of his columns, and as an introduction to the ideas in his new book, Brooks asked and explored a perplexing mystery: when did our views of human nature become so flat-minded, particularly in the way we approach it from an economic or political point of view? This revolution is slowly happening, as we begin to understand more about human nature, and this is being particularly driven by new scientific insights.

What particularly caught my imagination was Brooks' descriptions of the kinds of things that are unmeasurable, but predict so much of our success. While we would like to be able to measure the human capital available in our economic institutions through SAT and IQ scores, the human mind and potential incorporates much more depth. He describes a few of these factors, for example, the human capacity for "mind sight," which describes our ability to empathize, to place our selves in another's mind and imagine the world from their perspective. Other intangibles include things such as our ability to work in a group - "it's not the IQ of the group, it's how well they communicate," that defines success in groups, and our sensitivity to our physical environment, which encapsulates our ability to notice things from around us and see patterns.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Deb Roy's Unusual Home Movies

2011-03-11T19:03:00.000-08:00

Score: 9 balloons

The MIT Media Labs Cognitive Machines Group's director Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with 11 videocameras and 14 microphones to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 7 million words spoken in 90,000 hours of home video to hear "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Founder of free online Khan Academy

2011-03-09T08:47:00.000-08:00

Salman Khan
Score: 8 balloons

This first-hand account of the creation and rising popularity of Khan Academy was widely considered a highlight of TED.

Salman had started making math videos as a favor to his cousins, but they became so popular on YouTube that he decided to quit his job at a hedge fund and record thousands more videos across diverse subject areas. His intellect, light style and generosity have seeded a tremendous online educational resource.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

Wall Street Journal, Come Join the 21st Century

2011-03-09T02:02:00.000-08:00

I made the mistake last week of turning my attention to the Opinion pages of the March 2 Wall Street Journal. I was suddenly reminded of the newspaper’s common ownership with FOX News.

The top essay, The Decline of US Naval Power, laments our shrinking navy, but fails to make me care. According to the author Mark Helprin, 20 seaward ships at a time are insufficient to “project military power”. Completely ignoring common sense, he implies that a larger navy would have prevented Somali pirates from killing four American tourists. And he declares with surprising certainty that if the trend continues, “China will be driven even faster to construct a navy that can dominate the oceans.” Really? That seems counter-intuitive.

And of course Helprin ignores the issue of cost, except to conclude that, “A technological nation with a GDP of $14 trillion can afford to build a fleet worthy of its past...” Hasn’t he read the news lately? The GDP is large, but we’re running the largest deficit of any nation in history, with enormous, unfunded liabilities looming. How do we afford a shiny new navy?

As a taxpayer I'd much rather see my tax dollars spent on modern warfare such as cyber capabilities. Deploying a cyberworm that undoubtedly cost less than 0.001% of the cost of operating (let alone buying) a single battleship for one year, the US and Israel (allegedly) disabled Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility for three years, and did so without loss of life on either side. By pursuing military objectives using immensely cheaper cyber assets, we can allocate some of that whopping GDP to restore some of our healthcare and education.

The second essay that day was In Defense of the Defense of Marriage Act, which objects to President Obama's recent decision to stop enforcing the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act. This Act somehow aimed to revoke the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution when it comes to gay marriage so that the gay marriages are not recognized by the federal government or any states that don't license same sex unions.

According to the essay's authors, the Full Faith and Credit Clause shouldn't apply because "marriage is unlike any other government benefit. License to marry carries with it far more than mere permission...marriage is an affirmative statement of societal approval." And since "large majorities of Americans [sic] still oppose recognition of same-sex marriages," Congress decided that federal law should "clearly establish a preference for traditional marriage."

What a stunning, hateful argument. By their logic, mixed-race marriages should also be subject to each state's "societal approval."

But don't get the wrong idea -- the authors deny that they are ignorant, homophobic rednecks; they merely insist that Presidents must enforce all laws passed by Congress, no matter how disgusting or obviously unconstitutional.

Funny, though: the Wall Street Journal never published opinion pieces condemning President Bush Sr for declining to enforce affirmative action for broadcast licensing, or President Reagan for declining to enforce the independent counsel law and the law permitting one-house legislative vetoes of executive actions.

And get this -- the co-authors of this opinion piece, Rivkin and Casey, served as attorneys in both the Reagan and Bush Sr administrations. Hey guys, why didn't you complain back then?

TED 2011: Anthony Atala Prints Organs

2011-03-07T16:52:00.000-08:00

Score: 9 balloons

This was the most fascinating technology demo of TED. Dr. Atala uses a 3D printer (which is already awesome cool in itself) to lay down layers of stem cells in order to create organs for transplant. The unit he brought with him printed out a kidney!

Now the kidney he showed us doesn't yet work. For that step he'll have to hire someone like TED Fellow Nina Tandon, a Columbia University researcher who shared her progress in using electrical current to activate stem cells (e.g. she can make heart cells start beating).

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Wael Ghonim, Egyptian Activist

2011-03-06T23:02:00.000-08:00

Score: 10 balloons

This rabble-rousing Googler hero shares his inspiring first-hand account of the Egyptian revolution. Wael delivered his TED Talk from Cairo, where one of 70 TEDx groups participated virtually in this year’s conference.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

TED 2011: Wadah Khanfar, Director General of Al Jazeera

2011-03-06T22:49:00.000-08:00

This review was written by Nina Khosla.

Score: 9 balloons

Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera, seemed to be a polarizing talk - many believed that his perspective was illuminating and Al Jazeera had played a crucial role in the extraordinary events taking place in the Middle East; and many others that the talk was a token attempt by TED to incorporate something, anything, about these world-changing events, and that the role of Al Jazeera was not particularly central to precipitating the occasion.

I personally fall somewhere in the middle: was Al Jazeera the thing that sparked a thousand revolutions? Absolutely not. Still, Al Jazeera sat with the cameras on, and embraced a new generation that, as Khanfar emphasized multiple times, effused a new set of "global values." According to Khanfar, this new generation created these revolutions, and sculpted a new view of the world to inspire their countrymen. Khanfar seemed to be enthralled with the word "connected," but not in the way we find ourselves captivated by this word in the west. This is a society that needs to present this new view of the world so that individuals can understand that they are not alone, but part of a movement of others embracing a new view of society. Al Jazeera took this and captured it on camera, sharing and perpetuating this view.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

JR, Winner of the 2011 TED Prize

2011-03-06T22:35:00.000-08:00

Score: 6 balloons

This year TED awarded its prize to JR, a unique kind of street artist. I have never understood how TED selects its winners (Karen Armstrong? Jamie Oliver?) and JR is no exception. What about those speakers who are eradicating polio, malaria and slavery? But based on the standing ovation and web site comments, the TED community found him to be "courageous and inspiring". So I will defer to TED.com's description of JR:

JR, a semi-anonymous French street artist, uses his camera to show the world its true face, by pasting photos of the human face across massive canvases. At TED2011, he makes his audacious TED Prize wish: to use art to turn the world inside out. Learn more about his work and learn how you can join in at insideoutproject.net.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.

Your Guide to TED Talks 2011

2011-03-06T22:33:00.000-08:00

I had the great fortune this week to attend my fifth TED Conference in Long Beach, along with Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Demi Moore, Al Gore, Jason Mraz, Mark Pincus, and too many other fabulous TEDsters.

As in prior years, I've compiled a resource to help you select which TED Talks to watch online. The main-stage talks -- which I've classified below -- will link to my reviews and to the videos as they become available throughout March. Each TED Talk has been rated on a 1-to-10 scale by a panel that includes me, my sister Jill, and Nina Khosla, an 8-year TEDster and blogger who graciously reviewed the Tuesday sessions that I missed. Nina co-founded Teethie, an online community platform set to launch this summer.

The 2011 speaker lineup lived up to prior years. You can never tell beforehand which ones will be the classics; this year the standouts turned out to be General Stanley McChrystal, dinosaur hunter Jack Horner, transplant surgeon Anthony Atala, Slate columnist Kathryn Schulz, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, poet Sarah Kay, Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, and fourth grade teacher John Hunter.

Invention

9 Anthony Atala, printing organs

9 Deb Roy, 24/7 home movies

8 Aaron O’Connell, human scale quantum mechanics

6 Fiorenzo Omenetto, cool uses of silk

Directed Evolution

9 Jack Horner on making a dinosaur

8 Harvey Fineberg, Neo-evolution

7 Eythor Bender, human exo-skeletons

Cognition

How we think

10 Kathryn Shulz, Being Wrong

8 David Brooks, Emotion precedes reason

8 Ed Boyden, Illuminating the brain

7 Antonio Damasio, Cognition of Self

4 Daniel Temmet, autistic cognition

Revolution
How information networks are transforming military conflicts in the Arab world.

10 Wael Ghonim, Egyptian activist
10 General Stanley McChrystal on leadership
  9 Wadah Khanfar, Director General of Al Jazeera
  5 Ralph Langner, Stuxnet cyberworm

Education
Creating more engaging curricula for the diversity of kids in our schools.

10 John Hunter on World Peace, and other 4th Grade Achievements
  8 Salman Khan on Khan Academy

Smart Cars and Roads
The future of mobility

  9 Sebastian Thrun, Google's driverless cars

8 Bill Ford, the future of mobility

  7 Dennis Hong, driving blind

Deciphering the Past

  8 Rajesh Rao, Cracking the Indus code
  7 David Christian, history of entropy
  6 Edward Tenner, unintended consequences

Discovering New Life Forms

  8 Edith Widder, bio-illuminescence
  8 Felisa Wolfe-Simon, arsenic-based life forms

Shameless Promotion

10 Morgan Spurlock, Best TED Talk Ever Sold
  3 Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsi
  2 Christina Lampe-Onnerud, modular batteries

Performance Artists

10 Jason Mraz
  9 Bobby McFerrin
  9 Sarah Kay, poet
  7 Julie Taymour, designs musicals like Spiderman
  6 Handspring Puppet Company
  3 Maya Beiser cellist
  2 Antony, vocalist

Social Art

  9 Paul Nicklen, Arctic photographer
  8 Thomas Heatherwick, large scale artist
  7 Shea Hembrey, artist
  6 JR, TED Prize Winner
  5 Eric Whitacre, virtual chorus
  5 Sunni Brown, gamestormer
  4 Kate Hartman, funny hats
  4 Janet Echelman, fishnet sculptures
  3 Beatrice Coron, papercutter

Other

  9 Roger Ebert, finding his voice
  8 Al Weiwei, Chinese activisit
  7 Eli Parisi, the internet echo chamber
  6 Amina Az-Zubair, fixing Nigeria
  6 Janna Levin, black hole physicist
  5 Bruce Aylward, eradicating Polio

<-- TED2010

Transcendent Man

2011-02-17T15:21:00.000-08:00

At Ethan Kurzweil‘s kind invitation, my wife, son and I attended a screening of The Transcendent Man at the Tech Museum. This brilliant documentary chronicles some highlights from the life of futurist Ray Kurzweil, who was there with the film’s director Barry Ptolemy to answer questions. The film succeeds at several levels, and in ways that recursively support one another (reminiscent of Doxiadis’ LogiComix or Hofstadter’s fugue-ish essays on fugues).

The Science

On its surface, Transcendent Man explores the science behind Kurzweil’s prediction of a Singularity event, as Kurzweil authored in The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil has observed that new technologies – ranging from the printing press to Google – themselves enable us to develop newer technologies even faster. So the pace of innovation is always accelerating, yielding an exponential curve of discovery. Kurzweil produces data that extends Moore’s Law to bits shipped, social connections made, and many other metrics of information technology. Extrapolating from historical trends, we will within two decades manufacture the powerful computers we carry today in sizes no larger than a blood cell.

Furthermore, as genomic sequencing transforms biology into an information science, we should see the same exponential pace of invention. Inevitably our machines would be so effective at fixing and augmenting our frail, limited bodies that we will incorporate them ever deeper into our lives. Memory prosthetics will feed our brains data, and nanobots in our blood will download the latest anti-virus software for fighting REAL viruses!

Kurzweil’s Singularity is a point in time three decades from now when we create machines so intelligent that human beings are no longer on the critical path to further innovation. Our inventions will themselves solve the intractable problems of aging and death – even reverse engineering cerebral architectures so that memories and personalities can be backed up and activated in alternative computing platforms.

The Singularity is obviously a provocative prediction, even more so than Kurzweil’s highly accurate prediction in the 1970’s that in 1995 a computer would become the world’s best chess player, which seemed a lot crazier back then. (Kurzweil also predicted that immediately afterward, chess would be dismissed as an invalid test of true AI. And Jeopardy, too, of course.) But the Singularity violates no laws of physics, suggesting that it’s more likely a question of When, not If. Kurzweil presents the data transparently, challenging critics to assess the analysis rather than respond intuitively to the surprising conclusion.

The Inventor

At the same time, Transcendent Man recounts the life of an extraordinary scientist who was brilliant and crazy enough to doggedly tackle seemingly intractable problems. As a teenager in the 1960’s he built a computer to analyze and compose classical music. At MIT he started and sold his first computer software company, and after school he generalized optical character recognition (OCR) as Kurzweil Computer (the predecessor of today’s Nuance). More ventures followed: at Kurzweil Music Products, Ray invented the modern synthesizer, passing the musical equivalent of a Turing Test by generating sound indistinguishable from a grand piano. At Kurzweil Artificial Intelligence, Ray developed and commercialized the first large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Kurzweil Educational Systems developed text-to-speech software for the blind. Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies operated a hedge fund using AI techniques. And there were others – too many to expound.

When Ray was 35 he contracted diabetes, which had led to his own father’s death. Rather than capitulate to the limited science of the day, Ray resolved to learn the chemistry behind his condition and fix it. He studied the mechanisms behind diabetes and formulated a regmen of medical supplements that has, he claims, reversed the condition. He has since written two books on his medical research into staving off the ravages of age.

Now here’s a guy who knows how to get out of his comfort zone.

The Father

Beautifully woven into the documentary is a stream of Ray’s memories of his late father Fredric, a musical composer in Brooklyn. Intermingled with Ray’s discussion of the Singularity, we see the old photos and family mementos that haunt Ray’s consciousness. The audience develops an understanding of Ray’s profound sense of loss – his gratitude for Fredric’s support of Ray’s childhood tinkering, his appreciation of the music Fredric lovingly composed, his disappointment in the human physiological deficits that inflicted Fredric in his fifties, and his driving frustration that science failed to save his father.

Never one to fold, Ray embraced yet another bold ambition: not only will he work to escape his father’s fate, but he would do everything possible to preserve Fredric’s writings and DNA so that he might one day restore his father – or at least an AI replica – to life.

The Critics

Naturally, Kurzweil’s provocative science has attracted an impressive community of critics, several of whom were featured in the film. We see Kurzweil in a TV interview, his dignity wounded as a caller from Oak Ridge Labs labels him a crackpot. Two professors in particular – a Dr. Hurlbut from Stanford and a French Comp Sci professor from a Chinese university –were interviewed at length, and took issue with the Singularity. And they did appear so much more grounded than Kurzweil.

But as they picked up the pace of their criticism through the film, the audience had to start wondering who was really the madman here. It became clear that the Frenchman’s primary beef with Kurzweil was that somehow Kurzweil was predicting and therefore endorsing the dominion of robots – by the end he was rambling on about his very clear vision of the world war that will inevitably ravage civilization over the issue of robotic rights. And by the end Dr. Hurlbut exposed his own ignorance and bias, backing up his criticisms with the explanation that he himself is a Christian, and opposes Ray’s sacrilegeous invasion of GOD’s turf. (Really, Stanford?)

Transcendence

So on its surface, the film foretells how Humanity will transcend our biological boundaries, breaking the boom-and-bust cycle that has characterized every other species of nature.

But it’s also the story of how Kurzweil himself has transcend his modest means, his illness, and his critics – striving still to transcend his own mortality. In a way, it’s a tragic story of a brilliant scientist who sees medical miracles around the corner, but arriving a tad too late to save him and his family. I found it comforting, though, to think that Ptolemy’s film did help Ray achieve his dream of bringing Fredric back to life.

The entire evening was particularly meaningful for me, as I watched my attention-deficient son on the edge of his seat throughout the film and during Kurzweil’s presentation. He inhaled the content, scouring the data on every slide to understand each graph and animation. “What’s a logarithmic scale? … Is that RNA collecting those proteins? …Why’s the event horizon expanding like that?” And finally: “Why’s it so important to him that everyone know what’s going to happen?” His wheels are turning, faster and faster.

SPOILER ALERT

I had many favorite parts of this movie but my favoritest was the last line. Kurzweil had just shared his idea that once we’ve transcended our own biology, our colonization of the universe is inevitable…we will augment the human-Borg collective until we’ve incorporated all the matter at our disposal, bringing consciousness to the universe. “People ask if there’s a God. I say, not yet…”

UPDATE:

Transcendent Man will be available from iTunes on March 1.
Also, this review has been re-published by the MIT Technology Review (except the stodgy editors replaced the word "favoritest" with "very favorite").
Finally, you can now watch the movie right here:

My Privacy

2011-02-13T11:12:00.000-08:00

Great video from Reputation.com... (i particularly like the Pear noteboooks at the end)

Putting My Mouth Where My Money Is

2011-02-09T19:28:00.000-08:00

Sorry I’ve been gone so long, but Twitter has raised the bar for bloggers. Who has time for This when you can follow @davidcowan on Twitter? Ideas that would have once qualified as worthy posts can too often be summed up in 140 characters, so it has been nearly two years since I’ve updated this blog on my new investments.

So here's a recap. During the last couple years I looked for startups that (i) protect and promote online reputations, (ii) deliver social network value to enterprises, (iii) migrate enterprise data to the cloud, and (iv) bring Silicon Valley tech capabilities to the federal government. And of course I am always open to learning about exciting startups beyond these themes.

I found what I believe to be the world's Six Most Exciting Startups (excluding a few obvious high flyers whose valuations I couldn’t stomach). I have listed them below in the order in which I funded them. Just to clearly disclose my bias: when I find a great startup I invest, so I now have a material stake in all these companies!

So what does Google say about you -- too much (like your home address or an embarrassing photo)? Too little? Something unkind? Or maybe good things, but you're eclipsed by people with the same name?

As personal information about us migrates online, our prospects for school admission, employment, credit, dates, and professional success increasingly depend upon our online reputations. Reputation.com helps you take control, and the company’s monthly revenue has grown nearly tenfold since I invested (along with Floodgate and Kleiner).

Yesterday CBS Sunday Morning interviewed Reputation.com’s Founder/CEO Michael Fertik about a public school techer who lost her job over a private Facebook photo in which there happened to be a bottle of beer.

Reputation.com has kindly extended a huge promotion for my readers: Click here to visit the site and prices you'll see for the My Privacy Annual Plan or the My Reputation Starter Plan will be half the normal rates.

CrowdFlower is the first business process crowdsourcer. Crowdsourcing means tasking individuals on the web with untrained jobs like content moderation, local business listing verification, or transcription. CrowdFlower farms these tasks out to workers across dozens of networks, such as Amazon’s Mechanial Turk.

Compared to internal employees or business process outsourcers, crowdsouring is faster, cheaper and instantly scalable up or down as you need it. Contrary to intuition, CrowdFlower produces higher quality data than in-house or outsourced workers, since Crowdflower can provision the same job to multiple workers, and calibrate each worker’s quality. CrowdFlower promises to transform the nature of employment, unlocking the labor potential of a billion unemployed workers. Since my investment (alongside Trinity), the Company has beaten plan every quarter.

Zoosk is the fastest growing dating service on the web, with more singles’ profiles than any other site (check out the numbers). Zoosk makes dating fun with daily matches and a cool iPhone app. Unfortunately, their latest TV commercial was too much fun for Europe, where it was banned.

I’m going out on a limb here, and predicting that social gaming will be big. So I followed NEA into the last round of the creator of Mobsters and Tiki Resort. My kids were delighted to have a back channel to the designers of Wild Ones (thanks for all those laser cannons!), but the gravy train stopped when Disney picked up the company.

This Stanford team of aerospace jocks is applying the Lean Startup methodology and web APIs to commercial space projects, disrupting an industry characterized by bloated, government-funded projects (as reported by Slate). I can’t disclose exactly what Skybox is building, but here’s how two other entrepreneurs have already forged a cheap path to space…

Twilio provides a web services API for business to build scalabale, reliable, communications apps utilizing voice. With Twilio you can easily embed voice and SMS features into your web site (e.g. for notification, or connecting users by phone). Twilio provides the tools, platform and service. The technology is free to use, and you pay only for the actual voice minutes that your users end up consuming. On this deal I supported my partner Byron Deeter, who joined Twilio’s board.

Meanwhile, fate has mostly ruled on my prior generation of startups. GoodMail and Flock developed the technology they promised, but both their dreams were dashed by the waves of chaos that engulfed their primary business partner Yahoo. Meanwhile others, like Tripwire, Nominum, LinkedIn, GetInsured, Perimeter and Lifelock, forge ahead profitably.

So how do you think the markets will decide the fate of my 6 new picks?

2011-01-10T09:44:00.001-08:00

Artemis Fowl's C-Cube: The Ultimate Hacking Machine

2010-11-08T06:23:00.000-08:00

The books kids read today strike me as a lot more interesting than most of what I read in school. Furthermore, the boring old book report has been supplanted by more engaging formats. For example, my son recently recruited me to perform in his trailer for The Eternity Code, a project he produced for his 6th grade English teacher. This book is the third in Eoin Colfer's gripping Artemis Fowl series about an Irish boy criminal mastermind who discovers and befriends secret, subterranean, high-tech fairies.

Exclusive Episode of The Office

2010-11-02T10:53:00.000-07:00

My friend Christine Crawford is moving to Wisconsin this week, as she and her husband begin an exciting new chapter in their lives. But her gain is Bessemer's loss, as Christine has been our California office manager, and my assistant, for 13 years. Anyone who has worked with me knows that Christine is a star, and she will be missed.

To say goodbye to Christine, my kids have performed this souvenir for her:

I was a Drunken Mohel

2010-11-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

Magic By Numbers

2010-10-17T23:28:00.001-07:00

I have such high expectations from the NY Times that I always feel betrayed when they print garbage.

In today's Sunday issue, Harvard psychology professor and TV personality Daniel Gilbert penned an editorial titled “Magic by Numbers: Why a Roman Emperor is responsible for the 7-day antibiotic course.” Gilbert asserts that because human beings are irrationally drawn to use certain numbers relating to our 10 fingers and 7x24 calendars, medical therapies are now polluted with these numbers rather than numbers with scientific merit.

He bases his findings on a compelling plethora of evidence: 1) his own ruminations; 2) a flawed understanding of history; 3) a handful of anecdotes; and 4) completely uninformed speculation of how prescriptions are formulated.

The whole idea came to him because a doctor had prescribed a 7 day course of anti-biotics.

“Why not six, eight, or nine-and-a-half? Did the number seven correspond to some biological fact about the human digestive tract or the life cycle of bacteria?

My doctor seemed smart. She probably went to one of the nation’s finest medical schools, and regardless of where she trained, she certainly knew more about medicine than I did. And yet, as I walked out of the ER that night with my prescription in hand, I couldn’t help but suspect that I’d just been treated with magic.”

Gilbert goes on to assert that people tend to use the number 7 because a Roman emperor coined the 7 day week. (My 11 year old recently taught me that the Neo-Babylonians invented the 7 day week in the 6^th century BC – which simply points to Gilbert’s allergy to research.) Therefore that must be why antibiotics are prescribed for exactly 7 days.

He backs up his evidence for "magic numbers" with anecdotes of how people sometimes round off numbers to the nearest ten or five. But is that really such an amazing discovery of the human psyche -- that we choose to call someone back in 20 minutes rather than 17? Rounding numbers is a practical technique for remembering and tracking quantities. In no way does it imply that doctors must be plagiarizing from their calendars.

In fact, if Gilbert had simply asked his very smart, educated doctor, she could have explained that Yes, seven days does correspond to biological facts! Clinical studies clearly show that for this particular drug, six days is not always enough, and eight days is almost never needed. Why not 6.8, or 7.2? That’s easy – rounding off numbers when it comes to prescriptions improves patient compliance, a health benefit that far outweighs the fine tuning of a decimal place.

Further, Gilbert could have learned through a simple Google query that in fact there are just as many meds prescribed for 5, 6 or 8 days. Fortunately, Gilbert ignored these irrelevant facts by declining to ever collect them.

This ability to infer patterns from incomplete anecdotes must somewhere violate a business process patent owned by Malcom Gladwell. Indeed I had to check the byline to see if this was another brilliant Gladwell phenomenon. And then I saw the web site for Gilbert's book touting him as the next Gladwell! (Coincidentally, just yesterday I read about Gilbert's book on finding happiness-- it's a target of this month's Skeptic Magazine cover story debunking the happiness craze.)

But 7 isn’t the only magic number, writes Gilbert. He speculates that his antibiotics are prescribed 3 times per day because 3 implies a beginning, middle and end. (Really.) Again, a doctor could have explained to him about the timing of chemical breakdowns, and the compliance benefits of prescribing meds every morning, every morning/night, or at every meal.

But not just 7 and 3. According to Gilbert, nine is also a magic number as evidenced by all the prices that end in 99 cents.

But not just 3, 7 and 9. Four and six are magic, too, because they have soft-sounding syllables. (Really.)

And of course 5 and 10 are magic because they correspond to the fingers on our hands.

But that’s it. Those are the only “magic numbers” that everyone likes. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9 and 10. (He might be discouraged to learn that no one read his editorial because it appeared on page 8.)

Oh, and also 12, because it “corresponds to a half turn of our planet.” But that’s all.

The good news here is that Gilbert has just provided us forever with the canonical example of Pop Psychology. But that's just my 2 cents.

Phone Call from The Census

2010-07-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

The US Census office in New York has had to fire workers due to fraud. The new folks there must still be learning the ropes. This actual telephone call to my friend Erik Gordon was transcribed immediately upon hanging up, so it's practically verbatim...

Ring. Ring.

ERIK: "Hello?"

CHARLOTTE: "Hello. This is Charlotte calling from the 2010 United States Census. We've left you a couple of messages over the past few weeks but you haven't returned our calls. I'm calling to ask you some additional questions about the census form that you recently completed. This should take only a few minutes."

ERIK: "Okay."

CHARLOTTE: "Can I start by verifying your address?"

ERIK: "Yes, it's the one you have on the form -- 68 East 78th Street in New York."

CHARLOTTE: "And is this the Gordon household?"

ERIK: "Yes."

CHARLOTTE: "And who completed the census form on behalf of the household?"

ERIK: "I did. I'm the only one who lives here."

CHARLOTTE: "And what is your name?"

ERIK: "Erik Gordon. Don't you have that on the form I filled out?"

CHARLOTTE: "Yes."

ERIK: "So why are you asking me again?"

CHARLOTTE (reading): "We need to make sure that the 2010 US Census is an accurate count of every person in the United States and that no person is double counted. This should take only a few minutes."

ERIK: "Okay."

CHARLOTTE: "So Erik Gordon filled out the census form on behalf of your household?"

ERIK: "Yes, I did."

CHARLOTTE: "And am I speaking to Erik Gordon?"

ERIK: "Um, yes. But I think we've covered this, no?"

CHARLOTTE: "Yes, but I need to ask the questions in the order they appear on my screen."

ERIK: "Okay."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, how many people were living at your address on April 1, 2010?"

ERIK: "Just me. I'm the only one who lives here."

CHARLOTTE: "So should I put 'One?'"

ERIK: "Probably."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, do you have children, babies or foster children living with you?"

ERIK (louder): "I'm the only one here."

CHARLOTTE: "It's a yes or no question, Mr. Gordon."

ERIK: "If I'm the only one here, then the answer is 'No,' right?"

CHARLOTTE: "Okay, I'm going to put 'No.'"

ERIK: "Good idea."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, do you have any other relatives living with you?"

ERIK: "I'm the only one here."

CHARLOTTE: "I can't put that."

ERIK: "I don't care."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, we need to make sure that the 2010 US Census is an accurate count of every person in the United States and that no person is double counted. This should take only a few minutes."

ERIK: "But all of this is on the form I filled out."

CHARLOTTE: "I know. I have it here."

ERIK: "So why are you asking me the same questions?"

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, this should take only a few minutes."

ERIK: "This should take no minutes."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, are you refusing to answer the questions? Because if you're refusing to answer the questions, I'm going to have to call you back."

ERIK: "I'm not refusing to answer the questions, Charlotte. I already answered them."

CHARLOTTE: "When?"

ERIK: "On the form you have in front of you."

CHARLOTTE: "Oh."

ERIK: "Yes."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, this should only take a few minutes. Can I ask if you have any nonrelatives, such as roommates or babysitters living with you?"

ERIK: "I'm the only one here."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, you know I can't put that."

ERIK: "No, Charlotte, no. I don't have anyone else living here!"

CHARLOTTE: "No roomates or babysitters?"

ERIK: "No!"

CHARLOTTE: "I'm going to put 'No.' Mr. Gordon, do you have anyone living with you temporarily?"

ERIK: "Charlotte, you know what I'm going to say, right?"

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, it's a yes or no question."

ERIK: "Charlotte, you've already asked me about relatives and nonrelatives. Who else could be living with me?"

CHARLOTTE: "Anyone living with you temporarily, such as any illegal aliens."

ERIK: "Yes, Charlotte. I forgot. I do have illegal aliens living with me."

CHARLOTTE: "How many?"

ERIK: "I live with approximately twelve thousand illegal Mexican immigrants. But please don't put that down, I don't want to get in trouble."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, I have to put it down."

ERIK: "Please don't put it down. They're nice people. They’ve traveled far."

CHARLOTTE: "I'm sorry, Mr. Gordon. I have to put it down."

ERIK: "Okay, put it down."

CHARLOTTE: "Okay."

ERIK: "Charlotte, did you really just put down that I live with 12,000 illegal Mexican immigrants?"

CHARLOTTE: "No. I just put twelve."

ERIK: "Why?"

CHARLOTTE: "I don't have enough room."

ERIK: "Okay."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, were you away from this address anytime in March or April of 2010?"

ERIK: "What do you mean?"

CHARLOTTE: "What do *you* mean?"

ERIK: "Are you asking me if I left my apartment anytime in March or April?"

CHARLOTTE: "Yes."

ERIK: "Then 'Yes.'"

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, where did you go?"

ERIK: "Charlotte, I went a lot of places."

CHARLOTTE: "I only have one line."

ERIK: "That's too bad, Charlotte, because I went *a lot* of places."

CHARLOTTE: "But I only have one line."

ERIK: "So what do you want me to tell you?"

CHARLOTTE: "I don't know. Do you want me to ask my supervisor?"

ERIK: "Actually, I think you should ask your supervisor."

CHARLOTTE (returning to the phone after putting me on hold for two or three minutes): "I think we should just put 'Don't Know.'"

ERIK: "Fine."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, in March and April of 2010 where did you spend most of your time: at your address in New York or in Don't Know?"

ERIK: "New York. Don't Know isn't a real place."

CHARLOTTE: "Okay. New York. Is there any other place you spent most of your time?"

ERIK: "Charlotte, what does that mean?"

CHARLOTTE: "You said you spent most of your time in New York. Is there any other place where you spent most of your time?"

ERIK: "Charlotte, how can I spend most of my time in more than one place?"

CHARLOTTE (after thinking it over): "I think we should put 'Don't Know.'"

ERIK: "Okay. Let's put that."

CHARLOTTE: "Okay."

ERIK: "Okay."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, other than New York and Don't Know, did you spend any time anywhere else?"

ERIK: "Pardon?"

CHARLOTTE: "Other than New York and Don't Know, did you spend any time anywhere else?"

ERIK: "Other than New York and Don't Know?"

CHARLOTTE: "Yes."

ERIK: "No. I spent all of my time in New York and Don't Know."

CHARLOTTE: "How about prison?"

ERIK: "How about prison?"

CHARLOTTE: "Did you spend any time in prison in March or April of 2010?"

ERIK: "No, I was only in New York and Don't Know."

CHARLOTTE: "Okay."

ERIK: "Okay."

CHARLOTTE: "Okay. Mr. Gordon, did you spend any time in the military?"

ERIK: "No."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, did you spend any time in a nursing home?"

ERIK: "Charlotte, can we just put 'Don't Know' for the rest of the questions so we can both get on with our lives?"

CHARLOTTE: "No, I can't do that. You need to answer every question. This should take only a few minutes."

ERIK: "It’s already been more than a few minutes."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, are you refusing to answer the questions? Because if you're refusing to answer the questions--"

ERIK: "I don't want you to call me back Charlotte. I did not spend any time in a nursing home in March or April of 2010. I was too busy in Don't Know."

CHARLOTTE: "What?"

ERIK: "No. No time in a nursing home."

CHARLOTTE: "Mr. Gordon, that was the last question. On behalf of the 2010 United States Census, thank you and have a good evening."

The New Flock on Chromium

2010-06-15T23:55:00.000-07:00

Today Flock is launching a complete redesign of their social web browser based on Google's open source Chromium. Flock is now the fastest browser I've ever used, and the redesign is highly streamlined, with no extraneous chrome or buttons.

The social features are dead simple -- most prominently, a right-hand sidebar that streams Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds, made specifically for people active on those social networks. (The prior version of Flock is already the most popular desktop application in Facebook, with 7.5 million Facebook users, growing 600% in the last year; beyond Facebook we've delivered 17 million downloads with zero marketing spend thanks to word of mouth, and our users have already initiated billions of social transactions in Flock.)

With a rev share deal with Google, Flock now features Google as the default search engine. Flock is available in 34 languages, with users in 192 countries and territories. You can download it here.

New Flock from Flockstar on Vimeo.

"Not Terribly Disappointed!"

2010-06-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

My a capella group's concert Saturday night with The Manhattan Transfer couldn't have gone better. We sold out the California Theatre and felt great about our performance. Lots of twitter love. Here's a segment from a review posted on AllAboutJazz.com:

The second group was a 60 man chorus called Voices in Harmony. They sang 5 or 6 numbers ranging from showtunes to a Sinatra medley to a beautiful version of Billy Joel's "And So It Goes". During their version of "Cruella DeVille" (yes, the song from Disney's "101 Dalmatians") they incorporated a lot of movement to really add to the comedic intent of the song. Not having known that either of these groups were going to be performing at this show, I was certainly impressed by both of them and not terribly disappointed that their performances left less time for TMT.

Thanks to all my friends who came out for the show, both on stage and in the audience.

Performing with The Manhattan Transfer!

2010-03-30T17:16:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to tell you that The Manhattan Transfer will be joining my a capella group Voices in Harmony for our June 12 concert at the California Theatre in San Jose. Really.

Buy your tickets here.

Another Year Without a Car

2010-03-16T07:33:00.000-07:00

I'm getting used to carlessness. As Mark Twain once said, "Be carless in your dress, if you will, but keep a tidy soul." Or something like that.

It's all explained here.

Lifelock Settles with FTC

2010-03-10T08:29:00.000-08:00

Today the FTC announced that Lifelock and the Commission settled claims related to the company's advertising. The action may sound serious and of course the press loves to sensationalize these types of stories. The truth, however, is far different than what the newspapers report. Obviously I'm biased, but judge for yourself...

The FTC claims that Lifelock deceived the public by guaranteeing that it could protect consumers from identity theft, even though Lifelock's protection is not 100% effective in preventing ID theft, since it fails to stop fraud on existing credit card accounts. According to Illinois state attorney Attorney General Lisa Madigan:

“Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do or purchase that will protect you 100 percent from identity theft,” Madigan said. “Don’t be scared into spending your hard earned money.”

Now Lifelock has never claimed that it could prevent identity theft with 100% efficacy. What Lifelock has promised, and delivered, is a proactive identity theft protection service backed up by a guarantee that if the service fails (as any security mechanism will at times do), Lifelock will protect the subscriber's time and money by contributing the legal/accounting/forensic work necessary to set the record straight. And Lifelock's guarantee is 100% effective in protecting consumers from loss of time and money due to identity theft. (And no one even bothers filing claims about credit card fraud because the banks already cover those losses for the consumer.)

And even if the FTC were right that Lifelock is not 100% effective, does that really mean that the service has no value -- that consumers shouldn't spend their "hard-earned money" on it? That would mean that consumers should never buy ANY security product at all, since nothing is 100% effective.

Finally, the FTC thought that Lifelock's claims were too strong because we promised to "prevent" identity theft. And yet "prevention" is the promise of most every security product on the market: According to the Symantec Store, Norton Internt Security "prevents virus-infected emails and instant messages from spreading." According to McAfee, its Host Intrusion Prevention for Desktop product will "prevent loss of confidential data by securing desktops from targeted attacks." Experian (when they're not selling your data) also promises to "prevent fraud." This Google channel partner promises that Postini will "Stop Spam. Prevent Viruses."

The truth is that the FTC doesn't care whether consumers need protection from Lifelock's ads. The FTC has clear direction from President Obama to demonstrate its dominion over financial services as he campaigns to establish a consumer protection agency, and so the FTC is prepared to enforce and potentially litigate even in cases they know they can't win. Lifelock understood this, and so even though $12 million is a LOT of money, it's nothing compared to what the lawyers will charge over the next 5 years to successfully defend against an FTC crusade.

I'm proud of Lifelock's success, its team, and its technology. I'm a happy subscriber, along with 1.7 million other people. I know of no better way to protect my family from identity theft than Lifelock.

TED10 Saturday: Chaos, Lawyers and Avatars

2010-02-23T00:21:00.000-08:00

<-- Friday Afternoon

Nathalie and I were really glad we had decided to stay to the end. Saturday was a great day.

Benoit Mandelbrot
Score: 4 balloons

I had so looked forward to hearing the inventor of fractals. Unfortunately, he did not deliver. He sat back and reflected on all his work, with a lot of jargon and an expectation that the audience was already familiar with chaos theory.

George Whitesides

Score: 6 balloons

The Harvard chemist, whose publications are the most cited in the field, presented a talk on the two kinds of complexity -- emergent and stacked. Emergent complexity arises out of systems with many simple parts interacting and a steady supply of energy (the most prominent example is human life, which emerged from the evolution of competing cells). Stacked complexity -- like the internet -- emerges from exploiting predictably functional parts in systems with more and more layers of functionality (e.g. transistors, ICs, computers, networks).

This talk should have preceded Mandelbrot's, which might have then made more sense.

Sir Ken Robinson

Score: 10 balloons

As with Raghava KK's talk, we'd have never guessed beforehand from the speaker's bio or the content that this TED talk would score 10 balloons. But Sir Robinson, whose recent book The Element presents his theories on education, elocuted a summary of those ideas with compelling humor and wit. His primary message is that educators should prioritize the campaign to help students identify and ignite their passions, rather than pushing standard, tedious work.

Philip Howard
Score: 5 balloons

Phil Howard, author of Life Without Lawyers, delivered a rousing rally against litigators. It was very well received (way more than my 5 balloons would suggest) but I think it lacked substance and instead merely tapped into mob psychology.

Phil provoked anger at trial lawyers by illustrating examples of trivial litigation. But in my opinion he did not provide a balanced view -- even after cherry picking his examples, I think that they crumbled beneath some critical thought. For example, his flagship example was a schoolteacher he met in the woods one day who complained that she was under legal pressure to reverse her late penalty on a particular student's grade. Furthermore, when she wanted to drive two students to an extracurricular activity, the school prohibited it because of The Lawyers, insisting instead that they use a school bus.

Imagine that! How shocking that parents will sue an earnest, hard-working schoolmum for teaching discipline, and prevent her from simply driving a couple of kids to a scholastic opportunity. Those lawyers are OUT OF CONTROL!!

I don't know the details of the schoolteacher's case -- Howard did not share them. But I do know that in most of these cases where parents seek legal advocates relating to grades, the situation arose because the student -- usually a child on the autism spectrum -- has some learning difference that warrants accommodations in the classroom (such as extra time for homework). These accommodations are exactly the kind that Temple Gardin and Ken Robinson prescribed to standing ovations, not to mention that such accommodations are legally enforceable under federal law. But sadly, teachers who lack experience with learning disabilities sometimes see these accommodations as unfair, coddling, or inconvenient, and choose to ignore them, forcing the parents to either seek legal help or else watch their children unnecessarily fail at school.

As for the school bus, I do not want teachers driving my kids around when a trained, licensed school bus driver is available. Do you?

I am all for legal reform but let's approach it with balance and reason, rather than pitchforks and nooses. Anyway, here's the talk so you can decide for yourself...

Alan Siegel
Score: 9 balloons

If by some chance this TED Member's 3-minute talk makes it into a video, watch it! It was a very compelling description of how this guy makes the world better by simplifying complicated forms. The world is too complex, Alan complains, with too much fine print. But instead of organizing a posse like Philip Howard, Alan does something practical -- he redesigns forms to be much simpler. This kind of transparency is not only good for avoiding legal disputes, but it's also good for business. The examples he showed were a clear, streamlined, one-page credit card agreement that every lender should use, and the second was a streamlined, easy-to-understand IRS form that will replace a gobbledygook 9-page notice that millions of taxpayers get today.

Adora Svitak
Score: 8 balloons

Incredibly impressive 12 year old girl talks about her views on education. The content is secondary -- her charm, confidence, and eloquence are eery.

John Kasaona
Score: 9 balloons

For many decades in John's homeland Namibia, the local "poachers" like John's father were prohibited from the wild game preserves ("This Land For Use Only By White Persons" read the signs) at the punishment of death. But the locals had lived alongside the wildlife for millennia, sharing a sustainable ecosystem. Under white rule, the game was hunted for trophy and profit, and the animals dwindled to the point where only 20 lions remained in northwest Namibia. Finally the Prime Minister overruled the colonialists and charged the local poachers with protecting the wildlife. John's father, and later John, were among the newly deputized conservators. According to John, they succeeded in restoring the animal populations, with 60 conservancies now operating across the nation. The program is funded by the newly enabled tourism, with surplus profits funding a thriving new school system. The call to action here was to learn from Namibia's example of how important it is to support the local human populations when trying to conserve ecosystems.

James Cameron
Score: 8 balloons

The director of blockbuster films like Titanic and Avatar shared some great stories about his life and motivations. James described his younger self as an introverted sci-fi nerd who, for lack of access to space, resolved to learn scuba diving after seeing such alien life forms on the Jacques Cousteau programs. This was the inspiration for The Abyss, the first film to feature a character completely rendered by computer graphics. Cameron also confessed that he agreed to direct Titanic solely because he knew he could thus compel the studio to send him down to tour the real thing, which he did in a Russian submersible. It was on that trip, as he remotely controlled a video robot through the wreckage, that he first became interested in virtual agents and avatars.

Cameron's message was that the most important ingredient for success -- at least in budding filmmakers -- is imagination. And that's what the world needs now.

TED10 Fri PM: Music and Comedy

2010-02-17T20:07:00.000-08:00

<= Friday Morning Saturday Morning =>

Friday afternoon and evening were packed with official TED talks, TED member talks (3 minutes on stage), and entertainment. I'll cover the major stuff here but there were too many short format talks to cover them all.

Raghava KK

Score: 10 balloons

This was the best full TED talk of the day-- a Slumdog Millionaire tale of an Indian cartoonist's coming of age. The delivery was masterful and funny. Watch it now...

Denis Duton
Score: 3 balloons

Duton is a philosophy professor from New Zealand. The intriguing thesis of his book The Art Instinct is that appreciation for beauty is an evolutionary adaptation -- that we naturally find beauty in things and scenes that support our survival or reproduction. For example, he claims that people naturally prefer landscapes where the trees have low lying branches -- the better for escaping predators. Unfortunately his delivery was not up to TED standards.

Marion Bantjes

Score: 1 balloon

A totally self-absorbed artist shares her doodles. Okay so lots of folks liked her and I'm just a Philistine. Still, ick.

Temple Grandin
Score: 7 balloons

An autistic woman, whose autobiography is the subject of an upcoming film, presented her position on education. Temple has turned her intuitive understanding of animal cognition into a successful career improving slaughterhouses, and now she's preaching the importance of reforming education to accommodate learning differences. Amen!

Specifically for kids on the autistic spectrum, schools should integrate mentorships, hands-on activities, and on-the-job internships, so that Asperger's kids can "one day make their way to Silicon Valley."

David Rockwell
Score: 4 balloons

Architect designs innovative playground for kids. Crowd goes wild with sentiment.

David Byrne, Thomas Dolby and Ethel Quartet

Some great music to ease us in after the break.

Natalie Merchant
Score: 9 balloons

Even after David Byrne, Robert Gupta and Sheryl Crowe, the best musical show of the week was Nathalie Merchant's performance of the classic poems she has put to music in her upcoming album Leave Your Sleep. Here's a nice one...

"The Janitor’s Boy," Nathalia Crane (1913-1998)

Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy,
And the janitor's boy loves me;
He's going to hunt for a desert isle
In our geography.
A desert isle with spicy trees
Somewhere near Sheepshead Bay;
A right nice place, just fit for two
Where we can live alway.
Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy,
He's busy as he can be;
And down in the cellar he's making a raft
Out of an old settee.
He'll carry me off, I know that he will,
For his hair is exceedingly red;
And the only thing that occurs to me
Is to dutifully shiver in bed.
The day that we sail, I shall leave this brief note,
For my parents I hate to annoy:
"I have flown away to an isle in the bay
With the janitor's red-haired boy."

Julia Sweeney

Score: 10 balloons

Julia Sweeney, aka "Pat" from SNL, is my heroine for writing and performing her theatrical production Letting Go of God (which you can see on Showtime next week). In an impromptu 3-minute talk, Julia hopped on stage and recounted the birds-and-bees conversation she just had with her daughter. It was hysterical -- if this makes it into a TED video, watch it. Meanwhile you can check out her debut TED Talk from 2006:

Eve Ensler
Score: 9 balloons

The woman behind The Vagina Monologues presented an outstanding reading from her new book I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Lives of Girls Around the World. We heard the tales of two young women -- one in an Asian sweat shop and one who was kidnapped by soldiers in Africa. Again, if this makes it onto video, watch it.

Sarah Silverman

Score: 4 balloons

Silverman performed a stand-up shtick with shock comedy that became the subject of much controversy when Chris Anderson himself tweeted how god-awful she was. Later he deleted the tweet and apologized for sending it, but also apologized to TED for bringing Sarah in the first place.

Silverman's supportive bloggers insist that she was simply shaking up the establishment, sticking it to The Man by using the word retarded. Now I'm all for shock comedy, and so I laughed hard at her jokes about poop, hot sex and Jews -- for the most part she met my high expectations. But when she mocked dying, retarded kids, she lost me and most of the room. Less polite audiences would have booed off her the stage, but TED still applauded. Now I'll never criticize a comic for making folks uncomfortable or offending sensibilities, but Silverman hurt a lot of parents in there, and (maybe even worse) the joke just wasn't funny.

The controversy has fanned many anti-TED flames in the blogosphere, some of which I'm bound to attract because I admit I didn't laugh at one of Sarah's jokes. Apparently the detractors find TED to be elitist and self-important; we at TED don't produce fresh enough ideas, we take ourselves too seriously, and we're too crusty to get Silverman's sophisticated form of parody. The odd thing is that I only hear this from people who didn't attend TED. Really, who has time for this?

The Party

As usual TED hosted a Grand Party on that last night, which was okay (chilly, crowded and short on food). But the REAL party erupted, unplanned, in the lobby of the Westin, where Jake the Uke player held court among those of us who speculated that there just might be a repeat of last year's Westin lobby sing-a-long. As the hours passed, TED performers of all kinds must have read their tweets and made their way over, joining the impromptu jam session. Robert Gupta of the LA Philharmonic, the Ethel quartet, Louis the flamenco guitarist, Natalie Merchant, soundtrack composer Carter Burwell on the piano, and others joined the fray, riffing off each other's music and whipping up the crowd. At the pinnacle of the party, Harry Shum of LXD (and the cast of Glee) turned the lobby into a dance spectacle (check out the video below). This performance won't make it into a TED Talk video, but if you want to see it, I'm betting that Friday Night at the Westin has now become a TED institution.

TED10 Fri AM: Microsoft and Google

2010-02-15T16:43:00.000-08:00

<-- Thursday Afternoon Friday Afternoon -->

John Underkoffler

Score: 7 balloons

Fun demo of the hand-gesture UI developed at MIT Media Labs that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas

Score: 8 balloons

Very cool demo of Microsoft technology that synthesizes photos in the public domain, stitching together a navigable, 3D virtual street view product (without having to dispatch trucks everywhere). Watch it for yourself....

Bill Gates

Score: 8 balloons

BIll Gates gave a great talk on the landscape of choices facing us in the energy arena. Since renewables are intermittent, and all the batteries on Earth can store only 10 minutes worth of the world's energy usage, we need to make nuclear power work. Tothat end Gates has funded Terrapower, which aims to make fuel out of Uranium 235, which is far more abundant and safer than enriched Uranium 238.

Sergey Brin

Chris Anderson interviewed Sergey about Google's changing posture toward China (and you can watch it here). Sergey responded openly about the difficulty of figuring out what is right to do as China enforces political censorship. "Some say I'm naive. That may well be true -- I wouldn't have started a search engine company in 1998 if I wasn't." However, Sergey wimpily dodged Chris' question as to whether Google found evidence that China was behind the cyber attack.

Soon after a Googler came on stage to demonstrate the Nexus One, which seemed uncharacteristically commercial for TED, until the end when Chris announced that Sergey brought enough unlocked Nexus Ones for everyone! Really.

Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin

Score: 7 balloons

The co-founders of the Kipps charter schools led what can best be described as a pep rally for educational reform -- low on content and but high on volume and fun.

The Kipps schools target underprivileged neighborhoods, and so far their 82 schools are delivering phenomenal results that have raised the high school and college graduation rates to be on par with national averages.

George Church

Score: 2 balloons

This Harvard biologist touched on many interesting topics, but did so incomprehensibly. He defines life as "replicated complexity" and discussed his work synthesizing molecules that somehow "mirror" organic compounds, but can't interact with the wild. Self-referential?

Gary Lauder

In the best short-format TED Talk so far, Gary Lauder reflects upon how we might organize traffic differently at a time when we care about carbon emissions.

TED10 Thu PM: David Byrne, Laser Shield, Suspended Animation

2010-02-14T05:24:00.000-08:00

<--Thursday Morning Friday Morning -->

David Byrne

Score: 5 balloons

David Byrne of Talking Heads fame gave an interesting talk about the impact of spaces on music -- how the elements of different musical genres can be traced back to the spaces in which that music was performed, or the technical capabilities of the delivery mechanism (e.g. radio, CD, car boom box, iPod). He draws examples from Baroque, Jazz, Choral and other styles, explaining they differ in their allowance of volume changes, key changes, held notes, musical detail and other stylistic effects based on the acoustics of the cathedral, palace room, smokey bar or other venue. Of course he also shared photos of his grungy basement, where he and his buddies first wrote and performed.

Nathan Mhyrvold

Score: 8 balloons

To combat his reputation as patent troll, the former Microsoft CTO talked about his company's facility for invention, such as an optical scanner that can detect malaria by illuminatng hemozoin (waste from the malaria parasite), or a container that can dispense vaccines but keep the remaining ones cool inside -- without power -- for up to 6 months. But he brought his team's most awesome invention to demonstrate on stage; although it may not be the most practical intervention for African malaria, it is surely the coolest: a laser defense system from mosquitoes!

Mhyrvold's machine, which we got to examine up close later in the lobby, was made purely of parts bought on eBay. At one of the stage he placed a fish tank with mosquitoes flying around. At the other end, a good 20 yards away, he placed his gizmo that tracks the mosquitoes through long range infra-red cameras, extrapolates their motion in a computer, and then illuminates them each, as they fly, with frickin' laser beams! To keep the demo going they used low energy levels so as not to burn the critters, though of course that's what the machine is built to do (and Nathan brought videos of the buggers smoking up just to prove it works). Even better, they use two different color lasers to distinguish the genders, so they could choose to kill only the infectious females! (I'm guessing no one would mind if they killed all the mosquitoes, but someone thought up a way to hear the difference and it was too cool a feature not to include.)

Legion of Extraordinary Dancers

I don't normally blog the entertainment, but the LXD are superheroes. Check them out...

Mark Roth

Score: 8 balloons

Cancer researcher Mark Roth presented another candidate for the It-May-Not-Be-Pratical-But-It's-Cool-As-Shit Award. He and his team studies "metabolic flexibility", the phenomenon observed in rare medical cases where people are dead for hours -- usually in frozen conditions -- and then revived when their bodies are warmed. They hypothesized that our bodies may have some agent that can somehow lower our metabolism to the point where, under distress, we can do without oxygen for hours.

The concept of inducing suspended animation is not pure science fiction. Human eggs survive up to 50 years inside ovaries, and plant spores can survive up to 250 million years. The number of cases where human beings returned from frozen death states with no heartbeat has inspired the saying, "You're not dead until you're warm and dead."

Some of those cases involved industrial accidents in which workers collapsed after exposure to hydrogen sulfide, and were thought to be dead for hours until they were removed from the poisoned air and "woke up". Roth realized that we have trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide in our brains, and so perhaps this is the mystery agent. Early tests on rodents support the hypothesis, successfully "killing" the specimens until they are removed from the hydrogen sulfide chambers. So Roth's team is now in clinical trials with a drug that would place trauma victims in suspended animation for hours until their wounds can be properly treated. Really.

Seth Berkley

Score: 6 balloons

AIDS Researcher Seth Berkley presented some startling statistics on flu pandemics, suggesting that we are likely to soon see another like the one in 1918 that killed 100 million people.

Berkley also presented some promising research on a new vaccine to fight AIDS. He presented a great animation developed by XVIVO to illustrate the mechanism by which the memory cells that develop from vaccines can fight the AIDS infection.

Stephen Wolfram

Score: 8 balloons

With Wolfram's characteristic ego, he launched his talk about "the biggest idea of the century" which is, if I understood him, computational complexity. Wolfram has made his career studying emergent complexity, as documented in his humbly titled volume A New Kind of Science.

At TED he presented three things: an impressive demonstration of Wolfram Alpha, his web-based front-end to a computational engine; some background on mathematica, his attempt to build a structured, comprehensive computational engine; and his simulation of physical models designed to suss out those that reflect reality (I think he's basically trying to find the grand unification theory of physics through trial and error).

TED10 Thu AM: Science, Needles and Nukes

2010-02-13T18:55:00.000-08:00

<-- Wednesday Afternoon Thursday Afternoon -->

Thursday morning was a celebration of reason -- my favorite part of the program.

Michael Specter

8 (out of 10) balloons

Michael Specter is a New Yorker journalist who lambasted the anti-science movement. He wrote the book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives.

"Belief in magic instead of science leads to disease and war." With a passion befitting Christopher Hitchens he ripped apart the movements that oppose vaccination, engineered foods and western medicine. "Science is NOT a company." As a laymen he seemed to carry more credibility than those know-it-all scientists, though he wasn't as eloquent as a Dawkins or a Harris.

In a 3-minute presentation, Graham Hill (founder of TreeHugger) reflected on a question he had asked himself last year: why couldn't he bring himself to be a vegetarian when it's so much better for his health, the animals, and the planet's climate? "I just couldn't imagine that THIS is the last burger I will ever eat." So he became a Weekday Vegetarian -- an 80/20 solution. He gets most of the benefits of vegetarianism without feeling deprived. Now I normally don't blog the 3 minute presentations, but based on the hallway chatter here at TED, his Weekday Veggie meme has spread very successfully.

In another 3-minute diversion, Jim Daly taught us all about carnivorous plants, like the Venus Fly Trap native to North Carolina. These plants are quite beautiful, and one of them is now the basis of medical ant-bacterial research – it has a compound that kills its prey’s bacteria so that the bacteria can’t digest the bug's nutrients before the plant does.

Sam Harris

9 balloons

For the first time I got to hear Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation! Sam's talk today attacked the sacred cow belief that science has nothing to say about moral values. Provocative and compelling, he offered up some great examples of how relevant the scientific method is when grappling with serious moral issues of the day such as economic disparities, pollution, and women's rights. He challenged the ethos of cultural relativity -- some behaviors are simply wrong no matter where you grew up, so we must overcome our fear of saying so. “Do we know enough to judge a father whose reaction to his daughter’s rape is to kill her?”

He offered lots of examples. Is it right to apply corporal punishment in school (as endorsed by the law in 21 states)? Science can address this question by examining the well being and educational success of the children blessed with such discipline.

“How did we convince ourselves that every culture has a point of view on morality worth considering? The Taliban is ignorant on physics – how is their ignorance on human well being any less obvious?”

One example he offered was, in my opinion a bad one. Science can tell us, he said, whether it’s a good idea for people to believe that the evil eye is watching and punishing us for what we say about others. He slipped here, confusing belief and action – we cannot select our beliefs based on what is good for society, lest you invite a demand for theism – despite the utter lack of evidence of for it – simply because it tricks some people into being good on Sundays.

His conclusion: “It’s possible for entire cultures to care about the wrong things. Just admitting this will transform our society… we must converge on the most important questions about human life. We must first admit that these questions have answers.”

Nicholas Christakis

Score 8 balloons

Christakis is a Harvard professor of medicine and sociology, and author of Connected. He studies the properties of social networks such as friend counts, centrality (are you in the thick of the social graph or on the fringe), and transitivity (are your friends connected to each other). In his talk he overlaid obesity as a property to analyze, and learned that obesity clusters in the social graph. If your friends are obese, you are 45% more likely to be obese yourself. If your friends’ friends are obese, you’re 25% more likely.

Why would obesity cluster? Turns out that that are three reasons: friends are exposed to the same bad food choices based on their environments; friends encourage each other to make the same choices they make (“Let’s have muffins and beer!”); and people tend to befriend others like them.

Elizabeth Pisani

Score 7 balloons

Pisani is an epidemiologist who studies the spread of AIDS in Africa. Her presentation centered on the hidden rationalities behind the choices people make that spread HIV -- kind of like behavioral healthcare. From afar, it’s easy to dismiss the intelligence and well being of junkies and prostitutes, but a closer understanding of their circumstances yields clues as to why they share needles and engage in unprotected sex. In Indonesia, for example, anyone stopped by the police with a needle will be arrested and imprisoned, so addicts have no choice but to share. Prostitutes in that country earn close to $10 per hour, rather than the 30 cents they would other otherwise earn.

Pisani’s agenda is to encourage clean needle programs. In the UK, Australia and Netherlands, where clean needles are available, 3% of heroin addicts are HIV+. In New York, Jakarta and Moscow, where they are not available, 50% of heroin addicts are HIV+.

Pisani is particularly frustrated by the short-sighted, moralistic arguments against the distribution of condoms and needles, dismissing the notion that they encourage destructive behavior. "Pope Benedict, if you're watching this TED talk: I carry condoms and I NEVER get laid!"

Valerie Plame Wilson

Score 7 balloons

Wilson is an outed CIA agent who worked covertly to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons. She explained why terrorism and accidents will likely lead to catastrophic nuclear explosions, and the Global Zero movement to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. She showed a trailer of the film Countdown to Zero, aired at Sundance and previewed by TED Thursday night.

Michael Sandel

Score: 7 balloons

Sandel is the renowned and dynamic Harvard philosopher, whom I was fortunate to have as my professor for Justice as an undergrad (watch one of his lectures below). To improve the quality of our public debates, he prescribes raising the level of dialogue from the specific issue to a discussion of the fundamental philosophies that underlie the arguments. The example he used was the controversy around Casey Martin's use of a golf cart due to his disability, and the application of Aristotle's philosophy to the question (despite Aristotle's notoriously high golf handicap).

The TED talk was entertaining (e.g. mocking Justice Scalia), but it didn't tie together as well as the full lecture presented above, and Sandel was too wimpy to broach the underlying theistic philosophies that underlie arguments against gay marriage, stem cell therapy, and women's rights.

Christopher "moot" Poole

Score: 6 balloons

Founder of 4chan, the immensely popular, anonymous, and often profane chat site. The teenage Poole talks about his accidental fame, and his commitment to preserving privacy on the internet.

Kevin Bales

Score: 8 balloons

This sociology professor founded Free the Slaves, a movement to liberate the 27 million people around the world currently enslaved. Largely an unknown phenomenon, slavery exists in many nations where, for hte most part, bandits kidnap impoverished men, women and children, often under the guise of legitimate employment. I'd have given this guy the TED Prize.

Stewart Brand

Score: 7 balloons

Brand presented the merits of nuclear power, followed by a spirited debate with Mark Jacobson. Nuclear power is clean and doesn't require the huge land resource footprint of solar power (50 square miles per gigawatt) or wind power (250 square miles per gigawatt--although he seems to have forgotten that wind farm land can still be used for agriculture). The debate exposed a lot of numbers and costs, and the answer really boils down to whether you think that nuclear power will inevitably lead to radioactive accidents or the use of nuclear weapons. If so, it's an awful choice but if not then it's a no-brainer. The audience came into the discussion 75% pro-nuclear and exited 65% pro-nuclear.

Jane McGonigal

Score: 4 balloons

Game designer Jane McGonigal asserts that the 3 billion hours per year of computer game play prepares children well for the challenges that face our species. To win today's games, one must face daunting, world-shaking challenges despite awful odds, overcome failure numerous times, and innovate.

Nathalie and I topped off the morning enjoying a picnic lunch in the sunshine with Dan Dennett (the world's pre-eminent authority on consciousness) and his wife Susan. Over salads and sliders Dan convinced us that public schools should teach comparative religion -- it's the best ammunition against in-home brainwashing.

TED10 Wed PM: Making Good Food Choices

2010-02-11T15:04:00.000-08:00

<-- Wednesday Morning Thursday Morning -->

Carter Emmart

Score: 5 (out of 10) balloons

Carter is Director of Astrovisualization at Hayden Planetarium. He shared some cool renderings of the universe.

Phil Kaplan then had 3 minutes to pitch Blippy - -a Twitter for shopping, where you can follow what your friends are buying. Obviously this has some good monetization but is it compelling for users?

Cheryl Hayashi

Score: 3 Balloons

Associate Professor Hayashi teaches at UC Riverside. She is an expert on spiders enumerated the many kinds of silk and how spiders spin it.

William Li

Score: 8 balloons

Dr. Li educated the audience on an exciting approach to fighting cancer. To grow into a tumor, cancer cells need a blood supply, and so if we can systemically inhibit angiogenesis (the growth of blood vessels), we can prevent tumors. One approach is to develop medical therapies that do this, as two Bessemer companies --Aveo and Acceleron -- are already doing. Aveo's drug Tivozimab, now in Phase 3 clinical trials, inhibits receptors 1, 2 and 3 of the vascular endothilial growth factors.

A second approach is a prophylactic diet that reduces the chance of cancer by eating foods that naturally include anti-angiogenic compounds. Turmeric, green tea, lavender and cooked tomatoes were at the top of the list.

My only criticism of the talk is that Dr. Li did not address the downside of of inhibiting angiogenesis. Deficient angiogenesis leads to other disease conditions including heart disease. For someone who already has cancer this risk is obviously tolerable; but inhibiting angiogenesis as a general objective in one's diet seems to present other risks.

Dan Barber

Score: 10 Balloons

"There are only two fish I've ever loved." This is the opening sentence of a love story between a famous chef and a delicious fish he once ate that he traced to a naturally sustainable fish farm. In the most entertaining talk of TED '10 (so far), Barber (in an encore appearance) explained the current state of commercial fish farming, and how it could be done better, as evidenced better by one model of natural sustainability.

Jamie Oliver (as seen on TV!)

Score: 3 Balloons

The winner of the 2010 TED Prize is TV personality Jamie Oliver, a UK chef who advocates better food choices for children. Jamie's wish was to help teach kids recipes they can cook at home so they have choices beyond junk food. It's a nice cause, but Jamie blustered and rambled his way through it, tossing out junk science and TV-bite-size simplifications. Is he really the most worthy person in the world for the TED prize? Really? What about other speakers like Dr. Li, who would have used the prize to develop anti-angiogenic compounds that fight cancer?

To be fair, I think most of the audience liked Jamie's talk. Here it is, if you wish to judge for yourself...

Wednesday's program ended with a nice performance by Sheryl Crow.

TED 10 Wed AM: The Need for More Skepticism

2010-02-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

<-- Previous TED post Wednesday afternoon -->

Strong sessions today, and I enjoyed a string of great encounters with Bill Gross, Mark Zynga, Daniel Kahneman, Michael Shermer and Scott Kurnit.

Daniel Kahneman

Score: 9 Balloons

The opening session, Mindshift, started with Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, founder of behavioral economics. As an avid student of the subject (read my blog posts on the paralimbic cortex and irrational markets), I loved it. Kahneman took the opportunity to educate his audience on a class of cognitive traps I hadn't previously heard of, that all stem from our general inclination to mistake happy memories for experiential well-being.

We have two selves, he observed: the experiential self and the remembered self, and the remembered self dominates our thinking even though our memories are woefully incomplete. For example, which vacation is better -- the two weeks of blissful relaxation that fills every moment with joy (even though you didn't have a camera with you to record it), or the extreme expedition marked by difficult travels and punctuated by a few exciting moments from which you culled some exciting photos? Even if you factor in the hours of reminiscing that you get from those photos, the former vacation generated far more joy, and yet we tend to remember the latter vacation as better and more fun. I have thought about this very phenomenon during ski trips, when we endure tens of hours of packing, unpacking, driving, and freezing on windy chairlifts in order to experience at most two hours of memorable but fleeting downhill motion.

The decoupling of experienced and remembered happiness was validated in a pain study that chronicled people's characterizations of their colonoscopies. Every 30 seconds they rated their pain levels, and later rated the overall pain level of the operation. Oddly, their overall ratings had nothing to do with the accumulated pain they reported -- rather they reflected only the intensity of the last couple minutes of the procedure. In other words, the memory of a very painful procedure could be improved by adding some low intensity pan at the end, since that's what patients remembered as they rated the overall pain level. The experiential self may have had an awful time, but the remembering self would have thought it was okay.

Khaneman's talk gets a 9 for provoking these questions: How does this insight impact our everyday decisions, and how can we know who experiences real well-being when only our remembering selves report in? Of course, Kahneman himself deserves a high rating for his contribution to economics. (And speaking to him later, I was proud that he had high praise for my college roommate David Laibson, now a behavioral economist at Harvard.)

Dave Cameron

Score: 7 Balloons

UK Conservative leader Dave Cameron chimed in by satellite video from London, discussing the need for transparency, choice and accountability in government. Cameron, projected to win the coming election, impressed the audience as intelligent, compelling and -- most importantly for his campaign -- entertaining. Speaking from the British Film Academy, he quipped, "Politics is show business for ugly people."

Although he didn't really put forward any original thinking, he referenced a great quote from Robert Kennedy citing the need to look beyond gross national product for the success of a society. Asked whether he disagreed with Clinton that "It's the Economy, Stupid!" Cameron replied that a strong economy is the means to an end, not the end itself. A compassionate conservative! How exciting that in the UK conservatism is rooted in libertarianism rather than Christianity. (Having said that, Cameron's opposition to a pan-European currency confounds me.)

Here is Cameron's talk:

Esther Duflo

Score: 8 Balloons

"Our next speaker," announced TED Curator Chris Anderson, "describes herself as short, French, vivacious and pig-headed." No, it wasn't Nathalie -- it was Esther Duflo, who applies the scientific method to resolving debates on how to mitigate hunger, disease and poverty in Africa.

Specifically she cited three experiments to advance us beyond the equivalent of "giving the patient leeches" because we don't know what really helps. For example, they wanted to test anti-malarial campaigns to dispense bednets -- is it better to give them away (will people use them? will people be willing to pay for them when you stop giving them away?), to charge full price so they are valued, or to sell them at a discount? (Bednets are an extremely effective and economical way to stop malaria among the people who use them and their neighbors, since malarial spreads among villagers.) Her team arranged for coupons to be distributed that carried a range of discounts from very small to free. They found that the coupons with the greatest discounts, especially the free ones, were redeemed more than others (of course) but more importantly those bednets were used just as much, and the users were just as likely as the others (even a little bit more) to later buy more bednets themselves.

Duflo also cited an experiment that measured how many incremental hours of education per child resulted in a dollar invested in various types of support. Surprisingly, it turned out that deworming treatments and informational campaigns on the benefits of education were 10X more effective than investing in meals, teachers and scholarships. Counter-intuitive, but proven!

Michael Shermer

Score: 9 Balloons

Those of you who read my blog know that Shermer has been my hero for many years. He runs the Skeptics Society and has written several great books on the pervasive deficits of critical thinking.

In this encore appearance at TED, Shermer talked about patternicity -- the evolutionary adaptation we have developed to see patterns in data -- sometimes a good thing but sometimes not. Evolution has favored high patternicity -- hypersensitivity to dangers leads to short term survival, even at the expense of resources. And so we have an overdeveloped sense of patternicity. Dopamine enhancers like cocaine increase patternicity, and our right brain hemispheres are particularly culpable, as evidenced in experiments where we expose data with possible patterns to one eye or the other. While patternicity sometimes serves us well (scientists depend upon it), too much can drive us mad, as it did John Nash. Paranoia, in fact, can be viewed as an extreme state of patternicity.

Shermer brought some great visual examples of data sets where elusive patterns exist, and other examples where patterns are mistakenly perceived. For example, the Iraqi government recently bought hundreds of Electrostatic Magnetic Ion Bomb Detectors for $40,000 each, even though EMIBs are nothing but hollow plastic boxes with protruding antennae.

TED 2010: What the World Needs Now

2010-02-10T19:36:00.000-08:00

I'm here in Long Beach, CA blogging my fourth TED conference. My objective is to once again provide a road map of the TED talks so that, as the TED talks are published, you can be sure to catch the best ones. In past years I've done this for TED '07, TED '08 and TED '09 with increasing detail, and many folks have thanked me for the effort (though not so much the TED staff, who may not always appreciate the low scores that inevitably creep in).

This year's lineup of speakers looks better than ever, and I'm excited for the first time to have Nathalie with me here to experience it. Like last year, I'll rank the talks on a scale of 1 to 10 TED balloons, based on three dimensions:

(i) CONTENT -- how compelling and timely is the subject matter?

(ii) DELIVERY -- is the talk lively and entertaining?

(iii) SPEAKER -- how much has this speaker personally contributed to the subject matter?

Stay tuned for a rundown of today's sessions...

Update: TED 2010 is done and it was great -- better than ever.

Some recurring themes: irrational thinking leads to bad food choices, HIV infections, climate change and war; our educational system must accommodate and celebrate learning differences; and nuclear power presents an intriguing stop-gap source of power until we can harness the sun.

Lots of great TED moments: lunch with Professor and Mrs. Dan Dennett, the late night party with Nathalie Merchant, LXD and Robert Gupta, and my elevator ride with Al and Albert Gore.

There were three 10-balloon talks: Dan Barber, Raghava KK and Ken Robinson.

Detailed descriptions and ratings at:

Stopping a Runaway Toyota

2010-02-03T23:37:00.001-08:00

I present a guest post today on the emerging dangers of buggy automotive circuitry, contributed by an expert in both law and physics -- my father Martin Cowan...

Do you have a Toyota or other car manufactured by Toyota (e.g., Lexus or Prius)? If not, do you have a car manufactured by anyone else?

One of the terrible accidents reported in the NY Times a few days ago described a 911 call from a panic-stricken driver (an off-duty police officer). He was screaming into the phone that the car was accelerating, that he could not stop it, and that the brakes wouldn't work. The call ended with the sound of a crash. He and his three passengers were all killed instantly.

As the stories unfold in the press, the problem is not restricted to the accelerator pedal, but also includes the brakes. Toyota has known of both problems for many years, but has tried to minimize it. For example, it usually blamed sudden acceleration on floor mats getting stuck on the pedal. However, in several accidents, there were no mats in the car (or they were found in the trunk). It is still minimizing the problem, claiming that the replacement of the current gas pedal will do the trick, even though this fix has failed before, and there is no hard evidence that that is actually the problem.

Moreover, the reports of brake failure cannot be explained by faulty gas pedals. The driver on the 911 call reported that the brakes were not working, and there are multiple stories elsewhere to the same effect.

The US National Traffic Safety Administration thinks that electromagnetic fields may be fouling the electronic circuits. Toyota denies this possibility (see yesterday's NY Times). But if this is the case, no cosmetic fixes like replacing gas pedals is going to work. Moreover, the problem may extend to every car manufactured today with electronic circuitry that controls its operations.

When I first started driving, several centuries ago, the gas pedal was connected to the fuel pump by mechanical means. Today, the gas pedal depresses a sensor, which sends a signal to the computer board. This board processes this signal, along with all of the other data being fed to it from other sensors, and determines how much gasoline and air to feed to the engine. It then sends another electric signal to a fuel injector than controls how much of the gas/air mixture is fed to the engine.

There is a similar situation with brakes and steering. Until about the 1950’s, when power assisted brakes and power assisted steering became available, both braking and steering were purely mechanical procedures. The brake pedal was connected physically to the brakes, and the steering wheel mechanism was directly connected to the front axle. Today, both the brake pedal and the steering wheel operate motors which do most of the braking and steering. You might still be able to operate the brakes and steering when the engine is off, but it would take a great deal of strength to do that, too much to be useful during an emergency.

We all know the frustration when our personal computers crash or freeze up. It happens all the time. In almost every case, it is just an inconvenience. We re-boot and the worst possibility is the loss of some data or the corruption of a file. When the computer in an engine in an automobile going 60 miles per hour “crashes”, so does the vehicle, and the damage to the occupants goes beyond an inconvenience.

What is amazing is that we have been using these devices in our automobiles for so many years and they have not failed more often than they do.

The possibility that electromagnetic fields can cause the electronics to fail is downright scary, We live in a sea of magnetic fields. Radio and TV signals, cell phone calls, overhead power lines, even sun spots generate these fields. The list is endless. While most of the fields are pretty weak, the effect may be cumulative. Moreover, we have no idea how many times we pass through much stronger fields during the day as we go by facilities using high energy equipment. Imagine the consternation in Silicon Valley if it turns out that the IPhone being used by an occupant in the automobile (not just the driver) is responsible! (Maybe that's why the Woz reported today that his own Prius has an overactive accelerator.)

It seems to this writer that this problem is not going to be solved by replacing a gas pedal. Worse, if it is a problem with the electronic circuitry, many other automobile manufacturers may find that they have similar problems. At the least, new cars will have to have better shielding for the electronics, as well as better redundancy and fail-safe systems, including perhaps, manual cutoffs operable from the driver’s position.

In the meantime, what should you do if you are in a car that starts to accelerate and you cannot control it?

Whether or not you think that you have a car that might have this kind of problem, you should still have a plan of action in mind should the situation arise. All the drivers in the family should go over this. You may also want to verify with your mechanic whether these work. Not every model of automobile will respond the same and the efficacy of these suggestions might have to be varied to account for the differences in your particular car. Don't be surprised if the mechanic doesn't know all of this, or only repeats the Toyota press releases. (If he just assures you that Toyota has already solved the problem, consider getting another mechanic.)

If the engine is racing out of control and the brakes won't work there are two possible ways to bring the car under control.

1) The better and safer method is the following:

MOVE THE TRANSMISSION TO NEUTRAL.

This should work in all models. However, verify with your mechanic, or try it yourself at a low speed on a clear road. It is conceivable that, on some models, the transmission level merely operates some electronic circuits, like the gas pedal, in which case you might not be able to shift gears, either. I just don’t know.

Assuming that you are able to get the transmission into neutral, the engine will still be racing at full throttle, but it won’t be sending any power to the wheels. Unless there is something terribly wrong with all of the electronics in the car, and not just the engine circuit boards, the brakes and steering will continue to work properly, and you will retain full control over the vehicle. You should be able to stop it within a hundred feet or so. Even if the power brakes fail (as happened in some of the accidents reported in the newspapers), the car will eventually slow down by itself. You can also try to use the brakes manually—difficult without power brakes but not impossible—and apply the hand brake.

2) Another method, but clearly inferior, is to try to turn off the engine. If you can, the car will stop accelerating (unless you are going down a steep hill). But this won’t slow the car down very quickly (unless you are going uphill). There is still the problem of trying to stop it before it hits something really hard. If the engine is off, the power assists to both the brakes and the steering will be disabled, making it difficult to use the brakes and the steering. Depending on the design of the engine circuitry, the brakes might not work at all. If this happens, you can try applying the parking brake, although this is usually a very weak brake and it would take much longer to bring the car to a halt using this method. Finally, if none of the brakes work, you would just have to let the car roll to a stop. If it is going over 60 miles an hour on a level grade when you cut the engine, it could take a mile or more to stop the car this way. (My 1991 Mazda, which gets up to 38 miles to the gallon, might go 10 miles before stopping; my SUV, which gets 8 miles to the gallon, would probably stop in about 10 feet.)

Without power steering, you may still be able to control the steering at higher speeds (over 20 miles an hour), although you probably will need a significant amount of brute force to do this. When the car speed drops below 20, it will become harder and harder to control the steering wheel, but not necessarily impossible. Just takes even more force. Again, your car mechanic will know how the steering on your car would work if the engine is off.

The bottom line on this technique is that it is better than nothing, but can give you a lot of difficulty maintaining braking and steering control.

You should verify all of these suggestions with a mechanic who understands how the engine, steering and brakes in your particular car are wired up.

Meanwhile, all class action plaintiffs’ attorneys, rev up your engines. Your “action” is just beginning.

In a Liquidity Crisis, Who Will Buy?

2010-01-24T09:34:00.000-08:00

Who Will Buy, by the Avery Buddy Quartet.

Ten-year-old Avery Cowan leads his quartet in their rendition of Who Will Buy, from the musical Oliver. Rob Sequiera sings baritone, Tom Shields sings bass, and Dave Binetti sings tenor.

Escape to Maui

2010-01-12T16:58:00.000-08:00

The successful entrepreneur exhibits hope, critical thinking, and determination. These are the traits you will see in this short home movie of what my 10-year-old did over his holiday break (click on the Full Screen option for the HD experience)...

Watch this on Vimeo.

I'm gonna sing about baby Jesus!

2009-11-16T14:06:00.000-08:00

Nothing says "Holiday" better than the rich a capella sound of 72 Christians, four Jews and an atheist. Under the direction of Dr. Greg Lyne, Voices in Harmony will perform a variety of traditional seasonal works including "It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" (Pola and Wyle), "Hallelujah Chorus" (Handel), "Hodie Christus Natus Est" (Gregorian Chant), and the obligatory Hanukah number Feast of Lights. Joining as special guests are the Santa Clara Chorale under the direction of Ryan James Brandau, performing several outstanding pieces including "Ave Maria" (Busto). Plus, there will be a kids' chorus, and a sing-a-long!

PURCHASE BY PHONE
(408)792-4111

PURCHASE ONLINE

Tickets are also available at the
SJ Convention Center Box Office and Ticketmaster locations.
Box Office hours are Monday - Friday, 9am to 5pm

For more information, visit us at www.vihchorus.org or

Gladwell's Igon Value Problem

2009-11-15T18:26:00.000-08:00

For years I've felt quite alone in my opinion that Malcolm Gladwell is a fake (merely one rung above Victoria Knight-McDowell and Kevin Trudeau, and only because Gladwell probably believes his own claptrap). After all, he sells a gazillion books, and speaks at TED (although Karen Amrstrong does both as well, so there you go).

That's why it was great to read Harvard Professor Steven Pinker’s review of Gladwell’s latest product, What The Dog Saw, in today's New York Times Book Review.

Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
...The problem with Gladwell’s generalizations about prediction is that he never zeroes in on the essence of a statistical problem and instead overinterprets some of its trappings... Gladwell bamboozles his readers with pseudoparadoxes...

For example, Gladwell observes that teaching qualification tests are imperfect indicators of success, and concludes therefore that they shouldn’t be used at all. Instead “teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree,” whose first year results should serve as the basis for future employment. That is a provocative sound bite that sounds wise if you assess it for no longer than it takes to Blink! But Gladwell neglects to consider the costs of such a tactic, nor the impact on the poor students who are subjected to all those failed first year experiments. Who has time for this? By Gladwell’s logic, based on their imperfections we should dispense entirely with the police department, antibiotics and Hillary Clinton.

Does today's book review mean that my view of Gladwell is no longer an Outlier? If Pinker reaches enough readers, perhaps we'll see a Tipping Point…

Spiritual Guidance

2009-10-29T09:39:00.001-07:00

Attack of the Zombie Bikini Babes

2009-10-27T10:20:00.000-07:00

Okay, so zombies, bikinis and bombs aren't new to the App Store, but together in one app?? This morning's release of Attack of the Zombie Bikini Babes from Outer Space (with original soundtrack!) makes me proud to be a shareholder in Smort.

Mashable calls it "hilarious... very addictive."

Mobilecrunch calls it "a pretty damn fun game...absolutely insane."

Gizmodo calls it "99-cent B-movie brilliance...it's totally worth a buck."

Sure, I could be investing in cleantech, but for me it's not just about the capital gains--backing Smort was an investment in our planet and our species. After all, someone needs to train the resistance...

A Capella Concerts This Weekend and Next

2009-10-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

My chorus Voices in Harmony will be performing tomorrow night 8pm at the Gallo Center in Modesto (get tickets). Joining us will be the River Lights Chorus, with their salute to Elvis.

We're also performing with the Santa Clara Chorale next Saturday night 7:30pm at Mission Santa Clara on the Santa Clara university campus (get tickets).

The Fallacy of the Fallacy of Identity Theft

2009-10-15T22:50:00.000-07:00

Okay, sometimes bad ideas just slink away on their own, but a reckless, poorly researched Wall Street Journal column has attracted enough tweetness to keep the bad meme recirculating. As much as I fear the wrath of Wall Street Journalists, I simply can't let this go uncorrected.

Earlier this week Julia Angwin posted a story titled The Fallacy of Identity Theft, in which she accused big corporate bad guys of conspiring against the poor folk to whip up a panic regarding the non-existent crime of identity theft. (After all, who can resist a corporate conspiracy story?)

As far as I know, no one can steal my identity. Even if my bank account number, my credit card number and all my passwords are stolen, I am fairly confident that I will still be me and the thief will be a different person.

Yes, the criminal will be masquerading as me. But anyone who knows me – my husband, my children, my colleagues, my doorman, my employer – will not be fooled. If "I" was actually stolen, I believe that would be called a kidnapping.

The entities that would be fooled by a masquerader are ones that don't really know me: my bank, my credit card company, places where I do online or offline shopping. Maybe they should have done a better job figuring out who I was before parting with my money or their goods....

Meanwhile, you wouldn't know it from the headlines, but identity fraud began to decline...independent researchers at Javelin Strategy & Research show fraud declining to $48 billion in 2008 from $58 billion in 2003...

It turns out that "identity theft" is one of the most brilliant linguistic constructs ever, with its terrifying specter of losing not just your money – but your soul. Maybe it's time that we renamed it what it is: a fear campaign designed to get us to buy expensive services that we don't need.

Oy. So much ignorance in this story -- where do I begin?

First and foremost, identity theft is a real crime, with real victims. The damage cannot be quantified by simply measuring the consumer's reported losses. It's true that at the end of the day, victims of ID theft do not lose their homes or cash -- when they finally document the fraud, the banks generally do return the asset. But it usually takes years (35 years, in this case) to find out what happened, convince the bank or merchant that you didn't really borrow their money, convince the credit bureaus to clear the reported deficiencies from your credit report, and then convince them again as the negative report circulates among the credit bureaus. And unless you're unusually lucky that law enforcement agencies are willing and able to catch the thieves, the thieves still have your data and continue to wreak havoc. And throughout this anxious, painful ordeal, don't even think about getting a credit card, mortgage, car loan or cell phone. Even checking into a hospital or getting a new job can be difficult. You might even end up in jail.

Oh, but you still have your soul, so what's the big deal? Well apparently it is a big deal to the victims, who have inundated Julia with a shit storm of comments and actual data regarding identity theft. I wonder why she didn't interview any victims prior to writing her cutesy rant? For example, she could have asked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, a rather sophisticated consumer who was still vicitmized. According to Bernanke, "Identity theft is a serious crime that affects millions of Americans each year."

Julia twists a lot of facts. She blames the banks for poor security but so what? Yes, it's their job to secure our assets, and that's why they eventually give the money back, but how does that cure the other, more painful consequences? Yes, some ID theft does hurt only banks, but not all of it. Yes, ID theft is often perpetrated by relatives, but so what? How does that mitigate the pain? Yes, direct financial losses are declining, but why doesn't she even mention the years of hassle, paperwork and bad credit that victims endure?

Most importantly, it is misleading to conclude from last year's reported decline in financial losses that ID theft is going away. Any vicitm's real pain is measured in years not in dollars, and so the much more relevant datum is that in 2008 alone the number of victims increased 22%, to 9.9 million in the US.

As for the term "identity theft" it was not coined by the industry, and it would have been easy for Julia to figure that out instead of lobbing speculation. (Hey Julia, wasn't "Heart Disease" invented by the medical industry to sell you more drugs?) The first known use of "Identity Theft" was in a newspaper article in 1966, and the term was applied to financial fraud as early as 1991 by the Social Security Administration, more than 12 years before "the industry" existed (ooh, the feds must be in on the conspiracy).

Julia's philosophical challenge to the literal meaning of "Identity Theft" is worthy of a midnight dorm room conversation. Dude, why call it a firewall--is there really a fire raging around it? Totally! And why call it a computer virus -- does your PC get a fever? And the clincher: "If I was actually stolen, I believe that would be called a kidnapping." (Oh damn, there goes our evil plot to trick people into confusing the two crimes.)

I could pick apart much more of her story, but Who Has Time For This? Obviously Julia is generating page views by whipping up corporate conspiracies and, in the process, recklessly advising people not to protect themselves from a very real and damaging crime. Then again, maybe I'm wrong about her and she'll retract her column in light of more information. I hope so.

Praying with Richard Dawkins to the Great Ramen

2009-10-08T23:45:00.000-07:00

This week Dr. Richard Dawkins, the pre-eminent evolutionary scientist of our age, visited Menlo Park for the third time. He addressed a mandatory assembly of the Menlo School (!) and then Daniel Mendez and I co-hosted a fundraiser for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason, featuring the blasphemous a capella music of Hereby Chants. Thank you Christopher Hitchens, Steve Jurvetson, Jeff Hawkins, Aaron Patzer and everyone else who attended and generously contributed. (Even @God was there!)

The next evening Richard addressed a crowd of over 600 fans at Kepler's Bookstore about his new bestseller The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, after which he tirelessly signed books for hours! I had the honor of introducing Richard at both events, which I opened by invoking a prayer to the Flying Spaghetti Monster:

From your Heavenly head to your Farfelly feet, you’re cloaked in fresh ziti—both dashing and sweet!

You don’t like to boast

But you’re smarter than most

with Noodly Knowledge from Sky Monster College.

Your blond AngelHair , with buttery flair

Is streaked with linguine.

Your Son the Rotini,

Who did twist and coil, was born of virgin olive oil.

Vanquish the sinners who eat milk with pig,

who worship the physics, the bio the trig!

Show them whose meatballs are big!

Now, join me in common

To praise The Great Ramen.

Together say: Amen.

But a funny thing had happened on the way to Kepler's. While I was trying to leave the house, the kids were fussing, so Nathalie asked me to take one with me. I worried that they might be confused and bored by the event, so I turned to Eliot and asked him if hew knew what evolution is. My 7-year-old looked at me blankly, but curiously. I gave him the quick explanation, and asked him if he'd like to go with me to meet the world's expert on evolution. Eliot beamed, and said, "I'll get my tie!"

A few minutes later I found myself praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster with Richard Dawkins, Eliot, and 600+ Kepler's customers. As I publicly reflected on Richard's compilation of exactly 150 years of supporting evidence for Darwin's theory (published in 1859), it occured to me that natural selection is one of those ideas that, once it's stated, is so obvious that everyone says, "Now why didn't I think of that?" To demonstrate what an elegantly simple concept it is, I invited Eliot up to the podium and briefly interviewed him (without any rehearsal). Here's the transcript of what was said (since, unfortunately, the video was taken down from YouTube for some reason):

DAVID: What is your name?

ELIOT: Eliot Cowan.

DAVID: How old are you?

ELIOT: Seven years old.

DAVID: And can you tell us, what is evolution?

ELIOT: It's when a baby animal is born with some kind of advantage that other animals don't have. The baby has other babies with the same advantage, and they have more babies with that advantage. Eventually the animals with the advantage pretty much take over.

DAVID: Can you give us an example?

ELIOT: Okay. A baby giraffe is born with an extra long neck, so it can reach leaves higher up in the trees. It has babies with an extra long neck, and they have babies with an extra long neck and so on. The giraffes with the extra long necks are more likely to survive, so they pretty much take over.

DAVID: When did you first learn about evolution?

ELIOT: An hour ago.

When Richard took the podium (as you can see below on YouTube), here's how he began:

RICHARD: Well after hearing Eliot give the outline of the theory, I might as well go home!

The Richard Dawkins Foundation web site features 11 excellent educational shorts about science (check them out here). And if you agree that science should supplant mythology and superstition as the basis for which we make decisions about our lives, families, nation, and planet, please consider emailing me your pledge to contribute to the foundation. I promise that Richard will personally show you his appreciation upon his next visit!

Why USA.NET Feels So Lonely

2009-09-17T18:54:00.000-07:00

From Radicati's newly published report on hosted email services:

Nice work, guys!

Physical Encryption: The Ultimate ID Theft Defense

2009-09-16T22:33:00.000-07:00

When my father recently retired his old laptop, he realized that many years of financial records and other private data have proliferated all the dark nooks and crannies of his hard drive. So this weekend he charged my son with the task of physically encrypting his drive using the Sledgehammer Algorithm, an asymmetrical encryption protocol.

Multi-core Processors are Key to Security

2009-09-11T15:27:00.000-07:00

MIT Professor and Turing Award Winner Ron Rivest knows a thing or two about security. He invented the RC2, RC4, and RC5 symmetric key encryption algorithms (RC=Rivest Cipher), as well as the MD2, MD4 and MD5 hashing algorithms. He's also the R in RSA, so I got to know him when Jim Bidzos and I were getting VeriSign off the ground (not to mention a few friendly poker games we shared).

Anyway, the community of security researchers continuously strengthen their algorithms to withstand the steady onslaught of attack from cryptographers with increasingly powerful computers. So Rivest has been developing his newest MD6 algorithm on Tilera multi-core processors. Tilera is a Bessemer company that has integrated 64 processors with independent memory, caches and network ports on a single chip known as Tile64.

According to this article from a recent MIT campus paper, NIST won't adopt MD6 as a standard because it's just too slow to run without the Tile64. The inescapable conclusion is that as long as we continue to buy computers built on stale platforms, our security algorithms will be vulnerable to hackers with newer toys.

A Field Trip to 1906

2009-09-10T21:49:00.001-07:00

About an hour ago Captain Watts discharged my son Avery and me from our duties aboard the Balclutha, a sailing ship docked in the Bay. Together with Avery’s class (the regular crewmen), his teacher (Guest of the Captain), four other parents (the Tall Sailors), and the staff of the Age of Sail program (the Officers), we set sail to Portland in the year 1906 to fetch much needed timber for rebuilding San Francisco. Avery worked in Galley Crew, and I in the Rigger Crew. The simulated voyage—a 20 hour adventure –was arduous but ultimately successful.

The Balclutha—a glorious three-masted steel hull square rigged sailing ship built in Scotland and now docked in the San Francisco Maritime Museum—has sailed many times around the world since its commission in January 1887, and did actually sail up the West Coast through Frisco In 1906. Today, as our nation’s only floating national park, she’s open to visitors by day but open only to the Age o f Sail program off hours.

Dockmaster Clyde allowed us to board with but one duffel bag for our pillow, blanket and toothbrush. He relieved me and the other Tall Sailors of any anachronistic distractions like cameras and phones, so for 20 hours we were completely off-grid. First Mate Phoenix was not pleased when Second Mate Bonk presented the new crew. “I dispatched you to recruit 10 older experienced sailors, not 10-year-old sailors, you ninny!” But Captain Watts -- determined to be the first to market with Oregon lumber -- resolved to train the greenhands.

The Galley, Boat, Boson, Rigger and Deck Crews were each manned by four regular crewmen plus one Tall Sailor (grownup). But the Tall Sailors were NOT in charge. In fact, the contract we signed specifically prohibited us from doing or saying anything (except in the case of emergency, which never came up), since this experience was for the kids’ benefit, not ours. After years of

helicopter parenting, we had to somehow be there without ever saying a single word to any of the children, including our own. As they fumbled to put their coats on upside down, or provoked the captain by forgetting to remove their hats on deck, or over-salted the stew, or didn’t think to use the Head Call when they had the chance, or spoke too softly to be heard, or wondered where to stow a dirty tissue, or groped for the right word, or bickered, or encountered any of the little struggles that we normally help them overcome, the Tall Sailors had to suck it up and let it be. We simply followed our crews around and watched (though at night the Tall Sailors slept in a separate bunk galley so regular crewmen were on their own to make bunk).

In fact a regular seaman from each crew had already been designated to lead that crew as their mate, and to give the orders that the rest of us had to follow to the word. When it came to ship discipline, there was no impunity for Tall Sailors—I had to haul firewood for the Galley stove more than once just for putting hands in my pockets as the frigid Bay winds whipped around us.

It took some harsh training, but the crews learned how to appropriately respond to their captain, first mate, other officers and crew mate. (Say ‘Aye, Sir’ to anyone other than the captain and you’ll haul water buckets during Galley call.) The crew mates themselves were mostly uncomfortable at first when it came to issuing commands (our Rigger Mate was a sweet, shy 10 year old girl), but with the First Mate and Captain breathing down their necks they quickly learned to bark out orders clearly and properly.

For the past week the regular crewmen had been preparing by learning all kinds of stuff (that I still don’t know) such as how to identify parts of the ship, tie all kinds of strange knots, and sing authentic sailor shanties. So they were ready right away for the officers to teach them more complex team skills, such as working in unison to lower and raise the lifeboats, coil the hawser (a thick 120 foot mooring line), raise their school's flag up the main mast, and swab the decks. Rather than teach the crews directly, officers trained the mates to teach the crews.

The deck crew kept the bells ringing on time, and the galley crew kept all the hands fed. Through the cold night each crew kept a silent 90 minute watch, punctually and quietly relieving their deckmates. Turns out we had no pirate attacks (or sleepwalkers) and so it was a time for the deckhands to reflect on what they accomplished yesterday, and to enjoy the sounds and smells of the Bay, barely illuminated through the mist by the Ghirardelli factory sign. One boy, weepy and homesick, made it through the night with the help of his mate, but in the morning he had the biggest smile of all.

At 0430 this morning the Galley Crew began preparing breakfast and by 0600 all the crews were dressed, everyone had a Head Call, and the seaman returned the hawser to port. After galley call, it was time for some sailor fun—the Rigger Crew had hoisted a block and tackle and new lines up the aft mast to hold an expertly knotted boson’s chair, and now their mate was coordinating their Heaves and the Hos as the Riggers hauled their chair up the mast with their own crew members in it. At the captain’s suggestion, they recruited other crews to man the stern line, helping them hoist the Guest of the Captain (their teacher), whom they brought back to deck only after negotiating a week’s relief from homework.

At the final assembly of all deckhands, Captain Watts led us in a shantey.

The work wuz hard an' the voyage wuz long,
Leave her, Johnny, Leave her!
The sea was high an' the gales wuz strong.
An it's time for us to leave her!

It was as if these were different kids than yesterday morning. What they learned on the Balclutha went beyond a nautical lesson. They were confident, in charge, and even respectful of the officers who had been so firm with them. They learned that they can accomplish way more than they thought, that with elbow grease, teamwork and their own wits they can solve their own problems.

And that’s when it occurred to me that maybe in fact the Tall Sailors had as much to benefit from the experience as the kids. The 20 hours of just watching taught me that letting Avery solve his own problems is not only possible, but far more rewarding.

The captain dismissed the crew and for the first time in 20 hours parents and children could speak to each other. The kids of the Tall Sailors gave us each a “Hi” or a even a hug, and then went back to gathering their duffel bags--everything back to normal, but with a bit more spry in their steps, and a newfound respect for them in our eyes.

An Epic Search for Truth, with a Connection in Frankfurt

2009-09-08T07:54:00.000-07:00

Normally I’d wait until I finish reading a book before I write my review. But LogiComix is – er, unusual, and not just because it’s a graphic novel about a dead logician. Three chapters into it, I’m captivated and enchanted by the playful, clever, innovative use of self-reference. For example, the prologue opens with co-author Apostolos Doxiadis reading a draft of his story. As we intrude upon his thoughts, he invites us to meet Berkeley computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou, whom Apostolos must recruit to help him with the book. When Apostolos tells Christos the story he’d like to craft, we, the readers, get to hear it too!

Along the way, Christos asks questions, points out problems, and makes suggestions to Apostolos as well as to his illustrators Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna. As the story unfolds, the creative team debate how to best move it forward. By the end Christos and we together come to understand that LogiComix is deliberately not LOGIC FOR DUMMIES, but rather a true story about passion, family, war, love, tragedy and hope.

So if the LogiComix creative team can be characters writing their story as it goes, then I can do the same in this review. If that violates some rule, I wouldn’t know because I am of course not a professional book reviewer. Here are my only qualifications for writing this review:

(i) I have a fancy degree in theoretical computer science centered mainly on the works of those logicians portrayed in this story.

(ii) As a practiced blogger, I can emulate authority on any subject.

(iii) My dear friend Vivian Leal of Kepler’s Bookstore asked me to review this book.

(iv) As I type, I am on a Lufthansa flight from St. Petersburg heading home to San Francisco, so I have some time.

When Vivian asked me to review LogiComix, I readily agreed. Not only do I love both Vivian and Kepler’s, but I can also say that I love Christos Papadimitriou. I’ve never met him, but he did also happen to co-author my favorite college textbook Elements of the Theory of Computation, a beautifully elegant introduction to Turing machines and recursion that even I could understand. His co-author back then was Harry Lewis, my CS121 professor and also my undergraduate advisor. (Still, like Papadimitriou, Lewis never knew who I was, though once he passed me by in Harvard Yard and raised his eyebrows at me in an acknowledging way that made me feel a real connection.) Coincidentally, I would have never met Vivian had I not befriended her husband Daniel 23 years ago back in CS121 – another debt I owe Christos Papadimitriou.

So far, the graphic novel format of LogiComix (now popularized by the Wimpy Kid and Maus series, as well as The Invention of Hugo Cabret) is working well for me. The throwback to comic books promises to make even Boolean Algebra an accessible topic to all, just as Scott McCloud recently did with a comic book about Google’s new Chrome browser architecture. But more importantly, Apostolos draws us into the story with visuals that not only support the narrative but also relay sub-plots and emotional texture. Often we see a human side to the characters that they otherwise don’t acknowledge, such as a jealous look from a wife, or a 12-year-old boy subtly covering his lap while his beautiful French nanny reads him a love sonnet. (I’m reminded of the beautiful French nanny who charmed me as well – so much so that I married her. Hmm, can’t this plane fly any faster?)

The excited 12-year-old is our hero – the great mathematician Bertrand Russell who devoted not only his career but his life to the pursuit of a provably logical foundation for mathematics, as Euclid had purportedly done for geometry (at least before Lobachewski and Riemann each had his way with Euclid’s assumptions). Embedding yet another layer of recursion into LogiComix, Russell tells his own story in the form of a lecture delivered at an American university on Sept 4, 1939, the day the UK joined World War II. The lecture, titled “The Role of Logic in Human Affairs” promises an answer to the question hurled at him by isolationists as to whether Russell, as a World War I conscientious objector, supports the war this time around.

Russell’s own account of his childhood is a contrasting story of privilege and borderline abuse. Orphaned as an infant, “Bertie” lived with his grandfather – a former British prime minister – and a domineering grandmother who imprisoned Bertie in rules and superstitions. Eventually Bertie discovered the family secret that madness had taken his father’s life and disabled his uncle. So when he learned geometry – constructed proof by proof upon common sense and reason – Bertrand embraced logic and science as tools to not only understand the world, but to preserve his own sanity.

Bertrand Russell’s Epic Search for Truth

Russell studies mathematics at Cambridge University, and proceeds to seek out the great minds of his time, to find some articulation and validation of the basic tenets underlying mathematics. Russell overcomes his shyness to engage the greatest professors of his time with his questions (a thrill I remember well from studying the Sacks Theorem of recursion theory from Professor Gerald Sacks himself).

Russell’s travels take him to Germany just 10 minutes before my Lufthansa pilot announces our imminent arrival in Frankfurt, where I’ll make my connection to San Francisco. Russell’s account of those days in Germany evokes that nation’s unique capacity for both logic and madness. There he meets his future best friend, housemate and collaborator Alfred Whitehead, who had created the first formal system for algebra. He meets Gottlob Frege, who had founded modern logic studies by introducing the concept of Boolean variables, though eventually Frege becomes paranoid, and as early as 1925 starts ranting about a Final Solution for the” Jewish problem.” Finally Russell meets Georg Cantor, inventor of Set Theory, who was already then living in a mental asylum. The interplay of logic and madness is a recurring theme of LogiComix, as Russell struggles to stave off madness himself (with only partial success, as readers will learn).

Another recurring theme of the story is Russell’s failures at love, as he depends solely on logic to master courtship, marriage and child-rearing, even as everyone around him succumbs to irrationality. His memoirs – humble and candid –recount his nerdy fumbles followed by his inconsiderate prioritization of work over family. (That reminds me – I’ll use my layover in Frankfurt to call my family. Today is the kids’ first day of school, and they should know how proud I am.)

As Russell strives to formalize the logic behind math, he gravitates toward set theory, until he himself has an epiphany now known as Russell’s Paradox, which can be simplified to this question: Does The Book Review Of All Book Reviews That Are NOT Self-Referential include a review of itself? Either answer leads to a logical contradiction. Russell’s Paradox deflates everyone who has been working on Set Theory. Russell was surprised that Cantor himself takes the paradox as a sign from God.

As Russell embarks on his epic search for truth, he continues to engage the greatest minds of the century, but along the way he must navigate wars, women (enticing but difficult) and the madness that often accompanies logical genius. At one point he mentors the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, the renowned philosopher and father of cognitive psychology. Ultimately, poor mental health ravages Wittgenstein’s family, and Wittgenstein dismisses Russell’s call for formalizing mathematics as irrelevant to the real world.

Having made my connection out of Frankfurt, I’m now traversing the Continent just as Russell recounts his own travel through France, where he engages Klein, Dedekind, Poincare and Hilbert. I must confess that I didn’t learn (or remember) Hilbert’s work, and LogiComix fails to impart an intuitive understanding of his philosophy. Now that I think of it, the story fails to explain the work of any of the great logicians, so unless you already know the ideas, you’re somewhat in the dark as to how they relate to Russell’s search. (For example, the characters don’t explain how an infinite set can be countable.) Having said that, I can’t protest too much because Papadimitrious himself complains about this in the story. Apostos insists that the story should trump the math.

[What I learned only upon finishing the book is that it does come with a terrific glossary that expounds upon the thinkers and their work. I wish I had known about it while I was reading the story. You’re now duly notified. ]

Russell spends many years working and living with Whitehead trying to adapt Set Theory to overcome his paradox, but Volume II of their Principia Mathematica is interrupted by Russell’s greatest professional setback -- Kurt Godel’s delivery of the Incompleteness Theorem. Essentially Godel proves the futility of developing a formal system of logic rich enough to represent arithmetic by showing how one can formulate a paradox for any such system. Although Apostos and Papadimitriou mention this in the glossary, I wish the story itself explained how Godel himself used recursion to prove his theorem. It is really the most beautiful proof I have ever seen, and to this day I remember that moment in Math 141 when we reached the end of this proof. For weeks we had been learning Godel’s scheme for symbolically representing arithmetic concepts and applying obscure theorems (e.g. the “Pigeonhole Principle”) that took us in bizarre directions. But on that last day, the bits and pieces all magically converged into an inescapable conclusion. I got those goosebumps you get when you witness someone redefine the limits of human ability.

But in a way Godel’s Theorem liberates Russell, who redirects his logical faculties to more worldly affairs. Apostos brings it all home when Russell shares his life’s lessons with the American audience. (Judging from the view, I believe that I’m now back in the States as well!)

Influential and Similar Works

LogiComix marries the elements of many great works. Obviously, Apostos explores and uses self-reference in much the same way as Houfstadter’s masterpiece Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Another clear influence is Kurt Vonnegut, whose book SlaughterHouse Five featured the author’s voice in a similar lament of the madness behind World War II. At one point, Papadimitriou even mentions Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions to exemplify a self-referential novel.

Milton Steinberg’s As A Driven Leaf, about the Talmudic rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah who actually lived around the turn of the second century, tells a similar tale of an epic search for truth. Elisha rejects Judaism in favor of Greek logic, only to regret it in the end. But while Russell must ultimately concede the limitations of logic, he would never return to his grandmother’s superstitions. In fact when Whitehead’s son was killed in the war, Russell couldn’t even attend the funeral.

Although surely not an influence here, Caveh Zahedi’s hilarious, racy film I Am A Sex Addict would, I believe, also appeal to many LogiComix fans. Like LogiComix, it liberally uses real time self-reference to document the hero’s lusty mishaps with women, and the lessons he learns about love.

So LogiComix is part Godel-Escher-Bach, part As a Driven Leaf, part I Am a Sex Addict, and of course part Tintin.

The Fundamental Question: What Makes A Good Book?

Must it be engaging, provocative, emotional, beautiful, instructional, or right? Or some combination of the above? There is no universal answer. But acknowledging this incompleteness allows us to take the next step – to use the tools we have to assess each book independently (which gives you a hint as to what Russell’s told his audience of pacifists in 1941). So if I learned anything from LogiComix, I learned that I needn’t answer the fundamental question in order to recommend it. This is a story that engages, provokes and instructs the reader. But more importantly, I liked it.

So now that the flight attendant is insisting that I stow--

Blogged with the Flock Browser

I Am T-PAIN!!

2009-09-04T17:04:00.000-07:00

Today Smule launched a new app called I-Am-T-Pain. It's a karaoke app that auto tunes your voice using the same AnTares DSP technology T-Pain uses, so you sing in key and you sound like T-Pain. The app also lets you share your recordings with your Facebook and MySpace friends.

I'd say it's an overnight success, but it hasn't taken that long. On its first day out in the Apple store, I-Am-T-Pain is already the #2 seller. The tweeters are loving it, and so do the early reviewers...

"Get Ready for the Next Big App" - MobileCrunch

"Auto-Tune Isn’t Dead" - The New York Times

"Auto-Tuning Genius" - Gizmodo

"Sounds Just Like the Radio" - VatorNews

Here's how T-Pain himself (along with Soulja Boy, Keri Hilson and others) showing what you can do with I-Am-T-Pain.

And here are two Smulers being T-Pain...

Be T-Pain yourself and email me your songs so I can share them right here on WhoHasTimeForThis?