This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. Because I’m putting these posts together very quickly, I will get things wrong, will misspell names and bungle details. Please feel free to use the comments thread on this post to offer corrections. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.

Jay Walker, the founder of Priceline and the owner of a legendary library, takes the stage to talk about English mania. He tells us that the desire for people to learn English is now approaching mania state much as Beatlemania, sports manias or religious manias have swept through populations. Manias can be good, alarming or deadly, he tells us, but believes that English mania is an exciting and positive development.

He shows us a massive hall in China where people are learning English by shouting it at one another. They’re part of the two billion people around the world trying to learn English. In China, students are learning English by law in the 3rd grade. In most places, people are learning English because they see it as a ticket to opportunity.

Is this mania good or bad? He thinks it’s very good – English won’t eliminate other languages, he suspects, but will become the world’s second language. “English lets you become part of the global conversation about global problems” – it’s a universal language like mathematics or science. It’s a language of problemsolving.

Thomas Dolby, TED’s musicial director, reminds us that, like the speakers, the musicians who perform at TED aren’t paid – they perform for the opportunity to participate in this community and to attend the conference. I generally don’t blog the musical events at TED, though they’re often my favorite aspects of the conference.

Last night, Herbie Hancock took the stage with bassist Marcus Miller, and drummer Harvey Mason. Herbie opened up with a long improvisation around “Speak Like a Child”, which seemed a bit lost of the crowd. He came back with Watermelon Man and two other jams from his electro-fusion, mid-1980s era, closing with a funk track played on a Roland keytar. As far as I’m concerned, Hancock is the only man in the world who gets to use a keytar without irony. Great set, and I wish it could have gone on hours longer.

This morning, Jamie Cullum reminds us just how broad a genre jazz is – any genre that can include Hancock’s wide-ranging improvisation with Cullum’s creative lounge piano can include almost anything. Cullum plays jazz standards, mixing in snippets of Kanye West, tapping out rhythyms on the piano. Not my thing, but he’s a crowd pleaser and a hell of a charismatic performer.

Gever Tully had a TED talks hit with a talk called “Five dangerous things you should let your children do.” The thinking behind that talk has led him to start something called “Tinkering School“.

It’s a six day camp for kids to buid things, using real-world tools and potentially dangerous materials. The goal is to ensure that kids “leave with a better sense of how to make things, and with a sense that you can figure things out by fooling around.” The kids learn “that all project go awry – that’s a step towards either sweet success or gleeful calamity.” We see a video of a wooden rollercoaster made by eight year-olds. It looks like an amazing thing, a place I’d like to hang out for a week, never mind send my (non-existent) kids.

This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. Because I’m putting these posts together very quickly, I will get things wrong, will misspell names and bungle details. Please feel free to use the comments thread on this post to offer corrections. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.

Dan Ariely suffered burns over 70% of his body as a teenage military trainee from a magnesium flare explosion. As a result, he spent a long time in a hospital burn ward and had ample opportunity to think about the decisions nurses made. Every day, the nurses removed his bandages, ripping them off quickly to “minimize” pain. He wondered – aloud – whether this was the right way to treat his pain. Maybe removing them carefully and gently would have helped him?

The nurses insisted they had the right model to minimize his pain and made it clear that his input wasn’t wanted. But the experience – understandably – haunted him. As a psychology student, he began looking for ways to hurt people and ask them about their reactions – he’d crush fingers in vises, put people in pain suits, gave them electric shocks and subjected them to loud noises.

What he learned: his nurses were wrong. They would have hurt him less if they’d moved more slowly, because it turns out we remember intensity, not duration. They should have started with the painful bandages on his face and moved to the less painful ones on his legs, because that progression minimizes pain. And they should have given him breaks in the whole experience.

If the nurses could be so wrong about treating his pain, what else do we get wrong? Ariely got interested in cheating in the wake of the Enron scandal. He began studying cheating in the lab, inviting students to solve a sheet of 20 math problems in five minutes, offering a dollar for each solved. When students showed their results, they averaged 4 solved problems. When students self-reported what they’d solved and shredded their answer sheets, they reported solving seven.

It wasn’t that some people cheated radically – nearly everyone cheated a little. Ariely tried changing the incentives, adding more money to the equation – it turns out that people are generally insensitive to these effects. It’s possible that we cheat just a little bit so we can feel good about ourselves – we don’t cheat more just because it’s lucrative because we’d feel bad about ourselves.

Psychological factors matter a great deal. When Ariely tried an experiment asking people to recall the ten commandments or ten books from childhood, he discovered no cheating in the ten commandments set… despite the fact that no one remembered the ten commandments.

We cheat differently with different commodities. In an unscientific experiment, Ariely filled fridges at MIT with coke cans and tracked their disappearance… and also put in plates containing six dollar bills. The half-life of the coke was very short, and very long for the bills.

On the other hand, introducing tokens into the equation – instead of actual currency – even for just a second – increases cheating.

In a set of experiments designed to test peer effects, Ariely used a confederate who announced, after a few seconds, that he’d solved twenty math problems. This person was obviously cheating – would this encourage or discourage cheating from the others? It turns out that it mattered what sweatshirt he was wearing – if Carnegie Mellon students thought the confederate was a fellow student, they’d cheat more. If they thought he was from the University of Pittsburgh, they’d cheat less.

It’s possible the Enron situation happened through a combination of peer effects and abstraction, where derivates acted like tokens, distancing people from actual currency.

Ariely closes by telling us about conversations with his favorite nurse. She pointed out that nurses might have been minimizing their own pain, as they certainly didn’t enjoy torturing their patient. Beyond that, she explained that she didn’t believe his intuition about pain was right, and she was unwilling to engage in such a potentially painful experiment. This is a situation many of us find ourselves in – we may need to change our intuitions, but it’s painful to undertake the experiments to see if we’re right or wrong.

This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. Because I’m putting these posts together very quickly, I will get things wrong, will misspell names and bungle details. Please feel free to use the comments thread on this post to offer corrections. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.

Nicholas Negroponte takes the TED stage for the first time in three years. He tells us that a few years ago, everyone thought his idea of a low-cost laptop was silly. He points to the Netbook – lightweight, highly simplified laptops – and tells us this market is now up to 50% of the world’s laptop market. “They didn’t copy the right things from us, but they exist.”

But Netbooks can’t do everything – he throws laptops on stage and encourages us to try that with our netbooks. Or try using them underwater. Or in a dusty African village – “they won’t work.”

“OLPC is a nonprofit. That means we can have partners the normal market cannot have.” Those partners include the kids and their parents. With half a million machines in use, NN is seeing children teaching their parents both to use the computers and to read and write. Teachers see discipline problems go down – their main complaint is that they get too much email from students.

“Commercial markets will go to no end to stop you. It’s sort of a tragedy,” Negroponte tells us. So the future of One Laptop Per Child is to go “from uppercase to lower case”, to “build something that everyone copies.”

“We had to build the first laptop because no one else would do it.” But now, OLPC will release and open source hardware design and invite others to copy it. He predicts that within 3 years, we’ll see 5 to 6 million machines a month, built by companies around the world.

See you in three years, Nicholas.

This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. Because I’m putting these posts together very quickly, I will get things wrong, will misspell names and bungle details. Please feel free to use the comments thread on this post to offer corrections. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.

Bruce Bueno De Mesquita can predict the future. He’s not the Great Karnak, he tells us, nor does he examine the entrails of sheep. He believes that we can predict future events via “rational choice theory“, a technique he sees as vastly superior to the “seat of the pants wisdom” most politicians and economists use.

This theory, the tells us, applies to situations of persuasion and coercion – that means that’s it’s applicable to politics and business negotiations, not to markets. His work is rooted in game theory, which means math has come to politics, he warns us. (I think we’d worked that out with Nate Silver, thank you very much.) Game theory requires an assumption that people are rationally self-interested and aware that others have motivations and rational self-interest.

Everyone, he tells us, is rational, with the exception of two year-olds and schizophrenics. Corporations are rational as well – while it looks hard to convince a corporation to stop dumping toxins, we can do so if we can explain why it’s in their interests.

Understanding what the President wants to do regarding Iran misses the point. The President is influenced by his secretary of state. She’s influenced by her advisors on Iran. To understand US policy, we need to understand that whole complex web of relationships.

These relationships, he asserts, are too complicated for humans to understand without assistance. He points out that ten people can have 3.6 million interactions and suggests that only computer models can help us understand what decisions are likely to be made in these interactions.

In building these models, we need to know:
- who has a stake?
- what they say they want – not what they actually want in their heart of hears, but their strategically chosen positions
- how focused are they on these goals?
- how much power or clout do these people have?

This information can be filled in from public sources – the newspaper of the Economist, or from subject experts. You don’t need history, he tells us – just these easily available inputs?

Offering a 90% success model for these techniques, we looks at Iran:
- How secure is the theocracy?
- Where will the nuclear program go?
- Will Ahmedinejad remain in power?

He sees a decreasing chance that Iran will build bombs – instead, he sees scenarios that has Iran building only sufficient quantities of nuclear material for research purposes. He sees this as a liveable equilibrium for the US, and more likely to occur in the absence of international pressure. This analysis is based on a computer model of 87 Iranian decisionmakers, considering public polling data. He points out that virtually no one wants to test a bomb in Iran, and that his models of power structures suggest that the people who want to test a bomb are moving out of power.

The model is based on tracking the kremlinology inside Iranian politics – he offers a graph of rising and falling fortunes of figures like Ahmedinejad, moneyed interests and different groups of clerics. His money is on “the Quietists”, a group of clerics based in Qom with great influence and concerns that Iran is moving away from the values of the revolution.

de Mesquita tells us that people who say “That’s impossible” really mean “I don’t know how to do it.”

This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. Because I’m putting these posts together very quickly, I will get things wrong, will misspell names and bungle details. Please feel free to use the comments thread on this post to offer corrections. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.

Alex Tabarrok, a political economist from George Mason University, offers some good reasons to be hopeful about the world economy. He begins by explaining that the beginning of the last century was a difficult time – we experienced two world wars, a great depression and the rise of communist states. These phenomena led to the building of walls – iron curtains – that separated a global economy into national and regional economies.

In the second half of the last century, these walls came tumbling down. Tarrifs dropped from 40% to 5% over the course of decades. Container shipping brought down costs of transportation. The internet has shattered walls of communications. And we’re seeing incredible economic growth. China has grown at 10% a year, leading to an unprecendented rise of people out of poverty. Even in Africa, which experienced negative income growth for most of the late 20th century, has seen sharp growth the past eight years.

Tabarrok sees growth coming from new ideas. He believes that future growth comes from ideas that have high R&D costs, but low production costs. He quotes Jefferson, with the wonderful maxim about knowledge, that he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me. As he phrases it, “One apple feeds one man, one idea can feed the world.”

If you had to choose between having two deadly diseases, one common and one rare, you’d want to have the common disease. There are more incentives to produce solutions to common diseases – “Larger markets save lives.
Misery truly does love company.”

“If China and India were as rich as the US was today, the market for cancer drugs would be eight times what it is now.” We’d have far more scientists and engineers able to work on these problems and increased incentives to condust research. It’s similar to the ways in which action films have larger budgets than comedies – action films do better in overseas markets and therefore impact more sales, and can cost more.

“One Idea, One World, One Market” is the solution for the future, Tabarrok tells us. We need more idea creators. Less than 0.1% of the world’s population are scientists and engineers. A large percentage of those people are in the US. The US is now losing idea leadership… and that’s a good thing, he tells us. Around the world, there may be geniuses, like the Indian mathematician Ramanujan, toiling in poverty and obscurity.

“It’s as if we had a supercomputer and billions of our processors had been offline.” India, China, and Africa are coming online, and we will see an Einstein in Africa this century. We need to build investments in education that increase the supply of new ideas.

Should we be worried? No, he tells us – we may face a depression, but growth will more than equal it out. By 2100 he tells us we’ll have GDP per capita of $200,000 everywhere in the world.

Don’t worry about the price of oil, about the idea that “China is drinking our milkshake.” That price pressure is good for us – it will give us incentives to invest in green energy.

We need to keep globalizing and extending markets, and to keep investing in education. The challenge is to keep our education system globalized. We are, he tels us, the fire that others light their tapers from.

This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. Because I’m putting these posts together very quickly, I will get things wrong, will misspell names and bungle details. Please feel free to use the comments thread on this post to offer corrections. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.

It’s the final morning of the TED 2009 conference, a cold, rainy winter day in Long Beach. The hall is part empty this early – lots of folks are still sleeping off last night’s series of parties. Chris Anderson, our host, chooses this quiet moment to talk about an issue that hasn’t been on the table at the conference – the current economic crisis.

Chris explains that he sees TED working on larger issues: “There might be some issues more important than whether our GDP will rise or fall a bit… like global warming, the oceans, happiness…”

He offers a long quote from John Maynard Keynes that begins, “This is a nightmare which will pass away with the morning…” The point – this is likely to be a difficult, but passing, moment in time, and we’ve got much bigger problems that won’t pass with time. Chris tells us that the team looked for the “brilliant minds” who had insights on the current economy, but failed… and feels like Davos failed as well in bringing in those insightful minds.

There’s a brief discussion with the audience about how TED is working in the new venue. Some feedback:
- The venue in Long Beach is really big, and there’s been less social interaction between attendees in years past
- The progam has grown so cramped that it might make sense to have less time on stage and more interaction
- Something that worked very well in Monterey was a simulcast lounge, a shared space that allowed people to experience TED in a more laid-back fashion. That space doesn’t exist here, and lots of people (myself included) miss it.

The lead-off presenter for the day is the extraordinary Nate Silver, the baseball statistician who offered such successful insights on the 2008 election on fivethirtyeight.com. Silber is on the stage in Palm Springs, the second location for the conference.

Silver offers a picture of electoral maps between 2004 and 2008 – a profound shift of the entire electoral map towards blue, or liberal, voting. He points out that there’s a block of states – centered on Arkansas – which voted more strongly against Obama than they did against Clinton.

Is this about race?, Silver wonders. In Louisiana, roughly 1 in 5 white voters told polsters that race had been a factor in choosing not to vote for Obama – that compares to roughly 4% in states like New York and California.

Is racism predictable? he asks. He looked for correlations between independent variables and racism and found a strong correlation to levels of education – low education levels correlate closely with racial-based voting. Highly rural states also showed this pattern, though it’s less dramatic than the educational pattern.

Using data from the General Social Survey which looked at people who had neighbors of another race, Silver looks at political affiliation – there are more Republicans in monoracial neighborhoods, but it’s not a dramatic difference. Similarly, there’s not much difference in opinion regarding affirmative action. But a question about interracial marriage gets dramatically different results in monoracial neighborhoods – people in these neighborhoods are twice as likely to support a law banning interracial marriage.

If you wanted to address racism, Silver suggests, you need to create interracial neighborhoods, which might mean thinking about reengineering cities. Cities designed in the 1970s and 80s, he suggests, might actually have helped America become more conservative under Reagan. He also proposes a university-based mixing program, sending students from NYU to the University of Arkansas as a form of cultural exchange.

This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. Because I’m putting these posts together very quickly, I will get things wrong, will misspell names and bungle details. Please feel free to use the comments thread on this post to offer corrections. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.

If you’d like to capture the attention of the TED crowd, you could always give an 18 minute talk about orgasms. Or you could swallow a sword. Or do rope tricks.

Ross Evans of Xtraycle tries the latter strategy. After biking on stage on his “sport utility bicycle”, he does a brilliant job of not selling from the stage. Instead, he jumps through the rope, on one leg, sideways. He’s really good at it. It makes you wonder what other talents TEDsters have.

Lena Maria Klingvall probably isn’t going to do rope tricks… but she just might. Born in Sweden in 1968, she had no arms, and one of her legs was badly underdeveloped. Her parents were encouraged to put her in an institution, but her mother fell in love with her smile and raised her at home.

Klingvall is thankful that she was born in a progressive, wealthy country with parents able to raise and care for her… and tells us she’s lucky that she enjoys having people stare at her.

As a child, she discovered some things could actually be easier for her, using her feet than for peers using their hands. She tells us that chopsticks are lots easier with your feet. And swimming is a sport where arms can sometimes be an obstacle, not a benefit. As a teenager, she qualified to compete in the Swedish games. She won three silver medals, and was asked to join the Swedish swim team. She represented Sweden in the world championships, won two medals in butterfly, one in backstroke and then won four golds at the European championship in Paris.

That wasn’t enough for Klingvall. She turned to music, training as a singer and touring Europe and in Asia. She is, as they say, big in Japan, where she’s given dozens of concert tours, and where there’s a Lena Maria manga, with blue eyes, and “a perfect figure”.

Many of her friends are more fascinated by her everyday life than her more unusual achievements – her ability to knit and write caligraphy with her feet, to pump gasoline using her chin and shoulder. After she writes beautiful text with her feet and her mouth, it’s not hard to imagine that she might next pull out a rope and starting to do some tricks.

Lena’s been desperate for independence all her life. At thirteen, she wanted to go to summer camp, and didn’t want an assistant, who would feel like a second parent. So she worked with a prosthetic specialist to develop a stick with a hook that she can use to dress herself, a key piece of technology for her independence. She tells us she’s raced the Taiwanese president in a swimming race, and taking a motorcycle vacation with her ex-husband. The one thing she hasn’t been able to do is drive an 18-wheel truck – she’s always wanted to, if only to see what reactions she could get. She does, however, drive an SUV using her feet.

It’s clear Lena loves being in the spotlight, and that the attention of the TED crowd is a balm for her. It’s hard to imagine how her life might have been if she hadn’t been someone who drew strength and sustenance from being special and different.

This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. Because I’m putting these posts together very quickly, I will get things wrong, will misspell names and bungle details. Please feel free to use the comments thread on this post to offer corrections. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.

The closing session on Friday at TED appears to be all about physics and movement. The dance troupe Capacitor premieres parts of a piece titled Urban Canopy, a set of pieces that involve interaction with large, organic-looking metal sculptures. We see a duet, a trio and a solo, as dancers climb around and manipulate metal rings that look like flowers, a butterfly, a cave. It’s slow, sensual, more than a little sexy and very beautiful.

They’re followed on stage by Ueli Gegenschatz, who is crazy, as far as I’m concerned. He tells us he’s “addicted to air”. What he means is that he’s addicted to jumping off things. He began with paragliding, then moved to skydiving, and eventually to skysurfing – diving with a stiff board allowing him to fall more slowly, and with twists and tricks. He’s best known for his wingsuit flying, jumping from high objects wearing a suit that allows him to control his rate of secent and fly laterally as well as down. Recent B.A.S.E. jumps have included a jump from the Matterhorn and from the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Fitting with a theme about bodies, Mary Roach takes the stage and projects a slide titled, “Ten things you didn’t know about orgasms.” These are things she discovered while researching her new book, “Bonk“, about the science of sex.

1. You were having them in the womb. Possibly the most exciting paper ever in the journal of Ultrasound Medicine is a paper featuring “Observations of in utero masturbation.”

2. You don’t need genitals. It’s a function of autonomic reflexes, not specifically by genital stimulus. People with paraplegia sometimes develop a very sensitive area just above their injury. One woman reported having orgasms every time she brushed her teeth – the woman found this very disturbing and switched to mouthwash for her oral hygiene needs.

3. You can have them when you’re dead. If you stimulate a nerve pathway in a beating heart cadaver, you can cause an orgasm.

4. Orgasms can cause bad breath – a scientist in the 1930s reported being able to detect a seminal odor on the breath of women after sex.

5. And cure the hiccups. She tells the story of an Israeli man with intractible hiccups who had sex, still hiccuping with his wife, and was cured. He wrote a paper proposing sex or masturbation as a cure for hiccups.

6. Doctors once prescribes orgasms for fertility. They believed that orgasmic contractions sucked the semen up to the egg and promoted conception. This theory was disproven through a study of female masturbation and radioactive fake semen in the 1950s. (Roach tells us that water and flour, or water and corn starch works well for creating fake semen.)

There’s actually good evolutionary reasons for men to masturbate – semen that sit around for more than a week tend to mutate and are less effective at impregnating eggs.

7. Pig farmers still do. If you sexually stimulate a sow while impregnating her, you’ll see better yields of piglets. She shows us a video of a man sexually stimulating a sow before fertilizing her – it’s precisely as crazy as you would imagine.

8. Female animals are having more fun than you think. We get to see the ejaculation face of the stuffed-tale macaque. Again, less titilating than you might imagine.

9. Studying human orgasm in a lab is not easy. Masters and Johnson, sexologists active in the 1950s, designed mechanical penises that contained cameras so they could study female orgasm. Roach is very upset that this machine is no longer available for study.

10. But it sure is entertaining.
Alfred Kinsey wanted to study the force of male ejaculation to test theories that it was related to fertilization. So he organized 300 men, a measuring tape and a camera. Most men don’t get much distance, she tells us, but the record-holder – sadly anonymous – was just shy of 8 feet.

This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. Because I’m putting these posts together very quickly, I will get things wrong, will misspell names and bungle details. Please feel free to use the comments thread on this post to offer corrections. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.

Willie Smits lives in Borneo, Indonesia, where he works as a forrester and microbiologist. But he’s better know as the guy who saves orangutans. And if his projects continue to succeed, he may be known as the man who saved Borneo.

Smits tells us about seeing “the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen” on the face of a baby orangutan in a cage in a Borneo market. Later that day, he found the animal, half dead, on a gargae heap – “of course, the cage had been salvaged.’ He nursed the orangutan back to life, and she lives in the sanctuary he maintains, with her children and grandchildren, some of the almost a thousand orangutan he cares for.

When Smits tells us that his project protects a thousand orangutans, the audience erupts into applause… which makes him extremely angry. “No, no! Don’t you understand? I care for more orangutans than all the zoos in the world because we’re so bad at protecting them in the wild.”

Orangutans are losing habitat to deforestation, and the deforestation comes from clearing old-growth rainforest and building oil palm plantations. Indonesia is madly planting oil palms to sell biofuels, and may be creating an environmental disaster in the process. The country is now responsible for more CO2 emissions than any nations but the US and China… and Indonesia has virtually no heavy industry. The damage comes simply from removing forests.

To save orangutans, Smits needs to save forests. To save forests, he’s trying an incredibly ambitious experiment – rebuilding a forest in Samboja Lestari, an area in eastern Borneo that had been turned into a biological desert through deforestation. With all large trees gone, all other plants died, leaving a waste of dry grasses… and desperate human poverty.

In cooperation with the Indonesian government, Smits has transformed the environment and created over 3000 jobs. The project has reintroduced bird, lizard and primate species, and has mitigated both floods and fires. But it hasn’t been easy.

This area of Borneo is farmed using slash and burn techniques. These fires often spiral out of control, and at this point, much of the area is plagued with underground fires. When the earth dries, these fires can come to the surface and rapidly burn millions of hectares. In 1998, a fire burned 5.5 million hectares.

The key to preventing Borneo rom burning is the sugar palm. Smits discovered them because he was required to give six to his father in law as the dowry for his wife, an Indonesian princess. Not only are the trees fire and flood resistant, they produce sugar water every day, which can be tapped and used as a biofuel. Smits calls them biological PV cells, which yield three times as much fuel per hectare as any other crop.

To rebuilding these forests, Smits is trying recreate the complexity of nature – Acacia mangium trees help shade out grasses, protect soil and allow microclimates to form. Banboo can be used with Acacia timber to build structures… but the bamboo can burn unless it grows along waterlines. They can help filter the water, helping mitigate pollution. Eventually, Smits throws his hands up and says, “It’s complicated.”

It is, but it’s also very simple. Working closely with people in the local villages, farmers are planting crops like beans and pineapples between palms, giving the farmers free land. The crops feed the orangutans, and everyone makes money… by avoiding monocultures and figuring out how forests are actually made by nature, it may be possible to rebuild the forests and save our primate bretheren.

It gets even better. Smits now sees evidence that trees are rain machines. Despite widespread drought in the area, there’s now dramatically increased rainfall over the land he’s helping rehabilitate.

This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. Because I’m putting these posts together very quickly, I will get things wrong, will misspell names and bungle details. Please feel free to use the comments thread on this post to offer corrections. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.

David Merrill of MIT Media Lab likes playing with blocks. His project, Siftables, wonders what it would be like if we could use a computer not just with a “digital fingertip” – the mouse pointer – but by reaching in with both hands.

Siftables are interactive computers about the size of a cookie. They’re capable of displaying video and sound, and they’re sensitive to tilt and position. Tilt a block in one direction and a video plays forwards – tilt back and it rewinds. Surround a block with others and it interacts with others or complains about being surrounded.

He shows us a cartoon video where children can interact by moving the blocks, creating a novel interface. We see the blocks acting as number blocks that add and calculate, teaching a child the Fibonacci sequence.

The coup de grace of the demo is a gorgeous music application. One block controls a lead line, another a bass line, another a percussion track. Tilting a tempo block changes the speed of the piece, while putting a filter block near the drum changes the sound. It’s easy to imagine this being a live performance system for electronic music… quite possibly one of the applications his new company, Tacolab, will seek to commercialize after he gets his PhD.