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.

Dickson Despommier wants us to think vertical, because we don’t have enough space to grow our food.

The agricultural footprint of 7 billion people requires a South America-sized plot of arable land to feed us, at current technologies. By 2050, we’ll have 3 billion more people, and we’ll need another Brazil’s worth of land. And we don’t have it. We’re farming 80% of all arable land on the planet, and we’re doing so at great cost.

We use 70% of our fresh water and 20% of fossil fuels to produce our crops. We use massive amounts of fertilizes, pesticides and herbicides. This leads to agricultural runoff and dead zones. We’re killing off native vegetation in these dead zones, which helps explain why there have been three “millenium” floods in New Orleans in the past couple of decades.

The radical idea Despommier is putting forward is this: “What if we didn’t need soil?” We know how to do this, he tells us, using hydroponics, aeroponics, and drip irrigation. We used these techniques to raise produce in the South Pacific duing World War II… then promptly forgot what we learned.

Why vertical farming? There’s no run-off, we can produce crops year-round, we don’t lose crops to severe weather, and we use fewer fossil fuels, because there’s no plowing.

What if we built cities around sustainable, vertical agriculture? We’d build sustainable eco-cities, recycling water from urine, making power from solid waste. Despommier argues that all this technology exists already, and just requires the ambition, bravery and creativity to put them into place.

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.

Rosamund Zander, the partner of orchestra conductor Ben Zander, offers her insights on becoming a “human virtuoso” from her “new manual from growing up”. She believes that we continue to experience strategies we discovered in childhood through adulthood, and that these strategies trip us up.

She offers us the memory of an audition she had as a violin student at Swarthmore. The teacher told her, “If I work with you, you’ll need to start over entirely, left hand, right hand, vibrato. You’ll need to spend two hours a day playing scales.”

She reacted two ways – the child reacted with fury – “he doesn’t like me, he doesn’t acknowledge me.” As an adult, she reacted with calm and contempt – “I’m afraid I don’t have time for that.” She tells us that there’s a lesson she missed entirely: the conductor showed her enough respect to not allow her to be a Sunday player, but to challenge her to be a serious orchestral player.

If she had been a true adult, a human virtuoso, she tells us, she would have been able to accept the gift and the lesson. She would have been able to undo her bad habits and rebuilt herself as a grownup artist.

This idea – human virtuosity – is a strategy, a territory to live into. Virtuosity is “reliable access to an authetic state of being in tune with all being.” To reach it, we need to be released from programmed patterns of the past that wire us to win and unfortunately, wire us for war.”

Human virtuosity takes place when we are “who we are being when love and intention go hand in hand and nothing gets in their way.” It’s Tiger Woods stepping off the PGA tour to rebuild his stroke.

As children, we build survival patterns. The child of divorce learns to hide his love of the other parent to get love from the parent he’s with. It’s a pattern that, when it comes up in adulthood, can lead to being unfaithful.

How do we find release from these patterns?
- We need to frame experiences that shake us up as memories
- We must take responsibility for everything – EVERYTHING – that happens in our lives and don’t stop until you we find the explanations
- We need to seek out help in all directions, find people who will teach you to sing. “Give up the person you think you are and become the person you were called to be.”
- End the campaign for approval, safety and control, because, “You’ve already made it through.”

The strategies that get us through childhood alive keep us from growing up. They are an unseen force priming us to be carriers of the ills of the world no matter what we do. We must upgrade the stories from childhood and drop the ancient habits.

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.

Natasha Tsakos takes the TED stage wearing a coat, telling us that she’s never felt so naked. Chris Anderson tells us that he got a strange inquiry letter from a Swiss woman with a Greek name, who wanted to perform her one woman show on the TED stage. It’s not the right space or duration to show her piece, he tells us, but he wanted to give her a chance to show her unique vision of theatre as “a place here people would sit for an hour with people from all places, colors and walks of life.”

As her coat falls from her shoulder, she’s in a business suit with a teal tie, on stage as “Zero”, the main character from her hour-long one woman show, Up Wake. She uses projections on three walls of the stage and the floor to give her a set of three-dimensional animations which she interacts and dances with. Up Wake is the story of a businessman, living his life in a suitcase, dancing with empty suits, taming his computer mouse and djaying turntables that represent metaphor and reality.

It’s the collaborative work of 19 artists who’ve designed the projections on three walls and the floor and the soundtrack.”It’s not about taking theatre out of the box, but putting more things into the box.”

Tsakos clearly relishes playing Zero, a character that doesn’t speak and is beyond male/female or human/inhuman. She explains, “being slightly inhuman gives people permission to interact, to be who they are around you,” and seems to drive children to seek her out when she performs.

Chris Anderson thanks her, saying, “You know that guiding muse that Liz Gilbert spoke about? Yours is really crazy…”

Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter, is an unannounced speaker, trying to explain the explosion of his “side project”.
Twitter began a side project to Odeo, a digital media search engine and directory. Twitter was a simple tool to let people send status updates to friends. It’s become much bigger, of course, but Williams is used to this, as Blogger was a side project to an earlier effort, and he’s learned to trust the directions side projects go into.

His first slide quotes Bruce Barton: “”Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things… I am tempted to think… there are no little things.”

Twitter is a little thing, but it’s been used for very big things, like tracking the Santiago blaze in Orange county through citizen reports… and which was also used by town and county governments to provide information on the fire. 47 members of Congress are tweeting, as is the President… though he’s been less active lately, and John McCain more so. But so is a hugely popular Korean BBQ truck.

The tool is powerful, he tells us, because it’s so expandable. An API has let plants twitter when they need water, or a baby twitter when it kicks in a mother’s belly. The same API let Summize build a powerful search engine for Twitter, so powerful that Twitter purchased it.

He closes with a story of people in Atlanta using Twitter to share gas prices during a gas shortage. The power of the system comes from people helping each other.

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.

Nathan Wolfe takes the stage, making a Bill Gates joke. Referencing Gates’s stunt of opening a jar of mosquitoes on stage, he opens an empty jar and makes a show of pushing the contents out… this is what passes for humor with viral researchers.

Wolfe studies “viral chatter”, the spread of virii between species. Specifically, he’s interested in the spread from animal species to humans via bushmeat, the spread that allowed HIV to cross from primates to humans and caused the AIDS epidemic. He knows that HIV existed in Congo-Brazzaville as early as the 1920s, but it crossed and spread decades later. If we can understand viral crossing, we may be able to anticipate what new diseases we face.

Studying viral chatter means studying the Bushmeat trade. Wolfe focuses not on bushmeat – forest animals like monkeys killed and eaten for meat – being sold in urban markets, but on bushmeat eaten for survival by extremely poor and marginal people. It’s madness to blame bushmeat on poor hunters, he argues – we need to understand the systems that make this food insecurity widespread and mean that hundreds of thousands of people are forced to hunt and eat monkeys.

Hunting bushmeat means lots of blood contact between hunters and their primate prey. That’s a huge opportunity for virii to cross over. With his late mentor Don Burke and huge teams in Cameroon, he’s been studying hunters, sampling their blood, and identifying virii that cross between species. This requires a huge amount of trust and cooperation. The key to his team’s success, he believes, is Paul DeLong Minutu, a health reporter from Cameroonian TV and radio. Everyone knew his voice, which gave him a great ability to ask hard questions… like “can I have some blood, please?”

Wolfe’s team has discovered several brand-new retroviruses, viruses in the same family as HIV. This is important because, as he explains, what starts in Central Africa no longer remains in Central Africa. Virii travel, using the logging roads in the region and the global air networks. So Wolfe is starting the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, attempting to track new diseases as they cross species, before they become human crises. The center in Cameroon monitors thousands of hunters, but we need a much wider network, capable of monitoring the wild animal markets in Southeast Asia where SARS emerged, and other viral hotspots around the globe.

“The goal is to track diseases before they hit bloodbanks, airplanes, sexual networks.” This tracking may be a tool not just for preventing the next AIDS epidemic, but for preventing cancers, like cervical cancer which has a viral origin.

If this idea wasn’t big enough, Wolfe offers two others. Based on his study of virii, he believes that humans are – understandably enough – surface parochialists. The interesting stuff, he believes, is under the surface of the planet. “We should be looking not for life on Mars, but life in Mars.”

He also posits a brain-bending thought experiment – can we calcuate how much life we should expect to see in a drop of water based on estimating the density of genetic codes? Can we then compare this to what we actually see and somehow detect biological “dark matter”? I don’t fully understand the idea, but Wolfe believes it could lead us to new directions to explore for life on and off our planet – “If you want to study life outside the earth, you may need to study microbiology and virology.”

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.

Bonnie Bassler doesn’t really think of you as human. She thinks you’re mostly a big bunch of bacteria. She points out that the average human as a trillion cells, but hosts outside and in ten times as many cells. This means that humans have 30,000 genes, but you’re carrying maybe 100 times as many genes in your bacteria.

We think of bacteria as bad, because there are so many dangerous bacterial diseases. But most bacteria are beneficial and aren’t free riders – they act as body armor against external insults, digest our food, make vitamins and educate our immune system.

But here’s what’s really cool – bacteria talk to each other. They can conspire and cooperate.

She’s studied a bioluminescent bacteria called Vibrio Fischeri. In loose concentrations, the bacteria doesn’t glow – tightly packed, it does. The reason is that the bacteria emits a chemical signal – if the cell density is high enough, the molecules can sense each other and know to glow in synchrony.

These bacteria live in symbiosis with a particular squid which uses them to hunt. The bioluminescence counter-illuminates the squid so it leaves no shadow on the ocean floor, hiding it from predators – “it’s the stealth bomber of the ocean”. Every night, the squid pumps out the bacteria, leaving only a few behind. At low concentrations, they don’t glow – when they reproduce, they glow again the next night.

It’s worth understanding the mechanism that these bacteria use for collective behavior as a form of language. Bassler calls this phenomenon “bacterial quorum sensing”. It’s a form of chemical voting, and it appears to be used by a huge set of bacteria. One key place it’s used is in producing pathogens – a bacteria acting alone cannot possibly poison you… but using quorum sensing, they can coordinate and release pathogens at the same time, making you ill.

As she’s studied bacteria, she’s seen similar structures around this chemical signalling – the left side of the molecules is identical and the right side is different. Each bacteria speaks a slightly different, but related language. One language is specific to a species; another is “an interspecies trade language”, a language of communication that can coordinate between different species of bacteria.

Using these languages, bacteria are able to count how many there are in one species and how many in other species. That allows bacteria to make “decisions” about which bacteria should act and which shouldn’t.

The chemical signaling is based on a very simple, five-carbon molecule. “It’s a bacterial esperanto,” she tells us. This might mean we could design antibiotics based on jamming this molecule. Her team has developed molecules that can jam quorum sensing for specific species, or for all species, a powerful broad-spectrum antibiotic which doesn’t kill cells, just shuts them up.

Most intriguingly, she believes that communication between bacteria may have been the evolutionary pathway towards multicellularity. “Bacteria laid down the rules that multicellular organisms live by.”

My favorite talk so far, hands down – amazing (and slightly scary) stuff.

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.

Nalini Nadkarni likes to climb trees. Really big trees. She studies forest canopies in Costa Rica, climbing trees like the Giant Strangler Fig.

The contrast between the forest floor and canopy is stark – the floor is cool, constant, and largely empty as it’s extremely dark. The canopy, on the other hand, is more like an open field, and there’s an amazing diversity of species. Her husband studies ants in tree canopies – of 10,000 taxonomized ant species, 4,000 live exclusively in forest canopies. Species have been named after her, her husband and their children.

But her focus is epiphytes, plants with leaves that are adapted to absorb nutrients from mists and fog. These are mainly mosses, and they help generate rich arboreal soils. By stripping epiphytes from canopy roots, she’s been able to study the regrowth of these species – it takes more than 25 years to regrow parts of the canopy soils.

Canopy forests are incredibly important for the sequestration of carbon. And these forests are under threat – there’s a market for these mosses in the floral industry. Nadkarni has been trying a variety of promotional approaches to call attention to the problem. She’s started the International Canopy Network, a non-profit designed to promote forest survival.

The ICN uses wonderfully unconventional tactics. She has sewed a series of “treetop barbie dolls”, repurposed Barbie dolls that wear tree-climing clothing and carry books about the forest canopy. She’s worked on “canopy confluences”, bringing artists into the trees, and yielding sculptures by Bruce Chao and a dance piece called Biome by Capacitor, an amazing modern dance trouple. (A segment of that dance is below.)

Perhaps her most amazing work is focused on cultivating moss for the floral industry to prevent trees in the wild from being stripped. She’s working with inmates in Washington State prisons, encouraging them to learn about mosses and study which grow the most quickly. This has turned into a series of science and sustainability programs in the prisons, including letting prisoners grow rare Oregon spotted frogs… in captivity, she jokes.

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.

Dr. Jennifer Mather looks for intelligence in the oceans. She’s not studying the dolphin or the whale, but the octopus. They’re fascinating to her because octopuses are really different from us, related to clams and mollusks. If we can understand their intelligence, we can understand just how different intelligence can be and can manifest.

Cephalopods like the octopus took the mollusk body and lost the shell. As a result, they had to develop tricks: techniques, camouflage, and big brains. While Mather is fascinated by ways that octopuses can act as chameleons, her focus is on understanding octopus intelligence.

A definition of intelligence she offers involves reasoning, understanding and the capacity for learning. But she thinks the right way to understand these questions is to look at personality, play, and problem-solving.

Most people won’t consider animals to have personalities – but they’ll see it in their dogs, for instance. People who work at the Seattle aquarium began naming their octopuses – “Leisure suit Larry”, who enjoyed lots of human contact, or “Emily Dickinson”, who hid under rocks and wasn’t an appropriate aquarium exhibit.

To study personality, she added a threat to the environment – a test-tube brush that the octopuses didn’t like the feel of. Different animals responded to the threat differently – some were active, confronting it. Others reacted and jetted away when touched, while others were avoidant, hiding from the stimulus. She saw this variation track individuals, demonstrating the possibility of octopus personality.

Adding plaything to the tank- a neutrally-buoyant pill bottle – and she saw octopuses engage in play. Some, predictably, seized the bottle and tried it in their beaks. But one found a water jet where she could play “catch” – she’d use her siphon to send the bottle towards the jet, and it would bounce back to her, letting her “bounce the ball”.

To test problem-solving, Mather believes in framing “ecologically relevant problems”. This suggests studying clams, a creature in an “arms race” with octopi. As the octopuses get stronger, the clams develop stronger hinge muscles. She tested species of clams for the strength of their hinge and discovered that her research animals would choose the easier ones to open, even though they preferred the taste of the tougher ones. And they use a variety of techniques – ripping with arms, as well as drilling with their beaks – to open the different species.

Don’t worry about octopuses taking over the world – not only is their structure wrong for life outside the oceans, but they have very short memories, appropriate for their short lifespans. But they’re fascinating, especially because their intelligence isn’t centered – cut off an arm and it has a great deal of capacity to act on its own.

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.

TED announces that there will be three events this year – the one we’re participating in Long Beach, an event curated by Bruno Giussani in Oxford this summer, and a new event in India titled “The Future Becons”. That event will occur at the Infosys training campus in Mysore and will feature 100 Indian TED fellows, like the TED Arusha conference that succeeded so well.

Of course, TED now reaches far more than the people who can come to the conferences. TED Talks on video have reached millions of viewers, and they’re going o reach even more, as June Cohen announces that TED Talks will now have subtitles in 25 languages, including Hindi, Swahili and Tamil. The exciting next step is allowing open translation, which will let anyone translate talks into any language – a wonderful approach to buiding bridges in the polyglot internet.

Evan Schwartz really likes The Wizard of Oz. Referring to L. Frank Baum’s first novel as “the Harry Potter of his time,” Schwartz has spent years researching the real-world origins of the wizard of Oz. His new book, Finding Oz, explores the question of “who’s the man behind the curtain?”

Is it Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, master of electricity? Or John D. Rockefeller, the venal and greedy oil baron? The great showman PT Barnum? Or an Indian teacher, Swami Vivekanadra, who taught people to discover themselves through contemplation and yoga?

All, he tells us – the wizard is a shape-shifter, and his book explores the history of the early twentieth century as well as the protean nature of the book’s central character.

Thelma Golden, director and curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, is known for discovering innovative and challenging artists and featuring their work.

Golden learned to curate when she was only eight, using “fun-tack” and the cards from the board game, Masterpiece, re-organizing works so they would be in dialog with each other.

She wanted to curate and study black art, inspired by figures like Jimmy J.J. Walker on Good Times, the first black artist she got to see on television, and Jean Michel Basquiat, the first black artist she saw working in the world she longed to inhabit. But she studied art history at a moment when the canon still included very few artists of color, and studying black art might mean looking at paintings by Frank Stella.

Her show “Black Male” in 1994 at the Whitney was widely celebrated and caused a great deal of dialog and conversation about the portrayal of African-American males.

Her work now is with the Studio Museum of Harlem, “the psychic heart of black experience.” She’s looking at the question of whether a museum be a catalyst for transforming a community. A work that’s central to her thinking is a depiction of a wonderful maxim by Muhammed Ali: “Me, We” – a compact statement of individual and community.

Her exploration of the question what it means now to see art as a catalyst has led her to a set of three shows, featuring 40 young artists over 8 years, titled “freestyle”, “frequency”, and “flow”. These shows explore an idea of “post-black”, what it means to address race in a rapidly changing and recontextualizing world. The most recent show, “flow”, looks “not looking from Harlem out, but looking across” at artists born on the African continent.

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.

TED University features numerous short talks by TED fellows and attendees. Some of the speakers in this segment:

- Pat Mitchell from the Paley Center for Media tells us about the huge crowds in the streets in Kabul as people attempt to get tickets to Afghan Star, the most popular show in the country. 15 million people watch it a week, and there are two women in the finals, violating sharia law and attracting the hatred of mullahs.

The media affect of Afghan Star has accomplished something the military could not – provide a moment of peace and calm for at least an hour once a week.

She sees the power of media everywhere, positing anorexia in Bhutan due to Baywatch reruns, and the perception that America tortures from the export of 24 to the middle east. She celebrates Eve Ensler’s piece in Glamour calling attention to the ongoing conflict in the DRC. And she credits WITNESS with providing documentary evidence used to prosecute war criminals.

The media affect is so powerful, she tells us, that her father – a TV repairman – wouldn’t let her family own a TV. But she urges us to use media for positive change, to find ways to positively transform the world.

- Scott Heiferman of MeetUp wants us to see the silver linings in the economic collapse. He tells us about a pair of best friends who’d planned on going into investment banking. Losing their jobs with Goldman Sachs, one is now becoming a doctor, and the other is looking for ways to heal and transform the world.

He references Alcoholics Anonymous and the power of people coming together to address a problem and find personal cures. He sees in babysitting collectives and other mutual support networks a hopeful story about finding support within communities, not just in corporations. “The great unveiling is each other, and that’s the silver lining of this economic collapse.”

- Jim Stolze studies the internet and happiness. He asks us to consider whether we could live without the Internet and what we’d do.

Stolze went offline for a whole month – December – and tells us it was wonderful, for a week. But the second week, he became angry and frustrated. In the third week, he experienced incredible productivity and wrote half his book in a week. And in the final week, he was “torn apart”, loving aspects of his offline existence and missing the Internet.

He’s running the Virtual Happiness project which studies the intriguing fact that people who use the internet tend to be happier than non-users. His research tries to pick apart the aspects of life online that makes us happy and make us unhappy.

So here are five ways the internet can make us happier:
- Don’t take your blackberry into the bedroom. He recommends nice boxers or some lotion instead.
- Accept that there is more information on the web than you can read. Look at three search results pages, maximum.
- Rely more on social filters to answer questions.
- Know the difference between online and offline. When do you call someone, or visit them, or text them? Digital communication is an enabler for real communication.
- Charge one cent per email.It will force us to think before we send, and give ISPs a proper business model while eliminating spam.

- Oliver Hess brings a new dimension to concerns about the environment – he shows us a periodic table of the elements and predicts that a dozen will dissapear over the next forty years. His group Materials & Applications plays with innovative new materials to try to figure out how to build and create in a changing world.

He shows us Antonio Gaudi’s model for Sagrada Familia, a beautiful set of curved structures to create lofty curves with very little material. Thin-shell ice creates similar curves with fabric membranes – suspend a piece of fabric, spray it with water, freeze and invert, and you get an extremely thin, strong ice arc. He encourages those of us in cold to experiment using soft fabrics.

“My dream in the future is that kids build these instead of snow-block fortresses”.

- Dr. Aimee Mullins has great legs. Literally. She’s a prosthetics researcher who has designed legs both for herself and for atheletes and individuals around the world.

She shows us a set of prosthetic legs and explains how kids learn to fear things that are unusual and strange. She brought a bag of legs to show students and insisted that the kids look at them without adults around to chasten them not to stare at her prosthetics. She said, “Hey kids, what kind of legs should I have if I want to jump over a house?” As they brainstormed ideas, they didn’t see her as disabled, but as a sort of superhero.

Mullins is well known for creating incredibly functional and fast legs from carbon fiber, designed to emulate cheetahs. But her current fascination is with prosthetics and beauty. At her last TED talk, she was invited to do a photo shoot with ID magazine. This led to a range of fashion shoots where legs became wearable sculptures – handcrafted wooden objects, legs cast of soil with potato and beet sprouts in them, and a sexy and trangressive set of cheetah legs with articulated paws and “a tail that could be whipped around like a gecko’s”.

She tells us that poetry and whimsy is what gets people to look long enough to understand, to see people as augmented, not as disabled. The legs she wears today make her 6’1″, not her usual 5’8″, and she tells us that friends say, “Aimee, it’s not fair that you can change your height.” Prostetics aren’t just about replacing loss – they’re about new potential.

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.

Many thanks to Erik Hersman for giving me a day off yesterday. Erik did a fastastic job of documenting TED events, despite widespread internet connectivity problems at the venue. Fingers are crossed today that the bits will flow freely.

My friend – and usual twin-blogger – Bruno Giussani hosts the opening session at TED on Friday, TED University, a series of short talks by amazing people within the community. I arrived in time to hear a few inspiring talks:

- Dr. Laura Trice talks about the importance of pausing. She builds healthful, natural food – cookies and other treats. Sghe tells us about a complaint letter – someone sent her an email complaining that she was a perfectionist, anorexic overachiever – which arrived a few days after her father died of cancer. It took her a nine day pause before she was able to respond with compassion – she urges us to pause and sit with difficult issues until we’re able to respond positively, not negatively.

- Professor Rye Barcott travelled to Kiberia, Nairobi, for the first time as a graduate student at Chapel Hill, where he was a Marine ROTC. He was interested in learning about slums and what did and didn’t work in development projects in these areas. So he rented a house fo $13 a month, avoided giving money to his neighbors, but spent a long time doing interviews and listening.

He eventually ended up giving money to a neighbor, Tabitha, a widow with children who’d lost her job as a nurse. She presented him with a business plan to sell vegetables. When he returned to Kibera a year later to start a sports program called Carolina for Kibera, he discovered that she’d used the money to start a health clinic, which now serves 30,000 people a year.

This, he tells us, is participatory development.

- Dr. Sophal Ear studies how states can rebuild after war. His interest in the subject is a deeply personal one. He shows us a picture of his family in 1977 in Vietnam. As he’s Cambodian, there’s a story behind the picture. His parents, like so many others, were persecuted under Pol Pot, and made to work in rice fields.

His mother saw an opportunity to escape – she spoke a little Vietnamese, and there was an opportunity for Cambodians originally from Vietnam to pass a test and be sent to Vietnam.

The problem with this plan was that his father didn’t speak Vietnamese. But he died from malnutrition and overwork, and so his mother was able to take the test. Unfortunately, her Vietnamese was extremely poor, so she tried to strengthen her case by renaming her children with Vietnamese names. But she got the names wrong, giving the boys girl’s names and vice versa.

Through the help of a kind Vietnamese-speaking woman, she renamed her children again, had a two-day intensive Vietnamese course and was able to escape with her kids. His mother is with us today in the audience and receives a standing ovation.

Seeking closure, Dr. Ear has submitted a complaint to the Khmer Rouge Tribunal for his father’s death – the complaint has been accepted. No one can bring his father back, but he sees the ability to file and have accepted such a complaint a sign that Cambodia is moving in the right direction.

- Adrian Hong sees a contemporary genocide taking place in North Korea. He’s astounded by the fact that more than a million North Koreans died of starvation in the mid-1990s. And he tells us that “my failure is that I cannot summon the vocabulary to explain how bad things are in North Korea.” He’s worked on the front lines trying to rescue refugees, visited prisons in China to interview refugees, and is trying to figure out something – anything – that will make it possible to free more people from North Korea. He challenges us to stop a genocide for once, not just to honor the dead with another museum.

- In one of the stranger juxtapositions of the conference, Esther Chae presents an excerpt from a one-woman show, laying a proud Korean mother talking about her FBI-agent daughter, an American FBI agent, a double agent, and a proud high school student talking about greek tragedy. She’s clearly astounding, but it’s very strange to see an experimental theater piece on the heels of Hong’s impassioned plea for more attention to North Korea.