My friends at TED have launched an exciting new project today, the TED Open Translation Project. It’s a powerful system to allow the “social translation” of their video content. This tool demonstrates the state of the art in social translation on the web today, and I think there are a lot of lessons in the tool and thinking behind it for anyone who hopes to make the polyglot internet more comprehensible, and for anyone thinking about online cooperation.

I’m aware that most people think of translation as roughly as interesting as developing Linux device drivers – necessary, but far from sexy. My hope is to convince you that translation is one of the keys in helping the internet reach it’s potential and to get you at least a tenth as excited about this new tool and approach as I am.

For the past couple of years, TED has shared an amazing set of videos, talks delivered at the TED conferences in California, the UK, and Tanzania. These talks are some of the most fascinating and thought-provoking video content available on the web – many smart people have discovered TED talks and promptly lost a week or more gorging themselves on intellectual candy.

(A personal top five, for those who’ve not taken a deep dive into the videos that are available. I’m not going to argue that these are the “best” talks given at TED, but they are the ones that have had the most influence on me and my work:

- Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Nigerian minister of finance, on the debate on trade and aid in Africa, framed in deeply personal terms, as she talks about her family’s struggles during the Biafran war.

- Swedish doctor and scientist Hans Rosling uses statistics and visualization to rethink international development over the course of decades and centuries.

- Majora Carter on the importance of environmental issues to urban communities, and the connection between community development and the green movement.

- Oxford development economist Paul Collier explains his brilliant book, “The Bottom Billion” in eighteen minutes.

- Nigerian author Chris Abani on humanity, cruelty, compassion and storytelling. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a talk swing between humor and brutality as rapidly and powerfully as Chris does in this talk. When he finished giving it live, I left the theatre because I didn’t want to hear anything else that day.)

For the past couple of years, these talks have been available to anyone with a good internet connection and the time to download them… but they’re only helpful to people who speak English, the language the talks were delivered in. TED, and specifically June Cohen, the director of TED Media, recognized that there’s huge international demand for TED’s content around the world – take a look at TedToChina, a fan site that offers summaries of TED talks in Chinese.

Translation is supposed to be difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Professional translators routinely charge between $0.20 and $0.40 per word – translating this blogposts into one other language would cost over $500 at market rates. The cost of machine translation has fallen from cheap to free, with powerful systems incorporated into Google and other search engines… but the results are far from perfect, and tend to miss the nuance of complex texts. Very few of us choose to read blogs – even on topics we enjoy and follow – via machine translation because the experience is so awkward.

But maybe translation doesn’t need to be so difficult and expensive. Maybe it’s something that interested, talented people will do for free, if given the right opportunities and incentives. That idea inspired the Global Voices community to launch Lingua, our project to translate Global Voices content into over twenty languages. In 2006, we discovered that Portnoy Zheng, an amazing Taiwanese blogger, was translating Global Voices stories into Chinese, and inviting other translators to help with his efforts.

We were thrilled, and started pointing Chinese-speaking readers to Portnoy’s efforts. Other groups, starting with the Francophones, proposed that volunteer translation of Global Voices content into other languages become an official feature of our community, and beginning in 2007, we’ve integrated volunteer translations into our site – under many of the headlines on the main site, you’ll see “zh”, “fr”, “mg” or another two-letter language code. Click on that code, and you’ll find yourself on a translation of that post.

There’s a growing movement to make “social translation” – translation of online information by users around the world, motivated more by community recognition and appreciation than by money – a mainstream approach to making the web more accessible to all readers. The movement has been led by the open source software community, and projects like Dwayne Bailey’s pootle toolkit, a set of tools that make it easier to localize open-source software. (Dwayne launched translate.org.za, a project that makes key software available in South Africa’s eleven official languages.) Inspiring projects in the space include WorldWide Lexicon, an open platform to allow cooperative translation of any website; Meedan, an online community that uses social translation as well as machine translation to build dialog between Arabic and English speakers, and dotsub, a powerful video subtitling and translation tool that invites anyone to become a subtitler or translator.

Cohen and her team looked closely at the tools and teams building the social translation movement and built a new community that learned from the successes and failures of other projects in the space. TED’s tool is based on dotsub, with some very powerful new features added, and their model for recruiting, recognizing and rewarding translators is inspired in part by some of the work we’ve done at Global Voices. For visitors to the site, this means that you can browse videos by language, selecting one of the 32 talks available with Spanish subtitles, or the sole talk available in Kyrgyz.

Select a talk in one of its translated forms, and you’ll get a subtitled video, a translated title and description of the talk. Featured in this description are the two people responsible for translating the talk, the lead translator and the reviewer – like Global Voices, TED is inviting translators to join the community, pairing new translators with trusted reviewers to evaluate the work and to offer any changes or suggestions. Another link on the page leads to an “interactive transcript” – this allows a viewer to select a point in the talk and fast-forward to see the slides and images that accompany the speaker’s words.

Not only is this a fantastically cool way to navigate these talks, it leads to my favorite undocumented feature of the system, which Cohen calls “the Rosetta Stone”. Pick a transcript of a talk in a language you speak. Then select subtitles in a language you don’t speak. You can watch the talk in three languages – the English of the speaker’s words, the Spanish of the transcript and the Turkish of the subtitles. (I suspect my wife, who speaks English and Hebrew well, and is learning Arabic, will addicted to this feature in the near future.)

(This ability to view the same text in many languages may turn out to be one of the most important aspects of the project in the long run. As TED translates hundreds of talks, they’re creating “parallel corpora”, the raw material for machine translation systems. This might be too small to build really strong Turkish to Vietnamese translation technology, but the idea of pulling corpora from tools like dot.sub is something that machine translation folks should be taking a close look at.)

The system is launching with 375 translations, representing 42 languages. Some extremely popular talks, like Al Gore’s talk on climate change, are available in over twenty languages – others are available just in English and one other language. What’s remarkable to me is how many of the talks were translated by volunteers – 200 of the first 300 translation posted, and June tells me that 450 volunteer translations are in the queue and will launch soon. She calculates that if TED had to pay for those translations, the 650 underway would have cost roughly $500,000. While that sum might be something sponsors, like Nokia, which is the lead sponsor for the translation project, might have been able to cover, June estimates the cost of translating all TED talks into 40 languages at over $13 million dollars. To achieve what TED really wants to accomplish – all talks in 300 languages – is over $100 million. It’s simply not possible to take on a task of that size without trying a social translation approach.

Why are people queueing up to translate TED talks for free? The system June and TED have launched leverages some of the lessons we’ve learned about social translation:

- Translation can be fun, if the content’s enjoyable. There aren’t a lot of people lining up to translate UN internal memos for free (according to some estimates, transcripts of UN meetings can cost as much as $8000 an hour to produce, leading to an organization translation budget of $100 million per year.) But TED talks are fascinating to a wide audience, and some people are excited about investing the time to translate them.

- Choice matters. On Global Voices, we don’t attempt to translate every story into every language – we let translators choose what stories they’re interested in. We don’t get a complete edition of our content, but we wouldn’t have such great participation if we assigned specific stories to translators. My guess is that TED is seeing a similar phenomenon, and that translators will initially gravitate to a small set of highly popular talks, then start translating talks that meet their personal interests over time.

- Translators need recognition. On the TED site, translators are some of the most prominently featured people on the page – click through on the translator or reviewer’s name, and you get a page featuring her photo, her work and recognizing her contributions. On Global Voices, we try to feature authors and translators equally – that model doesn’t make as much sense for TED, where the speakers are often celebrities, but it’s clear that TED is taking the translator’s role very seriously and honoring the contributions.

- Community matters. Our translators have the same sort of internal communications systems that our authors do – they divide up tasks, consult each other for assistance and support, and generally function as a tight community. My guess is that language communities are going to emerge on TED in much the same way, and that the translator/review mechanism is going to be critically important for building support, friendships and communities.

- Not all rewards are (directly) financial. GV rewards its most productive translators with travel funding to help them attend our annual meetings. I wouldn’t be surprised to see TED try something similar if they’re able to secure the funding. And we’ve found that translators use their GV experience as evidence that they are competent professional translators and gain more professional translation work from their association with us – again, I’d expect to see something similar with TED. My guess is that prominent translators in the TED community will also become “go-to” guys and gals for TEDsters who are looking for contacts in Turkey or Poland.

I’m really excited about TED’s project for two reasons. One is that it’s great to see an organization I respect and admire adopting and improving on a strategy we’ve embraced at Global Voices. June and I had coffee in NYC a couple of weeks ago, and when she told me that the translations produced by volunteers were frequently better than those produced by professional translation agencies, I was so happy I gave her a high-five. It makes perfect sense to me – translators motivated by pride, community support and interest might well do a better job than those just collecting a paycheck.

I’m also thrilled because TED operates on a very large stage, and their embrace of social translation sends a message to organizations and projects around the world who are considering whether and how they tackle issues of language. Because translation is historically difficult and expensive, most organizations have simply avoided it, except when absolutely necessary.

The internet is huge, growing, and being built by people who speak hundreds of different languages. There are editions of Wikipedia in over 200 languages, and some scholars estimate that there’s as much user content created in Chinese as there is in English. Unless we find scaleable, inexpensive ways to translate, we’re each going to face an internet that’s grows everyday, where we find less of the content understandable. Until we figure out better solutions to translation, we’re fooling ourselves into believing we’re more cosmopolitan and connected than we actually are.

Social translation isn’t the only solution, and it won’t solve the problem by itself. But it’s a great first step, and TED deserves real congratulations in building this great tool and bringing this strategy to global prominence… and for it’s commitment to the values of connection and bridging that underly their commitment to making this information available around the world.

Attendees of the TED conference – like those of many technology and business conferences – came home with bags filled with gifts from corporate sponsors: a set of bath towels from Lexus, a stuffed panda bear from the World Wildlife Fund. My favorite gift from TED didn’t come from the gift bag. It’s a straw hat, given to me by my friend Andriankoto Ratozamanana.

You can see Andriankoto (who many of us know as “Harinjaka”, his blogging and twitter handle) and the hat in question in this photo by Erik Hersman… and if you follow along in his photo stream, you can see me proudly wearing the hat the final day of the conference. I admired the hat, and Andriankoto gifted it to me, along with some handmade paper cards and a beautiful bag, all from his homeland.

My friend was attending TED as one of this year’s 40 invited fellows, an invitation that recognized his accomplishments as a reforestation activist and media pioneer. I know him best through his work in founding FOKO Club, an amazing organization training Malagasy youth in journalism, computers, blogging and English – FOKO is a partner of Rising Voices, and has an amazing track record of empowering young journalists, who in turn have been telling important stories and changing the lives of people they report on.

What Andriankoto is now proposing to do is even more important than what he’s done helping spread citizen media in Madagascar. His new company, Megaseeds, is promoting new techniques for growing rice, the staple food for Madagascar, a country that faces food insecurity and widespread poverty. He’s promoting a technique that uses carefully controlled watering, organic fertilizers and selective mechanization to increase rice yield per hectare by a factor of four.

This is critically important because Madagascar’s forests are at risk as farmers – 80% of Madagascar’s population – look for land to grow crops for subsistence. Deforestation for agricultural purposes is always concerning, but in the case of Madagascar, one of the world’s bio-diversity hotspots, it’s especially troubling.

It’s a hard time for Andriankoto to come home – Madagascar is facing serious political turmoil, and people are dying in political violence. As a recent twitter post put it:

@whiteafrican @afromusing @ethanz #madagascar soldiers shoot protesters, some dead waitting for me after #TED :(

That violence, as it turns out, is connected to the reforestation and agriculture issues he’s focused on… but it’s a little complicated. Give me a moment or two to try and catch you up.

Andry Rajoelina is the mayor of Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. He’s a radio DJ, a media entrepreneur and has been an increasingly fierce critic of Marc Ravalomanana, the president of the country. On December 13, the president closed Rajoelina’s television station – Viva TV – because it broadcast an interview with exiled former leader Didier Ratsiraka. (Ravalomanana defeated Ratsiraka in a controversial election in 2002 – regulations required a run-off election, which was never held – and the country suffered six months of struggle before Ratsiraka fled to France.)

The closure of Viva TV has been condemned internationally, and it provoked Rajoelina to increase the stridency of his critique. About two weeks ago, Rajoelina declared himself in charge of Madagascar and demanded that the President step down. The President, not unsurprisingly, fired the mayor and continued to govern… but the country has been wracked with increasingly violent protests, including one in which protesters burned a government television station killing as many as forty.

This weekend, supporters of Rajoelina marched on the Presidential Palace. Government forces fired on them, killing 28. Malagasy bloggers are calling the incident Red Saturday, and their reactions include both outrage and amazement that protesters would dare to cross into “the red zone” that surrounds the Presidential palace. The results of this violence are likely to be long-lasting and profound: the minister of defense has already resigned in protest, and speculation is widespread that violence may now be difficult to contain. One of the people killed on Red Saturday was journalist Ando Ratovonirina – a friend to a number of people in the Global Voices Madagascar community – who was clearly unarmed and carrying recording equipment when he was shot. CPJ and others are demanding explanations for the government’s actions surrounding his death.

How does agriculture fit into all of this? Well, there’s been increasing dissatisfaction with the President’s government as he seems to be faring quite well economically while the rest of the country remains quite poor. Particularly galling to many Malagasy was the President’s purchase of an expensive jet – they question whether such expense is necessary given the poverty of many Malagasy citizens.

There’s speculation by some of my Malagasy friends that the jet was purchased with money paid to Ravalomanana by Daewoo. The Korean corporation recently signed an unprecedented agreement to lease 3.2 million acres of arable land from Madagascar at $12 an acre. That swath of land represents half the arable land in the country – it’s an area half the size of the nation of Belgium. Daewoo plans to put most of the land under corn for export to Korea and the remainder under oil palms, hoping to export the oil on the bio-fuels market.

This is a very odd deal, given that Madagascar is a nation that faces food insecurity and has a population that, for the most part, is composed of subsistence farmers. Spokesmen on both sides of the deal argue that it will create jobs in Madagascar on the new farms, and that the land was “totally undeveloped land which has been left untouched,” according to a Daewoo manager. Given the ecological sensitivity of the island, it seems like untouched land might be a resource the nation would want to conserve in the long term. The deal is so odd that many international experts have been expressing concern, and Daewoo has recently backed away from announcements that the deal has been completed.

So perhaps it’s a story about a brave, independent mayor standing up to a corrupt President who’s sold his country’s agricultural heartland for a new jet. Or, as others argue, an egomaniacal mayor who thought that people’s frustration with their President would lead him to a bloodless coup and control over a nation desperate for a path forward. One way or another, it’s pretty fascinating, especially as Africa-watchers look at the influence of China, India and other world powers on the African continent, and now may need to watch the rise of corporate powers as well.

But it’s not being very widely reported. Barry Bearak – god bless him – of the New York Times has been filing from Antananarivo… but he’s one of the very few. We cover Madagascar closely on Global Voices, as we’re lucky to have several members of the Madagascar blogging community as part of our team, and we’re discovering that Google News searches for Madagascar often feature our content… as we’re often the only ones reporting views and opinions from the ground. (We’ve got a dedicated page on the power struggle, which is very useful for catching up on the story.)

Reading the few stories that appear on news wires, I realize the incredible challenge of trying to get people to pay attention to this story. Madagascar is far away, even in African terms – most African friends know little about the country and it’s history. The names of the players in the conflict are hard to pronounce for northerners, the authoritative sources on the conflict are writing in French or Malagasy. It’s easy to understand how the story could get missed, even if it’s a critical story for understanding how the relationships between poor countries and powerful corporations might unfold in the 21st century.

I had a talk with a good friend at TED who works in public media. She and I were wondering how journalists can augment short, breaking news stories with the information necessary to actually understand the forces at work behind the scenes. We wondered what would be involved with producing a hundred or a thousand versions of This American Life’s groundbreaking piece, The Giant Pool of Money, which spent an hour offering sufficient background on the US mortgage crisis that listeners who’ve paid attention to it find that news updates on the mortgage industry are actually comprehensible. How would we do sufficient storytelling to give people the background to understand the conflict in Gaza, the gas pipeline crisis in Ukraine, the political violence in Madagascar? Could we do it in a way that people would enjoy listening and learning, as they did to the brilliant This American Life piece.

To put it bluntly: we need to figure out how to do this. It’s taken me a couple of hours of reading and some hours talking to Malagasy friends to understand the current crisis. As a result, I’m much more receptive to future news about it… until I did, the news largely floated over me, despite the fact that I have an interest in Madagascar through my Malagasy friends.

Until we do, I have a simpler strategy: I’m wearing Andriankoto’s hat. It looks good, and it attracts attention. And when people ask me whether it’s from Thailand or India, I can tell them it’s from Madagascar, a gift from a friend who’s trying to save his homeland from political violence by planting high-yield rice. And that’s a story I don’t mind telling as often as I have the opportunity.

The African Agriculture blog sees the Daewoo deal as dead, and offers a careful, detailed post-mortem. Most interesting to me, the author argues that large foreign investments are needed to make African agriculture more efficient, but that the Daewoo deal failed from size, unfair terms and a failure to understand how the deal would be perceived locally and on the 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.

I was a student at Bennington College, taking courses towards my degree at Williams College, in 1993. So I remember the bathroom graffiti that Chris Anderson uses to introduce Liz Coleman, the president of Bennington College: “Liz, why are you destroying our school?”

In 1993, Coleman eliminated presumtive tenure from Bennington and fired a third of the professors. That helped cement her reputation as a radical reformer in higher education and an expert on the importance of the liberal arts. (It also means that some of us remember her as a very controversial and divisive figure.)

Coleman challenges us with the idea that “liberal arts education no longer exists.” The liberal arts no longer provides the breath of knowledge and capacity for civic engagement we count on it to provide. This is why educators in the former Soviet Union looked to liberal arts as the model to rebuild their educational system after the fall of communism.

But liberal arts is in crisis. The expert has dethroned the generalist. “Expertise has its moments, but the price of its dominance is enormous.” Subjects are broken into smaller pieces, with an emhpasis on the technical and obscure. This, combined with the idea that neutrality is a condition of academic integrity creates an environment that’s toxic if we try to connect education and public good.

She reminds us that, in the years that preceded her time at Bennington, we saw stunning abuses of power and a “harrowing predeliction for the use of force”. And yet, “all our firepower was impotent in stemming slaughter in Rwanda.” While US public education had been a model for the world, it’s become an embarrasment at the primary and secondary level. And “despite our research establishment, more than half of the american public don’t believe in evolution… and don’t ask very hard questions to those who do.”

Coleman believes that no one was drawing connections between the body politic and our leading educational institutions. While colleges are at the top of the list for accessing influence to personal wealth, they don’t even appear on the list most of us have of influences over access to democracy. She quotes Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects something that never was or never will be.”

She’s now trying to recreate liberal arts education engaged with the community by trying to “make the political and social changes the organizers of the curiculum,” focusing the education on “health, equity, education, environment, governance, and the use of force”. These subjects must be addressed as mutually dependent circles, not isolating triangles.

She quotes students, who’ve said, “Deep thought matters when you’re considering what to do about things that matter.” What also matters, she believes, are rhetoric, design, mediation, improvisation, quantitative reasoning and technology, which interact to allow us to connect education and social transformation. “Artists at long last take their place at the tables as strategists,” and students continuously move outside the classroom to engage the world directly.

“This new wine needs new bottles,” she tells us – specifically, Bennington is building a center for the advancement for public action, a “secular church”. The announcement of the center reads, in part, “We intend to turn the intellectual and imaginative power, passion and boldness of our students, faculty and staff on developing strategies for acting on the most critical challenges of our time.”

With the exhiliration over Obama, we must remember that our work is not done. “We the people have become inurred to our own irrelavence beyond waiting another four years.” We’ve been sidelined by the idea of the expert, but we need to remember, “There is no such thing as a viable democracy of experts, zealots, politicians and spectators.”

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 curator Chris Anderson describes Barry Schwartz as one of the wisest men he knows. Schwartz is known for his work on the theory of choice, and he’s offered the wonderful observation that more choice tends to make us happy, up to a point, and then make us unhappy. Anderson wonders what Schwartz can offer us at a moment that’s both frightening and hopeful.

Schwartz’s talk focuses on “Practical wisdom and the remoralization of professional life”. It’s a preview of a book that he’s writing with Ken Sharp, his colleague at Swarthmore, and it focuses on questions of virtue.

Professor Schwartz tells us that President Obama didn’t appeal to Americans in his inaugural address to consume. He didn’t tell us to trust our country and to invest. He told us to put aside childish things. He appealed to our virtue.

His talk, he tells us, has four topics:
- Why Bbama is right about virtue
- Why “practical wisdom”, an idea introduced by Aristotle is the key virtue
- How America has unwittingly been engaged in war on wisdom
- Sources of hope to end the war on wisdom

He tells us about a hospital janitor, showing the responsibilities associated with the job in the job description. They are numerous, but not a single one involves interacting with other people. When Schwartz interviewed hospital janitors about the challenges of their jobs, all the problems they listed dealt with other people. Good janitors knew not to vacuum the floor when guests were napping, or not to mop the floor when a patient was walking the hallways and restoring his strength. Being a hospital janitor involves interactions that require kindness, care and empathic thought that’s not in the job description.

To show this sort of wisdom, Aristotle believed we needed moral will and moral skill. A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule, when to improvise. A person with practical wisdom is made, not born – it’s someone who learns from experience, someone who is allowed to improvise and occasionally to fail. It requires mentorship from wise teachers – it turns out it takes years of experience to be a caring a wise janitor.

Fortunately, we don’t need to be brilliant to be wise. “Without wisdom, brilliance isn’t enough. It’s as likely to get you into trouble as anything else.”

He shares a story about America’s war on practical wisdom. It’s the story of a university professor who took his son to a Detroit Tigers game. The kid asked him for a lemonade, and the father – foolishly – purchased a Mike’s Hard Lemonade, not understanding it was alcoholic. The kid drank the beverage, and a security guard reported him to the police. A terrible series of events ensued – the child briefly ended up in foster care, and the father needed to live in a motel for weeks. Everyone involved with the case said “we hate to do this, but we have to follow procedures.”

Scott Simon reported on the story for NPR, and concluded that “rules and procedures may be dumb, but they prevent us from having to think.” Schwarts tells us, “when things go wrong, we reach for rules – better and more of them – and incentives – better and more of them.”

As we confront the current financial crisis, we talk about regulating and fixing the incentives. But neither rules nor incentives will do the job. Would we pay an empathy bonus for janitors, or make it a job requirement?

The danger of rules is that they deprive us from our ability to learn from improvisation. Education now involves a large number of scripts – primary school teachers are given careful scripts that involve 75 points a teacher should make in reading a book to children. We know why we do this – we don’t trust the judgement of teachers. But while these rules prevent disaster, they also ensure mediocrity. “Jazz musicians need some notes… and god knows we need more rules for the bankers.” But too many rules and “we lose our gifts”.

Incentives can be a problem as well. Schwartz tells us about n experiment asking people if they’d be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in their neighborhoods. Given an appeal to responsibility, 50% of citizens were willing. Adding a large fiscal incentive, and only 25% were willing to agree. “When incentives get introduced, sometimes we remove our responsibilities.
There are no incentives you can devise that are smart enough to avoid being subverted by bad will.”

If you want to create practical wisdom, please don’t teach more ethics courses – there’s no better way to guarantee that you’re not taking this seriously. Instead, you need to celebrate moral exemplars – “no ten year old goes to law school to do mergers and acquisitions”, they want to be Atticus Finch.

We need to acknowledge and celebrate moral heroes like Aaron Feuerstein of Malden Mills. When his factory burned down, he kept 3000 staff on payroll rather than letting the community collapse.

Teachers want to be moral mentors to the people we teach. We have to remember that the camera is always on, that people are always watching us

Obama appealed to virtue. Above others, practical wisdom is a virtue that enables other virtues. He also appealed to hope – that’s the right thing to do, because people want to find ways to be virtuous.

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.