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Driving my hire car from San Francisco airport to Monterey I listen to a news station on the radio. The talk is all of Guantanamo Bay, Al Queda, and a robust defence of the US?s intelligence services.
I arrive in Monterey to find the street in front of my hotel blocked by a weekly farmers? market. After checking in, I go for a wander. London?s Borough Market specialises in meat from rare breeds, Monterey?s in rare (to me) varieties of fruit and vegetables. I stock up on apples and oranges ? that?s breakfasts sorted out. I also buy a few bunches of poppies for my room ? I?m going to be four days in this hotel.
I?ve finally made it to TED 830 participants, including the founders of Amazon, Google, AOL, ebay, Ask Jeeves, Paypal. and probably the Next Big Thing on the Web. Only 8% of the participants come from outside the US; the biggest foreign contingent from the BBC.
TED conferences (the acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment,
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Size 9 Jordan 11 Georgetown Low Running Shoes For Cheap, which he was missing dreadfully, coloured some of my colleagues? reactions. Wurman sold the annual conferences on to Chris Anderson, whose father had worked as a missionary eye surgeon in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan. My attempt to get a reduction on the conference fee on the basis that his father had probably been a BMJ reader was unsuccessful?
Before the conference kicks off proper there?s a debate about cosmology. A proponent of the inflationary universe (a theory about 20 years old) is pitted against a proponent of a much more recent theory of the cyclical universe. Readers of Philip Pullman?s trilogy His dark materials, with its parallel universes, would have no trouble finding their way around this latest theory.
The debate was inconclusive as presumably debates about cosmology usually are. However, trendspotters will want to know that gravity?s moment has just about arrived and that dark energy, which makes up 65% of the universe, could be up for a supporting role.
What was more interesting to me than the content of the debate was the way it was set up. The moderator (John Brockman) believes that the best way to assess where the world?s thinking has reached is not to go to the library but to have the 100 smartest people in the world ask each other the questions they are asking themselves. He?s trying to eliminate waste, by design. It followed his epiphany that on earth there?s no to throw things away to. In a recent project his company installed the world?s largest green roof on Ford?s main factories. So impressed were they by his methods that they?ve commissioned him to come up with a new car (the Model U Ford). The book setting out his thesis, Cradle to Cradle, is printed on a polymer rather than paper (and had sold out by the time I reached the bookshop next to the conference hall). He quoted Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood?s response to hearing the acreage of Canadian forests consumed by the New York Times each year: are now writing our history on the skin of fish, with the blood of bears. Etcoff, Harvard evolutionary psychologist,
Womens Cheap Jordan 11 Georgetown Low Retail Price, was next [the first of several speakers from the "positive psychology" movement.] Her recipe for happiness: forget about yourself. Poets who go on to commit suicide use etc more often than poets who don?t. Days given over to introspection are generally not happy days.
Patrick Whitney, professor of design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said that the dilemma facing many companies today is that while the knowhow exists to make just about anything they don?t know what to make.
He found it illuminating to go to the slums of Mumbai, apparently to build to a better brick, only to discovery a host of problems that a better brick wouldn?t solve. In Hong Kong, assumptions about what were most important to people in their houses (eg security and entertainment) were turned on their heads once they watched how they lived.
This struck a chord with a man from the BBC, who told me they were trying to find out what people really wanted from a news service. The process they were going through was far more than focus groups, which seem to have had their day.
Susan Savage Rumbaugh, primate researcher, enthralled the audience with her research on the bonobo. Living and working with the bonobo, she said learning to become like them, and they?re learning to become like us. Bonobos had learnt to draw meaningfully, to light fires,
Store Online Authentic Georgetown 11s Low For Cheap Shoes, and to make music (improvising with Peter Gabriel and Paul MacCartney.) It?s culture not biology that?s important in some species differences, she said. She compared the now extinct Tasmanian aborigine (no fire, no music making) unfavourably with the bonobo, which bothered me. Mixing hierarchies with value judgments can lead you astray.
Dean Ornish, professor of medicine at UCSF,
For Sale Womens Georgetown 11s 70% Off, is famous in America for showing that heart disease is reversible with changes in diet and lifestyle. He will be soon be reporting that prostate cancer is similarly sensitive to such changes. For Ornish, is not to be pursued; it?s there already until we disturb it. He was once in the presence of a guru who was asked the difference between illness and wellness. The guru wrote the two words down and circled the first letter of illness and the first two letters of wellness.
The message on happiness is turning out to be very consistent.
An odd mix. Gee whiz inventions ? focussing sound, a car that flies; an internet comedian (Ze Frank), an Irish magician (Keith Barry), a Indian woman who at 24 is a master sommelier (Alpana Singh),
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Eva Harris, assistant professor of infectious diseases at UC Berkeley,
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2014 Cheap Georgetown 11s Low Is a Good Choice For You, health research (Sep 2000).
Malcolm Gladwell?s The Tipping Point, had formed the basis of one of our editorial board?s sessions at its annual meeting a few years ago. For his talk, Gladwell concentrated on the man who had done most, in his opinion, to increase the happiness of Americans: an advisor to the food industry (whose name I didn?t catch). It all began when this advisor had to work out what amount of glutamate to add to diet Pepsi. The range lay between 8 12 units,
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The experimental data showed that there wasn?t a perfect Pepsi, but a range of perfect Pepsis. Bothered, the same man went on to look at ragout sauces. He took some 30 different recipes out on to the road to test. It turned out that customers clustered in three groups, and one of the groups liked chunky which didn?t exist as a variety of ragout sauce, because no focus group had ever mentioned it. People have to experience something to know what they like.(It?s why Starbucks doesn?t spend much on advertising.)
From there food markets underwent segmentation, and the notion of the platonic perfect anything was abandoned. There?s no one perfect mustard for the market, but a range of mustards deemed perfect,
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A conference attendee I spoke to later said that there was widespread scepticism about whether Merzenich?s results with children with learning difficulties were really much better than other techniques and particular concern at how his research had been commercialised. Last year, an issue of a scientific journal devoted to the field was filled by dissenters.
It pointed up one of the anomalies of TED: no questions from the audience (unless there was a gap to fill). This is not how science gets done.
As they leave each session most people have their mobile phones pressed to their ears, checking for any missed messages. It was a slight shock to see a Buddhist monk doing the same. In the breaks most people are on their mobile phones or their laptops, answering their email. Communicating with people who are in front of you seems to be on the way out.
The deal with myself is that if I wake in time I will go on the 5km run I?ve signed up for. (It starts at 6.15am.) After having been awake for an hour I check the clock and it?s 5 something, so I have no choice. I?m only doing it because being among the first 100 to sign up,
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Great camaraderie among the 60 runners at the starting line as it starts to rain. The course is down Cannery Row to the Monterey Aquarium and back. Steinbeck famously wrote of Cannery Row as poem,
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I finish in 27 and a half minutes running all the way, despite the siren calls in my head to walk for a while and collect my running shoes (made in China). They are too comfortable to consider handing over to anyone. At least that will avoid any Cinderella style squabbles over whose foot best fits the shoes when I get home.
Economist Stephen Levitt asks,
Buy Real Cheap Jordan 11 Georgetown For Sale Shoes, the thug life a happy life? (subtitle: being a drug dealer is such a great job why do so many of them live with their mothers? started with his research colleague stumbling into a crack house in Chicago as part of a sociological inquiry. The first question on the clipboard really was do you feel about being poor and black in America and the answer that was given, you, didn?t appear among the four available options (which for the record were good,
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Daniel Gilbert,
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