Christopher Herot's Weblog

Google Voice Translation Made Me Laugh

I set up Google Voice as the voice mail for my new Google Nexus One phone. I really like the way the voice mail transcriptions spare me from the tedium of listening to all of the messages, but sometimes the speech recognition is reminiscent of the humor that was spawned by the handwriting recognition on the Apple Newton. One that I received today:

Hi mister. Harris a man steals calling from Fidelity Investments about your computer Corporation retirement plans, please return my call on your convenience at 1 800 557. Thanking 100 extension 4291. Thank you.

It was enough for me to know how I should respond, but it did make me smile.

Social Spaces at TED

 One way that TED differs from the traditional tech conference is the total absence of people checking their email during the sessions and the lack of traffic in what the convention industry refers to as the "pre-function areas" outside the meeting room. While people at most conferences wander in an out of the sessions and the interesting conversations take place in the corridors, the TED talks are sufficiently engaging that no one wants to miss any of them. TED makes up for this by having long breaks between sessions - typically an hour, giving people plenty of time to talk about what they just heard.

For those who want to blog, Tweet, or email during the conference, or just grab a cappuccino and kibbitz, a number of areas have been set up inside and outside the building with comfortable furniture, WiFi, and large screen monitors. This year these areas were designated as Social Spaces with special theme for each one.

The idea originated when TED founder Richard Saul Wurman decided to enlarge his audience by selling seats in a "Simulcast Room" downstairs from the main meeting hall in Monterey. He charged the same price as seats in the main hall, so to make the experience palatable these were not ordinary meeting chairs, but ergonomically designed Steelcase Leap swivel chairs. Over the years the Simulcast Lounge added tables, lounge chairs, continuous refreshments, interactive exhibits, and even more large screen monitors until it became a popular place to hang out, even for people who had badges for the main hall. When the conference moved to Long Beach in 2009, everyone could now fit in one meeting room, so while the pref-function areas were outfitted with monitors and chairs, they were sparsely used during the conference. At the same time, the larger size of the new facility made it harder for TEDsters to find each other during the breaks. Hence, the advent of Social Spaces in 2010.

 There were nine Social Spaces on three floors of the Terrace Theater and on the plaza outside the building:

• The Hub - Intended as a Mecca for bloggers and Tweeters, the Hub had a large screen display, provided by Nokia, that showed what people on the Web were saying about TED. It also had an espresso bar, operated by Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, Inc. who imported baristas from their native Chicago to make what is arguable the best cappuccino ever served at TED. (None of that grande caramel half-decaf half-skim frappuccino stuff here!).
• Imaginarium - across the lobby from the Bub, the Imaginarium also had an Intelligentsia espresso bar, and the usual comfy chairs in front of flat screen monitors. It's unique feature, provided by GE, was a multimedia sculpture that recorded video clips from TED attendees 
• The Intersection - This area had a live video link to TEDActive in Palm Springs, provided by AT&T. It also had the traditional Internet Café with tables of laptops for anyone who didn't bring their own.
• Book Cafe - this was the traditional bookstore where books by past and current TED speakers were on sale.
•  The Playroom - up on the third floor, this space had beanbag chairs and beds where one could relax while watching TED. It also had a set of monitors (right) where people could watch the feeds from all eight cameras in the main hall.
• The Summit - perhaps the most underrated of the social spaces, this area was set up by Workspring, a unit of Steelcase, Inc. that operates a virtual conference room facility in Chicago. They set up a series of innovatively furnished conference rooms which one could reserve. There isn't usually much time to have formal meetings during TED, but I did bring my laptop up there during a break to do a VSee video conference and found it very comfortable.
• Eco Village - outside on the plaza
• Global Village - the hangout for the TED Fellows
• The Dome - had a spectacular, immersive interactive map display.

The social spaces were a welcome addition to TED. While they didn't really solve the problem of finding any particular individual in the crowd of 1500 people, you could sit or stand in and someone interesting was bound to come by. They also allowed some experimentation with different ways of watching and participating in the conference, from being hunched over a laptop to sprawling on a beanbag chair. And you can't beat that cappuccino!

More photos here.

Videoconferencing c. 1910

From a French postcard c. 1910. Notice the caption which translates as "In the year 2000."  Not too far off, except for the costumes. Found at http://expositions.bnf.fr/utopie/grand/3_95b2.htm

TED 2010

When I first started going to the annual TED Conference in 1993, people were already saying I should have been to the previous one. While it's true that none of them are to be missed, the different years of TED are like vintages of a fine wine. Each one has its own special qualities while the winemaker's craft continues to improve.

This year was no exception as Chris Anderson and his team pushed the conference to a new level. If the TED of lore was like a dinner party, going to TED today is like being in the studio audience of a television show. TED is no longer just a cult that gathers once a year at an annual meeting but is a world-wide phenomenon streamed live to over 900 paying sites and available afterwards as TED Talks free on the Internet and viewed over 200 million times. While there may have been fears at the beginning that making the talks available for free would cut into the conference attendance, the opposite has happened as people return annually to the source. The conversations in the hallways and over meals can be as interesting as the talks - grab pretty much any TEDster and you are bound to learn something new.

The talks themselves adhere to a long-tested format. Every speaker, whether a Nobel laureate, titan of industry, or movie star has no more than 18 minutes, with no sales pitches and minimum of PowerPoint bullets. The speakers are sometimes famous (James Cameron, Bill Gates) but are often, as CNN put it, "fascinating people you've never heard of," at least if they are outside of your specialized area of expertise.

 The first speaker was Daniel Kahneman, who pioneered behavioral economics and spoke, appropriately enough, on the difference between how we experience events and how we remember them. He cited an experiment that compared levels of pain over time in a medical procedure. The memories of the subjects turned out to be more influenced by the level of pain at the end of the procedure than the severity at the beginning or the overall level of pain. It turned out that the same principal applies to pleasurable activities, such as vacations and TED conferences.

Over the next three days, we were treated to a wide range of talks, including:

 
• Skeptic Michael Shermer talking about patternicity - the human tendency to see patterns even in random data
• Game designer Jane McGonigal telling us that humankind has collectively invested 5.93 million years playing World of Warcraft
• Inventor Nathan Myhrvold showing off his computer-guided laser-powered bug zapper
• Stephen Wolfram demonstrating Wolfram Alpha but allowing that as a scientist he has "no idea" of how successful it will be commercially
• Sergey Brin describing the recent cyber attacks from China and later giving everyone in attendance a Nexus One phone
• John Underkoffler demonstrating a 3D gesture interface that started with Minority Report.
• Bill Gates calling for some new energy "miracles" since all the world's batteries can only store 10 minutes of its power needs
• Mark Roth describing how hydrogen sulfide can induce suspended animation
• Temple Grandin describing how she turned her autism to advantage in learning about animal behavior (and lauding the recent HBO movie for accurately portraying how she thinks.)
• Ken Robinson, like Temple Grandin, calling for an educational system that accommodates student's unique talents, pointing out that Eric Clapton and he both received guitars at the same time, with wildly different outcomes
• James Cameron admitting that he made Titanic so he could get the studio to finance an expedition to find the wreck.

Cameron delivered a fitting closer to the event with his advice that nothing of value was accomplished without risk, upending the old NASA philosophy by saying that "Failure is an option, but Fear is not."