Sylvain Zimmer

• I'm at Rock en Seine (Allée du Grand Jet, Saint Cloud) w/ 107 others. http://4sq.com/bStNCp #
• Just registered for LEWEB'10 at http://www.amiando.com/tw/leweb10/254522750 #

• Lemonde.fr #fail http://twitpic.com/2dpwp8 #
• One of my favourite talks from #TEDGlobal 2010 just came online Jason Clay from @WWF http://bit.ly/dqPB1r #ted #

• Parliament/Funkadelic ! http://twitpic.com/2bm42b #
• Je viens de voir Stallone dans la rue au hasard! avant première expendables. Cohue au grand rex g fait une video depuis mon velib )) #

• RT @Maitre_Eolas: 8 cadavres de nouveaux-nés découverts dans le Nord. Le gouvernement annonce l'interdiction des nouveaux-nés. #

• Waging Peace : Recap of the last session of #tedglobal now online http://bit.ly/caHHsW #ted #tedx #tedxparis @wikileaks @ucmerced #
• Wax tailor + Jamiroquai !! (@ Arene De Nimes w/ 2 others) http://4sq.com/bmf8IV #
• #numericable down a Metz? #
• Accident sur #a31 au sud de Thionville :-/ #
• mon RPS #OVH est injoignable malgré reboot. ca parle de travaux mais j'ai pas été prévenu !? #
• Meta-recap of #tedglobal 2010 now online! http://bit.ly/aQQqf0 w/ links to all my previous recaps and general feedback #ted #tedx #tedxparis #

It has been 10 days since we left Oxford, time for a definite wrap-up

My recaps and highlights for each session

• Day 1 TEDx Workshop, Welcome Party
• TED University Session 2 Lee Hotz on Antartica, Ron Dembo on risk-taking
• Sessions 1 & 2 cartoonist Patrick Chappatte, Matt Ridley on “When Ideas Have Sex”
• Session 3: Found In Translation Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices
• Session 4: Irrational Choices Sheena Iyengar on choice, Laurie Santos on banker monkeys, Maz Jobrani stand-up
• Session 5: Healthier Together John Hardy on the Green School
• Session 6: Different By Design Miwa Matreyek’s performance, Eben Bayer on growing packagings, plus our acclaimed performance of “Sweet Hurdy Gurdy Dreams”
• Session 7: Creatures Great And Small Marcel Dicke on eating insects
• Session 8: Adventures In Fairness Jessica Jackley from Kiva, Auret Van Heerden and Peter Eigen
• Power outage: The ED Conference Maz Jobrani returns
• Session 9: The Unknown Brains Sebastian Seung “I am my connectome”
• Session 10: Who’s the Teacher? Sugata Mitra on unsupervised learning, Chris Anderson on crowd accelerated innovation
• Session 11: The Tiny Blue Dot Jason Clay from WWF, Ze Frank, Dimitar Sasselov on exoplanets
• Session 12: Waging Peace Surprise speaker Julian Assange from Wikileaks

Other resources

• TED Blog posts about TEDGlobal 2010
• Official photos from TED
• Flickr photos
• Videos of the talks as they come online (17 as of now)
• A few more quotes from the speakers

Final thoughts

My first TEDGlobal was astounding. And that is despite my extremely high expectations and all the TEDx events I’ve attended and organized. The whole mix of genius and openness found at TED is much, much more than the sum of its parts. It will take weeks if not months for everything I saw and learned to settle. Ideas have power to change the world we live in, and TED is all about sharing them and accelerating this change. It is about empowerment. Our empowerment. It is up to us now to use these ideas the good way, or help them spread them even further as we’ll try to do in the next TEDx PARIS I hope I’ll meet a lot of fellow french TEDGlobal attendees there, and for the others… see you at TEDGlobal 2011 next year

The last session began with a surprise speaker: Julian Assange from Wikileaks. Chris interviewed him about his achievements so far, including shifting 10% of the vote in the 2007 Kenyan election and lately the release of the infamous Bagdad shooting video. Why leak such material? “There are illegitimate secrets” Julian answered. “People in Bagdad, they don’t need to see the video. They see it everyday.”. Then he talked about Iceland who is becoming a safe heaven for free press. They are also working on a Nobel Prize for free press. At the end Chris asked the audience who thought of Julian as a modern hero or as a dangerous troublemaker. Modern hero won and even if I think “hero” may be a bit too much, you have to respect the guy for his courage and commitment. By the way, his talk was one of the first to be published on TED.com!

Next, Stefan Wolff talked about ethnic conflicts and civil wars. He wondered if all the pictures of current conflicts he showed on screen were to be pictures of the past. He argues there has been a decline in the number of conflicts since the 90s, due to institutional design, leadership and diplomacy. The subject was interesting but frankly the presentation a bit underwhelming because Stefan kept reading his notes too closely.

Then Eric Berlow did a short talk about the difference between complex and complicated. He showed how it was possible to find simple answers by raising complexity. He took as an example the NYT-leaked diagram for reaching popular support for the Iraqi government. An unholy mess of arrows but as he increased complexity and represented the graph in 3D, a simpler way to resolve dependencies emerged. Nice one!

William Perrin, the ex-CTO of the Blair administration from what I understood, talked about his neighborhood in London, which although very central seems to have been deserted by law enforcement. He showed how he managed to return to some kind of local civic democracy by launching a low-tech blog, and making people join forces. He argued governments should pledge to make the Internet the first means of communication with people.

Mallika Sarabhai, who opened TEDIndia, danced and sung. Some parts of it I liked, some others not.

Finally, Zainab Salbi talked about her childhood under missile strikes. She emphasized the importance of women in wars and most importantly in peace.

This last session closed TEDGlobal 2010, we unfortunately had to leave without going to the final BBQ party because of travel constraints. Next year maybe!

• Music & french food afterparty tonight… (w/ special guests!) Ask those 3 guys from #tedxparis about it! #tedglobal #ted #
• Panorama of yesterday's #tedglobal party at the ashmolean museum #ted http://twitpic.com/25g9e6 #
• True #TED moment: power failure, Chris invited lovely lady to sing, she's killing! Jobrani next2 improv #tedglobal http://twitpic.com/25i040 #
• Maz Jobrani is the funniest man this year at #TED ! Impromptu improv at power failure… HILARIOUS! #tedglobal http://twitpic.com/25i1hf #
• Chris Anderson's own awesome #TED talk ends in standing ovation after unveiling duplex with TEDxKibera #tedglobal http://twitpic.com/25jq9u #
• Recording of #BBC World program "The Forum" at #tedglobal Hope to get more jokes from Maz! #ted http://twitpic.com/25jt8b #
• Just posted my recap of the best #TEDGlobal session so far: Irrational Choices http://bit.ly/9c93Nr #ted #tedx #recap #tedxparis #
• Healthier Together at #TEDGlobal session recap : http://www.sylvainzimmer.com/2010/07/16/tedglobal-day-3-session-5-healthier-together/ #ted #
• Different By Design at #TEDGlobal session recap : http://bit.ly/9GOSE5 #ted #tedx #tedxparis #
• SURPRISE guest at #tedglobal : Julian Assange from #wikileaks I talked with him yesterday he's incredible. http://twitpic.com/25qxh6 #
• Standing ovation for the #TED team at #tedglobal 2010 http://twitpic.com/25r6lc #
• Back from TED! Maintenant g besoin d'une semaine de vacances… (@ Eurostar) http://4sq.com/8Ww5sc #
• Creatures Great and Small : Recap of #tedglobal seventh session http://bit.ly/aKQmW9 #ted #tedx #tedxparis #
• Adventures In Fairness : My Recap of Session 8 of #TEDGlobal is online! http://bit.ly/9mq6Vt #ted #tedx #tedxparis #kiva #transparency #
• JCG meetup (@ Brasserie Bofinger (La)) http://4sq.com/9KHv8N #
• voyages-sncf DE MERDE ! #
• is a fan of the album Guetteur by Douce-Amère http://jamendo.fm/b24187 #
• "The Unknown Brains" : my #recap of session 9 of #tedglobal (one of the best!) is online at http://bit.ly/bAValw #ted #tedx #tedxparis #
• "Who's the teacher?" : Recap of session 10 of #tedglobal : http://bit.ly/anuIVd #ted #tedx #tedxparis #wolframalpha @tedchris #elearning #
• All my recaps from #TEDGlobal are here: http://www.sylvainzimmer.com/category/ted/tedglobal-2010/ A few left and I'll do a metapost #ted #
• The ED Conference: My recap of the impromptu session of #tedglobal : http://bit.ly/b31Anx #poweroutage #ted #tedx #tedxparis @MazJobrani #
• The Tiny Blue Dot : Recap of session 11 of #tedglobal now online! http://bit.ly/clxW4C #ted #tedx #tedxparis @zefrank @WWF (1 more to go #

Johan Rockström, a sustainability expert, talked about how humans overwhelm the planet with their growth and way of life. He was a participant in the BBC program recorded the day before, along with Maz Jobrani and Ethan Zuckerman.

Jason Clay is a VP for WWF. I thought WWF was all about saving pandas but it has actually been renamed World Wide Fund for Nature. So it’s not only about Wildlife anymore and it made a talk I had expected to skip intellectually actually one of the best of this last day of TEDGlobal. Jason explained how we can hope to continue living on a finite planet. Example of Ben&Jerry who launched Rainforest Crunch but failed. “You can’t wake up a person who’s pretending to sleep”. We’re currently living on the resources of 1.3 planets :-/ The average domestic cat in Europe has a bigger footprint than most africans. We obviously have to use less resources. Can we leave the choice between “regular” and “sustainable” products to the consumer? 1.8 seconds are spent choosing a product in a supermarket shelf on average in the U.S. 3.5s in Europe. The current proportion of sustainable food is incredibly small, we have to accelerate change. This is where Jason makes a difference, much like Auret Van Heerden does in its field: he leverages the biggest companies of the world to make dramatic changes happen quickly. He sampled 15 basic commodities like soja, coffee, cocoa, and realized that only 100 companies deal with 25% of the demand and 40 to 50% of production, worldwide!

I’m so in love with these moments when you realize that damn, if we do things right we still have a chance to turn things around. Jason seemed very pragmatic. Not the kind of person I would have expected to work at WWF at all, and I’m happy to have been mistaken His previous achievements include getting 60% of the salmon production to be durable. He’s now pressing the 100 companies mentioned earlier to update their policies, and already got 40 of them signed! He explained that Mars (yes the chocolate bars) is sequencing the genome of Cocoa to make production more efficient. He also stressed that consumers should pay the right price of products, adjusted to their total footprint (for instance the cost of water input is often unaccounted for). Adding 3 more billion people and having global resource consumption double in the next 40 years because of developing countries would mean tripling global resource use. Not possible, we have to make a hard turn before hitting the wall and Jason seems to be a leading force on the wheel. Bravo!

Rachel Sussman showed us a few of her photographs about the oldest living things on Earth. Trees, lichens and other unusual organisms, all from 2000 to 600k years old!

Rachel Armstrong talked about programmable chemical complexes, built with carbon which is very abundant and has a cycle of its own.

Another highlight: Ze Frank. He’s an artist who seems to specialize in what I’d call “crowd-art”, making people collaborate around one of his projects. He showed a few of them: Earth Sandwitches, Dressed vaccum cleaners, YoungMeNowMe, Ray’s remixes (hilarious!), Childhood walks, 52to48, Angrigami, “Hey you’ll be fine” chorus from all around the world (my favourite). Both fun and inspiring.

Dimitar Sasselov talked about exoplanets and life in the universe. We may be on the verge of completing the Copernican Revolution. The NASA Kepler telescope give us more precise tools to detect exoplanets, and to prove the assumption that planets of the size of the Earth (hence with a higher probability of hosting life as we know it) are the most common. This wasn’t supported by any evidences up until now because of the bias the old detection methods had towards bigger planets. He expects 60 “roughly habitable” planets to be discovered by 2012. Capable of analyzing basic biochemistry remotely. He finished his talk with a very interesting remark, using his tie as a ruler. Life is very small in size in the universe (the tie being the universe, life would be smaller than an atom), but not so small in time (he pointed at the middle of his tie which represented the lifespan of the universe). Well done sir!

Just when the ninth session was about to begin, there was a power failure at the Playhouse. We were at the TEDx Club at the time but when we heard Kelly saying that the session was going to be delayed we rushed to the Playhouse because I suspected that Bruno or Rives would come on stage and make “filler jokes”

When we arrived a minute later, cameras, screens and mics seemed to be down. Bruno told the crowd they would need 15 minutes to get it fixed and Chris, at our delight, did what I expected: he called somebody on stage for an impromptu session. All the video system being down, that was going to be exclusive for us so we were actually quite excited In the 20 minutes or so they took to fix the system 3 people came on stage:

Genevieve Thiers who I didn’t know at all sung a couple of Opera pieces without any preparation nor mic.. really impressive! Of course the audience received this performance extremely well and it seemed like nobody in the audience was too impatient to have the power fixed

Then Maz Jobrani came on stage again with some hilarious material which in my opinion confirmed his title of funniest man at TEDGlobal this year! His quote will probably go down in TED’s history : “Whoa. For a minute, we didn’t have any technology here. We were just … ED.”. I absolutely love this guy and hope he will perform in Paris sometime soon (some of his videos on YouTube aren’t as funny as what we saw though).

Finally TED Fellow Ivie Okoawo came on stage to perform one poem. She had already sung at the fellows afterparty, she does have a beautiful voice. With power restored the ED Conference ended and Session 9 began but it was definitely one of the most memorable moments of TEDGlobal this year. It confirms the fact that when you have so many intelligent and talented people in a room, nothing can go wrong

Bonus: still laughing from his set, we allowed ourselves some fan time with Maz at the pause (notice my unusually large smile…)