TED2009: Bonnie Bassler on talking bacteria

Running notes from the TED conference in Long Beach, CA.; first posted at www.stltoday.com, my newspaper’s website.

Molecular biologist Bonnie Bassler wowed the TED conference today with her lively description of her research that proved bacteria talk with each other.

The annual gathering draws some of the world’s top scientists, scholars, technologists and business leaders who absorb 50-plus talks over four days. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) organizers pride themselves on assembling an eclectic roster of carefully screened speakers who are working on “big ideas.” This is not a crowd that is easily impressed.

As Bassler concluded her talk, the crowd came to its feet, cheering. “Wow, scientists never get standing ovations,” she said, laughing.

Why the buzz?

Bassler/Photo by Asa Mathat/TED

Bassler, a researcher at Princeton University, detailed a communication process that bacteria use to organize and act, which she calls “quorum sensing.” In 2002, Bassler discovered a molecule that is key to the process in a type of marine bacteria.

The bacteria, called Vibrio Fischer, makes light — but only when it is tightly packed. Bassler discovered that the molecule puts out a chemical signal and once the bacteria has grown to a certain cell size, the molecules collectively begin to glow. She described this as a chemical language, or a form of voting, and said different bacteria use it to carry out hundreds of behaviors.

She zeroed in on virulence. Bad bacteria that enter a human body are individually too small to have an effect. But, using quorum sensing, once they have reached a certain size they release their pathogens at the same time, making a person ill.

Bassler described — in simple terms — how her team has found that each form of bacteria speaks a slightly different language, but all are related. Thus, bacteria communicates not only with “siblings” in the same species, but also with other types of bacteria. With these languages, different types of bacteria can vote on “decisions” about which bacteria should act in a certain situation.

Bassler’s team has developed molecules that “jam” the quorum sensing of certain types of bacteria — rendering them effectively powerless, but not killing them. She believes this holds the key to a new generation of antibiotics to replace current drugs that kill bacteria and, as a result, have led to drug resistant mutations.

“We think this can get us around antibiotic resistance.”

You can read more about Bassler’s work at her lab’s website, and follow the conference’s photo, Twitter and blog feeds here.

TED2009 Prize winners share their wishes

Running notes from the TED conference in Long Beach, CA.; first posted on www.stltoday.com, my newspaper’s webiste.

The three 2009 TED Prize winners were recognized tonight at the organization’s annual conference, picking up $100,000 awards and revealing their “wishes” to change the world.

In addition to the money, the winners receive an array of volunteer help from TED members, who include some of the world’s richest technology entrepreneurs, leading scholars and scientists. This year’s awards ceremony was streamed lived on the TED website and broadcast in a handful of movie theaters around the world.

The winners and their wishes:

Astronomer Jill Tarter, director of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute’s Center for SETI research. Tarter has spent her career looking for signs of sentient life elsewhere in the universe.

Tarter/Photo by TED

She led a decade-long SETI study of 750 star systems, using telescopes around the world. She is on the management board of the Allen Telescope Array, a massive instrument that will be able to increase the speed and spectral range of the hunt for signals of distant technologies that would signal the presence of other intelligent life.

Tarter asked the TED community to help her “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.” She said she intends to use the prize money on efforts to engage and education young people and asked for help with new technologies to aid her search.

Deep ocean explore Sylvia Earle, who has led more than 50 expeditions around the world and was captain of the first all-female team to live underwater. She helped develop undersea vehicles that enable scientists to work at depths that were previously impossible.

In the 1990s, Earle was chief scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. She is currently explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society.

Earle/Photo by TED

Earle was introduced by former vice president Al Gore, who praised her efforts to educate people about the affect climate change is having on the oceans.

Earle asked for help to “ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean.”

Venezuelan economist and musician José Antonio Abreu, who founded a program that has taught classical music to thousands of poor children in his country. Abreu, who is retired, started the program in 1975 with the goal of providing the children an alternative to drugs and crime.

El Sistema — “the system” — is now a national organization with more than 155 children and youth orchestras and 270 music centers. Almost 250,000 Venezuelan children are involved in the programs.

Abreu/Photo by TED

Several participants have gone on to international careers, including Gustavo Dudamel, 28, the new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Abreu asked for help create a special training program for 50 young musicians who are committed to developing El Sistema in the United States and other countries.

NOTE: TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is an annual conference that draws some of the world’s leading scholars, scientists and business and technology figures.

TED2009: Shai Agassi’s electric car dream

Running notes from the TED conference in Long Beach, CA.; first posted on www.stltoday.com, my newspaper’s website.

Shai Agassi has an audacious goal: Transform the United States into an electric car driving nation. Agassi, once a rising star in the technology world, spelled out his vision for accomplishing this at the TED conference Thursday afternoon.

The key, he said, is building electric cars that are affordable and convenient enough that 99 percent of the population can own them. They need to be cars that are as good as those people are driving today.

“Affordable is not a $40,000 car and convenient is not one that you drive for one hour and charge for eight,” Agassi said. “So the question is how do you do that , within the science we have today, within the economy we have today and how do you do it from the consumer up?”

Agassi’s answer: People own the cars, but not the batteries, which are costly and have limited charging life. Under his plan, there would be would be charging stations and battery-swap stations everywhere. “You create the network before the cars show up,” he said.

People basically would buy miles for their cars. “A whole new business model. You’ll pay for miles like you pay for your cell phone,” Agassi said.

He estimates it would cost about eight cents a mile when his start-up company, Better Place, brings the first cars to market in 2010 and will drop to two cents a mile by 2020.

Agassi’s company is working with the governments of Denmark and Israel to build the charging network for such a system. Nissan-Renault has pledged to spend $1.5 billion building the cars. He said he is focusing his efforts to bring the system to the United States on Hawaii and San Francisco.

Agassi, an Israeli entrepreneur and software engineer by training, was on the verge of becoming CEO of the German software giant SAP when he resigned to pursue this project.

You can find details of Agassi’s plan on his website and you can see the TED conference’s blog, photo and Twitter feeds here.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is an annual conference that draws some of the world’s leading scholars, scientists and business and technology figures.

TED2009: Bill Gates on philanthropy

Running notes from the TED conference in Long Beach, CA.; first posted on www.stltoday.com, my newspaper’s website.

Bill Gates gave the opening session of the TED conference today a peek at his new life as a full-time philanthropist, focusing on two of his top priorities: global health and education.

As the CEO and founder of MIcrosoft, Gates had a reputation as a ruthless competitor with a laser focus on his business. In his wide-ranging talk today, Gates seemed relaxed, but no less intent on success.

“I think there are some very important problems that we don’t work on naturally,” because the market does not drive scientists, government and others to focus on them, he said.

He described his foundation’s work to eradicate malaria and the importance of developing good teachers.

His foundation has funded initiatives to improve education for nine years, and experience that convinced him that the key is “making great teachers.”

The foundation set out to determine how much variation there is in teacher quality and found it was “unbelievable,” Gates said. “A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class by over 10 percent a year.”

The U.S. education system does not reward these teachers or find ways to transfer their methods to other teachers, he said. “But I’m optimistic,” he added. He briefly listed steps to address the problems, including more systematic measurement of teachers’ performance.

In a brief post-talk interview onstage with TED Curator Chris Anderson, the subject turned to the economy. Gates said he thought it was “good that the mood was bleak” at last week’s annual World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland.

“We’re going through a period of years where a 50-year expansion of credit is contracting,” he said. People should stop expecting that the government to magically change that because that would just delay the economic reckoning, Gates said.

“I know we are going to get past it,” he said. “But I think we have three, four, five years that will be very tough.”

Anderson asked Gates what he wanted his legacy to be, setting off some gentle sparring. “I don’t think anyone optimizes for having a good funeral,” Gates said, prompting Anderson to ask him if the philanthropy is a hobby.
“I’m as engaged in the new work as I’ve been in anything,” Gates responded. “It’s because of the day-to-day activity and the goals. It’s not about legacy.” He said it is fun to work on the problems and “fun when you achieve these ambitious goals. In that sense, it’s magic in the same way software was.”

The full video of Gates’ talk is now posted on the TED site, along with live Twitter and photo feeds from the conference.

NOTE: TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is an annual conference that draws some of the world’s leading scholars, scientists and business and technology figures. I’ll be posting reports here on some of the 50-plus “talks” an array of speakers are giving at this week’s meeting.

Futurist Juan Enriquez opens TED2009

Note: This blog post from the annual TED appeared first on www.stltoday.com, my newspaper’s website. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is an annual conference that draws some of the world’s leading scholars, scientists and business and technology figures.

February 4

Some of the world’s leading scientists, business and technology leaders and scholars are gathered this week at the annual TED conference in Long Beach, CA. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, consists of more than 50 tightly-timed “talks” by speakers — some famous, many not — on big ideas. I’ll be posting short reports on the conference over the next few days.

You can also see the conference’s blog, photo and Twitter feeds at the TED site.

Futurist Juan Enriquez kicked off the 4-day conference this morning on a sober note, addressing the economic crisis before moving on to discuss the future of genomics and robotics. Technology will be key to growing the economy again, he said, but the U.S. has to get control of the federal deficit .

Enriquez is a former Harvard business school professor who now runs an investment and research firm that helps fund new genomics firms.

He criticized the recent wave of federal bailouts. “We thought we were putting off this debt to our kids, but we’re not,” Enriquez said.
“It’s not a question of who deserves a bailout anymore. We simply can’t afford to spend any more money.”

Sampling Missouri J-School Tech Summit

The University of Missouri School of Journalism on Friday hosted a technology summit to close out three days of panel discussions and parties celebrating its centennial.

The sessions were short (20 minutes) and organized in three tracks: digital storytelling, disruptive innovation and future economic models. Many (though not all) featured entrepreneurs pitching their start-ups’ products — some of which are not yet in wide release.

It’s impossible to provide a comprehensive single post on the sessions, but you can check out the J-school centennial’s blog for coverage of many of them (as well as those on other topics on Thursday).

In the several sessions I attended, I didn’t see anything that blew me away. But the demos reinforced the reality we in newspapers live with daily: the competition for people’s attention and time is exploding.

In fact, several of the start-ups I saw in the disruptive track, while different in their specifics, are essentially aiming at the same goal: making it easier and faster for individuals to find, consume and share just the content we want. The projects presented here are a sliver of those being pursued to find ways to help people cut through the digital noise. Just take a look at some of the start-ups that won coveted presentation spots at Tech50 and Demo, two of the biggest tech demo events, which were this week in California.

APME/SND: The Digital Chiefs

Running notes from the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) and the Society for Newspaper Design annual conferences.

APME president David Ledford leads a discussion about the role of editors in digital strategies with Howard Weaver, McClatchy’s vice president of news, and Rob Curley, news website pioneer and now head of the Las Vegas Sun’s digital operations. Video clips of Gannett digital chief Chris Saridakis addressing the same questions are incorporated into the conversation.

Some highlights:

Saridakis: The best way to advance digital strategies is to build a culture of experimentation in the newsroom. Constantly push the envelope of technology and of reporting. Understand how readers use information.

Curley: He explains a benchmarking experiment the Sun is about to do. But first some background: The Sun is in a unique situation (earlier post here) because it can start over, setting distinctly different but complementary missions for its print edition and website.

The Sun pays close attention to traffic trends and now has a home page that is not templated. It is redesigned every day to respond to traffic trends and news. Because breaking news drives traffic, in recent months the Sun has started posting those headlines at the top of the homepage, pushing down the well-designed packages that lead the page at the start of the day.

“It couldn’t be much uglier,” Curley says. Those ugly headlines are getting traffic.

In a couple of weeks, the Sun will begin adding design concepts to those ugly headlines and will watch the traffic. “Whatever wins is what we’re going to do,” he said. (He promises he will blog about this.)

Weaver: Newspapers need to think about a much wider range than their websites. Younger readers, he notes, assume the news will come to them — through RSS feeds, email, etc.

In order to stay true to our mission, which is public service journalism, newspaper companies have to remain a mass medium, but not the same kind of mass medium. “If we can’t find a way to do this that sustains public service journalism, then there is no reason to suffer this bad.”

Curley complains that most top editors know everything happening in print, “but they don’t know how their online site works.”

Ledford asks a question that’s been a topic of conversation during the breaks and informal moments this week: Will things get worse before they get better?

Weaver: He expects the economy is going to get worse, but he’s not sure about the newspaper industry. He believes a big part of the problem is cyclical because three of our biggest sources of advertising revenue — real estate, auto and retail — are in the tank. He acknowledges though that some is secular, brought on by the shift away from print toward online. “It’s not raining on us, it’s just raining … we have to learn to work wet for a while,” he says.

Saridakis and Curley believe things are going to get worse and the secular shift is significant. Saridakis says a bright spot, though is that content is still king, no matter the medium.

When the conversation is thrown open for questions, a journalist notes the deep staff cuts at McClatchy papers this year and challenges Weaver to explain how, in the face of such cuts, newspapers are going to sustain public service journalism.” How do we do it? We can’t do it all.”

Weaver replies: He says he was not intending to minimize the losses in McClatchy newsrooms this year. “This has been an incredibly painful process for us and one that hurts our journalism. What we’re trying to do is get through this the best we can with a mission-centered vision and our mission is public service journalism.”

Another editor in the audience asks: How do you define great journalism — adding that “most what we do that readers love the most would never win the Pulitzer Prize in a mission years.”

Curley agrees enthusiastically and offers an example: The Sun recently published an extensive story on water that a reporter had spent a year on. It got a little over 200 page views. A report report on the death of Mojave Max, a turtle used for years to teach Las Vegas school kids about the desert, got 22,000 page views. “If you’re not going to do Mojave Max, you’re screwed.”

Weaver challenges the either-or assumption as a false dicotomy. He says public service journalism is not necessarily massive projects. It’s aggressive coverage of local government; it’s holding public officials accountable; it’s journalism that creates community cohesion.”

SND: Crazy, uncompromising ideas on news web design

Running notes from the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) and the Society for Newspaper Design annual conferences.

Bill Ostendorf says he started out in journalism thinking he was going to be another Mike Royko, only to discover that he wasn’t funny in print. So instead, he’s had a career of many morphs. And in person, his sense of humor and high energy make for a fast-moving session that veers across a lot of territory but somehow is crystal clear.

Ostendorf is an award-winning photo editor and designer. After leaving the Providence Journal a few years back, he founded Creative Circle, a consulting firm that works in design, training and culture change. Since 2000, he has led about 200 redesigns.

Ostendorf says newspaper websites “stink” — including most of those that regularly win major awards. “This is because of the lemming effect in newspapers,” he says. “Newspapers feel comfortable in doing what others do.”

He offers 10 tips on how to “fight the ugliness”:

1. Scrolling is out. Penetrating is in. He shows a slide of eyetrack research on a long web page. It shows that nobody read to the bottom. He flips through slides of several newspaper websites that have been redesigned recently. They are wider and cleaner, he says, but almost all are also longer. And they have too many links.

2. Don’t copy from newspapers, because newspapers are dumb. “There’s this incredible notion that other newspapers know something … No, they are just as lost as you.” He uses this riff to reinforce Tip 1, interspersing slides of newspaper websites with some from which he gets inspiration — Apple, Dell, Google. There’s no scrolling and fewer links.

Ostendorf says news websites he’s recently redesigned without scrolling are getting more page views, longer time on site (stickiness) and more clicking on links. Users also are clicking on more ads. It’s too early to draw firm conclusions, he notes.

3. It’s not how many links you have. It’s how fast I get to what I want. In focus groups done for these recent redesigns the message was loud: people want fast.

4. Learn from newspapers: hierarchy, consistency, variety.The great thing about a well-designed newspaper page: the reader has no doubt what’s important. But on many newspaper websites, everything is the same volume (and usually low.) Ostendorf says web designers are often limited by crappy software and rigid, limited templates. He advocates using multiple templates that give greater flexibility and set up hierarchy.

5. Credibility comes from your print heritage. Good branding is important. He’s a fan of niches; it’s important for newspapers to do them. But they should somehow carry the parent brand.

6. Web sites need a sense of place. They should use images and words that make it clear where they are, what communities they are serving.

7. Think life, not news. Online, cover life, he says, not just news. Ask yourself: where do people go, how can we connect with them, how do they mark their lives — anniversaries, weddings, Bar Mitzvahs.

8. Pictures are big. Really big. He shows some more generic-looking sites. The photos are tiny; the text is dense.

9. Don’t think of one dimension on a flat screen. He’s been watching what younger users — college age or so — do when they sit in front of a computer. (He shows online game slides.) He says he’s working on figuring how to make news sites three dimensional.

10. Don’t just be a website. Be a community. Be my community.

SND: Worldwide convergence

Running notes from the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) and the Society for Newspaper Design annual conferences.

Dietmar Schantin takes this session on a tour of newspapers around the world that are in various stages of moving beyond publishing once daily in print. Schantin directs the Newsplex unit of IFRA, an international media consulting firm, advising newspapers on integration of various publishing platforms.

“It’s not about a single channel (of distribution) anymore,” he says. “It’s about breadth.”

He describes a cycle of publishing when big news breaks, which starts with an SMS news alert to mobile users, followed quickly by posting of the first online report, then continuing updates and SMS alerts (which also direct mobile users to the newspaper’s website for more information) through the day. In the evening, the story is prepared for the next morning’s paper, which will include a promo urging readers to visit the website for the latest updates.

Schantin says newsrooms publishing on multiple platforms are currently structured in one of three ways, and he gives examples of each:

Newsroom 1.0, multiple media newsroom.
Reporters and photographers (he calls them content gatherers) mostly focus on print, there are production teams for each platform and an editor with overall responsibility. There are usually one or two editors “running around a newsroom begging for content for online.”

Newsroom 2.0, cross-media newsroom.
The content gathers provide for print, online and sometimes broadcast. Each platform has an editor who decides which of this content it will use. There are packaging/production teams for the platforms.
He says about 4 percent of newsrooms work like this.

Newsroom 3.0 media integrated newsroom.
This is similar to the 2.0 version, but with one layer missing: an editor for each platform. Instead, editors of news departments (sports, business, local news, etc) are responsible for that department’s content on all platforms. In this structure, only the production specialists focus on one platform. “It’s about topics, not platforms,” he says.

Schantin says so far only two or three newsrooms in the world have moved to this degree of structural integration. One is the The Telegraph newspaper in London, which recently made the transistion. He shows a video in which Telegraph journalists and executives describe the operation. (In the U.S., he says, the sports department at the Tampa Tribune comes closest.)

SND: Designing for the future of the web

Running notes from the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) and the Society for Newspaper Design annual conferences.

Jeffrey Veen, a founding partner of Adaptive Path and until last spring a Googler (he worked on Google Analytics and Gmail), talks about the power of data visualization to provide context for the user. He shows several examples. A .pdf of his presentation is here.

Veen urges designers to stay focused on the user experience, giving them tools to find their own stories in data. “Instead of us telling the stories, it’s us creating tools so they can discover the stories,” he says.

(BTW: he drew a full house in one of the larger presentation rooms here.)

Like many web-experience firms, Adaptive Path uses ethnographic techniques to determine what users need/want. He describes how those observations of “users in the wild,” are collected and analyzed — using paper transcripts of user interviews, highlighters and sticky notes on the wall. Ultimately, patterns emerge and unmet user needs become clear. “Where there is nothing, there is opportunity,” he says.