Radar Redux.com is expanding the traditional concept of journalism, to cover a wide array of Baltimore Arts and Culture.
Ideas worth spreading is the oft-quoted slogan of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), an organization famous for its annual conference in California where speakers from a variety of disciplines give lectures, known as TED Talks. Though entry to the conference is near impossible to finagle-the standard TED membership fee is $6,000 and the conference sells out a year in advance-all the talks are available on the TED website, able to spread freely along the information superhighway through email and hyperlinks.
My own introduction to TED came from one such email with a link to MIT’s Pattie Maes’s TED Talk demoing the “sixth sense” device. It was fascinating and a little scary. I was hooked, and proceeded to watch a myriad of TED Talks from speakers like Elizabeth Gilbert, Bill Gates, Ken Robinson, and Malcolm Gladwell.
Thus, when word of that the TEDx MidAtlantic conference, an offshoot of TED, was coming to Baltimore on November 5th, I jumped at the chance to attend. Alas, TEDx turned out to be the hottest ticket in town, selling out completely. No matter, just like the national TED conference, TEDx MidAtlantic provided the live streamed conference and individual lectures on its website.
To address the conference theme of “The Power of Stories,” TEDx pulled twenty speakers from disparate fields with only passion and location as their consistent commonalities. Some highlights:
Tony Geraci, fresh food advocate, explaining the incredible things being done to improve the food in Baltimore city schools, including sourcing all the food from Maryland farms, the first school system in the nation to do so.
The dedication of Naomi Natale, an installation artist. She started The Cradle Project, where artists created over 550 beautiful cradles from discarded material to bring awareness to orphans of sub-Saharan Africa, and is currently working on a project called One Million Bones set to be installed in the National Mall in Washington.
Roland Griffiths, a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist, whose studies of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic substance found in magic mushrooms, indicated that participants’ psilocybin experiences look identical to measured religious experiences and have overwhelming positive effects.
Joel Salatin on the essence of chicken, and Ana Vidović, a guitar virtuoso, who ended the conference on a high note.
And then there was Tyler Cowen who made the list of highlights for simply defying TED conventions and not having an inspiring/hopeful/ernest/positive story to tell. Rather Cowen spoke about why he’s suspicious of stories, and why we should be too, ending his talk with a decidedly un-uplifting sentiment: “And you’re really not on a journey here, you’re here for some messy reason or reasons, and maybe like you don’t know what it is, and I don’t know what it is, but I’m happy to be invited, and thank you for listening.”
Cowen may not have completed the standard inspirational story arch, but he was thought-provoking and engaging, TED’s most basic criterium. And by those measures, TedxMidAtlanic was a success. Long after the live stream ends, I found myself thinking about diabetes and fresh foods, psychedelics, and the insidious nature of stories. That’s the genius of TED and its derivatives-it gives experts a forum to bring relatively unknown, often amazing, ideas to those at home, sitting in bed, just surfing the net for something interesting to watch.
Thanks for the link to the Tyler Cowen video. He tells a good story…….
January 11, 2010 1:43 pm