TED Talks: Introduction and Robert Full

Posted by Danny on Sunday, June 21, 2009 at 2:19 pm

One of my plans for this space is to regularly highlight TED Talks, which Geoff initially discovered by seeing Sir Ken Robinson’s Talk during a professional development day while on practicum in 2006. I gushed all over the place about it then, but for folks who don’t know about them, the Talks are a series of lectures broadcast from the annual conference of Technology, Entertainment and Design. They tend to be from ten to twenty minutes in length and feature some of the most prolific thinkers and workers in physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, philosophy, health, music, architecture, fine arts, journalism, politics, economics, and occasionally videogames. However, in addition to a showcase of exciting, vanguardey thought, one of the main purposes of the conference is to get all of these people in the same room listening to each other: synthesis of freshly developed ideas across arbitrarily (but often trenchantly) separate fields, for me, is the most valuable and promising aspect of the whole enterprise. They’re also groovy enough to make the lectures publically available on their website and as a video podcast (with a bit of advertisements thrown in tastefully after the talks), which is nice because full attendance costs $6,000 and you need to justify why you’re important enough to take up a seat.

From most people’s perspective, this is very Web 1.0: resources are produced and transmitted from the top down to an audience with little opportunity for viewers of the free talks to contribute meaningfully despite the expansion of commenting functionality. Nonetheless, even if one can’t easily grapple with the authors of the talks in a social constructivist sort of way, one can enjoy them as a gallery of novel thoughts, technologies, and expert articulations of ideas you might have already been incubating. For the most part, the production quality and presentation skills of the lecturers is superb; compare the signal-to-noise ratio for these talks with most of the new documentaries you see on the Discovery Channel and see if you don’t get excited too.

There are a lot of talks I’m itching to bring to your attention but I’ll start with a series of three by Robert Full, a “biologist” at UC:Berkley. “Biologist” is in quotation marks here because the study of life processes seems inadequate to describe the sort of work Full’s doing. Check out the first video:

So, is this biology? Absolutely, but it’s also engineering, physics, and prospective computer science. Academic disciplines are fantastic organising principles for departments and conferences, and certainly help focus the expertise of individual students, but can lead to a satisfaction with one’s ignorance.  Knowledge ought to be more about what an individual can do based on what she knows, rather than a discrete body of information she’s expected to know.  Interdisciplinarity shouldn’t need a name—it should be part of our default ontology. Here’s Full three years later.

In the above video, Full mentions “curiosity-based” (or “blue-sky” or “basic”) research, which is an ever-contentious topic in higher education, funding, and public policy because it can easily be viewed as an expensive long-shot. A perennial complaint, in the face of obvious and pressing social problems, is formed in the question of “why should money and research effort be expended in open-ended, curiosity-driven research when we could be working on specific solutions?” Why are we thinking about flying to the moon or Mars when starvation, AIDS, and climate change are killing people right now? Or, particularly where business interests are involved in funding (as is notoriously the case with much of biomedicine and the pharmaceutical industry), the question becomes, “is investing in basic research likely enough to pay off in time frames we care about?”[1] The alternative is “applied research,” with driving questions that seek answers immediately applicable to particular problems (or ventures). Applied research is easier to justify to a tax-paying public or a board of directors because it’s associated with goals and success can be more or less directly measured and reported; it can be disadvantageous from a scientific point of view because results are likely to fall within a narrow range of possibilities due to the focused nature of its driving research questions (and therefore constrains the potential of discovery). Much more insidious, however, is that the results and interpretation of data might be more subject to researcher (or funder) bias, and if unfavourable, may even be quieted up. Conversely, in basic research any results, even if they countermand a hypothesis and especially if they challenge an established theory, are valuable to the community and ought to be published.[2] A careful balance, rather than the wholesale adoption of one approach over the other, is optimal. Hopefully Full’s work will help to popularise basic research, if only by demonstrating it as a stepping stone to applied research and development of marketable technology—the dry-adhesive material he was talking about in the first talk is on its way to patent in the second one. See where it goes in this last, most recent video (four years after feet).

Full’s concluding theme throughout the series of lectures is obvious: there are practical, demonstrably economic reasons for preserving biodiversity. Seeing it here is a lot more compelling (at least for me) than the now platitudinous cry that the cure for cancer may be somewhere in the rainforest. It might also be compelling for someone who matters.

(P.S.: Information on embedding TED videos can be found here.)