The 3rd session is starting shortly. Scheduled for it are: Will Noel, Mark Walsh, Rebecca Hoffberger, Tyler Cowen, and John Forte.

Noel is talking about Archimedes and his codex writing. He is discussing document preservation and shows how a Codex by Archimedes was turned into a prayer book.

The text sold for $2M in 1998. The text was in bad condition – pages of it were painted over and it was suffering from mold damage. He talks about the restoration team and the process used to restore it. It took 4 years to take the book apart.

Noel talks about carbon-dating the documents and other techniques used. He discusses the cyclotron used for testing the codex. He has great slides of the codex, the process, and the people involved all through his presentation.

They put together all this work on a wiki and have it under a Creative Commons License. They also have a lot of scans from rare documents on Flickr.

Noel finishes at 2:38.

Mark Walsh is up next. Among other things, he ran the Internet portion of the Kerry campaign in 2004.

He grew up in Baltimore, is on the board of the BSO, was an altarboy at Old St. Paul’s Church, and his mother was the voice in the “More Clark’s sausages” ad.

Walsh has a proposal for the internet. He talks about 1200 baud modems, Compuserve, Prodigy, Genie. He was President of Genie. It was 80 character text on a green screen and low speed connections.

“When people said something online, you could believe it.”

He talks about it as days of Utopia and that things were unbiased. He defines the time when things changed as “when the money showed up.”

He knew money was becoming an issue when he heard an AOL exec’s son ask what jet they were taking to Aspen and when he was invited to a Bat Mitzvah that included N’Sync.

He think the internet is broken and we need to fix it. He says it is filled with junk and points to examples of bad banner ads.

He claims it shortens learning and promotes plagiarism. Walsh also says complex things are truncated into “oafish simplicity.” He says it promotes “false conviviality.”

He then badmouthes social media. He talks about false politics, scare tactics, and Astroturf. Walsh takes on politics discourse becoming coarsened while taking shots at LGF, Digby and Drudge.

He claims it has shattered local stores, markets and vendors because of large suppliers with low prices.

The problems he claims are: anonymity, contextual advertising, cookies, and PPC/PPA. He claims we have “sold our soul to the devil.”

Walsh next talks about the sense of false anonymity. He says privacy is dead. He talks about our “corporate masters” want us online, IDed, buying and dumb. He wants to fight back and save the Internet.

He wants to build a new internet with no anonyity, paid for attention to sites, and everyone is held accountable for their actions. Anonymity is possible in rare occasions in his proposal. He proposes that for a $10 CPM and when a user looks at that ad, the user should get $0.60 per hour compensation for getting online. His accountability proposal relates to data mining, personal data, political accountability, and getting a free credit report.

He wants to “buy us a return ticket to Utopia.”

“Are the dark forces of government and commerce too far gone?”

He wants to get back to the days of humanity and empowerment he says the Internet was built upon.

Rebecca Hoffberger speaks next around 2:56.

She speaks about museums and about the problems in Baltimore with academics. She cites the fact that children move an average of 8 times during their K-12 years and discusses some of the other depressing stats about Baltimore.

She mentions the programs her museum, the AVAM, has for schoolchildren and how beneficial they are. She mentions being inspired by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia when she was a child. She also talks about going to the Smithsonian museums on the Mall as a child and going to the medical oddities museum (which is now at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology I think) and seeing all sorts of oddities, including John Dillinger’s genitalia.

She then mentions the programs her museum has in place for its 10th anniversary. She finishes at 3:13.

Now the speaker I’ve been waiting for most is up. I love economics and I like Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution blog almost as much as I like his Ethnic Dining Guide.

He starts out talking about the dangers of stories (or the narrative.) The number one life metaphor in a survey was journey. He talks about imposing order on the mess that we observe.

Cowen uses examples of George Washington and the cherry tree and Paul Revere’s ride. Cowen’s problems with stories: too simple, dual and conflicting functions, and markets and politicans don’t always send the right stories to us.

He uses Michael Moore and Oliver Stone consiracy stories next as an example. He talks about evil people plotting together. Cowen says this is reason to be suspicious.

He says be especially suspicious when you hear a story and think it would make a great movie.

“We have to get tough with” banks, foreign governments, unions, etc. is another myth he discusses and says we fall back on too quickly when we don’t understand what’s happening. He views it as a kind of mental laziness and a warning signal.

Stories will lead us astray. He used to think he and other economists were good guys fighting the bad guys. He finally realized he wasn’t always the good guy, even if he wasn’t the bad guy.

He talks about biases and all the one-word title books. He mentions none of these books mention the most important way we screw up, which is we tell ourselves too many stories or believe too many stories. These books themselves are part of the reader’s cognitive bias.

Outsiders manipulate us using stories. Advertising works on all of us, not just the other guy. Cowen advises to think of stories as fundamentally human and a way to make sense of what happens in our lives while we connect with other people. Be more comfortable with the messy and agnostic areas of your life instead of trying to live your life as a narrative, says Cowen.

Cowen finishes speaking at 3:30.

John Forte is performing next.

Keep refreshing this post for updates on the opening session. We will let you know when we go to the next post. The live video stream can be found here.Official hashtags for Twitter are #tedxmid and #tedx.

Please also check out the website for my social media consulting firm, OnQ Social Media