Dave Troy comes out and speaks after a video.

Official hashtags for Twitter are #tedxmid and #tedx.

Jeff Salkin of MPT is introduced as the moderator for the day and things are now underway. A video from the international curator of TED is being shown now.

Steve Ziger and Jamie Snead are speaking first. They are the principals of Ziger Snead and will be discussing the architecture of MICA’s Brown Center. The Brown Center was built exactly 100 years after the historic main building. It’s a concrete frame with a steel structure. It’s wrapped in a standard curtain wall with standard glass. They used red film and projected pictures on the glass panels in 2004 to commemorate the centennial of the Great Baltimore Fire. They conclude their speech at 8:47 a.m.

Sandy Wiggins is the first speaker. He wants to talk about “relationship between sustainibility and meaning.”

Wiggins says he grew up as a speaker and then became a builder. Eventually he realized he was designing building just for the money and was a “mercenary.” He says the speaker and builder shook hands and he got into green building.

He talks about his time at St. Norbert College and walking across the campus and his gaze resting on a crack in the sidewalk caused by a tree branch and the crack jumped up and grabbed him. He was awed that the crack existed. He was amazed that anything existed. About a year later he was reading and looked out his apartment window and had a moment of clarity about the connectiveness of everything.

Wiggins then speaks about entropy. He speaks about things evolving around us into higher levels of complexity. Ideas and technology govern this rather than biology, he says. He talks about the law of creativity and how the evolution of ideas will happen somewhere if we don’t do.

He talks about the Gaia hypothesis that the Earth is one unified planetary organism. All environments and ecosystems act together collectively. We are conditioned to think fossil fuels are evil, but without them we wouldn’t be where we are today. He mentions the idea that life provides resources for future life to exist (fossil fuels for us – solar for the future from us.)

As business grows in their awareness and move toward sustainibility that meaning is developed and creativity is able to continue. Wiggins finishes at 9:07.

Marcus Ranum is speaking next about internet security. He talks about the ARPAnet being before the Internet and then mentions FTP as how all software moved and how FTP was even how email traveled prior to SMTP. FTP was a core capability of the purpose of the internet, along with Telnet. FTP was written around 1971. Around 1976, host-to-host protocol came to the fore and was later replaced by NCP and then TCP/IP.

He mentions how everyone is using TCP/IP and how upgrading the whole planet earth would be hard to do.

FTP was like the primordial bacteria that evolved into today’s Internet and things like Twitter. He then speaks about Network Sockets and how they are an abstraction for how the Internet works. The sockets are a rendezvous point between the client and server. FTP is more complicated since it does more than just connect and disconnect. He then details every single step in how FTP works.

Ranum then discusses the development of firewalls from the early 1990s. He then mentions more about sockets and how the internet was based on Unix originally. He discusses the socket tables and how too many connections would crash Unix.

He then discusses the development of HTTP by Tim Berners-Lee. All of the connections were slow before, so browsing was made faster by doing multiple connections in parallel. This caused problems that were fixed by 1996, when the server coders fixed the problems of limited incoming connections, thus making the problem fixed by HTTP no longer an issue. In 1997, commerce started online which added in encryption, shopping carts, website logins, et. al. Amazon wanted to start keeping state information so they started using cookies.

Session management layers are built into software frameworks to keep the state including server tracking and cookies. Every programmer does it in their own environment in a different manner. Then server farms were created behind load balancers to keep up with the traffic requirements.

Security problems arise from all the layers of state management including all the script kiddies and session hijacking (along with HTML injection.) His point is that “small mistakes over here can have huge impact elsewhere” and that “intelligent design by an omniscientoverseers would be nice.”

Another point he makes in a slide: “Laziness + Genius + Momentum = unpredictably baroque systems.”

He talks about software being a cost driver and how a fighter jet’s software costs almost as much as airframe design. He finishes at 9:29 after talking about how he thinks software should be developed in the future.

Scott Simon of NPR is speaking next. He said the organizers asked about images for his PowerPoint presentation and said he was struck by the fact that he had lived in his life in a way that he never had to prepare a PowerPoint presentation.

He talks about his love for stories (the theme of the event.) He details stories he tells and hears and gives several examples. He mentions that stories change as they get retold – that they aren’t instructions.

He talks about words as the building blocks of stories and you can build bridges with the stories.

Simon talks about the impact of technology and instantaneous expression and uses the example of the events in Iran in recent months. He says his most memorable story he covered was in Sarajevo in the 1990s. He talks about his experiences with the locals there and how he couldn’t give them anything without them giving something back and how they saw him at his hotel everyday.

He had a great quote to end his talk. It is now 9:45. Simon gets the most applause of any speaker so far (Ranum was the next most.)

Joel Salatin is the next speaker. He talks about his farm raising pullets (chickens) that take 5 months to start laying eggs. He had 100 pullets once after a woman ordered them and changed her mind over the 5 months. He talks about culture today wanting to grow everything faster, fatter and cheaper without thinking about the totality of the item. He makes a point about a society that treats its animals that way will eventually treat its citizens and other cultures that way.

He talks about a customer ordering lots of eggs every week and the guy is taking them to chefs in DC who are amazed by the eggs. He asks Salatin how soon he could get 500 dozen a week. He brought 1000 pullets and when they started laying his prospective partner was too busy to market them. He contacted a chef friend to help him find a list of leads to sell to in the area. He says he’s never had a chef turn him down.

He talks about his sales effort and the reaction of one Charlottesville chef who really got into his eggs. The chef bought 30 dozen on the spot. They were asking him to pay 3 times the price and cut a separate check. The chef became a very loyal customer.

Salatin says if we devote ourselves to “sacredness in our vocations, the world will rise to meet us.”

They have no marketing targets or sales plans. He sums it up and finishes at 10:01 and gets more applause than Scott Simon from my estimation.

Naomi Natale speaks next about using art to inspire social activism. Her project was The Cradle Project, which was setup to address issues with children living in poverty in Africa. She then talks about her time spent in Kenya a few years ago and the numbers of children orphaned in sub-Saharan Africa.

Her new project is One Million Bones that will be an installation on The National Mall in Washington. The mission is to increase awareness and help raise funds to combat ongoing genocide. Each bone will be sponsored for $5.

She wants it to be a recreation of a mass grave on the Mall to make people see the gravity of the situation. I’m sure the various levels of red tape to do anything in Washington will slow this down just a bit – especially since it’s on the Mall.

She mentions Sudan, Congo and Burma as locations of ongoing genocide. She is demanding that the people, journalists and politicians pay attention.

She mentions the logistics problems now – still no mention of whether the permissions to install the exhibit are being obtained and how.

Natale has good intentions, but she needs to channel her passions into becoming a more effective speaker. She is definitely the most boring one so far. Everything is a monotone except when she gets emotional (which is on the crying end of the spectrum instead of anger.)

She talks about the lost potential around the world, but what about the lost potential everyday here on the streets of Baltimore? What about the genocide that takes place everyday in abortion clinics across America?

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