These are the pictures I took during breaks and at the after-party last night. I also got one picture of all the volunteers on stage at the end when they were recognized after the presentations were over. Otherwise, my camera was in my bag since no pictures were allowed during the presentations by anyone but the TEDx photographers. Be sure to click on the thumbnails for the full sized photos.

The 4th and final session is starting at 4:30. Speakers are Karen Kasmauski, Aris Melissaratos, Bob Duggan, Roland Griffiths, and Ana Vidovic.

Kasmauski is a photojournalist specializing in Global Health. She was given a National Geographic assignment on viruses several years ago. It took her to Brazil to cover a yellow fever outbreak. She went in with the vaccinators after there had already been several deaths.

He points to data that says clinical satisfaction is when people know how to control symptoms rather than having the symptoms go away.

Duggan talks about his mother dying in childbirth when he was 3 and his father working 12 hours a day. He mentions the use of words like his father did with him after his mother’s death as creating a partnership.

Duggan concludes with reading something that he says he has seen was authored in various versions by Mandela, Marianne Williamson or Barack Obama.

He finishes at 5:36.

Dr. Roland Griffiths is next. He is an expedrt in the effects of mood-altering drugs. His speech is on psilocybin (magic mushrooms.)

Griffiths has been doing drug abuse pharmacology research at JHU for 35 years. He picked up a meditation practice about 15 years ago.

He has delved into how the use of psilocybin has resulted in facts about spiritual experiences. When he started, research with humans and hallucinogens had been suspended for some time. They initiated the study after approval by JHU and the FDA so they could evaluate the effects of psilocybin.

Griffiths then discusses the protocols for the study itself and who participated. All volunteers received both a high dose of psilocybin and a high dose of ritalin on separate occasions.

He finishes up at 5:57 and the stage is being setup for Ana Vidovic.

Vidovic is now playing the guitar.

After Vidovic, closing remarks are scheduled for 6:15.

Dave Troy recognizes all the volunteers in the audience on stage and has their names listed on the screen.

The after-party is next. I will have other blog posts wrapping things up later.

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

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

The 2nd session starts at 11:30. Peter Agre, Ico Bukvic, Tony Geraci, and Sonja Sohn are scheduled for this session. Naomi Natale was scheduled but ended up speaking earlier in the opening session.

A TED video on sounds and music is shown as the session starts.

Peter Agre is on stage speaking now. He says scientists don’t take time to reach out to the public and that an emphasis on being smart rather than creative is placed on children. He then does a word association game with the audience.

He shows a slide of his dad, a PhD. in Chemistry who taught at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and points to him as an inspiration. He talks about a slide of a periodic table next.

He then shows a picture of him and his family when he and his brother received the Eagle Scout Award (I too am an Eagle Scout.) Some of his other inspirations he shows and talks about are Linus Pauling and Albert Schweitzer. Agre then discusses his hitchiking trip around the world before he ended up in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins.

He talked about his lack of social skills and tells a story of telling a girl he met at a mixer at Goucher that area of medicine he was interested in was diarrhea.

He talks about water channels in the body and dehydration and clinical diseases. He specifically discusses aquaporins and aquaglycoporins.

Ico Buckovic beings speaking around 11:55 on music and visual performance. He talks of one culture that uses songs to communicate at night in the jungle.

He talks of testing in the Japanese culture that shows aural abilities may have atrophied in certain societies due to a lack of use. He then talks about the differences in sound versus visual and uses several examples surrounding televisions and sounds. He shows a picture of a DREAM (Discrete Reconfigurable Aural Matrix) which is basically a wall of speakers that can play different sounds at different volumes in each speaker, much like individual pixels on a television screen.

He talks about aural painting and then plays an example of what one might sound like. Another idea he discusses is the Linux Laptop Orchestra (L2Ork.) This includes spherical speakers fashioned from salad bowls. The U2 stage for its recent concert tour is shown and discussed next. We then get a L2Ork rehearsal video shown. Buckovic finishes up at 12:14.

Tony Geraci of Baltimore City Public Schools is the next speaker after a quick video introduction. I’m wondering how many man-hours of work by public employees being paid by the taxpayers of Baltimore City were used to put this video production together.

Geraci is the Director of Food and Nutrition for the city’s schools. He is a native of New Orleans and grew up above a nightclub on Bourbon Street. He’s a parent and a chef. He cites the figure of $174B in treating Type II diabetes a year in America and cites the states of children who will be diagnosed with Type II in the coming years.

He mentions an abandoned orphanage in Catonsville he was given by the city to use to develop as a farm with the help of volunteers. He calls the farm the first “agro-hospitality” school in America. He discusses a partnership with the Ravens and the Orioles to encourage breakfast participation in schools.

Baltimore City Schools get all their local produce from Maryland sources now – a distinction Geraci says makes them the first city in America. Their next step is to build a central kitchen. In January, hospitality program students will do externships at the farm or in cafeterias or at the cafe at school headquarters. After they get through the program including management training, they will be placed at places like Sodexho, Aramark or Chartwell’s.

Sonja Sohn of The Wire is next. She gives kudos to Al Gore for environmental measures he’s gotten people to taken. Her speech is actually about her Re-Wired project though. I saw a recent story on the local news about this program.

She talks about the nation’s young people suffering from abuse, neglect, trauma and violence. She talks about children left to die in inner cities across the country.

Sohn talks about the human race coming together to figure out how to save these young people. She then reads a letter from one of the 22 year olds in her program. She points out all the tragedies in the letter as being the real Wire. It’s not television. You can go less than a mile east from here and see it 24/7.

She then talks about her Re-Wired for Change program. She talks about using her celebrity and attachment to The Wire to help young people. Sohn then talks about a 17 year old who came into their program last year. The girl joined the program after one of her best friends was killed in a drive-by shooting. This girl was at the cookout this summer where 12 people were shot. Her uncle was killed in front of her this summer. All of these things happened in a four week time span.

She talks about young people dealing drugs or working the street corners because they don’t have any other way to make a living. Sohn also mentions trying to get her program started in a situation where the city and state are in dire financial circumstances. She talks about the challenge of fundraising with events that are affordable for people to donate and attend.

The participants watch an episode of The Wire and then discuss it through the lens of their own life. She then discusses the components of the program including the participants and their relationship with themselves, family, and public institutions. Civic engagement is also a component of the program. The use of poetry and creative arts is also discussed.

She talks about how the tech industry can help society as well as harm society in the hands of the wrong people. She criticizes violence in video games and says young people use games, social media, and other things as outlets to numb the pain of their lives. She challenges those in attendance to think about the impact on children of what is often seen as entertainment. Sohn also challenges the audience to talk to their colleagues and decide if they are helping or harming.

Sohn challenges people to make a sacrifice to help young people become productive members of society. She says that she took a year off from her work in the entertainment industry to start her program.

Sohn is a nice counterbalance to Naomi Natale from this morning. Natale is fighting to do something about change around the world with genocide. Sonja Sohn is working on doing it here in Baltimore and in a much more grittier, realistic and effective fashion than some pie-in-the-sky art installation.

Lunch break is next. Check back on our main page for liveblogging of Session 3 around 2:15.

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

Aneesh Chopra, first CTO of the US, is speaking now.

He’s the first speaker wearing a tie. He mentions meeting The King of Hearts in India on a delegation with Gov. Mark Warner. The discussion is about lowering the costs of healthcare by bringing scale to the endeavor. The average heart surgeon could do 300 heart surgeries a year. The King of Hearts and his surgeon have lowered the costs and make profits while doing 30 surgeries a day.

Chopra asks if innovations at this price point capable of inspiring innovations in the U.S.?

He talks about research by his mentor at the University of Michigan. He mentions the CEO of GE announcing that GE will take a new approach to global connectivity called “reverse innovation.”

GE is looking at developing high quality imaging at price points that are affordable in the developing world yet still profitable. The price has decreased 85% while providing the quality of care. Chopra again asks if this will work in the US. GE is trying to do this he says.

He talks about helping lay out the innovation strategy for the Obama administration then goes on to talk about re-designing the GED curriculum through apprenticeships in trades. He says this program in Alexandria came to his attention while he was in the Virginia government under Gov. Kaine.

He talks about the challenge they gave in Virginia to the colleges and stakeholders to train a high school dropout to become a technology worker in six months. He mentions Microsoft and their IT Academy and how they talked to the GED programs to reconfigure their programs around technology. Corporations were asked to provide real-life case studies.

He said the first graduating class took place 12 months after the idea was devised. He also mentions the President wanting to engineer online courses that are learning labs to ensure every child has access to materials that benefits their learning style.

He mentions Dr. David Green in Baltimore next. David Green works with medical devices for the poor. He has helped reduce costs in cataract lenses while still making a profit, according to Chopra. One of Green’s more recent innovations is in the hearing aid industry. Green has used a tiered pricing system based on ability to pay.

He mentions the president’s challenge to build intelligent prosthetics so that a wounded veteran can still play the piano. (A recent 60 Minutes report I saw had some amazing prosthetics being tested on wounded vets.)

He mentions that people want to come together in a democratic construct but also as a problem solving situation as a family. He mentions healthcare, energy and other issues as reason to come together to make innovations.

Keep refreshing this post for updates on this 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