Was invited to attend the second edition of TEDx Helsinki last week, and I have to thank the organizers for a fantastic event.  We had great speakers, awesome videos from official TED conferences and some very interesting insights.  A quick bullet-point summary below.

1. Sebastian Wernicke and how to create the ultimate TED talk using statistics (video).  “Tool” available from get-tedpad.com.
2. Esa Saarinen introduced us to the idea of Baby Radicalism, or what should we learn from toddler behaviour in our daily life: the power of smiling, growth and love.
3. Juuso Nissilä went over how our biology hasn’t evolved as fast as our culture and society, and our bodies struggle to catch up with our conduct and environment.
4. Bjarke Ingels showed us the power of letting ideas evolve in the architectural design process (video).
5. Virpi Kuitunen gave us a very personal talk on the challenges of giving up something. “The most difficult thing of quitting is not leaving stuff behind, is starting anew as you don’t know what lies ahead”.
6. Reidar Wasenius put the audience to exercise their brains for a little while.
7. Anssi Vanjoki explored the power of volunteering and volunteer organisations.  He mentioned the open source software movement and sports clubs as good examples, while contrasting them with the sad state of political party volunteering in Finland.
8. Mikael Jungner talked about the illusion of control and how it affects the decision-making process giving biting examples from his time at the helm of YLE.
9. Tom Wujec on the nature of collaboration (video).  Openness, expertise and facilitation will go a long way.
10. Kirsti Lonka showed us some of the challenges the Digital Natives pose to the way the education system in Finland currently works, and what are they doing to change it.
11. Teppo Turkki talked about the rising economic, technological and even cultural influence of South Korea, Japan and China.
12. Temple Grandin on how autistic minds work, and why they can and should be allowed to contribute to society (video).
13. Jufo Peltomaa showed why the coming singularity won’t mean the end of the human race.  In fact the emerging AIs will evolve so fast they will not care more for us than we do of, say, wolverines.
14. Miina Savolainen closed the event with a bang, talking about the empowering quality of portrait photography: what it says of the photographer’s values and ways of communication.  When you look at pictures, don’t only focus on what’s present, but also on what is not being photographed.  More info on her website.  You’ll never see family albums in the same way again.

All in all an enjoyable and inspirational occasion which I hope I can attend again.

Oh, Maemo, the promises you bring to nerds like me…

Mobile programmable computers have a new meaning now.

After a very interesting presentation by Dr. José Luis Cordeiro of Singularity University, I was left with a few interesting ideas about the coming accelerating technological and social progress.

• Genetic testing is becoming faster and cheaper.  In 3 years full sequencing will only cost 100 bucks and take 5 days, with a huge impact in ancestry and medicine (think about genetically-tailored preventive medicine). Imagine 23andme going mass market.
• We will go back to the moon, especially now that it is found that there’s water.
• World relationships are changing. For thousands of years the important body of water was the Mediterranean, and until recently the Atlantic.  We are now entering the age of the Pacific.
• Robot rights are already under discussion in Korea and Europe.
• Economic, telecommunications and energy source evolution is accelerating.
• The death of death: The Methuselah Foundation.
• Nano, bio, info and cognitive sciences are converging. Everything is information.
• Marvin Minsky (MIT): “Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be us!”
• Transhumanism as a possibility, not only a science fiction conjecture.

TEDx Helsinki was organised this year as a local mirror for the wonderful, famous TED talks.  The event was quite good overall, even if the level of the talks was a little uneven.  The only problem they had was with misleading marketing in one important aspect: while their website and the registration process was in English, 80% of the event was in Finnish with no translations, which meant those attendants who didn’t master the language of Aleksis Kivi (and there were quite a few), were given a cold shoulder from the get go.

This was one of those situations where I was really glad to have learned the local lingo. If you are interested to know more about the event, you can check twitter or Anssi Kela’s post (in Finnish).

Update 18.05.2010: Videos from the presentations here, here and here (in English).

Hi-def would have been impossible

Originally uploaded by Chiva Congelado

Finally we got a flatscreen TV for the living room, and returned our old one for recycling. Before flatscreen technology, large HD televisions (and therefore HD technology) were deemed impractical because they would have simply not fit through any door. Picture that for a moment.

Reminds me of the famous Bill Gates quote that nobody would need more than 640 kB of memory for a personal computer.

An interesting book I read in the December holiday period, it details how audiences relate to different properties accross media, and what are the new behaviours we are finding as a result.  Even though some of the cases and examples shown are already a couple of years old, if you are trying to understand what are the ways people are actually using, dissecting and mashing content this is definitely the book for you.

A previous review on Slashdot here.

Read a review of it on Blanca’s blog and decided to check it out.  The author discusses the book below.

Interesting post at Stephen's blog about worldwide trends.  Worth reading.

Bought an Apple AirPort Express to connect my laptop with my stereo to listen music and at the same time be able to browse the web.  Since I have a Fonera router for using my network and sharing it with others (not that anybody has actually connected as I live in the middle of nowhere), I thought it would be easy to have them talk to each other and to my PC… how wrong I was!

After 3 hours of fiddling with the different settings I got it all working and now I'm happy listening to music without any wires in the way.  However, it got me wondering about the good old problem of interoperability.  Even when following the same standards, it is ridiculous things wouldn't work because of an arcane problem between WPA/WPA2 implementations in the two routers.  I guess there is still plenty of work to be done.