This next TED talk is all about being effective in the face of a problem. Find out what is needed, and do that.

Larry Brilliant- Help stop the next pandemic

Official Description
“TEDPrize winner Larry Brilliant is an epidemiologist who presided over the last case of SmallPox on the planet. He also founded the Seva Foundation, which works to reverse cases of blindness, and co-founded several technology start-ups, including the legendary online community, The Well. He was recently named Executive Director of the Google Foundation. In this talk, he explains in fascinating detail the key behind the successful WHO campaign to eradicate Smallpox, and then unveils his TEDPrize wish: to build a global system that detects each new disease or disaster as it emerges or occurs.”

The punchline for this talk is “Early Detection, Early Response”. All of Larry Brilliant’s experience fighting diseases proved to him that the key to defeating disease is to find out early and act quickly.

This leads to Larry’s new work with Google- a tool that crawls the web and looks on blogs and within newspapers to find evidence that an epidemic is starting. The symptoms may not be understood or the pattern obvious at the ground level, but the epidemic pattern can be found by crawling the net and looking at the day to day traffic of blogs and newspapers.

Larry Brilliant’s example of a currently proven and effective system is GPHIN(official link is nigh-unreadable, a more useful description is here). GPHIN doesn’t crawl the internet but instead has some 20,000 news sources fed into the system and filtered to look for key information. The fascinating thing is that GPHIN found evidence of SARS months before the World Health Organization did.

It is projects like this that improve the world- not because Larry “decided to save the world”, but because he found a way to do good on a global scale.

I am going to start with my favorite talk, and add a post for each new talk as it comes up.

Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen

Official description-
“With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling uses an amazing new presentation tool, Gapminder, to debunk several myths about world development. Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a nonprofit that brings vital global data to life.”

My description-
This is the talk that got me interested in TED Talks. This is the kind of speaker that I want to be; when I get excited I talk a bit like him (excepting the Swedish accent), but I don’t have anything I’ve done that I could give a speech on.

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Humor aside, statistics are supposed to reflect the world as it is, and not how it once was or how we expect it to be.
The best part of this talk is how it explains how our world perceptions are not necessarily wrong, merely 30 years out of date.
When we think of Vietnam we think of rice paddies and bicycles. Vietnam today is not the Vietnam of 1960, but rather the USA of 1960 when you compare childhood mortality, education and wealth, etc. It is the insights like this that statistics can make real.
You can download the Gapminder tools he used in the demonstration and replicate his talk in its entirety. Hans Rosling is now working for google, and has a second TED post where he outlines some of his newest statistics including C02 emissions and it’s correlation with GDP.

As you may know, oh imaginary blog reader, I submit all of my stories to the Writers of the Future Contest- so far I’ve sent in 3 stories, and got 3 very nice rejection letters.
But in recent news my latest rejection letter said that Grimoire made it to the top 10% before being cut out.  Of course, only 3 stories get picked per quarter and they receive something like 1000 stories a quarter… but hey! I beat out 900 other stories! Only 97 stories left to go!

So that’s something.

Hello non-existent viewers of my blog,

Here are some free stories I have written for friends and family to enjoy or ignore.
The crowd favorite is Grimoire, which is my latest.

My first stories were written as a Christmas present to my wife, and are fittingly called Stories for Jessica, which includes “Station Keeping”, “Waiting for my Return”, and “Biking in Westwood”.

Use freely, distribute, etc, but please don’t call them your own.
Unless you’re famous. In which case it’s cool.