By the time I finished posting the previous image I realized that none of my friends have any idea what it is that I’m talking about.

Alright, quick refresher: Nicholas Negroponte has a project called “One Laptop Per Child“, possibly the most important thing to happen in education in the last 10 years. He has created a very small, simple laptop for the cost of $200 (soon to cheapen) that is being sold en masse to the developing nations of the world for the education of their children. The kicker is that as a condition to buy the laptops for the children the governments have to agree that the laptop belongs to the child, and can be done with as the child likes. This is an amazing educational tool- but listen to the TED talk, Nicholas says it better.

This laptop is called the XO-Laptop. It used to be called the $100 Laptop, but when the price crept up they realized marketing would need to shift…

The goal is educational, but as a marketing tool they have created a temporary offer called Give One Get One, where they allow you to buy one XO-Laptop for yourself and simultaneously donate one to the developing world. I signed up, and my copy showed up this morning.

The image in the previous post was taken off of the laptop. It has a mike, speakers and a small camera. I could have taken a video if I wanted to punish y’all.

I am currently typing this blog entry off of my XO-Laptop, logged on wirelessly to the internet.

Sweet.

I just received my OLPC XO laptop! This is the best thing ever!

This is me, on geek.

So many artists around the world are driven by social change, but the parts they are offered are for gangsters, sluts or alcoholics. They do their best to convert their limited role into a story of life, a guidepost to Life’s Lessons, but in the end they are constrained by the script.
There is an option (b): Make your own movie.

Jeff Skoll: Making movies that make change
Official Spiel-Jeff Skoll made his fortune as the first president of eBay. Now he’s spending it at the movies. His company, Participant Productions, makes entertaining, issues-driven films that inspire real change — Murderball, Syriana, An Inconvenient Truth … Here, he talks about the people who’ve inspired him to do good, and about some upcoming films that will open your eyes.

My Spiel-Jeff Skoll wanted to write stories when he was a kid to inspire people to become interested in the issues that affected us all, but he instead went off into engineering because he feared writing wasn’t certain enough to make a living. So he hoped to become financially independent and then return to his original dream (damn this sounds familiar). He ended up becoming a billionaire and using that wealth to get hordes of other people to create their own stories that would change the world. He quotes John Gardner as his inspiration, “Bet on good people doing good things.” So he chose people he trusted and created Participant Productions to provide the financial backing to make Murderball, Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, An Inconvenient Truth, North Country, Fast Food Nation, The Kite Runner, et al. that all went on to be successful artistically, critically and financially but more important have all created social change. My good friend Taron Lexton is following a parallel path in the director’s seat (note to self: step 1- become a billionaire, step 2- hire Taron). This is the road less traveled, but abundant in its rewards.

The key to this talk is not merely the genius and the power of Jeff Skoll but the insight that people want to make movies that make change, want to make art that makes a difference. The art will be better and more beautiful because of it, but it takes a leader with the drive to make it happen or all those artistic, socially inclined individuals won’t present themselves. They’ll show up for whatever they can get a role in. Between ‘Syriana’ and ‘Good Night and Good Luck’ George Clooney won his first Academy Award and his second Golden Globe- his last movie before that was Ocean’s Twelve. Enough said.

You have to create the structure for people to make a difference in. Most of us don’t have the energy to go it alone, to be the first, but most of us would show up in a Jeff Skoll’s movie if given half a chance.

One more thing- check out the Skoll Foundation for Jeff Skoll’s other humanitarian work. Very clever selection of priorities, great work, well worth supporting.

Sasa Vucinic is trying to keep a free press alive across the world. Along the way he came up with a new way of helping charities (listen carefully at the end of the talk).

Official Spiel:In this quietly persuasive talk, Sasa Vucinic tells how being an independent radio broadcaster in the former Yugoslavia led him to create the Media Development Loan Fund, a radically new way to support independent media. He explains the importance of creating media businesses rather than mere journalistic entities, and proposes his vision (since realized) to issue “free press bonds,” publicly traded securities that support independent media in developing and transitioning countries.

My Spiel:
The discussion of the value of free press and the difficulties in keeping it alive was interesting, but what gets this talk onto my favorite list is the idea he has at the end of the talk to create bonds for companies that have charitable aims, and provide those bonds on the open market. This is genius.
It is important that it be bonds and not stocks because you don’t want the charity going out of business because of a temporary swing in public opinion- you cannot afford to have a charity catering to investors first, and their public second. A bond bridges the gap between charity and pure commercialism as a bond is repayed in full, with or without interest.
Many investors want not only to make money (or at least break even) but also to be socially conscious about it. Many if not most mutual funds today have notations on them that they will not invest in Tobacco, Firearms or similar industries that the investor may find reprehensible. It is known and acknowledged in the investing community that the effect of the investment matters to the investor- this idea takes that knowledge one step further.
Right now most charitable organizations rely on a mixture of angel donations, commercial loans from banks and revenue (if any) from their charity model. This leaves out the opportunity for an investor that would happily loan them the money at less than market rate as long as he was guaranteed his money back.
Two examples:
Grameen Bank when it was started by Muhammed Yunus was funded off of his personal cash out of his pocket (literally). As it grew he needed larger loans from a commercial bank. The commercial banks were not set up to loan to the very poor directly so every loan was in Yunus’ name, and on his behalf Grameen bank loaned the money to the poor. They had donations as time went by, but not enough to match the massive volume of loans they were handling and so they had to suffer with the awkward constraints of dealing with commercial banks.
www.kiva.org is a microlending organization that is a mini example of this bond idea. Kiva searches out and finds worthy microlending causes across the world, takes a picture of the guy who wants a loan and gets a description of what business venture he needs the loan for. Socially concious investors go to www.kiva.org and find one of these microlending borrowers they like. They lend that guy some part or all of his loan (usually 100 to 1000 dollars). As the borrower pays off his loan the investor gets his money back with no interest. This is exactly like a bond, but from person to person, me to some guy in Tibet. If he fails to repay the loan he will find it very difficult to get another microloan, and as a result the repayment rate is typically 95-99 percent, far above American credit repayment rates.

The beauty of the bond idea is that it is so flexible. There can be no interest, some interest or even negative interest if the cause is worthy enough.
The bonds could be rated for their charitable performance much like stocks are rated by Morningstar for their financial performance.
I cannot emphasize how much I love this idea.

Anna Deavere Smith displays some of the best acting I’ve ever seen, becoming her characters rather than just acting like them.

Official Spiel:
Actor Anna Deavere Smith brings the TED audience to their feet as she gives life to a series of quintessential Americans. Smith transforms herself in and out of character as she embodies legendary author Studs Terkel, followed by convict Paulette Jenkins, a Korean merchant in Los Angeles after the 1992 riots, and finally a rodeo bull rider. The monologues are drawn verbatim from interviews she conducted for On the Road: A Search for American Character.

My spiel:
Everyone has a native ability to behave like someone else, pick up a few of their characteristics as time goes on. Watch an entire season of your favorite TV show in one evening and you’ll begin to sound like the cast (I’m looking at you Jess). But to be able to pick up and put down a personality like garment is where Anna stands apart. To be able to turn it on and turn it off at will- I’ve never quite seen anything like it.

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.