TED Community » Camilo Cetina

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Books, Movies, photography and the end of poverty

An idea worth spreading

Chance favors the connected mind. (Steve Johnson)

Comments

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  A comment on Conversation: Is it time to change TEDs official response to the question, "Is TED elitist?"

  Feb 25 2011: On the one side: Take the questions you have to answer in order to be admitted to the TED conference. You have to prove you stand ABOVE of other people's profiles: it is all about acomplishments, achievements, uniqueness, about having a web page... it looks like a "showing-off" thing. TED selects who attends and who does not, based on such criteria. So, if you live in the bottom of the global society and you just want to start some networking by attending to TED, perhaps there is nothing you can share with TED that interests them. You are not worth coming to TED.
  
  On the other side: TED had made a difference anyway... Here in Colombia, No university or organization could afford bringing guys such as Al Gore, V.S. Ramachandran, Jaqueline Novogratz, Esther Duflo, etc... and even if it is affordable to a University, then attending to the conference IS NOT affordable to interested people. By posting talks in the web, TED is making knowledge more accesible.
  
  It is a sort of Lamarkian and Darwinian combination: the former because ideas are being spread accross a generation who are the TED fans, and the latter because not everyone is worth attending to TED as not everyone survives its natural selection (so to speak).

• A comment on Conversation: What was the most amazing social experience you had and why?

  Feb 25 2011: Back in 2003 I was working for a NGO in Bogotá and I had to travel to the countryside, in the south-west.
  Once in San Vicente, I had to visit some rural schools in order to assess whether or not they were complying with some requirements to get computers donated by a Presidential Program called "Computadores para Educar". The 1st one was in an county called Guacamayas: extremely beautiful landscape but no public utilities at all. There was only one road to access the small county... but THEY DID HAVE DIRECT-TV!!! Warner Channel was more popular than Shakira. They had a small power station which worked from 5 am to 7 pm, but if you wanted or needed some electricity afterwards, then you had to pay like 5 USD for an extra hour (please notice that here even a dollar makes a difference between a meal and no meals at all during a day). Teachers and the principal of the school were so nice.... the principal allowed me to sleep at his place and he took me around the whole county to see how peasants and children lived.
  
  Then I had to move to another school, in another county like 2 hours from Guacamayas by car and 2 more hours by motorboat. I met people just as friendly as the people in Guacamayas but they were having so many disagreemts!. Computers were not working because school-administrators and the community did not agree to collect the money to get a voltage regulator. The astonishing thing was that they already had managed do the most difficult things: they BUILT an entire new classroom and they got new chairs and tables to put the computers in so they set up a public computer-room. But they had been stuck the last months because of a voltage regulator. I had to go almost door by door to get an extraordinary meeting and to get agreement about this last issue.
  
  I met a 25-year old guy. He had been teaching his whole life in rural schools. Although he did not know what life was like in the cities, he seemed TRULY happy to be a math teacher for peasant's children.

• A comment on Talk: Jake Shimabukuro plays "Bohemian Rhapsody"

  Jan 29 2011: Flawless.... amazing.... beautiful.

• A comment on Talk: Barry Schwartz: Our loss of wisdom

  Nov 18 2009: I love Schwartz%uFFFDapproach. This talk and "the paradox of choice" are both wise and brilliant. However, I keep wondering about rules (and the rule of law) in some developing countries. Pick any country in Africa and Latin America and see that it is the lack of rules and procedures -instead of the opposite- that is nurturing mediocrity and chaos. The scope is really wide: from the people who keep thinking how to jump the queue or how to pass the exam without stydying, to corrupt governors who keep stealing whereas nobody cares about others. It seems that rules also shape (or enforce -?-) both morale and morality. The "I-go-first" behaviour becomes the rule when there is no rule and that is why Switzerland is how it is, and Latin America is how it is.