TED Community » Stephen Feber

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Informal learning - spreading the democracy of ideas

An idea worth spreading

We live in an age where the 'cognitive pyramid' has a very broad base of data, a huge information level, shrinking knowledge and a tiny summit of wisdom. In the pre industrial age it was the other way round - knowledge was important but trans generational wisdom was the most important thing. Today we need means of visualising connectedness in the data - ways of linking the different levels. ways of findign wisdom from understanding patterns - the newly emerging field of information aesthetics holds one of the keys to this.

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Information aesthetics

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Raising money to get ideas to happen.

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• A reply on Talk: Allan Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change

  Mar 5 2013: Kevin - I've looked briefly at the threads where. Some seem rather confused..... Savory's point is that the alteration is permanent - rainfall increases - you don't have to keep these very large herds in operation. I don't know the calculations re protein v methane but ti is the case as you know that a meat free diet uses less land. We are omnivores though.

• A reply on Talk: Allan Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change

  Mar 5 2013: Joel - see my post above on water.....
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Allan Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change

  Mar 5 2013: I was there and it was compelling. In 18 minutes he had to leave out a few things but I spoke with him later. Nice and smart man. Water is an issue - humans are 60% water and mature animals probably about 50%. Young animals have a higher water %. Animals obtains water from three sources: drinking water, water present in food and metabolic water, this last being formed during metabolism by the oxidation of hydrogen-containing organic nutrients. Drinking water is the most significant. So Allan provides water via pumping using animal powered pumps - bringing up ground water. Oxen turn a gin which drives a generator and this in turn powers the pump. They have developed thin skinned concrete containment vessels for storage he said.
  
  Perhaps the most striking images were - desert to grass transformations, the earth from above view of the areas of the planet which are desert and a herd of 25,000 sheep in Patagonia. The idea that we might use mobile protein makers - animals - to green our planet is wonderful. Note though that they are at large herd scale - a very slow blitzkrieg, in effect.
  
  Note the word originally meant a wild and uninhabited place - not a barren, dry, treeless waste. It has come to mean the sandy vastness of our current usage.

• A comment on Conversation: Are we entering into a new historical period?

  Mar 21 2011: It's just history - us on the planet - change is new and its old. What was true of the village, then the town, city and country is now starting to be true globally and it is a truly good thing. The question is always how fast we'll solve the problems we've created and how great the price of the mis match will be between problem and solution.

• A comment on Conversation: How do we capture the collective wisdom and engage the global TEDx communities?

  Mar 20 2011: We need themes. In the work I have been doing on sustainable futures in the UK I've adapted the idea of the Forum of the Future's five capitals and looked at them as assets - social, human, built (made), natural and financial. I'd suggest grouping the TEDx activity under 5 broad headings and then digging down - to look at topics - like cities, food etc.

• A comment on Conversation: To create global real time data visualisation screens in every city round the world & on also the web.

  Mar 20 2011: Maybe I shouldn't have put Rosling's name in at the start of the thread! And I agree data visualisation is short on emotion. With due deference to MM - in data visualisation the medium is not the message - there's much that is in the pipeline - look at Carlo Ratti's talk or Aaron Koblin's from this year's TED. What is beginning to be possible is seeing what we have not seen before - flows of goods, services, energy, people. Once you can see them you can understand them and plan for them differently, especially see where they interact and where there is waste of energy and time. Visualisation can provide powerful backcasting and therefore forecasting - and this is essential because we're poor at foresight (I don't mean prediction). Because we'll be able also to do this in real time - particularly for cities - we will be able to optimise energy use, transport use and make cities much more efficient. Visualisation is also starting to show new markets and new opportunities. And if you look at visualisation in science, engineering, architecture and design - you see we're on the edge of a visualisation revolution.