TED Community » Connor Dickie

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Freedom of speech, especially online. To support this I travelled to Tajikistan in Fall 2009 to implement a national phone-in-automatically-anonymously-blogged poetry contest. http://10sec1bayt.com

An idea worth spreading

With the aid of digital cameras humans can see a broader spectrum of light (colours). Let's start creating art with these previously invisible colours! I built Kameraflage Inc. (http://kameraflage.com) to commercialize an "ultra-wide-gamut" display technology to enable and help spread this new way to think about human perception and colour.

Talk to me about

Talk with me about your experience with Alzheimer's Disease. My mother - who was a Radiologist and researcher with both Siemens and General Electric suffers from early onset Alzheimer's disease.

People don't know that I'm good at

Dancing!

My TED Story

I have never been to a proper TED event, but have attended Mozes Znaimer's "Idea City" in Toronto in '03, '04 and '05. In Fall 2008 I was Experience Director at a TED-inspired youth innovation conference in Toronto called "Changing the World" (http://changingtheworld.com) which was nominated for the 2010 TED Prize!

Comments

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• A comment on Conversation: electronic implants to control human movement

  May 31 2011: Have year heard of artist STELARC? He has been putting these ideas into practise for decades. Some very interesting (and perhaps disturbing) work.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stelarc

• A comment on Conversation: Why all religion founders are male and no female?

  May 20 2011: Mary Baker Edy started Christian Science in Boston. Not a full deletion, but at least a denomination/sect.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Could video recordings alleviate OCD for most people?

  May 17 2011: I don't think that this would be useful. OCD is a lot more than just flipping light switches and checking to make sure the stove of off.
  
  Seema C is correct in saying that a good doctor and a strong support network is the best thing that is realistically possible with today's resources... But Seema C's assertation that this was a surveillance tool to watch the OCD sufferer is incorrect. I believe this system is meant to be an enabling tool for the person with OCD acting as some sort of external memory aid... As if OCD was a memory or self-trust problem...

• A comment on Conversation: Has computer science completely missed the point of a computer -- namely, that it is a creative tool?

  May 17 2011: Hello Amir, and everyone else!
  
  Amir; what you speak of is descriptive of an area of Computer Science often called Human Computer Interaction (HCI), which is loosely a Human Factors field where the art of combining human and machine into something more than either is developed.
  
  Whereas strict Computer Scientists (I like to call them "Big Iron") work inside the machine, HCI folks work extends beyond the scope of machine to incude the human.
  
  If you have heard of Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, you may also be familiar with his design for an unconventional computer (with computational powers beyond the Turing Machine) called an "Oracle Machine". The Oracle Machine was a Turing Machine and a Black Box working together. In this symbiosis the Turing Machine asks the Black Box questions it can't answer alone and thus is more powerful than an unaugmented Touring Machne.
  
  In many ways the combination of computers and humans embodies this powerful tool described by Turing. HCI recognizes this and works towards both efficiency and humanistic gains. So, this is a hard example of an area of Computer Science that has both artistic and scientific acumen.
  
  If you look at work that comes out of many labs with a strong HCI history (eg. Zeros PARC, MIT Media Lab, Human Media Lab, etc.) you will see many interesting and odd uses of computers that are novel, disruptive and sometimes even world-changing!
• +2

  A comment on Conversation: How to bring peace in the world???

  May 16 2011: Kill everything on the planet so that it is silent and peaceful like the Moon. This is peace.
  
  How do we bring human-centric peace on Earth? Likely impossible without serious abdication of key realities of being a human. Things like privacy, travel, speech etc. I remember reading 1984 a long time ago and remarking about how peaceful life was in Oceana.
  
  I think it's more realistic to think about World Harmony rather than World Peace. Harmony allows for violence and death, as long as it's offset by opposite acts. I think the Earth right now is rather harmonious despite all the terrible news we see on TV. We're not dead yet!

• A comment on Conversation: Why don't we use technology to have a real Direct Democracy?

  May 16 2011: The problem of electronic voting extends beyond the tool or website that is implementing the poll; we also need to worry about voter coercion. Today we vote in private booths with proctors available to make sure that one person is not influencing the vote of another. When voting goes online we will have to worry about coercion from spouses, employers and other bullies. "if you want to keep your job, vote blue!" etc.
  
  Think of how easy it is to game current online polls!
  
  To remedy this there is research being undertaken (that I participated in) at the MIT/Caltech voting technology project. Can we detect voter coercion, influence and general unsatisfactory voting conditions electronically?
  
  As was stated in an earlier post, it's all about trust.