TED2007/Day 3: Looking Differently At AIDS, War and Sustainable Cities

Third day of the TED2007 conference in Monterey, California. Speakers ranged from "Lost" creator JJ Abrams to writer Isabel Allende, Participant Production founder Jeff Skoll, architect Elizabeth Diller, "Sims" creator Will Wright, economist Ed De Bono. I've liveblogged most of the sessions on the LunchOverIP blog. Here are my unedited running notes from three speakers:

Empirical economist Emily Oster is a Steven-Levitt-esque young researcher from Chicago that looks at data in a different way than most. For example, she looked into the millions of "missing women" in Asia, and argued (PDF) that one of the causes of the gender gap (along with the often-mentioned selective abortion and infanticide) was hepatitis-B: the women were not missing, but were never born, she explained, because pregnant woman with hepatitis-B are far more likely to have a boy than a girl. A couple of months ago, she wrote an article for Esquire on "the three things you don't know about AIDS in Africa".

(This is her research. There is another detail in Oster's biography that's worth mentioning. If you've read Malcom Gladwell's "Tipping Point" you may remember that he discusses a study of children's acquisition of linguistic skills, centred around a 2 year-old girl that had more sophisticated skills when she was alone (talking to herself) than when she was speaking with ther parents. That girl was identified as "baby Emily", and was in fact Emily Oster).

She talks about AIDS in Sub-Saharian Africa. AIDS is a policy issue, but the talk is about data -- because we cannot develop effective policy unless we understand how epidemics works. In places with high rates of AIDS, the cost of sex is very high. So somehow we feel that people there should have less sex in order to reduce risk. If you look at data about gay men in the US in 1984-88, there was indeed a big change in sexual behavior, the number of partners dicreased; this is not happening in Africa. It depends very much on life expectancy: not having sex is like an investment, so you value it more the longer you expect to live in the future.

Let's check this assumption: do people with more life expectancy change their behavior more? She uses data about malaria, and finds that in regions with a higher risk of death from malaria, people have consistently more sexual partners (graph at left). So if you improve the general life situation, she says, people will have a higher incentive to avoid AIDS on their own. But that's not automatic. What makes HIV epidemics develop faster or slower? There is a correlation between economic activity, particularly export volumes, and the development of HIV. Open markets are good but they come at a cost when it concerns diseases. The AIDS epidemic was introduced in the US by one traveller that got it in Africa. Areas with alot of activity etc have more prevalence of AIDS.

So unfortunately it seems that these things are closely related: more trade = more AIDS. If you double exports volume, you quadruple the number of AIDS infected. So making the economy better doesn't necessarily mean that AIDS will decrease. Uganda's ABC campaign is a (unique success) story, but Oster points to a correlation between the decrease of HIV infections in the country, and the decrease in coffee exports. These are figures that suggest that a part of the decrease in infections would have happened even without education campaign.

Deborah Scranton is the filmmaker of "The War Tapes": she gave cameras to US infantry soldiers in Iraq in 2004 asking them to film their war life, and basically directed the movie via e-mail and instant messaging -- a unique collaborative film (see the trailer). She calls the approach "virtual embed": a novel way to tell a story in video from the inside out, rather than observing from the outside  in, as in traditional documentary-making. She shows scenes from the movie, and tells the backstory. One of the most profound stories: A soldier came up to me and he looked at me and I smiled and I saw the tear starting hi his eye and he told me about killing a child who got too close to the vehicle and was run over, "I'm a father, and I'm afraid to tell my wife because she may think that I'm a monster". She sees this as exhibit A in a disconnect between the lives of soldiers and those of the other Americans.

Scranton is now using a similar approach to tell the story of the US-Mexico border, putting cameras into the hands of the border patrol, ranchers, humanitarians who leave water in the desert trying to save lives, smugglers, and illegal immigrants themselves. 

Chris Luebkeman, head of foresight at ARUP, the world's biggest engineering firm, also talks about the city of tomorrow. He puts up a picture of New York, which is a city depending on endless resources. "That era is over". In China alone 600 million people are going to be moving from the countryside into cities. Unsustainable urbanism is a threath to global security. We (ARUP) are creating a city outside of Shanghai, the size of Manhattan, Dongtan. Normally the ecological footprint in a conventional city is of 8.2, we got it down to 2.6, but it's still not good enough: we should go down to 2.2. We brought CO2 emissions for power and heath to zero: it's good, but not good enough. What he is saying is this: even applying the best and most advanced of today's materials, technologies, planning, design, engineering, and ideas, we still aren't capable of creating a sustainable city, we are missing the mark by 15 percent.

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The sessions of the day:

Thinking laterally about AIDS, emotions, assumptions, and how we think

Betting on good people doing good things, and a "virtually embedded" filmmaker

Designing DNA origami, "agritectural" parks, and sustainable cities (but we're still missing the mark)

Designing by sketching and prototyping vs street-up innovation

Also check out Lorna Herf's sketchblogging of the conference.

For a backgrounder on TED, see my previous post. And if you want to see what's ahead (fourth and last day tomorrow) check out TED's full program.

(A word of disclosure: I'm the European Director of TED)