Porn as education, robots at war, and retired Microsoft boss Bill Gates’ mosquito release were just some of the highlights at the TED conference.

TED, the Technology Entertainment Design conference consists of a series of talks given by “big thinkers” discussing “big ideas.”

It is attended by many of the world’s leading scientists, academics and business leaders.

Mr Gates’ stunt was to drive home the serious message of malaria prevention.

With the issue being high on the agenda of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the former software boss told the crowd in Long Beach, California “Not only poor people should experience this.”

While he asked the audience “How do you stop a deadly disease that is spread by mosquitoes”, Mr Gates also noted that more money is spent finding a cure for baldness than eradicating malaria.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged nearly $170 million (£118m) to develop a vaccine for malaria.

During his presentation, Mr Gates released several mosquitoes into a startled crowd.

TED organisers confirmed the mosquitoes did not carry malaria but they did give the audience food for thought. It was described as “an amazing TED moment”.

Meanwhile the insect release which was first reported on Twitter, the micro blogging service, lit up with comments.

Loic LeMeur of Seesmic tweeted “We’re all leaving the room and getting sick.”

“That’s it, I’m not sitting up front anymore,” tweeted Pierre Omidyar who founded eBay.

TED curator Chris Anderson quipped that when a video of the talk is posted on its website it would be headlined “Gates releases more bugs into the world.”

Economic downturn

Mr Gates’ other big focus concerned the need to retain teachers as well as the present state of the economy.

“I think we have three, four, five years here that will be very tough,” he said.

“There’s no doubt the American consumer was overspending. But there’s no government magic bullet to fix things.

“If you actually went back to overspending, you’d just go back to the same problems,” said Mr Gates.

Meanwhile Juan Enriquez, the author, entrepreneur and former Harvard business school professor who opened TED’s 25th event said, “It’s not a question of who deserves a bailout anymore. We simply can’t afford to spend any more money.”

Robots at war

The issue of how future wars will be fought was another issue that resulted in a flurry of comment from some of the 1500-strong crowd.

Author and analyst P.W. Singer talked about his new book “Wired for War” which examines how the military is moving towards an increasingly unmanned force through robots and drones.

Mr Singer estimated that by 2016, half of the military will be affected and that this will change the way individuals and governments engage in warfare.

“Robotic, video-controlled war distances humans from war. We do things in the video world that we wouldn’t do face-to-face,” he said.

TED organiser Chris Anderson called this vision “a bit frightening”.

Porn myths

Also aiming to provoke was a short presentation about a website called makelovenotporn.com to illustrate the myths surrounding sex.

Presenter Cindy Gallop told attendees “In our culture hard core porn has become a de-facto substitute for sex education. Children have access to it younger and younger.”

She noted that some re-education might be needed.

The website encourages people to go online and comment on real life sex versus porn sex.

Other highlights included former vice president Al Gore talking about the effect of carbon dioxide on weather patterns around the world.

Industrial designer Yves Behar showcased an electric motorcycle he said was capable of getting twice the range of other electric bikes and whose top speed is 150mph.

And British musicians Naturally 7 gave what was described as a “memorable presentation” of vocal play where no instruments are used, just the human voice.

Their so-called “Wall of Sound” earned a standing ovation

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

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The white space debate over how (or whether) to utilize unused frequencies in the broadcast spectrum has been going on for nearly two years now, and, despite all the ups and downs (and fear mongering), the various members of the White Spaces Coalition have continued to fight the good fight in the hopes of bringing faster downloads to more places. The latest initiative/olive branch is the formation of the White Spaces Database Group, mapping areas of unused spectrum and enabling devices to verify what frequencies are available based on positional information (likely GPS or cell tower triangulation). It’s still early days so there aren’t any details about the database itself yet, except that the group intends to keep things “open and non-proprietary” and will work with the FCC to populate it. Now, can’t we all just get along and work toward a summer of worry-free wireless?

[Via ars technica]

Filed under: Wireless

White Spaces Coalition launches DB Group, letting devices find their own piece of the spectrum originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ve dropped about 10 pounds so far, and a little more falls off every day. The fix hasn’t been running, lifting, or anything trendy—I’m just eating less meat, and enjoying what I eat more.

What I’m doing isn’t exactly new or original. You could call it flexitarianism, or a more regimented form of semi-vegetarianism. You could accuse me of jumping all over the latest thing foodie guru Mark Bittman said or wrote, and, given how often he shows up in my food-focused posts, you’d have good reason to bust out the fanboy flag.

However I came to it, I’m avoiding meat for all but one meal of the day. This plan has worked where a lot of other plans and diets haven’t.

First, a quick step back. I carried, in December, about 205 pounds on my 6-foot-1-inch frame. By all accounts, I’ve got a lucky metabolism, but I also love food—all of it, everywhere, in any amount—and dark, regional beers. And I’ve spent most of my career sitting down to write or edit words. So an excess of physique-softening, energy-reducing weight gradually accumulated on me, and it was defeating to think about. I’d read most of Michael Pollan’s popular eat-better-or-else books, and my family history is full of diabetes and obesity. Still, fast food drive-thru visits were written off with excuses about a tight schedule, vegetables were given the same respect as salt packets, and my sedendary life left me feeling pretty unfit.

Most diets seem to be based around broad concepts (Don’t eat carbohydrates!), ridiculously strict regiments (any crash diet focused on one type of food), or lists of “good” and “bad” foods so varied and long that scanning a restaurant menu feels like a course in advanced database queries (next stop: South Beach).

The diet suggested, or at least discussed at length, in Mark Bittman’s new book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, is simple, and centered around a rule a four-year-old can understand: Don’t eat meat before dinner. It might sound like sacrilege to those who truly relish a good meal, or foolishly restrictive to anyone raised on bacon with their breakfast, meat in their sandwiches, and a dinner plate with starch, vegetable, and entree. But for this Lifehacker editor, it’s an easily-defined, sensible challenge, and one that’s paying off the more I rise to it. It doesn’t punish you for dreaming of applewood-smoked pork ribs, it shouldn’t turn you into a waiter’s worst nightmare, and it makes it harder for you to overeat.

Bittman’s diet suggestions stem from a wider-focused concern about the earth’s ecology, the food production demands of our modern diet, and other pressing topics of the day. If vegan, organic, or locally-sourced foods are what you’re into, a daytime vegetarian diet can certainly accommodate. But the weight loss that’s worked for me and the New York Times food writer is more due to how scaling back on meat—dense with calories, a great hider of fat, and easily eaten too quickly—tricks you into consuming less. It almost goes without saying that avoiding the processed, mass-produced meats in burgers, re-heated chain restaurant meals, and packaged entrees is better for you in any situation. But avoiding \any kind of meat forces you, or at least me, to get creative with your daytime diet, and makes the evening meal something you really want to enjoy, not just scarf down.

Here’s how I’ve made a flexitarian/daytime-vegetarian/Bittmanist diet work for me as a day-to-day reality:

• Broaden your food base: Hide these from your friends with the “Meat is murder—tasty, delicious murder” T-shirts, if you must, but there are tons of great cookbooks, websites, and idea wells to grab meat-less meals or snacks from. The Meat Lite recipe series from the foodie blog Serious Eats, and a cookbook from the authors of that series, Almost Meatless, are just what they sound like—scaled-back quantities of meat that use it for good flavor. Sites like VegKitchen, 101 Cookbooks, and others have creative takes on meals that work great at breakfast, mid-day, or dinner. My personal source for endless inspiration? Asian cookbooks—any cuisine, any recipe. You can swap in tofu, if you dig it, or beans, fresh vegetables, or pretty much anything for most dishes, and you’ll find a few that work great with any ingredients.
• Don’t get held hostage at restaurants: If you’re sitting down for breakfast or lunch and the vegetarian offerings are unappealing, consider getting a salad and an appetizer, two appetizers, two salads, or asking the waiter for a plate with a few of the menu’s appealing sides. Last resort? Ask the waiter (gasp!) if the chef recommends any vegetarian substitutions. In a lot of cases, you’ll pay less than if you grabbed a full-fledged meal, and if you end up eating less, well …
• Re-think your hunger: As Bittman notes in Food Matters, most of us can’t (or, at least, don’t) have sex every single time we think about it—we’ll wait for you to finish up whatever wisecrack you got going with there. But hunger, real or routine, is something many of us satisfy with an unnatural level of urgency. You can fight off some of those pangs with a slow, steady stream of healthier stuff, like popcorn, almonds, or snacks that don’t come in thin foil, but it’s easier to engage in something, anything time-consuming when your body feels hungry and you can’t remind it that dinner’s only an hour away. There’s a reason critics always swipe at artists by referring to the work of their “young and hungry” days—being a little hungry is far from a bad thing.
• It’s a guideline, not a religion: Your buddy’s in town, and wants to meet at Texas Jack’s House of Steak for lunch. Go for it, try to eat just a reasonable amount—about the size of a deck of cards, and switch to vegetarian fare for dinner. But your spouse planned a great chicken dish! Okay, eat a healthy amount of that too, tell her you’re stuffed from lunch, and eat as many veggies as you can. This plan isn’t about quick results, or proudly waving a trendy diet flag in everyone’s face. Eat as realistically vegetarian as you can in the day, eat small amounts of (really good!) meat at night, and you’ll eventually adapt to eating smaller portions. You could eat nothing but Snickers bars all day and technically be eating vegetarian, but that’s not the point—use your meatless day to inspire your diet, not constrain it.

Photo by moriza.

This is, of course, just one man’s plan for losing weight, and anyone picking it up has to do a bit of research into what kind of meat-less meals are nutritious and relatively painless to cook and eat. It should be accompanied with real exercise; I’m just putting it off that part until spring because, well, it’s 12 degrees here on days like today. And results will vary, based on a lot of factors. But feeling good about what you’re putting in your body, and having a simple rule to manage it all, has worked out great so far.

Anybody in the crowd made a switch to lower-meat diets? Got any suggestions for staving off hunger and replacing those big hunks o’ flesh? Gather ’round the kitchen and offer some tips in the comments.

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