tedxwaterloo 2010 - program
DESCRIPTION
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x=independently organized TED event.TRANSCRIPT
Waterloo
Waterloo
TEDx Waterloo, Ontario, Canada – February 25, 2010
About TEDx 2Event Details 7Schedule 8Speakers 9Sponsors 16
About TED
Table of Contents
TED is an annual event where some of the world’s leading
thinkers and doers are invited to share what they are
most passionate about. “TED” stands for Technology,
Entertainment, Design – three broad subject areas that are,
collectively, shaping our future. And in fact, the event is
broader still, showcasing ideas that matter in any discipline.
Attendees have called it “the ultimate brain spa” and “a
four-day journey into the future.” The diverse audience
– CEOs, scientists, creatives, philanthropists – is almost
as extraordinary as the speakers, who have included Bill
Clinton, Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Frank Gehry, Paul Simon,
Sir Richard Branson, Philippe Starck and Bono.
TED was first held in Monterey, California, in 1984. In 2001,
Chris Anderson’s Sapling Foundation acquired TED from
its founder, Richard Saul Wurman. In recent years, TED
has expanded to include an international conference,
TEDGlobal; media initiatives, including TED.com and
TEDTalks and; and the TED Prize. TED2010, “What the
World Needs Now,” was held February 9 -13, 2010,
in Long Beach, California, with a simulcast in Palm
Springs, California. TEDGlobal 2009, “The Substance of
Things Not Seen,” was held July 21-24, 2009, in Oxford,
UK, and TEDIndia was held in November 2009.
Waterloo
Waterloo
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What is TEDx
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program
of local, self-organized events that bring people together
to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks
video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion
and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized
events are branded TEDx, where x=independently organized
TED event.
Event Details
TEDxWaterloo – February 25, 2010
Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada
Time: 1 p.m. – 8 p.m., followed by an afterparty.
Venue: Gig Music Hall, 137 Ontario Street North,
Kitchener, Ontario.
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6X
Welcome to TEDxWaterloo
Welcome to the inaugural TEDxWaterloo, an independently
organized TED event celebrating Ideas Worth Spreading.
You are part of an extraordinary community of enthusiastic
and accomplished individuals who have come together
today to be inspired, to share, and explore our theme:
Tomorrow Started Yesterday.
We often find ourselves so focused on opportunities,
problems or promises of the future that we can lose sight of
valuable lessons and stories from the past. Every moment
that we look forward to has had its seed in the past, and
what we are living through today has grown from the chaotic
complexity of what came before. Seen through this lens, our
ten speakers and three TED.com videos acknowledge and
celebrate the continuity of our journey from the past into
the future, inviting you to reframe, rethink, and re-imagine
what can be, from what is now, and from what once was.
Our day includes three sessions, each with its own mini-
theme: First the focus will be on design, art and technology.
Then we will look at our planet and cultures, and finally,
we will consider the evolution of our own selves. Between
each session will be a break to relax, mingle with one
another and discuss what you have been experiencing.
Following the event, you are invited to the after party at the
Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, the perfect place to carry on
discussions from the day.
It is our great honour to bring TEDx to the Region of Waterloo
and we thank you for coming to share this experience with
us. You are joining us from over 150 different companies,
schools and organizations, representing the diversity of
the region of Waterloo and beyond. As an important part
of this TEDx community, you will help further spread the
ideas presented today. As you get to know your fellow
attendees, you’ll have the chance to share your thoughts
and stories with them in this venue, and later online via the
TEDxWaterloo Facebook group, Twitter tags #tedxwaterloo
and #tedx, and Flickr pool ‘tedxwaterloo’.
We are looking forward to an unforgettable event, and we
hope you are too.
Jaclyn Konzelmann
Matt Gorbet
Renjie Butalid
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ScheduleRegistration 1:00 pm
Opening Remarks 2:00 pm
Design Started Yesterday 2:15 pm • Terry O’Reilly • Philip Beesley • TED.com Video – “Aimee Mullins and her 12 pairs of legs” • Ray LaFlamme
Break 3:40 pm
Our World Started Yesterday 4:40 pm • Paul Saltzman • Caroline Disler • TED.com Video – “Wade Davis on endangered cultures” • Madhur Anand • Michael Sacco
Break 6:15 pm
Our Identity Started Yesterday 7:00 pm • Darren Wershler • TED.com Video – “Matthew Childs’ 9 life lessons from rock climbing” • Marty Avery • Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Closing Remarks 8:15 pm
Afterparty 8:45 pm
JaclynKonzelmann - Co-host
Jaclyn Konzelmann is currently studying Mechatronics
Engineering at the University of Waterloo. She is the president
of EPIC Technology Organization, a non-profit, student-run
initiative dedicated to connecting students, academia and
business with an interest in technology and innovation.
MattGorbet - Co-host
Matt Gorbet is a co-founder of Gorbet Design, Inc., a firm that
uses technology in creative ways to create delightful experiences
for exceptional spaces. He and his partners are currently
implementing a comprehensive physical, technological and
human systems infrastructure for technology-based public art
at the new San Jose International Airport in Silicon Valley.
RenjieButalid - Lead Organizer
Renjie Butalid is interested in social innovation and social
entrepreneurship, and believes that young people have the power
and opportunities like never before to affect positive change in
the world. He is currently the Communications Coordinator for
Social Innovation Generation at the University of Waterloo.
MariaArshad - Logistics & Finance
MladenRangelov - Logistics
RichardHarbridge - PR Lead
RamyNassar - Sponsorship
DanTaylor - Logistics
SajjadKamal - Oganizer
TareqIsmail - Website Lead
JoannaWoo - Social Media Lead
Event Team
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Speakers
TerryO’Reilly
Terry O’Reilly began his career as a copywriter for some of
Canada’s top creative ad agencies. In 1990, he co-founded
the audio production company Pirate Radio & Television,
now in Toronto and New York City.
Terry has won awards around the world for his writing and
directing. When he’s not creating advertising, he’s talking
about it, as host of the award-winning CBC/Sirius radio
series, “The Age of Persuasion.” He’s co-written a best-selling
book based on the radio show, published by Knopf Canada,
which hits American bookstores this year.
The advertising industry has given Terry three lifetime
achievement awards, even though, to the best of his
knowledge, he only has one life.
What you think is not always what you’d think. Terry O’Reilly shares some surprising insights about human behaviour that have led to a counterintuitive approach to marketing.
PhilipBeesley
Philip Beesley is an associate professor in the School
of Architecture at the University of Waterloo, and creates
immersive, responsive environments. His projects feature
interactive kinetic systems that use dense arrays of
microprocessors, sensors and actuator systems arranged
within lightweight “textile” structures. These environments
pursue distributed emotional consciousness within
synthetic and near-living systems.
His current Hylozoic Ground project will transform the
Canadian Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Biennale with an
environment made of tens of thousands of digitally-fabricated
components fitted with meshed microprocessors and sensors.
Beesley’s work is widely published and exhibited, and has
been distinguished by awards, including VIDA 11.0 and
FEIDAD, and by the Prix de Rome in Architecture (Canada).
Can buildings literally come alive? With the Hylozoic Ground project, Philip Beesley demonstrates how buildings in the future might move, and even feel and think.
RaymondLaflamme
Raymond Laflamme is originally from Québec City, where he
studied physics as an undergraduate at the Université Laval.
After surviving part three of the Mathematical Tripos at the
University of Cambridge, he completed his PhD on aspects of
general relativity and quantum cosmology in the Department of
Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) under
the direction of Stephen Hawking. Laflamme and his colleague
Don Page are responsible for having changed Hawking’s mind
on the reversal of the direction of time in a contracting universe
(see Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time).
Throughout history, our innate human curiosity has driven us as we seek to understand and transform our world. This curiosity has now led us to the quantum frontier, where the mind-boggling rules of the subatomic realm promise to fundamentally challenge our very perception of reality.
PaulSaltzman
Paul Saltzman is a two-time Emmy Award-winning Toronto-
based film and television producer-director. He began his
career in 1965 at the CBC and then moved to the National
Film Board of Canada. In 1968-69, he assisted in the birth
of a new film format, as second-unit director and production
manager of the first IMAX film, produced for the 1970 World’s
Fair. In 1973, Paul founded Sunrise Films Limited. Since then,
he has produced television series, miniseries and movies of
the week, and in 2008, he made his feature-film directorial
debut with the documentary Prom Night in Mississippi with
Morgan Freeman, which premiered in competition at the 2009
Sundance Film Festival. He is currently editing his second
feature, the documentary Return to Mississippi. Paul is a
member of the Director’s Guild of Canada and the Academy
of Canadian Cinema and Television.
Is it true that we all have prejudices? and why do we so rarely talk about them? Paul Saltzman wants to change this, starting with his film Prom Night in Mississippi.
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DarrenWershler
Darren Wershler is a Canadian experimental poet, non-fiction
writer and cultural critic. A former gravedigger, he was the senior
editor of Coach House Books between 1997 and 2002, where
the works he edited included several highly acclaimed books
of contemporary innovative poetry, including Fidget by Kenneth
Goldsmith (2000); both volumes of Seven Pages Missing, the
collected works of Steve McCaffery (2000, 2002); Lip Service by
Bruce Andrews (2001); and Eunoia by Christian Bök (2002).
Wershler’s The Tapeworm Foundry was a Trillium Book Award
finalist in 2000. He has instructed courses at York University
and currently is an assistant professor of communication
studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has authored several
books about the Internet, technology and culture, as well
as occasional essays on pop culture for newspapers and
magazines such as Brick, Broken Pencil and This Magazine.
Untimely? Conceptual? Impossible? Darren Wershler introduces the rich history and critical importance of imaginary media.
MichaelSacco
Michael Sacco is a technologist, writer and chocolatier. He
founded ChocoSol, an artisanal chocolate company which he
has termed a “learning community social enterprise,” promoting
the diversity of production of organic cacao through a structure
defined as “horizontal trade.” Rather than sell commodities,
says Michael, ChocoSol extends symbolic invitations: “The
chocolate is an expression and vehicle for our dignity, creativity
and learning.”
Honoured as Toronto Food Policy Council’s Local Food Hero
in September 2009, he believes in open-source learning and
building, and has been designing green production systems
using solar power, pedal power, and waste diversion and
upcycling techniques. ChocoSol’s bicycle-powered chocolate
grinders earned it the title of Toronto’s Best New Bicycle
Business in 2008.
With chocolate, Michael Sacco invites us to think differently about food, community, business and our planet.
CarolineDisler
Caroline Disler is a master of translation. With reading knowledge
of many modern languages such as Spanish, Portuguese,
Swedish, Danish, Polish, Modern Greek and Arabic, as well as
working knowledge of ancient languages including Sumerian,
Akkadian, Edomite, Ancient Hebrew, Egyptian, Sanskrit, Latin
and Greek, she has unique perspective on the sources of
human thought. In addition to translating modern books and
academic papers from German, French, Dutch and Italian, her
work and teaching reveals how we come to think the way we
do, examining the largely unexplored role of translation itself in
ancient history. Drawing from original source material such as
pagan Ugaritic epics and original Moabite, Babylonian, Syriac
and Coptic texts, her studies of history, society and translation at
York University explore intercultural transfer of information from
the dawn of writing to the present day.
Caroline Disler explores the history of how language and cultural exchange have led to what has come to be called, somewhat ironically, “Western civilization.”
MadhurAnand
Madhur Anand is an internationally-recognized scientist and
professor with over 45 publications in peer-reviewed scientific
journals, and currently holds the Canada Research Chair in
Global Ecological Change at the University of Guelph. Her
research in forest ecology, ecological modeling and biodiversity
spans several countries, including Israel, Europe, India, China,
Brazil and the USA. She serves on several granting panels and
journals’ editorial boards and is currently president of the Sigma
Xi Scientific Society (University of Toronto Chapter).
Dr. Anand is also a poet. Her poetry has been published
in CV2, The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review, Room,
Grain, Interim, Vallum and Maple Tree Literary Supplement,
anthologized in The Shape of Content: Creative Writing in
Science and Mathematics (2008) and nominated for a
Pushcart prize (2007).
What is the colour green? Madhur Anand explores the science and poetry of ecological remembering.
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Afterparty
The TEDxWaterloo afterparty will be held at the Kitchener-
Waterloo Art Gallery which is located at 101 Queen St
North. The Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (KW|AG) connects
people and ideas through art. The Gallery’s exhibits and
programs are built on a vision of art as the catalyst for
shared experience, dialogue and imagination. KW|AG
emphasizes contemporary art, has a 4000 work permanent
collection, and offers artistic experiences for adults, children
and families. Established in 1956 and operating within
Centre In The Square, KW|AG is the oldest and largest
public gallery in Waterloo region: roots in the community,
eyes on the world. Current exhibitions will include:
Pandora’s Box
Curated by Amanda Cachia. Organized and toured by Dunlop
Art Gallery with the financial assistance of the Regina
Public Library, The Canada Council for the Arts and the
Saskatchewan Arts Board. Inside Pandora’s Box viewers
encounter myths, folk tales, stereotypes and ambiguity.
International artists challenge myths and fairy tales to make
them a more accurate mirror of female experience in new
contexts. They share personal fictions, political statements
and psychological manifestations. We are invited to reflect
on larger human issues such as birth, death, parenthood,
relationships, rites of passage and multiple identities through
an engagement with other worldly creatures and everyday
environments.
Ground Level
Whether through perspective or actual material components,
the works in Ground Level are either ‘of’ the ground or ‘from’
the ground. Peter Von Tiesenhausen and Jim Reid’s work
utilize two opposing vantage points: a view from the ground
looking up and the other of the ground viewed from above.
Other selections are composed of earth elements, like the
stone carvings of Stanley Lewis, or are intended to act as
a segment of earth, as in Graham Peacock’s Seasoned
Ground Vee.
Being Magnified: Heroes and Villains
Being Magnified focuses on works that depict the
fully realized being; those who through exceptional
ability in the physical, intellectual or spiritual realms, are
considered heroic by the multitude. The works in this
exhibition delineate a common thread of all myths, which
Joseph Campbell called ‘The Heroes Journey’.
Amy KrouseRosenthal
To say Amy Krouse Rosenthal is a writer, filmmaker and
radio host does not do justice to the variety and sheer
innovation behind her creative endeavours. The New York
Times said this about her work: “Her books radiate fun the
way tulips radiate spring: they are elegant and spirit-lifting.”
Rosenthal has published 12 children’s books (and 8
forthcoming), including The New York Times bestsellers
Duck! Rabbit! and Cookies: Bite Size Life Lessons. Duck!
Rabbit! was selected as Time Magazine’s best children’s
book of 2009. As for her adult work, Amazon named her
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life one of the top 10 memoirs
of 2005. Amy is also the creator of YouTube sensations such
as “17 Things I Made” and the international film project,
“The Beckoning of Lovely: A Feature Film Featuring You.”
Amy Krouse Rosenthal shares some notes on life, from A to G-sharp.
MartyAvery
Marty Avery is a business advisor who collaborates with
business founders and leaders to design and implement
prosperity strategies. She has been consulted by the Prime
Minister’s Task Force on Women in Business, as well as
NextMEDIA & Fortune Magazine. Marty has presented on
Digital Delivery at several CEO forums and on social change
at Buzz, a CEO think tank in California. Chief Catalyst
at What If?, a member of the faculty at the Canadian Film
Centre’s Media lab and at the Banff Centre’s BNMI, Marty’s
passion is using the power of networks and connection to
build a world where you can extend your reach.
Marty Avery offers us a decoder ring for everyday clues and takes us spelunking for the inner treasure that makes our outer world richer. What if?
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Sponsors
Partner:
Friend:
Media:
Thank you to Joseph Chen for use of the Theater.
Networking:
Map
Artbar
The GigTheatre
Artbar 101 Queen St N
Kitchener, ON
The Gig Theatre 137 Ontario St N
Kitchener, ON
Notes:
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