#tedxalb

TEDxAlbertopolis was a day of inspiring and entertaining talks held in The Royal Albert Hall, London. 

Musicians, medics, entomologists, etymologists, dancers and designers came together to share their unique perspectives on a wonderfully diverse range of topics.

And guess what?! We made Foldables of all the speakers! 

Daniel Glaser - Host

Andrew Shoben - The Vanishing Music Box

David Braben - Rules Can Be Beautiful

Deirdre Murphy - The Industrious Boy

Hannah Redler - We Do Not Know: University, Art and Science

Jessica Thom - Tourette's Syndrome: The Alchemy of Chaos

John Halpern - Dances with Words 

Julia Lohmann - The Power of Seaweed

Max Barclay - Beetles: Pinning Down the Secrets of Life

Nicholas McCarthy - Sole Determination 

Roland Lamb - From the Organ to the Organic: How to be Human in a Digital World

Ryan Francois - Planet Swing: The Real Harlem Globetrotters 

Sally Davies - The Drugs Don't Work 

Find out what you missed on the TEDxAlbertopolis website.

As a future neighbour in West London, the Design Museum was invited to take part in the TEDxAlbertopolis event at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 September, an afternoon of thought-provoking talks exploring how art and science can work together. Armed with booklets, brochures, renders, easels and the new museum model, Rhiannon Green, Volunteer and Community Development Manager, Robyn Dodsworth, Project Programme Manager, and Giulia Ascoli, Communications Coordinator, set up a stall in The Gallery on the top floor of the hall and talked to visitors about the Design Museum's activities and plans for its new home in Kensington.

To sign up for updates, visit designmuseum.org/signup

What's our hashtag again? Here's a fruity reminder ...

These fun logos were sent in by friends, family and TEDxAlbertolopolis fans. 

Got a logo you want to share? Send us a tweet @TEDxAlbrtopolis #TEDxAlb!

  All good tales have a beginning. Ours starts with an event in the summer of another age. In 1851 the Great Exhibition brought not only a celebration of the best of human creativity to this small corner of London but an ambition and idealism on which a community like no other was built.

Art and science have often been regarded as somehow divided, two cultures with mutually irreconciliable views on the world. But Albertopolis is a community that shows how wrong that is.

The two cultures do not split Albertopolis, they coexist in the minds of its occupants. The people who live and work here - and those who flock to the neighbourhood in their millions each year - cannot help but be representatives of both.

Albertopolis is a community of arts nestled inside one of science, a community of science built within one of arts. The two are intertwined - erected on the same foundations and without borders. 

It is also a community that joins our past to our future, two cultures in time. Walk among the local buildings and you will see the past preserved in the present, but step inside and you will see the future happening today.

TEDxAlbertopolis brings all of this together in the Royal Albert Hall. The arts and the sciences, the ideas and the people, on a shared stage at the heart of the story.

Hashtags are used all over the internet to get your content seen by as many people as possible. This point may have been lost on some scientists at Imperial College London, who wrote our #TEDxAlb tag in writing that’s physically impossible to see because it’s smaller than the wavelength of light.

Joseph Shaw, a PhD student in the Physics department working with Thomas Anthopolous, drew our hashtag on a layer of pentacene using a technique called Scanning Thermal Lithography (STL). Joe’s research focuses on using STL to draw transistors and other electrical circuits on organic material.

This image - which from end-to-end would fit neatly across the back of an E.Coli bacterium - was captured using Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). This works similarly to a record player - a sharp needle is moved over the sample and it measures the height of the surface beneath it.

The idea behind STL is to lay down a film of a material that breaks down when heated. By heating an AFM probe to 500 °C Joe can then write what he wants in the pentacene by moving the AFM probe around like a pen. Then, after allowing it to cool back down, the AFM tip can be used to see what it looks like.

Current industrial techniques to make the nano-size transparent transistors that are used in your television, phone and laptop screens require vacuums, high temperatures and electron beams.  The advantage of being able to produce and pattern circuits Joe's way -  effectively scratching patterns into paint, but with a very fine needle - is  that circuits can be made on flexible materials, leading the way to the production of things like foldable iPads and Kindles. 

All that's to come. But for the time being we're happy to use it for nano-graffiti. 

By Matthew Allinson

The TEDxAlbertopolis team is excited to announce our next two speakers. Nicholas McCarthy (pictured) and John Halpern join David Braben and Sally Davies adding inspirational piano-playing and cryptic wordplay to the mix. 

Nicholas McCarthy is a concert pianist and the only one-handed pianist to graduate from the Royal College of Music. Born without his right hand, at 14 he started to play the piano. Three years later he won a place at the Junior Department of the Guildhall School of Music. Now, 10 years after he started playing, he is the youngest one-handed concert pianist in the world.

McCarthy has performed in major venues throughout the world. Last year he played with the British Paraorchestra alongside Coldplay at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Paralympic games to an audience of 86,000 people and half a billion worldwide viewers. He was recently awarded the prestigious international AMI Award for his creative excellence in music. 

John Halpern -- or “Paul” to many -- is a cryptic crossword setter for The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph. 

2013 is the Crossword Centenary year and Halpern is its public face. An author and public speaker, he is currently touring the country facilitating crossword-based events, and creating community based crosswords with those who share a love of words and wordplay.

John believes words have a largely undiscovered magic. “We have tapped the resources of the earth and of the oceans,” he says. “But as yet, we have not fully harnessed the power of words.”

Some things are so ubiquitous, so ordinary and so mundane, that it’s difficult to believe someone had to invent it. The humble trouser pocket is a good example. Come to think of it, the humble trouser itself is a good example. Similarly, the word ‘hello’, the handshake, and of course, the iPhone (I jest).

Sir Henry Cole was a man who did many things of great importance. He helped organise the Great Exhibition, the incredible menagerie of invention that brought Albertopolis into existence.  He was instrumental in the design and construction of the Royal Albert Hall. He was the founding director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He also helped set up the Royal College of Art and the Royal College of Music.

But his most popular legacy? In 1843, he commissioned one of Britain’s most respected illustrators, John Calcott Horsely, to draw him a Christmas card. He printed 1000 and sold them for a shilling each. It was the first commercially sold Christmas card. 170 years later, we buy and send 1.5 billion cards a year in Britain alone.

And how did that first card celebrate our drunken Winter revelry? It was criticised at the time for promoting drunkenness. If you look closely, the illustration shows a child knocking back wine. Merry Christmas indeed.

By Kadhim Shubber

What’s for dinner tonight? If you’re stuck for ideas, might I recommend “Divine Water With Sirloin”? It’s a delightful mix of yellow onion, black bean, 0.87 ounces of veal and 1.46 dashes of Worcestershire Sauce. If you’re slightly suspicious about the exact nature of the ingredients, it might not surprise you to learn that this recipe was conjured up not by a human chef, but by a piece of software. The next celebrity chef could well be your MacBook.

There’s been a few attempts to get computers to play a role in the kitchen. IBM have software that tries to come up with combinations of ingredients that go well together, for instance, and every year the Computer Cooking Contest offers a cash prize for computer systems that are “more creative than the average cook”. But my personal favourite, the system that decided that 1.46 dashes of Worcestershire sauce was not too much and not too little, comes from Brigham Young University in Utah, USA.

PIERRE is the system’s name, the brainchild of Dan Ventura and his students Richard Morris, Scott Burton and Paul Bodily. It begins by reading through lists of soup and stew recipes, and armed with a little knowledge about the basic food groups PIERRE can use these recipes to combine, generalise and tweak dishes of its own. Like many computational - and human - cooks, PIERRE doesn’t have a good understanding of how to prepare meals, so stews are a perfect way for the system to experiment without needing to know how to poach or grill. Grab the ingredients, boil in a pot, and you’re done.

Dan and his students submitted PIERRE’s recipes to Food.com’s community recipes section. They didn’t exactly go down well - ingredient requirements like “0.26 slices of bacon” provoked a range of reactions from confusion to anger. Personally, I’d cook anything with a name like “Exotic Beefy Bean”. It’s an interesting reminder that computational creativity isn’t just about the creation - humans are fussy, and presentation plays just as big a part.

The creations of the synthetic soup chef weren’t universally hated, though. Dan cooked up a few recipes for his church group and told me they went down pretty well. 0.26 slices of bacon looks stupid on paper, but you don’t mind so much when you’re sitting down with a bowl of it. Debates about creativity are a lot less heated if the machine in question is catering the event!

By Michael Cook