TEDxOPorto - The do it yourself thing

These posts about TEDxOPorto will be written in English 

so I can share with the world the ideas worth spreading.

There are so many trends happening at the moment that I guess the world is becoming esquizofrenic.

Although social media should potentially generate a more intense activity of networking and interacting we hide behind a screen and become some kind of selfish bastards, addicted to taking pictures to ourselves and to the food we eat.

Some major trends that hit are resulting from this obsession about selfies and self-survival. One of those is the Do it Yourself (DiY) lifestyle.

One of the speakers at TEDxOPorto – Pedro Medeiros - came to talk about the “DiY gardens” as a way to eat healthier and be a pal for the environment.

Some years ago gardening was something unoccupied housewives or bucolic grandmas would dedicate themselves to. Nowadays having a small-scale farm (a real one not a country yard on Farmville!) is chic and hype.

This movement that leads people to planting parsley and tomato is not about self-sufficiency. We all know that it is impossible to grow a farm in the balcony of an apartment. On the other hand we are used to a pattern of acquiring fruits and vegetables all year long notwithstanding the rounds of nature something that is not possible in a natural environment where seasons regulate plants growth.
The farming mania is probably just a fashion with an eco label on it.

However, the drift around gardening isn't new. 
In England, United States, Canada and Germany during World War I and II governments motivated growing vegetables, fruits and herbs at home to reduce the pressure on the public food supply. These private gardens called “Victory gardens” were considered a civil “morale booster” since gardeners could feel empowered by their contribution of labor and rewarded by the produce grown.

Maybe this fascination around private cultivation is after all nothing more than a craving for a glimpse of power…

One other craze around these DiY possibilities are the 3D printers, an innovation that was presented last year as something that would change our lives someday and that a simple guy from Viana do Castelo – Emanuel Ferreira - confirmed as an existing option today.

Can you imagine wishing for a ring or a pair of sunglasses to wear, drawing the model and then leaving them to print on a 3D scale while taking a shower?

Probably you can’t. 
As Emanuel commented it is quite conceivable that if you had the possibility of crafting everything you wanted you would have some creative blackout, a phenomenon he called the “syndrome of the seated God”: if you could turn real all the things you desire you’d probably ask for a chair to sit and think about it for a while…

The truth is you spend as much energy at conceiving than as building so the mere fact that 3D printing is everyday more accessible will only shorten the leap between the idea and the completion not foster the creative process itself.

The major innovation doesn’t come out from those vain desires of wanting and getting. You can take this 3D printing technology and make it useful for producing miracles as the Not Impossible Labs.

One other speaker that brought about DiY was Hugo Silva who came to talk about innovative engineering possibilities that are founding a creative destruction of medicine. This guy that has fun democratizing DiY technologies created a site where almost everyone with a small technological background can acquire a low-cost basic toolkit to create projects and applications with physiological sensors for monitoring biomedical signals: Do it Yourself stuff. 
The paradox between being self-sufficient and socially responsible, between individualism and solidarity, between concealing and sharing can induce a silent and valuable revolution: we can become “skilled revolutionaries” using science to solve social problems. This expression was brought by Jose Antonio Pinto a social worker with a Master in Sociology who uses his knowledge to aid the poor overcoming their situation instead of just masquerading their basic needs with some immediate short assistance.

Lets hope that we are insolent enough to use some of the time we spend wandering, drifting and posting through social media to actually 

harvest a nonconformist social change 

that can benefit those in need.

TEDxOPorto - Don't be stupid!

These posts about TEDxOPorto will be written in English 

so I can share with the world the ideas worth spreading.

The image I chose to illustrate this post is an example of an odd phenomenon that spread like virus amongst Facebook users: the “quotephobia”.

Almost everyone posts quotes on Facebook! 
Some are light and humorous, others intend to be deep and thoughtful, others are clear directed messages or menaces to someone.

I am a victim of this phobia. 
I also post inspiring messages and reflective quotes with some expectation that the criteria I use to chose these notes will disclose features of my intelligence and intellectuality to an anonymous audience.

This is bullshit!

José Soares, one of the brightest speakers that attended TEDxOPorto, demonstrated how 
this "positive thinking mania", this exhilaration made out of pictures and axioms, levels us all as basic human beings capable of absorbing simple clichés and sound bytes.

Social media has made it possible for us to have access to limitless information. This is of course extraordinary as it stimulates our knowledge. However you cannot absorb nor comprehend all the information you read. On one hand because you don’t have enough time, on the other hand because you do not have the elementary background that ables you to understand some contents.

As a consequence we tend to become generalist posters of a random variety of subjects we are not proficient about, believing that the simple comprehension of a catchphrase is enough to apprehend the entire encyclopedia.

This exaggerated belief in ourselves, in our knowledge, in our capacity to do things and achieve results is creating a generation of pretentious leaders. We trust the attraction law and the power of positive thinking so we are certain that anything is possible and that there are no limits for our capacities.

As José Soares brightly puts this mindset: soft skills are becoming soft killers.

Soft skills don’t make you an expert in anything. 
Soft skills do not guarantee you´ll become grand and great. 
The fact is that a leader comes out of knowledge, luck and courage. There are countless limitations to our ability to grow professionally: some are a consequence of the lack opportunities or wrong timing, others are a consequence of each person's biological limitations. 

We are not all bright and brilliant!

Intelligence is not a sine qua non condition to evolve socially and professionally but neither will positive thinking lead you through life if you don't work hard.
"Things don't just happen: you make them happen!" (this could be a post)
You can't always be a bright idiot but please don't be stupid!

TEDxOPorto - We are what we eat

These posts about TEDxOPorto will be written in English 

so I can share with the world the ideas worth spreading.

I love to eat!

For me food is lust and indulgence, not subsistence or instinct.

However we have for food the same trends we have for fashion. Nowadays there is a gourmet frenzy, with lots of unexpected forged chefs adding extravagant ingredients to sophisticated recipes, and a healthy fever, with some fundamentalist diet gurus dictating we should be all drinking detox smoothies and eating whole grains. Clean eating is now a sort of buzzword for healthy and this obsession means you should eat more vegetables and scrutinize all processed foods. Society is bullying us so much with this “green food” thing that some people feel intimidated when they assume that they still drink milk and that they love eating meat.

One of the speakers at TEDxOPorto was a blogger that has become one of these healthy movements trendsetters. The lovely and skinny Francisca Guimarães chose to talk about aging in a date we were celebrating Woman International Day.

She began by acknowledging the fact that women are every time more pressured: they have to be excellent mothers, loving wives and brilliant professionals but also they have to keep the good looks, be fit and stay healthy. 

For women who were born with a “skinny-bitch” kind of genetics this imposition regarding body image might be something more easy to domain. For those who were not blessed by metabolism or hereditary the maintenance of an healthy weight, a curvy figure and a tonified body can be more stressful than working ten hours a day, managing a house and running a family. 

Most women I know blame themselves for not being able to follow a strict and clean regime, for not eating enough broccolis and lean protein, for not exercising enough and for forgetting to put the night moisturizer before falling asleep.

We all understand that aging is a process that can be tamed but living a life "by the book" can be an exhausting and gloomy discipline… HEEEEEEELP!

In the afternoon, a fat and funny “foodie” named Rodrigo Meneses came to tell us with a contagious humor that loving to eat it’s ok, it’s a lifestyle like any other and we shouldn’t punish ourselves by falling in love for good food. 

It is not attractive to be obese but it is not compelling to look like Miss Universe.

We have to stand in life aligned with our conscience and our “self”, trying to live a healthy life as to live longer. But there is no point in living if you deprive yourself from the little pleasures that make life a happy adventure not a marathon for sustenance. After all, we eat food not nutrients!

TEDxOPorto - Cybernetic existence

These posts about TEDxOPorto will be written in English 

so I can share with the world the ideas worth spreading.

I am not an “into science” person.

Ok, I like innovation and evolution, I get amazed and astonished by the discoveries and inventions some visionary and perseverant scientists make after long hours, days and years of investigation but my scale of appreciation of those progresses is directly proportional to my ability to understand them and to envision the impact they’ll have in our day-to-day life. 

Unfortunately scientific talks rarely are understandable to those who don’t have a scientific Phd.

One of the speakers at TEDxOPorto was an investigator called Steve Grand, an expert in artificial life forms that expects to find the meaning of life by creating some kind of robots that someday will have consciousness.

I couldn´t understand the extent and width of his talk but one thing I learned was the meaning of cybernetics.

Whenever a system is involved in a closed signaling loop, that is whenever an action by the system over the environment generates some change and that change is reflected in the system you have cybernetics. Basically cybernetics is a kind of feedback, a “circular causal” relationship triggered by a change that generates another change.

Cybernetics study may be something very interesting but what impressed me the most was that those effects the scientist spoke about are exactly the same the Forex Investor mentioned when talking about paying back to society, acknowledging that a community's problems are far more important than individual problems.

Margarida Pinto Correia also talked about cybernetics when she mentioned the “impact waves” that come from the influence we can have over one person’s life and utterly impact more people's lives in a sort of “domino effect”. The good deed we make today to someone will be conveyed to others in some kind of "ripple effect" that will expand incrementally.

So even if you’re not into science or even if you are too skeptical to believe in the “attraction law” or in “Heaven or Hell” at least there is an exercise you can practice everyday and that will surely make more fit as an human being:

Be honest 

Be bold enough to face yourself in the mirror and not be ashamed by the person you see

Be brave 

Dare to ask yourself what have you done today that is relevant for your existence 

and for the wellbeing of those you care about

Be proud 

of your achievements and share this satisfaction with others 

by helping them to be honest, brave and proud.

TEDxOPorto - Perspective

These posts about TEDxOPorto will be written in English 

so I can share with the world the ideas worth spreading.

Everyone knows that the higher your expectations the unhappiest you become. 

If you dream big reality will always seem too small.

We can argue that the size of each person’s dreams is conditioned by a subjective perception. It´s true. Even ones evaluation of happiness is conditioned by timing, conjecture and constraints. 

We can find ourselves unexplainably happy with sand between our toes or miserably unhappy standing tall on Loubotin pumps.

In the end it is all a question of perspective.

One of the speakers at TEDxOPorto came to talk precisely about this thing we can call perspective, the way you sense, categorize and measure reality.

Jorge Moutinho is an architect, or used to be one, trapped by the financial collapse of a global economy built on toxic assets. Suddenly the perspective he had about life changed.

The immediate reaction was to magnify his problems. The second was to understand their origin.

Jorge began to study the financial markets to comprehend how could a collapse in the USA had such a gigantic domino effect around the globe. He was probably looking for relief, something some people find in spirituality others in rationality.

Jorge discovered an intriguing and extraordinary new world and he understood that the ocean was so vast and deep that if he could learn how to tame a drop he would solve his financial personal problems.

So he did.

Jorge is now a well-off Forex Trader.

Being successful and having downscaled his personal problems he decided he should payback.

Jorge teaches others the basics of Forex trading so any person with a will can find a way of earning money. At TEDxOPorto he told the audience he would offer a workshop on the subject for free on the condition that people who benefited from that offer paid forward this gift.

A human being basically has four types of concerns: money, health, work and time. A society’s concerns are an amplified version of those and each one of us should be contributing for finding solutions not adding problems.

Our problems look smaller when we change perspective. 

Others problems become smoother when we ease them.

TEDxOPorto - You've got mail

These posts about TEDxOPorto will be written in English 

so I can share with the world the ideas worth spreading.

One of the marvelous things about TED talks is the broadening of horizons.

Some talks are high-tech, scientific, state of the art and amaze you because they reveal that the futuristic scenarios investigators, geeks and visionaries dream about are actually a possibility about to happen. Other talks however just wonder about the simple things in life.

These so called inspirational talks don’t debate global issues, disclose major trends, nor reveal surprising studies or astonishing discoveries. They just talk about people and proof with unquestionable doubt that it is not necessary to be a rocket scientist, a biochemist, a neuroscientist or an IT guru to have a small, non-methodological, non-mathematical, non-paper peer review idea that can make a difference and induce a positive change in the world.

One of the speakers at TEDxOPorto was Ana Campos, a young woman that like so many others likes to travel and to meet people. 
In an era of social networking with people texting and mailing each other all the time, Ana is still a fan of a traditional mean of sending messages: postcards.

As she was talking about the joy one feels when going to the mailbox (not the virtual one) and finding something more than bills and advertising the audience was listening with that condescending attitude of “ok, it’s nice but that was decades ago”.

Ana created a platform - POST CROSSING - that gathers postcard fans like her. She told us how surprised she was when she discovered so many people had this need of writing with a pen on the back of card. She made us belief that this kind of contact can be so intimate and truthful that people have developed friendships and even fallen in love just by exchanging handwritten words.
Ana shared impressive figures about a half a million people community that has shared 22 million postcards so far. The idea is simple: you write a postcard to someone and you receive one back.

You look at this idea as something kind of cute but then you imagine that it is far more simple to connect with people around the world through Facebook and getting to know them from a profile quick view.

But as Ana was finishing her presentation she asked us to look beneath our seat and find the postcard that was there for us. What happened then was miraculous! People were really delighted with the postcards they found! This childish reaction from the audience, eager for reading the postcards and sharing them with the person on the next seat, is an example of how basic our emotions truly are.

Simple things trigger happiness feelings; simple things change your life.