TEDxNicosia 2013 – The power of RE

The stage at #TEDxNicosia

As most of you know, I spent most of the yesterday in Nicosia, attending the second ever TEDxNicosia event.  I know quite a few people who wanted t go, but the event was sold out in 72 hours, and even yours truly missed getting the ticket.  If it wasn’t for the kind invite of Marina Theodotou, I would have missed it too.  So, here are my experiences, notes, and thoughts on the conference.

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TEDxNicosia speakers report

TEDxNicosia 2013 is just a few short hours away.   As I mentioned previously, I am very excited, and I keep thinking about it.  One particular thought was bugging me all day today – how are the speakers being selected, and is there anything common among them? Do they share any specific knowledge or experience, or personal characteristics?  Not knowing any of the speakers personally, I decided to go for some fun PHP scripting rather than any serious research.  It’s Friday after all!

The result is this little project.  I basically took the 12 speaker profiles directly from the TEDxNicosia speakers page, and used it as my source data.  Each profile is saved into a text file with the name of the speaker.  Then I ran some simple analysis on those text files.   First, I wanted to see if their profile texts were sharing any common words.  That would be an indication, right?  Obviously, I had to filter out some words like ‘as’, ‘and’, and ‘he’ (see a full list of filtered out words).  For the rest, here is the top 20 most common words (by the way, the script reports the names of speakers as well, but I took it out for clarity and simplicity):

  1. Cyprus, shared by 11 out of 12 profiles;
  2. years, shared by 10 / 12;
  3. university, shared by 8 / 12;
  4. international, shared by 7 / 12;
  5. world, shared by 7 / 12;
  6. work, shared by 6 / 12;
  7. national, shared by 5 / 12;
  8. media, shared by 5 / 12;
  9. currently, shared by 5 / 12;
  10. including, shared by 5 / 12;
  11. well, shared by 5 / 12;
  12. all, shared by 5 / 12;
  13. life, shared by 5 / 12;
  14. first, shared by 5 / 12;
  15. people, shared by 5 / 12;
  16. USA, shared by 5 / 12;
  17. development, shared by 4 / 12;
  18. London, shared by 4 / 12;
  19. business, shared by 4 / 12;
  20. experience, shared by 4 / 12;

Interesting, isn’t it?  The easiest to notice for me is geography.  The most shared word is Cyprus, which is not surprising, because the TEDxNicosia event is happening, here, in Cyprus, and because most of the speakers either live here, or were born here, or moved here.  the other two geographical highlights are the USA and UK (London specifically).  These are the most influential, however there are indications of other travel (national, international, world).

One other thing which stands out is hard work.  It is suggested by work, all, life, development, business, and experience.  It sounds like all these people know what they are talking about.  Especially if you throw in university in there.  Also, first is indicative of either trying new things or of leading somewhere.

The rest might also mean something, but they don’t stand out so much.  At least not to me.   Except maybe if I put together media and people.  Then there is a sort of social suggestion.

After reading speakers’ profiles, I think the above is pretty accurate.  Even if it wasn’t, accuracy wasn’t exactly the point.  The whole thing is more of technical entertainment piece.  Oh, by the way, that reminds me.  What does TED stand for?  Technology, Entertainment, Design.  While we are looking at speaker profile words, why don’t we try and see if the TED words are in there too.  A bit more of coding, and here is what I get:

  • technology is represented by 3 out of 12 speakers;
  • entertainment is not represented by anyone;
  • design is represented by 2 out of 12;

Doesn’t sound too good?  Well, that’s because these numbers have very little to do with the actual speakers.  The source data were speaker profiles, which are only a few words long.  If these were worded even slightly different, the results would be completely different.  Just to give you an indication – even though the word ‘entertainment’ haven’t been used, a few other words, such as ‘music’, ‘dance’, ‘film’, ‘book’ were used plenty, and these can easily be used near entertainment.

Now that Friday night is quickly turning into Saturday morning, I think I should grab a few hours of sleep and drive out to Nicosia.  See you all there, or see you all after!

TEDxNicosia 2013 – RE-Think. RE-Generate. RE-Act.

Since the last TEDxNicosia event back in 2011, everyone and their brother were asking: “When?  When is the next one?  And how do I get there?”  Well, guess what – the next TEDxNicosia event is this Saturday (March 9, 2013)!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_lPv0igcI0]

That’s the good news.  The bad news are that the event is totally sold out.  In fact, all tickets were sold out in 72 hours!   If you don’t have a ticket now,  you aren’t going this time.  Sad, I know.  But that’s not all the news either.  I have more.

(drum roll, nervous shaking, breath in, breath out, … go!)

Marina Theodotou, the event organizer, has invited me to attend the event in the capacity of the blogger.  Yes, that’s right.  This is my first “official” time.  I’ll be there for the whole day, blogging, tweeting, snapping pictures, and what not.  I’ll tell you all about it.  I promise.  But before I even start, here is the disclaimer:  the only compensation/gain that I received or will receive is the complimentary ticket to the event (Thank you, Marina).  All of the views, opinions, writing, tweets and images posted on this blog or in social networks under my accounts, are of my authorship, unless otherwise stated. 

Now, with that cleared, I have to say that I am super exciTED.  I can’t wait to get there, listen to speeches and presentations, and hang out with some really cool people.  Just a couple of days to go!

Bill Clinton in Cyprus

The former president of the USA, Bill Clinton is visiting Cyprus.  Cyprus Mail reports that he will be giving a lecture on the economic crisis:

FORMER president of the United States Bill Clinton will give a lecture on the economic crisis, at European University Cyprus on Saturday.

Clinton is the Honorary Chancellor of Laureate International Universities, which the European University is connected to, and he offers advice on social responsibility, youth leadership and increasing access to higher education.

“President Clinton will share his ideas with our students, faculty, administration, alumni and the community in the (university’s) Cultural Centre at 4pm, in a public address on ‘The Current Global Economic Situation”, the university announced.

Clinton is due to exchange views and ideas with the audience.

The website of European University Cyprus also has some information, as well as the map.

Update (July 22, 2012): If you missed the event, read this Cyprus Mail coverage.  And this.

Update (August 12, 2012): There’s now also a YouTube video (via Economists of Cyprus).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zkJS_egIYM]

New University of Cyprus library

Cyprus Mail reports that the construction of the new University of Cyprus library has begun.  It will take a while, so the doors are expected to open some time in September, 2014.  While reading through the article, one particular paragraph took me a while to understand.

The library’s collection, which will be housed in an impressive dome-shaped building holding  around 600,000 books, more than 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books all in digital format plus 10,000 audio books and 150 databases. Its contents will be accessible to all Cypriots.

My first thought was that the library will hold 600,000 books in digital format and that the new building is being constructed to accommodate that storage.  I thought that was a bit excessive.  After all, I used to have an e-book library of more than a 1,000 titles and they were living nicely on a single hard disk.  Digital storage is cheap these days and the size of drives keep growing.  How much space does one need to store 600,000 books in digital form? – I thought.

The size of books in my collection are somewhere between 500 kilobytes to a couple of megabytes.  Let’s assume 1 megabyte for an average book.  How much space is there on a modern hard drive?  I’ll assume 2 TB (terabytes).  How many average books can we store on such a disk? 2 TB / 1 MB = 2,000,000,000,000 / 1,000,000 = 2,000,000.  I know, I’m approximating things a lot with terabytes, megabytes, and average book sizes.  But with a single 2 TB disk holding 2,000,000 books, give or take, I don’t think a new building is in order.  3 TB and 4 TB hard disks exist already.  By September 2014 we’ll probably have way more than that.  Even a few of those connected together for backups, “150 databases” and such will provide a lot of storage, while being the size of a device that is easy to hide at home.  New building? Really?

Of course, once I re-read the paragraph a few times, I realized that I’m on a totally wrong foot here.  It read more like:

  • 600,000 books (print)
  • 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books (digital)
  • 10,000 audio books (digital)
  • 150 databases (digital?)

While the digital part of that library will easily fit on one or two hard drives, the 600,000 printed books collection does indeed need some storage space.

I am all for knowledge and education, and I’m glad that this effort is being taken and that all these books will be available to all Cypriots.  But if I was to express a wish, I’d say : please push for digitizing all those books and make them available on-line.  Cyprus is good, but why not share with the rest of the world?  Especially now that we do have the technology.