TEDx Canberra Ready

Greetings from the National Library of Australia in Canberra where TEDx Canberra 2011 starts tomorrow. Speakers are practicing today. I am one of the volunteers helping with odd jobs.

Some of the speakers who got my attention were:

• Michael Engemann and Damien Tonkin
  Damien and Michael are year 12 stu­dents from Dick­son Col­lege in Can­berra. They are design­ing, build­ing and fly­ing UAVs to deliver life-saving res­cue sup­plies to lost tourists stranded in the outback.
• Annette Zou and Richard Dear
  Richard and Annette founded ANU XSA, the ANU Cross-disciplinary Stu­dents Acad­emy in Feb­ru­ary 2011, and are devel­op­ing a Global Cross-disciplinary Tour­na­ment to the held for the first time this Sep­tem­ber. They hope to spread the idea of the ‘cross-disciplinary atti­tude’ to all uni­ver­si­ties around the world.
• Thomas Pogge
  By reform­ing harm­ful supra­na­tional reg­u­la­tions, Thomas Pogge is devel­op­ing a com­ple­ment to the patent sys­tem to stim­u­late phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal inno­va­tions that would be acces­si­ble, with­out delay, to poor and afflu­ent patients alike around the world. A philoso­pher at Yale and the ANU, Pogge works with a stel­lar inter­dis­ci­pli­nary and inter­na­tional team on pilot­ing the HIF idea and get­ting gov­ern­ments to col­lab­o­rate toward its implementation.