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A new way to stop identity theft | {0: 'David Birch is a digital money and ID consultant paving the way for a 21st-century identity.'} | TEDxSussexUniversity | So I thought I'd talk about identity. That's sort of an interesting enough topic to me. And the reason was, because when I was asked to do this, I'd just read, in one of the papers, I can't remember, something from someone at Facebook saying, well, "we need to make everybody use their real names." and then that's basically all the problems solved. And that's so wrong, that's such a fundamentally, reactionary view of identity, and it's going to get us into all sorts of trouble. And so what I thought I'd do is I'll explain four sort of problems about it, and then I'll suggest a solution, which hopefully you might find interesting. So just to frame the problem, what does authenticity mean? That's me, that's a camera phone picture of me looking at a painting. [What's the Problem?] That's a painting that was painted by a very famous forger, and because I'm not very good at presentations, I already can't remember the name that I wrote on my card. And he was incarcerated in, I think, Wakefield Prison for forging masterpieces by, I think, French Impressionists. And he's so good at it, that when he was in prison, everybody in prison, the governor and whatever, wanted him to paint masterpieces to put on the walls, because they were so good. And so that's a masterpiece, which is a fake of a masterpiece, and bonded into the canvas is a chip which identifies that as a real fake, if you see what I mean. (Laughter) So when we're talking about authenticity, it's a little more fractal than it appears and that's a good example to show it. I tried to pick four problems that will frame the issue properly. So the first problem, I thought, Chip and PIN, right? [Banks and legacies bringing down the system from within] [Offline solutions do not work online] I'm guessing everyone's got a chip and PIN card, right? So why is that a good example? That's the example of how legacy thinking about identity subverts the security of a well-constructed system. That chip and PIN card that's in your pocket has a little chip on it that cost millions of pounds to develop, is extremely secure, you can put scanning electron microscopes on it, you can try and grind it down, blah blah blah. Those chips have never been broken, whatever you read in the paper. And for a joke, we take that super-secure chip and we bond it to a trivially counterfeitable magnetic stripe and for very lazy criminals, we still emboss the card. So if you're a criminal in a hurry and you need to copy someone's card, you can just stick a piece of paper on it and rub a pencil over it just to sort of speed things up. And even more amusingly, and on my debit card too, we print the name and the SALT code and everything else on the front too. Why? There is no earthly reason why your name is printed on a chip and PIN card. And if you think about it, it's even more insidious and perverse than it seems at first. Because the only people that benefit from having the name on the card are criminals. You know what your name is, right? (Laughter) And when you go into a shop and buy something, it's a PIN, he doesn't care what the name is. The only place where you ever have to write your name on the back is in America at the moment. And whenever I go to America, and I have to pay with a mag stripe on the back of the card, I always sign it Carlos Tethers anyway, just as a security mechanism, because if a transaction ever gets disputed, and it comes back and it says Dave Birch, I know it must have been a criminal, because I would never sign it Dave Birch. (Laughter) So if you drop your card in the street, it means a criminal can pick it up and read it. They know the name, from the name they can find the address, and then they can go off and buy stuff online. Why do we put the name on the card? Because we think identity is something to do with names, and because we're rooted in the idea of the identity card, which obsesses us. And I know it crashed and burned a couple of years ago, but if you're someone in politics or the home office or whatever, and you think about identity, you can only think of identity in terms of cards with names on them. And that's very subversive in a modern world. So the second example I thought I'd use is chatrooms. [Chatrooms and Children] I'm very proud of that picture, that's my son playing in his band with his friends for the first-ever gig, I believe you call it, where he got paid. (Laughter) And I love that picture. I like the picture of him getting into medical school a lot better, (Laughter) I like that picture for the moment. Why do I use that picture? Because that was very interesting, watching that experience as an old person. So him and his friends, they get together, they booked a room, like a church hall, and they got all their friends who had bands, and they got them together, and they do it all on Facebook, and then they sell tickets, and the first band on the - I was going to say "menu," that's probably the wrong word for it, isn't it? The first band on the list of bands that appears at some public music performance of some kind gets the sales from the first 20 tickets, then the next band gets the next 20, and so on. They were at the bottom of the menu, they were like fifth, I thought they had no chance. He actually got 20 quid. Fantastic, right? But my point is, that all worked perfectly, except on the web. So they're sitting on Facebook, and they're sending these messages and arranging things and they don't know who anybody is, right? That's the big problem we're trying to solve. If only they were using the real names, Then you wouldn't be worried about them on the Internet. And so when he says to me, "Oh, I want to go to a chatroom to talk about guitars" or something, I'm like, "oh, well, I don't want you to go into a chatroom to talk about guitars, because they might not all be your friends, and some of the people that are in the chatroom might be perverts and teachers and vicars." (Laughter) I mean, they generally are, when you look in the paper, right? So I want to know who all the people in the chatroom are. So okay, you can go in the chatroom, but only if everybody in the chatroom is using their real names, and they submit full copies of their police report. But of course, if anybody in the chatroom asked for his real name, I'd say no. You can't give them your real name. Because what happens if they turn out to be perverts, and teachers and whatever. So you have this odd sort of paradox where I'm happy for him to go into this space if I know who everybody else is, but I don't want anybody else to know who he is. And so you get this sort of logjam around identity where you want full disclosure from everybody else, but not from yourself. And there's no progress, we get stuck. And so the chatroom thing doesn't work properly, and it's a very bad way of thinking about identity. So on my RSS feed, I saw this thing about - I just said something bad about my RSS feed, didn't I? I should stop saying it like that. For some random reason, I can't imagine, something about cheerleaders turned up in my inbox. And I read this story about cheerleaders, and it's a fascinating story. This happened a couple of years ago in the U.S. There were some cheerleaders in a team at a high school in the U.S., and they said mean things about their cheerleading coach, as I'm sure kids do about all of their teachers all of the time, and somehow the cheerleading coach found out about this. She was very upset. And so she went to one of the girls, and said, "you have to give me your Facebook password." I read this all the time, where even at some universities and places of education, kids are forced to hand over their Facebook passwords. So you've got to give them your Facebook password. She was a kid! What she should have said is, "my lawyer will be calling you first thing in the morning. It's an outrageous imposition on my 4th Amendment right to privacy, and you're going to be sued for all the money you've got." That's what she should have said. But she's a kid, so she hands over the password. The teacher can't log into Facebook, because the school has blocked access to Facebook. So the teacher can't log into Facebook until she gets home. So the girl tells her friends, guess what happened? The teacher logged in, she knows. So the girls just all logged into Facebook on their phones, and deleted their profiles. And so when the teacher logged in, there was nothing there. My point is, those identities, they don't think about them the same way. Identity is, especially when you're a teenager, a fluid thing. You have lots of identities. And you can have an identity, you don't like it, because it's subverted in some way, or it's insecure, or it's inappropriate, you just delete it and get another one. The idea that you have an identity that's given to you by someone, the government or whatever, and you have to stick with that identity and use it in all places, that's absolutely wrong. Why would you want to really know who someone was on Facebook, unless you wanted to abuse them and harass them in some way? And it just doesn't work properly. And my fourth example is there are some cases where you really want to be - In case you're wondering, that's me at the G20 protest. I wasn't actually at the G20 protest, but I had a meeting at a bank on the day of the G20 protest, and I got an email from the bank saying please don't wear a suit, because it'll inflame the protesters. I look pretty good in a suit, frankly, so you can see why it would drive them into an anti-capitalist frenzy. (Laughter) So I thought, well, look. If I don't want to inflame the protesters, the obvious thing to do is go dressed as a protester. So I went dressed completely in black, you know, with a black balaclava, I had black gloves on, but I've taken them off to sign the visitor's book. (Laughter) I'm wearing black trousers, black boots, I'm dressed completely in black. I go into the bank at 10 o'clock, go, "Hi, I'm Dave Birch, I've got a 3 o'clock with so and so there." Sure. They sign me in. There's my visitor's badge. (Laughter) So this nonsense about you've got to have real names on Facebook and whatever, that gets you that kind of security. That gets you security theater, where there's no actual security, but people are sort of playing parts in a play about security. And as long as everybody learns their lines, everyone's happy. But it's not real security. Especially because I hate banks more than the G20 protesters do, because I work for them. I know that things are actually worse than these guys think. (Laughter) But suppose I worked next to somebody in a bank who was doing something. Suppose I was sitting next to a rogue trader, and I want to report it to the boss of the bank. So I log on to do a little bit of whistleblowing. I send a message, this guy's a rogue trader. That message is meaningless if you don't know that I'm a trader at the bank. If that message just comes from anybody, it has zero information value. There's no point in sending that message. But if I have to prove who I am, I'll never send that message. It's just like the nurse in the hospital reporting the drunk surgeon. That message will only happen if I'm anonymous. So the system has to have ways of providing anonymity there, otherwise we don't get where we want to get to. So four issues. So what are we going to do about it? Well, what we tend to do about it is we think about Orwell space. And we try to make electronic versions of the identity card that we got rid of in 1953. So we think if we had a card, call it a Facebook login, which proves who you are, and I make you carry it all the time, that solves the problem. And of course, for all those reasons I've just outlined, it doesn't, and it might, actually, make some problems worse. The more times you're forced to use your real identity, certainly in transactional terms, the more likely that identity is to get stolen and subverted. The goal is to stop people from using identity in transactions which don't need identity, which is actually almost all transactions. Almost all of the transactions you do are not, who are you? They're, are you allowed to drive the car, are you allowed in the building, are you over 18, etcetera, etcetera. So my suggestion-I, like James, think that there should be a resurgence of interest in R & D. I think this is a solvable problem. It's something we can do about. Naturally, in these circumstances, I turn to Doctor Who. Because in this, as in so many other walks of life, Doctor Who has already shown us the answer. So I should say, for some of our foreign visitors, Doctor Who is the greatest living scientist in England, (Laughter) and a beacon of truth and enlightenment to all of us. And this is Doctor Who with his psychic paper. Come on, you guys must have seen Doctor Who's psychic paper. You're not nerds if you say yes. Who's seen Doctor Who's psychic paper? Oh right, you were in the library the whole time studying I guess. Is that what you're going to tell us? Doctor Who's psychic paper is when you hold up the psychic paper, the person, in their brain, sees the thing that they need to see. So I want to show you a British passport, I hold up the psychic paper, you see a British passport. I want to get into a party, I hold up the psychic paper, I show you a party invitation. You see what you want to see. So what I'm saying is we need to make an electronic version of that, but with one tiny, tiny change, which is that it'll only show you the British passport if I've actually got one. It'll only show you the party invitation if I actually have one. It will only show you that I'm over 18 if I actually am over 18. But nothing else. So you're the bouncer at the pub, you need to know that I'm over 18, instead of showing you my driving license, which shows you I know how to drive, what my name is, my address, all these kind of things, I show you my psychic paper, and all it tells you is am I over 18 or not. Right. Is that just a pipe dream? Of course not, otherwise I wouldn't be here talking to you. So in order to build that and make it work, I'm only going to name these things, I'll not go into them, we need a plan, which is we're going to build this as an infrastructure for everybody to use, to solve all of these problems. We're going to make a utility, the utility has to be universal, you can use it everywhere, I'm just giving you little flashes of the technology as we go along. That's a Japanese ATM, the fingerprint template is stored inside the mobile phone. So when you want to draw money out, you put the mobile phone on the ATM, and touch your finger, your fingerprint goes through to the phone, the phone says yes, that's whoever, and the ATM then gives you some money. It has to be a utility that you can use everywhere. It has to be absolutely convenient, that's me going into the pub. All the device on the door of the pub is allowed is, is this person over 18 and not barred from the pub? And so the idea is, you touch your ID card to the door, and if I am allowed in, it shows my picture, if I'm not allowed in, it shows a red cross. It doesn't disclose any other information. It has to have no special gadgets. That can only mean one thing, following on from Ross's statement, which I agree with completely. If it means no special gadgets, it has to run on a mobile phone. That's the only choice we have, we have to make it work on mobile phones. There are 6.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions. My favorite statistic of all time, only 4 billion toothbrushes in the world. That means something, I don't know what. (Laughter) I rely on our futurologists to tell me. It has to be a utility which is extensible. So it has to be something that anybody could build on. Anybody should be able to use this infrastructure, you don't need permissions, licenses, whatever, anyone should be able to write some code to do this. You know what symmetry is, so you don't need a picture of it. This is how we're going to do it. We're going to do it using phones, and we're going to do it using mobile proximity. I'm going to suggest to you the technology to implement Doctor Who's psychic paper is already here, and if any of you have got one of the new Barclay's debit cards with the contactless interface on it, you've already got that technology. If you've ever been up to the big city, and used an Oyster card at all, does that ring any bells to anybody? The technology already exists. The first phones that have the technology built in, the Google Nexus, the S2, the Samsung Wifi 7.9, the first phones that have the technology built into them are already in the shops. So the idea that the gas man can turn up at my mom's door and he can show my mom his phone, and she can tap it with her phone, and it will come up with green if he really is from British Gas and allowed in, and it'll come up with red if he isn't, end of story. We have the technology to do that. And what's more, although some of those things sounded a bit counter-intuitive, like proving I'm over 18 without proving who I am, the cryptography to do that not only exists, it's extremely well-known and well-understood. Digital signatures, the blinding of public key certificates, these technologies have been around for a while, we've just had no way of packaging them up. So the technology already exists. We know it works, There are a few examples of the technology being used in experimental places. That's London Fashion Week, where we built a system with O2, that's for the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park, you can see the persons walking in with their VIP band, it's just being checked by the Nokia phone that's reading the band. I'm only putting those up to show you these things are prosaic, this stuff works in these environments. They don't need to be special. So finally, I know that you can do this, because if you saw the episode of Doctor Who, the Easter special of Doctor Who, where he went to Mars in a bus, I should say again for our foreign students, that doesn't happen every episode. This was a very special case. So in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, I can't show you the clip, due to the outrageous restrictions of Queen Anne-style copyright by the BBC, but in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, Doctor Who is clearly shown getting on to the bus with the Oyster card reader using his psychic paper. Which proves that psychic paper has an MSE interface. Thank you very much. |
Will our kids be a different species? | {0: 'Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about the profound changes that genomics and brain research will bring about in business, technology, politics and society.'} | TEDxSummit | All right. So, like all good stories, this starts a long, long time ago when there was basically nothing. So here is a complete picture of the universe about 14-odd billion years ago. All energy is concentrated into a single point of energy. For some reason it explodes, and you begin to get these things. So you're now about 14 billion years into this. And these things expand and expand and expand into these giant galaxies, and you get trillions of them. And within these galaxies you get these enormous dust clouds. And I want you to pay particular attention to the three little prongs in the center of this picture. If you take a close-up of those, they look like this. And what you're looking at is columns of dust where there's so much dust — by the way, the scale of this is a trillion vertical miles — and what's happening is there's so much dust, it comes together and it fuses and ignites a thermonuclear reaction. And so what you're watching is the birth of stars. These are stars being born out of here. When enough stars come out, they create a galaxy. This one happens to be a particularly important galaxy, because you are here. (Laughter) And as you take a close-up of this galaxy, you find a relatively normal, not particularly interesting star. By the way, you're now about two-thirds of the way into this story. So this star doesn't even appear until about two-thirds of the way into this story. And then what happens is there's enough dust left over that it doesn't ignite into a star, it becomes a planet. And this is about a little over four billion years ago. And soon thereafter there's enough material left over that you get a primordial soup, and that creates life. And life starts to expand and expand and expand, until it goes kaput. (Laughter) Now the really strange thing is life goes kaput, not once, not twice, but five times. So almost all life on Earth is wiped out about five times. And as you're thinking about that, what happens is you get more and more complexity, more and more stuff to build new things with. And we don't appear until about 99.96 percent of the time into this story, just to put ourselves and our ancestors in perspective. So within that context, there's two theories of the case as to why we're all here. The first theory of the case is that's all she wrote. Under that theory, we are the be-all and end-all of all creation. And the reason for trillions of galaxies, sextillions of planets, is to create something that looks like that and something that looks like that. And that's the purpose of the universe; and then it flat-lines, it doesn't get any better. (Laughter) The only question you might want to ask yourself is, could that be just mildly arrogant? And if it is — and particularly given the fact that we came very close to extinction. There were only about 2,000 of our species left. A few more weeks without rain, we would have never seen any of these. (Laughter) (Applause) So maybe you have to think about a second theory if the first one isn't good enough. Second theory is: Could we upgrade? (Laughter) Well, why would one ask a question like that? Because there have been at least 29 upgrades so far of humanoids. So it turns out that we have upgraded. We've upgraded time and again and again. And it turns out that we keep discovering upgrades. We found this one last year. We found another one last month. And as you're thinking about this, you might also ask the question: So why a single human species? Wouldn't it be really odd if you went to Africa and Asia and Antarctica and found exactly the same bird — particularly given that we co-existed at the same time with at least eight other versions of humanoid at the same time on this planet? So the normal state of affairs is not to have just a Homo sapiens; the normal state of affairs is to have various versions of humans walking around. And if that is the normal state of affairs, then you might ask yourself, all right, so if we want to create something else, how big does a mutation have to be? Well Svante Paabo has the answer. The difference between humans and Neanderthal is 0.004 percent of gene code. That's how big the difference is one species to another. This explains most contemporary political debates. (Laughter) But as you're thinking about this, one of the interesting things is how small these mutations are and where they take place. Difference human/Neanderthal is sperm and testis, smell and skin. And those are the specific genes that differ from one to the other. So very small changes can have a big impact. And as you're thinking about this, we're continuing to mutate. So about 10,000 years ago by the Black Sea, we had one mutation in one gene which led to blue eyes. And this is continuing and continuing and continuing. And as it continues, one of the things that's going to happen this year is we're going to discover the first 10,000 human genomes, because it's gotten cheap enough to do the gene sequencing. And when we find these, we may find differences. And by the way, this is not a debate that we're ready for, because we have really misused the science in this. In the 1920s, we thought there were major differences between people. That was partly based on Francis Galton's work. He was Darwin's cousin. But the U.S., the Carnegie Institute, Stanford, American Neurological Association took this really far. That got exported and was really misused. In fact, it led to some absolutely horrendous treatment of human beings. So since the 1940s, we've been saying there are no differences, we're all identical. We're going to know at year end if that is true. And as we think about that, we're actually beginning to find things like, do you have an ACE gene? Why would that matter? Because nobody's ever climbed an 8,000-meter peak without oxygen that doesn't have an ACE gene. And if you want to get more specific, how about a 577R genotype? Well it turns out that every male Olympic power athelete ever tested carries at least one of these variants. If that is true, it leads to some very complicated questions for the London Olympics. Three options: Do you want the Olympics to be a showcase for really hardworking mutants? (Laughter) Option number two: Why don't we play it like golf or sailing? Because you have one and you don't have one, I'll give you a tenth of a second head start. Version number three: Because this is a naturally occurring gene and you've got it and you didn't pick the right parents, you get the right to upgrade. Three different options. If these differences are the difference between an Olympic medal and a non-Olympic medal. And it turns out that as we discover these things, we human beings really like to change how we look, how we act, what our bodies do. And we had about 10.2 million plastic surgeries in the United States, except that with the technologies that are coming online today, today's corrections, deletions, augmentations and enhancements are going to seem like child's play. You already saw the work by Tony Atala on TED, but this ability to start filling things like inkjet cartridges with cells are allowing us to print skin, organs and a whole series of other body parts. And as these technologies go forward, you keep seeing this, you keep seeing this, you keep seeing things — 2000, human genome sequence — and it seems like nothing's happening, until it does. And we may just be in some of these weeks. And as you're thinking about these two guys sequencing a human genome in 2000 and the Public Project sequencing the human genome in 2000, then you don't hear a lot, until you hear about an experiment last year in China, where they take skin cells from this mouse, put four chemicals on it, turn those skin cells into stem cells, let the stem cells grow and create a full copy of that mouse. That's a big deal. Because in essence what it means is you can take a cell, which is a pluripotent stem cell, which is like a skier at the top of a mountain, and those two skiers become two pluripotent stem cells, four, eight, 16, and then it gets so crowded after 16 divisions that those cells have to differentiate. So they go down one side of the mountain, they go down another. And as they pick that, these become bone, and then they pick another road and these become platelets, and these become macrophages, and these become T cells. But it's really hard, once you ski down, to get back up. Unless, of course, if you have a ski lift. And what those four chemicals do is they take any cell and take it way back up the mountain so it can become any body part. And as you think of that, what it means is potentially you can rebuild a full copy of any organism out of any one of its cells. That turns out to be a big deal because now you can take, not just mouse cells, but you can human skin cells and turn them into human stem cells. And then what they did in October is they took skin cells, turned them into stem cells and began to turn them into liver cells. So in theory, you could grow any organ from any one of your cells. Here's a second experiment: If you could photocopy your body, maybe you also want to take your mind. And one of the things you saw at TED about a year and a half ago was this guy. And he gave a wonderful technical talk. He's a professor at MIT. But in essence what he said is you can take retroviruses, which get inside brain cells of mice. You can tag them with proteins that light up when you light them. And you can map the exact pathways when a mouse sees, feels, touches, remembers, loves. And then you can take a fiber optic cable and light up some of the same things. And by the way, as you do this, you can image it in two colors, which means you can download this information as binary code directly into a computer. So what's the bottom line on that? Well it's not completely inconceivable that someday you'll be able to download your own memories, maybe into a new body. And maybe you can upload other people's memories as well. And this might have just one or two small ethical, political, moral implications. (Laughter) Just a thought. Here's the kind of questions that are becoming interesting questions for philosophers, for governing people, for economists, for scientists. Because these technologies are moving really quickly. And as you think about it, let me close with an example of the brain. The first place where you would expect to see enormous evolutionary pressure today, both because of the inputs, which are becoming massive, and because of the plasticity of the organ, is the brain. Do we have any evidence that that is happening? Well let's take a look at something like autism incidence per thousand. Here's what it looks like in 2000. Here's what it looks like in 2002, 2006, 2008. Here's the increase in less than a decade. And we still don't know why this is happening. What we do know is, potentially, the brain is reacting in a hyperactive, hyper-plastic way, and creating individuals that are like this. And this is only one of the conditions that's out there. You've also got people with who are extraordinarily smart, people who can remember everything they've seen in their lives, people who've got synesthesia, people who've got schizophrenia. You've got all kinds of stuff going on out there, and we still don't understand how and why this is happening. But one question you might want to ask is, are we seeing a rapid evolution of the brain and of how we process data? Because when you think of how much data's coming into our brains, we're trying to take in as much data in a day as people used to take in in a lifetime. And as you're thinking about this, there's four theories as to why this might be going on, plus a whole series of others. I don't have a good answer. There really needs to be more research on this. One option is the fast food fetish. There's beginning to be some evidence that obesity and diet have something to do with gene modifications, which may or may not have an impact on how the brain of an infant works. A second option is the sexy geek option. These conditions are highly rare. (Laughter) (Applause) But what's beginning to happen is because these geeks are all getting together, because they are highly qualified for computer programming and it is highly remunerated, as well as other very detail-oriented tasks, that they are concentrating geographically and finding like-minded mates. So this is the assortative mating hypothesis of these genes reinforcing one another in these structures. The third, is this too much information? We're trying to process so much stuff that some people get synesthetic and just have huge pipes that remember everything. Other people get hyper-sensitive to the amount of information. Other people react with various psychological conditions or reactions to this information. Or maybe it's chemicals. But when you see an increase of that order of magnitude in a condition, either you're not measuring it right or there's something going on very quickly, and it may be evolution in real time. Here's the bottom line. What I think we are doing is we're transitioning as a species. And I didn't think this when Steve Gullans and I started writing together. I think we're transitioning into Homo evolutis that, for better or worse, is not just a hominid that's conscious of his or her environment, it's a hominid that's beginning to directly and deliberately control the evolution of its own species, of bacteria, of plants, of animals. And I think that's such an order of magnitude change that your grandkids or your great-grandkids may be a species very different from you. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
What we didn't know about penis anatomy | {0: 'Diane Kelly studies vertebrate anatomy, in particular the connection between the design and the function of reproductive organs.'} | TEDMED 2012 | When I go to parties, it doesn't usually take very long for people to find out that I'm a scientist and I study sex. And then I get asked questions. And the questions usually have a very particular format. They start with the phrase, "A friend told me," and then they end with the phrase, "Is this true?" And most of the time I'm glad to say that I can answer them, but sometimes I have to say, "I'm really sorry, but I don't know because I'm not that kind of a doctor." That is, I'm not a clinician, I'm a comparative biologist who studies anatomy. And my job is to look at lots of different species of animals and try to figure out how their tissues and organs work when everything's going right, rather than trying to figure out how to fix things when they go wrong, like so many of you. And what I do is I look for similarities and differences in the solutions that they've evolved for fundamental biological problems. So today I'm here to argue that this is not at all an esoteric Ivory Tower activity that we find at our universities, but that broad study across species, tissue types and organ systems can produce insights that have direct implications for human health. And this is true both of my recent project on sex differences in the brain, and my more mature work on the anatomy and function of penises. And now you know why I'm fun at parties. (Laughter) So today I'm going to give you an example drawn from my penis study to show you how knowledge drawn from studies of one organ system provided insights into a very different one. Now I'm sure as everyone in the audience already knows — I did have to explain it to my nine-year-old late last week — penises are structures that transfer sperm from one individual to another. And the slide behind me barely scratches the surface of how widespread they are in animals. There's an enormous amount of anatomical variation. You find muscular tubes, modified legs, modified fins, as well as the mammalian fleshy, inflatable cylinder that we're all familiar with — or at least half of you are. (Laughter) And I think we see this tremendous variation because it's a really effective solution to a very basic biological problem, and that is getting sperm in a position to meet up with eggs and form zygotes. Now the penis isn't actually required for internal fertiliztion, but when internal fertilization evolves, penises often follow. And the question I get when I start talking about this most often is, "What made you interested in this subject?" And the answer is skeletons. You wouldn't think that skeletons and penises have very much to do with one another. And that's because we tend to think of skeletons as stiff lever systems that produce speed or power. And my first forays into biological research, doing dinosaur paleontology as an undergraduate, were really squarely in that realm. But when I went to graduate school to study biomechanics, I really wanted to find a dissertation project that would expand our knowledge of skeletal function. I tried a bunch of different stuff. A lot of it didn't pan out. But then one day I started thinking about the mammalian penis. And it's really an odd sort of structure. Before it can be used for internal fertilization, its mechanical behavior has to change in a really dramatic fashion. Most of the time it's a flexible organ. It's easy to bend. But before it's brought into use during copulation it has to become rigid, it has to become difficult to bend. And moreover, it has to work. A reproductive system that fails to function produces an individual that has no offspring, and that individual is then kicked out of the gene pool. And so I thought, "Here's a problem that just cries out for a skeletal system — not one like this one, but one like this one — because, functionally, a skeleton is any system that supports tissue and transmits forces. And I already knew that animals like this earthworm, indeed most animals, don't support their tissues by draping them over bones. Instead they're more like reinforced water balloons. They use a skeleton that we call a hydrostatic skeleton. And a hydrostatic skeleton uses two elements. The skeletal support comes from an interaction between a pressurized fluid and a surrounding wall of tissue that's held in tension and reinforced with fibrous proteins. And the interaction is crucial. Without both elements you have no support. If you have fluid with no wall to surround it and keep pressure up, you have a puddle. And if you have just the wall with no fluid inside of it to put the wall in tension, you've got a little wet rag. When you look at a penis in cross section, it has a lot of the hallmarks of a hydrostatic skeleton. It has a central space of spongy erectile tissue that fills with fluid — in this case blood — surrounded by a wall of tissue that's rich in a stiff structural protein called collagen. But at the time when I started this project, the best explanation I could find for penal erection was that the wall surrounded these spongy tissues, and the spongy tissues filled with blood and pressure rose and voila! it became erect. And that explained to me expansion — made sense: more fluid, you get tissues that expand — but it didn't actually explain erection. Because there was no mechanism in this explanation for making this structure hard to bend. And no one had systematically looked at the wall tissue. So I thought, wall tissue's important in skeletons. It has to be part of the explanation. And this was the point at which my graduate adviser said, "Whoa! Hold on. Slow down." Because after about six months of me talking about this, I think he finally figured out that I was really serious about the penis thing. (Laughter) So he sat me down, and he warned me. He was like, "Be careful going down this path. I'm not sure this project's going to pan out." Because he was afraid I was walking into a trap. I was taking on a socially embarrassing question with an answer that he thought might not be particularly interesting. And that was because every hydrostatic skeleton that we had found in nature up to that point had the same basic elements. It had the central fluid, it had the surrounding wall, and the reinforcing fibers in the wall were arranged in crossed helices around the long axis of the skeleton. So the image behind me shows a piece of tissue in one of these cross helical skeletons cut so that you're looking at the surface of the wall. The arrow shows you the long axis. And you can see two layers of fibers, one in blue and one in yellow, arranged in left-handed and right-handed angles. And if you weren't just looking at a little section of the fibers, those fibers would be going in helices around the long axis of the skeleton — something like a Chinese finger trap, where you stick your fingers in and they get stuck. And these skeletons have a particular set of behaviors, which I'm going to demonstrate in a film. It's a model skeleton that I made out of a piece of cloth that I wrapped around an inflated balloon. The cloth's cut on the bias. So you can see that the fibers wrap in helices, and those fibers can reorient as the skeleton moves, which means the skeleton's flexible. It lengthens, shortens and bends really easily in response to internal or external forces. Now my adviser's concern was what if the penile wall tissue is just the same as any other hydrostatic skeleton. What are you going to contribute? What new thing are you contributing to our knowledge of biology? And I thought, "Yeah, he does have a really good point here." So I spent a long, long time thinking about it. And one thing kept bothering me, and that's, when they're functioning, penises don't wiggle. (Laughter) So something interesting had to be going on. So I went ahead, collected wall tissue, prepared it so it was erect, sectioned it, put it on slides and then stuck it under the microscope to have a look, fully expecting to see crossed helices of collagen of some variety. But instead I saw this. There's an outer layer and an inner layer. The arrow shows you the long axis of the skeleton. I was really surprised at this. Everyone I showed it was really surprised at this. Why was everyone surprised at this? That's because we knew theoretically that there was another way of arranging fibers in a hydrostatic skeleton, and that was with fibers at zero degrees and 90 degrees to the long axis of the structure. The thing is, no one had ever seen it before in nature. And now I was looking at one. Those fibers in that particular orientation give the skeleton a very, very different behavior. I'm going to show a model made out of exactly the same materials. So it'll be made of the same cotton cloth, same balloon, same internal pressure. But the only difference is that the fibers are arranged differently. And you'll see that, unlike the cross helical model, this model resists extension and contraction and resists bending. Now what that tells us is that wall tissues are doing so much more than just covering the vascular tissues. They're an integral part of the penile skeleton. If the wall around the erectile tissue wasn't there, if it wasn't reinforced in this way, the shape would change, but the inflated penis would not resist bending, and erection simply wouldn't work. It's an observation with obvious medical applications in humans as well, but it's also relevant in a broad sense, I think, to the design of prosthetics, soft robots, basically anything where changes of shape and stiffness are important. So to sum up: Twenty years ago, I had a college adviser tell me, when I went to the college and said, "I'm kind of interested in anatomy," they said, "Anatomy's a dead science." He couldn't have been more wrong. I really believe that we still have a lot to learn about the normal structure and function of our bodies. Not just about its genetics and molecular biology, but up here in the meat end of the scale. We've got limits on our time. We often focus on one disease, one model, one problem, but my experience suggests that we should take the time to apply ideas broadly between systems and just see where it takes us. After all, if ideas about invertebrate skeletons can give us insights about mammalian reproductive systems, there could be lots of other wild and productive connections lurking out there just waiting to be found. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why is 'x' the unknown? | {0: 'Terry Moore is the director of the Radius Foundation, a forum for exploring and gaining insight from different worldviews.'} | TED2012 | I have the answer to a question that we've all asked. The question is, Why is it that the letter X represents the unknown? Now I know we learned that in math class, but now it's everywhere in the culture — The X prize, the X-Files, Project X, TEDx. Where'd that come from? About six years ago I decided that I would learn Arabic, which turns out to be a supremely logical language. To write a word or a phrase or a sentence in Arabic is like crafting an equation, because every part is extremely precise and carries a lot of information. That's one of the reasons so much of what we've come to think of as Western science and mathematics and engineering was really worked out in the first few centuries of the Common Era by the Persians and the Arabs and the Turks. This includes the little system in Arabic called al-jebra. And al-jebr roughly translates to "the system for reconciling disparate parts." Al-jebr finally came into English as algebra. One example among many. The Arabic texts containing this mathematical wisdom finally made their way to Europe — which is to say Spain — in the 11th and 12th centuries. And when they arrived there was tremendous interest in translating this wisdom into a European language. But there were problems. One problem is there are some sounds in Arabic that just don't make it through a European voice box without lots of practice. Trust me on that one. Also, those very sounds tend not to be represented by the characters that are available in European languages. Here's one of the culprits. This is the letter sheen, and it makes the sound we think of as SH — "sh." It's also the very first letter of the word shayun, which means "something" just like the the English word "something" — some undefined, unknown thing. Now in Arabic, we can make this definite by adding the definite article "al." So this is al-shayun — the unknown thing. And this is a word that appears throughout early mathematics, such as this 10th-century derivation of roots. The problem for the Medieval Spanish scholars who were tasked with translating this material is that the letter sheen and the word shayun can't be rendered into Spanish because Spanish doesn't have that SH, that "sh" sound. So by convention, they created a rule in which they borrowed the CK sound, "ck" sound, from the classical Greek in the form of the letter Kai. Later when this material was translated into a common European language, which is to say Latin, they simply replaced the Greek Kai with the Latin X. And once that happened, once this material was in Latin, it formed the basis for mathematics textbooks for almost 600 years. But now we have the answer to our question. Why is it that X is the unknown? X is the unknown because you can't say "sh" in Spanish. (Laughter) And I thought that was worth sharing. (Applause) |
Mining minerals from seawater | {0: 'Damian Palin is developing a way to use bacteria to biologically "mine" minerals from water -- specifically, out of the brine left over from the desalinization process.'} | TED2012 | I collaborate with bacteria. And I'm about to show you some stop-motion footage that I made recently where you'll see bacteria accumulating minerals from their environment over the period of an hour. So what you're seeing here is the bacteria metabolizing, and as they do so they create an electrical charge. And this attracts metals from their local environment. And these metals accumulate as minerals on the surface of the bacteria. One of the most pervasive problems in the world today for people is inadequate access to clean drinking water. And the desalination process is one where we take out salts. We can use it for drinking and agriculture. Removing the salts from water — particularly seawater — through reverse osmosis is a critical technique for countries who do not have access to clean drinking water around the globe. So seawater reverse osmosis is a membrane-filtration technology. We take the water from the sea and we apply pressure. And this pressure forces the seawater through a membrane. This takes energy, producing clean water. But we're also left with a concentrated salt solution, or brine. But the process is very expensive and it's cost-prohibitive for many countries around the globe. And also, the brine that's produced is oftentimes just pumped back out into the sea. And this is detrimental to the local ecology of the sea area that it's pumped back out into. So I work in Singapore at the moment, and this is a place that's really a leading place for desalination technology. And Singapore proposes by 2060 to produce [900] million liters per day of desalinated water. But this will produce an equally massive amount of desalination brine. And this is where my collaboration with bacteria comes into play. So what we're doing at the moment is we're accumulating metals like calcium, potassium and magnesium from out of desalination brine. And this, in terms of magnesium and the amount of water that I just mentioned, equates to a $4.5 billion mining industry for Singapore — a place that doesn't have any natural resources. So I'd like you to image a mining industry in a way that one hasn't existed before; imagine a mining industry that doesn't mean defiling the Earth; imagine bacteria helping us do this by accumulating and precipitating and sedimenting minerals out of desalination brine. And what you can see here is the beginning of an industry in a test tube, a mining industry that is in harmony with nature. Thank you. (Applause) |
Design, explained. | {0: 'John Hodgman is a writer, humorist, geek celebrity, former professional literary agent and expert on all world knowledge. He was the bumbling PC in Apple\'s long-running "I\'m a Mac; I\'m a PC" ad campaign.'} | TED2012 | Today I'm going to unpack for you three examples of iconic design, and it makes perfect sense that I should be the one to do it because I have a Bachelor's degree in Literature. (Laughter) But I'm also a famous minor television personality and an avid collector of Design Within Reach catalogs, so I pretty much know everything there is. Now, I'm sure you recognize this object; many of you probably saw it as you were landing your private zeppelins at Los Angeles International Airport over the past couple of days. This is known as the Theme Building; that is its name for reasons that are still very murky. And it is perhaps the best example we have in Los Angeles of ancient extraterrestrial architecture. It was first excavated in 1961 as they were building LAX, although scientists believe that it dates back to the year 2000 Before Common Era, when it was used as a busy transdimensional space port by the ancient astronauts who first colonized this planet and raised our species from savagery by giving us the gift of written language and technology and the gift of revolving restaurants. It is thought to have been a replacement for the older space ports located, of course, at Stonehenge and considered to be quite an improvement due to the uncluttered design, the lack of druids hanging around all the time and obviously, the much better access to parking. When it was uncovered, it ushered in a new era of streamlined, archaically futuristic design called Googie, which came to be synonymous with the Jet Age, a misnomer. After all, the ancient astronauts who used it did not travel by jet very often, preferring instead to travel by feathered serpent powered by crystal skulls. (Applause) (Music) Ah yes, a table. We use these every day. And on top of it, the juicy salif. This is a design by Philippe Starck, who I believe is in the audience at this very moment. And you can tell it is a Starck design by its precision, its playfulness, its innovation and its promise of imminent violence. (Laughter) It is a design that challenges your intuition — it is not what you think it is when you first see it. It is not a fork designed to grab three hors d'oeuvres at a time, which would be useful out in the lobby, I would say. And despite its obvious influence by the ancient astronauts and its space agey-ness and tripodism, it is not something designed to attach to your brain and suck out your thoughts. It is in fact a citrus juicer and when I say that, you never see it as anything else again. It is also not a monument to design, it is a monument to design's utility. You can take it home with you, unlike the Theme Building, which will stay where it is forever. This is affordable and can come home with you and, as such, it can sit on your kitchen counter — it can't go in your drawers; trust me, I found that out the hard way — and make your kitchen counter into a monument to design. One other thing about it, if you do have one at home, let me tell you one of the features you may not know: when you fall asleep, it comes alive and it walks around your house and goes through your mail and watches you as you sleep. (Applause) Okay, what is this object? I have no idea. I don't know what that thing is. It looks terrible. Is it a little hot plate? I don't get it. Does anyone know? Chi? It's an ... iPhone. iPhone. Oh yes, that's right, I remember those; I had my whole bathroom tiles redone with those back in the good old days. No, I have an iPhone. Of course I do. Here is my well-loved iPhone. I do so many things on this little device. I like to read books on it. More than that, I like to buy books on it that I never have to feel guilty about not reading because they go in here and I never look at them again and it's perfect. I use it every day to measure the weight of an ox, for example. Every now and then, I admit that I complete a phone call on it occasionally. And yet I forget about it all the time. This is a design that once you saw it, you forgot about it. It is easy to forget the gasp-inducement that occurred in 2007 when you first touched this thing because it became so quickly pervasive and because of how instantly we adopted these gestures and made it an extension of our life. Unlike the Theme Building, this is not alien technology. Or I should say, what it did was it took technology which, unlike people in this room, to many other people in the world, still feels very alien, and made it immediately and instantly feel familiar and intimate. And unlike the juicy salif, it does not threaten to attach itself to your brain, rather, it simply attaches itself to your brain. (Laughter) And you didn't even notice it happened. So there you go. My name is John Hodgman. I just explained design. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A new way to diagnose autism | {0: 'Ami Klin is an award winning autism spectrum disorder researcher finding new avenues for early diagnosis.'} | TEDxPeachtree | I always wanted to become a walking laboratory of social engagement: to resonate other people's feelings, thoughts, intentions, motivations, in the act of being with them. As a scientist, I always wanted to measure that resonance, that sense of the other that happens so quickly, in the blink of an eye. We intuit other people's feelings; we know the meaning of their actions even before they happen. We're always in this stance of being the object of somebody else's subjectivity. We do that all the time. We just can't shake it off. It's so important that the very tools we use to understand ourselves, to understand the world around us, are shaped by that stance. We are social to the core. So my journey in autism really started when I lived in a residential unit for adults with autism. Most of those individuals had spent most of their lives in long-stay hospitals. This is a long time ago. And for them, autism was devastating. They had profound intellectual disabilities. They didn't talk. But most of all, they were extraordinarily isolated from the world around them, from their environment and from the people. In fact, at the time, if you walked into a school for individuals with autism, you'd hear a lot of noise, plenty of commotion, actions, people doing things. But they're always doing things by themselves. So they may be looking at a light in the ceiling, or they may be isolated in the corner, or they might be engaged in these repetitive movements, in self-stimulatory movements that led them nowhere. Extremely, extremely isolated. Well, now we know that autism is this disruption, the disruption of this resonance that I am telling you about. These are survival skills. These are survival skills that we inherited over many, many hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. You see, babies are born in a state of utter fragility. Without the caregiver, they wouldn't survive, so it stands to reason that nature would endow them with these mechanisms of survival. They orient to the caregiver. From the first days and weeks of life, babies prefer to hear human sounds, rather than just sounds in the environment. They prefer to look at people rather than at things, and even as they're looking at people, they look at people's eyes, because the eye is the window to the other person's experiences, so much so that they even prefer to look at people who are looking at them rather than people who are looking away. Well, they orient to the caregiver. The caregiver seeks the baby. And it's out of this mutually reinforcing choreography that a lot that is of importance to the emergence of mind — the social mind, the social brain — depends on. We always think about autism as something that happens later on in life. It doesn't; it begins with the beginning of life. As babies engage with caregivers, they soon realize that, well, there is something between the ears that is very important — it's invisible, you can't see it, but it's really critical. And that thing is called attention. And they learn soon enough, even before they can utter one word, that they can take that attention and move somewhere in order to get things they want. They also learn to follow other people's gazes, because whatever people are looking at is what they are thinking about. And soon enough, they start to learn about the meaning of things, because when somebody is looking at something or somebody is pointing at something, they're not just getting a directional cue. They are getting the other person's meaning of that thing, the attitude. And soon enough, they start building this body of meanings, but meanings that were acquired within the realm of social interaction. Those are meanings that are acquired as part of their shared experiences with others. Well, this is a 15-month-old little girl, and she has autism. And I am coming so close to her that I am maybe two inches from her face, and she's quite oblivious to me. Imagine if I did that to you, came two inches from your face. You'd do probably two things, wouldn't you? You would recoil. You would call the police. (Laughter) You would do something, because it's literally impossible to penetrate somebody's physical space and not get that reaction. We do so, remember, intuitively, effortlessly. This is our body wisdom; it's not something mediated by our language. Our body just knows that. And we've known that for a long time. And this is not something that happens to humans only. It happens to some of our phyletic cousins, because if you're a monkey, and you look at another monkey, and that monkey has a higher hierarchy position than you, and that is considered to be a signal or threat, well, you are not going to be alive for long. So something that in other species are survival mechanisms, without which they wouldn't basically live, we bring into the context of human beings, and this is what we need to simply act, socially. Now, she is oblivious to me and I'm so close to her, and you think, maybe she can see you, maybe she can hear you. Well, a few minutes later, she goes to the corner of the room, and she finds a tiny little piece of candy, an M&M. So I could not attract her attention, but something — a thing — did. Now, most of us make a big dichotomy between the world of things and the world of people. Now, for this girl, that division line is not so clear, and the world of people is not attracting her as much as we would like. Now, remember that we learn a great deal by sharing experiences. What she is doing right now is that her path of learning is diverging, moment by moment, as she is isolating herself further and further. So we feel sometimes that the brain is deterministic, the brain determines who we're going to be. But, in fact, the brain also becomes who we are, and at the same time that her behaviors are taking away from the realm of social interaction, this is what's happening with her mind, and this is what's happening with her brain. Well, autism is the most strongly genetic condition of all developmental disorders. And it's a brain disorder. It's a disorder that begins much prior to the time that the child is born. We now know that there is a very broad spectrum of autism. There are those individuals who are profoundly intellectually disabled but there are those that are gifted. There are those individuals who don't talk at all; there are those individuals who talk too much. There are those individuals that if you observe them in their school, you see them running the periphery fence all the school day if you let them, to those individuals who cannot stop coming to you and trying to engage you repeatedly, relentlessly, but often in an awkward fashion, without that immediate resonance. Well, this is much more prevalent than we thought at the time. When I started in this field, we thought there were four individuals with autism per 10,000 — a very rare condition. Well, now we know it's more like one in 100. There are millions of individuals with autism all around us. The societal cost of this condition is huge, in the US alone, maybe 35 to 80 billion dollars. And you know what? Most of those funds are associated with adolescents and particularly adults who are severely disabled, individuals who need wraparound services — services that are very, very intensive. And those services can cost in excess of 60,000 to 80,000 dollars a year. Those are individuals who did not benefit from early treatment, because now we know that autism creates itself as individuals diverge in that pathway of learning that I mentioned to you. Were we to be able to identify this condition at an earlier point, and intervene and treat — I can tell you, this has been probably something that has changed my life in the past 10 years, this notion that we can absolutely attenuate this condition. Also, we have a window of opportunity, because the brain is malleable for just so long, and that window of opportunity happens in the first three years of life. It's not that that window closes; it doesn't. But it diminishes considerably. And yet, the median age of diagnosis in this country is still about five years, and in disadvantaged populations, the populations that don't have access to clinical services, rural populations, minorities, the age of diagnosis is later still, which is almost as if I were to tell you that we are condemning those communities to have individuals with autism whose condition is going to be more severe. So I feel that we have a bioethical imperative. The science is there. But no science is of relevance if it doesn't have an impact on the community. And we just can't afford that missed opportunity, because children with autism become adults with autism. And we feel that those things we can do for these children, for those families, early on, will have lifetime consequences — for the child, for the family, and for the community at large. So this is our view of autism. There are over a hundred genes that are associated with autism. In fact, we believe there are going to be something between 300 and 600 genes associated with autism, and genetic anomalies, much more than just genes. And we actually have a bit of a question here, because if there are so many different causes of autism, how do you go from those liabilities to the actual syndrome? Because people like myself, when we walk into a playroom, we recognize a child as having autism. So how do you go from multiple causes to a syndrome that has some homogeneity? And the answer is what lies in between, which is development. And in fact, we are very interested in those first two years of life, because those liabilities don't necessarily convert into autism. Autism creates itself. Were we to be able to intervene during those years of life, we might attenuate for some, and God knows, maybe even prevent for others. So how do we do that? How do we enter that feeling of resonance, how do we enter another person's being? I remember when I interacted with that 15-month-old, the thing that came to my mind was, "How do you come into her world? Is she thinking about me? Is she thinking about others?" Well, it's hard to do that, so we had to create the technologies. We had to basically step inside a body. We had to see the world through her eyes. And so in the past many years, we've been building these new technologies that are based on eye tracking. We can see, moment by moment, what children are engaging with. This is my colleague, Warren Jones, with whom we've been building these methods, these studies, for the past 12 years. And you see there a happy five-month-old, a five-month little boy who is going to watch things that are brought from his world: his mom, the caregiver, but also experiences that he would have were he to be in his daycare. What we want is to embrace that world and bring it into our laboratory, but in order for us to do that, we had to create these very sophisticated measures, measures of how people, how little babies, how newborns, engage with the world, moment by moment. What is important and what is not. Well, we created those measures, and here, what you see is what we call a funnel of attention. You're watching a video — those frames are separated by about a second — through the eyes of 35 typically developing two-year-olds. And we freeze one frame, and this is what the typical children are doing. In this scan pass, in green here, are two-year-olds with autism. So on that frame, the children who are typical are watching this, the emotion of expression of that little boy as he's fighting a little bit with the little girl. What are the children with autism doing? They are focusing on the revolving door, opening and shutting. Well, I can tell you that this divergence that you're seeing here doesn't happen only in our five-minute experiment. It happens moment by moment in their real lives, and their minds are being formed and their brains are being specialized in something other than what is happening with their typical peers. Well, we took a construct from our pediatrician friends, the concept of growth charts — you know, when you take a child to the pediatrician, and you have physical height and weight. Well, we decided we were going to create growth charts of social engagement. We sought children from the time they're born. What you see here on the x-axis is two, three, four, five, six months and nine, until about the age of 24 months. This is the percent of their viewing time that they're focusing on people's eyes, and this is their growth chart. They start over here — they love people's eyes — and it remains quite stable. It sort of goes up a little bit in those initial months. Now, let's see what's happening with babies who became autistic. It's something very different. It starts way up here, but then it's a free fall. It's very much like they brought into this world the reflex that orients them to people, but it has no traction. It's almost as if that stimulus — you — you're not exerting influence on what happens as they navigate their daily lives. Now, we thought those data were so powerful, in a way, that we wanted to see what happened in the first six months of life, because if you interact with a two- and a three-month-old, you'd be surprised by how social those babies are. And what we see in the first six months of life is that those two groups can be segregated very easily. And using these kinds of measures and many others, what we found out is that our science could, in fact, identify this condition early on. We didn't have to wait for the behaviors of autism to emerge in the second year of life. If we measured things that are, evolutionarily, highly conserved, and developmentally very early-emerging — things that are online from the first weeks of life — we could push the detection of autism all the way to those first months, and that's what we are doing now. Now, we can create the very best technologies and the very best methods to identify the children, but this would be for naught if we didn't have an impact on what happens in their reality in the community. Now we want those devices, of course, to be deployed by those who are in the trenches — our colleagues, the primary care physicians, who see every child — and we need to transform those technologies into something that is going to add value to their practice, because they have to see so many children. And we want to do that universally so that we don't miss any child. But this would be immoral if we also did not have an infrastructure for intervention, for treatment. We need to be able to work with the families, support the families, to manage those first years with them. We need to be able to really go from universal screening to universal access to treatment, because those treatments are going to change these children's and those families' lives. Now, when we think about what we [can] do in those first years, I can tell you, having been in this field for so long, one feels really rejuvenated. There is a sense that the science that one worked on can actually have an impact on realities, preventing, in fact, those experiences that I really started in my journey in this field. I thought at the time that this was an intractable condition. No longer. We can do a great deal of things. And the idea is not to cure autism. That's not the idea. What we want is to make sure that those individuals with autism can be free from the devastating consequences that come with it at times, the profound intellectual disabilities, the lack of language, the profound, profound isolation. We feel that individuals with autism, in fact, have a very special perspective on the world, and we need diversity. And they can work extremely well in some areas of strength: predictable situations, situations that can be defined. Because after all, they learn about the world almost, like, about it, rather than learning how to function in it. But this is a strength if you're working, for example, in technology. And there are those individuals who have incredible artistic abilities. We want them to be free to do that. We want that the next generations of individuals with autism will be able not only to express their strengths, but to fulfill their promise. Well, thank you for listening to me. (Applause) |
We are all designers | {0: 'Journalist and commentator John Hockenberry has reported from all over the world in virtually every medium. He\'s the author of "Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence."'} | TED2012 | I am no designer, nope, no way. My dad was, which is kind of an interesting way to grow up. I had to figure out what it is my dad did and why it was important. Dad talked a lot about bad design when we were growing up, you know, "Bad design is just people not thinking, John," he would say whenever a kid would be injured by a rotary lawn mower or, say, a typewriter ribbon would get tangled or an eggbeater would get jammed in the kitchen. You know, "Design — bad design, there's just no excuse for it. It's letting stuff happen without thinking about it. Every object should be about something, John. It should imagine a user. It should cast that user in a story starring the user and the object. Good design," my dad said, "is about supplying intent." That's what he said. Dad helped design the control panels for the IBM 360 computer. That was a big deal; that was important. He worked for Kodak for a while; that was important. He designed chairs and desks and other office equipment for Steelcase; that was important. I knew design was important in my house because, for heaven's sake, it put food on our table, right? And design was in everything my dad did. He had a Dixieland jazz band when we were growing up, and he would always cover Louis Armstrong tunes. And I would ask him every once in a while, "Dad, do you want it to sound like the record?" We had lots of old jazz records lying around the house. And he said, "No, never, John, never. The song is just a given, that's how you have to think about it. You gotta make it your own. You gotta design it. Show everyone what you intend," is what he said. "Doing that, acting by design, is what we all should be doing. It's where we all belong." All of us? Designers? Oh, oh, Dad. Oh, Dad. The song is just a given. It's how you cover it that matters. Well, let's hold on to that thought for just a minute. It's kind of like this wheelchair I'm in, right? The original tune? It's a little scary. "Ooh, what happened to that dude? He can't walk. Anybody know the story? Anybody?" I don't like to talk about this very much, but I'll tell you guys the story today. All right, exactly 36 years ago this week, that's right, I was in a poorly designed automobile that hit a poorly designed guardrail on a poorly designed road in Pennsylvania, and plummeted down a 200-foot embankment and killed two people in the car. But ever since then, the wheelchair has been a given in my life. My life, at the mercy of good design and bad design. Think about it. Now, in design terms, a wheelchair is a very difficult object. It mostly projects tragedy and fear and misfortune, and it projects that message, that story, so strongly that it almost blots out anything else. I roll swiftly through an airport, right? And moms grab their kids out of the way and say, "Don't stare!" The poor kid, you know, has this terrified look on his face, God knows what they think. And for decades, I'm going, why does this happen? What can I do about it? How can I change this? I mean there must be something. So I would roll, I'd make no eye contact — just kinda frown, right? Or I'd dress up really, really sharply or something. Or I'd make eye contact with everyone — that was really creepy; that didn't work at all. (Laughter) You know anything, I'd try. I wouldn't shower for a week — nothing worked. Nothing whatsoever worked until a few years ago, my six-year-old daughters were looking at this wheelchair catalog that I had, and they said, "Oh, Dad! Dad! Look, you gotta get these, these flashy wheels — you gotta get 'em!" And I said, "Oh, girls, Dad is a very important journalist, that just wouldn't do at all." And of course, they immediately concluded, "Oh, what a bummer, Dad. Journalists aren't allowed to have flashy wheels. I mean, how important could you be then?" they said. I went, "Wait a minute, all right, right — I'll get the wheels." Purely out of protest, I got the flashy wheels, and I installed them and — check this out. Could I have my special light cue please? (Laughter) Look at that! Now ... look at, look at this! Look at this! So what you are looking at here has completely changed my life, I mean totally changed my life. Instead of blank stares and awkwardness, now it is pointing and smiling! People going, "Awesome wheels, dude! Those are awesome! I mean, I want some of those wheels!" Little kids say, "Can I have a ride?" (Laughter) And of course there's the occasional person — usually a middle-aged male who will say, "Oh, those wheels are great! I guess they're for safety, right?" (Laughter) No! They're not for safety. No, no, no, no, no. What's the difference here, the wheelchair with no lights and the wheelchair with lights? The difference is intent. That's right, that's right; I'm no longer a victim. I chose to change the situation — I'm the Commander of the Starship Wheelchair with the phaser wheels in the front. Right? Intent changes the picture completely. I choose to enhance this rolling experience with a simple design element. Acting with intent. It conveys authorship. It suggests that someone is driving. It's reassuring; people are drawn to it. Someone making the experience their own. Covering the tragic tune with something different, something radically different. People respond to that. Now it seems simple, but actually I think in our society and culture in general, we have a huge problem with intent. Now go with me here. Look at this guy. You know who this is? It's Anders Breivik. Now, if he intended to kill in Olso, Norway last year, dozens and dozens of young people — if he intended to do that, he's a vicious criminal. We punish him. Life in prison. Death penalty in the United States, not so much in Norway. But, if he instead acted out of a delusional fantasy, if he was motivated by some random mental illness, he's in a completely different category. We may put him away for life, but we watch him clinically. It's a completely different domain. As an intentional murderer, Anders Breivik is merely evil. But as a dysfunctional, as a dysfunctional murderer/psychotic, he's something much more complicated. He's the breath of some primitive, ancient chaos. He's the random state of nature we emerged from. He's something very, very different. It's as though intent is an essential component for humanity. It's what we're supposed to do somehow. We're supposed to act with intent. We're supposed to do things by design. Intent is a marker for civilization. Now here's an example a little closer to home: My family is all about intent. You can probably tell there are two sets of twins, the result of IVF technology, in vitro fertilization technology, due to some physical limitations I won't go into. Anyway, in vitro technology, IVF, is about as intentional as agriculture. Let me tell you, some of you may have the experience. In fact, the whole technology of sperm extraction for spinal cord-injured males was invented by a veterinarian. I met the dude. He's a great guy. He carried this big leather bag full of sperm probes for all of the animals that he'd worked with, all the different animals. Probes he designed, and in fact, he was really, really proud of these probes. He would say, "You're right between horse and squirrel, John." (Laughter) But anyway, so when my wife and I decided to upgrade our early middle age — we had four kids, after all — with a little different technology that I won't explain in too much detail here — my urologist assured me I had nothing whatsoever to worry about. "No need for birth control, Doc, are you sure about that?" "John, John, I looked at your chart. From your sperm tests we can confidently say that you're basically a form of birth control." Well! (Laughter) What a liberating thought! Yes! And after a couple very liberating weekends, my wife and I, utilizing some cutting-edge erectile technology that is certainly worthy of a TEDTalk someday but I won't get into it now, we noticed some familiar, if unexpected, symptoms. I wasn't exactly a form of birth control. Look at that font there. My wife was so pissed. I mean, did a designer come up with that? No, I don't think a designer did come up with that. In fact, maybe that's the problem. And so, little Ajax was born. He's like our other children, but the experience is completely different. It's something like my accident, right? He came out of nowhere. But we all had to change, but not just react to the given; we bend to this new experience with intent. We're five now. Five. Facing the given with intent. Doing things by design. Hey, the name Ajax — you can't get much more intentional than that, right? We're really hoping he thanks us for that later on. (Laughter) But I never became a designer. No, no, no, no. Never attempted. Never even close. I did love some great designs as I was growing up: The HP 35S calculator — God, I loved that thing. Oh God, I wish I had one. Man, I love that thing. I could afford that. Other designs I really couldn't afford, like the 1974 911 Targa. In school, I studied nothing close to design or engineering; I studied useless things like the Classics, but there were some lessons even there — this guy, Plato, it turns out he's a designer. He designed a state in "The Republic," a design never implemented. Listen to one of the design features of Plato's Government 4.0: "The State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst." Well, got that wrong, didn't we? But look at that statement; it's all about intent. That's what I love about it. But consider what Plato is doing here. What is he doing? It's a grand idea of design — a huge idea of design, common to all of the voices of religion and philosophy that emerged in the Classical period. What was going on then? They were trying to answer the question of what would human beings do now that they were no longer simply trying to survive? As the human race emerged from a prehistoric chaos, a confrontation with random, brutal nature, they suddenly had a moment to think — and there was a lot to think about. All of a sudden, human existence needed an intent. Human life needed a reason. Reality itself needed a designer. The given was replaced by various aspects of intent, by various designs, by various gods. Gods we're still fighting about. Oh yeah. Today we don't confront the chaos of nature. Today it is the chaos of humanity's impact on the Earth itself that we confront. This young discipline called design, I think, is in fact the emerging ethos formulating and then answering a very new question: What shall we do now in the face of the chaos that we have created? What shall we do? How shall we inscribe intent on all the objects we create, on all the circumstances we create, on all the places we change? The consequences of a planet with 7 billion people and counting. That's the tune we're all covering today, all of us. And we can't just imitate the past. No. That won't do. That won't do at all. Here's my favorite design moment: In the city of Kinshasa in Zaire in the 1990s, I was working for ABC News, and I was reporting on the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator, the brutal dictator in Zaire, who raped and pillaged that country. There was rioting in the middle of Kinshasa. The place was falling apart; it was a horrible, horrible place, and I needed to go and explore the center of Kinshasa to report on the rioting and the looting. People were carrying off vehicles, carrying off pieces of buildings. Soldiers were in the streets shooting at looters and herding some in mass arrests. In the middle of this chaos, I'm rolling around in a wheelchair, and I was completely invisible. Completely. I was in a wheelchair; I didn't look like a looter. I was in a wheelchair; I didn't look like a journalist, particularly, at least from their perspective. And I didn't look like a soldier, that's for sure. I was part of this sort of background noise of the misery of Zaire, completely invisible. And all of a sudden, from around a corner, comes this young man, paralyzed, just like me, in this metal and wood and leather pedal, three-wheel tricycle-wheelchair device, and he pedals up to me as fast as he can. He goes, "Hey, mister! Mister!" And I looked at him — he didn't know any other English than that, but we didn't need English, no, no, no, no, no. We sat there and compared wheels and tires and spokes and tubes. And I looked at his whacky pedal mechanism; he was full of pride over his design. I wish I could show you that contraption. His smile, our glow as we talked a universal language of design, invisible to the chaos around us. His machine: homemade, bolted, rusty, comical. My machine: American-made, confident, sleek. He was particularly proud of the comfortable seat, really comfortable seat he had made in his chariot and its beautiful fabric fringe around the edge. Oh, I wish I'd had those sparkly wheels back then to have shown him, man! He would have loved those! Oh yeah. He would have understood those; a chariot of pure intent — think about it — in a city out of control. Design blew it all away for a moment. We spoke for a few minutes and then each of us vanished back into the chaos. He went back to the streets of Kinshasa; I went to my hotel. And I think of him now, now ... And I pose this question. An object imbued with intent — it has power, it's treasure, we're drawn to it. An object devoid of intent — it's random, it's imitative, it repels us. It's like a piece of junk mail to be thrown away. This is what we must demand of our lives, of our objects, of our things, of our circumstances: living with intent. And I have to say that on that score, I have a very unfair advantage over all of you. And I want to explain it to you now because this is a very special day. Thirty-six years ago at nearly this moment, a 19-year-old boy awoke from a coma to ask a nurse a question, but the nurse was already there with an answer. "You've had a terrible accident, young man. You've broken your back. You'll never walk again." I said, "I know all that — what day is it?" You see, I knew that the car had gone over the guardrail on the 28th of February, and I knew that 1976 was a leap year. "Nurse! Is this the 28th or the 29th?" And she looked at me and said, "It's March 1st." And I went, "Oh my God. I've got some catching up to do!" And from that moment, I knew the given was that accident; I had no option but to make up this new life without walking. Intent — a life with intent — lived by design, covering the original with something better. It's something for all of us to do or find a way to do in these times. To get back to this, to get back to design, and as my daddy suggested a long time ago, "Make the song your own, John. Show everybody what you intend." Daddy, this one's for you. (Music) ♫ Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner ♫ ♫ but he was another man. ♫ ♫ Jo Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona to attend a California bash. ♫ ♫ Get back, get back, ♫ ♫ get back to where you once belonged. ♫ ♫ Get back, get back, ♫ ♫ get back to where you once belonged. ♫ (Applause) |
What if our health care system kept us healthy? | {0: 'Rebecca Onie is a nationally recognized leader in the intersection of social determinants, population health and health care delivery'} | TEDMED 2012 | So my freshman year of college I signed up for an internship in the housing unit at Greater Boston Legal Services. Showed up the first day ready to make coffee and photocopies, but was paired with this righteous, deeply inspired attorney named Jeff Purcell, who thrust me onto the front lines from the very first day. And over the course of nine months I had the chance to have dozens of conversations with low-income families in Boston who would come in presenting with housing issues, but always had an underlying health issue. So I had a client who came in, about to be evicted because he hasn't paid his rent. But he hasn't paid his rent, of course, because he's paying for his HIV medication and just can't afford both. We had moms who would come in, daughter has asthma, wakes up covered in cockroaches every morning. And one of our litigation strategies was actually to send me into the home of these clients with these large glass bottles. And I would collect the cockroaches, hot glue-gun them to this poster board that we'd bring to court for our cases. And we always won because the judges were just so grossed out. Far more effective, I have to say, than anything I later learned in law school. But over the course of these nine months, I grew frustrated with feeling like we were intervening too far downstream in the lives of our clients — that by the time they came to us, they were already in crisis. And at the end of my freshman year of college, I read an article about the work that Dr. Barry Zuckerman was doing as Chair of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center. And his first hire was a legal services attorney to represent the patients. So I called Barry, and with his blessing, in October 1995 walked into the waiting room of the pediatrics clinic at Boston Medical Center. I'll never forget, the TVs played this endless reel of cartoons. And the exhaustion of mothers who had taken two, three, sometimes four buses to bring their child to the doctor was just palpable. The doctors, it seemed, never really had enough time for all the patients, try as they might. And over the course of six months, I would corner them in the hallway and ask them a sort of naive but fundamental question: "If you had unlimited resources, what's the one thing you would give your patients?" And I heard the same story again and again, a story we've heard hundreds of times since then. They said, "Every day we have patients that come into the clinic — child has an ear infection, I prescribe antibiotics. But the real issue is there's no food at home. The real issue is that child is living with 12 other people in a two-bedroom apartment. And I don't even ask about those issues because there's nothing I can do. I have 13 minutes with each patient. Patients are piling up in the clinic waiting room. I have no idea where the nearest food pantry is. And I don't even have any help." In that clinic, even today, there are two social workers for 24,000 pediatric patients, which is better than a lot of the clinics out there. So Health Leads was born of these conversations — a simple model where doctors and nurses can prescribe nutritious food, heat in the winter and other basic resources for their patients the same way they prescribe medication. Patients then take their prescriptions to our desk in the clinic waiting room where we have a core of well-trained college student advocates who work side by side with these families to connect them out to the existing landscape of community resources. So we began with a card table in the clinic waiting room — totally lemonade stand style. But today we have a thousand college student advocates who are working to connect nearly 9,000 patients and their families with the resources that they need to be healthy. So 18 months ago I got this email that changed my life. And the email was from Dr. Jack Geiger, who had written to congratulate me on Health Leads and to share, as he said, a bit of historical context. In 1965 Dr. Geiger founded one of the first two community health centers in this country, in a brutally poor area in the Mississippi Delta. And so many of his patients came in presenting with malnutrition that be began prescribing food for them. And they would take these prescriptions to the local supermarket, which would fill them and then charge the pharmacy budget of the clinic. And when the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, D.C. — which was funding Geiger's clinic — found out about this, they were furious. And they sent this bureaucrat down to tell Geiger that he was expected to use their dollars for medical care — to which Geiger famously and logically responded, "The last time I checked my textbooks, the specific therapy for malnutrition was food." (Laughter) So when I got this email from Dr. Geiger, I knew I was supposed to be proud to be part of this history. But the truth is I was devastated. Here we are, 45 years after Geiger has prescribed food for his patients, and I have doctors telling me, "On those issues, we practice a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy." Forty-five years after Geiger, Health Leads has to reinvent the prescription for basic resources. So I have spent hours upon hours trying to make sense of this weird Groundhog Day. How is it that if for decades we had a pretty straightforward tool for keeping patients, and especially low-income patients, healthy, that we didn't use it? If we know what it takes to have a healthcare system rather than a sick-care system, why don't we just do it? These questions, in my mind, are not hard because the answers are complicated, they are hard because they require that we be honest with ourselves. My belief is that it's almost too painful to articulate our aspirations for our healthcare system, or even admit that we have any at all. Because if we did, they would be so removed from our current reality. But that doesn't change my belief that all of us, deep inside, here in this room and across this country, share a similar set of desires. That if we are honest with ourselves and listen quietly, that we all harbor one fiercely held aspiration for our healthcare: that it keep us healthy. This aspiration that our healthcare keep us healthy is an enormously powerful one. And the way I think about this is that healthcare is like any other system. It's just a set of choices that people make. What if we decided to make a different set of choices? What if we decided to take all the parts of healthcare that have drifted away from us and stand firm and say, "No. These things are ours. They will be used for our purposes. They will be used to realize our aspiration"? What if everything we needed to realize our aspiration for healthcare was right there in front of us just waiting to be claimed? So that's where Health Leads began. We started with the prescription pad — a very ordinary piece of paper — and we asked, not what do patients need to get healthy — antibiotics, an inhaler, medication — but what do patients need to be healthy, to not get sick in the first place? And we chose to use the prescription for that purpose. So just a few miles from here at Children's National Medical Center, when patients come into the doctor's office, they're asked a few questions. They're asked, "Are you running out of food at the end of the month? Do you have safe housing?" And when the doctor begins the visit, she knows height, weight, is there food at home, is the family living in a shelter. And that not only leads to a better set of clinical choices, but the doctor can also prescribe those resources for the patient, using Health Leads like any other sub-specialty referral. The problem is, once you get a taste of what it's like to realize your aspiration for healthcare, you want more. So we thought, if we can get individual doctors to prescribe these basic resources for their patients, could we get an entire healthcare system to shift its presumption? And we gave it a shot. So now at Harlem Hospital Center when patients come in with an elevated body mass index, the electronic medical record automatically generates a prescription for Health Leads. And our volunteers can then work with them to connect patients to healthy food and excercise programs in their communities. We've created a presumption that if you're a patient at that hospital with an elevated BMI, the four walls of the doctor's office probably aren't going to give you everything you need to be healthy. You need more. So on the one hand, this is just a basic recoding of the electronic medical record. And on the other hand, it's a radical transformation of the electronic medical record from a static repository of diagnostic information to a health promotion tool. In the private sector, when you squeeze that kind of additional value out of a fixed-cost investment, it's called a billion-dollar company. But in my world, it's called reduced obesity and diabetes. It's called healthcare — a system where doctors can prescribe solutions to improve health, not just manage disease. Same thing in the clinic waiting room. So every day in this country three million patients pass through about 150,000 clinic waiting rooms in this country. And what do they do when they're there? They sit, they watch the goldfish in the fish tank, they read extremely old copies of Good Housekeeping magazine. But mostly we all just sit there forever, waiting. How did we get here where we devote hundreds of acres and thousands of hours to waiting? What if we had a waiting room where you don't just sit when you're sick, but where you go to get healthy. If airports can become shopping malls and McDonald's can become playgrounds, surely we can reinvent the clinic waiting room. And that's what Health Leads has tried to do, to reclaim that real estate and that time and to use it as a gateway to connect patients to the resources they need to be healthy. So it's a brutal winter in the Northeast, your kid has asthma, your heat just got turned off, and of course you're in the waiting room of the ER, because the cold air triggered your child's asthma. But what if instead of waiting for hours anxiously, the waiting room became the place where Health Leads turned your heat back on? And of course all of this requires a broader workforce. But if we're creative, we already have that too. We know that our doctors and nurses and even social workers aren't enough, that the ticking minutes of health care are too constraining. Health just takes more time. It requires a non-clinical army of community health workers and case managers and many others. What if a small part of that next healthcare workforce were the 11 million college students in this country? Unencumbered by clinical responsibilities, unwilling to take no for an answer from those bureaucracies that tend to crush patients, and with an unparalleled ability for information retrieval honed through years of using Google. Now lest you think it improbable that a college volunteer can make this kind of commitment, I have two words for you: March Madness. The average NCAA Division I men's basketball player dedicates 39 hours a week to his sport. Now we may think that's good or bad, but in either case it's real. And Health Leads is based on the presumption that for too long we have asked too little of our college students when it comes to real impact in vulnerable communities. College sports teams say, "We're going to take dozens of hours at some field across campus at some ungodly hour of the morning and we're going to measure your performance, and your team's performance, and if you don't measure up or you don't show up, we're going to cut you off the team. But we'll make huge investments in your training and development, and we'll give you an extraordinary community of peers." And people line up out the door just for the chance to be part of it. So our feeling is, if it's good enough for the rugby team, it's good enough for health and poverty. Health Leads too recruits competitively, trains intensively, coaches professionally, demands significant time, builds a cohesive team and measures results — a kind of Teach for America for healthcare. Now in the top 10 cities in the U.S. with the largest number of Medicaid patients, each of those has at least 20,000 college students. New York alone has half a million college students. And this isn't just a sort of short-term workforce to connect patients to basic resources, it's a next generation healthcare leadership pipeline who've spent two, three, four years in the clinic waiting room talking to patients about their most basic health needs. And they leave with the conviction, the ability and the efficacy to realize our most basic aspirations for health care. And the thing is, there's thousands of these folks already out there. So Mia Lozada is Chief Resident of Internal Medicine at UCSF Medical Center, but for three years as an undergraduate she was a Health Leads volunteer in the clinic waiting room at Boston Medical Center. Mia says, "When my classmates write a prescription, they think their work is done. When I write a prescription, I think, can the family read the prescription? Do they have transportation to the pharmacy? Do they have food to take with the prescription? Do they have insurance to fill the prescription? Those are the questions I learned at Health Leads, not in medical school." Now none of these solutions — the prescription pad, the electronic medical record, the waiting room, the army of college students — are perfect. But they are ours for the taking — simple examples of the vast under-utilized healthcare resources that, if we reclaimed and redeployed, could realize our most basic aspiration of healthcare. So I had been at Legal Services for about nine months when this idea of Health Leads started percolating in my mind. And I knew I had to tell Jeff Purcell, my attorney, that I needed to leave. And I was so nervous, because I thought he was going to be disappointed in me for abandoning our clients for some crazy idea. And I sat down with him and I said, "Jeff, I have this idea that we could mobilize college students to address patients' most basic health needs." And I'll be honest, all I wanted was for him to not be angry at me. But he said this, "Rebecca, when you have a vision, you have an obligation to realize that vision. You must pursue that vision." And I have to say, I was like "Whoa. That's a lot of pressure." I just wanted a blessing, I didn't want some kind of mandate. But the truth is I've spent every waking minute nearly since then chasing that vision. I believe that we all have a vision for healthcare in this country. I believe that at the end of the day when we measure our healthcare, it will not be by the diseases cured, but by the diseases prevented. It will not be by the excellence of our technologies or the sophistication of our specialists, but by how rarely we needed them. And most of all, I believe that when we measure healthcare, it will be, not by what the system was, but by what we chose it to be. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
The shared wonder of film | {0: 'Beeban Kidron directed <em>Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason</em> and <em>Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit</em>. She also cofounded FILMCLUB, a charity for students devoted to the art of storytelling through film.'} | TEDSalon London Spring 2012 | Evidence suggests that humans in all ages and from all cultures create their identity in some kind of narrative form. From mother to daughter, preacher to congregant, teacher to pupil, storyteller to audience. Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers. But where, in our increasingly secular and fragmented world, do we offer communality of experience, unmediated by our own furious consumerism? And what narrative, what history, what identity, what moral code are we imparting to our young? Cinema is arguably the 20th century's most influential art form. Its artists told stories across national boundaries, in as many languages, genres and philosophies as one can imagine. Indeed, it is hard to find a subject that film has yet to tackle. During the last decade we've seen a vast integration of global media, now dominated by a culture of the Hollywood blockbuster. We are increasingly offered a diet in which sensation, not story, is king. What was common to us all 40 years ago — the telling of stories between generations — is now rarified. As a filmmaker, it worried me. As a human being, it puts the fear of God in me. What future could the young build with so little grasp of where they've come from and so few narratives of what's possible? The irony is palpable; technical access has never been greater, cultural access never weaker. And so in 2006 we set up FILMCLUB, an organization that ran weekly film screenings in schools followed by discussions. If we could raid the annals of 100 years of film, maybe we could build a narrative that would deliver meaning to the fragmented and restless world of the young. Given the access to technology, even a school in a tiny rural hamlet could project a DVD onto a white board. In the first nine months we ran 25 clubs across the U.K., with kids in age groups between five and 18 watching a film uninterrupted for 90 minutes. The films were curated and contextualized. But the choice was theirs, and our audience quickly grew to choose the richest and most varied diet that we could provide. The outcome, immediate. It was an education of the most profound and transformative kind. In groups as large as 150 and as small as three, these young people discovered new places, new thoughts, new perspectives. By the time the pilot had finished, we had the names of a thousand schools that wished to join. The film that changed my life is a 1951 film by Vittorio De Sica, "Miracle in Milan." It's a remarkable comment on slums, poverty and aspiration. I had seen the film on the occasion of my father's 50th birthday. Technology then meant we had to hire a viewing cinema, find and pay for the print and the projectionist. But for my father, the emotional and artistic importance of De Sica's vision was so great that he chose to celebrate his half-century with his three teenage children and 30 of their friends, "In order," he said, "to pass the baton of concern and hope on to the next generation." In the last shot of "Miracle in Milan," slum-dwellers float skyward on flying brooms. Sixty years after the film was made and 30 years after I first saw it, I see young faces tilt up in awe, their incredulity matching mine. And the speed with which they associate it with "Slumdog Millionaire" or the favelas in Rio speaks to the enduring nature. In a FILMCLUB season about democracy and government, we screened "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Made in 1939, the film is older than most of our members' grandparents. Frank Capra's classic values independence and propriety. It shows how to do right, how to be heroically awkward. It is also an expression of faith in the political machine as a force of honor. Shortly after "Mr. Smith" became a FILMCLUB classic, there was a week of all-night filibustering in the House of Lords. And it was with great delight that we found young people up and down the country explaining with authority what filibustering was and why the Lords might defy their bedtime on a point of principle. After all, Jimmy Stewart filibustered for two entire reels. In choosing "Hotel Rwanda," they explored genocide of the most brutal kind. It provoked tears as well as incisive questions about unarmed peace-keeping forces and the double-dealing of a Western society that picks its moral fights with commodities in mind. And when "Schindler's List" demanded that they never forget, one child, full of the pain of consciousness, remarked, "We already forgot, otherwise how did 'Hotel Rwanda' happen?" As they watch more films their lives got palpably richer. "Pickpocket" started a debate about criminality disenfranchisement. "To Sir, with Love" ignited its teen audience. They celebrated a change in attitude towards non-white Britons, but railed against our restless school system that does not value collective identity, unlike that offered by Sidney Poitier's careful tutelage. By now, these thoughtful, opinionated, curious young people thought nothing of tackling films of all forms — black and white, subtitled, documentary, non-narrative, fantasy — and thought nothing of writing detailed reviews that competed to favor one film over another in passionate and increasingly sophisticated prose. Six thousand reviews each school week vying for the honor of being review of the week. From 25 clubs, we became hundreds, then thousands, until we were nearly a quarter of a million kids in 7,000 clubs right across the country. And although the numbers were, and continue to be, extraordinary, what became more extraordinary was how the experience of critical and curious questioning translated into life. Some of our kids started talking with their parents, others with their teachers, or with their friends. And those without friends started making them. The films provided communality across all manner of divide. And the stories they held provided a shared experience. "Persepolis" brought a daughter closer to her Iranian mother, and "Jaws" became the way in which one young boy was able to articulate the fear he'd experienced in flight from violence that killed first his father then his mother, the latter thrown overboard on a boat journey. Who was right, who wrong? What would they do under the same conditions? Was the tale told well? Was there a hidden message? How has the world changed? How could it be different? A tsunami of questions flew out of the mouths of children who the world didn't think were interested. And they themselves had not known they cared. And as they wrote and debated, rather than seeing the films as artifacts, they began to see themselves. I have an aunt who is a wonderful storyteller. In a moment she can invoke images of running barefoot on Table Mountain and playing cops and robbers. Quite recently she told me that in 1948, two of her sisters and my father traveled on a boat to Israel without my grandparents. When the sailors mutinied at sea in a demand for humane conditions, it was these teenagers that fed the crew. I was past 40 when my father died. He never mentioned that journey. My mother's mother left Europe in a hurry without her husband, but with her three-year-old daughter and diamonds sewn into the hem of her skirt. After two years in hiding, my grandfather appeared in London. He was never right again. And his story was hushed as he assimilated. My story started in England with a clean slate and the silence of immigrant parents. I had "Anne Frank," "The Great Escape," "Shoah," "Triumph of the Will." It was Leni Riefenstahl in her elegant Nazi propaganda who gave context to what the family had to endure. These films held what was too hurtful to say out loud, and they became more useful to me than the whispers of survivors and the occasional glimpse of a tattoo on a maiden aunt's wrist. Purists may feel that fiction dissipates the quest of real human understanding, that film is too crude to tell a complex and detailed history, or that filmmakers always serve drama over truth. But within the reels lie purpose and meaning. As one 12-year-old said after watching "Wizard of Oz," "Every person should watch this, because unless you do you may not know that you too have a heart." We honor reading, why not honor watching with the same passion? Consider "Citizen Kane" as valuable as Jane Austen. Agree that "Boyz n the Hood," like Tennyson, offers an emotional landscape and a heightened understanding that work together. Each a piece of memorable art, each a brick in the wall of who we are. And it's okay if we remember Tom Hanks better than astronaut Jim Lovell or have Ben Kingsley's face superimposed onto that of Gandhi's. And though not real, Eve Harrington, Howard Beale, Mildred Pierce are an opportunity to discover what it is to be human, and no less helpful to understanding our life and times as Shakespeare is in illuminating the world of Elizabethan England. We guessed that film, whose stories are a meeting place of drama, music, literature and human experience, would engage and inspire the young people participating in FILMCLUB. What we could not have foreseen was the measurable improvements in behavior, confidence and academic achievement. Once-reluctant students now race to school, talk to their teachers, fight, not on the playground, but to choose next week's film — young people who have found self-definition, ambition and an appetite for education and social engagement from the stories they have witnessed. Our members defy the binary description of how we so often describe our young. They are neither feral nor myopically self-absorbed. They are, like other young people, negotiating a world with infinite choice, but little culture of how to find meaningful experience. We appeared surprised at the behaviors of those who define themselves by the size of the tick on their shoes, yet acquisition has been the narrative we have offered. If we want different values we have to tell a different story, a story that understands that an individual narrative is an essential component of a person's identity, that a collective narrative is an essential component of a cultural identity, and without it it is impossible to imagine yourself as part of a group. Because when these people get home after a screening of "Rear Window" and raise their gaze to the building next door, they have the tools to wonder who, apart from them, is out there and what is their story. Thank you. (Applause) |
Archaeology from space | {0: 'Like a modern-day Indiana Jones, Sarah Parcak uses satellite images to locate lost ancient sites. The winner of the 2016 TED Prize, her wish is to protect the world’s shared cultural heritage.'} | TED2012 | When I was a child growing up in Maine, one of my favorite things to do was to look for sand dollars on the seashores of Maine, because my parents told me it would bring me luck. But you know, these shells, they're hard to find. They're covered in sand, they're difficult to see. However, over time, I got used to looking for them. I started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them. This grew into a passion for finding things, a love for the past and archaeology. And eventually, when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough. Because all of the sudden, in Egypt, my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long, next to the Nile. And my sand dollars had grown to the size of cities. This is really what brought me to using satellite imagery. For trying to map the past, I knew that I had to see differently. So I want to show you an example of how we see differently using the infrared. This is a site located in the eastern Egyptian delta called Mendes. And the site visibly appears brown, but when we use the infrared and we process it, all of the sudden, using false color, the site appears as bright pink. What you are seeing are the actual chemical changes to the landscape caused by the building materials and activities of the ancient Egyptians. What I want to share with you today is how we've used satellite data to find an ancient Egyptian city, called Itjtawy, missing for thousands of years. Itjtawy was ancient Egypt's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom, about four thousand years ago. The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt, and the site is really important, because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion. Egyptologists have always known the site of Itjtawy was located somewhere near the pyramids of the two kings who built it, indicated within the red circles here, but somewhere within this massive flood plain. This area is huge — it's four miles by three miles in size. The Nile used to flow right next to the city of Itjtawy, and as it shifted and changed and moved over time to the east, it covered over the city. So, how do you find a buried city in a vast landscape? Finding it randomly would be the equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack, blindfolded, wearing baseball mitts. (Laughter) So what we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes. We started to be able to see where the Nile used to flow. But you can see in more detail, and even more interesting, this very slight raised area seen within the circle up here which we thought could possibly be the location of the city of Itjtawy. So we collaborated with Egyptian scientists to do coring work, which you see here. When I say coring, it's like ice coring, but instead of layers of climate change, you're looking for layers of human occupation. And, five meters down, underneath a thick layer of mud, we found a dense layer of pottery. What this shows is that at this possible location of Itjtawy, five meters down, we have a layer of occupation for several hundred years, dating to the Middle Kingdom, dating to the exact period of time we think Itjtawy is. We also found work stone — carnelian, quartz and agate that shows that there was a jeweler's workshop here. These might not look like much, but when you think about the most common stones used in jewelry from the Middle Kingdom, these are the stones that were used. So, we have a dense layer of occupation dating to the Middle Kingdom at this site. We also have evidence of an elite jeweler's workshop, showing that whatever was there was a very important city. No Itjtawy was here yet, but we're going to be returning to the site in the near future to map it out. And even more importantly, we have funding to train young Egyptians in the use of satellite technology so they can be the ones making great discoveries as well. So I wanted to end with my favorite quote from the Middle Kingdom — it was probably written at the city of Itjtawy four thousand years ago. "Sharing knowledge is the greatest of all callings. There's nothing like it in the land." So as it turns out, TED was not founded in 1984 AD. (Laughter) Making ideas actually started in 1984 BC at a not-lost-for-long city, found from above. It certainly puts finding seashells by the seashore in perspective. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
The myth of the gay agenda | {0: 'CNN and ESPN columnist LZ Granderson is a celebrated voice on sports, race and gay rights.'} | TEDxGrandRapids | When I was about 16 years old I can remember flipping through channels at home during summer vacation, looking for a movie to watch on HBO — and how many of you remember "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"? Oh yeah, great movie, right? — Well, I saw Matthew Broderick on the screen, and so I thought, "Sweet! Ferris Bueller. I'll watch this!" It wasn't Ferris Bueller. And forgive me Matthew Broderick, I know you've done other movies besides Ferris Bueller, but that's how I remember you; you're Ferris. But you weren't doing Ferris-y things at the time; you were doing gay things at the time. He was in a movie called "Torch Song Trilogy." And "Torch Song Trilogy" was based on a play about this drag queen who essentially was looking for love. Love and respect — that's what the whole film was about. And as I'm watching it, I'm realizing that they're talking about me. Not the drag queen part — I am not shaving my hair for anyone — but the gay part. The finding love and respect, the part about trying to find your place in the world. So as I'm watching this, I see this powerful scene that brought me to tears, and it stuck with me for the past 25 years. And there's this quote that the main character, Arnold, tells his mother as they're fighting about who he is and the life that he lives. "There's one thing more — there's just one more thing you better understand. I've taught myself to sew, cook, fix plumbing, build furniture, I can even pat myself on the back when necessary, all so I don't have to ask anyone for anything. There's nothing I need from anyone except for love and respect, and anyone who can't give me those two things has no place in my life." I remember that scene like it was yesterday; I was 16, I was in tears, I was in the closet, and I'm looking at these two people, Ferris Bueller and some guy I'd never seen before, fighting for love. When I finally got to a place in my life where I came out and accepted who I was, and was really quite happy, to tell you the truth, I was happily gay and I guess that's supposed to be right because gay means happy too. I realized there were a lot of people who weren't as gay as I was — gay being happy, not gay being attracted to the same sex. In fact, I heard that there was a lot of hate and a lot of anger and a lot of frustration and a lot of fear about who I was and the gay lifestyle. Now, I'm sitting here trying to figure out "the gay lifestyle," "the gay lifestyle," and I keep hearing this word over and over and over again: lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle. I've even heard politicians say that the gay lifestyle is a greater threat to civilization than terrorism. That's when I got scared. Because I'm thinking, if I'm gay and I'm doing something that's going to destroy civilization, I need to figure out what this stuff is, and I need to stop doing it right now. (Laughter) So, I took a look at my life, a hard look at my life, and I saw some things very disturbing. (Laughter) And I want to begin sharing these evil things that I've been doing with you, starting with my mornings. I drink coffee. Not only do I drink coffee, I know other gay people who drink coffee. I get stuck in traffic — evil, evil traffic. Sometimes I get stuck in lines at airports. I look around, and I go, "My God, look at all these gay people! We're all trapped in these lines! These long lines trying to get on an airplane! My God, this lifestyle that I'm living is so freaking evil!" I clean up. This is not an actual photograph of my son's room; his is messier. And because I have a 15-year-old, all I do is cook and cook and cook. Any parents out there of teenagers? All we do is cook for these people — they eat two, three, four dinners a night — it's ridiculous! This is the gay lifestyle. And after I'm done cooking and cleaning and standing in line and getting stuck in traffic, my partner and I, we get together and we decide that we're gonna go and have some wild and crazy fun. (Laughter) We're usually in bed before we find out who's eliminated on "American Idol." We have to wake up and find out the next day who's still on because we're too freaking tired to hear who stays on. This is the super duper evil gay lifestyle. Run for your heterosexual lives, people. (Applause) When my partner, Steve, and I first started dating, he told me this story about penguins. And I didn't know where he was going with it at first. He was kind of a little bit nervous when he was sharing it with me, but he told me that when a penguin finds a mate that they want to spend the rest of their life with, they present them with a pebble — the perfect pebble. And then he reaches into his pocket, and he brings this out to me. And I looked at it, and I was like, this is really cool. And he says, "I want to spend the rest of my life with you." So I wear this whenever I have to do something that makes me a little nervous, like, I don't know, a TEDx talk. I wear this when I am apart from him for a long period of time. And sometimes I just wear it just because. How many people out there are in love? Anyone in love out there? You might be gay. (Laughter) Because I, too, am in love, and apparently that's part of the gay lifestyle that I warned you about. (Applause) You may want to tell your spouse. Who, if they're in love, might be gay as well. How many of you are single? Any single people out there? You too might be gay! Because I know some gay people who are also single. It's really scary, this gay lifestyle thing; it's super duper evil and there's no end to it! It goes and goes and engulfs! It's really quite silly, isn't it? That's why I'm so happy to finally hear President Obama come out and say (Applause) that he supports — (Applause) that he supports marriage equality. It's a wonderful day in our country's history; it's a wonderful day in the globe's history to be able to have an actual sitting president say, enough of this — first to himself, and then to the rest of the world. It's wonderful. But there's something that's been disturbing me since he made that remark just a short time ago. And that is, apparently, this is just another move by the gay activists that's on the gay agenda. And I'm disturbed by this because I've been openly gay now for quite some time. I've been to all of the functions, I've been to fundraisers, I've written about the topic, and I have yet to receive my copy of this gay agenda. (Laughter) I've paid my dues on time, (Laughter) I've marched in gay pride flags parades and the whole nine, and I've yet to see a copy of the gay agenda. It's very, very frustrating, and I was feeling left out, like I wasn't quite gay enough. But then something wonderful happened: I was out shopping, as I tend to do, and I came across a bootleg copy of the official gay agenda. And I said to myself, "LZ, for so long, you have been denied this. When you get in front of this crowd, you're gonna share the news. You're gonna spread the gay agenda so no one else has to wonder, what exactly is in the gay agenda? What are these gays up to? What do they want?" So, without further ado, I will present to you, ladies and gentlemen — now be careful, 'cause it's evil — a copy, the official copy, of the gay agenda. (Music) The gay agenda, people! (Applause) There it is! Did you soak it all in? The gay agenda. Some of you may be calling it, what, the Constitution of the United States, is that what you call it too? The U.S. Constitution is the gay agenda. These gays, people like me, want to be treated like full citizens and it's all written down in plain sight. I was blown away when I saw it. I was like, wait, this is the gay agenda? Why didn't you just call it the Constitution so I knew what you were talking about? I wouldn't have been so confused; I wouldn't have been so upset. But there it is. The gay agenda. Run for your heterosexual lives. Did you know that in all the states where there is no shading that people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered can be kicked out of their apartments for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered? That's the only reason that a landlord needs to have them removed, because there's no protection from discrimination of GLBT people. Did you know in the states where there's no shading that you can be fired for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered? Not based upon the quality of your work, how long you've been there, if you stink, just if you're gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. All of which flies in the face of the gay agenda, also known as the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, this little amendment right here: "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." I'm looking at you, North Carolina. But you're not looking at the U.S. Constitution. This is the gay agenda: equality. Not special rights, but the rights that were already written by these people — these elitists, if you will. Educated, well-dressed, (Laughter) some would dare say questionably dressed. (Laughter) Nonetheless, our forefathers, right? The people that, we say, knew what they were doing when they wrote the Constitution — the gay agenda, if you will. All of that flies in the face of what they did. That is the reason why I felt it was imperative that I presented you with this copy of the gay agenda. Because I figured if I made it funny, you wouldn't be as threatened. I figured if I was a bit irreverent, you wouldn't find it serious. But when you see the map, and you see our state of Michigan — it's legal to fire someone for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, that it's legal to remove someone from their home because they're gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, then you realize that this whole conversation about marriage equality is not about stripping someone's rights away, it's about granting them the rights that [have] already been stated. And we're just trying to walk in those rights that have already been stated, that we've already agreed upon. There are people living in fear of losing their jobs so they don't show anyone who they really are right here at home. This isn't just about North Carolina; all those states that were clear, it's legal. If I could brag for a second, I have a 15-year-old son from my marriage. He has a 4.0. He is starting a new club at school, Policy Debate. He's a budding track star; he has almost every single record in middle school for every event that he competed in. He volunteers. He prays before he eats. I would like to think, as his father — and he lives with me primarily — that I had a little something to do with all of that. I would like to think that he's a good boy, a respectful young man. I would like to think that I've proven to be a capable father. But if I were to go to the state of Michigan today, and try to adopt a young person who is in an orphanage, I would be disqualified for only one reason: because I'm gay. It doesn't matter what I've already proven, what I can do with my heart. It's because of what the state of Michigan says that I am that I am disqualified for any sort of adoption. And that's not just about me, that's about so many other Michiganders, U.S. citizens, who don't understand why what they are is so much more significant than who they are. This story just keeps playing over and over and over again in our country's history. There was a time in which, I don't know, people who were black couldn't have the same rights. People who happened to be women didn't have the same rights, couldn't vote. There was a point in our history in which, if you were considered disabled, that an employer could just fire you, before the Americans with Disabilities Act. We keep doing this over and over again. And so here we are, 2012, gay agenda, gay lifestyle, and I'm not a good dad and people don't deserve to be able to protect their families because of what they are, not who they are. So when you hear the words "gay lifestyle" and "gay agenda" in the future, I encourage you to do two things: One, remember the U.S. Constitution, and then two, if you wouldn't mind looking to your left, please. Look to your right. That person next to you is a brother, is a sister. And they should be treated with love and respect. Thank you. |
Pop an ollie and innovate! | {0: 'Rodney Mullen is a legendary skateboarder who transformed the art of street skating.'} | TEDxUSC | (Music) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) So, that's what I've done with my life. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) As a kid, I grew up on a farm in Florida, and I did what most little kids do. I played a little baseball, did a few other things like that, but I always had the sense of being an outsider, and it wasn't until I saw pictures in the magazines that a couple other guys skate, I thought, "Wow, that's for me," you know? Because there was no coach standing directly over you, and these guys, they were just being themselves. There was no opponent directly across from you. And I loved that sense, so I started skating when I was about 10 years old, in 1977, and when I did, I picked it up pretty quickly. In fact, here's some footage from about 1984. It wasn't until 79 I won my first amateur championship, and then, by 81, I was 14, and I won my first world championship, which was amazing to me, and in a very real sense, that was the first real victory I had. Oh, watch this. This is a Casper slide, where the board's upside down. Mental note on that one. (Laughter) And this one here? An ollie. So, as she mentioned, that is overstated for sure, but that's why they called me the godfather of modern street skating. Here's some images of that. Now, I was about halfway through my pro career in, I would say, the mid-'80s. Freestyle itself — we developed all these flat ground tricks, as you saw, but there was evolving a new kind of skateboarding, where guys were taking it to the streets, and they were using that ollie, like I showed you. They were using it to get up onto stuff like bleachers and handrails and over stairwells and all kinds of cool stuff. So it was evolving upwards. In fact, when someone tells you they're a skater today, they pretty much mean a street skater, because freestyle, it took about five years for it to die, and at that stage, I'd been a "champion" champion for 11 years, which — Phew! And suddenly, it was over for me, that's it — it was gone. They took my pro model off the shelf, which was essentially pronouncing you dead, publicly. That's how you make your money, you know? You have a signature board and wheels and shoes and clothes. I had all that stuff, and it's gone. The crazy thing was, there was a really liberating sense about it, because I no longer had to protect my record as a champion. "Champion," again. Champion sounds so goofy, but it's what it was, right? What drew me to skateboarding, the freedom, was now restored, where I could just create things, because that's where the joy was for me, always, was creating new stuff. The other thing that I had was a deep well of tricks to draw from that were rooted in these flat ground tricks. Stuff the normal guys were doing was very much different. So, as humbling and rotten as it was — And believe me, it was rotten. I would go to skate spots, and I was already "famous guy," right? And everyone thought I was good, but in this new terrain, I was horrible. So people would go, "Oh, what happened to Mullen?" (Laughter) So, humbling as it was, I began again. Here are some tricks that I started to bring to that new terrain. And again, there's this undergirding layer of influence of freestyle — Oh, that one? That's, like, the hardest thing I've ever done. OK, look at that, it's a Darkslide. See how it's sliding on the backside? Those are super fun, and, actually, not that hard. You know, at the very root of that, see, Caspers, see how you throw it? Simple as that, right? No biggie. And your front foot, the way it grabs it — I'd seen someone slide on the back of the board like that, and I was like, "How can I get it over?" Because that had not yet been done. And then it dawned on me, and here's part of what I'm saying. I had an infrastructure. I had this deep layer, where it was like, oh my gosh, it's just your foot. It's just the way you throw your board over. Just let the ledge do that, and it's easy, and the next thing you know, there's 20 more tricks based out of the variations. So that's the kind of thing — here, check this out, here's another way, and I won't overdo this. A little indulgent, I understand. There's something called a Primo slide. It is the funnest trick ever to do. It's like skimboarding. And this one, look how it slides sideways, every which way? OK, so when you're skating, and you take a fall, the board slips that way or that way; it's kind of predictable. This? It goes every which way — it's like a cartoon, the falls, and that's what I love the most about it. It's so much fun to do. In fact, when I started doing them, I remember, because I got hurt. I had to get a knee surgery, right? So there were a couple of weeks where I couldn't skate at all. It would give out on me, and I would watch the guys, I'd go to this warehouse where a lot of the guys were skating, my friends, and I was like, "I've got to do something new, I want to do something new. I want to start fresh." And so the night before my surgery, I'd watched, and I was like, "How am I going to do this?" So I ran up, and I jumped on my board, and I Cavemanned, and I flipped it down, and I remember thinking, I landed so light-footed, thinking, if my knee gives, they'll just have more work to do in the morning. (Laughter) And so, when it was the crazy thing. I don't know how many of you guys have had surgery, but — (Laughter) you are so helpless, right? You're on this gurney and you're watching the ceiling go by, every time, it's always that, and right when they're putting the mask on you before you go to sleep, all I was thinking is, "Man, when I wake up and I get better, the first thing I'm going to do is film that trick." And indeed I did, it was the very first thing I filmed, which was awesome. I told you a little bit about the evolution of the tricks. Consider that content, in a sense. What we do as street skaters is, you have these tricks — Say I'm working on Darkslides, or a Primo, that you guys know this stuff now. (Laughter) What you do is, you cruise around the same streets that you've seen a hundred times, but suddenly, because you already have something in this fixed domain of this target, it's like, what will match this trick? How can I expand, how can the context, how can the environment change the very nature of what I do? So you drive and drive and drive, and, actually I've got to admit, just because I was struggling with this because I'm here, but I'll just say it, is, I cannot tell you, not only to be here in front of you, but what a privilege it is to be at US campus, because I have been escorted off of this campus so many times. (Laughter) (Applause) So let me give you another example of how context shapes content. This is a place not that far from here, It's a rotten neighborhood. Your first consideration is, am I going to get beat up? You go out and — See this wall? It's fairly mellow, and it's beckoning to do bank tricks, right? But there's this other aspect of it for wheelies, so check this out. There's a few tricks, again, how environment changes the nature of your tricks. Freestyle oriented, manual down — wheelie down. Watch, this one? Oh, I love this, it's like surfing, this one, the way you catch it. This one, a little sketchy going backwards, and watch the back foot. Oops — (Laughter) Mental note right there. Again, we'll get back to that. (Laughter) Here, back foot, back foot. OK, up there? That was called a 360 flip. Notice how the board flipped and spun this way, both axes. And another example of how the context changed, and the creative process for me and for most skaters, is, you go, you get out of the car, you check for security, you check for stuff. (Laughter) It's funny, you get to know their rhythms, you know, the guys that cruise around — (Laughter) Skateboarding is such a humbling thing, man. No matter how good you are, you've still got to deal with — So you hit this wall, and when I hit it, the first thing you do is you fall forward, and I'm like, all right, all right. As you adjust ... you punch it up, and then when I would do that, it was throwing my shoulder this way ... which as I was doing it, I was like, "Oh wow, that's begging for a 360 flip," because that's how you load up for a 360 flip. And so this is what I want to emphasize that, as you can imagine, all of these tricks are made of submovements, executive motor functions, more granular to the degree to which I can't quite tell you, but one thing I do know is, every trick is made of combining two or three or four or five movements. And so, as I'm going up, these things are floating around, and you have to sort of let the cognitive mind rest back, pull it back a little bit, and let your intuition go as you feel these things. And these submovements are kind of floating around, and as the wall hits you, they connect themselves to an extent, and that's when the cognitive mind: "Oh, 360 flip, I'm going to make that." So that's how that works to me, the creative process, the process itself, of street skating. So, next — Oh, mind you ... (Laughter) Those are the community. These are some of the best skaters in the world. These are my friends — oh my gosh, they're such good people. And the beauty of skateboarding is that, no one guy is the best. In fact, I know this is rotten to say, they're my friends, but a couple of them actually don't look that comfortable on their board. What makes them great is the degree to which they use their skateboarding to individuate themselves. Every single one of these guys, you look at them, you can see a silhouette of them, and you realize, "Oh, that's him, that's Haslam, that's Koston, there's these guys, these are the guys." And skaters, I think they tend to be outsiders who seek a sense of belonging, but belonging on their own terms. And real respect is given by how much we take what other guys do, these basic tricks, 360 flips, we take that, we make it our own, and then we contribute back to the community the inner way that edifies the community itself. The greater the contribution, the more we express and form our individuality, which is so important to a lot of us who feel like rejects to begin with. The summation of that gives us something we could never achieve as an individual. I should say this. There's some sort of beautiful symmetry that the degree to which we connect to a community is in proportion to our individuality, which we are expressing by what we do. Next, these guys, very similar community that's extremely conducive to innovation. (Laughter) Notice a couple of these shots from the police department. But it is quite similar, I mean, what is it to hack, right? It's knowing a technology so well that you can manipulate it and steer it to do things it was never intended to do, right? And they're not all bad. You can be a Linux kernel hacker, make it more stable, right? More safe, more secure. You can be an iOS hacker, make your iPhone do stuff it wasn't supposed to. Not authorized, but not illegal. And then, you've got some of these guys, right? What they do is very similar to our creative process. They connect disparate information, and they bring it together in a way that a security analyst doesn't expect. It doesn't make them good people, but it's at the heart of engineering, at the heart of a creative community, an innovative community, and the open source community, the basic ethos of it is, take what other people do, make it better, give it back so we all rise further. Very similar communities, very similar. We have our edgier sides, too. (Laughter) It's funny, my dad was right. These are my peers. But I respect what they do, and they respect what I do, because they can do things, it's amazing what they can do. In fact, one of them, he was Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year for San Diego County, so they're not — you never know who you're dealing with. We've all had some degree of fame. In fact, I've had so much success that I strangely always feel unworthy of. I've had a patent, and that was cool, and we started a company, and it grew, and it became the biggest, and then it went down, and then it became the biggest again, which is harder than the first time, and then we sold it, and then we sold it again. So I've had some success. And in the end, when you've had all of these things, what is it that continues to drive you? As I mentioned, the knee stuff and these things, what is it that will punch you? Because it's not just the mind. What is it that will punch you and make you do something and bring it to another level, and when you've had it all, sometimes, guys, they die on the vine with all of that talent, and one of the things we've had, all of us, is fame — I think the best kind of fame, because you can take it off. I've been all around the world, and there will be a thousand kids crying out your name, and it's such a weird, visceral experience. It's like, it's disorienting. And you get in a car, and you drive away, and 10-minute drive, and you get out, and no one gives a rat's who you are. (Laughter) And it gives you that clarity of perspective of, man, I'm just me, and popularity, what does that really mean again? Not much. It's peer respect that drives us. That's the one thing that makes us do what we do. I've had over a dozen bones, this guy, over, eight, 10 concussions, to the point where it's comedy, right? It is actually comedy, they mess with him. (Laughter) Next, and this is something deeper. I think I was on tour when I was reading one of the Feynman biographies. It was the red one or the blue one. And he made this statement that was so profound to me. It was that the Nobel Prize was the tombstone on all great work, and it resonated because I had won 35 out of 36 contests that I'd entered over 11 years, and it made me bananas. In fact, winning isn't the word, I won it once. The rest of the time, you're just defending, and you get into this, turtle posture, you know? Where you're not doing — it usurped the joy of what I loved to do because I was no longer doing it to create and have fun, and when it died out from under me, that was one of the most liberating things, because I could create. And look, I understand that I am on the very edge of preachy, here. I'm not here to do that. It's just that I'm in front of a very privileged audience. If you guys aren't already leaders in your community, you probably will be, and if there's anything I can give you that will transcend what I've gotten from skateboarding, the only things of meaning, I think, and of permanence, it's not fame, it's not all these things. What it is, is that there's an intrinsic value in creating something for the sake of creating it, and better than that, because I'm 46 years old, or I'll be 46, and how pathetic is that I'm still skateboarding, but there is — there is this beauty in dropping it into a community of your own making, and seeing it dispersed, and seeing younger, more talented, just different talent, take it to levels you can never imagine, because that lives on. So thank you for your time. (Applause) Kristina Holly: I have a question for you. (Applause) So you've really reinvented yourself in the past, from freestyle to street, and, I think it was about four years ago you officially retired. Is that it? What's next? Rodney Mullen: That's a good question. KG: Something tells me it's not the end. RM: Yeah. Every time you think you've chased something down, it's funny, no matter how good you are, and I know guys like this, it feels like you're polishing a turd, you know? (Laughter) And I thought, the only way I can extend this is to change something infrastructural. And so that's what I proceeded to do, through a long story, one of desperation, so if I do it, rather than talk about it, if I do it, you'll be the first to know. KG: All right, we won't ask you any more. RM: You'll get a text. KG: Right, thank you, good job. RM: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
Women should represent women in media | {0: 'Journalist Megan Kamerick fights for well-balanced storytelling in media.\r\n'} | TEDxABQ | Like most journalists, I'm an idealist. I love unearthing good stories, especially untold stories. I just didn't think that in 2011, women would still be in that category. I'm the President of the Journalism and Women Symposium — JAWS. That's Sharky. (Laughter) I joined 10 years ago because I wanted female role models, and I was frustrated by the lagging status of women in our profession and what that meant for our image in the media. We make up half the population of the world, but we're just 24 percent of the news subjects quoted in news stories. And we're just 20 percent of the experts quoted in stories. And now, with today's technology, it's possible to remove women from the picture completely. This is a picture of President Barack Obama and his advisors, tracking the killing of Osama bin Laden. You can see Hillary Clinton on the right. Let's see how the photo ran in an Orthodox Jewish newspaper based in Brooklyn. Hillary's completely gone. (Laughter) The paper apologized, but said it never runs photos of women; they might be sexually provocative. (Laughter) This is an extreme case, yes. But the fact is, women are only 19 percent of the sources in stories on politics, and only 20 percent in stories on the economy. The news continues to give us a picture where men outnumber women in nearly all occupational categories, except two: students and homemakers. (Laughter) So we all get a very distorted picture of reality. The problem is, of course, there aren't enough women in newsrooms. They report at just 37 percent of stories in print, TV and radio. Even in stories on gender-based violence, men get an overwhelming majority of print space and airtime. Case in point: This March, the New York Times ran a story by James McKinley about a gang rape of a young girl, 11 years old, in a small Texas town. McKinley writes that the community is wondering, "How could their boys have been drawn into this?" "Drawn into this" — like they were seduced into committing an act of violence. And the first person he quotes says, "These boys will have to live with this the rest of their lives." (Groans, laughter) You don't hear much about the 11-year-old victim, except that she wore clothes that were a little old for her and she wore makeup. The Times was deluged with criticism. Initially, it defended itself, and said, "These aren't our views. This is what we found in our reporting." Now, here's a secret you probably know already: Your stories are constructed. As reporters, we research, we interview. We try to give a good picture of reality. We also have our own unconscious biases. But The Times makes it sound like anyone would have reported this story the same way. I disagree with that. So three weeks later, The Times revisits the story. This time, it adds another byline to it with McKinley's: Erica Goode. What emerges is a truly sad, horrific tale of a young girl and her family trapped in poverty. She was raped numerous times by many men. She had been a bright, easygoing girl. She was maturing quickly, physically, but her bed was still covered with stuffed animals. It's a very different picture. Perhaps the addition of Ms. Goode is what made this story more complete. The Global Media Monitoring Project has found that stories by female reporters are more likely to challenge stereotypes than those by male reporters. At KUNM here in Albuquerque, Elaine Baumgartel did some graduate research on the coverage of violence against women. What she found was many of these stories tend to blame victims and devalue their lives. They tend to sensationalize, and they lack context. So for her graduate work, she did a three-part series on the murder of 11 women, found buried on Albuquerque's West Mesa. She tried to challenge those patterns and stereotypes in her work and she tried to show the challenges that journalists face from external sources, their own internal biases and cultural norms. And she worked with an editor at National Public Radio to try to get a story aired nationally. She's not sure that would have happened if the editor had not been a female. Stories in the news are more than twice as likely to present women as victims than men, and women are more likely to be defined by their body parts. Wired magazine, November 2010. Yes, the issue was about breast-tissue engineering. Now I know you're all distracted, so I'll take that off. (Laughter) Eyes up here. (Laughter) So — (Applause) Here's the thing: Wired almost never puts women on its cover. Oh, there have been some gimmicky ones — Pam from "The Office," manga girls, a voluptuous model covered in synthetic diamonds. Texas State University professor Cindy Royal wondered in her blog how are young women like her students supposed to feel about their roles in technology, reading Wired. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, defended his choice and said there aren't enough women, prominent women in technology to sell a cover, to sell an issue. Part of that is true, there aren't as many prominent women in technology. Here's my problem with that argument: Media tells us every day what's important, by the stories they choose and where they place them; it's called agenda setting. How many people knew the founders of Facebook and Google before their faces were on a magazine cover? Putting them there made them more recognizable. Now, Fast Company Magazine embraces that idea. This is its cover from November 15, 2010. The issue is about the most prominent and influential women in technology. Editor Robert Safian told the Poynter Institute, "Silicon Valley is very white and very male. But that's not what Fast Company thinks the business world will look like in the future, so it tries to give a picture of where the globalized world is moving." By the way, apparently, Wired took all this to heart. This was its issue in April. (Laughter) That's Limor Fried, the founder of Adafruit Industries, in the Rosie the Riveter pose. It would help to have more women in positions of leadership in media. A recent global survey found that 73 percent of the top media-management jobs are still held by men. But this is also about something far more complex: our own unconscious biases and blind spots. Shankar Vedantam is the author of "The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives." He told the former ombudsman at National Public Radio, who was doing a report on how women fare in NPR coverage, unconscious bias flows throughout most of our lives. It's really difficult to disentangle those strands. But he did have one suggestion. He used to work for two editors who said every story had to have at least one female source. He balked at first, but said he eventually followed the directive happily, because his stories got better and his job got easier. Now, I don't know if one of the editors was a woman, but that can make the biggest difference. The Dallas Morning News won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for a series it did on women around the world, but one of the reporters told me she's convinced it never would have happened if they had not had a female assistant foreign editor, and they would not have gotten some of those stories without female reporters and editors on the ground, particularly one on female genital mutilation — men would just not be allowed into those situations. This is an important point to consider, because much of our foreign policy now revolves around countries where the treatment of women is an issue, such as Afghanistan. What we're told in terms of arguments against leaving this country is that the fate of the women is primary. Now, I'm sure a male reporter in Kabul can find women to interview. Not so sure about rural, traditional areas, where I'm guessing women can't talk to strange men. It's important to keep talking about this, in light of Lara Logan. She was the CBS News correspondent who was brutally sexually assaulted in Egypt's Tahrir Square, right after this photo was taken. Almost immediately, pundits weighed in, blaming her and saying things like, "You know, maybe women shouldn't be sent to cover those stories." I never heard anyone say this about Anderson Cooper and his crew, who were attacked covering the same story. One way to get more women into leadership is to have other women mentor them. One of my board members is an editor at a major global media company, but she never thought about this as a career path, until she met female role models at JAWS. But this is not just a job for super-journalists or my organization. You all have a stake in a strong, vibrant media. Analyze your news. And speak up when there are gaps missing in coverage, like people at The New York Times did. Suggest female sources to reporters and editors. Remember — a complete picture of reality may depend upon it. And I'll leave you with a video clip that I first saw in [1987] when I was a student in London. It's for The Guardian newspaper. It's actually long before I ever thought about becoming a journalist, but I was very interested in how we learn to perceive our world. Narrator: An event seen from one point of view gives one impression. Seen from another point of view, it gives quite a different impression. But it's only when you get the whole picture, you can fully understand what's going on. [The Guardian] Megan Kamerick: I think you'll all agree that we'd be better off if we all had the whole picture. |
Lessons from death row inmates | {0: 'David R. Dow has defended over 100 death row inmates in 20 years.'} | TEDxAustin | Two weeks ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my wife Katya, and we were talking about what I was going to talk about today. We have an 11-year-old son; his name is Lincoln. He was sitting at the same table, doing his math homework. And during a pause in my conversation with Katya, I looked over at Lincoln and I was suddenly thunderstruck by a recollection of a client of mine. My client was a guy named Will. He was from North Texas. He never knew his father very well, because his father left his mom while she was pregnant with him. And so, he was destined to be raised by a single mom, which might have been all right except that this particular single mom was a paranoid schizophrenic, and when Will was five years old, she tried to kill him with a butcher knife. She was taken away by authorities and placed in a psychiatric hospital, and so for the next several years Will lived with his older brother, until he committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart. And after that Will bounced around from one family member to another, until, by the time he was nine years old, he was essentially living on his own. That morning that I was sitting with Katya and Lincoln, I looked at my son, and I realized that when my client, Will, was his age, he'd been living by himself for two years. Will eventually joined a gang and committed a number of very serious crimes, including, most seriously of all, a horrible, tragic murder. And Will was ultimately executed as punishment for that crime. But I don't want to talk today about the morality of capital punishment. I certainly think that my client shouldn't have been executed, but what I would like to do today instead is talk about the death penalty in a way I've never done before, in a way that is entirely noncontroversial. I think that's possible, because there is a corner of the death penalty debate — maybe the most important corner — where everybody agrees, where the most ardent death penalty supporters and the most vociferous abolitionists are on exactly the same page. That's the corner I want to explore. Before I do that, though, I want to spend a couple of minutes telling you how a death penalty case unfolds, and then I want to tell you two lessons that I have learned over the last 20 years as a death penalty lawyer from watching well more than a hundred cases unfold in this way. You can think of a death penalty case as a story that has four chapters. The first chapter of every case is exactly the same, and it is tragic. It begins with the murder of an innocent human being, and it's followed by a trial where the murderer is convicted and sent to death row, and that death sentence is ultimately upheld by the state appellate court. The second chapter consists of a complicated legal proceeding known as a state habeas corpus appeal. The third chapter is an even more complicated legal proceeding known as a federal habeas corpus proceeding. And the fourth chapter is one where a variety of things can happen. The lawyers might file a clemency petition, they might initiate even more complex litigation, or they might not do anything at all. But that fourth chapter always ends with an execution. When I started representing death row inmates more than 20 years ago, people on death row did not have a right to a lawyer in either the second or the fourth chapter of this story. They were on their own. In fact, it wasn't until the late 1980s that they acquired a right to a lawyer during the third chapter of the story. So what all of these death row inmates had to do was rely on volunteer lawyers to handle their legal proceedings. The problem is that there were way more guys on death row than there were lawyers who had both the interest and the expertise to work on these cases. And so inevitably, lawyers drifted to cases that were already in chapter four — that makes sense, of course. Those are the cases that are most urgent; those are the guys who are closest to being executed. Some of these lawyers were successful; they managed to get new trials for their clients. Others of them managed to extend the lives of their clients, sometimes by years, sometimes by months. But the one thing that didn't happen was that there was never a serious and sustained decline in the number of annual executions in Texas. In fact, as you can see from this graph, from the time that the Texas execution apparatus got efficient in the mid- to late 1990s, there have only been a couple of years where the number of annual executions dipped below 20. In a typical year in Texas, we're averaging about two people a month. In some years in Texas, we've executed close to 40 people, and this number has never significantly declined over the last 15 years. And yet, at the same time that we continue to execute about the same number of people every year, the number of people who we're sentencing to death on an annual basis has dropped rather steeply. So we have this paradox, which is that the number of annual executions has remained high but the number of new death sentences has gone down. Why is that? It can't be attributed to a decline in the murder rate, because the murder rate has not declined nearly so steeply as the red line on that graph has gone down. What has happened instead is that juries have started to sentence more and more people to prison for the rest of their lives without the possibility of parole, rather than sending them to the execution chamber. Why has that happened? It hasn't happened because of a dissolution of popular support for the death penalty. Death penalty opponents take great solace in the fact that death penalty support in Texas is at an all-time low. Do you know what all-time low in Texas means? It means that it's in the low 60 percent. Now, that's really good compared to the mid-1980s, when it was in excess of 80 percent, but we can't explain the decline in death sentences and the affinity for life without the possibility of parole by an erosion of support for the death penalty, because people still support the death penalty. What's happened to cause this phenomenon? What's happened is that lawyers who represent death row inmates have shifted their focus to earlier and earlier chapters of the death penalty story. So 25 years ago, they focused on chapter four. And they went from chapter four 25 years ago to chapter three in the late 1980s. And they went from chapter three in the late 1980s to chapter two in the mid-1990s. And beginning in the mid- to late 1990s, they began to focus on chapter one of the story. Now, you might think that this decline in death sentences and the increase in the number of life sentences is a good thing or a bad thing. I don't want to have a conversation about that today. All that I want to tell you is that the reason that this has happened is because death penalty lawyers have understood that the earlier you intervene in a case, the greater the likelihood that you're going to save your client's life. That's the first thing I've learned. Here's the second thing I learned: My client Will was not the exception to the rule; he was the rule. I sometimes say, if you tell me the name of a death row inmate — doesn't matter what state he's in, doesn't matter if I've ever met him before — I'll write his biography for you. And eight out of 10 times, the details of that biography will be more or less accurate. And the reason for that is that 80 percent of the people on death row are people who came from the same sort of dysfunctional family that Will did. Eighty percent of the people on death row are people who had exposure to the juvenile justice system. That's the second lesson that I've learned. Now we're right on the cusp of that corner where everybody's going to agree. People in this room might disagree about whether Will should have been executed, but I think everybody would agree that the best possible version of his story would be a story where no murder ever occurs. How do we do that? When our son Lincoln was working on that math problem two weeks ago, it was a big, gnarly problem. And he was learning how, when you have a big old gnarly problem, sometimes the solution is to slice it into smaller problems. That's what we do for most problems — in math, in physics, even in social policy — we slice them into smaller, more manageable problems. But every once in a while, as Dwight Eisenhower said, the way you solve a problem is to make it bigger. The way we solve this problem is to make the issue of the death penalty bigger. We have to say, all right. We have these four chapters of a death penalty story, but what happens before that story begins? How can we intervene in the life of a murderer before he's a murderer? What options do we have to nudge that person off of the path that is going to lead to a result that everybody — death penalty supporters and death penalty opponents — still think is a bad result: the murder of an innocent human being? You know, sometimes people say that something isn't rocket science. And by that, what they mean is rocket science is really complicated and this problem that we're talking about now is really simple. Well that's rocket science; that's the mathematical expression for the thrust created by a rocket. What we're talking about today is just as complicated. What we're talking about today is also rocket science. My client Will and 80 percent of the people on death row had five chapters in their lives that came before the four chapters of the death penalty story. I think of these five chapters as points of intervention, places in their lives when our society could've intervened in their lives and nudged them off of the path that they were on that created a consequence that we all — death penalty supporters or death penalty opponents — say was a bad result. Now, during each of these five chapters: when his mother was pregnant with him; in his early childhood years; when he was in elementary school; when he was in middle school and then high school; and when he was in the juvenile justice system — during each of those five chapters, there were a wide variety of things that society could have done. In fact, if we just imagine that there are five different modes of intervention, the way that society could intervene in each of those five chapters, and we could mix and match them any way we want, there are 3,000 — more than 3,000 — possible strategies that we could embrace in order to nudge kids like Will off of the path that they're on. So I'm not standing here today with the solution. But the fact that we still have a lot to learn, that doesn't mean that we don't know a lot already. We know from experience in other states that there are a wide variety of modes of intervention that we could be using in Texas, and in every other state that isn't using them, in order to prevent a consequence that we all agree is bad. I'll just mention a few. I won't talk today about reforming the legal system. That's probably a topic that is best reserved for a room full of lawyers and judges. Instead, let me talk about a couple of modes of intervention that we can all help accomplish, because they are modes of intervention that will come about when legislators and policymakers, when taxpayers and citizens, agree that that's what we ought to be doing and that's how we ought to be spending our money. We could be providing early childhood care for economically disadvantaged and otherwise troubled kids, and we could be doing it for free. And we could be nudging kids like Will off of the path that we're on. There are other states that do that, but we don't. We could be providing special schools, at both the high school level and the middle school level, but even in K-5, that target economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids, and particularly kids who have had exposure to the juvenile justice system. There are a handful of states that do that; Texas doesn't. There's one other thing we can be doing — well, there are a bunch of other things — there's one other thing that I'm going to mention, and this is going to be the only controversial thing that I say today. We could be intervening much more aggressively into dangerously dysfunctional homes, and getting kids out of them before their moms pick up butcher knives and threaten to kill them. If we're going to do that, we need a place to put them. Even if we do all of those things, some kids are going to fall through the cracks and they're going to end up in that last chapter before the murder story begins, they're going to end up in the juvenile justice system. And even if that happens, it's not yet too late. There's still time to nudge them, if we think about nudging them rather than just punishing them. There are two professors in the Northeast — one at Yale and one at Maryland — they set up a school that is attached to a juvenile prison. And the kids are in prison, but they go to school from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. Now, it was logistically difficult. They had to recruit teachers who wanted to teach inside a prison, they had to establish strict separation between the people who work at the school and the prison authorities, and most dauntingly of all, they needed to invent a new curriculum because you know what? People don't come into and out of prison on a semester basis. (Laughter) But they did all those things. Now, what do all of these things have in common? What all of these things have in common is that they cost money. Some of the people in the room might be old enough to remember the guy on the old oil filter commercial. He used to say, "Well, you can pay me now or you can pay me later." What we're doing in the death penalty system is we're paying later. But the thing is that for every 15,000 dollars that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs down the road. Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense. I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will. It was the day that he was going to be executed, and we were just talking. There was nothing left to do in his case. And we were talking about his life. And he was talking first about his dad, who he hardly knew, who had died, and then about his mom, who he did know, who was still alive. And I said to him, "I know the story. I've read the records. I know that she tried to kill you." I said, "But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that." I said, "I don't remember anything from when I was five years old. Maybe you just remember somebody telling you." And he looked at me and he leaned forward, and he said, "Professor," — he'd known me for 12 years, he still called me Professor. He said, "Professor, I don't mean any disrespect by this, but when your mama picks up a butcher knife that looks bigger than you are, and chases you through the house screaming she's going to kill you, and you have to lock yourself in the bathroom and lean against the door and holler for help until the police get there," he looked at me and he said, "that's something you don't forget." I hope there's one thing you all won't forget: In between the time you arrived here this morning and the time we break for lunch, there are going to be four homicides in the United States. We're going to devote enormous social resources to punishing the people who commit those crimes, and that's appropriate because we should punish people who do bad things. But three of those crimes are preventable. If we make the picture bigger and devote our attention to the earlier chapters, then we're never going to write the first sentence that begins the death penalty story. Thank you. (Applause) |
Are we over-medicalized? | {0: 'Ivan Oransky is the executive editor of Reuters Health, and has done pioneering work in covering scientific retractions.'} | TEDMED 2012 | Those of you who have seen the film "Moneyball," or have read the book by Michael Lewis, will be familiar with the story of Billy Beane. Billy was supposed to be a tremendous ballplayer; all the scouts told him so. They told his parents that they predicted that he was going to be a star. But what actually happened when he signed the contract — and by the way, he didn't want to sign that contract, he wanted to go to college — which is what my mother, who actually does love me, said that I should do too, and I did — well, he didn't do very well. He struggled mightily. He got traded a couple of times, he ended up in the Minors for most of his career, and he actually ended up in management. He ended up as a General Manager of the Oakland A's. Now for many of you in this room, ending up in management, which is also what I've done, is seen as a success. I can assure you that for a kid trying to make it in the Bigs, going into management ain't no success story. It's a failure. And what I want to talk to you about today, and share with you, is that our healthcare system, our medical system, is just as bad at predicting what happens to people in it — patients, others — as those scouts were at predicting what would happen to Billy Beane. And yet, every day thousands of people in this country are diagnosed with preconditions. We hear about pre-hypertension, we hear about pre-dementia, we hear about pre-anxiety, and I'm pretty sure that I diagnosed myself with that in the green room. We also refer to subclinical conditions. There's subclinical atherosclerosis, subclinical hardening of the arteries, obviously linked to heart attacks, potentially. One of my favorites is called subclinical acne. If you look up subclinical acne, you may find a website, which I did, which says that this is the easiest type of acne to treat. You don't have the pustules or the redness and inflammation. Maybe that's because you don't actually have acne. I have a name for all of these conditions, it's another precondition: I call them preposterous. In baseball, the game follows the pre-game. Season follows the pre-season. But with a lot of these conditions, that actually isn't the case, or at least it isn't the case all the time. It's as if there's a rain delay, every single time in many cases. We have pre-cancerous lesions, which often don't turn into cancer. And yet, if you take, for example, subclinical osteoporosis, a bone thinning disease, the precondition, otherwise known as osteopenia, you would have to treat 270 women for three years in order to prevent one broken bone. That's an awful lot of women when you multiply by the number of women who were diagnosed with this osteopenia. And so is it any wonder, given all of the costs and the side effects of the drugs that we're using to treat these preconditions, that every year we're spending more than two trillion dollars on healthcare and yet 100,000 people a year — and that's a conservative estimate — are dying not because of the conditions they have, but because of the treatments that we're giving them and the complications of those treatments? We've medicalized everything in this country. Women in the audience, I have some pretty bad news that you already know, and that's that every aspect of your life has been medicalized. Strike one is when you hit puberty. You now have something that happens to you once a month that has been medicalized. It's a condition; it has to be treated. Strike two is if you get pregnant. That's been medicalized as well. You have to have a high-tech experience of pregnancy, otherwise something might go wrong. Strike three is menopause. We all know what happened when millions of women were given hormone replacement therapy for menopausal symptoms for decades until all of a sudden we realized, because a study came out, a big one, NIH-funded. It said, actually, a lot of that hormone replacement therapy may be doing more harm than good for many of those women. Just in case, I don't want to leave the men out — I am one, after all — I have really bad news for all of you in this room, and for everyone listening and watching elsewhere: You all have a universally fatal condition. So, just take a moment. It's called pre-death. Every single one of you has it, because you have the risk factor for it, which is being alive. But I have some good news for you, because I'm a journalist, I like to end things in a happy way or a forward-thinking way. And that good news is that if you can survive to the end of my talk, which we'll see if that happens for everyone, you will be a pre-vivor. I made up pre-death. If I used someone else's pre-death, I apologize, I think I made it up. I didn't make up pre-vivor. Pre-vivor is what a particular cancer advocacy group would like everyone who just has a risk factor, but hasn't actually had that cancer, to call themselves. You are a pre-vivor. We've had HBO here this morning. I'm wondering if Mark Burnett is anywhere in the audience, I'd like to suggest a reality TV show called "Pre-vivor." If you develop a disease, you're off the island. But the problem is, we have a system that is completely — basically promoted this. We've selected, at every point in this system, to do what we do, and to give everyone a precondition and then eventually a condition, in some cases. Start with the doctor-patient relationship. Doctors, most of them, are in a fee-for-service system. They are basically incentivized to do more — procedures, tests, prescribe medications. Patients come to them, they want to do something. We're Americans, we can't just stand there, we have to do something. And so they want a drug. They want a treatment. They want to be told, this is what you have and this is how you treat it. If the doctor doesn't give you that, you go somewhere else. That's not very good for doctors' business. Or even worse, if you are diagnosed with something eventually, and the doctor didn't order that test, you get sued. We have pharmaceutical companies that are constantly trying to expand the indications, expand the number of people who are eligible for a given treatment, because that obviously helps their bottom line. We have advocacy groups, like the one that's come up with pre-vivor, who want to make more and more people feel they are at risk, or might have a condition, so that they can raise more funds and raise visibility, et cetera. But this isn't actually, despite what journalists typically do, this isn't actually about blaming particular players. We are all responsible. I'm responsible. I actually root for the Yankees, I mean talk about rooting for the worst possible offender when it comes to doing everything you can do. Thank you. But everyone is responsible. I went to medical school, and I didn't have a course called How to Think Skeptically, or How Not to Order Tests. We have this system where that's what you do. And it actually took being a journalist to understand all these incentives. You know, economists like to say, there are no bad people, there are just bad incentives. And that's actually true. Because what we've created is a sort of Field of Dreams, when it comes to medical technology. So when you put another MRI in every corner, you put a robot in every hospital saying that everyone has to have robotic surgery. Well, we've created a system where if you build it, they will come. But you can actually perversely tell people to come, convince them that they have to come. It was when I became a journalist that I really realized how I was part of this problem, and how we all are part of this problem. I was medicalizing every risk factor, I was writing stories, commissioning stories, every day, that were trying to, not necessarily make people worried, although that was what often happened. But, you know, there are ways out. I saw my own internist last week, and he said to me, "You know," and he told me something that everyone in this audience could have told me for free, but I paid him for the privilege, which is that I need to lose some weight. Well, he's right. I've had honest-to-goodness high blood pressure for a dozen years now, same age my father got it, and it's a real disease. It's not pre-hypertension, it's actual hypertension, high blood pressure. Well, he's right, but he didn't say to me, well, you have pre-obesity or you have pre-diabetes, or anything like that. He didn't say, better start taking this Statin, you need to lower your cholesterol. No, he said, "Go out and lose some weight. Come back and see me in a bit, or just give me a call and let me know how you're doing." So that's, to me, a way forward. Billy Beane, by the way, learned the same thing. He learned, from watching this kid who he eventually hired, who was really successful for him, that it wasn't swinging for the fences, it wasn't swinging at every pitch like the sluggers do, which is what all the expensive teams like the Yankees like to — they like to pick up those guys. This kid told him, you know, you gotta watch the guys, and you gotta go out and find the guys who like to walk, because getting on base by a walk is just as good, and in our healthcare system we need to figure out, is that really a good pitch or should we let it go by and not swing at everything? Thanks. |
The electric rise and fall of Nikola Tesla | {0: 'Using technology and an array of special effects, Marco Tempest develops immersive environments that allow viewers to viscerally experience the magic of technology.'} | TED2012 | As a magician, I'm always interested in performances that incorporate elements of illusion. And one of the most remarkable was the tanagra theater, which was popular in the early part of the 20th century. It used mirrors to create the illusion of tiny people performing on a miniature stage. Now, I won't use mirrors, but this is my digital tribute to the tanagra theater. So let the story begin. On a dark and stormy night — really! — it was the 10th of July, 1856. Lightning lit the sky, and a baby was born. His name was Nikola, Nikola Tesla. Now the baby grew into a very smart guy. Let me show you. Tesla, what is 236 multiplied by 501? Nikola Tesla: The result is 118,236. Marco Tempest: Now Tesla's brain worked in the most extraordinary way. When a word was mentioned, an image of it instantly appeared in his mind. Tree. Chair. Girl. They were hallucinations, which vanished the moment he touched them. Probably a form of synesthesia. But it was something he later turned to his advantage. Where other scientists would play in their laboratory, Tesla created his inventions in his mind. NT: To my delight, I discovered I could visualize my inventions with the greatest facility. MT: And when they worked in the vivid playground of his imagination, he would build them in his workshop. NT: I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them as real in my mind, and there I run it, test it and improve it. Only then do I construct it. MT: His great idea was alternating current. But how could he convince the public that the millions of volts required to make it work were safe? To sell his idea, he became a showman. NT: We are at the dawn of a new age, the age of electricity. I have been able, through careful invention, to transmit, with the mere flick of a switch, electricity across the ether. It is the magic of science. (Applause) Tesla has over 700 patents to his name: radio, wireless telegraphy, remote control, robotics. He even photographed the bones of the human body. But the high point was the realization of a childhood dream: harnessing the raging powers of Niagara Falls, and bringing light to the city. But Tesla's success didn't last. NT: I had bigger ideas. Illuminating the city was only the beginning. A world telegraphy center — imagine news, messages, sounds, images delivered to any point in the world instantly and wirelessly. MT: It's a great idea; it was a huge project. Expensive, too. NT: They wouldn't give me the money. MT: Well, maybe you shouldn't have told them it could be used to contact other planets. NT: Yes, that was a big mistake. MT: Tesla's career as an inventor never recovered. He became a recluse. Dodged by death, he spent much of his time in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. NT: Everything I did, I did for mankind, for a world where there would be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich, where products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life. MT: Nikola Tesla died on the 7th of January, 1943. His final resting place is a golden globe that contains his ashes at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. His legacy is with us still. Tesla became the man who lit the world, but this was only the beginning. Tesla's insight was profound. NT: Tell me, what will man do when the forests disappear, and the coal deposits are exhausted? MT: Tesla thought he had the answer. We are still asking the question. Thank you. (Applause) |
The 100,000-student classroom | {0: 'Peter Norvig is a leading American computer scientist, expert on artificial intelligence and the Director of Research at Google Inc.'} | TED2012 | Everyone is both a learner and a teacher. This is me being inspired by my first tutor, my mom, and this is me teaching Introduction to Artificial Intelligence to 200 students at Stanford University. Now the students and I enjoyed the class, but it occurred to me that while the subject matter of the class is advanced and modern, the teaching technology isn't. In fact, I use basically the same technology as this 14th-century classroom. Note the textbook, the sage on the stage, and the sleeping guy in the back. (Laughter) Just like today. So my co-teacher, Sebastian Thrun, and I thought, there must be a better way. We challenged ourselves to create an online class that would be equal or better in quality to our Stanford class, but to bring it to anyone in the world for free. We announced the class on July 29th, and within two weeks, 50,000 people had signed up for it. And that grew to 160,000 students from 209 countries. We were thrilled to have that kind of audience, and just a bit terrified that we hadn't finished preparing the class yet. (Laughter) So we got to work. We studied what others had done, what we could copy and what we could change. Benjamin Bloom had showed that one-on-one tutoring works best, so that's what we tried to emulate, like with me and my mom, even though we knew it would be one-on-thousands. Here, an overhead video camera is recording me as I'm talking and drawing on a piece of paper. A student said, "This class felt like sitting in a bar with a really smart friend who's explaining something you haven't grasped, but are about to." And that's exactly what we were aiming for. Now, from Khan Academy, we saw that short 10-minute videos worked much better than trying to record an hour-long lecture and put it on the small-format screen. We decided to go even shorter and more interactive. Our typical video is two minutes, sometimes shorter, never more than six, and then we pause for a quiz question, to make it feel like one-on-one tutoring. Here, I'm explaining how a computer uses the grammar of English to parse sentences, and here, there's a pause and the student has to reflect, understand what's going on and check the right boxes before they can continue. Students learn best when they're actively practicing. We wanted to engage them, to have them grapple with ambiguity and guide them to synthesize the key ideas themselves. We mostly avoid questions like, "Here's a formula, now tell me the value of Y when X is equal to two." We preferred open-ended questions. One student wrote, "Now I'm seeing Bayes networks and examples of game theory everywhere I look." And I like that kind of response. That's just what we were going for. We didn't want students to memorize the formulas; we wanted to change the way they looked at the world. And we succeeded. Or, I should say, the students succeeded. And it's a little bit ironic that we set about to disrupt traditional education, and in doing so, we ended up making our online class much more like a traditional college class than other online classes. Most online classes, the videos are always available. You can watch them any time you want. But if you can do it any time, that means you can do it tomorrow, and if you can do it tomorrow, well, you may not ever get around to it. (Laughter) So we brought back the innovation of having due dates. (Laughter) You could watch the videos any time you wanted during the week, but at the end of the week, you had to get the homework done. This motivated the students to keep going, and it also meant that everybody was working on the same thing at the same time, so if you went into a discussion forum, you could get an answer from a peer within minutes. Now, I'll show you some of the forums, most of which were self-organized by the students themselves. From Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, we learned the concept of "flipping" the classroom. Students watched the videos on their own, and then they come together to discuss them. From Eric Mazur, I learned about peer instruction, that peers can be the best teachers, because they're the ones that remember what it's like to not understand. Sebastian and I have forgotten some of that. Of course, we couldn't have a classroom discussion with tens of thousands of students, so we encouraged and nurtured these online forums. And finally, from Teach For America, I learned that a class is not primarily about information. More important is motivation and determination. It was crucial that the students see that we're working hard for them and they're all supporting each other. Now, the class ran 10 weeks, and in the end, about half of the 160,000 students watched at least one video each week, and over 20,000 finished all the homework, putting in 50 to 100 hours. They got this statement of accomplishment. So what have we learned? Well, we tried some old ideas and some new and put them together, but there are more ideas to try. Sebastian's teaching another class now. I'll do one in the fall. Stanford Coursera, Udacity, MITx and others have more classes coming. It's a really exciting time. But to me, the most exciting part of it is the data that we're gathering. We're gathering thousands of interactions per student per class, billions of interactions altogether, and now we can start analyzing that, and when we learn from that, do experimentations, that's when the real revolution will come. And you'll be able to see the results from a new generation of amazing students. (Applause) |
How to air-condition outdoor spaces | {0: 'Wolfgang Kessling and his team at Transsolar designed the solar cooling and comfort concepts that helped Qatar win the bid for the 2022 football World Cup.'} | TEDxSummit | Good evening. We are in this wonderful open-air amphitheater and we are enjoying ourselves in that mild evening temperature tonight, but when Qatar will host the football World Cup 10 years from now, 2022, we already heard it will be in the hot, very hot and sunny summer months of June and July. And when Qatar has been assigned to the World Cup all, many people around the world have been wondering, how would it be possible that football players show spectacular football, run around in this desert climate? How would it be possible that spectators sit, enjoy themselves in open-air stadia in this hot environment? Together with the architects of Albert Speer & Partner, our engineers from Transsolar have been supporting, have been developing open-air stadia based on 100 percent solar power, on 100 percent solar cooling. Let me tell you about that, but let me start with comfort. Let me start with the aspect of comfort, because many people are confusing ambient temperature with thermal comfort. We are used to looking at charts like that, and you see this red line showing the air temperature in June and July, and yes, that's right, it's picking up to 45 degrees C. It's actually very hot. But air temperature is not the full set of climatic parameters which define comfort. Let me show you analysis a colleague of mine did looking on different football, World Cups, Olympic Games around the world, looking on the comfort and analyzing the comfort people have perceived at these different sport activities, and let me start with Mexico. Mexico temperature has been, air temperature has been something between 15, up to 30 degrees C, and people enjoyed themselves. It was a very comfortable game in Mexico City. Have a look. Orlando, same kind of stadium, open-air stadium. People have been sitting in the strong sun, in the very high humidity in the afternoon, and they did not enjoy. It was not comfortable. The air temperature was not too high, but it was not comfortable during these games. What about Seoul? Seoul, because of broadcast rights, all the games have been in the late afternoon. Sun has already been set, so the games have been perceived as comfortable. What about Athens? Mediterranean climate, but in the sun it was not comfortable. They didn't perceive comfort. And we know that from Spain, we know that "sol y sombra." If you have a ticket, and you get a ticket for the shade, you pay more, because you're in a more comfortable environment. What about Beijing? It's again, sun in the day and high humidity, and it was not comfortable. So if I overlay, and if you overlay all these comfort envelopes, what we see is, in all these places, air temperature has been ranging something from 25 to 35, and if you go on the line, 30, of 30 degrees C ambient temperatures. If you go along that line you see there has been all kind of comfort, all kinds of perceived outdoor comfort, ranging from very comfortable to very uncomfortable. So why is that? This is because there are more parameters influencing our thermal comfort, which is the sun, the direct sun, the diffuse sun, which is wind, strong wind, mild wind, which is air humidity, which is the radiant temperature of the surroundings where we are in. And this is air temperature. All these parameters go into the comfort feeling of our human body, and scientists have developed a parameter, which is the perceived temperature, where all these parameters go in and help designers to understand which is the driving parameter that I feel comfort or that I don't feel comfort. Which is the driving parameter which gives me a perceived temperature? And these parameters, these climatic parameters are related to the human metabolism. Because of our metabolism, we as human beings, we produce heat. I'm excited, I'm talking to you, I'm probably producing 150 watts at the moment. You are sitting, you are relaxed, you're looking at me. It's probably 100 watts each person is producing, and we need to get rid of that energy. I need, with my body, to get rid of the energy, and the harder it is for myself, for my body, to get rid of the energy, the less comfort I feel. That's it. And if I don't get rid of the energy, I will die. If we overlay what happens during the football World Cup, what will happen in June, July, we will see, yes, air temperature will be much higher, but because the games and the plays will be in the afternoon, it's probably the same comfort rating we've found in other places which has perceived as non-comfortable. So we sat together with a team which prepared the Bid Book, or goal, that we said, let's aim for perceived temperature, for outdoor comfort in this range, which is perceived with a temperature of 32 degrees Celsius perceived temperature, which is extremely comfortable. People would feel really fine in an open outdoor environment. But what does it mean? If we just look on what happens, we see, temperature's too high. If we apply the best architectural design, climate engineering design, we won't get much better. So we need to do something active. We need, for instance, to bring in radiant cooling technology, and we need to combine this with so-called soft conditioning. And how does it look like in a stadium? So the stadium has a few elements which create that outdoor comfort. First of all, it's shading. It needs to protect where the people are sitting against strong and warm wind. But that's not all what we need to do. We need to use active systems. Instead of blowing a hurricane of chilled air through the stadium, we can use radiant cooling technologies, like a floor heating system where water pipes are embedded in the floor. And just by using cold water going through the water pipes, you can release the heat which is absorbed during the day in the stadium, so you can create that comfort, and then by adding dry air instead of down-chilled air, the spectators and the football players can adjust to their individual comfort needs, to their individual energy balance. They can adjust and find their comfort they need to find. There are 12 stadia probably to come, but there are 32 training pitches where all the individual countries are going to train. We applied the same concept: shading of the training pitch, using a shelter against wind, then using the grass. Natural-watered lawn is a very good cooling source stabilizing temperature, and using dehumidified air to create comfort. But even the best passive design wouldn't help. We need active system. And how do we do that? Our idea for the bid was 100 percent solar cooling, based on the idea that we use the roof of the stadia, we cover the roofs of the stadia with PV systems. We don't borrow any energy from history. We are not using fossil energies. We are not borrowing energy from our neighbors. We're using energy we can harvest on our roofs, and also on the training pitches, which will be covered with large, flexible membranes, and we will see in the next years an industry coming up with flexible photovoltaics, giving the possibilities of shading against strong sun and producing electric energy in the same time. And this energy now is harvested throughout the year, sent into the grid, is replacing fossils in the grid, and when I need it for the cooling, I take it back from the grid and I use the solar energy which I have brought to the grid back when I need it for the solar cooling. And I can do that in the first year and I can balance that in the next 10, and the next 20 years, this energy, which is necessary to condition a World Cup in Qatar, the next 20 years, this energy goes into the grid of Qatar. So this — (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) This is not only useful for stadia. We can use that also in open-air places and streets, and we've been working on the City of the Future in Masdar, which is in the United Emirates, Abu Dhabi. And I had the pleasure to work on the central plaza. And the same idea to use there, to create outdoor conditions which are perceived as comfortable. People enjoy going there instead of going into a shopping mall, which is chilled down and which is cooled. We wanted to create an outdoor space which is so comfortable that people can go there in the early afternoon, even in these sunny and hot summer months, and they can enjoy and meet there with their families. (Applause) And the same concept: shade against the sun, shade against the wind, and use, use and take advantage of the sun you can harvest on your footprint. And these beautiful umbrellas. So I'd like to encourage you to pay attention to your thermal comfort, to your thermal environment, tonight and tomorrow, and if you'd like to learn more about that, I invite you to go to our website. We uploaded a very simple perceived temperature calculator where you can check out about your outdoor comfort. And I also hope that you share the idea that if engineers and designers can use all these different climatic parameters, it will be possible to create really good and comfortable outdoor conditions, to change our thermal perception that we feel comfortable in an outdoor environment, and we can do that with the best passive design, but also using the energy source of the site in Qatar which is the sun. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) Shukran. (Applause) |
Tour the solar system from home | {0: 'Jon Nguyen is an award winning aeronautics and graphics engineer at NASA.'} | TEDxSanDiego | As a kid, I was fascinated with all things air and space. I would watch Nova on PBS. Our school would show Bill Nye the Science Guy. When I was in elementary school, my next door neighbor, he gave me a book for my birthday. It was an astronomy book, and I poured over that thing for hours on end, and it was a combination of all these things that inspired me to pursue space exploration as my own personal dream, and part of that dream was, I always wanted to just fly around the solar system and visit different planets and visit moons and spacecraft. Well, a number of years later, I graduated from UCLA and I found myself at NASA, working for the jet propulsion laboratory, and there our team was challenged to create a 3D visualization of the solar system, and today I want to show you what we've done so far. Now, the kicker is, everything I'm about to do here you can do at home, because we built this for the public for you guys to use. So what you're looking at right now is the Earth. You can see the United States and California and San Diego, and you can use the mouse or the keyboard to spin things around. Now, this isn't new. Anyone who's used Google Earth has seen this before, but one thing we like to say in our group is, we do the opposite of Google Earth. Google Earth goes from this view down to your backyard. We go from this view out to the stars. So the Earth is cool, but what we really want to show are the spacecraft, so I'm going to bring the interface back up, and now you're looking at a number of satellites orbiting the Earth. These are a number of our science space Earth orbiters. We haven't included military satellites and weather satellites and communication satellites and reconnaissance satellites. If we did, it would be a complete mess, because there's a lot of stuff out there. And the cool thing is, we actually created 3D models for a number of these spacecraft, so if you want to visit any of these, all you need to do is double-click on them. So I'm going to find the International Space Station, double-click, and it will take us all the way down to the ISS. And now you're riding along with the ISS where it is right now. And the other cool thing is, not only can we move the camera around, we can also control time, so I can slide this jog dial here to shuttle time forward, and now we can see what a sunset on the ISS would look like, and they get one every 90 minutes. (Laughter) All right, so what about the rest of it? Well, I can click on this home button over here, and that will take us up to the inner solar system, and now we're looking at the rest of the solar system. You can see, there's Saturn, there's Jupiter, and while we're here, I want to point out something. It's actually pretty busy. Here we have the Mars Science Laboratory on its way to Mars, just launched last weekend. Here we have Juno on its cruise to Jupiter, there. We have Dawn orbiting Vesta, and we have over here New Horizons on a straight shot to Pluto. And I mention this because there's this strange public perception that NASA's dead, that the space shuttles stopped flying and all of the sudden there's no more spacecraft out there. Well, a lot of what NASA does is robotic exploration, and we have a lot of spacecraft out there. Granted, we're not sending humans up at the moment, well at least with our own launch vehicles, but NASA is far from dead, and one of the reasons why we write a program like this is so that people realize that there's so many other things that we're doing. Anyway, while we're here, again, if you want to visit anything, all you need to do is double-click. So I'm just going to double-click on Vesta, and here we have Dawn orbiting Vesta, and this is happening right now. I'm going to double-click on Uranus, and we can see Uranus rotating on its side along with its moons. You can see how it's tilted at about 89 degrees. And just being able to visit different places and go through different times, we have data from 1950 to 2050. Granted, we don't have everything in between, because some of the data is hard to get. Just being able to visit places in different times, you can explore this for hours, literally hours on end, but I want to show you one thing in particular, so I'm going to open up the destination tab, spacecraft outer planet missions, Voyager 1, and I'm going to bring up the Titan flyby. So now we've gone back in time. We're now riding along with Voyager 1. The date here is November 11, 1980. Now, there's a funny thing going on here. It doesn't look like anything's going on. It looks like I've paused the program. It's actually running at real rate right now, one second per second, and in fact, Voyager 1 here is flying by Titan at I think it's 38,000 miles per hour. It only looks like nothing's moving because, well, Saturn here is 700,000 miles away, and Titan here is 4,000 to 5,000 miles away. It's just the vastness of space makes it look like nothing's happening. But to make it more interesting, I'm going to speed up time, and we can watch as Voyager 1 flies by Titan, which is a hazy moon of Saturn. It actually has a very thick atmosphere. And I'm going to recenter the camera on Saturn, here. I'm going to pull out, and I want to show you Voyager 1 as it flies by Saturn. There's a point to be made here. With a 3D visualization like this, we can not only just say Voyager 1 flew by Saturn. There's a whole story to tell here. And even better, because it's an interactive application, you can tell the story for yourself. If you want to pause it, you can pause it. If you want to keep going, if you want to change the camera angle, you can do that, and because of that, I can show you that Voyager 1 doesn't just fly by Saturn. It actually flies underneath Saturn. Now, what happens is, as it flies underneath Saturn, Saturn grabs it gravitationally and flings it up and out of the solar system, so if I just keep letting this go, you can see Voyager 1 fly up like that. And, in fact, I'm going to go back to the solar system. I'm going to go back to today, now, and I want to show you where Voyager 1 is. Right there, above, way above the solar system, way beyond our solar system. And here's the thing. Now you know how it got there. Now you know why, and to me, that's the point of this program. You can manipulate it yourself. You can fly around yourself and you can learn for yourself. You know, the theme today is "The World In Your Grasp." Well, we're trying to give you the solar system in your grasp — (Laughter) — and we hope once it's there, you'll be able to learn for yourself what we've done out there, and what we're about to do. And my personal dream is for kids to take this and explore and see the wonders out there and be inspired, as I was as a kid, to pursue STEM education and to pursue a dream in space exploration. Thank you. (Applause) |
India's invisible innovation | {0: 'Nirmalya Kumar is a professor of Marketing at the London Business School and a passionate voice for new entrepreneurs in India.'} | TEDxLondonBusinessSchool | Over the last two decades, India has become a global hub for software development and offshoring of back office services, as we call it, and what we were interested in finding out was that because of this huge industry that has started over the last two decades in India, offshoring software development and back office services, there's been a flight of white collar jobs from the developed world to India. When this is combined with the loss of manufacturing jobs to China, it has, you know, led to considerable angst amongst the Western populations. In fact, if you look at polls, they show a declining trend for support for free trade in the West. Now, the Western elites, however, have said this fear is misplaced. For example, if you have read — I suspect many of you have done so — read the book by Thomas Friedman called "The World Is Flat," he said, basically, in his book that, you know, this fear for free trade is wrong because it assumes, it's based on a mistaken assumption that everything that can be invented has been invented. In fact, he says, it's innovation that will keep the West ahead of the developing world, with the more sophisticated, innovative tasks being done in the developed world, and the less sophisticated, shall we say, drudge work being done in the developing world. Now, what we were trying to understand was, is this true? Could India become a source, or a global hub, of innovation, just like it's become a global hub for back office services and software development? And for the last four years, my coauthor Phanish Puranam and I spent investigating this topic. Initially, or, you know, as people would say, you know, in fact the more aggressive people who are supporting the Western innovative model, say, "Where are the Indian Googles, iPods and Viagras, if the Indians are so bloody smart?" (Laughter) So initially, when we started our research, we went and met several executives, and we asked them, "What do you think? Will India go from being a favored destination for software services and back office services to a destination for innovation?" They laughed. They dismissed us. They said, "You know what? Indians don't do innovation." The more polite ones said, "Well, you know, Indians make good software programmers and accountants, but they can't do the creative stuff." Sometimes, it took a more, took a veneer of sophistication, and people said, "You know, it's nothing to do with Indians. It's really the rule-based, regimented education system in India that is responsible for killing all creativity." They said, instead, if you want to see real creativity, go to Silicon Valley, and look at companies like Google, Microsoft, Intel. So we started examining the R&D and innovation labs of Silicon Valley. Well, interestingly, what you find there is, usually you are introduced to the head of the innovation lab or the R&D center as they may call it, and more often than not, it's an Indian. (Laughter) So I immediately said, "Well, but you could not have been educated in India, right? You must have gotten your education here." It turned out, in every single case, they came out of the Indian educational system. So we realized that maybe we had the wrong question, and the right question is, really, can Indians based out of India do innovative work? So off we went to India. We made, I think, about a dozen trips to Bangalore, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Delhi, Hyderabad, you name it, to examine what is the level of corporate innovation in these cities. And what we found was, as we progressed in our research, was, that we were asking really the wrong question. When you ask, "Where are the Indian Googles, iPods and Viagras?" you are taking a particular perspective on innovation, which is innovation for end users, visible innovation. Instead, innovation, if you remember, some of you may have read the famous economist Schumpeter, he said, "Innovation is novelty in how value is created and distributed." It could be new products and services, but it could also be new ways of producing products. It could also be novel ways of organizing firms and industries. Once you take this, there's no reason to restrict innovation, the beneficiaries of innovation, just to end users. When you take this broader conceptualization of innovation, what we found was, India is well represented in innovation, but the innovation that is being done in India is of a form we did not anticipate, and what we did was we called it "invisible innovation." And specifically, there are four types of invisible innovation that are coming out of India. The first type of invisible innovation out of India is what we call innovation for business customers, which is led by the multinational corporations, which have — in the last two decades, there have been 750 R&D centers set up in India by multinational companies employing more than 400,000 professionals. Now, when you consider the fact that, historically, the R&D center of a multinational company was always in the headquarters, or in the country of origin of that multinational company, to have 750 R&D centers of multinational corporations in India is truly a remarkable figure. When we went and talked to the people in those innovation centers and asked them what are they working on, they said, "We are working on global products." They were not working on localizing global products for India, which is the usual role of a local R&D. They were working on truly global products, and companies like Microsoft, Google, AstraZeneca, General Electric, Philips, have already answered in the affirmative the question that from their Bangalore and Hyderabad R&D centers they are able to produce products and services for the world. But of course, as an end user, you don't see that, because you only see the name of the company, not where it was developed. The other thing we were told then was, "Yes, but, you know, the kind of work that is coming out of the Indian R&D center cannot be compared to the kind of work that is coming out of the U.S. R&D centers." So my coauthor Phanish Puranam, who happens to be one of the smartest people I know, said he's going to do a study. What he did was he looked at those companies that had an R&D center in USA and in India, and then he looked at a patent that was filed out of the U.S. and a similar patent filed out of the same company's subsidiary in India, so he's now comparing the patents of R&D centers in the U.S. with R&D centers in India of the same company to find out what is the quality of the patents filed out of the Indian centers and how do they compare with the quality of the patents filed out of the U.S. centers? Interestingly, what he finds is — and by the way, the way we look at the quality of a patent is what we call forward citations: How many times does a future patent reference the older patent? — he finds something very interesting. What we find is that the data says that the number of forward citations of a patent filed out of a U.S. R&D subsidiary is identical to the number of forward citations of a patent filed by an Indian subsidiary of the same company within that company. So within the company, there's no difference in the forward citation rates of their Indian subsidiaries versus their U.S. subsidiaries. So that's the first kind of invisible innovation coming out of India. The second kind of invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call outsourcing innovation to Indian companies, where many companies today are contracting Indian companies to do a major part of their product development work for their global products which are going to be sold to the entire world. For example, in the pharma industry, a lot of the molecules are being developed, but you see a major part of that work is being sent to India. For example, XCL Technologies, they developed two of the mission critical systems for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, one to avoid collisions in the sky, and another to allow landing in zero visibility. But of course, when you climb onto the Boeing 787, you are not going to know that this is invisible innovation out of India. The third kind of invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call process innovations, because of an injection of intelligence by Indian firms. Process innovation is different from product innovation. It's about how do you create a new product or develop a new product or manufacture a new product, but not a new product itself? Only in India do millions of young people dream of working in a call center. What happens — You know, it's a dead end job in the West, what high school dropouts do. What happens when you put hundreds of thousands of smart, young, ambitious kids on a call center job? Very quickly, they get bored, and they start innovating, and they start telling the boss how to do this job better, and out of this process innovation comes product innovations, which are then marketed around the world. For example, 24/7 Customer, traditional call center company, used to be a traditional call center company. Today they're developing analytical tools to do predictive modeling so that before you pick up the phone, you can guess or predict what this phone call is about. It's because of an injection of intelligence into a process which was considered dead for a long time in the West. And the last kind of innovation, invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call management innovation. It's not a new product or a new process but a new way to organize work, and the most significant management innovation to come out of India, invented by the Indian offshoring industry is what we call the global delivery model. What the global delivery model allows is, it allows you to take previously geographically core-located tasks, break them up into parts, send them around the world where the expertise and the cost structure exists, and then specify the means for reintegrating them. Without that, you could not have any of the other invisible innovations today. So, what I'm trying to say is, what we are finding in our research is, that if products for end users is the visible tip of the innovation iceberg, India is well represented in the invisible, large, submerged portion of the innovation iceberg. Now, this has, of course, some implications, and so we developed three implications of this research. The first is what we called sinking skill ladder, and now I'm going to go back to where I started my conversation with you, which was about the flight of jobs. Now, of course, when we first, as a multinational company, decide to outsource jobs to India in the R&D, what we are going to do is we are going to outsource the bottom rung of the ladder to India, the least sophisticated jobs, just like Tom Friedman would predict. Now, what happens is, when you outsource the bottom rung of the ladder to India for innovation and for R&D work, at some stage in the very near future you are going to have to confront a problem, which is where does the next step of the ladder people come from within your company? So you have two choices then: Either you bring the people from India into the developed world to take positions in the next step of the ladder — immigration — or you say, there's so many people in the bottom step of the ladder waiting to take the next position in India, why don't we move the next step to India? What we are trying to say is that once you outsource the bottom end of the ladder, you — it's a self-perpetuating act, because of the sinking skill ladder, and the sinking skill ladder is simply the point that you can't be an investment banker without having been an analyst once. You can't be a professor without having been a student. You can't be a consultant without having been a research associate. So, if you outsource the least sophisticated jobs, at some stage, the next step of the ladder has to follow. The second thing we bring up is what we call the browning of the TMT, the top management teams. If the R&D talent is going to be based out of India and China, and the largest growth markets are going to be based out of India and China, you have to confront the problem that your top management of the future is going to have to come out of India and China, because that's where the product leadership is, that's where the important market leadership is. Right? And the last thing we point out in this slide, which is, you know, that to this story, there's one caveat. India has the youngest growing population in the world. This demographic dividend is incredible, but paradoxically, there's also the mirage of mighty labor pools. Indian institutes and educational system, with a few exceptions, are incapable of producing students in the quantity and quality needed to keep this innovation engine going, so companies are finding innovative ways to overcome this, but in the end it does not absolve the government of the responsibility for creating this educational structure. So finally, I want to conclude by showing you the profile of one company, IBM. As many of you know, IBM has always been considered for the last hundred years to be one of the most innovative companies. In fact, if you look at the number of patents filed over history, I think they are in the top or the top two or three companies in the world of all patents filed in the USA as a private company. Here is the profile of employees of IBM over the last decade. In 2003, they had 300,000 employees, or 330,000 employees, out of which, 135,000 were in America, 9,000 were in India. In 2009, they had 400,000 employees, by which time the U.S. employees had moved to 105,000, whereas the Indian employees had gone to 100,000. Well, in 2010, they decided they're not going to reveal this data anymore, so I had to make some estimates based on various sources. Here are my best guesses. Okay? I'm not saying this is the exact number, it's my best guess. It gives you a sense of the trend. There are 433,000 people now at IBM, out of which 98,000 are remaining in the U.S., and 150,000 are in India. So you tell me, is IBM an American company, or an Indian company? (Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. (Applause) |
Advice to a young scientist | {0: 'Biologist E.O. Wilson explores the world of ants and other tiny creatures, and writes movingly about the way all creatures great and small are interdependent.'} | TEDMED 2012 | What I'm going to do is to just give a few notes, and this is from a book I'm preparing called "Letters to a Young Scientist." I'd thought it'd be appropriate to present it, on the basis that I have had extensive experience in teaching, counseling scientists across a broad array of fields. And you might like to hear some of the principles that I've developed in doing that teaching and counseling. So let me begin by urging you, particularly you on the youngsters' side, on this path you've chosen, to go as far as you can. The world needs you, badly. Humanity is now fully into the techno-scientific age. There is going to be no turning back. Although varying among disciplines — say, astrophysics, molecular genetics, the immunology, the microbiology, the public health, to the new area of the human body as a symbiont, to public health, environmental science. Knowledge in medical science and science overall is doubling every 15 to 20 years. Technology is increasing at a comparable rate. Between them, the two already pervade, as most of you here seated realize, every dimension of human life. So swift is the velocity of the techno-scientific revolution, so startling in its countless twists and turns, that no one can predict its outcome even a decade from the present moment. There will come a time, of course, when the exponential growth of discovery and knowledge, which actually began in the 1600s, has to peak and level off, but that's not going to matter to you. The revolution is going to continue for at least several more decades. It'll render the human condition radically different from what it is today. Traditional fields of study are going to continue to grow and in so doing, inevitably they will meet and create new disciplines. In time, all of science will come to be a continuum of description, an explanation of networks, of principles and laws. That's why you need not just be training in one specialty, but also acquire breadth in other fields, related to and even distant from your own initial choice. Keep your eyes lifted and your head turning. The search for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched. To understand and use it sanely, as a part of the civilization yet to evolve requires a vastly larger population of scientifically trained people like you. In education, medicine, law, diplomacy, government, business and the media that exist today. Our political leaders need at least a modest degree of scientific literacy, which most badly lack today — no applause, please. It will be better for all if they prepare before entering office rather than learning on the job. Therefore you will do well to act on the side, no matter how far into the laboratory you may go, to serve as teachers during the span of your career. I'll now proceed quickly, and before else, to a subject that is both a vital asset and a potential barrier to a scientific career. If you are a bit short in mathematical skills, don't worry. Many of the most successful scientists at work today are mathematically semi-literate. A metaphor will serve here: Where elite mathematicians and statisticians and theorists often serve as architects in the expanding realm of science, the remaining large majority of basic applied scientists, including a large portion of those who could be said to be of the first rank, are the ones who map the terrain, they scout the frontiers, they cut the pathways, they raise the buildings along the way. Some may have considered me foolhardy, but it's been my habit to brush aside the fear of mathematics when talking to candidate scientists. During 41 years of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright students turned away from the possibility of a scientific career or even from taking non-required courses in science because they were afraid of failure. These math-phobes deprive science and medicine of immeasurable amounts of badly needed talent. Here's how to relax your anxieties, if you have them: Understand that mathematics is a language ruled like other verbal languages, or like verbal language generally, by its own grammar and system of logic. Any person with average quantitative intelligence who learns to read and write mathematics at an elementary level will, as in verbal language, have little difficulty picking up most of the fundamentals if they choose to master the mathspeak of most disciplines of science. The longer you wait to become at least semi-literate the harder the language of mathematics will be to master, just as again in any verbal language, but it can be done at any age. I speak as an authority on that subject, because I'm an extreme case. I didn't take algebra until my freshman year at the University of Alabama. They didn't teach it before then. I finally got around to calculus as a 32-year-old tenured professor at Harvard, where I sat uncomfortably in classes with undergraduate students, little more than half my age. A couple of them were students in a course I was giving on evolutionary biology. I swallowed my pride, and I learned calculus. I found out that in science and all its applications, what is crucial is not that technical ability, but it is imagination in all of its applications. The ability to form concepts with images of entities and processes pictured by intuition. I found out that advances in science rarely come upstream from an ability to stand at a blackboard and conjure images from unfolding mathematical propositions and equations. They are instead the products of downstream imagination leading to hard work, during which mathematical reasoning may or may not prove to be relevant. Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake. Of foremost importance is a thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known of the relevant entities and processes that might be involved in that domain you propose to enter. When something new is discovered, it's logical then that one of the follow-up steps is to find the mathematical and statistical methods to move its analysis forward. If that step proves too difficult for the person or team that made the discovery, a mathematician can then be added by them as a collaborator. Consider the following principle, which I will modestly call Wilson's Principle Number One: It is far easier for scientists including medical researchers, to require needed collaboration in mathematics and statistics than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations. It is important in choosing the direction to take in science to find the subject at your level of competence that interests you deeply, and focus on that. Keep in mind, then, Wilson's Second Principle: For every scientist, whether researcher, technician, teacher, manager or businessman, working at any level of mathematical competence, there exists a discipline in science or medicine for which that level is enough to achieve excellence. Now I'm going to offer quickly several more principles that will be useful in organizing your education and career, or if you're teaching, how you might enhance your own teaching and counseling of young scientists. In selecting a subject in which to conduct original research, or to develop world-class expertise, take a part of the chosen discipline that is sparsely inhabited. Judge opportunity by how few other students and researchers are on hand. This is not to de-emphasize the essential requirement of broad training, or the value of apprenticing yourself in ongoing research to programs of high quality. It is important also to acquire older mentors within these successful programs, and to make friends and colleagues of your age for mutual support. But through it all, look for a way to break out, to find a field and subject not yet popular. We have seen this demonstrated already in the talks preceding mine. There is the quickest way advances are likely to occur, as measured in discoveries per investigator per year. You may have heard the military dictum for the gathering of armies: March to the sound of the guns. In science, the exact opposite is the case: March away from the sound of the guns. So Wilson's Principle Number Three: March away from the sound of the guns. Observe from a distance, but do not join the fray. Make a fray of your own. Once you have settled on a specialty, and the profession you can love, and you've secured opportunity, your potential to succeed will be greatly enhanced if you study it enough to become an expert. There are thousands of professionally delimited subjects sprinkled through physics and chemistry to biology and medicine. And on then into the social sciences, where it is possible in short time to acquire the status of an authority. When the subject is still very thinly populated, you can with diligence and hard work become the world authority. The world needs this kind of expertise, and it rewards the kind of people willing to acquire it. The existing information and what you self-discover may at first seem skimpy and difficult to connect to other bodies of knowledge. Well, if that's the case, good. Why hard instead of easy? The answer deserves to be stated as Principle Number Four. In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity, and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution. Now this brings me to a basic categorization in the way scientific discoveries are made. Scientists, pure mathematicians among them, follow one or the other of two pathways: First through early discoveries, a problem is identified and a solution is sought. The problem may be relatively small; for example, where exactly in a cruise ship does the norovirus begin to spread? Or larger, what's the role of dark matter in the expansion of the universe? As the answer is sought, other phenomena are typically discovered and other questions are asked. This first of the two strategies is like a hunter, exploring a forest in search of a particular quarry, who finds other quarries along the way. The second strategy of research is to study a subject broadly searching for unknown phenomena or patterns of known phenomena like a hunter in what we call "the naturalist's trance," the researcher of mind is open to anything interesting, any quarry worth taking. The search is not for the solution of the problem, but for problems themselves worth solving. The two strategies of research, original research, can be stated as follows, in the final principle I'm going to offer you: For every problem in a given discipline of science, there exists a species or entity or phenomenon ideal for its solution. And conversely, for every species or other entity or phenomenon, there exist important problems for the solution of which, those particular objects of research are ideally suited. Find out what they are. You'll find your own way to discover, to learn, to teach. The decades ahead will see dramatic advances in disease prevention, general health, the quality of life. All of humanity depends on the knowledge and practice of the medicine and the science behind it you will master. You have chosen a calling that will come in steps to give you satisfaction, at its conclusion, of a life well lived. And I thank you for having me here tonight. (Applause) Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. I salute you. |
Reinventing the encyclopedia game | {0: 'Performance artist and storyteller Rives has been called "the first 2.0 poet," using images, video and technology to bring his words to life. '} | TEDxSummit | So, last month, the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that it is going out of print after 244 years, which made me nostalgic, because I remember playing a game with the colossal encyclopedia set in my hometown library back when I was a kid, maybe 12 years old. And I wondered if I could update that game, not just for modern methods, but for the modern me. So I tried. I went to an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and I entered the term "Earth." You can start anywhere, this time I chose Earth. And the first rule of the game is pretty simple. You just have to read the article until you find something you don't know, and preferably something your dad doesn't even know. And in this case, I quickly found this: The furthest point from the center of the Earth is not the tip of Mount Everest, like I might have thought, it's the tip of this mountain: Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador. The Earth spins, of course, as it travels around the sun, so the Earth bulges a little bit around the middle, like some Earthlings. And even though Mount Chimborazo isn't the tallest mountain in the Andes, it's one degree away from the equator, it's riding that bulge, and so the summit of Chimborazo is the farthest point on Earth from the center of the Earth. And it is really fun to say. So I immediately decided, this is going to be the name of the game, or my new exclamation. You can use it at TED. Chimborazo, right? It's like "eureka" and "bingo" had a baby. I didn't know that; that's pretty cool. Chimborazo! So the next rule of the game is also pretty simple. You just have to find another term and look that up. Now in the old days, that meant getting out a volume and browsing through it alphabetically, maybe getting sidetracked, that was fun. Nowadays there are hundreds of links to choose from. I can go literally anywhere in the world, I think since I was already in Ecuador, I just decided to click on the word "tropical." That took me to this wet and warm band of the tropics that encircles the Earth. Now that's the Tropic of Cancer in the north and the Tropic of Capricorn in the south, that much I knew, but I was surprised to learn this little fact: Those are not cartographers' lines, like latitude or the borders between nations, they are astronomical phenomena caused by the Earth's tilt, and they change. They move; they go up, they go down. In fact, for years, the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn have been steadily drifting towards the equator at the rate of about 15 meters per year, and nobody told me that. I didn't know it. Chimborazo! So to keep the game going, I just have to find another term and look that one up. Since I'm already in the tropics, I chose "Tropical rainforest." Famous for its diversity, human diversity. There are still dozens and dozens of uncontacted tribes living on this planet. They're all over the globe, but virtually all of them live in tropical rainforests. This is the only place you can go nowadays and not get "friended." The link that I clicked on here was exotic in the beginning and then absolutely mysterious at the very end. It mentioned leopards and ring-tailed coatis and poison dart frogs and boa constrictors and then coleoptera, which turn out to be beetles. Now I clicked on this on purpose, but if I'd somehow gotten here by mistake, it does remind me, for the band, see "The Beatles," for the car see "Volkswagon Beetle," but I am here for beetle beetles. This is the most successful order on the planet by far. Something between 20 and 25 percent of all life forms on the planet, including plants, are beetles. That means the next time you are in the grocery store, take a look at the four people ahead of you in line. Statistically, one of you is a beetle. And if it is you, you are astonishingly well adapted. There are scavenger beetles that pick the skin and flesh off of bones in museums. There are predator beetles, that attack other insects and still look pretty cute to us. There are beetles that roll little balls of dung great distances across the desert floor to feed to their hatchlings. This reminded the ancient Egyptians of their god Khepri, who renews the ball of the sun every morning, which is how that dung-rolling scarab became that sacred scarab on the breastplate of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Beetles, I was reminded, have the most romantic flirtation in the animal kingdom. Fireflies are not flies, fireflies are beetles. Fireflies are coleoptera, and coleoptera communicate in other ways as well. Like my next link: The chemical language of pheromones. Now the pheromone page took me to a video of a sea urchin having sex. Yeah. (Laughter) And the link to aphrodisiac. Now that's something that increases sexual desire, possibly chocolate. There is a compound in chocolate called phenethylamine that might be an aphrodisiac. But as the article mentions, because of enzyme breakdown, it's unlikely that phenethylamine will reach your brain if taken orally. So those of you who only eat your chocolate, you might have to experiment. The link I clicked on here, "sympathetic magic," mostly because I understand what both of those words mean. But not when they're together like that. I do like sympathy. I do like magic. So when I click on "sympathetic magic," I get sympathetic magic and voodoo dolls. This is the boy in me getting lucky again. Sympathetic magic is imitation. If you imitate something, maybe you can have an effect on it. That's the idea behind voodoo dolls, and possibly also cave paintings. The link to cave paintings takes me to some of the oldest art known to humankind. I would love to see Google maps inside some of these caves. We've got tens-of-thousands-years-old artwork. Common themes around the globe include large wild animals and tracings of human hands, usually the left hand. We have been a dominantly right-handed tribe for millenia, so even though I don't know why a paleolithic person would trace his hand or blow pigment on it from a tube, I can easily picture how he did it. And I really don't think it's that different form our own little dominant hand avatar right there that I'm going to use now to click on the term for "hand," go to the page for "hand," where I found the most fun and possibly embarrassing bit of trivia I've found in a long time. It's simply this: The back of the hand is formally called the opisthenar. Now that's embarrassing, because up until now, every time I've said, "I know it like the back of my hand," I've really been saying, "I'm totally familiar with that, I just don't know it's freaking name, right?" And the link I clicked on here, well, lemurs, monkeys and chimpanzees have the little opisthenar. I click on chimpanzee, and I get our closest genetic relative. Pan troglodytes, the name we give him, means "cave dweller." He doesn't. He lives in rainforests and savannas. It's just that we're always thinking of this guy as lagging behind us, evolutionarily or somehow uncannily creeping up on us, and in some cases, he gets places before us. Like my next link, the almost irresistible link, Ham the Astrochimp. I click on him, and I really thought he was going to bring me full circle twice, in fact. He's born in Cameroon, which is smack in the middle of my tropics map, and more specifically his skeleton wound up in the Smithsonian museum getting picked clean by beetles. In between those two landmarks in Ham's life, he flew into space. He experienced weightlessness and re-entry months before the first human being to do it, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. When I click on Yuri Gagarin's page, I get this guy who was surprisingly short in stature, huge in heroism. Top estimates, Soviet estimates, put this guy at 1.65 meters, that is less than five and a half feet tall max, possibly because he was malnourished as a child. Germans occupied Russia. A Nazi officer took over the Gagarin household, and he and his family built and lived in a mud hut. Years later, the boy from that cramped mud hut would grow up to be the man in that cramped capsule on the tip of a rocket who volunteered to be launched into outer space, the first one of any of us to really physically leave this planet. And he didn't just leave it, he circled it once. Fifty years later, as a tribute, the International Space Station, which is still up there tonight, synced its orbit with Gagarin's orbit, at the exact same time of day, and filmed it, so you can go online and you can watch over 100 minutes of what must have been an absolutely mesmerizing ride, possibly a lonely one, the first person to ever see such a thing. And then when you've had your fill of that, you can click on one more link. You can come back to Earth. You return to where you started. You can finish your game. You just need to find one more fact that you didn't know. And for me, I quickly landed on this one: The Earth has a tolerance of about .17 percent from the reference spheroid, which is less than the .22 percent allowed in billiard balls. This is the kind of fact I would have loved as a boy. I found it myself. It's got some math that I can do. I'm pretty sure my dad doesn't know it. What this means is that if you could shrink the Earth to the size of a billiard ball, if you could take planet Earth, with all its mountain tops and caves and rainforests, astronauts and uncontacted tribes and chimpanzees, voodoo dolls, fireflies, chocolate, sea creatures making love in the deep blue sea, you just shrink that to the size of a billiard ball, it would be as smooth as a billiard ball, presumably a billiard ball with a slight bulge around the middle. That's pretty cool. I didn't know that. Chimborazo! Thank you. (Applause) |
How Arduino is open-sourcing imagination | {0: 'Massimo Banzi co-founded Arduino, which makes affordable open-source microcontrollers for interactive projects, from art installations to an automatic plant waterer.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | So a few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave this toy car to his 8-year-old son. But instead of going into a store and buying one, like we do normally, he went to this website and he downloaded a file, and then he printed it on this printer. So this idea that you can manufacture objects digitally using these machines is something that The Economist magazine defined as the Third Industrial Revolution. Actually, I argue that there is another revolution going on, and it's the one that has to do with open-source hardware and the maker's movement, because the printer that my friend used to print the toy is actually open-source. So you go to the same website, you can download all the files that you need in order to make that printer: the construction files, the hardware, the software, all the instruction is there. And also this is part of a large community where there are thousands of people around the world that are actually making these kinds of printers, and there's a lot of innovation happening because it's all open-source. You don't need anybody's permission to create something great. And that space is like the personal computer in 1976, like the Apples with the other companies are fighting, and we will see in a few years, there will be the Apple of this kind of market come out. Well, there's also another interesting thing. I said the electronics are open-source, because at the heart of this printer there is something I'm really attached to: these Arduino boards, the motherboard that sort of powers this printer, is a project I've been working on for the past seven years. It's an open-source project. I worked with these friends of mine that I have here. So the five of us, two Americans, two Italians and a Spaniard, we — (Laughter) You know, it's a worldwide project. (Laughter) So we came together in this design institute called the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, which was teaching interaction design, this idea that you can take design from the simple shape of an object and you can move it forward to design the way you interact with things. Well, when you design an object that's supposed to interact with a human being, if you make a foam model of a mobile phone, it doesn't make any sense. You have to have something that actually interacts with people. So, we worked on Arduino and a lot of other projects there to create platforms that would be simple for our students to use, so that our students could just build things that worked, but they don't have five years to become an electronics engineer. We have one month. So how do I make something that even a kid can use? And actually, with Arduino, we have kids like Sylvia that you see here, that actually make projects with Arduino. I have 11-year-old kids stop me and show me stuff they built for Arduino that's really scary to see the capabilities that kids have when you give them the tools. So let's look at what happens when you make a tool that anybody can just pick up and build something quickly, so one of the examples that I like to sort of kick off this discussion is this example of this cat feeder. The gentleman who made this project had two cats. One was sick and the other one was healthy, so he had to make sure they ate the proper food. So he made this thing that recognizes the cat from a chip mounted inside on the collar of the cat, and opens the door and the cat can eat the food. This is made by recycling an old CD player that you can get from an old computer, some cardboard, tape, couple of sensors, a few blinking LEDs, and then suddenly you have a tool. You build something that you cannot find on the market. And I like this phrase: "Scratch your own itch." If you have an idea, you just go and you make it. This is the equivalent of sketching on paper done with electronics. So one of the features that I think is important about our work is that our hardware, on top of being made with love in Italy — as you can see from the back of the circuit — (Laughter) is that it's open, so we publish all the design files for the circuit online, so you can download it and you can actually use it to make something, or to modify, to learn. You know, when I was learning about programming, I learned by looking at other people's code, or looking at other people's circuits in magazines. And this is a good way to learn, by looking at other people's work. So the different elements of the project are all open, so the hardware is released with a Creative Commons license. So, you know, I like this idea that hardware becomes like a piece of culture that you share and you build upon, like it was a song or a poem with Creative Commons. Or, the software is GPL, so it's open-source as well. The documentation and the hands-on teaching methodology is also open-source and released as the Creative Commons. Just the name is protected so that we can make sure that we can tell people what is Arduino and what isn't. Now, Arduino itself is made of a lot of different open-source components that maybe individually are hard to use for a 12-year-old kid, so Arduino wraps everything together into a mashup of open-source technologies where we try to give them the best user experience to get something done quickly. So you have situations like this, where some people in Chile decided to make their own boards instead of buying them, to organize a workshop and to save money. Or there are companies that make their own variations of Arduino that fit in a certain market, and there's probably, maybe like a 150 of them or something at the moment. This one is made by a company called Adafruit, which is run by this woman called Limor Fried, also known as Ladyada, who is one of the heroes of the open-source hardware movement and the maker movement. So, this idea that you have a new, sort of turbo-charged DIY community that believes in open-source, in collaboration, collaborates online, collaborates in different spaces. There is this magazine called Make that sort of gathered all these people and sort of put them together as a community, and you see a very technical project explained in a very simple language, beautifully typeset. Or you have websites, like this one, like Instructables, where people actually teach each other about anything. So this one is about Arduino projects, the page you see on the screen, but effectively here you can learn how to make a cake and everything else. So let's look at some projects. So this one is a quadcopter. It's a small model helicopter. In a way, it's a toy, no? And so this one was military technology a few years ago, and now it's open-source, easy to use, you can buy it online. DIY Drones is the community; they do this thing called ArduCopter. But then somebody actually launched this start-up called Matternet, where they figured out that you could use this to actually transport things from one village to another in Africa, and the fact that this was easy to find, open-source, easy to hack, enabled them to prototype their company really quickly. Or, other projects. Matt Richardson: I'm getting a little sick of hearing about the same people on TV over and over and over again, so I decided to do something about it. This Arduino project, which I call the Enough Already, will mute the TV anytime any of these over-exposed personalities is mentioned. (Laughter) I'll show you how I made it. (Applause) MB: Check this out. MR: Our producers caught up with Kim Kardashian earlier today to find out what she was planning on wearing to her — MB: Eh? (Laughter) MR: It should do a pretty good job of protecting our ears from having to hear about the details of Kim Kardashian's wedding. MB: Okay. So, you know, again, what is interesting here is that Matt found this module that lets Arduino process TV signals, he found some code written by somebody else that generates infrared signals for the TV, put it together and then created this great project. It's also used, Arduino's used, in serious places like, you know, the Large Hadron Collider. There's some Arduino balls collecting data and sort of measuring some parameters. Or it's used for — (Music) So this is a musical interface built by a student from Italy, and he's now turning this into a product. Because it was a student project becoming a product. Or it can be used to make an assistive device. This is a glove that understands the sign language and transforms the gestures you make into sounds and writes the words that you're signing on a display And again, this is made of all different parts you can find on all the websites that sell Arduino-compatible parts, and you assemble it into a project. Or this is a project from the ITP part of NYU, where they met with this boy who has a severe disability, cannot play with the PS3, so they built this device that allows the kid to play baseball although he has limited movement capability. Or you can find it in arts projects. So this is the txtBomber. So you put a message into this device and then you roll it on the wall, and it basically has all these solenoids pressing the buttons on spray cans, so you just pull it over a wall and it just writes on the wall all the political messages. So, yeah. (Applause) Then we have this plant here. This is called Botanicalls, because there's an Arduino ball with a Wi-Fi module in the plant, and it's measuring the well-being of the plant, and it's creating a Twitter account where you can actually interact with the plant. (Laughter) So, you know, this plant will start to say, "This is really hot," or there's a lot of, you know, "I need water right now." (Laughter) So it just gives a personality to your plant. Or this is something that twitters when the baby inside the belly of a pregnant woman kicks. (Laughter) Or this is a 14-year-old kid in Chile who made a system that detects earthquakes and publishes on Twitter. He has 280,000 followers. He's 14 and he anticipated a governmental project by one year. (Applause) Or again, another project where, by analyzing the Twitter feed of a family, you can basically point where they are, like in the "Harry Potter" movie. So you can find out everything about this project on the website. Or somebody made a chair that twitters when somebody farts. (Laughter) It's interesting how, in 2009, Gizmodo basically defined, said that this project actually gives a meaning to Twitter, so it was — a lot changed in between. (Laughter) So very serious project. When the Fukushima disaster happened, a bunch of people in Japan, they realized that the information that the government was giving wasn't really open and really reliable, so they built this Geiger counter, plus Arduino, plus network interface. They made 100 of them and gave them to people around Japan, and essentially the data that they gathered gets published on this website called Cosm, another website they built, so you can actually get reliable real-time information from the field, and you can get unbiased information. Or this machine here, it's from the DIY bio movement, and it's one of the steps that you need in order to process DNA, and again, it's completely open-source from the ground up. Or you have students in developing countries making replicas of scientific instruments that cost a lot of money to make. Actually they just build them themselves for a lot less using Arduino and a few parts. This is a pH probe. Or you get kids, like these kids, they're from Spain. They learned how to program and to make robots when they were probably, like, 11, and then they started to use Arduino to make these robots that play football. They became world champions by making an Arduino-based robot. And so when we had to make our own educational robot, we just went to them and said, you know, "You design it, because you know exactly what is needed to make a great robot that excites kids." Not me. I'm an old guy. What am I supposed to excite, huh? (Laughter) But as I — in terms of educational assets. (Laughter) There's also companies like Google that are using the technology to create interfaces between mobile phones, tablets and the real world. So the Accessory Development Kit from Google is open-source and based on Arduino, as opposed to the one from Apple which is closed-source, NDA, sign your life to Apple. Here you are. There's a giant maze, and Joey's sitting there, and the maze is moving when you tilt the tablet. Also, I come from Italy, and the design is important in Italy, and yet very conservative. So we worked with a design studio called Habits, in Milan, to make this mirror, which is completely open-source. This doubles also as an iPod speaker. So the idea is that the hardware, the software, the design of the object, the fabrication, everything about this project is open-source and you can make it yourself. So we want other designers to pick this up and learn how to make great devices, to learn how to make interactive products by starting from something real. But when you have this idea, you know, what happens to all these ideas? There's, like, thousands of ideas that I — You know, it would take seven hours for me to do all the presentations. I will not take all the seven hours. Thank you. But let's start from this example: So, the group of people that started this company called Pebble, they prototyped a watch that communicates via Bluetooth with your phone, and you can display information on it. And they prototyped with an old LCD screen from a Nokia mobile phone and an Arduino. And then, when they had a final project, they actually went to Kickstarter and they were asking for 100,000 dollars to make a few of them to sell. They got 10 million dollars. They got a completely fully funded start-up, and they don't have to, you know, get VCs involved or anything, just excite the people with their great project. The last project I want to show you is this: It's called ArduSat. It's currently on Kickstarter, so if you want to contribute, please do it. It's a satellite that goes into space, which is probably the least open-source thing you can imagine, and it contains an Arduino connected to a bunch of sensors. So if you know how to use Arduino, you can actually upload your experiments into this satellite and run them. So imagine, if you as a high school can have the satellite for a week and do satellite space experiments like that. So, as I said, there's lots of examples, and I'm going to stop here. And I just want to thank the Arduino community for being the best, and just every day making lots of projects. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) And thanks to the community. Chris Anderson: Massimo, you told me earlier today that you had no idea, of course, that it would take off like this. MB: No. CA: I mean, how must you feel when you read this stuff and you see what you've unlocked? MB: Well, it's the work of a lot of people, so we as a community are enabling people to make great stuff, and I just feel overwhelmed. It's just, it's difficult to describe this. Every morning, I wake up and I look at all the stuff that Google Alerts sends me, and it's just amazing. It's just going into every field that you can imagine. CA: Thank you so much. (Applause) (Applause) |
Four principles for the open world | {0: 'Don Tapscott, Executive Chairman of the Blockchain Research Institute, is one of the world’s leading authorities on the impact of technology in business and society. He has authored 16 books, including "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything," which has been translated into over 25 languages'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Openness. It's a word that denotes opportunity and possibilities. Open-ended, open hearth, open source, open door policy, open bar. (Laughter) And everywhere the world is opening up, and it's a good thing. Why is this happening? The technology revolution is opening the world. Yesterday's Internet was a platform for the presentation of content. The Internet of today is a platform for computation. The Internet is becoming a giant global computer, and every time you go on it, you upload a video, you do a Google search, you remix something, you're programming this big global computer that we all share. Humanity is building a machine, and this enables us to collaborate in new ways. Collaboration can occur on an astronomical basis. Now a new generation is opening up the world as well. I started studying kids about 15 years ago, — so actually 20 years ago now — and I noticed how my own children were effortlessly able to use all this sophisticated technology, and at first I thought, "My children are prodigies!" (Laughter) But then I noticed all their friends were like them, so that was a bad theory. So I've started working with a few hundred kids, and I came to the conclusion that this is the first generation to come of age in the digital age, to be bathed in bits. I call them the Net Generation. I said, these kids are different. They have no fear of technology, because it's not there. It's like the air. It's sort of like, I have no fear of a refrigerator. And — (Laughter) And there's no more powerful force to change every institution than the first generation of digital natives. I'm a digital immigrant. I had to learn the language. The global economic crisis is opening up the world as well. Our opaque institutions from the Industrial Age, everything from old models of the corporation, government, media, Wall Street, are in various stages of being stalled or frozen or in atrophy or even failing, and this is now creating a burning platform in the world. I mean, think about Wall Street. The core modus operandi of Wall Street almost brought down global capitalism. Now, you know the idea of a burning platform, that you're somewhere where the costs of staying where you are become greater than the costs of moving to something different, perhaps something radically different. And we need to change and open up all of our institutions. So this technology push, a demographic kick from a new generation and a demand pull from a new economic global environment is causing the world to open up. Now, I think, in fact, we're at a turning point in human history, where we can finally now rebuild many of the institutions of the Industrial Age around a new set of principles. Now, what is openness? Well, as it turns out, openness has a number of different meanings, and for each there's a corresponding principle for the transformation of civilization. The first is collaboration. Now, this is openness in the sense of the boundaries of organizations becoming more porous and fluid and open. The guy in the picture here, I'll tell you his story. His name is Rob McEwen. I'd like to say, "I have this think tank, we scour the world for amazing case studies." The reason I know this story is because he's my neighbor. (Laughter) He actually moved across the street from us, and he held a cocktail party to meet the neighbors, and he says, "You're Don Tapscott. I've read some of your books." I said, "Great. What do you do?" And he says, "Well I used to be a banker and now I'm a gold miner." And he tells me this amazing story. He takes over this gold mine, and his geologists can't tell him where the gold is. He gives them more money for geological data, they come back, they can't tell him where to go into production. After a few years, he's so frustrated he's ready to give up, but he has an epiphany one day. He wonders, "If my geologists don't know where the gold is, maybe somebody else does." So he does a "radical" thing. He takes his geological data, he publishes it and he holds a contest on the Internet called the Goldcorp Challenge. It's basically half a million dollars in prize money for anybody who can tell me, do I have any gold, and if so, where is it? (Laughter) He gets submissions from all around the world. They use techniques that he's never heard of, and for his half a million dollars in prize money, Rob McEwen finds 3.4 billion dollars worth of gold. The market value of his company goes from 90 million to 10 billion dollars, and I can tell you, because he's my neighbor, he's a happy camper. (Laughter) You know, conventional wisdom says talent is inside, right? Your most precious asset goes out the elevator every night. He viewed talent differently. He wondered, who are their peers? He should have fired his geology department, but he didn't. You know, some of the best submissions didn't come from geologists. They came from computer scientists, engineers. The winner was a computer graphics company that built a three dimensional model of the mine where you can helicopter underground and see where the gold is. He helped us understand that social media's becoming social production. It's not about hooking up online. This is a new means of production in the making. And this Ideagora that he created, an open market, agora, for uniquely qualified minds, was part of a change, a profound change in the deep structure and architecture of our organizations, and how we sort of orchestrate capability to innovate, to create goods and services, to engage with the rest of the world, in terms of government, how we create public value. Openness is about collaboration. Now secondly, openness is about transparency. This is different. Here, we're talking about the communication of pertinent information to stakeholders of organizations: employees, customers, business partners, shareholders, and so on. And everywhere, our institutions are becoming naked. People are all bent out of shape about WikiLeaks, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. You see, people at their fingertips now, everybody, not just Julian Assange, have these powerful tools for finding out what's going on, scrutinizing, informing others, and even organizing collective responses. Institutions are becoming naked, and if you're going to be naked, well, there's some corollaries that flow from that. I mean, one is, fitness is no longer optional. (Laughter) You know? Or if you're going to be naked, you'd better get buff. Now, by buff I mean, you need to have good value, because value is evidenced like never before. You say you have good products. They'd better be good. But you also need to have values. You need to have integrity as part of your bones and your DNA as an organization, because if you don't, you'll be unable to build trust, and trust is a sine qua non of this new network world. So this is good. It's not bad. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And we need a lot of sunlight in this troubled world. Now, the third meaning and corresponding principle of openness is about sharing. Now this is different than transparency. Transparency is about the communication of information. Sharing is about giving up assets, intellectual property. And there are all kinds of famous stories about this. IBM gave away 400 million dollars of software to the Linux movement, and that gave them a multi-billion dollar payoff. Now, conventional wisdom says, "Well, hey, our intellectual property belongs to us, and if someone tries to infringe it, we're going to get out our lawyers and we're going to sue them." Well, it didn't work so well for the record labels, did it? I mean, they took — They had a technology disruption, and rather than taking a business model innovation to correspond to that, they took and sought a legal solution and the industry that brought you Elvis and the Beatles is now suing children and is in danger of collapse. So we need to think differently about intellectual property. I'll give you an example. The pharmaceutical industry is in deep trouble. First of all, there aren't a lot of big inventions in the pipeline, and this is a big problem for human health, and the pharmaceutical industry has got a bigger problem, that they're about to fall off something called the patent cliff. Do you know about this? They're going to lose 20 to 35 percent of their revenue in the next 12 months. And what are you going to do, like, cut back on paper clips or something? No. We need to reinvent the whole model of scientific research. The pharmaceutical industry needs to place assets in a commons. They need to start sharing precompetitive research. They need to start sharing clinical trial data, and in doing so, create a rising tide that could lift all boats, not just for the industry but for humanity. Now, the fourth meaning of openness, and corresponding principle, is about empowerment. And I'm not talking about the motherhood sense here. Knowledge and intelligence is power, and as it becomes more distributed, there's a concomitant distribution and decentralization and disaggregation of power that's underway in the world today. The open world is bringing freedom. Now, take the Arab Spring. The debate about the role of social media and social change has been settled. You know, one word: Tunisia. And then it ended up having a whole bunch of other words too. But in the Tunisian revolution, the new media didn't cause the revolution; it was caused by injustice. Social media didn't create the revolution; it was created by a new generation of young people who wanted jobs and hope and who didn't want to be treated as subjects anymore. But just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government, it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion, and even insurrection in ways that people didn't understand. You know, during the Tunisian revolution, snipers associated with the regime were killing unarmed students in the street. So the students would take their mobile devices, take a picture, triangulate the location, send that picture to friendly military units, who'd come in and take out the snipers. You think that social media is about hooking up online? For these kids, it was a military tool to defend unarmed people from murderers. It was a tool of self-defense. You know, as we speak today, young people are being killed in Syria, and up until three months ago, if you were injured on the street, an ambulance would pick you up, take you to the hospital, you'd go in, say, with a broken leg, and you'd come out with a bullet in your head. So these 20-somethings created an alternative health care system, where what they did is they used Twitter and basic publicly available tools that when someone's injured, a car would show up, it would pick them up, take them to a makeshift medical clinic, where you'd get medical treatment, as opposed to being executed. So this is a time of great change. Now, it's not without its problems. Up until two years ago, all revolutions in human history had a leadership, and when the old regime fell, the leadership and the organization would take power. Well, these wiki revolutions happen so fast they create a vacuum, and politics abhors a vacuum, and unsavory forces can fill that, typically the old regime, or extremists, or fundamentalist forces. You can see this playing out today in Egypt. But that doesn't matter, because this is moving forward. The train has left the station. The cat is out of the bag. The horse is out of the barn. Help me out here, okay? (Laughter) The toothpaste is out of the tube. I mean, we're not putting this one back. The open world is bringing empowerment and freedom. I think, at the end of these four days, that you'll come to conclude that the arc of history is a positive one, and it's towards openness. If you go back a few hundred years, all around the world it was a very closed society. It was agrarian, and the means of production and political system was called feudalism, and knowledge was concentrated in the church and the nobility. People didn't know about things. There was no concept of progress. You were born, you lived your life and you died. But then Johannes Gutenberg came along with his great invention, and, over time, the society opened up. People started to learn about things, and when they did, the institutions of feudal society appeared to be stalled, or frozen, or failing. It didn't make sense for the church to be responsible for medicine when people had knowledge. So we saw the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther called the printing press "God's highest act of grace." The creation of a corporation, science, the university, eventually the Industrial Revolution, and it was all good. But it came with a cost. And now, once again, the technology genie is out of the bottle, but this time it's different. The printing press gave us access to the written word. The Internet enables each of us to be a producer. The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge. The Internet gives us access, not just to information and knowledge, but to the intelligence contained in the crania of other people on a global basis. To me, this is not an information age, it's an age of networked intelligence. It's an age of vast promise, an age of collaboration, where the boundaries of our organizations are changing, of transparency, where sunlight is disinfecting civilization, an age of sharing and understanding the new power of the commons, and it's an age of empowerment and of freedom. Now, what I'd like to do is, to close, to share with you some research that I've been doing. I've tried to study all kinds of organizations to understand what the future might look like, but I've been studying nature recently. You know, bees come in swarms and fish come in schools. Starlings, in the area around Edinburgh, in the moors of England, come in something called a murmuration, and the murmuration refers to the murmuring of the wings of the birds, and throughout the day the starlings are out over a 20-mile radius sort of doing their starling thing. And at night they come together and they create one of the most spectacular things in all of nature, and it's called a murmuration. And scientists that have studied this have said they've never seen an accident. Now, this thing has a function. It protects the birds. You can see on the right here, there's a predator being chased away by the collective power of the birds, and apparently this is a frightening thing if you're a predator of starlings. And there's leadership, but there's no one leader. Now, is this some kind of fanciful analogy, or could we actually learn something from this? Well, the murmuration functions to record a number of principles, and they're basically the principles that I have described to you today. This is a huge collaboration. It's an openness, it's a sharing of all kinds of information, not just about location and trajectory and danger and so on, but about food sources. And there's a real sense of interdependence, that the individual birds somehow understand that their interests are in the interest of the collective. Perhaps like we should understand that business can't succeed in a world that's failing. Well, I look at this thing, and I get a lot of hope. Think about the kids today in the Arab Spring, and you see something like this that's underway. And imagine, just consider this idea, if you would: What if we could connect ourselves in this world through a vast network of air and glass? Could we go beyond just sharing information and knowledge? Could we start to share our intelligence? Could we create some kind of collective intelligence that goes beyond an individual or a group or a team to create, perhaps, some kind of consciousness on a global basis? Well, if we could do this, we could attack some big problems in the world. And I look at this thing, and, I don't know, I get a lot of hope that maybe this smaller, networked, open world that our kids inherit might be a better one, and that this new age of networked intelligence could be an age of promise fulfilled and of peril unrequited. Let's do this. Thank you. (Applause) |
A tale of mental illness -- from the inside | {0: 'Elyn Saks asks bold questions about how society treats people with mental illness.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | So I'm a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I've spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I might have ended up spending most of my life on the back ward of a hospital, but that isn't how my life turned out. In fact, I've managed to stay clear of hospitals for almost three decades, perhaps my proudest accomplishment. That's not to say that I've remained clear of all psychiatric struggles. After I graduated from the Yale Law School and got my first law job, my New Haven analyst, Dr. White, announced to me that he was going to close his practice in three months, several years before I had planned to leave New Haven. White had been enormously helpful to me, and the thought of his leaving shattered me. My best friend Steve, sensing that something was terribly wrong, flew out to New Haven to be with me. Now I'm going to quote from some of my writings: "I opened the door to my studio apartment. Steve would later tell me that, for all the times he had seen me psychotic, nothing could have prepared him for what he saw that day. For a week or more, I had barely eaten. I was gaunt. I walked as though my legs were wooden. My face looked and felt like a mask. I had closed all the curtains in the apartment, so in the middle of the day the apartment was in near total darkness. The air was fetid, the room a shambles. Steve, both a lawyer and a psychologist, has treated many patients with severe mental illness, and to this day he'll say I was as bad as any he had ever seen. 'Hi,' I said, and then I returned to the couch, where I sat in silence for several moments. 'Thank you for coming, Steve. Crumbling world, word, voice. Tell the clocks to stop. Time is. Time has come.' 'White is leaving,' Steve said somberly. 'I'm being pushed into a grave. The situation is grave,' I moan. 'Gravity is pulling me down. I'm scared. Tell them to get away.'" As a young woman, I was in a psychiatric hospital on three different occasions for lengthy periods. My doctors diagnosed me with chronic schizophrenia, and gave me a prognosis of "grave." That is, at best, I was expected to live in a board and care, and work at menial jobs. Fortunately, I did not actually enact that grave prognosis. Instead, I'm a chaired Professor of Law, Psychology and Psychiatry at the USC Gould School of Law, I have many close friends and I have a beloved husband, Will, who's here with us today. (Applause) Thank you. He's definitely the star of my show. I'd like to share with you how that happened, and also describe my experience of being psychotic. I hasten to add that it's my experience, because everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own way. Let's start with the definition of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a brain disease. Its defining feature is psychosis, or being out of touch with reality. Delusions and hallucinations are hallmarks of the illness. Delusions are fixed and false beliefs that aren't responsive to evidence, and hallucinations are false sensory experiences. For example, when I'm psychotic I often have the delusion that I've killed hundreds of thousands of people with my thoughts. I sometimes have the idea that nuclear explosions are about to be set off in my brain. Occasionally, I have hallucinations, like one time I turned around and saw a man with a raised knife. Imagine having a nightmare while you're awake. Often, speech and thinking become disorganized to the point of incoherence. Loose associations involves putting together words that may sound a lot alike but don't make sense, and if the words get jumbled up enough, it's called "word salad." Contrary to what many people think, schizophrenia is not the same as multiple personality disorder or split personality. The schizophrenic mind is not split, but shattered. Everyone has seen a street person, unkempt, probably ill-fed, standing outside of an office building muttering to himself or shouting. This person is likely to have some form of schizophrenia. But schizophrenia presents itself across a wide array of socioeconomic status, and there are people with the illness who are full-time professionals with major responsibilities. Several years ago, I decided to write down my experiences and my personal journey, and I want to share some more of that story with you today to convey the inside view. So the following episode happened the seventh week of my first semester of my first year at Yale Law School. Quoting from my writings: "My two classmates, Rebel and Val, and I had made the date to meet in the law school library on Friday night to work on our memo assignment together. But we didn't get far before I was talking in ways that made no sense. 'Memos are visitations,' I informed them. 'They make certain points. The point is on your head. Pat used to say that. Have you killed you anyone?' Rebel and Val looked at me as if they or I had been splashed in the face with cold water. 'What are you talking about, Elyn?' 'Oh, you know, the usual. Who's what, what's who, heaven and hell. Let's go out on the roof. It's a flat surface. It's safe.' Rebel and Val followed and they asked what had gotten into me. 'This is the real me,' I announced, waving my arms above my head. And then, late on a Friday night, on the roof of the Yale Law School, I began to sing, and not quietly either. 'Come to the Florida sunshine bush. Do you want to dance?' 'Are you on drugs?' one asked. 'Are you high?' 'High? Me? No way, no drugs. Come to the Florida sunshine bush, where there are lemons, where they make demons.' 'You're frightening me,' one of them said, and Rebel and Val headed back into the library. I shrugged and followed them. Back inside, I asked my classmates if they were having the same experience of words jumping around our cases as I was. 'I think someone's infiltrated my copies of the cases,' I said. 'We've got to case the joint. I don't believe in joints, but they do hold your body together.'" — It's an example of loose associations. — "Eventually I made my way back to my dorm room, and once there, I couldn't settle down. My head was too full of noise, too full of orange trees and law memos I could not write and mass murders I knew I would be responsible for. Sitting on my bed, I rocked back and forth, moaning in fear and isolation." This episode led to my first hospitalization in America. I had two earlier in England. Continuing with the writings: "The next morning I went to my professor's office to ask for an extension on the memo assignment, and I began gibbering unintelligably as I had the night before, and he eventually brought me to the emergency room. Once there, someone I'll just call 'The Doctor' and his whole team of goons swooped down, lifted me high into the air, and slammed me down on a metal bed with such force that I saw stars. Then they strapped my legs and arms to the metal bed with thick leather straps. A sound came out of my mouth that I'd never heard before: half groan, half scream, barely human and pure terror. Then the sound came again, forced from somewhere deep inside my belly and scraping my throat raw." This incident resulted in my involuntary hospitalization. One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was "gravely disabled." To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven. (Laughter) During the next year, I would spend five months in a psychiatric hospital. At times, I spent up to 20 hours in mechanical restraints, arms tied, arms and legs tied down, arms and legs tied down with a net tied tightly across my chest. I never struck anyone. I never harmed anyone. I never made any direct threats. If you've never been restrained yourself, you may have a benign image of the experience. There's nothing benign about it. Every week in the United States, it's been estimated that one to three people die in restraints. They strangle, they aspirate their vomit, they suffocate, they have a heart attack. It's unclear whether using mechanical restraints is actually saving lives or costing lives. While I was preparing to write my student note for the Yale Law Journal on mechanical restraints, I consulted an eminent law professor who was also a psychiatrist, and said surely he would agree that restraints must be degrading, painful and frightening. He looked at me in a knowing way, and said, "Elyn, you don't really understand: These people are psychotic. They're different from me and you. They wouldn't experience restraints as we would." I didn't have the courage to tell him in that moment that, no, we're not that different from him. We don't like to be strapped down to a bed and left to suffer for hours any more than he would. In fact, until very recently, and I'm sure some people still hold it as a view, that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed with that view. Today, I'd like to say I'm very pro-psychiatry but very anti-force. I don't think force is effective as treatment, and I think using force is a terrible thing to do to another person with a terrible illness. Eventually, I came to Los Angeles to teach at the University of Southern California Law School. For years, I had resisted medication, making many, many efforts to get off. I felt that if I could manage without medication, I could prove that, after all, I wasn't really mentally ill, it was some terrible mistake. My motto was the less medicine, the less defective. My L.A. analyst, Dr. Kaplan, was urging me just to stay on medication and get on with my life, but I decided I wanted to make one last college try to get off. Quoting from the text: "I started the reduction of my meds, and within a short time I began feeling the effects. After returning from a trip to Oxford, I marched into Kaplan's office, headed straight for the corner, crouched down, covered my face, and began shaking. All around me I sensed evil beings poised with daggers. They'd slice me up in thin slices or make me swallow hot coals. Kaplan would later describe me as 'writhing in agony.' Even in this state, what he accurately described as acutely and forwardly psychotic, I refused to take more medication. The mission is not yet complete. Immediately after the appointment with Kaplan, I went to see Dr. Marder, a schizophrenia expert who was following me for medication side effects. He was under the impression that I had a mild psychotic illness. Once in his office, I sat on his couch, folded over, and began muttering. 'Head explosions and people trying to kill. Is it okay if I totally trash your office?' 'You need to leave if you think you're going to do that,' said Marder. 'Okay. Small. Fire on ice. Tell them not to kill me. Tell them not to kill me. What have I done wrong? Hundreds of thousands with thoughts, interdiction.' 'Elyn, do you feel like you're dangerous to yourself or others? I think you need to be in the hospital. I could get you admitted right away, and the whole thing could be very discrete.' 'Ha, ha, ha. You're offering to put me in hospitals? Hospitals are bad, they're mad, they're sad. One must stay away. I'm God, or I used to be.'" At that point in the text, where I said "I'm God, or I used to be," my husband made a marginal note. He said, "Did you quit or were you fired?" (Laughter) "'I give life and I take it away. Forgive me, for I know not what I do.' Eventually, I broke down in front of friends, and everybody convinced me to take more medication. I could no longer deny the truth, and I could not change it. The wall that kept me, Elyn, Professor Saks, separate from that insane woman hospitalized years past, lay smashed and in ruins." Everything about this illness says I shouldn't be here, but I am. And I am, I think, for three reasons: First, I've had excellent treatment. Four- to five-day-a-week psychoanalytic psychotherapy for decades and continuing, and excellent psychopharmacology. Second, I have many close family members and friends who know me and know my illness. These relationships have given my life a meaning and a depth, and they also helped me navigate my life in the face of symptoms. Third, I work at an enormously supportive workplace at USC Law School. This is a place that not only accommodates my needs but actually embraces them. It's also a very intellectually stimulating place, and occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness. Even with all that — excellent treatment, wonderful family and friends, supportive work environment — I did not make my illness public until relatively late in life, and that's because the stigma against mental illness is so powerful that I didn't feel safe with people knowing. If you hear nothing else today, please hear this: There are not "schizophrenics." There are people with schizophrenia, and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your friend, they may be your coworker. So let me share some final thoughts. We need to invest more resources into research and treatment of mental illness. The better we understand these illnesses, the better the treatments we can provide, and the better the treatments we can provide, the more we can offer people care, and not have to use force. Also, we must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States. American prisons and jails are filled with people who suffer from severe mental illness, and many of them are there because they never received adequate treatment. I could have easily ended up there or on the streets myself. A message to the entertainment industry and to the press: On the whole, you've done a wonderful job fighting stigma and prejudice of many kinds. Please, continue to let us see characters in your movies, your plays, your columns, who suffer with severe mental illness. Portray them sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people and not as diagnoses. Recently, a friend posed a question: If there were a pill I could take that would instantly cure me, would I take it? The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was offered psychoanalysis. He declined, saying, "Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too." My psychosis, on the other hand, is a waking nightmare in which my devils are so terrifying that all my angels have already fled. So would I take the pill? In an instant. That said, I don't wish to be seen as regretting the life I could have had if I'd not been mentally ill, nor am I asking anyone for their pity. What I rather wish to say is that the humanity we all share is more important than the mental illness we may not. What those of us who suffer with mental illness want is what everybody wants: in the words of Sigmund Freud, "to work and to love." Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. You're very kind. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
The levitating superconductor | {0: 'Boaz Almog uses quantum physics to levitate and trap objects in midair. Call it "quantum levitation."'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | The phenomenon you saw here for a brief moment is called quantum levitation and quantum locking. And the object that was levitating here is called a superconductor. Superconductivity is a quantum state of matter, and it occurs only below a certain critical temperature. Now, it's quite an old phenomenon; it was discovered 100 years ago. However, only recently, due to several technological advancements, we are now able to demonstrate to you quantum levitation and quantum locking. So, a superconductor is defined by two properties. The first is zero electrical resistance, and the second is the expulsion of a magnetic field from the interior of the superconductor. That sounds complicated, right? But what is electrical resistance? So, electricity is the flow of electrons inside a material. And these electrons, while flowing, they collide with the atoms, and in these collisions they lose a certain amount of energy. And they dissipate this energy in the form of heat, and you know that effect. However, inside a superconductor there are no collisions, so there is no energy dissipation. It's quite remarkable. Think about it. In classical physics, there is always some friction, some energy loss. But not here, because it is a quantum effect. But that's not all, because superconductors don't like magnetic fields. So a superconductor will try to expel magnetic field from the inside, and it has the means to do that by circulating currents. Now, the combination of both effects — the expulsion of magnetic fields and zero electrical resistance — is exactly a superconductor. But the picture isn't always perfect, as we all know, and sometimes strands of magnetic field remain inside the superconductor. Now, under proper conditions, which we have here, these strands of magnetic field can be trapped inside the superconductor. And these strands of magnetic field inside the superconductor, they come in discrete quantities. Why? Because it is a quantum phenomenon. It's quantum physics. And it turns out that they behave like quantum particles. In this movie here, you can see how they flow one by one discretely. This is strands of magnetic field. These are not particles, but they behave like particles. So, this is why we call this effect quantum levitation and quantum locking. But what happens to the superconductor when we put it inside a magnetic field? Well, first there are strands of magnetic field left inside, but now the superconductor doesn't like them moving around, because their movements dissipate energy, which breaks the superconductivity state. So what it actually does, it locks these strands, which are called fluxons, and it locks these fluxons in place. And by doing that, what it actually does is locking itself in place. Why? Because any movement of the superconductor will change their place, will change their configuration. So we get quantum locking. And let me show you how this works. I have here a superconductor, which I wrapped up so it'd stay cold long enough. And when I place it on top of a regular magnet, it just stays locked in midair. (Applause) Now, this is not just levitation. It's not just repulsion. I can rearrange the fluxons, and it will be locked in this new configuration. Like this, or move it slightly to the right or to the left. So, this is quantum locking — actually locking — three-dimensional locking of the superconductor. Of course, I can turn it upside down, and it will remain locked. Now, now that we understand that this so-called levitation is actually locking, Yeah, we understand that. You won't be surprised to hear that if I take this circular magnet, in which the magnetic field is the same all around, the superconductor will be able to freely rotate around the axis of the magnet. Why? Because as long as it rotates, the locking is maintained. You see? I can adjust and I can rotate the superconductor. We have frictionless motion. It is still levitating, but can move freely all around. So, we have quantum locking and we can levitate it on top of this magnet. But how many fluxons, how many magnetic strands are there in a single disk like this? Well, we can calculate it, and it turns out, quite a lot. One hundred billion strands of magnetic field inside this three-inch disk. But that's not the amazing part yet, because there is something I haven't told you yet. And, yeah, the amazing part is that this superconductor that you see here is only half a micron thick. It's extremely thin. And this extremely thin layer is able to levitate more than 70,000 times its own weight. It's a remarkable effect. It's very strong. Now, I can extend this circular magnet, and make whatever track I want. For example, I can make a large circular rail here. And when I place the superconducting disk on top of this rail, it moves freely. (Applause) And again, that's not all. I can adjust its position like this, and rotate, and it freely moves in this new position. And I can even try a new thing; let's try it for the first time. I can take this disk and put it here, and while it stays here — don't move — I will try to rotate the track, and hopefully, if I did it correctly, it stays suspended. (Applause) You see, it's quantum locking, not levitation. Now, while I'll let it circulate for a little more, let me tell you a little bit about superconductors. Now — (Laughter) — So we now know that we are able to transfer enormous amount of currents inside superconductors, so we can use them to produce strong magnetic fields, such as needed in MRI machines, particle accelerators and so on. But we can also store energy using superconductors, because we have no dissipation. And we could also produce power cables, to transfer enormous amounts of current between power stations. Imagine you could back up a single power station with a single superconducting cable. But what is the future of quantum levitation and quantum locking? Well, let me answer this simple question by giving you an example. Imagine you would have a disk similar to the one I have here in my hand, three-inch diameter, with a single difference. The superconducting layer, instead of being half a micron thin, being two millimeters thin, quite thin. This two-millimeter-thin superconducting layer could hold 1,000 kilograms, a small car, in my hand. Amazing. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's | {0: 'Alanna Shaikh is a global health consultant who specializes in strengthening health systems. '} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I'd like to talk about my dad. My dad has Alzheimer's disease. He started showing the symptoms about 12 years ago, and he was officially diagnosed in 2005. Now he's really pretty sick. He needs help eating, he needs help getting dressed, he doesn't really know where he is or when it is, and it's been really, really hard. My dad was my hero and my mentor for most of my life, and I've spent the last decade watching him disappear. My dad's not alone. There's about 35 million people globally living with some kind of dementia, and by 2030 they're expecting that to double to 70 million. That's a lot of people. Dementia scares us. The confused faces and shaky hands of people who have dementia, the big numbers of people who get it, they frighten us. And because of that fear, we tend to do one of two things: We go into denial: "It's not me, it has nothing to do with me, it's never going to happen to me." Or, we decide that we're going to prevent dementia, and it will never happen to us because we're going to do everything right and it won't come and get us. I'm looking for a third way: I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's disease. Prevention is good, and I'm doing the things that you can do to prevent Alzheimer's. I'm eating right, I'm exercising every day, I'm keeping my mind active, that's what the research says you should do. But the research also shows that there's nothing that will 100 percent protect you. If the monster wants you, the monster's gonna get you. That's what happened with my dad. My dad was a bilingual college professor. His hobbies were chess, bridge and writing op-eds. (Laughter) He got dementia anyway. If the monster wants you, the monster's gonna get you. Especially if you're me, 'cause Alzheimer's tends to run in families. So I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's disease. Based on what I've learned from taking care of my father, and researching what it's like to live with dementia, I'm focusing on three things in my preparation: I'm changing what I do for fun, I'm working to build my physical strength, and — this is the hard one — I'm trying to become a better person. Let's start with the hobbies. When you get dementia, it gets harder and harder to enjoy yourself. You can't sit and have long talks with your old friends, because you don't know who they are. It's confusing to watch television, and often very frightening. And reading is just about impossible. When you care for someone with dementia, and you get training, they train you to engage them in activities that are familiar, hands-on, open-ended. With my dad, that turned out to be letting him fill out forms. He was a college professor at a state school; he knows what paperwork looks like. He'll sign his name on every line, he'll check all the boxes, he'll put numbers in where he thinks there should be numbers. But it got me thinking, what would my caregivers do with me? I'm my father's daughter. I read, I write, I think about global health a lot. Would they give me academic journals so I could scribble in the margins? Would they give me charts and graphs that I could color? So I've been trying to learn to do things that are hands-on. I've always liked to draw, so I'm doing it more even though I'm really very bad at it. I am learning some basic origami. I can make a really great box. (Laughter) And I'm teaching myself to knit, which so far I can knit a blob. But, you know, it doesn't matter if I'm actually good at it. What matters is that my hands know how to do it. Because the more things that are familiar, the more things my hands know how to do, the more things that I can be happy and busy doing when my brain's not running the show anymore. They say that people who are engaged in activities are happier, easier for their caregivers to look after, and it may even slow the progress of the disease. That all seems like win to me. I want to be as happy as I can for as long as I can. A lot of people don't know that Alzheimer's actually has physical symptoms, as well as cognitive symptoms. You lose your sense of balance, you get muscle tremors, and that tends to lead people to being less and less mobile. They get scared to walk around. They get scared to move. So I'm doing activities that will build my sense of balance. I'm doing yoga and tai chi to improve my balance, so that when I start to lose it, I'll still be able to be mobile. I'm doing weight-bearing exercise, so that I have the muscle strength so that when I start to wither, I have more time that I can still move around. Finally, the third thing. I'm trying to become a better person. My dad was kind and loving before he had Alzheimer's, and he's kind and loving now. I've seen him lose his intellect, his sense of humor, his language skills, but I've also seen this: He loves me, he loves my sons, he loves my brother and my mom and his caregivers. And that love makes us want to be around him, even now. even when it's so hard. When you take away everything that he ever learned in this world, his naked heart still shines. I was never as kind as my dad, and I was never as loving. And what I need now is to learn to be like that. I need a heart so pure that if it's stripped bare by dementia, it will survive. I don't want to get Alzheimer's disease. What I want is a cure in the next 20 years, soon enough to protect me. But if it comes for me, I'm going to be ready. Thank you. (Applause) |
What's your 200-year plan? | {0: "Raghava KK's paintings and drawings use cartoonish shapes and colors to examine the body, society, our world. "} | TEDxSummit | About 75 years ago, my grandfather, a young man, walked into a tent that was converted into a movie theater like that, and he fell hopelessly in love with the woman he saw on the silver screen: none other than Mae West, the heartthrob of the '30s, and he could never forget her. In fact, when he had his daughter many years later, he wanted to name her after Mae West, but can you imagine an Indian child name Mae West? The Indian family said, no way! So when my twin brother Kaesava was born, he decided to tinker with the spelling of Keshava's name. He said, if Mae West can be M-A-E, why can't Keshava be K-A-E? So he changed Kaesava's spelling. Now Kaesava had a baby boy called Rehan a couple of weeks ago. He decided to spell, or, rather, misspell Raehan with an A-E. You know, my grandfather died many years ago when I was little, but his love for Mae West lives on as a misspelling in the DNA of his progeny. That for me is successful legacy. (Laughs) You know, as for me, my wife and I have our own crazy legacy project. We actually sit every few years, argue, disagree, fight, and actually come up with our very own 200-year plan. Our friends think we're mad. Our parents think we're cuckoo. Because, you know, we both come from families that really look up to humility and wisdom, but we both like to live larger than life. I believe in the concept of a Raja Yogi: Be a dude before you can become an ascetic. This is me being a rock star, even if it's in my own house. You know? So when Netra and I sat down to make our first plan 10 years ago, we said we want the focus of this plan to go way beyond ourselves. What do we mean by beyond ourselves? Well 200 years, we calculated, is at the end of our direct contact with the world. There's nobody I'll meet in my life will ever live beyond 200 years, so we thought that's a perfect place where we should situate our plan and let our imagination take flight. You know, I never really believed in legacy. What am I going to leave behind? I'm an artist. Until I made a cartoon about 9/11. It caused so much trouble for me. I was so upset. You know, a cartoon that was meant to be a cartoon of the week ended up staying so much longer. Now I'm in the business of creating art that will definitely even outlive me, and I think about what I want to leave behind through those paintings. You know, the 9/11 cartoon upset me so much that I decided I'll never cartoon again. I said, I'm never going to make any honest public commentary again. But of course I continued creating artwork that was honest and raw, because I forgot about how people reacted to my work. You know, sometimes forgetting is so important to remain idealistic. Perhaps loss of memory is so crucial for our survival as human beings. One of the most important things in my 200-year plan that Netra and I write is what to forget about ourselves. You know, we carry so much baggage, from our parents, from our society, from so many people — fears, insecurities — and our 200-year plan really lists all our childhood problems that we have to expire. We actually put an expiry date on all our childhood problems. The latest date I put was, I said, I am going to expire my fear of my leftist, feminist mother-in-law, and this today is the date! (Laughs) She's watching. (Laughter) Anyway, you know, I really make decisions all the time about how I want to remember myself, and that's the most important kind of decisions I make. And this directly translates into my paintings. But like my friends, I can do that really well on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube. Name it, I'm on it. I've started outsourcing my memory to the digital world, you know? But that comes with a problem. It's so easy to think of technology as a metaphor for memory, but our brains are not perfect storage devices like technology. We only remember what we want to. At least I do. And I rather think of our brains as biased curators of our memory, you know? And if technology is not a metaphor for memory, what is it? Netra and I use our technology as a tool in our 200-year plan to really curate our digital legacy. That is a picture of my mother, and she recently got a Facebook account. You know where this is going. And I've been very supportive until this picture shows up on my Facebook page. (Laughter) And I actually untagged myself first, then I picked up the phone. I said, "Mom, you will never put a picture of me in a bikini ever again." And she said, "Why? You look so cute, darling." I said, "You just don't understand." Maybe we are among the first generation that really understands this digital curating of ourselves. Maybe we are the first to even actively record our lives. You know, whether you agree with, you know, legacy or not, we are actually leaving behind digital traces all the time. So Netra and I really wanted to use our 200-year plan to curate this digital legacy, and not only digital legacy but we believe in curating the legacy of my past and future. How, you may ask? Well, when I think of the future, I never see myself moving forward in time. I actually see time moving backward towards me. I can actually visualize my future approaching. I can dodge what I don't want and pull in what I want. It's like a video game obstacle course. And I've gotten better and better at doing this. Even when I make a painting, I actually imagine I'm behind the painting, it already exists, and someone's looking at it, and I see whether they're feeling it from their gut. Are they feeling it from their heart, or is it just a cerebral thing? And it really informs my painting. Even when I do an art show, I really think about, what should people walk away with? I remember when I was 19, I did, I wanted to do my first art exhibition, and I wanted the whole world to know about it. I didn't know TED then, but what I did was I closed my eyes tight, and I started dreaming. I could imagine people coming in, dressed up, looking beautiful, my paintings with all the light, and in my visualization I actually saw a very famous actress launching my show, giving credibility to me. And I woke up from my visualization and I said, who was that? I couldn't tell if it was Shabana Azmi or Rekha, two very famous Indian actresses, like the Meryl Streeps of India. As it turned out, next morning I wrote a letter to both of them, and Shabana Azmi replied, and came and launched my very first show 12 years ago. And what a bang it started my career with! You know, when we think of time in this way, we can curate not only the future but also the past. This is a picture of my family, and that is Netra, my wife. She's the co-creator of my 200-year plan. Netra's a high school history teacher. I love Netra, but I hate history. I keep saying, "Nets, you live in the past while I'll create the future, and when I'm done, you can study about it." (Laughter) She gave me an indulgent smile, and as punishment, she said, "Tomorrow I'm teaching a class on Indian history, and you are sitting in it, and I'm grading you." I'm like, "Oh, God." I went. I actually went and sat in on her class. She started by giving students primary source documents from India, Pakistan, from Britain, and I said, "Wow." Then she asked them to separate fact from bias. I said, "Wow," again. Then she said, "Choose your facts and biases and create an image of your own story of dignity." History as an imaging tool? I was so inspired. I went and created my own version of Indian history. I actually included stories from my grandmother. She used to work for the telephone exchange, and she used to actually overhear conversations between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten. And she used to hear all kinds of things she shouldn't have heard. But, you know, I include things like that. This is my version of Indian history. You know, if this is so, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, the primary objective of our brains is to serve our dignity. Go tell Facebook to figure that out! Netra and I don't write our 200-year plan for someone else to come and execute it in 150 years. Imagine receiving a parcel saying, from the past, okay now you're supposed to spend the rest of your life doing all of this. No. We actually write it only to set our attitudes right. You know, I used to believe that education is the most important tool to leave a meaningful legacy. Education is great. It really teaches us who we are, and helps us contextualize ourselves in the world, but it's really my creativity that's taught me that I can be much more than what my education told me I am. I'd like to make the argument that creativity is the most important tool we have. It lets us create who we are, and curate what is to come. I like to think — Thank you. I like to think of myself as a storyteller, where my past and my future are only stories, my stories, waiting to be told and retold. I hope all of you one day get a chance to share and write your own 200-year story. Thank you so much. Shukran! (Applause) |
A novel idea for cleaning up oil spills | {0: 'TED Senior Fellow Cesar Harada aims to harness the forces of nature as he invents innovative remedies for man-made problems like oil spills and radioactive leaks.'} | TEDxSummit | In the ocean, what is the common point between oil, plastic and radioactivity? On the top line, this is the BP oil spill: billions of barrels of oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico. The middle line is millions of tons of plastic debris accumulating in our ocean, and the third line is radioactive material leaking from Fukushima nuclear power plant in the Pacific Ocean. Well, the three big problems have in common that they are man-made problems but they are controlled by natural forces. This should make us feel very, terribly awful as much as it should make us feel hopeful, because if we have the power to create these problems, we may as well have the power to remediate these problems. But what about natural forces? Well, that's exactly what I want to talk about today, is how we can use these natural forces to remediate these man-made problems. When the BP oil spill happened, I was working at MIT, and I was in charge of developing an oil spill-cleaning technology. And I had a chance to go in the Gulf of Mexico and meet some fishermen and see the terrible conditions in which they were working. More than 700 of these boats, which are fishermen boats repurposed with oil absorbent in white and oil containment in orange, were used, but they only collected three percent of the oil on the surface, and the health of the cleaners were very deeply affected. I was working on a very interesting technology at MIT, but it was a very long-term view of how to develop technology, and it was going to be a very expensive technology, and also it would be patented. So I wanted to develop something that we could develop very fast, that would be cheap, and that would be open-source, so, because oil spills are not only happening in the Gulf of Mexico, and that would be using renewable energy. So I quit my dream job, and I moved to New Orleans, and I kept on studying how the oil spill was happening. Currently, what they were doing is that they were using these small fishing boats, and they were cleaning clean lines in an ocean of dirt. If you're using the exact same amount of surface of oil absorbent, but you're just paying attention to natural patterns, and if you're going up the winds, you can collect a lot more material. If you're multiplying the rig, so you multiply how many layers of absorbent you're using, you can collect a lot more. But it's extremely difficult to move oil absorbent against the winds, the surface currents and the waves. These are enormous forces. So the very simple idea was to use the ancient technique of sailing and tacking of the wind to capture or intercept the oil that is drifting down the wind. So this didn't require any invention. We just took a simple sailing boat and we tried to pull something long and heavy, but as we tacked back and forth, what we lost was two things: we were losing pulling power and direction. And so, I thought, what about if we just take the rudder from the back of the boat to the front, would we have better control? So I built this small sailing robot with the rudder at the front, and I was trying to pull something very long and heavy, so that's a four-meter-long object just to pull, and I was surprised with just a 14-centimeter rudder, I could control four meters of absorbent. Then I was so happy that I kept playing with the robot, and so you see the robot has a front rudder here. Normally it's at the back. And, playing, I realized that the maneuverability of this was really amazing, and I could avoid an obstacle at the very last second, more maneuverable than a normal boat. Then I started publishing online, and some friends from Korea, they started being interested in this, and we made a boat which has a front rudder and a back rudder, so we started interacting with this, and it was slightly better, although it was very small and a bit off balance, but then we thought, what if we have more than two points of control? What if the entire boat becomes a point of control? What if the entire boat changes shape? So — (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) And so that's the beginning of Protei, and that's the first boat in history that completely changed the shape of the hull in order to control it, and the properties of sailing that we get are very superior compared to a normal boat. When we're turning, we have the feeling of surfing, and the way it's going up-wind, it's very efficient. This is low speed, low wind speed, and the maneuverability is very increased, and here I'm going to do a small jibe, and look at the position of the sail. What's happening is that, because the boat changes shape, the position of the front sail and the main sail are different to the wind. We're catching wind from both sides. And this is exactly what we're looking [for] if we want to pull something long and heavy. We don't want to lose pulling power, nor direction. So, I wanted to know if this was possible to put this at an industrial level, so we made a large boat with a large sail, and with a very light hull, inflatable, very small footprint, so we have a very big size and power ratio. After this, we wanted to see if we could implement this and automate the system, so we used the same system but we added a structure to it so we could activate the machine. So, we used the same bladder-inflated system, and we took it for testing. So this is happening in the Netherlands. We tried in the water without any skin or ballast just to see how it works. And then we mounted a camera for controlling it, but quickly we saw that we would need a lot more weight at the bottom, so we had to take it back to the lab, and then we built a skin around it, we put batteries, remote controllers, and then we put it in the water and then we let it go in the water and see how well it would work, so let some rope out, and hope it's going to work, and it worked okay, but we still have a long way. Our small prototype has given us good insight that it's working very well, but we still need to work a lot more on this. So what we are doing is an accelerated evolution of sailing technology. We went from a back rudder to a front rudder to two rudders to multiple rudders to the whole boat changing shape, and the more we are moving forward, and the more the design looks simple and cute. (Laughter) But I wanted to show you a fish because — In fact, it's very different from a fish. A fish will move because — by changing like this, but our boat is propelled by the wind still, and the hull controls the trajectory. So I brought to you for the first time on the TED stage Protei Number Eight. It's not the last one, but it's a good one for making demos. So the first thing as I show you in the video is that we may be able to control the trajectory of a sailing boat better, or we may be able to never be in irons, so never facing the wind, we always can catch the wind from both sides. But new properties of a sailing boat. So if you're looking at the boat from this side, this might remind you of an airplane profile. An airplane, when you're moving in this direction, starts to lift, and that's how it takes off. Now, if you're taking the same system, and you're putting vertical, you're bending, and if you're moving this way forward, your instinct will tell you that you might go this way, but if you're moving fast enough, you might create what we call lateral lift, so we could get further or closer to the wind. Other property is this: A normal sailing boat has a centerboard here and a rudder at the back, and these two things are what creates most resistance and turbulence behind the boat, but because this doesn't have either a centerboard or a rudder, we hope that if we keep working on this hull design we can improve and have less resistance. The other thing is, most boats, when they reach a certain speed, and they are going on waves, they start to hit and slap on the surface of the water, and a lot of the energy moving forward is lost. But if we're going with the flow, if we pay attention to natural patterns instead of trying to be strong, but if you're going with the flow, we may absorb a lot of environmental noises, so the wave energy, to actually save some energy to move forward. So we may have developed the technology which is very efficient for pulling something long and heavy, but the idea is, what is the purpose of technology if it doesn't reach the right hands? Normal technology or innovation happens like this: Somebody has an interesting idea, some other scientist or engineer, they take it to the next level, they make a theory about it and maybe they patent it, and then some industry will make a contract of exclusivity to manufacture and sell it, and then, eventually, a buyer will buy it, and we hope that they are going to use [it] for a good purpose. What we really want is that this innovation happens continuously. The inventor and engineers and also the manufacturers and everybody works at the same time, but this would be sterile if this was happening in a parallel and uncrossed process. What you really want is not a sequential, not parallel development. You want to have a network of innovation. You want everybody, like we're doing now, to work at the same time, and that can only happen if these people all together decide to share the information, and that's exactly what open hardware is about. It's to replace competition by collaboration. It's to transform any new product into a new market. So what is open hardware? Essentially, open hardware is a license. It's just an intellectual property setup. It means that everybody is free to use, modify and distribute, and in exchange we only ask for two things: The name is credited — the name of the project — and also the people who make improvement, they share back with the community. So it's a very simple condition. And I started this project alone in a garage in New Orleans, but quickly after I wanted to publish and share this information, so I made a Kickstarter, which is a crowd-fundraising platform, and in about one month we fundraised 30,000 dollars. With this money, I hired a team of young engineers from all over the world, and we rented a factory in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. We were peer-learning, we were engineering, we were making things, prototyping, but most importantly we were trying our prototypes in the water as often as possible, to fail as quickly as possible, to learn from. This is a proud member of Protei from Korea, and on the right side, this is a multiple-masts design proposed by a team in Mexico. This idea really appealed to Gabriella Levine in New York, and so she decided to prototype this idea that she saw, and she documented every step of the process, and she published it on Instructables, which is a website for sharing inventions. Less than one week after, this is a team in Eindhoven, it's a school of engineering. They made it, but they eventually published a simplified design. They also made it into an Instructable, and in less than one week, they had almost 10,000 views, and they got many new friends. We're working on also simpler technology, not that complex, with younger people and also older people, like this dinosaur is from Mexico. (Laughter) So Protei is now an international network of innovation for selling technology using this shape-shifting hull. And what puts us together is that we have a common, at least, global understanding of what the word "business" is, or what it should be. This is how most work today. Business as usual is saying, what's most important is to make lots of profit, and you'll be using technology for that, and people will be your work force, instrumentalized, and environment is usually the last priority. It will be just a way to, say, greenwash your audience and, say, increase your price tag. What we're trying to do, or what we believe, because this is how we believe the world really works, is that without the environment you have nothing. We have the people so we need to protect each other, yes, and we're a technology company, and profit is necessary to make this happen. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) If we have the courage to understand or accept that this actually how the world really works, and this is the order of priority that we need to choose, then it makes obvious why we need to choose open hardware for developing environmental technology, because we need to share information. What's next for us? So, this small machine that you've seen, we're hoping to make small toys like one-meter remote control Protei that you can upgrade — so replace the remote control parts by Androids, so the mobile phone, and Arduino micro-controller, so you could be controlling this from your mobile phone, your tablet. Then what we want to do is create six-meter versions so we can test the maximum performance of these machines, so we can go at very, very high speed. So imagine yourself. You are laying down in a flexible torpedo, sailing at high speed, controlling the shape of the hull with your legs and controlling the sail with your arms. So that's what we're looking for developing. (Applause) And we replace the human being — to go, for example, for measuring radioactivity, you don't want a human to be sailing those robots — with batteries, motors, micro-controllers and sensors. This is what our teammates, we dream of at night. We hope that we can sometime clean up oil spills, or we can gather or collect plastic in the ocean, or we can have swarms of our machines controlled by multi-player video game engines to control many of these machines, to monitor coral reefs or to monitor fisheries. Our hope is that we can use open hardware technology to better understand and protect our oceans. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) |
A young guitarist meets his hero | {0: 'Preston Reed’s hands have an otherworldly coordination. The fingers, nails, thumbs, and palms of both left and right dance, pluck, strum, and slap his guitar, which bursts with a full sound.', 1: 'TED Senior Fellow Usman Riaz is an artist and composer.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | (Music) (Applause) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) Chris Anderson: You guys were amazing. That's amazing. (Applause) You just don't hear that every day. (Laughter) Usman, the official story is that you learned to play the guitar by watching Jimmy Page on YouTube. Usman Riaz: Yes, that was the first one. And then I — That was the first thing I learned, and then I started progressing to other things. And I started watching Kaki King a lot, and she would always cite Preston Reed as a big influence, so then I started watching his videos, and it's very surreal right now to be — (Laughter) (Applause) CA: Was that piece just now, that was one of his songs that you learned, or how did that happen? UR: I'd never learned it before, but he told me that we would be playing that on stage, so I was familiar with it, so that's why I had so much more fun learning it. And it finally happened, so ... (Laughter) CA: Preston, from your point of view, I mean, you invented this like 20 years ago, right? How does it feel to see someone like this come along taking your art and doing so much with it? Preston Reed: It's mind-blowing, and I feel really proud, really honored. And he's a wonderful musician, so it's cool. (Laughter) CA: I guess, I don't think there is like a one-minute other piece you guys can do? Can you? Do you jam? Do you have anything else? PR: We haven't prepared anything. CA: There isn't. I'll tell you what. If you have another 30 or 40 seconds, and you have another 30 or 40 seconds, and we just see that, I just think — I can feel it. We want to hear a little more. And if it goes horribly wrong, no worries. (Applause) (Laughter) (Music) (Applause) |
The game that can give you 10 extra years of life | {0: 'Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. Her work shows us how.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I'm a gamer, so I like to have goals. I like special missions and secret objectives. So here's my special mission for this talk: I'm going to try to increase the life span of every single person in this room by seven and a half minutes. Literally, you will live seven and a half minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk. Some of you are looking a little bit skeptical. That's okay, because check it out — I have math to prove that it is possible. It won't make much sense now. I'll explain it all later, just pay attention to the number at the bottom: +7.68245837 minutes. That will be my gift to you if I'm successful in my mission. Now, you have a secret mission too. Your mission is to figure out how you want to spend your extra seven and a half minutes. And I think you should do something unusual with them, because these are bonus minutes. You weren't going to have them anyway. Now, because I'm a game designer, you might be thinking to yourself, I know what she wants us to do with those minutes, she wants us to spend them playing games. Now this is a totally reasonable assumption, given that I have made quite a habit of encouraging people to spend more time playing games. For example, in my first TED Talk, I did propose that we should spend 21 billion hours a week, as a planet, playing video games. Now, 21 billion hours, it's a lot of time. It's so much time, in fact, that the number one unsolicited comment that I have heard from people all over the world since I gave that talk, is this: Jane, games are great and all, but on your deathbed, are you really going to wish you spent more time playing Angry Birds? (Laughter) This idea is so pervasive — that games are a waste of time that we will come to regret — that I hear it literally everywhere I go. For example, true story: Just a few weeks ago, this cab driver, upon finding out that a friend and I were in town for a game developers' conference, turned around and said — and I quote — "I hate games. Waste of life. Imagine getting to the end of your life and regretting all that time." Now, I want to take this problem seriously. I want games to be a force for good in the world. I don't want gamers to regret the time they spent playing, time that I encouraged them to spend. So I have been thinking about this question a lot lately. When we're on our deathbeds, will we regret the time we spent playing games? Now, this may surprise you, but it turns out there is actually some scientific research on this question. It's true. Hospice workers, the people who take care of us at the end of our lives, recently issued a report on the most frequently expressed regrets that people say when they are literally on their deathbeds. And that's what I want to share with you today — the top five regrets of the dying. Number one: I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number two: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Number three: I wish I had let myself be happier. Number four: I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self. And number five: I wish I'd lived a life true to my dreams, instead of what others expected of me. Now, as far as I know, no one ever told one of the hospice workers, "I wish I'd spent more time playing video games," but when I hear these top five regrets of the dying, I can't help but hear five deep human cravings that games actually help us fulfill. For example, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. For many people, this means, I wish I'd spent more time with my family, with my kids when they were growing up. Well, we know that playing games together has tremendous family benefits. A recent study from Brigham Young University School of Family Life reported that parents who spend more time playing video games with their kids have much stronger real-life relationships with them. "I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends." Hundreds of millions of people use social games like FarmVille or Words With Friends to stay in daily contact with real-life friends and family. A recent study from the University of Michigan showed that these games are incredibly powerful relationship-management tools. They help us stay connected with people in our social network that we would otherwise grow distant from, if we weren't playing games together. "I wish I'd let myself be happier." Well, here I can't help but think of the groundbreaking clinical trials recently conducted at East Carolina University that showed that online games can outperform pharmaceuticals for treating clinical anxiety and depression. Just 30 minutes of online game play a day was enough to create dramatic boosts in mood and long-term increases in happiness. "I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self." Well, avatars are a way to express our true selves, our most heroic, idealized version of who we might become. You can see that in this alter ego portrait by Robbie Cooper of a gamer with his avatar. And Stanford University has been doing research for five years now to document how playing a game with an idealized avatar changes how we think and act in real life, making us more courageous, more ambitious, more committed to our goals. "I wish I'd led a life true to my dreams, and not what others expected of me." Are games doing this yet? I'm not sure, so I've left a Super Mario question mark. We're going to come back to this one. But in the meantime, perhaps you're wondering, who is this game designer to be talking to us about deathbed regrets? And it's true, I've never worked in a hospice, I've never been on my deathbed. But recently I did spend three months in bed, wanting to die. Really wanting to die. Now let me tell you that story. It started two years ago, when I hit my head and got a concussion. The concussion didn't heal properly, and after 30 days, I was left with symptoms like nonstop headaches, nausea, vertigo, memory loss, mental fog. My doctor told me that in order to heal my brain, I had to rest it. So I had to avoid everything that triggered my symptoms. For me that meant no reading, no writing, no video games, no work or email, no running, no alcohol, no caffeine. In other words — and I think you see where this is going — no reason to live. (Laughter) Of course it's meant to be funny, but in all seriousness, suicidal ideation is quite common with traumatic brain injuries. It happens to one in three, and it happened to me. My brain started telling me, "Jane, you want to die." It said, "You're never going to get better." It said, "The pain will never end." And these voices became so persistent and so persuasive that I started to legitimately fear for my life, which is the time that I said to myself after 34 days — and I will never forget this moment — I said, "I am either going to kill myself or I'm going to turn this into a game." Now, why a game? I knew from researching the psychology of games for more than a decade that when we play a game — and this is in the scientific literature — we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination, more optimism, and we're more likely to reach out to others for help. I wanted to bring these gamer traits to my real-life challenge, so I created a role-playing recovery game called Jane the Concussion Slayer. Now this became my new secret identity, and the first thing I did as a slayer was call my twin sister — I have an identical twin sister named Kelly — and tell her, "I'm playing a game to heal my brain, and I want you to play with me." This was an easier way to ask for help. She became my first ally in the game, my husband Kiyash joined next, and together we identified and battled the bad guys. Now this was anything that could trigger my symptoms and therefore slow down the healing process, things like bright lights and crowded spaces. We also collected and activated power-ups. This was anything I could do on even my worst day to feel just a little bit good, just a little bit productive. Things like cuddling my dog for 10 minutes, or getting out of bed and walking around the block just once. Now the game was that simple: Adopt a secret identity, recruit your allies, battle the bad guys, activate the power-ups. But even with a game so simple, within just a couple days of starting to play, that fog of depression and anxiety went away. It just vanished. It felt like a miracle. Now it wasn't a miracle cure for the headaches or the cognitive symptoms. That lasted for more than a year, and it was the hardest year of my life by far. But even when I still had the symptoms, even while I was still in pain, I stopped suffering. Now what happened next with the game surprised me. I put up some blog posts and videos online, explaining how to play. But not everybody has a concussion, obviously, not everyone wants to be "the slayer," so I renamed the game SuperBetter. And soon, I started hearing from people all over the world who were adopting their own secret identity, recruiting their own allies, and they were getting "super better," facing challenges like cancer and chronic pain, depression and Crohn's disease. Even people were playing it for terminal diagnoses like ALS. And I could tell from their messages and their videos that the game was helping them in the same ways that it helped me. They talked about feeling stronger and braver. They talked about feeling better understood by their friends and family. And they even talked about feeling happier, even though they were in pain, even though they were tackling the toughest challenge of their lives. Now at the time, I'm thinking to myself, what is going on here? I mean, how could a game so trivial intervene so powerfully in such serious, and in some cases life-and-death, circumstances? I mean, if it hadn't worked for me, there's no way I would have believed it was possible. Well, it turns out there's some science here, too. Some people get stronger and happier after a traumatic event. And that's what was happening to us. The game was helping us experience what scientists call post-traumatic growth, which is not something we usually hear about. We usually hear about post-traumatic stress disorder. But scientists now know that a traumatic event doesn't doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives. Here are the top five things that people with post-traumatic growth say: "My priorities have changed." "I'm not afraid to do what makes me happy." "I feel closer to my friends and family." "I understand myself better. I know who I really am now." "I have a new sense of meaning and purpose in my life." "I'm better able to focus on my goals and dreams." Now, does this sound familiar? It should, because the top five traits of post-traumatic growth are essentially the direct opposite of the top five regrets of the dying. Now this is interesting, right? It seems that somehow, a traumatic event can unlock our ability to lead a life with fewer regrets. But how does it work? How do you get from trauma to growth? Or better yet, is there a way to get all the benefits of post-traumatic growth without the trauma, without having to hit your head in the first place? That would be good, right? I wanted to understand the phenomenon better, so I devoured the scientific literature, and here's what I learned. There are four kinds of strength, or resilience, that contribute to post-traumatic growth, and there are scientifically validated activities that you can do every day to build up these four kinds of resilience, and you don't need a trauma to do it. I could tell you what these four types of strength are, but I'd rather you experience them firsthand. I'd rather we all start building them up together right now. Here's what we're going to do. We'll play a quick game together. This is where you earn the seven and a half minutes of bonus life that I promised you earlier. All you have to do is successfully complete the first four SuperBetter quests. And I feel like you can do it. I have confidence in you. So, everybody ready? This is your first quest. Here we go. Pick one: Stand up and take three steps, or make your hands into fists, raise them over your head as high as you can for five seconds, go! All right, I like the people doing both. You are overachievers. Very good. (Laughter) Well done, everyone. That is worth +1 physical resilience, which means that your body can withstand more stress and heal itself faster. We know from the research that the number one thing you can do to boost your physical resilience is to not sit still. That's all it takes. Every single second that you are not sitting still, you are actively improving the health of your heart, and your lungs and brains. Everybody ready for your next quest? I want you to snap your fingers exactly 50 times, or count backwards from 100 by seven, like this: 100, 93... Go! (Snapping) Don't give up. (Snapping) Don't let the people counting down from 100 interfere with your counting to 50. (Snapping) (Laughter) Nice. Wow. That's the first time I've ever seen that. Bonus physical resilience. Well done, everyone. Now that's worth +1 mental resilience, which means you have more mental focus, more discipline, determination and willpower. We know from the scientific research that willpower actually works like a muscle. It gets stronger the more you exercise it. So tackling a tiny challenge without giving up, even one as absurd as snapping your fingers exactly 50 times or counting backwards from 100 by seven is actually a scientifically validated way to boost your willpower. So good job. Quest number three. Pick one: Because of the room, fate's really determined this for you, but here are the two options. If you're inside, find a window and look out of it. If you're outside, find a window and look in. Or do a quick YouTube or Google image search for "baby [your favorite animal.]" Do it on your phones, or just shout out some baby animals, and I'll put them on the screen. So, what do we want to see? Sloth, giraffe, elephant, snake. Okay, let's see what we got. Baby dolphin and baby llamas. Everybody look. Got that? Okay, one more. Baby elephant. (Audience) Oh! We're clapping for that? That's amazing. (Laughter) All right, what we're just feeling there is plus-one emotional resilience, which means you have the ability to provoke powerful, positive emotions like curiosity or love, which we feel looking at baby animals, when you need them most. Here's a secret from the scientific literature for you. If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion over the course of an hour, a day, a week, you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you're facing. And this is called the three-to-one positive emotion ratio. It's my favorite SuperBetter trick, so keep it up. All right, pick one, last quest: Shake someone's hand for six seconds, or send someone a quick thank you by text, email, Facebook or Twitter. Go! (Chatting) Looking good, looking good. Nice, nice. Keep it up. I love it! All right, everybody, that is +1 social resilience, which means you actually get more strength from your friends, your neighbors, your family, your community. Now, a great way to boost social resilience is gratitude. Touch is even better. Here's one more secret for you: Shaking someone's hand for six seconds dramatically raises the level of oxytocin in your bloodstream, now that's the trust hormone. That means that all of you who just shook hands are biochemically primed to like and want to help each other. This will linger during the break, so take advantage of the networking opportunities. (Laughter) Well, you have successfully completed your four quests, let's see if I've successfully completed my mission to give you seven and a half minutes of bonus life. Now I get to share one more little bit of science with you. It turns out that people who regularly boost these four types of resilience — physical, mental, emotional and social — live 10 years longer than everyone else. So this is true. If you are regularly achieving the three-to-one positive emotion ratio, if you are never sitting still for more than an hour at a time, if you are reaching out to one person you care about every single day, if you are tackling tiny goals to boost your willpower, you will live 10 years longer than everyone else, and here's where that math I showed you earlier comes in. So, the average life expectancy in the U.S. and the U.K. is 78.1 years, but we know from more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies that you can add 10 years of life by boosting your four types of resilience. So every single year that you are boosting your four types of resilience, you're actually earning .128 more years of life or 46 more days of life, or 67,298 more minutes of life, which means every single day, you are earning 184 minutes of life, or every single hour that you are boosting your four types of resilience, like we just did together, you are earning 7.68245837 more minutes of life. Congratulations, those seven and a half minutes are all yours. You totally earned them. Yeah! (Applause) Awesome. Wait, wait, wait. You still have your special mission, your secret mission. How are you going to spend these minutes of bonus life? Well, here's my suggestion. These seven and a half bonus minutes are kind of like genie's wishes. You can use your first wish to wish for a million more wishes. Pretty clever, right? So, if you spend these seven and a half minutes today doing something that makes you happy, or that gets you physically active, or puts you in touch with someone you care about, or even just tackling a tiny challenge, you're going to boost your resilience, so you're going to earn more minutes. And the good news is, you can keep going like that. Every hour of the day, every day of your life, all the way to your deathbed, which will now be 10 years later than it would have otherwise. And when you get there, more than likely, you will not have any of those top five regrets, because you will have built up the strength and resilience to lead a life truer to your dreams. And with 10 extra years, you might even have enough time to play a few more games. Thank you. (Applause) |
Meet your microbes | {0: 'Jonathan Eisen studies the ecology and evolution of microbial communities -- and their co-evolution with their hosts.'} | TEDMED 2012 | I'm going to start with a little story. So, I grew up in this neighborhood. When I was 15 years old, I went from being what I think was a strapping young athlete, over four months, slowly wasting away until I was basically a famine victim with an unquenchable thirst. I had basically digested away my body. And this all came to a head when I was on a backpacking trip, my first one ever actually, on Old Rag Mountain in West Virginia, and was putting my face into puddles of water and drinking like a dog. That night, I was taken into the emergency room and diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic in full-blown ketoacidosis. And I recovered, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, insulin and other things, and gained all my weight back and more. And something festered inside me after this happened. What I thought about was, what caused the diabetes? You see, diabetes is an autoimmune disease where your body fights itself, and at the time people thought that somehow maybe exposure to a pathogen had triggered my immune system to fight the pathogen and then kill the cells that make insulin. And this is what I thought for a long period of time, and that's in fact what medicine and people have focused on quite a bit, the microbes that do bad things. And that's where I need my assistant here now. You may recognize her. So, I went yesterday, I apologize, I skipped a few of the talks, and I went over to the National Academy of Sciences building, and they sell toys, giant microbes. And here we go! So you have caught flesh-eating disease if you caught that one. I gotta get back out my baseball ability here. (Laughter) So, unfortunately or not surprisingly, most of the microbes they sell at the National Academy building are pathogens. Everybody focuses on the things that kill us, and that's what I was focusing on. And it turns out that we are covered in a cloud of microbes, and those microbes actually do us good much of the time, rather than killing us. And so, we've known about this for some period of time. People have used microscopes to look at the microbes that cover us, I know you're not paying attention to me, but ... (Laughter) The microbes that cover us. And if you look at them in the microscope, you can see that we actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells. There's more mass in the microbes than the mass of our brain. We are literally a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms. And unfortunately, if you want to learn about the microorganisms, just looking at them in a microscope is not sufficient. And so we just heard about the DNA sequencing. It turns out that one of the best ways to look at microbes and to understand them is to look at their DNA. And that's what I've been doing for 20 years, using DNA sequencing, collecting samples from various places, including the human body, reading the DNA sequence and then using that DNA sequencing to tell us about the microbes that are in a particular place. And what's amazing, when you use this technology, for example, looking at humans, we're not just covered in a sea of microbes. There are thousands upon thousands of different kinds of microbes on us. We have millions of genes of microbes in our human microbiome covering us. And so this microbial diversity differs between people, and what people have been thinking about in the last 10, maybe 15 years is, maybe these microbes, this microbial cloud in and on us, and the variation between us, may be responsible for some of the health and illness differences between us. And that comes back to the diabetes story I was telling you. It turns out that people now think that one of the triggers for type 1 diabetes is not fighting a pathogen, but is in fact trying to — miscommunicating with the microbes that live in and on you. And somehow maybe the microbial community that's in and on me got off, and then this triggered some sort of immune response and led to me killing the cells that make insulin in my body. And so what I want to tell you about for a few minutes is, what people have learned using DNA sequencing techniques in particular, to study the microbial cloud that lives in and on us. And I want to tell you a story about a personal project. My first personal experience with studying the microbes on the human body actually came from a talk that I gave, right around the corner from here at Georgetown. I gave a talk, and a family friend who happened to be the Dean of Georgetown Medical School was at the talk, and came up to me afterwards saying, they were doing a study of ileal transplants in people. And they wanted to look at the microbes after the transplants. And so I started a collaboration with this person, Michael Zasloff and Thomas Fishbein, to look at the microbes that colonized these ilea after they were transplanted into a recipient. And I can tell you all the details about the microbial study that we did there, but the reason I want to tell you this story is something really striking that they did at the beginning of this project. They take the donor ileum, which is filled with microbes from a donor and they have a recipient who might have a problem with their microbial community, say Crohn's disease, and they sterilized the donor ileum. Cleaned out all the microbes, and then put it in the recipient. They did this because this was common practice in medicine, even though it was obvious that this was not a good idea. And fortunately, in the course of this project, the transplant surgeons and the other people decided, forget common practice. We have to switch. So they actually switched to leaving some of the microbial community in the ileum. They leave the microbes with the donor, and theoretically that might help the people who are receiving this ileal transplant. And so, people — this is a study that I did now. In the last few years there's been a great expansion in using DNA technology to study the microbes in and on people. There's something called the Human Microbiome Project that's going on in the United States, and MetaHIT going on in Europe, and a lot of other projects. And when people have done a variety of studies, they have learned things such as, when a baby is born, during vaginal delivery you get colonized by the microbes from your mother. There are risk factors associated with cesarean sections, some of those risk factors may be due to mis-colonization when you carve a baby out of its mother rather than being delivered through the birth canal. And a variety of other studies have shown that the microbial community that lives in and on us helps in development of the immune system, helps in fighting off pathogens, helps in our metabolism, and determining our metabolic rate, probably determines our odor, and may even shape our behavior in a variety of ways. And so, these studies have documented or suggested out of a variety of important functions for the microbial community, this cloud, the non-pathogens that live in and on us. And one area that I think is very interesting, which many of you may have now that we've thrown microbes into the crowd, is something that I would call "germophobia." So people are really into cleanliness, right? We have antibiotics in our kitchen counters, people are washing every part of them all of the time, we pump antibiotics into our food, into our communities, we take antibiotics excessively. And killing pathogens is a good thing if you're sick, but we should understand that when we pump chemicals and antibiotics into our world, that we're also killing the cloud of microbes that live in and on us. And excessive use of antibiotics, in particular in children, has been shown to be associated with, again, risk factors for obesity, for autoimmune diseases, for a variety of problems that are probably due to disruption of the microbial community. So the microbial community can go wrong whether we want it to or not, or we can kill it with antibiotics, but what can we do to restore it? I'm sure many people here have heard about probiotics. Probiotics are one thing that you can try and do to restore the microbial community that is in and on you. And they definitely have been shown to be effective in some cases. There's a project going on at UC Davis where people are using probiotics to try and treat, prevent, necrotizing enterocolitis in premature infants. Premature infants have real problems with their microbial community. And it may be that probiotics can help prevent the development of this horrible necrotizing enterocolitis in these premature infants. But probiotics are sort of a very, very simple solution. Most of the pills that you can take or the yogurts that you can eat have one or two species in them, maybe five species in them, and the human community is thousands upon thousands of species. So what can we do to restore our microbial community when we have thousands and thousands of species on us? Well, one thing that animals seem to do is, they eat poo — coprophagia. And it turns out that many veterinarians, old school veterinarians in particular, have been doing something called "poo tea," not booty, but poo tea, to treat colic and other ailments in horses and cows and things like that, where you make tea from the poo from a healthy individual animal and you feed it to a sick animal. Although, unless you have a fistulated cow with a big hole in its side, and you can put your hand into its rumen, it's hard to imagine that the delivery of microbes directly into the mouth and through the entire top of the digestive tract is the best delivery system, so you may have heard in people they are now doing fecal transplants, where rather than delivering a couple of probiotic microbes through the mouth, they are delivering a community of probiotics, a community of microbes from a healthy donor, through the other end. And this has turned out to be very effective in fighting certain intransigent infectious diseases like Clostridium difficile infections that can stay with people for years and years and years. Transplants of the feces, of the microbes from the feces, from a healthy donor has actually been shown to cure systemic C. dif infections in some people. Now what these transplants, these fecal transplants, or the poo tea suggest to me, and many other people have come up with this same idea, is that the microbial community in and on us, it's an organ. We should view it as a functioning organ, part of ourselves. We should treat it carefully and with respect, and we do not want to mess with it, say by C-sections or by antibiotics or excessive cleanliness, without some real good justification. And what the DNA sequencing technologies are allowing people to do now is do detailed studies of, say, 100 patients who have Crohn's disease and 100 people who don't have Crohn's disease. Or 100 people who took antibiotics when they were little, and 100 people who did not take antibiotics. And we can now start to compare the community of microbes and their genes and see if there are differences. And eventually we may be able to understand if they're not just correlative differences, but causative. Studies in model systems like mouse and other animals are also helping do this, but people are now using these technologies because they've gotten very cheap, to study the microbes in and on a variety of people. So, in wrapping up, what I want to tell you about is, I didn't tell you a part of the story of coming down with diabetes. It turns out that my father was an M.D., actually studied hormones. I told him many times that I was tired, thirsty, not feeling very good. And he shrugged it off, I think he either thought I was just complaining a lot, or it was the typical M.D. "nothing can be wrong with my children." We even went to the International Society of Endocrinology meeting as family in Quebec. And I was getting up every five minutes to pee, and drinking everybody's water at the table, and I think they all thought I was a druggie. (Laughter) But the reason I'm telling you this is that the medical community, my father as an example, sometimes doesn't see what's right in front of their eyes. The microbial cloud, it is right in front of us. We can't see it most of the time. It's invisible. They're microbes. They're tiny. But we can see them through their DNA, we can see them through the effects that they have on people. And what we need now is to start thinking about this microbial community in the context of everything in human medicine. It doesn't mean that it affects every part of us, but it might. What we need is a full field guide to the microbes that live in and on people, so that we can understand what they're doing to our lives. We are them. They are us. Thank you. (Applause) |
The future race car -- 150mph, and no driver | {0: 'An autonomous car may seem like a thing of the distant future, but mechanical engineer Chris Gerdes is racing to make it a reality today.'} | TEDxStanford | So, how many of you have ever gotten behind the wheel of a car when you really shouldn't have been driving? Maybe you're out on the road for a long day, and you just wanted to get home. You were tired, but you felt you could drive a few more miles. Maybe you thought, I've had less to drink than everybody else, I should be the one to go home. Or maybe your mind was just entirely elsewhere. Does this sound familiar to you? Now, in those situations, wouldn't it be great if there was a button on your dashboard that you could push, and the car would get you home safely? Now, that's been the promise of the self-driving car, the autonomous vehicle, and it's been the dream since at least 1939, when General Motors showcased this idea at their Futurama booth at the World's Fair. Now, it's been one of those dreams that's always seemed about 20 years in the future. Now, two weeks ago, that dream took a step forward, when the state of Nevada granted Google's self-driving car the very first license for an autonomous vehicle, clearly establishing that it's legal for them to test it on the roads in Nevada. Now, California's considering similar legislation, and this would make sure that the autonomous car is not one of those things that has to stay in Vegas. (Laughter) Now, in my lab at Stanford, we've been working on autonomous cars too, but with a slightly different spin on things. You see, we've been developing robotic race cars, cars that can actually push themselves to the very limits of physical performance. Now, why would we want to do such a thing? Well, there's two really good reasons for this. First, we believe that before people turn over control to an autonomous car, that autonomous car should be at least as good as the very best human drivers. Now, if you're like me, and the other 70 percent of the population who know that we are above-average drivers, you understand that's a very high bar. There's another reason as well. Just like race car drivers can use all of the friction between the tire and the road, all of the car's capabilities to go as fast as possible, we want to use all of those capabilities to avoid any accident we can. Now, you may push the car to the limits not because you're driving too fast, but because you've hit an icy patch of road, conditions have changed. In those situations, we want a car that is capable enough to avoid any accident that can physically be avoided. I must confess, there's kind of a third motivation as well. You see, I have a passion for racing. In the past, I've been a race car owner, a crew chief and a driving coach, although maybe not at the level that you're currently expecting. One of the things that we've developed in the lab — we've developed several vehicles — is what we believe is the world's first autonomously drifting car. It's another one of those categories where maybe there's not a lot of competition. (Laughter) But this is P1. It's an entirely student-built electric vehicle, which through using its rear-wheel drive and front-wheel steer-by-wire can drift around corners. It can get sideways like a rally car driver, always able to take the tightest curve, even on slippery, changing surfaces, never spinning out. We've also worked with Volkswagen Oracle, on Shelley, an autonomous race car that has raced at 150 miles an hour through the Bonneville Salt Flats, gone around Thunderhill Raceway Park in the sun, the wind and the rain, and navigated the 153 turns and 12.4 miles of the Pikes Peak Hill Climb route in Colorado with nobody at the wheel. (Laughter) (Applause) I guess it goes without saying that we've had a lot of fun doing this. But in fact, there's something else that we've developed in the process of developing these autonomous cars. We have developed a tremendous appreciation for the capabilities of human race car drivers. As we've looked at the question of how well do these cars perform, we wanted to compare them to our human counterparts. And we discovered their human counterparts are amazing. Now, we can take a map of a race track, we can take a mathematical model of a car, and with some iteration, we can actually find the fastest way around that track. We line that up with data that we record from a professional driver, and the resemblance is absolutely remarkable. Yes, there are subtle differences here, but the human race car driver is able to go out and drive an amazingly fast line, without the benefit of an algorithm that compares the trade-off between going as fast as possible in this corner, and shaving a little bit of time off of the straight over here. Not only that, they're able to do it lap after lap after lap. They're able to go out and consistently do this, pushing the car to the limits every single time. It's extraordinary to watch. You put them in a new car, and after a few laps, they've found the fastest line in that car, and they're off to the races. It really makes you think, we'd love to know what's going on inside their brain. So as researchers, that's what we decided to find out. We decided to instrument not only the car, but also the race car driver, to try to get a glimpse into what was going on in their head as they were doing this. Now, this is Dr. Lene Harbott applying electrodes to the head of John Morton. John Morton is a former Can-Am and IMSA driver, who's also a class champion at Le Mans. Fantastic driver, and very willing to put up with graduate students and this sort of research. She's putting electrodes on his head so that we can monitor the electrical activity in John's brain as he races around the track. Now, clearly we're not going to put a couple of electrodes on his head and understand exactly what all of his thoughts are on the track. However, neuroscientists have identified certain patterns that let us tease out some very important aspects of this. For instance, the resting brain tends to generate a lot of alpha waves. In contrast, theta waves are associated with a lot of cognitive activity, like visual processing, things where the driver is thinking quite a bit. Now, we can measure this, and we can look at the relative power between the theta waves and the alpha waves. This gives us a measure of mental workload, how much the driver is actually challenged cognitively at any point along the track. Now, we wanted to see if we could actually record this on the track, so we headed down south to Laguna Seca. Laguna Seca is a legendary raceway about halfway between Salinas and Monterey. It has a curve there called the Corkscrew. Now, the Corkscrew is a chicane, followed by a quick right-handed turn as the road drops three stories. Now, the strategy for driving this as explained to me was, you aim for the bush in the distance, and as the road falls away, you realize it was actually the top of a tree. All right, so thanks to the Revs Program at Stanford, we were able to take John there and put him behind the wheel of a 1960 Porsche Abarth Carrera. Life is way too short for boring cars. So, here you see John on the track, he's going up the hill — Oh! Somebody liked that — and you can see, actually, his mental workload — measuring here in the red bar — you can see his actions as he approaches. Now watch, he has to downshift. And then he has to turn left. Look for the tree, and down. Not surprisingly, you can see this is a pretty challenging task. You can see his mental workload spike as he goes through this, as you would expect with something that requires this level of complexity. But what's really interesting is to look at areas of the track where his mental workload doesn't increase. I'm going to take you around now to the other side of the track. Turn three. And John's going to go into that corner and the rear end of the car is going to begin to slide out. He's going to have to correct for that with steering. So watch as John does this here. Watch the mental workload, and watch the steering. The car begins to slide out, dramatic maneuver to correct it, and no change whatsoever in the mental workload. Not a challenging task. In fact, entirely reflexive. Now, our data processing on this is still preliminary, but it really seems that these phenomenal feats that the race car drivers are performing are instinctive. They are things that they have simply learned to do. It requires very little mental workload for them to perform these amazing feats. And their actions are fantastic. This is exactly what you want to do on the steering wheel to catch the car in this situation. Now, this has given us tremendous insight and inspiration for our own autonomous vehicles. We've started to ask the question: Can we make them a little less algorithmic and a little more intuitive? Can we take this reflexive action that we see from the very best race car drivers, introduce it to our cars, and maybe even into a system that could get onto your car in the future? That would take us a long step along the road to autonomous vehicles that drive as well as the best humans. But it's made us think a little bit more deeply as well. Do we want something more from our car than to simply be a chauffeur? Do we want our car to perhaps be a partner, a coach, someone that can use their understanding of the situation to help us reach our potential? Can, in fact, the technology not simply replace humans, but allow us to reach the level of reflex and intuition that we're all capable of? So, as we move forward into this technological future, I want you to just pause and think of that for a moment. What is the ideal balance of human and machine? And as we think about that, let's take inspiration from the absolutely amazing capabilities of the human body and the human mind. Thank you. (Applause) |
A vision of crimes in the future | {0: 'Marc Goodman works to prevent future crimes and acts of terrorism, even those security threats not yet invented.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I study the future of crime and terrorism, and frankly, I'm afraid. I'm afraid by what I see. I sincerely want to believe that technology can bring us the techno-utopia that we've been promised, but, you see, I've spent a career in law enforcement, and that's informed my perspective on things. I've been a street police officer, an undercover investigator, a counter-terrorism strategist, and I've worked in more than 70 countries around the world. I've had to see more than my fair share of violence and the darker underbelly of society, and that's informed my opinions. My work with criminals and terrorists has actually been highly educational. They have taught me a lot, and I'd like to be able to share some of these observations with you. Today I'm going to show you the flip side of all those technologies that we marvel at, the ones that we love. In the hands of the TED community, these are awesome tools which will bring about great change for our world, but in the hands of suicide bombers, the future can look quite different. I started observing technology and how criminals were using it as a young patrol officer. In those days, this was the height of technology. Laugh though you will, all the drug dealers and gang members with whom I dealt had one of these long before any police officer I knew did. Twenty years later, criminals are still using mobile phones, but they're also building their own mobile phone networks, like this one, which has been deployed in all 31 states of Mexico by the narcos. They have a national encrypted radio communications system. Think about that. Think about the innovation that went into that. Think about the infrastructure to build it. And then think about this: Why can't I get a cell phone signal in San Francisco? (Laughter) How is this possible? (Laughter) It makes no sense. (Applause) We consistently underestimate what criminals and terrorists can do. Technology has made our world increasingly open, and for the most part, that's great, but all of this openness may have unintended consequences. Consider the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai. The men that carried that attack out were armed with AK-47s, explosives and hand grenades. They threw these hand grenades at innocent people as they sat eating in cafes and waited to catch trains on their way home from work. But heavy artillery is nothing new in terrorist operations. Guns and bombs are nothing new. What was different this time is the way that the terrorists used modern information communications technologies to locate additional victims and slaughter them. They were armed with mobile phones. They had BlackBerries. They had access to satellite imagery. They had satellite phones, and they even had night vision goggles. But perhaps their greatest innovation was this. We've all seen pictures like this on television and in the news. This is an operations center. And the terrorists built their very own op center across the border in Pakistan, where they monitored the BBC, al Jazeera, CNN and Indian local stations. They also monitored the Internet and social media to monitor the progress of their attacks and how many people they had killed. They did all of this in real time. The innovation of the terrorist operations center gave terrorists unparalleled situational awareness and tactical advantage over the police and over the government. What did they do with this? They used it to great effect. At one point during the 60-hour siege, the terrorists were going room to room trying to find additional victims. They came upon a suite on the top floor of the hotel, and they kicked down the door and they found a man hiding by his bed. And they said to him, "Who are you, and what are you doing here?" And the man replied, "I'm just an innocent schoolteacher." Of course, the terrorists knew that no Indian schoolteacher stays at a suite in the Taj. They picked up his identification, and they phoned his name in to the terrorist war room, where the terrorist war room Googled him, and found a picture and called their operatives on the ground and said, "Your hostage, is he heavyset? Is he bald in front? Does he wear glasses?" "Yes, yes, yes," came the answers. The op center had found him and they had a match. He was not a schoolteacher. He was the second-wealthiest businessman in India, and after discovering this information, the terrorist war room gave the order to the terrorists on the ground in Mumbai. ("Kill him.") We all worry about our privacy settings on Facebook, but the fact of the matter is, our openness can be used against us. Terrorists are doing this. A search engine can determine who shall live and who shall die. This is the world that we live in. During the Mumbai siege, terrorists were so dependent on technology that several witnesses reported that as the terrorists were shooting hostages with one hand, they were checking their mobile phone messages in the very other hand. In the end, 300 people were gravely wounded and over 172 men, women and children lost their lives that day. Think about what happened. During this 60-hour siege on Mumbai, 10 men armed not just with weapons, but with technology, were able to bring a city of 20 million people to a standstill. Ten people brought 20 million people to a standstill, and this traveled around the world. This is what radicals can do with openness. This was done nearly four years ago. What could terrorists do today with the technologies available that we have? What will they do tomorrow? The ability of one to affect many is scaling exponentially, and it's scaling for good and it's scaling for evil. It's not just about terrorism, though. There's also been a big paradigm shift in crime. You see, you can now commit more crime as well. In the old days, it was a knife and a gun. Then criminals moved to robbing trains. You could rob 200 people on a train, a great innovation. Moving forward, the Internet allowed things to scale even more. In fact, many of you will remember the recent Sony PlayStation hack. In that incident, over 100 million people were robbed. Think about that. When in the history of humanity has it ever been possible for one person to rob 100 million? Of course, it's not just about stealing things. There are other avenues of technology that criminals can exploit. Many of you will remember this super cute video from the last TED, but not all quadcopter swarms are so nice and cute. They don't all have drumsticks. Some can be armed with HD cameras and do countersurveillance on protesters, or, as in this little bit of movie magic, quadcopters can be loaded with firearms and automatic weapons. Little robots are cute when they play music to you. When they swarm and chase you down the block to shoot you, a little bit less so. Of course, criminals and terrorists weren't the first to give guns to robots. We know where that started. But they're adapting quickly. Recently, the FBI arrested an al Qaeda affiliate in the United States, who was planning on using these remote-controlled drone aircraft to fly C4 explosives into government buildings in the United States. By the way, these travel at over 600 miles an hour. Every time a new technology is being introduced, criminals are there to exploit it. We've all seen 3D printers. We know with them that you can print in many materials ranging from plastic to chocolate to metal and even concrete. With great precision I actually was able to make this just the other day, a very cute little ducky. But I wonder to myself, for those people that strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up, how might they use 3D printers? Perhaps like this. You see, if you can print in metal, you can print one of these, and in fact you can also print one of these too. The UK I know has some very strict firearms laws. You needn't bring the gun into the UK anymore. You just bring the 3D printer and print the gun while you're here, and, of course, the magazines for your bullets. But as these get bigger in the future, what other items will you be able to print? The technologies are allowing bigger printers. As we move forward, we'll see new technologies also, like the Internet of Things. Every day we're connecting more and more of our lives to the Internet, which means that the Internet of Things will soon be the Internet of Things To Be Hacked. All of the physical objects in our space are being transformed into information technologies, and that has a radical implication for our security, because more connections to more devices means more vulnerabilities. Criminals understand this. Terrorists understand this. Hackers understand this. If you control the code, you control the world. This is the future that awaits us. There has not yet been an operating system or a technology that hasn't been hacked. That's troubling, since the human body itself is now becoming an information technology. As we've seen here, we're transforming ourselves into cyborgs. Every year, thousands of cochlear implants, diabetic pumps, pacemakers and defibrillators are being implanted in people. In the United States, there are 60,000 people who have a pacemaker that connects to the Internet. The defibrillators allow a physician at a distance to give a shock to a heart in case a patient needs it. But if you don't need it, and somebody else gives you the shock, it's not a good thing. Of course, we're going to go even deeper than the human body. We're going down to the cellular level these days. Up until this point, all the technologies I've been talking about have been silicon-based, ones and zeroes, but there's another operating system out there: the original operating system, DNA. And to hackers, DNA is just another operating system waiting to be hacked. It's a great challenge for them. There are people already working on hacking the software of life, and while most of them are doing this to great good and to help us all, some won't be. So how will criminals abuse this? Well, with synthetic biology you can do some pretty neat things. For example, I predict that we will move away from a plant-based narcotics world to a synthetic one. Why do you need the plants anymore? You can just take the DNA code from marijuana or poppies or coca leaves and cut and past that gene and put it into yeast, and you can take those yeast and make them make the cocaine for you, or the marijuana, or any other drug. So how we use yeast in the future is going to be really interesting. In fact, we may have some really interesting bread and beer as we go into this next century. The cost of sequencing the human genome is dropping precipitously. It was proceeding at Moore's Law pace, but then in 2008, something changed. The technologies got better, and now DNA sequencing is proceeding at a pace five times that of Moore's Law. That has significant implications for us. It took us 30 years to get from the introduction of the personal computer to the level of cybercrime we have today, but looking at how biology is proceeding so rapidly, and knowing criminals and terrorists as I do, we may get there a lot faster with biocrime in the future. It will be easy for anybody to go ahead and print their own bio-virus, enhanced versions of ebola or anthrax, weaponized flu. We recently saw a case where some researchers made the H5N1 avian influenza virus more potent. It already has a 70 percent mortality rate if you get it, but it's hard to get. Engineers, by moving around a small number of genetic changes, were able to weaponize it and make it much more easy for human beings to catch, so that not thousands of people would die, but tens of millions. You see, you can go ahead and create new pandemics, and the researchers who did this were so proud of their accomplishments, they wanted to publish it openly so that everybody could see this and get access to this information. But it goes deeper than that. DNA researcher Andrew Hessel has pointed out quite rightly that if you can use cancer treatments, modern cancer treatments, to go after one cell while leaving all the other cells around it intact, then you can also go after any one person's cell. Personalized cancer treatments are the flip side of personalized bioweapons, which means you can attack any one individual, including all the people in this picture. How will we protect them in the future? What to do? What to do about all this? That's what I get asked all the time. For those of you who follow me on Twitter, I will be tweeting out the answer later on today. (Laughter) Actually, it's a bit more complex than that, and there are no magic bullets. I don't have all the answers, but I know a few things. In the wake of 9/11, the best security minds put together all their innovation and this is what they created for security. If you're expecting the people who built this to protect you from the coming robopocalypse — (Laughter) — uh, you may want to have a backup plan. (Laughter) Just saying. Just think about that. (Applause) Law enforcement is currently a closed system. It's nation-based, while the threat is international. Policing doesn't scale globally. At least, it hasn't, and our current system of guns, border guards, big gates and fences are outdated in the new world into which we're moving. So how might we prepare for some of these specific threats, like attacking a president or a prime minister? This would be the natural government response, to hide away all our government leaders in hermetically sealed bubbles. But this is not going to work. The cost of doing a DNA sequence is going to be trivial. Anybody will have it and we will all have them in the future. So maybe there's a more radical way that we can look at this. What happens if we were to take the President's DNA, or a king or queen's, and put it out to a group of a few hundred trusted researchers so they could study that DNA and do penetration testing against it as a means of helping our leaders? Or what if we sent it out to a few thousand? Or, controversially, and not without its risks, what happens if we just gave it to the whole public? Then we could all be engaged in helping. We've already seen examples of this working well. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is staffed by journalists and citizens where they are crowd-sourcing what dictators and terrorists are doing with public funds around the world, and, in a more dramatic case, we've seen in Mexico, a country that has been racked by 50,000 narcotics-related murders in the past six years. They're killing so many people they can't even afford to bury them all in anything but these unmarked graves like this one outside of Ciudad Juarez. What can we do about this? The government has proven ineffective. So in Mexico, citizens, at great risk to themselves, are fighting back to build an effective solution. They're crowd-mapping the activities of the drug dealers. Whether or not you realize it, we are at the dawn of a technological arms race, an arms race between people who are using technology for good and those who are using it for ill. The threat is serious, and the time to prepare for it is now. I can assure you that the terrorists and criminals are. My personal belief is that, rather than having a small, elite force of highly trained government agents here to protect us all, we're much better off having average and ordinary citizens approaching this problem as a group and seeing what we can do. If we all do our part, I think we'll be in a much better space. The tools to change the world are in everybody's hands. How we use them is not just up to me, it's up to all of us. This was a technology I would frequently deploy as a police officer. This technology has become outdated in our current world. It doesn't scale, it doesn't work globally, and it surely doesn't work virtually. We've seen paradigm shifts in crime and terrorism. They call for a shift to a more open form and a more participatory form of law enforcement. So I invite you to join me. After all, public safety is too important to leave to the professionals. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
New ways to see music (with color! and fire!) | {0: 'In his day job, Jared Ficklin makes user interfaces at frog design. As a hobby, he explores what music looks like ... in light, in shapes, in fire.'} | TED2012 | My passions are music, technology and making things. And it's the combination of these things that has led me to the hobby of sound visualization, and, on occasion, has led me to play with fire. This is a Rubens' tube. It's one of many I've made over the years, and I have one here tonight. It's about an 8-foot-long tube of metal, it's got a hundred or so holes on top, on that side is the speaker, and here is some lab tubing, and it's connected to this tank of propane. So, let's fire it up and see what it does. So let's play a 550-herz frequency and watch what happens. (Frequency) Thank you. (Applause) It's okay to applaud the laws of physics, but essentially what's happening here — (Laughter) — is the energy from the sound via the air and gas molecules is influencing the combustion properties of propane, creating a visible waveform, and we can see the alternating regions of compression and rarefaction that we call frequency, and the height is showing us amplitude. So let's change the frequency of the sound, and watch what happens to the fire. (Higher frequency) So every time we hit a resonant frequency we get a standing wave and that emergent sine curve of fire. So let's turn that off. We're indoors. Thank you. (Applause) I also have with me a flame table. It's very similar to a Rubens' tube, and it's also used for visualizing the physical properties of sound, such as eigenmodes, so let's fire it up and see what it does. Ooh. (Laughter) Okay. Now, while the table comes up to pressure, let me note here that the sound is not traveling in perfect lines. It's actually traveling in all directions, and the Rubens' tube's a little like bisecting those waves with a line, and the flame table's a little like bisecting those waves with a plane, and it can show a little more subtle complexity, which is why I like to use it to watch Geoff Farina play guitar. (Music) All right, so it's a delicate dance. If you watch closely — (Applause) If you watch closely, you may have seen some of the eigenmodes, but also you may have seen that jazz music is better with fire. Actually, a lot of things are better with fire in my world, but the fire's just a foundation. It shows very well that eyes can hear, and this is interesting to me because technology allows us to present sound to the eyes in ways that accentuate the strength of the eyes for seeing sound, such as the removal of time. So here, I'm using a rendering algorithm to paint the frequencies of the song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in a way that the eyes can take them in as a single visual impression, and the technique will also show the strengths of the visual cortex for pattern recognition. So if I show you another song off this album, and another, your eyes will easily pick out the use of repetition by the band Nirvana, and in the frequency distribution, the colors, you can see the clean-dirty-clean sound that they are famous for, and here is the entire album as a single visual impression, and I think this impression is pretty powerful. At least, it's powerful enough that if I show you these four songs, and I remind you that this is "Smells Like Teen Spirit," you can probably correctly guess, without listening to any music at all, that the song a die hard Nirvana fan would enjoy is this song, "I'll Stick Around" by the Foo Fighters, whose lead singer is Dave Grohl, who was the drummer in Nirvana. The songs are a little similar, but mostly I'm just interested in the idea that someday maybe we'll buy a song because we like the way it looks. All right, now for some more sound data. This is data from a skate park, and this is Mabel Davis skate park in Austin, Texas. (Skateboard sounds) And the sounds you're hearing came from eight microphones attached to obstacles around the park, and it sounds like chaos, but actually all the tricks start with a very distinct slap, but successful tricks end with a pop, whereas unsuccessful tricks more of a scratch and a tumble, and tricks on the rail will ring out like a gong, and voices occupy very unique frequencies in the skate park. So if we were to render these sounds visually, we might end up with something like this. This is all 40 minutes of the recording, and right away the algorithm tells us a lot more tricks are missed than are made, and also a trick on the rails is a lot more likely to produce a cheer, and if you look really closely, we can tease out traffic patterns. You see the skaters often trick in this direction. The obstacles are easier. And in the middle of the recording, the mics pick this up, but later in the recording, this kid shows up, and he starts using a line at the top of the park to do some very advanced tricks on something called the tall rail. And it's fascinating. At this moment in time, all the rest of the skaters turn their lines 90 degrees to stay out of his way. You see, there's a subtle etiquette in the skate park, and it's led by key influencers, and they tend to be the kids who can do the best tricks, or wear red pants, and on this day the mics picked that up. All right, from skate physics to theoretical physics. I'm a big fan of Stephen Hawking, and I wanted to use all eight hours of his Cambridge lecture series to create an homage. Now, in this series he's speaking with the aid of a computer, which actually makes identifying the ends of sentences fairly easy. So I wrote a steering algorithm. It listens to the lecture, and then it uses the amplitude of each word to move a point on the x-axis, and it uses the inflection of sentences to move a same point up and down on the y-axis. And these trend lines, you can see, there's more questions than answers in the laws of physics, and when we reach the end of a sentence, we place a star at that location. So there's a lot of sentences, so a lot of stars, and after rendering all of the audio, this is what we get. This is Stephen Hawking's universe. (Applause) It's all eight hours of the Cambridge lecture series taken in as a single visual impression, and I really like this image, but a lot of people think it's fake. So I made a more interactive version, and the way I did that is I used their position in time in the lecture to place these stars into 3D space, and with some custom software and a Kinect, I can walk right into the lecture. I'm going to wave through the Kinect here and take control, and now I'm going to reach out and I'm going to touch a star, and when I do, it will play the sentence that generated that star. Stephen Hawking: There is one, and only one, arrangement in which the pieces make a complete picture. Jared Ficklin: Thank you. (Applause) There are 1,400 stars. It's a really fun way to explore the lecture, and, I hope, a fitting homage. All right. Let me close with a work in progress. I think, after 30 years, the opportunity exists to create an enhanced version of closed captioning. Now, we've all seen a lot of TEDTalks online, so let's watch one now with the sound turned off and the closed captioning turned on. There's no closed captioning for the TED theme song, and we're missing it, but if you've watched enough of these, you hear it in your mind's ear, and then applause starts. It usually begins here, and it grows and then it falls. Sometimes you get a little star applause, and then I think even Bill Gates takes a nervous breath, and the talk begins. All right, so let's watch this clip again. This time, I'm not going to talk at all. There's still going to be no audio, but what I am going to do is I'm going to render the sound visually in real time at the bottom of the screen. So watch closely and see what your eyes can hear. This is fairly amazing to me. Even on the first view, your eyes will successfully pick out patterns, but on repeated views, your brain actually gets better at turning these patterns into information. You can get the tone and the timbre and the pace of the speech, things that you can't get out of closed captioning. That famous scene in horror movies where someone is walking up from behind is something you can see, and I believe this information would be something that is useful at times when the audio is turned off or not heard at all, and I speculate that deaf audiences might actually even be better at seeing sound than hearing audiences. I don't know. It's a theory right now. Actually, it's all just an idea. And let me end by saying that sound moves in all directions, and so do ideas. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to fool a GPS | {0: 'Todd Humphreys studies GPS, its future, and how we can address some of its biggest security problems.'} | TEDxAustin | Something happened in the early morning hours of May 2nd, 2000, that had a profound effect on the way our society operates. Ironically, hardly anyone noticed at the time. The change was silent, imperceptible, unless you knew exactly what to look for. On that morning, U.S. President Bill Clinton ordered that a special switch be thrown in the orbiting satellites of the Global Positioning System. Instantaneously, every civilian GPS receiver around the globe went from errors the size of a football field to errors the size of a small room. It's hard to overstate the effect that this change in accuracy has had on us. Before this switch was thrown, we didn't have in-car navigation systems giving turn-by-turn directions, because back then, GPS couldn't tell you what block you were on, let alone what street. For geolocation, accuracy matters, and things have only improved over the last 10 years. With more base stations, more ground stations, better receivers and better algorithms, GPS can now not only tell you what street you are on, but what part of the street. This level of accuracy has unleashed a firestorm of innovation. In fact, many of you navigated here today with the help of your TomTom or your smartphone. Paper maps are becoming obsolete. But we now stand on the verge of another revolution in geolocation accuracy. What if I told you that the two-meter positioning that our current cell phones and our TomToms give us is pathetic compared to what we could be getting? For some time now, it's been known that if you pay attention to the carrier phase of the GPS signal, and if you have an Internet connection, then you can go from meter level to centimeter level, even millimeter-level positioning. So why don't we have this capability on our phones? Only, I believe, for a lack of imagination. Manufacturers haven't built this carrier phase technique into their cheap GPS chips because they're not sure what the general public would do with geolocation so accurate that you could pinpoint the wrinkles in the palm of your hand. But you and I and other innovators, we can see the potential in this next leap in accuracy. Imagine, for example, an augmented reality app that overlays a virtual world to millimeter-level precision on top of the physical world. I could build for you a structure up here in 3D, millimeter accurate, that only you could see, or my friends at home. So this level of positioning, this is what we're looking for, and I believe that, within the next few years, I predict, that this kind of hyper-precise, carrier phase-based positioning will become cheap and ubiquitous, and the consequences will be fantastic. The Holy Grail, of course, is the GPS dot. Do you remember the movie "The Da Vinci Code?" Here's Professor Langdon examining a GPS dot, which his accomplice tells him is a tracking device accurate within two feet anywhere on the globe, but we know that in the world of nonfiction, the GPS dot is impossible, right? For one thing, GPS doesn't work indoors, and for another, they don't make devices quite this small, especially when those devices have to relay their measurements back over a network. Well, these objections were perfectly reasonable a few years ago, but things have changed. There's been a strong trend toward miniaturization, better sensitivity, so much so that, a few years ago, a GPS tracking device looked like this clunky box to the left of the keys. Compare that with the device released just months ago that's now packaged into something the size of a key fob, and if you take a look at the state of the art for a complete GPS receiver, which is only a centimeter on a side and more sensitive than ever, you realize that the GPS dot will soon move from fiction to nonfiction. Imagine what we could do with a world full of GPS dots. It's not just that you'll never lose your wallet or your keys anymore, or your child when you're at Disneyland. You'll buy GPS dots in bulk, and you'll stick them on everything you own worth more than a few tens of dollars. I couldn't find my shoes one recent morning, and, as usual, had to ask my wife if she had seen them. But I shouldn't have to bother my wife with that kind of triviality. I should be able to ask my house where my shoes are. (Laughter) Those of you who have made the switch to Gmail, remember how refreshing it was to go from organizing all of your email to simply searching it. The GPS dot will do the same for our possessions. Now, of course, there is a flip side to the GPS dot. I was in my office some months back and got a telephone call. The woman on the other end of the line, we'll call her Carol, was panicked. Apparently, an ex-boyfriend of Carol's from California had found her in Texas and was following her around. So you might ask at this point why she's calling you. Well, so did I. But it turned out there was a technical twist to Carol's case. Every time her ex-boyfriend would show up, at the most improbable times and the most improbable locations, he was carrying an open laptop, and over time Carol realized that he had planted a GPS tracking device on her car, so she was calling me for help to disable it. "Well, you should go to a good mechanic and have him look at your car," I said. "I already have," she told me. "He didn't see anything obvious, and he said he'd have to take the car apart piece by piece." "Well then, you'd better go to the police," I said. "I already have," she replied. "They're not sure this rises to the level of harassment, and they're not set up technically to find the device." "Okay, what about the FBI?" "I've talked to them too, and same story." We then talked about her coming to my lab and us performing a radio sweep of her car, but I wasn't even sure that would work, given that some of these devices are configured to only transmit when they're inside safe zones or when the car is moving. So, there we were. Carol isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, to find herself in this kind of fearsome environment, worrisome situation caused by GPS tracking. In fact, as I looked into her case, I discovered to my surprise that it's not clearly illegal for you or me to put a tracking device on someone else's car. The Supreme Court ruled last month that a policeman has to get a warrant if he wants to do prolonged tracking, but the law isn't clear about civilians doing this to one another, so it's not just Big Brother we have to worry about, but Big Neighbor. (Laughter) There is one alternative that Carol could have taken, very effective. It's called the Wave Bubble. It's an open-source GPS jammer, developed by Limor Fried, a graduate student at MIT, and Limor calls it "a tool for reclaiming our personal space." With a flip of the switch you create a bubble around you within which GPS signals can't reside. They get drowned out by the bubble. And Limor designed this, in part, because, like Carol, she felt threatened by GPS tracking. Then she posted her design to the web, and if you don't have time to build your own, you can buy one. Chinese manufacturers now sell thousands of nearly identical devices on the Internet. So you might be thinking, the Wave Bubble sounds great. I should have one. Might come in handy if somebody ever puts a tracking device on my car. But you should be aware that its use is very much illegal in the United States. And why is that? Well, because it's not a bubble at all. Its jamming signals don't stop at the edge of your personal space or at the edge of your car. They go on to jam innocent GPS receivers for miles around you. (Laughter) Now, if you're Carol or Limor, or someone who feels threatened by GPS tracking, it might not feel wrong to turn on a Wave Bubble, but in fact, the results can be disastrous. Imagine, for example, you're the captain of a cruise ship trying to make your way through a thick fog and some passenger in the back turns on a Wave Bubble. All of a sudden your GPS readout goes blank, and now it's just you and the fog and whatever you can pull off the radar system if you remember how to work it. They — in fact, they don't update or upkeep lighthouses anymore, and LORAN, the only backup to GPS, was discontinued last year. Our modern society has a special relationship with GPS. We're almost blindly reliant on it. It's built deeply into our systems and infrastructure. Some call it "the invisible utility." So, turning on a Wave Bubble might not just cause inconvenience. It might be deadly. But as it turns out, for purposes of protecting your privacy at the expense of general GPS reliability, there's something even more potent and more subversive than a Wave Bubble, and that is a GPS spoofer. The idea behind the GPS spoofer is simple. Instead of jamming the GPS signals, you fake them. You imitate them, and if you do it right, the device you're attacking doesn't even know it's being spoofed. So let me show you how this works. In any GPS receiver, there's a peak inside that corresponds to the authentic signals. These three red dots represent the tracking points that try to keep themselves centered on that peak. But if you send in a fake GPS signal, another peak pops up, and if you can get these two peaks perfectly aligned, the tracking points can't tell the difference, and they get hijacked by the stronger counterfeit signal, with the authentic peak getting forced off. At this point, the game is over. The fake signals now completely control this GPS receiver. So is this really possible? Can someone really manipulate the timing and positioning of a GPS receiver just like that, with a spoofer? Well, the short answer is yes. The key is that civil GPS signals are completely open. They have no encryption. They have no authentication. They're wide open, vulnerable to a kind of spoofing attack. Even so, up until very recently, nobody worried about GPS spoofers. People figured that it would be too complex or too expensive for some hacker to build one. But I, and a friend of mine from graduate school, we didn't see it that way. We knew it wasn't going to be so hard, and we wanted to be the first to build one so we could get out in front of the problem and help protect against GPS spoofing. I remember vividly the week it all came together. We built it at my home, which means that I got a little extra help from my three-year-old son Ramon. Here's Ramon — (Laughter) — looking for a little attention from Dad that week. At first, the spoofer was just a jumble of cables and computers, though we eventually got it packaged into a small box. Now, the Dr. Frankenstein moment, when the spoofer finally came alive and I glimpsed its awful potential, came late one night when I tested the spoofer against my iPhone. Let me show you some actual footage from that very first experiment. I had come to completely trust this little blue dot and its reassuring blue halo. They seemed to speak to me. They'd say, "Here you are. Here you are." (Laughter) And "you can trust us." So something felt very wrong about the world. It was a sense, almost, of betrayal, when this little blue dot started at my house, and went running off toward the north leaving me behind. I wasn't moving. What I then saw in this little moving blue dot was the potential for chaos. I saw airplanes and ships veering off course, with the captain learning only too late that something was wrong. I saw the GPS-derived timing of the New York Stock Exchange being manipulated by hackers. You can scarcely imagine the kind of havoc you could cause if you knew what you were doing with a GPS spoofer. There is, though, one redeeming feature of the GPS spoofer. It's the ultimate weapon against an invasion of GPS dots. Imagine, for example, you're being tracked. Well, you can play the tracker for a fool, pretending to be at work when you're really on vacation. Or, if you're Carol, you could lure your ex-boyfriend into some empty parking lot where the police are waiting for him. So I'm fascinated by this conflict, a looming conflict, between privacy on the one hand and the need for a clean radio spectrum on the other. We simply cannot tolerate GPS jammers and spoofers, and yet, given the lack of effective legal means for protecting our privacy from the GPS dot, can you really blame people for wanting to turn them on, for wanting to use them? I hold out hope that we'll be able to reconcile this conflict with some sort of, some yet uninvented technology. But meanwhile, grab some popcorn, because things are going to get interesting. Within the next few years, many of you will be the proud owner of a GPS dot. Maybe you'll have a whole bag full of them. You'll never lose track of your things again. The GPS dot will fundamentally reorder your life. But will you be able to resist the temptation to track your fellow man? Or will you be able to resist the temptation to turn on a GPS spoofer or a Wave Bubble to protect your own privacy? So, as usual, what we see just beyond the horizon is full of promise and peril. It'll be fascinating to see how this all turns out. Thanks. (Applause) |
Capturing memories in video art | {0: 'Gabe Barcia-Colombo creates madcap art inspired both by Renaissance era curiosity cabinets and the modern-day digital chronicling of everyday life. Think: miniature people projected in objects and a DNA Vending Machine.'} | TED2012 | I love to collect things. Ever since I was a kid, I've had massive collections of random stuff, everything from bizarre hot sauces from all around the world to insects that I've captured and put in jars. Now, it's no secret, because I like collecting things, that I love the Natural History Museum and the collections of animals at the Natural History Museum in dioramas. These, to me, are like living sculptures, right, that you can go and look at, and they memorialize a specific point of time in this animal's life. So I was thinking about my own life, and how I'd like to memorialize my life, you know, for the ages, and also — (Laughter) — the lives of my friends, but the problem with this is that my friends aren't quite keen on the idea of me taxidermy-ing them. (Laughter) So instead, I turned to video, and video is the next best way to preserve and memorialize someone and to capture a specific moment in time. So what I did was, I filmed six of my friends and then, using video mapping and video projection, I created a video sculpture, which was these six friends projected into jars. (Laughter) So now I have this collection of my friends I can take around with me whenever I go, and this is called Animalia Chordata, from the Latin nomenclature for human being, classification system. So this piece memorializes my friends in these jars, and they actually move around. (Laughter) So, this is interesting to me, but it lacked a certain human element. (Laughter) It's a digital sculpture, so I wanted to add an interaction system. So what I did was, I added a proximity sensor, so that when you get close to the people in jars, they react to you in different ways. You know, just like people on the street when you get too close to them. Some people reacted in terror. (Laughter) Others reacted in asking you for help, and some people hide from you. So this was really interesting to me, this idea of taking video off the screen and putting it in real life, and also adding interactivity to sculpture. So over the next year, I documented 40 of my other friends and trapped them in jars as well and created a piece known as Garden, which is literally a garden of humanity. But something about the first piece, the Animali Chordata piece, kept coming back to me, this idea of interaction with art, and I really liked the idea of people being able to interact, and also being challenged by interacting with art. So I wanted to create a new piece that actually forced people to come and interact with something, and the way I did this was actually by projecting a 1950s housewife into a blender. (Laughter) This is a piece called Blend, and what it does is it actually makes you implicit in the work of art. You may never experience the entire thing yourself. You can walk away, you can just watch as this character stands there in the blender and looks at you, or you can actually choose to interact with it. So if you do choose to interact with the piece, and you press the blender button, it actually sends this character into this dizzying disarray of dishevelment. By doing that, you are now part of my piece. You, like the people that are trapped in my work — (Blender noises, laughter) — have become part of my work as well. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) But, but this seems a bit unfair, right? I put my friends in jars, I put this character, this sort of endangered species character in a blender. But I'd never done anything about myself. I'd never really memorialized myself. So I decided to create a piece which is a self-portrait piece. This is sort of a self-portrait taxidermy time capsule piece called A Point Just Passed, in which I project myself on top of a time card punch clock, and it's up to you. If you want to choose to punch that punch card clock, you actually age me. So I start as a baby, and then if you punch the clock, you'll actually transform the baby into a toddler, and then from a toddler I'm transformed into a teenager. From a teenager, I'm transformed into my current self. From my current self, I'm turned into a middle-aged man, and then, from there, into an elderly man. And if you punch the punch card clock a hundred times in one day, the piece goes black and is not to be reset until the next day. So, in doing so, you're erasing time. You're actually implicit in this work and you're erasing my life. So I like this about interactive video sculpture, that you can actually interact with it, that all of you can actually touch an artwork and be part of the artwork yourselves, and hopefully, one day, I'll have each and every one of you trapped in one of my jars. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
Experiments that point to a new understanding of cancer | {0: "Mina Bissell studies how cancer interacts with our bodies, searching for clues to how cancer's microenvironment influences its growth."} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Now, I don't usually like cartoons, I don't think many of them are funny, I find them weird. But I love this cartoon from the New Yorker. (Text: Never, ever think outside the box.) (Laughter) So, the guy is telling the cat, don't you dare think outside the box. Well, I'm afraid I used to be the cat. I always wanted to be outside the box. And it's partly because I came to this field from a different background, chemist and a bacterial geneticist. So, what people were saying to me about the cause of cancer, sources of cancer, or, for that matter, why you are who you are, didn't make sense. So, let me quickly try and tell you why I thought that and how I went about it. So, to begin with, however, I have to give you a very, very quick lesson in developmental biology, with apologies to those of you who know some biology. So, when your mom and dad met, there is a fertilized egg, that round thing with that little blip. It grows and then it grows, and then it makes this handsome man. (Applause) So, this guy, with all the cells in his body, all have the same genetic information. So how did his nose become his nose, his elbow his elbow, and why doesn't he get up one morning and have his nose turn into his foot? It could. It has the genetic information. You all remember, dolly, it came from a single mammary cell. So, why doesn't it do it? So, have a guess of how many cells he has in his body. Somewhere between 10 trillion to 70 trillion cells in his body. Trillion! Now, how did these cells, all with the same genetic material, make all those tissues? And so, the question I raised before becomes even more interesting if you thought about the enormity of this in every one of your bodies. Now, the dominant cancer theory would say that there is a single oncogene in a single cancer cell, and it would make you a cancer victim. Well, this did not make sense to me. Do you even know how a trillion looks? Now, let's look at it. There it comes, these zeroes after zeroes after zeroes. Now, if .0001 of these cells got mutated, and .00001 got cancer, you will be a lump of cancer. You will have cancer all over you. And you're not. Why not? So, I decided over the years, because of a series of experiments that this is because of context and architecture. And let me quickly tell you some crucial experiment that was able to actually show this. To begin with, I came to work with this virus that causes that ugly tumor in the chicken. Rous discovered this in 1911. It was the first cancer virus discovered, and when I call it "oncogene," meaning "cancer gene." So, he made a filtrate, he took this filter which was the liquid after he passed the tumor through a filter, and he injected it to another chicken, and he got another tumor. So, scientists were very excited, and they said, a single oncogene can do it. All you need is a single oncogene. So, they put the cells in cultures, chicken cells, dumped the virus on it, and it would pile up, and they would say, this is malignant and this is normal. And again this didn't make sense to me. So for various reasons, we took this oncogene, attached it to a blue marker, and we injected it into the embryos. Now look at that. There is that beautiful feather in the embryo. Every one of those blue cells are a cancer gene inside a cancer cell, and they're part of the feather. So, when we dissociated the feather and put it in a dish, we got a mass of blue cells. So, in the chicken you get a tumor, in the embryo you don't, you dissociate, you put it in a dish, you get another tumor. What does that mean? That means that microenvironment and the context which surrounds those cells actually are telling the cancer gene and the cancer cell what to do. Now, let's take a normal example. The normal example, let's take the human mammary gland. I work on breast cancer. So, here is a lovely human breast. And many of you know how it looks, except that inside that breast, there are all these pretty, developing, tree-like structures. So, we decided that what we like to do is take just a bit of that mammary gland, which is called an "acinus," where there are all these little things inside the breast where the milk goes, and the end of the nipple comes through that little tube when the baby sucks. And we said, wonderful! Look at this pretty structure. We want to make this a structure, and ask the question, how do the cells do that? So, we took the red cells — you see the red cells are surrounded by blue, other cells that squeeze them, and behind it is material that people thought was mainly inert, and it was just having a structure to keep the shape, and so we first photographed it with the electron microscope years and years ago, and you see this cell is actually quite pretty. It has a bottom, it has a top, it is secreting gobs and gobs of milk, because it just came from an early pregnant mouse. You take these cells, you put them in a dish, and within three days, they look like that. They completely forget. So you take them out, you put them in a dish, they don't make milk. They completely forget. For example, here is a lovely yellow droplet of milk on the left, there is nothing on the right. Look at the nuclei. The nuclei in the cell on the left is in the animal, the one on the right is in a dish. They are completely different from each other. So, what does this tell you? This tells you that here also, context overrides. In different contexts, cells do different things. But how does context signal? So, Einstein said that "For an idea that does not first seem insane, there is no hope." So, you can imagine the amount of skepticism I received — couldn't get money, couldn't do a whole lot of other things, but I'm so glad it all worked out. So, we made a section of the mammary gland of the mouse, and all those lovely acini are there, every one of those with the red around them are an acinus, and we said okay, we are going to try and make this, and I said, maybe that red stuff around the acinus that people think there's just a structural scaffold, maybe it has information, maybe it tells the cells what to do, maybe it tells the nucleus what to do. So I said, extracellular matrix, which is this stuff called ECM, signals and actually tells the cells what to do. So, we decided to make things that would look like that. We found some gooey material that had the right extracellular matrix in it, we put the cells in it, and lo and behold, in about four days, they got reorganized and on the right, is what we can make in culture. On the left is what's inside the animal, we call it in vivo, and the one in culture was full of milk, the lovely red there is full of milk. So, we Got Milk, for the American audience. All right. And here is this beautiful human cell, and you can imagine that here also, context goes. So, what do we do now? I made a radical hypothesis. I said, if it's true that architecture is dominant, architecture restored to a cancer cell should make the cancer cell think it's normal. Could this be done? So, we tried it. In order to do that, however, we needed to have a method of distinguishing normal from malignant, and on the left is the single normal cell, human breast, put in three-dimensional gooey gel that has extracellular matrix, it makes all these beautiful structures. On the right, you see it looks very ugly, the cells continue to grow, the normal ones stop. And you see here in higher magnification the normal acinus and the ugly tumor. So we said, what is on the surface of these ugly tumors? Could we calm them down — they were signaling like crazy and they have pathways all messed up — and make them to the level of the normal? Well, it was wonderful. Boggles my mind. This is what we got. We can revert the malignant phenotype. (Applause) And in order to show you that the malignant phenotype I didn't just choose one, here are little movies, sort of fuzzy, but you see that on the left are the malignant cells, all of them are malignant, we add one single inhibitor in the beginning, and look what happens, they all look like that. We inject them into the mouse, the ones on the right, and none of them would make tumors. We inject the other ones in the mouse, 100 percent tumors. So, it's a new way of thinking about cancer, it's a hopeful way of thinking about cancer. We should be able to be dealing with these things at this level, and these conclusions say that growth and malignant behavior is regulated at the level of tissue organization and that the tissue organization is dependent on the extracellular matrix and the microenvironment. All right, thus form and function interact dynamically and reciprocally. And here is another five seconds of repose, is my mantra. Form and function. And of course, we now ask, where do we go now? We'd like to take this kind of thinking into the clinic. But before we do that, I'd like you to think that at any given time when you're sitting there, in your 70 trillion cells, the extracellular matrix signaling to your nucleus, the nucleus is signaling to your extracellular matrix and this is how your balance is kept and restored. We have made a lot of discoveries, we have shown that extracellular matrix talks to chromatin. We have shown that there's little pieces of DNA on the specific genes of the mammary gland that actually respond to extracellular matrix. It has taken many years, but it has been very rewarding. And before I get to the next slide, I have to tell you that there are so many additional discoveries to be made. There is so much mystery we don't know. And I always say to the students and post-docs I lecture to, don't be arrogant, because arrogance kills curiosity. Curiosity and passion. You need to always think, what else needs to be discovered? And maybe my discovery needs to be added to or maybe it needs to be changed. So, we have now made an amazing discovery, a post-doc in the lab who is a physicist asked me, what do the cells do when you put them in? What do they do in the beginning when they do? I said, I don't know, we couldn't look at them. We didn't have high images in the old days. So she, being an imager and a physicist, did this incredible thing. This is a single human breast cell in three dimensions. Look at it. It's constantly doing this. Has a coherent movement. You put the cancer cells there, and they do go all over, they do this. They don't do this. And when we revert the cancer cell, it again does this. Absolutely boggles my mind. So the cell acts like an embryo. What an exciting thing. So I'd like to finish with a poem. Well I used to love English literature, and I debated in college, which one should I do? And unfortunately or fortunately, chemistry won. But here is a poem from Yeats. I'll just read you the last two lines. It's called "Among the School Children." "O body swayed to music / O brightening glance / How [can we know] the dancer from the dance?" And here is Merce Cunningham, I was fortunate to dance with him when I was younger, and here he is a dancer, and while he is dancing, he is both the dancer and the dance. The minute he stops, we have neither. So it's like form and function. Now, I'd like to show you a current picture of my group. I have been fortunate to have had these magnificant students and post-docs who have taught me so much, and I have had many of these groups come and go. They are the future and I try to make them not be afraid of being the cat and being told, don't think outside the box. And I'd like to leave you with this thought. On the left is water coming through the shore, taken from a NASA satellite. On the right, there is a coral. Now if you take the mammary gland and spread it and take the fat away, on a dish it looks like that. Do they look the same? Do they have the same patterns? Why is it that nature keeps doing that over and over again? And I'd like to submit to you that we have sequenced the human genome, we know everything about the sequence of the gene, the language of the gene, the alphabet of the gene, But we know nothing, but nothing, about the language and alphabet of form. So, it's a wonderful new horizon, it's a wonderful thing to discover for the young and the passionate old, and that's me. So go to it! (Applause) |
Let's crowdsource the world's goals | {0: 'Jamie Drummond co-founded the advocacy organization ONE, whose central themes are ending extreme poverty and fighting the AIDS pandemic.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | So let me start by taking you back, back into the mists of your memory to perhaps the most anticipated year in your life, but certainly the most anticipated year in all human history: the year 2000. Remember that? Y2K, the dotcom bubble, stressing about whose party you're going to go to as the clock strikes midnight, before the champagne goes flat, and then there's that inchoate yearning that was felt, I think, by many, that the millennium, that the year 2000, should mean more, more than just a two and some zeroes. Well, amazingly, for once, our world leaders actually lived up to that millennium moment and back in 2000 agreed to some pretty extraordinary stuff: visionary, measurable, long-term targets called the Millennium Development Goals. Now, I'm sure you all keep a copy of the goals under your pillow, or by the bedside table, but just in case you don't, and your memory needs some jogging, the deal agreed then goes like this: developing countries promised to at least halve extreme poverty, hunger and deaths from disease, alongside some other targets, by 2015, and developed nations promised to help them get that done by dropping debts, increasing smart aid, and trade reform. Well, we're approaching 2015, so we'd better assess, how are we doing on these goals? But we've also got to decide, do we like such global goals? Some people don't. And if we like them, we've got to decide what we want to do on these goals going forward. What does the world want to do together? We've got to decide a process by which we decide. Well, I definitely think these goals are worth building on and seeing through, and here's just a few reasons why. Incredible partnerships between the private sector, political leaders, philanthropists and amazing grassroots activists across the developing world, but also 250,000 people marched in the streets of Edinburgh outside this very building for Make Poverty History. All together, they achieved these results: increased the number of people on anti-retrovirals, life-saving anti-AIDS drugs; nearly halved deaths from malaria; vaccinated so many that 5.4 million lives will be saved. And combined, this is going to result in two million fewer children dying every year, last year, than in the year 2000. That's 5,000 fewer kids dying every day, ten times you lot not dead every day, because of all of these partnerships. So I think this is amazing living proof of progress that more people should know about, but the challenge of communicating this kind of good news is probably the subject of a different TEDTalk. Anyway, for now, anyone involved in getting these results, thank you. I think this proved these goals are worth it. But there's still a lot of unfinished business. Still, 7.6 million children die every year of preventable, treatable diseases, and 178 million kids are malnourished to the point of stunting, a horrible term which means physical and cognitive lifelong impairment. So there's plainly a lot more to do on the goals we've got. But then, a lot of people think there are things that should have been in the original package that weren't agreed back then that should now be included, like sustainable development targets, natural resource governance targets, access to opportunity, to knowledge, equity, fighting corruption. All of this is measurable and could be in the new goals. But the key thing here is, what do you think should be in the new goals? What do you want? Are you annoyed that I didn't talk about gender equality or education? Should those be in the new package of goals? And quite frankly, that's a good question, but there's going to be some tough tradeoffs and choices here, so you want to hope that the process by which the world decides these new goals is going to be legitimate, right? Well, as we gather here in Edinburgh, technocrats appointed by the U.N. and certain governments, with the best intentions, are busying themselves designing a new package of goals, and currently they're doing that through pretty much the same old late-20th-century, top-down, elite, closed process. But, of course, since then, the Web and mobile telephony, along with ubiquitous reality TV formats have spread all around the world. So what we'd like to propose is that we use them to involve people from all around the world in an historic first: the world's first truly global poll and consultation, where everyone everywhere has an equal voice for the very first time. I mean, wouldn't it be a huge historic missed opportunity not to do this, given that we can? There's hundreds of billions of your aid dollars at stake, tens of millions of lives, or deaths, at stake, and, I'd argue, the security and future of you and your family is also at stake. So, if you're with me, I'd say there's three essential steps in this crowdsourcing campaign: collecting, connecting and committing. So first of all, we've got to ground this campaign in core polling data. Let's go into every country that will let us in, ask 1,001 people what they want the new goals to be, making special efforts to reach the poorest, those without access to modern technology, and let's make sure that their views are at the center of the goals going forward. Then, we've got to commission a baseline survey to make sure we can monitor and progress the goals going forward. The original goals didn't really have good baseline survey data, and we're going to need the help of big data through all of this process to make sure we can really monitor the progress. And then we've got to connect with the big crowd. Now here, we see the role for an unprecedented coalition of social media giants and upstarts, telecoms companies, reality TV show formats, gaming companies, telecoms, all of them together in kind of their "We Are The World" moment. Could they come together and help the Millennium Development Goals get rebranded into the Millennial Generation's Goals? And if just five percent of the five billion plus who are currently connected made a comment, and that comment turned into a commitment, we could crowdsource a force of 300 million people around the world to help see these goals through. If we have this collected data, and this connected crowd, based upon our experience of campaigning and getting world leaders to commit, I think world leaders will commit to most of the crowdsourced recommendations. But the question really is, through this process will we all have become committed? And if we are, are we ready to iterate, monitor and provide feedback, make sure these promises are really delivering results? Well, there's some fantastic examples here to scale up, mostly piloted within Africa, actually. There's Open Data Kenya, which geocodes and crowdsources information about where projects are, are they delivering results. Often, they're not in the right place. And Ushahidi, which means "witness" in Swahili, which geocodes and crowdsources information in complex emergencies to help target responses. This is some of the most exciting stuff in development and democracy, where citizens on the edge of a network are helping to force open the process to make sure that the big global aid promises and vague stuff up at the top really delivers for people at a grassroots level and inverts that pyramid. This openness, this forcing openness, is key, and if it wasn't entirely transparent already, I should be open: I've got a completely transparent agenda. Long-term trends suggest that this century is going to be a tough place to live, with population increases, consumption patterns increasing, and conflict over scarce natural resources. And look at the state of global politics today. Look at the Rio Earth Summit that happened just last week, or the Mexican G20, also last week. Both, if we're honest, a bust. Our world leaders, our global politics, currently can't get it done. They need our help. They need the cavalry, and the cavalry's not going to come from Mars. It's got to come from us, and I see this process of deciding democratically in a bottom-up fashion what the world wants to work on together as one vital means by which we can crowdsource the force to really build that constituency that's going to reinvigorate global governance in the 21st century. I started in 2000. Let me finish in 2030. Many people made fun of a big campaign a few years ago we had called Make Poverty History. It was a naive thought in many people's minds, and it's true, it was just a t-shirt slogan that worked for the moment. But look. The empirical condition of living under a dollar and 25 is trending down, and look where it gets to by 2030. It's getting near zero. Now sure, progress in China and India and poverty reduction there was key to that, but recently also in Africa, poverty rates are being reduced. It will get harder as we get towards zero, as the poor will be increasingly located in post-conflict, fragile states, or maybe in middle income states where they don't really care about the marginalized. But I'm confident, with the right kind of political campaigning and creative and technological innovation combined working together more and more as one, I think we can get this and other goals done. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Jamie, here's the puzzle to me. If there was an incident today where a hundred kids died in some tragedy or where, say, a hundred kids were kidnapped and then rescued by special forces, I mean, it would be all over the news for a week, right? You just put up, just as one of your numbers there, that 5,000 — is that the number? Jamie Drummond: Fewer children every day. CA: Five thousand fewer children dying every day. I mean, it dwarfs, dwarfs everything that is actually on our news agenda, and it's invisible. This must drive you crazy. JD: It does, and we're having a huge debate in this country about aid levels, for example, and aid alone is not the whole solution. Nobody thinks it is. But, you know, if people saw the results of this smart aid, I mean, they'd be going crazy for it. I wish the 250,000 people who really did march outside this very building knew these results. Right now they don't, and it would be great to find a way to better communicate it, because we have not. Creatively, we've failed to communicate this success so far. If those kinds of efforts just could multiply their voice and amplify it at the key moments, I know for a fact we'd get better policy. The Mexican G20 need not have been a bust. Rio, if anyone cares about the environment, need not have been a bust, okay? But these conferences are going on, and I know people get skeptical and cynical about the big global summits and the promises and their never being kept, but actually, the bits that are, are making a difference, and what the politicians need is more permission from the public. CA: But you haven't fully worked out the Web mechanisms, etc. by which this might happen. I mean, if the people here who've had experience using open platforms, you're interested to talk with them this week and try to take this forward. JD: Absolutely. CA: All right, well I must say, if this conference led in some way to advancing that idea, that's a huge idea, and if you carry that forward, that is really awesome, so thank you. JD: I'd love your help. CA: Thank you, thank you. (Applause) |
Sometimes it's good to give up the driver's seat | {0: 'Baba Shiv studies how “liking” and “wanting” shape the choices we make, and what that means in the world of marketing.'} | TEDxStanford | I'm going to start on a slightly somber note. Two thousand and seven, five years ago, my wife gets diagnosed with breast cancer. Stage IIB. Now, looking back, the most harrowing part of that experience was not just the hospital visits — these were very painful for my wife, understandably so. It was not even the initial shock of knowing that she had breast cancer at just 39 years old, absolutely no history of cancer in her family. The most horrifying and agonizing part of the whole experience was we were making decisions after decisions after decisions that were being thrust upon us. Should it be a mastectomy? Should it be a lumpectomy? Should it be a more aggressive form of treatment, given that it was stage IIB? With all the side effects? Or should it be a less aggressive form of treatment? And these were being thrust upon us by the doctors. Now you could ask this question, why were the doctors doing this? A simplistic answer would be, the doctors are doing this because they want to protect themselves legally. I think that is too simplistic. These are well-meaning doctors, some of them have gone on to become very good friends. They probably were simply following the wisdom that has come down through the ages, this adage that when you're making decisions, especially decisions of importance, it's best to be in charge, it's best to be in control, it's best to be in the driver's seat. And we were certainly in the driver's seat, making all these decisions. And let me tell you — if some of you have been there, it was a most agonizing and harrowing experience. Which got me thinking. I said, is there any validity to this whole adage that when you're making decisions, it's best to take the driver's seat, be in charge, be in control? Or are there contexts where we're far better off taking the passenger's seat and have someone else drive? For example, a trusted financial advisor, could be a trusted doctor, etc. And since I study human decision making, I said, I'm going to run some studies to find some answers. And I'm going to share one of these studies with you today. So, imagine that all of you are participants in the study. I want to tell you that what you're going to do in the study is, you're going to drink a cup of tea. If you're wondering why, I'll tell you why in a few seconds from now. You are going to solve a series of puzzles, and I'm going to show you examples of these puzzles momentarily. And the more puzzles you solve, the greater the chances that you'll win some prizes. Now, why do you have to consume the tea? Why? Because it makes a lot of sense: In order to solve these puzzles effectively, if you think about it, your mind needs to be in two states simultaneously, right? It needs to be alert, for which caffeine is very good. Simultaneously, it needs to be calm — not agitated, calm — for which chamomile is very good. Now comes the between-subjects design, the AB design, the AB testing. So what I'm going to do is randomly assign you to one of two groups. So imagine that there is an imaginary line out here, so everyone here will be group A, everyone out here will be group B. Now, for you folks, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you these two teas, and I'll go ahead and ask you to choose your tea. So you can choose whichever tea you want. You can decide, what is your mental state: OK, I choose the caffeinated tea, I choose the chamomile tea. So you're going to be in charge, you're going to be in control, you're going to be in the driver's seat. You folks, I'm going to show you these two teas, but you don't have a choice. I'm going to give you one of these two teas, and keep in mind, I'm going to pick one of these two teas at random for you. And you know that. So if you think about it, this is an extreme-case scenario, because in the real world, whenever you are taking passenger's seat, very often the driver is going to be someone you trust, an expert, etc. So this is an extreme-case scenario. Now, you're all going to consume the tea. So imagine that you're taking the tea now, we'll wait for you to finish the tea. We'll give another five minutes for the ingredient to have its effects. Now you're going to have 30 minutes to solve 15 puzzles. Here's an example of the puzzle you're going to solve. Anyone in the audience want to take a stab? Audience member: Pulpit! Baba Shiv: Whoa! OK. That's cool. Yeah, so what we'd do if we had you who gave the answer as a participant, we would have calibrated the difficulty level of the puzzles to your expertise. Because we want these puzzles to be difficult. These are tricky puzzles, because your first instinct is to say "tulip." And then you have to unstick yourself. Right? So these have been calibrated to your level of expertise, because we want this to be difficult, and I'll tell you why, momentarily. Now, here's another example. Anyone? This is much more difficult. Audience member: Embark. BS: Yeah. Wow! OK. So, yeah, so this is, again, difficult. You'll say "kamber," then you'll go, "maker," and all that, and then you can unstick yourself. So you have 30 minutes now to solve these 15 puzzles. Now, the question we're asking here is, in terms of the outcome — and it comes in the number of puzzles solved — will you in the driver's seat end up solving more puzzles because you are in control, you could decide which tea you would choose, or would you be better off, in terms of the number of puzzles solved? And, systemically, what we will show, across a series of studies, is that you, the passengers, even though the tea was picked for you at random, will end up solving more puzzles than you, the drivers. We also observe another thing, and that is, you folks not only are solving fewer puzzles, you're also putting less juice into the task — less effort, you're less persistent, and so on. How do we know that? Well, we have two objective measures. One is, what is the time, on average, you're taking in attempting to solve these puzzles? You will spend less time compared to you. Second, you have 30 minutes to solve these; are you taking the entire 30 minutes or are you giving up before the 30 minutes elapse? You will be more likely to give up before the 30 minutes elapse, compared to you. So you're putting in less juice, and therefore, the outcome: fewer puzzles solved. That brings us now to: why does this happen? And under what situations — when — would we see this pattern of results where the passenger is going to show better, more favorable outcomes, compared to the driver? It all has to do with when you face what I call the INCA. It's an acronym that stands for the nature of the feedback you're getting after you made the decision. So if you think about it, in this particular puzzle task — it could happen in investing in the stock market, very volatile out there, it could be the medical situation — the feedback here is immediate. You know the feedback, whether you're solving the puzzles or not. Right? Second, it is negative. Remember, the deck was stacked against you, in terms of the difficulty level of these puzzles. And this can happen in the medical domain. For example, very early on in the treatment, things are negative, the feedback, before things become positive. Right? It can happen in the stock market. Volatile stock market, getting negative feedback, it is also immediate. And the feedback in all these cases is concrete, it's unambiguous; you know if you've solved the puzzles or not. Now, the added one, apart from this immediacy, negative, this concreteness — now you have a sense of agency. You were responsible for your decision. So what do you do? You focus on the foregone option. You say, you know what? I should have chosen the other tea. (Laughter) That casts your decision in doubt, reduces the confidence you have in the decision, the confidence you have in the performance, the performance in terms of solving the puzzles. And therefore less juice into the task, fewer puzzles solved and less favorable outcomes compared to you folks. And this can happen in the medical domain, if you think about it, right? A patient in the driver's seat, for example. Less juice, which means keeping herself or himself less physically fit, physically active to hasten the recovery process, which is what is often advocated. You probably wouldn't do that. And therefore, there are times when you're facing the INCA, when the feedback is going to be immediate, negative, concrete and you have the sense of agency, where you're far better off taking the passenger's seat and have someone else drive. Now, I started off on a somber note. I want to finish up on a more upbeat note. It has now been five years, slightly more than five years, and the good news, thank God, is that the cancer is still in remission. So it all ends well. But one thing I didn't mention was that very early on into her treatment, my wife and I decided that we would take the passenger's seat. And that made so much of a difference in terms of the peace of mind that came with that; we could focus on her recovery. We let the doctors make all the decisions and take the driver's seat. Thank you. (Applause) |
Image recognition that triggers augmented reality | {0: 'Matt Mills comes from Aurasma, a startup that makes augmented-reality technology for mobile phones.', 1: 'Tamara Roukaerts is head of marketing at Aurasma, working to build an augmented-reality lens via smartphones.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | So wouldn't it be amazing if our phones could see the world in the same way that we do, as we're walking around being able to point a phone at anything, and then have it actually recognize images and objects like the human brain, and then be able to pull in information from an almost infinite library of knowledge and experiences and ideas. Well, traditionally that was seen as science fiction, but now we've moved to a world where actually this has become possible. So the best way of explaining it is to just show it. What you can see over here is Tamara, who is holding my phone that's now plugged in. So let me start with this. What we have here is a painting of the great poet Rabbie Burns, and it's just a normal image, but if we now switch inputs over to the phone, running our technology, you can see effectively what Tamara's seeing on the screen, and when she points at this image, something magical happens. (Laughter) (Bagpipes) (Bagpipes) (Applause) (Bagpipes) Voice: Now simmer blinks on flowery braes ... Matt Mills: Now, what's great about this is, there's no trickery here. There's nothing done to this image. And what's great about this is the technology's actually allowing the phone to start to see and understand much like how the human brain does. Not only that, but as I move the object around, it's going to track it and overlay that content seamlessly. Again, the thing that's incredible about this is this is how advanced these devices have become. All the processing to do that was actually done on the device itself. Now, this has applications everywhere, whether in things like art in museums, like you just saw, or in the world of, say, advertising, or print journalism. So a newspaper becomes out of date as soon as it's printed. And here is this morning's newspaper, and we have some Wimbledon news, which is great. Now what we can do is point at the front of the newspaper and immediately get the bulletin. Voice: ... To the grass, and it's very important that you adapt and you, you have to be flexible, you have to be willing to change direction at a split second, and she does all that. She's won this title. MM: And that linking of the digital content to something that's physical is what we call an aura, and I'll be using that term a little bit as we go through the talk. So, what's great about this is it isn't just a faster, more convenient way to get information in the real world, but there are times when actually using this medium allows you to be able to display information in a way that was never before possible. So what I have here is a wireless router. My American colleagues have told me I've got to call it a router, so that everyone here understands — (Laughter) — but nonetheless, here is the device. So now what I can do is, rather than getting the instructions for the device online, I can simply point at it, the device is recognized, and then — Voice: Begin by plugging in the grey ADSL cable. Then connect the power. Finally, the yellow ethernet cable. Congratulations. You have now completed setup. (Laughter) MM: Awesome. Thank you. (Applause) The incredible work that made that possible was done here in the U.K. by scientists at Cambridge, and they work in our offices, and I've got a lovely picture of them here. They couldn't all be on stage, but we're going to bring their aura to the stage, so here they are. They're not very animated. (Laughter) This was the fourth take, I'm told. (Laughter) Okay. So, as we're talking about Cambridge, let's now move on to technical advancements, because since we started putting this technology on mobile phones less than 12 months ago, the speed and the processing in these devices has grown at a really phenomenal rate, and that means that I can now take cinema-quality 3D models and place them in the world around me, so I have one over here. Tamara, would you like to jump in? (Music) (Dinosaur roaring) (Laughter) MM: I should leap in. (Music) (Dinosaur roaring) (Applause) So then, after the fun, comes the more emotional side of what we do, because effectively, this technology allows you to see the world through someone's eyes, and for that person to be able to take a moment in time and effectively store it and tag it to something physical that exists in the real world. What's great about this is, the tools to do this are free. They're open, they're available to everyone within our application, and educators have really got on board with the classrooms. So we have teachers who've tagged up textbooks, teachers who've tagged up school classrooms, and a great example of this is a school in the U.K. I have a picture here from a video, and we're now going to play it. Teacher: See what happens. (Children talking) Keep going. Child: TV. (Children react) Child: Oh my God. Teacher: Now move it either side. See what happens. Move away from it and come back to it. Child: Oh, that is so cool. Teacher: And then, have you got it again? Child: Oh my God! How did you do that? Second child: It's magic. (Laughter) MM: (Laughs) So, it's not magic. It's available for everyone to do, and actually I'm going to show you how easy it is to do by doing one right now. So, as sort of — I'm told it's called a stadium wave, so we're going to start from this side of the room on the count of three, and go over to here. Tamara, are you recording? Okay, so are you all ready? One, two, three. Go! Audience: Whooooooo! MM: Fellows are really good at that. (Laughs) (Laughter) Okay. Now we're going to switch back into the Aurasma application, and what Tamara's going to do is tag that video that we just took onto my badge, so that I can remember it forever. Now, we have lots of people who are doing this already, and we've talked a little bit about the educational side. On the emotional side, we have people who've done things like send postcards and Christmas cards back to their family with little messages on them. We have people who have, for example, taken the inside of the engine bay of an old car and tagged up different components within an engine, so that if you're stuck and you want to find out more, you can point and discover the information. We're all very, very familiar with the Internet. In the last 20 years, it's really changed the way that we live and work, and the way that we see the world, and what's great is, we sort of think this is the next paradigm shift, because now we can literally take the content that we share, we discover, and that we enjoy and make it a part of the world around us. It's completely free to download this application. If you have a good Wi-Fi connection or 3G, this process is very, very quick. Oh, there we are. We can save it now. It's just going to do a tiny bit of processing to convert that image that we just took into a sort of digital fingerprint, and the great thing is, if you're a professional user, — so, a newspaper — the tools are pretty much identical to what we've just used to create this demonstration. The only difference is that you've got the ability to add in links and slightly more content. Are you now ready? Tamara Roukaerts: We're ready to go. MM: Okay. So, I'm told we're ready, which means we can now point at the image, and there you all are. MM on video: One, two, three. Go! MM: Well done. We've been Aurasma. Thank you. (Applause) |
I listen to color | {0: 'Neil Harbisson\'s "eyeborg" allows him to hear colors, even those beyond the range of sight.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Well, I was born with a rare visual condition called achromatopsia, which is total color blindness, so I've never seen color, and I don't know what color looks like, because I come from a grayscale world. To me, the sky is always gray, flowers are always gray, and television is still in black and white. But, since the age of 21, instead of seeing color, I can hear color. In 2003, I started a project with computer scientist Adam Montandon, and the result, with further collaborations with Peter Kese from Slovenia and Matias Lizana from Barcelona, is this electronic eye. It's a color sensor that detects the color frequency in front of me — (Frequency sounds) — and sends this frequency to a chip installed at the back of my head, and I hear the color in front of me through the bone, through bone conduction. (Frequency sounds) So, for example, if I have, like — This is the sound of purple. (Frequency sounds) For example, this is the sound of grass. (Frequency sounds) This is red, like TED. (Frequency sounds) This is the sound of a dirty sock. (Laughter) Which is like yellow, this one. So I've been hearing color all the time for eight years, since 2004, so I find it completely normal now to hear color all the time. At the start, though, I had to memorize the names you give for each color, so I had to memorize the notes, but after some time, all this information became a perception. I didn't have to think about the notes. And after some time, this perception became a feeling. I started to have favorite colors, and I started to dream in colors. So, when I started to dream in color is when I felt that the software and my brain had united, because in my dreams, it was my brain creating electronic sounds. It wasn't the software, so that's when I started to feel like a cyborg. It's when I started to feel that the cybernetic device was no longer a device. It had become a part of my body, an extension of my senses, and after some time, it even became a part of my official image. This is my passport from 2004. You're not allowed to appear on U.K. passports with electronic equipment, but I insisted to the passport office that what they were seeing was actually a new part of my body, an extension of my brain, and they finally accepted me to appear with the passport photo. So, life has changed dramatically since I hear color, because color is almost everywhere, so the biggest change for example is going to an art gallery, I can listen to a Picasso, for example. So it's like I'm going to a concert hall, because I can listen to the paintings. And supermarkets, I find this is very shocking, it's very, very attractive to walk along a supermarket. It's like going to a nightclub. It's full of different melodies. (Laughter) Yeah. Especially the aisle with cleaning products. It's just fabulous. (Laughter) Also, the way I dress has changed. Before, I used to dress in a way that it looked good. Now I dress in a way that it sounds good. (Laughter) (Applause) So today I'm dressed in C major, so it's quite a happy chord. (Laughter) If I had to go to a funeral, though, I would dress in B minor, which would be turquoise, purple and orange. (Laughter) Also, food, the way I look at food has changed, because now I can display the food on a plate, so I can eat my favorite song. (Laughter) So depending on how I display it, I can hear and I can compose music with food. So imagine a restaurant where we can have, like, Lady Gaga salads as starters. (Laughter) I mean, this would get teenagers to eat their vegetables, probably. And also, some Rachmaninov piano concertos as main dishes, and some Bjork or Madonna desserts, that would be a very exciting restaurant where you can actually eat songs. Also, the way I perceive beauty has changed, because when I look at someone, I hear their face, so someone might look very beautiful but sound terrible. (Laughter) And it might happen the opposite, the other way around. So I really enjoy creating, like, sound portraits of people. Instead of drawing someone's face, like drawing the shape, I point at them with the eye and I write down the different notes I hear, and then I create sound portraits. Here's some faces. (Musical chords) Yeah, Nicole Kidman sounds good. (Laughter) Some people, I would never relate, but they sound similar. Prince Charles has some similarities with Nicole Kidman. They have similar sound of eyes. So you relate people that you wouldn't relate, and you can actually also create concerts by looking at the audience faces. So I connect the eye, and then I play the audience's faces. The good thing about this is, if the concert doesn't sound good, it's their fault. It's not my fault, because — (Laughter) And so another thing that happens is that I started having this secondary effect that normal sounds started to become color. I heard a telephone tone, and it felt green because it sounded just like the color green. The BBC beeps, they sound turquoise, and listening to Mozart became a yellow experience, so I started to paint music and paint people's voices, because people's voices have frequencies that I relate to color. And here's some music translated into color. For example, Mozart, "Queen of the Night," looks like this. (Music) Very yellow and very colorful, because there's many different frequencies. (Music) And this is a completely different song. (Music) It's Justin Bieber's "Baby." (Laughter) (Music) It is very pink and very yellow. So, also voices, I can transform speeches into color, for example, these are two very well-known speeches. One of them is Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream," and the other one is Hitler. And I like to exhibit these paintings in the exhibition halls without labels, and then I ask people, "Which one do you prefer?" And most people change their preference when I tell them that the one on the left is Hitler and the one on the right is Martin Luther King. So I got to a point when I was able to perceive 360 colors, just like human vision. I was able to differentiate all the degrees of the color wheel. But then, I just thought that this human vision wasn't good enough. There's many, many more colors around us that we cannot perceive, but that electronic eyes can perceive. So I decided to continue extending my color senses, and I added infrared and I added ultraviolet to the color-to-sound scale, so now I can hear colors that the human eye cannot perceive. For example, perceiving infrared is good because you can actually detect if there's movement detectors in a room. I can hear if someone points at me with a remote control. And the good thing about perceiving ultraviolet is that you can hear if it's a good day or a bad day to sunbathe, because ultraviolet is a dangerous color, a color that can actually kill us, so I think we should all have this wish to perceive things that we cannot perceive. That's why, two years ago, I created the Cyborg Foundation, which is a foundation that tries to help people become a cyborg, tries to encourage people to extend their senses by using technology as part of the body. We should all think that knowledge comes from our senses, so if we extend our senses, we will consequently extend our knowledge. I think life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body. I think this will be a big, big change that we will see during this century. So I do encourage you all to think about which senses you'd like to extend. I would encourage you to become a cyborg. You won't be alone. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
The greatest machine that never was | {0: 'Computer programmer John Graham-Cumming keeps geek history alive by raising awareness for its heroes and their inventions.'} | TEDxImperialCollege | So the machine I'm going to talk you about is what I call the greatest machine that never was. It was a machine that was never built, and yet, it will be built. It was a machine that was designed long before anyone thought about computers. If you know anything about the history of computers, you will know that in the '30s and the '40s, simple computers were created that started the computer revolution we have today, and you would be correct, except for you'd have the wrong century. The first computer was really designed in the 1830s and 1840s, not the 1930s and 1940s. It was designed, and parts of it were prototyped, and the bits of it that were built are here in South Kensington. That machine was built by this guy, Charles Babbage. Now, I have a great affinity for Charles Babbage because his hair is always completely unkempt like this in every single picture. (Laughter) He was a very wealthy man, and a sort of, part of the aristocracy of Britain, and on a Saturday night in Marylebone, were you part of the intelligentsia of that period, you would have been invited round to his house for a soiree — and he invited everybody: kings, the Duke of Wellington, many, many famous people — and he would have shown you one of his mechanical machines. I really miss that era, you know, where you could go around for a soiree and see a mechanical computer get demonstrated to you. (Laughter) But Babbage, Babbage himself was born at the end of the 18th century, and was a fairly famous mathematician. He held the post that Newton held at Cambridge, and that was recently held by Stephen Hawking. He's less well known than either of them because he got this idea to make mechanical computing devices and never made any of them. The reason he never made any of them, he's a classic nerd. Every time he had a good idea, he'd think, "That's brilliant, I'm going to start building that one. I'll spend a fortune on it. I've got a better idea. I'm going to work on this one. (Laughter) And I'm going to do this one." He did this until Sir Robert Peel, then Prime Minister, basically kicked him out of Number 10 Downing Street, and kicking him out, in those days, that meant saying, "I bid you good day, sir." (Laughter) The thing he designed was this monstrosity here, the analytical engine. Now, just to give you an idea of this, this is a view from above. Every one of these circles is a cog, a stack of cogs, and this thing is as big as a steam locomotive. So as I go through this talk, I want you to imagine this gigantic machine. We heard those wonderful sounds of what this thing would have sounded like. And I'm going to take you through the architecture of the machine — that's why it's computer architecture — and tell you about this machine, which is a computer. So let's talk about the memory. The memory is very like the memory of a computer today, except it was all made out of metal, stacks and stacks of cogs, 30 cogs high. Imagine a thing this high of cogs, hundreds and hundreds of them, and they've got numbers on them. It's a decimal machine. Everything's done in decimal. And he thought about using binary. The problem with using binary is that the machine would have been so tall, it would have been ridiculous. As it is, it's enormous. So he's got memory. The memory is this bit over here. You see it all like this. This monstrosity over here is the CPU, the chip, if you like. Of course, it's this big. Completely mechanical. This whole machine is mechanical. This is a picture of a prototype for part of the CPU which is in the Science Museum. The CPU could do the four fundamental functions of arithmetic — so addition, multiplication, subtraction, division — which already is a bit of a feat in metal, but it could also do something that a computer does and a calculator doesn't: this machine could look at its own internal memory and make a decision. It could do the "if then" for basic programmers, and that fundamentally made it into a computer. It could compute. It couldn't just calculate. It could do more. Now, if we look at this, and we stop for a minute, and we think about chips today, we can't look inside a silicon chip. It's just so tiny. Yet if you did, you would see something very, very similar to this. There's this incredible complexity in the CPU, and this incredible regularity in the memory. If you've ever seen an electron microscope picture, you'll see this. This all looks the same, then there's this bit over here which is incredibly complicated. All this cog wheel mechanism here is doing is what a computer does, but of course you need to program this thing, and of course, Babbage used the technology of the day and the technology that would reappear in the '50s, '60s and '70s, which is punch cards. This thing over here is one of three punch card readers in here, and this is a program in the Science Museum, just not far from here, created by Charles Babbage, that is sitting there — you can go see it — waiting for the machine to be built. And there's not just one of these, there's many of them. He prepared programs anticipating this would happen. Now, the reason they used punch cards was that Jacquard, in France, had created the Jacquard loom, which was weaving these incredible patterns controlled by punch cards, so he was just repurposing the technology of the day, and like everything else he did, he's using the technology of his era, so 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, cogs, steam, mechanical devices. Ironically, born the same year as Charles Babbage was Michael Faraday, who would completely revolutionize everything with the dynamo, transformers, all these sorts of things. Babbage, of course, wanted to use proven technology, so steam and things. Now, he needed accessories. Obviously, you've got a computer now. You've got punch cards, a CPU and memory. You need accessories you're going to come with. You're not just going to have that, So, first of all, you had sound. You had a bell, so if anything went wrong — (Laughter) — or the machine needed the attendant to come to it, there was a bell it could ring. (Laughter) And there's actually an instruction on the punch card which says "Ring the bell." So you can imagine this "Ting!" You know, just stop for a moment, imagine all those noises, this thing, "Click, clack click click click," steam engine, "Ding," right? (Laughter) You also need a printer, obviously, and everyone needs a printer. This is actually a picture of the printing mechanism for another machine of his, called the Difference Engine No. 2, which he never built, but which the Science Museum did build in the '80s and '90s. It's completely mechanical, again, a printer. It prints just numbers, because he was obsessed with numbers, but it does print onto paper, and it even does word wrapping, so if you get to the end of the line, it goes around like that. You also need graphics, right? I mean, if you're going to do anything with graphics, so he said, "Well, I need a plotter. I've got a big piece of paper and an ink pen and I'll make it plot." So he designed a plotter as well, and, you know, at that point, I think he got pretty much a pretty good machine. Along comes this woman, Ada Lovelace. Now, imagine these soirees, all these great and good comes along. This lady is the daughter of the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know Lord Byron, and her mother, being a bit worried that she might have inherited some of Lord Byron's madness and badness, thought, "I know the solution: Mathematics is the solution. We'll teach her mathematics. That'll calm her down." (Laughter) Because of course, there's never been a mathematician that's gone crazy, so, you know, that'll be fine. (Laughter) Everything'll be fine. So she's got this mathematical training, and she goes to one of these soirees with her mother, and Charles Babbage, you know, gets out his machine. The Duke of Wellington is there, you know, get out the machine, obviously demonstrates it, and she gets it. She's the only person in his lifetime, really, who said, "I understand what this does, and I understand the future of this machine." And we owe to her an enormous amount because we know a lot about the machine that Babbage was intending to build because of her. Now, some people call her the first programmer. This is actually from one of — the paper that she translated. This is a program written in a particular style. It's not, historically, totally accurate that she's the first programmer, and actually, she did something more amazing. Rather than just being a programmer, she saw something that Babbage didn't. Babbage was totally obsessed with mathematics. He was building a machine to do mathematics, and Lovelace said, "You could do more than mathematics on this machine." And just as you do, everyone in this room already's got a computer on them right now, because they've got a phone. If you go into that phone, every single thing in that phone or computer or any other computing device is mathematics. It's all numbers at the bottom. Whether it's video or text or music or voice, it's all numbers, it's all, underlying it, mathematical functions happening, and Lovelace said, "Just because you're doing mathematical functions and symbols doesn't mean these things can't represent other things in the real world, such as music." This was a huge leap, because Babbage is there saying, "We could compute these amazing functions and print out tables of numbers and draw graphs," — (Laughter) — and Lovelace is there and she says, "Look, this thing could even compose music if you told it a representation of music numerically." So this is what I call Lovelace's Leap. When you say she's a programmer, she did do some, but the real thing is to have said the future is going to be much, much more than this. Now, a hundred years later, this guy comes along, Alan Turing, and in 1936, and invents the computer all over again. Now, of course, Babbage's machine was entirely mechanical. Turing's machine was entirely theoretical. Both of these guys were coming from a mathematical perspective, but Turing told us something very important. He laid down the mathematical foundations for computer science, and said, "It doesn't matter how you make a computer." It doesn't matter if your computer's mechanical, like Babbage's was, or electronic, like computers are today, or perhaps in the future, cells, or, again, mechanical again, once we get into nanotechnology. We could go back to Babbage's machine and just make it tiny. All those things are computers. There is in a sense a computing essence. This is called the Church–Turing thesis. And so suddenly, you get this link where you say this thing Babbage had built really was a computer. In fact, it was capable of doing everything we do today with computers, only really slowly. (Laughter) To give you an idea of how slowly, it had about 1k of memory. It used punch cards, which were being fed in, and it ran about 10,000 times slower the first ZX81. It did have a RAM pack. You could add on a lot of extra memory if you wanted to. (Laughter) So, where does that bring us today? So there are plans. Over in Swindon, the Science Museum archives, there are hundreds of plans and thousands of pages of notes written by Charles Babbage about this analytical engine. One of those is a set of plans that we call Plan 28, and that is also the name of a charity that I started with Doron Swade, who was the curator of computing at the Science Museum, and also the person who drove the project to build a difference engine, and our plan is to build it. Here in South Kensington, we will build the analytical engine. The project has a number of parts to it. One was the scanning of Babbage's archive. That's been done. The second is now the study of all of those plans to determine what to build. The third part is a computer simulation of that machine, and the last part is to physically build it at the Science Museum. When it's built, you'll finally be able to understand how a computer works, because rather than having a tiny chip in front of you, you've got to look at this humongous thing and say, "Ah, I see the memory operating, I see the CPU operating, I hear it operating. I probably smell it operating." (Laughter) But in between that we're going to do a simulation. Babbage himself wrote, he said, as soon as the analytical engine exists, it will surely guide the future course of science. Of course, he never built it, because he was always fiddling with new plans, but when it did get built, of course, in the 1940s, everything changed. Now, I'll just give you a little taste of what it looks like in motion with a video which shows just one part of the CPU mechanism working. So this is just three sets of cogs, and it's going to add. This is the adding mechanism in action, so you imagine this gigantic machine. So, give me five years. Before the 2030s happen, we'll have it. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Technology crafts for the digitally underserved | {0: 'Vinay Venkatraman aims to design technological devices for the "bottom of the pyramid" rather than simply for the affluent.'} | TEDxSummit | Frugal Digital is essentially a small research group at C.I.D. where we are looking to find alternate visions of how to create a digitally inclusive society. That's what we're after. And we do this because we actually believe that silicon technology today is mostly about a culture of excess. It's about the fastest and the most efficient and the most dazzling gadget you can have, while about two-thirds of the world can hardly reach the most basic of this technology to even address fundamental needs in life, including health care, education and all these kinds of very fundamental issues. So before I start, I want to talk about a little anecdote, a little story about a man I met once in Mumbai. So this man, his name is Sathi Shri. He is an outstanding person, because he's a small entrepreneur. He runs a little shop in one of the back streets of Mumbai. He has this little 10-square-meter store, where so much is being done. It's incredible, because I couldn't believe my eyes when I once just happened to bump into him. Basically, what he does is, he has all these services for micro-payments and booking tickets and all kinds of basic things that you would go online for, but he does it for people offline and connects to the digital world. More importantly, he makes his money by selling these mobile recharge coupons, you know, for the prepaid subscriptions. But then, in the backside, he's got this little nook with a few of his employees where they can fix almost anything. Any cell phone, any gadget you can bring them, they can fix it. And it's pretty incredible because I took my iPhone there, and he was like, "Yeah, do you want an upgrade?" "Yes." (Laughter) I was a bit skeptical, but then, I decided to give him a Nokia instead. (Laughter) But what I was amazed about is this reverse engineering and know-how that's built into this little two meters of space. They have figured out everything that's required to dismantle, take things apart, rewrite the circuitry, re-flash the firmware, do whatever you want to with the phone, and they can fix anything so quickly. You can hand over a phone this morning and you can go pick it up after lunch, and it was quite incredible. But then we were wondering whether this is a local phenomenon, or is truly global? And, over time, we started understanding and systematically researching what this tinkering ecosystem is about, because that is something that's happening not just in one street corner in Mumbai. It's actually happening in all parts of the country. It's even happening in Africa, like, for example, in Cape Town we did extensive research on this. Even here in Doha I found this little nook where you can get alarm clocks and watches fixed, and it's a lot of tiny little parts. It's not easy. You've got to try it on your own to believe it. But what fuels this? It's this entire ecosystem of low-cost parts and supplies that are produced all over the world, literally, and then redistributed to basically service this industry, and you can even buy salvaged parts. Basically, you don't have to necessarily buy brand new things. You have condemned computers that are stripped apart, and you can buy salvaged components and things that you can reassemble in a new configuration. But what does this new, sort of, approach give us? That's the real question, because this is something that's been there, part of every society that's deprived of enough resources. But there's an interesting paradigm. There's the traditional crafts, and then there's the technology crafts. We call it the technology crafts because these are emerging. They're not something that's been established. It's not something that's institutionalized. It's not taught in universities. It's taught [by] word of mouth, and it's an informal education system around this. So we said, "What can we get out of this? You know, like, what are the key values that we can get out of this?" The main thing is a fix-it-locally culture, which is fantastic because it means that your product or your service doesn't have to go through a huge bureaucratic system to get it fixed. It also affords us cheap fabrication, which is fantastic, so it means that you can do a lot more with it. And then, the most important thing is, it gives us large math for low cost. So it means that you can actually embed pretty clever algorithms and lots of other kinds of extendable ideas into really simple devices. So, what we call this is a silicon cottage industry. It's basically what was the system or the paradigm before the industrial revolution is now re-happening in a whole new way in small digital shops across the planet in most developing countries. So, we kind of toyed around with this idea, and we said, "What can we do with this? Can we make a little product or a service out of it?" So one of the first things we did is this thing called a multimedia platform. We call it a lunch box. Basically one of the contexts that we studied was schools in very remote parts of India. So there is this amazing concept called the one-teacher school, which is basically a single teacher who is a multitasker who teaches this amazing little social setting. It's an informal school, but it's really about holistic education. The only thing that they don't have is access to resources. They don't even have a textbook sometimes, and they don't even have a proper curriculum. So we said, "What can we do to empower this teacher to do more?" How to access the digital world? Instead of being the sole guardian of information, be a facilitator to all this information. So we said, "What are the steps required to empower the teacher?" How do you make this teacher into a digital gateway, and how do you design an inexpensive multimedia platform that can be constructed locally and serviced locally?" So we walked around. We went and scavenged the nearby markets, and we tried to understand, "What can we pick up that will make this happen?" So the thing that we got was a little mobile phone with a little pico projector that comes for about 60 dollars. We went a bought a flashlight with a very big battery, and a bunch of small speakers. So essentially, the mobile phone gives us a connected multimedia platform. It allows us to get online and allows us to load up files of different formats and play them. The flashlight gives us this really intense, bright L.E.D., and six hours worth of rechargeable battery pack, and the lunch box is a nice little package in which you can put everything inside, and a bunch of mini speakers to sort of amplify the sound large enough. Believe me, those little classrooms are really noisy. They are kids who scream at the top of their voices, and you really have to get above that. And we took it back to this little tinkering setup of a mobile phone repair shop, and then the magic happens. We dismantle the whole thing, we reassemble it in a new configuration, and we do this hardware mashup, systematically training the guy how to do this. Out comes this, a little lunch box — form factor. (Applause) And we systematically field tested, because in the field testing we learned some important lessons, and we went through many iterations. One of the key issues was battery consumption and charging. Luminosity was an issue, when you have too much bright sunlight outside. Often the roofs are broken, so you don't have enough darkness in the classroom to do these things. We extended this idea. We tested it many times over, and the next version we came up with was a box that kind of could trickle charge on solar energy, but most importantly connect to a car battery, because a car battery is a ubiquitous source of power in places where there's not enough electricity or erratic electricity. And the other key thing that we did was make this box run off a USB key, because we realized that even though there was GPRS and all that on paper, at least, in theory, it was much more efficient to send the data on a little USB key by surface mail. It might take a few days to get there, but at least it gets there in high definition and in a reliable quality. So we made this box, and we tested it again and again and again, and we're going through multiple iterations to do these things. But it's not limited to just education. This kind of a technique or metrology can actually be applied to other kinds of areas, and I'm going to tell you one more little story. It's about this little device called a medi-meter. It's basically a little health care screening tool that we developed. In India, there is a context of these amazing people, the health care workers called ASHA workers. They are essentially foot soldiers for the health care system who live in the local community and are trained with basic tools and basic concepts of health care, and the main purpose is basically to inform people to basically, how to lead a better life, but also to divert or sort of make recommendations of what kind of health care should they approach? They are basically referral services, essentially. But the problem with that is that we realized after a bunch of research that they are amazing at referring people to the nearest clinic or the public health care system, but what happens at the public health care system is this: these incredibly long lines and too many people who overload the system simply because there's not enough doctors and facilities for the population that's being referred. So everything from a common cold to a serious case of malaria gets almost the same level of attention, and there's no priorities. So we said, "Come on, there's got to be a better way of doing this for sure." So we said, "What can we do with the ASHA worker that'll allow this ASHA worker to become an interesting filter, but not just a filter, a really well thought through referral system that allows load balancing of the network, and directs patients to different sources of health care based on the severity or the criticalness of those situations?" So the real key question was, how do we empower this woman? How do we empower her with simple tools that's not diagnostic but more screening in nature so she at least knows how to advise the patients better? And that'll make such a huge difference on the system, because the amount of waiting time and the amount of distances that people need to travel, often sometimes seven to 15 kilometers, sometimes by foot, to get a simple health check done, is very, very detrimental in the sense that it really dissuades people from getting access to health care. So if there was something that she could do, that would be amazing. So what we did was that we converted this device into a medical device. I want to demo this actually, because it's a very simple process. Bruno, do you want to join us? (Cheers) Come along. (Applause) So, what we're going to do is that we're going to measure a few basic parameters on you, including your pulse rate and the amount of oxygen that's there in your blood. So you're going to put your thumb on top of this. Bruno Giussani: Like this, works? Vinay Venkatraman: Yeah. That's right. BG: Okay. VV: So I'm going to start it up. I hope it works. (Beeps) It even beeps, because it's an alarm clock, after all. So ... (Laughter) So I take it into the start position, and then I press the read button. (Beeps) So it's taking a little reading from you. (Beeps) And then the pointer goes and points to three different options. Let's see what happens here. (Beeps) Oh Bruno, you can go home, actually. BG: Great. Good news. (Applause) VV: So ... (Applause) So the thing about this is that if the pointer, unfortunately, had pointed to the red spot, we would have to rush you to a hospital. Luckily, not today. And if it had pointed to the orange or the amber, it basically meant you had to have, sort of, more continuous care from the health care worker. So that was a very simple three-step screening process that could basically change the equation of how public health care works in so many different ways. BG: Thank you for the good news. VV: Yeah. (Applause) So, very briefly, I'll just explain to you how this is done, because that's the more interesting part. So essentially, the three things that are required to make this conversion from this guy to this guy is a cheap remote control for a television that you can almost find in every home today, some parts from a computer mouse, basically, something that you can scavenge for very low cost, and a few parts that have to be pre-programmed. Basically this is a micro-controller with a few extra components that can be shipped for very little cost across the world, and that's what is all required with a little bit of local tinkering talent to convert the device into something else. So we are right now doing some systematic field tests to basically ascertain whether something like this actually makes sense to the ASHA worker. We are going through some reference tests to compare it against professional equipment to see if there's a degree of change in efficacy and if it actually makes an impact in people's lives. But most importantly, what we are trying to do right now is we are trying to scale this up, because there are over 250,000 ASHA workers on the ground who are these amazing foot soldiers, and if we can give at least a fraction of them the access to these things, it just changes the way the economics of public health care works, and it changes the way systems actually function, not just on a systematic planning level, but also in a very grassroots, bottom-up level. So that's it, and we hope to do this in a big way. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
A Navy Admiral's thoughts on global security | {0: 'What will 21st-century security look like? Navy Admiral James Stavridis suggests that dialogue and openness will be the game-changers.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I'm gonna talk a little bit about open-source security, because we've got to get better at security in this 21st century. Let me start by saying, let's look back to the 20th century, and kind of get a sense of how that style of security worked for us. This is Verdun, a battlefield in France just north of the NATO headquarters in Belgium. At Verdun, in 1916, over a 300-day period, 700,000 people were killed, so about 2,000 a day. If you roll it forward — 20th-century security — into the Second World War, you see the Battle of Stalingrad, 300 days, 2 million people killed. We go into the Cold War, and we continue to try and build walls. We go from the trench warfare of the First World War to the Maginot Line of the Second World War, and then we go into the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall. Walls don't work. My thesis for us today is, instead of building walls to create security, we need to build bridges. This is a famous bridge in Europe. It's in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It's the bridge over the Drina River, the subject of a novel by Ivo Andrić, and it talks about how, in that very troubled part of Europe and the Balkans, over time there's been enormous building of walls. More recently, in the last decade, we begin to see these communities start, hesitatingly, to come together. I would argue, again, open-source security is about connecting the international, the interagency, the private-public, and lashing it together with strategic communication, largely in social networks. So let me talk a little bit about why we need to do that, because our global commons is under attack in a variety of ways, and none of the sources of threat to the global commons will be solved by building walls. Now, I'm a sailor, obviously. This is a ship, a liner, clipping through the Indian Ocean. What's wrong with this picture? It's got concertina wire along the sides of it. That's to prevent pirates from attacking it. Piracy is a very active threat today around the world. This is in the Indian Ocean. Piracy is also very active in the Strait of Malacca. It's active in the Gulf of Guinea. We see it in the Caribbean. It's a $10-billion-a-year discontinuity in the global transport system. Last year, at this time, there were 20 vessels, 500 mariners held hostage. This is an attack on the global commons. We need to think about how to address it. Let's shift to a different kind of sea, the cyber sea. Here are photographs of two young men. At the moment, they're incarcerated. They conducted a credit card fraud that netted them over 10 billion dollars. This is part of cybercrime which is a $2-trillion-a-year discontinuity in the global economy. Two trillion a year. That's just under the GDP of Great Britain. So this cyber sea, which we know endlessly is the fundamental piece of radical openness, is very much under threat as well. Another thing I worry about in the global commons is the threat posed by trafficking, by the movement of narcotics, opium, here coming out of Afghanistan through Europe over to the United States. We worry about cocaine coming from the Andean Ridge north. We worry about the movement of illegal weapons and trafficking. Above all, perhaps, we worry about human trafficking, and the awful cost of it. Trafficking moves largely at sea but in other parts of the global commons. This is a photograph, and I wish I could tell you that this is a very high-tech piece of US Navy gear that we're using to stop the trafficking. The bad news is, this is a semi-submersible run by drug cartels. It was built in the jungles of South America. We caught it with that low-tech raft — (Laughter) — and it was carrying six tons of cocaine. Crew of four. Sophisticated communications sweep. This kind of trafficking, in narcotics, in humans, in weapons, God forbid, in weapons of mass destruction, is part of the threat to the global commons. And let's pull it together in Afghanistan today. This is a field of poppies in Afghanistan. Eighty to 90 percent of the world's poppy, opium and heroin, comes out of Afghanistan. We also see there, of course, terrorism. This is where al Qaeda is staged from. We also see a very strong insurgency embedded there. So this terrorism concern is also part of the global commons, and what we must address. So here we are, 21st century. We know our 20th-century tools are not going to work. What should we do? I would argue that we will not deliver security solely from the barrel of a gun. We will not deliver security solely from the barrel of a gun. We will need the application of military force. When we do it, we must do it well, and competently. But my thesis is, open-source security is about international, interagency, private-public connection pulled together by this idea of strategic communication on the Internet. Let me give you a couple of examples of how this works in a positive way. This is Afghanistan. These are Afghan soldiers. They are all holding books. You should say, "That's odd. I thought I read that this demographic, young men and women in their 20s and 30s, is largely illiterate in Afghanistan." You would be correct. Eighty-five percent cannot read when they enter the security forces of Afghanistan. Why? Because the Taliban withheld education during the period of time in which these men and women would have learned to read. So the question is, so, why are they all standing there holding books? The answer is, we are teaching them to read in literacy courses by NATO in partnership with private sector entities, in partnership with development agencies. We've taught well over 200,000 Afghan Security Forces to read and write at a basic level. When you can read and write in Afghanistan, you will typically put a pen in your pocket. At the ceremonies, when these young men and women graduate, they take that pen with great pride, and put it in their pocket. This is bringing together international — there are 50 nations involved in this mission — interagency — these development agencies — and private-public, to take on this kind of security. Now, we are also teaching them combat skills, of course, but I would argue, open-source security means connecting in ways that create longer lasting security effect. Here's another example. This is a US Navy warship. It's called the Comfort. There's a sister ship called the Mercy. They are hospital ships. This one, the Comfort, operates throughout the Caribbean and the coast of South America conducting patient treatments. On a typical cruise, they'll do 400,000 patient treatments. It is crewed not strictly by military but by a combination of humanitarian organizations: Operation Hope, Project Smile. Other organizations send volunteers. Interagency physicians come out. They're all part of this. To give you one example of the impact this can have, this little boy, eight years old, walked with his mother two days to come to the eye clinic put on by the Comfort. When he was fitted, over his extremely myopic eyes, he suddenly looked up and said, "Mama, veo el mundo." "Mom, I see the world." Multiply this by 400,000 patient treatments, this private-public collaboration with security forces, and you begin to see the power of creating security in a very different way. Here you see baseball players. Can you pick out the two US Army soldiers in this photograph? They are the two young men on either side of these young boys. This is part of a series of baseball clinics, where we have explored collaboration between Major League Baseball, the Department of State, who sets up the diplomatic piece of this, military baseball players, who are real soldiers with real skills but participate in this mission, and they put on clinics throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, in Honduras, in Nicaragua, in all of the Central American and Caribbean nations where baseball is so popular, and it creates security. It shows role models to young men and women about fitness and about life that I would argue help create security for us. Another aspect of this partnership is in disaster relief. This is a US Air Force helicopter participating after the tsunami in 2004 which killed 250,000 people. In each of these major disasters — the tsunami in 2004, 250,000 dead, the Kashmiri earthquake in Pakistan, 2005, 85,000 dead, the Haitian earthquake, about 300,000 dead, more recently the awful earthquake-tsunami combination which struck Japan and its nuclear industry — in all of these instances, we see partnerships between international actors, interagency, private-public working with security forces to respond to this kind of natural disaster. So these are examples of this idea of open-source security. We tie it together, increasingly, by doing things like this. Now, you're looking at this thinking, "Ah, Admiral, these must be sea lanes of communication, or these might be fiber optic cables." No. This is a graphic of the world according to Twitter. Purple are tweets. Green are geolocation. White is the synthesis. It's a perfect evocation of that great population survey, the six largest nations in the world in descending order: China, India, Facebook, the United States, Twitter and Indonesia. (Laughter) Why do we want to get in these nets? Why do we want to be involved? We talked earlier about the Arab Spring, and the power of all this. I'll give you another example, and it's how you move this message. I gave a talk like this in London a while back about this point. I said, as I say to all of you, I'm on Facebook. Friend me. Got a little laugh from the audience. There was an article which was run by AP, on the wire. Got picked up in two places in the world: Finland and Indonesia. The headline was: NATO Admiral Needs Friends. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) Which I do. (Laughter) And the story was a catalyst, and the next morning I had hundreds of Facebook friend requests from Indonesians and Finns, mostly saying, "Admiral, we heard you need a friend, and oh, by the way, what is NATO?" (Laughter) So ... (Laughter) Yeah, we laugh, but this is how we move the message, and moving that message is how we connect international, interagency, private-public, and these social nets to help create security. Now, let me hit a somber note. This is a photograph of a brave British soldier. He's in the Scots Guards. He's standing the watch in Helmand, in southern Afghanistan. I put him here to remind us, I would not want anyone to leave the room thinking that we do not need capable, competent militaries who can create real military effect. That is the core of who we are and what we do, and we do it to protect freedom, freedom of speech, all the things we treasure in our societies. But, you know, life is not an on-and-off switch. You don't have to have a military that is either in hard combat or is in the barracks. I would argue life is a rheostat. You have to dial it in, and as I think about how we create security in this 21st century, there will be times when we will apply hard power in true war and crisis, but there will be many instances, as we've talked about today, where our militaries can be part of creating 21st-century security, international, interagency, private-public, connected with competent communication. I would close by saying that we heard earlier today about Wikipedia. I use Wikipedia all the time to look up facts, and as all of you appreciate, Wikipedia is not created by 12 brilliant people locked in a room writing articles. Wikipedia, every day, is tens of thousands of people inputting information, and every day millions of people withdrawing that information. It's a perfect image for the fundamental point that no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together. No one person, no one alliance, no one nation, no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together. The vision statement of Wikipedia is very simple: a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. My thesis for you is that by combining international, interagency, private-public, strategic communication, together, in this 21st century, we can create the sum of all security. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
Your phone company is watching | {0: 'Malte Spitz asked his cell phone carrier what it knew about him -- and mapped what he found out.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Hi. This is my mobile phone. A mobile phone can change your life, and a mobile phone gives you individual freedom. With a mobile phone, you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria. With a mobile phone, you can tweet a message and start a protest in Egypt. And with a mobile phone, you can record a song, load it up to SoundCloud and become famous. All this is possible with your mobile phone. I'm a child of 1984, and I live in the city of Berlin. Let's go back to that time, to this city. Here you can see how hundreds of thousands of people stood up and protested for change. This is autumn 1989, and imagine that all those people standing up and protesting for change had a mobile phone in their pocket. Who in the room has a mobile phone with you? Hold it up. Hold your phones up, hold your phones up! Hold it up. An Android, a Blackberry, wow. That's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone. But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone, and how it changed my life. And I will talk about this. These are 35,830 lines of information. Raw data. And why are these informations there? Because in the summer of 2006, the E.U. Commission tabled a directive. This directive [is] called Data Retention Directive. This directive says that each phone company in Europe, each Internet service company all over Europe, has to store a wide range of information about the users. Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email? Who sends whom a text message? And if you use your mobile phone, where you are. All this information is stored for at least six months, up to two years by your phone company or your Internet service provider. And all over Europe, people stood up and said, "We don't want this." They said, we don't want this data retention. We want self-determination in the digital age, and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companies have to store all this information about us. They were lawyers, journalists, priests, they all said: "We don't want this." And here you can see, like 10 thousands of people went out on the streets of Berlin and said, "Freedom, not fear." And some even said, this would be Stasi 2.0. Stasi was the secret police in East Germany. And I also ask myself, does it really work? Can they really store all this information about us? Every time I use my mobile phone? So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom, which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany, and I asked them, please, send me all the information you have stored about me. And I asked them once, and I asked them again, and I got no real answer. It was only blah blah answers. But then I said, I want to have this information, because this is my life you are protocoling. So I decided to start a lawsuit against them, because I wanted to have this information. But Deutsche Telekom said, no, we will not give you this information. So at the end, I had a settlement with them. I'll put down the lawsuit and they will send me all the information I ask for. Because in the mean time, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of this E.U. directive into German law was unconstitutional. So I got this ugly brown envelope with a C.D. inside. And on the C.D., this was on. Thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information. At first I saw it, and I said, okay, it's a huge file. Okay. But then after a while I realized, this is my life. This is six months of my life, into this file. So I was a little bit skeptical, what should I do with it? Because you can see where I am, where I sleep at night, what I am doing. But then I said, I want to go out with this information. I want to make them public. Because I want to show the people what does data retention mean. So together with Zeit Online and Open Data City, I did this. This is a visualization of six months of my life. You can zoom in and zoom out, you can wind back and fast forward. You can see every step I take. And you can even see how I go from Frankfurt by train to Cologne, and how often I call in between. All this is possible with this information. That's a little bit scary. But it is not only about me. It's about all of us. First, it's only like, I call my wife and she calls me, and we talk to each other a couple of times. And then there are some friends calling me, and they call each other. And after a while you are calling you, and you are calling you, and you have this great communication network. But you can see how your people are communicating with each other, what times they call each other, when they go to bed. You can see all of this. You can see the hubs, like who are the leaders in the group. If you have access to this information, you can see what your society is doing. If you have access to this information, you can control your society. This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran. This is a blueprint how to survey your society, because you know who talks to whom, who sends whom an email, all this is possible if you have access to this information. And this information is stored for at least six months in Europe, up to two years. Like I said at the beginning, imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlin in autumn of 1989 had a mobile phone in their pocket. And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest, and if the Stasi would have known who are the leaders behind it, this may never have happened. The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not [have been] there. And in the aftermath, also not the fall of the Iron Curtain. Because today, state agencies and companies want to store as much information as they can get about us, online and offline. They want to have the possibility to track our lives, and they want to store them for all time. But self-determination and living in the digital age is no contradiction. But you have to fight for your self-determination today. You have to fight for it every day. So, when you go home, tell your friends that privacy is a value of the 21st century, and it's not outdated. When you go home, tell your representative only because companies and state agencies have the possibility to store certain information, they don't have to do it. And if you don't believe me, ask your phone company what information they store about you. So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone, let it be a reminder to you that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age. Thank you. (Applause) |
Finding the story inside the painting | {0: 'Novelist Tracy Chevalier is the author of "Girl With a Pearl Earring."'} | TEDSalon London Spring 2012 | I'm going to tell you about an affliction I suffer from. And I have a funny feeling that quite a few of you suffer from it as well. When I'm walking around an art gallery, rooms and rooms full of paintings, after about 15 or 20 minutes, I realize I'm not thinking about the paintings. I'm not connecting to them. Instead, I'm thinking about that cup of coffee I desperately need to wake me up. I'm suffering from gallery fatigue. How many of you out there suffer from — yes. Ha ha, ha ha! Now, sometimes you might last longer than 20 minutes, or even shorter, but I think we all suffer from it. And do you have the accompanying guilt? For me, I look at the paintings on the wall and I think, somebody has decided to put them there, thinks they're good enough to be on that wall, but I don't always see it. In fact, most of the time I don't see it. And I leave feeling actually unhappy. I feel guilty and unhappy with myself, rather than thinking there's something wrong with the painting, I think there's something wrong with me. And that's not a good experience, to leave a gallery like that. (Laughter) The thing is, I think we should give ourselves a break. If you think about going into a restaurant, when you look at the menu, are you expected to order every single thing on the menu? No! You select. If you go into a department store to buy a shirt, are you going to try on every single shirt and want every single shirt? Of course not, you can be selective. It's expected. How come, then, it's not so expected to be selective when we go to an art gallery? Why are we supposed to have a connection with every single painting? Well I'm trying to take a different approach. And there's two things I do: When I go into a gallery, first of all, I go quite fast, and I look at everything, and I pinpoint the ones that make me slow down for some reason or other. I don't even know why they make me slow down, but something pulls me like a magnet and then I ignore all the others, and I just go to that painting. So it's the first thing I do is, I do my own curation. I choose a painting. It might just be one painting in 50. And then the second thing I do is I stand in front of that painting, and I tell myself a story about it. Why a story? Well, I think that we are wired, our DNA tells us to tell stories. We tell stories all the time about everything, and I think we do it because the world is kind of a crazy, chaotic place, and sometimes stories, we're trying to make sense of the world a little bit, trying to bring some order to it. Why not apply that to our looking at paintings? So I now have this sort of restaurant menu visiting of art galleries. There are three paintings I'm going to show you now that are paintings that made me stop in my tracks and want to tell stories about them. The first one needs little introduction — "Girl with a Pearl Earring" by Johannes Vermeer, 17th-century Dutch painter. This is the most glorious painting. I first saw it when I was 19, and I immediately went out and got a poster of it, and in fact I still have that poster. 30 years later it's hanging in my house. It's accompanied me everywhere I've gone, I never tire of looking at her. What made me stop in my tracks about her to begin with was just the gorgeous colors he uses and the light falling on her face. But I think what's kept me still coming back year after year is another thing, and that is the look on her face, the conflicted look on her face. I can't tell if she's happy or sad, and I change my mind all the time. So that keeps me coming back. One day, 16 years after I had this poster on my wall, I lay in bed and looked at her, and I suddenly thought, I wonder what the painter did to her to make her look like that. And it was the first time I'd ever thought that the expression on her face is actually reflecting how she feels about him. Always before I'd thought of it as a portrait of a girl. Now I began to think of it as a portrait of a relationship. And I thought, well, what is that relationship? So I went to find out. I did some research and discovered, we have no idea who she is. In fact, we don't know who any of the models in any of Vermeer's paintings are, and we know very little about Vermeer himself. Which made me go, "Yippee!" I can do whatever I want, I can come up with whatever story I want to. So here's how I came up with the story. First of all, I thought, I've got to get her into the house. How does Vermeer know her? Well, there've been suggestions that she is his 12-year-old daughter. The daughter at the time was 12 when he painted the painting. And I thought, no, it's a very intimate look, but it's not a look a daughter gives her father. For one thing, in Dutch painting of the time, if a woman's mouth was open, it was indicating sexual availability. It would have been inappropriate for Vermeer to paint his daughter like that. So it's not his daughter, but it's somebody close to him, physically close to him. Well, who else would be in the house? A servant, a lovely servant. So, she's in the house. How do we get her into the studio? We don't know very much about Vermeer, but the little bits that we do know, one thing we know is that he married a Catholic woman, they lived with her mother in a house where he had his own room where he — his studio. He also had 11 children. It would have been a chaotic, noisy household. And if you've seen Vermeer's paintings before, you know that they're incredibly calm and quiet. How does a painter paint such calm, quiet paintings with 11 kids around? Well, he compartmentalizes his life. He gets to his studio, and he says, "Nobody comes in here. Not the wife, not the kids. Okay, the maid can come in and clean." She's in the studio. He's got her in the studio, they're together. And he decides to paint her. He has her wear very plain clothes. Now, all of the women, or most of the women in Vermeer's other paintings wore velvet, silk, fur, very sumptuous materials. This is very plain; the only thing that isn't plain is her pearl earring. Now, if she's a servant, there is no way she could afford a pair of pearl earrings. So those are not her pearl earrings. Whose are they? We happen to know, there's a list of Catharina, the wife's clothes. Amongst them a yellow coat with white fur, a yellow and black bodice, and you see these clothes on lots of other paintings, different women in the paintings, Vermeer's paintings. So clearly, her clothes were lent to various different women. It's not such a leap of faith to take that that pearl earring actually belongs to his wife. So we've got all the elements for our story. She's in the studio with him for a long time. These paintings took a long time to make. They would have spent the time alone, all that time. She's wearing his wife's pearl earring. She's gorgeous. She obviously loves him. She's conflicted. And does the wife know? Maybe not. And if she doesn't, well — that's the story. (Laughter) The next painting I'm going to talk about is called "Boy Building a House of Cards" by Chardin. He's an 18th-century French painter best known for his still lifes, but he did occasionally paint people. And in fact, he painted four versions of this painting, different boys building houses of cards, all concentrated. I like this version the best, because some of the boys are older and some are younger, and to me, this one, like Goldilocks's porridge, is just right. He's not quite a child, and he's not quite a man. He's absolutely balanced between innocence and experience, and that made me stop in my tracks in front of this painting. And I looked at his face. It's like a Vermeer painting a bit. The light comes in from the left, his face is bathed in this glowing light. It's right in the center of the painting, and you look at it, and I found that when I was looking at it, I was standing there going, "Look at me. Please look at me." And he didn't look at me. He was still looking at his cards, and that's one of the seductive elements of this painting is, he's so focused on what he's doing that he doesn't look at us. And that is, to me, the sign of a masterpiece, of a painting when there's a lack of resolution. He's never going to look at me. So I was thinking of a story where, if I'm in this position, who could be there looking at him? Not the painter, I don't want to think about the painter. I'm thinking of an older version of himself. He's a man, a servant, an older servant looking at this younger servant, saying, "Look at me. I want to warn you about what you're about to go through. Please look at me." And he never does. And that lack of resolution, the lack of resolution in "Girl with a Pearl Earring" — we don't know if she's happy or sad. I've written an entire novel about her, and I still don't know if she's happy or sad. Again and again, back to the painting, looking for the answer, looking for the story to fill in that gap. And we may make a story, and it satisfies us momentarily, but not really, and we come back again and again. The last painting I'm going to talk about is called "Anonymous" by anonymous. (Laughter) This is a Tudor portrait bought by the National Portrait Gallery. They thought it was a man named Sir Thomas Overbury, and then they discovered that it wasn't him, and they have no idea who it is. Now, in the National Portrait Gallery, if you don't know the biography of the painting, it's kind of useless to you. They can't hang it on the wall, because they don't know who he is. So unfortunately, this orphan spends most of his time in storage, along with quite a number of other orphans, some of them some beautiful paintings. This painting made me stop in my tracks for three reasons: One is the disconnection between his mouth that's smiling and his eyes that are wistful. He's not happy, and why isn't he happy? The second thing that really attracted me were his bright red cheeks. He is blushing. He's blushing for his portrait being made! This must be a guy who blushes all the time. What is he thinking about that's making him blush? The third thing that made me stop in my tracks is his absolutely gorgeous doublet. Silk, gray, those beautiful buttons. And you know what it makes me think of, is it's sort of snug and puffy; it's like a duvet spread over a bed. I kept thinking of beds and red cheeks, and of course I kept thinking of sex when I looked at him, and I thought, is that what he's thinking about? And I thought, if I'm going to make a story, what's the last thing I'm going to put in there? Well, what would a Tudor gentleman be preoccupied with? And I thought, well, Henry VIII, okay. He'd be preoccupied with his inheritance, with his heir. Who is going to inherit his name and his fortune? You put all those together, and you've got your story to fill in that gap that makes you keep coming back. Now, here's the story. It's short. "Rosy" I am still wearing the white brocade doublet Caroline gave me. It has a plain high collar, detachable sleeves and intricate buttons of twisted silk thread, set close together so that the fit is snug. The doublet makes me think of a coverlet on the vast bed. Perhaps that was the intention. I first wore it at an elaborate dinner her parents held in our honor. I knew even before I stood up to speak that my cheeks were inflamed. I have always flushed easily, from physical exertion, from wine, from high emotion. As a boy, I was teased by my sisters and by schoolboys, but not by George. Only George could call me Rosy. I would not allow anyone else. He managed to make the word tender. When I made the announcement, George did not turn rosy, but went pale as my doublet. He should not have been surprised. It has been a common assumption that I would one day marry his cousin. But it is difficult to hear the words aloud. I know, I could barely utter them. Afterwards, I found George on the terrace overlooking the kitchen garden. Despite drinking steadily all afternoon, he was still pale. We stood together and watched the maids cut lettuces. "What do you think of my doublet?" I asked. He glanced at me. "That collar looks to be strangling you." "We will still see each other," I insisted. "We can still hunt and play cards and attend court. Nothing need change." George did not speak. "I am 23 years old. It is time for me to marry and produce an heir. It is expected of me." George drained another glass of claret and turned to me. "Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials, James. I'm sure you'll be content together." He never used my nickname again. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Imaging at a trillion frames per second | {0: 'Photography is about creating images by recording light. At the MIT media lab, professor Ramesh Raskar and his team members have invented a camera that can photograph light itself as it moves at, well, the speed of light.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Doc Edgerton inspired us with awe and curiosity with this photo of a bullet piercing through an apple, and exposure just a millionth of a second. But now, 50 years later, we can go a million times faster and see the world not at a million or a billion, but one trillion frames per second. I present to you a new type of photography, femto-photography, a new imaging technique so fast that it can create slow motion videos of light in motion. And with that, we can create cameras that can look around corners, beyond line of sight, or see inside our body without an x-ray, and really challenge what we mean by a camera. Now if I take a laser pointer and turn it on and off in one trillionth of a second — which is several femtoseconds — I'll create a packet of photons barely a millimeter wide. And that packet of photons, that bullet, will travel at the speed of light, and again, a million times faster than an ordinary bullet. Now, if you take that bullet and take this packet of photons and fire into this bottle, how will those photons shatter into this bottle? How does light look in slow motion? [Light in Slow Motion ... 10 Billion x Slow] Now, the whole event — (Applause) Now remember, the whole event is effectively taking place in less than a nanosecond — that's how much time it takes for light to travel. But I'm slowing down in this video by a factor of 10 billion, so you can see the light in motion. (Laughter) But Coca-Cola did not sponsor this research. (Laughter) Now, there's a lot going on in this movie, so let me break this down and show you what's going on. So the pulse enters the bottle, our bullet, with a packet of photons that start traveling through and that start scattering inside. Some of the light leaks, goes on the table, and you start seeing these ripples of waves. Many of the photons eventually reach the cap and then they explode in various directions. As you can see, there's a bubble of air and it's bouncing around inside. Meanwhile, the ripples are traveling on the table, and because of the reflections at the top, you see at the back of the bottle, after several frames, the reflections are focused. Now, if you take an ordinary bullet and let it go the same distance and slow down the video — again, by a factor of 10 billion — do you know how long you'll have to sit here to watch that movie? (Laughter) A day, a week? Actually, a whole year. It'll be a very boring movie — (Laughter) of a slow, ordinary bullet in motion. And what about some still-life photography? You can watch the ripples, again, washing over the table, the tomato and the wall in the back. It's like throwing a stone in a pond of water. I thought: this is how nature paints a photo, one femto frame at a time, but of course our eye sees an integral composite. But if you look at this tomato one more time, you will notice, as the light washes over the tomato, it continues to glow. It doesn't become dark. Why is that? Because the tomato is actually ripe, and the light is bouncing around inside the tomato, and it comes out after several trillionths of a second. So in the future, when this femto-camera is in your camera phone, you might be able to go to a supermarket and check if the fruit is ripe without actually touching it. (Laughter) So how did my team at MIT create this camera? Now, as photographers, you know, if you take a short exposure photo, you get very little light. But we're going to go a billion times faster than your shortest exposure, so you're going to get hardly any light. So what we do is we send that bullet — that packet of photons — millions of times, and record again and again with very clever synchronization, and from the gigabytes of data, we computationally weave together to create those femto-videos I showed you. And we can take all that raw data and treat it in very interesting ways. So, Superman can fly. Some other heroes can become invisible. But what about a new power for a future superhero: To see around corners. The idea is that we could shine some light on the door, it's going to bounce, go inside the room, some of that is going to reflect back on the door, and then back to the camera. And we could exploit these multiple bounces of light. And it's not science fiction. We have actually built it. On the left, you see our femto-camera. There's a mannequin hidden behind a wall, and we're going to bounce light off the door. So after our paper was published in Nature Communications, it was highlighted by Nature.com, and they created this animation. (Music) [A laser pulse is fired] (Music) Ramesh Raskar: We're going to fire those bullets of light, and they're going to hit this wall, and because of the packet of the photons, they will scatter in all the directions, and some of them will reach our hidden mannequin, which in turn will again scatter that light, and again in turn, the door will reflect some of that scattered light. And a tiny fraction of the photons will actually come back to the camera, but most interestingly, they will all arrive at a slightly different time slot. (Music) And because we have a camera that can run so fast — our femto-camera — it has some unique abilities. It has very good time resolution, and it can look at the world at the speed of light. And this way, we know the distances, of course to the door, but also to the hidden objects, but we don't know which point corresponds to which distance. (Music) By shining one laser, we can record one raw photo, which, if you look on the screen, doesn't really make any sense. But then we will take a lot of such pictures, dozens of such pictures, put them together, and try to analyze the multiple bounces of light, and from that, can we see the hidden object? Can we see it in full 3D? So this is our reconstruction. (Music) (Applause) Now, we have some ways to go before we take this outside the lab on the road, but in the future, we could create cars that avoid collisions with what's around the bend. Or we can look for survivors in hazardous conditions by looking at light reflected through open windows. Or we can build endoscopes that can see deep inside the body around occluders, and also for cardioscopes. But of course, because of tissue and blood, this is quite challenging, so this is really a call for scientists to start thinking about femto-photography as really a new imaging modality to solve the next generation of health-imaging problems. Now, like Doc Edgerton, a scientist himself, science became art — an art of ultra-fast photography. And I realized that all the gigabytes of data that we're collecting every time, are not just for scientific imaging. But we can also do a new form of computational photography, with time-lapse and color coding. And we look at those ripples. Remember: The time between each of those ripples is only a few trillionths of a second. But there's also something funny going on here. When you look at the ripples under the cap, the ripples are moving away from us. The ripples should be moving towards us. What's going on here? It turns out, because we're recording nearly at the speed of light, we have strange effects, and Einstein would have loved to see this picture. (Laughter) The order at which events take place in the world appears in the camera sometimes in reversed order. So by applying the corresponding space and time warp, we can correct for this distortion. So whether it's for photography around corners, or creating the next generation of health imaging, or creating new visualizations, since our invention, we have open-sourced all the data and details on our website, and our hope is that the DIY, the creative and the research communities will show us that we should stop obsessing about the megapixels in cameras — (Laughter) and start focusing on the next dimension in imaging. It's about time. Thank you. (Applause) |
Building unimaginable shapes | {0: 'Michael Hansmeyer is an architect and programmer who explores the use of algorithms and computation to generate architectural form.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | As an architect, I often ask myself, what is the origin of the forms that we design? What kind of forms could we design if we wouldn't work with references anymore? If we had no bias, if we had no preconceptions, what kind of forms could we design if we could free ourselves from our experience? If we could free ourselves from our education? What would these unseen forms look like? Would they surprise us? Would they intrigue us? Would they delight us? If so, then how can we go about creating something that is truly new? I propose we look to nature. Nature has been called the greatest architect of forms. And I'm not saying that we should copy nature, I'm not saying we should mimic biology, instead I propose that we can borrow nature's processes. We can abstract them and to create something that is new. Nature's main process of creation, morphogenesis, is the splitting of one cell into two cells. And these cells can either be identical, or they can be distinct from each other through asymmetric cell division. If we abstract this process, and simplify it as much as possible, then we could start with a single sheet of paper, one surface, and we could make a fold and divide the surface into two surfaces. We're free to choose where we make the fold. And by doing so, we can differentiate the surfaces. Through this very simple process, we can create an astounding variety of forms. Now, we can take this form and use the same process to generate three-dimensional structures, but rather than folding things by hand, we'll bring the structure into the computer, and code it as an algorithm. And in doing so, we can suddenly fold anything. We can fold a million times faster, we can fold in hundreds and hundreds of variations. And as we're seeking to make something three-dimensional, we start not with a single surface, but with a volume. A simple volume, the cube. If we take its surfaces and fold them again and again and again and again, then after 16 iterations, 16 steps, we end up with 400,000 surfaces and a shape that looks, for instance, like this. And if we change where we make the folds, if we change the folding ratio, then this cube turns into this one. We can change the folding ratio again to produce this shape, or this shape. So we exert control over the form by specifying the position of where we're making the fold, but essentially you're looking at a folded cube. And we can play with this. We can apply different folding ratios to different parts of the form to create local conditions. We can begin to sculpt the form. And because we're doing the folding on the computer, we are completely free of any physical constraints. So that means that surfaces can intersect themselves, they can become impossibly small. We can make folds that we otherwise could not make. Surfaces can become porous. They can stretch. They can tear. And all of this expounds the scope of forms that we can produce. But in each case, I didn't design the form. I designed the process that generated the form. In general, if we make a small change to the folding ratio, which is what you're seeing here, then the form changes correspondingly. But that's only half of the story — 99.9 percent of the folding ratios produce not this, but this, the geometric equivalent of noise. The forms that I showed before were made actually through very long trial and error. A far more effective way to create forms, I have found, is to use information that is already contained in forms. A very simple form such as this one actually contains a lot of information that may not be visible to the human eye. So, for instance, we can plot the length of the edges. White surfaces have long edges, black ones have short ones. We can plot the planarity of the surfaces, their curvature, how radial they are — all information that may not be instantly visible to you, but that we can bring out, that we can articulate, and that we can use to control the folding. So now I'm not specifying a single ratio anymore to fold it, but instead I'm establishing a rule, I'm establishing a link between a property of a surface and how that surface is folded. And because I've designed the process and not the form, I can run the process again and again and again to produce a whole family of forms. These forms look elaborate, but the process is a very minimal one. There is a simple input, it's always a cube that I start with, and it's a very simple operation — it's making a fold, and doing this over and over again. So let's bring this process to architecture. How? And at what scale? I chose to design a column. Columns are architectural archetypes. They've been used throughout history to express ideals about beauty, about technology. A challenge to me was how we could express this new algorithmic order in a column. I started using four cylinders. Through a lot of experimentation, these cylinders eventually evolved into this. And these columns, they have information at very many scales. We can begin to zoom into them. The closer one gets, the more new features one discovers. Some formations are almost at the threshold of human visibility. And unlike traditional architecture, it's a single process that creates both the overall form and the microscopic surface detail. These forms are undrawable. An architect who's drawing them with a pen and a paper would probably take months, or it would take even a year to draw all the sections, all of the elevations, you can only create something like this through an algorithm. The more interesting question, perhaps, is, are these forms imaginable? Usually, an architect can somehow envision the end state of what he is designing. In this case, the process is deterministic. There's no randomness involved at all, but it's not entirely predictable. There's too many surfaces, there's too much detail, one can't see the end state. So this leads to a new role for the architect. One needs a new method to explore all of the possibilities that are out there. For one thing, one can design many variants of a form, in parallel, and one can cultivate them. And to go back to the analogy with nature, one can begin to think in terms of populations, one can talk about permutations, about generations, about crossing and breeding to come up with a design. And the architect is really, he moves into the position of being an orchestrator of all of these processes. But enough of the theory. At one point I simply wanted to jump inside this image, so to say, I bought these red and blue 3D glasses, got up very close to the screen, but still that wasn't the same as being able to walk around and touch things. So there was only one possibility — to bring the column out of the computer. There's been a lot of talk now about 3D printing. For me, or for my purpose at this moment, there's still too much of an unfavorable tradeoff between scale, on the one hand, and resolution and speed, on the other. So instead, we decided to take the column, and we decided to build it as a layered model, made out of very many slices, thinly stacked over each other. What you're looking at here is an X-ray of the column that you just saw, viewed from the top. Unbeknownst to me at the time, because we had only seen the outside, the surfaces were continuing to fold themselves, to grow on the inside of the column, which was quite a surprising discovery. From this shape, we calculated a cutting line, and then we gave this cutting line to a laser cutter to produce — and you're seeing a segment of it here — very many thin slices, individually cut, on top of each other. And this is a photo now, it's not a rendering, and the column that we ended up with after a lot of work, ended up looking remarkably like the one that we had designed in the computer. Almost all of the details, almost all of the surface intricacies were preserved. But it was very labor intensive. There's a huge disconnect at the moment still between the virtual and the physical. It took me several months to design the column, but ultimately it takes the computer about 30 seconds to calculate all of the 16 million faces. The physical model, on the other hand, is 2,700 layers, one millimeter thick, it weighs 700 kilos, it's made of sheet that can cover this entire auditorium. And the cutting path that the laser followed goes from here to the airport and back again. But it is increasingly possible. Machines are getting faster, it's getting less expensive, and there's some promising technological developments just on the horizon. These are images from the Gwangju Biennale. And in this case, I used ABS plastic to produce the columns, we used the bigger, faster machine, and they have a steel core inside, so they're structural, they can bear loads for once. Each column is effectively a hybrid of two columns. You can see a different column in the mirror, if there's a mirror behind the column that creates a sort of an optical illusion. So where does this leave us? I think this project gives us a glimpse of the unseen objects that await us if we as architects begin to think about designing not the object, but a process to generate objects. I've shown one simple process that was inspired by nature; there's countless other ones. In short, we have no constraints. Instead, we have processes in our hands right now that allow us to create structures at all scales that we couldn't even have dreamt up. And, if I may add, at one point we will build them. Thank you. (Applause) |
Every city needs healthy honey bees | {0: "Noah Wilson-Rich doesn't just want to know why bees are dying off, but what's saving them."} | TEDxBoston 2012 | This man is wearing what we call a bee beard. (Laughter) A beard full of bees. Now, this is what many of you might picture when you think about honeybees, maybe insects, or maybe anything that has more legs than two. And let me start by telling you, I gotcha. I understand that. But, there are many things to know, and I want you to open your minds here, keep them open, and change your perspective about honeybees. Notice that this man is not getting stung. He probably has a queen bee tied to his chin, and the other bees are attracted to it. So this really demonstrates our relationship with honeybees, and that goes deep back for thousands of years. We're very co-evolved, because we depend on bees for pollination and, even more recently, as an economic commodity. Many of you may have heard that honeybees are disappearing, not just dying, but they're gone. We don't even find dead bodies. This is called colony collapse disorder, and it's bizarre. Researchers around the globe still do not know what's causing it, but what we do know is that, with the declining numbers of bees, the costs of over 130 fruit and vegetable crops that we rely on for food is going up in price. So honeybees are important for their role in the economy as well as in agriculture. Here you can see some pictures of what are called green roofs, or urban agriculture. We're familiar with the image on the left that shows a local neighborhood garden in the South End. That's where I call home. I have a beehive in the backyard. And perhaps a green roof in the future, when we're further utilizing urban areas, where there are stacks of garden spaces. Check out this image above the orange line in Boston. Try to spot the beehive. It's there. It's on the rooftop, right on the corner there, and it's been there for a couple of years now. The way that urban beekeeping currently operates is that the beehives are quite hidden, and it's not because they need to be. It's just because people are uncomfortable with the idea, and that's why I want you today to try to think about this, think about the benefits of bees in cities and why they really are a terrific thing. Let me give you a brief rundown on how pollination works. So we know flowers, we know fruits and vegetables, even some alfalfa in hay that the livestock for the meats that we eat, rely on pollinators, but you've got male and female parts to a plant here, and basically pollinators are attracted to plants for their nectar, and in the process, a bee will visit some flowers and pick up some pollen, or that male kind of sperm counterpart, along the way, and then travel to different flowers, and eventually an apple, in this case, will be produced. You can see the orientation. The stem is down. The blossom end has fallen off by the time we eat it, but that's a basic overview of how pollination works. And let's think about urban living, not today, and not in the past, but what about in a hundred years? What's it gonna look like? We have huge grand challenges these days of habitat loss. We have more and more people, billions of people, in 100 years, God knows how many people, and how little space there will be to fit all of them, so we need to change the way that we see cities, and looking at this picture on the left of New York City today, you can see how gray and brown it is. We have tar paper on the rooftops that bounces heat back into the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change, no doubt. What about in 100 years, if we have green rooftops everywhere, and gardening, and we create our own crops right in the cities? We save on the costs of transportation, we save on a healthier diet, and we also educate and create new jobs locally. We need bees for the future of our cities and urban living. Here's some data that we collected through our company with Best Bees, where we deliver, install and manage honeybee hives for anybody who wants them, in the city, in the countryside, and we introduce honeybees, and the idea of beekeeping in your own backyard or rooftop or fire escape, for even that matter, and seeing how simple it is and how possible it is. There's a counterintuitive trend that we noticed in these numbers. So let's look at the first metric here, overwintering survival. Now this has been a huge problem for many years, basically since the late 1980s, when the varroa mite came and brought many different viruses, bacteria and fungal diseases with it. Overwintering success is hard, and that's when most of the colonies are lost, and we found that in the cities, bees are surviving better than they are in the country. A bit counterintuitive, right? We think, oh, bees, countryside, agriculture, but that's not what the bees are showing. The bees like it in the city. (Laughter) Furthermore, they also produce more honey. The urban honey is delicious. The bees in Boston on the rooftop of the Seaport Hotel, where we have hundreds of thousands of bees flying overheard right now that I'm sure none of you noticed when we walked by, are going to all of the local community gardens and making delicious, healthy honey that just tastes like the flowers in our city. So the yield for urban hives, in terms of honey production, is higher as well as the overwintering survival, compared to rural areas. Again, a bit counterintuitive. And looking back historically at the timeline of honeybee health, we can go back to the year 950 and see that there was also a great mortality of bees in Ireland. So the problems of bees today isn't necessarily something new. It has been happening since over a thousand years ago, but what we don't really notice are these problems in cities. So one thing I want to encourage you to think about is the idea of what an urban island is. You think in the city maybe the temperature's warmer. Why are bees doing better in the city? This is a big question now to help us understand why they should be in the city. Perhaps there's more pollen in the city. With the trains coming in to urban hubs, they can carry pollen with them, very light pollen, and it's just a big supermarket in the city. A lot of linden trees live along the railroad tracks. Perhaps there are fewer pesticides in the cities than there are in [rural] areas. Perhaps there are other things that we're just not thinking about yet, but that's one idea to think about, urban islands. And colony collapse disorder is not the only thing affecting honeybees. Honeybees are dying, and it's a huge, huge grand challenge of our time. What you can see up here is a map of the world, and we're tracking the spread of this varroa mite. Now, the varroa mite is what changed the game in beekeeping, and you can see, at the top right, the years are changing, we're coming up to modern times, and you can see the spread of the varroa mite from the early 1900s through now. It's 1968, and we're pretty much covering Asia. 1971, we saw it spread to Europe and South America, and then, when we get to the 1980s, and specifically to 1987, the varroa mite finally came to North America and to the United States, and that is when the game changed for honeybees in the United States. Many of us will remember our childhood growing up, maybe you got stung by a bee, you saw bees on flowers. Think of the kids today. Their childhood's a bit different. They don't experience this. The bees just aren't around anymore. So we need bees and they're disappearing and it's a big problem. What can we do here? So, what I do is honeybee research. I got my Ph.D. studying honeybee health. I started in 2005 studying honeybees. In 2006, honeybees started disappearing, so suddenly, like, this little nerd kid going to school working with bugs — (Laughter) — became very relevant in the world. And it worked out that way. So my research focuses on ways to make bees healthier. I don't research what's killing the bees, per se. I'm not one of the many researchers around the world who's looking at the effects of pesticides or diseases or habitat loss and poor nutrition on bees. We're looking at ways to make bees healthier through vaccines, through yogurt, like probiotics, and other types of therapies in ways that can be fed orally to bees, and this process is so easy, even a 7-year-old can do it. You just mix up some pollen, sugar and water, and whatever active ingredient you want to put in, and you just give it right to the bees. No chemicals involved, just immune boosters. Humans think about our own health in a prospective way. We exercise, we eat healthy, we take vitamins. Why don't we think about honeybees in that same type of way? Bring them to areas where they're thriving and try to make them healthier before they get sick. I spent many years in grad school trying to poke bees and do vaccines with needles. (Laughter) Like, years, years at the bench, "Oh my gosh, it's 3 a.m. and I'm still pricking bees." (Laughter) And then one day I said, "Why don't we just do an oral vaccine?" It's like, "Ugh," so that's what we do. (Laughter) I'd love to share with you some images of urban beehives, because they can be anything. I mean, really open your mind with this. You can paint a hive to match your home. You can hide a hive inside your home. These are three hives on the rooftop of the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, and they're beautiful here. I mean, we matched the new color of the inside of their rooms to do some type of a stained wood with blue for their sheets, and these bees are terrific, and they also will use herbs that are growing in the garden. That's what the chefs go to to use for their cooking, and the honey — they do live events — they'll use that honey at their bars. Honey is a great nutritional substitute for regular sugar because there are different types of sugars in there. We also have a classroom hives project, where — this is a nonprofit venture — we're spreading the word around the world for how honeybee hives can be taken into the classroom or into the museum setting, behind glass, and used as an educational tool. This hive that you see here has been in Fenway High School for many years now. The bees fly right into the outfield of Fenway Park. Nobody notices it. If you're not a flower, these bees do not care about you. (Laughter) They don't. They don't. They'll say, "S'cuse me, flying around." (Laughter) Some other images here in telling a part of the story that really made urban beekeeping terrific is in New York City, beekeeping was illegal until 2010. That's a big problem, because what's going to pollinate all of the gardens and the produce locally? Hands? I mean, locally in Boston, there is a terrific company called Green City Growers, and they are going and pollinating their squash crops by hand with Q-Tips, and if they miss that three day window, there's no fruit. Their clients aren't happy, and people go hungry. So this is important. We have also some images of honey from Brooklyn. Now, this was a mystery in the New York Times where the honey was very red, and the New York State forensics department came in and they actually did some science to match the red dye with that found in a maraschino cherry factory down the street. (Laughter) So you can tailor your honey to taste however you want by planting bee-friendly flowers. Paris has been a terrific model for urban beekeeping. They've had hives on the rooftop of their opera house for many years now, and that's what really got people started, thinking, "Wow, we can do this, and we should do this." Also in London, and in Europe across the board, they're very advanced in their use of green rooftops and integrating beehives, and I'll show you an ending note here. I would like to encourage you to open your mind. What can you do to save the bees or to help them or to think of sustainable cities in the future? Well, really, just change your perspective. Try to understand that bees are very important. A bee isn't going to sting you if you see it. The bee dies. Honeybees die when they sting, so they don't want to do it either. (Laughter) It's nothing to panic about. They're all over the city. You could even get your own hive if you want. There are great resources available, and there are even companies that will help get you set up and mentor you and it's important for our educational system in the world for students to learn about agriculture worldwide such as this little girl, who, again, is not even getting stung. Thank you. (Applause) |
When a reporter becomes the story | {0: 'Giles Duley began his career as a fashion photographer. When it was time for a change he found himself on a journey of war and hardship.'} | TEDxObserver | Good morning, everyone. When I was first asked to do a TED Talk, I Googled to try and find out a little bit more about, you know, how it felt to be giving one. And one of the first things I read was a speaker in the States saying that she felt fine until she came onstage, and then she saw the timer ticking down. (Laughter) And it reminded her of a bomb. I was thinking, "That's the last thing I need." (Laughter) (Applause) Anyway, it's a great privilege to be here. I think it's a bit of a joke for an editor of a paper to choose a photographer to open a speaking event. (Laughter) We're not renowned for our words, and I spent the last 40 years hiding behind a camera so I didn't have to speak. But I'm here today, and what I want to talk about are stories and the importance of stories to me and, I think, the importance of stories to everybody. I'm sure today you'll hear a lot of stories and, by listening to other people's stories, I think we can learn about the world, about other people and get a better understanding. So I want to talk about three stories that I've done as a photographer, and how they've inspired me, and how, in my life, I've become a part of the stories that I document myself. As John said, I was a fashion photographer and music photographer for 10 years. I enjoyed it, I had a lot of fun, but always wanted to do something more with my work. And storytelling was always something I wanted to do. So 10 years ago, I set out to travel the world, to go and photograph other people in their situations and to record their stories, to bring them back, so that other people might understand. But this didn't happen overnight. When I worked as a music photographer and a fashion photographer, I always had this nagging feeling that there was something missing, that I wasn't quite using my skills productively. And it may seem very obvious, the link, now, but at the time, I couldn't really work out how could I use my photography to do something useful. So I gave up photography. I walked away from it completely and decided to do care work. As a care worker, I started looking after a young guy called Nick. Nick has autism, very severe autism. But over the years of looking after him, we became very close friends. I would give him a 24-hour care, we would go off and do things from swimming, going for walks ... all sorts. Bit by bit, though, as I got to know him better, I realized that his story wasn't being told. He self-harmed, he would punch himself quite a lot in the face. And nobody really got to see that. So this is Nick. He used to describe his life as living downstairs at a party. He said he could hear the party in the kitchen, but he felt like he was always trapped in the basement, in his own little world, wanting to be part of the party but not able to walk upstairs. So I documented his life. I started to photograph it, not really with any intention of doing anything with the pictures, but just as a way of recording. And as I started doing that, I realized that I could tell somebody's story through my photographs. As I said, Nick would self-harm. He would punch himself in the face. And nobody really got to see that. As we built up a kind of closer friendship, he finally would allow me to actually see him doing this and to document it. It was a moment of trust. The social services were not particularly good at helping Nick, and they said that he wouldn't be self-harming as bad as we said. So one day, I took a photograph of when he'd really been self-harming. We took that to the social services, and their reaction was immediately incredibly different, and they managed to get a lot of help. And I'm glad to say now, eight years later, I actually spoke to Nick last night, and he wanted to let me know that he was feeling a lot better, and he doesn't do the self-harming anymore. And in some small way, I hope that the photographs was a part of that process. The main thing it did is it inspired me to go out with my camera and to tell other people's stories. One of the stories I did was in Kutupalong, on the border of Burma and Bangladesh. Here, the Rohingyas refugees have been left, pretty much to rot, for over 20 years. This is a picture of the unofficial camp. At the top, you can see the official UN camp. All these huts are the unofficial camps. Literally, the raw sewage runs through the camp. The people there have been forgotten, so I thought it was important to go and document their stories. So I arranged with the village elder; the people would come along the next day, and I would take portraits of all these people and record their stories. So as the time went on, I turned up in the morning, I put a big, white sheet up, and I started to photograph these people. Suddenly, though, everything got a bit out of control, and, although it was still dawn, we were filled in this small little compound we had made with literally hundreds of people turning up with ailments and diseases and just ... a hopeless situation. And that's exactly what their situation is — helpless. A child with a tumor that nobody helped, who was slowly suffocating. I got in a bit of a panic, because these people were coming up to me, desperate, and I was trying to explain to the village elder that I was not a doctor, and I couldn't help these people. And the village elder turned to me and he said, "No, it's really important; these people know you're not a doctor, but at least somebody is now telling their story, and somebody is recording what is happening to them." And it was a good moment for me. It was a realization that maybe it was worthwhile going off and doing these things. Another story that inspired me was in Odessa, in Ukraine. I was documenting a bunch of street kids. I ended up actually living with them in a squat, which I can say was an experience. Many late nights of vodka-fueled violence with me sitting in the corner with my bag, just going, "When was this a good idea?" (Laughter) I would say it's moments like that when I think, "Why did I leave the fashion world?" But they were great kids, and on the last day, they took me down to the sea for a sort of trip, a sort of farewell. There they are, drinking vodka. And then Serge, who was the oldest and the most violent — he'd just got out of the prison for stabbing somebody — comes and puts his arm around me and says, "We go swimming." Now, I have to say, I had a "Lonely Planet" guide to Ukraine and in it, it gave some advice. And in that advice was, "Do not talk to the street kids, at no point leave your baggage unattended and in all counts, do not go swimming." (Laughter) So I was like, "I don't know if this is a good idea." Serge has got his arm around me. I'm like, "OK." So there I am. (Laughter) I literally handed all my cameras, all my equipment, to these street kids. And they took it. It's kind of funny to know, if you look in the background, you can see the other street kids who didn't get in the water go, "Why would you get in that water?" But one of the little kids, Lilic, he was the one who had taken my camera, and he started taking photographs. He was really excited by this camera. And we talked a lot about how I was going to get him a camera and would return and we could start to teach him photography. He had a real eye for things. That's him, there. That was taken on the last evening I was there. I'd been staying there, but that night, I left to go and collect my things. And when I came back in the morning, he was dead. He had taken a lot of pills and a lot of vodka. And he had passed out in the night and didn’t recover. Again, it was another reminder of maybe why I should record these people's stories: because their lives are important, and it's important for me to document them. Then in February of last year, when I was on patrol in Afghanistan, I stepped on an IED. That's me down there, somewhere. I became part of the story. At first, I was devastated by what had happened, obviously. I thought my work was over, I thought — everything didn't make sense to me. And then I realized: I never set out to Congo, to Angola, to Bangladesh to take photographs. I went to those places because I wanted to make some kind of change, and photography happened to be my tool. And then I became aware that my body was, in many ways, a living example of what war does to somebody. And I realized I could use my own experience, my own body, to tell that story. And it was also by looking back at the other people I've documented. I thought of Nick, and I thought of his resilience. I thought of the Rohingyas and the fact that they have no hope. I thought of Lilic and a lost life. And in fact, it was the stories that I've documented that inspired me to get through the last year, to survive, to get back up on my new legs and to be able to come and tell their stories, but also my own story. So I did a self-portrait, because I wanted to show everybody what a bomb does to somebody, but also to show that losing your limbs doesn't end your life; that you can have what people say is disability, but not be disabled; that you can be able to do anything if you put your mind to it and have belief in it. It's strange, but in many ways I look at where I was a year ago, and I look at where I am now, and I realize that I have a lot of things I didn't have then. I wouldn't be sitting here right now if this hadn't happened. I wouldn't have been able to show you those photographs and tell you those stories. I was lucky 10 years ago, when I sat down and I tried to work out what I could do to make a difference in this world. I realized that my photography was a tool and a way to do it. I think that's what's really key. It's that we all can be part of that wheel. We can all be cogs in a wheel of change. We can all make a difference. Everybody here has an ability to use something to make a difference to the world. We can all sit in front of the TV and go, "I don't know what to do about it," and forget about it. But the reality is that we can all do something. It might be just writing a letter. It might be standing on a soapbox and talking. It might be just recording somebody's story and telling it to somebody else. But every single one of us here, if we want to make a difference, we can, an there is nothing to stop us. And we all have our own experiences that we can use as well. So really, that's all I wanted to talk about today. I just wanted to say that life goes on all around the world. People are going through terrible things. Everyone of us is going through our own terrible experience. But if we share those and we talk about stories, then we can inspire each other to get through our own bad experiences. I know that the people I've recorded have gotten me to this point. And I hope in some small way, the stories I've been able to tell you will help you get through things. And in turn, I hope you will use your experiences to help others. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Behind the Great Firewall of China | {0: "Michael Anti (Zhao Jing), a key figure in China's new journalism, explores the growing power of the Chinese internet."} | TEDGlobal 2012 | In the past several days, I heard people talking about China. And also, I talked to friends about China and Chinese Internet. Something is very challenging to me. I want to make my friends understand: China is complicated. So I always want to tell the story, like, one hand it is that, the other hand is that. You can't just tell a one sided story. I'll give an example. China is a BRIC country. BRIC country means Brazil, Russia, India and China. This emerging economy really is helping the revival of the world economy. But at the same time, on the other hand, China is a SICK country, the terminology coined by Facebook IPO papers — file. He said the SICK country means Syria, Iran, China and North Korea. The four countries have no access to Facebook. So basically, China is a SICK BRIC country. (Laughter) Another project was built up to watch China and Chinese Internet. And now, today I want to tell you my personal observation in the past several years, from that wall. So, if you are a fan of the Game of Thrones, you definitely know how important a big wall is for an old kingdom. It prevents weird things from the north. Same was true for China. In the north, there was a great wall, Chang Cheng. It protected China from invaders for 2,000 years. But China also has a great firewall. That's the biggest digital boundary in the whole world. It's not only to defend the Chinese regime from overseas, from the universal values, but also to prevent China's own citizens to access the global free Internet, and even separate themselves into blocks, not united. So, basically the "Internet" has two Internets. One is the Internet, the other is the Chinanet. But if you think the Chinanet is something like a deadland, wasteland, I think it's wrong. But we also use a very simple metaphor, the cat and the mouse game, to describe in the past 15 years the continuing fight between Chinese censorship, government censorship, the cat, and the Chinese Internet users. That means us, the mouse. But sometimes this kind of a metaphor is too simple. So today I want to upgrade it to 2.0 version. In China, we have 500 million Internet users. That's the biggest population of Netizens, Internet users, in the whole world. So even though China's is a totally censored Internet, but still, Chinese Internet society is really booming. How to make it? It's simple. You have Google, we have Baidu. You have Twitter, we have Weibo. You have Facebook, we have Renren. You have YouTube, we have Youku and Tudou. The Chinese government blocked every single international Web 2.0 service, and we Chinese copycat every one. (Laughter) So, that's the kind of the thing I call smart censorship. That's not only to censor you. Sometimes this Chinese national Internet policy is very simple: Block and clone. On the one hand, he wants to satisfy people's need of a social network, which is very important; people really love social networking. But on the other hand, they want to keep the server in Beijing so they can access the data any time they want. That's also the reason Google was pulled out from China, because they can't accept the fact that Chinese government wants to keep the server. Sometimes the Arab dictators didn't understand these two hands. For example, Mubarak, he shut down the Internet. He wanted to prevent the Netizens [from criticizing] him. But once Netizens can't go online, they go in the street. And now the result is very simple. We all know Mubarak is technically dead. But also, Ben Ali, Tunisian president, didn't follow the second rule. That means keep the server in your hands. He allowed Facebook, a U.S.-based service, to continue to stay on inside of Tunisia. So he can't prevent it, his own citizens to post critical videos against his corruption. The same thing happend. He was the first to topple during the Arab Spring. But those two very smart international censorship policies didn't prevent Chinese social media [from] becoming a really public sphere, a pathway of public opinion and the nightmare of Chinese officials. Because we have 300 million microbloggers in China. It's the entire population of the United States. So when these 300 million people, microbloggers, even they block the tweet in our censored platform. But itself — the Chinanet — but itself can create very powerful energy, which has never happened in the Chinese history. 2011, in July, two [unclear] trains crashed, in Wenzhou, a southern city. Right after the train crash, authorities literally wanted to cover up the train, bury the train. So it angered the Chinese Netizens. The first five days after the train crash, there were 10 million criticisms of the posting on social media, which never happened in Chinese history. And later this year, the rail minister was sacked and sentenced to jail for 10 years. And also, recently, very funny debate between the Beijing Environment Ministry and the American Embassy in Beijing because the Ministry blamed the American Embassy for intervening in Chinese internal politics by disclosing the air quality data of Beijing. So, the up is the Embassy data, the PM 2.5. He showed 148, they showed it's dangerous for the sensitive group. So a suggestion, it's not good to go outside. But that is the Ministry's data. He shows 50. He says it's good. It's good to go outside. But 99 percent of Chinese microbloggers stand firmly on the Embassy's side. I live in Beijing. Every day, I just watch the American Embassy's data to decide whether I should open my window. Why is Chinese social networking, even within the censorship, so booming? Part of the reason is Chinese languages. You know, Twitter and Twitter clones have a kind of a limitation of 140 characters. But in English it's 20 words or a sentence with a short link. Maybe in Germany, in German language, it may be just "Aha!" (Laughter) But in Chinese language, it's really about 140 characters, means a paragraph, a story. You can almost have all the journalistic elements there. For example, this is Hamlet, of Shakespeare. It's the same content. One, you can see exactly one Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets. Chinese is always cheating, right? So because of this, the Chinese really regard this microblogging as a media, not only a headline to media. And also, the clone, Sina company is the guy who cloned Twitter. It even has its own name, with Weibo. "Weibo" is the Chinese translation for "microblog". It has its own innovation. At the commenting area, [it makes] the Chinese Weibo more like Facebook, rather than the original Twitter. So these innovations and clones, as the Weibo and microblogging, when it came to China in 2009, it immediately became a media platform itself. It became the media platform of 300 million readers. It became the media. Anything not mentioned in Weibo, it does not appear to exist for the Chinese public. But also, Chinese social media is really changing Chinese mindsets and Chinese life. For example, they give the voiceless people a channel to make your voice heard. We had a petition system. It's a remedy outside the judicial system, because the Chinese central government wants to keep a myth: The emperor is good. The old local officials are thugs. So that's why the petitioner, the victims, the peasants, want to take the train to Beijing to petition to the central government, they want the emperor to settle the problem. But when more and more people go to Beijing, they also cause the risk of a revolution. So they send them back in recent years. And even some of them were put into black jails. But now we have Weibo, so I call it the Weibo petition. People just use their cell phones to tweet. So your sad stories, by some chance your story will be picked up by reporters, professors or celebrities. One of them is Yao Chen, she is the most popular microblogger in China, who has about 21 million followers. They're almost like a national TV station. If you — so a sad story will be picked up by her. So this Weibo social media, even in the censorship, still gave the Chinese a real chance for 300 million people every day chatting together, talking together. It's like a big TED, right? But also, it is like the first time a public sphere happened in China. Chinese people start to learn how to negotiate and talk to people. But also, the cat, the censorship, is not sleeping. It's so hard to post some sensitive words on the Chinese Weibo. For example, you can't post the name of the president, Hu Jintao, and also you can't post the city of Chongqing, the name, and until recently, you can't search the surname of top leaders. So, the Chinese are very good at these puns and alternative wording and even memes. They even name themselves — you know, use the name of this world-changing battle between the grass-mud horse and the river crab. The grass-mud horse is caoníma, is the phonogram for motherfucker, the Netizens call themselves. River crab is héxiè, is the phonogram for harmonization, for censorship. So that's kind of a caoníma versus the héxiè, that's very good. So, when some very political, exciting moments happened, you can see on Weibo, you see a lot of very weird stories happened. Weird phrases and words, even if you have a PhD of Chinese language, you can't understand them. But you can't even expand more, no, because Chinese Sina Weibo, when it was founded was exactly one month after the official blocking of Twitter.com. That means from the very beginning, Weibo has already convinced the Chinese government, we will not become the stage for any kind of a threat to the regime. For example, anything you want to post, like "get together" or "meet up" or "walk," it is automatically recorded and data mined and reported to a poll for further political analyzing. Even if you want to have some gathering, before you go there, the police are already waiting for you. Why? Because they have the data. They have everything in their hands. So they can use the 1984 scenario data mining of the dissident. So the crackdown is very serious. But I want you to notice a very funny thing during the process of the cat-and-mouse. The cat is the censorship, but Chinese is not only one cat, but also has local cats. Central cat and local cats. (Laughter) You know, the server is in the [central] cats' hands, so even that — when the Netizens criticize the local government, the local government has not any access to the data in Beijing. Without bribing the central cats, he can do nothing, only apologize. So these three years, in the past three years, social movements about microblogging really changed local government, became more and more transparent, because they can't access the data. The server is in Beijing. The story about the train crash, maybe the question is not about why 10 million criticisms in five days, but why the Chinese central government allowed the five days of freedom of speech online. It's never happened before. And so it's very simple, because even the top leaders were fed up with this guy, this independent kingdom. So they want an excuse — public opinion is a very good excuse to punish him. But also, the Bo Xilai case recently, very big news, he's a princeling. But from February to April this year, Weibo really became a marketplace of rumors. You can almost joke everything about these princelings, everything! It's almost like you're living in the United States. But if you dare to retweet or mention any fake coup about Beijing, you definitely will be arrested. So this kind of freedom is a targeted and precise window. So Chinese in China, censorship is normal. Something you find is, freedom is weird. Something will happen behind it. Because he was a very popular Leftist leader, so the central government wanted to purge him, and he was very cute, he convinced all the Chinese people, why he is so bad. So Weibo, the 300 million public sphere, became a very good, convenient tool for a political fight. But this technology is very new, but technically is very old. It was made famous by Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong, because he mobilized millions of Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution to destroy every local government. It's very simple, because Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead the public opinion. They just give them a target window to not censor people. Not censoring in China has become a political tool. So that's the update about this game, cat-and-mouse. Social media changed Chinese mindset. More and more Chinese intend to embrace freedom of speech and human rights as their birthright, not some imported American privilege. But also, it gave the Chinese a national public sphere for people to, it's like a training of their citizenship, preparing for future democracy. But it didn't change the Chinese political system, and also the Chinese central government utilized this centralized server structure to strengthen its power to counter the local government and the different factions. So, what's the future? After all, we are the mouse. Whatever the future is, we should fight against the [cat]. There is not only in China, but also in the United States there are some very small, cute but bad cats. (Laughter) SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, TPP and ITU. And also, like Facebook and Google, they claim they are friends of the mouse, but sometimes we see them dating the cats. So my conclusion is very simple. We Chinese fight for our freedom, you just watch your bad cats. Don't let them hook [up] with the Chinese cats. Only in this way, in the future, we will achieve the dreams of the mouse: that we can tweet anytime, anywhere, without fear. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
A teacher growing green in the South Bronx | {0: 'Stephen Ritz teaches at-risk kids in the South Bronx.'} | TEDxManhattan | Good afternoon. I am not a farmer. (Laughter) I'm not. I'm a parent, I'm a resident and I'm a teacher. And this is my world. And along the way I've started noticing — I'm on my third generation of kids — that they're getting bigger. They're getting sicker. In addition to these complexities, I just learned that 70 percent of the kids that I see who are labeled learning disabled would not have been had they had proper prenatal nutrition. The realities of my community are simple. They look like this. Kids should not have to grow up and look at things like this. And as jobs continue to leave my community, and energy continues to come in, be exported in, it's no wonder that really some people refer to the South Bronx as a desert. But I'm the oldest sixth grader you'll ever meet, so I get up every day with this tremendous amount of enthusiasm that I'm hoping to share with you all today. And with that note, I come to you with this belief that kids should not have to leave their communities to live, learn and earn in a better one. So I'm here to tell you a story about me and this wall that I met outside, which I'm now bringing inside. And it starts with three people. The crazy teacher — that's me on the left, I dress up pretty, thank you, my wife, I love you for getting a good suit — my passionate borough president and a guy named George Irwin from Green Living Technologies who helped me with my class and helped me get involved with this patented technology. But it all starts with seeds in classrooms, in my place, which looks like this. And I'm here today hoping that my reach will exceed my grasp. And that's really what this is all about. And it starts with incredible kids like this, who come early and stay late. All of my kids are either IEP or ELL learners, most come with a lot of handicaps, most are homeless and many are in foster care. Almost all of my kids live below poverty. But with those seeds, from day one, we are growing in my classroom, and this is what it looks like in my classroom. And you see how attentive these kids are to these seeds. And then you notice that those seeds become farms across the Bronx that look like this. But again, I am not a farmer. I'm a teacher. And I don't like weeding, and I don't like back-breaking labor. So I wanted to figure out how I could get this kind of success into something small, like this, and bring it into my classroom so that handicapped kids could do it, kids who didn't want to be outside could do it, and everyone could have access. So I called George Irwin, and what do you know? He came to my class and we built an indoor edible wall. And what we do is we partner it with authentic learning experiences, private-based learning. And lo and behold, we gave birth to the first edible wall in New York City. So if you're hungry, get up and eat. You can do it right now. My kids play cow all the time. Okay? But we were just getting started, the kids loved the technology, so we called up George and we said, "We gotta learn more!" Now, Mayor Bloomberg, thank you very much, we no longer need work permits, which comes with slices and bonded contractors — we're available for you — We decided to go to Boston. And my kids, from the poorest congressional district in America, became the first to install a green wall, designed by a computer, with real-live learning tools, 21 stories up — if you're going to go visit it, it's on top of the John Hancock building. But closer to home, we started installing these walls in schools that look like this with lighting like that, real LED stuff, 21st-century technology. And what do you know? We made 21st century money, and that was groundbreaking. Wow! This is my harvest, people. And what do you do with this food? You cook it! And those are my heirloom students making heirloom sauce, with plastic forks, and we get it into the cafeteria, and we grow stuff and we feed our teachers. And that is the youngest nationally certified workforce in America with our Bronx Borough President. And what'd we do then? Well, I met nice people like you, and they invited us to the Hamptons. So I call this "from South Bronx to Southampton." And we started putting in roofs that look like this, and we came in from destitute neighborhoods to start building landscape like this, wow! People noticed. And so we got invited back this past summer, and we actually moved into the Hamptons, payed 3,500 dollars a week for a house, and we learned how to surf. And when you can do stuff like this — These are my kids putting in this technology, and when you can build a roof that looks like that on a house that looks like that with sedum that looks like this, this is the new green graffiti. So, you may wonder what does a wall like this really do for kids, besides changing landscapes and mindsets? Okay, I'm going to tell you what it does. It gets me to meet incredible contractors like this, Jim Ellenberger from Ellenberger Services. And this is where it becomes true triple bottom line. Because Jim realized that these kids, my future farmers, really had the skills he needed to build affordable housing for New Yorkers, right in their own neighborhood. And this is what my kids are doing, making living wage. Now, if you're like me, you live in a building, there are seven guys out of work looking to manage a million dollars. I don't have it. But if you need a toilet fixed or, you know, some shelving, I gotta wait six months for an appointment with someone who drives a much nicer car than me. That's the beauty of this economy. But my kids are now licensed and bonded in trade. And that's my first student to open up, the first in his family to have a bank account. This immigrant student is the first one in his family to use an ATM. And this is the true triple bottom line, because we can take neighborhoods that were abandoned and destitute and turn them into something like this with interiors like this. Wow! People noticed. And notice they did. So CNN called, and we were delighted to have them come to our farmer's market. And then when Rockefeller Center said, NBC, could you put this thing up on the walls? We were delighted. But this, I show you, when kids from the poorest congressional district in America can build a 30-foot by 15-foot wall, design it, plant it and install it in the heart of New York City, that's a true "sí se puede" moment. Really scholastic, if you ask me. But this is not a Getty image. That's a picture I took of my Bronx Borough President, addressing my kids in his house, not the jailhouse, making them feel a part of it. That's our State Senator Gustavo Rivera and Bob Bieder, coming to my classroom to make my kids feel important. And when the Bronx Borough President shows up and the State Senator comes to our class, believe you me, the Bronx can change attitudes now. We are poised, ready, willing and able to export our talent and diversity in ways we've never even imagined. And when the local senator gets on the scale in public and says he's got to lose weight, so do I! And I tell you what, I'm doing it and so are the kids. Okay? And then celebrities started. Produce Pete can't believe what we grow. Lorna Sass came and donated books. Okay? We're feeding seniors. And when we realized that we were growing for food justice in the South Bronx, so did the international community. And my kids in the South Bronx were repped in the first international green roof conference. And that's just great. Except what about locally? Well, we met this woman, Avis Richards, with the Ground Up Campaign. Unbelievable! Through her, my kids, the most disenfranchised and marginalized, were able to roll out 100 gardens to New York City public schools. That's triple bottom line! Okay? A year ago today, I was invited to the New York Academy of Medicine. I thought this concept of designing a strong and healthy New York made sense, especially when the resources were free. So thank you all and I love them. They introduced me to the New York City Strategic Alliance for Health, again, free resources, don't waste them. And what do you know? Six months later, my school and my kids were awarded the first ever high school award of excellence for creating a healthy school environment. The greenest class in New York City. But more importantly is my kids learned to get, they learned to give. And we took the money that we made from our farmer's market, and started buying gifts for the homeless and for needy around the world. So we started giving back. And that's when I realized that the greening of America starts first with the pockets, then with the heart and then with the mind. So we were onto something, and we're still onto something. And thank God Trinity Wall Street noticed, because they gave us the birth of Green Bronx Machine. We're 3,000 strong right now. And what does it really do? It teaches kids to re-vision their communities, so when they grow up in places like this, they can imagine it like this. And my kids, trained and certified — Ma, you get the tax abatement. Thank you, Mayor Bloomberg — can take communities that look like this and convert them into things that look like that, and that to me, people, is another true "sí se puede" moment. Now, how does it start? It starts in schools. No more little Knicks and little Nets. Group by broccoli, group by your favorite vegetable, something you can aspire to. Okay? And these are my future farmers of America, growing up in Brook Park on 141st Street, the most migrant community in America. When tenacious little ones learn how to garden like this, it's no wonder we get fruit like that. And I love it! And so do they. And we're building teepees in neighborhoods that were burning down. And that's a true "sí se puede" moment. And again, Brook Park feeds hundreds of people without a food stamp or a fingerprint. The poorest congressional district in America, the most migratory community in America, we can do this. Bissel Gardens is cranking out food in epic proportions, moving kids into an economy they never imagined. Now, somewhere over the rainbow, my friends, is the South Bronx of America. And we're doing it. How does it start? Well, look at Jose's attention to detail. Thank God Omar knows that carrots come from the ground, and not aisle 9 at the supermarket or through a bullet-proof window or through a piece of styrofoam. And when Henry knows that green is good, so do I. And when you expand their palates, you expand their vocabulary. And most importantly, when you put big kids together with little kids, you get the big fat white guy out of the middle, which is cool, and you create this kind of accountability amongst peers, which is incredible. God, I'm going to run out of time, so I've gotta keep it moving. But this is my weekly paycheck for kids; that's our green graffiti. This is what we're doing. And behold the glory and bounty that is Bronx County. Nothing thrills me more than to see kids pollinating plants instead of each other. I gotta tell you, I'm a protective parent. But those kids are the kids who are now putting pumpkin patches on top of trains. We're also designing coin ponds for the rich and affluent. We're also becoming children of the corn, creating farms in the middle of Fordham Road for awareness and window bottles out of garbage. Now I don't expect every kid to be a farmer, but I expect you to read about it, write about it, blog about it, offer outstanding customer service. I expect them to be engaged, and man, are they! So that's my incredible classroom, that's the food. Where does it go? Zero miles to plate, right down into the cafeteria. Or more importantly, to local shelters, where most of our kids are getting one to two meals a day. And we're stepping it up. No Air Jordans were ever ruined on my farm. And in his day, a million dollar gardens and incredible installations. Let me tell you something, people. This is a beautiful moment. Black field, brown field, toxic waste field, battlefield — we're proving in the Bronx that you can grow anywhere, on cement. And we take orders for flowers. I'm putting the bake sale to shame. We take orders now. I'm booking for the spring. And these were all grown from seeds. We're learning everything. And again, when you can take kids from backgrounds as diverse as this to do something as special as this, we're really creating a moment. Now, you may ask about these kids. Forty percent attendance to 93 percent attendance. All start overage and under-credit. They are now, my first cohort is all in college, earning a living wage. The rest are scheduled to graduate this June. Happy kids, happy families, happy colleagues. Amazed people. The glory and bounty that is Bronx County. Let's talk about mint. Where is my mint? I grow seven kinds of mint in my class. Mojitos, anybody? I'll be at Telepan later. But, understand this is my intellectual Viagra. Ladies and gentlemen, I gotta move quick, but understand this: The borough that gave us baggy pants and funky fresh beats is becoming home to the organic ones. My green [unclear] 25,000 pounds of vegetables, I'm growing organic citizens, engaged kids. So help us go from this to this. Self-sustaining entities, 18 months return on investment, plus we're paying people living wage and health benefits, while feeding people for pennies on the dollar. Martin Luther King said that people need to be uplifted with dignity. So here in New York, I urge you, my fellow Americans, to help us make America great again. It's simple. Share your passion. It's real easy. Go see these two videos, please. One got us invited to the White House, one's a recent incarnation. And most importantly, get the biggest bully out of schools. This has got to go tomorrow. People, you can all do that. Keep kids out of stores that look like this. Make them a healthy plate, especially if you can pick it off the wall in your own classroom — delicioso! Model good behavior. Get them to a green cart. Big kids love strawberries and bananas. Teach them entrepreneurship. Thank God for GrowNYC. Let them cook. Great lunch today, let them do culinary things. But most importantly, just love them. Nothing works like unconditional love. So, my good friend Kermit said it's not easy being green. It's not. I come from a place where kids can buy 35 flavors of blunt wrap at any day of the moment, where ice cream freezers are filled with slushy malt liquor. Okay? My dear friend Majora Carter once told me, we have everything to gain and nothing to lose. So here, and at a time when we've gone from the audacity to hope to hope for some audacity, I urge you to do something. I urge you to do something. Right now, we're all tadpoles, but I urge you to become a big frog and take that big, green leap. I don't care if you're on the left, on the right, up the middle, wherever. Join me. Use — I've got a lot of energy. Help me use it. We can do something here. And along the way, please take time to smell the flowers, especially if you and your students grew them. I'm Steve Ritz, this is Green Bronx Machine. I've got to say thank you to my wife and family, for my kids, thank you for coming every day, and for my colleagues, believing and supporting me. We are growing our way into a new economy. Thank you, God bless you and enjoy the day. I'm Steve Ritz. Sí se puede! (Applause) |
What we're learning from online education | {0: 'With Coursera, Daphne Koller and co-founder Andrew Ng are bringing courses from top colleges online, free, for anyone who wants to take them.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Like many of you, I'm one of the lucky people. I was born to a family where education was pervasive. I'm a third-generation PhD, a daughter of two academics. In my childhood, I played around in my father's university lab. So it was taken for granted that I attend some of the best universities, which in turn opened the door to a world of opportunity. Unfortunately, most of the people in the world are not so lucky. In some parts of the world, for example, South Africa, education is just not readily accessible. In South Africa, the educational system was constructed in the days of apartheid for the white minority. And as a consequence, today there is just not enough spots for the many more people who want and deserve a high quality education. That scarcity led to a crisis in January of this year at the University of Johannesburg. There were a handful of positions left open from the standard admissions process, and the night before they were supposed to open that for registration, thousands of people lined up outside the gate in a line a mile long, hoping to be first in line to get one of those positions. When the gates opened, there was a stampede, and 20 people were injured and one woman died. She was a mother who gave her life trying to get her son a chance at a better life. But even in parts of the world like the United States where education is available, it might not be within reach. There has been much discussed in the last few years about the rising cost of health care. What might not be quite as obvious to people is that during that same period the cost of higher education tuition has been increasing at almost twice the rate, for a total of 559 percent since 1985. This makes education unaffordable for many people. Finally, even for those who do manage to get the higher education, the doors of opportunity might not open. Only a little over half of recent college graduates in the United States who get a higher education actually are working in jobs that require that education. This, of course, is not true for the students who graduate from the top institutions, but for many others, they do not get the value for their time and their effort. Tom Friedman, in his recent New York Times article, captured, in the way that no one else could, the spirit behind our effort. He said the big breakthroughs are what happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. I've talked about what's desperately necessary. Let's talk about what's suddenly possible. What's suddenly possible was demonstrated by three big Stanford classes, each of which had an enrollment of 100,000 people or more. So to understand this, let's look at one of those classes, the Machine Learning class offered by my colleague and cofounder Andrew Ng. Andrew teaches one of the bigger Stanford classes. It's a Machine Learning class, and it has 400 people enrolled every time it's offered. When Andrew taught the Machine Learning class to the general public, it had 100,000 people registered. So to put that number in perspective, for Andrew to reach that same size audience by teaching a Stanford class, he would have to do that for 250 years. Of course, he'd get really bored. So, having seen the impact of this, Andrew and I decided that we needed to really try and scale this up, to bring the best quality education to as many people as we could. So we formed Coursera, whose goal is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free. We currently have 43 courses on the platform from four universities across a range of disciplines, and let me show you a little bit of an overview of what that looks like. (Video) Robert Ghrist: Welcome to Calculus. Ezekiel Emanuel: Fifty million people are uninsured. Scott Page: Models help us design more effective institutions and policies. We get unbelievable segregation. Scott Klemmer: So Bush imagined that in the future, you'd wear a camera right in the center of your head. Mitchell Duneier: Mills wants the student of sociology to develop the quality of mind ... RG: Hanging cable takes on the form of a hyperbolic cosine. Nick Parlante: For each pixel in the image, set the red to zero. Paul Offit: ... Vaccine allowed us to eliminate polio virus. Dan Jurafsky: Does Lufthansa serve breakfast and San Jose? Well, that sounds funny. Daphne Koller: So this is which coin you pick, and this is the two tosses. Andrew Ng: So in large-scale machine learning, we'd like to come up with computational ... (Applause) DK: It turns out, maybe not surprisingly, that students like getting the best content from the best universities for free. Since we opened the website in February, we now have 640,000 students from 190 countries. We have 1.5 million enrollments, 6 million quizzes in the 15 classes that have launched so far have been submitted, and 14 million videos have been viewed. But it's not just about the numbers, it's also about the people. Whether it's Akash, who comes from a small town in India and would never have access in this case to a Stanford-quality course and would never be able to afford it. Or Jenny, who is a single mother of two and wants to hone her skills so that she can go back and complete her master's degree. Or Ryan, who can't go to school, because his immune deficient daughter can't be risked to have germs come into the house, so he couldn't leave the house. I'm really glad to say — recently, we've been in correspondence with Ryan — that this story had a happy ending. Baby Shannon — you can see her on the left — is doing much better now, and Ryan got a job by taking some of our courses. So what made these courses so different? After all, online course content has been available for a while. What made it different was that this was real course experience. It started on a given day, and then the students would watch videos on a weekly basis and do homework assignments. And these would be real homework assignments for a real grade, with a real deadline. You can see the deadlines and the usage graph. These are the spikes showing that procrastination is global phenomenon. (Laughter) At the end of the course, the students got a certificate. They could present that certificate to a prospective employer and get a better job, and we know many students who did. Some students took their certificate and presented this to an educational institution at which they were enrolled for actual college credit. So these students were really getting something meaningful for their investment of time and effort. Let's talk a little bit about some of the components that go into these courses. The first component is that when you move away from the constraints of a physical classroom and design content explicitly for an online format, you can break away from, for example, the monolithic one-hour lecture. You can break up the material, for example, into these short, modular units of eight to 12 minutes, each of which represents a coherent concept. Students can traverse this material in different ways, depending on their background, their skills or their interests. So, for example, some students might benefit from a little bit of preparatory material that other students might already have. Other students might be interested in a particular enrichment topic that they want to pursue individually. So this format allows us to break away from the one-size-fits-all model of education, and allows students to follow a much more personalized curriculum. Of course, we all know as educators that students don't learn by sitting and passively watching videos. Perhaps one of the biggest components of this effort is that we need to have students who practice with the material in order to really understand it. There's been a range of studies that demonstrate the importance of this. This one that appeared in Science last year, for example, demonstrates that even simple retrieval practice, where students are just supposed to repeat what they already learned gives considerably improved results on various achievement tests down the line than many other educational interventions. We've tried to build in retrieval practice into the platform, as well as other forms of practice in many ways. For example, even our videos are not just videos. Every few minutes, the video pauses and the students get asked a question. (Video) SP: ... These four things. Prospect theory, hyperbolic discounting, status quo bias, base rate bias. They're all well documented. So they're all well documented deviations from rational behavior. DK: So here the video pauses, and the student types in the answer into the box and submits. Obviously they weren't paying attention. (Laughter) So they get to try again, and this time they got it right. There's an optional explanation if they want. And now the video moves on to the next part of the lecture. This is a kind of simple question that I as an instructor might ask in class, but when I ask that kind of a question in class, 80 percent of the students are still scribbling the last thing I said, 15 percent are zoned out on Facebook, and then there's the smarty pants in the front row who blurts out the answer before anyone else has had a chance to think about it, and I as the instructor am terribly gratified that somebody actually knew the answer. And so the lecture moves on before, really, most of the students have even noticed that a question had been asked. Here, every single student has to engage with the material. And of course these simple retrieval questions are not the end of the story. One needs to build in much more meaningful practice questions, and one also needs to provide the students with feedback on those questions. Now, how do you grade the work of 100,000 students if you do not have 10,000 TAs? The answer is, you need to use technology to do it for you. Now, fortunately, technology has come a long way, and we can now grade a range of interesting types of homework. In addition to multiple choice and the kinds of short answer questions that you saw in the video, we can also grade math, mathematical expressions as well as mathematical derivations. We can grade models, whether it's financial models in a business class or physical models in a science or engineering class and we can grade some pretty sophisticated programming assignments. Let me show you one that's actually pretty simple but fairly visual. This is from Stanford's Computer Science 101 class, and the students are supposed to color-correct that blurry red image. They're typing their program into the browser, and you can see they didn't get it quite right, Lady Liberty is still seasick. And so, the student tries again, and now they got it right, and they're told that, and they can move on to the next assignment. This ability to interact actively with the material and be told when you're right or wrong is really essential to student learning. Now, of course we cannot yet grade the range of work that one needs for all courses. Specifically, what's lacking is the kind of critical thinking work that is so essential in such disciplines as the humanities, the social sciences, business and others. So we tried to convince, for example, some of our humanities faculty that multiple choice was not such a bad strategy. That didn't go over really well. So we had to come up with a different solution. And the solution we ended up using is peer grading. It turns out that previous studies show, like this one by Saddler and Good, that peer grading is a surprisingly effective strategy for providing reproducible grades. It was tried only in small classes, but there it showed, for example, that these student-assigned grades on the y-axis are actually very well correlated with the teacher-assigned grade on the x-axis. What's even more surprising is that self-grades, where the students grade their own work critically — so long as you incentivize them properly so they can't give themselves a perfect score — are actually even better correlated with the teacher grades. And so this is an effective strategy that can be used for grading at scale, and is also a useful learning strategy for the students, because they actually learn from the experience. So we now have the largest peer-grading pipeline ever devised, where tens of thousands of students are grading each other's work, and quite successfully, I have to say. But this is not just about students sitting alone in their living room working through problems. Around each one of our courses, a community of students had formed, a global community of people around a shared intellectual endeavor. What you see here is a self-generated map from students in our Princeton Sociology 101 course, where they have put themselves on a world map, and you can really see the global reach of this kind of effort. Students collaborated in these courses in a variety of different ways. First of all, there was a question and answer forum, where students would pose questions, and other students would answer those questions. And the really amazing thing is, because there were so many students, it means that even if a student posed a question at 3 o'clock in the morning, somewhere around the world, there would be somebody who was awake and working on the same problem. And so, in many of our courses, the median response time for a question on the question and answer forum was 22 minutes. Which is not a level of service I have ever offered to my Stanford students. (Laughter) And you can see from the student testimonials that students actually find that because of this large online community, they got to interact with each other in many ways that were deeper than they did in the context of the physical classroom. Students also self-assembled, without any kind of intervention from us, into small study groups. Some of these were physical study groups along geographical constraints and met on a weekly basis to work through problem sets. This is the San Francisco study group, but there were ones all over the world. Others were virtual study groups, sometimes along language lines or along cultural lines, and on the bottom left there, you see our multicultural universal study group where people explicitly wanted to connect with people from other cultures. There are some tremendous opportunities to be had from this kind of framework. The first is that it has the potential of giving us a completely unprecedented look into understanding human learning. Because the data that we can collect here is unique. You can collect every click, every homework submission, every forum post from tens of thousands of students. So you can turn the study of human learning from the hypothesis-driven mode to the data-driven mode, a transformation that, for example, has revolutionized biology. You can use these data to understand fundamental questions like, what are good learning strategies that are effective versus ones that are not? And in the context of particular courses, you can ask questions like, what are some of the misconceptions that are more common and how do we help students fix them? So here's an example of that, also from Andrew's Machine Learning class. This is a distribution of wrong answers to one of Andrew's assignments. The answers happen to be pairs of numbers, so you can draw them on this two-dimensional plot. Each of the little crosses that you see is a different wrong answer. The big cross at the top left is where 2,000 students gave the exact same wrong answer. Now, if two students in a class of 100 give the same wrong answer, you would never notice. But when 2,000 students give the same wrong answer, it's kind of hard to miss. So Andrew and his students went in, looked at some of those assignments, understood the root cause of the misconception, and then they produced a targeted error message that would be provided to every student whose answer fell into that bucket, which means that students who made that same mistake would now get personalized feedback telling them how to fix their misconception much more effectively. So this personalization is something that one can then build by having the virtue of large numbers. Personalization is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities here as well, because it provides us with the potential of solving a 30-year-old problem. Educational researcher Benjamin Bloom, in 1984, posed what's called the 2 sigma problem, which he observed by studying three populations. The first is the population that studied in a lecture-based classroom. The second is a population of students that studied using a standard lecture-based classroom, but with a mastery-based approach, so the students couldn't move on to the next topic before demonstrating mastery of the previous one. And finally, there was a population of students that were taught in a one-on-one instruction using a tutor. The mastery-based population was a full standard deviation, or sigma, in achievement scores better than the standard lecture-based class, and the individual tutoring gives you 2 sigma improvement in performance. To understand what that means, let's look at the lecture-based classroom, and let's pick the median performance as a threshold. So in a lecture-based class, half the students are above that level and half are below. In the individual tutoring instruction, 98 percent of the students are going to be above that threshold. Imagine if we could teach so that 98 percent of our students would be above average. Hence, the 2 sigma problem. Because we cannot afford, as a society, to provide every student with an individual human tutor. But maybe we can afford to provide each student with a computer or a smartphone. So the question is, how can we use technology to push from the left side of the graph, from the blue curve, to the right side with the green curve? Mastery is easy to achieve using a computer, because a computer doesn't get tired of showing you the same video five times. And it doesn't even get tired of grading the same work multiple times, we've seen that in many of the examples that I've shown you. And even personalization is something that we're starting to see the beginnings of, whether it's via the personalized trajectory through the curriculum or some of the personalized feedback that we've shown you. So the goal here is to try and push, and see how far we can get towards the green curve. So, if this is so great, are universities now obsolete? Well, Mark Twain certainly thought so. He said that, "College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either." (Laughter) I beg to differ with Mark Twain, though. I think what he was complaining about is not universities but rather the lecture-based format that so many universities spend so much time on. So let's go back even further, to Plutarch, who said that, "The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting." And maybe we should spend less time at universities filling our students' minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity, their imagination and their problem-solving skills by actually talking with them. So how do we do that? We do that by doing active learning in the classroom. So there's been many studies, including this one, that show that if you use active learning, interacting with your students in the classroom, performance improves on every single metric — on attendance, on engagement and on learning as measured by a standardized test. You can see, for example, that the achievement score almost doubles in this particular experiment. So maybe this is how we should spend our time at universities. So to summarize, if we could offer a top quality education to everyone around the world for free, what would that do? Three things. First it would establish education as a fundamental human right, where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skills that they need to make a better life for themselves, their families and their communities. Second, it would enable lifelong learning. It's a shame that for so many people, learning stops when we finish high school or when we finish college. By having this amazing content be available, we would be able to learn something new every time we wanted, whether it's just to expand our minds or it's to change our lives. And finally, this would enable a wave of innovation, because amazing talent can be found anywhere. Maybe the next Albert Einstein or the next Steve Jobs is living somewhere in a remote village in Africa. And if we could offer that person an education, they would be able to come up with the next big idea and make the world a better place for all of us. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
(Re)touching lives through photos | {0: 'After the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Becci Manson and her volunteer colleagues cleaned and restored hundreds of damaged photos.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Before March, 2011, I was a photographic retoucher based in New York City. We're pale, gray creatures. We hide in dark, windowless rooms, and generally avoid sunlight. We make skinny models skinnier, perfect skin more perfect, and the impossible possible, and we get criticized in the press all the time, but some of us are actually talented artists with years of experience and a real appreciation for images and photography. On March 11, 2011, I watched from home, as the rest of the world did, as the tragic events unfolded in Japan. Soon after, an organization I volunteer with, All Hands Volunteers, were on the ground, within days, working as part of the response efforts. I, along with hundreds of other volunteers, knew we couldn't just sit at home, so I decided to join them for three weeks. On May the 13th, I made my way to the town of Ōfunato. It's a small fishing town in Iwate Prefecture, about 50,000 people, one of the first that was hit by the wave. The waters here have been recorded at reaching over 24 meters in height, and traveled over two miles inland. As you can imagine, the town had been devastated. We pulled debris from canals and ditches. We cleaned schools. We de-mudded and gutted homes ready for renovation and rehabilitation. We cleared tons and tons of stinking, rotting fish carcasses from the local fish processing plant. We got dirty, and we loved it. For weeks, all the volunteers and locals alike had been finding similar things. They'd been finding photos and photo albums and cameras and SD cards. And everyone was doing the same. They were collecting them up, and handing them in to various places around the different towns for safekeeping. Now, it wasn't until this point that I realized that these photos were such a huge part of the personal loss these people had felt. As they had run from the wave, and for their lives, absolutely everything they had, everything had to be left behind. At the end of my first week there, I found myself helping out in an evacuation center in the town. I was helping clean the onsen, the communal onsen, the huge giant bathtubs. This happened to also be a place in the town where the evacuation center was collecting the photos. This is where people were handing them in, and I was honored that day that they actually trusted me to help them start hand-cleaning them. Now, it was emotional and it was inspiring, and I've always heard about thinking outside the box, but it wasn't until I had actually gotten outside of my box that something happened. As I looked through the photos, there were some were over a hundred years old, some still in the envelope from the processing lab, I couldn't help but think as a retoucher that I could fix that tear and mend that scratch, and I knew hundreds of people who could do the same. So that evening, I just reached out on Facebook and asked a few of them, and by morning the response had been so overwhelming and so positive, I knew we had to give it a go. So we started retouching photos. This was the very first. Not terribly damaged, but where the water had caused that discoloration on the girl's face had to be repaired with such accuracy and delicacy. Otherwise, that little girl isn't going to look like that little girl anymore, and surely that's as tragic as having the photo damaged. (Applause) Over time, more photos came in, thankfully, and more retouchers were needed, and so I reached out again on Facebook and LinkedIn, and within five days, 80 people wanted to help from 12 different countries. Within two weeks, I had 150 people wanting to join in. Within Japan, by July, we'd branched out to the neighboring town of Rikuzentakata, further north to a town called Yamada. Once a week, we would set up our scanning equipment in the temporary photo libraries that had been set up, where people were reclaiming their photos. The older ladies sometimes hadn't seen a scanner before, but within 10 minutes of them finding their lost photo, they could give it to us, have it scanned, uploaded to a cloud server, it would be downloaded by a gaijin, a stranger, somewhere on the other side of the globe, and it'd start being fixed. The time it took, however, to get it back is a completely different story, and it depended obviously on the damage involved. It could take an hour. It could take weeks. It could take months. The kimono in this shot pretty much had to be hand-drawn, or pieced together, picking out the remaining parts of color and detail that the water hadn't damaged. It was very time-consuming. Now, all these photos had been damaged by water, submerged in salt water, covered in bacteria, in sewage, sometimes even in oil, all of which over time is going to continue to damage them, so hand-cleaning them was a huge part of the project. We couldn't retouch the photo unless it was cleaned, dry and reclaimed. Now, we were lucky with our hand-cleaning. We had an amazing local woman who guided us. It's very easy to do more damage to those damaged photos. As my team leader Wynne once said, it's like doing a tattoo on someone. You don't get a chance to mess it up. The lady who brought us these photos was lucky, as far as the photos go. She had started hand-cleaning them herself and stopped when she realized she was doing more damage. She also had duplicates. Areas like her husband and her face, which otherwise would have been completely impossible to fix, we could just put them together in one good photo, and remake the whole photo. When she collected the photos from us, she shared a bit of her story with us. Her photos were found by her husband's colleagues at a local fire department in the debris a long way from where the home had once stood, and they'd recognized him. The day of the tsunami, he'd actually been in charge of making sure the tsunami gates were closed. He had to go towards the water as the sirens sounded. Her two little boys, not so little anymore, but her two boys were both at school, separate schools. One of them got caught up in the water. It took her a week to find them all again and find out that they had all survived. The day I gave her the photos also happened to be her youngest son's 14th birthday. For her, despite all of this, those photos were the perfect gift back to him, something he could look at again, something he remembered from before that wasn't still scarred from that day in March when absolutely everything else in his life had changed or been destroyed. After six months in Japan, 1,100 volunteers had passed through All Hands, hundreds of whom had helped us hand-clean over 135,000 photographs, the large majority — (Applause) — a large majority of which did actually find their home again, importantly. Over five hundred volunteers around the globe helped us get 90 families hundreds of photographs back, fully restored and retouched. During this time, we hadn't really spent more than about a thousand dollars in equipment and materials, most of which was printer inks. We take photos constantly. A photo is a reminder of someone or something, a place, a relationship, a loved one. They're our memory-keepers and our histories, the last thing we would grab and the first thing you'd go back to look for. That's all this project was about, about restoring those little bits of humanity, giving someone that connection back. When a photo like this can be returned to someone like this, it makes a huge difference in the lives of the person receiving it. The project's also made a big difference in the lives of the retouchers. For some of them, it's given them a connection to something bigger, giving something back, using their talents on something other than skinny models and perfect skin. I would like to conclude by reading an email I got from one of them, Cindy, the day I finally got back from Japan after six months. "As I worked, I couldn't help but think about the individuals and the stories represented in the images. One in particular, a photo of women of all ages, from grandmother to little girl, gathered around a baby, struck a chord, because a similar photo from my family, my grandmother and mother, myself, and newborn daughter, hangs on our wall. Across the globe, throughout the ages, our basic needs are just the same, aren't they?" Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
The mad scientist of music | {0: 'Mark Applebaum has built an instrument out of doorstops and combs, as well as composed a piece of music to be performed by a florist.'} | TEDxStanford | I thought if I skipped it might help my nerves, but I'm actually having a paradoxical reaction to that, so that was a bad idea. (Laughter) Anyway, I was really delighted to receive the invitation to present to you some of my music and some of my work as a composer, presumably because it appeals to my well-known and abundant narcissism. (Laughter) And I'm not kidding, I just think we should just say that and move forward. (Laughter) So, but the thing is, a dilemma quickly arose, and that is that I'm really bored with music, and I'm really bored with the role of the composer, and so I decided to put that idea, boredom, as the focus of my presentation to you today. And I'm going to share my music with you, but I hope that I'm going to do so in a way that tells a story, tells a story about how I used boredom as a catalyst for creativity and invention, and how boredom actually forced me to change the fundamental question that I was asking in my discipline, and how boredom also, in a sense, pushed me towards taking on roles beyond the sort of most traditional, narrow definition of a composer. What I'd like to do today is to start with an excerpt of a piece of music at the piano. (Music) Okay, I wrote that. (Laughter) No, it's not — (Applause) Oh, why thank you. No, no, I didn't write that. In fact, that was a piece by Beethoven, and so I was not functioning as a composer. Just now I was functioning in the role of the interpreter, and there I am, interpreter. So, an interpreter of what? Of a piece of music, right? But we can ask the question, "But is it music?" And I say this rhetorically, because of course by just about any standard we would have to concede that this is, of course, a piece of music, but I put this here now because, just to set it in your brains for the moment, because we're going to return to this question. It's going to be a kind of a refrain as we go through the presentation. So here we have this piece of music by Beethoven, and my problem with it is, it's boring. I mean, you — I'm just like, a hush, huh — It's like — (Laughter) It's Beethoven, how can you say that? No, well, I don't know, it's very familiar to me. I had to practice it as a kid, and I'm really sick of it. So — (Laughter) I would, so what I might like to try to do is to change it, to transform it in some ways, to personalize it, so I might take the opening, like this idea — (Music) and then I might substitute — (Music) and then I might improvise on that melody that goes forward from there — (Music) (Music) So that might be the kind of thing — Why thank you. (Applause) That would be the kind of thing that I would do, and it's not necessarily better than the Beethoven. In fact, I think it's not better than it. The thing is — (Laughter) — it's more interesting to me. It's less boring for me. I'm really leaning into me, because I, because I have to think about what decisions I'm going to make on the fly as that Beethoven text is running in time through my head and I'm trying to figure out what kinds of transformations I'm going to make to it. So this is an engaging enterprise for me, and I've really leaned into that first person pronoun thing there, and now my face appears twice, so I think we can agree that this is a fundamentally solipsistic enterprise. (Laughter) But it's an engaging one, and it's interesting to me for a while, but then I get bored with it, and by it, I actually mean, the piano, because it becomes, it's this familiar instrument, it's timbral range is actually pretty compressed, at least when you play on the keyboard, and if you're not doing things like listening to it after you've lit it on fire or something like that, you know. It gets a little bit boring, and so pretty soon I go through other instruments, they become familiar, and eventually I find myself designing and constructing my own instrument, and I brought one with me today, and I thought I would play a little bit on it for you so you can hear what it sounds like. (Music) You gotta have doorstops, that's important. (Laughter) I've got combs. They're the only combs that I own. (Music) They're all mounted on my instruments. (Laughter) (Music) I can actually do all sorts of things. I can play with a violin bow. I don't have to use the chopsticks. So we have this sound. (Music) And with a bank of live electronics, I can change the sounds radically. (Music) (Music) Like that, and like this. (Music) And so forth. So this gives you a little bit of an idea of the sound world of this instrument, which I think is quite interesting and it puts me in the role of the inventor, and the nice thing about — This instrument is called the Mouseketeer ... (Laughter) and the cool thing about it is I'm the world's greatest Mouseketeer player. (Laughter) Okay? (Applause) So in that regard, this is one of the things, this is one of the privileges of being, and here's another role, the inventor, and by the way, when I told you that I'm the world's greatest, if you're keeping score, we've had narcissism and solipsism and now a healthy dose of egocentricism. I know some of you are just, you know, bingo! Or, I don't know. (Laughter) Anyway, so this is also a really enjoyable role. I should concede also that I'm the world's worst Mouseketeer player, and it was this distinction that I was most worried about when I was on that prior side of the tenure divide. I'm glad I'm past that. We're not going to go into that. I'm crying on the inside. There are still scars. Anyway, but I guess my point is that all of these enterprises are engaging to me in their multiplicity, but as I've presented them to you today, they're actually solitary enterprises, and so pretty soon I want to commune with other people, and so I'm delighted that in fact I get to compose works for them. I get to write, sometimes for soloists and I get to work with one person, sometimes full orchestras, and I work with a lot of people, and this is probably the capacity, the role creatively for which I'm probably best known professionally. Now, some of my scores as a composer look like this, and others look like this, and some look like this, and I make all of these by hand, and it's really tedious. It takes a long, long time to make these scores, and right now I'm working on a piece that's 180 pages in length, and it's just a big chunk of my life, and I'm just pulling out hair. I have a lot of it, and that's a good thing I suppose. (Laughter) So this gets really boring and really tiresome for me, so after a while the process of notating is not only boring, but I actually want the notation to be more interesting, and so that's pushed me to do other projects like this one. This is an excerpt from a score called "The Metaphysics of Notation." The full score is 72 feet wide. It's a bunch of crazy pictographic notation. Let's zoom in on one section of it right here. You can see it's rather detailed. I do all of this with drafting templates, with straight edges, with French curves, and by freehand, and the 72 feet was actually split into 12 six-foot-wide panels that were installed around the Cantor Arts Center Museum lobby balcony, and it appeared for one year in the museum, and during that year, it was experienced as visual art most of the week, except, as you can see in these pictures, on Fridays, from noon til one, and only during that time, various performers came and interpreted these strange and undefined pictographic glyphs. (Laughter) Now this was a really exciting experience for me. It was gratifying musically, but I think the more important thing is it was exciting because I got to take on another role, especially given that it appeared in a museum, and that is as visual artist. (Laughter) We're going to fill up the whole thing, don't worry. (Laughter) I am multitudes. (Laughter) So one of the things is that, I mean, some people would say, like, "Oh, you're being a dilettante," and maybe that's true. I can understand how, I mean, because I don't have a pedigree in visual art and I don't have any training, but it's just something that I wanted to do as an extension of my composition, as an extension of a kind of creative impulse. I can understand the question, though. "But is it music?" I mean, there's not any traditional notation. I can also understand that sort of implicit criticism in this piece, "S-tog," which I made when I was living in Copenhagen. I took the Copenhagen subway map and I renamed all the stations to abstract musical provocations, and the players, who are synchronized with stopwatches, follow the timetables, which are listed in minutes past the hour. So this is a case of actually adapting something, or maybe stealing something, and then turning it into a musical notation. Another adaptation would be this piece. I took the idea of the wristwatch, and I turned it into a musical score. I made my own faces, and had a company fabricate them, and the players follow these scores. They follow the second hands, and as they pass over the various symbols, the players respond musically. Here's another example from another piece, and then its realization. So in these two capacities, I've been scavenger, in the sense of taking, like, the subway map, right, or thief maybe, and I've also been designer, in the case of making the wristwatches. And once again, this is, for me, interesting. Another role that I like to take on is that of the performance artist. Some of my pieces have these kind of weird theatric elements, and I often perform them. I want to show you a clip from a piece called "Echolalia." This is actually being performed by Brian McWhorter, who is an extraordinary performer. Let's watch a little bit of this, and please notice the instrumentation. (Music) Okay, I hear you were laughing nervously because you too could hear that the drill was a little bit sharp, the intonation was a little questionable. (Laughter) Let's watch just another clip. (Music) You can see the mayhem continues, and there's, you know, there were no clarinets and trumpets and flutes and violins. Here's a piece that has an even more unusual, more peculiar instrumentation. This is "Tlön," for three conductors and no players. (Laughter) This was based on the experience of actually watching two people having a virulent argument in sign language, which produced no decibels to speak of, but affectively, psychologically, was a very loud experience. So, yeah, I get it, with, like, the weird appliances and then the total absence of conventional instruments and this glut of conductors, people might, you know, wonder, yeah, "Is this music?" But let's move on to a piece where clearly I'm behaving myself, and that is my "Concerto for Orchestra." You're going to notice a lot of conventional instruments in this clip. (Music) (Music) This, in fact, is not the title of this piece. I was a bit mischievous. In fact, to make it more interesting, I put a space right in here, and this is the actual title of the piece. Let's continue with that same excerpt. (Music) It's better with a florist, right? (Laughter) (Music) Or at least it's less boring. Let's watch a couple more clips. (Music) So with all these theatric elements, this pushes me in another role, and that would be, possibly, the dramaturge. I was playing nice. I had to write the orchestra bits, right? Okay? But then there was this other stuff, right? There was the florist, and I can understand that, once again, we're putting pressure on the ontology of music as we know it conventionally, but let's look at one last piece today I'm going to share with you. This is going to be a piece called "Aphasia," and it's for hand gestures synchronized to sound, and this invites yet another role, and final one I'll share with you, which is that of the choreographer. And the score for the piece looks like this, and it instructs me, the performer, to make various hand gestures at very specific times synchronized with an audio tape, and that audio tape is made up exclusively of vocal samples. I recorded an awesome singer, and I took the sound of his voice in my computer, and I warped it in countless ways to come up with the soundtrack that you're about to hear. And I'll perform just an excerpt of "Aphasia" for you here. Okay? (Music) So that gives you a little taste of that piece. (Applause) Yeah, okay, that's kind of weird stuff. Is it music? Here's how I want to conclude. I've decided, ultimately, that this is the wrong question, that this is not the important question. The important question is, "Is it interesting?" And I follow this question, not worrying about "Is it music?" — not worrying about the definition of the thing that I'm making. I allow my creativity to push me in directions that are simply interesting to me, and I don't worry about the likeness of the result to some notion, some paradigm, of what music composition is supposed to be, and that has actually urged me, in a sense, to take on a whole bunch of different roles, and so what I want you to think about is, to what extent might you change the fundamental question in your discipline, and, okay, I'm going to put one extra little footnote in here, because, like, I realized I mentioned some psychological defects earlier, and we also, along the way, had a fair amount of obsessive behavior, and there was some delusional behavior and things like that, and here I think we could say that this is an argument for self-loathing and a kind of schizophrenia, at least in the popular use of the term, and I really mean dissociative identity disorder, okay. (Laughter) Anyway, despite those perils, I would urge you to think about the possibility that you might take on roles in your own work, whether they are neighboring or far-flung from your professional definition. And with that, I thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) |
Is life really that complex? | {0: 'Hannah Fry researches the trends in our civilization and ways we can forecast its future.'} | TEDxUCL | Thanks very much. I am Hannah Fry, the badass. And today I'm asking the question: Is life really that complex? Now, I've only got nine minutes to try and provide you with an answer, so what I've done is split this neatly into two parts: part one: yes; and later on, part two: no. Or, to be more accurate: no? (Laughter) So first of all, let me try and define what I mean by "complex." Now, I could give you a host of formal definitions, but in the simplest terms, any problem in complexity is something that Einstein and his peers can't do. So, let's imagine — if the clicker works ... there we go. Einstein is playing a game of snooker. He's a clever chap, so he knows that when he hits the cue ball, he could write you an equation and tell you exactly where the red ball is going to hit the sides, how fast it's going and where it's going to end up. Now, if you scale these snooker balls up to the size of the solar system, Einstein can still help you. Sure, the physics changes, but if you wanted to know about the path of the Earth around the Sun, Einstein could write you an equation telling you where both objects are at any point in time. Now, with a surprising increase in difficulty, Einstein could include the Moon in his calculations. But as you add more and more planets, Mars and Jupiter, say, the problem gets too tough for Einstein to solve with a pen and paper. Now, strangely, if instead of having a handful of planets, you had millions of objects or even billions, the problem actually becomes much simpler, and Einstein is back in the game. Let me explain what I mean by this, by scaling these objects back down to a molecular level. If you wanted to trace the erratic path of an individual air molecule, you'd have absolutely no hope. But when you have millions of air molecules all together, they start to act in a way which is quantifiable, predictable and well-behaved. And thank goodness air is well-behaved, because if it wasn't, planes would fall out of the sky. Now, on an even bigger scale, across the whole of the world, the idea is exactly the same with all of these air molecules. It's true that you can't take an individual rain droplet and say where it's come from or where it's going to end up. But you can say with pretty good certainty whether it will be cloudy tomorrow. So that's it. In Einstein's time, this is how far science had got. We could do really small problems with a few objects with simple interactions, or we could do huge problems with millions of objects and simple interactions. But what about everything in the middle? Well, just seven years before Einstein's death, an American scientist called Warren Weaver made exactly this point. He said that scientific methodology has gone from one extreme to another, leaving out an untouched great middle region. Now, this middle region is where complexity science lies, and this is what I mean by complex. Now, unfortunately, almost every single problem you can think of to do with human behavior lies in this middle region. Einstein's got absolutely no idea how to model the movement of a crowd. There are too many people to look at them all individually and too few to treat them as a gas. Similarly, people are prone to annoying things like decisions and not wanting to walk into each other, which makes the problem all the more complicated. Einstein also couldn't tell you when the next stock market crash is going to be. Einstein couldn't tell you how to improve unemployment. Einstein can't even tell you whether the next iPhone is going to be a hit or a flop. So to conclude part one: we're completely screwed. We've got no tools to deal with this, and life is way too complex. But maybe there's hope, because in the last few years, we've begun to see the beginnings of a new area of science using mathematics to model our social systems. And I'm not just talking here about statistics and computer simulations. I'm talking about writing down equations about our society that will help us understand what's going on in the same way as with the snooker balls or the weather prediction. And this has come about because people have begun to realize that we can use and exploit analogies between our human systems and those of the physical world around us. Now, to give you an example: the incredibly complex problem of migration across Europe. Actually, as it turns out, when you view all of the people together, collectively, they behave as though they're following the laws of gravity. But instead of planets being attracted to one another, it's people who are attracted to areas with better job opportunities, higher pay, better quality of life and lower unemployment. And in the same way as people are more likely to go for opportunities close to where they live already — London to Kent, for example, as opposed to London to Melbourne — the gravitational effect of planets far away is felt much less. So, to give you another example: in 2008, a group in UCLA were looking into the patterns of burglary hot spots in the city. Now, one thing about burglaries is this idea of repeat victimization. So if you have a group of burglars who manage to successfully rob an area, they'll tend to return to that area and carry on burgling it. So they learn the layout of the houses, the escape routes and the local security measures that are in place. And this will continue to happen until local residents and police ramp up the security, at which point, the burglars will move off elsewhere. And it's that balance between burglars and security which creates these dynamic hot spots of the city. As it turns out, this is exactly the same process as how a leopard gets its spots, except in the leopard example, it's not burglars and security, it's the chemical process that creates these patterns and something called "morphogenesis." We actually know an awful lot about the morphogenesis of leopard spots. Maybe we can use this to try and spot some of the warning signs with burglaries and perhaps, also to create better crime strategies to prevent crime. There's a group here at UCL who are working with the West Midlands police right now on this very question. I could give you plenty of examples like this, but I wanted to leave you with one from my own research on the London riots. Now, you probably don't need me to tell you about the events of last summer, where London and the UK saw the worst sustained period of violent looting and arson for over twenty years. It's understandable that, as a society, we want to try and understand exactly what caused these riots, but also, perhaps, to equip our police with better strategies to lead to a swifter resolution in the future. Now, I don't want to upset the sociologists here, so I absolutely cannot talk about the individual motivations for a rioter, but when you look at the rioters all together, mathematically, you can separate it into a three-stage process and draw analogies accordingly. So, step one: let's say you've got a group of friends. None of them are involved in the riots, but one of them walks past a Foot Locker which is being raided, and goes in and bags himself a new pair of trainers. He texts one of his friends and says, "Come on down to the riots." So his friend joins him, and then the two of them text more of their friends, who join them, and text more of their friends and more and more, and so it continues. This process is identical to the way that a virus spreads through a population. If you think about the bird flu epidemic of a couple of years ago, the more people that were infected, the more people that got infected, and the faster the virus spread before the authorities managed to get a handle on events. And it's exactly the same process here. So let's say you've got a rioter, he's decided he's going to riot. The next thing he has to do is pick a riot site. Now, what you should know about rioters is that, um ... Oops, clicker's gone. There we go. What you should know about rioters is, they're not prepared to travel that far from where they live, unless it's a really juicy riot site. (Laughter) So you can see that here from this graph, with an awful lot of rioters having traveled less than a kilometer to the site that they went to. Now, this pattern is seen in consumer models of retail spending, i.e., where we choose to go shopping. So, of course, people like to go to local shops, but you'd be prepared to go a little bit further if it was a really good retail site. And this analogy, actually, was already picked up by some of the papers, with some tabloid press calling the events "Shopping with violence," which probably sums it up in terms of our research. Oh! — we're going backwards. OK, step three. Finally, the rioter is at his site, and he wants to avoid getting caught by the police. The rioters will avoid the police at all times, but there is some safety in numbers. And on the flip side, the police, with their limited resources, are trying to protect as much of the city as possible, arrest rioters wherever possible and to create a deterrent effect. And actually, as it turns out, this mechanism between the two species, so to speak, of rioters and police, is identical to predators and prey in the wild. So if you can imagine rabbits and foxes, rabbits are trying to avoid foxes at all costs, while foxes are patrolling the space, trying to look for rabbits. We actually know an awful lot about the dynamics of predators and prey. We also know a lot about consumer spending flows. And we know a lot about how viruses spread through a population. So if you take these three analogies together and exploit them, you can come up with a mathematical model of what actually happened, that's capable of replicating the general patterns of the riots themselves. Now, once we've got this, we can almost use this as a petri dish and start having conversations about which areas of the city were more susceptible than others and what police tactics could be used if this were ever to happen again in the future. Even twenty years ago, modeling of this sort was completely unheard of. But I think that these analogies are an incredibly important tool in tackling problems with our society, and perhaps, ultimately improving our society overall. So, to conclude: life is complex, but perhaps understanding it need not necessarily be that complicated. Thank you. (Applause) |
Fighting with nonviolence | {0: 'Scilla Elworthy founded Oxford Research Group in 1982, to promote effective dialogue between nuclear weapons policy-makers and their opponents.'} | TEDxExeter | In half a century of trying to help prevent wars, there's one question that never leaves me: How do we deal with extreme violence without using force in return? When you're faced with brutality, whether it's a child facing a bully on a playground or domestic violence — or, on the streets of Syria today, facing tanks and shrapnel, what's the most effective thing to do? Fight back? Give in? Use more force? This question: "How do I deal with a bully without becoming a thug in return?" has been with me ever since I was a child. I remember I was about 13, glued to a grainy black and white television in my parents' living room as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, and kids not much older than me were throwing themselves at the tanks and getting mown down. And I rushed upstairs and started packing my suitcase. And my mother came up and said, "What on Earth are you doing?" And I said, "I'm going to Budapest." And she said, "What on Earth for?" And I said, "Kids are getting killed there. There's something terrible happening." And she said, "Don't be so silly." And I started to cry. And she got it, she said, "Okay, I see it's serious. You're much too young to help. You need training. I'll help you. But just unpack your suitcase." And so I got some training and went and worked in Africa during most of my 20s. But I realized that what I really needed to know I couldn't get from training courses. I wanted to understand how violence, how oppression, works. And what I've discovered since is this: Bullies use violence in three ways. They use political violence to intimidate, physical violence to terrorize and mental or emotional violence to undermine. And only very rarely in very few cases does it work to use more violence. Nelson Mandela went to jail believing in violence, and 27 years later he and his colleagues had slowly and carefully honed the skills, the incredible skills, that they needed to turn one of the most vicious governments the world has known into a democracy. And they did it in a total devotion to non-violence. They realized that using force against force doesn't work. So what does work? Over time I've collected about a half-dozen methods that do work — of course there are many more — that do work and that are effective. And the first is that the change that has to take place has to take place here, inside me. It's my response, my attitude, to oppression that I've got control over, and that I can do something about. And what I need to develop is self-knowledge to do that. That means I need to know how I tick, when I collapse, where my formidable points are, where my weaker points are. When do I give in? What will I stand up for? And meditation or self-inspection is one of the ways — again it's not the only one — it's one of the ways of gaining this kind of inner power. And my heroine here — like Satish's — is Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. She was leading a group of students on a protest in the streets of Rangoon. They came around a corner faced with a row of machine guns. And she realized straight away that the soldiers with their fingers shaking on the triggers were more scared than the student protesters behind her. But she told the students to sit down. And she walked forward with such calm and such clarity and such total lack of fear that she could walk right up to the first gun, put her hand on it and lower it. And no one got killed. So that's what the mastery of fear can do — not only faced with machine guns, but if you meet a knife fight in the street. But we have to practice. So what about our fear? I have a little mantra. My fear grows fat on the energy I feed it. And if it grows very big it probably happens. So we all know the three o'clock in the morning syndrome, when something you've been worrying about wakes you up — I see a lot of people — and for an hour you toss and turn, it gets worse and worse, and by four o'clock you're pinned to the pillow by a monster this big. The only thing to do is to get up, make a cup of tea and sit down with the fear like a child beside you. You're the adult. The fear is the child. And you talk to the fear and you ask it what it wants, what it needs. How can this be made better? How can the child feel stronger? And you make a plan. And you say, "Okay, now we're going back to sleep. Half-past seven, we're getting up and that's what we're going to do." I had one of these 3 a.m. episodes on Sunday — paralyzed with fear at coming to talk to you. (Laughter) So I did the thing. I got up, made the cup of tea, sat down with it, did it all and I'm here — still partly paralyzed, but I'm here. (Applause) So that's fear. What about anger? Wherever there is injustice there's anger. But anger is like gasoline, and if you spray it around and somebody lights a match, you've got an inferno. But anger as an engine — in an engine — is powerful. If we can put our anger inside an engine, it can drive us forward, it can get us through the dreadful moments and it can give us real inner power. And I learned this in my work with nuclear weapon policy-makers. Because at the beginning I was so outraged at the dangers they were exposing us to that I just wanted to argue and blame and make them wrong. Totally ineffective. In order to develop a dialogue for change we have to deal with our anger. It's okay to be angry with the thing — the nuclear weapons in this case — but it is hopeless to be angry with the people. They are human beings just like us. And they're doing what they think is best. And that's the basis on which we have to talk with them. So that's the third one, anger. And it brings me to the crux of what's going on, or what I perceive as going on, in the world today, which is that last century was top-down power. It was still governments telling people what to do. This century there's a shift. It's bottom-up or grassroots power. It's like mushrooms coming through concrete. It's people joining up with people, as Bundy just said, miles away to bring about change. And Peace Direct spotted quite early on that local people in areas of very hot conflict know what to do. They know best what to do. So Peace Direct gets behind them to do that. And the kind of thing they're doing is demobilizing militias, rebuilding economies, resettling refugees, even liberating child soldiers. And they have to risk their lives almost every day to do this. And what they've realized is that using violence in the situations they operate in is not only less humane, but it's less effective than using methods that connect people with people, that rebuild. And I think that the U.S. military is finally beginning to get this. Up to now their counter-terrorism policy has been to kill insurgents at almost any cost, and if civilians get in the way, that's written as "collateral damage." And this is so infuriating and humiliating for the population of Afghanistan, that it makes the recruitment for al-Qaeda very easy, when people are so disgusted by, for example, the burning of the Koran. So the training of the troops has to change. And I think there are signs that it is beginning to change. The British military have always been much better at this. But there is one magnificent example for them to take their cue from, and that's a brilliant U.S. lieutenant colonel called Chris Hughes. And he was leading his men down the streets of Najaf — in Iraq actually — and suddenly people were pouring out of the houses on either side of the road, screaming, yelling, furiously angry, and surrounded these very young troops who were completely terrified, didn't know what was going on, couldn't speak Arabic. And Chris Hughes strode into the middle of the throng with his weapon above his head, pointing at the ground, and he said, "Kneel." And these huge soldiers with their backpacks and their body armor, wobbled to the ground. And complete silence fell. And after about two minutes, everybody moved aside and went home. Now that to me is wisdom in action. In the moment, that's what he did. And it's happening everywhere now. You don't believe me? Have you asked yourselves why and how so many dictatorships have collapsed over the last 30 years? Dictatorships in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mali, Madagascar, Poland, the Philippines, Serbia, Slovenia, I could go on, and now Tunisia and Egypt. And this hasn't just happened. A lot of it is due to a book written by an 80-year-old man in Boston, Gene Sharp. He wrote a book called "From Dictatorship to Democracy" with 81 methodologies for non-violent resistance. And it's been translated into 26 languages. It's flown around the world. And it's being used by young people and older people everywhere, because it works and it's effective. So this is what gives me hope — not just hope, this is what makes me feel very positive right now. Because finally human beings are getting it. We're getting practical, doable methodologies to answer my question: How do we deal with a bully without becoming a thug? We're using the kind of skills that I've outlined: inner power — the development of inner power — through self-knowledge, recognizing and working with our fear, using anger as a fuel, cooperating with others, banding together with others, courage, and most importantly, commitment to active non-violence. Now I don't just believe in non-violence. I don't have to believe in it. I see evidence everywhere of how it works. And I see that we, ordinary people, can do what Aung San Suu Kyi and Ghandi and Mandela did. We can bring to an end the bloodiest century that humanity has ever known. And we can organize to overcome oppression by opening our hearts as well as strengthening this incredible resolve. And this open-heartedness is exactly what I've experienced in the entire organization of this gathering since I got here yesterday. Thank you. (Applause) |
Dare to disagree | {0: 'The former CEO of five businesses, Margaret Heffernan explores the all-too-human thought patterns that lead organizations and managers astray.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | In Oxford in the 1950s, there was a fantastic doctor, who was very unusual, named Alice Stewart. And Alice was unusual partly because, of course, she was a woman, which was pretty rare in the 1950s. And she was brilliant, she was one of the, at the time, the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of Physicians. She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married, after she had kids, and even after she got divorced and was a single parent, she continued her medical work. And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science, the emerging field of epidemiology, the study of patterns in disease. But like every scientist, she appreciated that to make her mark, what she needed to do was find a hard problem and solve it. The hard problem that Alice chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancers. Most disease is correlated with poverty, but in the case of childhood cancers, the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent families. So, what, she wanted to know, could explain this anomaly? Now, Alice had trouble getting funding for her research. In the end, she got just 1,000 pounds from the Lady Tata Memorial prize. And that meant she knew she only had one shot at collecting her data. Now, she had no idea what to look for. This really was a needle in a haystack sort of search, so she asked everything she could think of. Had the children eaten boiled sweets? Had they consumed colored drinks? Did they eat fish and chips? Did they have indoor or outdoor plumbing? What time of life had they started school? And when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come back, one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of. By a rate of two to one, the children who had died had had mothers who had been X-rayed when pregnant. Now that finding flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom held that everything was safe up to a point, a threshold. It flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which was huge enthusiasm for the cool new technology of that age, which was the X-ray machine. And it flew in the face of doctors' idea of themselves, which was as people who helped patients, they didn't harm them. Nevertheless, Alice Stewart rushed to publish her preliminary findings in The Lancet in 1956. People got very excited, there was talk of the Nobel Prize, and Alice really was in a big hurry to try to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find before they disappeared. In fact, she need not have hurried. It was fully 25 years before the British and medical — British and American medical establishments abandoned the practice of X-raying pregnant women. The data was out there, it was open, it was freely available, but nobody wanted to know. A child a week was dying, but nothing changed. Openness alone can't drive change. So for 25 years Alice Stewart had a very big fight on her hands. So, how did she know that she was right? Well, she had a fantastic model for thinking. She worked with a statistician named George Kneale, and George was pretty much everything that Alice wasn't. So, Alice was very outgoing and sociable, and George was a recluse. Alice was very warm, very empathetic with her patients. George frankly preferred numbers to people. But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship. He said, "My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong." He actively sought disconfirmation. Different ways of looking at her models, at her statistics, different ways of crunching the data in order to disprove her. He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories. Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong, that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right. It's a fantastic model of collaboration — thinking partners who aren't echo chambers. I wonder how many of us have, or dare to have, such collaborators. Alice and George were very good at conflict. They saw it as thinking. So what does that kind of constructive conflict require? Well, first of all, it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves. That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive, which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves, and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them. That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy. And the more I've thought about this, the more I think, really, that that's a kind of love. Because you simply won't commit that kind of energy and time if you don't really care. And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds. Alice's daughter told me that every time Alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist, they made her think and think and think again. "My mother," she said, "My mother didn't enjoy a fight, but she was really good at them." So it's one thing to do that in a one-to-one relationship. But it strikes me that the biggest problems we face, many of the biggest disasters that we've experienced, mostly haven't come from individuals, they've come from organizations, some of them bigger than countries, many of them capable of affecting hundreds, thousands, even millions of lives. So how do organizations think? Well, for the most part, they don't. And that isn't because they don't want to, it's really because they can't. And they can't because the people inside of them are too afraid of conflict. In surveys of European and American executives, fully 85 percent of them acknowledged that they had issues or concerns at work that they were afraid to raise. Afraid of the conflict that that would provoke, afraid to get embroiled in arguments that they did not know how to manage, and felt that they were bound to lose. Eighty-five percent is a really big number. It means that organizations mostly can't do what George and Alice so triumphantly did. They can't think together. And it means that people like many of us, who have run organizations, and gone out of our way to try to find the very best people we can, mostly fail to get the best out of them. So how do we develop the skills that we need? Because it does take skill and practice, too. If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking, and then we have to get really good at it. So, recently, I worked with an executive named Joe, and Joe worked for a medical device company. And Joe was very worried about the device that he was working on. He thought that it was too complicated and he thought that its complexity created margins of error that could really hurt people. He was afraid of doing damage to the patients he was trying to help. But when he looked around his organization, nobody else seemed to be at all worried. So, he didn't really want to say anything. After all, maybe they knew something he didn't. Maybe he'd look stupid. But he kept worrying about it, and he worried about it so much that he got to the point where he thought the only thing he could do was leave a job he loved. In the end, Joe and I found a way for him to raise his concerns. And what happened then is what almost always happens in this situation. It turned out everybody had exactly the same questions and doubts. So now Joe had allies. They could think together. And yes, there was a lot of conflict and debate and argument, but that allowed everyone around the table to be creative, to solve the problem, and to change the device. Joe was what a lot of people might think of as a whistle-blower, except that like almost all whistle-blowers, he wasn't a crank at all, he was passionately devoted to the organization and the higher purposes that that organization served. But he had been so afraid of conflict, until finally he became more afraid of the silence. And when he dared to speak, he discovered much more inside himself and much more give in the system than he had ever imagined. And his colleagues don't think of him as a crank. They think of him as a leader. So, how do we have these conversations more easily and more often? Well, the University of Delft requires that its PhD students have to submit five statements that they're prepared to defend. It doesn't really matter what the statements are about, what matters is that the candidates are willing and able to stand up to authority. I think it's a fantastic system, but I think leaving it to PhD candidates is far too few people, and way too late in life. I think we need to be teaching these skills to kids and adults at every stage of their development, if we want to have thinking organizations and a thinking society. The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to, because we can't handle, don't want to handle, the conflict that it provokes. But when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking. Open information is fantastic, open networks are essential. But the truth won't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it. Openness isn't the end. It's the beginning. (Applause) |
A test for Parkinson's with a phone call | {0: "Max Little is a mathematician whose research includes a breakthrough technique to monitor – and potentially screen for – Parkinson's disease through simple voice recordings."} | TEDGlobal 2012 | So, well, I do applied math, and this is a peculiar problem for anyone who does applied math, is that we are like management consultants. No one knows what the hell we do. So I am going to give you some — attempt today to try and explain to you what I do. So, dancing is one of the most human of activities. We delight at ballet virtuosos and tap dancers you will see later on. Now, ballet requires an extraordinary level of expertise and a high level of skill, and probably a level of initial suitability that may well have a genetic component to it. Now, sadly, neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease gradually destroy this extraordinary ability, as it is doing to my friend Jan Stripling, who was a virtuoso ballet dancer in his time. So great progress and treatment has been made over the years. However, there are 6.3 million people worldwide who have the disease, and they have to live with incurable weakness, tremor, rigidity and the other symptoms that go along with the disease, so what we need are objective tools to detect the disease before it's too late. We need to be able to measure progression objectively, and ultimately, the only way we're going to know when we actually have a cure is when we have an objective measure that can answer that for sure. But frustratingly, with Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders, there are no biomarkers, so there's no simple blood test that you can do, and the best that we have is like this 20-minute neurologist test. You have to go to the clinic to do it. It's very, very costly, and that means that, outside the clinical trials, it's just never done. It's never done. But what if patients could do this test at home? Now, that would actually save on a difficult trip to the clinic, and what if patients could do that test themselves, right? No expensive staff time required. Takes about $300, by the way, in the neurologist's clinic to do it. So what I want to propose to you as an unconventional way in which we can try to achieve this, because, you see, in one sense, at least, we are all virtuosos like my friend Jan Stripling. So here we have a video of the vibrating vocal folds. Now, this is healthy and this is somebody making speech sounds, and we can think of ourselves as vocal ballet dancers, because we have to coordinate all of these vocal organs when we make sounds, and we all actually have the genes for it. FoxP2, for example. And like ballet, it takes an extraordinary level of training. I mean, just think how long it takes a child to learn to speak. From the sound, we can actually track the vocal fold position as it vibrates, and just as the limbs are affected in Parkinson's, so too are the vocal organs. So on the bottom trace, you can see an example of irregular vocal fold tremor. We see all the same symptoms. We see vocal tremor, weakness and rigidity. The speech actually becomes quieter and more breathy after a while, and that's one of the example symptoms of it. So these vocal effects can actually be quite subtle, in some cases, but with any digital microphone, and using precision voice analysis software in combination with the latest in machine learning, which is very advanced by now, we can now quantify exactly where somebody lies on a continuum between health and disease using voice signals alone. So these voice-based tests, how do they stack up against expert clinical tests? We'll, they're both non-invasive. The neurologist's test is non-invasive. They both use existing infrastructure. You don't have to design a whole new set of hospitals to do it. And they're both accurate. Okay, but in addition, voice-based tests are non-expert. That means they can be self-administered. They're high-speed, take about 30 seconds at most. They're ultra-low cost, and we all know what happens. When something becomes ultra-low cost, it becomes massively scalable. So here are some amazing goals that I think we can deal with now. We can reduce logistical difficulties with patients. No need to go to the clinic for a routine checkup. We can do high-frequency monitoring to get objective data. We can perform low-cost mass recruitment for clinical trials, and we can make population-scale screening feasible for the first time. We have the opportunity to start to search for the early biomarkers of the disease before it's too late. So, taking the first steps towards this today, we're launching the Parkinson's Voice Initiative. With Aculab and PatientsLikeMe, we're aiming to record a very large number of voices worldwide to collect enough data to start to tackle these four goals. We have local numbers accessible to three quarters of a billion people on the planet. Anyone healthy or with Parkinson's can call in, cheaply, and leave recordings, a few cents each, and I'm really happy to announce that we've already hit six percent of our target just in eight hours. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Tom Rielly: So Max, by taking all these samples of, let's say, 10,000 people, you'll be able to tell who's healthy and who's not? What are you going to get out of those samples? Max Little: Yeah. Yeah. So what will happen is that, during the call you have to indicate whether or not you have the disease or not, you see. TR: Right. ML: You see, some people may not do it. They may not get through it. But we'll get a very large sample of data that is collected from all different circumstances, and it's getting it in different circumstances that matter because then we are looking at ironing out the confounding factors, and looking for the actual markers of the disease. TR: So you're 86 percent accurate right now? ML: It's much better than that. Actually, my student Thanasis, I have to plug him, because he's done some fantastic work, and now he has proved that it works over the mobile telephone network as well, which enables this project, and we're getting 99 percent accuracy. TR: Ninety-nine. Well, that's an improvement. So what that means is that people will be able to — ML: (Laughs) TR: People will be able to call in from their mobile phones and do this test, and people with Parkinson's could call in, record their voice, and then their doctor can check up on their progress, see where they're doing in this course of the disease. ML: Absolutely. TR: Thanks so much. Max Little, everybody. ML: Thanks, Tom. (Applause) |
How we can eat our landscapes | {0: 'Pam Warhurst cofounded Incredible Edible, an initiative in Todmorden, England dedicated to growing food locally by planting on unused land throughout the community.'} | TEDSalon London Spring 2012 | The will to live life differently can start in some of the most unusual places. This is where I come from, Todmorden. It's a market town in the north of England, 15,000 people, between Leeds and Manchester, fairly normal market town. It used to look like this, and now it's more like this, with fruit and veg and herbs sprouting up all over the place. We call it propaganda gardening. (Laughter) Corner row railway, station car park, front of a health center, people's front gardens, and even in front of the police station. (Laughter) We've got edible canal towpaths, and we've got sprouting cemeteries. The soil is extremely good. (Laughter) We've even invented a new form of tourism. It's called vegetable tourism, and believe it or not, people come from all over the world to poke around in our raised beds, even when there's not much growing. (Laughter) But it starts a conversation. (Laughter) And, you know, we're not doing it because we're bored. (Laughter) We're doing it because we want to start a revolution. We tried to answer this simple question: Can you find a unifying language that cuts across age and income and culture that will help people themselves find a new way of living, see spaces around them differently, think about the resources they use differently, interact differently? Can we find that language? And then, can we replicate those actions? And the answer would appear to be yes, and the language would appear to be food. So, three and a half years ago, a few of us sat around a kitchen table and we just invented the whole thing. (Laughter) (Applause) We came up with a really simple game plan that we put to a public meeting. We did not consult. We did not write a report. Enough of all that. (Laughter) And we said to that public meeting in Todmorden, look, let's imagine that our town is focused around three plates: a community plate, the way we live our everyday lives; a learning plate, what we teach our kids in school and what new skills we share amongst ourselves; and business, what we do with the pound in our pocket and which businesses we choose to support. Now, let's imagine those plates agitated with community actions around food. If we start one of those community plates spinning, that's really great, that really starts to empower people, but if we can then spin that community plate with the learning plate, and then spin it with the business plate, we've got a real show there, we've got some action theater. We're starting to build resilience ourselves. We're starting to reinvent community ourselves, and we've done it all without a flipping strategy document. (Applause) And here's the thing as well. We've not asked anybody's permission to do this, we're just doing it. (Laughter) And we are certainly not waiting for that check to drop through the letterbox before we start, and most importantly of all, we are not daunted by the sophisticated arguments that say, "These small actions are meaningless in the face of tomorrow's problems," because I have seen the power of small actions, and it is awesome. So, back to the public meeting. (Laughter) We put that proposition to the meeting, two seconds, and then the room exploded. I have never, ever experienced anything like that in my life. And it's been the same in every single room, in every town that we've ever told our story. People are ready and respond to the story of food. They want positive actions they can engage in, and in their bones, they know it's time to take personal responsibility and invest in more kindness to each other and to the environment. And since we had that meeting three and a half years ago, it's been a heck of a roller coaster. We started with a seed swap, really simple stuff, and then we took an area of land, a strip on the side of our main road, which was a dog toilet, basically, and we turned it into a really lovely herb garden. We took the corner of the car park in the station that you saw, and we made vegetable beds for everybody to share and pick from themselves. We went to the doctors. We've just had a 6-million-pound health center built in Todmorden, and for some reason that I cannot comprehend, it has been surrounded by prickly plants. (Laughter) So we went to the doctors, said, "Would you mind us taking them up?" They said, "Absolutely fine, provided you get planning permission and you do it in Latin and you do it in triplicate," so we did — (Laughter) — and now there are fruit trees and bushes and herbs and vegetables around that doctor's surgery. And there's been lots of other examples, like the corn that was in front of the police station, and the old people's home that we've planted it with food that they can pick and grow. But it isn't just about growing, because we all are part of this jigsaw. It's about taking those artistic people in your community and doing some fabulous designs in those raised beds to explain to people what's growing there, because there's so many people that don't really recognize a vegetable unless it's in a bit of plastic with a bit of an instruction packet on the top. (Laughter) So we have some people who designed these things, "If it looks like this, please don't pick it, but if it looks like this, help yourself." This is about sharing and investing in kindness. And for those people that don't want to do either of those things, maybe they can cook, so we pick them seasonally and then we go on the street, or in the pub, or in the church, or wherever people are living their lives. This is about us going to the people and saying, "We are all part of the local food jigsaw, we are all part of a solution." And then, because we know we've got vegetable tourists and we love them to bits and they're absolutely fantastic, we thought, what could we do to give them an even better experience? So we invented, without asking, of course, the Incredible Edible Green Route. And this is a route of exhibition gardens, and edible towpaths, and bee-friendly sites, and the story of pollinators, and it's a route that we designed that takes people through the whole of our town, past our cafes and our small shops, through our market, not just to and fro from the supermarket, and we're hoping that, in changing people's footfall around our town, we're also changing their behavior. And then there's the second plate, the learning plate. Well, we're in partnership with a high school. We've created a company. We are designing and building an aquaponics unit in some land that was spare at the back of the high school, like you do, and now we're going to be growing fish and vegetables in an orchard with bees, and the kids are helping us build that, and the kids are on the board, and because the community was really keen on working with the high school, the high school is now teaching agriculture, and because it's teaching agriculture, we started to think, how could we then get those kids that never had a qualification before in their lives but are really excited about growing, how can we give them some more experience? So we got some land that was donated by a local garden center. It was really quite muddy, but in a truly incredible way, totally voluntary-led, we have turned that into a market garden training center, and that is polytunnels and raised beds and all the things you need to get the soil under your fingers and think maybe there's a job in this for me in the future. And because we were doing that, some local academics said, "You know, we could help design a commercial horticulture course for you. There's not one that we know of." So they're doing that, and we're going to launch it later this year, and it's all an experiment, and it's all voluntary. And then there's the third plate, because if you walk through an edible landscape, and if you're learning new skills, and if you start to get interested in what's growing seasonally, you might just want to spend more of your own money in support of local producers, not just veg, but meat and cheese and beer and whatever else it might be. But then, we're just a community group, you know. We're just all volunteers. What could we actually do? So we did some really simple things. We fundraised, we got some blackboards, we put "Incredible Edible" on the top, we gave it every market trader that was selling locally, and they scribbled on what they were selling in any one week. Really popular. People congregated around it. Sales were up. And then, we had a chat with the farmers, and we said, "We're really serious about this," but they didn't actually believe us, so we thought, okay, what should we do? I know. If we can create a campaign around one product and show them there is local loyalty to that product, maybe they'll change their mind and see we're serious. So we launched a campaign — because it just amuses me — called Every Egg Matters. (Laughter) And what we did was we put people on our egg map. It's a stylized map of Togmorden. Anybody that's selling their excess eggs at the garden gate, perfectly legally, to their neighbors, we've stuck on there. We started with four, and we've now got 64 on, and the result of that was that people were then going into shops asking for a local Todmorden egg, and the result of that was, some farmers upped the amount of flocks they got of free range birds, and then they went on to meat birds, and although these are really, really small steps, that increasing local economic confidence is starting to play out in a number of ways, and we now have farmers doing cheese and they've upped their flocks and rare breed pigs, they're doing pasties and pies and things that they would have never done before. We've got increasing market stalls selling local food, and in a survey that local students did for us, 49 percent of all food traders in that town said that their bottom line had increased because of what we were actually doing. And we're just volunteers and it's only an experiment. (Laughter) Now, none of this is rocket science. It certainly is not clever, and it's not original. But it is joined up, and it is inclusive. This is not a movement for those people that are going to sort themselves out anyway. This is a movement for everyone. We have a motto: If you eat, you're in. (Laughter) (Applause) Across age, across income, across culture. It's been really quite a roller coaster experience, but going back to that first question that we asked, is it replicable? Yeah. It most certainly is replicable. More than 30 towns in England now are spinning the Incredible Edible plate. Whichever way they want to do it, of their own volition, they're trying to make their own lives differently, and worldwide, we've got communities across America and Japan — it's incredible, isn't it? I mean, America and Japan and New Zealand. People after the earthquake in New Zealand visited us in order to incorporate some of this public spiritedness around local growing into the heart of Christchurch. And none of this takes more money and none of this demands a bureaucracy, but it does demand that you think things differently and you are prepared to bend budgets and work programs in order to create that supportive framework that communities can bounce off. And there's some great ideas already in our patch. Our local authority has decided to make everywhere Incredible Edible, and in support of that have decided to do two things. First, they're going to create an asset register of spare land that they've got, put it in a food bank so that communities can use that wherever they live, and they're going to underpin that with a license. And then they've said to every single one of their workforce, if you can, help those communities grow, and help them to maintain their spaces. Suddenly, we're seeing actions on the ground from local government. We're seeing this mainstreamed. We are responding creatively at last to what Rio demanded of us, and there's lots more you could do. I mean, just to list a few. One, please stop putting prickly plants around public buildings. It's a waste of space. (Laughter) Secondly, please create — please, please create edible landscapes so that our children start to walk past their food day in, day out, on our high streets, in our parks, wherever that might be. Inspire local planners to put the food sites at the heart of the town and the city plan, not relegate them to the edges of the settlements that nobody can see. Encourage all our schools to take this seriously. This isn't a second class exercise. If we want to inspire the farmers of tomorrow, then please let us say to every school, create a sense of purpose around the importance to the environment, local food and soils. Put that at the heart of your school culture, and you will create a different generation. There are so many things you can do, but ultimately this is about something really simple. Through an organic process, through an increasing recognition of the power of small actions, we are starting, at last, to believe in ourselves again, and to believe in our capacity, each and every one of us, to build a different and a kinder future, and in my book, that's incredible. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Embrace the remix | {0: 'Kirby Ferguson explores creativity in a world where "everything is a remix."'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | We're going to begin in 1964. Bob Dylan is 23 years old, and his career is just reaching its pinnacle. He's been christened the voice of a generation, and he's churning out classic songs at a seemingly impossible rate, but there's a small minority of dissenters, and they claim that Bob Dylan is stealing other people's songs. 2004. Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, takes the Beatles' "White Album," combines it with Jay-Z's "The Black Album" to create "The Grey Album." "The Grey Album" becomes an immediate sensation online, and the Beatles' record company sends out countless cease-and-desist letters for "unfair competition and dilution of our valuable property." Now, "The Grey Album" is a remix. It is new media created from old media. It was made using these three techniques: copy, transform and combine. It's how you remix. You take existing songs, you chop them up, you transform the pieces, you combine them back together again, and you've got a new song, but that new song is clearly comprised of old songs. But I think these aren't just the components of remixing. I think these are the basic elements of all creativity. I think everything is a remix, and I think this is a better way to conceive of creativity. All right, let's head back to 1964, and let's hear where some of Dylan's early songs came from. We'll do some side-by-side comparisons here. All right, this first song you're going to hear is "Nottamun Town." It's a traditional folk tune. After that, you'll hear Dylan's "Masters of War." Jean Ritchie: ♫ In Nottamun Town, not a soul would look out, ♫ ♫ not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down. ♫ Bob Dylan: ♫ Come you masters of war, ♫ ♫ you that build the big guns, you that build the death planes, ♫ ♫ You that build all the bombs. ♫ Kirby Ferguson: Okay, so that's the same basic melody and overall structure. This next one is "The Patriot Game," by Dominic Behan. Alongside that, you're going to hear "With God on Our Side," by Dylan. Dominic Behan: ♫ Come all ye young rebels, ♫ ♫ and list while I sing, ♫ ♫ for the love of one's land is a terrible thing. ♫ BD: ♫ Oh my name it is nothin', ♫ ♫ my age it means less, ♫ ♫ the country I come from is called the Midwest. ♫ KF: Okay, so in this case, Dylan admits he must have heard "The Patriot Game," he forgot about it, then when the song kind of bubbled back up in his brain, he just thought it was his song. Last one, this is "Who's Going To Buy You Ribbons," another traditional folk tune. Alongside that is "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." This one's more about the lyric. Paul Clayton: ♫ It ain't no use to sit and sigh now, ♫ ♫ darlin', and it ain't no use to sit and cry now. ♫ BD: ♫ It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe, ♫ ♫ if you don't know by now, ♫ ♫ and it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe, ♫ ♫ it'll never do somehow. ♫ KF: Okay, now, there's a lot of these. It's been estimated that two thirds of the melodies Dylan used in his early songs were borrowed. This is pretty typical among folk singers. Here's the advice of Dylan's idol, Woody Guthrie. "The worlds are the important thing. Don't worry about tunes. Take a tune, sing high when they sing low, sing fast when they sing slow, and you've got a new tune." (Laughter) (Applause) And that's, that's what Guthrie did right here, and I'm sure you all recognize the results. (Music) We know this tune, right? We know it? Actually you don't. That is "When the World's on Fire," a very old melody, in this case performed by the Carter Family. Guthrie adapted it into "This Land Is Your Land." So, Bob Dylan, like all folk singers, he copied melodies, he transformed them, he combined them with new lyrics which were frequently their own concoction of previous stuff. Now, American copyright and patent laws run counter to this notion that we build on the work of others. Instead, these laws and laws around the world use the rather awkward analogy of property. Now, creative works may indeed be kind of like property, but it's property that we're all building on, and creations can only take root and grow once that ground has been prepared. Henry Ford once said, "I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable." 2007. The iPhone makes it debut. Apple undoubtedly brings this innovation to us early, but its time was approaching because its core technology had been evolving for decades. That's multi-touch, controlling a device by touching its display. Here is Steve Jobs introducing multi-touch and making a rather foreboding joke. Steve Jobs: And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch. You can do multi-fingered gestures on it, and boy have we patented it. (Laughter) KF: Yes. And yet, here is multi-touch in action. This is at TED, actually, about a year earlier. This is Jeff Han, and, I mean, that's multi-touch. It's the same animal, at least. Let's hear what Jeff Han has to say about this newfangled technology. Jeff Han: Multi-touch sensing isn't anything — isn't completely new. I mean, people like Bill Buxton have been playing around with it in the '80s. The technology, you know, isn't the most exciting thing here right now other than probably its newfound accessibility. KF: So he's pretty frank about it not being new. So it's not multi-touch as a whole that's patented. It's the small parts of it that are, and it's in these small details where we can clearly see patent law contradicting its intent: to promote the progress of useful arts. Here is the first ever slide-to-unlock. That is all there is to it. Apple has patented this. It's a 28-page software patent, but I will summarize what it covers. Spoiler alert: Unlocking your phone by sliding an icon with your finger. (Laughter) I'm only exaggerating a little bit. It's a broad patent. Now, can someone own this idea? Now, back in the '80s, there were no software patents, and it was Xerox that pioneered the graphical user interface. What if they had patented pop-up menus, scrollbars, the desktop with icons that look like folders and sheets of paper? Would a young and inexperienced Apple have survived the legal assault from a much larger and more mature company like Xerox? Now, this idea that everything is a remix might sound like common sense until you're the one getting remixed. For example ... SJ: I mean, Picasso had a saying. He said, "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." And we have, you know, always been shameless about stealing great ideas. KF: Okay, so that's in '96. Here's in 2010. "I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product." (Laughter) "I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." (Laughter) Okay, so in other words, great artists steal, but not from me. (Laughter) Now, behavioral economists might refer to this sort of thing as loss aversion We have a strong predisposition towards protecting what we feel is ours. We have no such aversion towards copying what other people have, because we do that nonstop. So here's the sort of equation we're looking at. We've got laws that fundamentally treat creative works as property, plus massive rewards or settlements in infringement cases, plus huge legal fees to protect yourself in court, plus cognitive biases against perceived loss. And the sum looks like this. That is the last four years of lawsuits in the realm of smartphones. Is this promoting the progress of useful arts? 1983. Bob Dylan is 42 years old, and his time in the cultural spotlight is long since past. He records a song called "Blind Willie McTell," named after the blues singer, and the song is a voyage through the past, through a much darker time, but a simpler one, a time when musicians like Willie McTell had few illusions about what they did. "I jump 'em from other writers but I arrange 'em my own way." I think this is mostly what we do. Our creativity comes from without, not from within. We are not self-made. We are dependent on one another, and admitting this to ourselves isn't an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness. It's a liberation from our misconceptions, and it's an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves and to simply begin. Thank you so much. It was an honor to be here. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Photos that bear witness to modern slavery | {0: 'Lisa Kristine uses photography to expose deeply human stories.'} | TEDxMaui | I'm 150 feet down an illegal mine shaft in Ghana. The air is thick with heat and dust, and it's hard to breathe. I can feel the brush of sweaty bodies passing me in the darkness, but I can't see much else. I hear voices talking, but mostly the shaft is this cacophony of men coughing, and stone being broken with primitive tools. Like the others, I wear a flickering, cheap flashlight tied to my head with this elastic, tattered band, and I can barely make out the slick tree limbs holding up the walls of the three-foot square hole dropping hundreds of feet into the earth. When my hand slips, I suddenly remember a miner I had met days before who had lost his grip and fell countless feet down that shaft. As I stand talking to you today, these men are still deep in that hole, risking their lives without payment or compensation, and often dying. I got to climb out of that hole, and I got to go home, but they likely never will, because they're trapped in slavery. For the last 28 years, I've been documenting indigenous cultures in more than 70 countries on six continents, and in 2009 I had the great honor of being the sole exhibitor at the Vancouver Peace Summit. Amongst all the astonishing people I met there, I met a supporter of Free the Slaves, an NGO dedicated to eradicating modern day slavery. We started talking about slavery, and really, I started learning about slavery, for I had certainly known it existed in the world, but not to such a degree. After we finished talking, I felt so horrible and honestly ashamed at my own lack of knowledge of this atrocity in my own lifetime, and I thought, if I don't know, how many other people don't know? It started burning a hole in my stomach, so within weeks, I flew down to Los Angeles to meet with the director of Free the Slaves and offer them my help. Thus began my journey into modern day slavery. Oddly, I had been to many of these places before. Some I even considered like my second home. But this time, I would see the skeletons hidden in the closet. A conservative estimate tells us there are more than 27 million people enslaved in the world today. That's double the amount of people taken from Africa during the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade. A hundred and fifty years ago, an agricultural slave cost about three times the annual salary of an American worker. That equates to about $50,000 in today's money. Yet today, entire families can be enslaved for generations over a debt as small as $18. Astonishingly, slavery generates profits of more than $13 billion worldwide each year. Many have been tricked by false promises of a good education, a better job, only to find that they're forced to work without pay under the threat of violence, and they cannot walk away. Today's slavery is about commerce, so the goods that enslaved people produce have value, but the people producing them are disposable. Slavery exists everywhere, nearly, in the world, and yet it is illegal everywhere in the world. In India and Nepal, I was introduced to the brick kilns. This strange and awesome sight was like walking into ancient Egypt or Dante's Inferno. Enveloped in temperatures of 130 degrees, men, women, children, entire families in fact, were cloaked in a heavy blanket of dust, while mechanically stacking bricks on their head, up to 18 at a time, and carrying them from the scorching kilns to trucks hundreds of yards away. Deadened by monotony and exhaustion, they work silently, doing this task over and over for 16 or 17 hours a day. There were no breaks for food, no water breaks, and the severe dehydration made urinating pretty much inconsequential. So pervasive was the heat and the dust that my camera became too hot to even touch and ceased working. Every 20 minutes, I'd have to run back to our cruiser to clean out my gear and run it under an air conditioner to revive it, and as I sat there, I thought, my camera is getting far better treatment than these people. Back in the kilns, I wanted to cry, but the abolitionist next to me quickly grabbed me and he said, "Lisa, don't do that. Just don't do that here." And he very clearly explained to me that emotional displays are very dangerous in a place like this, not just for me, but for them. I couldn't offer them any direct help. I couldn't give them money, nothing. I wasn't a citizen of that country. I could get them in a worse situation than they were already in. I'd have to rely on Free the Slaves to work within the system for their liberation, and I trusted that they would. As for me, I'd have to wait until I got home to really feel my heartbreak. In the Himalayas, I found children carrying stone for miles down mountainous terrain to trucks waiting at roads below. The big sheets of slate were heavier than the children carrying them, and the kids hoisted them from their heads using these handmade harnesses of sticks and rope and torn cloth. It's difficult to witness something so overwhelming. How can we affect something so insidious, yet so pervasive? Some don't even know they're enslaved, people working 16, 17 hours a day without any pay, because this has been the case all their lives. They have nothing to compare it to. When these villagers claimed their freedom, the slaveholders burned down all of their houses. I mean, these people had nothing, and they were so petrified, they wanted to give up, but the woman in the center rallied for them to persevere, and abolitionists on the ground helped them get a quarry lease of their own, so that now they do the same back-breaking work, but they do it for themselves, and they get paid for it, and they do it in freedom. Sex trafficking is what we often think of when we hear the word slavery, and because of this worldwide awareness, I was warned that it would be difficult for me to work safely within this particular industry. In Kathmandu, I was escorted by women who had previously been sex slaves themselves. They ushered me down a narrow set of stairs that led to this dirty, dimly fluorescent lit basement. This wasn't a brothel, per se. It was more like a restaurant. Cabin restaurants, as they're known in the trade, are venues for forced prostitution. Each has small, private rooms, where the slaves, women, along with young girls and boys, some as young as seven years old, are forced to entertain the clients, encouraging them to buy more food and alcohol. Each cubicle is dark and dingy, identified with a painted number on the wall, and partitioned by plywood and a curtain. The workers here often endure tragic sexual abuse at the hands of their customers. Standing in the near darkness, I remember feeling this quick, hot fear, and in that instant, I could only imagine what it must be like to be trapped in that hell. I had only one way out: the stairs from where I'd come in. There were no back doors. There were no windows large enough to climb through. These people have no escape at all, and as we take in such a difficult subject, it's important to note that slavery, including sex trafficking, occurs in our own backyard as well. Tens of hundreds of people are enslaved in agriculture, in restaurants, in domestic servitude, and the list can go on. Recently, the New York Times reported that between 100,000 and 300,000 American children are sold into sex slavery every year. It's all around us. We just don't see it. The textile industry is another one we often think of when we hear about slave labor. I visited villages in India where entire families were enslaved in the silk trade. This is a family portrait. The dyed black hands are the father, while the blue and red hands are his sons. They mix dye in these big barrels, and they submerge the silk into the liquid up to their elbows, but the dye is toxic. My interpreter told me their stories. "We have no freedom," they said. "We hope still, though, that we could leave this house someday and go someplace else where we actually get paid for our dyeing." It's estimated that more than 4,000 children are enslaved on Lake Volta, the largest man-made lake in the world. When we first arrived, I went to have a quick look. I saw what seemed to be a family fishing on a boat, two older brothers, some younger kids, makes sense right? Wrong. They were all enslaved. Children are taken from their families and trafficked and vanished, and they're forced to work endless hours on these boats on the lake, even though they do not know how to swim. This young child is eight years old. He was trembling when our boat approached, frightened it would run over his tiny canoe. He was petrified he would be knocked in the water. The skeletal tree limbs submerged in Lake Volta often catch the fishing nets, and weary, frightened children are thrown into the water to untether the lines. Many of them drown. For as long as he can recall, he's been forced to work on the lake. Terrified of his master, he will not run away, and since he's been treated with cruelty all his life, he passes that down to the younger slaves that he manages. I met these boys at five in the morning, when they were hauling in the last of their nets, but they had been working since 1 a.m. in the cold, windy night. And it's important to note that these nets weigh more than a thousand pounds when they're full of fish. I want to introduce you to Kofi. Kofi was rescued from a fishing village. I met him at a shelter where Free the Slaves rehabilitates victims of slavery. Here he's seen taking a bath at the well, pouring big buckets of water over his head, and the wonderful news is, as you and I are sitting here talking today, Kofi has been reunited with his family, and what's even better, his family has been given tools to make a living and to keep their children safe. Kofi is the embodiment of possibility. Who will he become because someone took a stand and made a difference in his life? Driving down a road in Ghana with partners of Free the Slaves, a fellow abolitionist on a moped suddenly sped up to our cruiser and tapped on the window. He told us to follow him down a dirt road into the jungle. At the end of the road, he urged us out of the car, and told the driver to quickly leave. Then he pointed toward this barely visible footpath, and said, "This is the path, this is the path. Go." As we started down the path, we pushed aside the vines blocking the way, and after about an hour of walking in, found that the trail had become flooded by recent rains, so I hoisted the photo gear above my head as we descended into these waters up to my chest. After another two hours of hiking, the winding trail abruptly ended at a clearing, and before us was a mass of holes that could fit into the size of a football field, and all of them were full of enslaved people laboring. Many women had children strapped to their backs while they were panning for gold, wading in water poisoned by mercury. Mercury is used in the extraction process. These miners are enslaved in a mine shaft in another part of Ghana. When they came out of the shaft, they were soaking wet from their own sweat. I remember looking into their tired, bloodshot eyes, for many of them had been underground for 72 hours. The shafts are up to 300 feet deep, and they carry out heavy bags of stone that later will be transported to another area, where the stone will be pounded so that they can extract the gold. At first glance, the pounding site seems full of powerful men, but when we look closer, we see some less fortunate working on the fringes, and children too. All of them are victim to injury, illness and violence. In fact, it's very likely that this muscular person will end up like this one here, racked with tuberculosis and mercury poisoning in just a few years. This is Manuru. When his father died, his uncle trafficked him to work with him in the mines. When his uncle died, Manuru inherited his uncle's debt, which further forced him into being enslaved in the mines. When I met him, he had been working in the mines for 14 years, and the leg injury that you see here is actually from a mining accident, one so severe doctors say his leg should be amputated. On top of that, Manuru has tuberculosis, yet he's still forced to work day in and day out in that mine shaft. Even still, he has a dream that he will become free and become educated with the help of local activists like Free the Slaves, and it's this sort of determination, in the face of unimaginable odds, that fills me with complete awe. I want to shine a light on slavery. When I was working in the field, I brought lots of candles with me, and with the help of my interpreter, I imparted to the people I was photographing that I wanted to illuminate their stories and their plight, so when it was safe for them, and safe for me, I made these images. They knew their image would be seen by you out in the world. I wanted them to know that we will be bearing witness to them, and that we will do whatever we can to help make a difference in their lives. I truly believe, if we can see one another as fellow human beings, then it becomes very difficult to tolerate atrocities like slavery. These images are not of issues. They are of people, real people, like you and me, all deserving of the same rights, dignity and respect in their lives. There is not a day that goes by that I don't think of these many beautiful, mistreated people I've had the tremendous honor of meeting. I hope that these images awaken a force in those who view them, people like you, and I hope that force will ignite a fire, and that fire will shine a light on slavery, for without that light, the beast of bondage can continue to live in the shadows. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
What's a snollygoster? A short lesson in political speak | {0: 'Mark Forsyth strolls through the English language, telling stories, making connections and banishing hobgoblins.'} | TEDxHousesOfParliament | One of my favorite words in the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary is "snollygoster," just because it sounds so good. And what snollygoster means is "a dishonest politician." Although there was a 19th-century newspaper editor who defined it rather better when he said, "A snollygoster is a fellow who seeks office regardless of party, platform or principle, and who, when he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy." (Laughter) Now, I have no idea what "talknophical" is. Something to do with words, I assume. But it's very important that words are at the center of politics, and all politicians know they have to try and control language. It wasn't until, for example, 1771 that the British Parliament allowed newspapers to report the exact words that were said in the debating chamber. And this was actually all down to the bravery of a guy with the extraordinary name of Brass Crosby, who took on Parliament. And he was thrown into the Tower of London and imprisoned, but he was brave enough, he was brave enough to take them on, and in the end, he had such popular support in London that he won. And it was only a few years later that we have the first recorded use of the phrase "as bold as brass." Most people think that's down to the metal. It's not; it's down to a campaigner for the freedom of the press. But to really show you how words and politics interact, I want to take you back to the United States of America, just after they'd achieved independence. And they had to face the question of what to call George Washington, their leader. They didn't know. What do you call the leader of a republican country? And this was debated in Congress for ages and ages. And there were all sorts of suggestions on the table, which might have made it. I mean, some people wanted him to be called "Chief Magistrate Washington," and other people, "His Highness, George Washington," and other people, "Protector of the Liberties of the People of the United States of America Washington." Not that catchy. Some people just wanted to call him king — it was tried and tested. They weren't even being monarchical, they had the idea that you could be elected king for a fixed term. And, you know, it could have worked. And everybody got insanely bored, because this debate went on for three weeks. I read a diary of this poor senator who just keeps coming back, "Still on this subject." And the reason for the delay and the boredom was that the House of Representatives were against the Senate. The House of Representatives didn't want Washington to get drunk on power. They didn't want to call him "king," in case that gave him ideas, or his successor ideas. So they wanted to give him the humblest, meagerest, most pathetic title that they could think of. And that title ... was "President." (Laughter) "President." They didn't invent the title. I mean, it existed before, but it just meant somebody who presides over a meeting. It was like the foreman of the jury. And it didn't have much more grandeur than the term "foreman" or "overseer." There were occasional presidents of little colonial councils and bits of government, but it was really a nothing title. And that's why the Senate objected to it. They said, "That's ridiculous! You can't call him 'President.' This guy has to go and sign treaties and meet foreign dignitaries. Who's going to take him seriously if he's got a silly little title like 'President of the United States of America'?" (Laughter) And after three weeks of debate, in the end, the Senate did not cave in. Instead, they agreed to use the title "President" for now. But they also wanted it absolutely set down that they didn't agree with it, from a decent respect for the opinions and practice of civilized nations, whether under republican or monarchical forms of government, whose custom it is to annex, through the office of the Chief Magistrate, titles of respectability — not bloody "President." And that, in the intercourse with foreign nations, the majesty of the people of the United States may not be hazarded by an appearance of singularity — i.e., we don't want to look like bloody weirdos. Now, you can learn three interesting things from this. First of all — and this is my favorite — is that, so far as I've ever been able to find out, the Senate has never formally endorsed the title of President. Barack Obama, President Obama, is there on borrowed time, just waiting for the Senate to spring into action. (Laughter) The second thing you can learn is that, when a government says that this is a temporary measure — (Laughter) you can still be waiting 223 years later. But the third thing you can learn — and this is the really important one, the point I want to leave you on — is that the title, "President of the United States of America," doesn't sound that humble at all these days, does it? Something to do with the slightly over 5,000 nuclear warheads he has at his disposal and the largest economy in the world and a fleet of drones and all that sort of stuff. Reality and history have endowed that title with grandeur. And so the Senate won in the end. They got their title of respectability. And also, the Senate's other worry, the appearance of singularity — well, it was a singularity back then. But now, do you know how many nations have a president? A hundred and forty-seven. All because they want to sound like the guy who's got the 5,000 nuclear warheads, etc. And so, in the end, the Senate won and the House of Representatives lost ... because nobody's going to feel that humble when they're told that they are now the President of the United States of America. And that's the important lesson I think you can take away, and the one I want to leave you with. Politicians try to pick and use words to shape and control reality, but in fact, reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality. Thank you very much. |
Can democracy exist without trust? | {0: 'From his home base in Bulgaria, Ivan Krastev thinks about democracy -- and how to reframe it.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I'm afraid I'm one of those speakers you hope you're not going to meet at TED. First, I don't have a mobile, so I'm on the safe side. Secondly, a political theorist who's going to talk about the crisis of democracy is probably not the most exciting topic you can think about. And plus, I'm not going to give you any answers. I'm much more trying to add to some of the questions we're talking about. And one of the things that I want to question is this very popular hope these days that transparency and openness can restore the trust in democratic institutions. There is one more reason for you to be suspicious about me. You people, the Church of TED, are a very optimistic community. (Laughter) Basically you believe in complexity, but not in ambiguity. As you have been told, I'm Bulgarian. And according to the surveys, we are marked the most pessimistic people in the world. (Laughter) The Economist magazine recently wrote an article covering one of the recent studies on happiness, and the title was "The Happy, the Unhappy and the Bulgarians." (Laughter) So now when you know what to expect, let's give you the story. And this is a rainy election day in a small country — that can be my country, but could be also your country. And because of the rain until four o'clock in the afternoon, nobody went to the polling stations. But then the rain stopped, people went to vote. And when the votes had been counted, three-fourths of the people have voted with a blank ballot. The government and the opposition, they have been simply paralyzed. Because you know what to do about the protests. You know who to arrest, who to negotiate with. But what to do about people who are voting with a blank ballot? So the government decided to have the elections once again. And this time even a greater number, 83 percent of the people, voted with blank ballots. Basically they went to the ballot boxes to tell that they have nobody to vote for. This is the opening of a beautiful novel by Jose Saramago called "Seeing." But in my view it very well captures part of the problem that we have with democracy in Europe these days. On one level nobody's questioning that democracy is the best form of government. Democracy is the only game in town. The problem is that many people start to believe that it is not a game worth playing. For the last 30 years, political scientists have observed that there is a constant decline in electoral turnout, and the people who are least interested to vote are the people whom you expect are going to gain most out of voting. I mean the unemployed, the under-privileged. And this is a major issue. Because especially now with the economic crisis, you can see that the trust in politics, that the trust in democratic institutions, was really destroyed. According to the latest survey being done by the European Commission, 89 percent of the citizens of Europe believe that there is a growing gap between the opinion of the policy-makers and the opinion of the public. Only 18 percent of Italians and 15 percent of Greeks believe that their vote matters. Basically people start to understand that they can change governments, but they cannot change policies. And the question which I want to ask is the following: How did it happen that we are living in societies which are much freer than ever before — we have more rights, we can travel easier, we have access to more information — at the same time that trust in our democratic institutions basically has collapsed? So basically I want to ask: What went right and what went wrong in these 50 years when we talk about democracy? And I'll start with what went right. And the first thing that went right was, of course, these five revolutions which, in my view, very much changed the way we're living and deepened our democratic experience. And the first was the cultural and social revolution of 1968 and 1970s, which put the individual at the center of politics. It was the human rights moment. Basically this was also a major outbreak, a culture of dissent, a culture of basically non-conformism, which was not known before. So I do believe that even things like that are very much the children of '68 — nevertheless that most of us had been even not born then. But after that you have the market revolution of the 1980s. And nevertheless that many people on the left try to hate it, the truth is that it was very much the market revolution that sent the message: "The government does not know better." And you have more choice-driven societies. And of course, you have 1989 — the end of Communism, the end of the Cold War. And it was the birth of the global world. And you have the Internet. And this is not the audience to which I'm going to preach to what extent the Internet empowered people. It has changed the way we are communicating and basically we are viewing politics. The very idea of political community totally has changed. And I'm going to name one more revolution, and this is the revolution in brain sciences, which totally changed the way we understand how people are making decisions. So this is what went right. But if we're going to see what went wrong, we're going to end up with the same five revolutions. Because first you have the 1960s and 1970s, cultural and social revolution, which in a certain way destroyed the idea of a collective purpose. The very idea, all these collective nouns that we have been taught about — nation, class, family. We start to like divorcing, if we're married at all. All this was very much under attack. And it is so difficult to engage people in politics when they believe that what really matters is where they personally stand. And you have the market revolution of the 1980s and the huge increase of inequality in societies. Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality. And I find this very much disturbing when we're talking about what's going on right and wrong with democracy these days. And if you go to 1989 — something that basically you don't expect that anybody's going to criticize — but many are going to tell you, "Listen, it was the end of the Cold War that tore the social contract between the elites and the people in Western Europe." When the Soviet Union was still there, the rich and the powerful, they needed the people, because they feared them. Now the elites basically have been liberated. They're very mobile. You cannot tax them. And basically they don't fear the people. So as a result of it, you have this very strange situation in which the elites basically got out of the control of the voters. So this is not by accident that the voters are not interested to vote anymore. And when we talk about the Internet, yes, it's true, the Internet connected all of us, but we also know that the Internet created these echo chambers and political ghettos in which for all your life you can stay with the political community you belong to. And it's becoming more and more difficult to understand the people who are not like you. I know that many people here have been splendidly speaking about the digital world and the possibility for cooperation, but [have you] seen what the digital world has done to American politics these days? This is also partly a result of the Internet revolution. This is the other side of the things that we like. And when you go to the brain sciences, what political consultants learned from the brain scientists is don't talk to me about ideas anymore, don't talk to me about policy programs. What really matters is basically to manipulate the emotions of the people. And you have this very strongly to the extent that, even if you see when we talk about revolutions these days, these revolutions are not named anymore around ideologies or ideas. Before, revolutions used to have ideological names. They could be communist, they could be liberal, they could be fascist or Islamic. Now the revolutions are called under the medium which is most used. You have Facebook revolutions, Twitter revolutions. The content doesn't matter anymore, the problem is the media. I'm saying this because one of my major points is what went right is also what went wrong. And when we're now trying to see how we can change the situation, when basically we're trying to see what can be done about democracy, we should keep this ambiguity in mind. Because probably some of the things that we love most are going to be also the things that can hurt us most. These days it's very popular to believe that this push for transparency, this kind of a combination between active citizens, new technologies and much more transparency-friendly legislation can restore trust in politics. You believe that when you have these new technologies and people who are ready to use this, it can make it much more difficult for the governments to lie, it's going to be more difficult for them to steal and probably even going to be more difficult for them to kill. This is probably true. But I do believe that we should be also very clear that now when we put the transparency at the center of politics where the message is, "It's transparency, stupid." Transparency is not about restoring trust in institutions. Transparency is politics' management of mistrust. We are assuming that our societies are going to be based on mistrust. And by the way, mistrust was always very important for democracy. This is why you have checks and balances. This is why basically you have all this creative mistrust between the representatives and those whom they represent. But when politics is only management of mistrust, then — I'm very glad that "1984" has been mentioned — now we're going to have "1984" in reverse. It's not going to be the Big Brother watching you, it's going to be we being the Big Brother watching the political class. But is this the idea of a free society? For example, can you imagine that decent, civic, talented people are going to run for office if they really do believe that politics is also about managing mistrust? Are you not afraid with all these technologies that are going to track down any statement the politicians are going to make on certain issues, are you not afraid that this is going to be a very strong signal to politicians to repeat their positions, even the very wrong positions, because consistency is going to be more important than common sense? And the Americans who are in the room, are you not afraid that your presidents are going to govern on the basis of what they said in the primary elections? I find this extremely important, because democracy is about people changing their views based on rational arguments and discussions. And we can lose this with the very noble idea to keep people accountable for showing the people that we're not going to tolerate politicians the opportunism in politics. So for me this is extremely important. And I do believe that when we're discussing politics these days, probably it makes sense to look also at this type of a story. But also don't forget, any unveiling is also veiling. [Regardless of] how transparent our governments want to be, they're going to be selectively transparent. In a small country that could be my country, but could be also your country, they took a decision — it is a real case story — that all of the governmental decisions, discussions of the council of ministers, were going to be published on the Internet 24 hours after the council discussions took place. And the public was extremely all for it. So I had the opportunity to talk to the prime minister, why he made this decision. He said, "Listen, this is the best way to keep the mouths of my ministers closed. Because it's going to be very difficult for them to dissent knowing that 24 hours after this is going to be on the public space, and this is in a certain way going to be a political crisis." So when we talk about transparency, when we talk about openness, I really do believe that what we should keep in mind is that what went right is what went wrong. And this is Goethe, who is neither Bulgarian nor a political scientist, some centuries ago he said, "There is a big shadow where there is much light." Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How to step up in the face of disaster | {0: "When a freak tornado hit her Massachusetts hometown, Caitria O’Neill wasn't an expert in disaster relief recovery. But she learned quickly and is now passing her knowledge on through the website Recovers.org.", 1: "Pursuing her PhD in atmospheric science did not prepare Morgan O'Neill for a freak tornado hitting her hometown. With her sister, she helped coordinate a local relief effort and is teaching other towns to do the same through the website Recovers.org."} | TEDxBoston 2012 | (Video) Newscaster: There's a large path of destruction here in town. ... pulling trees from the ground, shattering windows, taking the roofs off of homes ... Caitria O'Neill: That was me in front of our house in Monson, Massachusetts last June. After an EF3 tornado ripped straight through our town and took parts of our roof off, I decided to stay in Massachusetts, instead of pursuing the master's program I had moved my boxes home that afternoon for. Morgan O'Neill: So, on June 1, we weren't disaster experts, but on June 3, we started faking it. This experience changed our lives, and now we're trying to change the experience. CO: So, tornadoes don't happen in Massachusetts, and I was cleverly standing in the front yard when one came over the hill. After a lamppost flew by, my family and I sprinted into the basement. Trees were thrown against the house, the windows exploded. When we finally got out the back door, transformers were burning in the street. MO: I was here in Boston. I'm a PhD student at MIT, and I happen to study atmospheric science. Actually, it gets weirder — I was in the museum of science at the time the tornado hit, playing with the tornado display — (Laughter) so I missed her call. I get a call from Caitria, hear the news, and start tracking the radar online to call the family back when another supercell was forming in their area. I drove home late that night with batteries and ice. We live across the street from a historic church that had lost its very iconic steeple in the storm. It had become a community gathering place overnight. The town hall and the police department had also suffered direct hits, and so people wanting to help or needing information went to the church. CO: We walked to the church because we heard they had hot meals, but when we arrived, we found problems. There were a couple large, sweaty men with chainsaws standing in the center of the church, but nobody knew where to send them because no one knew the extent of the damage yet. As we watched, they became frustrated and left to go find somebody to help on their own. MO: So we started organizing. Why? It had to be done. We found Pastor Bob and offered to give the response some infrastructure. And then, armed with just two laptops and one air card, we built a recovery machine. (Applause) CO: That was a tornado, and everyone's heading to the church to drop things off and volunteer. MO: Everyone's donating clothing. We should inventory the donations piling up here. CO: And we need a hotline. Can you make a Google Voice number? MO: Sure. And we need to tell people what not to bring. I'll make a Facebook account. Can you print flyers? CO: Yeah, but we don't even know what houses are accepting help. We need to canvas and send out volunteers. MO: We need to tell people what not to bring. Hey, there's a news truck. I'll tell them. CO: You got my number off the news? We don't need more freezers! (Together) MO: Insurance won't cover it? CO: Juice boxes coming in an hour? Together: Someone get me Post-its! (Laughter) CO: And then the rest of the community figured out that we had answers. MO: I can donate three water heaters, but someone needs to come pick them up. CO: My car is in my living room! MO: My boyscout troop would like to rebuild 12 mailboxes. CO: My puppy is missing and insurance doesn't cover chimneys. MO: My church group of 50 would like housing and meals for a week while we repair properties. CO: You sent me to that place on Washington Street yesterday, and now I'm covered in poison ivy. (Laughter) So this is what filled our days. We had to learn how to answer questions quickly and to solve problems in a minute or less; otherwise, something more urgent would come up, and it wouldn't get done. MO: We didn't get our authority from the board of selectmen or the emergency management director or the United Way. We just started answering questions and making decisions because someone — anyone — had to. And why not me? I'm a campaign organizer. I'm good at Facebook. And there's two of me. (Laughter) CO: The point is, if there's a flood or a fire or a hurricane, you, or somebody like you, are going to step up and start organizing things. The other point is that it is hard. MO: Lying on the ground after another 17-hour day, Caitria and I would empty our pockets and try to place dozens of scraps of paper into context — all bits of information that had to be remembered and matched in order to help someone. After another day and a shower at the shelter, we realized it shouldn't be this hard. CO: In a country like ours where we breathe Wi-Fi, leveraging technology for a faster recovery should be a no-brainer. Systems like the ones that we were creating on the fly could exist ahead of time. And if some community member is in this organizing position in every area after every disaster, these tools should exist. MO: So, we decided to build them: a recovery in a box, something that could be deployed after every disaster by any local organizer. CO: I decided to stay in the country, give up the master's in Moscow and to work full-time to make this happen. In the course of the past year, we've become experts in the field of community-powered disaster recovery. And there are three main problems that we've observed with the way things work currently. MO: The tools. Large aid organizations are exceptional at bringing massive resources to bear after a disaster, but they often fulfill very specific missions, and then they leave. This leaves local residents to deal with the thousands of spontaneous volunteers, thousands of donations, and all with no training and no tools. So they use Post-its or Excel or Facebook. But none of these tools allow you to value high-priority information amidst all of the photos and well-wishes. CO: The timing. Disaster relief is essentially a backwards political campaign. In a political campaign, you start with no interest and no capacity to turn that into action. You build both gradually, until a moment of peak mobilization at the time of the election. In a disaster, however, you start with all of the interest and none of the capacity. And you've only got about seven days to capture 50 percent of all of the Web searches that will ever be made to help your area. Then some sporting event happens, and you've got only the resources that you've collected thus far to meet the next five years of recovery needs. This is the slide for Katrina. This is the curve for Joplin. And this is the curve for the Dallas tornadoes in April, where we deployed software. There's a gap here. Affected households have to wait for the insurance adjuster to visit before they can start accepting help on their properties. And you've only got about four days of interest in Dallas. MO: Data. Data is inherently unsexy, but it can jump-start an area's recovery. FEMA and the state will pay 85 percent of the cost of a federally-declared disaster, leaving the town to pay the last 15 percent of the bill. Now that expense can be huge, but if the town can mobilize X amount of volunteers for Y hours, the dollar value of that labor used goes toward the town's contribution. But who knows that? Now try to imagine the sinking feeling you get when you've just sent out 2,000 volunteers and you can't prove it. CO: These are three problems with a common solution. If we can get the right tools at the right time to the people who will inevitably step up and start putting their communities back together, we can create new standards in disaster recovery. MO: We needed canvasing tools, donations databasing, needs reporting, remote volunteer access, all in an easy-to-use website. CO: And we needed help. Alvin, our software engineer and co-founder, has built these tools. Chris and Bill have volunteered their time to use operations and partnerships. And we've been flying into disaster areas since this past January, setting up software, training residents and licensing the software to areas that are preparing for disasters. MO: One of our first launches was after the Dallas tornadoes this past April. We flew into a town that had a static, outdated website and a frenetic Facebook feed, trying to structure the response, and we launched our platform. All of the interest came in the first four days, but by the time they lost the news cycle, that's when the needs came in, yet they had this massive resource of what people were able to give and they've been able to meet the needs of their residents. CO: So it's working, but it could be better. Emergency preparedness is a big deal in disaster recovery because it makes towns safer and more resilient. Imagine if we could have these systems ready to go in a place before a disaster. So that's what we're working on. We're working on getting the software to places so people expect it, so people know how to use it and so it can be filled ahead of time with that micro-information that drives recovery. MO: It's not rocket science. These tools are obvious and people want them. In our hometown, we trained a half-dozen residents to run these Web tools on their own, because Caitria and I live here, in Boston. They took to it immediately, and now they are forces of nature. There are over three volunteer groups working almost every day, and have been since June 1 of last year, to make sure these residents get what they need and get back in their homes. They have hotlines and spreadsheets and data. CO: And that makes a difference. June 1 this year marked the one-year anniversary of the Monson tornado, and our community's never been more connected or more empowered. We've been able to see the same transformation in Texas and in Alabama. Because it doesn't take Harvard or MIT to fly in and fix problems after a disaster; it takes a local. No matter how good an aid organization is at what they do, they eventually have to go home. But if you give locals the tools, if you show them what they can do to recover, they become experts. (Applause) MO: All right. Let's go. (Applause) |
Strange answers to the psychopath test | {0: 'Jon Ronson is a writer and documentary filmmaker who dips into every flavor of madness, extremism and obsession.'} | TED2012 | The story starts: I was at a friend's house, and she had on her shelf a copy of the DSM manual, which is the manual of mental disorders. It lists every known mental disorder. And it used to be, back in the '50s, a very slim pamphlet. And then it got bigger and bigger and bigger, and now it's 886 pages long. And it lists currently 374 mental disorders. So I was leafing through it, wondering if I had any mental disorders, and it turns out I've got 12. (Laughter) I've got generalized anxiety disorder, which is a given. I've got nightmare disorder, which is categorized if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued or declared a failure, and all my dreams involve people chasing me down the street going, "You're a failure!" (Laughter) I've got parent-child relational problems, which I blame my parents for. (Laughter) I'm kidding. I'm not kidding. I'm kidding. And I've got malingering. And I think it's actually quite rare to have both malingering and generalized anxiety disorder, because malingering tends to make me feel very anxious. Anyway, I was looking through this book, wondering if I was much crazier than I thought I was, or maybe it's not a good idea to diagnose yourself with a mental disorder if you're not a trained professional, or maybe the psychiatry profession has a kind of strange desire to label what's essentially normal human behavior as a mental disorder. I didn't know which of these was true, but I thought it was kind of interesting, and I thought maybe I should meet a critic of psychiatry to get their view, which is how I ended up having lunch with the Scientologists. (Laughter) It was a man called Brian, who runs a crack team of Scientologists who are determined to destroy psychiatry wherever it lies. They're called the CCHR. And I said to him, "Can you prove to me that psychiatry is a pseudo-science that can't be trusted?" And he said, "Yes, we can prove it to you." And I said, "How?" And he said, "We're going to introduce you to Tony." And I said, "Who's Tony?" And he said, "Tony's in Broadmoor." Now, Broadmoor is Broadmoor Hospital. It used to be known as the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. It's where they send the serial killers, and the people who can't help themselves. And I said to Brian, "Well, what did Tony do?" And he said, "Hardly anything. He beat someone up or something, and he decided to fake madness to get out of a prison sentence. But he faked it too well, and now he's stuck in Broadmoor and nobody will believe he's sane. Do you want us to try and get you into Broadmoor to meet Tony?" So I said, "Yes, please." So I got the train to Broadmoor. I began to yawn uncontrollably around Kempton Park, which apparently is what dogs also do when anxious, they yawn uncontrollably. And we got to Broadmoor. And I got taken through gate after gate after gate after gate into the wellness center, which is where you get to meet the patients. It looks like a giant Hampton Inn. It's all peach and pine and calming colors. And the only bold colors are the reds of the panic buttons. And the patients started drifting in. And they were quite overweight and wearing sweatpants, and quite docile-looking. And Brian the Scientologist whispered to me, "They're medicated," which, to the Scientologists, is like the worst evil in the world, but I'm thinking it's probably a good idea. (Laughter) And then Brian said, "Here's Tony." And a man was walking in. And he wasn't overweight, he was in very good physical shape. And he wasn't wearing sweatpants, he was wearing a pinstripe suit. And he had his arm outstretched like someone out of The Apprentice. He looked like a man who wanted to wear an outfit that would convince me that he was very sane. And he sat down. And I said, "So is it true that you faked your way in here?" And he said, "Yep. Yep. Absolutely. I beat someone up when I was 17. And I was in prison awaiting trial, and my cellmate said to me, 'You know what you have to do? Fake madness. Tell them you're mad, you'll get sent to some cushy hospital. Nurses will bring you pizzas, you'll have your own PlayStation.'" I said, "Well, how did you do it?" He said, "Well, I asked to see the prison psychiatrist. And I'd just seen a film called 'Crash,' in which people get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls. So I said to the psychiatrist, 'I get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls.'" And I said, "What else?" He said, "Oh, yeah. I told the psychiatrist that I wanted to watch women as they died, because it would make me feel more normal." I said, "Where'd you get that from?" He said, "Oh, from a biography of Ted Bundy that they had at the prison library." Anyway, he faked madness too well, he said. And they didn't send him to some cushy hospital. They sent him to Broadmoor. And the minute he got there, said he took one look at the place, asked to see the psychiatrist, said, "There's been a terrible misunderstanding. I'm not mentally ill." I said, "How long have you been here for?" He said, "Well, if I'd just done my time in prison for the original crime, I'd have got five years. I've been in Broadmoor for 12 years." Tony said that it's a lot harder to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy. He said, "I thought the best way to seem normal would be to talk to people normally about normal things like football or what's on TV. I subscribe to New Scientist, and recently they had an article about how the U.S. Army was training bumblebees to sniff out explosives. So I said to a nurse, 'Did you know that the U.S. Army is training bumblebees to sniff out explosives?' When I read my medical notes, I saw they'd written: 'Believes bees can sniff out explosives.'" (Laughter) He said, "You know, they're always looking out for nonverbal clues to my mental state. But how do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way? It's just impossible." When Tony said that to me, I thought to myself, "Am I sitting like a journalist? Am I crossing my legs like a journalist?" He said, "You know, I've got the Stockwell Strangler on one side of me, and I've got the 'Tiptoe Through the Tulips' rapist on the other side of me. So I tend to stay in my room a lot because I find them quite frightening. And they take that as a sign of madness. They say it proves that I'm aloof and grandiose." So, only in Broadmoor would not wanting to hang out with serial killers be a sign of madness. Anyway, he seemed completely normal to me, but what did I know? And when I got home I emailed his clinician, Anthony Maden. I said, "What's the story?" And he said, "Yep. We accept that Tony faked madness to get out of a prison sentence, because his hallucinations — that had seemed quite cliche to begin with — just vanished the minute he got to Broadmoor. However, we have assessed him, and we've determined that what he is is a psychopath." And in fact, faking madness is exactly the kind of cunning and manipulative act of a psychopath. It's on the checklist: cunning, manipulative. So, faking your brain going wrong is evidence that your brain has gone wrong. And I spoke to other experts, and they said the pinstripe suit — classic psychopath — speaks to items one and two on the checklist: glibness, superficial charm and grandiose sense of self-worth. And I said, "Well, but why didn't he hang out with the other patients?" Classic psychopath — it speaks to grandiosity and also lack of empathy. So all the things that had seemed most normal about Tony was evidence, according to his clinician, that he was mad in this new way. He was a psychopath. And his clinician said to me, "If you want to know more about psychopaths, you can go on a psychopath-spotting course run by Robert Hare, who invented the psychopath checklist." So I did. I went on a psychopath-spotting course, and I am now a certified — and I have to say, extremely adept — psychopath spotter. So, here's the statistics: One in a hundred regular people is a psychopath. So there's 1,500 people in his room. Fifteen of you are psychopaths. Although that figure rises to four percent of CEOs and business leaders, so I think there's a very good chance there's about 30 or 40 psychopaths in this room. It could be carnage by the end of the night. (Laughter) Hare said the reason why is because capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior — the lack of empathy, the glibness, cunning, manipulative. In fact, capitalism, perhaps at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy. It's like a form of psychopathy that's come down to affect us all. Hare said, "You know what? Forget about some guy at Broadmoor who may or may not have faked madness. Who cares? That's not a big story. The big story," he said, "is corporate psychopathy. You want to go and interview yourself some corporate psychopaths." So I gave it a try. I wrote to the Enron people. I said, "Could I come and interview you in prison, to find out it you're psychopaths?" (Laughter) And they didn't reply. (Laughter) So I changed tack. I emailed "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap, the asset stripper from the 1990s. He would come into failing businesses and close down 30 percent of the workforce, just turn American towns into ghost towns. And I emailed him and I said, "I believe you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you ... special, and interested in the predatory spirit, and fearless. Can I come and interview you about your special brain anomaly?" And he said, "Come on over!" (Laughter) So I went to Al Dunlap's grand Florida mansion. It was filled with sculptures of predatory animals. There were lions and tigers — he was taking me through the garden — there were falcons and eagles, he was saying, "Over there you've got sharks and —" he was saying this in a less effeminate way — "You've got more sharks and you've got tigers." It was like Narnia. (Laughter) And then we went into his kitchen. Now, Al Dunlap would be brought in to save failing companies, he'd close down 30 percent of the workforce. And he'd quite often fire people with a joke. Like, for instance, one famous story about him, somebody came up to him and said, "I've just bought myself a new car." And he said, "Well, you may have a new car, but I'll tell you what you don't have — a job." So in his kitchen — he was in there with his wife, Judy, and his bodyguard, Sean — and I said, "You know how I said in my email that you might have a special brain anomaly that makes you special?" He said, "Yeah, it's an amazing theory, it's like Star Trek. You're going where no man has gone before." And I said, "Well —" (Clears throat) (Laughter) Some psychologists might say that this makes you —" (Mumbles) (Laughter) And he said, "What?" And I said, "A psychopath." And I said, "I've got a list of psychopathic traits in my pocket. Can I go through them with you?" And he looked intrigued despite himself, and he said, "Okay, go on." And I said, "Okay. Grandiose sense of self-worth." Which I have to say, would have been hard for him to deny, because he was standing under a giant oil painting of himself. (Laughter) He said, "Well, you've got to believe in you!" And I said, "Manipulative." He said, "That's leadership." (Laughter) And I said, "Shallow affect, an inability to experience a range of emotions." He said, "Who wants to be weighed down by some nonsense emotions?" So he was going down the psychopath checklist, basically turning it into "Who Moved My Cheese?" (Laughter) But I did notice something happening to me the day I was with Al Dunlap. Whenever he said anything to me that was kind of normal — like he said "no" to juvenile delinquency, he said he got accepted into West Point, and they don't let delinquents in West Point. He said "no" to many short-term marital relationships. He's only ever been married twice. Admittedly, his first wife cited in her divorce papers that he once threatened her with a knife and said he always wondered what human flesh tasted like, but people say stupid things to each other in bad marriages in the heat of an argument, and his second marriage has lasted 41 years. So whenever he said anything to me that just seemed kind of non-psychopathic, I thought to myself, well I'm not going to put that in my book. And then I realized that becoming a psychopath spotter had kind of turned me a little bit psychopathic. Because I was desperate to shove him in a box marked "Psychopath." I was desperate to define him by his maddest edges. And I realized, my God — this is what I've been doing for 20 years. It's what all journalists do. We travel across the world with our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the gems. And the gems are always the outermost aspects of our interviewee's personality. And we stitch them together like medieval monks, and we leave the normal stuff on the floor. And you know, this is a country that over-diagnoses certain mental disorders hugely. Childhood bipolar — children as young as four are being labeled bipolar because they have temper tantrums, which scores them high on the bipolar checklist. When I got back to London, Tony phoned me. He said, "Why haven't you been returning my calls?" I said, "Well, they say that you're a psychopath." And he said, "I'm not a psychopath." He said, "You know what? One of the items on the checklist is lack of remorse, but another item on the checklist is cunning, manipulative. So when you say you feel remorse for your crime, they say, 'Typical of the psychopath to cunningly say he feels remorse when he doesn't.' It's like witchcraft, they turn everything upside-down." He said, "I've got a tribunal coming up. Will you come to it?" So I said okay. So I went to his tribunal. And after 14 years in Broadmoor, they let him go. They decided that he shouldn't be held indefinitely because he scores high on a checklist that might mean that he would have a greater than average chance of recidivism. So they let him go. And outside in the corridor he said to me, "You know what, Jon? Everyone's a bit psychopathic." He said, "You are, I am. Well, obviously I am." I said, "What are you going to do now?" He said, "I'm going to go to Belgium. There's a woman there that I fancy. But she's married, so I'm going to have to get her split up from her husband." (Laughter) Anyway, that was two years ago, and that's where my book ended. And for the last 20 months, everything was fine. Nothing bad happened. He was living with a girl outside London. He was, according to Brian the Scientologist, making up for lost time, which I know sounds ominous, but isn't necessarily ominous. Unfortunately, after 20 months, he did go back to jail for a month. He got into a "fracas" in a bar, he called it. Ended up going to jail for a month, which I know is bad, but at least a month implies that whatever the fracas was, it wasn't too bad. And then he phoned me. And you know what, I think it's right that Tony is out. Because you shouldn't define people by their maddest edges. And what Tony is, is he's a semi-psychopath. He's a gray area in a world that doesn't like gray areas. But the gray areas are where you find the complexity. It's where you find the humanity, and it's where you find the truth. And Tony said to me, "Jon, could I buy you a drink in a bar? I just want to thank you for everything you've done for me." And I didn't go. What would you have done? Thank you. (Applause) |
Design for people, not awards | {0: 'Timothy Prestero loves a flashy "concept car." But in his own work, he aims to design products for social impact, keeping users in mind.'} | TEDxBoston 2012 | I've got a great idea that's going to change the world. It's fantastic, it's going to blow your mind. It's my beautiful baby. Here's the thing: everybody loves a beautiful baby. I mean, I was a beautiful baby. Here's me and my dad a couple days after I was born. So in the world of product design, the beautiful baby's like the concept car. It's the knockout. You see it and you go, "Oh, my God. I'd buy that in a second!" So why is it that this year's new cars look pretty much exactly like last year's new cars? (Laughter) What went wrong between the design studio and the factory? Today, I don't want to talk about beautiful babies, I want to talk about the awkward adolescence of design — those sort of dorky teenage years where you're trying to figure out how the world works. I'm going to start with an example from some work that we did on newborn health. So here's a problem: four million babies around the world, mostly in developing countries, die every year before their first birthday, even before their first month of life. It turns out half of those kids, or about 1.8 million newborns around the world, would make it if you could just keep them warm for the first three days, maybe the first week. So this is a newborn intensive care unit in Kathmandu, Nepal. All of these kids in blankets belong in incubators — something like this. This is a donated Japanese Atom incubator that we found in a NICU in Kathmandu. This is what we want. Probably what happened is a hospital in Japan upgraded their equipment and donated their old stuff to Nepal. The problem is, without technicians, without spare parts, donations like this very quickly turn into junk. So this seemed like a problem that we could do something about. Keeping a baby warm for a week — that's not rocket science. So we got started. We partnered with a leading medical research institution here in Boston. We conducted months of user research overseas, trying to think like designers, human-centered design — "Let's figure out what people want." We killed thousands of Post-it notes. We made dozens of prototypes to get to this. So this is the NeoNurture infant incubator, and this has a lot of smarts built into it, and we felt great. So the idea here is, unlike the concept car, we want to marry something beautiful with something that actually works. And our idea is that this design would inspire manufacturers and other people of influence to take this model and run with it. Here's the bad news: the only baby ever actually put inside the NeoNurture incubator was this kid during a Time magazine photo shoot. So recognition is fantastic. We want design to get out for people to see it. It won lots of awards. But it felt like a booby prize. We wanted to make beautiful things that are going to make the world a better place, and I don't think this kid was even in it long enough to get warm. So it turns out that design for inspiration doesn't really ... I guess what I would say is, for us, for what I want to do, it's either too slow or it just doesn't work, it's ineffective. So, really, I want to design for outcomes. I don't want to make beautiful stuff; I want to make the world a better place. So when we were designing NeoNurture, we paid a lot of attention to the people who are going to use this thing, for example, poor families, rural doctors, overloaded nurses, even repair technicians. We thought we had all our bases covered, we'd done everything right. Well, it turns out there's this whole constellation of people who have to be involved in a product for it to be successful: manufacturing, financing, distribution, regulation. Michael Free at PATH says you have to figure out who will "choose, use and pay the dues" for a product like this. And I have to ask the question that VCs always ask: "Sir, what is your business, and who is your customer?" Who is our customer? Well, here's an example. This is a Bangladeshi hospital director outside his facility. It turns out he doesn't buy any of his equipment. Those decisions are made by the Ministry of Health or by foreign donors, and it just kind of shows up. Similarly, here's a multinational medical-device manufacturer. It turns out they've got to fish where the fish are. So it turns out that in emerging markets — where the fish are — are the emerging middle class of these countries — diseases of affluence: heart disease, infertility. So it turns out that design for outcomes in one aspect really means thinking about design for manufacture and distribution. OK, that was an important lesson. Second, we took that lesson and tried to push it into our next project. So we started by finding a manufacturer, an organization called MTTS in Vietnam, that manufactures newborn-care technologies for Southeast Asia. Our other partner is East Meets West, an American foundation that distributes that technology to poor hospitals around that region. So we started with them, saying, "Well, what do you want? What's a problem you want to solve?" And they said, "Let's work on newborn jaundice." So this is another one of these mind-boggling global problems. Jaundice affects two-thirds of newborns around the world. Of those newborns, one in 10 roughly, if it's not treated, the jaundice gets so severe that it leads to either a life-long disability, or the kids could even die. There's one way to treat jaundice, and that's what's called an exchange transfusion. So as you can imagine, that's expensive and a little bit dangerous. There is another cure. It's very technological, it's very complex, a little daunting. You've got to shine blue light on the kid. (Laughter) Bright blue light on as much of the skin as you can cover. How is this a hard problem? I went to MIT. OK, we'll figure that out. (Laughter) So here's an example. This is an overhead phototherapy device that's designed for American hospitals, and here's how it's supposed to be used. It's over the baby, illuminating a single patient. Take it out of an American hospital, send it overseas to a crowded facility in Asia, here's how it's actually used. The effectiveness of phototherapy is a function of light intensity. These dark blue squares show you where it's effective phototherapy. Here's what it looks like under actual use. So those kids on the edges aren't actually receiving effective phototherapy. But without training, without some kind of light meter, how would you know? We see other examples of problems like this. Here's a neonatal intensive care unit, where moms come in to visit their babies. And keep in mind that Mom maybe just had a C-section, so that's already kind of a bummer. Mom's visiting her kid. She sees her baby naked, lying under some blue lights, looking kind of vulnerable. It's not uncommon for Mom to put a blanket over the baby. From a phototherapy standpoint, maybe not the best behavior. In fact, that sounds kind of dumb. Except, what we've learned is that there's no such thing as a dumb user — there are only dumb products. We have to think like existentialists: it's not the painting we would have painted, it's the painting that we actually painted. It's the use — designed for actual use. How are people actually going to use this? So, similarly, when we think about our partner MTTS, they've made some amazing technologies for treating newborn illnesses. So here's an overhead warmer and a CPAP. They're inexpensive, really rugged. They've treated 50,000 kids in Vietnam with this technology. But here's the problem: Every doctor in the world, every hospital administrator, has seen TV — curse those "ER" reruns! Turns out they all know what a medical device is supposed to look like. They want Buck Rogers, they don't want effective. It sounds crazy, it sounds dumb, but there are actually hospitals who would rather have no equipment than something that looks cheap and crummy. So again, if we want people to trust a device, it has to look trustworthy. So thinking about outcomes, it turns out appearances matter. We took all that information together. We tried, this time, to get it right. And here's what we developed. This is the Firefly phototherapy device, except this time, we didn't stop at the concept car. From the very beginning, we started by talking to manufacturers. Our goal is to make a state-of-the-art product that our partner MTTS can actually manufacture. Our goal is to study how they work, the resources they have access to, so that they can make this product. So that's the design for manufacture question. When we think about actual use, you'll notice that Firefly has a single bassinet. It only fits a single baby, and the idea here is it's obvious how you ought to use this device. If you try to put more than one kid in, you're stacking them on top of each other. (Laughter) So the idea here is you want to make it hard to use wrong. In other words, you want to make the right way to use it the easiest way to use it. Another example — again, silly Mom. Silly Mom thinks her baby looks cold, wants to put a blanket over the baby. That's why we have lights above and below the baby in Firefly, so if Mom does put a blanket over the baby, it's still receiving effective phototherapy from below. Last story here: I've got a friend in India who told me that you haven't really tested a piece of electronic technology for distribution in Asia, until you've trained a cockroach to climb in and pee on every single little component on the inside. (Laughter) You think it's funny. I had a laptop in the Peace Corps, and the screen had all these dead pixels on it. And one day I looked in — they were all dead ants that had gotten into my laptop and perished. Those poor ants. (Laughter) So with Firefly, what we did is — the problem is electronics get hot, and you have to put in vents or fans to keep them cool — in most products. We decided we can't put a "Do not enter" sign next to the vent. We actually got rid of all that stuff. So Firefly's totally sealed. These are the kinds of lessons — as awkward as it was to be a pretty goofy teenager, much worse to be a frustrated designer. So I was thinking, "What I really want to do is change the world. I have to pay attention to manufacturing and distribution. I have to pay attention to how people are actually going to use a device. I actually have to pay attention. There's no excuse for failure. I have to think like an existentialist. I have to accept that there are no dumb users, only dumb products." We have to ask ourselves hard questions. Are we designing for the world that we want? Are we designing for the world that we have? Are we designing for the world that's coming, whether we're ready or not? I got into this business designing products. I've since learned that if you really want to make a difference in the world, you have to design outcomes. And that's design that matters. Thank you. (Applause) |
The art of creating awe | {0: 'Rob Legato creates surprising and creative visual illusions for movies.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I worked on a film called "Apollo 13," and when I worked on this film, I discovered something about how our brains work, and how our brains work is that, when we're sort of infused with either enthusiasm or awe or fondness or whatever, it changes and alters our perception of things. It changes what we see. It changes what we remember. And as an experiment, because I dauntingly create a task for myself of recreating a Saturn V launch for this particular movie, because I put it out there, I felt a little nervous about it, so I need to do an experiment and bring a group of people like this in a projection room and play this stock footage, and when I played this stock footage, I simply wanted to find out what people remembered, what was memorable about it? What should I actually try to replicate? What should I try to emulate to some degree? So this is the footage that I was showing everybody. And what I discovered is, because of the nature of the footage and the fact that we're doing this film, there was an emotion that was built into it and our collective memories of what this launch meant to us and all these various things. When I showed it, and I asked, immediately after the screening was over, what they thought of it, what was your memorable shots, they changed them. They were — had camera moves on them. They had all kinds of things. Shots were combined, and I was just really curious, I mean, what the hell were you looking at just a few minutes ago and how come, how'd you come up with this sort of description? And what I discovered is, what I should do is not actually replicate what they saw, is replicate what they remembered. So this is our footage of the launch, based on, basically, taking notes, asking people what they thought, and then the combination of all the different shots and all the different things put together created their sort of collective consciousness of what they remembered it looked like, but not what it really looked like. So this is what we created for "Apollo 13." (Launch noises) So literally what you're seeing now is the confluence of a bunch of different people, a bunch of different memories, including my own, of taking a little bit of liberty with the subject matter. I basically shot everything with short lenses, which means that you're very close to the action, but framed it very similarly to the long lens shots which gives you a sense of distance, so I was basically was setting up something that would remind you of something you haven't really quite seen before. (Music) And then I'm going to show you exactly what it is that you were reacting to when you were reacting to it. (Music) Tom Hanks: Hello, Houston, this is Odyssey. It's good to see you again. (Cheers) (Music) Rob Legato: I pretend they're clapping for me. (Laughter) So now I'm in a parking lot. Basically it's a tin can, and I'm basically recreating the launch with fire extinguishers, fire, I have wax that I threw in front of the lens to look like ice, and so basically if you believed any of the stuff that I just showed you, what you were reacting to, what you're emoting to, is something that's a total falsehood, and I found that really kind of fascinating. And in this particular case, this is the climax of the movie, and, you know, the weight of achieving it was simply take a model, throw it out of a helicopter, and shoot it. And that's simply what I did. That's me shooting, and I'm a fairly mediocre operator, so I got that nice sense of verisimilitude, of a kind of, you know, following the rocket all the way down, and giving that little sort of edge, I was desperately trying to keep it in frame. So then I come up to the next thing. We had a NASA consultant who was actually an astronaut, who was actually on some of the missions, of Apollo 15, and he was there to basically double check my science. And, I guess somebody thought they needed to do that. (Laughter) I don't know why, but they thought they did. So we were, he's a hero, he's an astronaut, and we're all sort of excited, and, you know, I gave myself the liberty of saying, you know, some of the shots I did didn't really suck that bad. And so maybe, you know, we were feeling kind of a little good about it, so I brought him in here, and he needed to really check and see what we were doing, and basically give us our A plus report card, and so I showed him some shots we were working on, and waiting for the reaction that you hope for, which is what I got. (Music) (Launch noises) So I showed him these two shots, and then he basically told me what he thought. ("That's wrong") (Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) It's what you dream about. (Laughter) So what I got from him is, he turned to me and said, "You would never, ever design a rocket like that. You would never have a rocket go up while the gantry arms are going out. Can you imagine the tragedy that could possibly happen with that? You would never, ever design a rocket like that." And he was looking at me. It's like, Yeah, I don't know if you noticed, but I'm the guy out in the parking lot recreating one of America's finest moments with fire extinguishers. (Laughter) And I'm not going to argue with you. You're an astronaut, a hero, and I'm from New Jersey, so — (Laughter) I'm just going to show you some footage. I'm just going to show you some footage, and tell me what you think. And then I did kind of get the reaction I was hoping for. So I showed him this, and this is actual footage that he was on. This is Apollo 15. This was his mission. So I showed him this, and the reaction I got was interesting. ("That's wrong too.") (Laughter) So, and what happened was, I mean, what I sort of intuned in that is that he remembered it differently. He remembered that was a perfectly safe sort of gantry system, perfectly safe rocket launch, because he's sitting in a rocket that has, like, a hundred thousand pounds of thrust, built by the lowest bidder. He was hoping it was going to work out okay. (Laughter) (Applause) So he twisted his memory around. Now, Ron Howard ran into Buzz Aldrin, who was not on the movie, so he had no idea that we were faking any of this footage, and he just responded as he would respond, and I'll run this. Ron Howard: Buzz Aldrin came up to me and said, "Hey, that launch footage, I saw some shots I'd never seen before. Did you guys, what vault did you find that stuff in?" And I said, "Well, no vault, Buzz, we generated all that from scratch." And he said, "Huh, that's pretty good. Can we use it?" (Explosion) ("Sure") (Laughter) RL: I think he's a great American. (Laughter) So, "Titanic" was, if you don't know the story, doesn't end well. (Laughter) Jim Cameron actually photographed the real Titanic. So he basically set up, or basically shattered the suspension of disbelief, because what he photographed was the real thing, a Mir sub going down, or actually two Mir subs going down to the real wreck, and he created this very haunting footage. It's really beautiful, and it conjures up all these various different emotions, but he couldn't photograph everything, and to tell the story, I had to fill in the gaps, which is now rather daunting, because now I have to recreate back to back what really happened and I had, I'm the only one who could really blow it at that point. So this is the footage he photographed, and it was pretty moving and pretty awe-inspiring. So I'm going to just let it run, so you kind of absorb this sort of thing, and I'll describe my sort of reactions when I was looking at it for the very first time. I got the feeling that my brain wanted to basically see it come back to life. I automatically wanted to see this ship, this magnificent ship, basically in all its glory, and conversely, I wanted to see it not in all its glory, basically go back to what it looks like. So I conjured up an effect that I'm later going to show you what I tried to do, which is kind of the heart of the movie, for me, and so that's why I wanted to do the movie, that's why I wanted to create the sort of things I created. And I'll show you, you know, another thing that I found interesting is what we really were emoting to when you take a look at it. So here's the behind the scenes, a couple of little shots here. So, when you saw my footage, you were seeing this: basically, a bunch of guys flipping a ship upside down, and the little Mir subs are actually about the size of small footballs, and shot in smoke. Jim went three miles went down, and I went about three miles away from the studio and photographed this in a garage. And so, but what you're emoting to, or what you're looking at, had the same feeling, the same haunting quality, that Jim's footage had, so I found it so fascinating that our brains sort of, once you believe something's real, you transfer everything that you feel about it, this quality you have, and it's totally artificial. It's totally make-believe, yet it's not to you, and I found that that was a very interesting thing to explore and use, and it caused me to create the next effect that I'll show you, which is this sort of magic transition, and all I was really attempting to do is basically have the audience cue the effect, so it became a seamless experience for them, that I wasn't showing you my sort of interpretation, I was showing you what you wanted to see. And the very next shot, right after this — So you can see what I was doing. So basically, if there's two subs in the same shot, I shot it, because where's the camera coming from? And when Jim shot it, it was only one sub, because he was photographing from the other, and I don't remember if I did this or Jim did this. I'll give it to Jim, because he could use the pat on the back. (Laughter) Okay. So now the Titanic transition. So this is what I was referring to where I wanted to basically magically transplant from one state of the Titanic to the other. So I'll just play the shot once. (Music) (Music) And what I was hoping for is that it just melts in front of you. Gloria Stuart: That was the last time Titanic ever saw daylight. RL: So, what I did is basically I had another screening room experience where I was basically tracking where I was looking, or where we were looking, and of course you're looking at the two people on the bow of the ship, and then at some point, I'm changing the periphery of the shot, I'm changing, it's becoming the rusted wreck, and then I would run it every day, and then I would find exactly the moment that I stopped looking at them and start noticing the rest of it, and the moment my eye shifted, we just marked it to the frame. The moment my eye shifted, I immediately started to change them, so now somehow you missed where it started and where it stopped. And so I'll just show it one more time. (Music) And it's literally done by using what our brains naturally do for us, which is, as soon as you shift your attention, something changes, and then I left the little scarf going, because it really wanted to be a ghostly shot, really wanted to feel like they were still on the wreck, essentially. That's where they were buried forever. Or something like that. I just made that up. (Laughter) It was, incidentally, the last time I ever saw daylight. It was a long film to work on. (Laughter) Now, "Hugo" was another interesting movie, because the movie itself is about film illusions. It's about how our brain is tricked into seeing a persistence of vision that creates a motion picture, and one of the things I had to do is, we — Sasha Baron Cohen is a very clever, very smart guy, comedian, wanted to basically do an homage to the kind of the Buster Keaton sort of slapstick things, and he wanted his leg brace to get caught on a moving train. Very dangerous, very impossible to do, and particularly on our stage, because there literally is no way to actually move this train, because it fits so snugly into our set. So let me show you the scene, and then I basically used the trick that was identified by Sergei Eisenstein, which is, if you have a camera that's moving with a moving object, what is not moving appears to be moving, and what is moving appears to be stopped, so what you're actually seeing now is the train is not moving at all, and what is actually moving is the floor. So this is the shot. That's a little video of what you're looking at there, which is our little test, so that's actually what you're seeing, and I thought it was sort of an interesting thing, because it was, part of the homage of the movie itself is coming up with this sort of genius trick which I can't take credit for. I'd love to but I can't, because it was invented like in 1910 or something like that, is I told Marty, and it's kind of one of those mind things that it's really hard to really get until you actually see it work, and I said, you know, what I was going to do, and he said, "So, let me see if I can get this straight. The thing with the wheels? That doesn't move." (Laughter) (Applause) "And the thing without the wheels, that moves." Precisely. (Laughter) Brings me to the next, and final — Marty's not going to see this, is he? (Laughter) This isn't viewed outside of — (Laughter) The next illustration is something that, there's like all one shot theory. It's a very elegant way of telling a story, especially if you're following somebody on a journey, and that journey basically tells something about their personality in a very concise way, and what we wanted to do based on the shot in "Goodfellas," which is one of the great shots ever, a Martin Scorsese film, of basically following Henry Hill through what it feels like to be a gangster walk going through the Copacabana and being treated in a special way. He was the master of his universe, and we wanted Hugo to feel the same way, so we created this shot. (Music) That's Hugo. (Music) And we felt that if we could basically move the camera with him, we would feel what it feels like to be this boy who is basically the master of his universe, and his universe is, you know, behind the scenes in the bowels of this particular train station that only he can actually navigate through and do it this way, and we had to make it feel that this is his normal, everyday sort of life, so the idea of doing it as one shot was very important, and of course, in shooting in 3D, which is basically it's a huge camera that's hanging off of a giant stick, so to recreate a steadycam shot was the task, and make it feel kind of like what the reaction you got when you saw the "Goodfellas" shot. So what you're now going to see is how we actually did it. It's actually five separate sets shot at five different times with two different boys. The one on the left is where the shot ends, and the shot on the right is where it takes over, and now we switch boys, so it went from Asa Butterfield, who's the star of the show, to his stand-in. (Music) I wouldn't say his stunt double. There's a crazy rig that we built for this. (Music) And so this is, and now this is set number three we're into, and then we're going to go into, basically the very last moment of the shot is actually the steadycam shot. Everything else was shot on cranes and various things like that, and it literally was done over five different sets, two different boys, different times, and it all had to feel like it was all one shot, and what was sort of great for me was it was probably the best-reviewed shot I've ever worked on, and, you know, I was kind of proud of it when I was done, which is, you should never really be proud of stuff, I guess. So I was kind of proud of it, and I went to a friend of mine, and said, "You know, this is, you know, kind of the best-reviewed shot I've ever worked on. What do you think was the reason?" And he said, "Because no one knows you had anything to do with it." (Laughter) So, all I can say is, thank you, and that's my presentation for you. (Applause) (Applause) |
The power of the informal economy | {0: 'Robert Neuwirth’s writings on the street-level reality of the developing world have opened a new dialogue on development and economics.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | In System D, this is a store, and what I mean by that is that this is a photograph I took in Makoko, shantytown in Lagos, Nigeria. It's built over the lagoon, and there are no streets where there can be stores to shop, and so the store comes to you. And in the same community, this is business synergy. This is the boat that that lady was paddling around in, and this artisan makes the boat and the paddles and sells directly to the people who need the boat and the paddles. And this is a global business. Ogandiro smokes fish in Makoko in Lagos, and I asked her, "Where does the fish come from?" And I thought she'd say, "Oh, you know, up the lagoon somewhere, or maybe across Africa," but you'll be happy to know she said it came from here, it comes from the North Sea. It's caught here, frozen, shipped down to Lagos, smoked, and sold for a tiny increment of profit on the streets of Lagos. And this is a business incubator. This is Olusosun dump, the largest garbage dump in Lagos, and 2,000 people work here, and I found this out from this fellow, Andrew Saboru. Andrew spent 16 years scavenging materials on the dump, earned enough money to turn himself into a contract scaler, which meant he carried a scale and went around and weighed all the materials that people had scavenged from the dump. Now he's a scrap dealer. That's his little depot behind him, and he earns twice the Nigerian minimum wage. This is a shopping mall. This is Oshodi Market in Lagos. Jorge Luis Borges had a story called "The Aleph," and the Aleph is a point in the world where absolutely everything exists, and for me, this image is a point in the world where absolutely everything exists. So, what am I talking about when I talk about System D? It's traditionally called the informal economy, the underground economy, the black market. I don't conceive of it that way. I think it's really important to understand that something like this is totally open. It's right there for you to find. All of this is happening openly, and aboveboard. There's nothing underground about it. It's our prejudgment that it's underground. I've pirated the term System D from the former French colonies. There's a word in French that is débrouillardise, that means to be self-reliant, and the former French colonies have turned that into System D for the economy of self-reliance, or the DIY economy. But governments hate the DIY economy, and that's why — I took this picture in 2007, and this is the same market in 2009 — and I think, when the organizers of this conference were talking about radical openness, they didn't mean that the streets should be open and the people should be gone. I think what we have is a pickle problem. I had a friend who worked at a pickle factory, and the cucumbers would come flying down this conveyer belt, and his job was to pick off the ones that didn't look so good and throw them in the bin labeled "relish" where they'd be crushed and mixed with vinegar and used for other kinds of profit. This is the pickle economy. We're all focusing on — this is a statistic from earlier this month in the Financial Times — we're all focusing on the luxury economy. It's worth 1.5 trillion dollars every year, and that's a vast amount of money, right? That's three times the Gross Domestic Product of Switzerland. So it's vast. But it should come with an asterisk, and the asterisk is that it excludes two thirds of the workers of the world. 1.8 billion people around the world work in the economy that is unregulated and informal. That's a huge number, and what does that mean? Well, it means if it were united in a single political system, one country, call it "The United Street Sellers Republic," the U.S.S.R., or "Bazaaristan," it would be worth 10 trillion dollars every year, and that would make it the second largest economy in the world, after the United States. And given that projections are that the bulk of economic growth over the next 15 years will come from emerging economies in the developing world, it could easily overtake the United States and become the largest economy in the world. So the implications of that are vast, because it means that this is where employment is — 1.8 billion people — and this is where we can create a more egalitarian world, because people are actually able to earn money and live and thrive, as Andrew Saboru did. Big businesses have recognized this, and what's fascinating about this slide, it's not that the guys can carry boxes on their heads and run around without dropping them off. it's that the Gala sausage roll is a product that's made by a global company called UAC foods that's active throughout Africa and the Middle East, but the Gala sausage roll is not sold in stores. UAC foods has recognized that it won't sell if it's in stores. It's only sold by a phalanx of street hawkers who run around the streets of Lagos at bus stations and in traffic jams and sell it as a snack, and it's been sold that way for 40 years. It's a business plan for a corporation. And it's not just in Africa. Here's Mr. Clean looking amorously at all the other Procter & Gamble products, and Procter & Gamble, you know, the statistic always cited is that Wal-Mart is their largest customer, and it's true, as one store, Wal-Mart buys 15 percent, thus 15 percent of Procter & Gamble's business is with Wal-Mart, but their largest market segment is something that they call "high frequency stores," which is all these tiny kiosks and the lady in the canoe and all these other businesses that exist in System D, the informal economy, and Procter & Gamble makes 20 percent of its money from that market segment, and it's the only market segment that's growing. So Procter & Gamble says, "We don't care whether a store is incorporated or registered or anything like that. We want our products in that store." And then there's mobile phones. This is an ad for MTN, which is a South African multinational active in about 25 countries, and when they came into Nigeria — Nigeria is the big dog in Africa. One in seven Africans is a Nigerian, and so everyone wants in to the mobile phone market in Nigeria. And when MTN came in, they wanted to sell the mobile service like I get in the United States or like people get here in the U.K. or in Europe — expensive monthly plans, you get a phone, you pay overages, you're killed with fees — and their plan crashed and burned. And they went back to the drawing board, and they retooled, and they came up with another plan: We don't sell you the phone, we don't sell you the monthly plan. We only sell you airtime. And where's the airtime sold? It's sold at umbrella stands all over the streets, where people are unregistered, unlicensed, but MTN makes most of its profits, perhaps 90 percent of its profits, from selling through System D, the informal economy. And where do the phones come from? Well, they come from here. This is in Guangzhou, China, and if you go upstairs in this rather sleepy looking electronics mall, you find the Guangzhou Dashatou second-hand trade center, and if you go in there, you follow the guys with the muscles who are carrying the boxes, and where are they going? They're going to Eddy in Lagos. Now, most of the phones there are not second-hand at all. The name is a misnomer. Most of them are pirated. They have the name brand on them, but they're not manufactured by the name brand. Now, are there downsides to that? Well, I guess. You know, China has no — (Laughter) — no intellectual property, right? Versace without the vowels. Zhuomani instead of Armani. S. Guuuci, and — (Laughter) (Applause) All around the world this is how products are being distributed, so, for instance, in one street market on Rua 25 de Março in São Paulo, Brazil, you can buy fake designer glasses. You can buy cloned cologne. You can buy pirated DVDs, of course. You can buy New York Yankees caps in all sorts of unauthorized patterns. You can buy cuecas baratas, designer underwear that isn't really manufactured by a designer, and even pirated evangelical mixtapes. (Laughter) Now, businesses tend to complain about this, and their, they, I don't want to take away from their entire validity of complaining about it, but I did ask a major sneaker manufacturer earlier this year what they thought about piracy, and they told me, "Well, you can't quote me on this, because if you quote me on this, I have to kill you," but they use piracy as market research. The sneaker manufacturer told me that if they find that Pumas are being pirated, or Adidas are being pirated and their sneakers aren't being pirated, they know they've done something wrong. (Laughter) So it's very important to them to track piracy exactly because of this, and the people who are buying, the pirates, are not their customers anyway, because their customers want the real deal. Now, there's another problem. This is a real street sign in Lagos, Nigeria. All of System D really doesn't pay taxes, right? And when I think about that, first of all I think that government is a social contract between the people and the government, and if the government isn't transparent, then the people aren't going to be transparent either, but also that we're blaming the little guy who doesn't pay his taxes, and we're not recognizing that everyone's fudging things all over the world, including some extremely respected businesses, and I'll give you one example. There was one company that paid 4,000 bribes in the first decade of this millennium, and a million dollars in bribes every business day, right? All over the world. And that company was the big German electronics giant Siemens. So this goes on in the formal economy as well as the informal economy, so it's wrong of us to blame — and I'm not singling out Siemens, I'm saying everyone does it. Okay? I just want to end by saying that if Adam Smith had framed out a theory of the flea market instead of the free market, what would be some of the principles? First, it would be to understand that it could be considered a cooperative, and this is a thought from the Brazilian legal scholar Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Cooperative development is a way forward. Secondly, from the [Austrian] anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend, facts are relative, and what is a massive right of self-reliance to a Nigerian businessperson is considered unauthorized and horrible to other people, and we have to recognize that there are differences in how people define things and what their facts are. And third is, and I'm taking this from the great American beat poet Allen Ginsberg, that alternate economies barter and different kinds of currency, alternate currencies are also very important, and he talked about buying what he needed just with his good looks. And so I just want to leave you there, and say that this economy is a tremendous force for global development and we need to think about it that way. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) |
The rise of human-computer cooperation | {0: 'An advocate of human-computer symbiosis, Shyam Sankar looks for clues in big and disparate data sets.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I'd like to tell you about two games of chess. The first happened in 1997, in which Garry Kasparov, a human, lost to Deep Blue, a machine. To many, this was the dawn of a new era, one where man would be dominated by machine. But here we are, 20 years on, and the greatest change in how we relate to computers is the iPad, not HAL. The second game was a freestyle chess tournament in 2005, in which man and machine could enter together as partners, rather than adversaries, if they so chose. At first, the results were predictable. Even a supercomputer was beaten by a grandmaster with a relatively weak laptop. The surprise came at the end. Who won? Not a grandmaster with a supercomputer, but actually two American amateurs using three relatively weak laptops. Their ability to coach and manipulate their computers to deeply explore specific positions effectively counteracted the superior chess knowledge of the grandmasters and the superior computational power of other adversaries. This is an astonishing result: average men, average machines beating the best man, the best machine. And anyways, isn't it supposed to be man versus machine? Instead, it's about cooperation, and the right type of cooperation. We've been paying a lot of attention to Marvin Minsky's vision for artificial intelligence over the last 50 years. It's a sexy vision, for sure. Many have embraced it. It's become the dominant school of thought in computer science. But as we enter the era of big data, of network systems, of open platforms, and embedded technology, I'd like to suggest it's time to reevaluate an alternative vision that was actually developed around the same time. I'm talking about J.C.R. Licklider's human-computer symbiosis, perhaps better termed "intelligence augmentation," I.A. Licklider was a computer science titan who had a profound effect on the development of technology and the Internet. His vision was to enable man and machine to cooperate in making decisions, controlling complex situations without the inflexible dependence on predetermined programs. Note that word "cooperate." Licklider encourages us not to take a toaster and make it Data from "Star Trek," but to take a human and make her more capable. Humans are so amazing — how we think, our non-linear approaches, our creativity, iterative hypotheses, all very difficult if possible at all for computers to do. Licklider intuitively realized this, contemplating humans setting the goals, formulating the hypotheses, determining the criteria, and performing the evaluation. Of course, in other ways, humans are so limited. We're terrible at scale, computation and volume. We require high-end talent management to keep the rock band together and playing. Licklider foresaw computers doing all the routinizable work that was required to prepare the way for insights and decision making. Silently, without much fanfare, this approach has been compiling victories beyond chess. Protein folding, a topic that shares the incredible expansiveness of chess — there are more ways of folding a protein than there are atoms in the universe. This is a world-changing problem with huge implications for our ability to understand and treat disease. And for this task, supercomputer field brute force simply isn't enough. Foldit, a game created by computer scientists, illustrates the value of the approach. Non-technical, non-biologist amateurs play a video game in which they visually rearrange the structure of the protein, allowing the computer to manage the atomic forces and interactions and identify structural issues. This approach beat supercomputers 50 percent of the time and tied 30 percent of the time. Foldit recently made a notable and major scientific discovery by deciphering the structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus. A protease that had eluded determination for over 10 years was solved was by three players in a matter of days, perhaps the first major scientific advance to come from playing a video game. Last year, on the site of the Twin Towers, the 9/11 memorial opened. It displays the names of the thousands of victims using a beautiful concept called "meaningful adjacency." It places the names next to each other based on their relationships to one another: friends, families, coworkers. When you put it all together, it's quite a computational challenge: 3,500 victims, 1,800 adjacency requests, the importance of the overall physical specifications and the final aesthetics. When first reported by the media, full credit for such a feat was given to an algorithm from the New York City design firm Local Projects. The truth is a bit more nuanced. While an algorithm was used to develop the underlying framework, humans used that framework to design the final result. So in this case, a computer had evaluated millions of possible layouts, managed a complex relational system, and kept track of a very large set of measurements and variables, allowing the humans to focus on design and compositional choices. So the more you look around you, the more you see Licklider's vision everywhere. Whether it's augmented reality in your iPhone or GPS in your car, human-computer symbiosis is making us more capable. So if you want to improve human-computer symbiosis, what can you do? You can start by designing the human into the process. Instead of thinking about what a computer will do to solve the problem, design the solution around what the human will do as well. When you do this, you'll quickly realize that you spent all of your time on the interface between man and machine, specifically on designing away the friction in the interaction. In fact, this friction is more important than the power of the man or the power of the machine in determining overall capability. That's why two amateurs with a few laptops handily beat a supercomputer and a grandmaster. What Kasparov calls process is a byproduct of friction. The better the process, the less the friction. And minimizing friction turns out to be the decisive variable. Or take another example: big data. Every interaction we have in the world is recorded by an ever growing array of sensors: your phone, your credit card, your computer. The result is big data, and it actually presents us with an opportunity to more deeply understand the human condition. The major emphasis of most approaches to big data focus on, "How do I store this data? How do I search this data? How do I process this data?" These are necessary but insufficient questions. The imperative is not to figure out how to compute, but what to compute. How do you impose human intuition on data at this scale? Again, we start by designing the human into the process. When PayPal was first starting as a business, their biggest challenge was not, "How do I send money back and forth online?" It was, "How do I do that without being defrauded by organized crime?" Why so challenging? Because while computers can learn to detect and identify fraud based on patterns, they can't learn to do that based on patterns they've never seen before, and organized crime has a lot in common with this audience: brilliant people, relentlessly resourceful, entrepreneurial spirit — (Laughter) — and one huge and important difference: purpose. And so while computers alone can catch all but the cleverest fraudsters, catching the cleverest is the difference between success and failure. There's a whole class of problems like this, ones with adaptive adversaries. They rarely if ever present with a repeatable pattern that's discernable to computers. Instead, there's some inherent component of innovation or disruption, and increasingly these problems are buried in big data. For example, terrorism. Terrorists are always adapting in minor and major ways to new circumstances, and despite what you might see on TV, these adaptations, and the detection of them, are fundamentally human. Computers don't detect novel patterns and new behaviors, but humans do. Humans, using technology, testing hypotheses, searching for insight by asking machines to do things for them. Osama bin Laden was not caught by artificial intelligence. He was caught by dedicated, resourceful, brilliant people in partnerships with various technologies. As appealing as it might sound, you cannot algorithmically data mine your way to the answer. There is no "Find Terrorist" button, and the more data we integrate from a vast variety of sources across a wide variety of data formats from very disparate systems, the less effective data mining can be. Instead, people will have to look at data and search for insight, and as Licklider foresaw long ago, the key to great results here is the right type of cooperation, and as Kasparov realized, that means minimizing friction at the interface. Now this approach makes possible things like combing through all available data from very different sources, identifying key relationships and putting them in one place, something that's been nearly impossible to do before. To some, this has terrifying privacy and civil liberties implications. To others it foretells of an era of greater privacy and civil liberties protections, but privacy and civil liberties are of fundamental importance. That must be acknowledged, and they can't be swept aside, even with the best of intents. So let's explore, through a couple of examples, the impact that technologies built to drive human-computer symbiosis have had in recent time. In October, 2007, U.S. and coalition forces raided an al Qaeda safe house in the city of Sinjar on the Syrian border of Iraq. They found a treasure trove of documents: 700 biographical sketches of foreign fighters. These foreign fighters had left their families in the Gulf, the Levant and North Africa to join al Qaeda in Iraq. These records were human resource forms. The foreign fighters filled them out as they joined the organization. It turns out that al Qaeda, too, is not without its bureaucracy. (Laughter) They answered questions like, "Who recruited you?" "What's your hometown?" "What occupation do you seek?" In that last question, a surprising insight was revealed. The vast majority of foreign fighters were seeking to become suicide bombers for martyrdom — hugely important, since between 2003 and 2007, Iraq had 1,382 suicide bombings, a major source of instability. Analyzing this data was hard. The originals were sheets of paper in Arabic that had to be scanned and translated. The friction in the process did not allow for meaningful results in an operational time frame using humans, PDFs and tenacity alone. The researchers had to lever up their human minds with technology to dive deeper, to explore non-obvious hypotheses, and in fact, insights emerged. Twenty percent of the foreign fighters were from Libya, 50 percent of those from a single town in Libya, hugely important since prior statistics put that figure at three percent. It also helped to hone in on a figure of rising importance in al Qaeda, Abu Yahya al-Libi, a senior cleric in the Libyan Islamic fighting group. In March of 2007, he gave a speech, after which there was a surge in participation amongst Libyan foreign fighters. Perhaps most clever of all, though, and least obvious, by flipping the data on its head, the researchers were able to deeply explore the coordination networks in Syria that were ultimately responsible for receiving and transporting the foreign fighters to the border. These were networks of mercenaries, not ideologues, who were in the coordination business for profit. For example, they charged Saudi foreign fighters substantially more than Libyans, money that would have otherwise gone to al Qaeda. Perhaps the adversary would disrupt their own network if they knew they cheating would-be jihadists. In January, 2010, a devastating 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, third deadliest earthquake of all time, left one million people, 10 percent of the population, homeless. One seemingly small aspect of the overall relief effort became increasingly important as the delivery of food and water started rolling. January and February are the dry months in Haiti, yet many of the camps had developed standing water. The only institution with detailed knowledge of Haiti's floodplains had been leveled in the earthquake, leadership inside. So the question is, which camps are at risk, how many people are in these camps, what's the timeline for flooding, and given very limited resources and infrastructure, how do we prioritize the relocation? The data was incredibly disparate. The U.S. Army had detailed knowledge for only a small section of the country. There was data online from a 2006 environmental risk conference, other geospatial data, none of it integrated. The human goal here was to identify camps for relocation based on priority need. The computer had to integrate a vast amount of geospacial information, social media data and relief organization information to answer this question. By implementing a superior process, what was otherwise a task for 40 people over three months became a simple job for three people in 40 hours, all victories for human-computer symbiosis. We're more than 50 years into Licklider's vision for the future, and the data suggests that we should be quite excited about tackling this century's hardest problems, man and machine in cooperation together. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
Sculpted space, within and without | {0: "Antony Gormley's work plays with the human form in space."} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I'm going to tell you about why I became a sculptor, and you may think that sculptors, well, they deal with meta, they deal with objects, they deal with bodies, but I think, really, what I care about most is making space, and that's what I've called this talk: Making Space. Space that exists within us, and without us. So, when I was a child, I don't know how many of you grew up in the '50s, but I was sent upstairs for an enforced rest. (Laughter) It's a really bad idea. I mean, after lunch, you're, you know, you're six, and you want to go and climb a tree. But I had to go upstairs, this tiny little room that was actually made out of an old balcony, so it was incredibly hot, small and light, and I had to lie there. It was ridiculous. But anyway, for some reason, I promised myself that I wasn't going to move, that I was going to do this thing that Mummy wanted me to do. And there I was, lying there in this tiny space, hot, dark, claustrophobic, matchbox-sized, behind my eyes, but it was really weird, like, after this went on for days, weeks, months, that space would get bigger and darker and cooler until I really looked forward to that half an hour of enforced immobility and rest, and I really looked forward to going to that place of darkness. Do you mind if we do something completely different? Can we all just close our eyes for a minute? Now, this isn't going to be freaky. It isn't some cultic thing. (Laughter) It's just, it's just, I just would like us all to go there. So I'm going to do it too. We'll all be there together. So close your eyes for a minute. Here we are, in a space, the subjective, collective space of the darkness of the body. I think of this as the place of imagination, of potential, but what are its qualities? It is objectless. There are no things in it. It is dimensionless. It is limitless. It is endless. Okay, open your eyes. That's the space that I think sculpture — which is a bit of a paradox, sculpture that is about making material propositions — but I think that's the space that sculpture can connect us with. So, imagine we're in the middle of America. You're asleep. You wake up, and without lifting your head from the earth on your sleeping bag, you can see for 70 miles. This is a dry lake bed. I was young. I'd just finished art school. I wanted to do something that was working directly with the world, directly with place. This was a wonderful place, because it was a place where you could imagine that you were the first person to be there. It was a place where nothing very much had happened. Anyway, bear with me. I picked up a hand-sized stone, threw it as far as I was able, it was about 22 meters. I then cleared all the stones within that radius and made a pile. And that was the pile, by the way. And then, I stood on the pile, and threw all of those rocks out again, and here is rearranged desert. You could say, well, it doesn't look very different from when he started. (Laughter) What's all the fuss about? In fact, Chris was worried and said, "Look, don't show them that slide, because they're just going to think you're another one of those crazy modern artists who doesn't do much. (Laughter) But the fact is, this is evidence of a living body on other bodies, rocks that have been the subject of geological formation, erosion, the action of time on objects. This is a place, in a way, that I just would like you to, in a way, look at differently because of this event that has happened in it, a human event, and in general, it just asks us to look again at this world, so different from, in a way, the world that we have been sharing with each other, the technological world, to look again at the elemental world. The elemental world that we all live in is that space that we all visited together, the darkness of the body. I wanted to start again with that environment, the environment of the intimate, subjective space that each of us lives in, but from the other side of appearance. So here is a daily activity of the studio. You can see I don't do much. I'm just standing there, again with my eyes closed, and other people are molding me, evidential. This is an indexical register of a lived moment of a body in time. Can we map that space, using the language of neutrinos or cosmic rays, taking the bounding condition of the body as its limit, but in complete reversal of, in a way, the most traditional Greek idea of pointing? In the old days they used to take a lump of Pentelic marble and drill from the surface in order to identify the skin, the appearance, what Aristotle defined as the distinction between substance and appearance, the thing that makes things visible, but here we're working from the other side. Or can we do it as an exclusive membrane? This is a lead case made around the space that my body occupied, but it's now void. This is a work called "Learning To See." It's a bit of, well, we could call it night, we could call it the 96 percent of gravity that we don't know about, dark matter, placed in space, anyway, another version of a human space in space at large, but I don't know if you can see, the eyes are indicated, they're closed. It's called "Learning To See" because it's about an object that hopefully works reflexively and talks about that vision or connection with the darkness of the body that I see as a space of potential. Can we do it another way, using the language of particles around a nucleus, and talk about the body as an energy center? No longer about statues, no longer having to take that duty of standing, the standing of a human body, or the standing of a statue, release it, allow it to be an energy field, a space in space that talks about human life, between becoming an entropy as a sort of concentration of attention, a human place of possibility in space at large. Is there another way? Dark matter now placed against a horizon. If minds live in bodies, if bodies live in clothes, and then in rooms, and then in buildings, and then in cities, do they also have a final skin, and is that skin perceptual? The horizon. And is art about trying to imagine what lies beyond the horizon? Can we use, in a way, a body as an empty catalyst for a kind of empathy with the experience of space-time as it is lived, as I am standing here in front of you trying to feel and make a connection in this space-time that we are sharing, can we use, at it were, the memory of a body, of a human space in space to catalyze an experience, again, firsthand experience, of elemental time. Human time, industrial time, tested against the time of the tides, in which these memories of a particular body, that could be any body, multiplied as in the time of mechanical reproduction, many times, placed over three square miles, a mile out to sea, disappearing, in different conditions of day and night. You can see this work. It's on the mouth of the Mersey, just outside Liverpool. And there you can see what a Liverpool sea looks like on a typical afternoon. The pieces appear and disappear, but maybe more importantly — this is just looking north from the center of the installation — they create a field, a field that involves living and the surrogate bodies in a kind of relation, a relation with each other and a relation with that limit, the edge, the horizon. Just moving on, is it possible, taking that idea of mind, body, body-building, to supplant the first body, the biological body, with the second, the body of architecture and the built environment. This is a work called "Room for the Great Australian Desert." It's in an undefined location and I've never published where it is. It's an object for the mind. I think of it as a 21st-century Buddha. Again, the darkness of the body, now held within this bunker shape of the minimum position that a body needs to occupy, a crouching body. There's a hole at the anus, penis level. There are holes at ears. There are no holes at the eyes. There's a slot for the mouth. It's two and a half inches thick, concrete with a void interior. Again, a site found with a completely flat 360-degree horizon. This is just simply asking, again, as if we had arrived for the first time, what is the relationship of the human project to time and space? Taking that idiom of, as it were, the darkness of the body transferred to architecture, can you use architectural space not for living but as a metaphor, and use its systolic, diastolic smaller and larger spaces to provide a kind of firsthand somatic narrative for a journey through space, light and darkness? This is a work of some proportion and some weight that makes the body into a city, an aggregation of cells that are all interconnected and that allow certain visual access at certain places. The last work that I just wanted to share with you is "Blind Light," which is perhaps the most open work, and in a conference of radical openness, I think maybe this is as radical as I get, using light and water vapor as my materials. Here is a box filled at one and a half atmospheres of atmospheric pressure, with a cloud and with very bright light. As you walk towards the ever-open threshold, you disappear, both to yourselves and to others. If you hold your hand out in front of you, you can't see it. If you look down, you can't see your feet. You are now consciousness without an object, freed from the dimensionful and measured way in which life links us to the obligatory. But this is a space that is actually filled with people, disembodied voices, and out of that ambient environment, when people come close to your own body zone, very close, they appear to you as representations. When they appear close to the edge, they are representations, representations in which the viewers have become the viewed. For me, art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time. As John Cage said, "We are not moving towards some kind of goal. We are at the goal, and it is changing with us. If art has any purpose, it is to open our eyes to that fact." Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Energy from floating algae pods | {0: 'Not only does Jonathan Trent grow algae for biofuel, he wants to do so by cleansing wastewater and trapping carbon dioxide in the process. And it’s all solar-powered.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Some years ago, I set out to try to understand if there was a possibility to develop biofuels on a scale that would actually compete with fossil fuels but not compete with agriculture for water, fertilizer or land. So here's what I came up with. Imagine that we build an enclosure where we put it just underwater, and we fill it with wastewater and some form of microalgae that produces oil, and we make it out of some kind of flexible material that moves with waves underwater, and the system that we're going to build, of course, will use solar energy to grow the algae, and they use CO2, which is good, and they produce oxygen as they grow. The algae that grow are in a container that distributes the heat to the surrounding water, and you can harvest them and make biofuels and cosmetics and fertilizer and animal feed, and of course you'd have to make a large area of this, so you'd have to worry about other stakeholders like fishermen and ships and such things, but hey, we're talking about biofuels, and we know the importance of potentially getting an alternative liquid fuel. Why are we talking about microalgae? Here you see a graph showing you the different types of crops that are being considered for making biofuels, so you can see some things like soybean, which makes 50 gallons per acre per year, or sunflower or canola or jatropha or palm, and that tall graph there shows what microalgae can contribute. That is to say, microalgae contributes between 2,000 and 5,000 gallons per acre per year, compared to the 50 gallons per acre per year from soy. So what are microalgae? Microalgae are micro — that is, they're extremely small, as you can see here a picture of those single-celled organisms compared to a human hair. Those small organisms have been around for millions of years and there's thousands of different species of microalgae in the world, some of which are the fastest-growing plants on the planet, and produce, as I just showed you, lots and lots of oil. Now, why do we want to do this offshore? Well, the reason we're doing this offshore is because if you look at our coastal cities, there isn't a choice, because we're going to use waste water, as I suggested, and if you look at where most of the waste water treatment plants are, they're embedded in the cities. This is the city of San Francisco, which has 900 miles of sewer pipes under the city already, and it releases its waste water offshore. So different cities around the world treat their waste water differently. Some cities process it. Some cities just release the water. But in all cases, the water that's released is perfectly adequate for growing microalgae. So let's envision what the system might look like. We call it OMEGA, which is an acronym for Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae. At NASA, you have to have good acronyms. So how does it work? I sort of showed you how it works already. We put waste water and some source of CO2 into our floating structure, and the waste water provides nutrients for the algae to grow, and they sequester CO2 that would otherwise go off into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. They of course use solar energy to grow, and the wave energy on the surface provides energy for mixing the algae, and the temperature is controlled by the surrounding water temperature. The algae that grow produce oxygen, as I've mentioned, and they also produce biofuels and fertilizer and food and other bi-algal products of interest. And the system is contained. What do I mean by that? It's modular. Let's say something happens that's totally unexpected to one of the modules. It leaks. It's struck by lightning. The waste water that leaks out is water that already now goes into that coastal environment, and the algae that leak out are biodegradable, and because they're living in waste water, they're fresh water algae, which means they can't live in salt water, so they die. The plastic we'll build it out of is some kind of well-known plastic that we have good experience with, and we'll rebuild our modules to be able to reuse them again. So we may be able to go beyond that when thinking about this system that I'm showing you, and that is to say we need to think in terms of the water, the fresh water, which is also going to be an issue in the future, and we're working on methods now for recovering the waste water. The other thing to consider is the structure itself. It provides a surface for things in the ocean, and this surface, which is covered by seaweeds and other organisms in the ocean, will become enhanced marine habitat so it increases biodiversity. And finally, because it's an offshore structure, we can think in terms of how it might contribute to an aquaculture activity offshore. So you're probably thinking, "Gee, this sounds like a good idea. What can we do to try to see if it's real?" Well, I set up laboratories in Santa Cruz at the California Fish and Game facility, and that facility allowed us to have big seawater tanks to test some of these ideas. We also set up experiments in San Francisco at one of the three waste water treatment plants, again a facility to test ideas. And finally, we wanted to see where we could look at what the impact of this structure would be in the marine environment, and we set up a field site at a place called Moss Landing Marine Lab in Monterey Bay, where we worked in a harbor to see what impact this would have on marine organisms. The laboratory that we set up in Santa Cruz was our skunkworks. It was a place where we were growing algae and welding plastic and building tools and making a lot of mistakes, or, as Edison said, we were finding the 10,000 ways that the system wouldn't work. Now, we grew algae in waste water, and we built tools that allowed us to get into the lives of algae so that we could monitor the way they grow, what makes them happy, how do we make sure that we're going to have a culture that will survive and thrive. So the most important feature that we needed to develop were these so-called photobioreactors, or PBRs. These were the structures that would be floating at the surface made out of some inexpensive plastic material that'll allow the algae to grow, and we had built lots and lots of designs, most of which were horrible failures, and when we finally got to a design that worked, at about 30 gallons, we scaled it up to 450 gallons in San Francisco. So let me show you how the system works. We basically take waste water with algae of our choice in it, and we circulate it through this floating structure, this tubular, flexible plastic structure, and it circulates through this thing, and there's sunlight of course, it's at the surface, and the algae grow on the nutrients. But this is a bit like putting your head in a plastic bag. The algae are not going to suffocate because of CO2, as we would. They suffocate because they produce oxygen, and they don't really suffocate, but the oxygen that they produce is problematic, and they use up all the CO2. So the next thing we had to figure out was how we could remove the oxygen, which we did by building this column which circulated some of the water, and put back CO2, which we did by bubbling the system before we recirculated the water. And what you see here is the prototype, which was the first attempt at building this type of column. The larger column that we then installed in San Francisco in the installed system. So the column actually had another very nice feature, and that is the algae settle in the column, and this allowed us to accumulate the algal biomass in a context where we could easily harvest it. So we would remove the algaes that concentrated in the bottom of this column, and then we could harvest that by a procedure where you float the algae to the surface and can skim it off with a net. So we wanted to also investigate what would be the impact of this system in the marine environment, and I mentioned we set up this experiment at a field site in Moss Landing Marine Lab. Well, we found of course that this material became overgrown with algae, and we needed then to develop a cleaning procedure, and we also looked at how seabirds and marine mammals interacted, and in fact you see here a sea otter that found this incredibly interesting, and would periodically work its way across this little floating water bed, and we wanted to hire this guy or train him to be able to clean the surface of these things, but that's for the future. Now really what we were doing, we were working in four areas. Our research covered the biology of the system, which included studying the way algae grew, but also what eats the algae, and what kills the algae. We did engineering to understand what we would need to be able to do to build this structure, not only on the small scale, but how we would build it on this enormous scale that will ultimately be required. I mentioned we looked at birds and marine mammals and looked at basically the environmental impact of the system, and finally we looked at the economics, and what I mean by economics is, what is the energy required to run the system? Do you get more energy out of the system than you have to put into the system to be able to make the system run? And what about operating costs? And what about capital costs? And what about, just, the whole economic structure? So let me tell you that it's not going to be easy, and there's lots more work to do in all four of those areas to be able to really make the system work. But we don't have a lot of time, and I'd like to show you the artist's conception of how this system might look if we find ourselves in a protected bay somewhere in the world, and we have in the background in this image, the waste water treatment plant and a source of flue gas for the CO2, but when you do the economics of this system, you find that in fact it will be difficult to make it work. Unless you look at the system as a way to treat waste water, sequester carbon, and potentially for photovoltaic panels or wave energy or even wind energy, and if you start thinking in terms of integrating all of these different activities, you could also include in such a facility aquaculture. So we would have under this system a shellfish aquaculture where we're growing mussels or scallops. We'd be growing oysters and things that would be producing high value products and food, and this would be a market driver as we build the system to larger and larger scales so that it becomes, ultimately, competitive with the idea of doing it for fuels. So there's always a big question that comes up, because plastic in the ocean has got a really bad reputation right now, and so we've been thinking cradle to cradle. What are we going to do with all this plastic that we're going to need to use in our marine environment? Well, I don't know if you know about this, but in California, there's a huge amount of plastic that's used in fields right now as plastic mulch, and this is plastic that's making these tiny little greenhouses right along the surface of the soil, and this provides warming the soil to increase the growing season, it allows us to control weeds, and, of course, it makes the watering much more efficient. So the OMEGA system will be part of this type of an outcome, and that when we're finished using it in the marine environment, we'll be using it, hopefully, on fields. Where are we going to put this, and what will it look like offshore? Here's an image of what we could do in San Francisco Bay. San Francisco produces 65 million gallons a day of waste water. If we imagine a five-day retention time for this system, we'd need 325 million gallons to accomodate, and that would be about 1,280 acres of these OMEGA modules floating in San Francisco Bay. Well, that's less than one percent of the surface area of the bay. It would produce, at 2,000 gallons per acre per year, it would produce over 2 million gallons of fuel, which is about 20 percent of the biodiesel, or of the diesel that would be required in San Francisco, and that's without doing anything about efficiency. Where else could we potentially put this system? There's lots of possibilities. There's, of course, San Francisco Bay, as I mentioned. San Diego Bay is another example, Mobile Bay or Chesapeake Bay, but the reality is, as sea level rises, there's going to be lots and lots of new opportunities to consider. (Laughter) So what I'm telling you about is a system of integrated activities. Biofuels production is integrated with alternative energy is integrated with aquaculture. I set out to find a pathway to innovative production of sustainable biofuels, and en route I discovered that what's really required for sustainability is integration more than innovation. Long term, I have great faith in our collective and connected ingenuity. I think there is almost no limit to what we can accomplish if we are radically open and we don't care who gets the credit. Sustainable solutions for our future problems are going to be diverse and are going to be many. I think we need to consider everything, everything from alpha to OMEGA. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Just a quick question for you, Jonathan. Can this project continue to move forward within NASA or do you need some very ambitious green energy fund to come and take it by the throat? Jonathan Trent: So it's really gotten to a stage now in NASA where they would like to spin it out into something which would go offshore, and there are a lot of issues with doing it in the United States because of limited permitting issues and the time required to get permits to do things offshore. It really requires, at this point, people on the outside, and we're being radically open with this technology in which we're going to launch it out there for anybody and everybody who's interested to take it on and try to make it real. CA: So that's interesting. You're not patenting it. You're publishing it. JT: Absolutely. CA: All right. Thank you so much. JT: Thank you. (Applause) |
Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city | {0: 'Kent Larson designs new technologies that solve the biggest questions facing our cities.'} | TEDxBoston 2012 | I thought I would start with a very brief history of cities. Settlements typically began with people clustered around a well, and the size of that settlement was roughly the distance you could walk with a pot of water on your head. In fact, if you fly over Germany, for example, and you look down and you see these hundreds of little villages, they're all about a mile apart. You needed easy access to the fields. And for hundreds, even thousands of years, the home was really the center of life. Life was very small for most people. It was a center of entertainment, of energy production, of work, a center of health care. That's where babies were born and people died. Then, with industrialization, everything started to become centralized. You had dirty factories that were moved to the outskirts of cities. Production was centralized in assembly plants. You had centralized energy production. Learning took place in schools. Health care took place in hospitals. And then you had networks that developed. You had water, sewer networks that allowed for this kind of unchecked expansion. You had separated functions, increasingly. You had rail networks that connected residential, industrial, commercial areas. You had auto networks. In fact, the model was really, give everybody a car, build roads to everything, and give people a place to park when they get there. It was not a very functional model. And we still live in that world, and this is what we end up with. So you have the sprawl of LA, the sprawl of Mexico City. You have these unbelievable new cities in China, which you might call tower sprawl. They're all building cities on the model that we invented in the '50s and '60s, which is really obsolete, I would argue, and there are hundreds and hundreds of new cities that are being planned all over the world. In China alone, 300 million people, some say 400 million people, will move to the city over the next 15 years. That means building the equivalent of the entire built infrastructure of the US in 15 years. Imagine that. And we should all care about this whether you live in cities or not. Cities will account for 90 percent of the population growth, 80 percent of the global CO2, 75 percent of energy use, but at the same time it's where people want to be, increasingly. More than half the people now in the world live in cities, and that will just continue to escalate. Cities are places of celebration, personal expression. You have the flash mobs of pillow fights that — I've been to a couple. They're quite fun. You have — (Laughter) Cities are where most of the wealth is created, and particularly in the developing world, it's where women find opportunities. That's a lot of the reason why cities are growing very quickly. Now there's some trends that will impact cities. First of all, work is becoming distributed and mobile. The office building is basically obsolete for doing private work. The home, once again, because of distributed computation — Communication is becoming a center of life, so it's a center of production and learning and shopping and health care and all of these things that we used to think of as taking place outside of the home. And increasingly, everything that people buy, every consumer product, in one way or another, can be personalized. And that's a very important trend to think about. So this is my image of the city of the future. (Laughter) In that it's a place for people, you know. Maybe not the way people dress, but — You know, the question now is, how can we have all the good things that we identify with cities without all the bad things? This is Bangalore. It took me a couple of hours to get a few miles in Bangalore last year. So with cities, you also have congestion and pollution and disease and all these negative things. How can we have the good stuff without the bad? So we went back and started looking at the great cities that evolved before the cars. Paris was a series of these little villages that came together, and you still see that structure today. The 20 arrondissements of Paris are these little neighborhoods. Most of what people need in life can be within a five- or 10-minute walk. And if you look at the data, when you have that kind of a structure, you get a very even distribution of the shops and the physicians and the pharmacies and the cafes in Paris. And then you look at cities that evolved after the automobile, and it's not that kind of a pattern. There's very little that's within a five-minute walk of most areas of places like Pittsburgh. Not to pick on Pittsburgh, but most American cities really have evolved this way. So we said, well, let's look at new cities, and we're involved in a couple of new city projects in China. So we said, let's start with that neighborhood cell. We think of it as a compact urban cell. So provide most of what most people want within that 20-minute walk. This can also be a resilient electrical microgrid, community heating, power, communication networks, etc. can be concentrated there. Stewart Brand would put a micronuclear reactor right in the center, probably. And he might be right. And then we can form, in effect, a mesh network. It's something of an Internet typology pattern, so you can have a series of these neighborhoods. You can dial up the density — about 20,000 people per cell, if it's Cambridge. Go up to 50,000 if it's Manhattan density. You connect everything with mass transit and you provide most of what most people need within that neighborhood. You can begin to develop a whole typology of streetscapes and the vehicles that can go on them. I won't go through all of them. I'll just show one. This is Boulder. It's a great example of kind of a mobility parkway, a superhighway for joggers and bicyclists, where you can go from one end of the city to the other without crossing the street, and they also have bike-sharing, which I'll get into in a minute. This is even a more interesting solution in Seoul, Korea. They took the elevated highway, they got rid of it, they reclaimed the street, the river down below, below the street, and you can go from one end of Seoul to the other without crossing a pathway for cars. The High Line in Manhattan is very similar. You have these rapidly emerging bike lanes all over the world. I lived in Manhattan for 15 years. I went back a couple of weekends ago, took this photograph of these fabulous new bike lanes that they have installed. They're still not to where Copenhagen is, where something like 42 percent of the trips within the city are by bicycle. It's mostly just because they have fantastic infrastructure there. We actually did exactly the wrong thing in Boston. The Big Dig — (Laughter) So we got rid of the highway but we created a traffic island, and it's certainly not a mobility pathway for anything other than cars. Mobility on demand is something we've been thinking about, so we think we need an ecosystem of these shared-use vehicles connected to mass transit. These are some of the vehicles that we've been working on. But shared use is really key. If you share a vehicle, you can have at least four people use one vehicle, as opposed to one. We have Hubway here in Boston, the Vélib' system in Paris. We've been developing, at the Media Lab, this little city car that is optimized for shared use in cities. We got rid of all the useless things like engines and transmissions. We moved everything to the wheels, so you have the drive motor, the steering motor, the breaking — all in the wheel. That left the chassis unencumbered, so you can do things like fold, so you can fold this little vehicle up to occupy a tiny little footprint. This was a video that was on European television last week showing the Spanish Minister of Industry driving this little vehicle, and when it's folded, it can spin. You don't need reverse. You don't need parallel parking. You just spin and go directly in. (Laughter) So we've been working with a company to commercialize this. My PhD student Ryan Chin presented these early ideas two years ago at a TEDx conference. So what's interesting is, then if you begin to add new things to it, like autonomy, you get out of the car, you park at your destination, you pat it on the butt, it goes and it parks itself, it charges itself, and you can get something like seven times as many vehicles in a given area as conventional cars, and we think this is the future. Actually, we could do this today. It's not really a problem. We can combine shared use and folding and autonomy and we get something like 28 times the land utilization with that kind of strategy. One of our graduate students then says, well, how does a driverless car communicate with pedestrians? You have nobody to make eye contact with. You don't know if it's going to run you over. So he's developing strategies so the vehicle can communicate with pedestrians, so — (Laughter) So the headlights are eyeballs, the pupils can dilate, we have directional audio, we can throw sound directly at people. What I love about this project is he solved a problem that doesn't exist yet, so — (Laughter) We also think that we can democratize access to bike lanes. You know, bike lanes are mostly used by young guys in stretchy pants. So — (Laughter) We think we can develop a vehicle that operates on bike lanes, accessible to elderly and disabled, women in skirts, businesspeople, and address the issues of energy congestion, mobility, aging and obesity simultaneously. That's our challenge. This is an early design for this little three-wheel. It's an electronic bike. You have to pedal to operate it in a bike lane, but if you're an older person, that's a switch. If you're a healthy person, you might have to work really hard to go fast. You can dial in 40 calories going into work and 500 going home, when you can take a shower. We hope to have that built this fall. Housing is another area where we can really improve. Mayor Menino in Boston says lack of affordable housing for young people is one of the biggest problems the city faces. Developers say, OK, we'll build little teeny apartments. People say, we don't really want to live in a little teeny conventional apartment. So we're saying, let's build a standardized chassis, much like our car. Let's bring advanced technology into the apartment, technology-enabled infill, give people the tools within this open-loft chassis to go through a process of defining what their needs and values and activities are, and then a matching algorithm will match a unique assembly of integrated infill components, furniture, and cabinetry, that are personalized to that individual, and they give them the tools to go through the process and to refine it, and it's something like working with an architect, where the dialogue starts when you give an alternative to a person to react to. Now, the most interesting implementation of that for us is when you can begin to have robotic walls, so your space can convert from exercise to a workplace, if you run a virtual company. You have guests over, you have two guest rooms that are developed. You have a conventional one-bedroom arrangement when you need it. Maybe that's most of the time. You have a dinner party. The table folds out to fit 16 people in otherwise a conventional one-bedroom, or maybe you want a dance studio. I mean, architects have been thinking about these ideas for a long time. What we need to do now, develop things that can scale to those 300 million Chinese people that would like to live in the city, and very comfortably. We think we can make a very small apartment that functions as if it's twice as big by utilizing these strategies. I don't believe in smart homes. That's sort of a bogus concept. I think you have to build dumb homes and put smart stuff in it. (Laughter) And so we've been working on a chassis of the wall itself. You know, standardized platform with the motors and the battery when it operates, little solenoids that will lock it in place and get low-voltage power. We think this can all be standardized, and then people can personalize the stuff that goes into that wall, and like the car, we can integrate all kinds of sensing to be aware of human activity, so if there's a baby or a puppy in the way, you won't have a problem. (Laughter) So the developers say, well, this is great. OK, so if we have a conventional building, we have a fixed envelope, maybe we can put in 14 units. If they function as if they're twice as big, we can get 28 units in. That means twice as much parking, though. Parking's really expensive. It's about 70,000 dollars per space to build a conventional parking spot inside a building. So if you can have folding and autonomy, you can do that in one-seventh of the space. That goes down to 10,000 dollars per car, just for the cost of the parking. You add shared use, and you can even go further. We can also integrate all kinds of advanced technology through this process. There's a path to market for innovative companies to bring technology into the home. In this case, a project we're doing with Siemens. We have sensors on all the furniture, all the infill, that understands where people are and what they're doing. Blue light is very efficient, so we have these tunable 24-bit LED lighting fixtures. It recognizes where the person is, what they're doing, fills out the light when necessary to full spectrum white light, and saves maybe 30, 40 percent in energy consumption, we think, over even conventional state-of-the-art lighting systems. This just shows you the data that comes from the sensors that are embedded in the furniture. We don't really believe in cameras to do things in homes. We think these little wireless sensors are more effective. We think we can also personalize sunlight. That's sort of the ultimate personalization in some ways. So we've looked at articulating mirrors of the facade that can throw shafts of sunlight anywhere into the space, therefore allowing you to shade most of the glass on a hot day like today. In this case, she picks up her phone, she can map food preparation at the kitchen island to a particular location of sunlight. An algorithm will keep it in that location as long as she's engaged in that activity. This can be combined with LED lighting as well. We think workplaces should be shared. I mean, this is really the workplace of the future, I think. This is Starbucks, you know. Maybe a third — And you see everybody has their back to the wall and they have food and coffee down the way and they're in their own little personal bubble. We need shared spaces for interaction and collaboration. We're not doing a very good job with that. At the Cambridge Innovation Center, you can have shared desks. I've spent a lot of time in Finland at the design factory of Aalto University, where the they have a shared shop and shared fab lab, shared quiet spaces, electronics spaces, recreation places. We think ultimately, all of this stuff can come together, a new model for mobility, a new model for housing, a new model for how we live and work, a path to market for advanced technologies. But in the end, the main thing we need to focus on are people. Cities are all about people. They're places for people. There's no reason why we can't dramatically improve the livability and creativity of cities like they've done in Melbourne with the laneways while at the same time dramatically reducing CO2 and energy. It's a global imperative. We have to get this right. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why eyewitnesses get it wrong | {0: 'Scott Fraser is a forensic psychologist who thinks deeply about the fallibility of human memory and encourages a more scientific approach to trial evidence.'} | TEDxUSC | The murder happened a little over 21 years ago, January the 18th, 1991, in a small bedroom community of Lynwood, California, just a few miles southeast of Los Angeles. A father came out of his house to tell his teenage son and his five friends that it was time for them to stop horsing around on the front lawn and on the sidewalk, to get home, finish their schoolwork, and prepare themselves for bed. And as the father was administering these instructions, a car drove by, slowly, and just after it passed the father and the teenagers, a hand went out from the front passenger window, and — "Bam, Bam!" — killing the father. And the car sped off. The police, investigating officers, were amazingly efficient. They considered all the usual culprits, and in less than 24 hours, they had selected their suspect: Francisco Carrillo, a 17-year-old kid who lived about two or three blocks away from where the shooting occurred. They found photos of him. They prepared a photo array, and the day after the shooting, they showed it to one of the teenagers, and he said, "That's the picture. That's the shooter I saw that killed the father." That was all a preliminary hearing judge had to listen to, to bind Mr. Carrillo over to stand trial for a first-degree murder. In the investigation that followed before the actual trial, each of the other five teenagers was shown photographs, the same photo array. The picture that we best can determine was probably the one that they were shown in the photo array is in your bottom left hand corner of these mug shots. The reason we're not sure absolutely is because of the nature of evidence preservation in our judicial system, but that's another whole TEDx talk for later. (Laughter) So at the actual trial, all six of the teenagers testified, and indicated the identifications they had made in the photo array. He was convicted. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and transported to Folsom Prison. So what's wrong? Straightforward, fair trial, full investigation. Oh yes, no gun was ever found. No vehicle was ever identified as being the one in which the shooter had extended his arm, and no person was ever charged with being the driver of the shooter's vehicle. And Mr. Carrillo's alibi? Which of those parents here in the room might not lie concerning the whereabouts of your son or daughter in an investigation of a killing? Sent to prison, adamantly insisting on his innocence, which he has consistently for 21 years. So what's the problem? The problems, actually, for this kind of case come manyfold from decades of scientific research involving human memory. First of all, we have all the statistical analyses from the Innocence Project work, where we know that we have, what, 250, 280 documented cases now where people have been wrongfully convicted and subsequently exonerated, some from death row, on the basis of later DNA analysis, and you know that over three quarters of all of those cases of exoneration involved only eyewitness identification testimony during the trial that convicted them. We know that eyewitness identifications are fallible. The other comes from an interesting aspect of human memory that's related to various brain functions but I can sum up for the sake of brevity here in a simple line: The brain abhors a vacuum. Under the best of observation conditions, the absolute best, we only detect, encode and store in our brains bits and pieces of the entire experience in front of us, and they're stored in different parts of the brain. So now, when it's important for us to be able to recall what it was that we experienced, we have an incomplete, we have a partial store, and what happens? Below awareness, with no requirement for any kind of motivated processing, the brain fills in information that was not there, not originally stored, from inference, from speculation, from sources of information that came to you, as the observer, after the observation. But it happens without awareness such that you don't, aren't even cognizant of it occurring. It's called reconstructed memories. It happens to us in all the aspects of our life, all the time. It was those two considerations, among others — reconstructed memory, the fact about the eyewitness fallibility — that was part of the instigation for a group of appeal attorneys led by an amazing lawyer named Ellen Eggers to pool their experience and their talents together and petition a superior court for a retrial for Francisco Carrillo. They retained me, as a forensic neurophysiologist, because I had expertise in eyewitness memory identification, which obviously makes sense for this case, right? But also because I have expertise and testify about the nature of human night vision. Well, what's that got to do with this? Well, when you read through the case materials in this Carrillo case, one of the things that suddenly strikes you is that the investigating officers said the lighting was good at the crime scene, at the shooting. All the teenagers testified during the trial that they could see very well. But this occurred in mid-January, in the Northern Hemisphere, at 7 p.m. at night. So when I did the calculations for the lunar data and the solar data at that location on Earth at the time of the incident of the shooting, all right, it was well past the end of civil twilight and there was no moon up that night. So all the light in this area from the sun and the moon is what you see on the screen right here. The only lighting in that area had to come from artificial sources, and that's where I go out and I do the actual reconstruction of the scene with photometers, with various measures of illumination and various other measures of color perception, along with special cameras and high-speed film, right? Take all the measurements and record them, right? And then take photographs, and this is what the scene looked like at the time of the shooting from the position of the teenagers looking at the car going by and shooting. This is looking directly across the street from where they were standing. Remember, the investigating officers' report said the lighting was good. The teenagers said they could see very well. This is looking down to the east, where the shooting vehicle sped off, and this is the lighting directly behind the father and the teenagers. As you can see, it is at best poor. No one's going to call this well-lit, good lighting, and in fact, as nice as these pictures are, and the reason we take them is I knew I was going to have to testify in court, and a picture is worth more than a thousand words when you're trying to communicate numbers, abstract concepts like lux, the international measurement of illumination, the Ishihara color perception test values. When you present those to people who are not well-versed in those aspects of science and that, they become salamanders in the noonday sun. It's like talking about the tangent of the visual angle, all right? Their eyes just glaze over, all right? A good forensic expert also has to be a good educator, a good communicator, and that's part of the reason why we take the pictures, to show not only where the light sources are, and what we call the spill, the distribution, but also so that it's easier for the trier of fact to understand the circumstances. So these are some of the pictures that, in fact, I used when I testified, but more importantly were, to me as a scientist, are those readings, the photometer readings, which I can then convert into actual predictions of the visual capability of the human eye under those circumstances, and from my readings that I recorded at the scene under the same solar and lunar conditions at the same time, so on and so forth, right, I could predict that there would be no reliable color perception, which is crucial for face recognition, and that there would be only scotopic vision, which means there would be very little resolution, what we call boundary or edge detection, and that furthermore, because the eyes would have been totally dilated under this light, the depth of field, the distance at which you can focus and see details, would have been less than 18 inches away. I testified to that to the court, and while the judge was very attentive, it had been a very, very long hearing for this petition for a retrial, and as a result, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that I thought that maybe the judge was going to need a little more of a nudge than just more numbers. And here I became a bit audacious, and I turned and I asked the judge, I said, "Your Honor, I think you should go out and look at the scene yourself." Now I may have used a tone which was more like a dare than a request — (Laughter) — but nonetheless, it's to this man's credit and his courage that he said, "Yes, I will." A shocker in American jurisprudence. So in fact, we found the same identical conditions, we reconstructed the entire thing again, he came out with an entire brigade of sheriff's officers to protect him in this community, all right? (Laughter) We had him stand actually slightly in the street, so closer to the suspect vehicle, the shooter vehicle, than the actual teenagers were, so he stood a few feet from the curb toward the middle of the street. We had a car that came by, same identical car as described by the teenagers, right? It had a driver and a passenger, and after the car had passed the judge by, the passenger extended his hand, pointed it back to the judge as the car continued on, just as the teenagers had described it, right? Now, he didn't use a real gun in his hand, so he had a black object in his hand that was similar to the gun that was described. He pointed by, and this is what the judge saw. This is the car 30 feet away from the judge. There's an arm sticking out of the passenger side and pointed back at you. That's 30 feet away. Some of the teenagers said that in fact the car was 15 feet away when it shot. Okay. There's 15 feet. At this point, I became a little concerned. This judge is someone you'd never want to play poker with. He was totally stoic. I couldn't see a twitch of his eyebrow. I couldn't see the slightest bend of his head. I had no sense of how he was reacting to this, and after he looked at this reenactment, he turned to me and he says, "Is there anything else you want me to look at?" I said, "Your honor," and I don't know whether I was emboldened by the scientific measurements that I had in my pocket and my knowledge that they are accurate, or whether it was just sheer stupidity, which is what the defense lawyers thought — (Laughter) — when they heard me say, "Yes, Your Honor, I want you stand right there and I want the car to go around the block again and I want it to come and I want it to stop right in front of you, three to four feet away, and I want the passenger to extend his hand with a black object and point it right at you, and you can look at it as long as you want." And that's what he saw. (Laughter) You'll notice, which was also in my test report, all the dominant lighting is coming from the north side, which means that the shooter's face would have been photo-occluded. It would have been backlit. Furthermore, the roof of the car is causing what we call a shadow cloud inside the car which is making it darker. And this is three to four feet away. Why did I take the risk? I knew that the depth of field was 18 inches or less. Three to four feet, it might as well have been a football field away. This is what he saw. He went back, there was a few more days of evidence that was heard. At the end of it, he made the judgment that he was going to grant the petition for a retrial. And furthermore, he released Mr. Carrillo so that he could aid in the preparation of his own defense if the prosecution decided to retry him. Which they decided not to. He is now a freed man. (Applause) (Applause) This is him embracing his grandmother-in-law. He — His girlfriend was pregnant when he went to trial, right? And she had a little baby boy. He and his son are both attending Cal State, Long Beach right now taking classes. (Applause) And what does this example — what's important to keep in mind for ourselves? First of all, there's a long history of antipathy between science and the law in American jurisprudence. I could regale you with horror stories of ignorance over decades of experience as a forensic expert of just trying to get science into the courtroom. The opposing council always fight it and oppose it. One suggestion is that all of us become much more attuned to the necessity, through policy, through procedures, to get more science in the courtroom, and I think one large step toward that is more requirements, with all due respect to the law schools, of science, technology, engineering, mathematics for anyone going into the law, because they become the judges. Think about how we select our judges in this country. It's very different than most other cultures. All right? The other one that I want to suggest, the caution that all of us have to have, I constantly have to remind myself, about just how accurate are the memories that we know are true, that we believe in? There is decades of research, examples and examples of cases like this, where individuals really, really believe. None of those teenagers who identified him thought that they were picking the wrong person. None of them thought they couldn't see the person's face. We all have to be very careful. All our memories are reconstructed memories. They are the product of what we originally experienced and everything that's happened afterwards. They're dynamic. They're malleable. They're volatile, and as a result, we all need to remember to be cautious, that the accuracy of our memories is not measured in how vivid they are nor how certain you are that they're correct. Thank you. (Applause) |
Mental health for all by involving all | {0: 'Vikram Patel helps bring better mental health care to low-resource communities -- by teaching ordinary people to deliver basic psychiatric services.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I want you to imagine this for a moment. Two men, Rahul and Rajiv, living in the same neighborhood, from the same educational background, similar occupation, and they both turn up at their local accident emergency complaining of acute chest pain. Rahul is offered a cardiac procedure, but Rajiv is sent home. What might explain the difference in the experience of these two nearly identical men? Rajiv suffers from a mental illness. The difference in the quality of medical care received by people with mental illness is one of the reasons why they live shorter lives than people without mental illness. Even in the best-resourced countries in the world, this life expectancy gap is as much as 20 years. In the developing countries of the world, this gap is even larger. But of course, mental illnesses can kill in more direct ways as well. The most obvious example is suicide. It might surprise some of you here, as it did me, when I discovered that suicide is at the top of the list of the leading causes of death in young people in all countries in the world, including the poorest countries of the world. But beyond the impact of a health condition on life expectancy, we're also concerned about the quality of life lived. Now, in order for us to examine the overall impact of a health condition both on life expectancy as well as on the quality of life lived, we need to use a metric called the DALY, which stands for a Disability-Adjusted Life Year. Now when we do that, we discover some startling things about mental illness from a global perspective. We discover that, for example, mental illnesses are amongst the leading causes of disability around the world. Depression, for example, is the third-leading cause of disability, alongside conditions such as diarrhea and pneumonia in children. When you put all the mental illnesses together, they account for roughly 15 percent of the total global burden of disease. Indeed, mental illnesses are also very damaging to people's lives, but beyond just the burden of disease, let us consider the absolute numbers. The World Health Organization estimates that there are nearly four to five hundred million people living on our tiny planet who are affected by a mental illness. Now some of you here look a bit astonished by that number, but consider for a moment the incredible diversity of mental illnesses, from autism and intellectual disability in childhood, through to depression and anxiety, substance misuse and psychosis in adulthood, all the way through to dementia in old age, and I'm pretty sure that each and every one us present here today can think of at least one person, at least one person, who's affected by mental illness in our most intimate social networks. I see some nodding heads there. But beyond the staggering numbers, what's truly important from a global health point of view, what's truly worrying from a global health point of view, is that the vast majority of these affected individuals do not receive the care that we know can transform their lives, and remember, we do have robust evidence that a range of interventions, medicines, psychological interventions, and social interventions, can make a vast difference. And yet, even in the best-resourced countries, for example here in Europe, roughly 50 percent of affected people don't receive these interventions. In the sorts of countries I work in, that so-called treatment gap approaches an astonishing 90 percent. It isn't surprising, then, that if you should speak to anyone affected by a mental illness, the chances are that you will hear stories of hidden suffering, shame and discrimination in nearly every sector of their lives. But perhaps most heartbreaking of all are the stories of the abuse of even the most basic human rights, such as the young woman shown in this image here that are played out every day, sadly, even in the very institutions that were built to care for people with mental illnesses, the mental hospitals. It's this injustice that has really driven my mission to try to do a little bit to transform the lives of people affected by mental illness, and a particularly critical action that I focused on is to bridge the gulf between the knowledge we have that can transform lives, the knowledge of effective treatments, and how we actually use that knowledge in the everyday world. And an especially important challenge that I've had to face is the great shortage of mental health professionals, such as psychiatrists and psychologists, particularly in the developing world. Now I trained in medicine in India, and after that I chose psychiatry as my specialty, much to the dismay of my mother and all my family members who kind of thought neurosurgery would be a more respectable option for their brilliant son. Any case, I went on, I soldiered on with psychiatry, and found myself training in Britain in some of the best hospitals in this country. I was very privileged. I worked in a team of incredibly talented, compassionate, but most importantly, highly trained, specialized mental health professionals. Soon after my training, I found myself working first in Zimbabwe and then in India, and I was confronted by an altogether new reality. This was a reality of a world in which there were almost no mental health professionals at all. In Zimbabwe, for example, there were just about a dozen psychiatrists, most of whom lived and worked in Harare city, leaving only a couple to address the mental health care needs of nine million people living in the countryside. In India, I found the situation was not a lot better. To give you a perspective, if I had to translate the proportion of psychiatrists in the population that one might see in Britain to India, one might expect roughly 150,000 psychiatrists in India. In reality, take a guess. The actual number is about 3,000, about two percent of that number. It became quickly apparent to me that I couldn't follow the sorts of mental health care models that I had been trained in, one that relied heavily on specialized, expensive mental health professionals to provide mental health care in countries like India and Zimbabwe. I had to think out of the box about some other model of care. It was then that I came across these books, and in these books I discovered the idea of task shifting in global health. The idea is actually quite simple. The idea is, when you're short of specialized health care professionals, use whoever is available in the community, train them to provide a range of health care interventions, and in these books I read inspiring examples, for example of how ordinary people had been trained to deliver babies, diagnose and treat early pneumonia, to great effect. And it struck me that if you could train ordinary people to deliver such complex health care interventions, then perhaps they could also do the same with mental health care. Well today, I'm very pleased to report to you that there have been many experiments in task shifting in mental health care across the developing world over the past decade, and I want to share with you the findings of three particular such experiments, all three of which focused on depression, the most common of all mental illnesses. In rural Uganda, Paul Bolton and his colleagues, using villagers, demonstrated that they could deliver interpersonal psychotherapy for depression and, using a randomized control design, showed that 90 percent of the people receiving this intervention recovered as compared to roughly 40 percent in the comparison villages. Similarly, using a randomized control trial in rural Pakistan, Atif Rahman and his colleagues showed that lady health visitors, who are community maternal health workers in Pakistan's health care system, could deliver cognitive behavior therapy for mothers who were depressed, again showing dramatic differences in the recovery rates. Roughly 75 percent of mothers recovered as compared to about 45 percent in the comparison villages. And in my own trial in Goa, in India, we again showed that lay counselors drawn from local communities could be trained to deliver psychosocial interventions for depression, anxiety, leading to 70 percent recovery rates as compared to 50 percent in the comparison primary health centers. Now, if I had to draw together all these different experiments in task shifting, and there have of course been many other examples, and try and identify what are the key lessons we can learn that makes for a successful task shifting operation, I have coined this particular acronym, SUNDAR. What SUNDAR stands for, in Hindi, is "attractive." It seems to me that there are five key lessons that I've shown on this slide that are critically important for effective task shifting. The first is that we need to simplify the message that we're using, stripping away all the jargon that medicine has invented around itself. We need to unpack complex health care interventions into smaller components that can be more easily transferred to less-trained individuals. We need to deliver health care, not in large institutions, but close to people's homes, and we need to deliver health care using whoever is available and affordable in our local communities. And importantly, we need to reallocate the few specialists who are available to perform roles such as capacity-building and supervision. Now for me, task shifting is an idea with truly global significance, because even though it has arisen out of the situation of the lack of resources that you find in developing countries, I think it has a lot of significance for better-resourced countries as well. Why is that? Well, in part, because health care in the developed world, the health care costs in the [developed] world, are rapidly spiraling out of control, and a huge chunk of those costs are human resource costs. But equally important is because health care has become so incredibly professionalized that it's become very remote and removed from local communities. For me, what's truly sundar about the idea of task shifting, though, isn't that it simply makes health care more accessible and affordable but that it is also fundamentally empowering. It empowers ordinary people to be more effective in caring for the health of others in their community, and in doing so, to become better guardians of their own health. Indeed, for me, task shifting is the ultimate example of the democratization of medical knowledge, and therefore, medical power. Just over 30 years ago, the nations of the world assembled at Alma-Ata and made this iconic declaration. Well, I think all of you can guess that 12 years on, we're still nowhere near that goal. Still, today, armed with that knowledge that ordinary people in the community can be trained and, with sufficient supervision and support, can deliver a range of health care interventions effectively, perhaps that promise is within reach now. Indeed, to implement the slogan of Health for All, we will need to involve all in that particular journey, and in the case of mental health, in particular we would need to involve people who are affected by mental illness and their caregivers. It is for this reason that, some years ago, the Movement for Global Mental Health was founded as a sort of a virtual platform upon which professionals like myself and people affected by mental illness could stand together, shoulder-to-shoulder, and advocate for the rights of people with mental illness to receive the care that we know can transform their lives, and to live a life with dignity. And in closing, when you have a moment of peace or quiet in these very busy few days or perhaps afterwards, spare a thought for that person you thought about who has a mental illness, or persons that you thought about who have mental illness, and dare to care for them. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
The voices of China's workers | {0: 'In her reporting and writing, Leslie T. Chang explores the lives of workers in China, focusing on the experience of women.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Hi. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the people who make the things we use every day: our shoes, our handbags, our computers and cell phones. Now, this is a conversation that often calls up a lot of guilt. Imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less than a dollar an hour stitching your running shoes, or the young Chinese man who jumps off a rooftop after working overtime assembling your iPad. We, the beneficiaries of globalization, seem to exploit these victims with every purchase we make, and the injustice feels embedded in the products themselves. After all, what's wrong with a world in which a worker on an iPhone assembly line can't even afford to buy one? It's taken for granted that Chinese factories are oppressive, and that it's our desire for cheap goods that makes them so. So, this simple narrative equating Western demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time when many of us already feel guilty about our impact on the world, but it's also inaccurate and disrespectful. We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways. In fact, China makes goods for markets all over the world, including its own, thanks to a combination of factors: its low costs, its large and educated workforce, and a flexible manufacturing system that responds quickly to market demands. By focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets, we have rendered the individuals on the other end into invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone. Chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods. They choose to leave their homes in order to earn money, to learn new skills, and to see the world. In the ongoing debate about globalization, what's been missing is the voices of the workers themselves. Here are a few. Bao Yongxiu: "My mother tells me to come home and get married, but if I marry now, before I have fully developed myself, I can only marry an ordinary worker, so I'm not in a rush." Chen Ying: "When I went home for the new year, everyone said I had changed. They asked me, what did you do that you have changed so much? I told them that I studied and worked hard. If you tell them more, they won't understand anyway." Wu Chunming: "Even if I make a lot of money, it won't satisfy me. Just to make money is not enough meaning in life." Xiao Jin: "Now, after I get off work, I study English, because in the future, our customers won't be only Chinese, so we must learn more languages." All of these speakers, by the way, are young women, 18 or 19 years old. So I spent two years getting to know assembly line workers like these in the south China factory city called Dongguan. Certain subjects came up over and over: how much money they made, what kind of husband they hoped to marry, whether they should jump to another factory or stay where they were. Other subjects came up almost never, including living conditions that to me looked close to prison life: 10 or 15 workers in one room, 50 people sharing a single bathroom, days and nights ruled by the factory clock. Everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances, and it was still better than the dormitories and homes of rural China. The workers rarely spoke about the products they made, and they often had great difficulty explaining what exactly they did. When I asked Lu Qingmin, the young woman I got to know best, what exactly she did on the factory floor, she said something to me in Chinese that sounded like "qiu xi." Only much later did I realize that she had been saying "QC," or quality control. She couldn't even tell me what she did on the factory floor. All she could do was parrot a garbled abbreviation in a language she didn't even understand. Karl Marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism, the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor. Unlike, say, a traditional maker of shoes or cabinets, the worker in an industrial factory has no control, no pleasure, and no true satisfaction or understanding in her own work. But like so many theories that Marx arrived at sitting in the reading room of the British Museum, he got this one wrong. Just because a person spends her time making a piece of something does not mean that she becomes that, a piece of something. What she does with the money she earns, what she learns in that place, and how it changes her, these are the things that matter. What a factory makes is never the point, and the workers could not care less who buys their products. Journalistic coverage of Chinese factories, on the other hand, plays up this relationship between the workers and the products they make. Many articles calculate: How long would it take for this worker to work in order to earn enough money to buy what he's making? For example, an entry-level-line assembly line worker in China in an iPhone plant would have to shell out two and a half months' wages for an iPhone. But how meaningful is this calculation, really? For example, I recently wrote an article in The New Yorker magazine, but I can't afford to buy an ad in it. But, who cares? I don't want an ad in The New Yorker, and most of these workers don't really want iPhones. Their calculations are different. How long should I stay in this factory? How much money can I save? How much will it take to buy an apartment or a car, to get married, or to put my child through school? The workers I got to know had a curiously abstract relationship with the product of their labor. About a year after I met Lu Qingmin, or Min, she invited me home to her family village for the Chinese New Year. On the train home, she gave me a present: a Coach brand change purse with brown leather trim. I thanked her, assuming it was fake, like almost everything else for sale in Dongguan. After we got home, Min gave her mother another present: a pink Dooney & Bourke handbag, and a few nights later, her sister was showing off a maroon LeSportsac shoulder bag. Slowly it was dawning on me that these handbags were made by their factory, and every single one of them was authentic. Min's sister said to her parents, "In America, this bag sells for 320 dollars." Her parents, who are both farmers, looked on, speechless. "And that's not all — Coach is coming out with a new line, 2191," she said. "One bag will sell for 6,000." She paused and said, "I don't know if that's 6,000 yuan or 6,000 American dollars, but anyway, it's 6,000." (Laughter) Min's sister's boyfriend, who had traveled home with her for the new year, said, "It doesn't look like it's worth that much." Min's sister turned to him and said, "Some people actually understand these things. You don't understand shit." (Laughter) (Applause) In Min's world, the Coach bags had a curious currency. They weren't exactly worthless, but they were nothing close to the actual value, because almost no one they knew wanted to buy one, or knew how much it was worth. Once, when Min's older sister's friend got married, she brought a handbag along as a wedding present. Another time, after Min had already left the handbag factory, her younger sister came to visit, bringing two Coach Signature handbags as gifts. I looked in the zippered pocket of one, and I found a printed card in English, which read, "An American classic. In 1941, the burnished patina of an all-American baseball glove inspired the founder of Coach to create a new collection of handbags from the same luxuriously soft gloved-hand leather. Six skilled leatherworkers crafted 12 Signature handbags with perfect proportions and a timeless flair. They were fresh, functional, and women everywhere adored them. A new American classic was born." I wonder what Karl Marx would have made of Min and her sisters. Their relationship with the product of their labor was more complicated, surprising and funny than he could have imagined. And yet, his view of the world persists, and our tendency to see the workers as faceless masses, to imagine that we can know what they're really thinking. The first time I met Min, she had just turned 18 and quit her first job on the assembly line of an electronics factory. Over the next two years, I watched as she switched jobs five times, eventually landing a lucrative post in the purchasing department of a hardware factory. Later, she married a fellow migrant worker, moved with him to his village, gave birth to two daughters, and saved enough money to buy a secondhand Buick for herself and an apartment for her parents. She recently returned to Dongguan on her own to take a job in a factory that makes construction cranes, temporarily leaving her husband and children back in the village. In a recent email to me, she explained, "A person should have some ambition while she is young so that in old age she can look back on her life and feel that it was not lived to no purpose." Across China, there are 150 million workers like her, one third of them women, who have left their villages to work in the factories, the hotels, the restaurants and the construction sites of the big cities. Together, they make up the largest migration in history, and it is globalization, this chain that begins in a Chinese farming village and ends with iPhones in our pockets and Nikes on our feet and Coach handbags on our arms that has changed the way these millions of people work and marry and live and think. Very few of them would want to go back to the way things used to be. When I first went to Dongguan, I worried that it would be depressing to spend so much time with workers. I also worried that nothing would ever happen to them, or that they would have nothing to say to me. Instead, I found young women who were smart and funny and brave and generous. By opening up their lives to me, they taught me so much about factories and about China and about how to live in the world. This is the Coach purse that Min gave me on the train home to visit her family. I keep it with me to remind me of the ties that tie me to the young women I wrote about, ties that are not economic but personal in nature, measured not in money but in memories. This purse is also a reminder that the things that you imagine, sitting in your office or in the library, are not how you find them when you actually go out into the world. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you, Leslie, that was an insight that a lot of us haven't had before. But I'm curious. If you had a minute, say, with Apple's head of manufacturing, what would you say? Leslie Chang: One minute? CA: One minute. (Laughter) LC: You know, what really impressed me about the workers is how much they're self-motivated, self-driven, resourceful, and the thing that struck me, what they want most is education, to learn, because most of them come from very poor backgrounds. They usually left school when they were in 7th or 8th grade. Their parents are often illiterate, and then they come to the city, and they, on their own, at night, during the weekends, they'll take a computer class, they'll take an English class, and learn really, really rudimentary things, you know, like how to type a document in Word, or how to say really simple things in English. So, if you really want to help these workers, start these small, very focused, very pragmatic classes in these schools, and what's going to happen is, all your workers are going to move on, but hopefully they'll move on into higher jobs within Apple, and you can help their social mobility and their self-improvement. When you talk to workers, that's what they want. They do not say, "I want better hot water in the showers. I want a nicer room. I want a TV set." I mean, it would be nice to have those things, but that's not why they're in the city, and that's not what they care about. CA: Was there a sense from them of a narrative that things were kind of tough and bad, or was there a narrative of some kind of level of growth, that things over time were getting better? LC: Oh definitely, definitely. I mean, you know, it was interesting, because I spent basically two years hanging out in this city, Dongguan, and over that time, you could see immense change in every person's life: upward, downward, sideways, but generally upward. If you spend enough time, it's upward, and I met people who had moved to the city 10 years ago, and who are now basically urban middle class people, so the trajectory is definitely upward. It's just hard to see when you're suddenly sucked into the city. It looks like everyone's poor and desperate, but that's not really how it is. Certainly, the factory conditions are really tough, and it's nothing you or I would want to do, but from their perspective, where they're coming from is much worse, and where they're going is hopefully much better, and I just wanted to give that context of what's going on in their minds, not what necessarily is going on in yours. CA: Thanks so much for your talk. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The promise of research with stem cells | {0: 'Susan Solomon enables support for human stem cell research, aiming to cure major diseases and empower more personalized medicine.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | So, embryonic stem cells are really incredible cells. They are our body's own repair kits, and they're pluripotent, which means they can morph into all of the cells in our bodies. Soon, we actually will be able to use stem cells to replace cells that are damaged or diseased. But that's not what I want to talk to you about, because right now there are some really extraordinary things that we are doing with stem cells that are completely changing the way we look and model disease, our ability to understand why we get sick, and even develop drugs. I truly believe that stem cell research is going to allow our children to look at Alzheimer's and diabetes and other major diseases the way we view polio today, which is as a preventable disease. So here we have this incredible field, which has enormous hope for humanity, but much like IVF over 35 years ago, until the birth of a healthy baby, Louise, this field has been under siege politically and financially. Critical research is being challenged instead of supported, and we saw that it was really essential to have private safe haven laboratories where this work could be advanced without interference. And so, in 2005, we started the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory so that we would have a small organization that could do this work and support it. What we saw very quickly is the world of both medical research, but also developing drugs and treatments, is dominated by, as you would expect, large organizations, but in a new field, sometimes large organizations really have trouble getting out of their own way, and sometimes they can't ask the right questions, and there is an enormous gap that's just gotten larger between academic research on the one hand and pharmaceutical companies and biotechs that are responsible for delivering all of our drugs and many of our treatments, and so we knew that to really accelerate cures and therapies, we were going to have to address this with two things: new technologies and also a new research model. Because if you don't close that gap, you really are exactly where we are today. And that's what I want to focus on. We've spent the last couple of years pondering this, making a list of the different things that we had to do, and so we developed a new technology, It's software and hardware, that actually can generate thousands and thousands of genetically diverse stem cell lines to create a global array, essentially avatars of ourselves. And we did this because we think that it's actually going to allow us to realize the potential, the promise, of all of the sequencing of the human genome, but it's going to allow us, in doing that, to actually do clinical trials in a dish with human cells, not animal cells, to generate drugs and treatments that are much more effective, much safer, much faster, and at a much lower cost. So let me put that in perspective for you and give you some context. This is an extremely new field. In 1998, human embryonic stem cells were first identified, and just nine years later, a group of scientists in Japan were able to take skin cells and reprogram them with very powerful viruses to create a kind of pluripotent stem cell called an induced pluripotent stem cell, or what we refer to as an IPS cell. This was really an extraordinary advance, because although these cells are not human embryonic stem cells, which still remain the gold standard, they are terrific to use for modeling disease and potentially for drug discovery. So a few months later, in 2008, one of our scientists built on that research. He took skin biopsies, this time from people who had a disease, ALS, or as you call it in the U.K., motor neuron disease. He turned them into the IPS cells that I've just told you about, and then he turned those IPS cells into the motor neurons that actually were dying in the disease. So basically what he did was to take a healthy cell and turn it into a sick cell, and he recapitulated the disease over and over again in the dish, and this was extraordinary, because it was the first time that we had a model of a disease from a living patient in living human cells. And as he watched the disease unfold, he was able to discover that actually the motor neurons were dying in the disease in a different way than the field had previously thought. There was another kind of cell that actually was sending out a toxin and contributing to the death of these motor neurons, and you simply couldn't see it until you had the human model. So you could really say that researchers trying to understand the cause of disease without being able to have human stem cell models were much like investigators trying to figure out what had gone terribly wrong in a plane crash without having a black box, or a flight recorder. They could hypothesize about what had gone wrong, but they really had no way of knowing what led to the terrible events. And stem cells really have given us the black box for diseases, and it's an unprecedented window. It really is extraordinary, because you can recapitulate many, many diseases in a dish, you can see what begins to go wrong in the cellular conversation well before you would ever see symptoms appear in a patient. And this opens up the ability, which hopefully will become something that is routine in the near term, of using human cells to test for drugs. Right now, the way we test for drugs is pretty problematic. To bring a successful drug to market, it takes, on average, 13 years — that's one drug — with a sunk cost of 4 billion dollars, and only one percent of the drugs that start down that road are actually going to get there. You can't imagine other businesses that you would think of going into that have these kind of numbers. It's a terrible business model. But it is really a worse social model because of what's involved and the cost to all of us. So the way we develop drugs now is by testing promising compounds on — We didn't have disease modeling with human cells, so we'd been testing them on cells of mice or other creatures or cells that we engineer, but they don't have the characteristics of the diseases that we're actually trying to cure. You know, we're not mice, and you can't go into a living person with an illness and just pull out a few brain cells or cardiac cells and then start fooling around in a lab to test for, you know, a promising drug. But what you can do with human stem cells, now, is actually create avatars, and you can create the cells, whether it's the live motor neurons or the beating cardiac cells or liver cells or other kinds of cells, and you can test for drugs, promising compounds, on the actual cells that you're trying to affect, and this is now, and it's absolutely extraordinary, and you're going to know at the beginning, the very early stages of doing your assay development and your testing, you're not going to have to wait 13 years until you've brought a drug to market, only to find out that actually it doesn't work, or even worse, harms people. But it isn't really enough just to look at the cells from a few people or a small group of people, because we have to step back. We've got to look at the big picture. Look around this room. We are all different, and a disease that I might have, if I had Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease, it probably would affect me differently than if one of you had that disease, and if we both had Parkinson's disease, and we took the same medication, but we had different genetic makeup, we probably would have a different result, and it could well be that a drug that worked wonderfully for me was actually ineffective for you, and similarly, it could be that a drug that is harmful for you is safe for me, and, you know, this seems totally obvious, but unfortunately it is not the way that the pharmaceutical industry has been developing drugs because, until now, it hasn't had the tools. And so we need to move away from this one-size-fits-all model. The way we've been developing drugs is essentially like going into a shoe store, no one asks you what size you are, or if you're going dancing or hiking. They just say, "Well, you have feet, here are your shoes." It doesn't work with shoes, and our bodies are many times more complicated than just our feet. So we really have to change this. There was a very sad example of this in the last decade. There's a wonderful drug, and a class of drugs actually, but the particular drug was Vioxx, and for people who were suffering from severe arthritis pain, the drug was an absolute lifesaver, but unfortunately, for another subset of those people, they suffered pretty severe heart side effects, and for a subset of those people, the side effects were so severe, the cardiac side effects, that they were fatal. But imagine a different scenario, where we could have had an array, a genetically diverse array, of cardiac cells, and we could have actually tested that drug, Vioxx, in petri dishes, and figured out, well, okay, people with this genetic type are going to have cardiac side effects, people with these genetic subgroups or genetic shoes sizes, about 25,000 of them, are not going to have any problems. The people for whom it was a lifesaver could have still taken their medicine. The people for whom it was a disaster, or fatal, would never have been given it, and you can imagine a very different outcome for the company, who had to withdraw the drug. So that is terrific, and we thought, all right, as we're trying to solve this problem, clearly we have to think about genetics, we have to think about human testing, but there's a fundamental problem, because right now, stem cell lines, as extraordinary as they are, and lines are just groups of cells, they are made by hand, one at a time, and it takes a couple of months. This is not scalable, and also when you do things by hand, even in the best laboratories, you have variations in techniques, and you need to know, if you're making a drug, that the Aspirin you're going to take out of the bottle on Monday is the same as the Aspirin that's going to come out of the bottle on Wednesday. So we looked at this, and we thought, okay, artisanal is wonderful in, you know, your clothing and your bread and crafts, but artisanal really isn't going to work in stem cells, so we have to deal with this. But even with that, there still was another big hurdle, and that actually brings us back to the mapping of the human genome, because we're all different. We know from the sequencing of the human genome that it's shown us all of the A's, C's, G's and T's that make up our genetic code, but that code, by itself, our DNA, is like looking at the ones and zeroes of the computer code without having a computer that can read it. It's like having an app without having a smartphone. We needed to have a way of bringing the biology to that incredible data, and the way to do that was to find a stand-in, a biological stand-in, that could contain all of the genetic information, but have it be arrayed in such a way as it could be read together and actually create this incredible avatar. We need to have stem cells from all the genetic sub-types that represent who we are. So this is what we've built. It's an automated robotic technology. It has the capacity to produce thousands and thousands of stem cell lines. It's genetically arrayed. It has massively parallel processing capability, and it's going to change the way drugs are discovered, we hope, and I think eventually what's going to happen is that we're going to want to re-screen drugs, on arrays like this, that already exist, all of the drugs that currently exist, and in the future, you're going to be taking drugs and treatments that have been tested for side effects on all of the relevant cells, on brain cells and heart cells and liver cells. It really has brought us to the threshold of personalized medicine. It's here now, and in our family, my son has type 1 diabetes, which is still an incurable disease, and I lost my parents to heart disease and cancer, but I think that my story probably sounds familiar to you, because probably a version of it is your story. At some point in our lives, all of us, or people we care about, become patients, and that's why I think that stem cell research is incredibly important for all of us. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
A choreographer's creative process in real time | {0: 'Wayne McGregor and his dancers explore the uncharted territory where mind and movement intersect.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | As you might imagine, I'm absolutely passionate about dance. I'm passionate about making it, about watching it, about encouraging others to participate in it, and I'm also really passionate about creativity. Creativity for me is something that's absolutely critical, and I think it's something that you can teach. I think the technicities of creativity can be taught and shared, and I think you can find out things about your own personal physical signature, your own cognitive habits, and use that as a point of departure to misbehave beautifully. I was born in the 1970s, and John Travolta was big in those days: "Grease," "Saturday Night Fever," and he provided a fantastic kind of male role model for me to start dancing. My parents were very up for me going. They absolutely encouraged me to take risks, to go, to try, to try. I had an opportunity, an access to a local dance studio, and I had an enlightened teacher who allowed me to make up my own and invent my own dances, so what she did was let me make up my own ballroom and Latin American dances to teach to my peers. And that was the very first time that I found an opportunity to feel that I was able to express my own voice, and that's what's fueled me, then, to become a choreographer. I feel like I've got something to say and something to share. And I guess what's interesting is, is that I am now obsessed with the technology of the body. I think it's the most technologically literate thing that we have, and I'm absolutely obsessed with finding a way of communicating ideas through the body to audiences that might move them, touch them, help them think differently about things. So for me, choreography is very much a process of physical thinking. It's very much in mind, as well as in body, and it's a collaborative process. It's something that I have to do with other people. You know, it's a distributed cognitive process in a way. I work often with designers and visual artists, obviously dancers and other choreographers, but also, more and more, with economists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, people really who come from very different domains of expertise, where they bring their intelligence to bear on a different kind of creative process. What I thought we would do today a little bit is explore this idea of physical thinking, and we're all experts in physical thinking. Yeah, you all have a body, right? And we all know what that body is like in the real world, so one of the aspects of physical thinking that we think about a lot is this notion of proprioception, the sense of my own body in the space in the real world. So, we all understand what it feels like to know where the ends of your fingers are when you hold out your arms, yeah? You absolutely know that when you're going to grab a cup, or that cup moves and you have to renavigate it. So we're experts in physical thinking already. We just don't think about our bodies very much. We only think about them when they go wrong, so, when there's a broken arm, or when you have a heart attack, then you become really very aware of your bodies. But how is it that we can start to think about using choreographic thinking, kinesthetic intelligence, to arm the ways in which we think about things more generally? What I thought I'd do is, I'd make a TED premiere. I'm not sure if this is going to be good or not. I'll just be doing it. I thought what I'd do is, I'd use three versions of physical thinking to make something. I want to introduce you. This is Paolo. This is Catarina. (Applause) They have no idea what we're going to do. So this is not the type of choreography where I already have in mind what I'm going to make, where I've fixed the routine in my head and I'm just going to teach it to them, and these so-called empty vessels are just going to learn it. That's not the methodology at all that we work with. But what's important about it is how it is that they're grasping information, how they're taking information, how they're using it, and how they're thinking with it. I'm going to start really, really simply. Usually, dance has a stimulus or stimuli, and I thought I'd take something simple, TED logo, we can all see it, it's quite easy to work with, and I'm going to do something very simply, where you take one idea from a body, and it happens to be my body, and translate that into somebody else's body, so it's a direct transfer, transformation of energy. And I'm going to imagine this, you can do this too if you like, that I'm going to just take the letter "T" and I'm going to imagine it in mind, and I'm going to place that outside in the real world. So I absolutely see a letter "T" in front of me. Yeah? It's absolutely there. I can absolutely walk around it when I see it, yeah? It has a kind of a grammar. I know what I'm going to do with it, and I can start to describe it, so I can describe it very simply. I can describe it in my arms, right? So all I did was take my hand and then I move my hand. I can describe it, whoa, in my head, you know? Whoa. Okay. I can do also my shoulder. Yeah? It gives me something to do, something to work towards. If I were to take that letter "T" and flatten it down on the floor, here, maybe just off the floor, all of a sudden I could do maybe something with my knee, yeah? Whoa. So If I put the knee and the arms together, I've got something physical, yeah? And I can start to build something. So what I'm going to do just for one and a half minutes or so is I'm going to take that concept, I'm going to make something, and the dancers behind me are going to interpret it, they're going to snapshot it, they're going to take aspects of it, and it's almost like I'm offloading memory and they're holding onto memory? Yeah? And we'll see what we come up with. So just have a little watch about how they're, how they're accessing this and what they're doing, and I'm just going to take this letter "T," the letter "E," and the letter "D," to make something. Okay. Here goes. So I have to get myself in the zone. Right. It's a bit of a cross of my arm. So all I'm doing is exploring this space of "T" and flashing through it with some action. I'm not remembering what I'm doing. I'm just working on my task. My task is this "T." Going to watch it from the side, whoa. Strike moment. That's it. So we're starting to build a phrase. So what they're doing, let's see, something like that, so what they're doing is grasping aspects of that movement and they're generating it into a phrase. You can see the speed is extremely quick, yeah? I'm not asking them to copy exactly. They're using the information that they receive to generate the beginnings of a phrase. I can watch that and that can tell me something about how it is that they're moving. Yeah, they're super quick, right? So I've taken this aspect of TED and translated it into something that's physical. Some dancers, when they're watching action, take the overall shape, the arc of the movement, the kinetic sense of the movement, and use that for memory. Some work very much in specific detail. They start with small little units and build it up. Okay, you've got something? One more thing. So they're solving this problem for me, having a little — They're constructing that phrase. They have something and they're going to hold on to it, yeah? One way of making. That's going to be my beginning in this world premiere. Okay. From there I'm going to do a very different thing. So basically I'm going to make a duet. I want you to think about them as architectural objects, so what they are, are just pure lines. They're no longer people, just pure lines, and I'm going to work with them almost as objects to think with, yeah? So what I'm thinking about is taking a few physical extensions from the body as I move, and I move them, and I do that by suggesting things to them: If, then; if, then. Okay, so here we go. Just grab this arm. Can you place that down into the floor? Yeah, down to the floor. Can you go underneath? Yeah. Cat, can you put leg over that side? Yeah. Can you rotate? Whoom, just go back to the beginning. Here we go, ready? And ... bam, bake ... (clicks metronome) Great. Okay, from there, you're both getting up. You're both getting up. Here we go. Good, now? Them. (Applause) So from there, from there, we're both getting up, we're both getting up, going in this direction, going underneath. Whoa, whoa, underneath. Whoa, underneath, whoo-um. Yeah? Underneath. Jump. Underneath. Jump. Paolo, kick. Don't care where. Kick. Kick, replace, change a leg. Kick, replace, change the leg. Yeah? Okay? Cat, almost get his head. Almost get his head. Whoaa. Just after it, maybe. Whoaa, whaaay, ooh. Grab her waist, come up back into her first, whoom, spin, turn her, whoo-aa. (Snaps) Great. Okay, let's have a little go from the beginning of that. Just, let me slow down here. Fancy having eight — (Laughter) Fancy having eight hours with me in a day. So, maybe too much. So, here we go, ready, and — (Clicks metronome) (Clicks metronome) Nice, good job. Yeah? Okay. (Applause) Okay, not bad. (Applause) A little bit more? Yeah. Just a little bit more, here we go, from that place. Separate. Face the front. Separate. Face the front. Imagine that there's a circle in front of you, yeah? Avoid it. Avoid it. Whoom. Kick it out of the way. Kick it out of the way. Throw it into the audience. Whoom. Throw it into the audience again. We've got mental architecture, we're sharing it, therefore solving a problem. They're enacting it. Let me just see that a little bit. Ready, and go. (Clicks metronome) Okay, brilliant. Okay, here we go. From the beginning, can we do our phrases first? And then that. And we're going to build something now, organize it, the phrases. Here we go. Nice and slow? Ready and go ... um. (Clicks metronome) (Clicks metronome) The duet starts. (Clicks metronome) (Clicks metronome) So yeah, okay, good. Okay, nice, very nice. (Applause) So good. So — (Applause) Okay. So that was — (Applause) Well done. (Applause) That was the second way of working. The first one, body-to-body transfer, yeah, with an outside mental architecture that I work with that they hold memory with for me. The second one, which is using them as objects to think with their architectural objects, I do a series of provocations, I say, "If this happens, then that. If this, if that happens — " I've got lots of methods like that, but it's very, very quick, and this is a third method. They're starting it already, and this is a task-based method, where they have the autonomy to make all of the decisions for themselves. So I'd like us just to do, we're going to do a little mental dance, a little, in this little one minute, so what I'd love you to do is imagine, you can do this with your eyes closed, or open, and if you don't want to do it you can watch them, it's up to you. Just for a second, think about that word "TED" in front of you, so it's in mind, and it's there right in front of your mind. What I'd like you to do is transplant that outside into the real world, so just imagine that word "TED" in the real world. What I'd like you to do what that is take an aspect of it. I'm going to zone in on the "E," and I'm going to scale that "E" so it's absolutely massive, so I'm scaling that "E" so it's absolutely massive, and then I'm going to give it dimensionality. I'm going to think about it in 3D space. So now, instead of it just being a letter that's in front of me, it's a space that my body can go inside of. I now decide where I'm going to be in that space, so I'm down on this small part of the bottom rib of the letter "E," and I'm thinking about it, and I'm imagining this space that's really high and above. If I asked you to reach out — you don't have to literally do it, but in mind — reach out to the top of the "E," where would you reach? If you reach with your finger, where would it be? If you reach with your elbow, where would it be? If I already then said about that space that you're in, let's infuse it with the color red, what does that do to the body? If I then said to you, what happens if that whole wall on the side of "E" collapses and you have to use your weight to put it back up, what would you be able to do with it? So this is a mental picture, I'm describing a mental, vivid picture that enables dancers to make choices for themselves about what to make. Okay, you can open your eyes if you had them closed. So the dancers have been working on them. So just keep working on them for a little second. So they've been working on those mental architectures in the here. I know, I think we should keep them as a surprise. So here goes, world premiere dance. Yeah? Here we go. TED dance. Okay. Here it comes. I'm going to organize it quickly. So, you're going to do the first solo that we made, yeah blah blah blah blah, we go into the duet, yeah, blah blah blah blah. The next solo, blah blah blah blah, yeah, and both at the same time, you do the last solutions. Okay? Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, world premiere, TED dance, three versions of physical thinking. (Applause) Well, clap afterwards, let's see if it's any good, yeah? (Laughter) So yeah, let's clap — yeah, let's clap afterwards. Here we go. Catarina, big moment, here we go, one. (Clicks metronome) Here it comes, Cat. (Clicks metronome) Paolo, go. (Clicks metronome) Last you solo. The one you made. (Clicks metronome) (Clicks metronome) Well done. Okay, good. Super. So — (Applause) So — (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) So — three versions. (Applause) Oh. (Laughs) (Applause) Three versions of physical thinking, yeah? Three versions of physical thinking. I'm hoping that today, what you're going to do is go away and make a dance for yourself, and if not that, at least misbehave more beautifully, more often. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Here we go. (Applause) (Applause) |
Demand a more open-source government | {0: 'A lawyer by training and a techie by inclination, Beth Noveck works to build data transparency into government.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | So when the White House was built in the early 19th century, it was an open house. Neighbors came and went. Under President Adams, a local dentist happened by. He wanted to shake the President's hand. The President dismissed the Secretary of State, whom he was conferring with, and asked the dentist if he would remove a tooth. Later, in the 1850s, under President Pierce, he was known to have remarked — probably the only thing he's known for — when a neighbor passed by and said, "I'd love to see the beautiful house," and Pierce said to him, "Why my dear sir, of course you may come in. This isn't my house. It is the people's house." Well, when I got to the White House in the beginning of 2009, at the start of the Obama Administration, the White House was anything but open. Bomb blast curtains covered my windows. We were running Windows 2000. Social media were blocked at the firewall. We didn't have a blog, let alone a dozen twitter accounts like we have today. I came in to become the head of Open Government, to take the values and the practices of transparency, participation and collaboration, and instill them into the way that we work, to open up government, to work with people. Now one of the things that we know is that companies are very good at getting people to work together in teams and in networks to make very complex products, like cars and computers, and the more complex the products are a society creates, the more successful the society is over time. Companies make goods, but governments, they make public goods. They work on the cure for cancer and educating our children and making roads, but we don't have institutions that are particularly good at this kind of complexity. We don't have institutions that are good at bringing our talents to bear, at working with us in this kind of open and collaborative way. So when we wanted to create our Open Government policy, what did we do? We wanted, naturally, to ask public sector employees how we should open up government. Turns out that had never been done before. We wanted to ask members of the public to help us come up with a policy, not after the fact, commenting on a rule after it's written, the way is typically the case, but in advance. There was no legal precedent, no cultural precedent, no technical way of doing this. In fact, many people told us it was illegal. Here's the crux of the obstacle. Governments exist to channel the flow of two things, really, values and expertise to and from government and to and from citizens to the end of making decisions. But the way that our institutions are designed, in our rather 18th-century, centralized model, is to channel the flow of values through voting, once every four years, once every two years, at best, once a year. This is a rather anemic and thin way, in this era of social media, for us to actually express our values. Today we have technology that lets us express ourselves a great deal, perhaps a little too much. Then in the 19th century, we layer on the concept of bureaucracy and the administrative state to help us govern complex and large societies. But we've centralized these bureaucracies. We've entrenched them. And we know that the smartest person always works for someone else. We need to only look around this room to know that expertise and intelligence is widely distributed in society, and not limited simply to our institutions. Scientists have been studying in recent years the phenomenon that they often describe as flow, that the design of our systems, whether natural or social, channel the flow of whatever runs through them. So a river is designed to channel the flow of water, and the lightning bolt that comes out of a cloud channels the flow of electricity, and a leaf is designed to channel the flow of nutrients to the tree, sometimes even having to route around an obstacle, but to get that nutrition flowing. The same can be said for our social systems, for our systems of government, where, at the very least, flow offers us a helpful metaphor for understanding what the problem is, what's really broken, and the urgent need that we have, that we all feel today, to redesign the flow of our institutions. We live in a Cambrian era of big data, of social networks, and we have this opportunity to redesign these institutions that are actually quite recent. Think about it: What other business do you know, what other sector of the economy, and especially one as big as the public sector, that doesn't seek to reinvent its business model on a regular basis? Sure, we invest plenty in innovation. We invest in broadband and science education and science grants, but we invest far too little in reinventing and redesigning the institutions that we have. Now, it's very easy to complain, of course, about partisan politics and entrenched bureaucracy, and we love to complain about government. It's a perennial pastime, especially around election time, but the world is complex. We soon will have 10 billion people, many of whom will lack basic resources. So complain as we might, what actually can replace what we have today? What comes the day after the Arab Spring? Well, one attractive alternative that obviously presents itself to us is that of networks. Right? Networks like Facebook and Twitter. They're lean. They're mean. You've got 3,000 employees at Facebook governing 900 million inhabitants. We might even call them citizens, because they've recently risen up to fight against legislative incursion, and the citizens of these networks work together to serve each other in great ways. But private communities, private, corporate, privatizing communities, are not bottom-up democracies. They cannot replace government. Friending someone on Facebook is not complex enough to do the hard work of you and I collaborating with each other and doing the hard work of governance. But social media do teach us something. Why is Twitter so successful? Because it opens up its platform. It opens up the API to allow hundreds of thousands of new applications to be built on top of it, so that we can read and process information in new and exciting ways. We need to think about how to open up the API of government, and the way that we're going to do that, the next great superpower is going to be the one who can successfully combine the hierarchy of institution — because we have to maintain those public values, we have to coordinate the flow — but with the diversity and the pulsating life and the chaos and the excitement of networks, all of us working together to build these new innovations on top of our institutions, to engage in the practice of governance. We have a precedent for this. Good old Henry II here, in the 12th century, invented the jury. Powerful, practical, palpable model for handing power from government to citizens. Today we have the opportunity, and we have the imperative, to create thousands of new ways of interconnecting between networks and institutions, thousands of new kinds of juries: the citizen jury, the Carrotmob, the hackathon, we are just beginning to invent the models by which we can cocreate the process of governance. Now, we don't fully have a picture of what this will look like yet, but we're seeing pockets of evolution emerging all around us — maybe not even evolution, I'd even start to call it a revolution — in the way that we govern. Some of it's very high-tech, and some of it is extremely low-tech, such as the project that MKSS is running in Rajasthan, India, where they take the spending data of the state and paint it on 100,000 village walls, and then invite the villagers to come and comment who is on the government payroll, who's actually died, what are the bridges that have been built to nowhere, and to work together through civic engagement to save real money and participate and have access to that budget. But it's not just about policing government. It's also about creating government. Spacehive in the U.K. is engaging in crowd-funding, getting you and me to raise the money to build the goalposts and the park benches that will actually allow us to deliver better services in our communities. No one is better at this activity of actually getting us to engage in delivering services, sometimes where none exist, than Ushahidi. Created after the post-election riots in Kenya in 2008, this crisis-mapping website and community is actually able to crowdsource and target the delivery of better rescue services to people trapped under the rubble, whether it's after the earthquakes in Haiti, or more recently in Italy. And the Red Cross too is training volunteers and Twitter is certifying them, not simply to supplement existing government institutions, but in many cases, to replace them. Now what we're seeing lots of examples of, obviously, is the opening up of government data, not enough examples of this yet, but we're starting to see this practice of people creating and generating innovative applications on top of government data. There's so many examples I could have picked, and I selected this one of Jon Bon Jovi. Some of you may or may not know that he runs a soup kitchen in New Jersey, where he caters to and serves the homeless and particularly homeless veterans. In February, he approached the White House, and said, "I would like to fund a prize to create scalable national applications, apps, that will help not only the homeless but those who deliver services [to] them to do so better." February 2012 to June of 2012, the finalists are announced in the competition. Can you imagine, in the bureaucratic world of yesteryear, getting anything done in a four-month period of time? You can barely fill out the forms in that amount of time, let alone generate real, palpable innovations that improve people's lives. And I want to be clear to mention that this open government revolution is not about privatizing government, because in many cases what it can do when we have the will to do so is to deliver more progressive and better policy than the regulations and the legislative and litigation-oriented strategies by which we make policy today. In the State of Texas, they regulate 515 professions, from well-driller to florist. Now, you can carry a gun into a church in Dallas, but do not make a flower arrangement without a license, because that will land you in jail. So what is Texas doing? They're asking you and me, using online policy wikis, to help not simply get rid of burdensome regulations that impede entrepreneurship, but to replace those regulations with more innovative alternatives, sometimes using transparency in the creation of new iPhone apps that will allows us both to protect consumers and the public and to encourage economic development. That is a nice sideline of open government. It's not only the benefits that we've talked about with regard to development. It's the economic benefits and the job creation that's coming from this open innovation work. Sberbank, the largest and oldest bank in Russia, largely owned by the Russian government, has started practicing crowdsourcing, engaging its employees and citizens in the public in developing innovations. Last year they saved a billion dollars, 30 billion rubles, from open innovation, and they're pushing radically the extension of crowdsourcing, not only from banking, but into the public sector. And we see lots of examples of these innovators using open government data, not simply to make apps, but then to make companies and to hire people to build them working with the government. So a lot of these innovations are local. In San Ramon, California, they published an iPhone app in which they allow you or me to say we are certified CPR-trained, and then when someone has a heart attack, a notification goes out so that you can rush over to the person over here and deliver CPR. The victim who receives bystander CPR is more than twice as likely to survive. "There is a hero in all of us," is their slogan. But it's not limited to the local. British Columbia, Canada, is publishing a catalogue of all the ways that its residents and citizens can engage with the state in the cocreation of governance. Let me be very clear, and perhaps controversial, that open government is not about transparent government. Simply throwing data over the transom doesn't change how government works. It doesn't get anybody to do anything with that data to change lives, to solve problems, and it doesn't change government. What it does is it creates an adversarial relationship between civil society and government over the control and ownership of information. And transparency, by itself, is not reducing the flow of money into politics, and arguably, it's not even producing accountability as well as it might if we took the next step of combining participation and collaboration with transparency to transform how we work. We're going to see this evolution really in two phases, I think. The first phase of the open government revolution is delivering better information from the crowd into the center. Starting in 2005, and this is how this open government work in the U.S. really got started, I was teaching a patent law class to my students and explaining to them how a single person in the bureaucracy has the power to make a decision about which patent application becomes the next patent, and therefore monopolizes for 20 years the rights over an entire field of inventive activity. Well, what did we do? We said, we can make a website, we can make an expert network, a social network, that would connect the network to the institution to allow scientists and technologists to get better information to the patent office to aid in making those decisions. We piloted the work in the U.S. and the U.K. and Japan and Australia, and now I'm pleased to report that the United States Patent Office will be rolling out universal, complete, and total openness, so that all patent applications will now be open for citizen participation, beginning this year. The second phase of this evolution — Yeah. (Applause) They deserve a hand. (Applause) The first phase is in getting better information in. The second phase is in getting decision-making power out. Participatory budgeting has long been practiced in Porto Alegre, Brazil. They're just starting it in the 49th Ward in Chicago. Russia is using wikis to get citizens writing law together, as is Lithuania. When we start to see power over the core functions of government — spending, legislation, decision-making — then we're well on our way to an open government revolution. There are many things that we can do to get us there. Obviously opening up the data is one, but the important thing is to create lots more — create and curate — lots more participatory opportunities. Hackathons and mashathons and working with data to build apps is an intelligible way for people to engage and participate, like the jury is, but we're going to need lots more things like it. And that's why we need to start with our youngest people. We've heard talk here at TED about people biohacking and hacking their plants with Arduino, and Mozilla is doing work around the world in getting young people to build websites and make videos. When we start by teaching young people that we live, not in a passive society, a read-only society, but in a writable society, where we have the power to change our communities, to change our institutions, that's when we begin to really put ourselves on the pathway towards this open government innovation, towards this open government movement, towards this open government revolution. So let me close by saying that I think the important thing for us to do is to talk about and demand this revolution. We don't have words, really, to describe it yet. Words like equality and fairness and the traditional elections, democracy, these are not really great terms yet. They're not fun enough. They're not exciting enough to get us engaged in this tremendous opportunity that awaits us. But I would argue that if we want to see the kinds of innovations, the hopeful and exciting innovations that we hear talked about here at TED, in clean energy, in clean education, in development, if we want to see those adopted and we want to see those scaled, we want to see them become the governance of tomorrow, then we must all participate, then we must get involved. We must open up our institutions, and like the leaf, we must let the nutrients flow throughout our body politic, throughout our culture, to create open institutions to create a stronger democracy, a better tomorrow. Thank you. (Applause) |
The global food waste scandal | {0: 'Tristram Stuart sounds the warning bell on global food waste, calling for us to change the systems whereby large quantities of produce and other foods end up in trash heaps.'} | TEDSalon London Spring 2012 | The job of uncovering the global food waste scandal started for me when I was 15 years old. I bought some pigs. I was living in Sussex. And I started to feed them in the most traditional and environmentally friendly way. I went to my school kitchen, and I said, "Give me the scraps that my school friends have turned their noses up at." I went to the local baker and took their stale bread. I went to the local greengrocer, and I went to a farmer who was throwing away potatoes because they were the wrong shape or size for supermarkets. This was great. My pigs turned that food waste into delicious pork. I sold that pork to my school friends' parents, and I made a good pocket money addition to my teenage allowance. But I noticed that most of the food that I was giving my pigs was in fact fit for human consumption, and that I was only scratching the surface, and that right the way up the food supply chain, in supermarkets, greengrocers, bakers, in our homes, in factories and farms, we were hemorrhaging out food. Supermarkets didn't even want to talk to me about how much food they were wasting. I'd been round the back. I'd seen bins full of food being locked and then trucked off to landfill sites, and I thought, surely there is something more sensible to do with food than waste it. One morning, when I was feeding my pigs, I noticed a particularly tasty-looking sun-dried tomato loaf that used to crop up from time to time. I grabbed hold of it, sat down, and ate my breakfast with my pigs. (Laughter) That was the first act of what I later learned to call freeganism, really an exhibition of the injustice of food waste, and the provision of the solution to food waste, which is simply to sit down and eat food, rather than throwing it away. That became, as it were, a way of confronting large businesses in the business of wasting food, and exposing, most importantly, to the public, that when we're talking about food being thrown away, we're not talking about rotten stuff, we're not talking about stuff that's beyond the pale. We're talking about good, fresh food that is being wasted on a colossal scale. Eventually, I set about writing my book, really to demonstrate the extent of this problem on a global scale. What this shows is a nation-by-nation breakdown of the likely level of food waste in each country in the world. Unfortunately, empirical data, good, hard stats, don't exist, and therefore to prove my point, I first of all had to find some proxy way of uncovering how much food was being wasted. So I took the food supply of every single country and I compared it to what was actually likely to be being consumed in each country. That's based on diet intake surveys, it's based on levels of obesity, it's based on a range of factors that gives you an approximate guess as to how much food is actually going into people's mouths. That black line in the middle of that table is the likely level of consumption with an allowance for certain levels of inevitable waste. There will always be waste. I'm not that unrealistic that I think we can live in a waste-free world. But that black line shows what a food supply should be in a country if they allow for a good, stable, secure, nutritional diet for every person in that country. Any dot above that line, and you'll quickly notice that that includes most countries in the world, represents unnecessary surplus, and is likely to reflect levels of waste in each country. As a country gets richer, it invests more and more in getting more and more surplus into its shops and restaurants, and as you can see, most European and North American countries fall between 150 and 200 percent of the nutritional requirements of their populations. So a country like America has twice as much food on its shop shelves and in its restaurants than is actually required to feed the American people. But the thing that really struck me, when I plotted all this data, and it was a lot of numbers, was that you can see how it levels off. Countries rapidly shoot towards that 150 mark, and then they level off, and they don't really go on rising as you might expect. So I decided to unpack that data a little bit further to see if that was true or false. And that's what I came up with. If you include not just the food that ends up in shops and restaurants, but also the food that people feed to livestock, the maize, the soy, the wheat, that humans could eat but choose to fatten livestock instead to produce increasing amounts of meat and dairy products, what you find is that most rich countries have between three and four times the amount of food that their population needs to feed itself. A country like America has four times the amount of food that it needs. When people talk about the need to increase global food production to feed those nine billion people that are expected on the planet by 2050, I always think of these graphs. The fact is, we have an enormous buffer in rich countries between ourselves and hunger. We've never had such gargantuan surpluses before. In many ways, this is a great success story of human civilization, of the agricultural surpluses that we set out to achieve 12,000 years ago. It is a success story. It has been a success story. But what we have to recognize now is that we are reaching the ecological limits that our planet can bear, and when we chop down forests, as we are every day, to grow more and more food, when we extract water from depleting water reserves, when we emit fossil fuel emissions in the quest to grow more and more food, and then we throw away so much of it, we have to think about what we can start saving. And yesterday, I went to one of the local supermarkets that I often visit to inspect, if you like, what they're throwing away. I found quite a few packets of biscuits amongst all the fruit and vegetables and everything else that was in there. And I thought, well this could serve as a symbol for today. So I want you to imagine that these nine biscuits that I found in the bin represent the global food supply, okay? We start out with nine. That's what's in fields around the world every single year. The first biscuit we're going to lose before we even leave the farm. That's a problem primarily associated with developing work agriculture, whether it's a lack of infrastructure, refrigeration, pasteurization, grain stores, even basic fruit crates, which means that food goes to waste before it even leaves the fields. The next three biscuits are the foods that we decide to feed to livestock, the maize, the wheat and the soya. Unfortunately, our beasts are inefficient animals, and they turn two-thirds of that into feces and heat, so we've lost those two, and we've only kept this one in meat and dairy products. Two more we're going to throw away directly into bins. This is what most of us think of when we think of food waste, what ends up in the garbage, what ends up in supermarket bins, what ends up in restaurant bins. We've lost another two, and we've left ourselves with just four biscuits to feed on. That is not a superlatively efficient use of global resources, especially when you think of the billion hungry people that exist already in the world. Having gone through the data, I then needed to demonstrate where that food ends up. Where does it end up? We're used to seeing the stuff on our plates, but what about all the stuff that goes missing in between? Supermarkets are an easy place to start. This is the result of my hobby, which is unofficial bin inspections. (Laughter) Strange you might think, but if we could rely on corporations to tell us what they were doing in the back of their stores, we wouldn't need to go sneaking around the back, opening up bins and having a look at what's inside. But this is what you can see more or less on every street corner in Britain, in Europe, in North America. It represents a colossal waste of food, but what I discovered whilst I was writing my book was that this very evident abundance of waste was actually the tip of the iceberg. When you start going up the supply chain, you find where the real food waste is happening on a gargantuan scale. Can I have a show of hands if you have a loaf of sliced bread in your house? Who lives in a household where that crust — that slice at the first and last end of each loaf — who lives in a household where it does get eaten? Okay, most people, not everyone, but most people, and this is, I'm glad to say, what I see across the world, and yet has anyone seen a supermarket or sandwich shop anywhere in the world that serves sandwiches with crusts on it? (Laughter) I certainly haven't. So I kept on thinking, where do those crusts go? (Laughter) This is the answer, unfortunately: 13,000 slices of fresh bread coming out of this one single factory every single day, day-fresh bread. In the same year that I visited this factory, I went to Pakistan, where people in 2008 were going hungry as a result of a squeeze on global food supplies. We contribute to that squeeze by depositing food in bins here in Britain and elsewhere in the world. We take food off the market shelves that hungry people depend on. Go one step up, and you get to farmers, who throw away sometimes a third or even more of their harvest because of cosmetic standards. This farmer, for example, has invested 16,000 pounds in growing spinach, not one leaf of which he harvested, because there was a little bit of grass growing in amongst it. Potatoes that are cosmetically imperfect, all going for pigs. Parsnips that are too small for supermarket specifications, tomatoes in Tenerife, oranges in Florida, bananas in Ecuador, where I visited last year, all being discarded. This is one day's waste from one banana plantation in Ecuador. All being discarded, perfectly edible, because they're the wrong shape or size. If we do that to fruit and vegetables, you bet we can do it to animals too. Liver, lungs, heads, tails, kidneys, testicles, all of these things which are traditional, delicious and nutritious parts of our gastronomy go to waste. Offal consumption has halved in Britain and America in the last 30 years. As a result, this stuff gets fed to dogs at best, or is incinerated. This man, in Kashgar, Xinjiang province, in Western China, is serving up his national dish. It's called sheep's organs. It's delicious, it's nutritious, and as I learned when I went to Kashgar, it symbolizes their taboo against food waste. I was sitting in a roadside cafe. A chef came to talk to me, I finished my bowl, and halfway through the conversation, he stopped talking and he started frowning into my bowl. I thought, "My goodness, what taboo have I broken? How have I insulted my host?" He pointed at three grains of rice at the bottom of my bowl, and he said, "Clean." (Laughter) I thought, "My God, you know, I go around the world telling people to stop wasting food. This guy has thrashed me at my own game." (Laughter) But it gave me faith. It gave me faith that we, the people, do have the power to stop this tragic waste of resources if we regard it as socially unacceptable to waste food on a colossal scale, if we make noise about it, tell corporations about it, tell governments we want to see an end to food waste, we do have the power to bring about that change. Fish, 40 to 60 percent of European fish are discarded at sea, they don't even get landed. In our homes, we've lost touch with food. This is an experiment I did on three lettuces. Who keeps lettuces in their fridge? Most people. The one on the left was kept in a fridge for 10 days. The one in the middle, on my kitchen table. Not much difference. The one on the right I treated like cut flowers. It's a living organism, cut the slice off, stuck it in a vase of water, it was all right for another two weeks after this. Some food waste, as I said at the beginning, will inevitably arise, so the question is, what is the best thing to do with it? I answered that question when I was 15. In fact, humans answered that question 6,000 years ago: We domesticated pigs to turn food waste back into food. And yet, in Europe, that practice has become illegal since 2001 as a result of the foot-and-mouth outbreak. It's unscientific. It's unnecessary. If you cook food for pigs, just as if you cook food for humans, it is rendered safe. It's also a massive saving of resources. At the moment, Europe depends on importing millions of tons of soy from South America, where its production contributes to global warming, to deforestation, to biodiversity loss, to feed livestock here in Europe. At the same time we throw away millions of tons of food waste which we could and should be feeding them. If we did that, and fed it to pigs, we would save that amount of carbon. If we feed our food waste which is the current government favorite way of getting rid of food waste, to anaerobic digestion, which turns food waste into gas to produce electricity, you save a paltry 448 kilograms of carbon dioxide per ton of food waste. It's much better to feed it to pigs. We knew that during the war. (Laughter) A silver lining: It has kicked off globally, the quest to tackle food waste. Feeding the 5,000 is an event I first organized in 2009. We fed 5,000 people all on food that otherwise would have been wasted. Since then, it's happened again in London, it's happening internationally, and across the country. It's a way of organizations coming together to celebrate food, to say the best thing to do with food is to eat and enjoy it, and to stop wasting it. For the sake of the planet we live on, for the sake of our children, for the sake of all the other organisms that share our planet with us, we are a terrestrial animal, and we depend on our land for food. At the moment, we are trashing our land to grow food that no one eats. Stop wasting food. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) |
The mysterious workings of the adolescent brain | {0: 'Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is Professor of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, UK, and leader of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Group. '} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Fifteen years ago, it was widely assumed that the vast majority of brain development takes place in the first few years of life. Back then, 15 years ago, we didn't have the ability to look inside the living human brain and track development across the lifespan. In the past decade or so, mainly due to advances in brain imaging technology such as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, neuroscientists have started to look inside the living human brain of all ages, and to track changes in brain structure and brain function, so we use structural MRI if you'd like to take a snapshot, a photograph, at really high resolution of the inside of the living human brain, and we can ask questions like, how much gray matter does the brain contain, and how does that change with age? And we also use functional MRI, called fMRI, to take a video, a movie, of brain activity when participants are taking part in some kind of task like thinking or feeling or perceiving something. So many labs around the world are involved in this kind of research, and we now have a really rich and detailed picture of how the living human brain develops, and this picture has radically changed the way we think about human brain development by revealing that it's not all over in early childhood, and instead, the brain continues to develop right throughout adolescence and into the '20s and '30s. So adolescence is defined as the period of life that starts with the biological, hormonal, physical changes of puberty and ends at the age at which an individual attains a stable, independent role in society. (Laughter) It can go on a long time. (Laughter) One of the brain regions that changes most dramatically during adolescence is called prefrontal cortex. So this is a model of the human brain, and this is prefrontal cortex, right at the front. Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area. It's proportionally much bigger in humans than in any other species, and it's involved in a whole range of high level cognitive functions, things like decision-making, planning, planning what you're going to do tomorrow or next week or next year, inhibiting inappropriate behavior, so stopping yourself saying something really rude or doing something really stupid. It's also involved in social interaction, understanding other people, and self-awareness. So MRI studies looking at the development of this region have shown that it really undergoes dramatic development during the period of adolescence. So if you look at gray matter volume, for example, gray matter volume across age from age four to 22 years increases during childhood, which is what you can see on this graph. It peaks in early adolescence. The arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex. You can see that that peak happens a couple of years later in boys relative to girls, and that's probably because boys go through puberty a couple of years later than girls on average, and then during adolescence, there's a significant decline in gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex. Now that might sound bad, but actually this is a really important developmental process, because gray matter contains cell bodies and connections between cells, the synapses, and this decline in gray matter volume during prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning, the elimination of unwanted synapses. This is a really important process. It's partly dependent on the environment that the animal or the human is in, and the synapses that are being used are strengthened, and synapses that aren't being used in that particular environment are pruned away. You can think of it a bit like pruning a rosebush. You prune away the weaker branches so that the remaining, important branches, can grow stronger, and this process, which effectively fine-tunes brain tissue according to the species-specific environment, is happening in prefrontal cortex and in other brain regions during the period of human adolescence. So a second line of inquiry that we use to track changes in the adolescent brain is using functional MRI to look at changes in brain activity across age. So I'll just give you an example from my lab. So in my lab, we're interested in the social brain, that is the network of brain regions that we use to understand other people and to interact with other people. So I like to show a photograph of a soccer game to illustrate two aspects of how your social brains work. So this is a soccer game. (Laughter) Michael Owen has just missed a goal, and he's lying on the ground, and the first aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates is how automatic and instinctive social emotional responses are, so within a split second of Michael Owen missing this goal, everyone is doing the same thing with their arms and the same thing with their face, even Michael Owen as he slides along the grass, is doing the same thing with his arms, and presumably has a similar facial expression, and the only people who don't are the guys in yellow at the back — (Laughs) — and I think they're on the wrong end of the stadium, and they're doing another social emotional response that we all instantly recognize, and that's the second aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates, how good we are at reading other people's behavior, their actions, their gestures, their facial expressions, in terms of their underlying emotions and mental states. So you don't have to ask any of these guys. You have a pretty good idea of what they're feeling and thinking at this precise moment in time. So that's what we're interested in looking at in my lab. So in my lab, we bring adolescents and adults into the lab to have a brain scan, we give them some kind of task that involves thinking about other people, their minds, their mental states, their emotions, and one of the findings that we've found several times now, as have other labs around the world, is part of the prefrontal cortex called medial prefrontal cortex, which is shown in blue on the slide, and it's right in the middle of prefrontal cortex in the midline of your head. This region is more active in adolescents when they make these social decisions and think about other people than it is in adults, and this is actually a meta-analysis of nine different studies in this area from labs around the world, and they all show the same thing, that activity in this medial prefrontal cortex area decreases during the period of adolescence. And we think that might be because adolescents and adults use a different mental approach, a different cognitive strategy, to make social decisions, and one way of looking at that is to do behavioral studies whereby we bring people into the lab and we give them some kind of behavioral task, and I'll just give you another example of the kind of task that we use in my lab. So imagine that you're the participant in one of our experiments. You come into the lab, you see this computerized task. In this task, you see a set of shelves. Now, there are objects on these shelves, on some of them, and you'll notice there's a guy standing behind the set of shelves, and there are some objects that he can't see. They're occluded, from his point of view, with a kind of gray piece of wood. This is the same set of shelves from his point of view. Notice that there are only some objects that he can see, whereas there are many more objects that you can see. Now your task is to move objects around. The director, standing behind the set of shelves, is going to direct you to move objects around, but remember, he's not going to ask you to move objects that he can't see. This introduces a really interesting condition whereby there's a kind of conflict between your perspective and the director's perspective. So imagine he tells you to move the top truck left. There are three trucks there. You're going to instinctively go for the white truck, because that's the top truck from your perspective, but then you have to remember, "Oh, he can't see that truck, so he must mean me to move the blue truck," which is the top truck from his perspective. Now believe it or not, normal, healthy, intelligent adults like you make errors about 50 percent of the time on that kind of trial. They move the white truck instead of the blue truck. So we give this kind of task to adolescents and adults, and we also have a control condition where there's no director and instead we give people a rule. We tell them, okay, we're going to do exactly the same thing but this time there's no director. Instead you've got to ignore objects with the dark gray background. You'll see that this is exactly the same condition, only in the no-director condition they just have to remember to apply this somewhat arbitrary rule, whereas in the director condition, they have to remember to take into account the director's perspective in order to guide their ongoing behavior. Okay, so if I just show you the percentage errors in a large developmental study we did, this is in a study ranging from age seven to adulthood, and what you're going to see is the percentage errors in the adult group in both conditions, so the gray is the director condition, and you see that our intelligent adults are making errors about 50 percent of the time, whereas they make far fewer errors when there's no director present, when they just have to remember that rule of ignoring the gray background. Developmentally, these two conditions develop in exactly the same way. Between late childhood and mid-adolescence, there's an improvement, in other words a reduction of errors, in both of these trials, in both of these conditions. But it's when you compare the last two groups, the mid-adolescent group and the adult group where things get really interesting, because there, there is no continued improvement in the no-director condition. In other words, everything you need to do in order to remember the rule and apply it seems to be fully developed by mid-adolescence, whereas in contrast, if you look at the last two gray bars, there's still a significant improvement in the director condition between mid-adolescence and adulthood, and what this means is that the ability to take into account someone else's perspective in order to guide ongoing behavior, which is something, by the way, that we do in everyday life all the time, is still developing in mid-to-late adolescence. So if you have a teenage son or a daughter and you sometimes think they have problems taking other people's perspectives, you're right. They do. And this is why. So we sometimes laugh about teenagers. They're parodied, sometimes even demonized in the media for their kind of typical teenage behavior. They take risks, they're sometimes moody, they're very self-conscious. I have a really nice anecdote from a friend of mine who said that the thing he noticed most about his teenage daughters before and after puberty was their level of embarrassment in front of him. So, he said, "Before puberty, if my two daughters were messing around in a shop, I'd say, 'Hey, stop messing around and I'll sing your favorite song,' and instantly they'd stop messing around and he'd sing their favorite song. After puberty, that became the threat. (Laughter) The very notion of their dad singing in public was enough to make them behave. So people often ask, "Well, is adolescence a kind of recent phenomenon? Is it something we've invented recently in the West?" And actually, the answer is probably not. There are lots of descriptions of adolescence in history that sound very similar to the descriptions we use today. So there's a famous quote by Shakespeare from "The Winter's Tale" where he describes adolescence as follows: "I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting." (Laughter) He then goes on to say, "Having said that, would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt in this weather?" (Laughter) So almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portraying adolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today, but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain. So for example, take risk-taking. We know that adolescents have a tendency to take risks. They do. They take more risks than children or adults, and they are particularly prone to taking risks when they're with their friends. There's an important drive to become independent from one's parents and to impress one's friends in adolescence. But now we try to understand that in terms of the development of a part of their brain called the limbic system, so I'm going to show you the limbic system in red in the slide behind me, and also on this brain. So the limbic system is right deep inside the brain, and it's involved in things like emotion processing and reward processing. It gives you the rewarding feeling out of doing fun things, including taking risks. It gives you the kick out of taking risks. And this region, the regions within the limbic system, have been found to be hypersensitive to the rewarding feeling of risk-taking in adolescents compared with adults, and at the very same time, the prefrontal cortex, which you can see in blue in the slide here, which stops us taking excessive risks, is still very much in development in adolescents. So brain research has shown that the adolescent brain undergoes really quite profound development, and this has implications for education, for rehabilitation, and intervention. The environment, including teaching, can and does shape the developing adolescent brain, and yet it's only relatively recently that we have been routinely educating teenagers in the West. All four of my grandparents, for example, left school in their early adolescence. They had no choice. And that's still the case for many, many teenagers around the world today. Forty percent of teenagers don't have access to secondary school education. And yet, this is a period of life where the brain is particularly adaptable and malleable. It's a fantastic opportunity for learning and creativity. So what's sometimes seen as the problem with adolescents — heightened risk-taking, poor impulse control, self-consciousness — shouldn't be stigmatized. It actually reflects changes in the brain that provide an excellent opportunity for education and social development. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
Why architects need to use their ears | {0: 'Julian Treasure studies sound and advises businesses on how best to use it.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | It's time to start designing for our ears. Architects and designers tend to focus exclusively on these. They use these to design with and they design for them, which is why we end up sitting in restaurants that look like this — (loud crowd noise) — and sound like this, shouting from a foot away to try and be heard by our dinner companion, or why we get on airplanes — (flight attendant announcements) — which cost 200 million pounds, with somebody talking through an old-fashioned telephone handset on a cheap stereo system, making us jump out of our skins. We're designing environments that make us crazy. (Laughter) And it's not just our quality of life which suffers. It's our health, our social behavior, and our productivity as well. How does this work? Well, two ways. First of all, ambience. I have a whole TEDTalk about this. Sound affects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively and behaviorally all the time. The sound around us is affecting us even though we're not conscious of it. There's a second way though, as well. That's interference. Communication requires sending and receiving, and I have another whole TEDTalk about the importance of conscious listening, but I can send as well as I like, and you can be brilliant conscious listeners. If the space I'm sending it in is not effective, that communication can't happen. Spaces tend to include noise and acoustics. A room like this has acoustics, this one very good acoustics. Many rooms are not so good. Let me give you some examples from a couple of areas which I think we all care about: health and education. (Hospital noises) When I was visiting my terminally ill father in a hospital, I was asking myself, how does anybody get well in a place that sounds like this? Hospital sound is getting worse all the time. Noise levels in hospitals have doubled in the last few years, and it affects not just the patients but also the people working there. I think we would like for dispensing errors to be zero, wouldn't we? And yet, as noise levels go up, so do the errors in dispensing made by the staff in hospitals. Most of all, though, it affects the patients, and that could be you, it could be me. Sleep is absolutely crucial for recovery. It's when we regenerate, when we rebuild ourselves, and with threatening noise like this going on, your body, even if you are able to sleep, your body is telling you, "I'm under threat. This is dangerous." And the quality of sleep is degraded, and so is our recovery. There are just huge benefits to come from designing for the ears in our health care. This is an area I intend to take on this year. Education. When I see a classroom that looks like this, can you imagine how this sounds? I am forced to ask myself a question. ("Do architects have ears?") (Laughter) Now, that's a little unfair. Some of my best friends are architects. (Laughter) And they definitely do have ears. But I think sometimes they don't use them when they're designing buildings. Here's a case in point. This is a 32-million-pound flagship academy school which was built quite recently in the U.K. and designed by one of Britain's top architects. Unfortunately, it was designed like a corporate headquarters, with a vast central atrium and classrooms leading off it with no back walls at all. The children couldn't hear their teachers. They had to go back in and spend 600,000 pounds putting the walls in. Let's stop this madness of open plan classrooms right now, please. It's not just these modern buildings which suffer. Old-fashioned classrooms suffer too. A study in Florida just a few years ago found that if you're sitting where this photograph was taken in the classroom, row four, speech intelligibility is just 50 percent. Children are losing one word in two. Now that doesn't mean they only get half their education, but it does mean they have to work very hard to join the dots and understand what's going on. This is affected massively by reverberation time, how reverberant a room is. In a classroom with a reverberation time of 1.2 seconds, which is pretty common, this is what it sounds like. (Inaudible echoing voice) Not so good, is it? If you take that 1.2 seconds down to 0.4 seconds by installing acoustic treatments, sound absorbing materials and so forth, this is what you get. Voice: In language, infinitely many words can be written with a small set of letters. In arithmetic, infinitely many numbers can be composed from just a few digits with the help of the simple zero. Julian Treasure: What a difference. Now that education you would receive, and thanks to the British acoustician Adrian James for those simulations. The signal was the same, the background noise was the same. All that changed was the acoustics of the classroom in those two examples. If education can be likened to watering a garden, which is a fair metaphor, sadly, much of the water is evaporating before it reaches the flowers, especially for some groups, for example, those with hearing impairment. Now that's not just deaf children. That could be any child who's got a cold, glue ear, an ear infection, even hay fever. On a given day, one in eight children fall into that group, on any given day. Then you have children for whom English is a second language, or whatever they're being taught in is a second language. In the U.K., that's more than 10 percent of the school population. And finally, after Susan Cain's wonderful TEDTalk in February, we know that introverts find it very difficult to relate when they're in a noisy environment doing group work. Add those up. That is a lot of children who are not receiving their education properly. It's not just the children who are affected, though. (Noisy conversation) This study in Germany found the average noise level in classrooms is 65 decibels. I have to really raise my voice to talk over 65 decibels of sound, and teachers are not just raising their voices. This chart maps the teacher's heart rate against the noise level. Noise goes up, heart rate goes up. That is not good for you. In fact, 65 decibels is the very level at which this big survey of all the evidence on noise and health found that, that is the threshold for the danger of myocardial infarction. To you and me, that's a heart attack. It may not be pushing the boat out too far to suggest that many teachers are losing significant life expectancy by teaching in environments like that day after day. What does it cost to treat a classroom down to that 0.4-second reverberation time? Two and a half thousand pounds. And the Essex study which has just been done in the U.K., which incidentally showed that when you do this, you do not just make a room that's suitable for hearing-impaired children, you make a room where behavior improves, and results improve significantly, this found that sending a child out of area to a school that does have such a room, if you don't have one, costs 90,000 pounds a year. I think the economics are pretty clear on this. I'm glad that debate is happening on this. I just moderated a major conference in London a few weeks ago called Sound Education, which brought together top acousticians, government people, teachers, and so forth. We're at last starting to debate this issue, and the benefits that are available for designing for the ears in education, unbelievable. Out of that conference, incidentally, also came a free app which is designed to help children study if they're having to work at home, for example, in a noisy kitchen. And that's free out of that conference. Let's broaden the perspective a little bit and look at cities. We have urban planners. Where are the urban sound planners? I don't know of one in the world, and the opportunity is there to transform our experience in our cities. The World Health Organization estimates that a quarter of Europe's population is having its sleep degraded by noise in cities. We can do better than that. And in our offices, we spend a lot of time at work. Where are the office sound planners? People who say, don't sit that team next to this team, because they like noise and they need quiet. Or who say, don't spend all your budget on a huge screen in the conference room, and then place one tiny microphone in the middle of a table for 30 people. (Laughter) If you can hear me, you can understand me without seeing me. If you can see me without hearing me, that does not work. So office sound is a huge area, and incidentally, noise in offices has been shown to make people less helpful, less enjoy their teamwork, and less productive at work. Finally, we have homes. We use interior designers. Where are the interior sound designers? Hey, let's all be interior sound designers, take on listening to our rooms and designing sound that's effective and appropriate. My friend Richard Mazuch, an architect in London, coined the phrase "invisible architecture." I love that phrase. It's about designing, not appearance, but experience, so that we have spaces that sound as good as they look, that are fit for purpose, that improve our quality of life, our health and well being, our social behavior and our productivity. It's time to start designing for the ears. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Discover the physical side of the internet | {0: 'For his new book, "Tubes," Andrew Blum visited the places where the internet exists in physical form: the cables and switches and servers that virtually connect us.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I've always written primarily about architecture, about buildings, and writing about architecture is based on certain assumptions. An architect designs a building, and it becomes a place, or many architects design many buildings, and it becomes a city, and regardless of this complicated mix of forces of politics and culture and economics that shapes these places, at the end of the day, you can go and you can visit them. You can walk around them. You can smell them. You can get a feel for them. You can experience their sense of place. But what was striking to me over the last several years was that less and less was I going out into the world, and more and more, I was sitting in front of my computer screen. And especially since about 2007, when I got an iPhone, I was not only sitting in front of my screen all day, but I was also getting up at the end of the day and looking at this little screen that I carried in my pocket. And what was surprising to me was how quickly my relationship to the physical world had changed. In this very short period of time, you know, whether you call it the last 15 years or so of being online, or the last, you know, four or five years of being online all the time, our relationship to our surroundings had changed in that our attention is constantly divided. You know, we're both looking inside the screens and we're looking out in the world around us. And what was even more striking to me, and what I really got hung up on, was that the world inside the screen seemed to have no physical reality of its own. If you went and looked for images of the Internet, this was all that you found, this famous image by Opte of the Internet as the kind of Milky Way, this infinite expanse where we don't seem to be anywhere on it. We can never seem to grasp it in its totality. It's always reminded me of the Apollo image of the Earth, the blue marble picture, and it's similarly meant to suggest, I think, that we can't really understand it as a whole. We're always sort of small in the face of its expanse. So if there was this world and this screen, and if there was the physical world around me, I couldn't ever get them together in the same place. And then this happened. My Internet broke one day, as it occasionally does, and the cable guy came to fix it, and he started with the dusty clump of cables behind the couch, and he followed it to the front of my building and into the basement and out to the back yard, and there was this big jumble of cables against the wall. And then he saw a squirrel running along the wire, and he said, "There's your problem. A squirrel is chewing on your Internet." (Laughter) And this seemed astounding. The Internet is a transcendent idea. It's a set of protocols that has changed everything from shopping to dating to revolutions. It was unequivocally not something a squirrel could chew on. (Laughter) But that in fact seemed to be the case. A squirrel had in fact chewed on my Internet. (Laughter) And then I got this image in my head of what would happen if you yanked the wire from the wall and if you started to follow it. Where would it go? Was the Internet actually a place that you could visit? Could I go there? Who would I meet? You know, was there something actually out there? And the answer, by all accounts, was no. This was the Internet, this black box with a red light on it, as represented in the sitcom "The IT Crowd." Normally it lives on the top of Big Ben, because that's where you get the best reception, but they had negotiated that their colleague could borrow it for the afternoon to use in an office presentation. The elders of the Internet were willing to part with it for a short while, and she looks at it and she says, "This is the Internet? The whole Internet? Is it heavy?" They say, "Of course not, the Internet doesn't weigh anything." And I was embarrassed. I was looking for this thing that only fools seem to look for. The Internet was that amorphous blob, or it was a silly black box with a blinking red light on it. It wasn't a real world out there. But, in fact, it is. There is a real world of the Internet out there, and that's what I spent about two years visiting, these places of the Internet. I was in large data centers that use as much power as the cities in which they sit, and I visited places like this, 60 Hudson Street in New York, which is one of the buildings in the world, one of a very short list of buildings, about a dozen buildings, where more networks of the Internet connect to each other than anywhere else. And that connection is an unequivocally physical process. It's about the router of one network, a Facebook or a Google or a B.T. or a Comcast or a Time Warner, whatever it is, connecting with usually a yellow fiber optic cable up into the ceiling and down into the router of another network, and that's unequivocally physical, and it's surprisingly intimate. A building like 60 Hudson, and a dozen or so others, has 10 times more networks connecting within it than the next tier of buildings. There's a very short list of these places. And 60 Hudson in particular is interesting because it's home to about a half a dozen very important networks, which are the networks which serve the undersea cables that travel underneath the ocean that connect Europe and America and connect all of us. And it's those cables in particular that I want to focus on. If the Internet is a global phenomenon, if we live in a global village, it's because there are cables underneath the ocean, cables like this. And in this dimension, they are incredibly small. You can you hold them in your hand. They're like a garden hose. But in the other dimension they are incredibly expansive, as expansive as you can imagine. They stretch across the ocean. They're three or five or eight thousand miles in length, and if the material science and the computational technology is incredibly complicated, the basic physical process is shockingly simple. Light goes in on one end of the ocean and comes out on the other, and it usually comes from a building called a landing station that's often tucked away inconspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood, and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor that look kind of like bluefin tuna, and every 50 miles they amplify the signal, and since the rate of transmission is incredibly fast, the basic unit is a 10-gigabit-per-second wavelength of light, maybe a thousand times your own connection, or capable of carrying 10,000 video streams, but not only that, but you'll put not just one wavelength of light through one of the fibers, but you'll put maybe 50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light through a single fiber, and then you'll have maybe eight fibers in a cable, four going in each direction. And they're tiny. They're the thickness of a hair. And then they connect to the continent somewhere. They connect in a manhole like this. Literally, this is where the 5,000-mile cable plugs in. This is in Halifax, a cable that stretches from Halifax to Ireland. And the landscape is changing. Three years ago, when I started thinking about this, there was one cable down the Western coast of Africa, represented in this map by Steve Song as that thin black line. Now there are six cables and more coming, three down each coast. Because once a country gets plugged in by one cable, they realize that it's not enough. If they're going to build an industry around it, they need to know that their connection isn't tenuous but permanent, because if a cable breaks, you have to send a ship out into the water, throw a grappling hook over the side, pick it up, find the other end, and then fuse the two ends back together and then dump it over. It's an intensely, intensely physical process. So this is my friend Simon Cooper, who until very recently worked for Tata Communications, the communications wing of Tata, the big Indian industrial conglomerate. And I've never met him. We've only communicated via this telepresence system, which always makes me think of him as the man inside the Internet. (Laughter) And he is English. The undersea cable industry is dominated by Englishmen, and they all seem to be 42. (Laughter) Because they all started at the same time with the boom about 20 years ago. And Tata had gotten its start as a communications business when they bought two cables, one across the Atlantic and one across the Pacific, and proceeded to add pieces onto them, until they had built a belt around the world, which means they will send your bits to the East or the West. They have — this is literally a beam of light around the world, and if a cable breaks in the Pacific, it'll send it around the other direction. And then having done that, they started to look for places to wire next. They looked for the unwired places, and that's meant North and South, primarily these cables to Africa. But what amazes me is Simon's incredible geographic imagination. He thinks about the world with this incredible expansiveness. And I was particularly interested because I wanted to see one of these cables being built. See, you know, all the time online we experience these fleeting moments of connection, these sort of brief adjacencies, a tweet or a Facebook post or an email, and it seemed like there was a physical corollary to that. It seemed like there was a moment when the continent was being plugged in, and I wanted to see that. And Simon was working on a new cable, WACS, the West Africa Cable System, that stretched from Lisbon down the west coast of Africa, to Cote d'Ivoire, to Ghana, to Nigeria, to Cameroon. And he said there was coming soon, depending on the weather, but he'd let me know when, and so with about four days notice, he said to go to this beach south of Lisbon, and a little after 9, this guy will walk out of the water. (Laughter) And he'll be carrying a green nylon line, a lightweight line, called a messenger line, and that was the first link between sea and land, this link that would then be leveraged into this 9,000-mile path of light. Then a bulldozer began to pull the cable in from this specialized cable landing ship, and it was floated on these buoys until it was in the right place. Then you can see the English engineers looking on. And then, once it was in the right place, he got back in the water holding a big knife, and he cut each buoy off, and the buoy popped up into the air, and the cable dropped to the sea floor, and he did that all the way out to the ship, and when he got there, they gave him a glass of juice and a cookie, and then he jumped back in, and he swam back to shore, and then he lit a cigarette. (Laughter) And then once that cable was on shore, they began to prepare to connect it to the other side, for the cable that had been brought down from the landing station. And first they got it with a hacksaw, and then they start sort of shaving away at this plastic interior with a — sort of working like chefs, and then finally they're working like jewelers to get these hair-thin fibers to line up with the cable that had come down, and with this hole-punch machine they fuse it together. And when you see these guys going at this cable with a hacksaw, you stop thinking about the Internet as a cloud. It starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing. And what surprised me as well was that as much as this is based on the most sophisticated technology, as much as this is an incredibly new thing, the physical process itself has been around for a long time, and the culture is the same. You see the local laborers. You see the English engineer giving directions in the background. And more importantly, the places are the same. These cables still connect these classic port cities, places like Lisbon, Mombasa, Mumbai, Singapore, New York. And then the process on shore takes around three or four days, and then, when it's done, they put the manhole cover back on top, and they push the sand over that, and we all forget about it. And it seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud, but every time we put something on the cloud, we give up some responsibility for it. We are less connected to it. We let other people worry about it. And that doesn't seem right. There's a great Neal Stephenson line where he says that wired people should know something about wires. And we should know, I think, we should know where our Internet comes from, and we should know what it is that physically, physically connects us all. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) |
Demand a fair trade cell phone | {0: 'Bandi Mbubi would like to make sure that you are using a fair trade cell phone.'} | TEDxExeter | I want to talk to you today about a difficult topic that is close to me, and closer than you might realize to you. I came to the UK 21 years ago, as an asylum-seeker. I was 21. I was forced to leave the Democratic Republic of the Congo, my home, where I was a student activist. I would love my children to be able to meet my family in the Congo. But I want to tell you what the Congo has got to do with you. But first of all, I want you to do me a favor. Can you all please reach into your pockets and take out your mobile phone? Feel that familiar weight ... how naturally your finger slides towards the buttons. (Laughter) Can you imagine your world without it? It connects us to our loved ones, our family, friends and colleagues, at home and overseas. It is a symbol of an interconnected world. But what you hold in your hand leaves a bloody trail, and it all boils down to a mineral: tantalum, mined in the Congo as coltan. It is an anticorrosive heat conductor. It stores energy in our mobile phones, PlayStations and laptops. It is used in aerospace and medical equipment as an alloy. It is so powerful that we only need tiny amounts. It would be great if the story ended there. Unfortunately, what you hold in your hand has not only enabled incredible technological development and industrial expansion, but it has also contributed to unimaginable human suffering. Since 1996, over five million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Countless women, men and children have been raped, tortured or enslaved. Rape is used as a weapon of war, instilling fear and depopulating whole areas. The quest for extracting this mineral has not only aided, but it has fueled the ongoing war in the Congo. But don't throw away your phones yet. Thirty thousand children are enlisted and are made to fight in armed groups. The Congo consistently scores dreadfully in global health and poverty rankings. But remarkably, the UN Environmental Programme has estimated the wealth of the country to be over 24 trillion dollars. The state-regulated mining industry has collapsed, and control over mines has splintered. Coltan is easily controlled by armed groups. One well-known illicit trade route is that across the border to Rwanda, where Congolese tantalum is disguised as Rwandan. But don't throw away your phones yet, because the incredible irony is that the technology that has placed such unsustainable, devastating demands on the Congo is the same technology that has brought this situation to our attention. We only know so much about the situation in the Congo and in the mines because of the kind of communication the mobile phone allows. As with the Arab Spring, during the recent elections in the Congo, voters were able to send text messages of local polling stations to the headquarters in the capital, Kinshasa. And in the wake of the result, the diaspora has joined with the Carter Center, the Catholic Church and other observers, to draw attention to the undemocratic result. The mobile phone has given people around the world an important tool towards gaining their political freedom. It has truly revolutionized the way we communicate on the planet. It has allowed momentous political change to take place. So, we are faced with a paradox. The mobile phone is an instrument of freedom and an instrument of oppression. TED has always celebrated what technology can do for us, technology in its finished form. It is time to be asking questions about technology. Where does it come from? Who makes it? And for what? Here, I am speaking directly to you, the TED community, and to all those who might be watching on a screen, on your phone, across the world, in the Congo. All the technology is in place for us to communicate, and all the technology is in place to communicate this. At the moment, there is no clear fair-trade solution. But there has been a huge amount of progress. The US has recently passed legislation to target bribery and misconduct in the Congo. Recent UK legislation could be used in the same way. In February, Nokia unveiled its new policy on sourcing minerals in the Congo, and there is a petition to Apple to make a conflict-free iPhone. There are campaigns spreading across university campuses to make their colleges conflict-free. But we're not there yet. We need to continue mounting pressure on phone companies to change their sourcing processes. When I first came to the UK, 21 years ago, I was homesick. I missed my family and the friends I left behind. Communication was extremely difficult. Sending and receiving letters took months — if you were lucky. Often, they never arrived. Even if I could have afforded the phone bills home, like most people in the Congo, my parents did not own a phone line. Today, my two sons — David and Daniel, can talk to my parents and get to know them. Why should we allow such a wonderful, brilliant and necessary product to be the cause of unnecessary suffering for human beings? We demand fair-trade food and fair-trade clothes. It is time to demand fair-trade phones. This is an idea worth spreading. Thank you. (Applause) |
A story about knots and surgeons | {0: 'Ed Gavagan was walking down the street in downtown Manhattan when he was the victim of a gang assignment to kill a random stranger. He lives to tell the amazing story.'} | TEDMED 2012 | You know, we wake up in the morning, you get dressed, put on your shoes, you head out into the world. You plan on coming back, getting undressed, going to bed, waking up, doing it again, and that anticipation, that rhythm, helps give us a structure to how we organize ourselves and our lives, and gives it a measure of predictability. Living in New York City, as I do, it's almost as if, with so many people doing so many things at the same time in such close quarters, it's almost like life is dealing you extra hands out of that deck. You're never, there's just, juxtapositions are possible that just aren't, you don't think they're going to happen. And you never think you're going to be the guy who's walking down the street and, because you choose to go down one side or the other, the rest of your life is changed forever. And one night, I'm riding the uptown local train. I get on. I tend to be a little bit vigilant when I get on the subway. I'm not one of the people zoning out with headphones or a book. And I get on the car, and I look, and I notice this couple, college-aged, student-looking kids, a guy and a girl, and they're sitting next to each other, and she's got her leg draped over his knee, and they're doing — they have this little contraption, and they're tying these knots, and they're doing it with one hand, they're doing it left-handed and right-handed very quickly, and then she'll hand the thing to him and he'll do it. I've never seen anything like this. It's almost like they're practicing magic tricks. And at the next stop, a guy gets on the car, and he has this sort of visiting professor look to him. He's got the overstuffed leather satchel and the rectangular file case and a laptop bag and the tweed jacket with the leather patches, and — (Laughter) — he looks at them, and then in a blink of an eye, he kneels down in front of them, and he starts to say, "You know, listen, here's how you can do it. Look, if you do this — " and he takes the laces out of their hand, and instantly, he starts tying these knots, and even better than they were doing it, remarkably. And it turns out they are medical students on their way to a lecture about the latest suturing techniques, and he's the guy giving the lecture. (Laughter) So he starts to tell them, and he's like, "No, this is very important here. You know, when you're needing these knots, it's going to be, you know, everything's going to be happening at the same time, it's going to be — you're going to have all this information coming at you, there's going to be organs getting in the way, it's going to be slippery, and it's just very important that you be able to do these beyond second nature, each hand, left hand, right hand, you have to be able to do them without seeing your fingers." And at that moment, when I heard that, I just got catapulted out of the subway car into a night when I had been getting a ride in an ambulance from the sidewalk where I had been stabbed to the trauma room of St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, and what had happened was a gang had come in from Brooklyn. As part of an initiation for three of their members, they had to kill somebody, and I happened to be the guy walking down Bleecker Street that night, and they jumped on me without a word. One of the very lucky things, when I was at Notre Dame, I was on the boxing team, so I put my hands up right away, instinctively. The guy on the right had a knife with a 10-inch blade, and he went in under my elbow, and it went up and cut my inferior vena cava. If you know anything about anatomy, that's not a good thing to get cut, and everything, of course, on the way up, and then — I still had my hands up — he pulled it out and went for my neck, and sunk it in up to the hilt in my neck, and I got one straight right punch and knocked the middle guy out. The other guy was still working on me, collapsing my other lung, and I managed to, by hitting that guy, to get a minute. I ran down the street and collapsed, and the ambulance guys intubated me on the sidewalk and let the trauma room know they had an incoming. And one of the side effects of having major massive blood loss is you get tunnel vision, so I remember being on the stretcher and having a little nickel-sized cone of vision, and I was moving my head around and we got to St. Vincent's, and we're racing down this hallway, and I see the lights going, and it's a peculiar effect of memories like that. They don't really go to the usual place that memories go. They kind of have this vault where they're stored in high-def, and George Lucas did all the sound effects. (Laughter) So sometimes, remembering them, it's like, it's not like any other kind of memories. And I get into the trauma room, and they're waiting for me, and the lights are there, and I'd been able to breathe a little more now, because the blood has left, had been filling up my lungs and I was having a very hard time breathing, but now it's kind of gone into the stretcher. And I said, "Is there anything I can do to help?" and — (Laughter) — the nurse kind of had a hysterical laugh, and I'm turning my head trying to see everybody, and I had this weird memory of being in college and raising, raising money for the flood victims of Bangladesh, and then I look over and my anesthesiologist is clamping the mask on me, and I think, "He looks Bangladeshi," — (Laughter) — and I just have those two facts, and I just think, "This could work somehow." (Laughter) And then I go out, and they work on me for the rest of the night, and I needed about 40 units of blood to keep me there while they did their work, and the surgeon took out about a third of my intestines, my cecum, organs I didn't know that I had, and he later told me one of the last things he did while he was in there was to remove my appendix for me, which I thought was great, you know, just a little tidy thing there at the end. (Laughter) And I came to in the morning. Out of anesthetic, he had let them know that he wanted to be there, and he had given me about a two percent chance of living. So he was there when I woke up, and it was, waking up was like breaking through the ice into a frozen lake of pain. It was that enveloping, and there was only one spot that didn't hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt, and it was my instep, and he was holding the arch of my foot and rubbing the instep with his thumb. And I looked up, and he's like, "Good to see you," and I was trying to remember what had happened and trying to get my head around everything, and the pain was just overwhelming, and he said, "You know, we didn't cut your hair. I thought you might have gotten strength from your hair like Samson, and you're going to need all the strength you can get." And in those days, my hair was down to my waist, I drove a motorcycle, I was unmarried, I owned a bar, so those were different times. (Laughter) But I had three days of life support, and everybody was expecting, due to just the massive amount of what they had had to do that I wasn't going to make it, so it was three days of everybody was either waiting for me to die or poop, and — (Laughter) — when I finally pooped, then that somehow, surgically speaking, that's like you crossed some good line, and, um — (Laughter) — on that day, the surgeon came in and whipped the sheet off of me. He had three or four friends with him, and he does that, and they all look, and there was no infection, and they bend over me and they're poking and prodding, and they're like, "There's no hematomas, blah blah, look at the color," and they're talking amongst themselves and I'm, like, this restored automobile that he's just going, "Yeah, I did that." (Laughter) And it was just, it was amazing, because these guys are high-fiving him over how good I turned out, you know? (Laughter) And it's my zipper, and I've still got the staples in and everything. And later on, when I got out and the flashbacks and the nightmares were giving me a hard time, I went back to him and I was sort of asking him, you know, what am I gonna do? And I think, kind of, as a surgeon, he basically said, "Kid, I saved your life. Like, now you can do whatever you want, like, you gotta get on with that. It's like I gave you a new car and you're complaining about not finding parking. Like, just, go out, and, you know, do your best. But you're alive. That's what it's about." And then I hear, "Bing-bong," and the subway doors are closing, and my stop is next, and I look at these kids, and I go, I think to myself, "I'm going to lift my shirt up and show them," — (Laughter) — and then I think, "No, this is the New York City subway, that's going to lead to other things." (Laughter) And so I just think, they got their lecture to go to. I step off, I'm standing on the platform, and I feel my index finger in the first scar that I ever got, from my umbilical cord, and then around that, is traced the last scar that I got from my surgeon, and I think that, that chance encounter with those kids on the street with their knives led me to my surgical team, and their training and their skill and, always, a little bit of luck pushed back against chaos. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Very lucky to be here. Thank you. (Applause) |
The currency of the new economy is trust | {0: 'Rachel Botsman is a recognized expert on how collaboration and trust enabled by digital technologies will change the way we live, work, bank and consume.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | So if someone asked you for the three words that would sum up your reputation, what would you say? How would people describe your judgment, your knowledge, your behaviors, in different situations? Today I'd like to explore with you why the answer to this question will become profoundly important in an age where reputation will be your most valuable asset. I'd like to start by introducing you to someone whose life has been changed by a marketplace fueled by reputation. Sebastian Sandys has been a bed and breakfast host on Airbnb since 2008. I caught up with him recently, where, over the course of several cups of tea, he told me how hosting guests from all over the world has enriched his life. More than 50 people have come to stay in the 18th-century watchhouse he lives in with his cat, Squeak. Now, I mention Squeak because Sebastian's first guest happened to see a rather large mouse run across the kitchen, and she promised that she would refrain from leaving a bad review on one condition: he got a cat. And so Sebastian bought Squeak to protect his reputation. Now, as many of you know, Airbnb is a peer-to-peer marketplace that matches people who have space to rent with people who are looking for a place to stay in over 192 countries. The places being rented out are things that you might expect, like spare rooms and holiday homes, but part of the magic is the unique places that you can now access: treehouses, teepees, airplane hangars, igloos. If you don't like the hotel, there's a castle down the road that you can rent for 5,000 dollars a night. It's a fantastic example of how technology is creating a market for things that never had a marketplace before. Now let me show you these heat maps of Paris to see how insanely fast it's growing. This image here is from 2008. The pink dots represent host properties. Even four years ago, letting strangers stay in your home seemed like a crazy idea. Now the same view in 2010. And now, 2012. There is an Airbnb host on almost every main street in Paris. Now, what's happening here is people are realizing the power of technology to unlock the idling capacity and value of all kinds of assets, from skills to spaces to material possessions, in ways and on a scale never possible before. It's an economy and culture called collaborative consumption, and, through it, people like Sebastian are becoming micro-entrepreneurs. They're empowered to make money and save money from their existing assets. But the real magic and the secret source behind collaborative consumption marketplaces like Airbnb isn't the inventory or the money. It's using the power of technology to build trust between strangers. This side of Airbnb really hit home to Sebastian last summer during the London riots. He woke up around 9, and he checked his email and he saw a bunch of messages all asking him if he was okay. Former guests from around the world had seen that the riots were happening just down the street, and wanted to check if he needed anything. Sebastian actually said to me, he said, "Thirteen former guests contacted me before my own mother rang." (Laughter) Now, this little anecdote gets to the heart of why I'm really passionate about collaborative consumption, and why, after I finished my book, I decided I'm going to try and spread this into a global movement. Because at its core, it's about empowerment. It's about empowering people to make meaningful connections, connections that are enabling us to rediscover a humanness that we've lost somewhere along the way, by engaging in marketplaces like Airbnb, like Kickstarter, like Etsy, that are built on personal relationships versus empty transactions. Now the irony is that these ideas are actually taking us back to old market principles and collaborative behaviors that are hard-wired in all of us. They're just being reinvented in ways that are relevant for the Facebook age. We're literally beginning to realize that we have wired our world to share, swap, rent, barter or trade just about anything. We're sharing our cars on WhipCar, our bikes on Spinlister, our offices on Loosecubes, our gardens on Landshare. We're lending and borrowing money from strangers on Zopa and Lending Club. We are trading lessons on everything from sushi-making to coding on Skillshare, and we're even sharing our pets on DogVacay. Now welcome to the wonderful world of collaborative consumption that's enabling us to match wants with haves in more democratic ways. Now, collaborative consumption is creating the start of a transformation in the way we think about supply and demand, but it's also a part of a massive value shift underway, where instead of consuming to keep up with the Joneses, people are consuming to get to know the Joneses. But the key reason why it's taking off now so fast is because every new advancement of technology increases the efficiency and the social glue of trust to make sharing easier and easier. Now, I've looked at thousands of these marketplaces, and trust and efficiency are always the critical ingredients. Let me give you an example. Meet 46-year-old Chris Mok, who has, I bet, the best job title here of SuperRabbit. Now, four years ago, Chris lost his job, unfortunately, as an art buyer at Macy's, and like so many people, he struggled to find a new one during the recession. And then he happened to stumble across a post about TaskRabbit. Now, the story behind TaskRabbit starts like so many great stories with a very cute dog by the name of Kobe. Now what happened was, in February 2008, Leah and her husband were waiting for a cab to take them out for dinner, when Kobe came trotting up to them and he was salivating with saliva. They realized they'd run out of dog food. Kevin had to cancel the cab and trudge out in the snow. Now, later that evening, the two self-confessed tech geeks starting talking about how cool it would be if some kind of eBay for errands existed. Six months later, Leah quit her job, and TaskRabbit was born. At the time, she didn't realize that she was actually hitting on a bigger idea she later called service networking. It's essentially about how we use our online relationships to get things done in the real world. Now the way TaskRabbit works is, people outsource the tasks that they want doing, name the price they're willing to pay, and then vetted Rabbits bid to run the errand. Yes, there's actually a four-stage, rigorous interview process that's designed to find the people that would make great personal assistants and weed out the dodgy Rabbits. Now, there's over 4,000 Rabbits across the United States and 5,000 more on the waiting list. Now the tasks being posted are things that you might expect, like help with household chores or doing some supermarket runs. I actually learned the other day that 12 and a half thousand loads of laundry have been cleaned and folded through TaskRabbit. But I love that the number one task posted, over a hundred times a day, is something that many of us have felt the pain of doing: yes, assembling Ikea furniture. (Laughter) (Applause) It's brilliant. Now, we may laugh, but Chris here is actually making up to 5,000 dollars a month running errands around his life. And 70 percent of this new labor force were previously unemployed or underemployed. I think TaskRabbit and other examples of collaborative consumption are like lemonade stands on steroids. They're just brilliant. Now, when you think about it, it's amazing, right, that over the past 20 years, we've evolved from trusting people online to share information to trusting to handing over our credit card information, and now we're entering the third trust wave: connecting trustworthy strangers to create all kinds of people-powered marketplaces. I actually came across this fascinating study by the Pew Center this week that revealed that an active Facebook user is three times as likely as a non-Internet user to believe that most people are trustworthy. Virtual trust will transform the way we trust one another face to face. Now, with all of my optimism, and I am an optimist, comes a healthy dose of caution, or rather, an urgent need to address some pressing, complex questions. How to ensure our digital identities reflect our real world identities? Do we want them to be the same? How do we mimic the way trust is built face-to-face online? How do we stop people who've behaved badly in one community doing so under a different guise? In a similar way that companies often use some kind of credit rating to decide whether to give you a mobile plan, or the rate of a mortgage, marketplaces that depend on transactions between relative strangers need some kind of device to let you know that Sebastian and Chris are good eggs, and that device is reputation. Reputation is the measurement of how much a community trusts you. Let's just take a look at Chris. You can see that over 200 people have given him an average rating over 4.99 out of 5. There are over 20 pages of reviews of his work describing him as super-friendly and fast, and he's reached level 25, the highest level, making him a SuperRabbit. Now — (Laughter) — I love that word, SuperRabbit. And interestingly, what Chris has noted is that as his reputation has gone up, so has his chances of winning a bid and how much he can charge. In other words, for SuperRabbits, reputation has a real world value. Now, I know what you might be thinking. Well, this isn't anything new. Just think of power sellers on eBay or star ratings on Amazon. The difference today is that, with every trade we make, comment we leave, person we flag, badge we earn, we leave a reputation trail of how well we can and can't be trusted. And it's not just the breadth but the volume of reputation data out there that is staggering. Just consider this: Five million nights have been booked on Airbnb in the past six months alone. 30 million rides have been shared on Carpooling.com. This year, two billion dollars worth of loans will go through peer-to-peer lending platforms. This adds up to millions of pieces of reputation data on how well we behave or misbehave. Now, capturing and correlating the trails of information that we leave in different places is a massive challenge, but one we're being asked to figure out. What the likes of Sebastian are starting to rightfully ask is, shouldn't they own their reputation data? Shouldn't the reputation that he's personally invested on building on Airbnb mean that it should travel with him from one community to another? What I mean by this is, say he started selling second-hand books on Amazon. Why should he have to start from scratch? It's a bit like when I moved from New York to Sydney. It was ridiculous. I couldn't get a mobile phone plan because my credit history didn't travel with me. I was essentially a ghost in the system. Now I'm not suggesting that the next stage of the reputation economy is about adding up multiple ratings into some kind of empty score. People's lives are too complex, and who wants to do that? I also want to be clear that this isn't about adding up tweets and likes and friends in a Klout-like fashion. Those guys are measuring influence, not behaviors that indicate our trustworthiness. But the most important thing that we have to keep in mind is that reputation is largely contextual. Just because Sebastian is a wonderful host does not mean that he can assemble Ikea furniture. The big challenge is figuring out what data makes sense to pull, because the future's going to be driven by a smart aggregation of reputation, not a single algorithm. It's only a matter of time before we'll be able to perform a Facebook- or Google-like search and see a complete picture of someone's behaviors in different contexts over time. I envision a realtime stream of who has trusted you, when, where and why, your reliability on TaskRabbit, your cleanliness as a guest on Airbnb, the knowledge that you display on Quora or Tripovo, they'll all live together in one place, and this will live in some kind of reputation dashboard that will paint a picture of your reputation capital. Now this is a concept that I'm currently researching and writing my next book on, and currently define as the worth of your reputation, your intentions, capabilities and values across communities and marketplaces. This isn't some far-off frontier. There are actually a wave of startups like Connect.Me and Legit and TrustCloud that are figuring out how you can aggregate, monitor and use your online reputation. Now, I realize that this concept may sound a little Big Brother to some of you, and yes, there are some enormous transparency and privacy issues to solve, but ultimately, if we can collect our personal reputation, we can actually control it more, and extract the immense value that will flow from it. Also, more so than our credit history, we can actually shape our reputation. Just think of Sebastian and how he bought the cat to influence his. Now privacy issues aside, the other really interesting issue I'm looking at is how do we empower digital ghosts, people [who] for whatever reason, are not active online, but are some of the most trustworthy people in the world? How do we take their contributions to their jobs, their communities and their families, and convert that value into reputation capital? Ultimately, when we get it right, reputation capital could create a massive positive disruption in who has power, trust and influence. A three-digit score, your traditional credit history, that only 30 percent of us actually know what it is, will no longer be the determining factor in how much things cost, what we can access, and, in many instances, limit what we can do in the world. Indeed, reputation is a currency that I believe will become more powerful than our credit history in the 21st century. Reputation will be the currency that says that you can trust me. Now the interesting thing is, reputation is the socioeconomic lubricant that makes collaborative consumption work and scale, but the sources it will be generated from, and its applications, are far bigger than this space alone. Let me give you one example from the world of recruiting, where reputation data will make the résumé seem like an archaic relic of the past. Four years ago, tech bloggers and entrepreneurs Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, decided to start something called Stack Overflow. Now, Stack Overflow is basically a platform where experienced programmers can ask other good programmers highly detailed technical questions on things like tiny pixels and chrome extensions. This site receives five and a half thousand questions a day, and 80 percent of these receive accurate answers. Now users earn reputation in a whole range of ways, but it's basically by convincing their peers they know what they're talking about. Now a few months after this site launched, the founders heard about something interesting, and it actually didn't surprise them. What they heard was that users were putting their reputation scores on the top of their résumés, and that recruiters were searching the platform to find people with unique talents. Now thousands of programmers today are finding better jobs this way, because Stack Overflow and the reputation dashboards provide a priceless window into how someone really behaves, and what their peers think of them. But the bigger principle of what's happening behind Stack Overflow, I think, is incredibly exciting. People are starting to realize that the reputation they generate in one place has value beyond the environments from which it was built. You know, it's very interesting. When you talk to super-users, whether that's SuperRabbits or super-people on Stack Overflow, or Uberhosts, they all talk about how having a high reputation unlocks a sense of their own power. On Stack Overflow, it creates a level playing field, enabling the people with the real talent to rise to the top. On Airbnb, the people often become more important than the spaces. On TaskRabbit, it gives people control of their economic activity. Now at the end of my tea with Sebastian, he told me how, on a bad, rainy day, when he hasn't had a customer in his bookstore, he thinks of all the people around the world who've said something wonderful about him, and what that says about him as a person. He's turning 50 this year, and he's convinced that the rich tapestry of reputation he's built on Airbnb will lead him to doing something interesting with the rest of his life. You know, there are only a few windows in history where the opportunity exists to reinvent part of how our socioeconomic system works. We're living through one of those moments. I believe that we are at the start of a collaborative revolution that will be as significant as the Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, the invention of traditional credit transformed our consumer system, and in many ways controlled who had access to what. In the 21st century, new trust networks, and the reputation capital they generate, will reinvent the way we think about wealth, markets, power and personal identity, in ways we can't yet even imagine. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) |
Are droids taking our jobs? | {0: 'Andrew McAfee studies how information technology affects businesses and society.'} | TEDxBoston 2012 | As it turns out, when tens of millions of people are unemployed or underemployed, there's a fair amount of interest in what technology might be doing to the labor force. And as I look at the conversation, it strikes me that it's focused on exactly the right topic, and at the same time, it's missing the point entirely. The topic that it's focused on, the question is whether or not all these digital technologies are affecting people's ability to earn a living, or, to say it a little bit different way, are the droids taking our jobs? And there's some evidence that they are. The Great Recession ended when American GDP resumed its kind of slow, steady march upward, and some other economic indicators also started to rebound, and they got kind of healthy kind of quickly. Corporate profits are quite high; in fact, if you include bank profits, they're higher than they've ever been. And business investment in gear — in equipment and hardware and software — is at an all-time high. So the businesses are getting out their checkbooks. What they're not really doing is hiring. So this red line is the employment-to-population ratio, in other words, the percentage of working-age people in America who have work. And we see that it cratered during the Great Recession, and it hasn't started to bounce back at all. But the story is not just a recession story. The decade that we've just been through had relatively anemic job growth all throughout, especially when we compare it to other decades, and the 2000s are the only time we have on record where there were fewer people working at the end of the decade than at the beginning. This is not what you want to see. When you graph the number of potential employees versus the number of jobs in the country, you see the gap gets bigger and bigger over time, and then, during the Great Recession, it opened up in a huge way. I did some quick calculations. I took the last 20 years of GDP growth and the last 20 years of labor-productivity growth and used those in a fairly straightforward way to try to project how many jobs the economy was going to need to keep growing, and this is the line that I came up with. Is that good or bad? This is the government's projection for the working-age population going forward. So if these predictions are accurate, that gap is not going to close. The problem is, I don't think these projections are accurate. In particular, I think my projection is way too optimistic, because when I did it, I was assuming that the future was kind of going to look like the past, with labor productivity growth, and that's actually not what I believe. Because when I look around, I think that we ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to technology's impact on the labor force. Just in the past couple years, we've seen digital tools display skills and abilities that they never, ever had before, and that kind of eat deeply into what we human beings do for a living. Let me give you a couple examples. Throughout all of history, if you wanted something translated from one language into another, you had to involve a human being. Now we have multi-language, instantaneous, automatic translation services available for free via many of our devices, all the way down to smartphones. And if any of us have used these, we know that they're not perfect, but they're decent. Throughout all of history, if you wanted something written, a report or an article, you had to involve a person. Not anymore. This is an article that appeared in Forbes online a while back, about Apple's earnings. It was written by an algorithm. And it's not decent — it's perfect. A lot of people look at this and they say, "OK, but those are very specific, narrow tasks, and most knowledge workers are actually generalists. And what they do is sit on top of a very large body of expertise and knowledge and they use that to react on the fly to kind of unpredictable demands, and that's very, very hard to automate." One of the most impressive knowledge workers in recent memory is a guy named Ken Jennings. He won the quiz show "Jeopardy!" 74 times in a row. Took home three million dollars. That's Ken on the right, getting beat three-to-one by Watson, the Jeopardy-playing supercomputer from IBM. So when we look at what technology can do to general knowledge workers, I start to think there might not be something so special about this idea of a generalist, particularly when we start doing things like hooking Siri up to Watson, and having technologies that can understand what we're saying and repeat speech back to us. Now, Siri is far from perfect, and we can make fun of her flaws, but we should also keep in mind that if technologies like Siri and Watson improve along a Moore's law trajectory, which they will, in six years, they're not going to be two times better or four times better, they'll be 16 times better than they are right now. So I start to think a lot of knowledge work is going to be affected by this. And digital technologies are not just impacting knowledge work, they're starting to flex their muscles in the physical world as well. I had the chance a little while back to ride in the Google autonomous car, which is as cool as it sounds. (Laughter) And I will vouch that it handled the stop-and-go traffic on US 101 very smoothly. There are about three and a half million people who drive trucks for a living in the United States; I think some of them are going to be affected by this technology. And right now, humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive. They can't do very much. But they're getting better quite quickly and DARPA, which is the investment arm of the Defense Department, is trying to accelerate their trajectory. So, in short, yeah, the droids are coming for our jobs. In the short term, we can stimulate job growth by encouraging entrepreneurship and by investing in infrastructure, because the robots today still aren't very good at fixing bridges. But in the not-too-long-term, I think within the lifetimes of most of the people in this room, we're going to transition into an economy that is very productive, but that just doesn't need a lot of human workers. And managing that transition is going to be the greatest challenge that our society faces. Voltaire summarized why; he said, "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need." But despite this challenge — personally, I'm still a huge digital optimist, and I am supremely confident that the digital technologies that we're developing now are going to take us into a Utopian future, not a dystopian future. And to explain why, I want to pose a ridiculously broad question. I want to ask: what have been the most important developments in human history? Now, I want to share some of the answers that I've gotten in response to this question. It's a wonderful question to ask and start an endless debate about, because some people are going to bring up systems of philosophy in both the West and the East that have changed how a lot of people think about the world. And then other people will say, "No, actually, the big stories, the big developments are the founding of the world's major religions, which have changed civilizations and have changed and influenced how countless people are living their lives." And then some other folk will say, "Actually, what changes civilizations, what modifies them and what changes people's lives are empires, so the great developments in human history are stories of conquest and of war." And then some cheery soul usually always pipes up and says, "Hey, don't forget about plagues!" (Laughter) There are some optimistic answers to this question, so some people will bring up the Age of Exploration and the opening up of the world. Others will talk about intellectual achievements in disciplines like math that have helped us get a better handle on the world, and other folk will talk about periods when there was a deep flourishing of the arts and sciences. So this debate will go on and on. It's an endless debate and there's no conclusive, single answer to it. But if you're a geek like me, you say, "Well, what do the data say?" And you start to do things like graph things that we might be interested in — the total worldwide population, for example, or some measure of social development or the state of advancement of a society. And you start to plot the data, because, by this approach, the big stories, the big developments in human history, are the ones that will bend these curves a lot. So when you do this and when you plot the data, you pretty quickly come to some weird conclusions. You conclude, actually, that none of these things have mattered very much. (Laughter) They haven't done a darn thing to the curves. There has been one story, one development in human history that bent the curve, bent it just about 90 degrees, and it is a technology story. The steam engine and the other associated technologies of the Industrial Revolution changed the world and influenced human history so much, that in the words of the historian Ian Morris, "... they made mockery out of all that had come before." And they did this by infinitely multiplying the power of our muscles, overcoming the limitations of our muscles. Now, what we're in the middle of now is overcoming the limitations of our individual brains and infinitely multiplying our mental power. How can this not be as big a deal as overcoming the limitations of our muscles? So at the risk of repeating myself a little bit, when I look at what's going on with digital technology these days, we are not anywhere near through with this journey. And when I look at what is happening to our economies and our societies, my single conclusion is that we ain't seen nothing yet. The best days are really ahead. Let me give you a couple examples. Economies don't run on energy. They don't run on capital, they don't run on labor. Economies run on ideas. So the work of innovation, the work of coming up with new ideas, is some of the most powerful, most fundamental work that we can do in an economy. And this is kind of how we used to do innovation. We'd find a bunch of fairly similar-looking people ... (Laughter) We'd take them out of elite institutions, we'd put them into other elite institutions and we'd wait for the innovation. Now — (Laughter) as a white guy who spent his whole career at MIT and Harvard, I've got no problem with this. (Laughter) But some other people do, and they've kind of crashed the party and loosened up the dress code of innovation. (Laughter) So here are the winners of a Topcoder programming challenge, and I assure you that nobody cares where these kids grew up, where they went to school, or what they look like. All anyone cares about is the quality of the work, the quality of the ideas. And over and over again, we see this happening in the technology-facilitated world. The work of innovation is becoming more open, more inclusive, more transparent and more merit-based, and that's going to continue no matter what MIT and Harvard think of it, and I couldn't be happier about that development. I hear once in a while, "OK, I'll grant you that, but technology is still a tool for the rich world, and what's not happening, these digital tools are not improving the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid." And I want to say to that very clearly: nonsense. The bottom of the pyramid is benefiting hugely from technology. The economist Robert Jensen did this wonderful study a while back where he watched, in great detail, what happened to the fishing villages of Kerala, India, when they got mobile phones for the very first time. And when you write for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, you have to use very dry and very circumspect language. But when I read his paper, I kind of feel Jensen is trying to scream at us and say, "Look, this was a big deal. Prices stabilized, so people could plan their economic lives. Waste was not reduced — it was eliminated. And the lives of both the buyers and the sellers in these villages measurably improved." Now, what I don't think is that Jensen got extremely lucky and happened to land in the one set of villages where technology made things better. What happened instead is he very carefully documented what happens over and over again when technology comes for the first time to an environment and a community: the lives of people, the welfares of people, improve dramatically. So as I look around at all the evidence and I think about the room that we have ahead of us, I become a huge digital optimist and I start to think that this wonderful statement from the physicist Freeman Dyson is actually not hyperbole. This is an accurate assessment of what's going on. Our technologies are great gifts, and we, right now, have the great good fortune to be living at a time when digital technology is flourishing, when it is broadening and deepening and becoming more profound all around the world. So, yeah, the droids are taking our jobs, but focusing on that fact misses the point entirely. The point is that then we are freed up to do other things, and what we're going to do, I am very confident, what we're going to do is reduce poverty and drudgery and misery around the world. I'm very confident we're going to learn to live more lightly on the planet, and I am extremely confident that what we're going to do with our new digital tools is going to be so profound and so beneficial that it's going to make a mockery out of everything that came before. I'm going to leave the last word to a guy who had a front-row seat for digital progress, our old friend Ken Jennings. I'm with him; I'm going to echo his words: "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords." (Laughter) Thanks very much. (Applause) |
What we're learning from 5,000 brains | {0: 'What does "normal behavior" look like? To find out, Read Montague is imaging thousands of brains at work.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Other people. Everyone is interested in other people. Everyone has relationships with other people, and they're interested in these relationships for a variety of reasons. Good relationships, bad relationships, annoying relationships, agnostic relationships, and what I'm going to do is focus on the central piece of an interaction that goes on in a relationship. So I'm going to take as inspiration the fact that we're all interested in interacting with other people, I'm going to completely strip it of all its complicating features, and I'm going to turn that object, that simplified object, into a scientific probe, and provide the early stages, embryonic stages of new insights into what happens in two brains while they simultaneously interact. But before I do that, let me tell you a couple of things that made this possible. The first is we can now eavesdrop safely on healthy brain activity. Without needles and radioactivity, without any kind of clinical reason, we can go down the street and record from your friends' and neighbors' brains while they do a variety of cognitive tasks, and we use a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging. You've probably all read about it or heard about in some incarnation. Let me give you a two-sentence version of it. So we've all heard of MRIs. MRIs use magnetic fields and radio waves and they take snapshots of your brain or your knee or your stomach, grayscale images that are frozen in time. In the 1990s, it was discovered you could use the same machines in a different mode, and in that mode, you could make microscopic blood flow movies from hundreds of thousands of sites independently in the brain. Okay, so what? In fact, the so what is, in the brain, changes in neural activity, the things that make your brain work, the things that make your software work in your brain, are tightly correlated with changes in blood flow. You make a blood flow movie, you have an independent proxy of brain activity. This has literally revolutionized cognitive science. Take any cognitive domain you want, memory, motor planning, thinking about your mother-in-law, getting angry at people, emotional response, it goes on and on, put people into functional MRI devices, and image how these kinds of variables map onto brain activity. It's in its early stages, and it's crude by some measures, but in fact, 20 years ago, we were at nothing. You couldn't do people like this. You couldn't do healthy people. That's caused a literal revolution, and it's opened us up to a new experimental preparation. Neurobiologists, as you well know, have lots of experimental preps, worms and rodents and fruit flies and things like this. And now, we have a new experimental prep: human beings. We can now use human beings to study and model the software in human beings, and we have a few burgeoning biological measures. Okay, let me give you one example of the kinds of experiments that people do, and it's in the area of what you'd call valuation. Valuation is just what you think it is, you know? If you went and you were valuing two companies against one another, you'd want to know which was more valuable. Cultures discovered the key feature of valuation thousands of years ago. If you want to compare oranges to windshields, what do you do? Well, you can't compare oranges to windshields. They're immiscible. They don't mix with one another. So instead, you convert them to a common currency scale, put them on that scale, and value them accordingly. Well, your brain has to do something just like that as well, and we're now beginning to understand and identify brain systems involved in valuation, and one of them includes a neurotransmitter system whose cells are located in your brainstem and deliver the chemical dopamine to the rest of your brain. I won't go through the details of it, but that's an important discovery, and we know a good bit about that now, and it's just a small piece of it, but it's important because those are the neurons that you would lose if you had Parkinson's disease, and they're also the neurons that are hijacked by literally every drug of abuse, and that makes sense. Drugs of abuse would come in, and they would change the way you value the world. They change the way you value the symbols associated with your drug of choice, and they make you value that over everything else. Here's the key feature though. These neurons are also involved in the way you can assign value to literally abstract ideas, and I put some symbols up here that we assign value to for various reasons. We have a behavioral superpower in our brain, and it at least in part involves dopamine. We can deny every instinct we have for survival for an idea, for a mere idea. No other species can do that. In 1997, the cult Heaven's Gate committed mass suicide predicated on the idea that there was a spaceship hiding in the tail of the then-visible comet Hale-Bopp waiting to take them to the next level. It was an incredibly tragic event. More than two thirds of them had college degrees. But the point here is they were able to deny their instincts for survival using exactly the same systems that were put there to make them survive. That's a lot of control, okay? One thing that I've left out of this narrative is the obvious thing, which is the focus of the rest of my little talk, and that is other people. These same valuation systems are redeployed when we're valuing interactions with other people. So this same dopamine system that gets addicted to drugs, that makes you freeze when you get Parkinson's disease, that contributes to various forms of psychosis, is also redeployed to value interactions with other people and to assign value to gestures that you do when you're interacting with somebody else. Let me give you an example of this. You bring to the table such enormous processing power in this domain that you hardly even notice it. Let me just give you a few examples. So here's a baby. She's three months old. She still poops in her diapers and she can't do calculus. She's related to me. Somebody will be very glad that she's up here on the screen. You can cover up one of her eyes, and you can still read something in the other eye, and I see sort of curiosity in one eye, I see maybe a little bit of surprise in the other. Here's a couple. They're sharing a moment together, and we've even done an experiment where you can cut out different pieces of this frame and you can still see that they're sharing it. They're sharing it sort of in parallel. Now, the elements of the scene also communicate this to us, but you can read it straight off their faces, and if you compare their faces to normal faces, it would be a very subtle cue. Here's another couple. He's projecting out at us, and she's clearly projecting, you know, love and admiration at him. Here's another couple. (Laughter) And I'm thinking I'm not seeing love and admiration on the left. (Laughter) In fact, I know this is his sister, and you can just see him saying, "Okay, we're doing this for the camera, and then afterwards you steal my candy and you punch me in the face." (Laughter) He'll kill me for showing that. All right, so what does this mean? It means we bring an enormous amount of processing power to the problem. It engages deep systems in our brain, in dopaminergic systems that are there to make you chase sex, food and salt. They keep you alive. It gives them the pie, it gives that kind of a behavioral punch which we've called a superpower. So how can we take that and arrange a kind of staged social interaction and turn that into a scientific probe? And the short answer is games. Economic games. So what we do is we go into two areas. One area is called experimental economics. The other area is called behavioral economics. And we steal their games. And we contrive them to our own purposes. So this shows you one particular game called an ultimatum game. Red person is given a hundred dollars and can offer a split to blue. Let's say red wants to keep 70, and offers blue 30. So he offers a 70-30 split with blue. Control passes to blue, and blue says, "I accept it," in which case he'd get the money, or blue says, "I reject it," in which case no one gets anything. Okay? So a rational choice economist would say, well, you should take all non-zero offers. What do people do? People are indifferent at an 80-20 split. At 80-20, it's a coin flip whether you accept that or not. Why is that? You know, because you're pissed off. You're mad. That's an unfair offer, and you know what an unfair offer is. This is the kind of game done by my lab and many around the world. That just gives you an example of the kind of thing that these games probe. The interesting thing is, these games require that you have a lot of cognitive apparatus on line. You have to be able to come to the table with a proper model of another person. You have to be able to remember what you've done. You have to stand up in the moment to do that. Then you have to update your model based on the signals coming back, and you have to do something that is interesting, which is you have to do a kind of depth of thought assay. That is, you have to decide what that other person expects of you. You have to send signals to manage your image in their mind. Like a job interview. You sit across the desk from somebody, they have some prior image of you, you send signals across the desk to move their image of you from one place to a place where you want it to be. We're so good at this we don't really even notice it. These kinds of probes exploit it. Okay? In doing this, what we've discovered is that humans are literal canaries in social exchanges. Canaries used to be used as kind of biosensors in mines. When methane built up, or carbon dioxide built up, or oxygen was diminished, the birds would swoon before people would — so it acted as an early warning system: Hey, get out of the mine. Things aren't going so well. People come to the table, and even these very blunt, staged social interactions, and they, and there's just numbers going back and forth between the people, and they bring enormous sensitivities to it. So we realized we could exploit this, and in fact, as we've done that, and we've done this now in many thousands of people, I think on the order of five or six thousand. We actually, to make this a biological probe, need bigger numbers than that, remarkably so. But anyway, patterns have emerged, and we've been able to take those patterns, convert them into mathematical models, and use those mathematical models to gain new insights into these exchanges. Okay, so what? Well, the so what is, that's a really nice behavioral measure, the economic games bring to us notions of optimal play. We can compute that during the game. And we can use that to sort of carve up the behavior. Here's the cool thing. Six or seven years ago, we developed a team. It was at the time in Houston, Texas. It's now in Virginia and London. And we built software that'll link functional magnetic resonance imaging devices up over the Internet. I guess we've done up to six machines at a time, but let's just focus on two. So it synchronizes machines anywhere in the world. We synchronize the machines, set them into these staged social interactions, and we eavesdrop on both of the interacting brains. So for the first time, we don't have to look at just averages over single individuals, or have individuals playing computers, or try to make inferences that way. We can study individual dyads. We can study the way that one person interacts with another person, turn the numbers up, and start to gain new insights into the boundaries of normal cognition, but more importantly, we can put people with classically defined mental illnesses, or brain damage, into these social interactions, and use these as probes of that. So we've started this effort. We've made a few hits, a few, I think, embryonic discoveries. We think there's a future to this. But it's our way of going in and redefining, with a new lexicon, a mathematical one actually, as opposed to the standard ways that we think about mental illness, characterizing these diseases, by using the people as birds in the exchanges. That is, we exploit the fact that the healthy partner, playing somebody with major depression, or playing somebody with autism spectrum disorder, or playing somebody with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, we use that as a kind of biosensor, and then we use computer programs to model that person, and it gives us a kind of assay of this. Early days, and we're just beginning, we're setting up sites around the world. Here are a few of our collaborating sites. The hub, ironically enough, is centered in little Roanoke, Virginia. There's another hub in London, now, and the rest are getting set up. We hope to give the data away at some stage. That's a complicated issue about making it available to the rest of the world. But we're also studying just a small part of what makes us interesting as human beings, and so I would invite other people who are interested in this to ask us for the software, or even for guidance on how to move forward with that. Let me leave you with one thought in closing. The interesting thing about studying cognition has been that we've been limited, in a way. We just haven't had the tools to look at interacting brains simultaneously. The fact is, though, that even when we're alone, we're a profoundly social creature. We're not a solitary mind built out of properties that kept it alive in the world independent of other people. In fact, our minds depend on other people. They depend on other people, and they're expressed in other people, so the notion of who you are, you often don't know who you are until you see yourself in interaction with people that are close to you, people that are enemies of you, people that are agnostic to you. So this is the first sort of step into using that insight into what makes us human beings, turning it into a tool, and trying to gain new insights into mental illness. Thanks for having me. (Applause) (Applause) |
How the Internet will (one day) transform government | {0: 'Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible -- with deep social and political implications.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I want to talk to you today about something the open-source programming world can teach democracy, but before that, a little preamble. Let's start here. This is Martha Payne. Martha's a 9-year-old Scot who lives in the Council of Argyll and Bute. A couple months ago, Payne started a food blog called NeverSeconds, and she would take her camera with her every day to school to document her school lunches. Can you spot the vegetable? (Laughter) And, as sometimes happens, this blog acquired first dozens of readers, and then hundreds of readers, and then thousands of readers, as people tuned in to watch her rate her school lunches, including on my favorite category, "Pieces of hair found in food." (Laughter) This was a zero day. That's good. And then two weeks ago yesterday, she posted this. A post that read: "Goodbye." And she said, "I'm very sorry to tell you this, but my head teacher pulled me out of class today and told me I'm not allowed to take pictures in the lunch room anymore. I really enjoyed doing this. Thank you for reading. Goodbye." You can guess what happened next, right? (Laughter) The outrage was so swift, so voluminous, so unanimous, that the Council of Argyll and Bute reversed themselves the same day and said, "We would, we would never censor a nine-year-old." (Laughter) Except, of course, this morning. (Laughter) And this brings up the question, what made them think they could get away with something like that? (Laughter) And the answer is, all of human history prior to now. (Laughter) So, what happens when a medium suddenly puts a lot of new ideas into circulation? Now, this isn't just a contemporaneous question. This is something we've faced several times over the last few centuries. When the telegraph came along, it was clear that it was going to globalize the news industry. What would this lead to? Well, obviously, it would lead to world peace. The television, a medium that allowed us not just to hear but see, literally see, what was going on elsewhere in the world, what would this lead to? World peace. (Laughter) The telephone? You guessed it: world peace. Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no world peace. Not yet. Even the printing press, even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe. Instead, what we got was Martin Luther's 95 Theses, the Protestant Reformation, and, you know, the Thirty Years' War. All right, so what all of these predictions of world peace got right is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly come into circulation, it changes society. What they got exactly wrong was what happens next. The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing. That's what happens when the media's space expands. And yet, when we look back on the printing press in the early years, we like what happened. We are a pro-printing press society. So how do we square those two things, that it leads to more arguing, but we think it was good? And the answer, I think, can be found in things like this. This is the cover of "Philosophical Transactions," the first scientific journal ever published in English in the middle of the 1600s, and it was created by a group of people who had been calling themselves "The Invisible College," a group of natural philosophers who only later would call themselves scientists, and they wanted to improve the way natural philosophers argued with each other, and they needed to do two things for this. They needed openness. They needed to create a norm which said, when you do an experiment, you have to publish not just your claims, but how you did the experiment. If you don't tell us how you did it, we won't trust you. But the other thing they needed was speed. They had to quickly synchronize what other natural philosophers knew. Otherwise, you couldn't get the right kind of argument going. The printing press was clearly the right medium for this, but the book was the wrong tool. It was too slow. And so they invented the scientific journal as a way of synchronizing the argument across the community of natural scientists. The scientific revolution wasn't created by the printing press. It was created by scientists, but it couldn't have been created if they didn't have a printing press as a tool. So what about us? What about our generation, and our media revolution, the Internet? Well, predictions of world peace? Check. (Laughter) More arguing? Gold star on that one. (Laughter) (Laughter) I mean, YouTube is just a gold mine. (Laughter) Better arguing? That's the question. So I study social media, which means, to a first approximation, I watch people argue. And if I had to pick a group that I think is our Invisible College, is our generation's collection of people trying to take these tools and to press it into service, not for more arguments, but for better arguments, I'd pick the open-source programmers. Programming is a three-way relationship between a programmer, some source code, and the computer it's meant to run on, but computers are such famously inflexible interpreters of instructions that it's extraordinarily difficult to write out a set of instructions that the computer knows how to execute, and that's if one person is writing it. Once you get more than one person writing it, it's very easy for any two programmers to overwrite each other's work if they're working on the same file, or to send incompatible instructions that simply causes the computer to choke, and this problem grows larger the more programmers are involved. To a first approximation, the problem of managing a large software project is the problem of keeping this social chaos at bay. Now, for decades there has been a canonical solution to this problem, which is to use something called a "version control system," and a version control system does what is says on the tin. It provides a canonical copy of the software on a server somewhere. The only programmers who can change it are people who've specifically been given permission to access it, and they're only allowed to access the sub-section of it that they have permission to change. And when people draw diagrams of version control systems, the diagrams always look something like this. All right. They look like org charts. And you don't have to squint very hard to see the political ramifications of a system like this. This is feudalism: one owner, many workers. Now, that's fine for the commercial software industry. It really is Microsoft's Office. It's Adobe's Photoshop. The corporation owns the software. The programmers come and go. But there was one programmer who decided that this wasn't the way to work. This is Linus Torvalds. Torvalds is the most famous open-source programmer, created Linux, obviously, and Torvalds looked at the way the open-source movement had been dealing with this problem. Open-source software, the core promise of the open-source license, is that everybody should have access to all the source code all the time, but of course, this creates the very threat of chaos you have to forestall in order to get anything working. So most open-source projects just held their noses and adopted the feudal management systems. But Torvalds said, "No, I'm not going to do that." His point of view on this was very clear. When you adopt a tool, you also adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool, and he wasn't going to adopt anything that didn't work the way the Linux community worked. And to give you a sense of how enormous a decision like this was, this is a map of the internal dependencies within Linux, within the Linux operating system, which sub-parts of the program rely on which other sub-parts to get going. This is a tremendously complicated process. This is a tremendously complicated program, and yet, for years, Torvalds ran this not with automated tools but out of his email box. People would literally mail him changes that they'd agreed on, and he would merge them by hand. And then, 15 years after looking at Linux and figuring out how the community worked, he said, "I think I know how to write a version control system for free people." And he called it "Git." Git is distributed version control. It has two big differences with traditional version control systems. The first is that it lives up to the philosophical promise of open-source. Everybody who works on a project has access to all of the source code all of the time. And when people draw diagrams of Git workflow, they use drawings that look like this. And you don't have to understand what the circles and boxes and arrows mean to see that this is a far more complicated way of working than is supported by ordinary version control systems. But this is also the thing that brings the chaos back, and this is Git's second big innovation. This is a screenshot from GitHub, the premier Git hosting service, and every time a programmer uses Git to make any important change at all, creating a new file, modifying an existing one, merging two files, Git creates this kind of signature. This long string of numbers and letters here is a unique identifier tied to every single change, but without any central coordination. Every Git system generates this number the same way, which means this is a signature tied directly and unforgeably to a particular change. This has the following effect: A programmer in Edinburgh and a programmer in Entebbe can both get the same — a copy of the same piece of software. Each of them can make changes and they can merge them after the fact even if they didn't know of each other's existence beforehand. This is cooperation without coordination. This is the big change. Now, I tell you all of this not to convince you that it's great that open-source programmers now have a tool that supports their philosophical way of working, although I think that is great. I tell you all of this because of what I think it means for the way communities come together. Once Git allowed for cooperation without coordination, you start to see communities form that are enormously large and complex. This is a graph of the Ruby community. It's an open-source programming language, and all of the interconnections between the people — this is now not a software graph, but a people graph, all of the interconnections among the people working on that project — and this doesn't look like an org chart. This looks like a dis-org chart, and yet, out of this community, but using these tools, they can now create something together. So there are two good reasons to think that this kind of technique can be applied to democracies in general and in particular to the law. When you make the claim, in fact, that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often get this reaction. (Music) (Laughter) Which is, are you talking about the thing with the singing cats? Like, is that the thing you think is going to be good for society? To which I have to say, here's the thing with the singing cats. That always happens. And I don't just mean that always happens with the Internet, I mean that always happens with media, full stop. It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. (Laughter) You don't have to have an economic incentive to sell books very long before someone says, "Hey, you know what I bet people would pay for?" (Laughter) It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal, right? So — (Laughter) (Applause) So the harnessing by the Invisible College of the printing press to create the scientific journal was phenomenally important, but it didn't happen big, and it didn't happen quick, and it didn't happen fast, so if you're going to look for where the change is happening, you have to look on the margins. So, the law is also dependency-related. This is a graph of the U.S. Tax Code, and the dependencies of one law on other laws for the overall effect. So there's that as a site for source code management. But there's also the fact that law is another place where there are many opinions in circulation, but they need to be resolved to one canonical copy, and when you go onto GitHub, and you look around, there are millions and millions of projects, almost all of which are source code, but if you look around the edges, you can see people experimenting with the political ramifications of a system like that. Someone put up all the Wikileaked cables from the State Department, along with software used to interpret them, including my favorite use ever of the Cablegate cables, which is a tool for detecting naturally occurring haiku in State Department prose. (Laughter) Right. (Laughter) The New York Senate has put up something called Open Legislation, also hosting it on GitHub, again for all of the reasons of updating and fluidity. You can go and pick your Senator and then you can see a list of bills they have sponsored. Someone going by Divegeek has put up the Utah code, the laws of the state of Utah, and they've put it up there not just to distribute the code, but with the very interesting possibility that this could be used to further the development of legislation. Somebody put up a tool during the copyright debate last year in the Senate, saying, "It's strange that Hollywood has more access to Canadian legislators than Canadian citizens do. Why don't we use GitHub to show them what a citizen-developed bill might look like?" And it includes this very evocative screenshot. This is a called a "diff," this thing on the right here. This shows you, for text that many people are editing, when a change was made, who made it, and what the change is. The stuff in red is the stuff that got deleted. The stuff in green is the stuff that got added. Programmers take this capability for granted. No democracy anywhere in the world offers this feature to its citizens for either legislation or for budgets, even though those are the things done with our consent and with our money. Now, I would love to tell you that the fact that the open-source programmers have worked out a collaborative method that is large scale, distributed, cheap, and in sync with the ideals of democracy, I would love to tell you that because those tools are in place, the innovation is inevitable. But it's not. Part of the problem, of course, is just a lack of information. Somebody put a question up on Quora saying, "Why is it that lawmakers don't use distributed version control?" This, graphically, was the answer. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) And that is indeed part of the problem, but only part. The bigger problem, of course, is power. The people experimenting with participation don't have legislative power, and the people who have legislative power are not experimenting with participation. They are experimenting with openness. There's no democracy worth the name that doesn't have a transparency move, but transparency is openness in only one direction, and being given a dashboard without a steering wheel has never been the core promise a democracy makes to its citizens. So consider this. The thing that got Martha Payne's opinions out into the public was a piece of technology, but the thing that kept them there was political will. It was the expectation of the citizens that she would not be censored. That's now the state we're in with these collaboration tools. We have them. We've seen them. They work. Can we use them? Can we apply the techniques that worked here to this? T.S. Eliot once said, "One of the most momentous things that can happen to a culture is that they acquire a new form of prose." I think that's wrong, but — (Laughter) I think it's right for argumentation. Right? A momentous thing that can happen to a culture is they can acquire a new style of arguing: trial by jury, voting, peer review, now this. Right? A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes, in the last decade, in fact. It's large, it's distributed, it's low-cost, and it's compatible with the ideals of democracy. The question for us now is, are we going to let the programmers keep it to themselves? Or are we going to try and take it and press it into service for society at large? Thank you for listening. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
An animated tour of the invisible | {0: 'John Lloyd helps make some of the cleverest television in the UK. '} | TED-Ed | (Circus music) [Ted N' Ed's Carnival] [John Lloyd's Inventory of the Invisible] [Adapted from a TEDTalk given by John Lloyd in 2009] June Cohen: Our next speaker has spent his whole career eliciting that sense of wonder. Please welcome John Lloyd. (Applause) [Hall of Mirrors] The question is, "What is invisible?" There's more of it than you think, actually. Everything, I would say — everything that matters — Except every thing, and except matter. We can see matter but we can't see what's the matter. We can see the stars and the planets but we can't see what holds them apart, or what draws them together. With matter as with people, we see only the skin of things, we can't see into the engine room, we can't see what makes people tick, at least not without difficulty, and the closer we look at anything, the more it disappears. In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, there isn't anything there. Electrons disappear in a kind of fuzz, and there is only energy. One of the interesting things about invisibility is, the things that we can's see, we also can't understand. Gravity is one thing that we can't see, and which we don't understand. It's the least understood of all the four fundamental forces, and the weakest, and nobody really knows what it is or why it's there. For what it's worth, Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived, he thought Jesus came to Earth specifically to operate the levers of gravity. That's what he thought he was there for. So, bright guy, could be wrong on that one, I don't know. (Laughter) Consciousness. I see all your faces; I've no idea what any of you are thinking. Isn't that amazing? Isn't it incredible that we can't read each other's minds, when we can touch each other, taste each other, perhaps, if we get close enough, but we can't read each other's minds. I find that quite astonishing. In the Sufi faith, this great Middle Eastern religion which some claim is the root of all religions, Sufi masters are all telepaths, so they say, but their main exercise of telepathy is to send out powerful signals to the rest of us that it doesn't exist. So that's why we don't think it exists; the Sufi masters working on us. In the question of consciousness and artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence has really, like the study of consciousness, gotten nowhere, we have no idea how consciousness works. Not only have they not created artificial intelligence, they haven't yet created artificial stupidity. (Laughter) The laws of physics: invisible, eternal, omnipresent, all powerful. Remind you of anyone? Interesting. I'm, as you can guess, not a materialist, I'm an immaterialist. And I've found a very useful new word — ignostic. Okay? I'm an ignostic. [God?] I refuse to be drawn on the question on whether God exists until somebody properly defines the terms. Another thing we can't see is the human genome. And this is increasingly peculiar, because about 20 years ago when they started delving into the genome, they thought it would probably contain around 100 thousand genes. Every year since, it's been revised downwards. We now think there are likely to be just over 20 thousand genes in the human genome. This is extraordinary, because rice — get this — rice is known to have 38 thousand genes. Potatoes have 48 chromosomes, two more than people, and the same as a gorilla. (Laughter) You can't see these things, but they are very strange. The stars by day, I always think that's fascinating. The universe disappears. The more light there is, the less you can see. Time. Nobody can see time. I don't know if you know this. There's a big movement in modern physics to decide that time doesn't really exist, because it's too inconvenient for the figures. It's much easier if it's not really there. You can't see the future, obviously, and you can't see the past, except in your memory. One of the interesting things about the past is you particularly can't see — my son asked me this the other day, "Dad, can you remember what I was like when I was two? And I said, "Yes." He said, "Why can't I?" Isn't that extraordinary? You cannot remember what happened to you earlier than the age of two or three. Which is great news for psychoanalysts, because otherwise they'd be out of a job. Because that's where all the stuff happens (Laughter) that makes you who you are. Another thing you can't see is the grid on which we hang. This is fascinating. You probably know, some of you, that cells are continually renewed. Skin flakes off, hairs grow, nails, that kind of stuff — but every cell in your body is replaced at some point. Taste buds, every ten days or so. Livers and internal organs take a bit longer. Spine takes several years. But at the end of seven years, not one cell in your body remains from what was there seven years ago. The question is: who then are we? What are we? What is this thing that we hang on? That is actually us? Atoms, can't see them. Nobody ever will. They're smaller than the wavelength of light. Gas, can't see that. Interesting, somebody mentioned 1600 recently. Gas was invented in 1600 by a Dutch chemist called van Helmont. It's said to be the most successful ever invention of a word by a known individual. Quite good. He also invented a word called "blas," meaning astral radiation. Didn't catch on, unfortunately. (Laughter) But well done, him. Light — you can't see light. When it's dark, in a vacuum, if a person shines a beam of light straight across your eyes, you won't see it. Slightly technical, some physicists will disagree with this. But it's odd that you can't see the beam of light, you can only see what it hits. Electricity, can't see that. Don't let anyone tell you they understand electricity, they don't. Nobody knows what it is. (Laughter) You probably think the electrons in an electric wire move instantaneously down a wire, don't you, at the speed of light, when you turn the light on, they don't. Electrons bumble down the wire, about the speed of spreading honey, they say. Galaxies — hundred billion of them, estimated in the universe. Hundred billion. How many can we see? Five. Five, out of a hundred billion galaxies, with the naked eye. And one of them is quite difficult to see, unless you've got very good eyesight. Radio waves. There's another thing. Heinrich Hertz, when he discovered radio waves, in 1887, he called them radio waves because they radiated. Somebody said to him, "What's the point of these, Heinrich? What's the point of these radio waves that you've found?" And he said, "Well, I've no idea, but I guess somebody will find a use for them someday. The biggest thing that's invisible to us is what we don't know. It is incredible how little we know. Thomas Edison once said, "We don't know one percent of one millionth about anything." And I've come to the conclusion — because you ask this other question: "What's another thing we can't see?" The point, most of us. What's the point? The point — what I've got it down to is there are only two questions really worth asking. "Why are we here?", and "What should we do about it while we are?" To help you, I've got two things to leave you with, from two great philosophers, perhaps two of the greatest philosopher thinkers of the 20th century. One a mathematician and engineer, and the other a poet. The first is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, "I don't know why we are here, but I am pretty sure it's not in order to enjoy ourselves." (Laughter) He was a cheerful bastard, wasn't he? (Laughter) And secondly, and lastly, W.H. Auden, one of my favorite poets, who said, "We are here on Earth to help others. What the others are here for, I've no idea." (Laughter) (Applause) (Circus music) [Get your souvenir photo here!] [Continue your journey into the unknown!] (Circus music) |
What doctors don't know about the drugs they prescribe | {0: 'Ben Goldacre unpicks dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dubious government reports, pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies and quacks.'} | TEDMED 2012 | Hi. So, this chap here, he thinks he can tell you the future. His name is Nostradamus, although here the Sun have made him look a little bit like Sean Connery. (Laughter) And like most of you, I suspect, I don't really believe that people can see into the future. I don't believe in precognition, and every now and then, you hear that somebody has been able to predict something that happened in the future, and that's probably because it was a fluke, and we only hear about the flukes and about the freaks. We don't hear about all the times that people got stuff wrong. Now we expect that to happen with silly stories about precognition, but the problem is, we have exactly the same problem in academia and in medicine, and in this environment, it costs lives. So firstly, thinking just about precognition, as it turns out, just last year a researcher called Daryl Bem conducted a piece of research where he found evidence of precognitive powers in undergraduate students, and this was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal and most of the people who read this just said, "Okay, well, fair enough, but I think that's a fluke, that's a freak, because I know that if I did a study where I found no evidence that undergraduate students had precognitive powers, it probably wouldn't get published in a journal. And in fact, we know that that's true, because several different groups of research scientists tried to replicate the findings of this precognition study, and when they submitted it to the exact same journal, the journal said, "No, we're not interested in publishing replication. We're not interested in your negative data." So this is already evidence of how, in the academic literature, we will see a biased sample of the true picture of all of the scientific studies that have been conducted. But it doesn't just happen in the dry academic field of psychology. It also happens in, for example, cancer research. So in March, 2012, just one month ago, some researchers reported in the journal Nature how they had tried to replicate 53 different basic science studies looking at potential treatment targets in cancer, and out of those 53 studies, they were only able to successfully replicate six. Forty-seven out of those 53 were unreplicable. And they say in their discussion that this is very likely because freaks get published. People will do lots and lots and lots of different studies, and the occasions when it works they will publish, and the ones where it doesn't work they won't. And their first recommendation of how to fix this problem, because it is a problem, because it sends us all down blind alleys, their first recommendation of how to fix this problem is to make it easier to publish negative results in science, and to change the incentives so that scientists are encouraged to post more of their negative results in public. But it doesn't just happen in the very dry world of preclinical basic science cancer research. It also happens in the very real, flesh and blood of academic medicine. So in 1980, some researchers did a study on a drug called lorcainide, and this was an anti-arrhythmic drug, a drug that suppresses abnormal heart rhythms, and the idea was, after people have had a heart attack, they're quite likely to have abnormal heart rhythms, so if we give them a drug that suppresses abnormal heart rhythms, this will increase the chances of them surviving. Early on its development, they did a very small trial, just under a hundred patients. Fifty patients got lorcainide, and of those patients, 10 died. Another 50 patients got a dummy placebo sugar pill with no active ingredient, and only one of them died. So they rightly regarded this drug as a failure, and its commercial development was stopped, and because its commercial development was stopped, this trial was never published. Unfortunately, over the course of the next five, 10 years, other companies had the same idea about drugs that would prevent arrhythmias in people who have had heart attacks. These drugs were brought to market. They were prescribed very widely because heart attacks are a very common thing, and it took so long for us to find out that these drugs also caused an increased rate of death that before we detected that safety signal, over 100,000 people died unnecessarily in America from the prescription of anti-arrhythmic drugs. Now actually, in 1993, the researchers who did that 1980 study, that early study, published a mea culpa, an apology to the scientific community, in which they said, "When we carried out our study in 1980, we thought that the increased death rate that occurred in the lorcainide group was an effect of chance." The development of lorcainide was abandoned for commercial reasons, and this study was never published; it's now a good example of publication bias. That's the technical term for the phenomenon where unflattering data gets lost, gets unpublished, is left missing in action, and they say the results described here "might have provided an early warning of trouble ahead." Now these are stories from basic science. These are stories from 20, 30 years ago. The academic publishing environment is very different now. There are academic journals like "Trials," the open access journal, which will publish any trial conducted in humans regardless of whether it has a positive or a negative result. But this problem of negative results that go missing in action is still very prevalent. In fact it's so prevalent that it cuts to the core of evidence-based medicine. So this is a drug called reboxetine, and this is a drug that I myself have prescribed. It's an antidepressant. And I'm a very nerdy doctor, so I read all of the studies that I could on this drug. I read the one study that was published that showed that reboxetine was better than placebo, and I read the other three studies that were published that showed that reboxetine was just as good as any other antidepressant, and because this patient hadn't done well on those other antidepressants, I thought, well, reboxetine is just as good. It's one to try. But it turned out that I was misled. In fact, seven trials were conducted comparing reboxetine against a dummy placebo sugar pill. One of them was positive and that was published, but six of them were negative and they were left unpublished. Three trials were published comparing reboxetine against other antidepressants in which reboxetine was just as good, and they were published, but three times as many patients' worth of data was collected which showed that reboxetine was worse than those other treatments, and those trials were not published. I felt misled. Now you might say, well, that's an extremely unusual example, and I wouldn't want to be guilty of the same kind of cherry-picking and selective referencing that I'm accusing other people of. But it turns out that this phenomenon of publication bias has actually been very, very well studied. So here is one example of how you approach it. The classic model is, you get a bunch of studies where you know that they've been conducted and completed, and then you go and see if they've been published anywhere in the academic literature. So this took all of the trials that had ever been conducted on antidepressants that were approved over a 15-year period by the FDA. They took all of the trials which were submitted to the FDA as part of the approval package. So that's not all of the trials that were ever conducted on these drugs, because we can never know if we have those, but it is the ones that were conducted in order to get the marketing authorization. And then they went to see if these trials had been published in the peer-reviewed academic literature. And this is what they found. It was pretty much a 50-50 split. Half of these trials were positive, half of them were negative, in reality. But when they went to look for these trials in the peer-reviewed academic literature, what they found was a very different picture. Only three of the negative trials were published, but all but one of the positive trials were published. Now if we just flick back and forth between those two, you can see what a staggering difference there was between reality and what doctors, patients, commissioners of health services, and academics were able to see in the peer-reviewed academic literature. We were misled, and this is a systematic flaw in the core of medicine. In fact, there have been so many studies conducted on publication bias now, over a hundred, that they've been collected in a systematic review, published in 2010, that took every single study on publication bias that they could find. Publication bias affects every field of medicine. About half of all trials, on average, go missing in action, and we know that positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine. If I flipped a coin 100 times but then withheld the results from you from half of those tosses, I could make it look as if I had a coin that always came up heads. But that wouldn't mean that I had a two-headed coin. That would mean that I was a chancer and you were an idiot for letting me get away with it. (Laughter) But this is exactly what we blindly tolerate in the whole of evidence-based medicine. And to me, this is research misconduct. If I conducted one study and I withheld half of the data points from that one study, you would rightly accuse me, essentially, of research fraud. And yet, for some reason, if somebody conducts 10 studies but only publishes the five that give the result that they want, we don't consider that to be research misconduct. And when that responsibility is diffused between a whole network of researchers, academics, industry sponsors, journal editors, for some reason we find it more acceptable, but the effect on patients is damning. And this is happening right now, today. This is a drug called Tamiflu. Tamiflu is a drug which governments around the world have spent billions and billions of dollars on stockpiling, and we've stockpiled Tamiflu in panic, in the belief that it will reduce the rate of complications of influenza. Complications is a medical euphemism for pneumonia and death. (Laughter) Now when the Cochrane systematic reviewers were trying to collect together all of the data from all of the trials that had ever been conducted on whether Tamiflu actually did this or not, they found that several of those trials were unpublished. The results were unavailable to them. And when they started obtaining the writeups of those trials through various different means, through Freedom of Information Act requests, through harassing various different organizations, what they found was inconsistent. And when they tried to get a hold of the clinical study reports, the 10,000-page long documents that have the best possible rendition of the information, they were told they weren't allowed to have them. And if you want to read the full correspondence and the excuses and the explanations given by the drug company, you can see that written up in this week's edition of PLOS Medicine. And the most staggering thing of all of this, to me, is that not only is this a problem, not only do we recognize that this is a problem, but we've had to suffer fake fixes. We've had people pretend that this is a problem that's been fixed. First of all, we had trials registers, and everybody said, oh, it's okay. We'll get everyone to register their trials, they'll post the protocol, they'll say what they're going to do before they do it, and then afterwards we'll be able to check and see if all the trials which have been conducted and completed have been published. But people didn't bother to use those registers. And so then the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors came along, and they said, oh, well, we will hold the line. We won't publish any journals, we won't publish any trials, unless they've been registered before they began. But they didn't hold the line. In 2008, a study was conducted which showed that half of all of trials published by journals edited by members of the ICMJE weren't properly registered, and a quarter of them weren't registered at all. And then finally, the FDA Amendment Act was passed a couple of years ago saying that everybody who conducts a trial must post the results of that trial within one year. And in the BMJ, in the first edition of January, 2012, you can see a study which looks to see if people kept to that ruling, and it turns out that only one in five have done so. This is a disaster. We cannot know the true effects of the medicines that we prescribe if we do not have access to all of the information. And this is not a difficult problem to fix. We need to force people to publish all trials conducted in humans, including the older trials, because the FDA Amendment Act only asks that you publish the trials conducted after 2008, and I don't know what world it is in which we're only practicing medicine on the basis of trials that completed in the past two years. We need to publish all trials in humans, including the older trials, for all drugs in current use, and you need to tell everyone you know that this is a problem and that it has not been fixed. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) |
A thousand times no | {0: 'TED Fellow Bahia Shehab sends an important message through her street art in Cairo: “You can crush the flowers, but you can’t delay spring."'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Two years ago, I was invited as an artist to participate in an exhibition commemorating 100 years of Islamic art in Europe. The curator had only one condition: I had to use the Arabic script for my artwork. Now, as an artist, a woman, an Arab, or a human being living in the world in 2010, I only had one thing to say: I wanted to say no. And in Arabic, to say "no," we say "no, and a thousand times no." So I decided to look for a thousand different noes. on everything ever produced under Islamic or Arab patronage in the past 1,400 years, from Spain to the borders of China. I collected my findings in a book, placed them chronologically, stating the name, the patron, the medium and the date. Now, the book sat on a small shelf next to the installation, which stood three by seven meters, in Munich, Germany, in September of 2010. Now, in January, 2011, the revolution started, and life stopped for 18 days, and on the 12th of February, we naively celebrated on the streets of Cairo, believing that the revolution had succeeded. Nine months later I found myself spraying messages in Tahrir Square. The reason for this act was this image that I saw in my newsfeed. I did not feel that I could live in a city where people were being killed and thrown like garbage on the street. So I took one "no" off a tombstone from the Islamic Museum in Cairo, and I added a message to it: "no to military rule." And I started spraying that on the streets in Cairo. But that led to a series of no, coming out of the book like ammunition, and adding messages to them, and I started spraying them on the walls. So I'll be sharing some of these noes with you. No to a new Pharaoh, because whoever comes next should understand that we will never be ruled by another dictator. No to violence: Ramy Essam came to Tahrir on the second day of the revolution, and he sat there with this guitar, singing. One month after Mubarak stepped down, this was his reward. No to blinding heroes. Ahmed Harara lost his right eye on the 28th of January, and he lost his left eye on the 19th of November, by two different snipers. No to killing, in this case no to killing men of religion, because Sheikh Ahmed Adina Refaat was shot on December 16th, during a demonstration, leaving behind three orphans and a widow. No to burning books. The Institute of Egypt was burned on December 17th, a huge cultural loss. No to stripping the people, and the blue bra is to remind us of our shame as a nation when we allow a veiled woman to be stripped and beaten on the street, and the footprint reads, "Long live a peaceful revolution," because we will never retaliate with violence. No to barrier walls. On February 5th, concrete roadblocks were set up in Cairo to protect the Ministry of Defense from protesters. Now, speaking of walls, I want to share with you the story of one wall in Cairo. A group of artists decided to paint a life-size tank on a wall. It's one to one. In front of this tank there's a man on a bicycle with a breadbasket on his head. To any passerby, there's no problem with this visual. After acts of violence, another artist came, painted blood, protesters being run over by the tank, demonstrators, and a message that read, "Starting tomorrow, I wear the new face, the face of every martyr. I exist." Authority comes, paints the wall white, leaves the tank and adds a message: "Army and people, one hand. Egypt for Egyptians." Another artist comes, paints the head of the military as a monster eating a maiden in a river of blood in front of the tank. Authority comes, paints the wall white, leaves the tank, leaves the suit, and throws a bucket of black paint just to hide the face of the monster. So I come with my stencils, and I spray them on the suit, on the tank, and on the whole wall, and this is how it stands today until further notice. (Laughter) Now, I want to leave you with a final no. I found Neruda scribbled on a piece of paper in a field hospital in Tahrir, and I decided to take a no of Mamluk Mausoleum in Cairo. The message reads, [Arabic] "You can crush the flowers, but you can't delay spring." Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Shukran. (Applause) |
Making sense of maps | {0: 'Aris Venetikidis imagines how maps work with our minds.'} | TEDxDublin | What I do is I organize information. I'm a graphic designer. Professionally, I try to make sense often of things that don't make much sense themselves. So my father might not understand what it is that I do for a living. His part of my ancestry has been farmers. He's part of this ethnic minority called the Pontic Greeks. They lived in Asia Minor and fled to Greece after a genocide about a hundred years ago. And ever since that, migration has somewhat been a theme in my family. My father moved to Germany, studied there and married, and as a result, I now have this half-German brain, with all the analytical thinking and that slightly dorky demeanor that come with that. And of course it meant that I was a foreigner in both countries, and that of course made it pretty easy for me to migrate as well, in good family tradition, if you like. But of course, most journeys that we undertake from day to day are within a city. And, especially if you know the city, getting from A to B may seem pretty obvious, right? But the question is, why is it obvious? How do we know where we're going? So I washed up on a Dublin ferry port about 12 years ago, a professional foreigner, if you like, and I'm sure you've all had this experience before, yeah? You arrive in a new city, and your brain is trying to make sense of this new place. Once you find your base, your home, you start to build this cognitive map of your environment. It's essentially this virtual map that only exists in your brain. All animal species do it, even though we all use slightly different tools. Us humans, of course, we don't move around marking our territory by scent, like dogs. We don't run around emitting ultrasonic squeaks, like bats. We just don't do that, although a night in the Temple Bar district can get pretty wild. (Laughter) No, we do two important things to make a place our own. First, we move along linear routes. Typically, we find a main street, and this main street becomes a linear strip map in our minds. But our mind keeps it pretty simple, yeah? Every street is generally perceived as a straight line, and we kind of ignore the little twists and turns that the streets make. When we do, however, make a turn into a side street, our mind tends to adjust that turn to a 90-degree angle. This of course makes for some funny moments when you're in some old city layout that follows some sort of circular city logic, yeah? Maybe you've had that experience as well. Let's say you're on some spot on a side street that projects from a main cathedral square, and you want to get to another point on a side street just like that. The cognitive map in your mind may tell you, "Aris, go back to the main cathedral square, take a 90-degree turn and walk down that other side street." But somehow you feel adventurous that day, and you suddenly discover that the two spots were actually only a single building apart. Now, I don't know about you, but I always feel like I find this wormhole or this inter-dimensional portal. (Laughter) So we move along linear routes and our mind straightens streets and perceives turns as 90-degree angles. The second thing that we do to make a place our own is we attach meaning and emotions to the things that we see along those lines. If you go to the Irish countryside and you ask an old lady for directions, brace yourself for some elaborate Irish storytelling about all the landmarks, yeah? She'll tell you the pub where her sister used to work, and "... go past that church where I got married," that kind of thing. So we fill our cognitive maps with these markers of meaning. What's more, we abstract repeat patterns and recognize them. We recognize them by the experiences and we abstract them into symbols. And of course, we're all capable of understanding these symbols. (Laughter) What's more, we're all capable of understanding the cognitive maps, and you are all capable of creating these cognitive maps yourselves. So next time, when you want to tell your friend how to get to your place, you grab a beermat, grab a napkin, and you just observe yourself create this awesome piece of communication design. It's got straight lines. It's got 90-degree corners. You might add little symbols along the way. And when you look at what you've just drawn, you realize it does not resemble a street map. If you were to put an actual street map on top of what you've just drawn, you'd realize your streets and the distances — they'd be way off. No, what you've just drawn is more like a diagram or a schematic. It's a visual construct of lines, dots, letters, designed in the language of our brains. So it's no big surprise that the big information-design icon of the last century — the pinnacle of showing everybody how to get from A to B, the London Underground map — was not designed by a cartographer or a city planner; it was designed by an engineering draftsman. In the 1930s, Harry Beck applied the principles of schematic diagram design and changed the way public transport maps are designed forever. Now the very key to the success of this map is in the omission of less important information and in the extreme simplification. So, straightened streets, corners of 90 and 45 degrees, but also the extreme geographic distortion in that map. If you were to look at the actual locations of these stations, you'd see they're very different. But this is all for the clarity of the public Tube map. If you, say, wanted to get from Regent's Park station to Great Portland Street, the Tube map would tell you: take the Tube, go to Baker Street, change over, take another Tube. Of course, what you don't know is that the two stations are only about a hundred meters apart. Now we've reached the subject of public transport, and public transport here in Dublin is a somewhat touchy subject. (Laughter) For everybody who does not know the public transport here in Dublin, essentially, we have this system of local buses that grew with the city. For every outskirt that was added, there was another bus route added, running from the outskirt all the way to the city center. And as these local buses approach the city center, they all run side by side and converge in pretty much one main street. So when I stepped off the boat 12 years ago, I tried to make sense of that. Because exploring a city on foot only gets you so far. But when you explore a foreign and new public transport system, you will build a cognitive map in your mind in pretty much the same way. Typically, you choose yourself a rapid transport route, and in your mind, this route is perceived as a straight line. And like a pearl necklace, all the stations and stops are nicely and neatly aligned along the line. And only then you start to discover some local bus routes that would fill in the gaps, and that allow for those wormhole, inter-dimensional portal shortcuts. So I tried to make sense, and when I arrived, I was looking for some information leaflets that would help me crack this system and understand it, and I found those brochures. (Laughter) They were not geographically distorted. They had a lot of omission of information, but unfortunately, the wrong information. Say, in the city center — there were never actually any lines that showed the routes. (Laughter) There are actually not even any stations with names. (Laughter) Now, the maps of Dublin transport have gotten better, and after I finished the project, they got a good bit better, but still no station names, still no routes. So, being naive, and being half-German, I decided, "Aris, why don't you build your own map?" So that's what I did. I researched how each and every bus route moved through the city, nice and logical, every bus route a separate line. I plotted it into my own map of Dublin, and in the city center ... I got a nice spaghetti plate. (Laughter) Now, this is a bit of a mess, so I decided, of course, "You're going to apply the rules of schematic design," cleaning up the corridors, widening the streets where there were loads of buses and making the streets at straight, 90-degree corners, 45-degree corners or fractions of that, and filled it in with the bus routes. And I built this city center bus map of the system, how it was five years ago. I'll zoom in again so that you get the full impact of the quays and Westmoreland Street. (Laughter) Now I can proudly say — (Applause) I can proudly say, as a public transport map, this diagram is an utter failure. (Laughter) Except, probably, in one aspect: I now had a great visual representation of just how clogged up and overrun the city center really was. Now, call me old-fashioned, but I think a public transport route map should have lines, because that's what they are, yeah? They're little pieces of string that wrap their way through the city center or through the city. If you will, the Greek guy inside of me feels if I don't get a line, it's like entering the labyrinth of the Minotaur without having Ariadne giving you the string to find your way. So the outcome of my academic research, loads of questionnaires, case studies and looking at a lot of maps, was that a lot of the problems and shortcomings of the public transport system here in Dublin was the lack of a coherent public transport map — a simplified, coherent public transport map — because I think this is the crucial step to understanding a public transport network on a physical level, but it's also the crucial step to make a public transport network mappable on a visual level. So I teamed up with a gentleman called James Leahy, a civil engineer and a recent master's graduate of the Sustainable Development program at DIT, and together we drafted the simplified model network, which I could then go ahead and visualize. So here's what we did. We distributed these rapid-transport corridors throughout the city center, and extended them into the outskirts. Rapid, because we wanted them to be served by rapid-transport vehicles. They would get exclusive road use, where possible, and it would be high-quantity, high-quality transport. James wanted to use bus rapid transport for that, rather than light rail. For me, it was important that the vehicles that would run on those rapid transport corridors would be visibly distinguishable from local buses on the street. Now we could take out all the local buses that ran alongside those rapid transport means. Any gaps that appeared in the outskirts were filled again. So, in other words, if there was a street in an outskirt where there had been a bus, we put a bus back in, only now these buses wouldn't run all the way to the city center, but connect to the nearest rapid-transport mode, one of these thick lines over there. So the rest was merely a couple of months of work, and a couple of fights with my girlfriend, of our place constantly being clogged up with maps, and the outcome, one of the outcomes, was this map of the Greater Dublin area. I'll zoom in a little bit. This map only shows the rapid transport connections, no local bus, very much in the "metro map" style that was so successful in London, and that since has been exported to so many other major cities, and therefore is the language that we should use for public transport maps. What's also important is, with a simplified network like this, it now would become possible for me to tackle the ultimate challenge and make a public transport map for the city center, one where I wouldn't just show rapid transport connections, but also all the local bus routes, streets and the likes, and this is what a map like this could look like. I'll zoom in a little bit. In this map, I'm including each transport mode, so rapid transport, bus, DART, tram and the likes. Each individual route is represented by a separate line. The map shows each and every station, each and every station name, and I'm also displaying side streets. In fact, most of the side streets even with their name, and for good measure, also a couple of landmarks, some of them signified by little symbols, others by these isometric three-dimensional bird's-eye-view drawings. The map is relatively small in overall size, so something that you could still hold as a fold-out map or display in a reasonably-sized display box on a bus shelter. I think it tries to be the best balance between actual representation and simplification — the language of way-finding in our brain. So, straightened lines, cleaned-up corners, and of course, that very, very important geographic distortion that makes public transport maps possible. If you, for example, have a look at the two main corridors that run through the city — the yellow and orange one over here — this is how they look in an actual, accurate street map, and this is how they would look in my distorted, simplified public transport map. So for a successful public transport map, we should not stick to accurate representation, but design them in the way our brains work. The reactions I got were tremendous, it was really good to see. And of course, for my own self, I was very happy to see that my folks in Germany and Greece finally have an idea what I do for a living. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
Let's prepare for our new climate | {0: 'Vicki Arroyo uses environmental law and her background in biology and ecology to help prepare for global climate change.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | This is the skyline of my hometown, New Orleans. It was a great place to grow up, but it's one of the most vulnerable spots in the world. Half the city is already below sea level. In 2005, the world watched as New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. One thousand, eight hundred and thirty-six people died. Nearly 300,000 homes were lost. These are my mother's, at the top — although that's not her car, it was carried there by floodwaters up to the roof — and that's my sister's, below. Fortunately, they and other family members got out in time, but they lost their homes, and as you can see, just about everything in them. Other parts of the world have been hit by storms in even more devastating ways. In 2008, Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath killed 138,000 in Myanmar. Climate change is affecting our homes, our communities, our way of life. We should be preparing at every scale and at every opportunity. This talk is about being prepared for, and resilient to the changes that are coming and that will affect our homes and our collective home, the Earth. The changes in these times won't affect us all equally. There are important distributional consequences, and they're not what you always might think. In New Orleans, the elderly and female-headed households were among the most vulnerable. For those in vulnerable, low-lying nations, how do you put a dollar value on losing your country where you ancestors are buried? And where will your people go? And how will they cope in a foreign land? Will there be tensions over immigration, or conflicts over competition for limited resources? It's already fueled conflicts in Chad and Darfur. Like it or not, ready or not, this is our future. Sure, some are looking for opportunities in this new world. That's the Russians planting a flag on the ocean bottom to stake a claim for minerals under the receding Arctic sea ice. But while there might be some short-term individual winners, our collective losses will far outweigh them. Look no further than the insurance industry as they struggle to cope with mounting catastrophic losses from extreme weather events. The military gets it. They call climate change a threat multiplier that could harm stability and security, while governments around the world are evaluating how to respond. So what can we do? How can we prepare and adapt? I'd like to share three sets of examples, starting with adapting to violent storms and floods. In New Orleans, the I-10 Twin Spans, with sections knocked out in Katrina, have been rebuilt 21 feet higher to allow for greater storm surge. And these raised and energy-efficient homes were developed by Brad Pitt and Make It Right for the hard-hit Ninth Ward. The devastated church my mom attends has been not only rebuilt higher, it's poised to become the first Energy Star church in the country. They're selling electricity back to the grid thanks to solar panels, reflective paint and more. Their March electricity bill was only 48 dollars. Now these are examples of New Orleans rebuilding in this way, but better if others act proactively with these changes in mind. For example, in Galveston, here's a resilient home that survived Hurricane Ike, when others on neighboring lots clearly did not. And around the world, satellites and warning systems are saving lives in flood-prone areas such as Bangladesh. But as important as technology and infrastructure are, perhaps the human element is even more critical. We need better planning and systems for evacuation. We need to better understand how people make decisions in times of crisis, and why. While it's true that many who died in Katrina did not have access to transportation, others who did refused to leave as the storm approached, often because available transportation and shelters refused to allow them to take their pets. Imagine leaving behind your own pet in an evacuation or a rescue. Fortunately in 2006, Congress passed the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (Laughter) — it spells "PETS" — to change that. Second, preparing for heat and drought. Farmers are facing challenges of drought from Asia to Africa, from Australia to Oklahoma, while heat waves linked with climate change have killed tens of thousands of people in Western Europe in 2003, and again in Russia in 2010. In Ethiopia, 70 percent, that's 7-0 percent of the population, depends on rainfall for its livelihood. Oxfam and Swiss Re, together with Rockefeller Foundation, are helping farmers like this one build hillside terraces and find other ways to conserve water, but they're also providing for insurance when the droughts do come. The stability this provides is giving the farmers the confidence to invest. It's giving them access to affordable credit. It's allowing them to become more productive so that they can afford their own insurance over time, without assistance. It's a virtuous cycle, and one that could be replicated throughout the developing world. After a lethal 1995 heat wave turned refrigerator trucks from the popular Taste of Chicago festival into makeshift morgues, Chicago became a recognized leader, tamping down on the urban heat island impact through opening cooling centers, outreach to vulnerable neighborhoods, planting trees, creating cool white or vegetated green roofs. This is City Hall's green roof, next to Cook County's [portion of the] roof, which is 77 degrees Fahrenheit hotter at the surface. Washington, D.C., last year, actually led the nation in new green roofs installed, and they're funding this in part thanks to a five-cent tax on plastic bags. They're splitting the cost of installing these green roofs with home and building owners. The roofs not only temper urban heat island impact but they save energy, and therefore money, the emissions that cause climate change, and they also reduce stormwater runoff. So some solutions to heat can provide for win-win-wins. Third, adapting to rising seas. Sea level rise threatens coastal ecosystems, agriculture, even major cities. This is what one to two meters of sea level rise looks like in the Mekong Delta. That's where half of Vietnam's rice is grown. Infrastructure is going to be affected. Airports around the world are located on the coast. It makes sense, right? There's open space, the planes can take off and land without worrying about creating noise or avoiding tall buildings. Here's just one example, San Francisco Airport, with 16 inches or more of flooding. Imagine the staggering cost of protecting this vital infrastructure with levees. But there might be some changes in store that you might not imagine. For example, planes require more runway for takeoff because the heated, less dense air, provides for less lift. San Francisco is also spending 40 million dollars to rethink and redesign its water and sewage treatment, as water outfall pipes like this one can be flooded with seawater, causing backups at the plant, harming the bacteria that are needed to treat the waste. So these outfall pipes have been retrofitted to shut seawater off from entering the system. Beyond these technical solutions, our work at the Georgetown Climate Center with communities encourages them to look at what existing legal and policy tools are available and to consider how they can accommodate change. For example, in land use, which areas do you want to protect, through adding a seawall, for example, alter, by raising buildings, or retreat from, to allow the migration of important natural systems, such as wetlands or beaches? Other examples to consider. In the U.K., the Thames Barrier protects London from storm surge. The Asian Cities Climate [Change] Resilience Network is restoring vital ecosystems like forest mangroves. These are not only important ecosystems in their own right, but they also serve as a buffer to protect inland communities. New York City is incredibly vulnerable to storms, as you can see from this clever sign, and to sea level rise, and to storm surge, as you can see from the subway flooding. But back above ground, these raised ventilation grates for the subway system show that solutions can be both functional and attractive. In fact, in New York, San Francisco and London, designers have envisioned ways to better integrate the natural and built environments with climate change in mind. I think these are inspiring examples of what's possible when we feel empowered to plan for a world that will be different. But now, a word of caution. Adaptation's too important to be left to the experts. Why? Well, there are no experts. We're entering uncharted territory, and yet our expertise and our systems are based on the past. "Stationarity" is the notion that we can anticipate the future based on the past, and plan accordingly, and this principle governs much of our engineering, our design of critical infrastructure, city water systems, building codes, even water rights and other legal precedents. But we can simply no longer rely on established norms. We're operating outside the bounds of CO2 concentrations that the planet has seen for hundreds of thousands of years. The larger point I'm trying to make is this. It's up to us to look at our homes and our communities, our vulnerabilities and our exposures to risk, and to find ways to not just survive, but to thrive, and it's up to us to plan and to prepare and to call on our government leaders and require them to do the same, even while they address the underlying causes of climate change. There are no quick fixes. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. We're all learning by doing. But the operative word is doing. Thank you. (Applause) |
Your body language may shape who you are | {0: 'Amy Cuddy’s research on body language reveals that we can change other people’s perceptions — and perhaps even our own body chemistry — simply by changing body positions.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posture for two minutes. But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what you're doing with your body. So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller? Maybe you're hunching, crossing your legs, maybe wrapping your ankles. Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this. Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter) I see you. So I want you to pay attention to what you're doing right now. We're going to come back to that in a few minutes, and I'm hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit, it could significantly change the way your life unfolds. So, we're really fascinated with body language, and we're particularly interested in other people's body language. You know, we're interested in, like, you know — (Laughter) — an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake. Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10. This lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States. Here comes the Prime Minister — No. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) (Applause) Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake, can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks. Even the BBC and The New York Times. So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior, or body language — but we call it nonverbals as social scientists — it's language, so we think about communication. When we think about communication, we think about interactions. So what is your body language communicating to me? What's mine communicating to you? And there's a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this. So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language, or other people's body language, on judgments. And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language. And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date. For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University, shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician's niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued. So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent, but do we like that person and how they interacted? Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead you to claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right? So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves. We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology. So what nonverbals am I talking about? I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics. I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance. And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance? Well, this is what they are. So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding. So you make yourself big, you stretch out, you take up space, you're basically opening up. It's about opening up. And this is true across the animal kingdom. It's not just limited to primates. And humans do the same thing. (Laughter) So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically, and also when they're feeling powerful in the moment. And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are. This expression, which is known as pride, Jessica Tracy has studied. She shows that people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally blind do this when they win at a physical competition. So when they cross the finish line and they've won, it doesn't matter if they've never seen anyone do it. They do this. So the arms up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted. What do we do when we feel powerless? We do exactly the opposite. We close up. We wrap ourselves up. We make ourselves small. We don't want to bump into the person next to us. So again, both animals and humans do the same thing. And this is what happens when you put together high and low power. So what we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement the other's nonverbals. So if someone is being really powerful with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller. We don't mirror them. We do the opposite of them. So I'm watching this behavior in the classroom, and what do I notice? I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals. So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space. When they sit down, they're sort of spread out. They raise their hands like this. You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in. As soon they come in, you see it. You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sit in their chair and they make themselves tiny, and they go like this when they raise their hand. I notice a couple of things about this. One, you're not going to be surprised. It seems to be related to gender. So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men. Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising. But the other thing I noticed is that it also seemed to be related to the extent to which the students were participating, and how well they were participating. And this is really important in the MBA classroom, because participation counts for half the grade. So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap. You get these equally qualified women and men coming in and then you get these differences in grades, and it seems to be partly attributable to participation. So I started to wonder, you know, okay, so you have these people coming in like this, and they're participating. Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more? So my main collaborator Dana Carney, who's at Berkeley, and I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it? Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us. There's a lot of evidence. But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves? There's some evidence that they do. So, for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also, when we're forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy. So it goes both ways. When it comes to power, it also goes both ways. So when you feel powerful, you're more likely to do this, but it's also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful. So the second question really was, you know, so we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds? And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what am I talking about? So I'm talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that's hormones. I look at hormones. So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like? So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. They actually feel they're going to win even at games of chance. They also tend to be able to think more abstractly. So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks. There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people. Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone. So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol. So what does that mean? When you think about power, people tended to think only about testosterone, because that was about dominance. But really, power is also about how you react to stress. So do you want the high-power leader that's dominant, high on testosterone, but really stress reactive? Probably not, right? You want the person who's powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back. So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alpha needs to take over, if an individual needs to take over an alpha role sort of suddenly, within a few days, that individual's testosterone has gone up significantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly. So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape the mind, at least at the facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind. So what happens, okay, you take a role change, what happens if you do that at a really minimal level, like this tiny manipulation, this tiny intervention? "For two minutes," you say, "I want you to stand like this, and it's going to make you feel more powerful." So this is what we did. We decided to bring people into the lab and run a little experiment, and these people adopted, for two minutes, either high-power poses or low-power poses, and I'm just going to show you five of the poses, although they took on only two. So here's one. A couple more. This one has been dubbed the "Wonder Woman" by the media. Here are a couple more. So you can be standing or you can be sitting. And here are the low-power poses. So you're folding up, you're making yourself small. This one is very low-power. When you're touching your neck, you're really protecting yourself. So this is what happens. They come in, they spit into a vial, for two minutes, we say, "You need to do this or this." They don't look at pictures of the poses. We don't want to prime them with a concept of power. We want them to be feeling power. So two minutes they do this. We then ask them, "How powerful do you feel?" on a series of items, and then we give them an opportunity to gamble, and then we take another saliva sample. That's it. That's the whole experiment. So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, we find that when you are in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. When you're in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that's a whopping significant difference. Here's what we find on testosterone. From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease. So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down. And we've all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves. Also, our bodies change our minds. But the next question, of course, is, can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways? This is in the lab, it's this little task, it's just a couple of minutes. Where can you actually apply this? Which we cared about, of course. And so we think where you want to use this is evaluative situations, like social threat situations. Where are you being evaluated, either by your friends? For teenagers, it's at the lunchroom table. For some people it's speaking at a school board meeting. It might be giving a pitch or giving a talk like this or doing a job interview. We decided that the one that most people could relate to because most people had been through, was the job interview. So we published these findings, and the media are all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview, right? (Laughter) You know, so we were of course horrified, and said, Oh my God, no, that's not what we meant at all. For numerous reasons, no, don't do that. Again, this is not about you talking to other people. It's you talking to yourself. What do you do before you go into a job interview? You do this. You're sitting down. You're looking at your iPhone — or your Android, not trying to leave anyone out. You're looking at your notes, you're hunching up, making yourself small, when really what you should be doing maybe is this, like, in the bathroom, right? Do that. Find two minutes. So that's what we want to test. Okay? So we bring people into a lab, and they do either high- or low-power poses again, they go through a very stressful job interview. It's five minutes long. They are being recorded. They're being judged also, and the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback, so they look like this. Imagine this is the person interviewing you. So for five minutes, nothing, and this is worse than being heckled. People hate this. It's what Marianne LaFrance calls "standing in social quicksand." So this really spikes your cortisol. So this is the job interview we put them through, because we really wanted to see what happened. We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them. They're blind to the hypothesis. They're blind to the conditions. They have no idea who's been posing in what pose, and they end up looking at these sets of tapes, and they say, "We want to hire these people," all the high-power posers. "We don't want to hire these people. We also evaluate these people much more positively overall." But what's driving it? It's not about the content of the speech. It's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech. Because we rate them on all these variables related to competence, like, how well-structured is the speech? How good is it? What are their qualifications? No effect on those things. This is what's affected. These kinds of things. People are bringing their true selves, basically. They're bringing themselves. They bring their ideas, but as themselves, with no, you know, residue over them. So this is what's driving the effect, or mediating the effect. So when I tell people about this, that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me, "It feels fake." Right? So I said, fake it till you make it. It's not me. I don't want to get there and then still feel like a fraud. I don't want to feel like an impostor. I don't want to get there only to feel like I'm not supposed to be here. And that really resonated with me, because I want to tell you a little story about being an impostor and feeling like I'm not supposed to be here. When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident. I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times. I was thrown from the car. And I woke up in a head injury rehab ward, and I had been withdrawn from college, and I learned that my IQ had dropped by two standard deviations, which was very traumatic. I knew my IQ because I had identified with being smart, and I had been called gifted as a child. So I'm taken out of college, I keep trying to go back. They say, "You're not going to finish college. Just, you know, there are other things for you to do, but that's not going to work out for you." So I really struggled with this, and I have to say, having your identity taken from you, your core identity, and for me it was being smart, having that taken from you, there's nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that. So I felt entirely powerless. I worked and worked, and I got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked. Eventually I graduated from college. It took me four years longer than my peers, and I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske, to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton, and I was like, I am not supposed to be here. I am an impostor. And the night before my first-year talk, and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk to 20 people. That's it. I was so afraid of being found out the next day that I called her and said, "I'm quitting." She was like, "You are not quitting, because I took a gamble on you, and you're staying. You're going to stay, and this is what you're going to do. You are going to fake it. You're going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do. You're just going to do it and do it and do it, even if you're terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience, until you have this moment where you say, 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing it. Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this.'" So that's what I did. Five years in grad school, a few years, you know, I'm at Northwestern, I moved to Harvard, I'm at Harvard, I'm not really thinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking, "Not supposed to be here." So at the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, "Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail," came into my office. I really didn't know her at all. She came in totally defeated, and she said, "I'm not supposed to be here." And that was the moment for me. Because two things happened. One was that I realized, oh my gosh, I don't feel like that anymore. I don't feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling. And the second was, she is supposed to be here! Like, she can fake it, she can become it. So I was like, "Yes, you are! You are supposed to be here! And tomorrow you're going to fake it, you're going to make yourself powerful, and, you know — (Applause) And you're going to go into the classroom, and you are going to give the best comment ever." You know? And she gave the best comment ever, and people turned around and were like, oh my God, I didn't even notice her sitting there. (Laughter) She comes back to me months later, and I realized that she had not just faked it till she made it, she had actually faked it till she became it. So she had changed. And so I want to say to you, don't fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it. Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize. The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this. Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes. So, this is two minutes. Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors. That's what you want to do. Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation. Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down. Don't leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn't show them who I am. Leave that situation feeling like, I really feel like I got to say who I am and show who I am. So I want to ask you first, you know, both to try power posing, and also I want to ask you to share the science, because this is simple. I don't have ego involved in this. (Laughter) Give it away. Share it with people, because the people who can use it the most are the ones with no resources and no technology and no status and no power. Give it to them because they can do it in private. They need their bodies, privacy and two minutes, and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life. Thank you. (Applause) |
Between music and medicine | {0: "Violinist Robert Gupta joined the LA Philharmonic at the age of 19 -- and maintains a passionate parallel interest in neurobiology and mental health issues. He's a TED Senior Fellow."} | TEDMED 2012 | (Music) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. It's a distinct privilege to be here. A few weeks ago, I saw a video on YouTube of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at the early stages of her recovery from one of those awful bullets. This one entered her left hemisphere, and knocked out her Broca's area, the speech center of her brain. And in this session, Gabby's working with a speech therapist, and she's struggling to produce some of the most basic words, and you can see her growing more and more devastated, until she ultimately breaks down into sobbing tears, and she starts sobbing wordlessly into the arms of her therapist. And after a few moments, her therapist tries a new tack, and they start singing together, and Gabby starts to sing through her tears, and you can hear her clearly able to enunciate the words to a song that describe the way she feels, and she sings, in one descending scale, she sings, "Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine." And it's a very powerful and poignant reminder of how the beauty of music has the ability to speak where words fail, in this case literally speak. Seeing this video of Gabby Giffords reminded me of the work of Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, one of the preeminent neuroscientists studying music and the brain at Harvard, and Schlaug is a proponent of a therapy called Melodic Intonation Therapy, which has become very popular in music therapy now. Schlaug found that his stroke victims who were aphasic, could not form sentences of three- or four-word sentences, but they could still sing the lyrics to a song, whether it was "Happy Birthday To You" or their favorite song by the Eagles or the Rolling Stones. And after 70 hours of intensive singing lessons, he found that the music was able to literally rewire the brains of his patients and create a homologous speech center in their right hemisphere to compensate for the left hemisphere's damage. When I was 17, I visited Dr. Schlaug's lab, and in one afternoon he walked me through some of the leading research on music and the brain — how musicians had fundamentally different brain structure than non-musicians, how music, and listening to music, could just light up the entire brain, from our prefrontal cortex all the way back to our cerebellum, how music was becoming a neuropsychiatric modality to help children with autism, to help people struggling with stress and anxiety and depression, how deeply Parkinsonian patients would find that their tremor and their gait would steady when they listened to music, and how late-stage Alzheimer's patients, whose dementia was so far progressed that they could no longer recognize their family, could still pick out a tune by Chopin at the piano that they had learned when they were children. But I had an ulterior motive of visiting Gottfried Schlaug, and it was this: that I was at a crossroads in my life, trying to choose between music and medicine. I had just completed my undergraduate, and I was working as a research assistant at the lab of Dennis Selkoe, studying Parkinson's disease at Harvard, and I had fallen in love with neuroscience. I wanted to become a surgeon. I wanted to become a doctor like Paul Farmer or Rick Hodes, these kind of fearless men who go into places like Haiti or Ethiopia and work with AIDS patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, or with children with disfiguring cancers. I wanted to become that kind of Red Cross doctor, that doctor without borders. On the other hand, I had played the violin my entire life. Music for me was more than a passion. It was obsession. It was oxygen. I was lucky enough to have studied at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, and to have played my debut with Zubin Mehta and the Israeli philharmonic orchestra in Tel Aviv, and it turned out that Gottfried Schlaug had studied as an organist at the Vienna Conservatory, but had given up his love for music to pursue a career in medicine. And that afternoon, I had to ask him, "How was it for you making that decision?" And he said that there were still times when he wished he could go back and play the organ the way he used to, and that for me, medical school could wait, but that the violin simply would not. And after two more years of studying music, I decided to shoot for the impossible before taking the MCAT and applying to medical school like a good Indian son to become the next Dr. Gupta. (Laughter) And I decided to shoot for the impossible and I took an audition for the esteemed Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was my first audition, and after three days of playing behind a screen in a trial week, I was offered the position. And it was a dream. It was a wild dream to perform in an orchestra, to perform in the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in an orchestra conducted now by the famous Gustavo Dudamel, but much more importantly to me to be surrounded by musicians and mentors that became my new family, my new musical home. But a year later, I met another musician who had also studied at Juilliard, one who profoundly helped me find my voice and shaped my identity as a musician. Nathaniel Ayers was a double bassist at Juilliard, but he suffered a series of psychotic episodes in his early 20s, was treated with thorazine at Bellevue, and ended up living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles 30 years later. Nathaniel's story has become a beacon for homelessness and mental health advocacy throughout the United States, as told through the book and the movie "The Soloist," but I became his friend, and I became his violin teacher, and I told him that wherever he had his violin, and wherever I had mine, I would play a lesson with him. And on the many times I saw Nathaniel on Skid Row, I witnessed how music was able to bring him back from his very darkest moments, from what seemed to me in my untrained eye to be the beginnings of a schizophrenic episode. Playing for Nathaniel, the music took on a deeper meaning, because now it was about communication, a communication where words failed, a communication of a message that went deeper than words, that registered at a fundamentally primal level in Nathaniel's psyche, yet came as a true musical offering from me. I found myself growing outraged that someone like Nathaniel could have ever been homeless on Skid Row because of his mental illness, yet how many tens of thousands of others there were out there on Skid Row alone who had stories as tragic as his, but were never going to have a book or a movie made about them that got them off the streets? And at the very core of this crisis of mine, I felt somehow the life of music had chosen me, where somehow, perhaps possibly in a very naive sense, I felt what Skid Row really needed was somebody like Paul Farmer and not another classical musician playing on Bunker Hill. But in the end, it was Nathaniel who showed me that if I was truly passionate about change, if I wanted to make a difference, I already had the perfect instrument to do it, that music was the bridge that connected my world and his. There's a beautiful quote by the Romantic German composer Robert Schumann, who said, "To send light into the darkness of men's hearts, such is the duty of the artist." And this is a particularly poignant quote because Schumann himself suffered from schizophrenia and died in asylum. And inspired by what I learned from Nathaniel, I started an organization on Skid Row of musicians called Street Symphony, bringing the light of music into the very darkest places, performing for the homeless and mentally ill at shelters and clinics on Skid Row, performing for combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, and for the incarcerated and those labeled as criminally insane. After one of our events at the Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, a woman walked up to us and she had tears streaming down her face, and she had a palsy, she was shaking, and she had this gorgeous smile, and she said that she had never heard classical music before, she didn't think she was going to like it, she had never heard a violin before, but that hearing this music was like hearing the sunshine, and that nobody ever came to visit them, and that for the first time in six years, when she heard us play, she stopped shaking without medication. Suddenly, what we're finding with these concerts, away from the stage, away from the footlights, out of the tuxedo tails, the musicians become the conduit for delivering the tremendous therapeutic benefits of music on the brain to an audience that would never have access to this room, would never have access to the kind of music that we make. Just as medicine serves to heal more than the building blocks of the body alone, the power and beauty of music transcends the "E" in the middle of our beloved acronym. Music transcends the aesthetic beauty alone. The synchrony of emotions that we experience when we hear an opera by Wagner, or a symphony by Brahms, or chamber music by Beethoven, compels us to remember our shared, common humanity, the deeply communal connected consciousness, the empathic consciousness that neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says is hard-wired into our brain's right hemisphere. And for those living in the most dehumanizing conditions of mental illness within homelessness and incarceration, the music and the beauty of music offers a chance for them to transcend the world around them, to remember that they still have the capacity to experience something beautiful and that humanity has not forgotten them. And the spark of that beauty, the spark of that humanity transforms into hope, and we know, whether we choose the path of music or of medicine, that's the very first thing we must instill within our communities, within our audiences, if we want to inspire healing from within. I'd like to end with a quote by John Keats, the Romantic English poet, a very famous quote that I'm sure all of you know. Keats himself had also given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry, but he died when he was a year older than me. And Keats said, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know." (Music) (Applause) |
Terrorism is a failed brand | {0: 'Jason McCue litigates against terrorists, dictators and others who seem above the law, using the legal and judicial system in innovative ways.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | We most certainly do talk to terrorists, no question about it. We are at war with a new form of terrorism. It's sort of the good old, traditional form of terrorism, but it's sort of been packaged for the 21st century. One of the big things about countering terrorism is, how do you perceive it? Because perception leads to your response to it. So if you have a traditional perception of terrorism, it would be that it's one of criminality, one of war. So how are you going to respond to it? Naturally, it would follow that you meet kind with kind. You fight it. If you have a more modernist approach, and your perception of terrorism is almost cause-and-effect, then naturally from that, the responses that come out of it are much more asymmetrical. We live in a modern, global world. Terrorists have actually adapted to it. It's something we have to, too, and that means the people who are working on counterterrorism responses have to start, in effect, putting on their Google-tinted glasses, or whatever. For my part, what I wanted us to do was just to look at terrorism as though it was a global brand, say, Coca-Cola. Both are fairly bad for your health. (Laughter) If you look at it as a brand in those ways, what you'll come to realize is, it's a pretty flawed product. As we've said, it's pretty bad for your health, it's bad for those who it affects, and it's not actually good if you're a suicide bomber either. It doesn't actually do what it says on the tin. You're not really going to get 72 virgins in heaven. It's not going to happen, I don't think. And you're not really going to, in the '80s, end capitalism by supporting one of these groups. It's a load of nonsense. But what you realize, it's got an Achilles' heel. The brand has an Achilles' heel. We've mentioned the health, but it needs consumers to buy into it. The consumers it needs are the terrorist constituency. They're the people who buy into the brand, support them, facilitate them, and they're the people we've got to reach out to. We've got to attack that brand in front of them. There's two essential ways of doing that, if we carry on this brand theme. One is reducing their market. What I mean is, it's their brand against our brand. We've got to compete. We've got to show we're a better product. If I'm trying to show we're a better product, I probably wouldn't do things like Guantanamo Bay. We've talked there about curtailing the underlying need for the product itself. You could be looking there at poverty, injustice, all those sorts of things which feed terrorism. The other thing to do is to knock the product, attack the brand myth, as we've said. You know, there's nothing heroic about killing a young kid. Perhaps we need to focus on that and get that message back across. We've got to reveal the dangers in the product. Our target audience, it's not just the producers of terrorism, as I've said, the terrorists. It's not just the marketeers of terrorism, which is those who finance, those who facilitate it, but it's the consumers of terrorism. We've got to get in to those homelands. That's where they recruit from. That's where they get their power and strength. That's where their consumers come from. And we have to get our messaging in there. So the essentials are, we've got to have interaction in those areas, with the terrorists, the facilitators, etc. We've got to engage, we've got to educate, and we've got to have dialogue. Now, staying on this brand thing for just a few more seconds, think about delivery mechanisms. How are we going to do these attacks? Well, reducing the market is really one for governments and civil society. We've got to show we're better. We've got to show our values. We've got to practice what we preach. But when it comes to knocking the brand, if the terrorists are Coca-Cola and we're Pepsi, I don't think, being Pepsi, anything we say about Coca-Cola, anyone's going to believe us. So we've got to find a different mechanism, and one of the best mechanisms I've ever come across is the victims of terrorism. They are somebody who can actually stand there and say, "This product's crap. I had it and I was sick for days. It burnt my hand, whatever." You believe them. You can see their scars. You trust them. But whether it's victims, whether it's governments, NGOs, or even the Queen yesterday, in Northern Ireland, we have to interact and engage with those different layers of terrorism, and, in effect, we do have to have a little dance with the devil. This is my favorite part of my speech. I wanted to blow you all up to try and make a point, but — (Laughter) — TED, for health and safety reasons, have told me I've got to do a countdown, so I feel like a bit of an Irish or Jewish terrorist, sort of a health and safety terrorist, and I — (Laughter) — I've got to count 3, 2, 1, and it's a bit alarming, so thinking of what my motto would be, and it would be, "Body parts, not heart attacks." So 3, 2, 1. (Explosion sound) Very good. (Laughter) Now, lady in 15J was a suicide bomber amongst us all. We're all victims of terrorism. There's 625 of us in this room. We're going to be scarred for life. There was a father and a son who sat in that seat over there. The son's dead. The father lives. The father will probably kick himself for years to come that he didn't take that seat instead of his kid. He's going to take to alcohol, and he's probably going to kill himself in three years. That's the stats. There's a very young, attractive lady over here, and she has something which I think's the worst form of psychological, physical injury I've ever seen out of a suicide bombing: It's human shrapnel. What it means is, when she sat in a restaurant in years to come, 10 years to come, 15 years to come, or she's on the beach, every so often she's going to start rubbing her skin, and out of there will come a piece of that shrapnel. And that is a hard thing for the head to take. There's a lady over there as well who lost her legs in this bombing. She's going to find out that she gets a pitiful amount of money off our government for looking after what's happened to her. She had a daughter who was going to go to one of the best universities. She's going to give up university to look after Mum. We're all here, and all of those who watch it are going to be traumatized by this event, but all of you here who are victims are going to learn some hard truths. That is, our society, we sympathize, but after a while, we start to ignore. We don't do enough as a society. We do not look after our victims, and we do not enable them, and what I'm going to try and show is that actually, victims are the best weapon we have against more terrorism. How would the government at the turn of the millennium approach today? Well, we all know. What they'd have done then is an invasion. If the suicide bomber was from Wales, good luck to Wales, I'd say. Knee-jerk legislation, emergency provision legislation — which hits at the very basis of our society, as we all know — it's a mistake. We're going to drive prejudice throughout Edinburgh, throughout the U.K., for Welsh people. Today's approach, governments have learned from their mistakes. They are looking at what I've started off on, on these more asymmetrical approaches to it, more modernist views, cause and effect. But mistakes of the past are inevitable. It's human nature. The fear and the pressure to do something on them is going to be immense. They are going to make mistakes. They're not just going to be smart. There was a famous Irish terrorist who once summed up the point very beautifully. He said, "The thing is, about the British government, is, is that it's got to be lucky all the time, and we only have to be lucky once." So what we need to do is we have to effect it. We've got to start thinking about being more proactive. We need to build an arsenal of noncombative weapons in this war on terrorism. But of course, it's ideas — is not something that governments do very well. I want to go back just to before the bang, to this idea of brand, and I was talking about Coke and Pepsi, etc. We see it as terrorism versus democracy in that brand war. They'll see it as freedom fighters and truth against injustice, imperialism, etc. We do have to see this as a deadly battlefield. It's not just [our] flesh and blood they want. They actually want our cultural souls, and that's why the brand analogy is a very interesting way of looking at this. If we look at al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was essentially a product on a shelf in a souk somewhere which not many people had heard of. 9/11 launched it. It was its big marketing day, and it was packaged for the 21st century. They knew what they were doing. They were effectively [doing] something in this brand image of creating a brand which can be franchised around the world, where there's poverty, ignorance and injustice. We, as I've said, have got to hit that market, but we've got to use our heads rather than our might. If we perceive it in this way as a brand, or other ways of thinking at it like this, we will not resolve or counter terrorism. What I'd like to do is just briefly go through a few examples from my work on areas where we try and approach these things differently. The first one has been dubbed "lawfare," for want of a better word. When we originally looked at bringing civil actions against terrorists, everyone thought we were a bit mad and mavericks and crackpots. Now it's got a title. Everyone's doing it. There's a bomb, people start suing. But one of the first early cases on this was the Omagh Bombing. A civil action was brought from 1998. In Omagh, bomb went off, Real IRA, middle of a peace process. That meant that the culprits couldn't really be prosecuted for lots of reasons, mostly to do with the peace process and what was going on, the greater good. It also meant, then, if you can imagine this, that the people who bombed your children and your husbands were walking around the supermarket that you lived in. Some of those victims said enough is enough. We brought a private action, and thank God, 10 years later, we actually won it. There is a slight appeal on at the moment so I have to be a bit careful, but I'm fairly confident. Why was it effective? It was effective not just because justice was seen to be done where there was a huge void. It was because the Real IRA and other terrorist groups, their whole strength is from the fact that they are an underdog. When we put the victims as the underdog and flipped it, they didn't know what to do. They were embarrassed. Their recruitment went down. The bombs actually stopped — fact — because of this action. We became, or those victims became, more importantly, a ghost that haunted the terrorist organization. There's other examples. We have a case called Almog which is to do with a bank that was, allegedly, from our point of view, giving rewards to suicide bombers. Just by bringing the very action, that bank has stopped doing it, and indeed, the powers that be around the world, which for real politic reasons before, couldn't actually deal with this issue, because there was lots of competing interests, have actually closed down those loopholes in the banking system. There's another case called the McDonald case, where some victims of Semtex, of the Provisional IRA bombings, which were supplied by Gaddafi, sued, and that action has led to amazing things for new Libya. New Libya has been compassionate towards those victims, and started taking it — so it started a whole new dialogue there. But the problem is, we need more and more support for these ideas and cases. Civil affairs and civil society initiatives. A good one is in Somalia. There's a war on piracy. If anyone thinks you can have a war on piracy like a war on terrorism and beat it, you're wrong. What we're trying to do there is turn pirates to fisherman. They used to be fisherman, of course, but we stole their fish and dumped a load of toxic waste in their water, so what we're trying to do is create security and employment by bringing a coastguard along with the fisheries industry, and I can guarantee you, as that builds, al Shabaab and such likes will not have the poverty and injustice any longer to prey on those people. These initiatives cost less than a missile, and certainly less than any soldier's life, but more importantly, it takes the war to their homelands, and not onto our shore, and we're looking at the causes. The last one I wanted to talk about was dialogue. The advantages of dialogue are obvious. It self-educates both sides, enables a better understanding, reveals the strengths and weaknesses, and yes, like some of the speakers before, the shared vulnerability does lead to trust, and it does then become, that process, part of normalization. But it's not an easy road. After the bomb, the victims are not into this. There's practical problems. It's politically risky for the protagonists and for the interlocutors. On one occasion I was doing it, every time I did a point that they didn't like, they actually threw stones at me, and when I did a point they liked, they starting shooting in the air, equally not great. (Laughter) Whatever the point, it gets to the heart of the problem, you're doing it, you're talking to them. Now, I just want to end with saying, if we follow reason, we realize that I think we'd all say that we want to have a perception of terrorism which is not just a pure military perception of it. We need to foster more modern and asymmetrical responses to it. This isn't about being soft on terrorism. It's about fighting them on contemporary battlefields. We must foster innovation, as I've said. Governments are receptive. It won't come from those dusty corridors. The private sector has a role. The role we could do right now is going away and looking at how we can support victims around the world to bring initiatives. If I was to leave you with some big questions here which may change one's perception to it, and who knows what thoughts and responses will come out of it, but did myself and my terrorist group actually need to blow you up to make our point? We have to ask ourselves these questions, however unpalatable. Have we been ignoring an injustice or a humanitarian struggle somewhere in the world? What if, actually, engagement on poverty and injustice is exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do? What if the bombs are just simply wake-up calls for us? What happens if that bomb went off because we didn't have any thoughts and things in place to allow dialogue to deal with these things and interaction? What is definitely uncontroversial is that, as I've said, we've got to stop being reactive, and more proactive, and I just want to leave you with one idea, which is that it's a provocative question for you to think about, and the answer will require sympathy with the devil. It's a question that's been tackled by many great thinkers and writers: What if society actually needs crisis to change? What if society actually needs terrorism to change and adapt for the better? It's those Bulgakov themes, it's that picture of Jesus and the Devil hand in hand in Gethsemane walking into the moonlight. What it would mean is that humans, in order to survive in development, quite Darwinian spirit here, inherently must dance with the devil. A lot of people say that communism was defeated by the Rolling Stones. It's a good theory. Maybe the Rolling Stones has a place in this. Thank you. (Music) (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. (Applause) |
The self-organizing computer course | {0: 'Shimon Schocken is a computer science professor and dedicated educator.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | So, this is my grandfather, Salman Schocken, who was born into a poor and uneducated family with six children to feed, and when he was 14 years old, he was forced to drop out of school in order to help put bread on the table. He never went back to school. Instead, he went on to build a glittering empire of department stores. Salman was the consummate perfectionist, and every one of his stores was a jewel of Bauhaus architecture. He was also the ultimate self-learner, and like everything else, he did it in grand style. He surrounded himself with an entourage of young, unknown scholars like Martin Buber and Shai Agnon and Franz Kafka, and he paid each one of them a monthly salary so that they could write in peace. And yet, in the late '30s, Salman saw what's coming. He fled Germany, together with his family, leaving everything else behind. His department stores confiscated, he spent the rest of his life in a relentless pursuit of art and culture. This high school dropout died at the age of 82, a formidable intellectual, cofounder and first CEO of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and founder of Schocken Books, an acclaimed imprint that was later acquired by Random House. Such is the power of self-study. And these are my parents. They too did not enjoy the privilege of college education. They were too busy building a family and a country. And yet, just like Salman, they were lifelong, tenacious self-learners, and our home was stacked with thousands of books, records and artwork. I remember quite vividly my father telling me that when everyone in the neighborhood will have a TV set, then we'll buy a normal F.M. radio. (Laughter) And that's me, I was going to say holding my first abacus, but actually holding what my father would consider an ample substitute to an iPad. (Laughter) So one thing that I took from home is this notion that educators don't necessarily have to teach. Instead, they can provide an environment and resources that tease out your natural ability to learn on your own. Self-study, self-exploration, self-empowerment: these are the virtues of a great education. So I'd like to share with you a story about a self-study, self-empowering computer science course that I built, together with my brilliant colleague Noam Nisan. As you can see from the pictures, both Noam and I had an early fascination with first principles, and over the years, as our knowledge of science and technology became more sophisticated, this early awe with the basics has only intensified. So it's not surprising that, about 12 years ago, when Noam and I were already computer science professors, we were equally frustrated by the same phenomenon. As computers became increasingly more complex, our students were losing the forest for the trees, and indeed, it is impossible to connect with the soul of the machine if you interact with a black box P.C. or a Mac which is shrouded by numerous layers of closed, proprietary software. So Noam and I had this insight that if we want our students to understand how computers work, and understand it in the marrow of their bones, then perhaps the best way to go about it is to have them build a complete, working, general-purpose, useful computer, hardware and software, from the ground up, from first principles. Now, we had to start somewhere, and so Noam and I decided to base our cathedral, so to speak, on the simplest possible building block, which is something called NAND. It is nothing more than a trivial logic gate with four input-output states. So we now start this journey by telling our students that God gave us NAND — (Laughter) — and told us to build a computer, and when we asked how, God said, "One step at a time." And then, following this advice, we start with this lowly, humble NAND gate, and we walk our students through an elaborate sequence of projects in which they gradually build a chip set, a hardware platform, an assembler, a virtual machine, a basic operating system and a compiler for a simple, Java-like language that we call "JACK." The students celebrate the end of this tour de force by using JACK to write all sorts of cool games like Pong, Snake and Tetris. You can imagine the tremendous joy of playing with a Tetris game that you wrote in JACK and then compiled into machine language in a compiler that you wrote also, and then seeing the result running on a machine that you built starting with nothing more than a few thousand NAND gates. It's a tremendous personal triumph of going from first principles all the way to a fantastically complex and useful system. Noam and I worked five years to facilitate this ascent and to create the tools and infrastructure that will enable students to build it in one semester. And this is the great team that helped us make it happen. The trick was to decompose the computer's construction into numerous stand-alone modules, each of which could be individually specified, built and unit-tested in isolation from the rest of the project. And from day one, Noam and I decided to put all these building blocks freely available in open source on the Web. So chip specifications, APIs, project descriptions, software tools, hardware simulators, CPU emulators, stacks of hundreds of slides, lectures — we laid out everything on the Web and invited the world to come over, take whatever they need, and do whatever they want with it. And then something fascinating happened. The world came. And in short order, thousands of people were building our machine. And NAND2Tetris became one of the first massive, open, online courses, although seven years ago we had no idea that what we were doing is called MOOCs. We just observed how self-organized courses were kind of spontaneously spawning out of our materials. For example, Pramode C.E., an engineer from Kerala, India, has organized groups of self-learners who build our computer under his good guidance. And Parag Shah, another engineer, from Mumbai, has unbundled our projects into smaller, more manageable bites that he now serves in his pioneering do-it-yourself computer science program. The people who are attracted to these courses typically have a hacker mentality. They want to figure out how things work, and they want to do it in groups, like this hackers club in Washington, D.C., that uses our materials to offer community courses. And because these materials are widely available and open-source, different people take them to very different and unpredictable directions. For example, Yu Fangmin, from Guangzhou, has used FPGA technology to build our computer and show others how to do the same using a video clip, and Ben Craddock developed a very nice computer game that unfolds inside our CPU architecture, which is quite a complex 3D maze that Ben developed using the Minecraft 3D simulator engine. The Minecraft community went bananas over this project, and Ben became an instant media celebrity. And indeed, for quite a few people, taking this NAND2Tetris pilgrimage, if you will, has turned into a life-changing experience. For example, take Dan Rounds, who is a music and math major from East Lansing, Michigan. A few weeks ago, Dan posted a victorious post on our website, and I'd like to read it to you. So here's what Dan said. "I did the coursework because understanding computers is important to me, just like literacy and numeracy, and I made it through. I never worked harder on anything, never been challenged to this degree. But given what I now feel capable of doing, I would certainly do it again. To anyone considering NAND2Tetris, it's a tough journey, but you'll be profoundly changed." So Dan demonstrates the many self-learners who take this course off the Web, on their own traction, on their own initiative, and it's quite amazing because these people cannot care less about grades. They are doing it because of one motivation only. They have a tremendous passion to learn. And with that in mind, I'd like to say a few words about traditional college grading. I'm sick of it. We are obsessed with grades because we are obsessed with data, and yet grading takes away all the fun from failing, and a huge part of education is about failing. Courage, according to Churchill, is the ability to go from one defeat to another without losing enthusiasm. (Laughter) And [Joyce] said that mistakes are the portals of discovery. And yet we don't tolerate mistakes, and we worship grades. So we collect your B pluses and your A minuses and we aggregate them into a number like 3.4, which is stamped on your forehead and sums up who you are. Well, in my opinion, we went too far with this nonsense, and grading became degrading. So with that, I'd like to say a few words about upgrading, and share with you a glimpse from my current project, which is different from the previous one, but it shares exactly the same characteristics of self-learning, learning by doing, self-exploration and community-building, and this project deals with K-12 math education, beginning with early age math, and we do it on tablets because we believe that math, like anything else, should be taught hands on. So here's what we do. Basically, we developed numerous mobile apps, every one of them explaining a particular concept in math. So for example, let's take area. When you deal with a concept like area — well, we also provide a set of tools that the child is invited to experiment with in order to learn. So if area is what interests us, then one thing which is natural to do is to tile the area of this particular shape and simply count how many tiles it takes to cover it completely. And this little exercise here gives you a first good insight of the notion of area. Moving along, what about the area of this figure? Well, if you try to tile it, it doesn't work too well, does it. So instead, you can experiment with these different tools here by some process of guided trial and error, and at some point you will discover that one thing that you can do among several legitimate transformations is the following one. You can cut the figure, you can rearrange the parts, you can glue them and then proceed to tile just like we did before. (Applause) Now this particular transformation did not change the area of the original figure, so a six-year-old who plays with this has just discovered a clever algorithm to compute the area of any given parallelogram. We don't replace teachers, by the way. We believe that teachers should be empowered, not replaced. Moving along, what about the area of a triangle? So after some guided trial and error, the child will discover, with or without help, that he or she can duplicate the original figure and then take the result, transpose it, glue it to the original and then proceed [with] what we did before: cut, rearrange, paste — oops— paste and glue, and tile. Now this transformation has doubled the area of the original figure, and therefore we have just learned that the area of the triangle equals the area of this rectangle divided by two. But we discovered it by self-exploration. So, in addition to learning some useful geometry, the child has been exposed to some pretty sophisticated science strategies, like reduction, which is the art of transforming a complex problem into a simple one, or generalization, which is at the heart of any scientific discipline, or the fact that some properties are invariant under some transformations. And all this is something that a very young child can pick up using such mobile apps. So presently, we are doing the following: First of all, we are decomposing the K-12 math curriculum into numerous such apps. And because we cannot do it on our own, we've developed a very fancy authoring tool that any author, any parent or actually anyone who has an interest in math education, can use this authoring tool to develop similar apps on tablets without programming. And finally, we are putting together an adaptive ecosystem that will match different learners with different apps according to their evolving learning style. The driving force behind this project is my colleague Shmulik London, and, you see, just like Salman did about 90 years ago, the trick is to surround yourself with brilliant people, because at the end, it's all about people. And a few years ago, I was walking in Tel Aviv and I saw this graffiti on a wall, and I found it so compelling that by now I preach it to my students, and I'd like to try to preach it to you. Now, I don't know how many people here are familiar with the term "mensch." It basically means to be human and to do the right thing. And with that, what this graffiti says is, "High-tech schmigh-tech. The most important thing is to be a mensch." (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
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