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Weaving narratives in museum galleries | {0: "During his term as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and now at San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums, Thomas P. Campbell aims to make museum offerings both narrative-driven and accessible. "} | TED2012 | When I was considering a career in the art world, I took a course in London, and one of my supervisors was this irascible Italian called Pietro, who drank too much, smoked too much and swore much too much. But he was a passionate teacher, and I remember one of our earlier classes with him, he was projecting images on the wall, asking us to think about them, and he put up an image of a painting. It was a landscape with figures, semi-dressed, drinking wine. There was a nude woman in the lower foreground, and on the hillside in the back, there was a figure of the mythological god Bacchus, and he said, "What is this?" And I — no one else did, so I put up my hand, and I said, "It's a Bacchanal by Titian." He said, "It's a what?" I thought maybe I'd pronounced it wrong. "It's a Bacchanal by Titian." He said, "It's a what?" I said, "It's a Bacchanal by Titian." (Laughter) He said, "You boneless bookworm! It's a fucking orgy!" (Laughter) As I said, he swore too much. There was an important lesson for me in that. Pietro was suspicious of formal art training, art history training, because he feared that it filled people up with jargon, and then they just classified things rather than looking at them, and he wanted to remind us that all art was once contemporary, and he wanted us to use our eyes, and he was especially evangelical about this message, because he was losing his sight. He wanted us to look and ask basic questions of objects. What is it? How is it made? Why was it made? How is it used? And these were important lessons to me when I subsequently became a professional art historian. My kind of eureka moment came a few years later, when I was studying the art of the courts of Northern Europe, and of course it was very much discussed in terms of the paintings and the sculptures and the architecture of the day. But as I began to read historical documents and contemporary descriptions, I found there was a kind of a missing component, for everywhere I came across descriptions of tapestries. Tapestries were ubiquitous between the Middle Ages and, really, well into the 18th century, and it was pretty apparent why. Tapestries were portable. You could roll them up, send them ahead of you, and in the time it took to hang them up, you could transform a cold, dank interior into a richly colored setting. Tapestries effectively provided a vast canvas on which the patrons of the day could depict the heroes with whom they wanted to be associated, or even themselves, and in addition to that, tapestries were hugely expensive. They required scores of highly skilled weavers working over extended periods of time with very expensive materials — the wools, the silks, even gold and silver thread. So, all in all, in an age when the visual image of any kind was rare, tapestries were an incredibly potent form of propaganda. Well, I became a tapestry historian. In due course, I ended up as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, because I saw the Met as one of the few places where I could organize really big exhibitions about the subject I cared so passionately about. And in about 1997, the then-director Philippe de Montebello gave me the go-ahead to organize an exhibition for 2002. We normally have these very long lead-in times. It wasn't straightforward. It's no longer a question of chucking a tapestry in the back of a car. They have to be wound on huge rollers, shipped in oversized freighters. Some of them are so big we had, to get them into the museum, we had to take them up the great steps at the front. We thought very hard about how to present this unknown subject to a modern audience: the dark colors to set off the colors that remained in objects that were often faded; the placing of lights to bring out the silk and the gold thread; the labeling. You know, we live in an age where we are so used to television images and photographs, a one-hit image. These were big, complex things, almost like cartoons with multiple narratives. We had to draw our audience in, get them to slow down, to explore the objects. There was a lot of skepticism. On the opening night, I overheard one of the senior members of staff saying, "This is going to be a bomb." But in reality, in the course of the coming weeks and months, hundreds of thousands of people came to see the show. The exhibition was designed to be an experience, and tapestries are hard to reproduce in photographs. So I want you to use your imaginations, thinking of these wall-high objects, some of them 10 meters wide, depicting lavish court scenes with courtiers and dandies who would look quite at home in the pages of the fashion press today, thick woods with hunters crashing through the undergrowth in pursuit of wild boars and deer, violent battles with scenes of fear and heroism. I remember taking my son's school class. He was eight at the time, and all the little boys, they kind of — you know, they were little boys, and then the thing that caught their attention was in one of the hunting scenes there was a dog pooping in the foreground — (Laughter) — kind of an in-your-face joke by the artist. And you can just imagine them. But it brought it alive to them. I think they suddenly saw that these weren't just old faded tapestries. These were images of the world in the past, and that it was the same for our audience. And for me as a curator, I felt proud. I felt I'd shifted the needle a little. Through this experience that could only be created in a museum, I'd opened up the eyes of my audience — historians, artists, press, the general public — to the beauty of this lost medium. A few years later, I was invited to be the director of the museum, and after I got over that — "Who, me? The tapestry geek? I don't wear a tie!" — I realized the fact: I believe passionately in that curated museum experience. We live in an age of ubiquitous information, and sort of "just add water" expertise, but there's nothing that compares with the presentation of significant objects in a well-told narrative, what the curator does, the interpretation of a complex, esoteric subject, in a way that retains the integrity of the subject, that makes it — unpacks it for a general audience. And that, to me, today, is now the challenge and the fun of my job, supporting the vision of my curators, whether it's an exhibition of Samurai swords, early Byzantine artifacts, Renaissance portraits, or the show we heard mentioned earlier, the McQueen show, with which we enjoyed so much success last summer. That was an interesting case. In the late spring, early summer of 2010, shortly after McQueen's suicide, our curator of costume, Andrew Bolton, came to see me, and said, "I've been thinking of doing a show on McQueen, and now is the moment. We have to, we have to do it fast." It wasn't easy. McQueen had worked throughout his career with a small team of designers and managers who were very protective of his legacy, but Andrew went to London and worked with them over the summer and won their confidence, and that of the designers who created his amazing fashion shows, which were works of performance art in their own right, and we proceeded to do something at the museum, I think, we've never done before. It wasn't just your standard installation. In fact, we ripped down the galleries to recreate entirely different settings, a recreation of his first studio, a hall of mirrors, a curiosity box, a sunken ship, a burned-out interior, with videos and soundtracks that ranged from operatic arias to pigs fornicating. And in this extraordinary setting, the costumes were like actors and actresses, or living sculptures. It could have been a train wreck. It could have looked like shop windows on Fifth Avenue at Christmas, but because of the way that Andrew connected with the McQueen team, he was channeling the rawness and the brilliance of McQueen, and the show was quite transcendant, and it became a phenomenon in its own right. By the end of the show, we had people queuing for four or five hours to get into the show, but no one really complained. I heard over and over again, "Wow, that was worth it. It was a such a visceral, emotive experience." Now, I've described two very immersive exhibitions, but I also believe that collections, individual objects, can also have that same power. The Met was set up not as a museum of American art, but of an encyclopedic museum, and today, 140 years later, that vision is as prescient as ever, because, of course, we live in a world of crisis, of challenge, and we're exposed to it through the 24/7 newsreels. It's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations, the cultures, that we're seeing the current manifestation of. Whether it's Libya, Egypt, Syria, it's in our galleries that we can explain and give greater understanding. I mean, our new Islamic galleries are a case in point, opened 10 years, almost to the week, after 9/11. I think for most Americans, knowledge of the Islamic world was pretty slight before 9/11, and then it was thrust upon us in one of America's darkest hours, and the perception was through the polarization of that terrible event. Now, in our galleries, we show 14 centuries of the development of different Islamic cultures across a vast geographic spread, and, again, hundreds of thousands of people have come to see these galleries since they opened last October. I'm often asked, "Is digital media replacing the museum?" and I think those numbers are a resounding rejection of that notion. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a huge advocate of the Web. It gives us a way of reaching out to audiences around the globe, but nothing replaces the authenticity of the object presented with passionate scholarship. Bringing people face to face with our objects is a way of bringing them face to face with people across time, across space, whose lives may have been very different to our own, but who, like us, had hopes and dreams, frustrations and achievements in their lives. And I think this is a process that helps us better understand ourselves, helps us make better decisions about where we're going. The Great Hall at the Met is one of the great portals of the world, awe-inspiring, like a medieval cathedral. From there, you can walk in any direction to almost any culture. I frequently go out into the hall and the galleries and I watch our visitors coming in. Some of them are comfortable. They feel at home. They know what they're looking for. Others are very uneasy. It's an intimidating place. They feel that the institution is elitist. I'm working to try and break down that sense of that elitism. I want to put people in a contemplative frame of mind, where they're prepared to be a little bit lost, to explore, to see the unfamiliar in the familiar, or to try the unknown. Because for us, it's all about bringing them face to face with great works of art, capturing them at that moment of discomfort, when the inclination is kind of to reach for your iPhone, your Blackberry, but to create a zone where their curiosity can expand. And whether it's in the expression of a Greek sculpture that reminds you of a friend, or a dog pooping in the corner of a tapestry, or, to bring it back to my tutor Pietro, those dancing figures who are indeed knocking back the wine, and that nude figure in the left foreground. Wow. She is a gorgeous embodiment of youthful sexuality. In that moment, our scholarship can tell you that this is a bacchanal, but if we're doing our job right, and you've checked the jargon at the front door, trust your instinct. You know it's an orgy. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
3 ways to (usefully) lose control of your brand | {0: 'A humanist in Silicon Valley, Tim Leberecht argues that in a time of artificial intelligence, big data and the quantification of everything, we are losing sight of the importance of the emotional and social aspects of our work.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Companies are losing control. What happens on Wall Street no longer stays on Wall Street. What happens in Vegas ends up on YouTube. (Laughter) Reputations are volatile. Loyalties are fickle. Management teams seem increasingly disconnected from their staff. (Laughter) A recent survey said that 27 percent of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm. However, in the same survey, only four percent of employees agreed. Companies are losing control of their customers and their employees. But are they really? I'm a marketer, and as a marketer, I know that I've never really been in control. Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room, the saying goes. Hyperconnectivity and transparency allow companies to be in that room now, 24/7. They can listen and join the conversation. In fact, they have more control over the loss of control than ever before. They can design for it. But how? First of all, they can give employees and customers more control. They can collaborate with them on the creation of ideas, knowledge, content, designs and product. They can give them more control over pricing, which is what the band Radiohead did with its pay-as-you-like online release of its album "In Rainbows." Buyers could determine the price, but the offer was exclusive, and only stood for a limited period of time. The album sold more copies than previous releases of the band. The Danish chocolate company Anthon Berg opened a so-called "generous store" in Copenhagen. It asked customers to purchase chocolate with the promise of good deeds towards loved ones. It turned transactions into interactions, and generosity into a currency. Companies can even give control to hackers. When Microsoft Kinect came out, the motion-controlled add-on to its Xbox gaming console, it immediately drew the attention of hackers. Microsoft first fought off the hacks, but then shifted course when it realized that actively supporting the community came with benefits. The sense of co-ownership, the free publicity, the added value, all helped drive sales. The ultimate empowerment of customers is to ask them not to buy. Outdoor clothier Patagonia encouraged prospective buyers to check out eBay for its used products and to resole their shoes before purchasing new ones. In an even more radical stance against consumerism, the company placed a "Don't Buy This Jacket" advertisement during the peak of shopping season. It may have jeopardized short-term sales, but it builds lasting, long-term loyalty based on shared values. Research has shown that giving employees more control over their work makes them happier and more productive. The Brazilian company Semco Group famously lets employees set their own work schedules and even their salaries. Hulu and Netflix, among other companies, have open vacation policies. Companies can give people more control, but they can also give them less control. Traditional business wisdom holds that trust is earned by predictable behavior, but when everything is consistent and standardized, how do you create meaningful experiences? Giving people less control might be a wonderful way to counter the abundance of choice and make them happier. Take the travel service Nextpedition. Nextpedition turns the trip into a game, with surprising twists and turns along the way. It does not tell the traveler where she's going until the very last minute, and information is provided just in time. Similarly, Dutch airline KLM launched a surprise campaign, seemingly randomly handing out small gifts to travelers en route to their destination. U.K.-based Interflora monitored Twitter for users who were having a bad day, and then sent them a free bouquet of flowers. Is there anything companies can do to make their employees feel less pressed for time? Yes. Force them to help others. A recent study suggests that having employees complete occasional altruistic tasks throughout the day increases their sense of overall productivity. At Frog, the company I work for, we hold internal speed meet sessions that connect old and new employees, helping them get to know each other fast. By applying a strict process, we give them less control, less choice, but we enable more and richer social interactions. Companies are the makers of their fortunes, and like all of us, they are utterly exposed to serendipity. That should make them more humble, more vulnerable and more human. At the end of the day, as hyperconnectivity and transparency expose companies' behavior in broad daylight, staying true to their true selves is the only sustainable value proposition. Or as the ballet dancer Alonzo King said, "What's interesting about you is you." For the true selves of companies to come through, openness is paramount, but radical openness is not a solution, because when everything is open, nothing is open. "A smile is a door that is half open and half closed," the author Jennifer Egan wrote. Companies can give their employees and customers more control or less. They can worry about how much openness is good for them, and what needs to stay closed. Or they can simply smile, and remain open to all possibilities. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
How art, technology and design inform creative leaders | {0: 'John Maeda, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, is dedicated to linking design and technology. Through the software tools, web pages and books he creates, he spreads his philosophy of elegant simplicity.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I have to say that I'm very glad to be here. I understand we have over 80 countries here, so that's a whole new paradigm for me to speak to all of these countries. In each country, I'm sure you have this thing called the parent-teacher conference. Do you know about the parent-teacher conference? Not the ones for your kids, but the one you had as a child, where your parents come to school and your teacher talks to your parents, and it's a little bit awkward. Well, I remember in third grade, I had this moment where my father, who never takes off from work, he's a classical blue collar, a working-class immigrant person, going to school to see his son, how he's doing, and the teacher said to him, he said, "You know, John is good at math and art." And he kind of nodded, you know? The next day I saw him talking to a customer at our tofu store, and he said, "You know, John's good at math." (Laughter) And that always stuck with me all my life. Why didn't Dad say art? Why wasn't it okay? Why? It became a question my entire life, and that's all right, because being good at math meant he bought me a computer, and some of you remember this computer, this was my first computer. Who had an Apple II? Apple II users, very cool. (Applause) As you remember, the Apple II did nothing at all. (Laughter) You'd plug it in, you'd type in it and green text would come out. It would say you're wrong most of the time. That was the computer we knew. That computer is a computer that I learned about going to MIT, my father's dream. And at MIT, however, I learned about the computer at all levels, and after, I went to art school to get away from computers, and I began to think about the computer as more of a spiritual space of thinking. And I was influenced by performance art — so this is 20 years ago. I made a computer out of people. It was called the Human Powered Computer Experiment. I have a power manager, mouse driver, memory, etc., and I built this in Kyoto, the old capital of Japan. It's a room broken in two halves. I've turned the computer on, and these assistants are placing a giant floppy disk built out of cardboard, and it's put into the computer. And the floppy disk drive person wears it. (Laughter) She finds the first sector on the disk, and takes data off the disk and passes it off to, of course, the bus. So the bus diligently carries the data into the computer to the memory, to the CPU, the VRAM, etc., and it's an actual working computer. That's a bus, really. (Laughter) And it looks kind of fast. That's a mouse driver, where it's XY. (Laughter) It looks like it's happening kind of quickly, but it's actually a very slow computer, and when I realized how slow this computer was compared to how fast a computer is, it made me wonder about computers and technology in general. And so I'm going to talk today about four things, really. The first three things are about how I've been curious about technology, design and art, and how they intersect, how they overlap, and also a topic that I've taken on since four years ago I became the President of Rhode Island School of Design: leadership. And I'll talk about how I've looked to combine these four areas into a kind of a synthesis, a kind of experiment. So starting from technology, technology is a wonderful thing. When that Apple II came out, it really could do nothing. It could show text and after we waited a bit, we had these things called images. Remember when images were first possible with a computer, those gorgeous, full-color images? And then after a few years, we got CD-quality sound. It was incredible. You could listen to sound on the computer. And then movies, via CD-ROM. It was amazing. Remember that excitement? And then the browser appeared. The browser was great, but the browser was very primitive, very narrow bandwidth. Text first, then images, we waited, CD-quality sound over the Net, then movies over the Internet. Kind of incredible. And then the mobile phone occurred, text, images, audio, video. And now we have iPhone, iPad, Android, with text, video, audio, etc. You see this little pattern here? We're kind of stuck in a loop, perhaps, and this sense of possibility from computing is something I've been questioning for the last 10 or so years, and have looked to design, as we understand most things, and to understand design with our technology has been a passion of mine. And I have a small experiment to give you a quick design lesson. Designers talk about the relationship between form and content, content and form. Now what does that mean? Well, content is the word up there: fear. It's a four-letter word. It's a kind of a bad feeling word, fear. Fear is set in Light Helvetica, so it's not too stressful, and if you set it in Ultra Light Helvetica, it's like, "Oh, fear, who cares?" Right? (Laughter) You take the same Ultra Light Helvetica and make it big, and like, whoa, that hurts. Fear. So you can see how you change the scale, you change the form. Content is the same, but you feel differently. You change the typeface to, like, this typeface, and it's kind of funny. It's like pirate typeface, like Captain Jack Sparrow typeface. Arr! Fear! Like, aww, that's not fearful. That's actually funny. Or fear like this, kind of a nightclub typeface. (Laughter) Like, we gotta go to Fear. (Laughter) It's, like, amazing, right? (Laughter) (Applause) It just changes the same content. Or you make it — The letters are separated apart, they're huddled together like on the deck of the Titanic, and you feel sorry for the letters, like, I feel the fear. You feel for them. Or you change the typeface to something like this. It's very classy. It's like that expensive restaurant, Fear. I can never get in there. (Laughter) It's just amazing, Fear. But that's form, content. If you just change one letter in that content, you get a much better word, much better content: free. "Free" is a great word. You can serve it almost any way. Free bold feels like Mandela free. It's like, yes, I can be free. Free even light feels kind of like, ah, I can breathe in free. It feels great. Or even free spread out, it's like, ah, I can breathe in free, so easily. And I can add in a blue gradient and a dove, and I have, like, Don Draper free. (Laughter) So you see that — form, content, design, it works that way. It's a powerful thing. It's like magic, almost, like the magicians we've seen at TED. It's magic. Design does that. And I've been curious about how design and technology intersect, and I'm going to show you some old work I never really show anymore, to give you a sense of what I used to do. So — yeah. So I made a lot of work in the '90s. This was a square that responds to sound. People ask me why I made that. It's not clear. (Laughter) But I thought it'd be neat for the square to respond to me, and my kids were small then, and my kids would play with these things, like, "Aaah," you know, they would say, "Daddy, aaah, aaah." You know, like that. We'd go to a computer store, and they'd do the same thing. And they'd say, "Daddy, why doesn't the computer respond to sound?" And it was really at the time I was wondering why doesn't the computer respond to sound? So I made this as a kind of an experiment at the time. And then I spent a lot of time in the space of interactive graphics and things like this, and I stopped doing it because my students at MIT got so much better than myself, so I had to hang up my mouse. But in '96, I made my last piece. It was in black and white, monochrome, fully monochrome, all in integer mathematics. It's called "Tap, Type, Write." It's paying a tribute to the wonderful typewriter that my mother used to type on all the time as a legal secretary. It has 10 variations. (Typing noise) (Typing noise) There's a shift. Ten variations. This is, like, spin the letter around. (Typing noises) This is, like, a ring of letters. (Typing noises) This is 20 years old, so it's kind of a — Let's see, this is — I love the French film "The Red Balloon." Great movie, right? I love that movie. So, this is sort of like a play on that. (Typing noises) (Typewriter bell) It's peaceful, like that. (Laughter) I'll show this last one. This is about balance, you know. It's kind of stressful typing out, so if you type on this keyboard, you can, like, balance it out. (Laughter) If you hit G, life's okay, so I always say, "Hit G, and it's going to be all right. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. So that was 20 years ago, and I was always on the periphery of art. By being President of RISD I've gone deep into art, and art is a wonderful thing, fine art, pure art. You know, when people say, "I don't get art. I don't get it at all." That means art is working, you know? It's like, art is supposed to be enigmatic, so when you say, like, "I don't get it," like, oh, that's great. (Laughter) Art does that, because art is about asking questions, questions that may not be answerable. At RISD, we have this amazing facility called the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab. It has 80,000 samples of animal, bone, mineral, plants. You know, in Rhode Island, if an animal gets hit on the road, they call us up and we pick it up and stuff it. And why do we have this facility? Because at RISD, you have to look at the actual animal, the object, to understand its volume, to perceive it. At RISD, you're not allowed to draw from an image. And many people ask me, John, couldn't you just digitize all this? Make it all digital? Wouldn't it be better? And I often say, well, there's something good to how things used to be done. There's something very different about it, something we should figure out what is good about how we did it, even in this new era. And I have a good friend, he's a new media artist named Tota Hasegawa. He's based in London, no, actually it's in Tokyo, but when he was based in London, he had a game with his wife. He would go to antique shops, and the game was as such: When we look at an antique we want, we'll ask the shopkeeper for the story behind the antique, and if it's a good story, we'll buy it. So they'd go to an antique shop, and they'd look at this cup, and they'd say, "Tell us about this cup." And the shopkeeper would say, "It's old." (Laughter) "Tell us more." "Oh, it's really old." (Laughter) And he saw, over and over, the antique's value was all about it being old. And as a new media artist, he reflected, and said, you know, I've spent my whole career making new media art. People say, "Wow, your art, what is it?" It's new media. And he realized, it isn't about old or new. It's about something in between. It isn't about "old," the dirt, "new," the cloud. It's about what is good. A combination of the cloud and the dirt is where the action is at. You see it in all interesting art today, in all interesting businesses today. How we combine those two together to make good is very interesting. So art makes questions, and leadership is something that is asking a lot of questions. We aren't functioning so easily anymore. We aren't a simple authoritarian regime anymore. As an example of authoritarianism, I was in Russia one time traveling in St. Petersburg, at a national monument, and I saw this sign that says, "Do Not Walk On The Grass," and I thought, oh, I mean, I speak English, and you're trying to single me out. That's not fair. But I found a sign for Russian-speaking people, and it was the best sign ever to say no. It was like, "No swimming, no hiking, no anything." My favorite ones are "no plants." Why would you bring a plant to a national monument? I'm not sure. And also "no love." (Laughter) So that is authoritarianism. And what is that, structurally? It's a hierarchy. We all know that a hierarchy is how we run many systems today, but as we know, it's been disrupted. It is now a network instead of a perfect tree. It's a heterarchy instead of a hierarchy. And that's kind of awkward. And so today, leaders are faced with how to lead differently, I believe. This is work I did with my colleague Becky Bermont on creative leadership. What can we learn from artists and designers for how to lead? Because in many senses, a regular leader loves to avoid mistakes. Someone who's creative actually loves to learn from mistakes. A traditional leader is always wanting to be right, whereas a creative leader hopes to be right. And this frame is important today, in this complex, ambiguous space, and artists and designers have a lot to teach us, I believe. And I had a show in London recently where my friends invited me to come to London for four days to sit in a sandbox, and I said great. And so I sat in a sandbox for four days straight, six hours every day, six-minute appointments with anyone in London, and that was really bad. But I would listen to people, hear their issues, draw in the sand, try to figure things out, and it was kind of hard to figure out what I was doing. You know? It's all these one-on-one meetings for like four days. And it felt kind of like being president, actually. I was like, "Oh, this my job. President. I do a lot of meetings, you know?" And by the end of the experience, I realized why I was doing this. It's because leaders, what we do is we connect improbable connections and hope something will happen, and in that room I found so many connections between people across all of London, and so leadership, connecting people, is the great question today. Whether you're in the hierarchy or the heterarchy, it's a wonderful design challenge. And one thing I've been doing is doing some research on systems that can combine technology and leadership with an art and design perspective. Let me show you something I haven't shown anywhere, actually. So what this is, is a kind of a sketch, an application sketch I wrote in Python. You know how there's Photoshop? This is called Powershop, and the way it works is imagine an organization. You know, the CEO isn't ever at the top. The CEO's at the center of the organization. There may be different subdivisions in the organization, and you might want to look into different areas. For instance, green are areas doing well, red are areas doing poorly. You know, how do you, as the leader, scan, connect, make things happen? So for instance, you might open up a distribution here and find the different subdivisions in there, and know that you know someone in Eco, over here, and these people here are in Eco, the people you might engage with as CEO, people going across the hierarchy. And part of the challenge of the CEO is to find connections across areas, and so you might look in R&D, and here you see one person who crosses the two areas of interest, and it's a person important to engage. So you might want to, for instance, get a heads-up display on how you're interacting with them. How many coffees do you have? How often are you calling them, emailing them? What is the tenor of their email? How is it working out? Leaders might be able to use these systems to better regulate how they work inside the heterarchy. You can also imagine using technology like from Luminoso, the guys from Cambridge who were looking at deep text analysis. What is the tenor of your communications? So these kind of systems, I believe, are important. They're targeted social media systems around leaders. And I believe that this kind of perspective will only begin to grow as more leaders enter the space of art and design, because art and design lets you think like this, find different systems like this, and I've just begun thinking like this, so I'm glad to share that with you. So in closing, I want to thank all of you for your attention. Thanks very much. (Applause) (Applause) |
What's so funny about mental illness? | {0: 'Ruby Wax is a loud, funny woman -- who spent much of her comedy career battling depression in silence. Now her work blends mental health advocacy and laughs.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | One in four people suffer from some sort of mental illness, so if it was one, two, three, four, it's you, sir. You. Yeah. (Laughter) With the weird teeth. And you next to him. (Laughter) You know who you are. Actually, that whole row isn't right. (Laughter) That's not good. Hi. Yeah. Real bad. Don't even look at me. (Laughter) I am one of the one in four. Thank you. I think I inherit it from my mother, who, used to crawl around the house on all fours. She had two sponges in her hand, and then she had two tied to her knees. My mother was completely absorbent. (Laughter) And she would crawl around behind me going, "Who brings footprints into a building?!" So that was kind of a clue that things weren't right. So before I start, I would like to thank the makers of Lamotrigine, Sertraline, and Reboxetine, because without those few simple chemicals, I would not be vertical today. So how did it start? My mental illness — well, I'm not even going to talk about my mental illness. What am I going to talk about? Okay. I always dreamt that, when I had my final breakdown, it would be because I had a deep Kafkaesque existentialist revelation, or that maybe Cate Blanchett would play me and she would win an Oscar for it. (Laughter) But that's not what happened. I had my breakdown during my daughter's sports day. There were all the parents sitting in a parking lot eating food out of the back of their car — only the English — eating their sausages. They loved their sausages. (Laughter) Lord and Lady Rigor Mortis were nibbling on the tarmac, and then the gun went off and all the girlies started running, and all the mummies went, "Run! Run Chlamydia! Run!" (Laughter) "Run like the wind, Veruca! Run!" And all the girlies, girlies running, running, running, everybody except for my daughter, who was just standing at the starting line, just waving, because she didn't know she was supposed to run. So I took to my bed for about a month, and when I woke up I found I was institutionalized, and when I saw the other inmates, I realized that I had found my people, my tribe. (Laughter) Because they became my only friends, they became my friends, because very few people that I knew — Well, I wasn't sent a lot of cards or flowers. I mean, if I had had a broken leg or I was with child I would have been inundated, but all I got was a couple phone calls telling me to perk up. Perk up. Because I didn't think of that. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) Because, you know, the one thing, one thing that you get with this disease, this one comes with a package, is you get a real sense of shame, because your friends go, "Oh come on, show me the lump, show me the x-rays," and of course you've got nothing to show, so you're, like, really disgusted with yourself because you're thinking, "I'm not being carpet-bombed. I don't live in a township." So you start to hear these abusive voices, but you don't hear one abusive voice, you hear about a thousand — 100,000 abusive voices, like if the Devil had Tourette's, that's what it would sound like. But we all know in here, you know, there is no Devil, there are no voices in your head. You know that when you have those abusive voices, all those little neurons get together and in that little gap you get a real toxic "I want to kill myself" kind of chemical, and if you have that over and over again on a loop tape, you might have yourself depression. Oh, and that's not even the tip of the iceberg. If you get a little baby, and you abuse it verbally, its little brain sends out chemicals that are so destructive that the little part of its brain that can tell good from bad just doesn't grow, so you might have yourself a homegrown psychotic. If a soldier sees his friend blown up, his brain goes into such high alarm that he can't actually put the experience into words, so he just feels the horror over and over again. So here's my question. My question is, how come when people have mental damage, it's always an active imagination? How come every other organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy, except the brain? I'd like to talk a little bit more about the brain, because I know you like that here at TED, so if you just give me a minute here, okay. Okay, let me just say, there's some good news. There is some good news. First of all, let me say, we've come a long, long way. We started off as a teeny, teeny little one-celled amoeba, tiny, just sticking onto a rock, and now, voila, the brain. Here we go. (Laughter) This little baby has a lot of horsepower. It comes completely conscious. It's got state-of-the-art lobes. We've got the occipital lobe so we can actually see the world. We got the temporal lobe so we can actually hear the world. Here we've got a little bit of long-term memory, so, you know that night you want to forget, when you got really drunk? Bye-bye! Gone. (Laughter) So actually, it's filled with 100 billion neurons just zizzing away, electrically transmitting information, zizzing, zizzing. I'm going to give you a little side view here. I don't know if you can get that here. (Laughter) So, zizzing away, and so — (Laughter) — And for every one — I know, I drew this myself. Thank you. For every one single neuron, you can actually have from 10,000 to 100,000 different connections or dendrites or whatever you want to call it, and every time you learn something, or you have an experience, that bush grows, you know, that bush of information. Can you imagine, every human being is carrying that equipment, even Paris Hilton? (Laughter) Go figure. But I got a little bad news for you folks. I got some bad news. This isn't for the one in four. This is for the four in four. We are not equipped for the 21st century. Evolution did not prepare us for this. We just don't have the bandwidth, and for people who say, oh, they're having a nice day, they're perfectly fine, they're more insane than the rest of us. Because I'll show you where there might be a few glitches in evolution. Okay, let me just explain this to you. When we were ancient man — (Laughter) — millions of years ago, and we suddenly felt threatened by a predator, okay? — (Laughter) — we would — Thank you. I drew these myself. (Laughter) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Anyway, we would fill up with our own adrenaline and our own cortisol, and then we'd kill or be killed, we'd eat or we'd be eaten, and then suddenly we'd de-fuel, and we'd go back to normal. Okay. So the problem is, nowadays, with modern man— (Laughter) — when we feel in danger, we still fill up with our own chemical but because we can't kill traffic wardens — (Laughter) — or eat estate agents, the fuel just stays in our body over and over, so we're in a constant state of alarm, a constant state. And here's another thing that happened. About 150,000 years ago, when language came online, we started to put words to this constant emergency, so it wasn't just, "Oh my God, there's a saber-toothed tiger," which could be, it was suddenly, "Oh my God, I didn't send the email. Oh my God, my thighs are too fat. Oh my God, everybody can see I'm stupid. I didn't get invited to the Christmas party!" So you've got this nagging loop tape that goes over and over again that drives you insane, so, you see what the problem is? What once made you safe now drives you insane. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but somebody has to be. Your pets are happier than you are. (Laughter) (Applause) So kitty cat, meow, happy happy happy, human beings, screwed. (Laughter) Completely and utterly — so, screwed. But my point is, if we don't talk about this stuff, and we don't learn how to deal with our lives, it's not going to be one in four. It's going to be four in four who are really, really going to get ill in the upstairs department. And while we're at it, can we please stop the stigma? Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. |
Talk nerdy to me | {0: 'Melissa Marshall aims to teach great communication skills to scientists and engineers, so that they can effectively share their work.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Five years ago, I experienced a bit of what it must have been like to be Alice in Wonderland. Penn State asked me, a communications teacher, to teach a communications class for engineering students. And I was scared. (Laughter) Really scared. Scared of these students with their big brains and their big books and their big, unfamiliar words. But as these conversations unfolded, I experienced what Alice must have when she went down that rabbit hole and saw that door to a whole new world. That's just how I felt as I had those conversations with the students. I was amazed at the ideas that they had, and I wanted others to experience this wonderland as well. And I believe the key to opening that door is great communication. We desperately need great communication from our scientists and engineers in order to change the world. Our scientists and engineers are the ones that are tackling our grandest challenges, from energy to environment to health care, among others, and if we don't know about it and understand it, then the work isn't done, and I believe it's our responsibility as non-scientists to have these interactions. But these great conversations can't occur if our scientists and engineers don't invite us in to see their wonderland. So scientists and engineers, please, talk nerdy to us. I want to share a few keys on how you can do that to make sure that we can see that your science is sexy and that your engineering is engaging. First question to answer for us: so what? Tell us why your science is relevant to us. Don't just tell me that you study trabeculae, but tell me that you study trabeculae, which is the mesh-like structure of our bones because it's important to understanding and treating osteoporosis. And when you're describing your science, beware of jargon. Jargon is a barrier to our understanding of your ideas. Sure, you can say "spatial and temporal," but why not just say "space and time," which is so much more accessible to us? And making your ideas accessible is not the same as dumbing it down. Instead, as Einstein said, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. You can clearly communicate your science without compromising the ideas. A few things to consider are having examples, stories and analogies. Those are ways to engage and excite us about your content. And when presenting your work, drop the bullet points. Have you ever wondered why they're called bullet points? (Laughter) What do bullets do? Bullets kill, and they will kill your presentation. A slide like this is not only boring, but it relies too much on the language area of our brain, and causes us to become overwhelmed. Instead, this example slide by Genevieve Brown is much more effective. It's showing that the special structure of trabeculae are so strong that they actually inspired the unique design of the Eiffel Tower. And the trick here is to use a single, readable sentence that the audience can key into if they get a bit lost, and then provide visuals which appeal to our other senses and create a deeper sense of understanding of what's being described. So I think these are just a few keys that can help the rest of us to open that door and see the wonderland that is science and engineering. And because the engineers that I've worked with have taught me to become really in touch with my inner nerd, I want to summarize with an equation. (Laughter) Take your science, subtract your bullet points and your jargon, divide by relevance, meaning share what's relevant to the audience, and multiply it by the passion that you have for this incredible work that you're doing, and that is going to equal incredible interactions that are full of understanding. And so, scientists and engineers, when you've solved this equation, by all means, talk nerdy to me. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
The secret lives of paintings | {0: 'Maurizio Seracini uses advanced tools common in engineering and medical labs to unravel centuries-old mysteries of art.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | In 1975, I met in Florence a professor, Carlo Pedretti, my former professor of art history, and today a world-renowned scholar of Leonardo da Vinci. Well, he asked me if I could find some technological way to unfold a five-centuries-old mystery related to a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, the "Battle of Anghiari," which is supposed to be located in the Hall of the 500 in Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence. Well, in the mid-'70s, there were not great opportunities for a bioengineer like me, especially in Italy, and so I decided, with some researchers from the United States and the University of Florence, to start probing the murals decorated by Vasari on the long walls of the Hall of the 500 searching for the lost Leonardo. Unfortunately, at that time we did not know that that was not exactly where we should be looking, because we had to go much deeper in, and so the research came to a halt, and it was only taken up in 2000 thanks to the interest and the enthusiasm of the Guinness family. Well, this time, we focused on trying to reconstruct the way the Hall of the 500 was before the remodeling, and the so-called Sala Grande, which was built in 1494, and to find out the original doors, windows, and in order to do that, we first created a 3D model, and then, with thermography, we went on to discover hidden windows. These are the original windows of the hall of the Sala Grande. We also found out about the height of the ceiling, and we managed to reconstruct, therefore, all the layout of this original hall the way it was before there came Vasari, and restructured the whole thing, including a staircase that was very important in order to precisely place "The Battle of Anghiari" on a specific area of one of the two walls. Well, we also learned that Vasari, who was commissioned to remodel the Hall of the 500 between 1560 and 1574 by the Grand Duke Cosimo I of the Medici family, we have at least two instances when he saved masterpieces specifically by placing a brick wall in front of it and leaving a small air gap. One that we [see] here, Masaccio, the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, so we just said, well maybe, Visari has done something like that in the case of this great work of art by Leonardo, since he was a great admirer of Leonardo da Vinci. And so we built some very sophisticated radio antennas just for probing both walls and searching for an air gap. And we did find many on the right panel of the east wall, an air gap, and that's where we believe "The Battle of Anghiari," or at least the part that we know has been painted, which is called "The Fight for the Standard," should be located. Well, from there, unfortunately, in 2004, the project came to a halt. Many political reasons. So I decided to go back to my alma mater, and, at the University of California, San Diego, and I proposed to open up a research center for engineering sciences for cultural heritage. And in 2007, we created CISA3 as a research center for cultural heritage, specifically art, architecture and archaeology. So students started to flow in, and we started to build technologies, because that's basically what we also needed in order to move forward and go and do fieldwork. We came back in the Hall of the 500 in 2011, and this time, with a great group of students, and my colleague, Professor Falko Kuester, who is now the director at CISA3, and we came back just since we knew already where to look for to find out if there was still something left. Well, we were confined though, limited, I should rather say, for several reasons that it's not worth explaining, to endoscopy only, of the many other options we had, and with a 4mm camera attached to it, we were successful in documenting and taking some fragments of what it turns out to be a reddish color, black color, and there is some beige fragments that later on we ran a much more sophisticated exams, XRF, X-ray diffraction, and the results are very positive so far. It seems to indicate that indeed we have found some pigments, and since we know for sure that no other artist has painted on that wall before Vasari came in about 60 years later, well, those pigments are therefore firmly related to mural painting and most likely to Leonardo. Well, we are searching for the highest and highly praised work of art ever achieved by mankind. As a matter of fact, this is by far the most important commission that Leonardo has ever had, and for doing this great masterpiece, he was named the number one artist influence at the time. I had also had the privilege since the last 37 years to work on several masterpieces as you can see behind me, but basically to do what? Well, to assess, for example, the state of conservation. See here the face of the Madonna of the Chair that when just shining a UV light on it you suddenly see another, different lady, aged lady, I should rather say. There is a lot of varnish still sitting there, several retouches, and some over cleaning. It becomes very visible. But also, technology has helped to write new pages of our history, or at least to update pages of our histories. For example, the "Lady with the Unicorn," another painting by Rafael, well, you see the unicorn. A lot has been said and written about the unicorn, but if you take an X-ray of the unicorn, it becomes a puppy dog. And — (Laughter) — no problem, but, unfortunately, continuing with the scientific examination of this painting came out that Rafael did not paint the unicorn, did not paint the puppy dog, actually left the painting unfinished, so all this writing about the exotic symbol of the unicorn — (Laughter) — unfortunately, is not very reliable. (Laughter) Well, also, authenticity. Just think for a moment if science really could move in the field of authenticity of works of art. There would be a cultural revolution to say the least, but also, I would say, a market revolution, let me add. Take this example: Otto Marseus, nice painting, which is "Still Life" at the Pitti Gallery, and just have an infrared camera peering through, and luckily for art historians, it just was confirmed that there is a signature of Otto Marseus. It even says when it was made and also the location. So that was a good result. Sometimes, it's not that good, and so, again, authenticity and science could go together and change the way, not attributions being made, but at least lay the ground for a more objective, or, I should rather say, less subjective attribution, as it is done today. But I would say the discovery that really caught my imagination, my admiration, is the incredibly vivid drawing under this layer, brown layer, of "The Adoration of the Magi." Here you see a handmade setting XYZ scanner with an infrared camera put on it, and just peering through this brown layer of this masterpiece to reveal what could have been underneath. Well, this happens to be the most important painting we have in Italy by Leonardo da Vinci, and look at the wonderful images of faces that nobody has seen for five centuries. Look at these portraits. They're magnificent. You see Leonardo at work. You see the geniality of his creation, right directly on the ground layer of the panel, and see this cool thing, finding, I should rather say, an elephant. (Laughter) Because of this elephant, over 70 new images came out, never seen for centuries. This was an epiphany. We came to understand and to prove that the brown coating that we see today was not done by Leonardo da Vinci, which left us only the other drawing that for five centuries we were not able to see, so thanks only to technology. Well, the tablet. Well, we thought, well, if we all have this pleasure, this privilege to see all this, to find all these discoveries, what about for everybody else? So we thought of an augmented reality application using a tablet. Let me show you just simulating what we could be doing, any of us could be doing, in a museum environment. So let's say that we go to a museum with a tablet, okay? And we just aim the camera of the tablet to the painting that we are interested to see, like this. Okay? And I will just click on it, we pause, and now let me turn to you so the moment the image, or, I should say, the camera, has locked in the painting, then the images you just saw up there in the drawing are being loaded. And so, see. We can, as we said, we can zoom in. Then we can scroll. Okay? Let's go and find the elephant. So all we need is one finger. Just wipe off and we see the elephant. (Applause) (Applause) Okay? And then if we want, we can continue the scroll to find out, for example, on the staircase, the whole iconography is going to be changed. There are a lot of laymen reconstructing from the ruins of an old temple a new temple, and there are a lot of figures showing up. See? This is not just a curiosity, because it changes not just the iconography as you see it, but the iconology, the meaning of the painting, and we believe this is a cool way, easy way, that everybody could have access to, to become more the protagonist of your own discovery, and not just be so passive about it, as we are when we walk through endless rooms of museums. (Applause) Another concept is the digital clinical chart, which sounds very obvious if we were to talk about real patients, but when we talk about works of art, unfortunately, it's never been tapped as an idea. Well, we believe, again, that this should be the beginning, the very first step, to do real conservation, and allowing us to really explore and to understand everything related to the state of our conservation, the technique, materials, and also if, when, and why we should restore, or, rather, to intervene on the environment surrounding the painting. Well, our vision is to rediscover the spirit of the Renaissance, create a new discipline where engineering for cultural heritage is actually a symbol of blending art and science together. We definitely need a new breed of engineers that will go out and do this kind of work and rediscover for us these values, these cultural values that we badly need, especially today. And if you want to summarize in one just single word, well, this is what we're trying to do. We're trying to give a future to our past in order to have a future. As long as we live a life of curiosity and passion, there is a bit of Leonardo in all of us. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
Smart failure for a fast-changing world | {0: 'Our environment changes faster than we can learn about it, Eddie Obeng says. How do we keep up?'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Over the past six months, I've spent my time traveling. I think I've done 60,000 miles, but without leaving my desk. And the reason I can do that is because I'm actually two people. I look like one person but I'm two people. I'm Eddie who is here, and at the same time, my alter ego is a big green boxy avatar nicknamed Cyber Frank. So that's what I spend my time doing. I'd like to start, if it's possible, with a test, because I do business stuff, so it's important that we focus on outcomes. And then I struggled, because I was thinking to myself, "What should I talk? What should I do? It's a TED audience. It's got to be stretching. How am I going to make — ?" So I just hope I've got the level of difficulty right. So let's just walk our way through this. Please could you work this through with me? You can shout out the answer if you like. The question is, which of these horizontal lines is longer? The answer is? Audience: The same.Eddie Obeng: The same. No, they're not the same. (Laughter) They're not the same. The top one is 10 percent longer than the bottom one. So why did you tell me they were the same? Do you remember when we were kids at school, about that big, they played the same trick on us? It was to teach us parallax. Do you remember? And you got, you said, "It's the same!" And you got it wrong. You remember? And you learned the answer, and you've carried this answer in your head for 10, 20, 30, 40 years: The answer is the same. The answer is the same. So when you're asked what the lengths are, you say they're the same, but they're not the same, because I've changed it. And this is what I'm trying to explain has happened to us in the 21st century. Somebody or something has changed the rules about how our world works. When I'm joking, I try and explain it happened at midnight, you see, while we were asleep, but it was midnight 15 years ago. Okay? You didn't notice it? But basically, what they do is, they switched all the rules round, so that the way to successfully run a business, an organization, or even a country, has been deleted, flipped, and it's a completely new — you think I'm joking, don't you — there's a completely new set of rules in operation. (Laughter) Did you notice that? I mean, you missed this one. You probably — No, you didn't. Okay. (Laughter) My simple idea is that what's happened is, the real 21st century around us isn't so obvious to us, so instead we spend our time responding rationally to a world which we understand and recognize, but which no longer exists. You don't believe me, do you? Okay. (Applause) So let me take you on a little journey of many of the things I don't understand. If you search Amazon for the word "creativity," you'll discover something like 90,000 books. If you go on Google and you look for "innovation + creativity," you get 30 million hits. If you add the word "consultants," it doubles to 60 million. (Laughter) Are you with me? And yet, statistically, what you discover is that about one in 100,000 ideas is found making money or delivering benefits two years after its inception. It makes no sense. Companies make their expensive executives spend ages carefully preparing forecasts and budgets which are obsolete or need changing before they can be published. How is that possible? If you look at the visions we have, the visions of how we're going to change the world, the key thing is implementation. We have the vision. We've got to make it happen. We've spent decades professionalizing implementation. People are supposed to be good at making stuff happen. However, if I use as an example a family of five going on holiday, if you can imagine this, all the way from London all the way across to Hong Kong, what I want you to think about is their budget is only 3,000 pounds of expenses. What actually happens is, if I compare this to the average real project, average real successful project, the family actually end up in Makassar, South Sulawesi, at a cost of 4,000 pounds, whilst leaving two of the children behind. (Laughter) What I'm trying to explain to you is, there are things which don't make sense to us. It gets even worse than that. Let me just walk you through this one. This is a quote, and I'll just pick words out of it. It says — I'll put on the voice — "In summary, your Majesty, the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis was due to the lack of creativity and the number of bright minds," or something like that. This was a group of eminent economists apologizing to the Queen of England when she asked the question, "Why did no one tell us that the crisis was coming?" (Laughter) I'll never get my knighthood. I'll never get my knighthood. (Laughter) That's not the important point. The thing you have to remember is, these are eminent economists, some of the smartest people on the planet. Do you see the challenge? (Laughter) It's scary. My friend and mentor, Tim Brown of IDEO, he explains that design must get big, and he's right. He wisely explains this to us. He says design thinking must tackle big systems for the challenges we have. He's absolutely right. And then I ask myself, "Why was it ever small?" Isn't it weird? You know, if collaboration is so cool, is cross-functional working is so amazing, why did we build these huge hierarchies? What's going on? You see, I think what's happened, perhaps, is that we've not noticed that change I described earlier. What we do know is that the world has accelerated. Cyberspace moves everything at the speed of light. Technology accelerates things exponentially. So if this is now, and that's the past, and we start thinking about change, you know, all governments are seeking change, you're here seeking change, everybody's after change, it's really cool. (Laughter) So what happens is, we get this wonderful whooshing acceleration and change. The speed is accelerating. That's not the only thing. At the same time, as we've done that, we've done something really weird. We've doubled the population in 40 years, put half of them in cities, then connected them all up so they can interact. The density of the interaction of human beings is amazing. There are charts which show all these movements of information. That density of information is amazing. And then we've done a third thing. you know, for those of you who have as an office a little desk underneath the stairs, and you say, well this is my little desk under the stairs, no! You are sitting at the headquarters of a global corporation if you're connected to the Internet. What's happened is, we've changed the scale. Size and scale are no longer the same. And then add to that, every time you tweet, over a third of your followers follow from a country which is not your own. Global is the new scale. We know that. And so people say things like, "The world is now a turbulent place." Have you heard them saying things like that? And they use it as a metaphor. Have you come across this? And they think it's a metaphor, but this is not a metaphor. It's reality. As a young engineering student, I remember going to a demonstration where they basically, the demonstrator did something quite intriguing. What he did was, he got a transparent pipe — have you seen this demonstration before? — he attached it to a tap. So effectively what you had was, you had a situation where — I'll try and draw the tap and the pipe, actually I'll skip the tap. The taps are hard. Okay? So I'll write the word "tap." Is that okay? It's a tap. (Laughter) Okay, so he attaches it to a transparent pipe, and he turns the water on. And he says, do you notice anything? And the water is whooshing down this pipe. I mean, this is not exciting stuff. Are you with me? So the water goes up. He turns it back down. Great. And he says, "Anything you notice?" No. Then he sticks a needle into the pipe, and he connects this to a container, and he fills the container up with green ink. You with me? So guess what happens? A thin green line comes out as it flows down the pipe. It's not that interesting. And then he turns the water up a bit, so it starts coming back in. And nothing changes. So he's changing the flow of the water, but it's just a boring green line. He adds some more. He adds some more. And then something weird happens. There's this little flicker, and then as he turns it ever so slightly more, the whole of that green line disappears, and instead there are these little sort of inky dust devils close to the needle. They're called eddies. Not me. And they're violently dispersing the ink so that it actually gets diluted out, and the color's gone. What's happened in this world of pipe is somebody has flipped it. They've changed the rules from laminar to turbulent. All the rules are gone. In that environment, instantly, all the possibilities which turbulence brings are available, and it's not the same as laminar. And if we didn't have that green ink, you'd never notice. And I think this is our challenge, because somebody has actually increased — and it's probably you guys with all your tech and stuff — the speed, the scale and the density of interaction. Now how do we cope and deal with that? Well, we could just call it turbulence, or we could try and learn. Yes, learn, but I know you guys grew up in the days when there were actually these things called correct answers, because of the answer you gave me to the horizontal line puzzle, and you believe it will last forever. So I'll put a little line up here which represents learning, and that's how we used to do it. We could see things, understand them, take the time to put them into practice. Out here is the world. Now, what's happened to our pace of learning as the world has accelerated? Well, if you work for a corporation, you'll discover it's quite difficult to work on stuff which your boss doesn't approve of, isn't in the strategy, and anyway, you've got to go through your monthly meetings. If you work in an institution, one day you will get them to make that decision. And if you work in a market where people believe in cycles, it's even funnier, because you have to wait all the way for the cycle to fail before you go, "There's something wrong." You with me? So it's likely that the line, in terms of learning, is pretty flat. You with me? This point over here, the point at which the lines cross over, the pace of change overtakes the pace of learning, and for me, that is what I was describing when I was telling you about midnight. So what does it do to us? Well, it completely transforms what we have to do, many mistakes we make. We solve last year's problems without thinking about the future. If you try and think about it, the things you're solving now, what problems are they going to bring in the future? If you haven't understood the world you're living in, it's almost impossible to be absolutely certain that what you're going to deliver fits. I'll give you an example, a quick one. Creativity and ideas, I mentioned that earlier. All the CEOs around me, my clients, they want innovation, so they seek innovation. They say to people, "Take risks and be creative!" But unfortunately the words get transformed as they travel through the air. Entering their ears, what they hear is, "Do crazy things and then I'll fire you." Why? (Laughter) Because — Why? Because in the old world, okay, in the old world, over here, getting stuff wrong was unacceptable. If you got something wrong, you'd failed. How should you be treated? Well, harshly, because you could have asked somebody who had experience. So we learned the answer and we carried this in our heads for 20, 30 years, are you with me? The answer is, don't do things which are different. And then suddenly we tell them to and it doesn't work. You see, in reality, there are two ways you can fail in our new world. One, you're doing something that you should follow a procedure to, and it's a very difficult thing, you're sloppy, you get it wrong. How should you be treated? You should probably be fired. On the other hand, you're doing something new, no one's ever done before, you get it completely wrong. How should you be treated? Well, free pizzas! You should be treated better than the people who succeed. It's called smart failure. Why? Because you can't put it on your C.V. So what I want to leave you, then, is with the explanation of why I actually traveled 60,000 miles from my desk. When I realized the power of this new world, I quit my safe teaching job, and set up a virtual business school, the first in the world, in order to teach people how to make this happen, and I used some of my learnings about some of the rules which I'd learned on myself. If you're interested, worldaftermidnight.com, you'll find out more, but I've applied them to myself for over a decade, and I'm still here, and I still have my house, and the most important thing is, I hope I've done enough to inject a little green ink into your lives, so that when you go away and you're making your next absolutely sensible and rational decision, you'll take some time to think, "Hmm, I wonder whether this also makes sense in our new world after midnight." Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you, thank you. (Applause) |
Let's pool our medical data | {0: 'Imagine the discoveries that could result from a giant pool of freely available health and genomic data. John Wilbanks is working to build it.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | So I have bad news, I have good news, and I have a task. So the bad news is that we all get sick. I get sick. You get sick. And every one of us gets sick, and the question really is, how sick do we get? Is it something that kills us? Is it something that we survive? Is it something that we can treat? And we've gotten sick as long as we've been people. And so we've always looked for reasons to explain why we get sick. And for a long time, it was the gods, right? The gods are angry with me, or the gods are testing me, right? Or God, singular, more recently, is punishing me or judging me. And as long as we've looked for explanations, we've wound up with something that gets closer and closer to science, which is hypotheses as to why we get sick, and as long as we've had hypotheses about why we get sick, we've tried to treat it as well. So this is Avicenna. He wrote a book over a thousand years ago called "The Canon of Medicine," and the rules he laid out for testing medicines are actually really similar to the rules we have today, that the disease and the medicine must be the same strength, the medicine needs to be pure, and in the end we need to test it in people. And so if you put together these themes of a narrative or a hypothesis in human testing, right, you get some beautiful results, even when we didn't have very good technologies. This is a guy named Carlos Finlay. He had a hypothesis that was way outside the box for his time, in the late 1800s. He thought yellow fever was not transmitted by dirty clothing. He thought it was transmitted by mosquitos. And they laughed at him. For 20 years, they called this guy "the mosquito man." But he ran an experiment in people, right? He had this hypothesis, and he tested it in people. So he got volunteers to go move to Cuba and live in tents and be voluntarily infected with yellow fever. So some of the people in some of the tents had dirty clothes and some of the people were in tents that were full of mosquitos that had been exposed to yellow fever. And it definitively proved that it wasn't this magic dust called fomites in your clothes that caused yellow fever. But it wasn't until we tested it in people that we actually knew. And this is what those people signed up for. This is what it looked like to have yellow fever in Cuba at that time. You suffered in a tent, in the heat, alone, and you probably died. But people volunteered for this. And it's not just a cool example of a scientific design of experiment in theory. They also did this beautiful thing. They signed this document, and it's called an informed consent document. And informed consent is an idea that we should be very proud of as a society, right? It's something that separates us from the Nazis at Nuremberg, enforced medical experimentation. It's the idea that agreement to join a study without understanding isn't agreement. It's something that protects us from harm, from hucksters, from people that would try to hoodwink us into a clinical study that we don't understand, or that we don't agree to. And so you put together the thread of narrative hypothesis, experimentation in humans, and informed consent, and you get what we call clinical study, and it's how we do the vast majority of medical work. It doesn't really matter if you're in the north, the south, the east, the west. Clinical studies form the basis of how we investigate, so if we're going to look at a new drug, right, we test it in people, we draw blood, we do experiments, and we gain consent for that study, to make sure that we're not screwing people over as part of it. But the world is changing around the clinical study, which has been fairly well established for tens of years if not 50 to 100 years. So now we're able to gather data about our genomes, but, as we saw earlier, our genomes aren't dispositive. We're able to gather information about our environment. And more importantly, we're able to gather information about our choices, because it turns out that what we think of as our health is more like the interaction of our bodies, our genomes, our choices and our environment. And the clinical methods that we've got aren't very good at studying that because they are based on the idea of person-to-person interaction. You interact with your doctor and you get enrolled in the study. So this is my grandfather. I actually never met him, but he's holding my mom, and his genes are in me, right? His choices ran through to me. He was a smoker, like most people were. This is my son. So my grandfather's genes go all the way through to him, and my choices are going to affect his health. The technology between these two pictures cannot be more different, but the methodology for clinical studies has not radically changed over that time period. We just have better statistics. The way we gain informed consent was formed in large part after World War II, around the time that picture was taken. That was 70 years ago, and the way we gain informed consent, this tool that was created to protect us from harm, now creates silos. So the data that we collect for prostate cancer or for Alzheimer's trials goes into silos where it can only be used for prostate cancer or for Alzheimer's research. Right? It can't be networked. It can't be integrated. It cannot be used by people who aren't credentialed. So a physicist can't get access to it without filing paperwork. A computer scientist can't get access to it without filing paperwork. Computer scientists aren't patient. They don't file paperwork. And this is an accident. These are tools that we created to protect us from harm, but what they're doing is protecting us from innovation now. And that wasn't the goal. It wasn't the point. Right? It's a side effect, if you will, of a power we created to take us for good. And so if you think about it, the depressing thing is that Facebook would never make a change to something as important as an advertising algorithm with a sample size as small as a Phase III clinical trial. We cannot take the information from past trials and put them together to form statistically significant samples. And that sucks, right? So 45 percent of men develop cancer. Thirty-eight percent of women develop cancer. One in four men dies of cancer. One in five women dies of cancer, at least in the United States. And three out of the four drugs we give you if you get cancer fail. And this is personal to me. My sister is a cancer survivor. My mother-in-law is a cancer survivor. Cancer sucks. And when you have it, you don't have a lot of privacy in the hospital. You're naked the vast majority of the time. People you don't know come in and look at you and poke you and prod you, and when I tell cancer survivors that this tool we created to protect them is actually preventing their data from being used, especially when only three to four percent of people who have cancer ever even sign up for a clinical study, their reaction is not, "Thank you, God, for protecting my privacy." It's outrage that we have this information and we can't use it. And it's an accident. So the cost in blood and treasure of this is enormous. Two hundred and twenty-six billion a year is spent on cancer in the United States. Fifteen hundred people a day die in the United States. And it's getting worse. So the good news is that some things have changed, and the most important thing that's changed is that we can now measure ourselves in ways that used to be the dominion of the health system. So a lot of people talk about it as digital exhaust. I like to think of it as the dust that runs along behind my kid. We can reach back and grab that dust, and we can learn a lot about health from it, so if our choices are part of our health, what we eat is a really important aspect of our health. So you can do something very simple and basic and take a picture of your food, and if enough people do that, we can learn a lot about how our food affects our health. One interesting thing that came out of this — this is an app for iPhones called The Eatery — is that we think our pizza is significantly healthier than other people's pizza is. Okay? (Laughter) And it seems like a trivial result, but this is the sort of research that used to take the health system years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to accomplish. It was done in five months by a startup company of a couple of people. I don't have any financial interest in it. But more nontrivially, we can get our genotypes done, and although our genotypes aren't dispositive, they give us clues. So I could show you mine. It's just A's, T's, C's and G's. This is the interpretation of it. As you can see, I carry a 32 percent risk of prostate cancer, 22 percent risk of psoriasis and a 14 percent risk of Alzheimer's disease. So that means, if you're a geneticist, you're freaking out, going, "Oh my God, you told everyone you carry the ApoE E4 allele. What's wrong with you?" Right? When I got these results, I started talking to doctors, and they told me not to tell anyone, and my reaction is, "Is that going to help anyone cure me when I get the disease?" And no one could tell me yes. And I live in a web world where, when you share things, beautiful stuff happens, not bad stuff. So I started putting this in my slide decks, and I got even more obnoxious, and I went to my doctor, and I said, "I'd like to actually get my bloodwork. Please give me back my data." So this is my most recent bloodwork. As you can see, I have high cholesterol. I have particularly high bad cholesterol, and I have some bad liver numbers, but those are because we had a dinner party with a lot of good wine the night before we ran the test. (Laughter) Right. But look at how non-computable this information is. This is like the photograph of my granddad holding my mom from a data perspective, and I had to go into the system and get it out. So the thing that I'm proposing we do here is that we reach behind us and we grab the dust, that we reach into our bodies and we grab the genotype, and we reach into the medical system and we grab our records, and we use it to build something together, which is a commons. And there's been a lot of talk about commonses, right, here, there, everywhere, right. A commons is nothing more than a public good that we build out of private goods. We do it voluntarily, and we do it through standardized legal tools. We do it through standardized technologies. Right. That's all a commons is. It's something that we build together because we think it's important. And a commons of data is something that's really unique, because we make it from our own data. And although a lot of people like privacy as their methodology of control around data, and obsess around privacy, at least some of us really like to share as a form of control, and what's remarkable about digital commonses is you don't need a big percentage if your sample size is big enough to generate something massive and beautiful. So not that many programmers write free software, but we have the Apache web server. Not that many people who read Wikipedia edit, but it works. So as long as some people like to share as their form of control, we can build a commons, as long as we can get the information out. And in biology, the numbers are even better. So Vanderbilt ran a study asking people, we'd like to take your biosamples, your blood, and share them in a biobank, and only five percent of the people opted out. I'm from Tennessee. It's not the most science-positive state in the United States of America. (Laughter) But only five percent of the people wanted out. So people like to share, if you give them the opportunity and the choice. And the reason that I got obsessed with this, besides the obvious family aspects, is that I spend a lot of time around mathematicians, and mathematicians are drawn to places where there's a lot of data because they can use it to tease signals out of noise. And those correlations that they can tease out, they're not necessarily causal agents, but math, in this day and age, is like a giant set of power tools that we're leaving on the floor, not plugged in in health, while we use hand saws. If we have a lot of shared genotypes, and a lot of shared outcomes, and a lot of shared lifestyle choices, and a lot of shared environmental information, we can start to tease out the correlations between subtle variations in people, the choices they make and the health that they create as a result of those choices, and there's open-source infrastructure to do all of this. Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit that's built a giant math system that's waiting for data, but there isn't any. So that's what I do. I've actually started what we think is the world's first fully digital, fully self-contributed, unlimited in scope, global in participation, ethically approved clinical research study where you contribute the data. So if you reach behind yourself and you grab the dust, if you reach into your body and grab your genome, if you reach into the medical system and somehow extract your medical record, you can actually go through an online informed consent process — because the donation to the commons must be voluntary and it must be informed — and you can actually upload your information and have it syndicated to the mathematicians who will do this sort of big data research, and the goal is to get 100,000 in the first year and a million in the first five years so that we have a statistically significant cohort that you can use to take smaller sample sizes from traditional research and map it against, so that you can use it to tease out those subtle correlations between the variations that make us unique and the kinds of health that we need to move forward as a society. And I've spent a lot of time around other commons. I've been around the early web. I've been around the early creative commons world, and there's four things that all of these share, which is, they're all really simple. And so if you were to go to the website and enroll in this study, you're not going to see something complicated. But it's not simplistic. These things are weak intentionally, right, because you can always add power and control to a system, but it's very difficult to remove those things if you put them in at the beginning, and so being simple doesn't mean being simplistic, and being weak doesn't mean weakness. Those are strengths in the system. And open doesn't mean that there's no money. Closed systems, corporations, make a lot of money on the open web, and they're one of the reasons why the open web lives is that corporations have a vested interest in the openness of the system. And so all of these things are part of the clinical study that we've created, so you can actually come in, all you have to be is 14 years old, willing to sign a contract that says I'm not going to be a jerk, basically, and you're in. You can start analyzing the data. You do have to solve a CAPTCHA as well. (Laughter) And if you'd like to build corporate structures on top of it, that's okay too. That's all in the consent, so if you don't like those terms, you don't come in. It's very much the design principles of a commons that we're trying to bring to health data. And the other thing about these systems is that it only takes a small number of really unreasonable people working together to create them. It didn't take that many people to make Wikipedia Wikipedia, or to keep it Wikipedia. And we're not supposed to be unreasonable in health, and so I hate this word "patient." I don't like being patient when systems are broken, and health care is broken. I'm not talking about the politics of health care, I'm talking about the way we scientifically approach health care. So I don't want to be patient. And the task I'm giving to you is to not be patient. So I'd like you to actually try, when you go home, to get your data. You'll be shocked and offended and, I would bet, outraged, at how hard it is to get it. But it's a challenge that I hope you'll take, and maybe you'll share it. Maybe you won't. If you don't have anyone in your family who's sick, maybe you wouldn't be unreasonable. But if you do, or if you've been sick, then maybe you would. And we're going to be able to do an experiment in the next several months that lets us know exactly how many unreasonable people are out there. So this is the Athena Breast Health Network. It's a study of 150,000 women in California, and they're going to return all the data to the participants of the study in a computable form, with one-clickability to load it into the study that I've put together. So we'll know exactly how many people are willing to be unreasonable. So what I'd end [with] is, the most beautiful thing I've learned since I quit my job almost a year ago to do this, is that it really doesn't take very many of us to achieve spectacular results. You just have to be willing to be unreasonable, and the risk we're running is not the risk those 14 men who got yellow fever ran. Right? It's to be naked, digitally, in public. So you know more about me and my health than I know about you. It's asymmetric now. And being naked and alone can be terrifying. But to be naked in a group, voluntarily, can be quite beautiful. And so it doesn't take all of us. It just takes all of some of us. Thank you. (Applause) |
Science is for everyone, kids included | {0: 'Beau Lotto seeks to pull aside the curtain of why we see what we do in order to create the possibility and agency in deciding what to perceive next.', 1: "Amy O'Toole is a 12-year-old student who helped run a science experiment inspired by Beau Lotto's participative science approach. At age 10 she became one of the youngest people ever to publish a peer-reviewed science paper."} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Beau Lotto: So, this game is very simple. All you have to do is read what you see. Right? So, I'm going to count to you, so we don't all do it together. Okay, one, two, three.Audience: Can you read this? BL: Amazing. What about this one? One, two, three.Audience: You are not reading this. BL: All right. One, two, three. (Laughter) If you were Portuguese, right? How about this one? One, two, three. Audience: What are you reading? BL: What are you reading? There are no words there. I said, read what you're seeing. Right? It literally says, "Wat ar ou rea in?" (Laughter) Right? That's what you should have said. Right? Why is this? It's because perception is grounded in our experience. Right? The brain takes meaningless information and makes meaning out of it, which means we never see what's there, we never see information, we only ever see what was useful to see in the past. All right? Which means, when it comes to perception, we're all like this frog. (Laughter) Right? It's getting information. It's generating behavior that's useful. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Video) Man: Ow! Ow! (Laughter) (Applause) BL: And sometimes, when things don't go our way, we get a little bit annoyed, right? But we're talking about perception here, right? And perception underpins everything we think, we know, we believe, our hopes, our dreams, the clothes we wear, falling in love, everything begins with perception. Now if perception is grounded in our history, it means we're only ever responding according to what we've done before. But actually, it's a tremendous problem, because how can we ever see differently? Now, I want to tell you a story about seeing differently, and all new perceptions begin in the same way. They begin with a question. The problem with questions is they create uncertainty. Now, uncertainty is a very bad thing. It's evolutionarily a bad thing. If you're not sure that's a predator, it's too late. Okay? (Laughter) Even seasickness is a consequence of uncertainty. Right? If you go down below on a boat, your inner ears are you telling you you're moving. Your eyes, because it's moving in register with the boat, say I'm standing still. Your brain cannot deal with the uncertainty of that information, and it gets ill. The question "why?" is one of the most dangerous things you can do, because it takes you into uncertainty. And yet, the irony is, the only way we can ever do anything new is to step into that space. So how can we ever do anything new? Well fortunately, evolution has given us an answer, right? And it enables us to address even the most difficult of questions. The best questions are the ones that create the most uncertainty. They're the ones that question the things we think to be true already. Right? It's easy to ask questions about how did life begin, or what extends beyond the universe, but to question what you think to be true already is really stepping into that space. So what is evolution's answer to the problem of uncertainty? It's play. Now play is not simply a process. Experts in play will tell you that actually it's a way of being. Play is one of the only human endeavors where uncertainty is actually celebrated. Uncertainty is what makes play fun. Right? It's adaptable to change. Right? It opens possibility, and it's cooperative. It's actually how we do our social bonding, and it's intrinsically motivated. What that means is that we play to play. Play is its own reward. Now if you look at these five ways of being, these are the exact same ways of being you need in order to be a good scientist. Science is not defined by the method section of a paper. It's actually a way of being, which is here, and this is true for anything that is creative. So if you add rules to play, you have a game. That's actually what an experiment is. So armed with these two ideas, that science is a way of being and experiments are play, we asked, can anyone become a scientist? And who better to ask than 25 eight- to 10-year-old children? Because they're experts in play. So I took my bee arena down to a small school in Devon, and the aim of this was to not just get the kids to see science differently, but, through the process of science, to see themselves differently. Right? The first step was to ask a question. Now, I should say that we didn't get funding for this study because the scientists said small children couldn't make a useful contribution to science, and the teachers said kids couldn't do it. So we did it anyway. Right? Of course. So, here are some of the questions. I put them in small print so you wouldn't bother reading it. Point is that five of the questions that the kids came up with were actually the basis of science publication the last five to 15 years. Right? So they were asking questions that were significant to expert scientists. Now here, I want to share the stage with someone quite special. Right? She was one of the young people who was involved in this study, and she's now one of the youngest published scientists in the world. Right? She will now, once she comes onto stage, will be the youngest person to ever speak at TED. Right? Now, science and asking questions is about courage. Now she is the personification of courage, because she's going to stand up here and talk to you all. So Amy, would you please come up? (Applause) (Applause) So Amy's going to help me tell the story of what we call the Blackawton Bees Project, and first she's going to tell you the question that they came up with. So go ahead, Amy. Amy O'Toole: Thank you, Beau. We thought that it was easy to see the link between humans and apes in the way that we think, because we look alike. But we wondered if there's a possible link with other animals. It'd be amazing if humans and bees thought similar, since they seem so different from us. So we asked if humans and bees might solve complex problems in the same way. Really, we wanted to know if bees can also adapt themselves to new situations using previously learned rules and conditions. So what if bees can think like us? Well, it'd be amazing, since we're talking about an insect with only one million brain cells. But it actually makes a lot of sense they should, because bees, like us, can recognize a good flower regardless of the time of day, the light, the weather, or from any angle they approach it from. (Applause) BL: So the next step was to design an experiment, which is a game. So the kids went off and they designed this experiment, and so — well, game — and so, Amy, can you tell us what the game was, and the puzzle that you set the bees? AO: The puzzle we came up with was an if-then rule. We asked the bees to learn not just to go to a certain color, but to a certain color flower only when it's in a certain pattern. They were only rewarded if they went to the yellow flowers if the yellow flowers were surrounded by the blue, or if the blue flowers were surrounded by the yellow. Now there's a number of different rules the bees can learn to solve this puzzle. The interesting question is, which? What was really exciting about this project was we, and Beau, had no idea whether it would work. It was completely new, and no one had done it before, including adults. (Laughter) BL: Including the teachers, and that was really hard for the teachers. It's easy for a scientist to go in and not have a clue what he's doing, because that's what we do in the lab, but for a teacher not to know what's going to happen at the end of the day — so much of the credit goes to Dave Strudwick, who was the collaborator on this project. Okay? So I'm not going to go through the whole details of the study because actually you can read about it, but the next step is observation. So here are some of the students doing the observations. They're recording the data of where the bees fly. (Video) Dave Strudwick: So what we're going to do —Student: 5C. Dave Strudwick: Is she still going up here?Student: Yeah. Dave Strudwick: So you keep track of each.Student: Henry, can you help me here? BL: "Can you help me, Henry?" What good scientist says that, right? Student: There's two up there. And three in here. BL: Right? So we've got our observations. We've got our data. They do the simple mathematics, averaging, etc., etc. And now we want to share. That's the next step. So we're going to write this up and try to submit this for publication. Right? So we have to write it up. So we go, of course, to the pub. All right? (Laughter) The one on the left is mine, okay? (Laughter) Now, I tell them, a paper has four different sections: an introduction, a methods, a results, a discussion. The introduction says, what's the question and why? Methods, what did you do? Results, what was the observation? And the discussion is, who cares? Right? That's a science paper, basically. (Laughter) So the kids give me the words, right? I put it into a narrative, which means that this paper is written in kidspeak. It's not written by me. It's written by Amy and the other students in the class. As a consequence, this science paper begins, "Once upon a time ... " (Laughter) The results section, it says: "Training phase, the puzzle ... duh duh duuuuuhhh." Right? (Laughter) And the methods, it says, "Then we put the bees into the fridge (and made bee pie)," smiley face. Right? (Laughter) This is a science paper. We're going to try to get it published. So here's the title page. We have a number of authors there. All the ones in bold are eight to 10 years old. The first author is Blackawton Primary School, because if it were ever referenced, it would be "Blackawton et al," and not one individual. So we submit it to a public access journal, and it says this. It said many things, but it said this. "I'm afraid the paper fails our initial quality control checks in several different ways." (Laughter) In other words, it starts off "once upon a time," the figures are in crayon, etc. (Laughter) So we said, we'll get it reviewed. So I sent it to Dale Purves, who is at the National Academy of Science, one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, and he says, "This is the most original science paper I have ever read" — (Laughter) — "and it certainly deserves wide exposure." Larry Maloney, expert in vision, says, "The paper is magnificent. The work would be publishable if done by adults." So what did we do? We send it back to the editor. They say no. So we asked Larry and Natalie Hempel to write a commentary situating the findings for scientists, right, putting in the references, and we submit it to Biology Letters. And there, it was reviewed by five independent referees, and it was published. Okay? (Applause) (Applause) It took four months to do the science, two years to get it published. (Laughter) Typical science, actually, right? So this makes Amy and her friends the youngest published scientists in the world. What was the feedback like? Well, it was published two days before Christmas, downloaded 30,000 times in the first day, right? It was the Editors' Choice in Science, which is a top science magazine. It's forever freely accessible by Biology Letters. It's the only paper that will ever be freely accessible by this journal. Last year, it was the second-most downloaded paper by Biology Letters, and the feedback from not just scientists and teachers but the public as well. And I'll just read one. "I have read 'Blackawton Bees' recently. I don't have words to explain exactly how I am feeling right now. What you guys have done is real, true and amazing. Curiosity, interest, innocence and zeal are the most basic and most important things to do science. Who else can have these qualities more than children? Please congratulate your children's team from my side." So I'd like to conclude with a physical metaphor. Can I do it on you? (Laughter) Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, come on. Yeah yeah. Okay. Now, science is about taking risks, so this is an incredible risk, right? (Laughter) For me, not for him. Right? Because we've only done this once before. (Laughter) And you like technology, right? Shimon Schocken: Right, but I like myself. BL: This is the epitome of technology. Right. Okay. Now ... (Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) Now, we're going to do a little demonstration, right? You have to close your eyes, and you have to point where you hear me clapping. All right? (Clapping) (Clapping) Okay, how about if everyone over there shouts. One, two, three? Audience: (Shouts) (Laughter) (Shouts) (Laughter) Brilliant. Now, open your eyes. We'll do it one more time. Everyone over there shout. (Shouts) Where's the sound coming from? (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) What's the point? The point is what science does for us. Right? We normally walk through life responding, but if we ever want to do anything different, we have to step into uncertainty. When he opened his eyes, he was able to see the world in a new way. That's what science offers us. It offers the possibility to step on uncertainty through the process of play, right? Now, true science education I think should be about giving people a voice and enabling to express that voice, so I've asked Amy to be the last voice in this short story. So, Amy? AO: This project was really exciting for me, because it brought the process of discovery to life, and it showed me that anyone, and I mean anyone, has the potential to discover something new, and that a small question can lead into a big discovery. Changing the way a person thinks about something can be easy or hard. It all depends on the way the person feels about change. But changing the way I thought about science was surprisingly easy. Once we played the games and then started to think about the puzzle, I then realized that science isn't just a boring subject, and that anyone can discover something new. You just need an opportunity. My opportunity came in the form of Beau, and the Blackawton Bee Project. Thank you.BL: Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) |
My battle to expose government corruption | {0: 'Heather Brooke campaigns for freedom of information, requesting one secret document at a time.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Once upon a time, the world was a big, dysfunctional family. It was run by the great and powerful parents, and the people were helpless and hopeless naughty children. If any of the more rowdier children questioned the authority of the parents, they were scolded. If they went exploring into the parents' rooms, or even into the secret filing cabinets, they were punished, and told that for their own good they must never go in there again. Then one day, a man came to town with boxes and boxes of secret documents stolen from the parents' rooms. "Look what they've been hiding from you," he said. The children looked and were amazed. There were maps and minutes from meetings where the parents were slagging each other off. They behaved just like the children. And they made mistakes, too, just like the children. The only difference was, their mistakes were in the secret filing cabinets. Well, there was a girl in the town, and she didn't think they should be in the secret filing cabinets, or if they were, there ought to be a law to allow the children access. And so she set about to make it so. Well, I'm the girl in that story, and the secret documents that I was interested in were located in this building, the British Parliament, and the data that I wanted to get my hands on were the expense receipts of members of Parliament. I thought this was a basic question to ask in a democracy. (Applause) It wasn't like I was asking for the code to a nuclear bunker, or anything like that, but the amount of resistance I got from this Freedom of Information request, you would have thought I'd asked something like this. So I fought for about five years doing this, and it was one of many hundreds of requests that I made, not — I didn't — Hey, look, I didn't set out, honestly, to revolutionize the British Parliament. That was not my intention. I was just making these requests as part of research for my first book. But it ended up in this very long, protracted legal battle and there I was after five years fighting against Parliament in front of three of Britain's most eminent High Court judges waiting for their ruling about whether or not Parliament had to release this data. And I've got to tell you, I wasn't that hopeful, because I'd seen the establishment. I thought, it always sticks together. I am out of luck. Well, guess what? I won. Hooray. (Applause) Well, that's not exactly the story, because the problem was that Parliament delayed and delayed releasing that data, and then they tried to retrospectively change the law so that it would no longer apply to them. The transparency law they'd passed earlier that applied to everybody else, they tried to keep it so it didn't apply to them. What they hadn't counted on was digitization, because that meant that all those paper receipts had been scanned in electronically, and it was very easy for somebody to just copy that entire database, put it on a disk, and then just saunter outside of Parliament, which they did, and then they shopped that disk to the highest bidder, which was the Daily Telegraph, and then, you all remember, there was weeks and weeks of revelations, everything from porn movies and bath plugs and new kitchens and mortgages that had never been paid off. The end result was six ministers resigned, the first speaker of the house in 300 years was forced to resign, a new government was elected on a mandate of transparency, 120 MPs stepped down at that election, and so far, four MPs and two lords have done jail time for fraud. So, thank you. (Applause) Well, I tell you that story because it wasn't unique to Britain. It was an example of a culture clash that's happening all over the world between bewigged and bestockinged officials who think that they can rule over us without very much prying from the public, and then suddenly confronted with a public who is no longer content with that arrangement, and not only not content with it, now, more often, armed with official data itself. So we are moving to this democratization of information, and I've been in this field for quite a while. Slightly embarrassing admission: Even when I was a kid, I used to have these little spy books, and I would, like, see what everybody was doing in my neighborhood and log it down. I think that was a pretty good indication about my future career as an investigative journalist, and what I've seen from being in this access to information field for so long is that it used to be quite a niche interest, and it's gone mainstream. Everybody, increasingly, around the world, wants to know about what people in power are doing. They want a say in decisions that are made in their name and with their money. It's this democratization of information that I think is an information enlightenment, and it has many of the same principles of the first Enlightenment. It's about searching for the truth, not because somebody says it's true, "because I say so." No, it's about trying to find the truth based on what you can see and what can be tested. That, in the first Enlightenment, led to questions about the right of kings, the divine right of kings to rule over people, or that women should be subordinate to men, or that the Church was the official word of God. Obviously the Church weren't very happy about this, and they tried to suppress it, but what they hadn't counted on was technology, and then they had the printing press, which suddenly enabled these ideas to spread cheaply, far and fast, and people would come together in coffee houses, discuss the ideas, plot revolution. In our day, we have digitization. That strips all the physical mass out of information, so now it's almost zero cost to copy and share information. Our printing press is the Internet. Our coffee houses are social networks. We're moving to what I would think of as a fully connected system, and we have global decisions to make in this system, decisions about climate, about finance systems, about resources. And think about it — if we want to make an important decision about buying a house, we don't just go off. I mean, I don't know about you, but I want to see a lot of houses before I put that much money into it. And if we're thinking about a finance system, we need a lot of information to take in. It's just not possible for one person to take in the amount, the volume of information, and analyze it to make good decisions. So that's why we're seeing increasingly this demand for access to information. That's why we're starting to see more disclosure laws come out, so for example, on the environment, there's the Aarhus Convention, which is a European directive that gives people a very strong right to know, so if your water company is dumping water into your river, sewage water into your river, you have a right to know about it. In the finance industry, you now have more of a right to know about what's going on, so we have different anti-bribery laws, money regulations, increased corporate disclosure, so you can now track assets across borders. And it's getting harder to hide assets, tax avoidance, pay inequality. So that's great. We're starting to find out more and more about these systems. And they're all moving to this central system, this fully connected system, all of them except one. Can you guess which one? It's the system which underpins all these other systems. It's the system by which we organize and exercise power, and there I'm talking about politics, because in politics, we're back to this system, this top-down hierarchy. And how is it possible that the volume of information can be processed that needs to in this system? Well, it just can't. That's it. And I think this is largely what's behind the crisis of legitimacy in our different governments right now. So I've told you a bit about what I did to try and drag Parliament, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century, and I'm just going to give you a couple of examples of what a few other people I know are doing. So this is a guy called Seb Bacon. He's a computer programmer, and he built a site called Alaveteli, and what it is, it's a Freedom of Information platform. It's open-source, with documentation, and it allows you to make a Freedom of Information request, to ask your public body a question, so it takes all the hassle out of it, and I can tell you that there is a lot of hassle making these requests, so it takes all of that hassle out, and you just type in your question, for example, how many police officers have a criminal record? It zooms it off to the appropriate person, it tells you when the time limit is coming to an end, it keeps track of all the correspondence, it posts it up there, and it becomes an archive of public knowledge. So that's open-source and it can be used in any country where there is some kind of Freedom of Information law. So there's a list there of the different countries that have it, and then there's a few more coming on board. So if any of you out there like the sound of that and have a law like that in your country, I know that Seb would love to hear from you about collaborating and getting that into your country. This is Birgitta Jónsdóttir. She's an Icelandic MP. And quite an unusual MP. In Iceland, she was one of the protesters who was outside of Parliament when the country's economy collapsed, and then she was elected on a reform mandate, and she's now spearheading this project. It's the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, and they've just got funding to make it an international modern media project, and this is taking all of the best laws around the world about freedom of expression, protection of whistleblowers, protection from libel, source protection, and trying to make Iceland a publishing haven. It's a place where your data can be free, so when we think about, increasingly, how governments want to access user data, what they're trying to do in Iceland is make this safe haven where it can happen. In my own field of investigative journalism, we're also having to start thinking globally, so this is a site called Investigative Dashboard. And if you're trying to track a dictator's assets, for example, Hosni Mubarak, you know, he's just funneling out cash from his country when he knows he's in trouble, and what you want to do to investigate that is, you need to have access to all of the world's, as many as you can, companies' house registrations databases. So this is a website that tries to agglomerate all of those databases into one place so you can start searching for, you know, his relatives, his friends, the head of his security services. You can try and find out how he's moving out assets from that country. But again, when it comes to the decisions which are impacting us the most, perhaps, the most important decisions that are being made about war and so forth, again we can't just make a Freedom of Information request. It's really difficult. So we're still having to rely on illegitimate ways of getting information, through leaks. So when the Guardian did this investigation about the Afghan War, you know, they can't walk into the Department of Defense and ask for all the information. You know, they're just not going to get it. So this came from leaks of tens of thousands of dispatches that were written by American soldiers about the Afghan War, and leaked, and then they're able to do this investigation. Another rather large investigation is around world diplomacy. Again, this is all based around leaks, 251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, and I was involved in this investigation because I got this leak through a leak from a disgruntled WikiLeaker and ended up going to work at the Guardian. So I can tell you firsthand what it was like to have access to this leak. It was amazing. I mean, it was amazing. It reminded me of that scene in "The Wizard of Oz." Do you know the one I mean? Where the little dog Toto runs across to where the wizard [is], and he pulls back, the dog's pulling back the curtain, and — "Don't look behind the screen. Don't look at the man behind the screen." It was just like that, because what you started to see is that all of these grand statesmen, these very pompous politicians, they were just like us. They all bitched about each other. I mean, quite gossipy, those cables. Okay, but I thought it was a very important point for all of us to grasp, these are human beings just like us. They don't have special powers. They're not magic. They are not our parents. Beyond that, what I found most fascinating was the level of endemic corruption that I saw across all different countries, and particularly centered around the heart of power, around public officials who were embezzling the public's money for their own personal enrichment, and allowed to do that because of official secrecy. So I've mentioned WikiLeaks, because surely what could be more open than publishing all the material? Because that is what Julian Assange did. He wasn't content with the way the newspapers published it to be safe and legal. He threw it all out there. That did end up with vulnerable people in Afghanistan being exposed. It also meant that the Belarussian dictator was given a handy list of all the pro-democracy campaigners in that country who had spoken to the U.S. government. Is that radical openness? I say it's not, because for me, what it means, it doesn't mean abdicating power, responsibility, accountability, it's actually being a partner with power. It's about sharing responsibility, sharing accountability. Also, the fact that he threatened to sue me because I got a leak of his leaks, I thought that showed a remarkable sort of inconsistency in ideology, to be honest, as well. (Laughs) The other thing is that power is incredibly seductive, and you must have two real qualities, I think, when you come to the table, when you're dealing with power, talking about power, because of its seductive capacity. You've got to have skepticism and humility. Skepticism, because you must always be challenging. I want to see why do you — you just say so? That's not good enough. I want to see the evidence behind why that's so. And humility because we are all human. We all make mistakes. And if you don't have skepticism and humility, then it's a really short journey to go from reformer to autocrat, and I think you only have to read "Animal Farm" to get that message about how power corrupts people. So what is the solution? It is, I believe, to embody within the rule of law rights to information. At the moment our rights are incredibly weak. In a lot of countries, we have Official Secrets Acts, including in Britain here. We have an Official Secrets Act with no public interest test. So that means it's a crime, people are punished, quite severely in a lot of cases, for publishing or giving away official information. Now wouldn't it be amazing, and really, this is what I want all of you to think about, if we had an Official Disclosure Act where officials were punished if they were found to have suppressed or hidden information that was in the public interest? So that — yes. Yes! My power pose. (Applause) (Laughs) I would like us to work towards that. So it's not all bad news. I mean, there definitely is progress on the line, but I think what we find is that the closer that we get right into the heart of power, the more opaque, closed it becomes. So it was only just the other week that I heard London's Metropolitan Police Commissioner talking about why the police need access to all of our communications, spying on us without any judicial oversight, and he said it was a matter of life and death. He actually said that, it was a matter of life and death. There was no evidence. He presented no evidence of that. It was just, "Because I say so. You have to trust me. Take it on faith." Well, I'm sorry, people, but we are back to the pre-Enlightenment Church, and we need to fight against that. So he was talking about the law in Britain which is the Communications Data Bill, an absolutely outrageous piece of legislation. In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance. You have the National Security Agency building the world's giantest spy center. It's just this colossal — it's five times bigger than the U.S. Capitol, in which they're going to intercept and analyze communications, traffic and personal data to try and figure out who's the troublemaker in society. Well, to go back to our original story, the parents have panicked. They've locked all the doors. They've kitted out the house with CCTV cameras. They're watching all of us. They've dug a basement, and they've built a spy center to try and run algorithms and figure out which ones of us are troublesome, and if any of us complain about that, we're arrested for terrorism. Well, is that a fairy tale or a living nightmare? Some fairy tales have happy endings. Some don't. I think we've all read the Grimms' fairy tales, which are, indeed, very grim. But the world isn't a fairy tale, and it could be more brutal than we want to acknowledge. Equally, it could be better than we've been led to believe, but either way, we have to start seeing it exactly as it is, with all of its problems, because it's only by seeing it with all of its problems that we'll be able to fix them and live in a world in which we can all be happily ever after. (Laughs) Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Online video -- annotated, remixed and popped | {0: 'Ryan Merkley is the Chief Operating Officer at the Mozilla Foundation, and is dedicated to making the web a more user-friendly place.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | To understand the world that live in, we tell stories. And while remixing and sharing have come to define the web as we know it, all of us can now be part of that story through simple tools that allow us to make things online. But video has been left out. It arrived on the web in a small box, and there it has remained, completely disconnected from the data and the content all around it. In fact, in over a decade on the web, the only thing that has changed about video is the size of the box and the quality of the picture. Popcorn changes all of that. It's an online tool that allows anyone to combine video with content pulled live directly from the web. Videos created with Popcorn behave like the web itself: dynamic, full of links, and completely remixable, and finally allowed to break free from the frame. I want to give you a demo of a prototype that we're working on that we'll launch later this fall. It will be completely free, and it will work in any browser. So, every Popcorn production begins with the video, and so I've made a short, 20-second clip using a newscaster template that we use in workshops. So let's watch it. We'll go back, and I'll show you how we made it. Hi, and welcome to my newscast. I've added my location with a Google Map, and it's live, so try moving it around. You can add pop-ups with live links and custom icons, or pull in content from any web service, like Flickr, or add articles and blog posts with links out to the full content. So let's go back, and I'll show you what you saw. There was a lot there. So this is the timeline, and if you've ever edited video, you're familiar with this, but instead of clips in the timeline, what you're looking at is web events pulled into the video. Now in this Popcorn production we've got the title card, we've got a Google Map that shows up picture-in-picture, then Popcorn lets it push outside the frame and take over the whole screen. There are two pop-ups bringing you some other information, and a final article with a link out to the original article. Let's go to this Google Map, and I'll show you how you can edit it. All you do, go into the timeline, double-click the item, and I've set it to Toronto, because that's where I'm from. Let's set it to something else. Popcorn immediately goes out onto the web, talks to Google, grabs the map, and puts it in the display. And it's exactly the same for the people who watch your production. And it's live. It's not an image. So you click on it, you zoom in, right down to street view if you want to. Now in the video, I mentioned adding a live feed, which we can do right now, so let's add a live feed from Flickr. Go over to the right-hand side, grab Flickr from the list of options, drag it into the timeline, and put it where you'd like it to go, and it immediately goes out to Flickr and starts pulling in images based on the tags. Now, my developers really like ponies, and so they've set that as the default tag. Let's try something else, maybe something a bit more relevant to today. Now here are live images being pulled straight from the feed. If you come and watch this a week from now, this will be completely different, dynamic, just like the web, and just like the web, everything is sourced, so click your link, and you go straight to Flickr and see the source image. Everything you've seen today is built with the basic building blocks of the web: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. That means it's completely remixable. It also means there's no proprietary software. All you need is a web browser. So imagine if every video that we watched on the web worked like the web, completely remixable, linked to its source content, and interactive for everyone who views it. I think Popcorn could change the way that we tell stories on the web, and the way we understand the world we live in. Thank you. (Applause) |
Actually, the world isn't flat | {0: "Our world is not flat, says ecnomist Pankaj Ghemawat -- it's at best semi-globalized, with limited interactions between countries and economies."} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I'm here to talk to you about how globalized we are, how globalized we aren't, and why it's important to actually be accurate in making those kinds of assessments. And the leading point of view on this, whether measured by number of books sold, mentions in media, or surveys that I've run with groups ranging from my students to delegates to the World Trade Organization, is this view that national borders really don't matter very much anymore, cross-border integration is close to complete, and we live in one world. And what's interesting about this view is, again, it's a view that's held by pro-globalizers like Tom Friedman, from whose book this quote is obviously excerpted, but it's also held by anti-globalizers, who see this giant globalization tsunami that's about to wreck all our lives if it hasn't already done so. The other thing I would add is that this is not a new view. I'm a little bit of an amateur historian, so I've spent some time going back, trying to see the first mention of this kind of thing. And the best, earliest quote that I could find was one from David Livingstone, writing in the 1850s about how the railroad, the steam ship, and the telegraph were integrating East Africa perfectly with the rest of the world. Now clearly, David Livingstone was a little bit ahead of his time, but it does seem useful to ask ourselves, "Just how global are we?" before we think about where we go from here. So the best way I've found of trying to get people to take seriously the idea that the world may not be flat, may not even be close to flat, is with some data. So one of the things I've been doing over the last few years is really compiling data on things that could either happen within national borders or across national borders, and I've looked at the cross-border component as a percentage of the total. I'm not going to present all the data that I have here today, but let me just give you a few data points. I'm going to talk a little bit about one kind of information flow, one kind of flow of people, one kind of flow of capital, and, of course, trade in products and services. So let's start off with plain old telephone service. Of all the voice-calling minutes in the world last year, what percentage do you think were accounted for by cross-border phone calls? Pick a percentage in your own mind. The answer turns out to be two percent. If you include Internet telephony, you might be able to push this number up to six or seven percent, but it's nowhere near what people tend to estimate. Or let's turn to people moving across borders. One particular thing we might look at, in terms of long-term flows of people, is what percentage of the world's population is accounted for by first-generation immigrants? Again, please pick a percentage. Turns out to be a little bit higher. It's actually about three percent. Or think of investment. Take all the real investment that went on in the world in 2010. What percentage of that was accounted for by foreign direct investment? Not quite ten percent. And then finally, the one statistic that I suspect many of the people in this room have seen: the export-to-GDP ratio. If you look at the official statistics, they typically indicate a little bit above 30 percent. However, there's a big problem with the official statistics, in that if, for instance, a Japanese component supplier ships something to China to be put into an iPod, and then the iPod gets shipped to the U.S., that component ends up getting counted multiple times. So nobody knows how bad this bias with the official statistics actually is, so I thought I would ask the person who's spearheading the effort to generate data on this, Pascal Lamy, the Director of the World Trade Organization, what his best guess would be of exports as a percentage of GDP, without the double- and triple-counting, and it's actually probably a bit under 20 percent, rather than the 30 percent-plus numbers that we're talking about. So it's very clear that if you look at these numbers or all the other numbers that I talk about in my book, "World 3.0," that we're very, very far from the no-border effect benchmark, which would imply internationalization levels of the order of 85, 90, 95 percent. So clearly, apocalyptically-minded authors have overstated the case. But it's not just the apocalyptics, as I think of them, who are prone to this kind of overstatement. I've also spent some time surveying audiences in different parts of the world on what they actually guess these numbers to be. Let me share with you the results of a survey that Harvard Business Review was kind enough to run of its readership as to what people's guesses along these dimensions actually were. So a couple of observations stand out for me from this slide. First of all, there is a suggestion of some error. Okay. (Laughter) Second, these are pretty large errors. For four quantities whose average value is less than 10 percent, you have people guessing three, four times that level. Even though I'm an economist, I find that a pretty large error. And third, this is not just confined to the readers of the Harvard Business Review. I've run several dozen such surveys in different parts of the world, and in all cases except one, where a group actually underestimated the trade-to-GDP ratio, people have this tendency towards overestimation, and so I thought it important to give a name to this, and that's what I refer to as globaloney, the difference between the dark blue bars and the light gray bars. Especially because, I suspect, some of you may still be a little bit skeptical of the claims, I think it's important to just spend a little bit of time thinking about why we might be prone to globaloney. A couple of different reasons come to mind. First of all, there's a real dearth of data in the debate. Let me give you an example. When I first published some of these data a few years ago in a magazine called Foreign Policy, one of the people who wrote in, not entirely in agreement, was Tom Friedman. And since my article was titled "Why the World Isn't Flat," that wasn't too surprising. (Laughter) What was very surprising to me was Tom's critique, which was, "Ghemawat's data are narrow." And this caused me to scratch my head, because as I went back through his several-hundred-page book, I couldn't find a single figure, chart, table, reference or footnote. So my point is, I haven't presented a lot of data here to convince you that I'm right, but I would urge you to go away and look for your own data to try and actually assess whether some of these hand-me-down insights that we've been bombarded with actually are correct. So dearth of data in the debate is one reason. A second reason has to do with peer pressure. I remember, I decided to write my "Why the World Isn't Flat" article, because I was being interviewed on TV in Mumbai, and the interviewer's first question to me was, "Professor Ghemawat, why do you still believe that the world is round?" And I started laughing, because I hadn't come across that formulation before. (Laughter) And as I was laughing, I was thinking, I really need a more coherent response, especially on national TV. I'd better write something about this. (Laughter) But what I can't quite capture for you was the pity and disbelief with which the interviewer asked her question. The perspective was, here is this poor professor. He's clearly been in a cave for the last 20,000 years. He really has no idea as to what's actually going on in the world. So try this out with your friends and acquaintances, if you like. You'll find that it's very cool to talk about the world being one, etc. If you raise questions about that formulation, you really are considered a bit of an antique. And then the final reason, which I mention, especially to a TED audience, with some trepidation, has to do with what I call "techno-trances." If you listen to techno music for long periods of time, it does things to your brainwave activity. (Laughter) Something similar seems to happen with exaggerated conceptions of how technology is going to overpower in the very immediate run all cultural barriers, all political barriers, all geographic barriers, because at this point I know you aren't allowed to ask me questions, but when I get to this point in my lecture with my students, hands go up, and people ask me, "Yeah, but what about Facebook?" And I got this question often enough that I thought I'd better do some research on Facebook. Because, in some sense, it's the ideal kind of technology to think about. Theoretically, it makes it as easy to form friendships halfway around the world as opposed to right next door. What percentage of people's friends on Facebook are actually located in countries other than where people we're analyzing are based? The answer is probably somewhere between 10 to 15 percent. Non-negligible, so we don't live in an entirely local or national world, but very, very far from the 95 percent level that you would expect, and the reason's very simple. We don't, or I hope we don't, form friendships at random on Facebook. The technology is overlaid on a pre-existing matrix of relationships that we have, and those relationships are what the technology doesn't quite displace. Those relationships are why we get far fewer than 95 percent of our friends being located in countries other than where we are. So does all this matter? Or is globaloney just a harmless way of getting people to pay more attention to globalization-related issues? I want to suggest that actually, globaloney can be very harmful to your health. First of all, recognizing that the glass is only 10 to 20 percent full is critical to seeing that there might be potential for additional gains from additional integration, whereas if we thought we were already there, there would be no particular point to pushing harder. It's a little bit like, we wouldn't be having a conference on radical openness if we already thought we were totally open to all the kinds of influences that are being talked about at this conference. So being accurate about how limited globalization levels are is critical to even being able to notice that there might be room for something more, something that would contribute further to global welfare. Which brings me to my second point. Avoiding overstatement is also very helpful because it reduces and in some cases even reverses some of the fears that people have about globalization. So I actually spend most of my "World 3.0" book working through a litany of market failures and fears that people have that they worry globalization is going to exacerbate. I'm obviously not going to be able to do that for you today, so let me just present to you two headlines as an illustration of what I have in mind. Think of France and the current debate about immigration. When you ask people in France what percentage of the French population is immigrants, the answer is about 24 percent. That's their guess. Maybe realizing that the number is just eight percent might help cool some of the superheated rhetoric that we see around the immigration issue. Or to take an even more striking example, when the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations did a survey of Americans, asking them to guess what percentage of the federal budget went to foreign aid, the guess was 30 percent, which is slightly in excess of the actual level — ("actually about ... 1%") (Laughter) — of U.S. governmental commitments to federal aid. The reassuring thing about this particular survey was, when it was pointed out to people how far their estimates were from the actual data, some of them — not all of them — seemed to become more willing to consider increases in foreign aid. So foreign aid is actually a great way of sort of wrapping up here, because if you think about it, what I've been talking about today is this notion — very uncontroversial amongst economists — that most things are very home-biased. "Foreign aid is the most aid to poor people," is about the most home-biased thing you can find. If you look at the OECD countries and how much they spend per domestic poor person, and compare it with how much they spend per poor person in poor countries, the ratio — Branko Milanovic at the World Bank did the calculations — turns out to be about 30,000 to one. Now of course, some of us, if we truly are cosmopolitan, would like to see that ratio being brought down to one-is-to-one. I'd like to make the suggestion that we don't need to aim for that to make substantial progress from where we are. If we simply brought that ratio down to 15,000 to one, we would be meeting those aid targets that were agreed at the Rio Summit 20 years ago that the summit that ended last week made no further progress on. So in summary, while radical openness is great, given how closed we are, even incremental openness could make things dramatically better. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) |
The strange politics of disgust | {0: 'David Pizarro is a psychologist interested in how certain emotions (disgust, fear, anger) affect our moral judgment.'} | TEDxEast | In the 17th century, a woman named Giulia Tofana had a very successful perfume business. For over 50 years she ran it. It sort of ended abruptly when she was executed — (Laughter) — for murdering 600 men. You see, it wasn't a very good perfume. In fact, it was completely odorless and tasteless and colorless, but as a poison, it was the best money could buy, so women flocked to her in order to murder their husbands. It turns out that poisoners were a valued and feared group, because poisoning a human being is a quite difficult thing. The reason is, we have sort of a built-in poison detector. You can see this as early as even in newborn infants. If you are willing to do this, you can take a couple of drops of a bitter substance or a sour substance, and you'll see that face, the tongue stick out, the wrinkled nose, as if they're trying to get rid of what's in their mouth. This reaction expands into adulthood and becomes sort of a full-blown disgust response, no longer just about whether or not we're about to be poisoned, but whenever there's a threat of physical contamination from some source. But the face remains strikingly similar. It has expanded more, though, than just keeping us away from physical contaminants, and there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that, in fact, this emotion of disgust now influences our moral beliefs and even our deeply held political intuitions. Why this might be the case? We can understand this process by understanding a little bit about emotions in general. So the basic human emotions, those kinds of emotions that we share with all other human beings, exist because they motivate us to do good things and they keep us away from doing bad things. So by and large, they are good for our survival. Take the emotion of fear, for instance. It keeps us away from doing things that are really, really risky. This photo taken just before his death — (Laughter) — is actually a — No, one reason this photo is interesting is because most people would not do this, and if they did, they would not live to tell it, because fear would have kicked in a long time ago to a natural predator. Just like fear offers us protective benefits, disgust seems to do the same thing, except for what disgust does is keeps us away from not things that might eat us, or heights, but rather things that might poison us, or give us disease and make us sick. So one of the features of disgust that makes it such an interesting emotion is that it's very, very easy to elicit, in fact more so than probably any of the other basic emotions, and so I'm going to show you that with a couple of images I can probably make you feel disgust. So turn away. I'll tell you when you can turn back. (Laughter) I mean, you see it every day, right? I mean, come on. (Laughter) (Audience: Ewww.) Okay, turn back, if you didn't look. Those probably made a lot of you in the audience feel very, very disgusted, but if you didn't look, I can tell you about some of the other things that have been shown sort of across the world to make people disgusted, things like feces, urine, blood, rotten flesh. These are the sorts of things that it makes sense for us to stay away from, because they might actually contaminate us. In fact, just having a diseased appearance or odd sexual acts, these things are also things that give us a lot of disgust. Darwin was probably one of the first scientists to systematically investigate the human emotions, and he pointed to the universal nature and the strength of the disgust response. This is an anecdote from his travels in South America. "In Tierro del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat while I was eating ... and plainly showed disgust at its softness, whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage — (Laughter) — though his hands did not appear dirty." He later wrote, "It's okay, some of my best friends are naked savages." (Laughter) Well it turns out it's not only old-timey British scientists who are this squeamish. I recently got a chance to talk to Richard Dawkins for a documentary, and I was able to disgust him a bunch of times. Here's my favorite. Richard Dawkins: "We've evolved around courtship and sex, are attached to deep-rooted emotions and reactions that are hard to jettison overnight." David Pizarro: So my favorite part of this clip is that Professor Dawkins actually gagged. He jumps back, and he gags, and we had to do it three times, and all three times he gagged. (Laughter) And he was really gagging. I thought he might throw up on me, actually. One of the features, though, of disgust, is not just its universality and its strength, but the way that it works through association. So when one disgusting thing touches a clean thing, that clean thing becomes disgusting, not the other way around. This makes it very useful as a strategy if you want to convince somebody that an object or an individual or an entire social group is disgusting and should be avoided. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum points this out in this quote: "Thus throughout history, certain disgust properties — sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness — have been repeatedly and monotonously been associated with ... Jews, women, homosexuals, untouchables, lower-class people — all of those are imagined as tainted by the dirt of the body." Let me give you just some examples of how, some powerful examples of how this has been used historically. This comes from a Nazi children's book published in 1938: "Just look at these guys! The louse-infested beards, the filthy, protruding ears, those stained, fatty clothes... Jews often have an unpleasant sweetish odor. If you have a good nose, you can smell the Jews." A more modern example comes from people who try to convince us that homosexuality is immoral. This is from an anti-gay website, where they said gays are "worthy of death for their vile ... sex practices." They're like "dogs eating their own vomit and sows wallowing in their own feces." These are disgust properties that are trying to be directly linked to the social group that you should not like. When we were first investigating the role of disgust in moral judgment, one of the things we became interested in was whether or not these sorts of appeals are more likely to work in individuals who are more easily disgusted. So while disgust, along with the other basic emotions, are universal phenomena, it just really is true that some people are easier to disgust than others. You could probably see it in the audience members when I showed you those disgusting images. The way that we measured this was by a scale that was constructed by some other psychologists that simply asked people across a wide variety of situations how likely they are to feel disgust. So here are a couple of examples. "Even if I were hungry, I would not drink a bowl of my favorite soup if it had been stirred by a used but thoroughly washed fly-swatter." "Do you agree or disagree?" (Laughter) "While you are walking through a tunnel under a railroad track, you smell urine. Would you be very disgusted or not at all disgusted?" If you ask enough of these, you can get a general overall score of disgust sensitivity. It turns out that this score is actually meaningful. When you bring people into the laboratory and you ask them if they're willing to engage in safe but disgusting behaviors like eating chocolate that's been baked to look like dog poop, or in this case eating some mealworms that are perfectly healthy but pretty gross, your score on that scale actually predicts whether or not you'll be willing to engage in those behaviors. The first time that we set out to collect data on this and associate it with political or moral beliefs, we found a general pattern — this is with the psychologists Yoel Inbar and Paul Bloom — that in fact, across three studies we kept finding that people who reported that they were easily disgusted also reported that they were more politically conservative. Another way to say this, though, is that people who are very liberal are very hard to disgust. (Laughter) In a more recent follow-up study, we were able to look at a much greater sample, a much larger sample. In this case, this is nearly 30,000 U.S. respondents, and we find the same pattern. As you can see, people who are on the very conservative side of answering the political orientation scale are also much more likely to report that they're easily disgusted. This data set also allowed us to statistically control for a number of things that we knew were both related to political orientation and to disgust sensitivity. So we were able to control for gender, age, income, education, even basic personality variables, and the result stays the same. When we actually looked at not just self-reported political orientation, but voting behavior, we were able to look geographically across the nation. What we found was that in regions in which people reported high levels of disgust sensitivity, McCain got more votes. So it not only predicted self-reported political orientation, but actual voting behavior. And also we were able, with this sample, to look across the world, in 121 different countries we asked the same questions, and as you can see, this is 121 countries collapsed into 10 different geographical regions. No matter where you look, what this is plotting is the size of the relationship between disgust sensitivity and political orientation, and no matter where we looked, we saw a very similar effect. Other labs have actually looked at this as well using different measures of disgust sensitivity, so rather than asking people how easily disgusted they are, they hook people up to physiological measures, in this case skin conductance. And what they've demonstrated is that people who report being more politically conservative are also more physiologically aroused when you show them disgusting images like the ones that I showed you. Interestingly, what they also showed in a finding that we kept getting in our previous studies as well was that one of the strongest influences here is that individuals who are very disgust-sensitive not only are more likely to report being politically conservative, but they're also very much more opposed to gay marriage and homosexuality and pretty much a lot of the socio-moral issues in the sexual domain. So physiological arousal predicted, in this study, attitudes toward gay marriage. But even with all these data linking disgust sensitivity and political orientation, one of the questions that remains is what is the causal link here? Is it the case that disgust really is shaping political and moral beliefs? We have to resort to experimental methods to answer this, and so what we can do is actually bring people into the lab and disgust them and compare them to a control group that hasn't been disgusted. It turns out that over the past five years a number of researchers have done this, and by and large the results have all been the same, that when people are feeling disgust, their attitudes shift towards the right of the political spectrum, toward more moral conservatism as well. So this is whether you use a foul odor, a bad taste, from film clips, from post-hypnotic suggestions of disgust, images like the ones I've shown you, even just reminding people that disease is prevalent and they should be wary of it and wash up, right, to keep clean, these all have similar effects on judgment. Let me just give you an example from a recent study that we conducted. We asked participants to just simply give us their opinion of a variety of social groups, and we either made the room smell gross or not. When the room smelled gross, what we saw was that individuals actually reported more negative attitudes toward gay men. Disgust didn't influence attitudes toward all the other social groups that we asked, including African-Americans, the elderly. It really came down to the attitudes they had toward gay men. In another set of studies we actually simply reminded people — this was at a time when the swine flu was going around — we reminded people that in order to prevent the spread of the flu that they ought to wash their hands. For some participants, we actually had them take questionnaires next to a sign that reminded them to wash their hands. And what we found was that just taking a questionnaire next to this hand-sanitizing reminder made individuals report being more politically conservative. And when we asked them a variety of questions about the rightness or wrongness of certain acts, what we also found was that simply being reminded that they ought to wash their hands made them more morally conservative. In particular, when we asked them questions about sort of taboo but fairly harmless sexual practices, just being reminded that they ought to wash their hands made them think that they were more morally wrong. Let me give you an example of what I mean by harmless but taboo sexual practice. We gave them scenarios. One of them said a man is house-sitting for his grandmother. When his grandmother's away, he has sex with his girlfriend on his grandma's bed. In another one, we said a woman enjoys masturbating with her favorite teddy bear cuddled next to her. (Laughter) People find these to be more morally abhorrent if they've been reminded to wash their hands. (Laughter) (Laughter) Okay. The fact that emotions influence our judgment should come as no surprise. I mean, that's part of how emotions work. They not only motivate you to behave in certain ways, but they change the way you think. In the case of disgust, what is a little bit more surprising is the scope of this influence. It makes perfect sense, and it's a very good emotion for us to have, that disgust would make me change the way that I perceive the physical world whenever contamination is possible. It makes less sense that an emotion that was built to prevent me from ingesting poison should predict who I'm going to vote for in the upcoming presidential election. The question of whether disgust ought to influence our moral and political judgments certainly has to be complex, and might depend on exactly what judgments we're talking about, and as a scientist, we have to conclude sometimes that the scientific method is just ill-equipped to answer these sorts of questions. But one thing that I am fairly certain about is, at the very least, what we can do with this research is point to what questions we ought to ask in the first place. Thank you. (Applause) |
A child of the state | {0: 'An award-winning playwright and popular broadcaster in the UK, as well as the author of five poetry books, Lemn Sissay has a way with words. '} | TEDxHousesOfParliament | Having spent 18 years as a child of the state in children's homes and foster care, you could say that I'm an expert on the subject, and in being an expert, I want to let you know that being an expert does in no way make you right in light of the truth. If you're in care, legally the government is your parent, loco parentis. Margaret Thatcher was my mother. (Laughter) Let's not talk about breastfeeding. (Laughter) Harry Potter was a foster child. Pip from "Great Expectations" was adopted; Superman was a foster child; Cinderella was a foster child; Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, was fostered and institutionalized; Batman was orphaned; Lyra Belacqua from Philip Pullman's "Northern Lights" was fostered; Jane Eyre, adopted; Roald Dahl's James from "James and the Giant Peach;" Matilda; Moses — Moses! (Laughter) Moses! (Laughter) — the boys in Michael Morpurgo's "Friend or Foe;" Alem in Benjamin Zephaniah's "Refugee Boy;" Luke Skywalker — Luke Skywalker! (Laughter) — Oliver Twist; Cassia in "The Concubine of Shanghai" by Hong Ying; Celie in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple." All of these great fictional characters, all of them who were hurt by their condition, all of them who spawned thousands of other books and other films, all of them were fostered, adopted or orphaned. It seems that writers know that the child outside of family reflects on what family truly is more than what it promotes itself to be. That is, they also use extraordinary skills to deal with extraordinary situations on a daily basis. How have we not made the connection? And why have we not made the connection, between — How has that happened? — between these incredible characters of popular culture and religions, and the fostered, adopted or orphaned child in our midst? It's not our pity that they need. It's our respect. I know famous musicians, I know actors and film stars and millionaires and novelists and top lawyers and television executives and magazine editors and national journalists and dustbinmen and hairdressers, all who were looked after children, fostered, adopted or orphaned, and many of them grow into their adult lives in fear of speaking of their background, as if it may somehow weaken their standing in the foreground, as if it were somehow Kryptonite, as if it were a time bomb strapped on the inside. Children in care, who've had a life in care, deserve the right to own and live the memory of their own childhood. It is that simple. My own mother — and I should say this here — she same to this country in the late '60s, and she was, you know, she found herself pregnant, as women did in the late '60s. You know what I mean? They found themselves pregnant. And she sort of, she had no idea of the context in which she'd landed. In the 1960s — I should give you some context — in the 1960s, if you were pregnant and you were single, you were seen as a threat to the community. You were separated from your family by the state. You were separated from your family and placed into mother and baby homes. You were appointed a social worker. The adoptive parents were lined up. It was the primary purpose of the social worker, the aim, to get the woman at her most vulnerable time in her entire life, to sign the adoption papers. So the adoption papers were signed. The mother and baby's homes were often run by nuns. The adoption papers were signed, the child was given to the adoptive parents, and the mother shipped back to her community to say that she'd been on a little break. A little break. A little break. The first secret of shame for a woman for being a woman, "a little break." The adoption process took, like, a matter of months, so it was a closed shop, you know, sealed deal, an industrious, utilitarian solution: the government, the farmer, the adopting parents, the consumer, the mother, the earth, and the child, the crop. It's kind of easy to patronize the past, to forego our responsibilities in the present. What happened then is a direct reflection of what is happening now. Everybody believed themselves to be doing the right thing by God and by the state for the big society, fast-tracking adoption. So anyway, she comes here, 1967, she's pregnant, and she comes from Ethiopia that was celebrating its own jubilee at the time under the Emperor Haile Selassie, and she lands months before the Enoch Powell speech, the "Rivers of Blood" speech. She lands months before the Beatles release "The White Album," months before Martin Luther King was killed. It was a summer of love if you were white. If you were black, it was a summer of hate. So she goes from Oxford, she's sent to the north of England to a mother and baby home, and appointed a social worker. It's her plan. You know, I have to say this in the Houses — It's her plan to have me fostered for a short period of time while she studies. But the social worker, he had a different agenda. He found the foster parents, and he said to them, "Treat this as an adoption. He's yours forever. His name is Norman." (Laughter) Norman! (Laughter) Norman! So they took me. I was a message, they said. I was a sign from God, they said. I was Norman Mark Greenwood. Now, for the next 11 years, all I know is that this woman, this birth woman, should have her eyes scratched out for not signing the adoption papers. She was an evil woman too selfish to sign, so I spent those 11 years kneeling and praying. I tried praying. I swear I tried praying. "God, can I have a bike for Christmas?" But I would always answer myself, "Yes, of course you can." (Laughter) And then I was supposed to determine whether that was the voice of God or it was the voice of the Devil. And it turns out I've got the Devil inside of me. Who knew? (Laughter) So anyway, two years sort of passed, and they had a child of their own, and then another two years passed, and they had another child of their own, and then another time passed and they had another child that they called an accident, which I thought was an unusual name. (Laughter) And I was on the cusp of, sort of, adolescence, so I was starting to take biscuits from the tin without asking. I was starting to stay out a little bit late, etc., etc. Now, in their religiosity, in their naivete, my mom and dad, which I believed them to be forever, as they said they were, my mom and dad conceived that I had the Devil inside of me. And what — I should say this here, because this is how they engineered my leaving. They sat me at a table, my foster mom, and she said to me, "You don't love us, do you?" At 11 years old. They've had three other children. I'm the fourth. The third was an accident. And I said, "Yeah, of course I do." Because you do. My foster mother asked me to go away to think about love and what it is and to read the Scriptures and to come back tomorrow and give my most honest and truthful answer. So this was an opportunity. If they were asking me whether I loved them or not, then I mustn't love them, which led me to the miracle of thought that I thought they wanted me to get to. "I will ask God for forgiveness and His light will shine through me to them. How fantastic." This was an opportunity. The theology was perfect, the timing unquestionable, and the answer as honest as a sinner could get. "I mustn't love you," I said to them. "But I will ask God for forgiveness." "Because you don't love us, Norman, clearly you've chosen your path." Twenty-four hours later, my social worker, this strange man who used to visit me every couple of months, he's waiting for me in the car as I say goodbye to my parents. I didn't say goodbye to anybody, not my mother, my father, my sisters, my brothers, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my grandparents, nobody. On the way to the children's home, I started to ask myself, "What's happened to me?" It's not that I'd had the rug pulled from beneath me as much as the entire floor had been taken away. When I got to the — For the next four, five years, I was held in four different children's homes. On the third children's home, at 15, I started to rebel, and what I did was, I got three tins of paint, Airfix paint that you use for models, and I was — it was a big children's home, big Victorian children's home — and I was in a little turret at the top of it, and I poured them, red, yellow and green, the colors of Africa, down the tiles. You couldn't see it from the street, because the home was surrounded by beech trees. For doing this, I was incarcerated for a year in an assessment center which was actually a remand center. It was a virtual prison for young people. By the way, years later, my social worker said that I should never have been put in there. I wasn't charged for anything. I hadn't done anything wrong. But because I had no family to inquire about me, they could do anything to me. I'm 17 years old, and they had a padded cell. They would march me down corridors in last-size order. They — I was put in a dormitory with a confirmed Nazi sympathizer. All of the staff were ex-police — interesting — and ex-probation officers. The man who ran it was an ex-army officer. Every time I had a visit by a person who I did not know who would feed me grapes, once every three months, I was strip-searched. That home was full of young boys who were on remand for things like murder. And this was the preparation that I was being given after 17 years as a child of the state. I have to tell this story. I have to tell it, because there was no one to put two and two together. I slowly became aware that I knew nobody that knew me for longer than a year. See, that's what family does. It gives you reference points. I'm not defining a good family from a bad family. I'm just saying that you know when your birthday is by virtue of the fact that somebody tells you when your birthday is, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, an aunt, an uncle, a cousin, a grandparent. It matters to someone, and therefore it matters to you. Understand, I was 14 years old, tucked away in myself, into myself, and I wasn't touched either, physically touched. I'm reporting back. I'm reporting back simply to say that when I left the children's home I had two things that I wanted to do. One was to find my family, and the other was to write poetry. In creativity I saw light. In the imagination I saw the endless possibility of life, the endless truth, the permanent creation of reality, the place where anger was an expression in the search for love, a place where dysfunction is a true reaction to untruth. I've just got to say it to you all: I found all of my family in my adult life. I spent all of my adult life finding them, and I've now got a fully dysfunctional family just like everybody else. But I'm reporting back to you to say quite simply that you can define how strong a democracy is by how its government treats its child. I don't mean children. I mean the child of the state. Thanks very much. It's been an honor. (Applause) (Applause) |
Metal that breathes | {0: 'Doris Kim Sung is a biology student turned architect interested in thermo-bimetals, smart materials that respond dynamically to temperature change.'} | TEDxUSC | I was one of those kids that, every time I got in the car, I basically had to roll down the window. It was usually too hot, too stuffy or just too smelly, and my father would not let us use the air conditioner. He said that it would overheat the engine. And you might remember, some of you, how the cars were back then, and it was a common problem of overheating. But it was also the signal that capped the use, or overuse, of energy-consuming devices. Things have changed now. We have cars that we take across country. We blast the air conditioning the entire way, and we never experience overheating. So there's no more signal for us to tell us to stop. Great, right? Well, we have similar problems in buildings. In the past, before air conditioning, we had thick walls. The thick walls are great for insulation. It keeps the interior very cool during the summertime, and warm during the wintertime, and the small windows were also very good because it limited the amount of temperature transfer between the interior and exterior. Then in about the 1930s, with the advent of plate glass, rolled steel and mass production, we were able to make floor-to-ceiling windows and unobstructed views, and with that came the irreversible reliance on mechanical air conditioning to cool our solar-heated spaces. Over time, the buildings got taller and bigger, our engineering even better, so that the mechanical systems were massive. They require a huge amount of energy. They give off a lot of heat into the atmosphere, and for some of you may understand the heat island effect in cities, where the urban areas are much more warm than the adjacent rural areas, but we also have problems that, when we lose power, we can't open a window here, and so the buildings are uninhabitable and have to be made vacant until that air conditioning system can start up again. Even worse, with our intention of trying to make buildings move towards a net-zero energy state, we can't do it just by making mechanical systems more and more efficient. We need to look for something else, and we've gotten ourselves a little bit into a rut. So what do we do here? How do we pull ourselves and dig us out of this hole that we've dug? If we look at biology, and many of you probably don't know, I was a biology major before I went into architecture, the human skin is the organ that naturally regulates the temperature in the body, and it's a fantastic thing. That's the first line of defense for the body. It has pores, it has sweat glands, it has all these things that work together very dynamically and very efficiently, and so what I propose is that our building skins should be more similar to human skin, and by doing so can be much more dynamic, responsive and differentiated, depending on where it is. And this gets me back to my research. What I proposed first doing is looking at a different material palette to do that. I presently, or currently, work with smart materials, and a smart thermo-bimetal. First of all, I guess we call it smart because it requires no controls and it requires no energy, and that's a very big deal for architecture. What it is, it's a lamination of two different metals together. You can see that here by the different reflection on this side. And because it has two different coefficients of expansion, when heated, one side will expand faster than the other and result in a curling action. So in early prototypes I built these surfaces to try to see how the curl would react to temperature and possibly allow air to ventilate through the system, and in other prototypes did surfaces where the multiplicity of having these strips together can try to make bigger movement happen when also heated, and currently have this installation at the Materials & Applications gallery in Silver Lake, close by, and it's there until August, if you want to see it. It's called "Bloom," and the surface is made completely out of thermo-bimetal, and its intention is to make this canopy that does two things. One, it's a sun-shading device, so that when the sun hits the surface, it constricts the amount of sun passing through, and in other areas, it's a ventilating system, so that hot, trapped air underneath can actually move through and out when necessary. You can see here in this time-lapse video that the sun, as it moves across the surface, as well as the shade, each of the tiles moves individually. Keep in mind, with the digital technology that we have today, this thing was made out of about 14,000 pieces and there's no two pieces alike at all. Every single one is different. And the great thing with that is the fact that we can calibrate each one to be very, very specific to its location, to the angle of the sun, and also how the thing actually curls. So this kind of proof of concept project has a lot of implications to actual future application in architecture, and in this case, here you see a house, that's for a developer in China, and it's actually a four-story glass box. It's still with that glass box because we still want that visual access, but now it's sheathed with this thermo-bimetal layer, it's a screen that goes around it, and that layer can actually open and close as that sun moves around on that surface. In addition to that, it can also screen areas for privacy, so that it can differentiate from some of the public areas in the space during different times of day. And what it basically implies is that, in houses now, we don't need drapes or shutters or blinds anymore because we can sheath the building with these things, as well as control the amount of air conditioning you need inside that building. I'm also looking at trying to develop some building components for the market, and so here you see a pretty typical double-glazed window panel, and in that panel, between those two pieces of glass, that double-glazing, I'm trying to work on making a thermo-bimetal pattern system so that when the sun hits that outside layer and heats that interior cavity, that thermo-bimetal will begin to curl, and what actually will happen then is it'll start to block out the sun in certain areas of the building, and totally, if necessary. And so you can imagine, even in this application, that in a high-rise building where the panel systems go from floor to floor up to 30, 40 floors, the entire surface could be differentiated at different times of day depending on how that sun moves across and hits that surface. And these are some later studies that I'm working on right now that are on the boards, where you can see, in the bottom right-hand corner, with the red, it's actually smaller pieces of thermometal, and it's actually going to, we're trying to make it move like cilia or eyelashes. This last project is also of components. The influence — and if you have noticed, one of my spheres of influence is biology — is from a grasshopper. And grasshoppers have a different kind of breathing system. They breathe through holes in their sides called spiracles, and they bring the air through and it moves through their system to cool them down, and so in this project, I'm trying to look at how we can consider that in architecture too, how we can bring air through holes in the sides of a building. And so you see here some early studies of blocks, where those holes are actually coming through, and this is before the thermo-bimetal is applied, and this is after the bimetal is applied. Sorry, it's a little hard to see, but on the surfaces, you can see these red arrows. On the left, it's when it's cold and the thermo-bimetal is flat so it will constrict air from passing through the blocks, and on the right, the thermo-bimetal curls and allows that air to pass through, so those are two different components that I'm working on, and again, it's a completely different thing, because you can imagine that air could potentially be coming through the walls instead of opening windows. So I want to leave you with one last impression about the project, or this kind of work and using smart materials. When you're tired of opening and closing those blinds day after day, when you're on vacation and there's no one there on the weekends to be turning off and on the controls, or when there's a power outage, and you have no electricity to rely on, these thermo-bimetals will still be working tirelessly, efficiently and endlessly. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
A cyber-magic card trick like no other | {0: 'Using technology and an array of special effects, Marco Tempest develops immersive environments that allow viewers to viscerally experience the magic of technology.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Good morning. So magic is an excellent way for staying ahead of the reality curve, to make possible today what science will make a reality tomorrow. As a cyber-magician, I combine elements of illusion and science to give us a feel of how future technologies might be experienced. You've probably all heard of Google's Project Glass. It's new technology. You look through them and the world you see is augmented with data: names of places, monuments, buildings, maybe one day even the names of the strangers that pass you on the street. So these are my illusion glasses. They're a little bigger. They're a prototype. And when you look through them, you get a glimpse into the mind of the cyber-illusionist. Let me show you what I mean. All we need is a playing card. Any card will do. Like this. And let me mark it so we can recognize it when we see it again. All right. Very significant mark. And let's put it back into the deck, somewhere in the middle, and let's get started. (Music) Voice: System ready. Acquiring image. Marco Tempest: For those of you who don't play cards, a deck of cards is made up of four different suits: hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades. The cards are amongst the oldest of symbols, and have been interpreted in many different ways. Now, some say that the four suits represent the four seasons. There's spring, summer, autumn and â Voice: My favorite season is winter.MT: Well yeah, mine too. Winter is like magic. It's a time of change, when warmth turns to cold, water turns to snow, and then it all disappears. There are 13 cards in each suit. (Music) Voice: Each card represents a phase of the 13 lunar cycles. MT: So over here is low tide, and over here is high tide, and in the middle is the moon. Voice: The moon is one of the most potent symbols of magic. MT: There are two colors in a deck of cards. There is the color red and the color black, representing the constant change from day to night. Voice: Marco, I did not know you could do that. (Laughter) MT: And is it a coincidence that there are 52 cards in a deck of cards, just as there are 52 weeks in a year? (Music) Voice: If you total all the spots on a deck of cards, the result is 365. MT: Oh, 365, the number of days in a year, the number of days between each birthday. Make a wish. (Blowing noise) Voice: Don't tell, or it won't come true. MT: Well, as a matter of fact, it was on my sixth birthday that I received my first deck of cards, and ever since that day, I have traveled around the world performing magic for boys and girls, men and women, husbands and wives, even kings and queens. (Applause) Voice: And who are these?MT: Ah, mischief-makers. Watch. Wake up. Joker: Whoa.MT: Are you ready for your party piece? Joker: Ready!MT: Let me see what you've got. Joker: Presenting my pogo stick.MT: Ah. Watch out. Joker: Whoa, whoa, whoa, oh! (Music) MT: But today, I am performing for a different kind of audience. I'm performing for you. Voice: Signed card detected.MT: Well, sometimes people ask me how do you become a magician? Is it a 9-to-5 job? Of course not! You've got to practice 24/7. I don't literally mean 24 hours, seven days a week. 24/7 is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it does take practice. Now, some people will say, well, magic, that must be the work of some evil supernatural force. (Laughter) (Applause) (Music) Whoa. Well, to this, I just say, no no. Actually, in German, it's nein nein. (Laughter) Magic isn't that intense. I have to warn you, though, if you ever play with someone who deals cards like this, don't play for money. (Music) Voice: Why not? That's a very good hand. The odds of getting it are 4,165 to one. MT: Yeah, but I guess my hand is better. We beat the odds. Voice: I think you got your birthday wish.MT: And that actually leaves me with the last, and most important card of all: the one with this very significant mark on it. And unlike anything else we've just seen, virtual or not.Voice: Signed card detected. Digital MT: This is without a question the real thing. MT: Bye bye. (Music) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) |
Why democracy matters | {0: 'Rory Stewart -- a perpetual pedestrian, a diplomat, an adventurer and an author -- is the member of British Parliament for Penrith and the Border.'} | TEDxHousesOfParliament | So little Billy goes to school, and he sits down and the teacher says, "What does your father do?" And little Billy says, "My father plays the piano in an opium den." So the teacher rings up the parents, and says, "Very shocking story from little Billy today. Just heard that he claimed that you play the piano in an opium den." And the father says, "I'm very sorry. Yes, it's true, I lied. But how can I tell an eight-year-old boy that his father is a politician?" (Laughter) Now, as a politician myself, standing in front of you, or indeed, meeting any stranger anywhere in the world, when I eventually reveal the nature of my profession, they look at me as though I'm somewhere between a snake, a monkey and an iguana, and through all of this, I feel, strongly, that something is going wrong. Four hundred years of maturing democracy, colleagues in Parliament who seem to me, as individuals, reasonably impressive, an increasingly educated, energetic, informed population, and yet a deep, deep sense of disappointment. My colleagues in Parliament include, in my new intake, family doctors, businesspeople, professors, distinguished economists, historians, writers, army officers ranging from colonels down to regimental sergeant majors. All of them, however, including myself, as we walk underneath those strange stone gargoyles just down the road, feel that we've become less than the sum of our parts, feel as though we have become profoundly diminished. And this isn't just a problem in Britain. It's a problem across the developing world, and in middle income countries too. In Jamaica, for example — look at Jamaican members of Parliament, you meet them, and they're often people who are Rhodes Scholars, who've studied at Harvard or at Princeton, and yet, you go down to downtown Kingston, and you are looking at one of the most depressing sites that you can see in any middle-income country in the world: a dismal, depressing landscape of burnt and half-abandoned buildings. And this has been true for 30 years, and the handover in 1979, 1980, between one Jamaican leader who was the son of a Rhodes Scholar and a Q.C. to another who'd done an economics doctorate at Harvard, over 800 people were killed in the streets in drug-related violence. Ten years ago, however, the promise of democracy seemed to be extraordinary. George W. Bush stood up in his State of the Union address in 2003 and said that democracy was the force that would beat most of the ills of the world. He said, because democratic governments respect their own people and respect their neighbors, freedom will bring peace. Distinguished academics at the same time argued that democracies had this incredible range of side benefits. They would bring prosperity, security, overcome sectarian violence, ensure that states would never again harbor terrorists. Since then, what's happened? Well, what we've seen is the creation, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, of democratic systems of government which haven't had any of those side benefits. In Afghanistan, for example, we haven't just had one election or two elections. We've gone through three elections, presidential and parliamentary. And what do we find? Do we find a flourishing civil society, a vigorous rule of law and good security? No. What we find in Afghanistan is a judiciary that is weak and corrupt, a very limited civil society which is largely ineffective, a media which is beginning to get onto its feet but a government that's deeply unpopular, perceived as being deeply corrupt, and security that is shocking, security that's terrible. In Pakistan, in lots of sub-Saharan Africa, again you can see democracy and elections are compatible with corrupt governments, with states that are unstable and dangerous. And when I have conversations with people, I remember having a conversation, for example, in Iraq, with a community that asked me whether the riot we were seeing in front of us, this was a huge mob ransacking a provincial council building, was a sign of the new democracy. The same, I felt, was true in almost every single one of the middle and developing countries that I went to, and to some extent the same is true of us. Well, what is the answer to this? Is the answer to just give up on the idea of democracy? Well, obviously not. It would be absurd if we were to engage again in the kind of operations we were engaged in, in Iraq and Afghanistan if we were to suddenly find ourselves in a situation in which we were imposing anything other than a democratic system. Anything else would run contrary to our values, it would run contrary to the wishes of the people on the ground, it would run contrary to our interests. I remember in Iraq, for example, that we went through a period of feeling that we should delay democracy. We went through a period of feeling that the lesson learned from Bosnia was that elections held too early enshrined sectarian violence, enshrined extremist parties, so in Iraq in 2003 the decision was made, let's not have elections for two years. Let's invest in voter education. Let's invest in democratization. The result was that I found stuck outside my office a huge crowd of people, this is actually a photograph taken in Libya but I saw the same scene in Iraq of people standing outside screaming for the elections, and when I went out and said, "What is wrong with the interim provincial council? What is wrong with the people that we have chosen? There is a Sunni sheikh, there's a Shiite sheikh, there's the seven — leaders of the seven major tribes, there's a Christian, there's a Sabian, there are female representatives, there's every political party in this council, what's wrong with the people that we chose?" The answer came, "The problem isn't the people that you chose. The problem is that you chose them." I have not met, in Afghanistan, in even the most remote community, anybody who does not want a say in who governs them. Most remote community, I have never met a villager who does not want a vote. So we need to acknowledge that despite the dubious statistics, despite the fact that 84 percent of people in Britain feel politics is broken, despite the fact that when I was in Iraq, we did an opinion poll in 2003 and asked people what political systems they preferred, and the answer came back that seven percent wanted the United States, five percent wanted France, three percent wanted Britain, and nearly 40 percent wanted Dubai, which is, after all, not a democratic state at all but a relatively prosperous minor monarchy, democracy is a thing of value for which we should be fighting. But in order to do so we need to get away from instrumental arguments. We need to get away from saying democracy matters because of the other things it brings. We need to get away from feeling, in the same way, human rights matters because of the other things it brings, or women's rights matters for the other things it brings. Why should we get away from those arguments? Because they're very dangerous. If we set about saying, for example, torture is wrong because it doesn't extract good information, or we say, you need women's rights because it stimulates economic growth by doubling the size of the work force, you leave yourself open to the position where the government of North Korea can turn around and say, "Well actually, we're having a lot of success extracting good information with our torture at the moment," or the government of Saudi Arabia to say, "Well, our economic growth's okay, thank you very much, considerably better than yours, so maybe we don't need to go ahead with this program on women's rights." The point about democracy is not instrumental. It's not about the things that it brings. The point about democracy is not that it delivers legitimate, effective, prosperous rule of law. It's not that it guarantees peace with itself or with its neighbors. The point about democracy is intrinsic. Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality and an idea of liberty. It reflects an idea of dignity, the dignity of the individual, the idea that each individual should have an equal vote, an equal say, in the formation of their government. But if we're really to make democracy vigorous again, if we're ready to revivify it, we need to get involved in a new project of the citizens and the politicians. Democracy is not simply a question of structures. It is a state of mind. It is an activity. And part of that activity is honesty. After I speak to you today, I'm going on a radio program called "Any Questions," and the thing you will have noticed about politicians on these kinds of radio programs is that they never, ever say that they don't know the answer to a question. It doesn't matter what it is. If you ask about child tax credits, the future of the penguins in the south Antarctic, asked to hold forth on whether or not the developments in Chongqing contribute to sustainable development in carbon capture, and we will have an answer for you. We need to stop that, to stop pretending to be omniscient beings. Politicians also need to learn, occasionally, to say that certain things that voters want, certain things that voters have been promised, may be things that we cannot deliver or perhaps that we feel we should not deliver. And the second thing we should do is understand the genius of our societies. Our societies have never been so educated, have never been so energized, have never been so healthy, have never known so much, cared so much, or wanted to do so much, and it is a genius of the local. One of the reasons why we're moving away from banqueting halls such as the one in which we stand, banqueting halls with extraordinary images on the ceiling of kings enthroned, the entire drama played out here on this space, where the King of England had his head lopped off, why we've moved from spaces like this, thrones like that, towards the town hall, is we're moving more and more towards the energies of our people, and we need to tap that. That can mean different things in different countries. In Britain, it could mean looking to the French, learning from the French, getting directly elected mayors in place in a French commune system. In Afghanistan, it could have meant instead of concentrating on the big presidential and parliamentary elections, we should have done what was in the Afghan constitution from the very beginning, which is to get direct local elections going at a district level and elect people's provincial governors. But for any of these things to work, the honesty in language, the local democracy, it's not just a question of what politicians do. It's a question of what the citizens do. For politicians to be honest, the public needs to allow them to be honest, and the media, which mediates between the politicians and the public, needs to allow those politicians to be honest. If local democracy is to flourish, it is about the active and informed engagement of every citizen. In other words, if democracy is to be rebuilt, is to become again vigorous and vibrant, it is necessary not just for the public to learn to trust their politicians, but for the politicians to learn to trust the public. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause) |
How open data is changing international aid | {0: 'Sanjay Pradhan is vice president of the World Bank Institute, helping leaders in developing countries learn skills for reform, development and good governance.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I grew up in Bihar, India's poorest state, and I remember when I was six years old, I remember coming home one day to find a cart full of the most delicious sweets at our doorstep. My brothers and I dug in, and that's when my father came home. He was livid, and I still remember how we cried when that cart with our half-eaten sweets was pulled away from us. Later, I understood why my father got so upset. Those sweets were a bribe from a contractor who was trying to get my father to award him a government contract. My father was responsible for building roads in Bihar, and he had developed a firm stance against corruption, even though he was harassed and threatened. His was a lonely struggle, because Bihar was also India's most corrupt state, where public officials were enriching themselves, [rather] than serving the poor who had no means to express their anguish if their children had no food or no schooling. And I experienced this most viscerally when I traveled to remote villages to study poverty. And as I went village to village, I remember one day, when I was famished and exhausted, and I was almost collapsing in a scorching heat under a tree, and just at that time, one of the poorest men in that village invited me into his hut and graciously fed me. Only I later realized that what he fed me was food for his entire family for two days. This profound gift of generosity challenged and changed the very purpose of my life. I resolved to give back. Later, I joined the World Bank, which sought to fight such poverty by transferring aid from rich to poor countries. My initial work focused on Uganda, where I focused on negotiating reforms with the Finance Ministry of Uganda so they could access our loans. But after we disbursed the loans, I remember a trip in Uganda where I found newly built schools without textbooks or teachers, new health clinics without drugs, and the poor once again without any voice or recourse. It was Bihar all over again. Bihar represents the challenge of development: abject poverty surrounded by corruption. Globally, 1.3 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day, and the work I did in Uganda represents the traditional approach to these problems that has been practiced since 1944, when winners of World War II, 500 founding fathers, and one lonely founding mother, gathered in New Hampshire, USA, to establish the Bretton Woods institutions, including the World Bank. And that traditional approach to development had three key elements. First, transfer of resources from rich countries in the North to poorer countries in the South, accompanied by reform prescriptions. Second, the development institutions that channeled these transfers were opaque, with little transparency of what they financed or what results they achieved. And third, the engagement in developing countries was with a narrow set of government elites with little interaction with the citizens, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of development assistance. Today, each of these elements is opening up due to dramatic changes in the global environment. Open knowledge, open aid, open governance, and together, they represent three key shifts that are transforming development and that also hold greater hope for the problems I witnessed in Uganda and in Bihar. The first key shift is open knowledge. You know, developing countries today will not simply accept solutions that are handed down to them by the U.S., Europe or the World Bank. They get their inspiration, their hope, their practical know-how, from successful emerging economies in the South. They want to know how China lifted 500 million people out of poverty in 30 years, how Mexico's Oportunidades program improved schooling and nutrition for millions of children. This is the new ecosystem of open-knowledge flows, not just traveling North to South, but South to South, and even South to North, with Mexico's Oportunidades today inspiring New York City. And just as these North-to-South transfers are opening up, so too are the development institutions that channeled these transfers. This is the second shift: open aid. Recently, the World Bank opened its vault of data for public use, releasing 8,000 economic and social indicators for 200 countries over 50 years, and it launched a global competition to crowdsource innovative apps using this data. Development institutions today are also opening for public scrutiny the projects they finance. Take GeoMapping. In this map from Kenya, the red dots show where all the schools financed by donors are located, and the darker the shade of green, the more the number of out-of-school children. So this simple mashup reveals that donors have not financed any schools in the areas with the most out-of-school children, provoking new questions. Is development assistance targeting those who most need our help? In this manner, the World Bank has now GeoMapped 30,000 project activities in 143 countries, and donors are using a common platform to map all their projects. This is a tremendous leap forward in transparency and accountability of aid. And this leads me to the third, and in my view, the most significant shift in development: open governance. Governments today are opening up just as citizens are demanding voice and accountability. From the Arab Spring to the Anna Hazare movement in India, using mobile phones and social media not just for political accountability but also for development accountability. Are governments delivering services to the citizens? So for instance, several governments in Africa and Eastern Europe are opening their budgets to the public. But, you know, there is a big difference between a budget that's public and a budget that's accessible. This is a public budget. (Laughter) And as you can see, it's not really accessible or understandable to an ordinary citizen that is trying to understand how the government is spending its resources. To tackle this problem, governments are using new tools to visualize the budget so it's more understandable to the public. In this map from Moldova, the green color shows those districts that have low spending on schools but good educational outcomes, and the red color shows the opposite. Tools like this help turn a shelf full of inscrutable documents into a publicly understandable visual, and what's exciting is that with this openness, there are today new opportunities for citizens to give feedback and engage with government. So in the Philippines today, parents and students can give real-time feedback on a website, Checkmyschool.org, or using SMS, whether teachers and textbooks are showing up in school, the same problems I witnessed in Uganda and in Bihar. And the government is responsive. So for instance, when it was reported on this website that 800 students were at risk because school repairs had stalled due to corruption, the Department of Education in the Philippines took swift action. And you know what's exciting is that this innovation is now spreading South to South, from the Philippines to Indonesia, Kenya, Moldova and beyond. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, even an impoverished community was able to use these tools to voice its aspirations. This is what the map of Tandale looked like in August, 2011. But within a few weeks, university students were able to use mobile phones and an open-source platform to dramatically map the entire community infrastructure. And what is very exciting is that citizens were then able to give feedback as to which health or water points were not working, aggregated in the red bubbles that you see, which together provides a graphic visual of the collective voices of the poor. Today, even Bihar is turning around and opening up under a committed leadership that is making government transparent, accessible and responsive to the poor. But, you know, in many parts of the world, governments are not interested in opening up or in serving the poor, and it is a real challenge for those who want to change the system. These are the lonely warriors like my father and many, many others, and a key frontier of development work is to help these lonely warriors join hands so they can together overcome the odds. So for instance, today, in Ghana, courageous reformers from civil society, Parliament and government, have forged a coalition for transparent contracts in the oil sector, and, galvanized by this, reformers in Parliament are now investigating dubious contracts. These examples give new hope, new possibility to the problems I witnessed in Uganda or that my father confronted in Bihar. Two years ago, on April 8th, 2010, I called my father. It was very late at night, and at age 80, he was typing a 70-page public interest litigation against corruption in a road project. Though he was no lawyer, he argued the case in court himself the next day. He won the ruling, but later that very evening, he fell, and he died. He fought till the end, increasingly passionate that to combat corruption and poverty, not only did government officials need to be honest, but citizens needed to join together to make their voices heard. These became the two bookends of his life, and the journey he traveled in between mirrored the changing development landscape. Today, I'm inspired by these changes, and I'm excited that at the World Bank, we are embracing these new directions, a significant departure from my work in Uganda 20 years ago. We need to radically open up development so knowledge flows in multiple directions, inspiring practitioners, so aid becomes transparent, accountable and effective, so governments open up and citizens are engaged and empowered with reformers in government. We need to accelerate these shifts. If we do, we will find that the collective voices of the poor will be heard in Bihar, in Uganda, and beyond. We will find that textbooks and teachers will show up in schools for their children. We will find that these children, too, have a real chance of breaking their way out of poverty. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
The secret of the bat genome | {0: 'Emma Teeling, Director of the Centre for Irish Bat Research, thinks we have a lot to learn from the biology of bats.'} | TEDxDublin | What I want you all to do right now is to think of this mammal that I'm going to describe to you. The first thing I'm going to tell you about this mammal is that it is essential for our ecosystems to function correctly. If we remove this mammal from our ecosystems, they simply will not work. That's the first thing. The second thing is that due to the unique sensory abilities of this mammal, if we study this mammal, we're going to get great insight into our diseases of the senses, such as blindness and deafness. And the third really intriguing aspect of this mammal is that I fully believe that the secret of everlasting youth lies deep within its DNA. So are you all thinking? So, magnificent creature, isn't it? Who here thought of a bat? Ah, I can see half the audience agrees with me, and I have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of you. So I have had the good fortune for the past 20 years to study these fascinating and beautiful mammals. One fifth of all living mammals is a bat, and they have very unique attributes. Bats as we know them have been around on this planet for about 64 million years. One of the most unique things that bats do as a mammal is that they fly. Now flight is an inherently difficult thing. Flight within vertebrates has only evolved three times: once in the bats, once in the birds, and once in the pterodactyls. And so with flight, it's very metabolically costly. Bats have learned and evolved how to deal with this. But one other extremely unique thing about bats is that they are able to use sound to perceive their environment. They use echolocation. Now, what I mean by echolocation — they emit a sound from their larynx out through their mouth or through their nose. This sound wave comes out and it reflects and echoes back off objects in their environment, and the bats then hear these echoes and they turn this information into an acoustic image. And this enables them to orient in complete darkness. Indeed, they do look very strange. We're humans. We're a visual species. When scientists first realized that bats were actually using sound to be able to fly and orient and move at night, we didn't believe it. For a hundred years, despite evidence to show that this is what they were doing, we didn't believe it. Now, if you look at this bat, it looks a little bit alien. Indeed, the very famous philosopher Thomas Nagel once said, "To truly experience an alien life form on this planet, you should lock yourself inside a room with a flying, echolocating bat in complete darkness." And if you look at the actual physical characteristics on the face of this beautiful horseshoe bat, you see a lot of these characteristics are dedicated to be able to make sound and perceive it. Very big ears, strange nose leaves, but teeny-tiny eyes. So again, if you just look at this bat, you realize sound is very important for its survival. Most bats look like the previous one. However, there are a group that do not use echolocation. They do not perceive their environment using sound, and these are the flying foxes. If anybody has ever been lucky enough to be in Australia, you've seen them coming out of the Botanic Gardens in Sydney, and if you just look at their face, you can see they have much, much larger eyes and much smaller ears. So among and within bats is a huge variation in their ability to use sensory perception. Now this is going to be important for what I'm going to tell you later during the talk. Now, if the idea of bats in your belfry terrifies you, and I know some people probably are feeling a little sick looking at very large images of bats, that's probably not that surprising, because here in Western culture, bats have been demonized. Really, of course the famous book "Dracula," written by a fellow Northside Dubliner Bram Stoker, probably is mainly responsible for this. However, I also think it's got to do with the fact that bats come out at night, and we don't really understand them. We're a little frightened by things that can perceive the world slightly differently than us. Bats are usually synonymous with some type of evil events. They are the perpetrators in horror movies, such as this famous "Nightwing." Also, if you think about it, demons always have bat wings, whereas birds, they typically — or angels have bird wings. Now, this is Western society, and what I hope to do tonight is to convince you of the Chinese traditional culture, that they perceive bats as creatures that bring good luck, and indeed, if you walk into a Chinese home, you may see an image such as this. This is considered the Five Blessings. The Chinese word for "bat" sounds like the Chinese word for "happiness," and they believe that bats bring wealth, health, longevity, virtue and serenity. And indeed, in this image, you have a picture of longevity surrounded by five bats. And what I want to do tonight is to talk to you and to show you that at least three of these blessings are definitely represented by a bat, and that if we study bats we will get nearer to getting each of these blessings. So, wealth — how can a bat possibly bring us wealth? Now as I said before, bats are essential for our ecosystems to function correctly. And why is this? Bats in the tropics are major pollinators of many plants. They also feed on fruit, and they disperse the seeds of these fruits. Bats are responsible for pollinating the tequila plant, and this is a multi-million dollar industry in Mexico. So indeed, we need them for our ecosystems to function properly. Without them, it's going to be a problem. But most bats are voracious insect predators. It's been estimated in the U.S., in a tiny colony of big brown bats, that they will feed on over a million insects a year, and in the United States of America, right now bats are being threatened by a disease known as white-nose syndrome. It's working its way slowly across the U.S. and wiping out populations of bats, and scientists have estimated that 1,300 metric tons of insects a year are now remaining in the ecosystems due to the loss of bats. Bats are also threatened in the U.S. by their attraction to wind farms. Again, right now bats are looking at a little bit of a problem. They're going to — They are very threatened in the United States of America alone. Now how can this help us? Well, it has been calculated that if we were to remove bats from the equation, we're going to have to then use insecticides to remove all those pest insects that feed on our agricultural crops. And for one year in the U.S. alone, it's estimated that it's going to cost 22 billion U.S. dollars, if we remove bats. So indeed, bats then do bring us wealth. They maintain the health of our ecosystems, and also they save us money. So again, that's the first blessing. Bats are important for our ecosystems. And what about the second? What about health? Inside every cell in your body lies your genome. Your genome is made up of your DNA, your DNA codes for proteins that enable you to function and interact and be as you are. Now since the new advancements in modern molecular technologies, it is now possible for us to sequence our own genome in a very rapid time and at a very, very reduced cost. Now when we've been doing this, we've realized that there's variations within our genome. So I want you to look at the person beside you. Just have a quick look. And what we need to realize is that every 300 base pairs in your DNA, you're a little bit different. And one of the grand challenges right now in modern molecular medicine is to work out whether this variation makes you more susceptible to diseases, or does this variation just make you different? Again, what does it mean here? What does this variation actually mean? So if we are to capitalize on all of this new molecular data and personalized genomic information that is coming online that we will be able to have in the next few years, we have to be able to differentiate between the two. So how do we do this? Well, I believe we just look at nature's experiments. So through natural selection, over time, mutations, variations that disrupt the function of a protein will not be tolerated over time. Evolution acts as a sieve. It sieves out the bad variation. And so therefore, if you look at the same region of a genome in many mammals that have been evolutionarily distant from each other and are also ecologically divergent, you will get a better understanding of what the evolutionary prior of that site is, i.e., if it is important for the mammal to function, for its survival, it will be the same in all of those different lineages, species, taxa. So therefore, if we were to do this, what we'd need to do is sequence that region in all these different mammals and ascertain if it's the same or if it's different. So if it is the same, this indicates that that site is important for a function, so a disease mutation should fall within that site. So in this case here, if all the mammals that we look at have a yellow-type genome at that site, it probably suggests that purple is bad. This could be even more powerful if you look at mammals that are doing things slightly differently. So say, for example, the region of the genome that I was looking at was a region that's important for vision. If we look at that region in mammals that don't see so well, such as bats, and we find that bats that don't see so well have the purple type, we know that this is probably what's causing this disease. So in my lab, we've been using bats to look at two different types of diseases of the senses. We're looking at blindness. Now why would you do this? Three hundred and fourteen million people are visually impaired, and 45 million of these are blind. So blindness is a big problem, and a lot of these blind disorders come from inherited diseases, so we want to try and better understand which mutations in the gene cause the disease. Also we look at deafness. One in every 1,000 newborn babies are deaf, and when we reach 80, over half of us will also have a hearing problem. Again, there's many underlying genetic causes for this. So what we've been doing in my lab is looking at these unique sensory specialists, the bats, and we have looked at genes that cause blindness when there's a defect in them, genes that cause deafness when there's a defect in them, and now we can predict which sites are most likely to cause disease. So bats are also important for our health, to enable us to better understand how our genome functions. So this is where we are right now, but what about the future? What about longevity? This is where we're going to go, and as I said before, I really believe that the secret of everlasting youth lies within the bat genome. So why should we be interested in aging at all? Well, really, this is a picture drawn from the 1500s of the Fountain of Youth. Aging is considered one of the most familiar, yet the least well-understood, aspects of all of biology, and really, since the dawn of civilization, mankind has sought to avoid it. But we are going to have to understand it a bit better. In Europe alone, by 2050, there is going to be a 70 percent increase of individuals over 65, and 170 percent increase in individuals over 80. As we age, we deteriorate, and this deterioration causes problems for our society, so we have to address it. So how could the secret of everlasting youth actually lie within the bat genome? Does anybody want to hazard a guess over how long this bat could live for? Who — put up your hands — who says two years? Nobody? One? How about 10 years? Some? How about 30? How about 40? Okay, it's a whole varied response. This bat is myotis brandtii. It's the longest-living bat. It lived for up to 42 years, and this bat's still alive in the wild today. But what would be so amazing about this? Well, typically, in mammals there is a relationship between body size, metabolic rate, and how long you can live for, and you can predict how long a mammal can live for given its body size. So typically, small mammals live fast, die young. Think of a mouse. But bats are very different. As you can see here on this graph, in blue, these are all other mammals, but bats can live up to nine times longer than expected despite having a really, really high metabolic rate, and the question is, how can they do that? There are 19 species of mammal that live longer than expected, given their body size, than man, and 18 of those are bats. So therefore, they must have something within their DNA that ables them to deal with the metabolic stresses, particularly of flight. They expend three times more energy than a mammal of the same size, but don't seem to suffer the consequences or the effects. So right now, in my lab, we're combining state-of-the-art bat field biology, going out and catching the long-lived bats, with the most up-to-date, modern molecular technology to understand better what it is that they do to stop aging as we do. And hopefully in the next five years, I'll be giving you a TEDTalk on that. Aging is a big problem for humanity, and I believe that by studying bats, we can uncover the molecular mechanisms that enable mammals to achieve extraordinary longevity. If we find out what they're doing, perhaps through gene therapy, we can enable us to do the same thing. Potentially, this means that we could halt aging or maybe even reverse it. Just imagine what that would be like. So really, I don't think we should be thinking of them as flying demons of the night, but more as our superheroes. And the reality is that bats can bring us so much benefit if we just look in the right place. They're good for our ecosystem, they allow us to understand how our genome functions, and they potentially hold the secret to everlasting youth. So tonight, when you walk out of here and you look up in the night skies, and you see this beautiful flying mammal, I want you to smile. Thank you. (Applause) |
Healthier men, one moustache at a time | {0: "A co-founder of Movember, Adam Garone aims to change the face of men's health. "} | TEDxToronto 2011 | I think the beautiful Malin [Akerman] put it perfectly. Every man deserves the opportunity to grow a little bit of luxury. Ladies and gentlemen, and more importantly, Mo Bros and Mo Sistas — (Laughter) — for the next 17 minutes, I'm going to share with you my Movember journey, and how, through that journey, we've redefined charity, we're redefining the way prostate cancer researchers are working together throughout the world, and I hope, through that process, that I inspire you to create something significant in your life, something significant that will go on and make this world a better place. So the most common question I get asked, and I'm going to answer it now so I don't have to do it over drinks tonight, is how did this come about? How did Movember start? Well, normally, a charity starts with the cause, and someone that is directly affected by a cause. They then go on to create an event, and beyond that, a foundation to support that. Pretty much in every case, that's how a charity starts. Not so with Movember. Movember started in a very traditional Australian way. It was on a Sunday afternoon. I was with my brother and a mate having a few beers, and I was watching the world go by, had a few more beers, and the conversation turned to '70s fashion — (Laughter) — and how everything manages to come back into style. And a few more beers, I said, "There has to be some stuff that hasn't come back." (Laughter) Then one more beer and it was, whatever happened to the mustache? Why hasn't that made a comeback? (Laughter) So then there was a lot more beers, and then the day ended with a challenge to bring the mustache back. (Laughter) So in Australia, "mo" is slang for mustache, so we renamed the month of November "Movember" and created some pretty basic rules, which still stand today. And they are: start the month clean-shaven, rock a mustache — not a beard, not a goatee, a mustache — for the 30 days of November, and then we agreed that we would come together at the end of the month, have a mustache-themed party, and award a prize for the best, and of course, the worst mustache. (Laughter) Now trust me, when you're growing a mustache back in 2003, and there were 30 of us back then, and this was before the ironic hipster mustache movement — (Laughter) — it created a lot of controversy. (Laughter) So my boss wouldn't let me go and see clients. My girlfriend at the time, who's no longer my girlfriend — (Laughter) — hated it. Parents would shuffle kids away from us. (Laughter) But we came together at the end of the month and we celebrated our journey, and it was a real journey. And we had a lot of fun, and in 2004, I said to the guys, "That was so much fun. We need to legitimize this so we can get away with it year on year." (Laughter) So we started thinking about that, and we were inspired by the women around us and all they were doing for breast cancer. And we thought, you know what, there's nothing for men's health. Why is that? Why can't we combine growing a mustache and doing something for men's health? And I started to research that topic, and discovered prostate cancer is the male equivalent of breast cancer in terms of the number of men that die from it and are diagnosed with it. But there was nothing for this cause, so we married growing a mustache with prostate cancer, and then we created our tagline, which is, "Changing the face of men's health." And that eloquently describes the challenge, changing your appearance for the 30 days, and also the outcome that we're trying to achieve: getting men engaged in their health, having them have a better understanding about the health risks that they face. So with that model, I then cold-called the CEO of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. I said to him, "I've got the most amazing idea that's going to transform your organization." (Laughter) And I didn't want to share with him the idea over the phone, so I convinced him to meet with me for coffee in Melbourne in 2004. And we sat down, and I shared with him my vision of getting men growing mustaches across Australia, raising awareness for this cause, and funds for his organization. And I needed a partnership to legitimately do that. And I said, "We're going to come together at the end, we're going to have a mustache-themed party, we're going to have DJs, we're going to celebrate life, and we're going to change the face of men's health." And he just looked at me and laughed, and he said, he said, "Adam, that's a really novel idea, but we're an ultraconservative organization. We can't have anything to do with you." (Laughter) So I paid for coffee that day — (Laughter) — and his parting comment as we shook hands was, "Listen, if you happen to raise any money out of this, we'll gladly take it." (Laughter) So my lesson that year was persistence. And we persisted, and we got 450 guys growing mustaches, and together we raised 54,000 dollars, and we donated every cent of that to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia, and that represented at the time the single biggest donation they'd ever received. So from that day forward, my life has become about a mustache. Every day — this morning, I wake up and go, my life is about a mustache. (Laughter) Essentially, I'm a mustache farmer. (Laughter) And my season is November. (Applause) (Applause) So in 2005, the campaign got more momentum, was more successful in Australia and then New Zealand, and then in 2006 we came to a pivotal point. It was consuming so much of our time after hours on weekends that we thought, we either need to close this down or figure a way to fund Movember so that I could quit my job and go and spend more time in the organization and take it to the next level. It's really interesting when you try and figure a way to fund a fundraising organization built off growing mustaches. (Laughter) Let me tell you that there's not too many people interested in investing in that, not even the Prostate Cancer Foundation, who we'd raised about 1.2 million dollars for at that stage. So again we persisted, and Foster's Brewing came to the party and gave us our first ever sponsorship, and that was enough for me to quit my job, I did consulting on the side. And leading into Movember 2006, we'd run through all the money from Foster's, we'd run through all the money I had, and essentially we had no money left, and we'd convinced all our suppliers — creative agencies, web development agencies, hosting companies, whatnot — to delay their billing until December. So we'd racked up at this stage about 600,000 dollars worth of debt. So if Movember 2006 didn't happen, the four founders, well, we would've been broke, we would've been homeless, sitting on the street with mustaches. (Laughter) But we thought, you know what, if that's the worst thing that happens, so what? We're going to have a lot of fun doing it, and it taught us the importance of taking risks and really smart risks. Then in early 2007, a really interesting thing happened. We had Mo Bros from Canada, from the U.S., and from the U.K. emailing us and calling us and saying, hey, there's nothing for prostate cancer. Bring this campaign to these countries. So we thought, why not? Let's do it. So I cold-called the CEO of Prostate Cancer Canada, and I said to him, "I have this most amazing concept." (Laughter) "It's going to transform your organization. I don't want to tell you about it now, but will you meet with me if I fly all the way to Toronto?" So I flew here, met down on Front Street East, and we sat in the boardroom, and I said, "Right, here's my vision of getting men growing mustaches all across Canada raising awareness and funds for your organization." And he looked at me and laughed and said, "Adam, sounds like a really novel idea, but we're an ultraconservative organization." (Laughter) I've heard this before. I know how it goes. But he said, "We will partner with you, but we're not going to invest in it. You need to figure a way to bring this campaign across here and make it work." So what we did was, we took some of the money that we raised in Australia to bring the campaign across to this country, the U.S, and the U.K., and we did that because we knew, if this was successful, we could raise infinitely more money globally than we could just in Australia. And that money fuels research, and that research will get us to a cure. And we're not about finding an Australian cure or a Canadian cure, we're about finding the cure. So in 2007, we brought the campaign across here, and it was, it set the stage for the campaign. It wasn't as successful as we thought it would be. We were sort of very gung ho with our success in Australia and New Zealand at that stage. So that year really taught us the importance of being patient and really understanding the local market before you become so bold as to set lofty targets. But what I'm really pleased to say is, in 2010, Movember became a truly global movement. Canada was just pipped to the post in terms of the number one fundraising campaign in the world. Last year we had 450,000 Mo Bros spread across the world and together we raised 77 million dollars. (Applause) And that makes Movember now the biggest funder of prostate cancer research and support programs in the world. And that is an amazing achievement when you think about us growing mustaches. (Laughter) And for us, we have redefined charity. Our ribbon is a hairy ribbon. (Laughter) Our ambassadors are the Mo Bros and the Mo Sistas, and I think that's been fundamental to our success. We hand across our brand and our campaign to those people. We let them embrace it and interpret it in their own way. So now I live in Los Angeles, because the Prostate Cancer Foundation of the U.S. is based there, and I always get asked by the media down there, because it's so celebrity-driven, "Who are your celebrity ambassadors?" And I say to them, "Last year we were fortunate enough to have 450,000 celebrity ambassadors." And they go, "What, what do you mean?" And it's like, everything single person, every single Mo Bro and Mo Sista that participates in Movember is our celebrity ambassador, and that is so, so important and fundamental to our success. Now what I want to share with you is one of my most touching Movember moments, and it happened here in Toronto last year, at the end of the campaign. I was out with a team. It was the end of Movember. We'd had a great campaign, and to be honest, we'd had our fair share of beer that night, but I said, "You know what, I think we've got one more bar left in us." (Laughter) So we piled into a taxi, and this is our taxi driver, and I was sitting in the back seat, and he turned around and said, "Where are you going?" And I said, "Hang on, that is an amazing mustache." (Laughter) And he said, "I'm doing it for Movember." And I said, "So am I." And I said, "Tell me your Movember story." And he goes, "Listen, I know it's about men's health, I know it's about prostate cancer, but this is for breast cancer." And I said, "Okay, that's interesting." And he goes, "Last year, my mom passed away from breast cancer in Sri Lanka, because we couldn't afford proper treatment for her," and he said, "This mustache is my tribute to my mom." And we sort of all choked up in the back of the taxi, and I didn't tell him who I was, because I didn't think it was appropriate, and I just shook his hand and I said, "Thank you so much. Your mom would be so proud." And from that moment I realized that Movember is so much more than a mustache, having a joke. It's about each person coming to this platform, embracing it in their own way, and being significant in their own life. For us now at Movember, we really focus on three program areas, and having a true impact: awareness and education, survivor support programs, and research. Now we always focus, naturally, on how much we raise, because it's a very tangible outcome, but for me, awareness and education is more important than the funds we raise, because I know that is changing and saving lives today, and it's probably best exampled by a young guy that I met at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, at the start of the year. He came up to me and said, "Thank you for starting Movember." And I said, "Thank you for doing Movember." And I looked at him, and I was like, "I'm pretty sure you can't grow a mustache." (Laughter) And I said, "What's your Movember story?" And he said, "I grew the worst mustache ever." (Laughter) "But I went home for Thanksgiving dinner, and pretty quickly the conversation around the table turned to what the hell was going on." (Laughter) "And we talked — I talked to them about Movember, and then after that, my dad came up to me, and at the age of 26, for the first time ever, I had a conversation with my dad one on one about men's health. I had a conversation with my dad about prostate cancer, and I learned that my grandfather had prostate cancer and I was able to share with my dad that he was twice as likely to get that disease, and he didn't know that, and he hadn't been getting screened for it." So now, that guy is getting screened for prostate cancer. So those conversations, getting men engaged in this, at whatever age, is so critically important, and in my view so much more important than the funds we raise. Now to the funds we raise, and research, and how we're redefining research. We fund prostate cancer foundations now in 13 countries. We literally fund hundreds if not thousands of institutions and researchers around the world, and when we looked at this more recently, we realized there's a real lack of collaboration going on even within institutions, let alone nationally, let alone globally, and this is not unique to prostate cancer. This is cancer research the world over. And so we said, right, we'd redefined charity. We need to redefine the way these guys operate. How do we do that? So what we did was, we created a global action plan, and we're taking 10 percent of what's raised in each country now and putting it into a global fund, and we've got the best prostate cancer scientific minds in the world that look after that fund, and they come together each year and identify the number one priority, and that, last year, was getting a better screening test. So they identified that as a priority, and then they've got and recruited now 300 researchers from around the world that are studying that topic, essentially the same topic. So now we're funding them to the tune of about five or six million dollars to collaborate and bringing them together, and that's a unique thing in the cancer world, and we know, through that collaboration, it will accelerate outcomes. And that's how we're redefining the research world. So, what I know about my Movember journey is that, with a really creative idea, with passion, with persistence, and a lot of patience, four mates, four mustaches, can inspire a room full of people, and that room full of people can go on and inspire a city, and that city is Melbourne, my home. And that city can go on and inspire a state, and that state can go on and inspire a nation, and beyond that, you can create a global movement that is changing the face of men's health. My name is Adam Garone, and that's my story. Thank you. (Applause) |
What I've learned from my autistic brothers | {0: 'Writer Faith Jegede Cole draws on her experiences growing up with two autistic brothers in order to spread awareness and understanding about this increasingly common diagnosis.'} | TED@London | Today I have just one request. Please don't tell me I'm normal. Now I'd like to introduce you to my brothers. Remi is 22, tall and very handsome. He's speechless, but he communicates joy in a way that some of the best orators cannot. Remi knows what love is. He shares it unconditionally and he shares it regardless. He's not greedy. He doesn't see skin color. He doesn't care about religious differences, and get this: He has never told a lie. When he sings songs from our childhood, attempting words that not even I could remember, he reminds me of one thing: how little we know about the mind, and how wonderful the unknown must be. Samuel is 16. He's tall. He's very handsome. He has the most impeccable memory. He has a selective one, though. He doesn't remember if he stole my chocolate bar, but he remembers the year of release for every song on my iPod, conversations we had when he was four, weeing on my arm on the first ever episode of Teletubbies, and Lady Gaga's birthday. Don't they sound incredible? But most people don't agree. And in fact, because their minds don't fit into society's version of normal, they're often bypassed and misunderstood. But what lifted my heart and strengthened my soul was that even though this was the case, although they were not seen as ordinary, this could only mean one thing: that they were extraordinary — autistic and extraordinary. Now, for you who may be less familiar with the term "autism," it's a complex brain disorder that affects social communication, learning and sometimes physical skills. It manifests in each individual differently, hence why Remi is so different from Sam. And across the world, every 20 minutes, one new person is diagnosed with autism, and although it's one of the fastest-growing developmental disorders in the world, there is no known cause or cure. And I cannot remember the first moment I encountered autism, but I cannot recall a day without it. I was just three years old when my brother came along, and I was so excited that I had a new being in my life. And after a few months went by, I realized that he was different. He screamed a lot. He didn't want to play like the other babies did, and in fact, he didn't seem very interested in me whatsoever. Remi lived and reigned in his own world, with his own rules, and he found pleasure in the smallest things, like lining up cars around the room and staring at the washing machine and eating anything that came in between. And as he grew older, he grew more different, and the differences became more obvious. Yet beyond the tantrums and the frustration and the never-ending hyperactivity was something really unique: a pure and innocent nature, a boy who saw the world without prejudice, a human who had never lied. Extraordinary. Now, I cannot deny that there have been some challenging moments in my family, moments where I've wished that they were just like me. But I cast my mind back to the things that they've taught me about individuality and communication and love, and I realize that these are things that I wouldn't want to change with normality. Normality overlooks the beauty that differences give us, and the fact that we are different doesn't mean that one of us is wrong. It just means that there's a different kind of right. And if I could communicate just one thing to Remi and to Sam and to you, it would be that you don't have to be normal. You can be extraordinary. Because autistic or not, the differences that we have — We've got a gift! Everyone's got a gift inside of us, and in all honesty, the pursuit of normality is the ultimate sacrifice of potential. The chance for greatness, for progress and for change dies the moment we try to be like someone else. Please — don't tell me I'm normal. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
Want to be happier? Stay in the moment | {0: 'Researcher Matt Killingsworth designs studies that gather data on happiness. One takeaway? "A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind."'} | TEDxCambridge | So, people want a lot of things out of life, but I think, more than anything else, they want happiness. Aristotle called happiness "the chief good," the end towards which all other things aim. According to this view, the reason we want a big house or a nice car or a good job isn't that these things are intrinsically valuable. It's that we expect them to bring us happiness. Now in the last 50 years, we Americans have gotten a lot of the things that we want. We're richer. We live longer. We have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. The paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically, we haven't actually gotten any happier. Maybe because these conventional notions of progress haven't delivered big benefits in terms of happiness, there's been an increased interest in recent years in happiness itself. People have been debating the causes of happiness for a really long time, in fact for thousands of years, but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved. Well, as with many other domains in life, I think the scientific method has the potential to answer this question. In fact, in the last few years, there's been an explosion in research on happiness. For example, we've learned a lot about its demographics, how things like income and education, gender and marriage relate to it. But one of the puzzles this has revealed is that factors like these don't seem to have a particularly strong effect. Yes, it's better to make more money rather than less, or to graduate from college instead of dropping out, but the differences in happiness tend to be small. Which leaves the question, what are the big causes of happiness? I think that's a question we haven't really answered yet, but I think something that has the potential to be an answer is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences. It certainly seems that we're going about our lives, that what we're doing, who we're with, what we're thinking about, have a big influence on our happiness, and yet these are the very factors that have been very difficult, in fact almost impossible, for scientists to study. A few years ago, I came up with a way to study people's happiness moment to moment as they're going about their daily lives on a massive scale all over the world, something we'd never been able to do before. Called trackyourhappiness.org, it uses the iPhone to monitor people's happiness in real time. How does this work? Basically, I send people signals at random points throughout the day, and then I ask them a bunch of questions about their moment-to-moment experience at the instant just before the signal. The idea is that, if we can watch how people's happiness goes up and down over the course of the day, minute to minute in some cases, and try to understand how what people are doing, who they're with, what they're thinking about, and all the other factors that describe our day, how those might relate to those changes in happiness, we might be able to discover some of the things that really have a big influence on happiness. We've been fortunate with this project to collect quite a lot of data, a lot more data of this kind than I think has ever been collected before, over 650,000 real-time reports from over 15,000 people. And it's not just a lot of people, it's a really diverse group, people from a wide range of ages, from 18 to late 80s, a wide range of incomes, education levels, people who are married, divorced, widowed, etc. They collectively represent every one of 86 occupational categories and hail from over 80 countries. What I'd like to do with the rest of my time with you today is talk a little bit about one of the areas that we've been investigating, and that's mind-wandering. As human beings, we have this unique ability to have our minds stray away from the present. This guy is sitting here working on his computer, and yet he could be thinking about the vacation he had last month, wondering what he's going to have for dinner. Maybe he's worried that he's going bald. (Laughter) This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is really amazing. It allows us to learn and plan and reason in ways that no other species of animal can. And yet it's not clear what the relationship is between our use of this ability and our happiness. You've probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present. "Be here now," you've probably heard a hundred times. Maybe, to really be happy, we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment. Maybe these people are right. Maybe mind-wandering is a bad thing. On the other hand, when our minds wander, they're unconstrained. We can't change the physical reality in front of us, but we can go anywhere in our minds. Since we know people want to be happy, maybe when our minds wander, they're going to someplace happier than the place that they're leaving. It would make a lot of sense. In other words, maybe the pleasures of the mind allow us to increase our happiness with mind-wandering. Well, since I'm a scientist, I'd like to try to resolve this debate with some data, and in particular I'd like to present some data to you from three questions that I ask with Track Your Happiness. Remember, this is from sort of moment-to-moment experience in people's real lives. There are three questions. The first one is a happiness question: How do you feel, on a scale ranging from very bad to very good? Second, an activity question: What are you doing, on a list of 22 different activities including things like eating and working and watching TV? And finally a mind-wandering question: Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing? People could say no — in other words, I'm focused only on my task — or yes — I am thinking about something else — and the topic of those thoughts are pleasant, neutral or unpleasant. Any of those yes responses are what we called mind-wandering. So what did we find? This graph shows happiness on the vertical axis, and you can see that bar there representing how happy people are when they're focused on the present, when they're not mind-wandering. As it turns out, people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they're not. Now you might look at this result and say, okay, sure, on average people are less happy when they're mind-wandering, but surely when their minds are straying away from something that wasn't very enjoyable to begin with, at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us. Nope. As it turns out, people are less happy when they're mind-wandering no matter what they're doing. For example, people don't really like commuting to work very much. It's one of their least enjoyable activities, and yet they are substantially happier when they're focused only on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else. It's amazing. So how could this be happening? I think part of the reason, a big part of the reason, is that when our minds wander, we often think about unpleasant things, and they are enormously less happy when they do that, our worries, our anxieties, our regrets, and yet even when people are thinking about something neutral, they're still considerably less happy than when they're not mind-wandering at all. Even when they're thinking about something they would describe as pleasant, they're actually just slightly less happy than when they aren't mind-wandering. If mind-wandering were a slot machine, it would be like having the chance to lose 50 dollars, 20 dollars or one dollar. Right? You'd never want to play. (Laughter) So I've been talking about this, suggesting, perhaps, that mind-wandering causes unhappiness, but all I've really shown you is that these two things are correlated. It's possible that's the case, but it might also be the case that when people are unhappy, then they mind-wander. Maybe that's what's really going on. How could we ever disentangle these two possibilites? Well, one fact that we can take advantage of, I think a fact you'll all agree is true, is that time goes forward, not backward. Right? The cause has to come before the effect. We're lucky in this data we have many responses from each person, and so we can look and see, does mind-wandering tend to precede unhappiness, or does unhappiness tend to precede mind-wandering, to get some insight into the causal direction. As it turns out, there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now and being unhappy a short time later, consistent with the idea that mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy. In contrast, there's no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering a short time later. In other words, mind-wandering very likely seems to be an actual cause, and not merely a consequence, of unhappiness. A few minutes ago, I likened mind-wandering to a slot machine you'd never want to play. Well, how often do people's minds wander? Turns out, they wander a lot. In fact, really a lot. Forty-seven percent of the time, people are thinking about something other than what they're currently doing. How does that depend on what people are doing? This shows the rate of mind-wandering across 22 activities ranging from a high of 65 percent — (Laughter) — when people are taking a shower, brushing their teeth, to 50 percent when they're working, to 40 percent when they're exercising, all the way down to this one short bar on the right that I think some of you are probably laughing at. Ten percent of the time people's minds are wandering when they're having sex. (Laughter) But there's something I think that's quite interesting in this graph, and that is, basically with one exception, no matter what people are doing, they're mind-wandering at least 30 percent of the time, which suggests, I think, that mind-wandering isn't just frequent, it's ubiquitous. It pervades basically everything that we do. In my talk today, I've told you a little bit about mind-wandering, a variable that I think turns out to be fairly important in the equation for happiness. My hope is that over time, by tracking people's moment-to-moment happiness and their experiences in daily life, we'll be able to uncover a lot of important causes of happiness, and then in the end, a scientific understanding of happiness will help us create a future that's not only richer and healthier, but happier as well. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
A new mission for veterans -- disaster relief | {0: 'Jake Wood runs Team Rubicon, a nationwide nonprofit that provides military veterans with the opportunity to continue their service by responding to natural disasters and global crises.'} | TEDxSanDiego | Two years ago, after having served four years in the United States Marine Corps and deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, I found myself in Port-au-Prince, leading a team of veterans and medical professionals in some of the hardest-hit areas of that city, three days after the earthquake. We were going to the places that nobody else wanted to go, the places nobody else could go, and after three weeks, we realized something. Military veterans are very, very good at disaster response. And coming home, my cofounder and I, we looked at it, and we said, there are two problems. The first problem is there's inadequate disaster response. It's slow. It's antiquated. It's not using the best technology, and it's not using the best people. The second problem that we became aware of was a very inadequate veteran reintegration, and this is a topic that is front page news right now as veterans are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and they're struggling to reintegrate into civilian life. And we sat here and we looked at these two problems, and finally we came to a realization. These aren't problems. These are actually solutions. And what do I mean by that? Well, we can use disaster response as an opportunity for service for the veterans coming home. Recent surveys show that 92 percent of veterans want to continue their service when they take off their uniform. And we can use veterans to improve disaster response. Now on the surface, this makes a lot of sense, and in 2010, we responded to the tsunami in Chile, the floods in Pakistan, we sent training teams to the Thai-Burma border. But it was earlier this year, when one of our original members caused us to shift focus in the organization. This is Clay Hunt. Clay was a Marine with me. We served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clay was with us in Port-au-Prince. He was also with us in Chile. Earlier this year, in March, Clay took his own life. This was a tragedy, but it really forced us to refocus what it is that we were doing. You know, Clay didn't kill himself because of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clay killed himself because of what he lost when he came home. He lost purpose. He lost his community. And perhaps most tragically, he lost his self-worth. And so, as we evaluated, and as the dust settled from this tragedy, we realized that, of those two problems — in the initial iteration of our organization, we were a disaster response organization that was using veteran service. We had a lot of success, and we really felt like we were changing the disaster response paradigm. But after Clay, we shifted that focus, and suddenly, now moving forward, we see ourselves as a veteran service organization that's using disaster response. Because we think that we can give that purpose and that community and that self-worth back to the veteran. And tornadoes in Tuscaloosa and Joplin, and then later Hurricane Irene, gave us an opportunity to look at that. Now I want you to imagine for a second an 18-year-old boy who graduates from high school in Kansas City, Missouri. He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle. They send him to Iraq. Every day he leaves the wire with a mission. That mission is to defend the freedom of the family that he left at home. It's to keep the men around him alive. It's to pacify the village that he works in. He's got a purpose. But he comes home [to] Kansas City, Missouri, maybe he goes to college, maybe he's got a job, but he doesn't have that same sense of purpose. You give him a chainsaw. You send him to Joplin, Missouri after a tornado, he regains that. Going back, that same 18-year-old boy graduates from high school in Kansas City, Missouri, joins the Army, the Army gives him a rifle, they send him to Iraq. Every day he looks into the same sets of eyes around him. He leaves the wire. He knows that those people have his back. He's slept in the same sand. They've lived together. They've eaten together. They've bled together. He goes home to Kansas City, Missouri. He gets out of the military. He takes his uniform off. He doesn't have that community anymore. But you drop 25 of those veterans in Joplin, Missouri, they get that sense of community back. Again, you have an 18-year-old boy who graduates high school in Kansas City. He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle. They send him to Iraq. They pin a medal on his chest. He goes home to a ticker tape parade. He takes the uniform off. He's no longer Sergeant Jones in his community. He's now Dave from Kansas City. He doesn't have that same self-worth. But you send him to Joplin after a tornado, and somebody once again is walking up to him and shaking their hand and thanking them for their service, now they have self-worth again. I think it's very important, because right now somebody needs to step up, and this generation of veterans has the opportunity to do that if they are given the chance. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The beautiful nano details of our world | {0: 'Gary Greenberg is a photographer, biomedical researcher and inventor intent on giving us all a view of the microscopic wonders all around us.'} | TEDxMaui | So I want to talk a little bit about seeing the world from a totally unique point of view, and this world I'm going to talk about is the micro world. I've found, after doing this for many, many years, that there's a magical world behind reality. And that can be seen directly through a microscope, and I'm going to show you some of this today. So let's start off looking at something rather not-so-small, something that we can see with our naked eye, and that's a bee. So when you look at this bee, it's about this size here, it's about a centimeter. But to really see the details of the bee, and really appreciate what it is, you have to look a little bit closer. So that's just the eye of the bee with a microscope, and now all of a sudden you can see that the bee has thousands of individual eyes called ommatidia, and they actually have sensory hairs in their eyes so they know when they're right up close to something, because they can't see in stereo. As we go smaller, here is a human hair. A human hair is about the smallest thing that the eye can see. It's about a tenth of a millimeter. And as we go smaller again, about ten times smaller than that, is a cell. So you could fit 10 human cells across the diameter of a human hair. So when we would look at cells, this is how I really got involved in biology and science is by looking at living cells in the microscope. When I first saw living cells in a microscope, I was absolutely enthralled and amazed at what they looked like. So if you look at the cell like that from the immune system, they're actually moving all over the place. This cell is looking for foreign objects, bacteria, things that it can find. And it's looking around, and when it finds something, and recognizes it being foreign, it will actually engulf it and eat it. So if you look right there, it finds that little bacterium, and it engulfs it and eats it. If you take some heart cells from an animal, and put it in a dish, they'll just sit there and beat. That's their job. Every cell has a mission in life, and these cells, the mission is to move blood around our body. These next cells are nerve cells, and right now, as we see and understand what we're looking at, our brains and our nerve cells are actually doing this right now. They're not just static. They're moving around making new connections, and that's what happens when we learn. As you go farther down this scale here, that's a micron, or a micrometer, and we go all the way down to here to a nanometer and an angstrom. Now, an angstrom is the size of the diameter of a hydrogen atom. That's how small that is. And microscopes that we have today can actually see individual atoms. So these are some pictures of individual atoms. Each bump here is an individual atom. This is a ring of cobalt atoms. So this whole world, the nano world, this area in here is called the nano world, and the nano world, the whole micro world that we see, there's a nano world that is wrapped up within that, and the whole — and that is the world of molecules and atoms. But I want to talk about this larger world, the world of the micro world. So if you were a little tiny bug living in a flower, what would that flower look like, if the flower was this big? It wouldn't look or feel like anything that we see when we look at a flower. So if you look at this flower here, and you're a little bug, if you're on that surface of that flower, that's what the terrain would look like. The petal of that flower looks like that, so the ant is kind of crawling over these objects, and if you look a little bit closer at this stigma and the stamen here, this is the style of that flower, and you notice that it's got these little — these are like little jelly-like things that are what are called spurs. These are nectar spurs. So this little ant that's crawling here, it's like it's in a little Willy Wonka land. It's like a little Disneyland for them. It's not like what we see. These are little bits of individual grain of pollen there and there, and here is a — what you see as one little yellow dot of pollen, when you look in a microscope, it's actually made of thousands of little grains of pollen. So this, for example, when you see bees flying around these little plants, and they're collecting pollen, those pollen grains that they're collecting, they pack into their legs and they take it back to the hive, and that's what makes the beehive, the wax in the beehive. And they're also collecting nectar, and that's what makes the honey that we eat. Here's a close-up picture, or this is actually a regular picture of a water hyacinth, and if you had really, really good vision, with your naked eye, you'd see it about that well. There's the stamen and the pistil. But look what the stamen and the pistil look like in a microscope. That's the stamen. So that's thousands of little grains of pollen there, and there's the pistil there, and these are the little things called trichomes. And that's what makes the flower give a fragrance, and plants actually communicate with one another through their fragrances. I want to talk about something really ordinary, just ordinary sand. I became interested in sand about 10 years ago, when I first saw sand from Maui, and in fact, this is a little bit of sand from Maui. So sand is about a tenth of a millimeter in size. Each sand grain is about a tenth of a millimeter in size. But when you look closer at this, look at what's there. It's really quite amazing. You have microshells there. You have things like coral. You have fragments of other shells. You have olivine. You have bits of a volcano. There's a little bit of a volcano there. You have tube worms. An amazing array of incredible things exist in sand. And the reason that is, is because in a place like this island, a lot of the sand is made of biological material because the reefs provide a place where all these microscopic animals or macroscopic animals grow, and when they die, their shells and their teeth and their bones break up and they make grains of sand, things like coral and so forth. So here's, for example, a picture of sand from Maui. This is from Lahaina, and when we're walking along a beach, we're actually walking along millions of years of biological and geological history. We don't realize it, but it's actually a record of that entire ecology. So here we see, for example, a sponge spicule, two bits of coral here, that's a sea urchin spine. Really some amazing stuff. So when I first looked at this, I was — I thought, gee, this is like a little treasure trove here. I couldn't believe it, and I'd go around dissecting the little bits out and making photographs of them. Here's what most of the sand in our world looks like. These are quartz crystals and feldspar, so most sand in the world on the mainland is made of quartz crystal and feldspar. It's the erosion of granite rock. So mountains are built up, and they erode away by water and rain and ice and so forth, and they become grains of sand. There's some sand that's really much more colorful. These are sand from near the Great Lakes, and you can see that it's filled with minerals like pink garnet and green epidote, all kinds of amazing stuff, and if you look at different sands from different places, every single beach, every single place you look at sand, it's different. Here's from Big Sur, like they're little jewels. There are places in Africa where they do the mining of jewels, and you go to the sand where the rivers have the sand go down to the ocean, and it's like literally looking at tiny jewels through the microscope. So every grain of sand is unique. Every beach is different. Every single grain is different. There are no two grains of sand alike in the world. Every grain of sand is coming somewhere and going somewhere. They're like a snapshot in time. Now sand is not only on Earth, but sand is ubiquitous throughout the universe. In fact, outer space is filled with sand, and that sand comes together to make our planets and the Moon. And you can see those in micrometeorites. This is some micrometeorites that the Army gave me, and they get these out of the drinking wells in the South Pole. And they're quite amazing-looking, and these are the tiny constituents that make up the world that we live in — the planets and the Moon. So NASA wanted me to take some pictures of Moon sand, so they sent me sand from all the different landings of the Apollo missions that happened 40 years ago. And I started taking pictures with my three-dimensional microscopes. This was the first picture I took. It was kind of amazing. I thought it looked kind of a little bit like the Moon, which is sort of interesting. Now, the way my microscopes work is, normally in a microscope you can see very little at one time, so what you have to do is you have to refocus the microscope, keep taking pictures, and then I have a computer program that puts all those pictures together into one picture so you can see actually what it looks like, and I do that in 3D. So there, you can see, is a left-eye view. There's a right-eye view. So sort of left-eye view, right-eye view. Now something's interesting here. This looks very different than any sand on Earth that I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of sand on Earth, believe me. (Laughter) Look at this hole in the middle. That hole was caused by a micrometeorite hitting the Moon. Now, the Moon has no atmosphere, so micrometeorites come in continuously, and the whole surface of the Moon is covered with powder now, because for four billion years it's been bombarded by micrometeorites, and when micrometeorites come in at about 20 to 60,000 miles an hour, they vaporize on contact. And you can see here that that is — that's sort of vaporized, and that material is holding this little clump of little sand grains together. This is a very small grain of sand, this whole thing. And that's called a ring agglutinate. And many of the grains of sand on the Moon look like that, and you'd never find that on Earth. Most of the sand on the Moon, especially — and you know when you look at the Moon, there's the dark areas and the light areas. The dark areas are lava flows. They're basaltic lava flows, and that's what this sand looks like, very similar to the sand that you would see in Haleakala. Other sands, when these micrometeorites come in, they vaporize and they make these fountains, these microscopic fountains that go up into the — I was going to say "up into the air," but there is no air — goes sort of up, and these microscopic glass beads are formed instantly, and they harden, and by the time they fall down back to the surface of the Moon, they have these beautiful colored glass spherules. And these are actually microscopic; you need a microscope to see these. Now here's a grain of sand that is from the Moon, and you can see that the entire crystal structure is still there. This grain of sand is probably about three and a half or four billion years old, and it's never eroded away like the way we have sand on Earth erodes away because of water and tumbling, air, and so forth. All you can see is a little bit of erosion down here by the Sun, has these solar storms, and that's erosion by solar radiation. So what I've been trying to tell you today is things even as ordinary as a grain of sand can be truly extraordinary if you look closely and if you look from a different and a new point of view. I think that this was best put by William Blake when he said, "To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." Thank you. (Applause) |
The tragedy of orphanages | {0: 'Georgette Mulheir is a pioneer for the movement to end child abuse in the form of orphanages.'} | TEDSalon London Spring 2012 | Across Europe and Central Asia, approximately one million children live in large residential institutions, usually known as orphanages. Most people imagine orphanages as a benign environment that care for children. Others know more about the living conditions there, but still think they're a necessary evil. After all, where else would we put all of those children who don't have any parents? But 60 years of research has demonstrated that separating children from their families and placing them in large institutions seriously harms their health and development, and this is particularly true for young babies. As we know, babies are born without their full muscle development, and that includes the brain. During the first three years of life, the brain grows to its full size, with most of that growth taking place in the first six months. The brain develops in response to experience and to stimulation. Every time a young baby learns something new — to focus its eyes, to mimic a movement or a facial expression, to pick something up, to form a word or to sit up — new synaptic connections are being built in the brain. New parents are astonished by the rapidity of this learning. They are quite rightly amazed and delighted by their children's cleverness. They communicate their delight to their children, who respond with smiles, and a desire to achieve more and to learn more. This forming of the powerful attachment between child and parent provides the building blocks for physical, social, language, cognitive and psychomotor development. It is the model for all future relationships with friends, with partners and with their own children. It happens so naturally in most families that we don't even notice it. Most of us are unaware of its importance to human development and, by extension, to the development of a healthy society. And it's only when it goes wrong that we start to realize the importance of families to children. In August, 1993, I had my first opportunity to witness on a massive scale the impact on children of institutionalization and the absence of parenting. Those of us who remember the newspaper reports that came out of Romania after the 1989 revolution will recall the horrors of the conditions in some of those institutions. I was asked to help the director of a large institution to help prevent the separation of children from their families. Housing 550 babies, this was Ceausescu's show orphanage, and so I'd been told the conditions were much better. Having worked with lots of young children, I expected the institution to be a riot of noise, but it was as silent as a convent. It was hard to believe there were any children there at all, yet the director showed me into room after room, each containing row upon row of cots, in each of which lay a child staring into space. In a room of 40 newborns, not one of them was crying. Yet I could see soiled nappies, and I could see that some of the children were distressed, but the only noise was a low, continuous moan. The head nurse told me proudly, "You see, our children are very well-behaved." Over the next few days, I began to realize that this quietness was not exceptional. The newly admitted babies would cry for the first few hours, but their demands were not met, and so eventually they learned not to bother. Within a few days, they were listless, lethargic, and staring into space like all the others. Over the years, many people and news reports have blamed the personnel in the institutions for the harm caused to the children, but often, one member of staff is caring for 10, 20, and even 40 children. Hence they have no option but to implement a regimented program. The children must be woken at 7 and fed at 7:30. At 8, their nappies must be changed, so a staff member may have only 30 minutes to feed 10 or 20 children. If a child soils its nappy at 8:30, he will have to wait several hours before it can be changed again. The child's daily contact with another human being is reduced to a few hurried minutes of feeding and changing, and otherwise their only stimulation is the ceiling, the walls or the bars of their cots. Since my first visit to Ceausescu's institution, I've seen hundreds of such places across 18 countries, from the Czech Republic to Sudan. Across all of these diverse lands and cultures, the institutions, and the child's journey through them, is depressingly similar. Lack of stimulation often leads to self-stimulating behaviors like hand-flapping, rocking back and forth, or aggression, and in some institutions, psychiatric drugs are used to control the behavior of these children, whilst in others, children are tied up to prevent them from harming themselves or others. These children are quickly labeled as having disabilities and transferred to another institution for children with disabilities. Most of these children will never leave the institution again. For those without disabilities, at age three, they're transferred to another institution, and at age seven, to yet another. Segregated according to age and gender, they are arbitrarily separated from their siblings, often without even a chance to say goodbye. There's rarely enough to eat. They are often hungry. The older children bully the little ones. They learn to survive. They learn to defend themselves, or they go under. When they leave the institution, they find it really difficult to cope and to integrate into society. In Moldova, young women raised in institutions are 10 times more likely to be trafficked than their peers, and a Russian study found that two years after leaving institutions, young adults, 20 percent of them had a criminal record, 14 percent were involved in prostitution, and 10 percent had taken their own lives. But why are there so many orphans in Europe when there hasn't been a great deal of war or disaster in recent years? In fact, more than 95 percent of these children have living parents, and societies tend to blame these parents for abandoning these children, but research shows that most parents want their children, and that the primary drivers behind institutionalization are poverty, disability and ethnicity. Many countries have not developed inclusive schools, and so even children with a very mild disability are sent away to a residential special school, at age six or seven. The institution may be hundreds of miles away from the family home. If the family's poor, they find it difficult to visit, and gradually the relationship breaks down. Behind each of the million children in institutions, there is usually a story of parents who are desperate and feel they've run out of options, like Natalia in Moldova, who only had enough money to feed her baby, and so had to send her older son to the institution; or Desi, in Bulgaria, who looked after her four children at home until her husband died, but then she had to go out to work full time, and with no support, felt she had no option but to place a child with disabilities in an institution; or the countless young girls too terrified to tell their parents they're pregnant, who leave their babies in a hospital; or the new parents, the young couple who have just found out that their firstborn child has a disability, and instead of being provided with positive messages about their child's potential, are told by the doctors, "Forget her, leave her in the institution, go home and make a healthy one." This state of affairs is neither necessary nor is it inevitable. Every child has the right to a family, deserves and needs a family, and children are amazingly resilient. We find that if we get them out of institutions and into loving families early on, they recover their developmental delays, and go on to lead normal, happy lives. It's also much cheaper to provide support to families than it is to provide institutions. One study suggests that a family support service costs 10 percent of an institutional placement, whilst good quality foster care costs usually about 30 percent. If we spend less on these children but on the right services, we can take the savings and reinvest them in high quality residential care for those few children with extremely complex needs. Across Europe, a movement is growing to shift the focus and transfer the resources from large institutions that provide poor quality care to community-based services that protect children from harm and allow them to develop to their full potential. When I first started to work in Romania nearly 20 years ago, there were 200,000 children living in institutions, and more entering every day. Now, there are less than 10,000, and family support services are provided across the country. In Moldova, despite extreme poverty and the terrible effects of the global financial crisis, the numbers of children in institutions has reduced by more than 50 percent in the last five years, and the resources are being redistributed to family support services and inclusive schools. Many countries have developed national action plans for change. The European Commission and other major donors are finding ways to divert money from institutions towards family support, empowering communities to look after their own children. But there is still much to be done to end the systematic institutionalization of children. Awareness-raising is required at every level of society. People need to know the harm that institutions cause to children, and the better alternatives that exist. If we know people who are planning to support orphanages, we should convince them to support family services instead. Together, this is the one form of child abuse that we could eradicate in our lifetime. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
The future of lying | {0: 'Jeff Hancock studies how we interact by email, text message and social media blips, seeking to understand how technology mediates communication.'} | TEDxWinnipeg | Let me tell you, it has been a fantastic month for deception. And I'm not even talking about the American presidential race. (Laughter) We have a high-profile journalist caught for plagiarism, a young superstar writer whose book involves so many made up quotes that they've pulled it from the shelves; a New York Times exposé on fake book reviews. It's been fantastic. Now, of course, not all deception hits the news. Much of the deception is everyday. In fact, a lot of research shows that we all lie once or twice a day, as Dave suggested. So it's about 6:30 now, suggests that most of us should have lied. Let's take a look at Winnipeg. How many of you, in the last 24 hours — think back — have told a little fib, or a big one? How many have told a little lie out there? All right, good. These are all the liars. Make sure you pay attention to them. (Laughter) No, that looked good, it was about two thirds of you. The other third didn't lie, or perhaps forgot, or you're lying to me about your lying, which is very, very devious. (Laughter) This fits with a lot of the research, which suggests that lying is very pervasive. It's this pervasiveness, combined with the centrality to what it means to be a human, the fact that we can tell the truth or make something up, that has fascinated people throughout history. Here we have Diogenes with his lantern. Does anybody know what he was looking for? A single honest man, and he died without finding one back in Greece. And we have Confucius in the East who was really concerned with sincerity, not only that you walked the walk or talked the talk, but that you believed in what you were doing. You believed in your principles. Now my first professional encounter with deception is a little bit later than these guys, a couple thousand years. I was a customs officer for Canada back in the mid-'90s. Yeah. I was defending Canada's borders. You may think that's a weapon right there. In fact, that's a stamp. I used a stamp to defend Canada's borders. (Laughter) Very Canadian of me. I learned a lot about deception while doing my duty here in customs, one of which was that most of what I thought I knew about deception was wrong, and I'll tell you about some of that tonight. But even since just 1995, '96, the way we communicate has been completely transformed. We email, we text, we skype, we Facebook. It's insane. Almost every aspect of human communication's been changed, and of course that's had an impact on deception. Let me tell you a little bit about a couple of new deceptions we've been tracking and documenting. They're called the Butler, the Sock Puppet and the Chinese Water Army. It sounds a little bit like a weird book, but actually they're all new types of lies. Let's start with the Butlers. Here's an example of one: "On my way." Anybody ever written, "On my way?" Then you've also lied. (Laughter) We're never on our way. We're thinking about going on our way. Here's another one: "Sorry I didn't respond to you earlier. My battery was dead." Your battery wasn't dead. You weren't in a dead zone. You just didn't want to respond to that person that time. Here's the last one: You're talking to somebody, and you say, "Sorry, got work, gotta go." But really, you're just bored. You want to talk to somebody else. Each of these is about a relationship, and this is a 24/7 connected world. Once you get my cell phone number, you can literally be in touch with me 24 hours a day. And so these lies are being used by people to create a buffer, like the butler used to do, between us and the connections to everybody else. But they're very special. They use ambiguity that comes from using technology. You don't know where I am or what I'm doing or who I'm with. And they're aimed at protecting the relationships. These aren't just people being jerks. These are people that are saying, look, I don't want to talk to you now, or I didn't want to talk to you then, but I still care about you. Our relationship is still important. Now, the Sock Puppet, on the other hand, is a totally different animal. The sock puppet isn't about ambiguity, per se. It's about identity. Let me give you a very recent example, as in, like, last week. Here's R.J. Ellory, best-seller author in Britain. Here's one of his bestselling books. Here's a reviewer online, on Amazon. My favorite, by Nicodemus Jones, is, "Whatever else it might do, it will touch your soul." And of course, you might suspect that Nicodemus Jones is R.J. Ellory. He wrote very, very positive reviews about himself. Surprise, surprise. Now this Sock Puppet stuff isn't actually that new. Walt Whitman also did this back in the day, before there was Internet technology. Sock Puppet becomes interesting when we get to scale, which is the domain of the Chinese Water Army. Chinese Water Army refers to thousands of people in China that are paid small amounts of money to produce content. It could be reviews. It could be propaganda. The government hires these people, companies hire them, all over the place. In North America, we call this Astroturfing, and Astroturfing is very common now. There's a lot of concerns about it. We see this especially with product reviews, book reviews, everything from hotels to whether that toaster is a good toaster or not. Now, looking at these three reviews, or these three types of deception, you might think, wow, the Internet is really making us a deceptive species, especially when you think about the Astroturfing, where we can see deception brought up to scale. But actually, what I've been finding is very different from that. Now, let's put aside the online anonymous sex chatrooms, which I'm sure none of you have been in. I can assure you there's deception there. And let's put aside the Nigerian prince who's emailed you about getting the 43 million out of the country. (Laughter) Let's forget about that guy, too. Let's focus on the conversations between our friends and our family and our coworkers and our loved ones. Those are the conversations that really matter. What does technology do to deception with those folks? Here's a couple of studies. One of the studies we do are called diary studies, in which we ask people to record all of their conversations and all of their lies for seven days, and what we can do then is calculate how many lies took place per conversation within a medium, and the finding that we get that surprises people the most is that email is the most honest of those three media. And it really throws people for a loop because we think, well, there's no nonverbal cues, so why don't you lie more? The phone, in contrast, the most lies. Again and again and again we see the phone is the device that people lie on the most, and perhaps because of the Butler Lie ambiguities I was telling you about. This tends to be very different from what people expect. What about résumés? We did a study in which we had people apply for a job, and they could apply for a job either with a traditional paper résumé, or on LinkedIn, which is a social networking site like Facebook, but for professionals — involves the same information as a résumé. And what we found, to many people's surprise, was that those LinkedIn résumés were more honest on the things that mattered to employers, like your responsibilities or your skills at your previous job. How about Facebook itself? You know, we always think that hey, there are these idealized versions, people are just showing the best things that happened in their lives. I've thought that many times. My friends, no way they can be that cool and have good of a life. Well, one study tested this by examining people's personalities. They had four good friends of a person judge their personality. Then they had strangers, many strangers, judge the person's personality just from Facebook, and what they found was those judgments of the personality were pretty much identical, highly correlated, meaning that Facebook profiles really do reflect our actual personality. All right, well, what about online dating? I mean, that's a pretty deceptive space. I'm sure you all have "friends" that have used online dating. (Laughter) And they would tell you about that guy that had no hair when he came, or the woman that didn't look at all like her photo. Well, we were really interested in it, and so what we did is we brought people, online daters, into the lab, and then we measured them. We got their height up against the wall, we put them on a scale, got their weight — ladies loved that — and then we actually got their driver's license to get their age. And what we found was very, very interesting. Here's an example of the men and the height. Along the bottom is how tall they said they were in their profile. Along the y-axis, the vertical axis, is how tall they actually were. That diagonal line is the truth line. If their dot's on it, they were telling exactly the truth. Now, as you see, most of the little dots are below the line. What it means is all the guys were lying about their height. In fact, they lied about their height about nine tenths of an inch, what we say in the lab as "strong rounding up." (Laughter) You get to 5'8" and one tenth, and boom! 5'9". But what's really important here is, look at all those dots. They are clustering pretty close to the truth. What we found was 80 percent of our participants did indeed lie on one of those dimensions, but they always lied by a little bit. One of the reasons is pretty simple. If you go to a date, a coffee date, and you're completely different than what you said, game over. Right? So people lied frequently, but they lied subtly, not too much. They were constrained. Well, what explains all these studies? What explains the fact that despite our intuitions, mine included, a lot of online communication, technologically-mediated communication, is more honest than face to face? That really is strange. How do we explain this? Well, to do that, one thing is we can look at the deception-detection literature. It's a very old literature by now, it's coming up on 50 years. It's been reviewed many times. There's been thousands of trials, hundreds of studies, and there's some really compelling findings. The first is, we're really bad at detecting deception, really bad. Fifty-four percent accuracy on average when you have to tell if somebody that just said a statement is lying or not. That's really bad. Why is it so bad? Well it has to do with Pinocchio's nose. If I were to ask you guys, what do you rely on when you're looking at somebody and you want to find out if they're lying? What cue do you pay attention to? Most of you would say that one of the cues you look at is the eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul. And you're not alone. Around the world, almost every culture, one of the top cues is eyes. But the research over the last 50 years says there's actually no reliable cue to deception, which blew me away, and it's one of the hard lessons that I learned when I was customs officer. The eyes do not tell us whether somebody's lying or not. Some situations, yes — high stakes, maybe their pupils dilate, their pitch goes up, their body movements change a little bit, but not all the time, not for everybody, it's not reliable. Strange. The other thing is that just because you can't see me doesn't mean I'm going to lie. It's common sense, but one important finding is that we lie for a reason. We lie to protect ourselves or for our own gain or for somebody else's gain. So there are some pathological liars, but they make up a tiny portion of the population. We lie for a reason. Just because people can't see us doesn't mean we're going to necessarily lie. But I think there's actually something much more interesting and fundamental going on here. The next big thing for me, the next big idea, we can find by going way back in history to the origins of language. Most linguists agree that we started speaking somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That's a long time ago. A lot of humans have lived since then. We've been talking, I guess, about fires and caves and saber-toothed tigers. I don't know what they talked about, but they were doing a lot of talking, and like I said, there's a lot of humans evolving speaking, about 100 billion people in fact. What's important though is that writing only emerged about 5,000 years ago. So what that means is that all the people before there was any writing, every word that they ever said, every utterance disappeared. No trace. Evanescent. Gone. So we've been evolving to talk in a way in which there is no record. In fact, even the next big change to writing was only 500 years ago now, with the printing press, which is very recent in our past, and literacy rates remained incredibly low right up until World War II, so even the people of the last two millennia, most of the words they ever said — poof! — disappeared. Let's turn to now, the networked age. How many of you have recorded something today? Anybody do any writing today? Did anybody write a word? It looks like almost every single person here recorded something. In this room, right now, we've probably recorded more than almost all of human pre-ancient history. That is crazy. We're entering this amazing period of flux in human evolution where we've evolved to speak in a way in which our words disappear, but we're in an environment where we're recording everything. In fact, I think in the very near future, it's not just what we write that will be recorded, everything we do will be recorded. What does that mean? What's the next big idea from that? Well, as a social scientist, this is the most amazing thing I have ever even dreamed of. Now, I can look at all those words that used to, for millennia, disappear. I can look at lies that before were said and then gone. You remember those Astroturfing reviews that we were talking about before? Well, when they write a fake review, they have to post it somewhere, and it's left behind for us. So one thing that we did, and I'll give you an example of looking at the language, is we paid people to write some fake reviews. One of these reviews is fake. The person never was at the James Hotel. The other review is real. The person stayed there. Now, your task now is to decide which review is fake? I'll give you a moment to read through them. But I want everybody to raise their hand at some point. Remember, I study deception. I can tell if you don't raise your hand. All right, how many of you believe that A is the fake? All right. Very good. About half. And how many of you think that B is? All right. Slightly more for B. Excellent. Here's the answer. B is a fake. Well done second group. You dominated the first group. (Laughter) You're actually a little bit unusual. Every time we demonstrate this, it's usually about a 50-50 split, which fits with the research, 54 percent. Maybe people here in Winnipeg are more suspicious and better at figuring it out. Those cold, hard winters, I love it. All right, so why do I care about this? Well, what I can do now with my colleagues in computer science is we can create computer algorithms that can analyze the linguistic traces of deception. Let me highlight a couple of things here in the fake review. The first is that liars tend to think about narrative. They make up a story: Who? And what happened? And that's what happened here. Our fake reviewers talked about who they were with and what they were doing. They also used the first person singular, I, way more than the people that actually stayed there. They were inserting themselves into the hotel review, kind of trying to convince you they were there. In contrast, the people that wrote the reviews that were actually there, their bodies actually entered the physical space, they talked a lot more about spatial information. They said how big the bathroom was, or they said, you know, here's how far shopping is from the hotel. Now, you guys did pretty well. Most people perform at chance at this task. Our computer algorithm is very accurate, much more accurate than humans can be, and it's not going to be accurate all the time. This isn't a deception-detection machine to tell if your girlfriend's lying to you on text messaging. We believe that every lie now, every type of lie — fake hotel reviews, fake shoe reviews, your girlfriend cheating on you with text messaging — those are all different lies. They're going to have different patterns of language. But because everything's recorded now, we can look at all of those kinds of lies. Now, as I said, as a social scientist, this is wonderful. It's transformational. We're going to be able to learn so much more about human thought and expression, about everything from love to attitudes, because everything is being recorded now, but what does it mean for the average citizen? What does it mean for us in our lives? Well, let's forget deception for a bit. One of the big ideas, I believe, is that we're leaving these huge traces behind. My outbox for email is massive, and I never look at it. I write all the time, but I never look at my record, at my trace. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that, where we can reflect on who we are by looking at what we wrote, what we said, what we did. Now, if we bring it back to deception, there's a couple of take-away things here. First, lying online can be very dangerous, right? Not only are you leaving a record for yourself on your machine, but you're leaving a record on the person that you were lying to, and you're also leaving them around for me to analyze with some computer algorithms. So by all means, go ahead and do that, that's good. But when it comes to lying and what we want to do with our lives, I think we can go back to Diogenes and Confucius. And they were less concerned about whether to lie or not to lie, and more concerned about being true to the self, and I think this is really important. Now, when you are about to say or do something, we can think, do I want this to be part of my legacy, part of my personal record? Because in the digital age we live in now, in the networked age, we are all leaving a record. Thank you so much for your time, and good luck with your record. (Applause) |
4 lessons in creativity | {0: 'As a producer, Julie Burstein builds places to talk (brilliantly) about creative work. Her book "Spark: How Creativity Works" shares what she has learned.'} | TED2012 | On my desk in my office, I keep a small clay pot that I made in college. It's raku, which is a kind of pottery that began in Japan centuries ago as a way of making bowls for the Japanese tea ceremony. This one is more than 400 years old. Each one was pinched or carved out of a ball of clay, and it was the imperfections that people cherished. Everyday pots like this cup take eight to 10 hours to fire. I just took this out of the kiln last week, and the kiln itself takes another day or two to cool down, but raku is really fast. You do it outside, and you take the kiln up to temperature. In 15 minutes, it goes to 1,500 degrees, and as soon as you see that the glaze has melted inside, you can see that faint sheen, you turn the kiln off, and you reach in with these long metal tongs, you grab the pot, and in Japan, this red-hot pot would be immediately immersed in a solution of green tea, and you can imagine what that steam would smell like. But here in the United States, we ramp up the drama a little bit, and we drop our pots into sawdust, which catches on fire, and you take a garbage pail, and you put it on top, and smoke starts pouring out. I would come home with my clothes reeking of woodsmoke. I love raku because it allows me to play with the elements. I can shape a pot out of clay and choose a glaze, but then I have to let it go to the fire and the smoke, and what's wonderful is the surprises that happen, like this crackle pattern, because it's really stressful on these pots. They go from 1,500 degrees to room temperature in the space of just a minute. Raku is a wonderful metaphor for the process of creativity. I find in so many things that tension between what I can control and what I have to let go happens all the time, whether I'm creating a new radio show or just at home negotiating with my teenage sons. When I sat down to write a book about creativity, I realized that the steps were reversed. I had to let go at the very beginning, and I had to immerse myself in the stories of hundreds of artists and writers and musicians and filmmakers, and as I listened to these stories, I realized that creativity grows out of everyday experiences more often than you might think, including letting go. It was supposed to break, but that's okay. (Laughter) (Laughs) That's part of the letting go, is sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't, because creativity also grows from the broken places. The best way to learn about anything is through stories, and so I want to tell you a story about work and play and about four aspects of life that we need to embrace in order for our own creativity to flourish. The first embrace is something that we think, "Oh, this is very easy," but it's actually getting harder, and that's paying attention to the world around us. So many artists speak about needing to be open, to embrace experience, and that's hard to do when you have a lighted rectangle in your pocket that takes all of your focus. The filmmaker Mira Nair speaks about growing up in a small town in India. Its name is Bhubaneswar, and here's a picture of one of the temples in her town. Mira Nair: In this little town, there were like 2,000 temples. We played cricket all the time. We kind of grew up in the rubble. The major thing that inspired me, that led me on this path, that made me a filmmaker eventually, was traveling folk theater that would come through the town and I would go off and see these great battles of good and evil by two people in a school field with no props but with a lot of, you know, passion, and hashish as well, and it was amazing. You know, the folk tales of Mahabharata and Ramayana, the two holy books, the epics that everything comes out of in India, they say. After seeing that Jatra, the folk theater, I knew I wanted to get on, you know, and perform. Julie Burstein: Isn't that a wonderful story? You can see the sort of break in the everyday. There they are in the school fields, but it's good and evil, and passion and hashish. And Mira Nair was a young girl with thousands of other people watching this performance, but she was ready. She was ready to open up to what it sparked in her, and it led her, as she said, down this path to become an award-winning filmmaker. So being open for that experience that might change you is the first thing we need to embrace. Artists also speak about how some of their most powerful work comes out of the parts of life that are most difficult. The novelist Richard Ford speaks about a childhood challenge that continues to be something he wrestles with today. He's severely dyslexic. Richard Ford: I was slow to learn to read, went all the way through school not really reading more than the minimum, and still to this day can't read silently much faster than I can read aloud, but there were a lot of benefits to being dyslexic for me because when I finally did reconcile myself to how slow I was going to have to do it, then I think I came very slowly into an appreciation of all of those qualities of language and of sentences that are not just the cognitive aspects of language: the syncopations, the sounds of words, what words look like, where paragraphs break, where lines break. I mean, I wasn't so badly dyslexic that I was disabled from reading. I just had to do it really slowly, and as I did, lingering on those sentences as I had to linger, I fell heir to language's other qualities, which I think has helped me write sentences. JB: It's so powerful. Richard Ford, who's won the Pulitzer Prize, says that dyslexia helped him write sentences. He had to embrace this challenge, and I use that word intentionally. He didn't have to overcome dyslexia. He had to learn from it. He had to learn to hear the music in language. Artists also speak about how pushing up against the limits of what they can do, sometimes pushing into what they can't do, helps them focus on finding their own voice. The sculptor Richard Serra talks about how, as a young artist, he thought he was a painter, and he lived in Florence after graduate school. While he was there, he traveled to Madrid, where he went to the Prado to see this picture by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. It's from 1656, and it's called "Las Meninas," and it's the picture of a little princess and her ladies-in-waiting, and if you look over that little blonde princess's shoulder, you'll see a mirror, and reflected in it are her parents, the King and Queen of Spain, who would be standing where you might stand to look at the picture. As he often did, Velázquez put himself in this painting too. He's standing on the left with his paintbrush in one hand and his palette in the other. Richard Serra: I was standing there looking at it, and I realized that Velázquez was looking at me, and I thought, "Oh. I'm the subject of the painting." And I thought, "I'm not going to be able to do that painting." I was to the point where I was using a stopwatch and painting squares out of randomness, and I wasn't getting anywhere. So I went back and dumped all my paintings in the Arno, and I thought, I'm going to just start playing around. JB: Richard Serra says that so nonchalantly, you might have missed it. He went and saw this painting by a guy who'd been dead for 300 years, and realized, "I can't do that," and so Richard Serra went back to his studio in Florence, picked up all of his work up to that point, and threw it in a river. Richard Serra let go of painting at that moment, but he didn't let go of art. He moved to New York City, and he put together a list of verbs — to roll, to crease, to fold — more than a hundred of them, and as he said, he just started playing around. He did these things to all kinds of material. He would take a huge sheet of lead and roll it up and unroll it. He would do the same thing to rubber, and when he got to the direction "to lift," he created this, which is in the Museum of Modern Art. Richard Serra had to let go of painting in order to embark on this playful exploration that led him to the work that he's known for today: huge curves of steel that require our time and motion to experience. In sculpture, Richard Serra is able to do what he couldn't do in painting. He makes us the subject of his art. So experience and challenge and limitations are all things we need to embrace for creativity to flourish. There's a fourth embrace, and it's the hardest. It's the embrace of loss, the oldest and most constant of human experiences. In order to create, we have to stand in that space between what we see in the world and what we hope for, looking squarely at rejection, at heartbreak, at war, at death. That's a tough space to stand in. The educator Parker Palmer calls it "the tragic gap," tragic not because it's sad but because it's inevitable, and my friend Dick Nodel likes to say, "You can hold that tension like a violin string and make something beautiful." That tension resonates in the work of the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, who at the beginning of his career was known for his street photography, for capturing a moment on the street, and also for his beautiful photographs of landscapes — of Tuscany, of Cape Cod, of light. Joel is a New Yorker, and his studio for many years was in Chelsea, with a straight view downtown to the World Trade Center, and he photographed those buildings in every sort of light. You know where this story goes. On 9/11, Joel wasn't in New York. He was out of town, but he raced back to the city, and raced down to the site of the destruction. Joel Meyerowitz: And like all the other passersby, I stood outside the chain link fence on Chambers and Greenwich, and all I could see was the smoke and a little bit of rubble, and I raised my camera to take a peek, just to see if there was something to see, and some cop, a lady cop, hit me on my shoulder, and said, "Hey, no pictures!" And it was such a blow that it woke me up, in the way that it was meant to be, I guess. And when I asked her why no pictures, she said, "It's a crime scene. No photographs allowed." And I asked her, "What would happen if I was a member of the press?" And she told me, "Oh, look back there," and back a block was the press corps tied up in a little penned-in area, and I said, "Well, when do they go in?" and she said, "Probably never." And as I walked away from that, I had this crystallization, probably from the blow, because it was an insult in a way. I thought, "Oh, if there's no pictures, then there'll be no record. We need a record." And I thought, "I'm gonna make that record. I'll find a way to get in, because I don't want to see this history disappear." JB: He did. He pulled in every favor he could, and got a pass into the World Trade Center site, where he photographed for nine months almost every day. Looking at these photographs today brings back the smell of smoke that lingered on my clothes when I went home to my family at night. My office was just a few blocks away. But some of these photographs are beautiful, and we wondered, was it difficult for Joel Meyerowitz to make such beauty out of such devastation? JM: Well, you know, ugly, I mean, powerful and tragic and horrific and everything, but it was also as, in nature, an enormous event that was transformed after the fact into this residue, and like many other ruins — you go to the ruins of the Colosseum or the ruins of a cathedral someplace — and they take on a new meaning when you watch the weather. I mean, there were afternoons I was down there, and the light goes pink and there's a mist in the air and you're standing in the rubble, and I found myself recognizing both the inherent beauty of nature and the fact that nature, as time, is erasing this wound. Time is unstoppable, and it transforms the event. It gets further and further away from the day, and light and seasons temper it in some way, and it's not that I'm a romantic. I'm really a realist. The reality is, there's the Woolworth Building in a veil of smoke from the site, but it's now like a scrim across a theater, and it's turning pink, you know, and down below there are hoses spraying, and the lights have come on for the evening, and the water is turning acid green because the sodium lamps are on, and I'm thinking, "My God, who could dream this up?" But the fact is, I'm there, it looks like that, you have to take a picture. JB: You have to take a picture. That sense of urgency, of the need to get to work, is so powerful in Joel's story. When I saw Joel Meyerowitz recently, I told him how much I admired his passionate obstinacy, his determination to push through all the bureaucratic red tape to get to work, and he laughed, and he said, "I'm stubborn, but I think what's more important is my passionate optimism." The first time I told these stories, a man in the audience raised his hand and said, "All these artists talk about their work, not their art, which has got me thinking about my work and where the creativity is there, and I'm not an artist." He's right. We all wrestle with experience and challenge, limits and loss. Creativity is essential to all of us, whether we're scientists or teachers, parents or entrepreneurs. I want to leave you with another image of a Japanese tea bowl. This one is at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. It's more than a hundred years old and you can still see the fingermarks where the potter pinched it. But as you can also see, this one did break at some point in its hundred years. But the person who put it back together, instead of hiding the cracks, decided to emphasize them, using gold lacquer to repair it. This bowl is more beautiful now, having been broken, than it was when it was first made, and we can look at those cracks, because they tell the story that we all live, of the cycle of creation and destruction, of control and letting go, of picking up the pieces and making something new. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I started a sanitary napkin revolution! | {0: 'Arunachalam Muruganantham created a system of simple machines to make modern sanitary napkins -- giving millions of women in his home country and around the world access to hygiene.'} | TED@Bangalore | So I tried to do a small good thing for my wife. It makes me to stand here, the fame, the money I got out of it. So what I did, I'd gone back to my early marriage days. What you did in the early marriage days, you tried to impress your wife. I did the same. On that occasion, I found my wife carrying something like this. I saw. "What is that?" I asked. My wife replied, "None of your business." Then, being her husband, I ran behind her and saw she had a nasty rag cloth. I don't even use that cloth to clean my two-wheeler. Then I understood this — adapting that unhygienic method to manage her period days. Then I immediately asked her, why are you [using] that unhygienic method? She replied, I also know about [sanitary pads], but myself and my sisters, if they start using that, we have to cut our family milk budget. Then I was shocked. What is the connection between using a sanitary pad and a milk budget? And it's called affordability. I tried to impress my new wife by offering her a packet of sanitary pads. I went to a local shop, I tried to buy her a sanitary pad packet. That fellow looks left and right, and spreads a newspaper, rolls it into the newspaper, gives it to me like a banned item, something like that. I don't know why. I did not ask for a condom. Then I took that pad. I want to see that. What is inside it? The very first time, at the age of 29, that day I am touching the sanitary pad, first ever. I must know: How many of the guys here have touched a sanitary pad? They are not going to touch that, because it's not your matter. Then I thought to myself, white substance, made of cotton — oh my God, that guy is just using a penny value of raw material — inside they are selling for pounds, dollars. Why not make a local sanitary pad for my new wife? That's how all this started, but after making a sanitary pad, where can I check it? It's not like I can just check it in the lab. I need a woman volunteer. Where can I get one in India? Even in Bangalore you won't get [one], in India. So only problem: the only available victim is my wife. Then I made a sanitary pad and handed it to Shanti — my wife's name is Shanti. "Close your eyes. Whatever I give, it will be not a diamond pendant not a diamond ring, even a chocolate, I will give you a surprise with a lot of tinsel paper rolled up with it. Close your eyes." Because I tried to make it intimate. Because it's an arranged marriage, not a love marriage. (Laughter) So one day she said, openly, I'm not going to support this research. Then other victims, they got into my sisters. But even sisters, wives, they're not ready to support in the research. That's why I am always jealous with the saints in India. They are having a lot of women volunteers around them. Why I am not getting [any]? You know, without them even calling, they'll get a lot of women volunteers. Then I used, tried to use the medical college girls. They also refused. Finally, I decide, use sanitary pad myself. Now I am having a title like the first man to set foot on the moon. Armstrong. Then Tenzing [and] Hillary, in Everest, like that Muruganantham is the first man wore a sanitary pad across the globe. I wore a sanitary pad. I filled animal blood in a football bottle, I tied it up here, there is a tube going into my panties, while I'm walking, while I'm cycling, I made a press, doses of blood will go there. That makes me bow down to any woman in front of me to give full respect. That five days I'll never forget — the messy days, the lousy days, that wetness. My God, it's unbelievable. But here the problem is, one company is making napkin out of cotton. It is working well. But I am also trying to make sanitary pad with the good cotton. It's not working. That makes me to want to refuse to continue this research and research and research. You need first funds. Not only financial crises, but because of the sanitary pad research, I come through all sorts of problems, including a divorce notice from my wife. Why is this? I used medical college girls. She suspects I am using as a trump card to run behind medical college girls. Finally, I came to know it is a special cellulose derived from a pinewood, but even after that, you need a multimillion-dollar plant like this to process that material. Again, a stop-up. Then I spend another four years to create my own machine tools, a simple machine tool like this. In this machine, any rural woman can apply the same raw materials that they are processing in the multinational plant, anyone can make a world-class napkin at your dining hall. That is my invention. So after that, what I did, usually if anyone got a patent or an invention, immediately you want to make, convert into this. I never did this. I dropped it just like this, because you do this, if anyone runs after money, their life will not [have] any beauty. It is boredom. A lot of people making a lot of money, billion, billions of dollars accumulating. Why are they coming for, finally, for philanthropy? Why the need for accumulating money, then doing philanthropy? What if one decided to start philanthropy from the day one? That's why I am giving this machine only in rural India, for rural women, because in India, [you'll be] surprised, only two percent of women are using sanitary pads. The rest, they're using a rag cloth, a leaf, husk, [saw] dust, everything except sanitary pads. It is the same in the 21st century. That's why I am going to decide to give this machine only for poor women across India. So far, 630 installations happened in 23 states in six other countries. Now I'm on my seventh year sustaining against multinational, transnational giants — makes all MBA students a question mark. A school dropout from Coimbatore, how he is able to sustaining? That makes me a visiting professor and guest lecturer in all IIMs. (Applause) Play video one. (Video) Arunachalam Muruganantham: The thing I saw in my wife's hand, "Why are you using that nasty cloth?" She replied immediately, "I know about napkins, but if I start using napkins, then we have to cut our family milk budget." Why not make myself a low-cost napkin? So I decided I'm going to sell this new machine only for Women Self Help Groups. That is my idea. AM: And previously, you need a multimillion investment for machine and all. Now, any rural woman can. They are performing puja. (Video): (Singing) You just think, competing giants, even from Harvard, Oxford, is difficult. I make a rural woman to compete with multinationals. I'm sustaining on seventh year. Already 600 installations. What is my mission? I'm going to make India [into] a 100-percent-sanitary-napkin-using country in my lifetime. In this way I'm going to provide not less than a million rural employment that I'm going to create. That's why I'm not running after this bloody money. I'm doing something serious. If you chase a girl, the girl won't like you. Do your job simply, the girl will chase you. Like that, I never chased Mahalakshmi. Mahalakshmi is chasing me, I am keeping in the back pocket. Not in front pocket. I'm a back pocket man. That's all. A school dropout saw your problem in the society of not using sanitary pad. I am becoming a solution provider. I'm very happy. I don't want to make this as a corporate entity. I want to make this as a local sanitary pad movement across the globe. That's why I put all the details on public domain like an open software. Now 110 countries are accessing it. Okay? So I classify the people into three: uneducated, little educated, surplus educated. Little educated, done this. Surplus educated, what are you going to do for the society? Thank you very much. Bye! (Applause) |
Love letters to strangers | {0: 'Hannah Brencher believes in the power of pen and paper, and has started a global initiative that encourages strangers to exchange love letters.'} | TED@New York | I was one of the only kids in college who had a reason to go to the P.O. box at the end of the day, and that was mainly because my mother has never believed in email, in Facebook, in texting or cell phones in general. And so while other kids were BBM-ing their parents, I was literally waiting by the mailbox to get a letter from home to see how the weekend had gone, which was a little frustrating when Grandma was in the hospital, but I was just looking for some sort of scribble, some unkempt cursive from my mother. And so when I moved to New York City after college and got completely sucker-punched in the face by depression, I did the only thing I could think of at the time. I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me for strangers, and tucked them all throughout the city, dozens and dozens of them. I left them everywhere, in cafes and in libraries, at the U.N., everywhere. I blogged about those letters and the days when they were necessary, and I posed a kind of crazy promise to the Internet: that if you asked me for a hand-written letter, I would write you one, no questions asked. Overnight, my inbox morphed into this harbor of heartbreak — a single mother in Sacramento, a girl being bullied in rural Kansas, all asking me, a 22-year-old girl who barely even knew her own coffee order, to write them a love letter and give them a reason to wait by the mailbox. Well, today I fuel a global organization that is fueled by those trips to the mailbox, fueled by the ways in which we can harness social media like never before to write and mail strangers letters when they need them most, but most of all, fueled by crates of mail like this one, my trusty mail crate, filled with the scriptings of ordinary people, strangers writing letters to other strangers not because they're ever going to meet and laugh over a cup of coffee, but because they have found one another by way of letter-writing. But, you know, the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper. They could not tell you about the ink of their own love letters. They're the ones from my generation, the ones of us that have grown up into a world where everything is paperless, and where some of our best conversations have happened upon a screen. We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook, and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less. But what if it's not about efficiency this time? I was on the subway yesterday with this mail crate, which is a conversation starter, let me tell you. If you ever need one, just carry one of these. (Laughter) And a man just stared at me, and he was like, "Well, why don't you use the Internet?" And I thought, "Well, sir, I am not a strategist, nor am I specialist. I am merely a storyteller." And so I could tell you about a woman whose husband has just come home from Afghanistan, and she is having a hard time unearthing this thing called conversation, and so she tucks love letters throughout the house as a way to say, "Come back to me. Find me when you can." Or a girl who decides that she is going to leave love letters around her campus in Dubuque, Iowa, only to find her efforts ripple-effected the next day when she walks out onto the quad and finds love letters hanging from the trees, tucked in the bushes and the benches. Or the man who decides that he is going to take his life, uses Facebook as a way to say goodbye to friends and family. Well, tonight he sleeps safely with a stack of letters just like this one tucked beneath his pillow, scripted by strangers who were there for him when. These are the kinds of stories that convinced me that letter-writing will never again need to flip back her hair and talk about efficiency, because she is an art form now, all the parts of her, the signing, the scripting, the mailing, the doodles in the margins. The mere fact that somebody would even just sit down, pull out a piece of paper and think about someone the whole way through, with an intention that is so much harder to unearth when the browser is up and the iPhone is pinging and we've got six conversations rolling in at once, that is an art form that does not fall down to the Goliath of "get faster," no matter how many social networks we might join. We still clutch close these letters to our chest, to the words that speak louder than loud, when we turn pages into palettes to say the things that we have needed to say, the words that we have needed to write, to sisters and brothers and even to strangers, for far too long. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) |
How to "sketch" with electronics | {0: 'Leah Buechley is an MIT electronics designer who mixes high and low tech to create smart and playful results.'} | TEDYouth 2011 | Today, I'm going to talk to you about sketching electronics. I'm, among several other things, an electrical engineer, and that means that I spend a good amount of time designing and building new pieces of technology, and more specifically designing and building electronics. And what I've found is that the process of designing and building electronics is problematic in all sorts of ways. So it's a really slow process, it's really expensive, and the outcome of that process, namely electronic circuit boards, are limited in all sorts of kind of interesting ways. So they're really small, generally, they're square and flat and hard, and frankly, most of them just aren't very attractive, and so my team and I have been thinking of ways to really change and mix up the process and the outcome of designing electronics. And so what if you could design and build electronics like this? So what if you could do it extremely quickly, extremely inexpensively, and maybe more interestingly, really fluidly and expressively and even improvisationally? Wouldn't that be so cool, and that wouldn't that open up all sorts of new possibilities? I'm going to share with you two projects that are investigations along these lines, and we'll start with this one. (Video) Magnetic electronic pieces and ferrous paper. A conductive pen from the Lewis lab at UIUC. Sticker templates. Speed x 4. Making a switch. Music: DJ Shadow. Adding some intelligence with a microcontroller. Sketching an interface. (Music) (Laughter) (Applause) Pretty cool, huh? We think so. So now that we developed these tools and found these materials that let us do these things, we started to realize that, essentially, anything that we can do with paper, anything that we can do with a piece of paper and a pen we can now do with electronics. So the next project that I want to show you is kind of a deeper exploration of that possibility. And I'll kind of let it speak for itself. (Music) (Applause) So the next step for us in this process is now to find a way to let all of you build things like this, and so the way that we're approaching that is by teaching workshops to people where we explain how they can use these kinds of tools, and then also working to get the tools and the materials and techniques out into the real world in a variety of ways. And so sometime soon, you'll be able to play and build and sketch with electronics in this fundamentally new way. So thank you very much. (Applause) |
The arts festival revolution | {0: 'A Tony Award winner, theater producer David Binder is interested in taking performances off the stage.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Sydney. I had been waiting my whole life to get to Sydney. I got to the airport, to the hotel, checked in, and, sitting there in the lobby, was a brochure for the Sydney Festival. I thumbed through it, and I came across a show called "Minto: Live." The description read: "The suburban streets of Minto become the stage for performances created by international artists in collaboration with the people of Minto." What was this place called Minto? Sydney, as I would learn, is a city of suburbs, and Minto lies southwest, about an hour away. I have to say, it wasn't exactly what I had in mind for my first day down under. I mean, I'd thought about the Harbour Bridge or Bondi Beach, but Minto? But still, I'm a producer, and the lure of a site-specific theater project was more than I could resist. (Laughter) So, off I went into Friday afternoon traffic, and I'll never forget what I saw when I got there. For the performance, the audience walked around the neighborhood from house to house, and the residents, who were the performers, they came out of their houses, and they performed these autobiographical dances on their lawns, on their driveways. (Laughter) The show is a collaboration with a U.K.-based performance company called Lone Twin. Lone Twin had come to Minto and worked with the residents, and they had created these dances. This Australian-Indian girl, she came out and started to dance on her front lawn, and her father peered out the window to see what all the noise and commotion was about, and he soon joined her. And he was followed by her little sister. And soon they were all dancing this joyous, exuberant dance right there on their lawn. (Laughter) And as I walked through the neighborhood, I was amazed and I was moved by the incredible sense of ownership this community clearly felt about this event. "Minto: Live" brought Sydneysiders into dialogue with international artists, and really celebrated the diversity of Sydney on its own terms. The Sydney Festival which produced "Minto: Live" I think represents a new kind of 21st-century arts festival. These festivals are radically open. They can transform cities and communities. To understand this, I think it kind of makes sense to look where we've come from. Modern arts festivals were born in the rubble of World War II. Civic leaders created these annual events to celebrate culture as the highest expression of the human spirit. In 1947, the Edinburgh Festival was born and Avignon was born and hundreds of others would follow in their wake. The work they did was very, very high art, and stars came along like Laurie Anderson and Merce Cunningham and Robert Lepage who made work for this circuit, and you had these seminal shows like "The Mahabharata" and the monumental "Einstein on the Beach." But as the decades passed, these festivals, they really became the establishment, and as the culture and capital accelerated, the Internet brought us all together, high and low kind of disappeared, a new kind of festival emerged. The old festivals, they continued to thrive, but from Brighton to Rio to Perth, something new was emerging, and these festivals were really different. They're open, these festivals, because, like in Minto, they understand that the dialogue between the local and the global is essential. They're open because they ask the audience to be a player, a protagonist, a partner, rather than a passive spectator, and they're open because they know that imagination cannot be contained in buildings, and so much of the work they do is site-specific or outdoor work. So, the new festival, it asks the audience to play an essential role in shaping the performance. Companies like De La Guarda, which I produce, and Punchdrunk create these completely immersive experiences that put the audience at the center of the action, but the German performance company Rimini Protokoll takes this all to a whole new level. In a series of shows that includes "100 Percent Vancouver," "100 Percent Berlin," Rimini Protokoll makes shows that actually reflect society. Rimini Protokoll chooses 100 people that represent that city at that moment in terms of race and gender and class, through a careful process that begins three months before, and then those 100 people share stories about themselves and their lives, and the whole thing becomes a snapshot of that city at that moment. LIFT has always been a pioneer in the use of venues. They understand that theater and performance can happen anywhere. You can do a show in a schoolroom, in an airport, — (Laughter) — in a department store window. Artists are explorers. Who better to show us the city anew? Artists can take us to a far-flung part of the city that we haven't explored, or they can take us into that building that we pass every day but we never went into. An artist, I think, can really show us people that we might overlook in our lives. Back to Back is an Australian company of people with intellectual disabilities. I saw their amazing show in New York at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal at rush hour. We, the audience, were given headsets and seated on one side of the terminal. The actors were right there in front of us, right there among the commuters, and we could hear them, but we might not have otherwise seen them. So Back to Back takes site-specific theater and uses it to gently remind us about who and what we choose to edit out of our daily lives. So, the dialogue with the local and the global, the audience as participant and player and protagonist, the innovative use of site, all of these things come to play in the amazing work of the fantastic French company Royal de Luxe. Royal de Luxe's giant puppets come into a city and they live there for a few days. For "The Sultan's Elephant," Royal de Luxe came to central London and brought it to a standstill with their story of a giant little girl and her friend, a time-traveling elephant. For a few days, they transformed a massive city into a community where endless possibility reigned. The Guardian wrote, "If art is about transformation, then there can be no more transformative experience. What 'The Sultan's Elephant' represents is no less than an artistic occupation of the city and a reclamation of the streets for the people." We can talk about the economic impacts of these festivals on their cities, but I'm much [more] interested in many more things, like how a festival helps a city to express itself, how it lets it come into its own. Festivals promote diversity, they bring neighbors into dialogue, they increase creativity, they offer opportunities for civic pride, they improve our general psychological well-being. In short, they make cities better places to live. Case in point: When "The Sultan's Elephant" came to London just nine months after 7/7, a Londoner wrote, "For the first time since the London bombings, my daughter called up with that sparkle back in her voice. She had gathered with others to watch 'The Sultan's Elephant,' and, you know, it just made all the difference." Lyn Gardner in The Guardian has written that a great festival can show us a map of the world, a map of the city and a map of ourselves, but there is no one fixed festival model. I think what's so brilliant about the festivals, the new festivals, is that they are really fully capturing the complexity and the excitement of the way we all live today. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Your brain on video games | {0: 'Daphne Bavelier studies how the brain adapts to changes in experience, either by nature or by training.'} | TEDxCHUV | I'm a brain scientist, and as a brain scientist, I'm actually interested in how the brain learns, and I'm especially interested in a possibility of making our brains smarter, better and faster. This is in this context I'm going to tell you about video games. When we say video games, most of you think about children. It's true. Ninety percent of children do play video games. But let's be frank. When the kids are in bed, who is in front of the PlayStation? Most of you. The average age of a gamer is 33 years old, not eight years old, and in fact, if we look at the projected demographics of video game play, the video game players of tomorrow are older adults. (Laughter) So video [gaming] is pervasive throughout our society. It is clearly here to stay. It has an amazing impact on our everyday life. Consider these statistics released by Activision. After one month of release of the game "Call Of Duty: Black Ops," it had been played for 68,000 years worldwide, right? Would any of you complain if this was the case about doing linear algebra? So what we are asking in the lab is, how can we leverage that power? Now I want to step back a bit. I know most of you have had the experience of coming back home and finding your kids playing these kinds of games. (Shooting noises) The name of the game is to get after your enemy zombie bad guys before they get to you, right? And I'm almost sure most of you have thought, "Oh, come on, can't you do something more intelligent than shooting at zombies?" I'd like you to put this kind of knee-jerk reaction in the context of what you would have thought if you had found your girl playing sudoku or your boy reading Shakespeare. Right? Most parents would find that great. Well, I'm not going to tell you that playing video games days in and days out is actually good for your health. It's not, and binging is never good. But I'm going to argue that in reasonable doses, actually the very game I showed you at the beginning, those action-packed shooter games have quite powerful effects and positive effects on many different aspects of our behavior. There's not one week that goes without some major headlines in the media about whether video games are good or bad for you, right? You're all bombarded with that. I'd like to put this kind of Friday night bar discussion aside and get you to actually step into the lab. What we do in the lab is actually measure directly, in a quantitative fashion, what is the impact of video games on the brain. And so I'm going to take a few examples from our work. One first saying that I'm sure you all have heard is the fact that too much screen time makes your eyesight worse. That's a statement about vision. There may be vision scientists among you. We actually know how to test that statement. We can step into the lab and measure how good your vision is. Well, guess what? People that don't play a lot of action games, that don't actually spend a lot of time in front of screens, have normal, or what we call corrective-to-normal vision. That's okay. The issue is what happens with these guys that actually indulge into playing video games like five hours per week, 10 hours per week, 15 hours per week. By that statement, their vision should be really bad, right? Guess what? Their vision is really, really good. It's better than those that don't play. And it's better in two different ways. The first way is that they're actually able to resolve small detail in the context of clutter, and though that means being able to read the fine print on a prescription rather than using magnifier glasses, you can actually do it with just your eyesight. The other way that they are better is actually being able to resolve different levels of gray. Imagine you're driving in a fog. That makes a difference between seeing the car in front of you and avoiding the accident, or getting into an accident. So we're actually leveraging that work to develop games for patients with low vision, and to have an impact on retraining their brain to see better. Clearly, when it comes to action video games, screen time doesn't make your eyesight worse. Another saying that I'm sure you have all heard around: Video games lead to attention problems and greater distractability. Okay, we know how to measure attention in the lab. I'm actually going to give you an example of how we do so. I'm going to ask you to participate, so you're going to have to actually play the game with me. I'm going to show you colored words. I want you to shout out the color of the ink. Right? So this is the first example. ["Chair"] Orange, good. ["Table"] Green. ["Board"] Audience: Red.Daphne Bavelier: Red. ["Horse"] DB: Yellow. Audience: Yellow. ["Yellow"] DB: Red. Audience: Yellow. ["Blue"] DB: Yellow. Okay, you get my point, right? (Laughter) You're getting better, but it's hard. Why is it hard? Because I introduced a conflict between the word itself and its color. How good your attention is determines actually how fast you resolve that conflict, so the young guys here at the top of their game probably, like, did a little better than some of us that are older. What we can show is that when you do this kind of task with people that play a lot of action games, they actually resolve the conflict faster. So clearly playing those action games doesn't lead to attention problems. Actually, those action video game players have many other advantages in terms of attention, and one aspect of attention which is also improved for the better is our ability to track objects around in the world. This is something we use all the time. When you're driving, you're tracking, keeping track of the cars around you. You're also keeping track of the pedestrian, the running dog, and that's how you can actually be safe driving, right? In the lab, we get people to come to the lab, sit in front of a computer screen, and we give them little tasks that I'm going to get you to do again. You're going to see yellow happy faces and a few sad blue faces. These are children in the schoolyard in Geneva during a recess during the winter. Most kids are happy. It's actually recess. But a few kids are sad and blue because they've forgotten their coat. Everybody begins to move around, and your task is to keep track of who had a coat at the beginning and who didn't. So I'm just going to show you an example where there is only one sad kid. It's easy because you can actually track it with your eyes. You can track, you can track, and then when it stops, and there is a question mark, and I ask you, did this kid have a coat or not? Was it yellow initially or blue? I hear a few yellow. Good. So most of you have a brain. (Laughter) I'm now going to ask you to do the task, but now with a little more challenging task. There are going to be three of them that are blue. Don't move your eyes. Please don't move your eyes. Keep your eyes fixated and expand, pull your attention. That's the only way you can actually do it. If you move your eyes, you're doomed. Yellow or blue? Audience: Yellow.DB: Good. So your typical normal young adult can have a span of about three or four objects of attention. That's what we just did. Your action video game player has a span of about six to seven objects of attention, which is what is shown in this video here. That's for you guys, action video game players. A bit more challenging, right? (Laughter) Yellow or blue? Blue. We have some people that are serious out there. Yeah. (Laughter) Good. So in the same way that we actually see the effects of video games on people's behavior, we can use brain imaging and look at the impact of video games on the brain, and we do find many changes, but the main changes are actually to the brain networks that control attention. So one part is the parietal cortex which is very well known to control the orientation of attention. The other one is the frontal lobe, which controls how we sustain attention, and another one is the anterior cingulate, which controls how we allocate and regulate attention and resolve conflict. Now, when we do brain imaging, we find that all three of these networks are actually much more efficient in people that play action games. This actually leads me to a rather counterintuitive finding in the literature about technology and the brain. You all know about multitasking. You all have been faulty of multitasking when you're driving and you pick up your cellphone. Bad idea. Very bad idea. Why? Because as your attention shifts to your cell phone, you are actually losing the capacity to react swiftly to the car braking in front of you, and so you're much more likely to get engaged into a car accident. Now, we can measure that kind of skills in the lab. We obviously don't ask people to drive around and see how many car accidents they have. That would be a little costly proposition. But we design tasks on the computer where we can measure, to millisecond accuracy, how good they are at switching from one task to another. When we do that, we actually find that people that play a lot of action games are really, really good. They switch really fast, very swiftly. They pay a very small cost. Now I'd like you to remember that result, and put it in the context of another group of technology users, a group which is actually much revered by society, which are people that engage in multimedia-tasking. What is multimedia-tasking? It's the fact that most of us, most of our children, are engaged with listening to music at the same time as they're doing search on the web at the same time as they're chatting on Facebook with their friends. That's a multimedia-tasker. There was a first study done by colleagues at Stanford and that we replicated that showed that those people that identify as being high multimedia-taskers are absolutely abysmal at multitasking. When we measure them in the lab, they're really bad. Right? So these kinds of results really makes two main points. The first one is that not all media are created equal. You can't compare the effect of multimedia-tasking and the effect of playing action games. They have totally different effects on different aspects of cognition, perception and attention. Even within video games, I'm telling you right now about these action-packed video games. Different video games have a different effect on your brains. So we actually need to step into the lab and really measure what is the effect of each video game. The other lesson is that general wisdom carries no weight. I showed that to you already, like we looked at the fact that despite a lot of screen time, those action gamers have a lot of very good vision, etc. Here, what was really striking is that these undergraduates that actually report engaging in a lot of high multimedia-tasking are convinced they aced the test. So you show them their data, you show them they are bad and they're like, "Not possible." You know, they have this sort of gut feeling that, really, they are doing really, really good. That's another argument for why we need to step into the lab and really measure the impact of technology on the brain. Now in a sense, when we think about the effect of video games on the brain, it's very similar to the effect of wine on the health. There are some very poor uses of wine. There are some very poor uses of video games. But when consumed in reasonable doses, and at the right age, wine can be very good for health. There are actually specific molecules that have been identified in red wine as leading to greater life expectancy. So it's the same way, like those action video games have a number of ingredients that are actually really powerful for brain plasticity, learning, attention, vision, etc., and so we need and we're working on understanding what are those active ingredients so that we can really then leverage them to deliver better games, either for education or for rehabilitation of patients. Now because we are interested in having an impact for education or rehabilitation of patients, we are actually not that interested in how those of you that choose to play video games for many hours on end perform. I'm much more interested in taking any of you and showing that by forcing you to play an action game, I can actually change your vision for the better, whether you want to play that action game or not, right? That's the point of rehabilitation or education. Most of the kids don't go to school saying, "Great, two hours of math!" So that's really the crux of the research, and to do that, we need to go one more step. And one more step is to do training studies. So let me illustrate that step with a task which is called mental rotation. Mental rotation is a task where I'm going to ask you, and again you're going to do the task, to look at this shape. Study it, it's a target shape, and I'm going to present to you four different shapes. One of these four different shapes is actually a rotated version of this shape. I want you to tell me which one: the first one, second one, third one or fourth one? Okay, I'll help you. Fourth one. One more. Get those brains working. Come on. That's our target shape. Third. Good! This is hard, right? Like, the reason that I asked you to do that is because you really feel your brain cringing, right? It doesn't really feel like playing mindless action video games. Well, what we do in these training studies is, people come to the lab, they do tasks like this one, we then force them to play 10 hours of action games. They don't play 10 hours of action games in a row. They do distributed practice, so little shots of 40 minutes several days over a period of two weeks. Then, once they are done with the training, they come back a few days later and they are tested again on a similar type of mental rotation task. So this is work from a colleague in Toronto. What they showed is that, initially, you know, subjects perform where they are expected to perform given their age. After two weeks of training on action video games, they actually perform better, and the improvement is still there five months after having done the training. That's really, really important. Why? Because I told you we want to use these games for education or for rehabilitation. We need to have effects that are going to be long-lasting. Now, at this point, a number of you are probably wondering well, what are you waiting for, to put on the market a game that would be good for the attention of my grandmother and that she would actually enjoy, or a game that would be great to rehabilitate the vision of my grandson who has amblyopia, for example? Well, we're working on it, but here is a challenge. There are brain scientists like me that are beginning to understand what are the good ingredients in games to promote positive effects, and that's what I'm going to call the broccoli side of the equation. There is an entertainment software industry which is extremely deft at coming up with appealing products that you can't resist. That's the chocolate side of the equation. The issue is we need to put the two together, and it's a little bit like with food. Who really wants to eat chocolate-covered broccoli? None of you. (Laughter) And you probably have had that feeling, right, picking up an education game and sort of feeling, hmm, you know, it's not really fun, it's not really engaging. So what we need is really a new brand of chocolate, a brand of chocolate that is irresistible, that you really want to play, but that has all the ingredients, the good ingredients that are extracted from the broccoli that you can't recognize but are still working on your brains. And we're working on it, but it takes brain scientists to come and to get together, people that work in the entertainment software industry, and publishers, so these are not people that usually meet every day, but it's actually doable, and we are on the right track. I'd like to leave you with that thought, and thank you for your attention. (Applause) (Applause) |
The cheap all-terrain wheelchair | {0: 'Amos Winter and his team at MIT built the Leveraged Freedom Chair, a cheap lever-powered wheelchair whose design and develop put the user first.'} | TEDxBoston 2012 | Living with a physical disability isn't easy anywhere in the world, but if you live in a country like the United States, there's certain appurtenances available to you that do make life easier. So if you're in a building, you can take an elevator. If you're crossing the street, you have sidewalk cutouts. And if you have to travel some distance farther than you can do under your own power, there's accessible vehicles, and if you can't afford one of those, there's accessible public transportation. But in the developing world, things are quite different. There's 40 million people who need a wheelchair but don't have one, and the majority of these people live in rural areas, where the only connections to community, to employment, to education, are by traveling long distances on rough terrain often under their own power. And the devices usually available to these people are not made for that context, break down quickly, and are hard to repair. I started looking at wheelchairs in developing countries in 2005, when I spent the summer assessing the state of technology in Tanzania, and I talked to wheelchair users, wheelchair manufacturers, disability groups, and what stood out to me is that there wasn't a device available that was designed for rural areas, that could go fast and efficiently on many types of terrain. So being a mechanical engineer, being at MIT and having lots of resources available to me, I thought I'd try to do something about it. Now when you're talking about trying to travel long distances on rough terrain, I immediately thought of a mountain bike, and a mountain bike's good at doing this because it has a gear train, and you can shift to a low gear if you have to climb a hill or go through mud or sand and you get a lot of torque but a low speed. And if you want to go faster, say on pavement, you can shift to a high gear, and you get less torque, but higher speeds. So the logical evolution here is to just make a wheelchair with mountain bike components, which many people have done. But these are two products available in the U.S. that would be difficult to transfer into developing countries because they're much, much too expensive. And the context I'm talking about is where you need to have a product that is less than 200 dollars. And this ideal product would also be able to go about five kilometers a day so you could get to your job, get to school, and do it on many, many different types of terrain. But when you get home or want to go indoors at your work, it's got to be small enough and maneuverable enough to use inside. And furthermore, if you want it to last a long time out in rural areas, it has to be repairable using the local tools, materials and knowledge in those contexts. So the real crux of the problem here is, how do you make a system that's a simple device but gives you a large mechanical advantage? How do you make a mountain bike for your arms that doesn't have the mountain bike cost and complexity? So as is the case with simple solutions, oftentimes the answer is right in front of your face, and for us it was levers. We use levers all the time, in tools, doorknobs, bicycle parts. And that moment of inspiration, that key invention moment, was when I was sitting in front of my design notebook and I started thinking about somebody grabbing a lever, and if they grab near the end of the lever, they can get an effectively long lever and produce a lot of torque as they push back and forth, and effectively get a low gear. And as they slide their hand down the lever, they can push with a smaller effective lever length, but push through a bigger angle every stroke, which makes a faster rotational speed, and gives you an effective high gear. So what's exciting about this system is that it's really, really mechanically simple, and you could make it using technology that's been around for hundreds of years. So seeing this in practice, this is the Leveraged Freedom Chair that, after a few years of development, we're now going into production with, and this is a full-time wheelchair user — he's paralyzed — in Guatemala, and you see he's able to traverse pretty rough terrain. Again, the key innovation of this technology is that when he wants to go fast, he just grabs the levers near the pivots and goes through a big angle every stroke, and as the going gets tougher, he just slides his hands up the levers, creates more torque, and kind of bench-presses his way out of trouble through the rough terrain. Now the big, important point here is that the person is the complex machine in this system. It's the person that's sliding his hands up and down the levers, so the mechanism itself can be very simple and composed of bicycle parts you can get anywhere in the world. Because those bicycle parts are so ubiquitously available, they're super-cheap. They're made by the gazillions in China and India, and we can source them anywhere in the world, build the chair anywhere, and most importantly repair it, even out in a village with a local bicycle mechanic who has local tools, knowledge and parts available. Now, when you want to use the LFC indoors, all you have to do is pull the levers out of the drivetrain, stow them in the frame, and it converts into a normal wheelchair that you can use just like any other normal wheelchair, and we sized it like a normal wheelchair, so it's narrow enough to fit through a standard doorway, it's low enough to fit under a table, and it's small and maneuverable enough to fit in a bathroom and this is important so the user can get up close to a toilet, and be able to transfer off just like he could in a normal wheelchair. Now, there's three important points that I want to stress that I think really hit home in this project. The first is that this product works well because we were effectively able to combine rigorous engineering science and analysis with user-centered design focused on the social and usage and economic factors important to wheelchair users in the developing countries. So I'm an academic at MIT, and I'm a mechanical engineer, so I can do things like look at the type of terrain you want to travel on, and figure out how much resistance it should impose, look at the parts we have available and mix and match them to figure out what sort of gear trains we can use, and then look at the power and force you can get out of your upper body to analyze how fast you should be able to go in this chair as you put your arms up and down the levers. So as a wet-behind-the-ears student, excited, our team made a prototype, brought that prototype to Tanzania, Kenya and Vietnam in 2008, and found it was terrible because we didn't get enough input from users. So because we tested it with wheelchair users, with wheelchair manufacturers, we got that feedback from them, not just articulating their problems, but articulating their solutions, and worked together to go back to the drawing board and make a new design, which we brought back to East Africa in '09 that worked a lot better than a normal wheelchair on rough terrain, but it still didn't work well indoors because it was too big, it was heavy, it was hard to move around, so again with that user feedback, we went back to the drawing board, came up with a better design, 20 pounds lighter, as narrow as a regular wheelchair, tested that in a field trial in Guatemala, and that advanced the product to the point where we have now that it's going into production. Now also being engineering scientists, we were able to quantify the performance benefits of the Leveraged Freedom Chair, so here are some shots of our trial in Guatemala where we tested the LFC on village terrain, and tested people's biomechanical outputs, their oxygen consumption, how fast they go, how much power they're putting out, both in their regular wheelchairs and using the LFC, and we found that the LFC is about 80 percent faster going on these terrains than a normal wheelchair. It's also about 40 percent more efficient than a regular wheelchair, and because of the mechanical advantage you get from the levers, you can produce 50 percent higher torque and really muscle your way through the really, really rough terrain. Now the second lesson that we learned in this is that the constraints on this design really push the innovation, because we had to hit such a low price point, because we had to make a device that could travel on many, many types of terrain but still be usable indoors, and be simple enough to repair, we ended up with a fundamentally new product, a new product that is an innovation in a space that really hasn't changed in a hundred years. And these are all merits that are not just good in the developing world. Why not in countries like the U.S. too? So we teamed up with Continuum, a local product design firm here in Boston to make the high-end version, the developed world version, that we'll probably sell primarily in the U.S. and Europe, but to higher-income buyers. And the final point I want to make is that I think this project worked well because we engaged all the stakeholders that buy into this project and are important to consider in bringing the technology from inception of an idea through innovation, validation, commercialization and dissemination, and that cycle has to start and end with end users. These are the people that define the requirements of the technology, and these are the people that have to give the thumbs-up at the end, and say, "Yeah, it actually works. It meets our needs." So people like me in the academic space, we can do things like innovate and analyze and test, create data and make bench-level prototypes, but how do you get that bench-level prototype to commercialization? So we need gap-fillers like Continuum that can work on commercializing, and we started a whole NGO to bring our chair to market — Global Research Innovation Technology — and then we also teamed up with a big manufacturer in India, Pinnacle Industries, that's tooled up now to make 500 chairs a month and will make the first batch of 200 next month, which will be delivered in India. And then finally, to get this out to the people in scale, we teamed up with the largest disability organization in the world, Jaipur Foot. Now what's powerful about this model is when you bring together all these stakeholders that represent each link in the chain from inception of an idea all the way to implementation in the field, that's where the magic happens. That's where you can take a guy like me, an academic, but analyze and test and create a new technology and quantitatively determine how much better the performance is. You can connect with stakeholders like the manufacturers and talk with them face-to-face and leverage their local knowledge of manufacturing practices and their clients and combine that knowledge with our engineering knowledge to create something greater than either of us could have done alone. And then you can also engage the end user in the design process, and not just ask him what he needs, but ask him how he thinks it can be achieved. And this picture was taken in India in our last field trial, where we had a 90-percent adoption rate where people switched to using our Leveraged Freedom Chair over their normal wheelchair, and this picture specifically is of Ashok, and Ashok had a spinal injury when he fell out of a tree, and he had been working at a tailor, but once he was injured he wasn't able to transport himself from his house over a kilometer to his shop in his normal wheelchair. The road was too rough. But the day after he got an LFC, he hopped in it, rode that kilometer, opened up his shop and soon after landed a contract to make school uniforms and started making money, started providing for his family again. Ashok: You also encouraged me to work. I rested for a day at home. The next day I went to my shop. Now everything is back to normal. Amos Winter: And thank you very much for having me today. (Applause) |
Teen wonders play bluegrass | {0: 'The Sleepy Man Banjo Boys is made up of 11-year-old banjo sensation Jonny Mizzone and his brothers Robbie, 14, on fiddle, and Tommy, 15, on guitar.'} | TED@New York | Tommy Mizzone: Tonight we're going to play you two songs. We're three brothers from New Jersey, and the funny thing is that, believe it or not, we are hooked on bluegrass and we're excited to play it for you tonight. (Music) (Applause) TM: Thank you, thank you. (Applause) Robbie Mizzone: Thank you. I'm Robbie Mizzone. I'm 13, and I play the fiddle. This is my brother, Jonny. He's 10, and he plays the banjo. And on guitar is my 14-year-old brother, Tommy. (Applause) We call ourselves the Sleepy Man Banjo Boys. (Music) (Applause) TM: Thank you. JM: Thank you all. TM: Thank you very much. |
Nature. Beauty. Gratitude. | {0: 'Louie Schwartzberg is a cinematographer, director and producer who captures breathtaking images that celebrate life -- revealing connections, universal rhythms, patterns and beauty.'} | TEDxSF | When I graduated UCLA, I moved to Northern California, and I lived in a little town called Elk, on the Mendocino coast. And I didn't have a phone or TV, but I had US mail. And life was good back then — if you could remember it. I'd go to the general store for a cup of coffee and a brownie, I'd ship my film to San Francisco, and lo and behold, two days later, it would end up on my front door, which was way better than having to fight the traffic of Hollywood. I didn't have much money, (Music) but I had time and a sense of wonder. So I started shooting time-lapse photography. It would take me a month to shoot a four-minute roll of film, because that's all I could afford. I've been shooting time-lapse flowers continuously, nonstop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 30 years. And to see them move is a dance I'll never get tired of. Their beauty immerses us with color, taste, touch. It also provides a third of the food we eat. (Music) Beauty and seduction are nature's tools for survival, because we protect what we fall in love with. It opens our hearts and makes us realize we are a part of nature, and we're not separate from it. When we see ourselves in nature, it also connects us to every one of us, because it's clear that it's all connected in one. When people see my images, a lot of times they'll say, "Oh my God." Have you ever wondered what that meant? The "oh" means it caught your attention; it makes you present, makes you mindful. The "my" means it connects with something deep inside your soul. It creates a gateway for your inner voice to rise up and be heard. And "God"? God is that personal journey we all want to be on, to be inspired, to feel like we're connected to a universe that celebrates life. Did you know that 80 percent of the information we receive comes through our eyes, and if you compare light energy to musical scales, it would only be one octave that the naked eye could see, which is right in the middle? And aren't we grateful for our brains, that can take this electrical impulse that comes from light energy to create images in order for us to explore our world? And aren't we grateful that we have hearts that can feel these vibrations in order for us to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure and the beauty of nature? Nature's beauty is a gift that cultivates appreciation and gratitude. So, I have a gift I want to share with you today, a project I'm working on called "Happiness Revealed." And it'll give us a glimpse into that perspective — from the point of view of a child and an elderly man — of that world. Little girl: When I watch TV, it's just some shows that you just — that are pretend. And when you explore, you get more imagination than you already had, and when you get more imagination, it makes you want to go deeper in so you can get more and see beautifuller things, like the path, if it's a path, it could lead you to a beach or something, and it could be beautiful. (Music) (Narrator) Brother David Steindl-Rast: Do you think this is just another day in your life? It's not just another day. It's the one day that is given to you: today. (Music) It's given to you. It's a gift. It's the only gift that you have right now. And the only appropriate response is gratefulness. (Music) If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great gift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the first day in your life and the very last day, then you will have spent this day very well. (Music) Begin by opening your eyes and be surprised that you have eyes you can open, that incredible array of colors that is constantly offered to us for our pure enjoyment. Look at the sky. We so rarely look at the sky. We so rarely note how different it is from moment to moment, with clouds coming and going. We just think of the weather, and even with the weather, we don't think of all the many nuances of weather. We just think of "good weather" and "bad weather." This day, right now, has unique weather, maybe a kind that will never exactly, in that form, come again. The formation of clouds in the sky will never be the same as it is right now. Open your eyes. Look at that. (Music) Look at the faces of people whom you meet. Each one has an incredible story behind their face, a story that you could never fully fathom, not only their own story, but the story of their ancestors. We all go back so far, and in this present moment, on this day, all the people you meet, all that life from generations and from so many places all over the world flows together and meets you here, like a life-giving water, if you only open your heart and drink. (Music) Open your heart to the incredible gifts that civilization gives to us. You flip a switch, and there is electric light. You turn a faucet, and there is warm water and cold water, and drinkable water. It's a gift that millions and millions in the world will never experience. So these are just a few of an enormous number of gifts to which we can open your heart. And so I wish you that you will open your heart to all these blessings, and let them flow through you, that everyone whom you will meet on this day will be blessed by you, just by your eyes, by your smile, by your touch, just by your presence. Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you. (Music) And then, it will really be a good day. (Applause) Louie Schwartzberg: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Before I die I want to ... | {0: 'Candy Chang creates art that prompts people to think about their secrets, wishes and hopes -- and then share them. She is a TED Senior Fellow.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives. We don't bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, though we do share the same public spaces. So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk. And these projects came from questions I had, like: How much are my neighbors paying for their apartments? (Laughter) How can we lend and borrow more things, without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time? How can we share more memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape? How can we share more of our hopes for our vacant storefronts, so our communities can reflect our needs and dreams today? Now, I live in New Orleans, and I am in love with New Orleans. My soul is always soothed by the giant live oak trees, shading lovers, drunks and dreamers for hundreds of years, and I trust a city that always makes way for music. I feel like every time someone sneezes, New Orleans has a parade. (Laughter) The city has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, but it also has one of the highest amounts of abandoned properties in America. I live near this house, and I thought about how I could make it a nicer space for my neighborhood, and I also thought about something that changed my life forever. In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much. Her name was Joan, and she was a mother to me. And her death was sudden and unexpected. And I thought about death a lot. And ... this made me feel deep gratitude for the time I've had. And ... brought clarity to the things that are meaningful to my life now. But I struggle to maintain this perspective in my daily life. I feel like it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, and forget what really matters to you. So with help from old and new friends, I turned the side of this abandoned house into a giant chalkboard, and stenciled it with a fill-in-the-blank sentence: "Before I die, I want to ..." So anyone walking by can pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their life, and share their personal aspirations in public space. I didn't know what to expect from this experiment, but by the next day, the wall was entirely filled out, and it kept growing. And I'd like to share a few things that people wrote on this wall. "Before I die, I want to be tried for piracy." (Laughter) "Before I die, I want to straddle the International Dateline." "Before I die, I want to sing for millions." "Before I die, I want to plant a tree." "Before I die, I want to live off the grid." "Before I die, I want to hold her one more time." "Before I die, I want to be someone's cavalry." "Before I die, I want to be completely myself." So this neglected space became a constructive one, and people's hopes and dreams made me laugh out loud, tear up, and they consoled me during my own tough times. It's about knowing you're not alone; it's about understanding our neighbors in new and enlightening ways; it's about making space for reflection and contemplation, and remembering what really matters most to us as we grow and change. I made this last year, and started receiving hundreds of messages from passionate people who wanted to make a wall with their community. So, my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and beyond. Together, we've shown how powerful our public spaces can be if we're given the opportunity to have a voice, and share more with one another. Two of the most valuable things we have are time, and our relationships with other people. In our age of increasing distractions, it's more important than ever to find ways to maintain perspective, and remember that life is brief and tender. Death is something that we're often discouraged to talk about, or even think about, but I've realized that preparing for death is one of the most empowering things you can do. Thinking about death clarifies your life. Our shared spaces can better reflect what matters to us, as individuals and as a community, and with more ways to share our hopes, fears and stories, the people around us can not only help us make better places, they can help us lead better lives. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Want to help someone? Shut up and listen! | {0: "Ernesto Sirolli got his start doing aid work in Africa in the 70's -- and quickly realised how ineffective it was."} | TEDxEQChCh | Everything I do, and everything I do professionally — my life — has been shaped by seven years of work as a young man in Africa. From 1971 to 1977 — I look young, but I'm not — (Laughter) — I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia, in projects of technical cooperation with African countries. I worked for an Italian NGO, and every single project that we set up in Africa failed. And I was distraught. I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. Instead, everything we touched we killed. Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book, "Ripples from the Zambezi," was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food. So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River, and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini and ... And of course the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that, so we paid them to come and work, and sometimes they would show up. (Laughter) And we were amazed that the local people, in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture. But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, "Thank God we're here." (Laughter) "Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation." And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully. We had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomato would grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size. And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians, "Look how easy agriculture is." When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the river and they ate everything. (Laughter) And we said to the Zambians, "My God, the hippos!" And the Zambians said, "Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here." (Laughter) "Why didn't you tell us?""You never asked." I thought it was only us Italians blundering around Africa, but then I saw what the Americans were doing, what the English were doing, what the French were doing, and after seeing what they were doing, I became quite proud of our project in Zambia. Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos. You should see the rubbish — (Applause) — You should see the rubbish that we have bestowed on unsuspecting African people. You want to read the book, read "Dead Aid," by Dambisa Moyo, Zambian woman economist. The book was published in 2009. We Western donor countries have given the African continent two trillion American dollars in the last 50 years. I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done. Just go and read her book. Read it from an African woman, the damage that we have done. We Western people are imperialist, colonialist missionaries, and there are only two ways we deal with people: We either patronize them, or we are paternalistic. The two words come from the Latin root "pater," which means "father." But they mean two different things. Paternalistic, I treat anybody from a different culture as if they were my children. "I love you so much." Patronizing, I treat everybody from another culture as if they were my servants. That's why the white people in Africa are called "bwana," boss. I was given a slap in the face reading a book, "Small is Beautiful," written by Schumacher, who said, above all in economic development, if people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. This should be the first principle of aid. The first principle of aid is respect. This morning, the gentleman who opened this conference lay a stick on the floor, and said, "Can we — can you imagine a city that is not neocolonial?" I decided when I was 27 years old to only respond to people, and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation, where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion, the servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person. So what you do — you shut up. You never arrive in a community with any ideas, and you sit with the local people. We don't work from offices. We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub. We have zero infrastructure. And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do. The most important thing is passion. You can give somebody an idea. If that person doesn't want to do it, what are you going to do? The passion that the person has for her own growth is the most important thing. The passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing. And then we help them to go and find the knowledge, because nobody in the world can succeed alone. The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available. So years and years ago, I had this idea: Why don't we, for once, instead of arriving in the community to tell people what to do, why don't, for once, listen to them? But not in community meetings. Let me tell you a secret. There is a problem with community meetings. Entrepreneurs never come, and they never tell you, in a public meeting, what they want to do with their own money, what opportunity they have identified. So planning has this blind spot. The smartest people in your community you don't even know, because they don't come to your public meetings. What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one, you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn't exist. You have to create a new profession. The profession is the family doctor of enterprise, the family doctor of business, who sits with you in your house, at your kitchen table, at the cafe, and helps you find the resources to transform your passion into a way to make a living. I started this as a tryout in Esperance, in Western Australia. I was a doing a Ph.D. at the time, trying to go away from this patronizing bullshit that we arrive and tell you what to do. And so what I did in Esperance that first year was to just walk the streets, and in three days I had my first client, and I helped this first guy who was smoking fish from a garage, was a Maori guy, and I helped him to sell to the restaurant in Perth, to get organized, and then the fishermen came to me to say, "You the guy who helped Maori? Can you help us?" And I helped these five fishermen to work together and get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in Albany for 60 cents a kilo, but we found a way to take the fish for sushi to Japan for 15 dollars a kilo, and the farmers came to talk to me, said, "Hey, you helped them. Can you help us?" In a year, I had 27 projects going on, and the government came to see me to say, "How can you do that? How can you do — ?" And I said, "I do something very, very, very difficult. I shut up, and listen to them." (Laughter) So — (Applause) — So the government says, "Do it again." (Laughter) We've done it in 300 communities around the world. We have helped to start 40,000 businesses. There is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are dying of solitude. Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history, died age 96, a few years ago. Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophy before becoming involved in business, and this is what Peter Drucker says: "Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy." Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship. So now you're rebuilding Christchurch without knowing what the smartest people in Christchurch want to do with their own money and their own energy. You have to learn how to get these people to come and talk to you. You have to offer them confidentiality, privacy, you have to be fantastic at helping them, and then they will come, and they will come in droves. In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients. Can you imagine a community of 400,000 people, the intelligence and the passion? Which presentation have you applauded the most this morning? Local, passionate people. That's who you have applauded. So what I'm saying is that entrepreneurship is where it's at. We are at the end of the first industrial revolution — nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing — and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable. The internal combustion engine is not sustainable. Freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable. What we have to look at is at how we feed, cure, educate, transport, communicate for seven billion people in a sustainable way. The technologies do not exist to do that. Who is going to invent the technology for the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it! Government? Forget about it! It will be entrepreneurs, and they're doing it now. There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazine many, many years ago. There was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860. And in 1860, this group of people came together, and they all speculated about what would happen to the city of New York in 100 years, and the conclusion was unanimous: The city of New York would not exist in 100 years. Why? Because they looked at the curve and said, if the population keeps growing at this rate, to move the population of New York around, they would have needed six million horses, and the manure created by six million horses would be impossible to deal with. They were already drowning in manure. (Laughter) So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technology that is going to choke the life out of New York. So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900, in the United States of America, there were 1,001 car manufacturing companies — 1,001. The idea of finding a different technology had absolutely taken over, and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters. Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford. However, there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs. First, you have to offer them confidentiality. Otherwise they don't come and talk to you. Then you have to offer them absolute, dedicated, passionate service to them. And then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship. The smallest company, the biggest company, has to be capable of doing three things beautifully: The product that you want to sell has to be fantastic, you have to have fantastic marketing, and you have to have tremendous financial management. Guess what? We have never met a single human being in the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money. It doesn't exist. This person has never been born. We've done the research, and we have looked at the 100 iconic companies of the world — Carnegie, Westinghouse, Edison, Ford, all the new companies, Google, Yahoo. There's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common, only one: None were started by one person. Now we teach entrepreneurship to 16-year-olds in Northumberland, and we start the class by giving them the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography, and the task of the 16-year-olds is to underline, in the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography how many times Richard uses the word "I" and how many times he uses the word "we." Never the word "I," and the word "we" 32 times. He wasn't alone when he started. Nobody started a company alone. No one. So we can create the community where we have facilitators who come from a small business background sitting in cafes, in bars, and your dedicated buddies who will do to you, what somebody did for this gentleman who talks about this epic, somebody who will say to you, "What do you need? What can you do? Can you make it? Okay, can you sell it? Can you look after the money?" "Oh, no, I cannot do this.""Would you like me to find you somebody?" We activate communities. We have groups of volunteers supporting the Enterprise Facilitator to help you to find resources and people and we have discovered that the miracle of the intelligence of local people is such that you can change the culture and the economy of this community just by capturing the passion, the energy and imagination of your own people. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to solve traffic jams | {0: 'Jonas Eliasson is dedicated to researching transportation flow, analyzing how people think about their commutes and what can influence their travel decisions.'} | TEDxHelvetia | Hi. I'm here to talk about congestion, namely road congestion. Road congestion is a pervasive phenomenon. It exists in basically all of the cities all around the world, which is a little bit surprising when you think about it. I mean, think about how different cities are, actually. I mean, you have the typical European cities, with a dense urban core, good public transportation mostly, not a lot of road capacity. But then, on the other hand, you have the American cities. It's moving by itself, okay. Anyway, the American cities: lots of roads dispersed over large areas, almost no public transportation. And then you have the emerging world cities, with a mixed variety of vehicles, mixed land-use patterns, also rather dispersed but often with a very dense urban core. And traffic planners all around the world have tried lots of different measures: dense cities or dispersed cities, lots of roads or lots of public transport or lots of bike lanes or more information, or lots of different things, but nothing seems to work. But all of these attempts have one thing in common. They're basically attempts at figuring out what people should do instead of rush hour car driving. They're essentially, to a point, attempts at planning what other people should do, planning their life for them. Now, planning a complex social system is a very hard thing to do, and let me tell you a story. Back in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, an urban planner in London got a phone call from a colleague in Moscow saying, basically, "Hi, this is Vladimir. I'd like to know, who's in charge of London's bread supply?" And the urban planner in London goes, "What do you mean, who's in charge of London's — I mean, no one is in charge." "Oh, but surely someone must be in charge. I mean, it's a very complicated system. Someone must control all of this." "No. No. No one is in charge. I mean, it basically — I haven't really thought of it. It basically organizes itself." It organizes itself. That's an example of a complex social system which has the ability of self-organizing, and this is a very deep insight. When you try to solve really complex social problems, the right thing to do is most of the time to create the incentives. You don't plan the details, and people will figure out what to do, how to adapt to this new framework. And let's now look at how we can use this insight to combat road congestion. This is a map of Stockholm, my hometown. Now, Stockholm is a medium-sized city, roughly two million people, but Stockholm also has lots of water and lots of water means lots of bridges — narrow bridges, old bridges — which means lots of road congestion. And these red dots show the most congested parts, which are the bridges that lead into the inner city. And then someone came up with the idea that, apart from good public transport, apart from spending money on roads, let's try to charge drivers one or two euros at these bottlenecks. Now, one or two euros, that isn't really a lot of money, I mean compared to parking charges and running costs, etc., so you would probably expect that car drivers wouldn't really react to this fairly small charge. You would be wrong. One or two euros was enough to make 20 percent of cars disappear from rush hours. Now, 20 percent, well, that's a fairly huge figure, you might think, but you've still got 80 percent left of the problem, right? Because you still have 80 percent of the traffic. Now, that's also wrong, because traffic happens to be a nonlinear phenomenon, meaning that once you reach above a certain capacity threshold then congestion starts to increase really, really rapidly. But fortunately, it also works the other way around. If you can reduce traffic even somewhat, then congestion will go down much faster than you might think. Now, congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm on January 3, 2006, and the first picture here is a picture of Stockholm, one of the typical streets, January 2. The first day with the congestion charges looked like this. This is what happens when you take away 20 percent of the cars from the streets. You really reduce congestion quite substantially. But, well, as I said, I mean, car drivers adapt, right? So after a while they would all come back because they have sort of gotten used to charges. Wrong again. It's now six and a half years ago since the congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm, and we basically have the same low traffic levels still. But you see, there's an interesting gap here in the time series in 2007. Well, the thing is that, the congestion charges, they were introduced first as a trial, so they were introduced in January and then abolished again at the end of July, followed by a referendum, and then they were reintroduced again in 2007, which of course was a wonderful scientific opportunity. I mean, this was a really fun experiment to start with, and we actually got to do it twice. And personally, I would like to do this every once a year or so, but they won't let me do that. But it was fun anyway. So, we followed up. What happened? This is the last day with the congestion charges, July 31, and you see the same street but now it's summer, and summer in Stockholm is a very nice and light time of the year, and the first day without the congestion charges looked like this. All the cars were back again, and you even have to admire the car drivers. They adapt so extremely quickly. The first day they all came back. And this effect hanged on. So 2007 figures looked like this. Now these traffic figures are really exciting and a little bit surprising and very useful to know, but I would say that the most surprising slide here I'm going to show you today is not this one. It's this one. This shows public support for congestion pricing of Stockholm, and you see that when congestion pricing were introduced in the beginning of Spring 2006, people were fiercely against it. Seventy percent of the population didn't want this. But what happened when the congestion charges were there is not what you would expect, that people hated it more and more. No, on the contrary, they changed, up to a point where we now have 70 percent support for keeping the charges, meaning that — I mean, let me repeat that: 70 percent of the population in Stockholm want to keep a price for something that used to be free. Okay. So why can that be? Why is that? Well, think about it this way. Who changed? I mean, the 20 percent of the car drivers that disappeared, surely they must be discontent in a way. And where did they go? If we can understand this, then maybe we can figure out how people can be so happy with this. Well, so we did this huge interview survey with lots of travel services, and tried to figure out who changed, and where did they go? And it turned out that they don't know themselves. (Laughter) For some reason, the car drivers are — they are confident they actually drive the same way that they used to do. And why is that? It's because that travel patterns are much less stable than you might think. Each day, people make new decisions, and people change and the world changes around them, and each day all of these decisions are sort of nudged ever so slightly away from rush hour car driving in a way that people don't even notice. They're not even aware of this themselves. And the other question, who changed their mind? Who changed their opinion, and why? So we did another interview survey, tried to figure out why people changed their mind, and what type of group changed their minds? And after analyzing the answers, it turned out that more than half of them believe that they haven't changed their minds. They're actually confident that they have liked congestion pricing all along. Which means that we are now in a position where we have reduced traffic across this toll cordon with 20 percent, and reduced congestion by enormous numbers, and people aren't even aware that they have changed, and they honestly believe that they have liked this all along. This is the power of nudges when trying to solve complex social problems, and when you do that, you shouldn't try to tell people how to adapt. You should just nudge them in the right direction. And if you do it right, people will actually embrace the change, and if you do it right, people will actually even like it. Thank you. (Applause) |
A broken body isn't a broken person | {0: 'Aspiring Olympic skier Janine Shepherd was nearly killed when she was hit by a truck during a training bike ride. Paralysed and immobile for six months, she was given a grim picture for recovery. But not only did she teach herself to walk again— she learned to fly.'} | TEDxKC | Life is about opportunities — creating them and embracing them. And for me, that was the Olympic dream. That's what defined me. That was my bliss. As a cross-country skier and member of the Australian ski team headed towards the Winter Olympics, I was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates. As we made our way up towards the spectacular Blue Mountains west of Sydney, it was the perfect autumn day: sunshine, the smell of eucalypt and a dream. Life was good. We'd been on our bikes for around five-and-a-half hours when we got to the part of the ride that I loved, and that was the hills, because I loved the hills. I got up off the seat of my bike and I started pumping my legs, and as I sucked in the cold mountain air, I could feel it burning my lungs, and I looked up to see the sun shining in my face. And then everything went black. Where was I? What was happening? My body was consumed by pain. I'd been hit by a speeding utility truck with only 10 minutes to go on the bike ride. I was airlifted from the scene of the accident by a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in Sydney. I had extensive and life-threatening injuries. I'd broken my neck and my back in six places. I broke five ribs on my left side. I broke my right arm. I broke my collarbone. I broke some bones in my feet. My whole right side was ripped open, filled with gravel. My head was cut open across the front, lifted back, exposing the skull underneath. I had head injures. I had internal injuries. I had massive blood loss. In fact, I lost about five liters of blood, which is all someone my size would actually hold. By the time the helicopter arrived at Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney, my blood pressure was 40 over nothing. I was having a really bad day. (Laughter) For over 10 days, I drifted between two dimensions. I had an awareness of being in my body, but also being out of my body, somewhere else, watching from above, as if it was happening to someone else. Why would I want to go back to a body that was so broken? But this voice kept calling me: "Come on, stay with me." "No, it's too hard." "Come on. This is our opportunity." "No. That body is broken. It can no longer serve me." "Come on. Stay with me. We can do it. We can do it together." I was at a crossroads. I knew if I didn't return to my body, I'd have to leave this world forever. It was the fight of my life. After 10 days, I made the decision to return to my body. And the internal bleeding stopped. The next concern was whether I would walk again, because I was paralyzed from the waist down. They said to my parents that the neck break was a stable fracture, but the back was completely crushed: the vertebra at L1 was like you'd dropped a peanut, stepped on it, smashed it into thousands of pieces. They'd have to operate. They went in. They put me on a beanbag. They cut me — literally cut me in half. I have a scar that wraps around my entire body. They picked as much broken bone as they could that had lodged in my spinal cord. They took out two of my broken ribs and they rebuilt my back — L1, they rebuilt it, they took out another broken rib, they fused T12, L1 and L2 together. Then they stitched me up; they took an entire hour to stitch me up. I woke up in intensive care, and the doctors were really excited that the operation had been a success, because at that stage, I had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes, and I thought, "Great, because I'm going to the Olympics!" (Laughter) I had no idea. That's the sort of thing that happens to someone else, not me, surely. But then the doctor came over to me and she said, "Janine, the operation was a success, and we've picked as much bone out of your spinal cord as we could. But the damage is permanent. The central nervous system nerves — there is no cure. You're what we call a partial paraplegic, and you'll have all of the injuries that go along with that. You'll have no feeling from the waist down, and at most, you might get 10 or 20 percent return. You'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life. You'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life. And if you walk again, it will be with calipers and a walking frame." And then she said, "Janine, you'll have to rethink everything you do in your life, because you're never going to be able to do the things you did before." (Gasps) I tried to grasp what she was saying. I was an athlete. That's all I knew. That's all I'd done. If I couldn't do that, then what could I do? And the question I asked myself is: If I couldn't do that, then who was I? They moved me from intensive care to acute spinal. I was lying on a thin, hard spinal bed. I had no movement in my legs. I had tight stockings on to protect from blood clots. I had one arm in plaster, one arm tied down by drips. I had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my head and I saw my world through a mirror that was suspended above my head. I shared the ward with five other people, and the amazing thing is, because we were all lying paralyzed in a spinal ward, we didn't know what each other looked like. How amazing is that? How often in life do you get to make friendships, judgment-free, purely based on spirit? And there were no superficial conversations as we shared our innermost thoughts, our fears, and our hopes for life after the spinal ward. I remember one night, one of the nurses came in, Jonathan, with a whole lot of plastic straws. He put a pile on top of each of us, and he said, "Start threading them together." Well, there wasn't much else to do in the spinal ward, so we did. (Laughter) And when we'd finished, he went around silently and he joined all of the straws up till it looped around the whole ward. And then he said, "OK everybody, hold on to your straws." And we did. And he said, "Right ... Now we're all connected." And as we held on and we breathed as one, we knew we weren't on this journey alone. And even lying paralyzed in the spinal ward ... there were moments of incredible depth and richness, of authenticity and connection that I had never experienced before. And each of us knew that when we left the spinal ward, we would never be the same. After six months, it was time to go home. I remember Dad pushing me outside in my wheelchair, wrapped in a plaster body cast, and feeling the sun on my face for the first time. I soaked it up and I thought, "How could I ever have taken this for granted?" I felt so incredibly grateful for my life. But before I left hospital, the head nurse had said to me, "Janine, I want you to be ready, because when you get home, something's going to happen." And I said, "What?" And she said, "You're going to get depressed." And I said, "Not me, not Janine the Machine," which was my nickname. She said, "You are, because, see, it happens to everyone. In the spinal ward, that's normal. You're in a wheelchair. That's normal. But you're going to get home and realize how different life is." And I got home. And something happened. I realized Sister Sam was right. I did get depressed. I was in my wheelchair. I had no feeling from the waist down, attached to a catheter bottle. I couldn't walk. I'd lost so much weight in hospital, I now weighed about 80 pounds. And I wanted to give up. All I wanted to do was put my running shoes on and run out the door. I wanted my old life back. I wanted my body back. And I can remember Mom sitting on the end of my bed and saying, "I wonder if life will ever be good again." And I thought, "How could it? Because I've lost everything that I valued, everything that I'd worked towards. Gone." And the question I asked was, "Why me? Why me?" And then I remembered my friends that were still in the spinal ward, particularly Maria. Maria was in a car accident, and she woke up on her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic, had no movement from the neck down, had damage to her vocal chords, and she couldn't talk. They told me, "We're going to move you next to her because we think it will be good for her." I was worried. I didn't know how I'd react to being next to her. I knew it would be challenging, but it was actually a blessing, because Maria always smiled. She was always happy, and even when she began to talk again, albeit difficult to understand, she never complained, not once. And I wondered how had she ever found that level of acceptance. And I realized that this wasn't just my life; it was life itself. I realized that this wasn't just my pain; it was everybody's pain. And then I knew, just like before, that I had a choice: I could keep fighting this, or I could let go and accept not only my body, but the circumstances of my life. And then I stopped asking, "Why me?" And I started to ask, "Why not me?" And then I thought to myself, maybe being at rock bottom is actually the perfect place to start. I had never before thought of myself as a creative person. I was an athlete; my body was a machine. But now I was about to embark on the most creative project that any of us could ever do: that of rebuilding a life. And even though I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do, in that uncertainty came a sense of freedom. I was no longer tied to a set path. I was free to explore life's infinite possibilities. And that realization was about to change my life. Sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast, an airplane flew overhead. I looked up, and I thought to myself, "That's it! If I can't walk, then I might as well fly." (Laughter) I said, "Mom, I'm going to learn how to fly." She said, "That's nice, dear." (Laughter) I said, "Pass me the yellow pages." She passed me the phone book, I rang up the flying school, I said I'd like to make a booking to come out for a flight. They said, "When do you want to come out?" I said, "Well, I have to get a friend to drive me because I can't drive. Sort of can't walk, either. Is that a problem?" I made a booking, and weeks later, my friend Chris and my mom drove me out to the airport, all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body cast in a baggy pair of overalls. (Laughter) I can tell you, I did not look like the ideal candidate to get a pilot's license. (Laughter) I'm holding on to the counter because I can't stand. I said, "Hi, I'm here for a flying lesson." They took one look and ran out the back to draw short straws. "You get her." "No, no, you take her." Finally a guy goes, "Hi, I'm Andrew. I'm going to take you flying." I go, "Great!" They get me out on the tarmac, and there was this red, white and blue airplane — it was beautiful. They had to slide me up on the wing to put me in the cockpit. They sat me down. There are buttons and dials everywhere. I'm going, "Wow, how do you ever know what all these buttons and dials do?" Andrew got in the front, started the plane, and said, "Would you like to have a go at taxiing?" That's when you use your feet to control the rudder pedals to control the airplane on the ground. I said, "No, I can't use my legs." He went, "Oh." I said, "But I can use my hands," and he said, "OK." So he got over to the runway, and he applied the power. And as we took off down the runway, and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac, and we became airborne, I had the most incredible sense of freedom. And Andrew said to me, as we got over the training area, "You see that mountain over there?" And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Well, you take the controls, and you fly towards that mountain." And as I looked up, I realized that he was pointing towards the Blue Mountains, where the journey had begun. And I took the controls, and I was flying. And I was a long, long way from that spinal ward. I knew right then that I was going to be a pilot. Didn't know how on Earth I'd ever pass a medical. (Laughter) But I'd worry about that later, because right now, I had a dream. So I went home, I got a training diary out, and I had a plan. And I practiced my walking as much as I could, and I went from the point of two people holding me up ... to one person holding me up ... to the point where I could walk around the furniture as long as it wasn't too far apart. And then I made great progression, to the point where I could walk around the house, holding onto the walls, like this. And Mom said she was forever following me, wiping off my fingerprints. (Laughter) But at least she always knew where I was. (Laughter) So while the doctors continued to operate and put my body back together again, I went on with my theory study. And then eventually, amazingly, I passed my pilot's medical, and that was my green light to fly. And I spent every moment I could out at that flying school, way out of my comfort zone, all these young guys that wanted to be Qantas pilots, you know, and little old hop-along me in first my plaster cast, and then my steel brace, my baggy overalls, my bag of medication and catheters and my limp. They use to look at me and think, "Oh, who is she kidding? She's never going to be able to do this." And sometimes I thought that, too. But that didn't matter, because now there was something inside that burned that far outweighed my injuries. And little goals kept me going along the way, and eventually I got my private pilot's license. Then I learned to navigate, and I flew my friends around Australia. And then I learned to fly an airplane with two engines and I got my twin-engine rating. And then I learned to fly in bad weather as well as fine weather, and got my instrument rating. And then I got my commercial pilot's license. And then I got my instructor rating. And then I found myself back at that same school where I'd gone for that very first flight, teaching other people how to fly ... just under 18 months after I'd left the spinal ward. (Applause) (Applause ends) And then I thought, "Why stop there? Why not learn to fly upside down?" (Laughter) And I did, and I learned to fly upside down and became an aerobatics flying instructor. (Laughter) And Mom and Dad? Never been up. (Laughter) But then I knew for certain that although my body might be limited, it was my spirit that was unstoppable. The philosopher Lao Tzu once said, "When you let go of what you are, you become what you might be." I now know that it wasn't until I let go of who I thought I was that I was able to create a completely new life. It wasn't until I let go of the life I thought I should have ... that I was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me. I now know that my real strength never came from my body. And although my physical capabilities have changed dramatically, who I am is unchanged. The pilot light inside of me was still alight, just as it is in each and every one of us. I know that I'm not my body. And I also know that you're not yours. And then it no longer matters what you look like, where you come from, or what you do for a living. All that matters is that we continue to fan the flame of humanity by living our lives as the ultimate creative expression of who we really are, because we are all connected by millions and millions of straws. And it's time to join those up and to hang on. And if we are to move towards our collective bliss ... it's time we shed our focus on the physical and instead embrace the virtues of the heart. So raise your straws if you'll join me. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I love vultures | {0: 'Munir Virani is a raptor biologist and wildlife photographer, and Director of the Peregrine Fund Africa Program, devoted to conserving birds of prey.'} | TED@Nairobi | I would like to talk to you about a very special group of animals. There are 10,000 species of birds in the world. Vultures are amongst the most threatened group of birds. When you see a vulture like this, the first thing that comes to your mind is, these are disgusting, ugly, greedy creatures that are just after your flesh, associated with politicians. (Laughter) (Applause) I want to change that perception. I want to change those feelings you have for these birds, because they need our sympathy. They really do. (Laughter) And I'll tell you why. First of all, why do they have such a bad press? When Charles Darwin went across the Atlantic in 1832 on the Beagle, he saw the turkey vulture, and he said, "These are disgusting birds with bald scarlet heads that are formed to revel in putridity." (Laughter) You could not get a worse insult, and that from Charles Darwin. (Laughter) You know, he changed his mind when he came back, and I'll tell you why. They've also be associated with Disney — (Laughter) — personified as goofy, dumb, stupid characters. More recently, if you've been following the Kenyan press — (Laughter) (Applause) (Cheers) — these are the attributes that they associated the Kenyan MPs with. But I want to challenge that. I want to challenge that. Do you know why? Because MPs do not keep the environment clean. (Laughter) MPs do not help to prevent the spread of diseases. They are hardly monogamous. (Laughter) (Applause) They are far from being extinct. (Laughter) And, my favorite is, vultures are better looking. (Applause) (Laughter) So there's two types of vultures in this planet. There are the New World vultures that are mainly found in the Americas, like the condors and the caracaras, and then the Old World vultures, where we have 16 species. From these 16, 11 of them are facing a high risk of extinction. So why are vultures important? First of all, they provide vital ecological services. They clean up. They're our natural garbage collectors. They clean up carcasses right to the bone. They help to kill all the bacteria. They help absorb anthrax that would otherwise spread and cause huge livestock losses and diseases in other animals. Recent studies have shown that in areas where there are no vultures, carcasses take up to three to four times to decompose, and this has huge ramifications for the spread of diseases. Vultures also have tremendous historical significance. They have been associated in ancient Egyptian culture. Nekhbet was the symbol of the protector and the motherhood, and together with the cobra, symbolized the unity between Upper and Lower Egypt. In Hindu mythology, Jatayu was the vulture god, and he risked his life in order to save the goddess Sita from the 10-headed demon Ravana. In Tibetan culture, they are performing very important sky burials. In places like Tibet, there are no places to bury the dead, or wood to cremate them, so these vultures provide a natural disposal system. So what is the problem with vultures? We have eight species of vultures that occur in Kenya, of which six are highly threatened with extinction. The reason is that they're getting poisoned, and the reason that they're getting poisoned is because there's human-wildlife conflicts. The pastoral communities are using this poison to target predators, and in return, the vultures are falling victim to this. In South Asia, in countries like India and Pakistan, four species of vultures are listed as critically endangered, which means they have less than 10 or 15 years to go extinct, and the reason is because they are falling prey by consuming livestock that has been treated with a painkilling drug like Diclofenac. This drug has now been banned for veterinary use in India, and they have taken a stand. Because there are no vultures, there's been a spread in the numbers of feral dogs at carcass dump sites, and when you have feral dogs, you have a huge time bomb of rabies. The number of cases of rabies has increased tremendously in India. Kenya is going to have one of the largest wind farms in Africa: 353 wind turbines are going to be up at Lake Turkana. I am not against wind energy, but we need to work with the governments, because wind turbines do this to birds. They slice them in half. They are bird-blending machines. In West Africa, there's a horrific trade of dead vultures to serve the witchcraft and the fetish market. So what's being done? Well, we're conducting research on these birds. We're putting transmitters on them. We're trying to determine their basic ecology, and see where they go. We can see that they travel different countries, so if you focus on a problem locally, it's not going to help you. We need to work with governments in regional levels. We're working with local communities. We're talking to them about appreciating vultures, about the need from within to appreciate these wonderful creatures and the services that they provide. How can you help? You can become active, make noise. You can write a letter to your government and tell them that we need to focus on these very misunderstood creatures. Volunteer your time to spread the word. Spread the word. When you walk out of this room, you will be informed about vultures, but speak to your families, to your children, to your neighbors about vultures. They are very graceful. Charles Darwin said he changed his mind because he watched them fly effortlessly without energy in the skies. Kenya, this world, will be much poorer without these wonderful species. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Forget multitasking, try monotasking | {0: 'Paolo Cardini is a product designer who asks serious questions about how we live -- and answers them with whimsical and playful designs.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I'm a designer and an educator. I'm a multitasking person, and I push my students to fly through a very creative, multitasking design process. But how efficient is, really, this multitasking? Let's consider for a while the option of monotasking. A couple of examples. Look at that. This is my multitasking activity result. (Laughter) So trying to cook, answering the phone, writing SMS, and maybe uploading some pictures about this awesome barbecue. So someone tells us the story about supertaskers, so this two percent of people who are able to control multitasking environment. But what about ourselves, and what about our reality? When's the last time you really enjoyed just the voice of your friend? So this is a project I'm working on, and this is a series of front covers to downgrade our super, hyper — (Laughter) (Applause) to downgrade our super, hyper-mobile phones into the essence of their function. Another example: Have you ever been to Venice? How beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streets on the island. But our multitasking reality is pretty different, and full of tons of information. So what about something like that to rediscover our sense of adventure? I know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about mono when the number of possibilities is so huge, but I push you to consider the option of focusing on just one task, or maybe turning your digital senses totally off. So nowadays, everyone could produce his mono product. Why not? So find your monotask spot within the multitasking world. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why global jihad is losing | {0: 'Bobby Ghosh is the Managing Editor at Quartz.'} | TEDxGeorgetown | I'm going to talk about the power of a word: jihad. To the vast majority of practicing Muslims, jihad is an internal struggle for the faith. It is a struggle within, a struggle against vice, sin, temptation, lust, greed. It is a struggle to try and live a life that is set by the moral codes written in the Koran. In that original idea, the concept of jihad is as important to Muslims as the idea of grace is to Christians. It's a very powerful word, jihad, if you look at it in that respect, and there's a certain almost mystical resonance to it. And that's the reason why, for hundreds of years, Muslims everywhere have named their children Jihad, their daughters as much as their sons, in the same way that, say, Christians name their daughters Grace, and Hindus, my people, name our daughters Bhakti, which means, in Sanskrit, spiritual worship. But there have always been, in Islam, a small group, a minority, who believe that jihad is not only an internal struggle but also an external struggle against forces that would threaten the faith, or the faithul. And some of these people believe that in that struggle, it is sometimes okay to take up arms. And so the thousands of young Muslim men who flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet occupation of a Muslim country, in their minds they were fighting a jihad, they were doing jihad, and they named themselves the Mujahideen, which is a word that comes from the same root as jihad. And we forget this now, but back then the Mujahideen were celebrated in this country, in America. We thought of them as holy warriors who were taking the good fight to the ungodly communists. America gave them weapons, gave them money, gave them support, encouragement. But within that group, a tiny, smaller group, a minority within a minority within a minority, were coming up with a new and dangerous conception of jihad, and in time this group would come to be led by Osama bin Laden, and he refined the idea. His idea of jihad was a global war of terror, primarily targeted at the far enemy, at the crusaders from the West, against America. And the things he did in the pursuit of this jihad were so horrendous, so monstrous, and had such great impact, that his definition was the one that stuck, not just here in the West. We didn't know any better. We didn't pause to ask. We just assumed that if this insane man and his psychopathic followers were calling what they did jihad, then that's what jihad must mean. But it wasn't just us. Even in the Muslim world, his definition of jihad began to gain acceptance. A year ago I was in Tunis, and I met the imam of a very small mosque, an old man. Fifteen years ago, he named his granddaughter Jihad, after the old meaning. He hoped that a name like that would inspire her to live a spiritual life. But he told me that after 9/11, he began to have second thoughts. He worried that if he called her by that name, especially outdoors, outside in public, he might be seen as endorsing bin Laden's idea of jihad. On Fridays in his mosque, he gave sermons trying to reclaim the meaning of the word, but his congregants, the people who came to his mosque, they had seen the videos. They had seen pictures of the planes going into the towers, the towers coming down. They had heard bin Laden say that that was jihad, and claimed victory for it. And so the old imam worried that his words were falling on deaf ears. No one was paying attention. He was wrong. Some people were paying attention, but for the wrong reasons. The United States, at this point, was putting pressure on all its Arab allies, including Tunisia, to stamp out extremism in their societies, and this imam found himself suddenly in the crosshairs of the Tunisian intelligence service. They had never paid him any attention before — old man, small mosque — but now they began to pay visits, and sometimes they would drag him in for questions, and always the same question: "Why did you name your granddaughter Jihad? Why do you keep using the word jihad in your Friday sermons? Do you hate Americans? What is your connection to Osama bin Laden?" So to the Tunisian intelligence agency, and organizations like it all over the Arab world, jihad equaled extremism, Bin Laden's definition had become institutionalized. That was the power of that word that he was able to do. And it filled this old imam, it filled him with great sadness. He told me that, of bin Laden's many crimes, this was, in his mind, one that didn't get enough attention, that he took this word, this beautiful idea. He didn't so much appropriate it as kidnapped it and debased it and corrupted it and turned it into something it was never meant to be, and then persuaded all of us that it always was a global jihad. But the good news is that the global jihad is almost over, as bin Laden defined it. It was dying well before he did, and now it's on its last legs. Opinion polls from all over the Muslim world show that there is very little interest among Muslims in a global holy war against the West, against the far enemy. The supply of young men willing to fight and die for this cause is dwindling. The supply of money — just as important, more important perhaps — the supply of money to this activity is also dwindling. The wealthy fanatics who were previously sponsoring this kind of activity are now less generous. What does that mean for us in the West? Does it mean we can break out the champagne, wash our hands of it, disengage, sleep easy at night? No. Disengagement is not an option, because if you let local jihad survive, it becomes international jihad. And so there's now a lot of different violent jihads all over the world. In Somalia, in Mali, in Nigeria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, there are groups that claim to be the inheritors of the legacy of Osama bin Laden. They use his rhetoric. They even use the brand name he created for his jihad. So there is now an al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, there's an al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, there is an al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. There are other groups — in Nigeria, Boko Haram, in Somalia, al Shabaab — and they all pay homage to Osama bin Laden. But if you look closely, they're not fighting a global jihad. They're fighting battles over much narrower issues. Usually it has to do with ethnicity or race or sectarianism, or it's a power struggle. More often than not, it's a power struggle in one country, or even a small region within one country. Occasionally they will go across a border, from Iraq to Syria, from Mali to Algeria, from Somalia to Kenya, but they're not fighting a global jihad against some far enemy. But that doesn't mean that we can relax. I was in Yemen recently, where — it's the home of the last al Qaeda franchise that still aspires to attack America, attack the West. It's old school al Qaeda. You may remember these guys. They are the ones who tried to send the underwear bomber here, and they were using the Internet to try and instigate violence among American Muslims. But they have been distracted recently. Last year, they took control over a portion of southern Yemen, and ran it, Taliban-style. And then the Yemeni military got its act together, and ordinary people rose up against these guys and drove them out, and since then, most of their activities, most of their attacks have been directed at Yemenis. So I think we've come to a point now where we can say that, just like all politics, all jihad is local. But that's still not reason for us to disengage, because we've seen that movie before, in Afghanistan. When those Mujahideen defeated the Soviet Union, we disengaged. And even before the fizz had gone out of our celebratory champagne, the Taliban had taken over in Kabul, and we said, "Local jihad, not our problem." And then the Taliban gave the keys of Kandahar to Osama bin Laden. He made it our problem. Local jihad, if you ignore it, becomes global jihad again. The good news is that it doesn't have to be. We know how to fight it now. We have the tools. We have the knowhow, and we can take the lessons we've learned from the fight against global jihad, the victory against global jihad, and apply those to local jihad. What are those lessons? We know who killed bin Laden: SEAL Team Six. Do we know, do we understand, who killed bin Ladenism? Who ended the global jihad? There lie the answers to the solution to local jihad. Who killed bin Ladenism? Let's start with bin Laden himself. He probably thought 9/11 was his greatest achievement. In reality, it was the beginning of the end for him. He killed 3,000 innocent people, and that filled the Muslim world with horror and revulsion, and what that meant was that his idea of jihad could never become mainstream. He condemned himself to operating on the lunatic fringes of his own community. 9/11 didn't empower him; it doomed him. Who killed bin Ladenism? Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed it. He was the especially sadistic head of al Qaeda in Iraq who sent hundreds of suicide bombers to attack not Americans but Iraqis. Muslims. Sunni as well as Shiites. Any claim that al Qaeda had to being protectors of Islam against the Western crusaders was drowned in the blood of Iraqi Muslims. Who killed Osama bin Laden? The SEAL Team Six. Who killed bin Ladenism? Al Jazeera did, Al Jazeera and half a dozen other satellite news stations in Arabic, because they circumvented the old, state-owned television stations in a lot of these countries which were designed to keep information from people. Al Jazeera brought information to them, showed them what was being said and done in the name of their religion, exposed the hypocrisy of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and allowed them, gave them the information that allowed them to come to their own conclusions. Who killed bin Ladenism? The Arab Spring did, because it showed a way for young Muslims to bring about change in a manner that Osama bin Laden, with his limited imagination, could never have conceived. Who defeated the global jihad? The American military did, the American soldiers did, with their allies, fighting in faraway battlefields. And perhaps, a time will come when they get the rightful credit for it. So all these factors, and many more besides, we don't even fully understand some of them yet, these came together to defeat a monstrosity as big as bin Ladenism, the global jihad, you needed this group effort. Now, not all of these things will work in local jihad. The American military is not going to march into Nigeria to take on Boko Haram, and it's unlikely that SEAL Team Six will rappel into the homes of al Shabaab's leaders and take them out. But many of these other factors that were in play are now even stronger than before. Half the work is already done. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. The notion of violent jihad in which more Muslims are killed than any other kind of people is already thoroughly discredited. We don't have to go back to that. Satellite television and the Internet are informing and empowering young Muslims in exciting new ways. And the Arab Spring has produced governments, many of them Islamist governments, who know that, for their own self-preservation, they need to take on the extremists in their midsts. We don't need to persuade them, but we do need to help them, because they haven't really come to this place before. The good news, again, is that a lot of the things they need we already have, and we are very good at giving: economic assistance, not just money, but expertise, technology, knowhow, private investment, fair terms of trade, medicine, education, technical support for training for their police forces to become more effective, for their anti-terror forces to become more efficient. We've got plenty of these things. Some of the other things that they need we're not very good at giving. Maybe nobody is. Time, patience, subtlety, understanding — these are harder to give. I live in New York now. Just this week, posters have gone up in subway stations in New York that describe jihad as savage. But in all the many years that I have covered the Middle East, I have never been as optimistic as I am today that the gap between the Muslim world and the West is narrowing fast, and one of the many reasons for my optimism is that, because I know there are millions, hundreds of millions of people, Muslims like that old imam in Tunis, who are reclaiming this word and restoring to its original, beautiful purpose. Bin Laden is dead. Bin Ladenism has been defeated. His definition of jihad can now be expunged. To that jihad we can say, "Goodbye. Good riddance." To the real jihad we can say, "Welcome back. Good luck." Thank you. (Applause) |
A bath without water | {0: "Student Ludwick Marishane invented a water-less bathing lotion and was named the 2011 Global Student Entrepreneur of the Year Award -- all because he didn't feel like taking baths."} | TED@Johannesburg | So I grew up in Limpopo, on the border of Limpopo and Mpumalanga, a little town called Motetema. Water and electricity supply are as unpredictable as the weather, and growing up in these tough situations, at the age of 17, I was relaxing with a couple of friends of mine in winter, and we were sunbathing. The Limpopo sun gets really hot in winter. So as we were sunbathing, my best friend next to me says, "Man, why doesn't somebody invent something that you can just put on your skin and then you don't have to bathe?" And I sat, and I was like, "Man, I would buy that, eh?" So I went home, and I did a little research, and I found some very shocking statistics. Over 2.5 billion people in the world today do not have proper access to water and sanitation. Four hundred and fifty million of them are in Africa, and five million of them are in South Africa. Various diseases thrive in this environment, the most drastic of which is called trachoma. Trachoma is an infection of the eye due to dirt getting into your eye. Multiple infections of trachoma can leave you permanently blind. The disease leaves eight million people permanently blind each and every year. The shocking part about it is that to avoid being infected with trachoma, all you have to do is wash your face: no medicine, no pills, no injections. So after seeing these shocking statistics, I thought to myself, "Okay, even if I'm not just doing it for myself and the fact that I don't want to bathe, I at least need to do it to try to save the world." (Laughter) So with my trusty little steed, my Nokia 6234 cell phone — I didn't have a laptop, I didn't have Internet much, except for the 20-rand-an-hour Internet cafe — I did research on Wikipedia, on Google, about lotions, creams, the compositions, the melting points, the toxicities — I did high school science — and I wrote down a little formula on a piece of paper, and it looked like the KFC special spice, you know? So I was like, okay, so we've got the formula ready. Now we need to get this thing into practice. Fast forward four years later, after having written a 40-page business plan on the cell phone, having written my patent on the cell phone, I'm the youngest patent-holder in the country, and — ("No more bathing!") — I can't say any more than that. (Laughter) I had invented DryBath, the world's first bath-substituting lotion. You literally put it on your skin, and you don't have to bathe. (Laughter) So after having tried to make it work in high school with the limited resources I had, I went to university, met a few people, got it into practice, and we have a fully functioning product that's ready to go to the market. It's actually available on the market. So we learned a few lessons in commercializing and making DryBath available. One of the things we learned was that poor communities don't buy products in bulk. They buy products on demand. A person in Alex doesn't buy a box of cigarettes. They buy one cigarette each day, even though it's more expensive. So we packaged DryBath in these innovative little sachets. You just snap them in half, and you squeeze it out. And the cool part is, one sachet substitutes one bath for five rand. After creating that model, we also learned a lot in terms of implementing the product. We realized that even rich kids from the suburbs really want DryBath. (Laughter) At least once a week. Anyway, we realized that we could save 80 million liters of water on average each time they skipped a bath, and also we would save two hours a day for kids who are in rural areas, two hours more for school, two hours more for homework, two hours more to just be a kid. After seeing that global impact, we narrowed it down to our key value proposition, which was cleanliness and convenience. DryBath is a rich man's convenience and a poor man's lifesaver. Having put the product into practice, we are actually now on the verge of selling the product onto a multinational to take it to the retail market, and one question I have for the audience today is, on the gravel roads of Limpopo, with an allowance of 50 rand a week, I came up with a way for the world not to bathe. What's stopping you? (Applause) I'm not done yet. I'm not done yet. And another key thing that I learned a lot throughout this whole process, last year Google named me as one of the brightest young minds in the world. I'm also currently the best student entrepreneur in the world, the first African to get that accolade, and one thing that really puzzles me is, I did all of this just because I didn't want to bathe. Thank you. (Applause.) |
Lessons in business ... from prison | {0: "Once an up-and-coming star in the Missouri State Senate, Jeff Smith went to prison for covering up an election law violation. Since his release, he's created a new space for himself as a professor, writer, political commentator and advocate for those he was locked up with. "} | TED@New York | B.J. was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future. He had a vision. When he got out, he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight, and he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision. He'd spent 10,000 dollars to buy a website that exclusively featured women having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars. (Laughter) It was my first week in federal prison, and I was learning quickly that it wasn't what you see on TV. In fact, it was teeming with smart, ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wined and dined me six months earlier when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate. Now, 95 percent of the guys that I was locked up with had been drug dealers on the outside, but when they talked about what they did, they talked about it in a different jargon, but the business concepts that they talked about weren't unlike those that you'd learn in a first year MBA class at Wharton: promotional incentives, you never charge a first-time user, focus-grouping new product launches, territorial expansion. But they didn't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days. For the most part, everyone was just trying to survive. It's a lot harder than you might think. Contrary to what most people think, people don't pay, taxpayers don't pay, for your life when you're in prison. You've got to pay for your own life. You've got to pay for your soap, your deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, all of it. And it's hard for a couple of reasons. First, everything's marked up 30 to 50 percent from what you'd pay on the street, and second, you don't make a lot of money. I unloaded trucks. That was my full-time job, unloading trucks at a food warehouse, for $5.25, not an hour, but per month. So how do you survive? Well, you learn to hustle, all kinds of hustles. There's legal hustles. You pay everything in stamps. Those are the currency. You charge another inmate to clean his cell. There's sort of illegal hustles, like you run a barbershop out of your cell. There's pretty illegal hustles: You run a tattoo parlor out of your own cell. And there's very illegal hustles, which you smuggle in, you get smuggled in, drugs, pornography, cell phones, and just as in the outer world, there's a risk-reward tradeoff, so the riskier the enterprise, the more profitable it can potentially be. You want a cigarette in prison? Three to five dollars. You want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open and is about as big as your head? Three hundred bucks. You want a dirty magazine? Well, it can be as much as 1,000 dollars. So as you can probably tell, one of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity. Whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse, sculpting people's hair with toenail clippers, or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags tied on to tree limbs, prisoners learn how to make do with less, and many of them want to take this ingenuity that they've learned to the outside and start restaurants, barber shops, personal training businesses. But there's no training, nothing to prepare them for that, no rehabilitation at all in prison, no one to help them write a business plan, figure out a way to translate the business concepts they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises, no access to the Internet, even. And then, when they come out, most states don't even have a law prohibiting employers from discriminating against people with a background. So none of us should be surprised that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend within five years. Look, I lied to the Feds. I lost a year of my life from it. But when I came out, I vowed that I was going to do whatever I could to make sure that guys like the ones I was locked up with didn't have to waste any more of their life than they already had. So I hope that you'll think about helping in some way. The best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons, because if we don't, they're not going to learn any new skills that's going to help them, and they'll be right back. All they'll learn on the inside is new hustles. Thank you. (Applause) |
Could tissue engineering mean personalized medicine? | {0: 'Nina Tandon studies ways to use electrical signals to grow artificial tissues for transplants and other therapies.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I'd like to show you a video of some of the models I work with. They're all the perfect size, and they don't have an ounce of fat. Did I mention they're gorgeous? And they're scientific models? (Laughs) As you might have guessed, I'm a tissue engineer, and this is a video of some of the beating heart that I've engineered in the lab. And one day we hope that these tissues can serve as replacement parts for the human body. But what I'm going to tell you about today is how these tissues make awesome models. Well, let's think about the drug screening process for a moment. You go from drug formulation, lab testing, animal testing, and then clinical trials, which you might call human testing, before the drugs get to market. It costs a lot of money, a lot of time, and sometimes, even when a drug hits the market, it acts in an unpredictable way and actually hurts people. And the later it fails, the worse the consequences. It all boils down to two issues. One, humans are not rats, and two, despite our incredible similarities to one another, actually those tiny differences between you and I have huge impacts with how we metabolize drugs and how those drugs affect us. So what if we had better models in the lab that could not only mimic us better than rats but also reflect our diversity? Let's see how we can do it with tissue engineering. One of the key technologies that's really important is what's called induced pluripotent stem cells. They were developed in Japan pretty recently. Okay, induced pluripotent stem cells. They're a lot like embryonic stem cells except without the controversy. We induce cells, okay, say, skin cells, by adding a few genes to them, culturing them, and then harvesting them. So they're skin cells that can be tricked, kind of like cellular amnesia, into an embryonic state. So without the controversy, that's cool thing number one. Cool thing number two, you can grow any type of tissue out of them: brain, heart, liver, you get the picture, but out of your cells. So we can make a model of your heart, your brain on a chip. Generating tissues of predictable density and behavior is the second piece, and will be really key towards getting these models to be adopted for drug discovery. And this is a schematic of a bioreactor we're developing in our lab to help engineer tissues in a more modular, scalable way. Going forward, imagine a massively parallel version of this with thousands of pieces of human tissue. It would be like having a clinical trial on a chip. But another thing about these induced pluripotent stem cells is that if we take some skin cells, let's say, from people with a genetic disease and we engineer tissues out of them, we can actually use tissue-engineering techniques to generate models of those diseases in the lab. Here's an example from Kevin Eggan's lab at Harvard. He generated neurons from these induced pluripotent stem cells from patients who have Lou Gehrig's Disease, and he differentiated them into neurons, and what's amazing is that these neurons also show symptoms of the disease. So with disease models like these, we can fight back faster than ever before and understand the disease better than ever before, and maybe discover drugs even faster. This is another example of patient-specific stem cells that were engineered from someone with retinitis pigmentosa. This is a degeneration of the retina. It's a disease that runs in my family, and we really hope that cells like these will help us find a cure. So some people think that these models sound well and good, but ask, "Well, are these really as good as the rat?" The rat is an entire organism, after all, with interacting networks of organs. A drug for the heart can get metabolized in the liver, and some of the byproducts may be stored in the fat. Don't you miss all that with these tissue-engineered models? Well, this is another trend in the field. By combining tissue engineering techniques with microfluidics, the field is actually evolving towards just that, a model of the entire ecosystem of the body, complete with multiple organ systems to be able to test how a drug you might take for your blood pressure might affect your liver or an antidepressant might affect your heart. These systems are really hard to build, but we're just starting to be able to get there, and so, watch out. But that's not even all of it, because once a drug is approved, tissue engineering techniques can actually help us develop more personalized treatments. This is an example that you might care about someday, and I hope you never do, because imagine if you ever get that call that gives you that bad news that you might have cancer. Wouldn't you rather test to see if those cancer drugs you're going to take are going to work on your cancer? This is an example from Karen Burg's lab, where they're using inkjet technologies to print breast cancer cells and study its progressions and treatments. And some of our colleagues at Tufts are mixing models like these with tissue-engineered bone to see how cancer might spread from one part of the body to the next, and you can imagine those kinds of multi-tissue chips to be the next generation of these kinds of studies. And so thinking about the models that we've just discussed, you can see, going forward, that tissue engineering is actually poised to help revolutionize drug screening at every single step of the path: disease models making for better drug formulations, massively parallel human tissue models helping to revolutionize lab testing, reduce animal testing and human testing in clinical trials, and individualized therapies that disrupt what we even consider to be a market at all. Essentially, we're dramatically speeding up that feedback between developing a molecule and learning about how it acts in the human body. Our process for doing this is essentially transforming biotechnology and pharmacology into an information technology, helping us discover and evaluate drugs faster, more cheaply and more effectively. It gives new meaning to models against animal testing, doesn't it? Thank you. (Applause) |
Please don't take my Air Jordans | {0: 'Lemon Andersen is a wordsmith who thinks deeply about the sounds of syllables.'} | TEDYouth 2011 | "My Air Jordans cost a hundred with tax. My suede Starters jacket says Raiders on the back. I'm stylin', smilin', lookin' real mean, because it ain't about being heard, just being seen. My leather Adidas baseball cap matches my fake Gucci backpack. (Laughter) Ain't nobody who looks as good as me, but this costs money, it sure ain't free, and I gots no job, no money at all, but it's easy to steal all this from the mall. Parents say I shouldn't, but I knows I should. Got to do what I can to make sure I look good, and the reason I have to look real good, well, to tell you the truth, man, I don't know why. Guess it makes me feel special inside. When I'm wearing fresh gear I don't have to hide, and I really must get some new gear soon or my ego will pop like a 10-cent balloon. But security is tight at all the shops. Every day there are more and more cops. My crew is laughing at me because I'm wearing old gear. School's almost over. Summer is near. And I'm sportin' torn Jordans. I need something new. Only one thing left to do. Cut school Friday, catch the subway downtown, check out my victims hangin' around. Maybe I'll get lucky and find easy prey. Got to get some new gear. There's no other way. I'm ready and willing. I'm packing my gun. This is serious business. This ain't no fun. And I can't have my posse laughin' at me. I'mma cop something dope, just wait, you'll see. Come out of the station, West 4th near the park, brothers shooting hoops and someone remarks, 'Hey homes, where you get them Nik's?' I says to myself, 'Yeah. I likes 'em, I likes.' They were Q-tip white, bright and blinding my eyes. The red emblem of Michael looked as if it could fly. Not one spot of dirt. The Airs were brand new. Had my pistol and knew just what to do. Waited until it was just the right time, followed him very closely behind. He made a left turn on Houston, I pulled out my gun, and I said, 'Gimme them Jordans!' And the punk tried to run. Took off fast, didn't get far. I fired,'Pow!' Fool fell between two parked cars. He was coughing, crying, blood spilled on the street. And I snatched them Air Jordans off of his feet. While laying there dying, all he could say was, "Please man, don't take my Air Jordans away." You'd think he'd be worried about staying alive. As I took off with his sneakers, there was tears in his eyes. Very next day, I bopped into school with my brand new Air Jordans, man, I was cool. I killed to get 'em, but hey, I don't care, because now I needs a new jacket to wear." Thank you. (Applause) For the last 15 years that I have been performing, all I ever wanted to do was transcend poetry to the world. See, it wasn't enough for me to write a book. It wasn't enough for me to join a slam competition, and while those things hold weight, it wasn't the driving force that pushes the pen to the pad. The hunger and thirst was, and still remains: How do I get people who hate poetry to love me? Because I'm an extension of my work, and if they love me, then they will love my work, and if they love my work, then they will love poetry, and if they love poetry, then I will have done my job, which is to transcend it to the world. And in 1996, I found the answer in principles in a master spoken-word artist named Reg E. Gaines, who wrote the famous poem, "Please Don't Take My Air Jordans." And I followed this guy everywhere until I had him in the room, and I read him one of my pieces, and you know what he told me? "Yo' wack. You know what the problem is with you, homie? You don't read other people's poetry, and you don't got any subordination for verbal measures to tonal consideration." (Laughter) Now he kept on rambling about poetry and styles and Nuyorican Friday nights. Now I could have quit. I should have quit. I mean, I thought poetry was just self-expression. I didn't know you actually have to have creative control. So instead of quitting, I followed him everywhere. When he was writing a Broadway show, I would be outside of the door. I would wake him up at, like, 6:30 in the morning to ask him who's the best poet. I remember eating the eyes of a fish right out of the sea because he told me it was brain food. Then one day I told him, "Reg E., what is subordination for verbal measures to tonal consideration?" (Laughter) And he handed me a black-and-white printed out thesis on a poet named Etheridge Knight and the oral nature of poetry, and from that point, Reggie stopped becoming the best to me, because what Etheridge Knight taught me was that I could make my words sound like music, even my small ones, the monosyllables, the ifs, ands, buts, whats, the gangsta in my slang could fall right on the ear, and from then on, I started chasing Etheridge Knight. I wanted to know which poet he read, and I landed on a poem called ["Dark Prophecy: Sing of Shine"], a toast signifying that got me on the biggest stage a poet could ever be: Broadway, baby. And from that point, I learned how to pull the mic away and attack the poetry with my body. But that wasn't the biggest lesson I ever learned. The biggest lesson I learned was many years later when I went to Beverly Hills and I ran into a talent agent who looked at me up and down and said I don't look like I have any experience to be working in this business. And I said to him, "Listen, punk fool, you're a failed actor who became an agent, and you know why you failed as an actor? Because people like me took your job. I've traveled all the way from Cleveland and Essex in East New York, took the local 6 line up to the hookers of Hunt's Point who were in my way on my way to master the art of space, and the one-to-infinite amount of man, woman and child you can fit in there only so I can push them to the back of the wall with my experience. People have bought tickets to my experience and used them as refrigerator magnets to let them know that the revolution is near, so stock up. I'm so experienced that when you went to a privileged school to learn a Shakespearean sonnet, I was getting those beats kicked and shoved into me. I can master shock of "The Crying Game" with the awe of a child being called an AIDS victim by a bully who didn't know that it was his father who gave it to my mother, and that's a double entendre. I'm so experienced that when you went to the Fell School and all the rich little fairy boys decided to sponsor a child in it, that was me, but kicked me out when I was caught teaching the fairy boys how to rob the PATS off a pair of Lee Jeans and bring them to VIM. Let me see Chekhov pull that off. Sanford Meisner was my Uncle Artie yelling silently to himself, "Something's always wrong when nothing's always right." Method acting is nothing but a mixture of multiple personalities, believing your own lies are reality, like in high school cool Kenny telling me he wanted to be a cop. Dude, you go to Riker's Island Academy. I could make David Mamet psychoanalyze my attack on dialogue, Stanislavski be as if he were Bruce Lee kicking your roster of talentless students up and down Crenshaw. So what, your actors studied guerrilla theater at the London Rep? Let me tell you an ancient Chinese Saturday afternoon kung fu secret. Boards don't hit back. You think black entertainers have it hard finding work in this business? I'm a suspicious mulatto, which means I'm too black to be white and too white to be doing it right. Forget the American ghetto. I've cracked stages in Soweto, buried abortion babies in potter's field and still managed to keep a smile on my face, so whatever you curse at me to your caddyshack go-for-this, go-for-that assistant when I walk out that door, whatever slander you send my way, your mother. Thank you. (Applause) |
Pool medical patents, save lives | {0: "The founder of the Medicines Patent Pool, Ellen 't Hoen works (and makes change) at the place where profit and health collide: patented drugs."} | TEDxZurich 2012 | In 2002, a group of treatment activists met to discuss the early development of the airplane. The Wright Brothers, in the beginning of the last century, had for the first time managed to make one of those devices fly. They also had taken out numerous patents on essential parts of the airplane. They were not the only ones. That was common practice in the industry, and those who held patents on airplanes were defending them fiercely and suing competitors left and right. This actually wasn't so great for the development of the aviation industry, and this was at a time that in particular the U.S. government was interested in ramping up the production of military airplanes. So there was a bit of a conflict there. The U.S. government decided to take action, and forced those patent holders to make their patents available to share with others to enable the production of airplanes. So what has this got to do with this? In 2002, Nelson Otwoma, a Kenyan social scientist, discovered he had HIV and needed access to treatment. He was told that a cure did not exist. AIDS, he heard, was lethal, and treatment was not offered. This was at a time that treatment actually existed in rich countries. AIDS had become a chronic disease. People in our countries here in Europe, in North America, were living with HIV, healthy lives. Not so for Nelson. He wasn't rich enough, and not so for his three-year-old son, who he discovered a year later also had HIV. Nelson decided to become a treatment activist and join up with other groups. In 2002, they were facing a different battle. Prices for ARVs, the drugs needed to treat HIV, cost about 12,000 [dollars] per patient per year. The patents on those drugs were held by a number of Western pharmaceutical companies that were not necessarily willing to make those patents available. When you have a patent, you can exclude anyone else from making, from producing or making low-cost versions, for example, available of those medications. Clearly this led to patent wars breaking out all over the globe. Luckily, those patents did not exist everywhere. There were countries that did not recognize pharmaceutical product patents, such as India, and Indian pharmaceutical companies started to produce so-called generic versions, low-cost copies of antiretroviral medicines, and make them available in the developing world, and within a year the price had come down from 10,000 dollars per patient per year to 350 dollars per patient per year, and today that same triple pill cocktail is available for 60 dollars per patient per year, and of course that started to have an enormous effect on the number of people who could afford access to those medicines. Treatment programs became possible, funding became available, and the number of people on antiretroviral drugs started to increase very rapidly. Today, eight million people have access to antiretroviral drugs. Thirty-four million are infected with HIV. Never has this number been so high, but actually this is good news, because what it means is people stop dying. People who have access to these drugs stop dying. And there's something else. They also stop passing on the virus. This is fairly recent science that has shown that. What that means is we have the tools to break the back of this epidemic. So what's the problem? Well, things have changed. First of all, the rules have changed. Today, all countries are obliged to provide patents for pharmaceuticals that last at least 20 years. This is as a result of the intellectual property rules of the World Trade Organization. So what India did is no longer possible. Second, the practice of patent-holding companies have changed. Here you see the patent practices before the World Trade Organization's rules, before '95, before antiretroviral drugs. This is what you see today, and this is in developing countries, so what that means is, unless we do something deliberate and unless we do something now, we will very soon be faced with another drug price crisis, because new drugs are developed, new drugs go to market, but these medicines are patented in a much wider range of countries. So unless we act, unless we do something today, we will soon be faced [with] what some have termed the treatment time bomb. It isn't only the number of drugs that are patented. There's something else that can really scare generic manufacturers away. This shows you a patent landscape. This is the landscape of one medicine. So you can imagine that if you are a generic company about to decide whether to invest in the development of this product, unless you know that the licenses to these patents are actually going to be available, you will probably choose to do something else. Again, deliberate action is needed. So surely if a patent pool could be established to ramp up the production of military airplanes, we should be able to do something similar to tackle the HIV/AIDS epidemic. And we did. In 2010, UNITAID established the Medicines Patent Pool for HIV. And this is how it works: Patent holders, inventors that develop new medicines patent those inventions, but make those patents available to the Medicines Patent Pool. The Medicines Patent Pool then license those out to whoever needs access to those patents. That can be generic manufacturers. It can also be not-for-profit drug development agencies, for example. Those manufacturers can then sell those medicines at much lower cost to people who need access to them, to treatment programs that need access to them. They pay royalties over the sales to the patent holders, so they are remunerated for sharing their intellectual property. There is one key difference with the airplane patent pool. The Medicines Patent Pool is a voluntary mechanism. The airplane patent holders were not left a choice whether they'd license their patents or not. They were forced to do so. That is something that the Medicines Patent Pool cannot do. It relies on the willingness of pharmaceutical companies to license their patents and make them available for others to use. Today, Nelson Otwoma is healthy. He has access to antiretroviral drugs. His son will soon be 14 years old. Nelson is a member of the expert advisory group of the Medicines Patent Pool, and he told me not so long ago, "Ellen, we rely in Kenya and in many other countries on the Medicines Patent Pool to make sure that new medicines also become available to us, that new medicines, without delay, become available to us." And this is no longer fantasy. Already, I'll give you an example. In August of this year, the United States drug agency approved a new four-in-one AIDS medication. The company, Gilead, that holds the patents, has licensed the intellectual property to the Medicines Patent Pool. The pool is already working today, two months later, with generic manufacturers to make sure that this product can go to market at low cost where and when it is needed. This is unprecedented. This has never been done before. The rule is about a 10-year delay for a new product to go to market in developing countries, if at all. This has never been seen before. Nelson's expectations are very high, and quite rightly so. He and his son will need access to the next generation of antiretrovirals and the next, throughout their lifetime, so that he and many others in Kenya and other countries can continue to live healthy, active lives. Now we count on the willingness of drug companies to make that happen. We count on those companies that understand that it is in the interest, not only in the interest of the global good, but also in their own interest, to move from conflict to collaboration, and through the Medicines Patent Pool they can make that happen. They can also choose not to do that, but those that go down that road may end up in a similar situation the Wright brothers ended up with early last century, facing forcible measures by government. So they'd better jump now. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to separate fact and fiction online | {0: 'The managing editor of Storyful.com, Markham Nolan has watched journalism evolve from the pursuit of finding facts to the act of verifying those floating in the ether. '} | TEDSalon London Fall 2012 | I've been a journalist now since I was about 17, and it's an interesting industry to be in at the moment, because as you all know, there's a huge amount of upheaval going on in media, and most of you probably know this from the business angle, which is that the business model is pretty screwed, and as my grandfather would say, the profits have all been gobbled up by Google. So it's a really interesting time to be a journalist, but the upheaval that I'm interested in is not on the output side. It's on the input side. It's concern with how we get information and how we gather the news. And that's changed, because we've had a huge shift in the balance of power from the news organizations to the audience. And the audience for such a long time was in a position where they didn't have any way of affecting news or making any change. They couldn't really connect. And that's changed irrevocably. My first connection with the news media was in 1984, the BBC had a one-day strike. I wasn't happy. I was angry. I couldn't see my cartoons. So I wrote a letter. And it's a very effective way of ending your hate mail: "Love Markham, Aged 4." Still works. I'm not sure if I had any impact on the one-day strike, but what I do know is that it took them three weeks to get back to me. And that was the round journey. It took that long for anyone to have any impact and get some feedback. And that's changed now because, as journalists, we interact in real time. We're not in a position where the audience is reacting to news. We're reacting to the audience, and we're actually relying on them. They're helping us find the news. They're helping us figure out what is the best angle to take and what is the stuff that they want to hear. So it's a real-time thing. It's much quicker. It's happening on a constant basis, and the journalist is always playing catch up. To give an example of how we rely on the audience, on the 5th of September in Costa Rica, an earthquake hit. It was a 7.6 magnitude. It was fairly big. And 60 seconds is the amount of time it took for it to travel 250 kilometers to Managua. So the ground shook in Managua 60 seconds after it hit the epicenter. Thirty seconds later, the first message went onto Twitter, and this was someone saying "temblor," which means earthquake. So 60 seconds was how long it took for the physical earthquake to travel. Thirty seconds later news of that earthquake had traveled all around the world, instantly. Everyone in the world, hypothetically, had the potential to know that an earthquake was happening in Managua. And that happened because this one person had a documentary instinct, which was to post a status update, which is what we all do now, so if something happens, we put our status update, or we post a photo, we post a video, and it all goes up into the cloud in a constant stream. And what that means is just constant, huge volumes of data going up. It's actually staggering. When you look at the numbers, every minute there are 72 more hours of video on YouTube. So that's, every second, more than an hour of video gets uploaded. And in photos, Instagram, 58 photos are uploaded to Instagram a second. More than three and a half thousand photos go up onto Facebook. So by the time I'm finished talking here, there'll be 864 more hours of video on Youtube than there were when I started, and two and a half million more photos on Facebook and Instagram than when I started. So it's an interesting position to be in as a journalist, because we should have access to everything. Any event that happens anywhere in the world, I should be able to know about it pretty much instantaneously, as it happens, for free. And that goes for every single person in this room. The only problem is, when you have that much information, you have to find the good stuff, and that can be incredibly difficult when you're dealing with those volumes. And nowhere was this brought home more than during Hurricane Sandy. So what you had in Hurricane Sandy was a superstorm, the likes of which we hadn't seen for a long time, hitting the iPhone capital of the universe — (Laughter) — and you got volumes of media like we'd never seen before. And that meant that journalists had to deal with fakes, so we had to deal with old photos that were being reposted. We had to deal with composite images that were merging photos from previous storms. We had to deal with images from films like "The Day After Tomorrow." (Laughter) And we had to deal with images that were so realistic it was nearly difficult to tell if they were real at all. (Laughter) But joking aside, there were images like this one from Instagram which was subjected to a grilling by journalists. They weren't really sure. It was filtered in Instagram. The lighting was questioned. Everything was questioned about it. And it turned out to be true. It was from Avenue C in downtown Manhattan, which was flooded. And the reason that they could tell that it was real was because they could get to the source, and in this case, these guys were New York food bloggers. They were well respected. They were known. So this one wasn't a debunk, it was actually something that they could prove. And that was the job of the journalist. It was filtering all this stuff. And you were, instead of going and finding the information and bringing it back to the reader, you were holding back the stuff that was potentially damaging. And finding the source becomes more and more important — finding the good source — and Twitter is where most journalists now go. It's like the de facto real-time newswire, if you know how to use it, because there is so much on Twitter. And a good example of how useful it can be but also how difficult was the Egyptian revolution in 2011. As a non-Arabic speaker, as someone who was looking from the outside, from Dublin, Twitter lists, and lists of good sources, people we could establish were credible, were really important. And how do you build a list like that from scratch? Well, it can be quite difficult, but you have to know what to look for. This visualization was done by an Italian academic. He's called André Pannison, and he basically took the Twitter conversation in Tahrir Square on the day that Hosni Mubarak would eventually resign, and the dots you can see are retweets, so when someone retweets a message, a connection is made between two dots, and the more times that message is retweeted by other people, the more you get to see these nodes, these connections being made. And it's an amazing way of visualizing the conversation, but what you get is hints at who is more interesting and who is worth investigating. And as the conversation grew and grew, it became more and more lively, and eventually you were left with this huge, big, rhythmic pointer of this conversation. You could find the nodes, though, and then you went, and you go, "Right, I've got to investigate these people. These are the ones that are obviously making sense. Let's see who they are." Now in the deluge of information, this is where the real-time web gets really interesting for a journalist like myself, because we have more tools than ever to do that kind of investigation. And when you start digging into the sources, you can go further and further than you ever could before. Sometimes you come across a piece of content that is so compelling, you want to use it, you're dying to use it, but you're not 100 percent sure if you can because you don't know if the source is credible. You don't know if it's a scrape. You don't know if it's a re-upload. And you have to do that investigative work. And this video, which I'm going to let run through, was one we discovered a couple of weeks ago. Video: Getting real windy in just a second. (Rain and wind sounds) (Explosion) Oh, shit! Markham Nolan: Okay, so now if you're a news producer, this is something you'd love to run with, because obviously, this is gold. You know? This is a fantastic reaction from someone, very genuine video that they've shot in their back garden. But how do you find if this person, if it's true, if it's faked, or if it's something that's old and that's been reposted? So we set about going to work on this video, and the only thing that we had to go on was the username on the YouTube account. There was only one video posted to that account, and the username was Rita Krill. And we didn't know if Rita existed or if it was a fake name. But we started looking, and we used free Internet tools to do so. The first one was called Spokeo, which allowed us to look for Rita Krills. So we looked all over the U.S. We found them in New York, we found them in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Florida. So we went and we looked for a second free Internet tool called Wolfram Alpha, and we checked the weather reports for the day in which this video had been uploaded, and when we went through all those various cities, we found that in Florida, there were thunderstorms and rain on the day. So we went to the white pages, and we found, we looked through the Rita Krills in the phonebook, and we looked through a couple of different addresses, and that took us to Google Maps, where we found a house. And we found a house with a swimming pool that looked remarkably like Rita's. So we went back to the video, and we had to look for clues that we could cross-reference. So if you look in the video, there's the big umbrella, there's a white lilo in the pool, there are some unusually rounded edges in the swimming pool, and there's two trees in the background. And we went back to Google Maps, and we looked a little bit closer, and sure enough, there's the white lilo, there are the two trees, there's the umbrella. It's actually folded in this photo. Little bit of trickery. And there are the rounded edges on the swimming pool. So we were able to call Rita, clear the video, make sure that it had been shot, and then our clients were delighted because they were able to run it without being worried. Sometimes the search for truth, though, is a little bit less flippant, and it has much greater consequences. Syria has been really interesting for us, because obviously a lot of the time you're trying to debunk stuff that can be potentially war crime evidence, so this is where YouTube actually becomes the most important repository of information about what's going on in the world. So this video, I'm not going to show you the whole thing, because it's quite gruesome, but you'll hear some of the sounds. This is from Hama. Video: (Shouting) And what this video shows, when you watch the whole thing through, is bloody bodies being taken out of a pickup truck and thrown off a bridge. The allegations were that these guys were Muslim Brotherhood and they were throwing Syrian Army officers' bodies off the bridge, and they were cursing and using blasphemous language, and there were lots of counterclaims about who they were, and whether or not they were what the video said it was. So we talked to some sources in Hama who we had been back and forth with on Twitter, and we asked them about this, and the bridge was interesting to us because it was something we could identify. Three different sources said three different things about the bridge. They said, one, the bridge doesn't exist. Another one said the bridge does exist, but it's not in Hama. It's somewhere else. And the third one said, "I think the bridge does exist, but the dam upstream of the bridge was closed, so the river should actually have been dry, so this doesn't make sense." So that was the only one that gave us a clue. We looked through the video for other clues. We saw the distinctive railings, which we could use. We looked at the curbs. The curbs were throwing shadows south, so we could tell the bridge was running east-west across the river. It had black-and-white curbs. As we looked at the river itself, you could see there's a concrete stone on the west side. There's a cloud of blood. That's blood in the river. So the river is flowing south to north. That's what that tells me. And also, as you look away from the bridge, there's a divot on the left-hand side of the bank, and the river narrows. So onto Google Maps we go, and we start looking through literally every single bridge. We go to the dam that we talked about, we start just literally going through every time that road crosses the river, crossing off the bridges that don't match. We're looking for one that crosses east-west. And we get to Hama. We get all the way from the dam to Hama and there's no bridge. So we go a bit further. We switch to the satellite view, and we find another bridge, and everything starts to line up. The bridge looks like it's crossing the river east to west. So this could be our bridge. And we zoom right in. We start to see that it's got a median, so it's a two-lane bridge. And it's got the black-and-white curbs that we saw in the video, and as we click through it, you can see someone's uploaded photos to go with the map, which is very handy, so we click into the photos. And the photos start showing us more detail that we can cross-reference with the video. The first thing that we see is we see black-and-white curbing, which is handy because we've seen that before. We see the distinctive railing that we saw the guys throwing the bodies over. And we keep going through it until we're certain that this is our bridge. So what does that tell me? I've got to go back now to my three sources and look at what they told me: the one who said the bridge didn't exist, the one who said the bridge wasn't in Hama, and the one guy who said, "Yes, the bridge does exist, but I'm not sure about the water levels." Number three is looking like the most truthful all of a sudden, and we've been able to find that out using some free Internet tools sitting in a cubicle in an office in Dublin in the space of 20 minutes. And that's part of the joy of this. Although the web is running like a torrent, there's so much information there that it's incredibly hard to sift and getting harder every day, if you use them intelligently, you can find out incredible information. Given a couple of clues, I could probably find out a lot of things about most of you in the audience that you might not like me finding out. But what it tells me is that, at a time when there's more — there's a greater abundance of information than there ever has been, it's harder to filter, we have greater tools. We have free Internet tools that allow us, help us do this kind of investigation. We have algorithms that are smarter than ever before, and computers that are quicker than ever before. But here's the thing. Algorithms are rules. They're binary. They're yes or no, they're black or white. Truth is never binary. Truth is a value. Truth is emotional, it's fluid, and above all, it's human. No matter how quick we get with computers, no matter how much information we have, you'll never be able to remove the human from the truth-seeking exercise, because in the end, it is a uniquely human trait. Thanks very much. (Applause) |
A Saudi, an Indian and an Iranian walk into a Qatari bar ... | {0: 'A founding member of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani is now touring with his second solo comedy show, Browner and Friendlier.'} | TEDxSummit | Hello, Doha. Hello! Salaam alaikum. I love coming to Doha. It's such an international place. It feels like the United Nations here. You land at the airport, and you're welcomed by an Indian lady who takes you to Al Maha Services, where you meet a Filipino lady who hands you off to a South African lady who then takes you to a Korean who takes you to a Pakistani guy with the luggage who takes you to the car with a Sri Lankan. You go to the hotel and you check in. There's a Lebanese. Yeah? And then a Swedish guy showed me my room. I said, "Where are the Qataris?" (Laughter) (Applause) They said, "No, no, it's too hot. They come out later. They're smart." "They know." (Laughter) And of course, it's growing so fast, sometimes there's growing pains. You know, like sometimes you run into people that you think know the city well, but they don't know it that well. My Indian cab driver showed up at the W, and I asked him to take me to the Sheraton, and he said, "No problem, sir." And then we sat there for two minutes. I said, "What's wrong?" He said, "One problem, sir." (Laughter) I said, "What?" He goes, "Where is it?" (Laughter) I go, "You're the driver, you should know." He goes, "No, I just arrived, sir." I go, "You just arrived at the W?" "No, I just arrived in Doha, sir." (Laughter) "I was on my way home from the airport, I got a job. I'm working already." (Laughter) He goes, "Sir, why don't you drive?" (Laughter) "I don't know where we're going." "Neither do I. It will be an adventure, sir." (Laughter) The Middle East has been an adventure the past couple of years. It is going crazy with the Arab Spring and revolution and all this. Are there any Lebanese here tonight, by applause? (Cheering) Lebanese, yeah. The Middle East is going crazy. You know the Middle East is going crazy when Lebanon is the most peaceful place in the region. (Laughter) (Applause) Who would have thought? (Laughter) Oh my gosh. No, there's serious issues in the region. Some people don't want to talk about them. I'm here to talk about them tonight. Ladies and gentlemen of the Middle East, here's a serious issue. When we see each other, when we say hello, how many kisses are we going to do? (Laughter) Every country is different and it's confusing, okay? In Lebanon, they do three. In Egypt, they do two. I was in Lebanon, I got used to three. I went to Egypt. I went to say hello to this one Egyptian guy, I went, one, two. I went for three — He wasn't into it. (Laughter) I told him, I said, "No, no, I was just in Lebanon." He goes, "I don't care where you were. You just stay where you are, please." (Laughter) (Applause) I went to Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, they go one, two, and then they stay on the same side: three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 — (Laughter) Next time you see a Saudi, look closely. They're just a little bit tilted. (Laughter) "Abdul, are you okay?" "I was saying hello for half an hour. I'll be all right." (Laughter) Qataris, you guys do the nose to nose. Why is that? Are you too tired to go all the way around? (Laughter) "Habibi, it's so hot. Just come here for a second. Say hello. Hello, Habibi. Just don't move. Just stay there, please. I need to rest." (Laughter) Iranians, sometimes we do two, sometimes we do three. A friend of mine explained to me, before the '79 revolution, it was two. (Laughter) After the revolution, three. So with Iranians, you can tell whose side the person is on based on the number of kisses they give you. Yeah, if you go one, two, three — "I can't believe you support this regime!" (Laughter) "With your three kisses." (Laughter) But no, guys, really, it is exciting to be here, and like I said, you guys are doing a lot culturally, you know, and it's amazing, and it helps change the image of the Middle East in the West. A lot of Americans don't know a lot about us, about the Middle East. I'm Iranian and American. I'm there. I know, I've traveled here. There's so much, we laugh, right? People don't know we laugh. When I did the Axis of Evil comedy tour, it came out on Comedy Central, I went online to see what people were saying. I ended up on a conservative website. One guy wrote another guy. He said, "I never knew these people laughed." Think about it. You never see us laughing in American film or television, right? Maybe like an evil laugh: "Wuhahaha." (Laughter) "I will kill you in the name of Allah, wuhahahahaha." (Laughter) But never like, "Ha ha ha ha la." (Laughter) We like to laugh. We like to celebrate life. And I wish more Americans would travel here. I always encourage my friends: "Travel, see the Middle East, there's so much to see, so many good people." And it's vice versa, and it helps stop problems of misunderstanding and stereotypes from happening. For example, I don't know if you heard about this, a little while ago in the US, there was a Muslim family walking down the aisle of an airplane, talking about the safest place to sit on the plane. Some passengers overheard them, somehow misconstrued that as terrorist talk, got them kicked off the plane. It was a family, a mother, father, child, talking about the seating. As a Middle Eastern male, I know there's certain things I'm not supposed to say on an airplane in the US, right? I'm not supposed to be walking down the aisle, and be like, "Hi, Jack." That's not cool. (Laughter) Even if I'm there with my friend named Jack, I say, "Greetings, Jack. Salutations, Jack." Never "Hi, Jack." (Laughter) But now, apparently we can't even talk about the safest place to sit on an airplane. So my advice to all my Middle Eastern friends and Muslim friends and anyone who looks Middle Eastern or Muslim, so to, you know, Indians, and Latinos, everyone, if you're brown — (Laughter) Here's my advice to my brown friends. (Laughter) The next time you're on an airplane in the US, just speak your mother tongue. That way no one knows what you're saying. Life goes on. (Laughter) Granted, some mother tongues might sound a little threatening to the average American. If you're walking down the aisle speaking Arabic, you might freak them out — (Imitating Arabic) They might say, "What's he talking about?" The key, to my Arab brothers and sisters, is to throw in random good words to put people at ease as you're walking down the aisle. Just as you're walking down — (Imitating Arabic) Strawberry! (Laughter) (Imitating Arabic) Rainbow! (Laughter) (Imitating Arabic) Tutti Frutti! (Laughter) "I think he's going to hijack the plane with some ice cream." Thank you very much. Have a good night. Thank you, TED. (Cheers) (Applause) |
The dance of the dung beetle | {0: 'Marcus Byrne is fascinated by the way insects, particularly the intrepid dung beetle, have hardwired solutions to the challenges posed by their environments. Could they help humans solve problems?'} | TEDxWitsUniversity | This is poo, and what I want to do today is share my passion for poo with you, which might be quite difficult, but I think what you might find more fascinating is the way these small animals deal with poo. So this animal here has got a brain about the size of a grain of rice, and yet it can do things that you and I couldn't possibly entertain the idea of doing. And basically it's all evolved to handle its food source, which is dung. So the question is, where do we start this story? And it seems appropriate to start at the end, because this is a waste product that comes out of other animals, but it still contains nutrients and there are sufficient nutrients in there for dung beetles basically to make a living, and so dung beetles eat dung, and their larvae are also dung-feeders. They are grown completely in a ball of dung. Within South Africa, we've got about 800 species of dung beetles, in Africa we've got 2,000 species of dung beetles, and in the world we have about 6,000 species of dung beetles. So, according to dung beetles, dung is pretty good. Unless you're prepared to get dung under your fingernails and root through the dung itself, you'll never see 90 percent of the dung beetle species, because they go directly into the dung, straight down below it, and then they shuttle back and forth between the dung at the soil surface and a nest they make underground. So the question is, how do they deal with this material? And most dung beetles actually wrap it into a package of some sort. Ten percent of the species actually make a ball, and this ball they roll away from the dung source, usually bury it at a remote place away from the dung source, and they have a very particular behavior by which they are able to roll their balls. So this is a very proud owner of a beautiful dung ball. You can see it's a male because he's got a little hair on the back of his legs there, and he's clearly very pleased about what he's sitting on there. And then he's about to become a victim of a vicious smash-and-grab. (Laughter) And this is a clear indication that this is a valuable resource. And so valuable resources have to be looked after and guarded in a particular way, and we think the reason they roll the balls away is because of this, because of the competition that is involved in getting hold of that dung. So this dung pat was actually — well, it was a dung pat 15 minutes before this photograph was taken, and we think it's the intense competition that makes the beetles so well-adapted to rolling balls of dung. So what you've got to imagine here is this animal here moving across the African veld. Its head is down. It's walking backwards. It's the most bizarre way to actually transport your food in any particular direction, and at the same time it's got to deal with the heat. This is Africa. It's hot. So what I want to share with you now are some of the experiments that myself and my colleagues have used to investigate how dung beetles deal with these problems. So watch this beetle, and there's two things that I would like you to be aware of. The first is how it deals with this obstacle that we've put in its way. See, look, it does a little dance, and then it carries on in exactly the same direction that it took in the first place. A little dance, and then heads off in a particular direction. So clearly this animal knows where it's going and it knows where it wants to go, and that's a very, very important thing, because if you think about it, you're at the dung pile, you've got this great big pie that you want to get away from everybody else, and the quickest way to do it is in a straight line. So we gave them some more tasks to deal with, and what we did here is we turned the world under their feet. And watch its response. So this animal has actually had the whole world turned under its feet. It's turned by 90 degrees. But it doesn't flinch. It knows exactly where it wants to go, and it heads off in that particular direction. So our next question then was, how are they doing this? What are they doing? And there was a cue that was available to us. It was that every now and then they'd climb on top of the ball and they'd take a look at the world around them. And what do you think they could be looking at as they climb on top of the ball? What are the obvious cues that this animal could use to direct its movement? And the most obvious one is to look at the sky, and so we thought, now what could they be looking at in the sky? And the obvious thing to look at is the sun. So a classic experiment here, in that what we did was we moved the sun. What we're going to do now is shade the sun with a board and then move the sun with a mirror to a completely different position. And look at what the beetle does. It does a little double dance, and then it heads back in exactly the same direction it went in the first place. What happens now? So clearly they're looking at the sun. The sun is a very important cue in the sky for them. The thing is the sun is not always available to you, because at sunset it disappears below the horizon. What is happening in the sky here is that there's a great big pattern of polarized light in the sky that you and I can't see. It's the way our eyes are built. But the sun is at the horizon over here and we know that when the sun is at the horizon, say it's over on this side, there is a north-south, a huge pathway across the sky of polarized light that we can't see that the beetles can see. So how do we test that? Well, that's easy. What we do is we get a great big polarization filter, pop the beetle underneath it, and the filter is at right angles to the polarization pattern of the sky. The beetle comes out from underneath the filter and it does a right-hand turn, because it comes back under the sky that it was originally orientated to and then reorientates itself back to the direction it was originally going in. So obviously beetles can see polarized light. Okay, so what we've got so far is, what are beetles doing? They're rolling balls. How are they doing it? Well, they're rolling them in a straight line. How are they maintaining it in a particular straight line? Well, they're looking at celestial cues in the sky, some of which you and I can't see. But how do they pick up those celestial cues? That was what was of interest to us next. And it was this particular little behavior, the dance, that we thought was important, because look, it takes a pause every now and then, and then heads off in the direction that it wants to go in. So what are they doing when they do this dance? How far can we push them before they will reorientate themselves? And in this experiment here, what we did was we forced them into a channel, and you can see he wasn't particularly forced into this particular channel, and we gradually displaced the beetle by 180 degrees until this individual ends up going in exactly the opposite direction that it wanted to go in, in the first place. And let's see what his reaction is as he's headed through 90 degrees here, and now he's going to — when he ends up down here, he's going to be 180 degrees in the wrong direction. And see what his response is. He does a little dance, he turns around, and heads back in this. He knows exactly where he's going. He knows exactly what the problem is, and he knows exactly how to deal with it, and the dance is this transition behavior that allows them to reorientate themselves. So that's the dance, but after spending many years sitting in the African bush watching dung beetles on nice hot days, we noticed that there was another behavior associated with the dance behavior. Every now and then, when they climb on top of the ball, they wipe their face. And you see him do it again. Now we thought, now what could be going on here? Clearly the ground is very hot, and when the ground is hot, they dance more often, and when they do this particular dance, they wipe the bottom of their face. And we thought that it could be a thermoregulatory behavior. We thought that maybe what they're doing is trying to get off the hot soil and also spitting onto their face to cool their head down. So what we did was design a couple of arenas. one was hot, one was cold. We shaded this one. We left that one hot. And then what we did was we filmed them with a thermal camera. So what you're looking at here is a heat image of the system, and what you can see here emerging from the poo is a cool dung ball. So the truth is, if you look at the temperature over here, dung is cool. (Laughter) So all we're interested in here is comparing the temperature of the beetle against the background. So the background here is around about 50 degrees centigrade. The beetle itself and the ball are probably around about 30 to 35 degrees centigrade, so this is a great big ball of ice cream that this beetle is now transporting across the hot veld. It isn't climbing. It isn't dancing, because its body temperature is actually relatively low. It's about the same as yours and mine. And what's of interest here is that little brain is quite cool. But if we contrast now what happens in a hot environment, look at the temperature of the soil. It's up around 55 to 60 degrees centigrade. Watch how often the beetle dances. And look at its front legs. They're roaringly hot. So the ball leaves a little thermal shadow, and the beetle climbs on top of the ball and wipes its face, and all the time it's trying to cool itself down, we think, and avoid the hot sand that it's walking across. And what we did then was put little boots on these legs, because this was a way to test if the legs were involved in sensing the temperature of the soil. And if you look over here, with boots they climb onto the ball far less often when they had no boots on. So we described these as cool boots. It was a dental compound that we used to make these boots. And we also cooled down the dung ball, so we were able to put the ball in the fridge, gave them a nice cool dung ball, and they climbed onto that ball far less often than when they had a hot ball. So this is called stilting. It's a thermal behavior that you and I do if we cross the beach, we jump onto a towel, somebody has this towel — "Sorry, I've jumped onto your towel." — and then you scuttle across onto somebody else's towel, and that way you don't burn your feet. And that's exactly what the beetles are doing here. However, there's one more story I'd like to share with you, and that's this particular species. It's from a genus called Pachysoma. There are 13 species in the genus, and they have a particular behavior that I think you will find interesting. This is a dung beetle. Watch what he's doing. Can you spot the difference? They don't normally go this slowly. It's in slow motion. but it's walking forwards, and it's actually taking a pellet of dry dung with it. This is a different species in the same genus but exactly the same foraging behavior. There's one more interesting aspect of this dung beetle's behavior that we found quite fascinating, and that's that it forages and provisions a nest. So watch this individual here, and what he's trying to do is set up a nest. And he doesn't like this first position, but he comes up with a second position, and about 50 minutes later, that nest is finished, and he heads off to forage and provision at a pile of dry dung pellets. And what I want you to notice is the outward path compared to the homeward path, and compare the two. And by and large, you'll see that the homeward path is far more direct than the outward path. On the outward path, he's always on the lookout for a new blob of dung. On the way home, he knows where home is, and he wants to go straight to it. The important thing here is that this is not a one-way trip, as in most dung beetles. The trip here is repeated back and forth between a provisioning site and a nest site. And watch, you're going to see another South African crime taking place right now. (Laughter) And his neighbor steals one of his dung pellets. So what we're looking at here is a behavior called path integration. And what's taking place is that the beetle has got a home spot, it goes out on a convoluted path looking for food, and then when it finds food, it heads straight home. It knows exactly where its home is. Now there's two ways it could be doing that, and we can test that by displacing the beetle to a new position when it's at the foraging site. If it's using landmarks, it will find its home. If it is using something called path integration, it will not find its home. It will arrive at the wrong spot, and what it's doing here if it's using path integration is it's counting its steps or measuring the distance out in this direction. It knows the bearing home, and it knows it should be in that direction. If you displace it, it ends up in the wrong place. So let's see what happens when we put this beetle to the test with a similar experiment. So here's our cunning experimenter. He displaces the beetle, and now we have to see what is going to take place. What we've got is a burrow. That's where the forage was. The forage has been displaced to a new position. If he's using landmark orientation, he should be able to find the burrow, because he'll be able to recognize the landmarks around it. If he's using path integration, then it should end up in the wrong spot over here. So let's watch what happens when we put the beetle through the whole test. So there he is there. He's about to head home, and look what happens. Shame. It hasn't a clue. It starts to search for its house in the right distance away from the food, but it is clearly completely lost. So we know now that this animal uses path integration to find its way around, and the callous experimenter leads it top left and leaves it. (Laughter) So what we're looking at here are a group of animals that use a compass, and they use the sun as a compass to find their way around, and they have some sort of system for measuring that distance, and we know that these species here actually count the steps. That's what they use as an odometer, a step-counting system, to find their way back home. We don't know yet what dung beetles use. So what have we learned from these animals with a brain that's the size of a grain of rice? Well, we know that they can roll balls in a straight line using celestial cues. We know that the dance behavior is an orientation behavior and it's also a thermoregulation behavior, and we also know that they use a path integration system for finding their way home. So for a small animal dealing with a fairly revolting substance we can actually learn an awful lot from these things doing behaviors that you and I couldn't possibly do. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why bother leaving the house? | {0: 'In 2004, Ben Saunders became the youngest person ever to ski solo to the North Pole. In 2013, he set out on another record-breaking expedition, this time to retrace Captain Scott’s ill-fated journey to the South Pole on foot.'} | TEDSalon London Fall 2012 | I essentially drag sledges for a living, so it doesn't take an awful lot to flummox me intellectually, but I'm going to read this question from an interview earlier this year: "Philosophically, does the constant supply of information steal our ability to imagine or replace our dreams of achieving? After all, if it is being done somewhere by someone, and we can participate virtually, then why bother leaving the house?" I'm usually introduced as a polar explorer. I'm not sure that's the most progressive or 21st-century of job titles, but I've spent more than two percent now of my entire life living in a tent inside the Arctic Circle, so I get out of the house a fair bit. And in my nature, I guess, I am a doer of things more than I am a spectator or a contemplator of things, and it's that dichotomy, the gulf between ideas and action that I'm going to try and explore briefly. The pithiest answer to the question "why?" that's been dogging me for the last 12 years was credited certainly to this chap, the rakish-looking gentleman standing at the back, second from the left, George Lee Mallory. Many of you will know his name. In 1924 he was last seen disappearing into the clouds near the summit of Mt. Everest. He may or may not have been the first person to climb Everest, more than 30 years before Edmund Hillary. No one knows if he got to the top. It's still a mystery. But he was credited with coining the phrase, "Because it's there." Now I'm not actually sure that he did say that. There's very little evidence to suggest it, but what he did say is actually far nicer, and again, I've printed this. I'm going to read it out. "The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this: What is the use of climbing Mt. Everest? And my answer must at once be, it is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation, but otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, and not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. So it is no use. If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy, and joy, after all, is the end of life. We don't live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means, and that is what life is for." Mallory's argument that leaving the house, embarking on these grand adventures is joyful and fun, however, doesn't tally that neatly with my own experience. The furthest I've ever got away from my front door was in the spring of 2004. I still don't know exactly what came over me, but my plan was to make a solo and unsupported crossing of the Arctic Ocean. I planned essentially to walk from the north coast of Russia to the North Pole, and then to carry on to the north coast of Canada. No one had ever done this. I was 26 at the time. A lot of experts were saying it was impossible, and my mum certainly wasn't very keen on the idea. (Laughter) The journey from a small weather station on the north coast of Siberia up to my final starting point, the edge of the pack ice, the coast of the Arctic Ocean, took about five hours, and if anyone watched fearless Felix Baumgartner going up, rather than just coming down, you'll appreciate the sense of apprehension, as I sat in a helicopter thundering north, and the sense, I think if anything, of impending doom. I sat there wondering what on Earth I had gotten myself into. There was a bit of fun, a bit of joy. I was 26. I remember sitting there looking down at my sledge. I had my skis ready to go, I had a satellite phone, a pump-action shotgun in case I was attacked by a polar bear. I remember looking out of the window and seeing the second helicopter. We were both thundering through this incredible Siberian dawn, and part of me felt a bit like a cross between Jason Bourne and Wilfred Thesiger. Part of me felt quite proud of myself, but mostly I was just utterly terrified. And that journey lasted 10 weeks, 72 days. I didn't see anyone else. We took this photo next to the helicopter. Beyond that, I didn't see anyone for 10 weeks. The North Pole is slap bang in the middle of the sea, so I'm traveling over the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean. NASA described conditions that year as the worst since records began. I was dragging 180 kilos of food and fuel and supplies, about 400 pounds. The average temperature for the 10 weeks was minus 35. Minus 50 was the coldest. So again, there wasn't an awful lot of joy or fun to be had. One of the magical things about this journey, however, is that because I'm walking over the sea, over this floating, drifting, shifting crust of ice that's floating on top of the Arctic Ocean is it's an environment that's in a constant state of flux. The ice is always moving, breaking up, drifting around, refreezing, so the scenery that I saw for nearly 3 months was unique to me. No one else will ever, could ever, possibly see the views, the vistas, that I saw for 10 weeks. And that, I guess, is probably the finest argument for leaving the house. I can try to tell you what it was like, but you'll never know what it was like, and the more I try to explain that I felt lonely, I was the only human being in 5.4 million square-miles, it was cold, nearly minus 75 with windchill on a bad day, the more words fall short, and I'm unable to do it justice. And it seems to me, therefore, that the doing, you know, to try to experience, to engage, to endeavor, rather than to watch and to wonder, that's where the real meat of life is to be found, the juice that we can suck out of our hours and days. And I would add a cautionary note here, however. In my experience, there is something addictive about tasting life at the very edge of what's humanly possible. Now I don't just mean in the field of daft macho Edwardian style derring-do, but also in the fields of pancreatic cancer, there is something addictive about this, and in my case, I think polar expeditions are perhaps not that far removed from having a crack habit. I can't explain quite how good it is until you've tried it, but it has the capacity to burn up all the money I can get my hands on, to ruin every relationship I've ever had, so be careful what you wish for. Mallory postulated that there is something in man that responds to the challenge of the mountain, and I wonder if that's the case whether there's something in the challenge itself, in the endeavor, and particularly in the big, unfinished, chunky challenges that face humanity that call out to us, and in my experience that's certainly the case. There is one unfinished challenge that's been calling out to me for most of my adult life. Many of you will know the story. This is a photo of Captain Scott and his team. Scott set out just over a hundred years ago to try to become the first person to reach the South Pole. No one knew what was there. It was utterly unmapped at the time. We knew more about the surface of the moon than we did about the heart of Antarctica. Scott, as many of you will know, was beaten to it by Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian team, who used dogs and dogsleds. Scott's team were on foot, all five of them wearing harnesses and dragging around sledges, and they arrived at the pole to find the Norwegian flag already there, I'd imagine pretty bitter and demoralized. All five of them turned and started walking back to the coast and all five died on that return journey. There is a sort of misconception nowadays that it's all been done in the fields of exploration and adventure. When I talk about Antarctica, people often say, "Hasn't, you know, that's interesting, hasn't that Blue Peter presenter just done it on a bike?" Or, "That's nice. You know, my grandmother's going on a cruise to Antarctica next year. You know. Is there a chance you'll see her there?" (Laughter) But Scott's journey remains unfinished. No one has ever walked from the very coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again. It is, arguably, the most audacious endeavor of that Edwardian golden age of exploration, and it seemed to me high time, given everything we have figured out in the century since from scurvy to solar panels, that it was high time someone had a go at finishing the job. So that's precisely what I'm setting out to do. This time next year, in October, I'm leading a team of three. It will take us about four months to make this return journey. That's the scale. The red line is obviously halfway to the pole. We have to turn around and come back again. I'm well aware of the irony of telling you that we will be blogging and tweeting. You'll be able to live vicariously and virtually through this journey in a way that no one has ever before. And it'll also be a four-month chance for me to finally come up with a pithy answer to the question, "Why?" And our lives today are safer and more comfortable than they have ever been. There certainly isn't much call for explorers nowadays. My career advisor at school never mentioned it as an option. If I wanted to know, for example, how many stars were in the Milky Way, how old those giant heads on Easter Island were, most of you could find that out right now without even standing up. And yet, if I've learned anything in nearly 12 years now of dragging heavy things around cold places, it is that true, real inspiration and growth only comes from adversity and from challenge, from stepping away from what's comfortable and familiar and stepping out into the unknown. In life, we all have tempests to ride and poles to walk to, and I think metaphorically speaking, at least, we could all benefit from getting outside the house a little more often, if only we could summon up the courage. I certainly would implore you to open the door just a little bit and take a look at what's outside. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Excuse me, may I rent your car? | {0: "With Zipcar, Robin Chase introduced car-crazy America to the concept of non-ownership. Now she's flipping that model with Buzzcar, which lets you rent your own auto to your neighbors."} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Twelve years ago, I founded Zipcar. Zipcar buys cars and parks them throughout dense metropolitan areas for people to use, by the hour and by the day, instead of owning their own cars. Each Zipcar replaces 15 personal cars, and each driver drives about 80 percent less because they're now paying the full cost, all at once, in real time. But what Zipcar really did was make sharing the norm. Now, a decade later, it's really time to push the envelope a little bit, and so a couple years ago I moved to Paris with my husband and youngest child, and we launched Buzzcar a year ago. Buzzcar lets people rent out their own cars to their friends and neighbors. Instead of investing in a car, we invest in a community. We bring the power of a corporation to individuals who add their cars to the network. Some people call this peer-to-peer. This does express the humanity of what's going on, and the personal relationships, but that is also like saying that it's the same thing as a yard sale or a bake sale or babysitting. That's peer-to-peer. It's like saying yard sales are the same thing as eBay, or craft fairs are the same thing as Etsy. But what's really happening is that we've got the power of a free and open Internet, and on top of that we're putting a platform for participation, and the peers are now in partnership with the company, creating shared value on shared values, and each strengthening the other, and doing what the other can't do. I call this Peers, Inc. The incorporated side, the company, is doing things that it does really well. What does it do really well? It creates economies of scale, significant and long-term resource investment, the expertise of many different kinds of people and different kinds of minds, and for individuals, consumers, it's bringing the standards, rules and recourse that we really want as consumers, and this is kind of bound up in a brand promise, and the companies are providing this on a platform for participation. Peers are giving and doing things that are incredibly expensive for companies to do. What do they bring? They bring this fabulous diversity, expensive for companies. And what does that deliver? It delivers localization and customization, specialization, and all of this aspect about social networks and how companies are yearning and eager to get inside there? It's natural for me. Me and my friends, I can connect to them easily. And it also delivers really fabulous innovation, and I'll talk about that later. So we have the peers that are providing the services and the product, and the company that's doing the stuff that companies do. The two of these are delivering the best of both worlds. Some of my favorite examples: in transportation, Carpooling.com. Ten years old, three and a half million people have joined up, and a million rides are shared every day. It's a phenomenal thing. It's the equivalent of 2,500 TGV trains, and just think, they didn't have to lay a track or buy a car. This is all happening with excess capacity. And it's not just with transportation, my love, but of course in other realms. Here's Fiverr.com. I met these founders just weeks after they had launched, and now, in two years, what would you do for five dollars? Seven hundred and fifty thousand gigs are now posted after two years, what people would do for five dollars. And not just easy things that anyone can do. This Peers, Inc. concept is in a very difficult and complex realm. TopCoder has 400,000 engineers who are delivering complex design and engineering services. When I talked to their CEO, he had this great line. He said, "We have a community that owns its own company." And then my all-time favorite, Etsy. Etsy is providing goods that people make themselves and they're selling it in a marketplace. It just celebrated its seventh anniversary, and after seven years, last year it delivered 530 million dollars' worth of sales to all those individuals who have been making those objects. I know you guys out there who are businesspeople, are thinking, "Oh my God, I want to build one of those. I see this incredible speed and scale. You mean all I have to do is build a platform and all these people are going to put their stuff on top and I sit back and roll it in?" Building these platforms for participation are so nontrivial to do. I think of the difference of Google Video versus YouTube. Who would have thought that two young guys and a start-up would beat out Google Video? Why? I actually have no idea why. I didn't talk to them. But I'm thinking, you know, they probably had the "share" button a little bit brighter and to the right, and so it was easier and more convenient for the two sides that are always participating on these networks. So I actually know a lot about building a peer platform now, and a Peers, Inc. company, because I've spent the last two years doing that in Paris. So let me take you back how it's so incredibly different building Buzzcar than it was building Zipcar, because now every single thing we do has these two different bodies that I have to be thinking about: the owners who are going to provide the cars and the drivers who are going to rent them. Every single decision, I have to think about what is right for both sides. There are many, many examples and I'll give you one that is not my favorite example: insurance. It took me a year and a half to get the insurance just right. Hours and hours of sitting with insurers and many companies and their thoughts about risk and how this is totally innovative, they'd never thought of it before. Way too much money, I just can't even go there, with lawyers, trying to figure out how this is different, who's responsible to whom, and the result was that we were able to provide owners protection for their own driving records and their own history. The cars are completely insured during the rental, and it gives drivers what they need, and what do they need? They need a low deductible, and 24-hour roadside assistance. So this was a trick to get these two sides. So now I want to take you to the moment of — When you're an entrepreneur, and you've started a new company, there's the, here's all the stuff we do beforehand, and then the service launches. What happens? So all those months of work, they come into play. Last June 1, we launched. It was an exciting moment. And all the owners are adding their cars. It's really exciting. All the drivers are becoming members. It's excellent. The reservations start coming in, and here, owners who were getting text messages and emails that said, "Hey, Joe wants to rent your car for the weekend. You can earn 60 euros. Isn't that great? Yes or no?" No reply. Like, a huge proportion of them couldn't be bothered after they had just started, they just signed up, to reply. So I thought, "Duh, Robin, this is the difference between industrial production and peer production." Industrial production, the whole point of industrial production is to provide a standardized, exact service model that is consistent every single time, and I'm really thankful that my smartphone is made using industrial production. And Zipcar provides a very nice, consistent service that works fabulously. But what does peer production do? Peer production is this completely different way of doing things, and you have a big quality range, and so eBay, cleverly, the first peer production, Peer, Inc. company, I'd say, they figured out early on, we need to have ratings and commentaries and all that yucky side stuff. We can flag that and we can put it to the side, and people who are buyers and consumers don't have to deal with it. So going back, this is my look of excitement and joy, because all this stuff that I'd also been hoping for actually really did happen, and what's that? That is the diversity of what's going on. You have these different fabulous owners and their different cars, different prices, different locations. (Laughter) They dress differently, and they look different, and, really, I love these photos every time I look at them. Cool guys, excited guys, and here is Selma, who — I love this driver. And after a year, we have 1,000 cars that are parked across France and 6,000 people who are members and eager to drive them. This would not be possible to do that in economic fashion for a traditional company. Back to this spectrum. So what's happening is, we had the yuck side, but we actually had this real wow side. And I can tell you two great stories. A driver was telling me that they went to rent a car to go up the coast of France and the owner gave it to them, and said, "You know what, here's where the cliffs are, and here's all the beaches, and this is my best beach, and this is where the best fish restaurant is." And the peers also become, peers and owners create relationships, and so at the last minute people can — a driver can say, "Hey, you know what, I really need the car, is it available?" And that person will say, "Sure, my wife's at home. Go pick up the keys. Go do it." So you can have these really nice things that can't happen, and it's a kind of "Wow!" and I want to say "Wow!" type of thing that's happening here, because individuals, if you're a company, what happens is you might have 10 people who are in charge of innovation, or 100 people who are in charge of innovation. What happens in Peer, Inc. companies is that you have tens and hundreds and thousands and even millions of people who are creating experiments on this model, and so out of all that influence and that effort, you are having this exceptional amount of innovation that is coming out. So one of the reasons, if we come back to why did I call it Buzzcar? I wanted to remind all of us about the power of the hive, and its incredible facility to create this platform that individuals want to participate and innovate on. And for me, when I think about our future, and all of those problems that seem incredibly large, the scale is impossible, the urgency is there, Peers, Inc. provides the speed and scale and the innovation and the creativity that is going to answer these problems. All we have to do is create a fabulous platform for participation — nontrivial. So I continue to think that transportation is the center of the hard universe. All problems come back to transportation for me. But there are all these other areas that are these profound, big problems that I know that we can work on, and people are working on them in many different sectors, but there's this really fabulous group of things with the power of this Peers, Inc. model. So over the last decade, we've been reveling in the power of the Internet and how it's empowered individuals, and for me, what Peers, Inc. does is it takes it up a notch. We're now bringing the power of the company and the corporation and supercharging individuals. So for me, it's a collaboration. Together, we can. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Beware neuro-bunk | {0: 'Neuroscientist Molly Crockett studies altruism, morality and value-based decision-making in humans.'} | TEDSalon London Fall 2012 | I'm a neuroscientist, and I study decision-making. I do experiments to test how different chemicals in the brain influence the choices we make. I'm here to tell you the secret to successful decision-making: a cheese sandwich. That's right. According to scientists, a cheese sandwich is the solution to all your tough decisions. How do I know? I'm the scientist who did the study. A few years ago, my colleagues and I were interested in how a brain chemical called serotonin would influence people's decisions in social situations. Specifically, we wanted to know how serotonin would affect the way people react when they're treated unfairly. So we did an experiment. We manipulated people's serotonin levels by giving them this really disgusting-tasting artificial lemon-flavored drink that works by taking away the raw ingredient for serotonin in the brain. This is the amino acid tryptophan. So what we found was, when tryptophan was low, people were more likely to take revenge when they're treated unfairly. That's the study we did, and here are some of the headlines that came out afterwards. ("A cheese sandwich is all you need for strong decision-making") ("What a friend we have in cheeses") ("Eating Cheese and Meat May Boost Self-Control") At this point, you might be wondering, did I miss something? ("Official! Chocolate stops you being grumpy") Cheese? Chocolate? Where did that come from? And I thought the same thing myself when these came out, because our study had nothing to do with cheese or chocolate. We gave people this horrible-tasting drink that affected their tryptophan levels. But it turns out that tryptophan also happens to be found in cheese and chocolate. And of course when science says cheese and chocolate help you make better decisions, well, that's sure to grab people's attention. So there you have it: the evolution of a headline. When this happened, a part of me thought, well, what's the big deal? So the media oversimplified a few things, but in the end, it's just a news story. And I think a lot of scientists have this attitude. But the problem is that this kind of thing happens all the time, and it affects not just the stories you read in the news but also the products you see on the shelves. When the headlines rolled, what happened was, the marketers came calling. Would I be willing to provide a scientific endorsement of a mood-boosting bottled water? Or would I go on television to demonstrate, in front of a live audience, that comfort foods really do make you feel better? I think these folks meant well, but had I taken them up on their offers, I would have been going beyond the science, and good scientists are careful not to do this. But nevertheless, neuroscience is turning up more and more in marketing. Here's one example: Neuro drinks, a line of products, including Nuero Bliss here, which according to its label helps reduce stress, enhances mood, provides focused concentration, and promotes a positive outlook. I have to say, this sounds awesome. (Laughter) I could totally have used this 10 minutes ago. So when this came up in my local shop, naturally I was curious about some of the research backing these claims. So I went to the company's website looking to find some controlled trials of their products. But I didn't find any. Trial or no trial, these claims are front and center on their label right next to a picture of a brain. And it turns out that pictures of brains have special properties. A couple of researchers asked a few hundred people to read a scientific article. For half the people, the article included a brain image, and for the other half, it was the same article but it didn't have a brain image. At the end — you see where this is going — people were asked whether they agreed with the conclusions of the article. So this is how much people agree with the conclusions with no image. And this is how much they agree with the same article that did include a brain image. So the take-home message here is, do you want to sell it? Put a brain on it. Now let me pause here and take a moment to say that neuroscience has advanced a lot in the last few decades, and we're constantly discovering amazing things about the brain. Like, just a couple of weeks ago, neuroscientists at MIT figured out how to break habits in rats just by controlling neural activity in a specific part of their brain. Really cool stuff. But the promise of neuroscience has led to some really high expectations and some overblown, unproven claims. So what I'm going to do is show you how to spot a couple of classic moves, dead giveaways, really, for what's variously been called neuro-bunk, neuro-bollocks, or, my personal favorite, neuro-flapdoodle. So the first unproven claim is that you can use brain scans to read people's thoughts and emotions. Here's a study published by a team of researchers as an op-ed in The New York Times. The headline? "You Love Your iPhone. Literally." It quickly became the most emailed article on the site. So how'd they figure this out? They put 16 people inside a brain scanner and showed them videos of ringing iPhones. The brain scans showed activation in a part of the brain called the insula, a region they say is linked to feelings of love and compassion. So they concluded that because they saw activation in the insula, this meant the subjects loved their iPhones. Now there's just one problem with this line of reasoning, and that's that the insula does a lot. Sure, it is involved in positive emotions like love and compassion, but it's also involved in tons of other processes, like memory, language, attention, even anger, disgust and pain. So based on the same logic, I could equally conclude you hate your iPhone. The point here is, when you see activation in the insula, you can't just pick and choose your favorite explanation from off this list, and it's a really long list. My colleagues Tal Yarkoni and Russ Poldrack have shown that the insula pops up in almost a third of all brain imaging studies that have ever been published. So chances are really, really good that your insula is going off right now, but I won't kid myself to think this means you love me. So speaking of love and the brain, there's a researcher, known to some as Dr. Love, who claims that scientists have found the glue that holds society together, the source of love and prosperity. This time it's not a cheese sandwich. No, it's a hormone called oxytocin. You've probably heard of it. So, Dr. Love bases his argument on studies showing that when you boost people's oxytocin, this increases their trust, empathy and cooperation. So he's calling oxytocin "the moral molecule." Now these studies are scientifically valid, and they've been replicated, but they're not the whole story. Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy. It increases gloating. Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups. And in some cases, oxytocin can even decrease cooperation. So based on these studies, I could say oxytocin is an immoral molecule, and call myself Dr. Strangelove. (Laughter) So we've seen neuro-flapdoodle all over the headlines. We see it in supermarkets, on book covers. What about the clinic? SPECT imaging is a brain-scanning technology that uses a radioactive tracer to track blood flow in the brain. For the bargain price of a few thousand dollars, there are clinics in the U.S. that will give you one of these SPECT scans and use the image to help diagnose your problems. These scans, the clinics say, can help prevent Alzheimer's disease, solve weight and addiction issues, overcome marital conflicts, and treat, of course, a variety of mental illnesses ranging from depression to anxiety to ADHD. This sounds great. A lot of people agree. Some of these clinics are pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year in business. There's just one problem. The broad consensus in neuroscience is that we can't yet diagnose mental illness from a single brain scan. But these clinics have treated tens of thousands of patients to date, many of them children, and SPECT imaging involves a radioactive injection, so exposing people to radiation, potentially harmful. I am more excited than most people, as a neuroscientist, about the potential for neuroscience to treat mental illness and even maybe to make us better and smarter. And if one day we can say that cheese and chocolate help us make better decisions, count me in. But we're not there yet. We haven't found a "buy" button inside the brain, we can't tell whether someone is lying or in love just by looking at their brain scans, and we can't turn sinners into saints with hormones. Maybe someday we will, but until then, we have to be careful that we don't let overblown claims detract resources and attention away from the real science that's playing a much longer game. So here's where you come in. If someone tries to sell you something with a brain on it, don't just take them at their word. Ask the tough questions. Ask to see the evidence. Ask for the part of the story that's not being told. The answers shouldn't be simple, because the brain isn't simple. But that's not stopping us from trying to figure it out anyway. Thank you. (Applause) |
A father-daughter bond, one photo at a time | {0: 'Steven Addis is a father and photography buff who, by day, harnesses the power of branding for social change.'} | TED2012 | Photography has been my passion ever since I was old enough to pick up a camera, but today I want to share with you the 15 most treasured photos of mine, and I didn't take any of them. There were no art directors, no stylists, no chance for reshoots, not even any regard for lighting. In fact, most of them were taken by random tourists. My story begins when I was in New York City for a speaking engagement, and my wife took this picture of me holding my daughter on her first birthday. We're on the corner of 57th and 5th. We happened to be back in New York exactly a year later, so we decided to take the same picture. Well you can see where this is going. Approaching my daughter's third birthday, my wife said, "Hey, why don't you take Sabina back to New York and make it a father-daughter trip, and continue the ritual?" This is when we started asking passing tourists to take the picture. You know, it's remarkable how universal the gesture is of handing your camera to a total stranger. No one's ever refused, and luckily no one's ever run off with our camera. Back then, we had no idea how much this trip would change our lives. It's really become sacred to us. This one was taken just weeks after 9/11, and I found myself trying to explain what had happened that day in ways a five-year-old could understand. So these photos are far more than proxies for a single moment, or even a specific trip. They're also ways for us to freeze time for one week in October and reflect on our times and how we change from year to year, and not just physically, but in every way. Because while we take the same photo, our perspectives change, and she reaches new milestones, and I get to see life through her eyes, and how she interacts with and sees everything. This very focused time we get to spend together is something we cherish and anticipate the entire year. Recently, on one trip, we were walking, and she stops dead in her tracks, and she points to a red awning of the doll store that she loved when she was little on our earlier trips. And she describes to me the feeling she felt as a five-year-old standing in that exact spot. She said she remembers her heart bursting out of her chest when she saw that place for the very first time nine years earlier. And now what she's looking at in New York are colleges, because she's determined to go to school in New York. And it hit me: One of the most important things we all make are memories. So I want to share the idea of taking an active role in consciously creating memories. I don't know about you, but aside from these 15 shots, I'm not in many of the family photos. I'm always the one taking the picture. So I want to encourage everyone today to get in the shot, and don't hesitate to go up to someone and ask, "Will you take our picture?" Thank you. (Applause) |
What we learned from teetering on the fiscal cliff | {0: 'Adam Davidson is the co-host and co-creator of "Planet Money," a weekly podcast and radio feature about the economy.'} | TEDSalon NY2012 | So a friend of mine who's a political scientist, he told me several months ago exactly what this month would be like. He said, you know, there's this fiscal cliff coming, it's going to come at the beginning of 2013. Both parties absolutely need to resolve it, but neither party wants to be seen as the first to resolve it. Neither party has any incentive to solve it a second before it's due, so he said, December, you're just going to see lots of angry negotiations, negotiations breaking apart, reports of phone calls that aren't going well, people saying nothing's happening at all, and then sometime around Christmas or New Year's, we're going to hear, "Okay, they resolved everything." He told me that a few months ago. He said he's 98 percent positive they're going to resolve it, and I got an email from him today saying, all right, we're basically on track, but now I'm 80 percent positive that they're going to resolve it. And it made me think. I love studying these moments in American history when there was this frenzy of partisan anger, that the economy was on the verge of total collapse. The most famous early battle was Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson over what the dollar would be and how it would be backed up, with Alexander Hamilton saying, "We need a central bank, the First Bank of the United States, or else the dollar will have no value. This economy won't work," and Thomas Jefferson saying, "The people won't trust that. They just fought off a king. They're not going to accept some central authority." This battle defined the first 150 years of the U.S. economy, and at every moment, different partisans saying, "Oh my God, the economy's about to collapse," and the rest of us just going about, spending our bucks on whatever it is we wanted to buy. To give you a quick primer on where we are, a quick refresher on where we are. So the fiscal cliff, I was told that that's too partisan a thing to say, although I can't remember which party it's supporting or attacking. People say we should call it the fiscal slope, or we should call it an austerity crisis, but then other people say, no, that's even more partisan. So I just call it the self-imposed, self-destructive arbitrary deadline about resolving an inevitable problem. And this is what the inevitable problem looks like. So this is a projection of U.S. debt as a percentage of our overall economy, of GDP. The light blue dotted line represents the Congressional Budget Office's best guess of what will happen if Congress really doesn't do anything, and as you can see, sometime around 2027, we reach Greek levels of debt, somewhere around 130 percent of GDP, which tells you that some time in the next 20 years, if Congress does absolutely nothing, we're going to hit a moment where the world's investors, the world's bond buyers, are going to say, "We don't trust America anymore. We're not going to lend them any money, except at really high interest rates." And at that moment our economy collapses. But remember, Greece is there today. We're there in 20 years. We have lots and lots of time to avoid that crisis, and the fiscal cliff was just one more attempt at trying to force the two sides to resolve the crisis. Here's another way to look at exactly the same problem. The dark blue line is how much the government spends. The light blue line is how much the government gets in. And as you can see, for most of recent history, except for a brief period, we have consistently spent more than we take in. Thus the national debt. But as you can also see, projected going forward, the gap widens a bit and raises a bit, and this graph is only through 2021. It gets really, really ugly out towards 2030. And this graph sort of sums up what the problem is. The Democrats, they say, well, this isn't a big deal. We can just raise taxes a bit and close that gap, especially if we raise taxes on the rich. The Republicans say, hey, no, no, we've got a better idea. Why don't we lower both lines? Why don't we lower government spending and lower government taxes, and then we'll be on an even more favorable long-term deficit trajectory? And behind this powerful disagreement between how to close that gap, there's the worst kind of cynical party politics, the worst kind of insider baseball, lobbying, all of that stuff, but there's also this powerfully interesting, respectful disagreement between two fundamentally different economic philosophies. And I like to think, when I picture how Republicans see the economy, what I picture is just some amazingly well-engineered machine, some perfect machine. Unfortunately, I picture it made in Germany or Japan, but this amazing machine that's constantly scouring every bit of human endeavor and taking resources, money, labor, capital, machinery, away from the least productive parts and towards the more productive parts, and while this might cause temporary dislocation, what it does is it builds up the more productive areas and lets the less productive areas fade away and die, and as a result the whole system is so much more efficient, so much richer for everybody. And this view generally believes that there is a role for government, a small role, to set the rules so people aren't lying and cheating and hurting each other, maybe, you know, have a police force and a fire department and an army, but to have a very limited reach into the mechanisms of this machinery. And when I picture how Democrats and Democratic-leaning economists picture this economy, most Democratic economists are, you know, they're capitalists, they believe, yes, that's a good system a lot of the time. It's good to let markets move resources to their more productive use. But that system has tons of problems. Wealth piles up in the wrong places. Wealth is ripped away from people who shouldn't be called unproductive. That's not going to create an equitable, fair society. That machine doesn't care about the environment, about racism, about all these issues that make this life worse for all of us, and so the government does have a role to take resources from more productive uses, or from richer sources, and give them to other sources. And when you think about the economy through these two different lenses, you understand why this crisis is so hard to solve, because the worse the crisis gets, the higher the stakes are, the more each side thinks they know the answer and the other side is just going to ruin everything. And I can get really despairing. I've spent a lot of the last few years really depressed about this, until this year, I learned something that I felt really excited about. I feel like it's really good news, and it's so shocking, I don't like saying it, because I think people won't believe me. But here's what I learned. The American people, taken as a whole, when it comes to these issues, to fiscal issues, are moderate, pragmatic centrists. And I know that's hard to believe, that the American people are moderate, pragmatic centrists. But let me explain what I'm thinking. When you look at how the federal government spends money, so this is the battle right here, 55 percent, more than half, is on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a few other health programs, 20 percent defense, 19 percent discretionary, and six percent interest. So when we're talking about cutting government spending, this is the pie we're talking about, and Americans overwhelmingly, and it doesn't matter what party they're in, overwhelmingly like that big 55 percent chunk. They like Social Security. They like Medicare. They even like Medicaid, even though that goes to the poor and indigent, which you might think would have less support. And they do not want it fundamentally touched, although the American people are remarkably comfortable, and Democrats roughly equal to Republicans, with some minor tweaks to make the system more stable. Social Security is fairly easy to fix. The rumors of its demise are always greatly exaggerated. So gradually raise Social Security retirement age, maybe only on people not yet born. Americans are about 50/50, whether they're Democrats or Republicans. Reduce Medicare for very wealthy seniors, seniors who make a lot of money. Don't even eliminate it. Just reduce it. People generally are comfortable with it, Democrats and Republicans. Raise medical health care contributions? Everyone hates that equally, but Republicans and Democrats hate that together. And so what this tells me is, when you look at the discussion of how to resolve our fiscal problems, we are not a nation that's powerfully divided on the major, major issue. We're comfortable with it needing some tweaks, but we want to keep it. We're not open to a discussion of eliminating it. Now there is one issue that is hyper-partisan, and where there is one party that is just spend, spend, spend, we don't care, spend some more, and that of course is Republicans when it comes to military defense spending. They way outweigh Democrats. The vast majority want to protect military defense spending. That's 20 percent of the budget, and that presents a more difficult issue. I should also note that the [discretionary] spending, which is about 19 percent of the budget, that is Democratic and Republican issues, so you do have welfare, food stamps, other programs that tend to be popular among Democrats, but you also have the farm bill and all sorts of Department of Interior inducements for oil drilling and other things, which tend to be popular among Republicans. Now when it comes to taxes, there is more disagreement. That's a more partisan area. You have Democrats overwhelmingly supportive of raising the income tax on people who make 250,000 dollars a year, Republicans sort of against it, although if you break it out by income, Republicans who make less than 75,000 dollars a year like this idea. So basically Republicans who make more than 250,000 dollars a year don't want to be taxed. Raising taxes on investment income, you also see about two thirds of Democrats but only one third of Republicans are comfortable with that idea. This brings up a really important point, which is that we tend in this country to talk about Democrats and Republicans and think there's this little group over there called independents that's, what, two percent? If you add Democrats, you add Republicans, you've got the American people. But that is not the case at all. And it has not been the case for most of modern American history. Roughly a third of Americans say that they are Democrats. Around a quarter say that they are Republicans. A tiny little sliver call themselves libertarians, or socialists, or some other small third party, and the largest block, 40 percent, say they're independents. So most Americans are not partisan, and most of the people in the independent camp fall somewhere in between, so even though we have tremendous overlap between the views on these fiscal issues of Democrats and Republicans, we have even more overlap when you add in the independents. Now we get to fight about all sorts of other issues. We get to hate each other on gun control and abortion and the environment, but on these fiscal issues, these important fiscal issues, we just are not anywhere nearly as divided as people say. And in fact, there's this other group of people who are not as divided as people might think, and that group is economists. I talk to a lot of economists, and back in the '70s and '80s it was ugly being an economist. You were in what they called the saltwater camp, meaning Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, or you were in the freshwater camp, University of Chicago, University of Rochester. You were a free market capitalist economist or you were a Keynesian liberal economist, and these people didn't go to each other's weddings, they snubbed each other at conferences. It's still ugly to this day, but in my experience, it is really, really hard to find an economist under 40 who still has that kind of way of seeing the world. The vast majority of economists — it is so uncool to call yourself an ideologue of either camp. The phrase that you want, if you're a graduate student or a postdoc or you're a professor, a 38-year-old economics professor, is, "I'm an empiricist. I go by the data." And the data is very clear. None of these major theories have been completely successful. The 20th century, the last hundred years, is riddled with disastrous examples of times that one school or the other tried to explain the past or predict the future and just did an awful, awful job, so the economics profession has acquired some degree of modesty. They still are an awfully arrogant group of people, I will assure you, but they're now arrogant about their impartiality, and they, too, see a tremendous range of potential outcomes. And this nonpartisanship is something that exists, that has existed in secret in America for years and years and years. I've spent a lot of the fall talking to the three major organizations that survey American political attitudes: Pew Research, the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, and the most important but the least known is the American National Election Studies group that is the world's longest, most respected poll of political attitudes. They've been doing it since 1948, and what they show consistently throughout is that it's almost impossible to find Americans who are consistent ideologically, who consistently support, "No we mustn't tax, and we must limit the size of government," or, "No, we must encourage government to play a larger role in redistribution and correcting the ills of capitalism." Those groups are very, very small. The vast majority of people, they pick and choose, they see compromise and they change over time when they hear a better argument or a worse argument. And that part of it has not changed. What has changed is how people respond to vague questions. If you ask people vague questions, like, "Do you think there should be more government or less government?" "Do you think government should" — especially if you use loaded language — "Do you think the government should provide handouts?" Or, "Do you think the government should redistribute?" Then you can see radical partisan change. But when you get specific, when you actually ask about the actual taxing and spending issues under consideration, people are remarkably centrist, they're remarkably open to compromise. So what we have, then, when you think about the fiscal cliff, don't think of it as the American people fundamentally can't stand each other on these issues and that we must be ripped apart into two separate warring nations. Think of it as a tiny, tiny number of ancient economists and misrepresentative ideologues have captured the process. And they've captured the process through familiar ways, through a primary system which encourages that small group of people's voices, because that small group of people, the people who answer all yeses or all noes on those ideological questions, they might be small but every one of them has a blog, every one of them has been on Fox or MSNBC in the last week. Every one of them becomes a louder and louder voice, but they don't represent us. They don't represent what our views are. And that gets me back to the dollar, and it gets me back to reminding myself that we know this experience. We know what it's like to have these people on TV, in Congress, yelling about how the end of the world is coming if we don't adopt their view completely, because it's happened about the dollar ever since there's been a dollar. We had the battle between Jefferson and Hamilton. In 1913, we had this ugly battle over the Federal Reserve, when it was created, with vicious, angry arguments over how it would be constituted, and a general agreement that the way it was constituted was the worst possible compromise, a compromise guaranteed to destroy this valuable thing, this dollar, but then everyone agreeing, okay, so long as we're on the gold standard, it should be okay. The Fed can't mess it up so badly. But then we got off the gold standard for individuals during the Depression and we got off the gold standard as a source of international currency coordination during Richard Nixon's presidency. Each of those times, we were on the verge of complete collapse. And nothing happened at all. Throughout it all, the dollar has been one of the most long-standing, stable, reasonable currencies, and we all use it every single day, no matter what the people screaming about tell us, no matter how scared we're supposed to be. And this long-term fiscal picture that we're in right now, I think what is most maddening about it is, if Congress were simply able to show not that they agree with each other, not that they're able to come up with the best possible compromise, but that they are able to just begin the process towards compromise, we all instantly are better off. The fear is that the world is watching. The fear is that the longer we delay any solution, the more the world will look to the U.S. not as the bedrock of stability in the global economy, but as a place that can't resolve its own fights, and the longer we put that off, the more we make the world nervous, the higher interest rates are going to be, the quicker we're going to have to face a day of horrible calamity. And so just the act of compromise itself, and sustained, real compromise, would give us even more time, would allow both sides even longer to spread out the pain and reach even more compromise down the road. So I'm in the media. I feel like my job to make this happen is to help foster the things that seem to lead to compromise, to not talk about this in those vague and scary terms that do polarize us, but to just talk about it like what it is, not an existential crisis, not some battle between two fundamentally different religious views, but a math problem, a really solvable math problem, one where we're not all going to get what we want and one where, you know, there's going to be a little pain to spread around. But the more we address it as a practical concern, the sooner we can resolve it, and the more time we have to resolve it, paradoxically. Thank you. (Applause) |
Israel and Iran: A love story? | {0: 'Ronny Edry of Israel created The Peace Factory, an online movement for peace in the Middle East, when he posted a Facebook image that declared "Iranians, we will never bomb your country."'} | TEDxJaffa 2012 | On March 14, this year, I posted this poster on Facebook. This is an image of me and my daughter holding the Israeli flag. I will try to explain to you about the context of why and when I posted. A few days ago, I was sitting waiting on the line at the grocery store, and the owner and one of the clients were talking to each other, and the owner was explaining to the client that we're going to get 10,000 missiles on Israel. And the client was saying, no, it's 10,000 a day. (Laughter) ("10,000 missiles") This is the context. This is where we are now in Israel. We have this war with Iran coming for 10 years now, and we have people, you know, afraid. It's like every year it's the last minute that we can do something about the war with Iran. It's like, if we don't act now, it's too late forever, for 10 years now. So at some point it became, you know, to me, I'm a graphic designer, so I made posters about it and I posted the one I just showed you before. Most of the time, I make posters, I post them on Facebook, my friends like it, don't like it, most of the time don't like it, don't share it, don't nothing, and it's another day. So I went to sleep, and that was it for me. And later on in the night, I woke up because I'm always waking up in the night, and I went by the computer and I see all these red dots, you know, on Facebook, which I've never seen before. (Laughter) And I was like, "What's going on?" So I come to the computer and I start looking on, and suddenly I see many people talking to me, most of them I don't know, and a few of them from Iran, which is — What? Because you have to understand, in Israel we don't talk with people from Iran. We don't know people from Iran. It's like, on Facebook, you have friends only from — it's like your neighbors are your friends on Facebook. And now people from Iran are talking to me. So I start answering this girl, and she's telling me she saw the poster and she asked her family to come, because they don't have a computer, she asked her family to come to see the poster, and they're all sitting in the living room crying. So I'm like, whoa. I ask my wife to come, and I tell her, you have to see that. People are crying, and she came, she read the text, and she started to cry. And everybody's crying now. (Laughter) So I don't know what to do, so my first reflex, as a graphic designer, is, you know, to show everybody what I'd just seen, and people started to see them and to share them, and that's how it started. The day after, when really it became a lot of talking, I said to myself, and my wife said to me, I also want a poster, so this is her. (Laughter) Because it's working, put me in a poster now. But more seriously, I was like, okay, these ones work, but it's not just about me, it's about people from Israel who want to say something. So I'm going to shoot all the people I know, if they want, and I'm going to put them in a poster and I'm going to share them. So I went to my neighbors and friends and students and I just asked them, give me a picture, I will make you a poster. And that's how it started. And that's how, really, it's unleashed, because suddenly people from Facebook, friends and others, just understand that they can be part of it. It's not just one dude making one poster, it's — we can be part of it, so they start sending me pictures and ask me, "Make me a poster. Post it. Tell the Iranians we from Israel love you too." It became, you know, at some point it was really, really intense. I mean, so many pictures, so I asked friends to come, graphic designers most of them, to make posters with me, because I didn't have the time. It was a huge amount of pictures. So for a few days, that's how my living room was. And we received Israeli posters, Israeli images, but also lots of comments, lots of messages from Iran. And we took these messages and we made posters out of it, because I know people: They don't read, they see images. If it's an image, they may read it. So here are a few of them. ("You are my first Israelian friend. I wish we both get rid of our idiot politicians, anyway nice to see you!") ("I love that blue. I love that star. I love that flag.") This one is really moving for me because it's the story of a girl who has been raised in Iran to walk on an Israeli flag to enter her school every morning, and now that she sees the posters that we're sending, she starts — she said that she changed her mind, and now she loves that blue, she loves that star, and she loves that flag, talking about the Israeli flag, and she wished that we'd meet and come to visit one another, and just a few days after I posted the first poster. The day after, Iranians started to respond with their own posters. They have graphic designers. What? (Laughter) Crazy, crazy. So you can see they are still shy, they don't want to show their faces, but they want to spread the message. They want to respond. They want to say the same thing. So. And now it's communication. It's a two-way story. It's Israelis and Iranians sending the same message, one to each other. ("My Israeli Friends. I don't hate you. I don't want War.") This never happened before, and this is two people supposed to be enemies, we're on the verge of a war, and suddenly people on Facebook are starting to say, "I like this guy. I love those guys." And it became really big at some point. And then it became news. Because when you're seeing the Middle East, you see only the bad news. And suddenly, there is something that was happening that was good news. So the guys on the news, they say, "Okay, let's talk about this." And they just came, and it was so much, I remember one day, Michal, she was talking with the journalist, and she was asking him, "Who's gonna see the show?"And he said, "Everybody." So she said, "Everybody in Palestine, in where? Israel? Who is everybody?""Everybody." They said, "Syria?" "Syria." "Lebanon?""Lebanon." At some point, he just said, "40 million people are going to see you today. It's everybody." The Chinese. And we were just at the beginning of the story. Something crazy also happened. Every time a country started talking about it, like Germany, America, wherever, a page on Facebook popped up with the same logo with the same stories, so at the beginning we had "Iran-Loves-Israel," which is an Iranian sitting in Tehran, saying, "Okay, Israel loves Iran? I give you Iran-Loves-Israel." You have Palestine-Loves-Israel. You have Lebanon that just — a few days ago. And this whole list of pages on Facebook dedicated to the same message, to people sending their love, one to each other. The moment I really understood that something was happening, a friend of mine told me, "Google the word 'Israel.'" And those were the first images on those days that popped up from Google when you were typing, "Israel" or "Iran." We really changed how people see the Middle East. Because you're not in the Middle East. You're somewhere over there, and then you want to see the Middle East, so you go on Google and you say, "Israel," and they give you the bad stuff. And for a few days you got those images. Today the Israel-Loves-Iran page is this number, 80,831, and two million people last week went on the page and shared, liked, I don't know, commented on one of the photos. So for five months now, that's what we are doing, me, Michal, a few of my friends, are just making images. We're showing a new reality by just making images because that's how the world perceives us. They see images of us, and they see bad images. So we're working on making good images. End of story. Look at this one. This is the Iran-Loves-Israel page. This is not the Israel-Loves-Iran. This is not my page. This is a guy in Tehran on the day of remembrance of the Israeli fallen soldier putting an image of an Israeli soldier on his page. This is the enemy. What? ("Our heartfelt condolences to the families who lost their dearests in terror attack in Bulgaria") And it's going both ways. It's like, we are showing respect, one to each other. And we're understanding. And you show compassion. And you become friends. And at some point, you become friends on Facebook, and you become friends in life. You can go and travel and meet people. And I was in Munich a few weeks ago. I went there to open an exposition about Iran and I met there with people from the page that told me, "Okay, you're going to be in Europe, I'm coming. I'm coming from France, from Holland, from Germany," of course, and from Israel people came, and we just met there for the first time in real life. I met with people that are supposed to be my enemies for the first time. And we just shake hands, and have a coffee and a nice discussion, and we talk about food and basketball. And that was the end of it. Remember that image from the beginning? At some point we met in real life, and we became friends. And it goes the other way around. Some girl that we met on Facebook never been in Israel, born and raised in Iran, lives in Germany, afraid of Israelis because of what she knows about us, decides after a few months of talking on the Internet with some Israelis to come to Israel, and she gets on the plane and arrives at Ben Gurion and says, "Okay, not that big a deal." So a few weeks ago, the stress is getting higher, so we start this new campaign called "Not ready to die in your war." I mean, it's plus/minus the same message, but we wanted really to add some aggressivity to it. And again, something amazing happened, something that we didn't have on the first wave of the campaign. Now people from Iran, the same ones who were shy at the first campaign and just sent, you know, their foot and half their faces, now they're sending their faces, and they're saying, "Okay, no problem, we're into it. We are with you." Just read where those guys are from. And for every guy from Israel, you've got someone from Iran. Just people sending their pictures. Crazy, yes? So — (Applause) So you may ask yourself, who is this dude? My name is Ronny Edry, and I'm 41, I'm an Israeli, I'm a father of two, I'm a husband, and I'm a graphic designer. I'm teaching graphic design. And I'm not that naive, because a lot of the time I've been asked, many times I've been asked, "Yeah, but, this is really naive, sending flowers over, I mean — " I was in the army. I was in the paratroopers for three years, and I know how it looks from the ground. I know how it can look really bad. So to me, this is the courageous thing to do, to try to reach the other side before it's too late, because when it's going to be too late, it's going to be too late. And sometimes war is inevitable, sometimes, but maybe [with] effort, we can avoid it. Maybe as people, because especially in Israel, we're in a democracy. We have the freedom of speech, and maybe that little thing can change something. And really, we can be our own ambassadors. We can just send a message and hope for the best. So I want to ask Michal, my wife, to come with me on the stage just to make with you one image, because it's all about images. And maybe that image will help us change something. Just raise that. Exactly. And I'm just going to take a picture of it, and I'm just going to post it on Facebook with kind of "Israelis for peace" or something. Oh my God. Don't cry. Thank you guys. (Applause) |
What fear can teach us | {0: 'Fiction writer Karen Thompson Walker explores the connection between fear and the imagination.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | One day in 1819, 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile, in one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean, 20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater. They'd been struck by a sperm whale, which had ripped a catastrophic hole in the ship's hull. As their ship began to sink beneath the swells, the men huddled together in three small whaleboats. These men were 10,000 miles from home, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land. In their small boats, they carried only rudimentary navigational equipment and limited supplies of food and water. These were the men of the whaleship Essex, whose story would later inspire parts of "Moby Dick." Even in today's world, their situation would be really dire, but think about how much worse it would have been then. No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong. No search party was coming to look for these men. So most of us have never experienced a situation as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves, but we all know what it's like to be afraid. We know how fear feels, but I'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about what our fears mean. As we grow up, we're often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard like baby teeth or roller skates. And I think it's no accident that we think this way. Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings are hard-wired to be optimists. So maybe that's why we think of fear, sometimes, as a danger in and of itself. "Don't worry," we like to say to one another. "Don't panic." In English, fear is something we conquer. It's something we fight. It's something we overcome. But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way? What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination, something that can be as profound and insightful as storytelling itself? It's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination in young children, whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid. When I was a child, I lived in California, which is, you know, mostly a very nice place to live, but for me as a child, California could also be a little scary. I remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier that hung above our dining table swing back and forth during every minor earthquake, and I sometimes couldn't sleep at night, terrified that the Big One might strike while we were sleeping. And what we say about kids who have fears like that is that they have a vivid imagination. But at a certain point, most of us learn to leave these kinds of visions behind and grow up. We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed, and not every earthquake brings buildings down. But maybe it's no coincidence that some of our most creative minds fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults. The same incredible imaginations that produced "The Origin of Species," "Jane Eyre" and "The Remembrance of Things Past," also generated intense worries that haunted the adult lives of Charles Darwin, Charlotte BrontĂŤ and Marcel Proust. So the question is, what can the rest of us learn about fear from visionaries and young children? Well let's return to the year 1819 for a moment, to the situation facing the crew of the whaleship Essex. Let's take a look at the fears that their imaginations were generating as they drifted in the middle of the Pacific. Twenty-four hours had now passed since the capsizing of the ship. The time had come for the men to make a plan, but they had very few options. In his fascinating account of the disaster, Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men were just about as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth. The men knew that the nearest islands they could reach were the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles away. But they'd heard some frightening rumors. They'd been told that these islands, and several others nearby, were populated by cannibals. So the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered and eaten for dinner. Another possible destination was Hawaii, but given the season, the captain was afraid they'd be struck by severe storms. Now the last option was the longest, and the most difficult: to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching a certain band of winds that could eventually push them toward the coast of South America. But they knew that the sheer length of this journey would stretch their supplies of food and water. To be eaten by cannibals, to be battered by storms, to starve to death before reaching land. These were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men, and as it turned out, the fear they chose to listen to would govern whether they lived or died. Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name. What if instead of calling them fears, we called them stories? Because that's really what fear is, if you think about it. It's a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do. And fears and storytelling have the same components. They have the same architecture. Like all stories, fears have characters. In our fears, the characters are us. Fears also have plots. They have beginnings and middles and ends. You board the plane. The plane takes off. The engine fails. Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel. Picture a cannibal, human teeth sinking into human skin, human flesh roasting over a fire. Fears also have suspense. If I've done my job as a storyteller today, you should be wondering what happened to the men of the whaleship Essex. Our fears provoke in us a very similar form of suspense. Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next? In other words, our fears make us think about the future. And humans, by the way, are the only creatures capable of thinking about the future in this way, of projecting ourselves forward in time, and this mental time travel is just one more thing that fears have in common with storytelling. As a writer, I can tell you that a big part of writing fiction is learning to predict how one event in a story will affect all the other events, and fear works in that same way. In fear, just like in fiction, one thing always leads to another. When I was writing my first novel, "The Age Of Miracles," I spent months trying to figure out what would happen if the rotation of the Earth suddenly began to slow down. What would happen to our days? What would happen to our crops? What would happen to our minds? And then it was only later that I realized how very similar these questions were to the ones I used to ask myself as a child frightened in the night. If an earthquake strikes tonight, I used to worry, what will happen to our house? What will happen to my family? And the answer to those questions always took the form of a story. So if we think of our fears as more than just fears but as stories, we should think of ourselves as the authors of those stories. But just as importantly, we need to think of ourselves as the readers of our fears, and how we choose to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives. Now, some of us naturally read our fears more closely than others. I read about a study recently of successful entrepreneurs, and the author found that these people shared a habit that he called "productive paranoia," which meant that these people, instead of dismissing their fears, these people read them closely, they studied them, and then they translated that fear into preparation and action. So that way, if their worst fears came true, their businesses were ready. And sometimes, of course, our worst fears do come true. That's one of the things that is so extraordinary about fear. Once in a while, our fears can predict the future. But we can't possibly prepare for all of the fears that our imaginations concoct. So how can we tell the difference between the fears worth listening to and all the others? I think the end of the story of the whaleship Essex offers an illuminating, if tragic, example. After much deliberation, the men finally made a decision. Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands and instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to South America. After more than two months at sea, the men ran out of food as they knew they might, and they were still quite far from land. When the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive, and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism. Herman Melville, who used this story as research for "Moby Dick," wrote years later, and from dry land, quote, "All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might in all human probability have been avoided had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, steered straight for Tahiti. But," as Melville put it, "they dreaded cannibals." So the question is, why did these men dread cannibals so much more than the extreme likelihood of starvation? Why were they swayed by one story so much more than the other? Looked at from this angle, theirs becomes a story about reading. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov said that the best reader has a combination of two very different temperaments, the artistic and the scientific. A good reader has an artist's passion, a willingness to get caught up in the story, but just as importantly, the readers also needs the coolness of judgment of a scientist, which acts to temper and complicate the reader's intuitive reactions to the story. As we've seen, the men of the Essex had no trouble with the artistic part. They dreamed up a variety of horrifying scenarios. The problem was that they listened to the wrong story. Of all the narratives their fears wrote, they responded only to the most lurid, the most vivid, the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture: cannibals. But perhaps if they'd been able to read their fears more like a scientist, with more coolness of judgment, they would have listened instead to the less violent but the more likely tale, the story of starvation, and headed for Tahiti, just as Melville's sad commentary suggests. And maybe if we all tried to read our fears, we too would be less often swayed by the most salacious among them. Maybe then we'd spend less time worrying about serial killers and plane crashes, and more time concerned with the subtler and slower disasters we face: the silent buildup of plaque in our arteries, the gradual changes in our climate. Just as the most nuanced stories in literature are often the richest, so too might our subtlest fears be the truest. Read in the right way, our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out. Properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious as our favorite works of literature: a little wisdom, a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing — the truth. Thank you. (Applause) |
Re-engineering mosquitos to fight disease | {0: 'Biotech entrepreneur Hadyn Parry leads a science start-up that develops GM insects to fight dengue fever.'} | TEDSalon London Fall 2012 | So I'd like to start by focusing on the world's most dangerous animal. Now, when you talk about dangerous animals, most people might think of lions or tigers or sharks. But of course the most dangerous animal is the mosquito. The mosquito has killed more humans than any other creature in human history. In fact, probably adding them all together, the mosquito has killed more humans. And the mosquito has killed more humans than wars and plague. And you would think, would you not, that with all our science, with all our advances in society, with better towns, better civilizations, better sanitation, wealth, that we would get better at controlling mosquitos, and hence reduce this disease. And that's not really the case. If it was the case, we wouldn't have between 200 and 300 million cases of malaria every year, and we wouldn't have a million and a half deaths from malaria, and we wouldn't have a disease that was relatively unknown 50 years ago now suddenly turned into the largest mosquito-borne virus threat that we have, and that's called dengue fever. So 50 years ago, pretty much no one had heard of it, no one certainly in the European environment. But dengue fever now, according to the World Health Organization, infects between 50 and 100 million people every year, so that's equivalent to the whole of the population of the U.K. being infected every year. Other estimates put that number at roughly double that number of infections. And dengue fever has grown in speed quite phenomenally. In the last 50 years, the incidence of dengue has grown thirtyfold. Now let me tell you a little bit about what dengue fever is, for those who don't know. Now let's assume you go on holiday. Let's assume you go to the Caribbean, or you might go to Mexico. You might go to Latin America, Asia, Africa, anywhere in Saudi Arabia. You might go to India, the Far East. It doesn't really matter. It's the same mosquito, and it's the same disease. You're at risk. And let's assume you're bitten by a mosquito that's carrying that virus. Well, you could develop flu-like symptoms. They could be quite mild. You could develop nausea, headache, your muscles could feel like they're contracting, and you could actually feel like your bones are breaking. And that's the nickname given to this disease. It's called breakbone fever, because that's how you can feel. Now the odd thing is, is that once you've been bitten by this mosquito, and you've had this disease, your body develops antibodies, so if you're bitten again with that strain, it doesn't affect you. But it's not one virus, it's four, and the same protection that gives you the antibodies and protects you from the same virus that you had before actually makes you much more susceptible to the other three. So the next time you get dengue fever, if it's a different strain, you're more susceptible, you're likely to get worse symptoms, and you're more likely to get the more severe forms, hemorrhagic fever or shock syndrome. So you don't want dengue once, and you certainly don't want it again. So why is it spreading so fast? And the answer is this thing. This is Aedes aegypti. Now this is a mosquito that came, like its name suggests, out of North Africa, and it's spread round the world. Now, in fact, a single mosquito will only travel about 200 yards in its entire life. They don't travel very far. What they're very good at doing is hitchhiking, particularly the eggs. They will lay their eggs in clear water, any pool, any puddle, any birdbath, any flower pot, anywhere there's clear water, they'll lay their eggs, and if that clear water is near freight, it's near a port, if it's anywhere near transport, those eggs will then get transported around the world. And that's what's happened. Mankind has transported these eggs all the way around the world, and these insects have infested over 100 countries, and there's now 2.5 billion people living in countries where this mosquito resides. To give you just a couple of examples how fast this has happened, in the mid-'70s, Brazil declared, "We have no Aedes aegypti," and currently they spend about a billion dollars now a year trying to get rid of it, trying to control it, just one species of mosquito. Two days ago, or yesterday, I can't remember which, I saw a Reuters report that said Madeira had had their first cases of dengue, about 52 cases, with about 400 probable cases. That's two days ago. Interestingly, Madeira first got the insect in 2005, and here we are, a few years later, first cases of dengue. So the one thing you'll find is that where the mosquito goes, dengue will follow. Once you've got the mosquito in your area, anyone coming into that area with dengue, mosquito will bite them, mosquito will bite somewhere else, somewhere else, somewhere else, and you'll get an epidemic. So we must be good at killing mosquitos. I mean, that can't be very difficult. Well, there's two principle ways. The first way is that you use larvicides. You use chemicals. You put them into water where they breed. Now in an urban environment, that's extraordinarily difficult. You've got to get your chemical into every puddle, every birdbath, every tree trunk. It's just not practical. The second way you can do it is actually trying to kill the insects as they fly around. This is a picture of fogging. Here what someone is doing is mixing up chemical in a smoke and basically spreading that through the environment. You could do the same with a space spray. This is really unpleasant stuff, and if it was any good, we wouldn't have this massive increase in mosquitos and we wouldn't have this massive increase in dengue fever. So it's not very effective, but it's probably the best thing we've got at the moment. Having said that, actually, your best form of protection and my best form of protection is a long-sleeve shirt and a little bit of DEET to go with it. So let's start again. Let's design a product, right from the word go, and decide what we want. Well we clearly need something that is effective at reducing the mosquito population. There's no point in just killing the odd mosquito here and there. We want something that gets that population right the way down so it can't get the disease transmission. Clearly the product you've got has got to be safe to humans. We are going to use it in and around humans. It has to be safe. We don't want to have a lasting impact on the environment. We don't want to do anything that you can't undo. Maybe a better product comes along in 20, 30 years. Fine. We don't want a lasting environmental impact. We want something that's relatively cheap, or cost-effective, because there's an awful lot of countries involved, and some of them are emerging markets, some of them emerging countries, low-income. And finally, you want something that's species-specific. You want to get rid of this mosquito that spreads dengue, but you don't really want to get all the other insects. Some are quite beneficial. Some are important to your ecosystem. This one's not. It's invaded you. But you don't want to get all of the insects. You just want to get this one. And most of the time, you'll find this insect lives in and around your home, so this — whatever we do has got to get to that insect. It's got to get into people's houses, into the bedrooms, into the kitchens. Now there are two features of mosquito biology that really help us in this project, and that is, firstly, males don't bite. It's only the female mosquito that will actually bite you. The male can't bite you, won't bite you, doesn't have the mouth parts to bite you. It's just the female. And the second is a phenomenon that males are very, very good at finding females. If there's a male mosquito that you release, and if there's a female around, that male will find the female. So basically, we've used those two factors. So here's a typical situation, male meets female, lots of offspring. A single female will lay about up to 100 eggs at a time, up to about 500 in her lifetime. Now if that male is carrying a gene which causes the death of the offspring, then the offspring don't survive, and instead of having 500 mosquitos running around, you have none. And if you can put more, I'll call them sterile, that the offspring will actually die at different stages, but I'll call them sterile for now. If you put more sterile males out into the environment, then the females are more likely to find a sterile male than a fertile one, and you will bring that population down. So the males will go out, they'll look for females, they'll mate. If they mate successfully, then no offspring. If they don't find a female, then they'll die anyway. They only live a few days. And that's exactly where we are. So this is technology that was developed in Oxford University a few years ago. The company itself, Oxitec, we've been working for the last 10 years, very much on a sort of similar development pathway that you'd get with a pharmaceutical company. So about 10 years of internal evaluation, testing, to get this to a state where we think it's actually ready. And then we've gone out into the big outdoors, always with local community consent, always with the necessary permits. So we've done field trials now in the Cayman Islands, a small one in Malaysia, and two more now in Brazil. And what's the result? Well, the result has been very good. In about four months of release, we've brought that population of mosquitos — in most cases we're dealing with villages here of about 2,000, 3,000 people, that sort of size, starting small — we've taken that mosquito population down by about 85 percent in about four months. And in fact, the numbers after that get, those get very difficult to count, because there just aren't any left. So that's been what we've seen in Cayman, it's been what we've seen in Brazil in those trials. And now what we're doing is we're going through a process to scale up to a town of about 50,000, so we can see this work at big scale. And we've got a production unit in Oxford, or just south of Oxford, where we actually produce these mosquitos. We can produce them, in a space a bit more than this red carpet, I can produce about 20 million a week. We can transport them around the world. It's not very expensive, because it's a coffee cup — something the size of a coffee cup will hold about three million eggs. So freight costs aren't our biggest problem. (Laughter) So we've got that. You could call it a mosquito factory. And for Brazil, where we've been doing some trials, the Brazilian government themselves have now built their own mosquito factory, far bigger than ours, and we'll use that for scaling up in Brazil. There you are. We've sent mosquito eggs. We've separated the males from the females. The males have been put in little pots and the truck is going down the road and they are releasing males as they go. It's actually a little bit more precise than that. You want to release them so that you get good coverage of your area. So you take a Google Map, you divide it up, work out how far they can fly, and make sure you're releasing such that you get coverage of the area, and then you go back, and within a very short space of time, you're bringing that population right the way down. We've also done this in agriculture. We've got several different species of agriculture coming along, and I'm hoping that soon we'll be able to get some funding together so we can get back and start looking at malaria. So that's where we stand at the moment, and I've just got a few final thoughts, which is that this is another way in which biology is now coming in to supplement chemistry in some of our societal advances in this area, and these biological approaches are coming in in very different forms, and when you think about genetic engineering, we've now got enzymes for industrial processing, enzymes, genetically engineered enzymes in food. We have G.M. crops, we have pharmaceuticals, we have new vaccines, all using roughly the same technology, but with very different outcomes. And I'm in favor, actually. Of course I am. I'm in favor of particularly where the older technologies don't work well or have become unacceptable. And although the techniques are similar, the outcomes are very, very different, and if you take our approach, for example, and you compare it to, say, G.M. crops, both techniques are trying to produce a massive benefit. Both have a side benefit, which is that we reduce pesticide use tremendously. But whereas a G.M. crop is trying to protect the plant, for example, and give it an advantage, what we're actually doing is taking the mosquito and giving it the biggest disadvantage it can possibly have, rendering it unable to reproduce effectively. So for the mosquito, it's a dead end. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A cinematic journey through visual effects | {0: 'Don Levy has served on the frontlines of the digital transformation of entertainment. For 17 years, he led the communications efforts for top visual effects and digital animation studio, Sony Pictures Imageworks. He is fascinated by the magic of movies. '} | TED2012 | The filmmaker Georges Méliès was first a magician. Now movies proved to be the ultimate medium for magic. With complete control of everything the audience can see, moviemakers had developed an arsenal of techniques to further their deceptions. Motion pictures are themselves an illusion of life, produced by the sequential projection of still frames, and they astonished the Lumière brothers' early audiences. Even today's sophisticated moviegoers still lose themselves to the screen, and filmmakers leverage this separation from reality to great effect. Now imaginative people have been having fun with this for over 400 years. Giambattista della Porta, a Neapolitan scholar in the 16th century, examined and studied the natural world and saw how it could be manipulated. Playing with the world, and our perception of it, really is the essence of visual effects. So digging deeper into this with the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reveals some truth behind the trickery. Visual effects are based on the principles of all illusions: assumption, things are as we know them; presumption, things will behave as we expect; and context in reality, our knowledge of the world as we know it, such as scale. Now a fourth factor really becomes an obsession, which is, never betray the illusion. And that last point has made visual effects a constant quest for perfection. So from the hand-cranked jump cut early days of cinema to last Sunday's Oscar winner, what follows are some steps and a few repeats in the evolution of visual effects. I hope you will enjoy. Isabelle: "The filmmaker Georges Méliès was one of the first to realize that films had the power to capture dreams." (Music) ["'A Trip to the Moon' (1902)"] ["2011 Restoration of the Original Hand-Tinted Color"] ["'2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968)"] ["Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects"] ["'Avatar' (2009)"] First doctor: How are you feeling, Jake? Jake: Hey guys. ["Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects"] Second doctor: Welcome to your new body, Jake.First doctor: Good. Second doctor: We're gonna take this nice and easy, Jake.First doctor: Well, do you want to sit up? That's fine. Second doctor: And good, just take it nice and slow, Jake. Well, no truncal ataxia, that's good.First doctor: You feeling light-headed or dizzy at all? Oh, you're wiggling your toes. ["'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' (1972)"] Alice: What's happening to me? ["'Alice in Wonderland' (2010)"] ["Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects"] ["'The Lost World' (1925)"] ["Stop Motion Animation"] ["'Jurassic Park' (1993)"] [Dinosaur roars] ["CG Animation"] ["Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects"] ["'The Smurfs' (2011)"] ["Autodesk Maya Software - Key Frame Animation"] ["'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' (2011)"] Chimpanzee: No! ["Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects"] ["'Metropolis' (1927)"] (Music) ["'Blade Runner' (1982)"] ["Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects"] ["'The Rains Came' (1939)"] Rama Safti: Well, it's all over. Maharaja: Nothing to worry about, not a thing. ['Academy Award for Special Effects - (First Year of Category)"] (Explosion) ["'2012' (2009)"]Governor: It seems to me that the worst is over. ["CG Destruction"] ["'Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King' (2003)"] ["Massive Software - Crowd Generation"] ["Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects"] ["'Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ' (1925)"] ["Miniatures and Puppets Bring the Crowd to Life"] ["'Gladiator' (2000)"] ["CG Coliseum and Digital Crowds"] ["Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects"] ["'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2' (2011)"] ["Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects"] ["Produced in conjunction with the Academy's Science and Technology Council."] (Applause) ["'It is today possible to realize the most impossible and improbable things.' — Georges Méliès"] Don Levy: Thank you. |
How common threats can make common (political) ground | {0: 'Jonathan Haidt studies how -- and why -- we evolved to be moral and political creatures.'} | TEDSalon NY2012 | So if you've been following the news, you've heard that there's a pack of giant asteroids headed for the United States, all scheduled to strike within the next 50 years. Now I don't mean actual asteroids made of rock and metal. That actually wouldn't be such a problem, because if we were really all going to die, we would put aside our differences, we'd spend whatever it took, and we'd find a way to deflect them. I'm talking instead about threats that are headed our way, but they're wrapped in a special energy field that polarizes us, and therefore paralyzes us. Last March, I went to the TED conference, and I saw Jim Hansen speak, the NASA scientist who first raised the alarm about global warming in the 1980s, and it seems that the predictions he made back then are coming true. This is where we're headed in terms of global temperature rises, and if we keep on going the way we're going, we get a four- or five-degree-Centigrade temperature rise by the end of this century. Hansen says we can expect about a five-meter rise in sea levels. This is what a five-meter rise in sea levels would look like. Low-lying cities all around the world will disappear within the lifetime of children born today. Hansen closed his talk by saying, "Imagine a giant asteroid on a collision course with Earth. That is the equivalent of what we face now. Yet we dither, taking no action to deflect the asteroid, even though the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive it becomes." Of course, the left wants to take action, but the right denies that there's any problem. All right, so I go back from TED, and then the following week, I'm invited to a dinner party in Washington, D.C., where I know that I'll be meeting a number of conservative intellectuals, including Yuval Levin, and to prepare for the meeting, I read this article by Levin in National Affairs called "Beyond the Welfare State." Levin writes that all over the world, nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable and unaffordable, dependent upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era. All right, now this might not sound as scary as an asteroid, but look at these graphs that Levin showed. This graph shows the national debt as a percentage of America's GDP, and as you see, if you go all the way back to the founding, we borrowed a lot of money to fight the Revolutionary War. Wars are expensive. But then we'd pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, and then, oh, what's this? The Civil War. Even more expensive. Borrow a lot of money, pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, get down to near zero, and bang! — World War I. Once again, the same process repeats. Now then we get the Great Depression and World War II. We rise to an astronomical level, around 118 percent of GDP, really unsustainable, really dangerous. But we pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, and then, what's this? Why has it been rising since the '70s? It's partly due to tax cuts that were unfunded, but it's due primarily to the rise of entitlement spending, especially Medicare. We're approaching the levels of indebtedness we had at World War II, and the baby boomers haven't even retired yet, and when they do, this is what will happen. This is data from the Congressional Budget Office showing its most realistic forecast of what would happen if current situations and expectations and trends are extended. All right, now what you might notice is that these two graphs are actually identical, not in terms of the x- and y-axes, or in terms of the data they present, but in terms of their moral and political implications, they say the same thing. Let me translate for you. "We are doomed unless we start acting now. What's wrong with you people on the other side in the other party? Can't you see reality? If you won't help, then get the hell out of the way." We can deflect both of these asteroids. These problems are both technically solvable. Our problem and our tragedy is that in these hyper-partisan times, the mere fact that one side says, "Look, there's an asteroid," means that the other side's going to say, "Huh? What? No, I'm not even going to look up. No." To understand why this is happening to us, and what we can do about it, we need to learn more about moral psychology. So I'm a social psychologist, and I study morality, and one of the most important principles of morality is that morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams that circle around sacred values but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality. Think of it like this. Large-scale cooperation is extremely rare on this planet. There are only a few species that can do it. That's a beehive. That's a termite mound, a giant termite mound. And when you find this in other animals, it's always the same story. They're always all siblings who are children of a single queen, so they're all in the same boat. They rise or fall, they live or die, as one. There's only one species on the planet that can do this without kinship, and that, of course, is us. This is a reconstruction of ancient Babylon, and this is Tenochtitlan. Now how did we do this? How did we go from being hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago to building these gigantic cities in just a few thousand years? It's miraculous, and part of the explanation is this ability to circle around sacred values. As you see, temples and gods play a big role in all ancient civilizations. This is an image of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca. It's a sacred rock, and when people circle something together, they unite, they can trust each other, they become one. It's as though you're moving an electrical wire through a magnetic field that generates current. When people circle together, they generate a current. We love to circle around things. We circle around flags, and then we can trust each other. We can fight as a team, as a unit. But even as morality binds people together into a unit, into a team, the circling blinds them. It causes them to distort reality. We begin separating everything into good versus evil. Now that process feels great. It feels really satisfying. But it is a gross distortion of reality. You can see the moral electromagnet operating in the U.S. Congress. This is a graph that shows the degree to which voting in Congress falls strictly along the left-right axis, so that if you know how liberal or conservative someone is, you know exactly how they voted on all the major issues. And what you can see is that, in the decades after the Civil War, Congress was extraordinarily polarized, as you would expect, about as high as can be. But then, after World War I, things dropped, and we get this historically low level of polarization. This was a golden age of bipartisanship, at least in terms of the parties' ability to work together and solve grand national problems. But in the 1980s and '90s, the electromagnet turns back on. Polarization rises. It used to be that conservatives and moderates and liberals could all work together in Congress. They could rearrange themselves, form bipartisan committees, but as the moral electromagnet got cranked up, the force field increased, Democrats and Republicans were pulled apart. It became much harder for them to socialize, much harder for them to cooperate. Retiring members nowadays say that it's become like gang warfare. Did anybody notice that in two of the three debates, Obama wore a blue tie and Romney wore a red tie? Do you know why they do this? It's so that the Bloods and the Crips will know which side to vote for. (Laughter) The polarization is strongest among our political elites. Nobody doubts that this is happening in Washington. But for a while, there was some doubt as to whether it was happening among the people. Well, in the last 12 years it's become much more apparent that it is. So look at this data. This is from the American National Elections Survey. And what they do on that survey is they ask what's called a feeling thermometer rating. So, how warm or cold do you feel about, you know, Native Americans, or the military, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, all sorts of groups in American life. The blue line shows how warmly Democrats feel about Democrats, and they like them. You know, ratings in the 70s on a 100-point scale. Republicans like Republicans. That's not a surprise. But when you look at cross-party ratings, you find, well, that it's lower, but actually, when I first saw this data, I was surprised. That's actually not so bad. If you go back to the Carter and even Reagan administrations, they were rating the other party 43, 45. It's not terrible. It drifts downwards very slightly, but now look what happens under George W. Bush and Obama. It plummets. Something is going on here. The moral electromagnet is turning back on, and nowadays, just very recently, Democrats really dislike Republicans. Republicans really dislike the Democrats. We're changing. It's as though the moral electromagnet is affecting us too. It's like put out in the two oceans and it's pulling the whole country apart, pulling left and right into their own territories like the Bloods and the Crips. Now, there are many reasons why this is happening to us, and many of them we cannot reverse. We will never again have a political class that was forged by the experience of fighting together in World War II against a common enemy. We will never again have just three television networks, all of which are relatively centrist. And we will never again have a large group of conservative southern Democrats and liberal northern Republicans making it easy, making there be a lot of overlap for bipartisan cooperation. So for a lot of reasons, those decades after the Second World War were an historically anomalous time. We will never get back to those low levels of polarization, I believe. But there's a lot that we can do. There are dozens and dozens of reforms we can do that will make things better, because a lot of our dysfunction can be traced directly to things that Congress did to itself in the 1990s that created a much more polarized and dysfunctional institution. These changes are detailed in many books. These are two that I strongly recommend, and they list a whole bunch of reforms. I'm just going to group them into three broad classes here. So if you think about this as the problem of a dysfunctional, hyper-polarized institution, well, the first step is, do what you can so that fewer hyper-partisans get elected in the first place, and when you have closed party primaries, and only the most committed Republicans and Democrats are voting, you're nominating and selecting the most extreme hyper-partisans. So open primaries would make that problem much, much less severe. But the problem isn't primarily that we're electing bad people to Congress. From my experience, and from what I've heard from Congressional insiders, most of the people going to Congress are good, hard-working, intelligent people who really want to solve problems, but once they get there, they find that they are forced to play a game that rewards hyper-partisanship and that punishes independent thinking. You step out of line, you get punished. So there are a lot of reforms we could do that will counteract this. For example, this "Citizens United" ruling is a disaster, because it means there's like a money gun aimed at your head, and if you step out of line, if you try to reach across the aisle, there's a ton of money waiting to be given to your opponent to make everybody think that you are a terrible person through negative advertising. But the third class of reforms is that we've got to change the nature of social relationships in Congress. The politicians I've met are generally very extroverted, friendly, very socially skillful people, and that's the nature of politics. You've got to make relationships, make deals, you've got to cajole, please, flatter, you've got to use your personal skills, and that's the way politics has always worked. But beginning in the 1990s, first the House of Representatives changed its legislative calendar so that all business is basically done in the middle of the week. Nowadays, Congressmen fly in on Tuesday morning, they do battle for two days, then they fly home Thursday afternoon. They don't move their families to the District. They don't meet each other's spouses or children. There's no more relationship there. And trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up and descends into paralysis and polarization? A simple change to the legislative calendar, such as having business stretch out for three weeks and then they get a week off to go home, that would change the fundamental relationships in Congress. So there's a lot we can do, but who's going to push them to do it? There are a number of groups that are working on this. No Labels and Common Cause, I think, have very good ideas for changes we need to do to make our democracy more responsive and our Congress more effective. But I'd like to supplement their work with a little psychological trick, and the trick is this. Nothing pulls people together like a common threat or a common attack, especially an attack from a foreign enemy, unless of course that threat hits on our polarized psychology, in which case, as I said before, it can actually pull us apart. Sometimes a single threat can polarize us, as we saw. But what if the situation we face is not a single threat but is actually more like this, where there's just so much stuff coming in, it's just, "Start shooting, come on, everybody, we've got to just work together, just start shooting." Because actually, we do face this situation. This is where we are as a country. So here's another asteroid. We've all seen versions of this graph, right, which shows the changes in wealth since 1979, and as you can see, almost all the gains in wealth have gone to the top 20 percent, and especially the top one percent. Rising inequality like this is associated with so many problems for a democracy. Especially, it destroys our ability to trust each other, to feel that we're all in the same boat, because it's obvious we're not. Some of us are sitting there safe and sound in gigantic private yachts. Other people are clinging to a piece of driftwood. We're not all in the same boat, and that means nobody's willing to sacrifice for the common good. The left has been screaming about this asteroid for 30 years now, and the right says, "Huh, what? Hmm? No problem. No problem." Now, why is that happening to us? Why is the inequality rising? Well, one of the largest causes, after globalization, is actually this fourth asteroid, rising non-marital births. This graph shows the steady rise of out-of-wedlock births since the 1960s. Most Hispanic and black children are now born to unmarried mothers. Whites are headed that way too. Within a decade or two, most American children will be born into homes with no father. This means that there's much less money coming into the house. But it's not just money. It's also stability versus chaos. As I know from working with street children in Brazil, Mom's boyfriend is often a really, really dangerous person for kids. Now the right has been screaming about this asteroid since the 1960s, and the left has been saying, "It's not a problem. It's not a problem." The left has been very reluctant to say that marriage is actually good for women and for children. Now let me be clear. I'm not blaming the women here. I'm actually more critical of the men who won't take responsibility for their own children and of an economic system that makes it difficult for many men to earn enough money to support those children. But even if you blame nobody, it still is a national problem, and one side has been more concerned about it than the other. The New York Times finally noticed this asteroid with a front-page story last July showing how the decline of marriage contributes to inequality. We are becoming a nation of just two classes. When Americans go to college and marry each other, they have very low divorce rates. They earn a lot of money, they invest that money in their kids, some of them become tiger mothers, the kids rise to their full potential, and the kids go on to become the top two lines in this graph. And then there's everybody else: the children who don't benefit from a stable marriage, who don't have as much invested in them, who don't grow up in a stable environment, and who go on to become the bottom three lines in that graph. So once again, we see that these two graphs are actually saying the same thing. As before, we've got a problem, we've got to start working on this, we've got to do something, and what's wrong with you people that you don't see my threat? But if everybody could just take off their partisan blinders, we'd see that these two problems actually are best addressed together. Because if you really care about income inequality, you might want to talk to some evangelical Christian groups that are working on ways to promote marriage. But then you're going to run smack into the problem that women don't generally want to marry someone who doesn't have a job. So if you really care about strengthening families, you might want to talk to some liberal groups who are working on promoting educational equality, who are working on raising the minimum wage, who are working on finding ways to stop so many men from being sucked into the criminal justice system and taken out of the marriage market for their whole lives. So to conclude, there are at least four asteroids headed our way. How many of you can see all four? Please raise your hand right now if you're willing to admit that all four of these are national problems. Please raise your hands. Okay, almost all of you. Well, congratulations, you guys are the inaugural members of the Asteroids Club, which is a club for all Americans who are willing to admit that the other side actually might have a point. In the Asteroids Club, we don't start by looking for common ground. Common ground is often very hard to find. No, we start by looking for common threats because common threats make common ground. Now, am I being naive? Is it naive to think that people could ever lay down their swords, and left and right could actually work together? I don't think so, because it happens, not all that often, but there are a variety of examples that point the way. This is something we can do. Because Americans on both sides care about the decline in civility, and they've formed dozens of organizations, at the national level, such as this one, down to many local organizations, such as To The Village Square in Tallahassee, Florida, which tries to bring state leaders together to help facilitate that sort of working together human relationship that's necessary to solve Florida's problems. Americans on both sides care about global poverty and AIDS, and on so many humanitarian issues, liberals and evangelicals are actually natural allies, and at times they really have worked together to solve these problems. And most surprisingly to me, they sometimes can even see eye to eye on criminal justice. For example, the incarceration rate, the prison population in this country has quadrupled since 1980. Now this is a social disaster, and liberals are very concerned about this. The Southern Poverty Law Center is often fighting the prison-industrial complex, fighting to prevent a system that's just sucking in more and more poor young men. But are conservatives happy about this? Well, Grover Norquist isn't, because this system costs an unbelievable amount of money. And so, because the prison-industrial complex is bankrupting our states and corroding our souls, groups of fiscal conservatives and Christian conservatives have come together to form a group called Right on Crime. And at times they have worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to oppose the building of new prisons and to work for reforms that will make the justice system more efficient and more humane. So this is possible. We can do it. Let us therefore go to battle stations, not to fight each other, but to begin deflecting these incoming asteroids. And let our first mission be to press Congress to reform itself, before it's too late for our nation. Thank you. (Applause) |
Deep sea diving ... in a wheelchair | {0: 'In repurposing her wheelchair to create fantastical art, Sue Austin reshapes how we think about disability.'} | TEDxWomen 2012 | It's wonderful to be here to talk about my journey, to talk about the wheelchair and the freedom it has bought me. I started using a wheelchair 16 years ago when an extended illness changed the way I could access the world. When I started using the wheelchair, it was a tremendous new freedom. I'd seen my life slip away and become restricted. It was like having an enormous new toy. I could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again. Just being out on the street was exhilarating. But even though I had this newfound joy and freedom, people's reaction completely changed towards me. It was as if they couldn't see me anymore, as if an invisibility cloak had descended. They seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair. When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair, they used words like "limitation," "fear," "pity" and "restriction." I realized I'd internalized these responses and it had changed who I was on a core level. A part of me had become alienated from myself. I was seeing myself not from my perspective, but vividly and continuously from the perspective of other people's responses to me. As a result, I knew I needed to make my own stories about this experience, new narratives to reclaim my identity. ["Finding Freedom: 'By creating our own stories we learn to take the texts of our lives as seriously as we do 'official' narratives.' — Davis 2009, TEDx Women"] I started making work that aimed to communicate something of the joy and freedom I felt when using a wheelchair — a power chair — to negotiate the world. I was working to transform these internalized responses, to transform the preconceptions that had so shaped my identity when I started using a wheelchair, by creating unexpected images. The wheelchair became an object to paint and play with. When I literally started leaving traces of my joy and freedom, it was exciting to see the interested and surprised responses from people. It seemed to open up new perspectives, and therein lay the paradigm shift. It showed that an arts practice can remake one's identity and transform preconceptions by revisioning the familiar. So when I began to dive, in 2005, I realized scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same way as a wheelchair does, but the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure, completely different to people's responses to the wheelchair. So I thought, "I wonder what'll happen if I put the two together?" (Laughter) (Applause) And the underwater wheelchair that has resulted has taken me on the most amazing journey over the last seven years. So to give you an idea of what that's like, I'd like to share with you one of the outcomes from creating this spectacle, and show you what an amazing journey it's taken me on. (Music) (Applause) It is the most amazing experience, beyond most other things I've experienced in life. I literally have the freedom to move in 360 degrees of space and an ecstatic experience of joy and freedom. And the incredibly unexpected thing is that other people seem to see and feel that too. Their eyes literally light up, and they say things like, "I want one of those," or, "If you can do that, I can do anything." And I'm thinking, it's because in that moment of them seeing an object they have no frame of reference for, or so transcends the frames of reference they have with the wheelchair, they have to think in a completely new way. And I think that moment of completely new thought perhaps creates a freedom that spreads to the rest of other people's lives. For me, this means that they're seeing the value of difference, the joy it brings when instead of focusing on loss or limitation, we see and discover the power and joy of seeing the world from exciting new perspectives. For me, the wheelchair becomes a vehicle for transformation. In fact, I now call the underwater wheelchair "Portal," because it's literally pushed me through into a new way of being, into new dimensions and into a new level of consciousness. And the other thing is, that because nobody's seen or heard of an underwater wheelchair before, and creating this spectacle is about creating new ways of seeing, being and knowing, now you have this concept in your mind. You're all part of the artwork too. (Applause) |
How a boy became an artist | {0: "Jarrett J. Krosoczka is the author/illustrator of countless children's books and graphic novels, including <em>Good Night, Monkey Boy</em>, <em>Baghead</em> and the <em>Lunch Lady</em> series."} | TEDxHampshireCollege | Hello. My name is Jarrett Krosoczka, and I write and illustrate books for children for a living. So I use my imagination as my full-time job. But well before my imagination was my vocation, my imagination saved my life. When I was a kid, I loved to draw, and the most talented artist I knew was my mother, but my mother was addicted to heroin. And when your parent is a drug addict, it's kind of like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, because as much as you want to love on that person, as much as you want to receive love from that person, every time you open your heart, you end up on your back. So throughout my childhood, my mother was incarcerated and I didn't have my father because I didn't even learn his first name until I was in the sixth grade. But I had my grandparents, my maternal grandparents Joseph and Shirley, who adopted me just before my third birthday and took me in as their own, after they had already raised five children. So two people who grew up in the Great Depression, there in the very, very early '80s took on a new kid. I was the Cousin Oliver of the sitcom of the Krosoczka family, the new kid who came out of nowhere. And I would like to say that life was totally easy with them. They each smoked two packs a day, each, nonfiltered, and by the time I was six, I could order a Southern Comfort Manhattan, dry with a twist, rocks on the side, the ice on the side so you could fit more liquor in the drink. But they loved the hell out of me. They loved me so much. And they supported my creative efforts, because my grandfather was a self-made man. He ran and worked in a factory. My grandmother was a homemaker. But here was this kid who loved Transformers and Snoopy and the Ninja Turtles, and the characters that I read about, I fell in love with, and they became my friends. So my best friends in life were the characters I read about in books. I went to Gates Lane Elementary School in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I had wonderful teachers there, most notably in first grade Mrs. Alisch. And I just, I can just remember the love that she offered us as her students. When I was in the third grade, a monumental event happened. An author visited our school, Jack Gantos. A published author of books came to talk to us about what he did for a living. And afterwards, we all went back to our classrooms and we drew our own renditions of his main character, Rotten Ralph. And suddenly the author appeared in our doorway, and I remember him sort of sauntering down the aisles, going from kid to kid looking at the desks, not saying a word. But he stopped next to my desk, and he tapped on my desk, and he said, "Nice cat." (Laughter) And he wandered away. Two words that made a colossal difference in my life. When I was in the third grade, I wrote a book for the first time, "The Owl Who Thought He Was The Best Flyer." (Laughter) We had to write our own Greek myth, our own creation story, so I wrote a story about an owl who challenged Hermes to a flying race, and the owl cheated, and Hermes, being a Greek god, grew angry and bitter, and turned the owl into a moon, so the owl had to live the rest of his life as a moon while he watched his family and friends play at night. Yeah. (Laughter) My book had a title page. I was clearly worried about my intellectual property when I was eight. (Laughter) And it was a story that was told with words and pictures, exactly what I do now for a living, and I sometimes let the words have the stage on their own, and sometimes I allowed the pictures to work on their own to tell the story. My favorite page is the "About the author" page. (Laughter) So I learned to write about myself in third person at a young age. So I love that last sentence: "He liked making this book." And I liked making that book because I loved using my imagination, and that's what writing is. Writing is using your imagination on paper, and I do get so scared because I travel to so many schools now and that seems like such a foreign concept to kids, that writing would be using your imagination on paper, if they're allowed to even write now within the school hours. So I loved writing so much that I'd come home from school, and I would take out pieces of paper, and I would staple them together, and I would fill those blank pages with words and pictures just because I loved using my imagination. And so these characters would become my friends. There was an egg, a tomato, a head of lettuce and a pumpkin, and they all lived in this refrigerator city, and in one of their adventures they went to a haunted house that was filled with so many dangers like an evil blender who tried to chop them up, an evil toaster who tried to kidnap the bread couple, and an evil microwave who tried to melt their friend who was a stick of butter. (Laughter) And I'd make my own comics too, and this was another way for me to tell stories, through words and through pictures. Now when I was in sixth grade, the public funding all but eliminated the arts budgets in the Worcester public school system. I went from having art once a week to twice a month to once a month to not at all. And my grandfather, he was a wise man, and he saw that as a problem, because he knew that was, like, the one thing I had. I didn't play sports. I had art. So he walked into my room one evening, and he sat on the edge of my bed, and he said, "Jarrett, it's up to you, but if you'd like to, we'd like to send you to the classes at the Worcester Art Museum." And I was so thrilled. So from sixth through 12th grade, once, twice, sometimes three times a week, I would take classes at the art museum, and I was surrounded by other kids who loved to draw, other kids who shared a similar passion. Now my publishing career began when I designed the cover for my eighth grade yearbook, and if you're wondering about the style of dress I put our mascot in, I was really into Bell Biv DeVoe and MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice at the time. (Laughter) And to this day, I still can do karaoke to "Ice, Ice Baby" without looking at the screen. Don't tempt me, because I will do it. So I get shipped off to private school, K through eight, public schools, but for some reason my grandfather was upset that somebody at the local high school had been stabbed and killed, so he didn't want me to go there. He wanted me to go to a private school, and he gave me an option. You can go to Holy Name, which is coed, or St. John's, which is all boys. Very wise man, because he knew I would, I felt like I was making the decision on my own, and he knew I wouldn't choose St. John's, so I went to Holy Name High School, which was a tough transition because, like I said, I didn't play sports, and it was very focused on sports, but I took solace in Mr. Shilale's art room. And I just flourished here. I just couldn't wait to get to that classroom every day. So how did I make friends? I drew funny pictures of my teachers — (Laughter) — and I passed them around. Well, in English class, in ninth grade, my friend John, who was sitting next to me, laughed a little bit too hard. Mr. Greenwood was not pleased. (Laughter) He instantly saw that I was the cause of the commotion, and for the first time in my life, I was sent to the hall, and I thought, "Oh no, I'm doomed. My grandfather's just going to kill me." And he came out to the hallway and he said, "Let me see the paper." And I thought, "Oh no. He thinks it's a note." And so I took this picture, and I handed it to him. And we sat in silence for that brief moment, and he said to me, "You're really talented." (Laughter) "You're really good. You know, the school newspaper needs a new cartoonist, and you should be the cartoonist. Just stop drawing in my class." So my parents never found out about it. I didn't get in trouble. I was introduced to Mrs. Casey, who ran the school newspaper, and I was for three and a half years the cartoonist for my school paper, handling such heavy issues as, seniors are mean, freshmen are nerds, the prom bill is so expensive. I can't believe how much it costs to go to the prom. And I took the headmaster to task and then I also wrote an ongoing story about a boy named Wesley who was unlucky in love, and I just swore up and down that this wasn't about me, but all these years later it was totally me. But it was so cool because I could write these stories, I could come up with these ideas, and they'd be published in the school paper, and people who I didn't know could read them. And I loved that thought, of being able to share my ideas through the printed page. On my 14th birthday, my grandfather and my grandmother gave me the best birthday present ever: a drafting table that I have worked on ever since. Here I am, 20 years later, and I still work on this table every day. On the evening of my 14th birthday, I was given this table, and we had Chinese food. And this was my fortune: "You will be successful in your work." I taped it to the top left hand of my table, and as you can see, it's still there. Now I never really asked my grandparents for anything. Well, two things: Rusty, who was a great hamster and lived a great long life when I was in fourth grade. (Laughter) And a video camera. I just wanted a video camera. And after begging and pleading for Christmas, I got a second-hand video camera, and I instantly started making my own animations on my own, and all throughout high school I made my own animations. I convinced my 10th grade English teacher to allow me to do my book report on Stephen King's "Misery" as an animated short. (Laughter) And I kept making comics. I kept making comics, and at the Worcester Art Museum, I was given the greatest piece of advice by any educator I was ever given. Mark Lynch, he's an amazing teacher and he's still a dear friend of mine, and I was 14 or 15, and I walked into his comic book class halfway through the course, and I was so excited, I was beaming. I had this book that was how to draw comics in the Marvel way, and it taught me how to draw superheroes, how to draw a woman, how to draw muscles just the way they were supposed to be if I were to ever draw for X-Men or Spiderman. And all the color just drained from his face, and he looked at me, and he said, "Forget everything you learned." And I didn't understand. He said, "You have a great style. Celebrate your own style. Don't draw the way you're being told to draw. Draw the way you're drawing and keep at it, because you're really good." Now when I was a teenager, I was angsty as any teenager was, but after 17 years of having a mother who was in and out of my life like a yo-yo and a father who was faceless, I was angry. And when I was 17, I met my father for the first time, upon which I learned I had a brother and sister I had never known about. And on the day I met my father for the first time, I was rejected from the Rhode Island School of Design, my one and only choice for college. But it was around this time I went to Camp Sunshine to volunteer a week and working with the most amazing kids, kids with leukemia, and this kid Eric changed my life. Eric didn't live to see his sixth birthday, and Eric lives with me every day. So after this experience, my art teacher, Mr. Shilale, he brought in these picture books, and I thought, "Picture books for kids!" and I started writing books for young readers when I was a senior in high school. Well, I eventually got to the Rhode Island School of Design. I transferred to RISD as a sophomore, and it was there that I took every course that I could on writing, and it was there that I wrote a story about a giant orange slug who wanted to be friends with this kid. The kid had no patience for him. And I sent this book out to a dozen publishers and it was rejected every single time, but I was also involved with the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, an amazing camp for kids with all sorts of critical illnesses, and it's those kids at the camp that read my stories, and I read to them, and I saw that they responded to my work. I graduated from RISD. My grandparents were very proud, and I moved to Boston, and I set up shop. I set up a studio and I tried to get published. I would send out my books. I would send out hundreds of postcards to editors and art directors, but they would go unanswered. And my grandfather would call me every week, and he would say, "Jarrett, how's it going? Do you have a job yet?" Because he had just invested a significant amount of money in my college education. And I said, "Yes, I have a job. I write and illustrate children's books." And he said, "Well, who pays you for that?" And I said, "No one, no one, no one just yet. But I know it's going to happen." Now, I used to work the weekends at the Hole in the Wall off-season programming to make some extra money as I was trying to get my feet off the ground, and this kid who was just this really hyper kid, I started calling him "Monkey Boy," and I went home and wrote a book called "Good Night, Monkey Boy." And I sent out one last batch of postcards. And I received an email from an editor at Random House with a subject line, "Nice work!" Exclamation point. "Dear Jarrett, I received your postcard. I liked your art, so I went to your website and I'm wondering if you ever tried writing any of your own stories, because I really like your art and it looks like there are some stories that go with them. Please let me know if you're ever in New York City." And this was from an editor at Random House Children's Books. So the next week I "happened" to be in New York. (Laughter) And I met with this editor, and I left New York for a contract for my first book, "Good Night, Monkey Boy," which was published on June 12, 2001. And my local paper celebrated the news. The local bookstore made a big deal of it. They sold out of all of their books. My friend described it as a wake, but happy, because everyone I ever knew was there in line to see me, but I wasn't dead. I was just signing books. My grandparents, they were in the middle of it. They were so happy. They couldn't have been more proud. Mrs. Alisch was there. Mr. Shilale was there. Mrs. Casey was there. Mrs. Alisch cut in front of the line and said, "I taught him how to read." (Laughter) And then something happened that changed my life. I got my first piece of significant fan mail, where this kid loved Monkey Boy so much that he wanted to have a Monkey Boy birthday cake. For a two-year-old, that is like a tattoo. (Laughter) You know? You only get one birthday per year. And for him, it's only his second. And I got this picture, and I thought, "This picture is going to live within his consciousness for his entire life. He will forever have this photo in his family photo albums." So that photo, since that moment, is framed in front of me while I've worked on all of my books. I have 10 picture books out. "Punk Farm," "Baghead," "Ollie the Purple Elephant." I just finished the ninth book in the "Lunch Lady" series, which is a graphic novel series about a lunch lady who fights crime. I'm expecting the release of a chapter book called "Platypus Police Squad: The Frog Who Croaked." And I travel the country visiting countless schools, letting lots of kids know that they draw great cats. And I meet Bagheads. Lunch ladies treat me really well. And I got to see my name in lights because kids put my name in lights. Twice now, the "Lunch Lady" series has won the Children's Choice Book of the Year in the third or fourth grade category, and those winners were displayed on a jumbotron screen in Times Square. "Punk Farm" and "Lunch Lady" are in development to be movies, so I am a movie producer and I really do think, thanks to that video camera I was given in ninth grade. I've seen people have "Punk Farm" birthday parties, people have dressed up as "Punk Farm" for Halloween, a "Punk Farm" baby room, which makes me a little nervous for the child's well-being in the long term. And I get the most amazing fan mail, and I get the most amazing projects, and the biggest moment for me came last Halloween. The doorbell rang and it was a trick-or-treater dressed as my character. It was so cool. Now my grandparents are no longer living, so to honor them, I started a scholarship at the Worcester Art Museum for kids who are in difficult situations but whose caretakers can't afford the classes. And it displayed the work from my first 10 years of publishing, and you know who was there to celebrate? Mrs. Alisch. I said, "Mrs. Alisch, how are you?" And she responded with, "I'm here." (Laughter) That's true. You are alive, and that's pretty good right now. So the biggest moment for me, though, my most important job now is I am a dad myself, and I have two beautiful daughters, and my goal is to surround them by inspiration, by the books that are in every single room of our house to the murals I painted in their rooms to the moments for creativity where you find, in quiet times, by making faces on the patio to letting her sit in the very desk that I've sat in for the past 20 years. Thank you. (Applause) |
Ethical riddles in HIV research | {0: 'Boghuma Kabisen Titanji set out to research HIV drug resistant viruses. In the process, Titanji met a woman who changed the way she thinks about research subjects.'} | TEDxGoodenoughCollege | I'd like to share with you the story of one of my patients called Celine. Celine is a housewife and lives in a rural district of Cameroon in west Central Africa. Six years ago, at the time of her HIV diagnosis, she was recruited to participate in the clinical trial which was running in her health district at the time. When I first met Celine, a little over a year ago, she had gone for 18 months without any antiretroviral therapy, and she was very ill. She told me that she stopped coming to the clinic when the trial ended because she had no money for the bus fare and was too ill to walk the 35-kilometer distance. Now during the clinical trial, she'd been given all her antiretroviral drugs free of charge, and her transportation costs had been covered by the research funds. All of these ended once the trial was completed, leaving Celine with no alternatives. She was unable to tell me the names of the drugs she'd received during the trial, or even what the trial had been about. I didn't bother to ask her what the results of the trial were because it seemed obvious to me that she would have no clue. Yet what puzzled me most was Celine had given her informed consent to be a part of this trial, yet she clearly did not understand the implications of being a participant or what would happen to her once the trial had been completed. Now, I have shared this story with you as an example of what can happen to participants in the clinical trial when it is poorly conducted. Maybe this particular trial yielded exciting results. Maybe it even got published in a high-profile scientific journal. Maybe it would inform clinicians around the world on how to improve on the clinical management of HIV patients. But it would have done so at a price to hundreds of patients who, like Celine, were left to their own devices once the research had been completed. I do not stand here today to suggest in any way that conducting HIV clinical trials in developing countries is bad. On the contrary, clinical trials are extremely useful tools, and are much needed to address the burden of disease in developing countries. However, the inequalities that exist between richer countries and developing countries in terms of funding pose a real risk for exploitation, especially in the context of externally-funded research. Sadly enough, the fact remains that a lot of the studies that are conducted in developing countries could never be authorized in the richer countries which fund the research. I'm sure you must be asking yourselves what makes developing countries, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa, so attractive for these HIV clinical trials? Well, in order for a clinical trial to generate valid and widely applicable results, they need to be conducted with large numbers of study participants and preferably on a population with a high incidence of new HIV infections. Sub-Saharan Africa largely fits this description, with 22 million people living with HIV, an estimated 70 percent of the 30 million people who are infected worldwide. Also, research within the continent is a lot easier to conduct due to widespread poverty, endemic diseases and inadequate health care systems. A clinical trial that is considered to be potentially beneficial to the population is more likely to be authorized, and in the absence of good health care systems, almost any offer of medical assistance is accepted as better than nothing. Even more problematic reasons include lower risk of litigation, less rigorous ethical reviews, and populations that are willing to participate in almost any study that hints at a cure. As funding for HIV research increases in developing countries and ethical review in richer countries become more strict, you can see why this context becomes very, very attractive. The high prevalence of HIV drives researchers to conduct research that is sometimes scientifically acceptable but on many levels ethically questionable. How then can we ensure that, in our search for the cure, we do not take an unfair advantage of those who are already most affected by the pandemic? I invite you to consider four areas I think we can focus on in order to improve the way in which things are done. The first of these is informed consent. Now, in order for a clinical trial to be considered ethically acceptable, participants must be given the relevant information in a way in which they can understand, and must freely consent to participate in the trial. This is especially important in developing countries, where a lot of participants consent to research because they believe it is the only way in which they can receive medical care or other benefits. Consent procedures that are used in richer countries are often inappropriate or ineffective in a lot of developing countries. For example, it is counterintuitive to have an illiterate study participant, like Celine, sign a lengthy consent form that they are unable to read, let alone understand. Local communities need to be more involved in establishing the criteria for recruiting participants in clinical trials, as well as the incentives for participation. The information in these trials needs to be given to the potential participants in linguistically and culturally acceptable formats. The second point I would like for you to consider is the standard of care that is provided to participants within any clinical trial. Now, this is subject to a lot of debate and controversy. Should the control group in the clinical trial be given the best current treatment which is available anywhere in the world? Or should they be given an alternative standard of care, such as the best current treatment available in the country in which the research is being conducted? Is it fair to evaluate a treatment regimen which may not be affordable or accessible to the study participants once the research has been completed? Now, in a situation where the best current treatment is inexpensive and simple to deliver, the answer is straightforward. However, the best current treatment available anywhere in the world is often very difficult to provide in developing countries. It is important to assess the potential risks and benefits of the standard of care which is to be provided to participants in any clinical trial, and establish one which is relevant for the context of the study and most beneficial for the participants within the study. That brings us to the third point I want you think about: the ethical review of research. An effective system for reviewing the ethical suitability of clinical trials is primordial to safeguard participants within any clinical trial. Unfortunately, this is often lacking or inefficient in a lot of developing countries. Local governments need to set up effective systems for reviewing the ethical issues around the clinical trials which are authorized in different developing countries, and they need to do this by setting up ethical review committees that are independent of the government and research sponsors. Public accountability needs to be promoted through transparency and independent review by nongovernmental and international organizations as appropriate. The final point I would like for you to consider tonight is what happens to participants in the clinical trial once the research has been completed. I think it is absolutely wrong for research to begin in the first place without a clear plan for what would happen to the participants once the trial has ended. Now, researchers need to make every effort to ensure that an intervention that has been shown to be beneficial during a clinical trial is accessible to the participants of the trial once the trial has been completed. In addition, they should be able to consider the possibility of introducing and maintaining effective treatments in the wider community once the trial ends. If, for any reason, they feel that this might not be possible, then I think they should have to ethically justify why the clinical trial should be conducted in the first place. Now, fortunately for Celine, our meeting did not end in my office. I was able to get her enrolled into a free HIV treatment program closer to her home, and with a support group to help her cope. Her story has a positive ending, but there are thousands of others in similar situations who are much less fortunate. Although she may not know this, my encounter with Celine has completely changed the way in which I view HIV clinical trials in developing countries, and made me even more determined to be part of the movement to change the way in which things are done. I believe that every single person listening to me tonight can be part of that change. If you are a researcher, I hold you to a higher standard of moral conscience, to remain ethical in your research, and not compromise human welfare in your search for answers. If you work for a funding agency or pharmaceutical company, I challenge you to hold your employers to fund research that is ethically sound. If you come from a developing country like myself, I urge you to hold your government to a more thorough review of the clinical trials which are authorized in your country. Yes, there is a need for us to find a cure for HIV, to find an effective vaccine for malaria, to find a diagnostic tool that works for T.B., but I believe that we owe it to those who willingly and selflessly consent to participate in these clinical trials to do this in a humane way. Thank you. |
All it takes is 10 mindful minutes | {0: 'Mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe wants to make meditation accessible to everybody: for a happier, healthier you.'} | TEDSalon London Fall 2012 | We live in an incredibly busy world. The pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, and we're always doing something. So with that in mind, I'd like you just to take a moment to think, when did you last take any time to do nothing? Just 10 minutes, undisturbed? And when I say nothing, I do mean nothing. So that's no emailing, texting, no Internet, no TV, no chatting, no eating, no reading. Not even sitting there reminiscing about the past or planning for the future. Simply doing nothing. I see a lot of very blank faces. (Laughter) You probably have to go a long way back. And this is an extraordinary thing, right? We're talking about our mind. The mind, our most valuable and precious resource, through which we experience every single moment of our life. The mind that we rely upon to be happy, content, emotionally stable as individuals, and at the same time, to be kind and thoughtful and considerate in our relationships with others. This is the same mind that we depend upon to be focused, creative, spontaneous, and to perform at our very best in everything that we do. And yet, we don't take any time out to look after it. In fact, we spend more time looking after our cars, our clothes and our hair than we — okay, maybe not our hair, (Laughter) but you see where I'm going. The result, of course, is that we get stressed. You know, the mind whizzes away like a washing machine going round and round, lots of difficult, confusing emotions, and we don't really know how to deal with that. And the sad fact is that we are so distracted that we're no longer present in the world in which we live. We miss out on the things that are most important to us, and the crazy thing is that everybody just assumes, that's the way life is, so we've just kind of got to get on with it. That's really not how it has to be. So I was about 11 when I went along to my first meditation class. And trust me, it had all the stereotypes that you can imagine, the sitting cross-legged on the floor, the incense, the herbal tea, the vegetarians, the whole deal, but my mom was going and I was intrigued, so I went along with her. I'd also seen a few kung fu movies, and secretly I kind of thought I might be able to learn how to fly, but I was very young at the time. Now as I was there, I guess, like a lot of people, I assumed that it was just an aspirin for the mind. You get stressed, you do some meditation. I hadn't really thought that it could be sort of preventative in nature, until I was about 20, when a number of things happened in my life in quite quick succession, really serious things which just flipped my life upside down and all of a sudden I was inundated with thoughts, inundated with difficult emotions that I didn't know how to cope with. Every time I sort of pushed one down, another one would pop back up again. It was a really very stressful time. I guess we all deal with stress in different ways. Some people will bury themselves in work, grateful for the distraction. Others will turn to their friends, their family, looking for support. Some people hit the bottle, start taking medication. My own way of dealing with it was to become a monk. So I quit my degree, I headed off to the Himalayas, I became a monk, and I started studying meditation. People often ask me what I learned from that time. Well, obviously it changed things. Let's face it, becoming a celibate monk is going to change a number of things. But it was more than that. It taught me — it gave me a greater appreciation, an understanding for the present moment. By that I mean not being lost in thought, not being distracted, not being overwhelmed by difficult emotions, but instead learning how to be in the here and now, how to be mindful, how to be present. I think the present moment is so underrated. It sounds so ordinary, and yet we spend so little time in the present moment that it's anything but ordinary. There was a research paper that came out of Harvard, just recently, that said on average, our minds are lost in thought almost 47 percent of the time. 47 percent. At the same time, this sort of constant mind-wandering is also a direct cause of unhappiness. Now we're not here for that long anyway, but to spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy, I don't know, it just kind of seems tragic, actually, especially when there's something we can do about it, when there's a positive, practical, achievable, scientifically proven technique which allows our mind to be more healthy, to be more mindful and less distracted. And the beauty of it is that even though it need only take about 10 minutes a day, it impacts our entire life. But we need to know how to do it. We need an exercise. We need a framework to learn how to be more mindful. That's essentially what meditation is. It's familiarizing ourselves with the present moment. But we also need to know how to approach it in the right way to get the best from it. And that's what these are for, in case you've been wondering, because most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it's quite different from that. It's more about stepping back, sort of seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going, emotions coming and going without judgment, but with a relaxed, focused mind. So for example, right now, if I focus too much on the balls, then there's no way I can relax and talk to you at the same time. Equally, if I relax too much talking to you, there's no way I can focus on the balls. I'm going to drop them. Now in life, and in meditation, there'll be times when the focus becomes a little bit too intense, and life starts to feel a bit like this. It's a very uncomfortable way to live life, when you get this tight and stressed. At other times, we might take our foot off the gas a little bit too much, and things just become a sort of little bit like this. Of course in meditation — (Snores) we're going to end up falling asleep. So we're looking for a balance, a focused relaxation where we can allow thoughts to come and go without all the usual involvement. Now, what usually happens when we're learning to be mindful is that we get distracted by a thought. Let's say this is an anxious thought. Everything's going fine, and we see the anxious thought. "Oh, I didn't realize I was worried about that." You go back to it, repeat it. "Oh, I am worried. I really am worried. Wow, there's so much anxiety." And before we know it, right, we're anxious about feeling anxious. (Laughter) You know, this is crazy. We do this all the time, even on an everyday level. If you think about the last time you had a wobbly tooth. You know it's wobbly, and you know that it hurts. But what do you do every 20, 30 seconds? (Mumbling) It does hurt. And we reinforce the storyline, right? And we just keep telling ourselves, and we do it all the time. And it's only in learning to watch the mind in this way that we can start to let go of those storylines and patterns of mind. But when you sit down and you watch the mind in this way, you might see many different patterns. You might find a mind that's really restless and — the whole time. Don't be surprised if you feel a bit agitated in your body when you sit down to do nothing and your mind feels like that. You might find a mind that's very dull and boring, and it's just, almost mechanical, it just seems it's as if you're getting up, going to work, eat, sleep, get up, work. Or it might just be that one little nagging thought that just goes round and round your mind. Well, whatever it is, meditation offers the opportunity, the potential to step back and to get a different perspective, to see that things aren't always as they appear. We can't change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. That's the potential of meditation, of mindfulness. You don't have to burn any incense, and you definitely don't have to sit on the floor. All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back, to familiarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm and clarity in your life. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A father-daughter dance ... in prison | {0: 'Angela Patton is an ambassador for who she calls "at-promise" (as opposed to "at-risk") girls and a serial innovator.'} | TEDxWomen 2012 | I was sitting with my girls, and Joy said, "Dang, I wish he'd get off my back. My daddy, he calls me all the time." "Lucky for you he calls at all," said Jasmine. "I haven't heard from my dad in years." At this moment, I knew the girls needed a way to connect with their fathers. At Camp Diva, my non-profit organization, we have these types of conversations all the time as a way to help girls of African descent prepare for their passage into womanhood. These girls just needed a way to invite their fathers into their lives on their own terms. So I asked the girls, "How can we help other girls develop healthy relationships with their fathers?" "Let's have a dance," one girl shouted, and all the girls quickly backed her up. They started dreaming about the decorations, invitations, the dresses they were going to wear, and what their fathers could and could not wear. (Laughter) It was off and running before I could even blink my eyes, but even if I could have slowed down those girls, I wouldn't have, because one thing that I have learned from over a decade of working with girls is that they already know what they need. The wisdom lives inside of them. As long as they have infrastructure, mentorship and resources, they can build what they need, not only to survive, but to thrive. So we had a dance, and girls and their fathers came in multitudes. They were dressed to the nines. They acted sweet. (Laughter) They acted silly. They really enjoyed each other's company. It was a huge success. And the girls decided to make it an annual event. So as the seasons changed, and it was time to plan the dance again, one girl named Brianna spoke up, and she said, "My dad can't come to the dance, and this whole thing is making me sad." "Why not?" the girls asked. "Because he's in jail," she bravely admitted. "Well, can he just get out for a day?" one of the girls asked. (Laughter) "And come in shackles? That's worse than not having him here at all." At this moment, I saw an opportunity for the girls to rise to the occasion and to become their own heroes. So I asked, "What do you think we should do about this? We want every girl to experience the dance, right?" So the girls thought for a moment, and one girl suggested, "Why don't we just take the dance in the jail?" Most of the girls doubted the possibility of that, and said, "Are you crazy? Who is going to allow a bunch of little girls, dressed up — " (Laughter) " — to come inside a jail and dance with their daddies in Spongebob suits?" Because that's what they called them. I said, "Girls, well, well, you never know unless you ask." So a letter was written to the Richmond City Sheriff, signed collectively by each girl, and I would have to say, he is a very special sheriff. He contacted me immediately and said, whenever there is an opportunity to bring families inside, his doors are always open. Because one thing he did know, that when fathers are connected to their children, it is less likely that they will return. So, 16 inmates and 18 girls were invited. The girls were dressed in their Sunday best, and the fathers traded in their yellow and blue jumpsuits for shirts and ties. They hugged. They shared a full catered meal of chicken and fish. They laughed together. It was beautiful. The fathers and daughters even experienced an opportunity to have a physical connection, something that a lot of them didn't even have for a while. Fathers were in a space where they were able to make their daughter's plate, and pull out her chair and extend his hand for a dance. Even the guards cried. But after the dance, we all realized that Dad still would be in jail. So we needed to create something that they could take with them. So we brought in Flip cams, and we had them look at the Flip cams and just interview each other — their messages, their thoughts. This was going to be used as a touchstone so when they started to miss each other and feel disconnected, they could reconnect through this image. I'll never forget that one girl looked in her father's eyes with that camera and said, "Daddy, when you look at me, what do you see?" Because our daddies are our mirrors that we reflect back on when we decide about what type of man we deserve, and how they see us for the rest of our lives. I know that very well, because I was one of the lucky girls. I have had my father in my life always. He's even here today. (Applause) And that is why it is extremely special for me to make sure that these girls are connected to their fathers, especially those who are separated because of barbed wires and metal doors. We have just created a form for girls who have heavy questions on their heart to be in a position to ask their fathers those questions and given the fathers the freedom to answer. Because we know that the fathers are even leaving with this one thought: What type of woman am I preparing to put in the world? Because a father is locked in does not mean he should be locked out of his daughter's life. (Applause) |
Biohacking -- you can do it, too | {0: 'Ellen Jorgensen is at the leading edge of the do-it-yourself biotechnology movement, bringing scientific exploration and understanding to the public.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | It's a great time to be a molecular biologist. (Laughter) Reading and writing DNA code is getting easier and cheaper. By the end of this year, we'll be able to sequence the three million bits of information in your genome in less than a day and for less than 1,000 euros. Biotech is probably the most powerful and the fastest-growing technology sector. It has the power, potentially, to replace our fossil fuels, to revolutionize medicine, and to touch every aspect of our daily lives. So who gets to do it? I think we'd all be pretty comfortable with this guy doing it. But what about that guy? (Laughter) (Laughter) In 2009, I first heard about DIYbio. It's a movement that — it advocates making biotechnology accessible to everyone, not just scientists and people in government labs. The idea is that if you open up the science and you allow diverse groups to participate, it could really stimulate innovation. Putting technology in the hands of the end user is usually a good idea because they've got the best idea of what their needs are. And here's this really sophisticated technology coming down the road, all these associated social, moral, ethical questions, and we scientists are just lousy at explaining to the public just exactly what it is we're doing in those labs. So wouldn't it be nice if there was a place in your local neighborhood where you could go and learn about this stuff, do it hands-on? I thought so. So, three years ago, I got together with some friends of mine who had similar aspirations and we founded Genspace. It's a nonprofit, a community biotech lab in Brooklyn, New York, and the idea was people could come, they could take classes and putter around in the lab in a very open, friendly atmosphere. None of my previous experience prepared me for what came next. Can you guess? The press started calling us. And the more we talked about how great it was to increase science literacy, the more they wanted to talk about us creating the next Frankenstein, and as a result, for the next six months, when you Googled my name, instead of getting my scientific papers, you got this. ["Am I a biohazard?"] (Laughter) It was pretty depressing. The only thing that got us through that period was that we knew that all over the world, there were other people that were trying to do the same thing that we were. They were opening biohacker spaces, and some of them were facing much greater challenges than we did, more regulations, less resources. But now, three years later, here's where we stand. It's a vibrant, global community of hackerspaces, and this is just the beginning. These are some of the biggest ones, and there are others opening every day. There's one probably going to open up in Moscow, one in South Korea, and the cool thing is they each have their own individual flavor that grew out of the community they came out of. Let me take you on a little tour. Biohackers work alone. We work in groups, in big cities — (Laughter) — and in small villages. We reverse engineer lab equipment. We genetically engineer bacteria. We hack hardware, software, wetware, and, of course, the code of life. We like to build things. Then we like to take things apart. We make things grow. We make things glow. And we make cells dance. The spirit of these labs, it's open, it's positive, but, you know, sometimes when people think of us, the first thing that comes to mind is bio-safety, bio-security, all the dark side stuff. I'm not going to minimize those concerns. Any powerful technology is inherently dual use, and, you know, you get something like synthetic biology, nanobiotechnology, it really compels you, you have to look at both the amateur groups but also the professional groups, because they have better infrastructure, they have better facilities, and they have access to pathogens. So the United Nations did just that, and they recently issued a report on this whole area, and what they concluded was the power of this technology for positive was much greater than the risk for negative, and they even looked specifically at the DIYbio community, and they noted, not surprisingly, that the press had a tendency to consistently overestimate our capabilities and underestimate our ethics. As a matter of fact, DIY people from all over the world, America, Europe, got together last year, and we hammered out a common code of ethics. That's a lot more than conventional science has done. Now, we follow state and local regulations. We dispose of our waste properly, we follow safety procedures, we don't work with pathogens. You know, if you're working with a pathogen, you're not part of the biohacker community, you're part of the bioterrorist community, I'm sorry. And sometimes people ask me, "Well, what about an accident?" Well, working with the safe organisms that we normally work with, the chance of an accident happening with somebody accidentally creating, like, some sort of superbug, that's literally about as probable as a snowstorm in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Now, it could happen, but I'm not going to plan my life around it. I've actually chosen to take a different kind of risk. I signed up for something called the Personal Genome Project. It's a study at Harvard where, at the end of the study, they're going to take my entire genomic sequence, all of my medical information, and my identity, and they're going to post it online for everyone to see. There were a lot of risks involved that they talked about during the informed consent portion. The one I liked the best is, someone could download my sequence, go back to the lab, synthesize some fake Ellen DNA, and plant it at a crime scene. (Laughter) But like DIYbio, the positive outcomes and the potential for good for a study like that far outweighs the risk. Now, you might be asking yourself, "Well, you know, what would I do in a biolab?" Well, it wasn't that long ago we were asking, "Well, what would anyone do with a personal computer?" So this stuff is just beginning. We're only seeing just the tip of the DNA iceberg. Let me show you what you could do right now. A biohacker in Germany, a journalist, wanted to know whose dog was leaving little presents on his street? (Laughter) (Applause) Yep, you guessed it. He threw tennis balls to all the neighborhood dogs, analyzed the saliva, identified the dog, and confronted the dog owner. (Laughter) (Applause) I discovered an invasive species in my own backyard. Looked like a ladybug, right? It actually is a Japanese beetle. And the same kind of technology — it's called DNA barcoding, it's really cool — You can use it to check if your caviar is really beluga, if that sushi is really tuna, or if that goat cheese that you paid so much for is really goat's. In a biohacker space, you can analyze your genome for mutations. You can analyze your breakfast cereal for GMO's, and you can explore your ancestry. You can send weather balloons up into the stratosphere, collect microbes, see what's up there. You can make a biocensor out of yeast to detect pollutants in water. You can make some sort of a biofuel cell. You can do a lot of things. You can also do an art science project. Some of these are really spectacular, and they look at social, ecological problems from a completely different perspective. It's really cool. Some people ask me, well, why am I involved? I could have a perfectly good career in mainstream science. The thing is, there's something in these labs that they have to offer society that you can't find anywhere else. There's something sacred about a space where you can work on a project, and you don't have to justify to anyone that it's going to make a lot of money, that it's going to save mankind, or even that it's feasible. It just has to follow safety guidelines. If you had spaces like this all over the world, it could really change the perception of who's allowed to do biotech. It's spaces like these that spawned personal computing. Why not personal biotech? If everyone in this room got involved, who knows what we could do? This is such a new area, and as we say back in Brooklyn, you ain't seen nothin' yet. (Laughter) (Applause) |
Looks aren't everything. Believe me, I'm a model. | {0: "Cameron Russell has stomped the runways for Victoria's Secret and Chanel, and has appeared in many magazines. But she is much more than just a pretty face."} | TEDxMidAtlantic | Hi. My name is Cameron Russell, and for the last little while, I've been a model. Actually, for 10 years. And I feel like there's an uncomfortable tension in the room right now because I should not have worn this dress. (Laughter) So luckily, I brought an outfit change. This is the first outfit change on the TED stage, so you guys are pretty lucky to witness it, I think. If some of the women were really horrified when I came out, you don't have to tell me now, but I'll find out later on Twitter. (Laughter) I'd also note that I'm quite privileged to be able to transform what you think of me in a very brief 10 seconds. Not everybody gets to do that. These heels are very uncomfortable, so good thing I wasn't going to wear them. The worst part is putting this sweater over my head, because that's when you'll all laugh at me, so don't do anything while it's over my head. All right. So, why did I do that? That was awkward. (Laughter) Well — (Laughter) Hopefully not as awkward as that picture. Image is powerful, but also, image is superficial. I just totally transformed what you thought of me, in six seconds. And in this picture, I had actually never had a boyfriend in real life. I was totally uncomfortable, and the photographer was telling me to arch my back and put my hand in that guy's hair. And of course, barring surgery, or the fake tan that I got two days ago for work, there's very little that we can do to transform how we look, and how we look, though it is superficial and immutable, has a huge impact on our lives. So today, for me, being fearless means being honest. And I am on this stage because I am a model. I am on this stage because I am a pretty, white woman, and in my industry, we call that a sexy girl. I'm going to answer the questions that people always ask me, but with an honest twist. So the first question is, how do you become a model? I always just say, "Oh, I was scouted," but that means nothing. The real way that I became a model is I won a genetic lottery, and I am the recipient of a legacy, and maybe you're wondering what is a legacy. Well, for the past few centuries we have defined beauty not just as health and youth and symmetry that we're biologically programmed to admire, but also as tall, slender figures, and femininity and white skin. And this is a legacy that was built for me, and it's a legacy that I've been cashing out on. And I know there are people in the audience who are skeptical at this point, and maybe there are some fashionistas who are like, "Wait. Naomi. Tyra. Joan Smalls. Liu Wen." And first, I commend you on your model knowledge. Very impressive. (Laughter) But unfortunately, I have to inform you that in 2007, a very inspired NYU Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four percent, were non-white. The next question people always ask is, "Can I be a model when I grow up?" And the first answer is, "I don't know, they don't put me in charge of that." But the second answer, and what I really want to say to these little girls is, "Why? You know? You can be anything. You could be the President of the United States, or the inventor of the next Internet, or a ninja cardiothoracic surgeon poet, which would be awesome, because you'd be the first one." (Laughter) If, after this amazing list, they still are like, "No, no, Cameron, I want to be a model," well, then I say, "Be my boss." Because I'm not in charge of anything, and you could be the editor in chief of American Vogue or the CEO of H&M, or the next Steven Meisel. Saying that you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying that you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. It's out of your control, and it's awesome, and it's not a career path. I will demonstrate for you now 10 years of accumulated model knowledge, because unlike cardiothoracic surgeons, it can just be distilled right now. So, if the photographer is right there, the light is right there, like a nice HMI, and the client says, "We want a walking shot," this leg goes first, nice and long, this arm goes back, this arm goes forward, the head is at three quarters, and you just go back and forth, just do that, and then you look back at your imaginary friends, 300, 400, 500 times. (Laughter) It will look something like this. (Laughter) Hopefully less awkward than that one in the middle. That was — I don't know what happened there. Unfortunately, after you've gone to school, and you have a résumé and you've done a few jobs, you can't say anything anymore, so if you say you want to be the President of the United States, but your résumé reads, "Underwear Model: 10 years," people give you a funny look. The next question is, "Do they retouch all the photos?" And yeah, they pretty much retouch all the photos, but that is only a small component of what's happening. This picture is the very first picture that I ever took, and it's also the very first time that I had worn a bikini, and I didn't even have my period yet. I know we're getting personal, but I was a young girl. This is what I looked like with my grandma just a few months earlier. Here's me on the same day as this shoot. My friend got to come. Here's me at a slumber party a few days before I shot French Vogue. Here's me on the soccer team and in V Magazine. And here's me today. And I hope what you're seeing is that these pictures are not pictures of me. They are constructions, and they are constructions by a group of professionals, by hairstylists and makeup artists and photographers and stylists and all of their assistants and pre-production and post-production, and they build this. That's not me. Okay, so the next question people always ask me is, "Do you get free stuff?" (Laughter) I do have too many 8-inch heels which I never get to wear, except for earlier, but the free stuff that I get is the free stuff that I get in real life, and that's what we don't like to talk about. I grew up in Cambridge, and one time I went into a store and I forgot my money and they gave me the dress for free. When I was a teenager, I was driving with my friend who was an awful driver and she ran a red and of course, we got pulled over, and all it took was a "Sorry, officer," and we were on our way. And I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are. I live in New York, and last year, of the 140,000 teenagers that were stopped and frisked, 86% of them were black and Latino, and most of them were young men. And there are only 177,000 young black and Latino men in New York, so for them, it's not a question of, "Will I get stopped?" but "How many times will I get stopped? When will I get stopped?" When I was researching this talk, I found out that of the 13-year-old girls in the United States, 53% don't like their bodies, and that number goes to 78% by the time that they're 17. So, the last question people ask me is, "What is it like to be a model?" And I think the answer that they're looking for is, "If you are a little bit skinnier and you have shinier hair, you will be so happy and fabulous." And when we're backstage, we give an answer that maybe makes it seem like that. We say, "It's really amazing to travel, and it's amazing to get to work with creative, inspired, passionate people." And those things are true, but they're only one half of the story, because the thing that we never say on camera, that I have never said on camera, is, "I am insecure." And I'm insecure because I have to think about what I look like every day. And if you ever are wondering, "If I have thinner thighs and shinier hair, will I be happier?" you just need to meet a group of models, because they have the thinnest thighs, the shiniest hair and the coolest clothes, and they're the most physically insecure women probably on the planet. When I was writing this talk, I found it very difficult to strike an honest balance, because on the one hand, I felt very uncomfortable to come out here and say, "Look I've received all these benefits from a deck stacked in my favor," and it also felt really uncomfortable to follow that up with, "and it doesn't always make me happy." But mostly it was difficult to unpack a legacy of gender and racial oppression when I am one of the biggest beneficiaries. But I'm also happy and honored to be up here and I think that it's great that I got to come before 10 or 20 or 30 years had passed and I'd had more agency in my career, because maybe then I wouldn't tell the story of how I got my first job, or maybe I wouldn't tell the story of how I paid for college, which seems so important right now. If there's a takeaway to this talk, I hope it's that we all feel more comfortable acknowledging the power of image in our perceived successes and our perceived failures. Thank you. (Applause) |
Could the sun be good for your heart? | {0: 'Dermatologist Richard Weller wants to know: Why are Scots so sick?'} | TEDxGlasgow | So, before I became a dermatologist, I started in general medicine, as most dermatologists do in Britain. At the end of that time, I went off to Australia, about 20 years ago. What you learn when you go to Australia is the Australians are very competitive. And they are not magnanimous in victory. And that happened a lot: "You pommies, you can't play cricket, rugby." I could accept that. But moving into work — and we have each week what's called a journal club, when you'd sit down with the other doctors and you'd study a scientific paper in relation to medicine. And after week one, it was about cardiovascular mortality, a dry subject — how many people die of heart disease, what the rates are. And they were competitive about this: "You pommies, your rates of heart disease are shocking." And of course, they were right. Australians have about a third less heart disease than we do — less deaths from heart attacks, heart failure, less strokes — they're generally a healthier bunch. And of course they said this was because of their fine moral standing, their exercise, because they're Australians and we're weedy pommies, and so on. But it's not just Australia that has better health than Britain. Within Britain, there is a gradient of health — and this is what's called standardized mortality, basically your chances of dying. This is looking at data from the paper about 20 years ago, but it's true today. Comparing your rates of dying 50 degrees north — that's the South, that's London and places — by latitude, and 55 degrees — the bad news is that's here, Glasgow. I'm from Edinburgh. Worse news, that's even Edinburgh. (Laughter) So what accounts for this horrible space here between us up here in southern Scotland and the South? Now, we know about smoking, deep-fried Mars bars, chips — the Glasgow diet. All of these things. But this graph is after taking into account all of these known risk factors. This is after accounting for smoking, social class, diet, all those other known risk factors. We are left with this missing space of increased deaths the further north you go. Now, sunlight, of course, comes into this. And vitamin D has had a great deal of press, and a lot of people get concerned about it. And we need vitamin D. It's now a requirement that children have a certain amount. My grandmother grew up in Glasgow, back in the 1920s and '30s when rickets was a real problem and cod liver oil was brought in. And that really prevented the rickets that used to be common in this city. And I as a child was fed cod liver oil by my grandmother. I distinctly — nobody forgets cod liver oil. But an association: The higher people's blood levels of vitamin D are, the less heart disease they have, the less cancer. There seems to be a lot of data suggesting that vitamin D is very good for you. And it is, to prevent rickets and so on. But if you give people vitamin D supplements, you don't change that high rate of heart disease. And the evidence for it preventing cancers is not yet great. So what I'm going to suggest is that vitamin D is not the only story in town. It's not the only reason preventing heart disease. High vitamin D levels, I think, are a marker for sunlight exposure, and sunlight exposure, in methods I'm going to show, is good for heart disease. Anyway, I came back from Australia, and despite the obvious risks to my health, I moved to Aberdeen. (Laughter) Now, in Aberdeen, I started my dermatology training. But I also became interested in research, and in particular I became interested in this substance, nitric oxide. Now these three guys up here, Furchgott, Ignarro and Murad, won the Nobel Prize for medicine back in 1998. And they were the first people to describe this new chemical transmitter, nitric oxide. What nitric oxide does is it dilates blood vessels, so it lowers your blood pressure. It also dilates the coronary arteries, so it stops angina. And what was remarkable about it was in the past when we think of chemical messengers within the body, we thought of complicated things like estrogen and insulin, or nerve transmission. Very complex processes with very complex chemicals that fit into very complex receptors. And here's this incredibly simple molecule, a nitrogen and an oxygen that are stuck together, and yet these are hugely important for [unclear] our low blood pressure, for neurotransmission, for many, many things, but particularly cardiovascular health. And I started doing research, and we found, very excitingly, that the skin produces nitric oxide. So it's not just in the cardiovascular system it arises. It arises in the skin. Well, having found that and published that, I thought, well, what's it doing? How do you have low blood pressure in your skin? It's not the heart. What do you do? So I went off to the States, as many people do if they're going to do research, and I spent a few years in Pittsburgh. This is Pittsburgh. And I was interested in these really complex systems. We thought that maybe nitric oxide affected cell death, and how cells survive, and their resistance to other things. And I first off started work in cell culture, growing cells, and then I was using knockout mouse models — mice that couldn't make the gene. We worked out a mechanism, which — NO was helping cells survive. And I then moved back to Edinburgh. And in Edinburgh, the experimental animal we use is the medical student. It's a species close to human, with several advantages over mice: They're free, you don't shave them, they feed themselves, and nobody pickets your office saying, "Save the lab medical student." So they're really an ideal model. But what we found was that we couldn't reproduce in man the data we had shown in mice. It seemed we couldn't turn off the production of nitric oxide in the skin of humans. We put on creams that blocked the enzyme that made it, we injected things. We couldn't turn off the nitric oxide. And the reason for this, it turned out, after two or three years' work, was that in the skin we have huge stores not of nitric oxide, because nitric oxide is a gas, and it's released — (Poof!) — and in a few seconds it's away, but it can be turned into these forms of nitric oxide — nitrate, NO3; nitrite, NO2; nitrosothiols. And these are more stable, and your skin has got really large stores of NO. And we then thought to ourselves, with those big stores, I wonder if sunlight might activate those stores and release them from the skin, where the stores are about 10 times as big as what's in the circulation. Could the sun activate those stores into the circulation, and there in the circulation do its good things for your cardiovascular system? Well, I'm an experimental dermatologist, so what we did was we thought we'd have to expose our experimental animals to sunlight. And so what we did was we took a bunch of volunteers and we exposed them to ultraviolet light. So these are kind of sunlamps. Now, what we were careful to do was, vitamin D is made by ultraviolet B rays and we wanted to separate our story from the vitamin D story. So we used ultraviolet A, which doesn't make vitamin D. When we put people under a lamp for the equivalent of about 30 minutes of sunshine in summer in Edinburgh, what we produced was, we produced a rise in circulating nitric oxide. So we put patients with these subjects under the UV, and their NO levels do go up, and their blood pressure goes down. Not by much, as an individual level, but enough at a population level to shift the rates of heart disease in a whole population. And when we shone UV at them, or when we warmed them up to the same level as the lamps, but didn't actually let the rays hit the skin, this didn't happen. So this seems to be a feature of ultraviolet rays hitting the skin. Now, we're still collecting data. A few good things here: This appeared to be more marked in older people. I'm not sure exactly how much. One of the subjects here was my mother-in-law, and clearly I do not know her age. But certainly in people older than my wife, this appears to be a more marked effect. And the other thing I should mention was there was no change in vitamin D. This is separate from vitamin D. So vitamin D is good for you — it stops rickets, it prevents calcium metabolism, important stuff. But this is a separate mechanism from vitamin D. Now, one of the problems with looking at blood pressure is your body does everything it can to keep your blood pressure at the same place. If your leg is chopped off and you lose blood, your body will clamp down, increase the heart rate, do everything it can to keep your blood pressure up. That is an absolutely fundamental physiological principle. So what we've next done is we've moved on to looking at blood vessel dilatation. So we've measured — this is again, notice no tail and hairless, this is a medical student. In the arm, you can measure blood flow in the arm by how much it swells up as some blood flows into it. And what we've shown is that doing a sham irradiation — this is the thick line here — this is shining UV on the arm so it warms up but keeping it covered so the rays don't hit the skin. There is no change in blood flow, in dilatation of the blood vessels. But the active irradiation, during the UV and for an hour after it, there is dilation of the blood vessels. This is the mechanism by which you lower blood pressure, by which you dilate the coronary arteries also, to let the blood be supplied with the heart. So here, further data that ultraviolet — that's sunlight — has benefits on the blood flow and the cardiovascular system. So we thought we'd just kind of model — Different amounts of UV hit different parts of the Earth at different times of year, so you can actually work out those stores of nitric oxide — the nitrates, nitrites, nitrosothiols in the skin — cleave to release NO. Different wavelengths of light have different activities of doing that. So you can look at the wavelengths of light that do that. And you can look — So, if you live on the equator, the sun comes straight overhead, it comes through a very thin bit of atmosphere. In winter or summer, it's the same amount of light. If you live up here, in summer the sun is coming fairly directly down, but in winter it's coming through a huge amount of atmosphere, and much of the ultraviolet is weeded out, and the range of wavelengths that hit the Earth are different from summer to winter. So what you can do is you can multiply those data by the NO that's released and you can calculate how much nitric oxide would be released from the skin into the circulation. Now, if you're on the equator here — that's these two lines here, the red line and the purple line — the amount of nitric oxide that's released is the area under the curve, it's the area in this space here. So if you're on the equator, December or June, you've got masses of NO being released from the skin. So Ventura is in southern California. In summer, you might as well be at the equator. It's great. Lots of NO is released. Ventura mid-winter, well, there's still a decent amount. Edinburgh in summer, the area beneath the curve is pretty good, but Edinburgh in winter, the amount of NO that can be released is next to nothing, tiny amounts. So what do we think? We're still working at this story, we're still developing it, we're still expanding it. We think it's very important. We think it probably accounts for a lot of the north-south health divide within Britain, It's of relevance to us. We think that the skin — well, we know that the skin has got very large stores of nitric oxide as these various other forms. We suspect a lot of these come from diet, green leafy vegetables, beetroot, lettuce has a lot of these nitric oxides that we think go to the skin. We think they're then stored in the skin, and we think the sunlight releases this where it has generally beneficial effects. And this is ongoing work, but dermatologists — I mean, I'm a dermatologist. My day job is saying to people, "You've got skin cancer, it's caused by sunlight, don't go in the sun." I actually think a far more important message is that there are benefits as well as risks to sunlight. Yes, sunlight is the major alterable risk factor for skin cancer, but deaths from heart disease are a hundred times higher than deaths from skin cancer. And I think that we need to be more aware of, and we need to find the risk-benefit ratio. How much sunlight is safe, and how can we finesse this best for our general health? So, thank you very much indeed. (Applause) |
How movies teach manhood | {0: 'The director of communications for the non-profit Citizen Schools, Colin Stokes thinks deeply about the media he shares with his two young children. '} | TEDxBeaconStreet | You know, my favorite part of being a dad is the movies I get to watch. I love sharing my favorite movies with my kids, and when my daughter was four, we got to watch "The Wizard of Oz" together. It totally dominated her imagination for months. Her favorite character was Glinda, of course. It gave her a great excuse to wear a sparkly dress and carry a wand. But you watch that movie enough times, and you start to realize how unusual it is. Now we live today, and are raising our children, in a kind of children's-fantasy-spectacular-industrial complex. But "The Wizard of Oz" stood alone. It did not start that trend. Forty years later was when the trend really caught on, with, interestingly, another movie that featured a metal guy and a furry guy rescuing a girl by dressing up as the enemy's guards. Do you know what I'm talking about? (Laughter) Yeah. Now, there's a big difference between these two movies, a couple of really big differences between "The Wizard of Oz" and all the movies we watch today. One is there's very little violence in "The Wizard of Oz." The monkeys are rather aggressive, as are the apple trees. But I think if "The Wizard of Oz" were made today, the wizard would say, "Dorothy, you are the savior of Oz that the prophecy foretold. Use your magic slippers to defeat the computer-generated armies of the Wicked Witch." But that's not how it happens. Another thing that's really unique about "The Wizard of Oz" to me is that all of the most heroic and wise and even villainous characters are female. Now I started to notice this when I actually showed "Star Wars" to my daughter, which was years later, and the situation was different. At that point I also had a son. He was only three at the time. He was not invited to the screening. He was too young for that. But he was the second child, and the level of supervision had plummeted. (Laughter) So he wandered in, and it imprinted on him like a mommy duck does to its duckling, and I don't think he understands what's going on, but he is sure soaking in it. And I wonder what he's soaking in. Is he picking up on the themes of courage and perseverance and loyalty? Is he picking up on the fact that Luke joins an army to overthrow the government? Is he picking up on the fact that there are only boys in the universe except for Aunt Beru, and of course this princess, who's really cool, but who kind of waits around through most of the movie so that she can award the hero with a medal and a wink to thank him for saving the universe, which he does by the magic that he was born with? Compare this to 1939 with "The Wizard of Oz." How does Dorothy win her movie? By making friends with everybody and being a leader. That's kind of the world I'd rather raise my kids in — Oz, right? — and not the world of dudes fighting, which is where we kind of have to be. Why is there so much Force — capital F, Force — in the movies we have for our kids, and so little yellow brick road? There is a lot of great writing about the impact that the boy-violent movie has on girls, and you should do that reading. It's very good. I haven't read as much on how boys are picking up on this vibe. I know from my own experience that Princess Leia did not provide the adequate context that I could have used in navigating the adult world that is co-ed. (Laughter) I think there was a first-kiss moment when I really expected the credits to start rolling because that's the end of the movie, right? I finished my quest, I got the girl. Why are you still standing there? I don't know what I'm supposed to do. The movies are very, very focused on defeating the villain and getting your reward, and there's not a lot of room for other relationships and other journeys. It's almost as though if you're a boy, you are a dopey animal, and if you are a girl, you should bring your warrior costume. There are plenty of exceptions, and I will defend the Disney princesses in front of any you. But they do send a message to boys, that they are not, the boys are not really the target audience. They are doing a phenomenal job of teaching girls how to defend against the patriarchy, but they are not necessarily showing boys how they're supposed to defend against the patriarchy. There's no models for them. And we also have some terrific women who are writing new stories for our kids, and as three-dimensional and delightful as Hermione and Katniss are, these are still war movies. And, of course, the most successful studio of all time continues to crank out classic after classic, every single one of them about the journey of a boy, or a man, or two men who are friends, or a man and his son, or two men who are raising a little girl. Until, as many of you are thinking, this year, when they finally came out with "Brave." I recommend it to all of you. It's on demand now. Do you remember what the critics said when "Brave" came out? "Aw, I can't believe Pixar made a princess movie." It's very good. Don't let that stop you. Now, almost none of these movies pass the Bechdel Test. I don't know if you've heard of this. It has not yet caught on and caught fire, but maybe today we will start a movement. Alison Bechdel is a comic book artist, and back in the mid-'80s, she recorded this conversation she'd had with a friend about assessing the movies that they saw. And it's very simple. There's just three questions you should ask: Is there more than one character in the movie that is female who has lines? So try to meet that bar. And do these women talk to each other at any point in the movie? And is their conversation about something other than the guy that they both like? (Laughter) Right? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Two women who exist and talk to each other about stuff. It does happen. I've seen it, and yet I very rarely see it in the movies that we know and love. In fact, this week I went to see a very high-quality movie, "Argo." Right? Oscar buzz, doing great at the box office, a consensus idea of what a quality Hollywood film is. It pretty much flunks the Bechdel test. And I don't think it should, because a lot of the movie, I don't know if you've seen it, but a lot of the movie takes place in this embassy where men and women are hiding out during the hostage crisis. We've got quite a few scenes of the men having deep, angst-ridden conversations in this hideout, and the great moment for one of the actresses is to peek through the door and say, "Are you coming to bed, honey?" That's Hollywood for you. So let's look at the numbers. 2011, of the 100 most popular movies, how many of them do you think actually have female protagonists? Eleven. It's not bad. It's not as many percent as the number of women we've just elected to Congress, so that's good. But there is a number that is greater than this that's going to bring this room down. Last year, The New York Times published a study that the government had done. Here's what it said. One out of five women in America say that they have been sexually assaulted some time in their life. Now, I don't think that's the fault of popular entertainment. I don't think kids' movies have anything to do with that. I don't even think that music videos or pornography are really directly related to that, but something is going wrong, and when I hear that statistic, one of the things I think of is that's a lot of sexual assailants. Who are these guys? What are they learning? What are they failing to learn? Are they absorbing the story that a male hero's job is to defeat the villain with violence and then collect the reward, which is a woman who has no friends and doesn't speak? Are we soaking up that story? You know, as a parent with the privilege of raising a daughter like all of you who are doing the same thing, we find this world and this statistic very alarming and we want to prepare them. We have tools at our disposal like "girl power," and we hope that that will help, but I gotta wonder, is girl power going to protect them if, at the same time, actively or passively, we are training our sons to maintain their boy power? I mean, I think the Netflix queue is one way that we can do something very important, and I'm talking mainly to the dads here. I think we have got to show our sons a new definition of manhood. The definition of manhood is already turning upside down. You've read about how the new economy is changing the roles of caregiver and wage earner. They're throwing it up in the air. So our sons are going to have to find some way of adapting to this, some new relationship with each other, and I think we really have to show them, and model for them, how a real man is someone who trusts his sisters and respects them, and wants to be on their team, and stands up against the real bad guys, who are the men who want to abuse the women. And I think our job in the Netflix queue is to look out for those movies that pass the Bechdel Test, if we can find them, and to seek out the heroines who are there, who show real courage, who bring people together, and to nudge our sons to identify with those heroines and to say, "I want to be on their team," because they're going to be on their team. When I asked my daughter who her favorite character was in "Star Wars," do you know what she said? Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Glinda. What do these two have in common? Maybe it's not just the sparkly dress. I think these people are experts. I think these are the two people in the movie who know more than anybody else, and they love sharing their knowledge with other people to help them reach their potential. Now, they are leaders. I like that kind of quest for my daughter, and I like that kind of quest for my son. I want more quests like that. I want fewer quests where my son is told, "Go out and fight it alone," and more quests where he sees that it's his job to join a team, maybe a team led by women, to help other people become better and be better people, like the Wizard of Oz. Thank you. |
What I saw in the war | {0: 'Janine di Giovanni reports from war zones around the world.'} | TEDxWomen 2012 | This is how war starts. One day you're living your ordinary life, you're planning to go to a party, you're taking your children to school, you're making a dentist appointment. The next thing, the telephones go out, the TVs go out, there's armed men on the street, there's roadblocks. Your life as you know it goes into suspended animation. It stops. I'm going to steal a story from a friend of mine, a Bosnian friend, about what happened to her, because I think it will illustrate for you exactly what it feels like. She was walking to work one day in April, 1992, in a miniskirt and high heels. She worked in a bank. She was a young mother. She was someone who liked to party. Great person. And suddenly she sees a tank ambling down the main road of Sarajevo knocking everything out of its path. She thinks she's dreaming, but she's not. And she runs as any of us would have done and takes cover, and she hides behind a trash bin, in her high heels and her miniskirt. And as she's hiding there, she's feeling ridiculous, but she's seeing this tank go by with soldiers and people all over the place and chaos and she thinks, "I feel like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole, down, down, down into chaos, and my life will never be the same again." A few weeks later, my friend was in a crowd of people pushing with her infant son in her arms to give him to a stranger on a bus, which was one of the last buses leaving Sarajevo to take children out so they could be safe. And she remembers struggling with her mother to the front, crowds and crowds of people, "Take my child! Take my child!" and passing her son to someone through a window. And she didn't see him for years. The siege went on for three and a half years, and it was a siege without water, without power, without electricity, without heat, without food, in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the 20th century. I had the honor of being one of those reporters that lived through that siege, and I say I have the honor and the privilege of being there because it's taught me everything, not just about being a reporter, but about being a human being. I learned about compassion. I learned about ordinary people who could be heroes. I learned about sharing. I learned about camaraderie. Most of all, I learned about love. Even in the midst of terrible destruction and death and chaos, I learned how ordinary people could help their neighbors, share food, raise their children, drag someone who's being sniped at from the middle of the road even though you yourself were endangering your life, helping people get into taxis who were injured to try to take them to hospitals. I learned so much about myself. Martha Gellhorn, who's one of my heroes, once said, "You can only love one war. The rest is responsibility." I went on to cover many, many, many wars after that, so many that I lost count, but there was nothing like Sarajevo. Last April, I went back to a very strange — what I called a deranged high school reunion. What it was, was the 20th anniversary of the siege, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, and I don't like the word "anniversary," because it sounds like a party, and this was not a party. It was a very somber gathering of the reporters that worked there during the war, humanitarian aid workers, and of course the brave and courageous people of Sarajevo themselves. And the thing that struck me the most, that broke my heart, was walking down the main street of Sarajevo, where my friend Aida saw the tank coming 20 years ago, and in that road were more than 12,000 red chairs, empty, and every single one of them symbolized a person who had died during the siege, just in Sarajevo, not in all of Bosnia, and it stretched from one end of the city to a large part of it, and the saddest for me were the tiny little chairs for the children. I now cover Syria, and I started reporting it because I believed that it needs to be done. I believe a story there has to be told. I see, again, a template of the war in Bosnia. And when I first arrived in Damascus, I saw this strange moment where people didn't seem to believe that war was going to descend, and it was exactly the same in Bosnia and nearly every other country I've seen where war comes. People don't want to believe it's coming, so they don't leave, they don't leave before they can. They don't get their money out. They stay because you want to stay in your home. And then war and chaos descend. Rwanda is a place that haunts me a lot. In 1994, I briefly left Sarajevo to go report the genocide in Rwanda. Between April and August, 1994, one million people were slaughtered. Now if those 12,000 chairs freaked me out with the sheer number, I want you just for a second to think of a million people. And to give you some example, I remember standing and looking down a road as far as I could see, at least a mile, and there were bodies piled twice my height of the dead. And that was just a small percentage of the dead. And there were mothers holding their children who had been caught in their last death throes. So we learn a lot from war, and I mention Rwanda because it is one place, like South Africa, where nearly 20 years on, there is healing. Fifty-six percent of the parliamentarians are women, which is fantastic, and there's also within the national constitution now, you're actually not allowed to say Hutu or Tutsi. You're not allowed to identify anyone by ethnicity, which is, of course, what started the slaughter in the first place. And an aid worker friend of mine told me the most beautiful story, or I find it beautiful. There was a group of children, mixed Hutus and Tutsis, and a group of women who were adopting them, and they lined up and one was just given to the next. There was no kind of compensation for, you're a Tutsi, you're a Hutu, you might have killed my mother, you might have killed my father. They were just brought together in this kind of reconciliation, and I find this remarkable. So when people ask me how I continue to cover war, and why I continue to do it, this is why. When I go back to Syria, next week in fact, what I see is incredibly heroic people, some of them fighting for democracy, for things we take for granted every single day. And that's pretty much why I do it. In 2004, I had a little baby boy, and I call him my miracle child, because after seeing so much death and destruction and chaos and darkness in my life, this ray of hope was born. And I called him Luca, which means "The bringer of light," because he does bring light to my life. But I'm talking about him because when he was four months old, my foreign editor forced me to go back to Baghdad where I had been reporting all throughout the Saddam regime and during the fall of Baghdad and afterwards, and I remember getting on the plane in tears, crying to be separated from my son, and while I was there, a quite famous Iraqi politician who was a friend of mine said to me, "What are you doing here? Why aren't you home with Luca?" And I said, "Well, I have to see." It was 2004 which was the beginning of the incredibly bloody time in Iraq, "I have to see, I have to see what is happening here. I have to report it." And he said, "Go home, because if you miss his first tooth, if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself. But there will always be another war." And there, sadly, will always be wars. And I am deluding myself if I think, as a journalist, as a reporter, as a writer, what I do can stop them. I can't. I'm not Kofi Annan. He can't stop a war. He tried to negotiate Syria and couldn't do it. I'm not a U.N. conflict resolution person. I'm not even a humanitarian aid doctor, and I can't tell you the times of how helpless I've felt to have people dying in front of me, and I couldn't save them. All I am is a witness. My role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless. A colleague of mine described it as to shine a light in the darkest corners of the world. And that's what I try to do. I'm not always successful, and sometimes it's incredibly frustrating, because you feel like you're writing into a void, or you feel like no one cares. Who cares about Syria? Who cares about Bosnia? Who cares about the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, all of these strings of places that I will remember for the rest of my life? But my métier is to bear witness and that is the crux, the heart of the matter, for us reporters who do this. And all I can really do is hope, not to policymakers or politicians, because as much as I'd like to have faith that they read my words and do something, I don't delude myself. But what I do hope is that if you remember anything I said or any of my stories tomorrow morning over breakfast, if you can remember the story of Sarajevo, or the story of Rwanda, then I've done my job. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Kids need structure | {0: 'General Colin Powell was the first African-American to serve as U.S. Secretary of State.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic | What I want to do this afternoon is something a little different than what's scheduled. Foreign policy, you can figure that out by watching, I don't know, Rachel Maddow or somebody, but — (Laughter) — I want to talk about young people and structure, young people and structure. This was last Wednesday afternoon at a school in Brooklyn, New York, at Cristo Rey High School, run by the Jesuits. And I was talking to this group of students, and take a look at them. They were around me in three directions. You'll noticed that almost all of them are minority. You'll notice that the building is rather austere. It's an old New York school building, nothing fancy. They still have old blackboards and whatnot. And there are about 300 kids in this school, and the school's been going now for four years, and they're about to graduate their first class. Twenty-two people are graduating, and all 22 are going to college. They all come from homes where there is, for the most part, just one person in the home, usually the mother or the grandmother, and that's it, and they come here for their education and for their structure. Now I had this picture taken, and it was put up on my Facebook page last week, and somebody wrote in, "Huh, why does he have him standing at attention like that?" And then they said, "But he looks good." (Laughter) He does look good, because kids need structure, and the trick I play in all of my school appearances is that when I get through with my little homily to the kids, I then invite them to ask questions, and when they raise their hands, I say, "Come up," and I make them come up and stand in front of me. I make them stand at attention like a soldier. Put your arms straight down at your side, look up, open your eyes, stare straight ahead, and speak out your question loudly so everybody can hear. No slouching, no pants hanging down, none of that stuff. (Laughter) And this young man, his name is — his last name Cruz — he loved it. That's all over his Facebook page and it's gone viral. (Laughter) So people think I'm being unkind to this kid. No, we're having a little fun. And the thing about it, I've done this for years, the younger they are, the more fun it is. When I get six- and seven-year-olds in a group, I have to figure out how to keep them quiet. You know that they'll always start yakking. And so I play a little game with them before I make them stand at attention. I say, "Now listen. In the army, when we want you to pay attention, we have a command. It's called 'at ease.' It means everybody be quiet and pay attention. Listen up. Do you understand?" "Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.""Let's practice. Everybody start chatting." And I let them go for about 10 seconds, then I go, "At ease!" "Huh!" (Laughter) "Yes, General. Yes, General." Try it with your kids. See if it works. (Laughter) I don't think so. But anyway, it's a game I play, and it comes obviously from my military experience. Because for the majority of my adult life, I worked with young kids, teenagers with guns, I call them. And we would bring them into the army, and the first thing we would do is to put them in an environment of structure, put them in ranks, make them all wear the same clothes, cut all their hair off so they look alike, make sure that they are standing in ranks. We teach them how to go right face, left face, so they can obey instructions and know the consequences of not obeying instructions. It gives them structure. And then we introduce them to somebody who they come to hate immediately, the drill sergeant. And they hate him. And the drill sergeant starts screaming at them, and telling them to do all kinds of awful things. But then the most amazing thing happens over time. Once that structure is developed, once they understand the reason for something, once they understand, "Mama ain't here, son. I'm your worst nightmare. I'm your daddy and your mommy. And that's just the way it is. You got that, son? Yeah, and then when I ask you a question, there are only three possible answers: yes, sir; no, sir; and no excuse, sir. Don't start telling me why you didn't do something. It's yes, sir; no, sir; no excuse, sir." "You didn't shave.""But sir —" "No, don't tell me how often you scraped your face this morning. I'm telling you you didn't shave." "No excuse, sir.""Attaboy, you're learning fast." But you'd be amazed at what you can do with them once you put them in that structure. In 18 weeks, they have a skill. They are mature. And you know what, they come to admire the drill sergeant and they never forget the drill sergeant. They come to respect him. And so we need more of this kind of structure and respect in the lives of our children. I spend a lot of time with youth groups, and I say to people, "When does the education process begin?" We're always talking about, "Let's fix the schools. Let's do more for our teachers. Let's put more computers in our schools. Let's get it all online." That isn't the whole answer. It's part of the answer. But the real answer begins with bringing a child to the school with structure in that child's heart and soul to begin with. When does the learning process begin? Does it begin in first grade? No, no, it begins the first time a child in a mother's arms looks up at the mother and says, "Oh, this must be my mother. She's the one who feeds me. Oh yeah, when I don't feel so good down there, she takes care of me. It's her language I will learn." And at that moment they shut out all the other languages that they could be learning at that age, but by three months, that's her. And if the person doing it, whether it's the mother or grandmother, whoever's doing it, that is when the education process begins. That's when language begins. That's when love begins. That's when structure begins. That's when you start to imprint on the child that "you are special, you are different from every other child in the world. And we're going to read to you." A child who has not been read to is in danger when that child gets to school. A child who doesn't know his or her colors or doesn't know how to tell time, doesn't know how to tie shoes, doesn't know how to do those things, and doesn't know how to do something that goes by a word that was drilled into me as a kid: mind. Mind your manners! Mind your adults! Mind what you're saying! This is the way children are raised properly. And I watched my own young grandchildren now come along and they're, much to the distress of my children, they are acting just like we did. You know? You imprint them. And that's what you have to do to prepare children for education and for school. And I'm working at all the energy I have to sort of communicate this message that we need preschool, we need Head Start, we need prenatal care. The education process begins even before the child is born, and if you don't do that, you're going to have difficulty. And we are having difficulties in so many of our communities and so many of our schools where kids are coming to first grade and their eyes are blazing, they've got their little knapsack on and they're ready to go, and then they realize they're not like the other first graders who know books, have been read to, can do their alphabet. And by the third grade, the kids who didn't have that structure and minding in the beginning start to realize they're behind, and what do they do? They act it out. They act it out, and they're on their way to jail or they're on their way to being dropouts. It's predictable. If you're not at the right reading level at third grade, you are a candidate for jail at age 18, and we have the highest incarceration rate because we're not getting our kids the proper start in life. The last chapter in my book is called "The Gift of a Good Start." The gift of a good start. Every child ought to have a good start in life. I was privileged to have that kind of good start. I was not a great student. I was a public school kid in New York City, and I didn't do well at all. I have my entire New York City Board of Education transcript from kindergarten through college. I wanted it when I was writing my first book. I wanted to see if my memory was correct, and, my God, it was. (Laughter) Straight C everywhere. And I finally bounced through high school, got into the City College of New York with a 78.3 average, which I shouldn't have been allowed in with, and then I started out in engineering, and that only lasted six months. (Laughter) And then I went into geology, "rocks for jocks." This is easy. And then I found ROTC. I found something that I did well and something that I loved doing, and I found a group of youngsters like me who felt the same way. And so my whole life then was dedicated to ROTC and the military. And I say to young kids everywhere, as you're growing up and as this structure is being developed inside of you, always be looking for that which you do well and that which you love doing, and when you find those two things together, man, you got it. That's what's going on. And that's what I found. Now the authorities at CCNY were getting tired of me being there. I'd been there four and a half going on five years, and my grades were not doing particularly well, and I was in occasional difficulties with the administration. And so they said, "But he does so well in ROTC. Look, he gets straight A's in that but not in anything else." And so they said, "Look, let's take his ROTC grades and roll them into his overall GPA and see what happens." And they did, and it brought me up to 2.0. (Laughter) Yep. (Laughter) (Applause) They said, "It's good enough for government work. Give him to the army. We'll never see him again. We'll never see him again." So they shipped me off to the army, and lo and behold, many years later, I'm considered one of the greatest sons the City College of New York has ever had. (Laughter) So, I tell young people everywhere, it ain't where you start in life, it's what you do with life that determines where you end up in life, and you are blessed to be living in a country that, no matter where you start, you have opportunities so long as you believe in yourself, you believe in the society and the country, and you believe that you can self-improve and educate yourself as you go along. And that's the key to success. But it begins with the gift of a good start. If we don't give that gift to each and every one of our kids, if we don't invest at the earliest age, we're going to be running into difficulties. It's why we have a dropout rate of roughly 25 percent overall and almost 50 percent of our minority population living in low-income areas, because they're not getting the gift of a good start. My gift of a good start was not only being in a nice family, a good family, but having a family that said to me, "Now listen, we came to this country in banana boats in 1920 and 1924. We worked like dogs down in the garment industry every single day. We're not doing it so that you can stick something up your nose or get in trouble. And don't even think about dropping out." If I had ever gone home and told those immigrant people that, "You know, I'm tired of school and I'm dropping out," they'd said, "We're dropping you out. We'll get another kid." (Laughter) They had expectations for all of the cousins and the extended family of immigrants that lived in the South Bronx, but they had more than just expectations for us. They stuck into our hearts like a dagger a sense of shame: "Don't you shame this family." Sometimes I would get in trouble, and my parents were coming home, and I was in my room waiting for what's going to happen, and I would sit there saying to myself, "Okay, look, take the belt and hit me, but, God, don't give me that 'shame the family' bit again." It devastated me when my mother did that to me. And I also had this extended network. Children need a network. Children need to be part of a tribe, a family, a community. In my case it was aunts who lived in all of these tenement buildings. I don't know how many of you are New Yorkers, but there were these tenement buildings, and these women were always hanging out one of the windows, leaning on a pillow. They never left. (Laughter) I, so help me God, I grew up walking those streets, and they were always there. They never went to the bathroom. They never cooked. (Laughter) They never did anything. But what they did was keep us in play. They kept us in play. And they didn't care whether you became a doctor or a lawyer or a general, and they never expected any generals in the family, as long as you got an education and then you got a job. "Don't give us any of that self-actualization stuff. You get a job and get out of the house. We don't have time to waste for that. And then you can support us. That's the role of you guys." And so, it's so essential that we kind of put this culture back into our families, all families. And it is so important that all of you here today who are successful people, and I'm sure have wonderful families and children and grandchildren, it's not enough. You've got to reach out and back and find kids like Mr. Cruz who can make it if you give them the structure, if you reach back and help, if you mentor, if you invest in boys and girls clubs, if you work with your school system, make sure it's the best school system, and not just your kid's school, but the school uptown in Harlem, not just downtown Montessori on the West Side. All of us have to have a commitment to do that. And we're not just investing in the kids. We're investing in our future. We're going to be a minority-majority country in one more generation. Those that we call minorities now are going to be the majority. And we have to make sure that they are ready to be the majority. We have to make sure they're ready to be the leaders of this great country of ours, a country that is like no other, a country that amazes me every single day, a country that's fractious. We're always arguing with each other. That's how the system's supposed to work. It's a country of such contrasts, but it's a nation of nations. We touch every nation. Every nation touches us. We are a nation of immigrants. That's why we need sound immigration policy. It's ridiculous not to have a sound immigration policy to welcome those who want to come here and be part of this great nation, or we can send back home with an education to help their people rise up out of poverty. One of the great stories I love to tell is about my love of going to my hometown of New York and walking up Park Avenue on a beautiful day and admiring everything and seeing all the people go by from all over the world. But what I always have to do is stop at one of the corners and get a hot dog from the immigrant pushcart peddler. Gotta have a dirty water dog. (Laughter) And no matter where I am or what I'm doing, I've got to do that. I even did it when I was Secretary of State. I'd come out of my suite at the Waldorf Astoria — (Laughter) — be walking up the street, and I would hit around 55th Street looking for the immigrant pushcart peddler. In those days, I had five bodyguards around me and three New York City police cars would roll alongside to make sure nobody whacked me while I was going up Park Avenue. (Laughter) And I would order the hot dog from the guy, and he'd start to fix it, and then he'd look around at the bodyguards and the police cars — "I've got a green card! I've got a green card!" (Laughter) "It's okay, it's okay." But now I'm alone. I'm alone. I've got no bodyguards, I've got no police cars. I've got nothing. But I gotta have my hot dog. I did it just last week. It was on a Tuesday evening down by Columbus Circle. And the scene repeats itself so often. I'll go up and ask for my hot dog, and the guy will fix it, and as he's finishing, he'll say, "I know you. I see you on television. You're, well, you're General Powell." "Yes, yes.""Oh ... " I hand him the money. "No, General. You can't pay me. I've been paid. America has paid me. I never forget where I came from. But now I'm an American. Sir, thank you." I accept the generosity, continue up the street, and it washes over me, my God, it's the same country that greeted my parents this way 90 years ago. So we are still that magnificent country, but we are fueled by young people coming up from every land in the world, and it is our obligation as contributing citizens to this wonderful country of ours to make sure that no child gets left behind. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A universal translator for surgeons | {0: "Dr. Steven Schwaitzberg is on a mission to teach surgeons around the world to perform minimally invasive surgery. But first, he's had to find the right technology to allow communication across the language barrier. "} | TEDxBeaconStreet | So I want to talk to you about two things tonight. Number one: Teaching surgery and doing surgery is really hard. And second, that language is one of the most profound things that separate us all over the world. And in my little corner of the world, these two things are actually related, and I want to tell you how tonight. Now, nobody wants an operation. Who here has had surgery? Did you want it? Keep your hands up if you wanted an operation. Nobody wants an operation. In particular, nobody wants an operation with tools like these through large incisions that cause a lot of pain, that cause a lot of time out of work or out of school, that leave a big scar. But if you have to have an operation, what you really want is a minimally invasive operation. That's what I want to talk to you about tonight — how doing and teaching this type of surgery led us on a search for a better universal translator. Now, this type of surgery is hard, and it starts by putting people to sleep, putting carbon dioxide in their abdomen, blowing them up like a balloon, sticking one of these sharp pointy things into their abdomen — it's dangerous stuff — and taking instruments and watching it on a TV screen. So let's see what it looks like. So this is gallbladder surgery. We perform a million of these a year in the United States alone. This is the real thing. There's no blood. And you can see how focused the surgeons are, how much concentration it takes. You can see it in their faces. It's hard to teach, and it's not all that easy to learn. We do about five million of these in the United States and maybe 20 million of these worldwide. All right, you've all heard the term: "He's a born surgeon." Let me tell you, surgeons are not born. Surgeons are not made either. There are no little tanks where we're making surgeons. Surgeons are trained one step at a time. It starts with a foundation, basic skills. We build on that and we take people, hopefully, to the operating room where they learn to be an assistant. Then we teach them to be a surgeon in training. And when they do all of that for about five years, they get the coveted board certification. If you need surgery, you want to be operated on by a board-certified surgeon. You get your board certificate, and you can go out into practice. And eventually, if you're lucky, you achieve mastery. Now that foundation is so important that a number of us from the largest general surgery society in the United States, SAGES, started in the late 1990s a training program that would assure that every surgeon who practices minimally invasive surgery would have a strong foundation of knowledge and skills necessary to go on and do procedures. Now the science behind this is so potent that it became required by the American Board of Surgery in order for a young surgeon to become board certified. It's not a lecture, it's not a course, it's all of that plus a high-stakes assessment. It's hard. Now just this past year, one of our partners, the American College of Surgeons, teamed up with us to make an announcement that all surgeons should be FLS (Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery)-certified before they do minimally invasive surgery. And are we talking about just people here in the U.S. and Canada? No, we just said all surgeons. So to lift this education and training worldwide is a very large task, something I'm very personally excited about as we travel around the world. SAGES does surgery all over the world, teaching and educating surgeons. So we have a problem, and one of the problems is distance. We can't travel everywhere. We need to make the world a smaller place. And I think that we can develop some tools to do so. And one of the tools I like personally is using video. So I was inspired by a friend. This is Allan Okrainec from Toronto. And he proved that you could actually teach people to do surgery using video conferencing. So here's Allan teaching an English-speaking surgeon in Africa these basic fundamental skills necessary to do minimally invasive surgery. Very inspiring. But for this examination, which is really hard, we have a problem. Even people who say they speak English, only 14 percent pass. Because for them it's not a surgery test, it's an English test. Let me bring it to you locally. I work at the Cambridge Hospital. It's the primary Harvard Medical School teaching facility. We have more than 100 translators covering 63 languages, and we spend millions of dollars just in our little hospital. It's a big labor-intensive effort. If you think about the worldwide burden of trying to talk to your patients — not just teaching surgeons, just trying to talk to your patients — there aren't enough translators in the world. We need to employ technology to assist us in this quest. At our hospital we see everybody from Harvard professors to people who just got here last week. And you have no idea how hard it is to talk to somebody or take care of somebody you can't talk to. And there isn't always a translator available. So we need tools. We need a universal translator. One of the things that I want to leave you with as you think about this talk is that this talk is not just about us preaching to the world. It's really about setting up a dialogue. We have a lot to learn. Here in the United States we spend more money per person for outcomes that are not better than many countries in the world. Maybe we have something to learn as well. So I'm passionate about teaching these FLS skills all over the world. This past year I've been in Latin America, I've been in China, talking about the fundamentals of laparoscopic surgery. And everywhere I go the barrier is: "We want this, but we need it in our language." So here's what we think we want to do: Imagine giving a lecture and being able to talk to people in their own native language simultaneously. I want to talk to the people in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe seamlessly, accurately and in a cost-effective fashion using technology. And it has to be bi-directional. They have to be able to teach us something as well. It's a big task. So we looked for a universal translator; I thought there would be one out there. Your webpage has translation, your cellphone has translation, but nothing that's good enough to teach surgery. Because we need a lexicon. What is a lexicon? A lexicon is a body of words that describes a domain. I need to have a health care lexicon. And in that I need a surgery lexicon. That's a tall order. We have to work at it. So let me show you what we're doing. This is research — can't buy it. We're working with the folks at IBM Research from the Accessibility Center to string together technologies to work towards the universal translator. It starts with a framework system where when the surgeon delivers the lecture using a framework of captioning technology, we then add another technology to do video conferencing. But we don't have the words yet, so we add a third technology. And now we've got the words, and we can apply the special sauce: the translation. We get the words up in a window and then apply the magic. We work with a fourth technology. And we currently have access to eleven language pairs. More to come as we think about trying to make the world a smaller place. And I'd like to show you our prototype of stringing all of these technologies that don't necessarily always talk to each other to become something useful. Narrator: Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery. Module five: manual skills practice. Students may display captions in their native language. Steven Schwaitzberg: If you're in Latin America, you click the "I want it in Spanish" button and out it comes in real time in Spanish. But if you happen to be sitting in Beijing at the same time, by using technology in a constructive fashion, you could get it in Mandarin or you could get it in Russian — on and on and on, simultaneously without the use of human translators. But that's the lectures. If you remember what I told you about FLS at the beginning, it's knowledge and skills. The difference in an operation between doing something successfully and not may be moving your hand this much. So we're going to take it one step further; we've brought my friend Allan back. Allan Okrainec: Today we're going to practice suturing. This is how you hold the needle. Grab the needle at the tip. It's important to be accurate. Aim for the black dots. Orient your loop this way. Now go ahead and cut. Very good Oscar. I'll see you next week. SS: So that's what we're working on in our quest for the universal translator. We want it to be bi-directional. We have a need to learn as well as to teach. I can think of a million uses for a tool like this. As we think about intersecting technologies — everybody has a cell phone with a camera — we could use this everywhere, whether it be health care, patient care, engineering, law, conferencing, translating videos. This is a ubiquitous tool. In order to break down our barriers, we have to learn to talk to people, to demand that people work on translation. We need it for our everyday life, in order to make the world a smaller place. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why domestic violence victims don't leave | {0: 'Leslie Morgan Steiner is a writer and outspoken advocate for survivors of domestic violence -- which includes herself.'} | TEDxRainier | I'm here today to talk about a disturbing question, which has an equally disturbing answer. My topic is the secrets of domestic violence, and the question I'm going to tackle is the one question everyone always asks: Why does she stay? Why would anyone stay with a man who beats her? I'm not a psychiatrist, a social worker or an expert in domestic violence. I'm just one woman with a story to tell. I was 22. I had just graduated from Harvard College. I had moved to New York City for my first job as a writer and editor at Seventeen magazine. I had my first apartment, my first little green American Express card, and I had a very big secret. My secret was that I had this gun loaded with hollow-point bullets pointed at my head by the man who I thought was my soulmate, many, many times. The man who I loved more than anybody on Earth held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me more times than I can even remember. I'm here to tell you the story of crazy love, a psychological trap disguised as love, one that millions of women and even a few men fall into every year. It may even be your story. I don't look like a typical domestic violence survivor. I have a B.A. in English from Harvard College, an MBA in marketing from Wharton Business School. I've spent most of my career working for Fortune 500 companies including Johnson & Johnson, Leo Burnett and The Washington Post. I've been married for almost 20 years to my second husband and we have three kids together. My dog is a black lab, and I drive a Honda Odyssey minivan. (Laughter) So my first message for you is that domestic violence happens to everyone — all races, all religions, all income and education levels. It's everywhere. And my second message is that everyone thinks domestic violence happens to women, that it's a women's issue. Not exactly. Over 85 percent of abusers are men, and domestic abuse happens only in intimate, interdependent, long-term relationships, in other words, in families, the last place we would want or expect to find violence, which is one reason domestic abuse is so confusing. I would have told you myself that I was the last person on Earth who would stay with a man who beats me, but in fact I was a very typical victim because of my age. I was 22, and in the United States, women ages 16 to 24 are three times as likely to be domestic violence victims as women of other ages, and over 500 women and girls this age are killed every year by abusive partners, boyfriends, and husbands in the United States. I was also a very typical victim because I knew nothing about domestic violence, its warning signs or its patterns. I met Conor on a cold, rainy January night. He sat next to me on the New York City subway, and he started chatting me up. He told me two things. One was that he, too, had just graduated from an Ivy League school, and that he worked at a very impressive Wall Street bank. But what made the biggest impression on me that first meeting was that he was smart and funny and he looked like a farm boy. He had these big cheeks, these big apple cheeks and this wheat-blond hair, and he seemed so sweet. One of the smartest things Conor did, from the very beginning, was to create the illusion that I was the dominant partner in the relationship. He did this especially at the beginning by idolizing me. We started dating, and he loved everything about me, that I was smart, that I'd gone to Harvard, that I was passionate about helping teenage girls, and my job. He wanted to know everything about my family and my childhood and my hopes and dreams. Conor believed in me, as a writer and a woman, in a way that no one else ever had. And he also created a magical atmosphere of trust between us by confessing his secret, which was that, as a very young boy starting at age four, he had been savagely and repeatedly physically abused by his stepfather, and the abuse had gotten so bad that he had had to drop out of school in eighth grade, even though he was very smart, and he'd spent almost 20 years rebuilding his life. Which is why that Ivy League degree and the Wall Street job and his bright shiny future meant so much to him. If you had told me that this smart, funny, sensitive man who adored me would one day dictate whether or not I wore makeup, how short my skirts were, where I lived, what jobs I took, who my friends were and where I spent Christmas, I would have laughed at you, because there was not a hint of violence or control or anger in Conor at the beginning. I didn't know that the first stage in any domestic violence relationship is to seduce and charm the victim. I also didn't know that the second step is to isolate the victim. Now, Conor did not come home one day and announce, "You know, hey, all this Romeo and Juliet stuff has been great, but I need to move into the next phase where I isolate you and I abuse you" — (Laughter) — "so I need to get you out of this apartment where the neighbors can hear you scream and out of this city where you have friends and family and coworkers who can see the bruises." Instead, Conor came home one Friday evening and he told me that he had quit his job that day, his dream job, and he said that he had quit his job because of me, because I had made him feel so safe and loved that he didn't need to prove himself on Wall Street anymore, and he just wanted to get out of the city and away from his abusive, dysfunctional family, and move to a tiny town in New England where he could start his life over with me by his side. Now, the last thing I wanted to do was leave New York, and my dream job, but I thought you made sacrifices for your soulmate, so I agreed, and I quit my job, and Conor and I left Manhattan together. I had no idea I was falling into crazy love, that I was walking headfirst into a carefully laid physical, financial and psychological trap. The next step in the domestic violence pattern is to introduce the threat of violence and see how she reacts. And here's where those guns come in. As soon as we moved to New England — you know, that place where Connor was supposed to feel so safe — he bought three guns. He kept one in the glove compartment of our car. He kept one under the pillows on our bed, and the third one he kept in his pocket at all times. And he said that he needed those guns because of the trauma he'd experienced as a young boy. He needed them to feel protected. But those guns were really a message for me, and even though he hadn't raised a hand to me, my life was already in grave danger every minute of every day. Conor first physically attacked me five days before our wedding. It was 7 a.m. I still had on my nightgown. I was working on my computer trying to finish a freelance writing assignment, and I got frustrated, and Conor used my anger as an excuse to put both of his hands around my neck and to squeeze so tightly that I could not breathe or scream, and he used the chokehold to hit my head repeatedly against the wall. Five days later, the ten bruises on my neck had just faded, and I put on my mother's wedding dress, and I married him. Despite what had happened, I was sure we were going to live happily ever after, because I loved him, and he loved me so much. And he was very, very sorry. He had just been really stressed out by the wedding and by becoming a family with me. It was an isolated incident, and he was never going to hurt me again. It happened twice more on the honeymoon. The first time, I was driving to find a secret beach and I got lost, and he punched me in the side of my head so hard that the other side of my head repeatedly hit the driver's side window. And then a few days later, driving home from our honeymoon, he got frustrated by traffic, and he threw a cold Big Mac in my face. Conor proceeded to beat me once or twice a week for the next two and a half years of our marriage. I was mistaken in thinking that I was unique and alone in this situation. One in three American women experiences domestic violence or stalking at some point in her life, and the CDC reports that 15 million children are abused every year, 15 million. So actually, I was in very good company. Back to my question: Why did I stay? The answer is easy. I didn't know he was abusing me. Even though he held those loaded guns to my head, pushed me down stairs, threatened to kill our dog, pulled the key out of the car ignition as I drove down the highway, poured coffee grinds on my head as I dressed for a job interview, I never once thought of myself as a battered wife. Instead, I was a very strong woman in love with a deeply troubled man, and I was the only person on Earth who could help Conor face his demons. The other question everybody asks is, why doesn't she just leave? Why didn't I walk out? I could have left any time. To me, this is the saddest and most painful question that people ask, because we victims know something you usually don't: It's incredibly dangerous to leave an abuser. Because the final step in the domestic violence pattern is kill her. Over 70 percent of domestic violence murders happen after the victim has ended the relationship, after she's gotten out, because then the abuser has nothing left to lose. Other outcomes include long-term stalking, even after the abuser remarries; denial of financial resources; and manipulation of the family court system to terrify the victim and her children, who are regularly forced by family court judges to spend unsupervised time with the man who beat their mother. And still we ask, why doesn't she just leave? I was able to leave, because of one final, sadistic beating that broke through my denial. I realized that the man who I loved so much was going to kill me if I let him. So I broke the silence. I told everyone: the police, my neighbors, my friends and family, total strangers, and I'm here today because you all helped me. We tend to stereotype victims as grisly headlines, self-destructive women, damaged goods. The question, "Why does she stay?" is code for some people for, "It's her fault for staying," as if victims intentionally choose to fall in love with men intent upon destroying us. But since publishing "Crazy Love," I have heard hundreds of stories from men and women who also got out, who learned an invaluable life lesson from what happened, and who rebuilt lives — joyous, happy lives — as employees, wives and mothers, lives completely free of violence, like me. Because it turns out that I'm actually a very typical domestic violence victim and a typical domestic violence survivor. I remarried a kind and gentle man, and we have those three kids. I have that black lab, and I have that minivan. What I will never have again, ever, is a loaded gun held to my head by someone who says that he loves me. Right now, maybe you're thinking, "Wow, this is fascinating," or, "Wow, how stupid was she," but this whole time, I've actually been talking about you. I promise you there are several people listening to me right now who are currently being abused or who were abused as children or who are abusers themselves. Abuse could be affecting your daughter, your sister, your best friend right now. I was able to end my own crazy love story by breaking the silence. I'm still breaking the silence today. It's my way of helping other victims, and it's my final request of you. Talk about what you heard here. Abuse thrives only in silence. You have the power to end domestic violence simply by shining a spotlight on it. We victims need everyone. We need every one of you to understand the secrets of domestic violence. Show abuse the light of day by talking about it with your children, your coworkers, your friends and family. Recast survivors as wonderful, lovable people with full futures. Recognize the early signs of violence and conscientiously intervene, deescalate it, show victims a safe way out. Together we can make our beds, our dinner tables and our families the safe and peaceful oases they should be. Thank you. (Applause) |
A new kind of job market | {0: "Wingham Rowan's work bridges the gap between flexible work schedules and modern financial markets. "} | TEDSalon London Fall 2012 | This is about a hidden corner of the labor market. It's the world of people who need to work ultra-flexibly, if they're to work at all. So think, for instance, of someone who has a recurring but unpredictable medical condition, or somebody who's caring for a dependent adult, or a parent with complex child care needs. Their availability for work can be such that it's, "A few hours today. Maybe I can work tomorrow, but I don't know if and when yet." And it's extraordinarily difficult for these people to find the work that they so often need very badly. Which is a tragedy because there are employers who can use pools of very flexible local people booked completely ad hoc around when that person wants to work. Imagine that you run a cafe. It's mid-morning, the place is filling up. You're going to have a busy lunchtime rush. If you could get two extra workers for 90 minutes to start in an hour's time, you'd do it, but they'd have to be reliable, inducted in how your cafe works. They'd have to be available at very competitive rates. They'd have to be bookable in about the next minute. In reality, no recruitment agency wants to handle that sort of business, so you are going to muddle by, understaffed. And it's not just caterers, it's hoteliers, it's retailers, it's anyone who provides services to the public or businesses. There's all sorts of organizations that can use these pools of very flexible people, possibly already once they've been inducted. At this level of the labor market, what you need is a marketplace for spare hours. They do exist. Here's how they work. So in this example, a distribution company has said, we've got a rush order that we've got to get out of the warehouse tomorrow morning. Show us everyone who's available. It's found 31 workers. Everybody on this screen is genuinely available at those specific hours tomorrow. They're all contactable in time for this booking. They've all defined the terms on which they will accept bookings. And this booking is within all the parameters for each individual. And they would all be legally compliant by doing this booking. Of course, they're all trained to work in warehouses. You can select as many of them as you want. They're from multiple agencies. It's calculated the charge rate for each person for this specific booking. And it's monitoring their reliability. The people on the top row are the provenly reliable ones. They're likely to be more expensive. In an alternative view of this pool of local, very flexible people, here's a market research company, and it's inducted maybe 25 local people in how to do street interviewing. And they've got a new campaign. They want to run it next week. And they're looking at how many of the people they've inducted are available each hour next week. And they'll then decide when to do their street interviews. But is there more that could be done for this corner of the labor market? Because right now there are so many people who need whatever economic opportunity they can get. Let's make it personal. Imagine that a young woman — base of the economic pyramid, very little prospect of getting a job — what economic activity could she theoretically engage in? Well, she might be willing to work odd hours in a call center, in a reception area, in a mail room. She may be interested in providing local services to her community: babysitting, local deliveries, pet care. She may have possessions that she would like to trade at times she doesn't need them. So she might have a sofa bed in her front room that she would like to let out. She might have a bike, a video games console she only uses occasionally. And you're probably thinking — because you're all very web-aware — yes, and we're in the era of collaborative consumption, so she can go online and do all this. She can go to Airbnb to list her sofa bed, she can go to TaskRabbit.com and say, "I want to do local deliveries," and so on. These are good sites, but I believe we can go a step further. And the key to that is a philosophy that we call modern markets for all. Markets have changed beyond recognition in the last 20 years, but only for organizations at the top of the economy. If you're a Wall Street trader, you now take it for granted that you sell your financial assets in a system of markets that identifies the most profitable opportunities for you in real time, executes on that in microseconds within the boundaries you've set. It analyzes supply and demand and pricing and tells you where your next wave of opportunities are coming from. It manages counterparty risk in incredibly sophisticated ways. It's all extremely low overhead. What have we gained at the bottom of the economy in terms of markets in the last 20 years? Basically classified adverts with a search facility. So why do we have this disparity between these incredibly sophisticated markets at the top of the economy that are increasingly sucking more and more activity and resource out of the main economy into this rarefied level of trading, and what the rest of us have? A modern market is more than a website; it's a web of interoperable marketplaces, back office mechanisms, regulatory regimes, settlement mechanisms, liquidity sources and so on. And when a Wall Street trader comes into work in the morning, she does not write a listing for every financial derivative she wants to sell today and then post that listing on multiple websites and wait for potential buyers to get in touch and start negotiating the terms on which she might trade. In the early days of this modern markets technology, the financial institutions worked out how they could leverage their buying power, their back office processes, their relationships, their networks to shape these new markets that would create all this new activity. They asked governments for supporting regulatory regimes, and in a lot of cases they got it. But throughout the economy, there are facilities that could likewise leverage a new generation of markets for the benefit of all of us. And those facilities — I'm talking about things like the mechanisms that prove our identity, the licensing authorities that know what each of us is allowed to do legally at any given time, the processes by which we resolve disputes through official channels. These mechanisms, these facilities are not in the gift of Craigslist or Gumtree or Yahoo, they're controlled by the state. And the policymakers who sit on top of them are, I suggest, simply not thinking about how those facilities could be used to underpin a whole new era of markets. Like everyone else, those policymakers are taking it for granted that modern markets are the preserve of organizations powerful enough to create them for themselves. Suppose we stopped taking that for granted. Suppose tomorrow morning the prime minister of Britain or the president of the U.S., or the leader of any other developed nation, woke up and said, "I'm never going to be able to create all the jobs I need in the current climate. I have got to focus on whatever economic opportunity I can get to my citizens. And for that they have to be able to access state-of-the-art markets. How do I make that happen?" And I think I can see a few eyes rolling. Politicians in a big, complex, sophisticated I.T. project? Oh, that's going to be a disaster waiting to happen. Not necessarily. There is a precedent for technology-enabled service that has been initiated by politicians in multiple countries and has been hugely successful: national lotteries. Let's take Britain as an example. Our government didn't design the national lottery, it didn't fund the national lottery, it doesn't operate the national lottery. It simply passed the National Lottery Act and this is what followed. This act defines what a national lottery will look like. It specifies certain benefits that the state can uniquely bestow on the operators. And it puts some obligations on those operators. In terms of spreading gambling activity to the masses, this was an unqualified success. But let's suppose that our aim is to bring new economic activity to the base of the pyramid. Could we use the same model? I believe we could. So imagine that policymakers outlined a facility. Let's call it national e-markets, NEMs for short. Think of it as a regulated public utility. So it's on a par with the water supply or the road network. And it's a series of markets for low-level trade that can be fulfilled by a person or a small company. And government has certain benefits it can uniquely bestow on these markets. It's about public spending going through these markets to buy public services at the local level. It's about interfacing these markets direct into the highest official channels in the land. It's about enshrining government's role as a publicist for these markets. It's about deregulating some sectors so that local people can enter them. So, taxi journeys might be one example. And there are certain obligations that should go with those benefits to be placed on the operators, and the key one is, of course, that the operators pay for everything, including all the interfacing into the public sector. So imagine that the operators make their return by building a percentage markup into each transaction. Imagine that there's a concession period defined of maybe 15 years in which they can take all these benefits and run with them. And imagine that the consortia who bid to run it are told, whoever comes in at the lowest percentage markup on each transaction to fund the whole thing will get the deal. So government then exits the frame. This is now in the hands of the consortium. Either they are going to unlock an awful lot of economic opportunity and make a percentage on all of it or it's all going to crash and burn, which is tough on their shareholders. It doesn't bother the taxpayer necessarily. And there would be no constraints on alternative markets. So this would just be one more choice among millions of Internet forums. But it could be very different, because having access to those state-backed facilities could incentivize this consortium to seriously invest in the service. Because they would have to get a lot of these small transactions going to start making their return. So we're talking about sectors like home hair care, the hire of toys, farm work, hire of clothes even, meals delivered to your door, services for tourists, home care. This would be a world of very small trades, but very well-informed, because national e-markets will deliver data. So this is a local person potentially deciding whether to enter the babysitting market. And they might be aware that they would have to fund vetting and training if they wanted to go into that market. They'd have to do assessment interviews with local parents who wanted a pool of babysitters. Is it worth their while? Should they be looking at other sectors? Should they be moving to another part of the country where there's a shortage of babysitters? This kind of data can become routine. And this data can be used by investors. So if there's a problem with a shortage of babysitters in some parts of the country and the problem is nobody can afford the vetting and training, an investor can pay for it and the system will tithe back the enhanced earnings of the individuals for maybe the next two years. This is a world of atomized capitalism. So it's small trades by small people, but it's very informed, safe, convenient, low-overhead and immediate. Some rough research suggests this could unlock around 100 million pounds' worth a day of new economic activity in a country the size of the U.K. Does that sound improbable to you? That's what a lot of people said about turbo trading in financial exchanges 20 years ago. Do not underestimate the transformative power of truly modern markets. Thank you. (Applause) |
Let's teach kids to code | {0: 'Mitch Resnick directs the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT Media Lab, dedicated to helping kids of all ages tinker and experiment with design.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | It was a Saturday afternoon in May, and I suddenly realized that the next day was Mother's Day, and I hadn't gotten anything for my mom, so I started thinking about what should I get my mom for Mother's Day? I thought, why don't I make her an interactive Mother's Day card using the Scratch software that I'd been developing with my research group at the MIT Media Lab? We developed it so that people could easily create their own interactive stories and games and animations, and then share their creations with one another. So I thought, this would be an opportunity to use Scratch to make an interactive card for my mom. Before making my own Mother's Day card, I thought I would take a look at the Scratch website. So over the last several years, kids around the world ages 8 and up, have shared their projects, and I thought, I wonder if, of those three million projects, whether anyone else has thought to put up Mother's Day cards. So in the search box I typed in "Mother's Day," and I was surprised and delighted to see a list of dozens and dozens of Mother's Day cards that showed up on the Scratch website, many of them just in the past 24 hours by procrastinators just like myself. So I started taking a look at them. (Music) I saw one of them that featured a kitten and her mom and wishing her mom a happy Mother's Day. And the creator very considerately offered a replay for her mom. Another one was an interactive project where, when you moved the mouse over the letters of "Happy Mom Day," it reveals a special happy Mother's Day slogan. (Music) In this one, the creator told a narrative about how she had Googled to find out when Mother's Day was happening. (Typing) And then once she found out when Mother's Day was happening, she delivered a special Mother's Day greeting of how much she loved her mom. So I really enjoyed looking at these projects and interacting with these projects. In fact, I liked it so much that, instead of making my own project, I sent my mom links to about a dozen of these projects. (Laughter) And actually, she reacted exactly the way that I hoped that she would. She wrote back to me and she said, "I'm so proud to have a son that created the software that allowed these kids to make Mother's Day cards for their mothers." So my mom was happy, and that made me happy, but actually I was even happier for another reason. I was happy because these kids were using Scratch just in the way that we had hoped that they would. As they created their interactive Mother's Day cards, you could see that they were really becoming fluent with new technologies. What do I mean by fluent? I mean that they were able to start expressing themselves and to start expressing their ideas. When you become fluent with language, it means you can write an entry in your journal or tell a joke to someone or write a letter to a friend. And it's similar with new technologies. By writing, be creating these interactive Mother's Day cards, these kids were showing that they were really fluent with new technologies. Now maybe you won't be so surprised by this, because a lot of times people feel that young people today can do all sorts of things with technology. I mean, all of us have heard young people referred to as "digital natives." But actually I'm sort of skeptical about this term. I'm not so sure we should be thinking of young people as digital natives. When you really look at it, how is it that young people spend most of their time using new technologies? You often see them in situations like this, or like this, and there's no doubt that young people are very comfortable and familiar browsing and chatting and texting and gaming. But that doesn't really make you fluent. So young people today have lots of experience and lots of familiarity with interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating with new technologies and expressing themselves with new technologies. It's almost as if they can read but not write with new technologies. And I'm really interested in seeing, how can we help young people become fluent so they can write with new technologies? And that really means that they need to be able to write their own computer programs, or code. So, increasingly, people are starting to recognize the importance of learning to code. You know, in recent years, there have been hundreds of new organizations and websites that are helping young people learn to code. You look online, you'll see places like Codecademy and events like CoderDojo and sites like Girls Who Code, or Black Girls Code. It seems that everybody is getting into the act. You know, just at the beginning of this year, at the turn of the new year, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a New Year's resolution that he was going to learn to code in 2012. A few months later, the country of Estonia decided that all of its first graders should learn to code. And that triggered a debate in the U.K. about whether all the children there should learn to code. Now, for some of you, when you hear about this, it might seem sort of strange about everybody learning to code. When many people think of coding, they think of it as something that only a very narrow sub-community of people are going to be doing, and they think of coding looking like this. And in fact, if this is what coding is like, it will only be a narrow sub-community of people with special mathematical skills and technological background that can code. But coding doesn't have to be like this. Let me show you about what it's like to code in Scratch. So in Scratch, to code, you just snap blocks together. In this case, you take a move block, snap it into a stack, and the stacks of blocks control the behaviors of the different characters in your game or your story, in this case controlling the big fish. After you've created your program, you can click on "share," and then share your project with other people, so that they can use the project and start working on the project as well. So, of course, making a fish game isn't the only thing you can do with Scratch. Of the millions of projects on the Scratch website, there's everything from animated stories to school science projects to anime soap operas to virtual construction kits to recreations of classic video games to political opinion polls to trigonometry tutorials to interactive artwork, and, yes, interactive Mother's Day cards. So I think there's so many different ways that people can express themselves using this, to be able to take their ideas and share their ideas with the world. And it doesn't just stay on the screen. You can also code to interact with the physical world around you. Here's an example from Hong Kong, where some kids made a game and then built their own physical interface device and had a light sensor, so the light sensor detects the hole in the board, so as they move the physical saw, the light sensor detects the hole and controls the virtual saw on the screen and saws down the tree. We're going to continue to look at new ways of bringing together the physical world and the virtual world and connecting to the world around us. This is an example from a new version of Scratch that we'll be releasing in the next few months, and we're looking again to be able to push you in new directions. Here's an example. It uses the webcam. And as I move my hand, I can pop the balloons or I can move the bug. So it's a little bit like Microsoft Kinect, where you interact with gestures in the world. But instead of just playing someone else's game, you get to create the games, and if you see someone else's game, you can just say "see inside," and you can look at the stacks of blocks that control it. So there's a new block that says how much video motion there is, and then, if there's so much video motion, it will then tell the balloon to pop. The same way that this uses the camera to get information into Scratch, you can also use the microphone. Here's an example of a project using the microphone. So I'm going to let all of you control this game using your voices. (Crickets chirping) (Shouts) (Chomping) (Laughter) (Applause) As kids are creating projects like this, they're learning to code, but even more importantly, they're coding to learn. Because as they learn to code, it enables them to learn many other things, opens up many new opportunities for learning. Again, it's useful to make an analogy to reading and writing. When you learn to read and write, it opens up opportunities for you to learn so many other things. When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it's the same thing with coding. If you learn to code, you can code to learn. Now some of the things you can learn are sort of obvious. You learn more about how computers work. But that's just where it starts. When you learn to code, it opens up for you to learn many other things. Let me show you an example. Here's another project, and I saw this when I was visiting one of the computer clubhouses. These are after-school learning centers that we helped start that help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. And when I went to one of the clubhouses a couple years ago, I saw a 13-year-old boy who was using our Scratch software to create a game somewhat like this one, and he was very happy with his game and proud of his game, but also he wanted to do more. He wanted to keep score. So this was a game where the big fish eats the little fish, but he wanted to keep score, so that each time the big fish eats the little fish, the score would go up and it would keep track, and he didn't know how to do that. So I showed him. In Scratch, you can create something called a variable. I'll call it score. And that creates some new blocks for you, and also creates a little scoreboard that keeps track of the score, so each time I click on "change score," it increments the score. So I showed this to the clubhouse member — let's call him Victor — and Victor, when he saw that this block would let him increment the score, he knew exactly what to do. He took the block and he put it into the program exactly where the big fish eats the little fish. So then, each time the big fish eats the little fish, he will increment the score, and the score will go up by one. And it's in fact working. And he saw this, and he was so excited, he reached his hand out to me, and he said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you." And what went through my mind was, how often is it that teachers are thanked by their students for teaching them variables? (Laughter) It doesn't happen in most classrooms, but that's because in most classrooms, when kids learn about variables, they don't know why they're learning it. It's nothing that, really, they can make use of. When you learn ideas like this in Scratch, you can learn it in a way that's really meaningful and motivating for you, that you can understand the reason for learning variables, and we see that kids learn it more deeply and learn it better. Victor had, I'm sure, been taught about variables in schools, but he really didn't — he wasn't paying attention. Now he had a reason for learning variables. So when you learn through coding, and coding to learn, you're learning it in a meaningful context, and that's the best way of learning things. So as kids like Victor are creating projects like this, they're learning important concepts like variables, but that's just the start. As Victor worked on this project and created the scripts, he was also learning about the process of design, how to start with the glimmer of an idea and turn it into a fully-fledged, functioning project like you see here. So he was learning many different core principles of design, about how to experiment with new ideas, how to take complex ideas and break them down into simpler parts, how to collaborate with other people on your projects, about how to find and fix bugs when things go wrong, how to keep persistent and to persevere in the face of frustrations when things aren't working well. Now those are important skills that aren't just relevant for coding. They're relevant for all sorts of different activities. Now, who knows if Victor is going to grow up and become a programmer or a professional computer scientist? It's probably not so likely, but regardless of what he does, he'll be able to make use of these design skills that he learned. Regardless of whether he grows up to be a marketing manager or a mechanic or a community organizer, that these ideas are useful for everybody. Again, it's useful to think about this analogy with language. When you become fluent with reading and writing, it's not something that you're doing just to become a professional writer. Very few people become professional writers. But it's useful for everybody to learn how to read and write. Again, the same thing with coding. Most people won't grow up to become professional computer scientists or programmers, but those skills of thinking creatively, reasoning systematically, working collaboratively — skills you develop when you code in Scratch — are things that people can use no matter what they're doing in their work lives. And it's not just about your work life. Coding can also enable you to express your ideas and feelings in your personal life. Let me end with just one more example. So this is an example that came from after I had sent the Mother's Day cards to my mom, she decided that she wanted to learn Scratch. So she made this project for my birthday and sent me a happy birthday Scratch card. Now this project is not going to win any prizes for design, and you can rest assured that my 83-year-old mom is not training to become a professional programmer or computer scientist. But working on this project enabled her to make a connection to someone that she cares about and enabled her to keep on learning new things and continuing to practice her creativity and developing new ways of expressing herself. So as we take a look and we see that Michael Bloomberg is learning to code, all of the children of Estonia learn to code, even my mom has learned to code, don't you think it's about time that you might be thinking about learning to code? If you're interested in giving it a try, I'd encourage you to go to the Scratch website. It's scratch.mit.edu, and give a try at coding. Thanks very much. (Applause) |
Fifty shades of gay | {0: 'As a child actor, iO Tillett Wright turned his shoes around in the bathroom stall so that people would think he was a boy. As a teenager, he fell in love with both women and men. His life in the gray areas of gender and sexuality deeply inform his work as an artist. '} | TEDxWomen 2012 | Human beings start putting each other into boxes the second that they see each other — Is that person dangerous? Are they attractive? Are they a potential mate? Are they a potential networking opportunity? We do this little interrogation when we meet people to make a mental resume for them. What's your name? Where are you from? How old are you? What do you do? Then we get more personal with it. Have you ever had any diseases? Have you ever been divorced? Does your breath smell bad while you're answering my interrogation right now? What are you into? Who are you into? What gender do you like to sleep with? I get it. We are neurologically hardwired to seek out people like ourselves. We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enough to know what acceptance feels like. We bond together based on anything that we can — music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on. We seek out environments that reinforce our personal choices. Sometimes, though, just the question "what do you do?" can feel like somebody's opening a tiny little box and asking you to squeeze yourself inside of it. Because the categories, I've found, are too limiting. The boxes are too narrow. And this can get really dangerous. So here's a disclaimer about me, though, before we get too deep into this. I grew up in a very sheltered environment. I was raised in downtown Manhattan in the early 1980s, two blocks from the epicenter of punk music. I was shielded from the pains of bigotry and the social restrictions of a religiously-based upbringing. Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinker or a performance artist of some kind, you were the weirdo. (Laughter) It was an unorthodox upbringing, but as a kid on the streets of New York, you learn how to trust your own instincts, you learn how to go with your own ideas. So when I was six, I decided that I wanted to be a boy. I went to school one day and the kids wouldn't let me play basketball with them. They said they wouldn't let girls play. So I went home, and I shaved my head, and I came back the next day and I said, "I'm a boy." I mean, who knows, right? When you're six, maybe you can do that. I didn't want anyone to know that I was a girl, and they didn't. I kept up the charade for eight years. So this is me when I was 11. I was playing a kid named Walter in a movie called "Julian Po." I was a little street tough that followed Christian Slater around and badgered him. See, I was also a child actor, which doubled up the layers of the performance of my identity, because no one knew that I was actually a girl really playing a boy. In fact, no one in my life knew that I was a girl — not my teachers at school, not my friends, not the directors that I worked with. Kids would often come up to me in class and grab me by the throat to check for an Adam's apple or grab my crotch to check what I was working with. When I would go to the bathroom, I would turn my shoes around in the stalls so that it looked like I was peeing standing up. At sleepovers I would have panic attacks trying to break it to girls that they didn't want to kiss me without outing myself. It's worth mentioning though that I didn't hate my body or my genitalia. I didn't feel like I was in the wrong body. I felt like I was performing this elaborate act. I wouldn't have qualified as transgender. If my family, though, had been the kind of people to believe in therapy, they probably would have diagnosed me as something like gender dysmorphic and put me on hormones to stave off puberty. But in my particular case, I just woke up one day when I was 14, and I decided that I wanted to be a girl again. Puberty had hit, and I had no idea what being a girl meant, and I was ready to figure out who I actually was. When a kid behaves like I did, they don't exactly have to come out, right? No one is exactly shocked. (Laughter) But I wasn't asked to define myself by my parents. When I was 15, and I called my father to tell him that I had fallen in love, it was the last thing on either of our minds to discuss what the consequences were of the fact that my first love was a girl. Three years later, when I fell in love with a man, neither of my parents batted an eyelash either. See, it's one of the great blessings of my very unorthodox childhood that I wasn't ever asked to define myself as any one thing at any point. I was just allowed to be me, growing and changing in every moment. So four, almost five years ago, Proposition 8, the great marriage equality debate, was raising a lot of dust around this country. And at the time, getting married wasn't really something I spent a lot of time thinking about. But I was struck by the fact that America, a country with such a tarnished civil rights record, could be repeating its mistakes so blatantly. And I remember watching the discussion on television and thinking how interesting it was that the separation of church and state was essentially drawing geographical boundaries throughout this country, between places where people believed in it and places where people didn't. And then, that this discussion was drawing geographical boundaries around me. If this was a war with two disparate sides, I, by default, fell on team gay, because I certainly wasn't 100 percent straight. At the time I was just beginning to emerge from this eight-year personal identity crisis zigzag that saw me go from being a boy to being this awkward girl that looked like a boy in girl's clothes to the opposite extreme of this super skimpy, over-compensating, boy-chasing girly-girl to finally just a hesitant exploration of what I actually was, a tomboyish girl who liked both boys and girls depending on the person. I had spent a year photographing this new generation of girls, much like myself, who fell kind of between-the-lines — girls who skateboarded but did it in lacy underwear, girls who had boys' haircuts but wore girly nail polish, girls who had eyeshadow to match their scraped knees, girls who liked girls and boys who all liked boys and girls who all hated being boxed in to anything. I loved these people, and I admired their freedom, but I watched as the world outside of our utopian bubble exploded into these raging debates where pundits started likening our love to bestiality on national television. And this powerful awareness rolled in over me that I was a minority, and in my own home country, based on one facet of my character. I was legally and indisputably a second-class citizen. I was not an activist. I wave no flags in my own life. But I was plagued by this question: How could anyone vote to strip the rights of the vast variety of people that I knew based on one element of their character? How could they say that we as a group were not deserving of equal rights as somebody else? Were we even a group? What group? And had these people ever even consciously met a victim of their discrimination? Did they know who they were voting against and what the impact was? And then it occurred to me, perhaps if they could look into the eyes of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship it might make it harder for them to do. It might give them pause. Obviously I couldn't get 20 million people to the same dinner party, so I figured out a way where I could introduce them to each other photographically without any artifice, without any lighting, or without any manipulation of any kind on my part. Because in a photograph you can examine a lion's whiskers without the fear of him ripping your face off. For me, photography is not just about exposing film, it's about exposing the viewer to something new, a place they haven't gone before, but most importantly, to people that they might be afraid of. Life magazine introduced generations of people to distant, far-off cultures they never knew existed through pictures. So I decided to make a series of very simple portraits, mugshots if you will. And I basically decided to photograph anyone in this country that was not 100 percent straight, which, if you don't know, is a limitless number of people. (Laughter) So this was a very large undertaking, and to do it we needed some help. So I ran out in the freezing cold, and I photographed every single person that I knew that I could get to in February of about two years ago. And I took those photographs, and I went to the HRC and I asked them for some help. And they funded two weeks of shooting in New York. And then we made this. (Music) Video: I'm iO Tillett Wright, and I'm an artist born and raised in New York City. (Music) Self Evident Truths is a photographic record of LGBTQ America today. My aim is to take a simple portrait of anyone who's anything other than 100 percent straight or feels like they fall in the LGBTQ spectrum in any way. My goal is to show the humanity that exists in every one of us through the simplicity of a face. (Music) "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal." It's written in the Declaration of Independence. We are failing as a nation to uphold the morals upon which we were founded. There is no equality in the United States. ["What does equality mean to you?"] ["Marriage"] ["Freedom"] ["Civil rights"] ["Treat every person as you'd treat yourself"] It's when you don't have to think about it, simple as that. The fight for equal rights is not just about gay marriage. Today in 29 states, more than half of this country, you can legally be fired just for your sexuality. ["Who is responsible for equality?"] I've heard hundreds of people give the same answer: "We are all responsible for equality." So far we've shot 300 faces in New York City. And we wouldn't have been able to do any of it without the generous support of the Human Rights Campaign. I want to take the project across the country. I want to visit 25 American cities, and I want to shoot 4,000 or 5,000 people. This is my contribution to the civil rights fight of my generation. I challenge you to look into the faces of these people and tell them that they deserve less than any other human being. (Music) ["Self evident truths"] ["4,000 faces across America"] (Music) (Applause) iO Tillett Wright: Absolutely nothing could have prepared us for what happened after that. Almost 85,000 people watched that video, and then they started emailing us from all over the country, asking us to come to their towns and help them to show their faces. And a lot more people wanted to show their faces than I had anticipated. So I changed my immediate goal to 10,000 faces. That video was made in the spring of 2011, and as of today I have traveled to almost 20 cities and photographed almost 2,000 people. I know that this is a talk, but I'd like to have a minute of just quiet and have you just look at these faces because there is nothing that I can say that will add to them. Because if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture of a face needs a whole new vocabulary. So after traveling and talking to people in places like Oklahoma or small-town Texas, we found evidence that the initial premise was dead on. Visibility really is key. Familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy. Once an issue pops up in your own backyard or amongst your own family, you're far more likely to explore sympathy for it or explore a new perspective on it. Of course, in my travels I met people who legally divorced their children for being other than straight, but I also met people who were Southern Baptists who switched churches because their child was a lesbian. Sparking empathy had become the backbone of Self Evident Truths. But here's what I was starting to learn that was really interesting: Self Evident Truths doesn't erase the differences between us. In fact, on the contrary, it highlights them. It presents, not just the complexities found in a procession of different human beings, but the complexities found within each individual person. It wasn't that we had too many boxes, it was that we had too few. At some point I realized that my mission to photograph "gays" was inherently flawed, because there were a million different shades of gay. Here I was trying to help, and I had perpetuated the very thing I had spent my life trying to avoid — yet another box. At some point I added a question to the release form that asked people to quantify themselves on a scale of one to 100 percent gay. And I watched so many existential crises unfold in front of me. (Laughter) People didn't know what to do because they had never been presented with the option before. Can you quantify your openness? Once they got over the shock, though, by and large people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent or the 3 to 20 percent marks. Of course, there were lots of people who opted for a 100 percent one or the other, but I found that a much larger proportion of people identified as something that was much more nuanced. I found that most people fall on a spectrum of what I have come to refer to as "Grey." Let me be clear though — and this is very important — in no way am I saying that preference doesn't exist. And I am not even going to address the issue of choice versus biological imperative, because if any of you happen to be of the belief that sexual orientation is a choice, I invite you to go out and try to be grey. I'll take your picture just for trying. (Laughter) What I am saying though is that human beings are not one-dimensional. The most important thing to take from the percentage system is this: If you have gay people over here and you have straight people over here, and while we recognize that most people identify as somewhere closer to one binary or another, there is this vast spectrum of people that exist in between. And the reality that this presents is a complicated one. Because, for example, if you pass a law that allows a boss to fire an employee for homosexual behavior, where exactly do you draw the line? Is it over here, by the people who have had one or two heterosexual experiences so far? Or is it over here by the people who have only had one or two homosexual experiences thus far? Where exactly does one become a second-class citizen? Another interesting thing that I learned from my project and my travels is just what a poor binding agent sexual orientation is. After traveling so much and meeting so many people, let me tell you, there are just as many jerks and sweethearts and Democrats and Republicans and jocks and queens and every other polarization you can possibly think of within the LGBT community as there are within the human race. Aside from the fact that we play with one legal hand tied behind our backs, and once you get past the shared narrative of prejudice and struggle, just being other than straight doesn't necessarily mean that we have anything in common. So in the endless proliferation of faces that Self Evident Truths is always becoming, as it hopefully appears across more and more platforms, bus shelters, billboards, Facebook pages, screen savers, perhaps in watching this procession of humanity, something interesting and useful will begin to happen. Hopefully these categories, these binaries, these over-simplified boxes will begin to become useless and they'll begin to fall away. Because really, they describe nothing that we see and no one that we know and nothing that we are. What we see are human beings in all their multiplicity. And seeing them makes it harder to deny their humanity. At the very least I hope it makes it harder to deny their human rights. So is it me particularly that you would choose to deny the right to housing, the right to adopt children, the right to marriage, the freedom to shop here, live here, buy here? Am I the one that you choose to disown as your child or your brother or your sister or your mother or your father, your neighbor, your cousin, your uncle, the president, your police woman or the fireman? It's too late. Because I already am all of those things. We already are all of those things, and we always have been. So please don't greet us as strangers, greet us as your fellow human beings, period. Thank you. (Applause) |
A country with no water | {0: "Fahad Al-Attiya's job is to maintain food security in Qatar, a country that has no water and imports 90 percent of its food."} | TEDxSummit | Salaam alaikum. Welcome to Doha. I am in charge of making this country's food secure. That is my job for the next two years, to design an entire master plan, and then for the next 10 years to implement it — of course, with so many other people. But first, I need to talk to you about a story, which is my story, about the story of this country that you're all here in today. And of course, most of you have had three meals today, and probably will continue to have after this event. So going in, what was Qatar in the 1940s? We were about 11,000 people living here. There was no water. There was no energy, no oil, no cars, none of that. Most of the people who lived here either lived in coastal villages, fishing, or were nomads who roamed around with the environment trying to find water. None of the glamour that you see today existed. No cities like you see today in Doha or Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Kuwait or Riyadh. It wasn't that they couldn't develop cities. Resources weren't there to develop them. And you can see that life expectancy was also short. Most people died around the age of 50. So let's move to chapter two: the oil era. 1939, that's when they discovered oil. But unfortunately, it wasn't really fully exploited commercially until after the Second World War. What did it do? It changed the face of this country, as you can see today and witness. It also made all those people who roamed around the desert — looking for water, looking for food, trying to take care of their livestock — urbanize. You might find this strange, but in my family we have different accents. My mother has an accent that is so different to my father, and we're all a population of about 300,000 people in the same country. There are about five or six accents in this country as I speak. Someone says, "How so? How could this happen?" Because we lived scattered. We couldn't live in a concentrated way simply because there was no resources. And when the resources came, be it oil, we started building these fancy technologies and bringing people together because we needed the concentration. People started to get to know each other. And we realized that there are some differences in accents. So that is the chapter two: the oil era. Let's look at today. This is probably the skyline that most of you know about Doha. So what's the population today? It's 1.7 million people. That is in less than 60 years. The average growth of our economy is about 15 percent for the past five years. Lifespan has increased to 78. Water consumption has increased to 430 liters. And this is amongst the highest worldwide. From having no water whatsoever to consuming water to the highest degree, higher than any other nation. I don't know if this was a reaction to lack of water. But what is interesting about the story that I've just said? The interesting part is that we continue to grow 15 percent every year for the past five years without water. Now that is historic. It's never happened before in history. Cities were totally wiped out because of the lack of water. This is history being made in this region. Not only cities that we're building, but cities with dreams and people who are wishing to be scientists, doctors. Build a nice home, bring the architect, design my house. These people are adamant that this is a livable space when it wasn't. But of course, with the use of technology. So Brazil has 1,782 millimeters per year of precipitation of rain. Qatar has 74, and we have that growth rate. The question is how. How could we survive that? We have no water whatsoever. Simply because of this gigantic, mammoth machine called desalination. Energy is the key factor here. It changed everything. It is that thing that we pump out of the ground, we burn tons of, probably most of you used it coming to Doha. So that is our lake, if you can see it. That is our river. That is how you all happen to use and enjoy water. This is the best technology that this region could ever have: desalination. So what are the risks? Do you worry much? I would say, perhaps if you look at the global facts, you will realize, of course I have to worry. There is growing demand, growing population. We've turned seven billion only a few months ago. And so that number also demands food. And there's predictions that we'll be nine billion by 2050. So a country that has no water has to worry about what happens beyond its borders. There's also changing diets. By elevating to a higher socio-economic level, they also change their diet. They start eating more meat and so on and so forth. On the other hand, there is declining yields because of climate change and because of other factors. And so someone has to really realize when the crisis is going to happen. This is the situation in Qatar, for those who don't know. We only have two days of water reserve. We import 90 percent of our food, and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land. The limited number of farmers that we have have been pushed out of their farming practices as a result of open market policy and bringing the big competitions, etc., etc. So we also face risks. These risks directly affect the sustainability of this nation and its continuity. The question is, is there a solution? Is there a sustainable solution? Indeed there is. This slide sums up thousands of pages of technical documents that we've been working on over the past two years. Let's start with the water. So we know very well — I showed you earlier — that we need this energy. So if we're going to need energy, what sort of energy? A depletable energy? Fossil fuel? Or should we use something else? Do we have the comparative advantage to use another sort of energy? I guess most of you by now realize that we do: 300 days of sun. And so we will use that renewable energy to produce the water that we need. And we will probably put 1,800 megawatts of solar systems to produce 3.5 million cubic meters of water. And that is a lot of water. That water will go then to the farmers, and the farmers will be able to water their plants, and they will be able then to supply society with food. But in order to sustain the horizontal line — because these are the projects, these are the systems that we will deliver — we need to also develop the vertical line: system sustenance, high-level education, research and development, industries, technologies, to produce these technologies for application, and finally markets. But what gels all of it, what enables it, is legislation, policies, regulations. Without it we can't do anything. So that's what we are planning to do. Within two years we should hopefully be done with this plan and taking it to implementation. Our objective is to be a millennium city, just like many millennium cities around: Istanbul, Rome, London, Paris, Damascus, Cairo. We are only 60 years old, but we want to live forever as a city, to live in peace. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why Libya's revolution didn't work -- and what might | {0: "Zahra' Langhi is the cofounder of Libyan Women’s Platform for Peace (LWPP), a movement advocating for women’s socio-political empowerment and peace-building."} | TEDxWomen 2012 | I have never, ever forgotten the words of my grandmother who died in her exile: "Son, resist Gaddafi. Fight him. But don't you ever turn into a Gaddafi-like revolutionary." Almost two years have passed since the Libyan Revolution broke out, inspired by the waves of mass mobilization in both the Tunisian and the Egyptian revolutions. I joined forces with many other Libyans inside and outside Libya to call for a day of rage and to initiate a revolution against the tyrannical regime of Gaddafi. And there it was, a great revolution. Young Libyan women and men were at the forefront calling for the fall of the regime, raising slogans of freedom, dignity, social justice. They have shown an exemplary bravery in confronting the brutal dictatorship of Gaddafi. They have shown a great sense of solidarity from the far east to the far west to the south. Eventually, after a period of six months of brutal war and a toll rate of almost 50,000 dead, we managed to liberate our country and to topple the tyrant. (Applause) However, Gaddafi left behind a heavy burden, a legacy of tyranny, corruption and seeds of diversions. For four decades Gaddafi's tyrannical regime destroyed the infrastructure as well as the culture and the moral fabric of Libyan society. Aware of the devastation and the challenges, I was keen among many other women to rebuild the Libyan civil society, calling for an inclusive and just transition to democracy and national reconciliation. Almost 200 organizations were established in Benghazi during and immediately after the fall of Gaddafi — almost 300 in Tripoli. After a period of 33 years in exile, I went back to Libya, and with unique enthusiasm, I started organizing workshops on capacity building, on human development of leadership skills. With an amazing group of women, I co-founded the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace, a movement of women, leaders, from different walks of life, to lobby for the sociopolitical empowerment of women and to lobby for our right for equal participation in building democracy and peace. I met a very difficult environment in the pre-elections, an environment which was increasingly polarized, an environment which was shaped by the selfish politics of dominance and exclusion. I led an initiative by the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace to lobby for a more inclusive electoral law, a law that would give every citizen, no matter what your background, the right to vote and run, and most importantly to stipulate on political parties the alternation of male and female candidates vertically and horizontally in their lists, creating the zipper list. Eventually, our initiative was adopted and successful. Women won 17.5 percent of the National Congress in the first elections ever in 52 years. (Applause) However, bit by bit, the euphoria of the elections, and of the revolution as a whole, was fading out — for every day we were waking up to the news of violence. One day we wake up to the news of the desecration of ancient mosques and Sufi tombs. On another day we wake up to the news of the murder of the American ambassador and the attack on the consulate. On another day we wake up to the news of the assassination of army officers. And every day, every day we wake up with the rule of the militias and their continuous violations of human rights of prisoners and their disrespect of the rule of law. Our society, shaped by a revolutionary mindset, became more polarized and has driven away from the ideals and the principles — freedom, dignity, social justice — that we first held. Intolerance, exclusion and revenge became the icons of the [aftermath] of the revolution. I am here today not at all to inspire you with our success story of the zipper list and the elections. I'm rather here today to confess that we as a nation took the wrong choice, made the wrong decision. We did not prioritize right. For elections did not bring peace and stability and security in Libya. Did the zipper list and the alternation between female and male candidates bring peace and national reconciliation? No, it didn't. What is it, then? Why does our society continue to be polarized and dominated with selfish politics of dominance and exclusion, by both men and women? Maybe what was missing was not the women only, but the feminine values of compassion, mercy and inclusion. Our society needs national dialogue and consensus-building more than it needed the elections, which only reinforced polarization and division. Our society needs the qualitative representation of the feminine more than it needs the numerical, quantitative representation of the feminine. We need to stop acting as agents of rage and calling for days of rage. We need to start acting as agents of compassion and mercy. We need to develop a feminine discourse that not only honors but also implements mercy instead of revenge, collaboration instead of competition, inclusion instead of exclusion. These are the ideals that a war-torn Libya needs desperately in order to achieve peace. For peace has an alchemy, and this alchemy is about the intertwining, the alternation between the feminine and masculine perspectives. That's the real zipper. And we need to establish that existentially before we do so sociopolitically. According to a Quranic verse "Salam" — peace — "is the word of the all-merciful God, raheem." In turn, the word "raheem," which is known in all Abrahamic traditions, has the same root in Arabic as the word "rahem" — womb — symbolizing the maternal feminine encompassing all humanity from which the male and the female, from which all tribes, all peoples, have emanated from. And so just as the womb entirely envelopes the embryo, which grows within it, the divine matrix of compassion nourishes the entire existence. Thus we are told that "My mercy encompasses all things." Thus we are told that "My mercy takes precedence over my anger." May we all be granted a grace of mercy. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Hey science teachers -- make it fun | {0: 'Tyler DeWitt recognizes that textbooks are not the way to get young people interested in science. Instead, he teaches science by making it fun and fantastical.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | Let me tell you a story. It's my first year as a new high school science teacher, and I'm so eager. I'm so excited, I'm pouring myself into my lesson plans. But I'm slowly coming to this horrifying realization that my students just might not be learning anything. This happens one day: I'd just assigned my class to read this textbook chapter about my favorite subject in all of biology: viruses and how they attack. And so I'm so excited to discuss this with them, and I come in and I say, "Can somebody please explain the main ideas and why this is so cool?" There's silence. Finally, my favorite student, she looks me straight in the eye, and she says, "The reading sucked." (Laughter) And then she clarified. She said, "You know what, I don't mean that it sucks. I mean I didn't understand a word of it. It's boring, who cares, and it sucks." (Laughter) These sympathetic smiles spread all throughout the room now, and I realize that all of my other students are in the same boat, that maybe they took notes or memorized definitions from the textbook, but not one of them really understood the main ideas. Not one of them can tell me why this stuff is so cool, why it's so important. I'm totally clueless. I have no idea what to do next. So the only thing I can think of is say, "Listen. Let me tell you a story. The main characters in the story are bacteria and viruses. These guys are blown up a couple million times. The real bacteria and viruses are so small we can't see them without a microscope, and you guys might know bacteria and viruses because they both make us sick. But what a lot of people don't know is that viruses can also make bacteria sick." Now, the story that I start telling my kids, it starts out like a horror story. Once upon a time, there's this happy little bacterium. Don't get too attached to him. (Laughter) Maybe he's floating around in your stomach or in some spoiled food somewhere, and all of a sudden, he starts to not feel so good. Maybe he ate something bad for lunch. And then things get really horrible, as his skin rips apart, and he sees a virus coming out from his insides. And then it gets horrible when he bursts open and an army of viruses floods out from his insides. "Ouch" is right. If you see this, and you're a bacterium, this is like your worst nightmare. But if you're a virus and you see this, you cross those little legs of yours and you think, "We rock." Because it took a lot of crafty work to infect this bacterium. Here's what had to happen. A virus grabbed onto a bacterium and it slipped its DNA into it. The next thing is that virus DNA made stuff that chopped up the bacteria DNA. And now that we've gotten rid of the bacteria DNA, the virus DNA takes control of the cell and it tells it to start making more viruses. Because, you see, DNA is like a blueprint that tells living things what to make. So this is kind of like going into a car factory and replacing the blueprints with blueprints for killer robots. The workers still come the next day, they do their job, but they're following different instructions. So replacing the bacteria DNA with virus DNA turns the bacteria into a factory for making viruses — that is, until it's so filled with viruses that it bursts. But that's not the only way that viruses infect bacteria. Some are much more crafty. (Laughter) When a secret agent virus infects a bacterium, they do a little espionage. Here, this cloaked, secret agent virus is slipping his DNA into the bacterial cell, but here's the kicker: It doesn't do anything harmful — not at first. Instead, it silently slips into the bacteria's own DNA, and it just stays there like a terrorist sleeper cell, waiting for instructions. And what's interesting about this is now, whenever this bacteria has babies, the babies also have the virus DNA in them. So now we have a whole extended bacteria family, filled with virus sleeper cells. They're just happily living together until a signal happens and bam! — all of the DNA pops out. It takes control of these cells, turns them into virus-making factories, and they all burst, a huge, extended bacteria family, all dying with viruses spilling out of their guts, the viruses taking over the bacterium. So now you understand how viruses can attack cells. There are two ways: On the left is what we call the lytic way, where the viruses go right in and take over the cells. On the [right] is the lysogenic way that uses secret agent viruses. So this stuff is not that hard, right? And now all of you understand it. But if you've graduated from high school, I can almost guarantee you've seen this information before. But I bet it was presented in a way that it didn't exactly stick in your mind. So when my students were first learning this, why did they hate it so much? Well, there were a couple of reasons. First of all, I can guarantee you you that their textbooks didn't have secret agent viruses, and they didn't have horror stories. You know, in the communication of science, there is this obsession with seriousness. It kills me. I'm not kidding. I used to work for an educational publisher, and as a writer, I was always told never to use stories or fun, engaging language, because then my work might not be viewed as "serious" and "scientific." I mean, because God forbid somebody have fun when they're learning science. So we have this field of science that's all about slime and color changes. Check this out. And then we have, of course, as any good scientist has to have ... explosions! But if a textbook seems too much fun, it's somehow unscientific. Now another problem was that the language in their textbook was truly incomprehensible. If we want to summarize that story that I told you earlier, we could start by saying, "These viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium." The way this showed up in the textbook, it looked like this: "Bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium." That's great, perfect for 13-year-olds. But here's the thing: There are plenty of people in science education who would look at this and say there's no way that we could ever give that to students, because it contains some language that isn't completely accurate. For example, I told you that viruses have DNA. Well, a very tiny fraction of them don't. They have something called RNA instead. So a professional science writer would say, "That has to go. We have to change it to something much more technical." And after a team of professional science editors went over this really simple explanation, they'd find fault with almost every word I've used, and they'd have to change anything that wasn't serious enough, and they'd have to change everything that wasn't 100 percent perfect. Then it would be accurate, but it would be completely impossible to understand. This is horrifying. You know, I keep talking about this idea of telling a story, and it's like science communication has taken on this idea of what I call the tyranny of precision, where you can't just tell a story. It's like science has become that horrible storyteller that we all know who gives us all the details nobody cares about, where you're like, "Oh, I met my friend for lunch the other day, and she was wearing these ugly jeans. I mean, they weren't really jeans, they were more like leggings, but I guess they're actually kind of more like jeggings, and you're just like, "Oh my God. What is the point?" Or even worse, science education is becoming like that guy who always says, "Actually." You want to be like, "Oh, dude, we had to get up in the middle of the night and drive a hundred miles in total darkness." And that guy's like, "Actually, it was 87.3 miles." And you're like, "Actually, shut up! I'm just trying to tell a story." Because good storytelling is all about emotional connection. We have to convince our audience that what we're talking about matters. But just as important is knowing which details we should leave out so that the main point still comes across. I'm reminded of what the architect Mies van der Rohe said, and I paraphrase, when he said that sometimes, you have to lie in order to tell the truth. I think this sentiment is particularly relevant to science education. Now, finally, I am often so disappointed when people think that I'm advocating a dumbing down of science. That's not true at all. I'm currently a Ph.D. student at MIT, and I absolutely understand the importance of detailed, specific scientific communication between experts, but not when we're trying to teach 13-year-olds. If a young learner thinks that all viruses have DNA, that's not going to ruin their chances of success in science. But if a young learner can't understand anything in science and learns to hate it because it all sounds like this, that will ruin their chances of success. This needs to stop ... and I wish that the change could come from the institutions at the top that are perpetuating these problems, and I beg them, I beseech them to just stop it. But I think that's unlikely. So we are so lucky that we have resources like the Internet, where we can circumvent these institutions from the bottom up. There's a growing number of online resources that are dedicated to just explaining science in simple, understandable ways. I dream of a Wikipedia-like website that would explain any scientific concept you can think of in simple language any middle schooler can understand. And I myself spend most of my free time making these science videos that I put on YouTube. I explain chemical equilibrium using analogies to awkward middle school dances, and I talk about fuel cells with stories about boys and girls at a summer camp. The feedback that I get is sometimes misspelled and it's often written in LOLcats, (Laughter) but nonetheless, it's so appreciative, so thankful that I know this is the right way we should be communicating science. There's still so much work left to be done, though, and if you're involved with science in any way, I urge you to join me. Pick up a camera, start to write a blog, whatever, but leave out the seriousness, leave out the jargon. Make me laugh. Make me care. Leave out those annoying details that nobody cares about and just get to the point. How should you start? Why don't you say, "Listen, let me tell you a story." Thank you. |
One second every day | {0: 'Cesar Kuriyama shoots one second of video every day of his life, and edits them together into a montage that prompts him to think how he approaches each day.'} | TED2012 | So, I'm an artist. I live in New York, and I've been working in advertising for — ever since I left school, so about seven, eight years now, and it was draining. I worked a lot of late nights. I worked a lot of weekends, and I found myself never having time for all the projects that I wanted to work on on my own. And one day I was at work and I saw a talk by Stefan Sagmeister on TED, and it was called "The power of time off," and he spoke about how every seven years, he takes a year off from work so he could do his own creative projects, and I was instantly inspired, and I just said, "I have to do that. I have to take a year off. I need to take time to travel and spend time with my family and start my own creative ideas." So the first of those projects ended up being something I called "One Second Every Day." Basically I'm recording one second of every day of my life for the rest of my life, chronologically compiling these one-second tiny slices of my life into one single continuous video until, you know, I can't record them anymore. The purpose of this project is, one: I hate not remembering things that I've done in the past. There's all these things that I've done with my life that I have no recollection of unless someone brings it up, and sometimes I think, "Oh yeah, that's something that I did." And something that I realized early on in the project was that if I wasn't doing anything interesting, I would probably forget to record the video. So the day — the first time that I forgot, it really hurt me, because it's something that I really wanted to — from the moment that I turned 30, I wanted to keep this project going until forever, and having missed that one second, I realized, it just kind of created this thing in my head where I never forgot ever again. So if I live to see 80 years of age, I'm going to have a five-hour video that encapsulates 50 years of my life. When I turn 40, I'll have a one-hour video that includes just my 30s. This has really invigorated me day-to-day, when I wake up, to try and do something interesting with my day. Now, one of the things that I have issues with is that, as the days and weeks and months go by, time just seems to start blurring and blending into each other and, you know, I hated that, and visualization is the way to trigger memory. You know, this project for me is a way for me to bridge that gap and remember everything that I've done. Even just this one second allows me to remember everything else I did that one day. It's difficult, sometimes, to pick that one second. On a good day, I'll have maybe three or four seconds that I really want to choose, but I'll just have to narrow it down to one, but even narrowing it down to that one allows me to remember the other three anyway. It's also kind of a protest, a personal protest, against the culture we have now where people just are at concerts with their cell phones out recording the whole concert, and they're disturbing you. They're not even enjoying the show. They're watching the concert through their cell phone. I hate that. I admittedly used to be that guy a little bit, back in the day, and I've decided that the best way for me to still capture and keep a visual memory of my life and not be that person, is to just record that one second that will allow me to trigger that memory of, "Yeah, that concert was amazing. I really loved that concert." And it just takes a quick, quick second. I was on a three-month road trip this summer. It was something that I've been dreaming about doing my whole life, just driving around the U.S. and Canada and just figuring out where to go the next day, and it was kind of outstanding. I actually ran out, I spent too much money on my road trip for the savings that I had to take my year off, so I had to, I went to Seattle and I spent some time with friends working on a really neat project. One of the reasons that I took my year off was to spend more time with my family, and this really tragic thing happened where my sister-in-law, her intestine suddenly strangled one day, and we took her to the emergency room, and she was, she was in really bad shape. We almost lost her a couple of times, and I was there with my brother every day. It helped me realize something else during this project, is that recording that one second on a really bad day is extremely difficult. It's not — we tend to take our cameras out when we're doing awesome things. Or we're, "Oh, yeah, this party, let me take a picture." But we rarely do that when we're having a bad day, and something horrible is happening. And I found that it's actually been very, very important to record even just that one second of a really bad moment. It really helps you appreciate the good times. It's not always a good day, so when you have a bad one, I think it's important to remember it, just as much as it is important to remember the [good] days. Now one of the things that I do is I don't use any filters, I don't use anything to — I try to capture the moment as much as possible as the way that I saw it with my own eyes. I started a rule of first person perspective. Early on, I think I had a couple of videos where you would see me in it, but I realized that wasn't the way to go. The way to really remember what I saw was to record it as I actually saw it. Now a couple of things that I have in my head about this project are, wouldn't it be interesting if thousands of people were doing this? I turned 31 last week, which is there. I think it would be interesting to see what everyone did with a project like this. I think everyone would have a different interpretation of it. I think everyone would benefit from just having that one second to remember every day. Personally, I'm tired of forgetting, and this is a really easy thing to do. I mean, we all have HD-capable cameras in our pockets right now — most people in this room, I bet — and it's something that's — I never want to forget another day that I've ever lived, and this is my way of doing that, and it'd be really interesting also to see, if you could just type in on a website, "June 18, 2018," and you would just see a stream of people's lives on that particular day from all over the world. And I don't know, I think this project has a lot of possibilities, and I encourage you all to record just a small snippet of your life every day, so you can never forget that that day, you lived. Thank you. (Applause) |
Print your own medicine | {0: 'A professor of chemistry, nanoscience and chemical complexity, Lee Cronin and his research group investigate how chemistry can revolutionize modern technology and even create life.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Organic chemists make molecules, very complicated molecules, by chopping up a big molecule into small molecules and reverse engineering. And as a chemist, one of the things I wanted to ask my research group a couple of years ago is, could we make a really cool universal chemistry set? In essence, could we "app" chemistry? Now what would this mean, and how would we do it? Well to start to do this, we took a 3D printer and we started to print our beakers and our test tubes on one side and then print the molecule at the same time on the other side and combine them together in what we call reactionware. And so by printing the vessel and doing the chemistry at the same time, we may start to access this universal toolkit of chemistry. Now what could this mean? Well if we can embed biological and chemical networks like a search engine, so if you have a cell that's ill that you need to cure or bacteria that you want to kill, if you have this embedded in your device at the same time, and you do the chemistry, you may be able to make drugs in a new way. So how are we doing this in the lab? Well it requires software, it requires hardware and it requires chemical inks. And so the really cool bit is, the idea is that we want to have a universal set of inks that we put out with the printer, and you download the blueprint, the organic chemistry for that molecule and you make it in the device. And so you can make your molecule in the printer using this software. So what could this mean? Well, ultimately, it could mean that you could print your own medicine. And this is what we're doing in the lab at the moment. But to take baby steps to get there, first of all we want to look at drug design and production, or drug discovery and manufacturing. Because if we can manufacture it after we've discovered it, we could deploy it anywhere. You don't need to go to the chemist anymore. We can print drugs at point of need. We can download new diagnostics. Say a new super bug has emerged. You put it in your search engine, and you create the drug to treat the threat. So this allows you on-the-fly molecular assembly. But perhaps for me the core bit going into the future is this idea of taking your own stem cells, with your genes and your environment, and you print your own personal medicine. And if that doesn't seem fanciful enough, where do you think we're going to go? Well, you're going to have your own personal matter fabricator. Beam me up, Scotty. (Applause) |
Take back your city with paint | {0: 'From 2000 to 2011 Edi Rama was the mayor of Tirana, where he implemented a series of reforms to take back the city for the people.'} | TEDxThessaloniki | In my previous life, I was an artist. I still paint. I love art. I love the joy that color can give to our lives and to our communities, and I try to bring something of the artist in me in my politics, and I see part of my job today, the reason for being here, not just to campaign for my party, but for politics, and the role it can play for the better in our lives. For 11 years, I was mayor of Tirana, our capital. We faced many challenges. Art was part of the answer, and my name, in the very beginning, was linked with two things: demolition of illegal constructions in order to get public space back, and use of colors in order to revive the hope that had been lost in my city. But this use of colors was not just an artistic act. Rather, it was a form of political action in a context when the city budget I had available after being elected amounted to zero comma something. When we painted the first building, by splashing a radiant orange on the somber gray of a facade, something unimaginable happened. There was a traffic jam and a crowd of people gathered as if it were the location of some spectacular accident, or the sudden sighting of a visiting pop star. The French E.U. official in charge of the funding rushed to block the painting. He screeched that he would block the financing. "But why?" I asked him. "Because the colors you have ordered do not meet European standards," he replied. "Well," I told him, "the surroundings do not meet European standards, even though this is not what we want, but we will choose the colors ourselves, because this is exactly what we want. And if you do not let us continue with our work, I will hold a press conference here, right now, right in this road, and we will tell people that you look to me just like the censors of the socialist realism era." Then he was kind of troubled, and asked me for a compromise. But I told him no, I'm sorry, compromise in colors is gray, and we have enough gray to last us a lifetime. (Applause) So it's time for change. The rehabilitation of public spaces revived the feeling of belonging to a city that people lost. The pride of people about their own place of living, and there were feelings that had been buried deep for years under the fury of the illegal, barbaric constructions that sprang up in the public space. And when colors came out everywhere, a mood of change started transforming the spirit of people. Big noise raised up: "What is this? What is happening? What are colors doing to us?" And we made a poll, the most fascinating poll I've seen in my life. We asked people, "Do you want this action, and to have buildings painted like that?" And then the second question was, "Do you want it to stop or do you want it to continue?" To the first question, 63 percent of people said yes, we like it. Thirty-seven said no, we don't like it. But to the second question, half of them that didn't like it, they wanted it to continue. (Laughter) So we noticed change. People started to drop less litter in the streets, for example, started to pay taxes, started to feel something they had forgotten, and beauty was acting as a guardsman where municipal police, or the state itself, were missing. One day I remember walking along a street that had just been colored, and where we were in the process of planting trees, when I saw a shopkeeper and his wife putting a glass facade to their shop. They had thrown the old shutter in the garbage collection place. "Why did you throw away the shutters?" I asked him. "Well, because the street is safer now," they answered. "Safer? Why? They have posted more policemen here?" "Come on, man! What policemen? You can see it for yourself. There are colors, streetlights, new pavement with no potholes, trees. So it's beautiful; it's safe." And indeed, it was beauty that was giving people this feeling of being protected. And this was not a misplaced feeling. Crime did fall. The freedom that was won in 1990 brought about a state of anarchy in the city, while the barbarism of the '90s brought about a loss of hope for the city. The paint on the walls did not feed children, nor did it tend the sick or educate the ignorant, but it gave hope and light, and helped to make people see there could be a different way of doing things, a different spirit, a different feel to our lives, and that if we brought the same energy and hope to our politics, we could build a better life for each other and for our country. We removed 123,000 tons of concrete only from the riverbanks. We demolished more than 5,000 illegal buildings all over the city, up to eight stories high, the tallest of them. We planted 55,000 trees and bushes in the streets. We established a green tax, and then everybody accepted it and all businessmen paid it regularly. By means of open competitions, we managed to recruit in our administration many young people, and we thus managed to build a de-politicized public institution where men and women were equally represented. International organizations have invested a lot in Albania during these 20 years, not all of it well spent. When I told the World Bank directors that I wanted them to finance a project to build a model reception hall for citizens precisely in order to fight endemic daily corruption, they did not understand me. But people were waiting in long queues under sun and under rain in order to get a certificate or just a simple answer from two tiny windows of two metal kiosks. They were paying in order to skip the queue, the long queue. The reply to their requests was met by a voice coming from this dark hole, and, on the other hand, a mysterious hand coming out to take their documents while searching through old documents for the bribe. We could change the invisible clerks within the kiosks, every week, but we could not change this corrupt practice. "I'm convinced," I told a German official with the World Bank, "that it would be impossible for them to be bribed if they worked in Germany, in a German administration, just as I am convinced that if you put German officials from the German administration in those holes, they would be bribed just the same." (Applause) It's not about genes. It's not about some being with a high conscience and some others having not a conscience. It's about system, it's about organization. It's also about environment and respect. We removed the kiosks. We built the bright new reception hall that made people, Tirana citizens, think they had traveled abroad when they entered to make their requests. We created an online system of control and so speeded up all the processes. We put the citizen first, and not the clerks. The corruption in the state administration of countries like Albania — it's not up to me to say also like Greece — can be fought only by modernization. Reinventing the government by reinventing politics itself is the answer, and not reinventing people based on a ready-made formula that the developed world often tries in vain to impose to people like us. (Applause) Things have come to this point because politicians in general, but especially in our countries, let's face it, think people are stupid. They take it for granted that, come what may, people have to follow them, while politics, more and more, fails to offer answers for their public concerns or the exigencies of the common people. Politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians, while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation. Seen from those stairs, all politicians today seem the same, and politics has come to resemble a sport that inspires more aggressiveness and pessimism than social cohesion and the desire for civic protaganism. Barack Obama won — (Applause) — because he mobilized people as never before through the use of social networks. He did not know each and every one of them, but with an admirable ingenuity, he managed to transform them into activists by giving them all the possibility to hold in their hands the arguments and the instruments that each would need to campaign in his name by making his own campaign. I tweet. I love it. I love it because it lets me get the message out, but it also lets people get their messages to me. This is politics, not from top down, but from the bottom up, and sideways, and allowing everybody's voice to be heard is exactly what we need. Politics is not just about leaders. It's not just about politicians and laws. It is about how people think, how they view the world around them, how they use their time and their energy. When people say all politicians are the same, ask yourself if Obama was the same as Bush, if François Hollande is the same as Sarkozy. They are not. They are human beings with different views and different visions for the world. When people say nothing can change, just stop and think what the world was like 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago. Our world is defined by the pace of change. We can all change the world. I gave you a very small example of how one thing, the use of color, can make change happen. I want to make more change as Prime Minister of my country, but every single one of you can make change happen if you want to. President Roosevelt, he said, "Believe you can, and you are halfway there." Efharisto and kalinihta. (Applause) |
Dare to educate Afghan girls | {0: 'Shabana Basij-Rasikh helps girls and young women in Afghanistan get an education.'} | TEDxWomen 2012 | When I was 11, I remember waking up one morning to the sound of joy in my house. My father was listening to BBC News on his small, gray radio. There was a big smile on his face which was unusual then, because the news mostly depressed him. "The Taliban are gone!" my father shouted. I didn't know what it meant, but I could see that my father was very, very happy. "You can go to a real school now," he said. A morning that I will never forget. A real school. You see, I was six when the Taliban took over Afghanistan and made it illegal for girls to go to school. So for the next five years, I dressed as a boy to escort my older sister, who was no longer allowed to be outside alone, to a secret school. It was the only way we both could be educated. Each day, we took a different route so that no one would suspect where we were going. We would cover our books in grocery bags so it would seem we were just out shopping. The school was in a house, more than 100 of us packed in one small living room. It was cozy in winter but extremely hot in summer. We all knew we were risking our lives — the teacher, the students and our parents. From time to time, the school would suddenly be canceled for a week because Taliban were suspicious. We always wondered what they knew about us. Were we being followed? Do they know where we live? We were scared, but still, school was where we wanted to be. I was very lucky to grow up in a family where education was prized and daughters were treasured. My grandfather was an extraordinary man for his time. A total maverick from a remote province of Afghanistan, he insisted that his daughter, my mom, go to school, and for that he was disowned by his father. But my educated mother became a teacher. There she is. She retired two years ago, only to turn our house into a school for girls and women in our neighborhood. And my father — that's him — he was the first ever in his family to receive an education. There was no question that his children would receive an education, including his daughters, despite the Taliban, despite the risks. To him, there was greater risk in not educating his children. During Taliban years, I remember there were times I would get so frustrated by our life and always being scared and not seeing a future. I would want to quit, but my father, he would say, "Listen, my daughter, you can lose everything you own in your life. Your money can be stolen. You can be forced to leave your home during a war. But the one thing that will always remain with you is what is here, and if we have to sell our blood to pay your school fees, we will. So do you still not want to continue?" Today I am 22. I was raised in a country that has been destroyed by decades of war. Fewer than six percent of women my age have made it beyond high school, and had my family not been so committed to my education, I would be one of them. Instead, I stand here a proud graduate of Middlebury College. (Applause) When I returned to Afghanistan, my grandfather, the one exiled from his home for daring to educate his daughters, was among the first to congratulate me. He not only brags about my college degree, but also that I was the first woman, and that I am the first woman to drive him through the streets of Kabul. (Applause) My family believes in me. I dream big, but my family dreams even bigger for me. That's why I am a global ambassador for 10x10, a global campaign to educate women. That's why I cofounded SOLA, the first and perhaps only boarding school for girls in Afghanistan, a country where it's still risky for girls to go to school. The exciting thing is that I see students at my school with ambition grabbing at opportunity. And I see their parents and their fathers who, like my own, advocate for them, despite and even in the face of daunting opposition. Like Ahmed. That's not his real name, and I cannot show you his face, but Ahmed is the father of one of my students. Less than a month ago, he and his daughter were on their way from SOLA to their village, and they literally missed being killed by a roadside bomb by minutes. As he arrived home, the phone rang, a voice warning him that if he sent his daughter back to school, they would try again. "Kill me now, if you wish," he said, "but I will not ruin my daughter's future because of your old and backward ideas." What I've come to realize about Afghanistan, and this is something that is often dismissed in the West, that behind most of us who succeed is a father who recognizes the value in his daughter and who sees that her success is his success. It's not to say that our mothers aren't key in our success. In fact, they're often the initial and convincing negotiators of a bright future for their daughters, but in the context of a society like in Afghanistan, we must have the support of men. Under the Taliban, girls who went to school numbered in the hundreds — remember, it was illegal. But today, more than three million girls are in school in Afghanistan. (Applause) Afghanistan looks so different from here in America. I find that Americans see the fragility in changes. I fear that these changes will not last much beyond the U.S. troops' withdrawal. But when I am back in Afghanistan, when I see the students in my school and their parents who advocate for them, who encourage them, I see a promising future and lasting change. To me, Afghanistan is a country of hope and boundless possibilities, and every single day the girls of SOLA remind me of that. Like me, they are dreaming big. Thank you. (Applause) |
A "self-healing" asphalt | {0: 'Erik Schlangen is a civil engineer and pioneer of experimental micromechanics, who focuses on making industrial materials more durable.'} | TEDxDelft | (Hammer) (Laughter) (Microwave beeps) (Laughter) You probably all agree with me that this is a very nice road. It's made of asphalt, and asphalt is a very nice material to drive on, but not always, especially not on these days as today, when it's raining a lot. Then you can have a lot of splash water in the asphalt. And especially if you then ride with your bicycle, and pass these cars, then that's not very nice. Also, asphalt can create a lot of noise. It's a noisy material, and if we produce roads like in the Netherlands, very close to cities, then we would like a silent road. The solution for that is to make roads out of porous asphalt. Porous asphalt, a material that we use now in most of the highways in the Netherlands, it has pores and water can just rain through it, so all the rainwater will flow away to the sides, and you have a road that's easy to drive on, so no splash water anymore. Also the noise will disappear in these pores. Because it's very hollow, all the noise will disappear, so it's a very silent road. It also has disadvantages, of course, and the disadvantage of this road is that raveling can occur. What is raveling? You see that in this road that the stones at the surface come off. First you get one stone, then several more, and more and more and more and more, and then they — well, I will not do that. (Laughter) But they can damage your windshield, so you're not happy with that. And finally, this raveling can also lead to more and more damage. Sometimes you can create potholes with that. Ha. He's ready. Potholes, of course, that can become a problem, but we have a solution. Here you see actually how the damage appears in this material. It's a porous asphalt, like I said, so you have only a small amount of binder between the stones. Due to weathering, due to U.V. light, due to oxidation, this binder, this bitumen, the glue between the aggregates is going to shrink, and if it shrinks, it gets micro-cracks, and it delaminates from the aggregates. Then if you drive over the road, you take out the aggregates — what we just saw here. To solve this problem, we thought of self-healing materials. If we can make this material self-healing, then probably we have a solution. So what we can do is use steel wool just to clean pans, and the steel wool we can cut in very small pieces, and these very small pieces we can mix to the bitumen. So then you have asphalt with very small pieces of steel wool in it. Then you need a machine, like you see here, that you can use for cooking — an induction machine. Induction can heat, especially steel; it's very good at that. Then what you do is you heat up the steel, you melt the bitumen, and the bitumen will flow into these micro-cracks, and the stones are again fixed to the surface. Today I use a microwave because I cannot take the big induction machine here onstage. So a microwave is a similar system. So I put the specimen in, which I'm now going to take out to see what happened. So this is the specimen coming out now. So I said we have such an industrial machine in the lab to heat up the specimens. We tested a lot of specimens there, and then the government, they actually saw our results, and they thought, "Well, that's very interesting. We have to try that." So they donated to us a piece of highway, 400 meters of the A58, where we had to make a test track to test this material. So that's what we did here. You see where we were making the test road, and then of course this road will last several years without any damage. That's what we know from practice. So we took a lot of samples from this road and we tested them in the lab. So we did aging on the samples, did a lot of loading on it, healed them with our induction machine, and healed them and tested them again. Several times we can repeat that. So actually, the conclusion from this research is that if we go on the road every four years with our healing machine — this is the big version we have made to go on the real road — if we go on the road every four years we can double the surface life of this road, which of course saves a lot of money. Well, to conclude, I can say that we made a material using steel fibers, the addition of steel fibers, using induction energy to really increase the surface life of the road, double the surface life you can even do, so it will really save a lot of money with very simple tricks. And now you're of course curious if it also worked. So we still have the specimen here. It's quite warm. Actually, it still has to cool down first before I can show you that the healing works. But I will do a trial. Let's see. Yeah, it worked. Thank you. (Applause) |
Who controls the world? | {0: 'James B. Glattfelder aims to give us a richer, data-driven understanding of the people and interactions that control our global economy. He does this not to push an ideology -- but with the hopes of making the world a better place.'} | TEDxZurich 2012 | "When the crisis came, the serious limitations of existing economic and financial models immediately became apparent." "There is also a strong belief, which I share, that bad or oversimplistic and overconfident economics helped create the crisis." Now, you've probably all heard of similar criticism coming from people who are skeptical of capitalism. But this is different. This is coming from the heart of finance. The first quote is from Jean-Claude Trichet when he was governor of the European Central Bank. The second quote is from the head of the UK Financial Services Authority. Are these people implying that we don't understand the economic systems that drive our modern societies? It gets worse. "We spend billions of dollars trying to understand the origins of the universe, while we still don't understand the conditions for a stable society, a functioning economy, or peace." What's happening here? How can this be possible? Do we really understand more about the fabric of reality than we do about the fabric which emerges from our human interactions? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. But there's an intriguing solution which is coming from what is known as the science of complexity. To explain what this means and what this thing is, please let me quickly take a couple of steps back. I ended up in physics by accident. It was a random encounter when I was young, and since then, I've often wondered about the amazing success of physics in describing the reality we wake up in every day. In a nutshell, you can think of physics as follows. So you take a chunk of reality you want to understand and you translate it into mathematics. You encode it into equations. Then, predictions can be made and tested. We're actually really lucky that this works, because no one really knows why the thoughts in our heads should actually relate to the fundamental workings of the universe. Despite the success, physics has its limits. As Dirk Helbing pointed out in the last quote, we don't really understand the complexity that relates to us, that surrounds us. This paradox is what got me interested in complex systems. So these are systems which are made up of many interconnected or interacting parts: swarms of birds or fish, ant colonies, ecosystems, brains, financial markets. These are just a few examples. Interestingly, complex systems are very hard to map into mathematical equations, so the usual physics approach doesn't really work here. So what do we know about complex systems? Well, it turns out that what looks like complex behavior from the outside is actually the result of a few simple rules of interaction. This means you can forget about the equations and just start to understand the system by looking at the interactions, so you can actually forget about the equations and you just start to look at the interactions. And it gets even better, because most complex systems have this amazing property called emergence. So this means that the system as a whole suddenly starts to show a behavior which cannot be understood or predicted by looking at the components of the system. So the whole is literally more than the sum of its parts. And all of this also means that you can forget about the individual parts of the system, how complex they are. So if it's a cell or a termite or a bird, you just focus on the rules of interaction. As a result, networks are ideal representations of complex systems. The nodes in the network are the system's components, and the links are given by the interactions. So what equations are for physics, complex networks are for the study of complex systems. This approach has been very successfully applied to many complex systems in physics, biology, computer science, the social sciences, but what about economics? Where are economic networks? This is a surprising and prominent gap in the literature. The study we published last year, called "The Network of Global Corporate Control," was the first extensive analysis of economic networks. The study went viral on the Internet and it attracted a lot of attention from the international media. This is quite remarkable, because, again, why did no one look at this before? Similar data has been around for quite some time. What we looked at in detail was ownership networks. So here the nodes are companies, people, governments, foundations, etc. And the links represent the shareholding relations, so shareholder A has x percent of the shares in company B. And we also assign a value to the company given by the operating revenue. So ownership networks reveal the patterns of shareholding relations. In this little example, you can see a few financial institutions with some of the many links highlighted. Now, you may think that no one looked at this before because ownership networks are really, really boring to study. Well, as ownership is related to control, as I shall explain later, looking at ownership networks actually can give you answers to questions like, who are the key players? How are they organized? Are they isolated? Are they interconnected? And what is the overall distribution of control? In other words, who controls the world? I think this is an interesting question. And it has implications for systemic risk. This is a measure of how vulnerable a system is overall. A high degree of interconnectivity can be bad for stability, because then the stress can spread through the system like an epidemic. Scientists have sometimes criticized economists who believe ideas and concepts are more important than empirical data, because a foundational guideline in science is: Let the data speak. OK. Let's do that. So we started with a database containing 13 million ownership relations from 2007. This is a lot of data, and because we wanted to find out "who rules the world," we decided to focus on transnational corporations, or "TNCs," for short. These are companies that operate in more than one country, and we found 43,000. In the next step, we built the network around these companies, so we took all the TNCs' shareholders, and the shareholders' shareholders, etc., all the way upstream, and we did the same downstream, and ended up with a network containing 600,000 nodes and one million links. This is the TNC network which we analyzed. And it turns out to be structured as follows. So you have a periphery and a center which contains about 75 percent of all the players, and in the center, there's this tiny but dominant core which is made up of highly interconnected companies. To give you a better picture, think about a metropolitan area. So you have the suburbs and the periphery, you have a center, like a financial district, then the core will be something like the tallest high-rise building in the center. And we already see signs of organization going on here. 36 percent of the TNCs are in the core only, but they make up 95 percent of the total operating revenue of all TNCs. OK, so now we analyzed the structure, so how does this relate to the control? Well, ownership gives voting rights to shareholders. This is the normal notion of control. And there are different models which allow you to compute the control you get from ownership. If you have more than 50 percent of the shares in a company, you get control, but usually, it depends on the relative distribution of shares. And the network really matters. About 10 years ago, Mr. Tronchetti Provera had ownership and control in a small company, which had ownership and control in a bigger company. You get the idea. This ended up giving him control in Telecom Italia with a leverage of 26. So this means that, with each euro he invested, he was able to move 26 euros of market value through the chain of ownership relations. Now what we actually computed in our study was the control over the TNCs' value. This allowed us to assign a degree of influence to each shareholder. This is very much in the sense of Max Weber's idea of potential power, which is the probability of imposing one's own will despite the opposition of others. If you want to compute the flow in an ownership network, this is what you have to do. It's actually not that hard to understand. Let me explain by giving you this analogy. So think about water flowing in pipes, where the pipes have different thickness. So similarly, the control is flowing in the ownership networks and is accumulating at the nodes. So what did we find after computing all this network control? Well, it turns out that the 737 top shareholders have the potential to collectively control 80 percent of the TNCs' value. Now remember, we started out with 600,000 nodes, so these 737 top players make up a bit more than 0.1 percent. They're mostly financial institutions in the US and the UK. And it gets even more extreme. There are 146 top players in the core, and they together have the potential to collectively control 40 percent of the TNCs' value. What should you take home from all of this? Well, the high degree of control you saw is very extreme by any standard. The high degree of interconnectivity of the top players in the core could pose a significant systemic risk to the global economy. And we could easily reproduce the TNC network with a few simple rules. This means that its structure is probably the result of self-organization. It's an emergent property which depends on the rules of interaction in the system, so it's probably not the result of a top-down approach like a global conspiracy. Our study "is an impression of the moon's surface. It's not a street map." So you should take the exact numbers in our study with a grain of salt, yet it "gave us a tantalizing glimpse of a brave new world of finance." We hope to have opened the door for more such research in this direction, so the remaining unknown terrain will be charted in the future. And this is slowly starting. We're seeing the emergence of long-term and highly-funded programs which aim at understanding our networked world from a complexity point of view. But this journey has only just begun, so we will have to wait before we see the first results. Now there is still a big problem, in my opinion. Ideas relating to finance, economics, politics, society, are very often tainted by people's personal ideologies. I really hope that this complexity perspective allows for some common ground to be found. It would be really great if it has the power to help end the gridlock created by conflicting ideas, which appears to be paralyzing our globalized world. Reality is so complex, we need to move away from dogma. But this is just my own personal ideology. Thank you. (Applause) |
The secret to desire in a long-term relationship | {0: 'Psychotherapist Esther Perel is changing the conversation on what it means to be in love and have a fulfilling sex life.'} | TEDSalon NY2013 | So, why does good sex so often fade, even for couples who continue to love each other as much as ever? And why does good intimacy not guarantee good sex, contrary to popular belief? Or, the next question would be, can we want what we already have? That's the million-dollar question, right? And why is the forbidden so erotic? What is it about transgression that makes desire so potent? And why does sex make babies, and babies spell erotic disaster in couples? (Laughter) It's kind of the fatal erotic blow, isn't it? And when you love, how does it feel? And when you desire, how is it different? These are some of the questions that are at the center of my exploration on the nature of erotic desire and its concomitant dilemmas in modern love. So I travel the globe, and what I'm noticing is that everywhere where romanticism has entered, there seems to be a crisis of desire. A crisis of desire, as in owning the wanting — desire as an expression of our individuality, of our free choice, of our preferences, of our identity — desire that has become a central concept as part of modern love and individualistic societies. You know, this is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term not because we want 14 children, for which we need to have even more because many of them won't make it, and not because it is exclusively a woman's marital duty. This is the first time that we want sex over time about pleasure and connection that is rooted in desire. So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult? And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship, I think, is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs. On the one hand, our need for security, for predictability, for safety, for dependability, for reliability, for permanence. All these anchoring, grounding experiences of our lives that we call home. But we also have an equally strong need — men and women — for adventure, for novelty, for mystery, for risk, for danger, for the unknown, for the unexpected, surprise — you get the gist. For journey, for travel. So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship, or what we today like to call a passionate marriage, used to be a contradiction in terms. Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. (Laughter) So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that. (Laughter) (Applause) So now we get to the existential reality of the story, right? Because I think, in some way — and I'll come back to that — but the crisis of desire is often a crisis of the imagination. So why does good sex so often fade? What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? Because therein lies the mystery of eroticism. So if there is a verb, for me, that comes with love, it's "to have." And if there is a verb that comes with desire, it is "to want." In love, we want to have, we want to know the beloved. We want to minimize the distance. We want to contract that gap. We want to neutralize the tensions. We want closeness. But in desire, we tend to not really want to go back to the places we've already gone. Forgone conclusion does not keep our interest. In desire, we want an Other, somebody on the other side that we can go visit, that we can go spend some time with, that we can go see what goes on in their red-light district. You know? In desire, we want a bridge to cross. Or in other words, I sometimes say, fire needs air. Desire needs space. And when it's said like that, it's often quite abstract. But then I took a question with me. And I've gone to more than 20 countries in the last few years with "Mating in Captivity," and I asked people, when do you find yourself most drawn to your partner? Not attracted sexually, per Se, but most drawn. And across culture, across religion, and across gender — except for one — there are a few answers that just keep coming back. So the first group is: I am most drawn to my partner when she is away, when we are apart, when we reunite. Basically, when I get back in touch with my ability to imagine myself with my partner, when my imagination comes back in the picture, and when I can root it in absence and in longing, which is a major component of desire. But then the second group is even more interesting. I am most drawn to my partner when I see him in the studio, when she is onstage, when he is in his element, when she's doing something she's passionate about, when I see him at a party and other people are really drawn to him, when I see her hold court. Basically, when I look at my partner radiant and confident. Probably the biggest turn-on across the board. Radiant, as in self-sustaining. I look at this person — by the way, in desire people rarely talk about it, when we are blended into one, five centimeters from each other. I don't know in inches how much that is. But it's also not when the other person is that far apart that you no longer see them. It's when I'm looking at my partner from a comfortable distance, where this person that is already so familiar, so known, is momentarily once again somewhat mysterious, somewhat elusive. And in this space between me and the other lies the erotic élan, lies that movement toward the other. Because sometimes, as Proust says, mystery is not about traveling to new places, but it's about looking with new eyes. And so, when I see my partner on his own or her own, doing something in which they are enveloped, I look at this person and I momentarily get a shift in perception, and I stay open to the mysteries that are living right next to me. And then, more importantly, in this description about the other or myself — it's the same — what is most interesting is that there is no neediness in desire. Nobody needs anybody. There is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving. It's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac. (Laughter) I have yet to see somebody who is so turned on by somebody who needs them. Wanting them is one thing. Needing them is a shot down and women have known that forever, because anything that will bring up parenthood will usually decrease the erotic charge. (Laughter) For good reasons, right? And then the third group of answers usually would be: when I'm surprised, when we laugh together, as somebody said to me in the office today, when he's in his tux, so I said, you know, it's either the tux or the cowboy boots. But basically it's when there is novelty. But novelty isn't about new positions. It isn't a repertoire of techniques. Novelty is, what parts of you do you bring out? What parts of you are just being seen? Because in some way one could say sex isn't something you do, eh? Sex is a place you go. It's a space you enter inside yourself and with another, or others. So where do you go in sex? What parts of you do you connect to? What do you seek to express there? Is it a place for transcendence and spiritual union? Is it a place for naughtiness and is it a place to be safely aggressive? Is it a place where you can finally surrender and not have to take responsibility for everything? Is it a place where you can express your infantile wishes? What comes out there? It's a language. It isn't just a behavior. And it's the poetic of that language that I'm interested in, which is why I began to explore this concept of erotic intelligence. You know, animals have sex. It's the pivot, it's biology, it's the natural instinct. We are the only ones who have an erotic life, which means that it's sexuality transformed by the human imagination. We are the only ones who can make love for hours, have a blissful time, multiple orgasms, and touch nobody, just because we can imagine it. We can hint at it. We don't even have to do it. We can experience that powerful thing called anticipation, which is a mortar to desire. The ability to imagine it, as if it's happening, to experience it as if it's happening, while nothing is happening and everything is happening, at the same time. So when I began to think about eroticism, I began to think about the poetics of sex. And if I look at it as an intelligence, then it's something that you cultivate. What are the ingredients? Imagination, playfulness, novelty, curiosity, mystery. But the central agent is really that piece called the imagination. But more importantly, for me to begin to understand who are the couples who have an erotic spark, what sustains desire, I had to go back to the original definition of eroticism, the mystical definition, and I went through it through a bifurcation by looking, actually, at trauma, which is the other side. And I looked at it, looking at the community that I had grown up in, which was a community in Belgium, all Holocaust survivors, and in my community, there were two groups: those who didn't die, and those who came back to life. And those who didn't die lived often very tethered to the ground, could not experience pleasure, could not trust, because when you're vigilant, worried, anxious, and insecure, you can't lift your head to go and take off in space and be playful and safe and imaginative. Those who came back to life were those who understood the erotic as an antidote to death. They knew how to keep themselves alive. And when I began to listen to the sexlessness of the couples that I work with, I sometimes would hear people say, "I want more sex," but generally, people want better sex, and better is to reconnect with that quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of renewal, of vitality, of Eros, of energy that sex used to afford them, or that they've hoped it would afford them. And so I began to ask a different question. "I shut myself off when ..." began to be the question. "I turn off my desires when ..." Which is not the same question as, "What turns me off is ..." and "You turn me off when ..." And people began to say, "I turn myself off when I feel dead inside, when I don't like my body, when I feel old, when I haven't had time for myself, when I haven't had a chance to even check in with you, when I don't perform well at work, when I feel low self esteem, when I don't have a sense of self-worth, when I don't feel like I have a right to want, to take, to receive pleasure." And then I began to ask the reverse question. "I turn myself on when ..." Because most of the time, people like to ask the question, "You turn me on, what turns me on," and I'm out of the question, you know? Now, if you are dead inside, the other person can do a lot of things for Valentine's. It won't make a dent. There is nobody at the reception desk. (Laughter) So I turn myself on when, I turn on my desires, I wake up when ... Now, in this paradox between love and desire, what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love — mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other — are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire. Because desire comes with a host of feelings that are not always such favorites of love: jealousy, possessiveness, aggression, power, dominance, naughtiness, mischief. Basically most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day. You know, the erotic mind is not very politically correct. If everybody was fantasizing on a bed of roses, we wouldn't be having such interesting talks about this. (Laughter) But no, in our mind up there are a host of things going on that we don't always know how to bring to the person that we love, because we think love comes with selflessness and in fact desire comes with a certain amount of selfishness in the best sense of the word: the ability to stay connected to one's self in the presence of another. So I want to draw that little image for you, because this need to reconcile these two sets of needs, we are born with that. Our need for connection, our need for separateness, or our need for security and adventure, or our need for togetherness and for autonomy, and if you think about the little kid who sits on your lap and who is cozily nested here and very secure and comfortable, and at some point all of us need to go out into the world to discover and to explore. That's the beginning of desire, that exploratory need, curiosity, discovery. And then at some point they turn around and they look at you. And if you tell them, "Hey kiddo, the world's a great place. Go for it. There's so much fun out there," then they can turn away and they can experience connection and separateness at the same time. They can go off in their imagination, off in their body, off in their playfulness, all the while knowing that there's somebody when they come back. But if on this side there is somebody who says, "I'm worried. I'm anxious. I'm depressed. My partner hasn't taken care of me in so long. What's so good out there? Don't we have everything you need together, you and I?" then there are a few little reactions that all of us can pretty much recognize. Some of us will come back, came back a long time ago, and that little child who comes back is the child who will forgo a part of himself in order not to lose the other. I will lose my freedom in order not to lose connection. And I will learn to love in a certain way that will become burdened with extra worry and extra responsibility and extra protection, and I won't know how to leave you in order to go play, in order to go experience pleasure, in order to discover, to enter inside myself. Translate this into adult language. It starts very young. It continues into our sex lives up to the end. Child number two comes back but looks like that over their shoulder all the time. "Are you going to be there? Are you going to curse me, scold me? Are you going to be angry with me?" And they may be gone, but they're never really away. And those are often the people that will tell you, "In the beginning, it was super hot." Because in the beginning, the growing intimacy wasn't yet so strong that it actually led to the decrease of desire. The more connected I became, the more responsible I felt, the less I was able to let go in your presence. The third child doesn't really come back. So what happens, if you want to sustain desire, it's that real dialectic piece. On the one hand you want the security in order to be able to go. On the other hand if you can't go, you can't have pleasure, you can't culminate, you don't have an orgasm, you don't get excited because you spend your time in the body and the head of the other and not in your own. So in this dilemma about reconciling these two sets of fundamental needs, there are a few things that I've come to understand erotic couples do. One, they have a lot of sexual privacy. They understand that there is an erotic space that belongs to each of them. They also understand that foreplay is not something you do five minutes before the real thing. Foreplay pretty much starts at the end of the previous orgasm. They also understand that an erotic space isn't about, you begin to stroke the other. It's about you create a space where you leave Management Inc., maybe where you leave the Agile program — (Laughter) And you actually just enter that place where you stop being the good citizen who is taking care of things and being responsible. Responsibility and desire just butt heads. They don't really do well together. Erotic couples also understand that passion waxes and wanes. It's pretty much like the moon. It has intermittent eclipses. But what they know is they know how to resurrect it. They know how to bring it back. And they know how to bring it back because they have demystified one big myth, which is the myth of spontaneity, which is that it's just going to fall from heaven while you're folding the laundry like a deus ex machina, and in fact they understood that whatever is going to just happen in a long-term relationship, already has. Committed sex is premeditated sex. It's willful. It's intentional. It's focus and presence. Merry Valentine's. (Applause) |
Be an artist, right now! | {0: 'One of the premiere writers of his generation, Korean novelist Young-ha Kim weaves tales that speak to the thrills and challenges of young Koreans in our increasingly globalized and ever-changing world. '} | TEDxSeoul | The theme of my talk today is, "Be an artist, right now." Most people, when this subject is brought up, get tense and resist it: "Art doesn't feed me, and right now I'm busy. I have to go to school, get a job, send my kids to lessons ... " You think, "I'm too busy. I don't have time for art." There are hundreds of reasons why we can't be artists right now. Don't they just pop into your head? There are so many reasons why we can't be, indeed, we're not sure why we should be. We don't know why we should be artists, but we have many reasons why we can't be. Why do people instantly resist the idea of associating themselves with art? Perhaps you think art is for the greatly gifted or for the thoroughly and professionally trained. And some of you may think you've strayed too far from art. Well you might have, but I don't think so. This is the theme of my talk today. We are all born artists. If you have kids, you know what I mean. Almost everything kids do is art. They draw with crayons on the wall. They dance to Son Dam Bi's dance on TV, but you can't even call it Son Dam Bi's dance — it becomes the kids' own dance. So they dance a strange dance and inflict their singing on everyone. Perhaps their art is something only their parents can bear, and because they practice such art all day long, people honestly get a little tired around kids. Kids will sometimes perform monodramas — playing house is indeed a monodrama or a play. And some kids, when they get a bit older, start to lie. Usually parents remember the very first time their kid lies. They're shocked. "Now you're showing your true colors," Mom says. She thinks, "Why does he take after his dad?" She questions him, "What kind of a person are you going to be?" But you shouldn't worry. The moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins. They are talking about things they didn't see. It's amazing. It's a wonderful moment. Parents should celebrate. "Hurray! My boy finally started to lie!" All right! It calls for celebration. For example, a kid says, "Mom, guess what? I met an alien on my way home." Then a typical mom responds, "Stop that nonsense." Now, an ideal parent is someone who responds like this: "Really? An alien, huh? What did it look like? Did it say anything? Where did you meet it?" "Um, in front of the supermarket." When you have a conversation like this, the kid has to come up with the next thing to say to be responsible for what he started. Soon, a story develops. Of course this is an infantile story, but thinking up one sentence after the next is the same thing a professional writer like me does. In essence, they are not different. Roland Barthes once said of Flaubert's novels, "Flaubert did not write a novel. He merely connected one sentence after another. The eros between sentences, that is the essence of Flaubert's novel." That's right — a novel, basically, is writing one sentence, then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence. And you continue to make connections. Take a look at this sentence: "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug." Yes, it's the first sentence of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." Writing such an unjustifiable sentence and continuing in order to justify it, Kafka's work became the masterpiece of contemporary literature. Kafka did not show his work to his father. He was not on good terms with his father. On his own, he wrote these sentences. Had he shown his father, "My boy has finally lost it," he would've thought. And that's right. Art is about going a little nuts and justifying the next sentence, which is not much different from what a kid does. A kid who has just started to lie is taking the first step as a storyteller. Kids do art. They don't get tired and they have fun doing it. I was in Jeju Island a few days ago. When kids are on the beach, most of them love playing in the water. But some of them spend a lot of time in the sand, making mountains and seas — well, not seas, but different things — people and dogs, etc. But parents tell them, "It will all be washed away by the waves." In other words, it's useless. There's no need. But kids don't mind. They have fun in the moment and they keep playing in the sand. Kids don't do it because someone told them to. They aren't told by their boss or anyone, they just do it. When you were little, I bet you spent time enjoying the pleasure of primitive art. When I ask my students to write about their happiest moment, many write about an early artistic experience they had as a kid. Learning to play piano for the first time and playing four hands with a friend, or performing a ridiculous skit with friends looking like idiots — things like that. Or the moment you developed the first film you shot with an old camera. They talk about these kinds of experiences. You must have had such a moment. In that moment, art makes you happy because it's not work. Work doesn't make you happy, does it? Mostly it's tough. The French writer Michel Tournier has a famous saying. It's a bit mischievous, actually. "Work is against human nature. The proof is that it makes us tired." Right? Why would work tire us if it's in our nature? Playing doesn't tire us. We can play all night long. If we work overnight, we should be paid for overtime. Why? Because it's tiring and we feel fatigue. But kids, usually they do art for fun. It's playing. They don't draw to sell the work to a client or play the piano to earn money for the family. Of course, there were kids who had to. You know this gentleman, right? He had to tour around Europe to support his family — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — but that was centuries ago, so we can make him an exception. Unfortunately, at some point our art — such a joyful pastime — ends. Kids have to go to lessons, to school, do homework and of course they take piano or ballet lessons, but they aren't fun anymore. You're told to do it and there's competition. How can it be fun? If you're in elementary school and you still draw on the wall, you'll surely get in trouble with your mom. Besides, if you continue to act like an artist as you get older, you'll increasingly feel pressure — people will question your actions and ask you to act properly. Here's my story: I was an eighth grader and I entered a drawing contest at school in Gyeongbokgung. I was trying my best, and my teacher came around and asked me, "What are you doing?" "I'm drawing diligently," I said. "Why are you using only black?" Indeed, I was eagerly coloring the sketchbook in black. And I explained, "It's a dark night and a crow is perching on a branch." Then my teacher said, "Really? Well, Young-ha, you may not be good at drawing but you have a talent for storytelling." Or so I wished. "Now you'll get it, you rascal!" was the response. (Laughter) "You'll get it!" he said. You were supposed to draw the palace, the Gyeonghoeru, etc., but I was coloring everything in black, so he dragged me out of the group. There were a lot of girls there as well, so I was utterly mortified. None of my explanations or excuses were heard, and I really got it big time. If he was an ideal teacher, he would have responded like I said before, "Young-ha may not have a talent for drawing, but he has a gift for making up stories," and he would have encouraged me. But such a teacher is seldom found. Later, I grew up and went to Europe's galleries — I was a university student — and I thought this was really unfair. Look what I found. (Laughter) Works like this were hung in Basel while I was punished and stood in front of the palace with my drawing in my mouth. Look at this. Doesn't it look just like wallpaper? Contemporary art, I later discovered, isn't explained by a lame story like mine. No crows are brought up. Most of the works have no title, Untitled. Anyways, contemporary art in the 20th century is about doing something weird and filling the void with explanation and interpretation — essentially the same as I did. Of course, my work was very amateur, but let's turn to more famous examples. This is Picasso's. He stuck handlebars into a bike seat and called it "Bull's Head." Sounds convincing, right? Next, a urinal was placed on its side and called "Fountain". That was Duchamp. So filling the gap between explanation and a weird act with stories — that's indeed what contemporary art is all about. Picasso even made the statement, "I draw not what I see but what I think." Yes, it means I didn't have to draw Gyeonghoeru. I wish I knew what Picasso said back then. I could have argued better with my teacher. Unfortunately, the little artists within us are choked to death before we get to fight against the oppressors of art. They get locked in. That's our tragedy. So what happens when little artists get locked in, banished or even killed? Our artistic desire doesn't go away. We want to express, to reveal ourselves, but with the artist dead, the artistic desire reveals itself in dark form. In karaoke bars, there are always people who sing "She's Gone" or "Hotel California," miming the guitar riffs. Usually they sound awful. Awful indeed. Some people turn into rockers like this. Or some people dance in clubs. People who would have enjoyed telling stories end up trolling on the Internet all night long. That's how a writing talent reveals itself on the dark side. Sometimes we see dads get more excited than their kids playing with Legos or putting together plastic robots. They go, "Don't touch it. Daddy will do it for you." The kid has already lost interest and is doing something else, but the dad alone builds castles. This shows the artistic impulses inside us are suppressed, not gone. But they can often reveal themselves negatively, in the form of jealousy. You know the song "I would love to be on TV"? Why would we love it? TV is full of people who do what we wished to do, but never got to. They dance, they act — and the more they do, they are praised. So we start to envy them. We become dictators with a remote and start to criticize the people on TV. "He just can't act." "You call that singing? She can't hit the notes." We easily say these sorts of things. We get jealous, not because we're evil, but because we have little artists pent up inside us. That's what I think. What should we do then? Yes, that's right. Right now, we need to start our own art. Right this minute, we can turn off TV, log off the Internet, get up and start to do something. Where I teach students in drama school, there's a course called Dramatics. In this course, all students must put on a play. However, acting majors are not supposed to act. They can write the play, for example, and the writers may work on stage art. Likewise, stage art majors may become actors, and in this way you put on a show. Students at first wonder whether they can actually do it, but later they have so much fun. I rarely see anyone who is miserable doing a play. In school, the military or even in a mental institution, once you make people do it, they enjoy it. I saw this happen in the army — many people had fun doing plays. I have another experience: In my writing class, I give students a special assignment. I have students like you in the class — many who don't major in writing. Some major in art or music and think they can't write. So I give them blank sheets of paper and a theme. It can be a simple theme: Write about the most unfortunate experience in your childhood. There's one condition: You must write like crazy. Like crazy! I walk around and encourage them, "Come on, come on!" They have to write like crazy for an hour or two. They only get to think for the first five minutes. The reason I make them write like crazy is because when you write slowly and lots of thoughts cross your mind, the artistic devil creeps in. This devil will tell you hundreds of reasons why you can't write: "People will laugh at you. This is not good writing! What kind of sentence is this? Look at your handwriting!" It will say a lot of things. You have to run fast so the devil can't catch up. The really good writing I've seen in my class was not from the assignments with a long deadline, but from the 40- to 60-minute crazy writing students did in front of me with a pencil. The students go into a kind of trance. After 30 or 40 minutes, they write without knowing what they're writing. And in this moment, the nagging devil disappears. So I can say this: It's not the hundreds of reasons why one can't be an artist, but rather, the one reason one must be that makes us artists. Why we cannot be something is not important. Most artists became artists because of the one reason. When we put the devil in our heart to sleep and start our own art, enemies appear on the outside. Mostly, they have the faces of our parents. (Laughter) Sometimes they look like our spouses, but they are not your parents or spouses. They are devils. Devils. They came to Earth briefly transformed to stop you from being artistic, from becoming artists. And they have a magic question. When we say, "I think I'll try acting. There's a drama school in the community center," or "I'd like to learn Italian songs," they ask, "Oh, yeah? A play? What for?" The magic question is, "What for?" But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal. It saves our souls and makes us live happily. It helps us express ourselves and be happy without the help of alcohol or drugs. So in response to such a pragmatic question, we need to be bold. "Well, just for the fun of it. Sorry for having fun without you," is what you should say. "I'll just go ahead and do it anyway." The ideal future I imagine is where we all have multiple identities, at least one of which is an artist. Once I was in New York and got in a cab. I took the backseat, and in front of me I saw something related to a play. So I asked the driver, "What is this?" He said it was his profile. "Then what are you?" I asked. "An actor," he said. He was a cabby and an actor. I asked, "What roles do you usually play?" He proudly said he played King Lear. King Lear. "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" — a great line from King Lear. That's the world I dream of. Someone is a golfer by day and writer by night. Or a cabby and an actor, a banker and a painter, secretly or publicly performing their own arts. In 1990, Martha Graham, the legend of modern dance, came to Korea. The great artist, then in her 90s, arrived at Gimpo Airport and a reporter asked her a typical question: "What do you have to do to become a great dancer? Any advice for aspiring Korean dancers?" Now, she was the master. This photo was taken in 1948 and she was already a celebrated artist. In 1990, she was asked this question. And here's what she answered: "Just do it." Wow. I was touched. Only those three words and she left the airport. That's it. So what should we do now? Let's be artists, right now. Right away. How? Just do it! Thank you. (Applause) |
A monkey that controls a robot with its thoughts. No, really. | {0: 'Miguel Nicolelis explores the limits of the brain-machine interface.'} | TEDMED 2012 | The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman. We are always chasing storms. We want to see and measure storms — brainstorms, that is. And we all talk about brainstorms in our daily lives, but we rarely see or listen to one. So I always like to start these talks by actually introducing you to one of them. Actually, the first time we recorded more than one neuron — a hundred brain cells simultaneously — we could measure the electrical sparks of a hundred cells in the same animal, this is the first image we got, the first 10 seconds of this recording. So we got a little snippet of a thought, and we could see it in front of us. I always tell the students that we could also call neuroscientists some sort of astronomer, because we are dealing with a system that is only comparable in terms of number of cells to the number of galaxies that we have in the universe. And here we are, out of billions of neurons, just recording, 10 years ago, a hundred. We are doing a thousand now. And we hope to understand something fundamental about our human nature. Because, if you don't know yet, everything that we use to define what human nature is comes from these storms, comes from these storms that roll over the hills and valleys of our brains and define our memories, our beliefs, our feelings, our plans for the future. Everything that we ever do, everything that every human has ever done, do or will do, requires the toil of populations of neurons producing these kinds of storms. And the sound of a brainstorm, if you've never heard one, is somewhat like this. You can put it louder if you can. My son calls this "making popcorn while listening to a badly-tuned A.M. station." This is a brain. This is what happens when you route these electrical storms to a loudspeaker and you listen to a hundred brain cells firing, your brain will sound like this — my brain, any brain. And what we want to do as neuroscientists in this time is to actually listen to these symphonies, these brain symphonies, and try to extract from them the messages they carry. In particular, about 12 years ago we created a preparation that we named brain-machine interfaces. And you have a scheme here that describes how it works. The idea is, let's have some sensors that listen to these storms, this electrical firing, and see if you can, in the same time that it takes for this storm to leave the brain and reach the legs or the arms of an animal — about half a second — let's see if we can read these signals, extract the motor messages that are embedded in it, translate it into digital commands and send it to an artificial device that will reproduce the voluntary motor wheel of that brain in real time. And see if we can measure how well we can translate that message when we compare to the way the body does that. And if we can actually provide feedback, sensory signals that go back from this robotic, mechanical, computational actuator that is now under the control of the brain, back to the brain, how the brain deals with that, of receiving messages from an artificial piece of machinery. And that's exactly what we did 10 years ago. We started with a superstar monkey called Aurora that became one of the superstars of this field. And Aurora liked to play video games. As you can see here, she likes to use a joystick, like any one of us, any of our kids, to play this game. And as a good primate, she even tries to cheat before she gets the right answer. So even before a target appears that she's supposed to cross with the cursor that she's controlling with this joystick, Aurora is trying to find the target, no matter where it is. And if she's doing that, because every time she crosses that target with the little cursor, she gets a drop of Brazilian orange juice. And I can tell you, any monkey will do anything for you if you get a little drop of Brazilian orange juice. Actually any primate will do that. Think about that. Well, while Aurora was playing this game, as you saw, and doing a thousand trials a day and getting 97 percent correct and 350 milliliters of orange juice, we are recording the brainstorms that are produced in her head and sending them to a robotic arm that was learning to reproduce the movements that Aurora was making. Because the idea was to actually turn on this brain-machine interface and have Aurora play the game just by thinking, without interference of her body. Her brainstorms would control an arm that would move the cursor and cross the target. And to our shock, that's exactly what Aurora did. She played the game without moving her body. So every trajectory that you see of the cursor now, this is the exact first moment she got that. That's the exact first moment a brain intention was liberated from the physical domains of a body of a primate and could act outside, in that outside world, just by controlling an artificial device. And Aurora kept playing the game, kept finding the little target and getting the orange juice that she wanted to get, that she craved for. Well, she did that because she, at that time, had acquired a new arm. The robotic arm that you see moving here 30 days later, after the first video that I showed to you, is under the control of Aurora's brain and is moving the cursor to get to the target. And Aurora now knows that she can play the game with this robotic arm, but she has not lost the ability to use her biological arms to do what she pleases. She can scratch her back, she can scratch one of us, she can play another game. By all purposes and means, Aurora's brain has incorporated that artificial device as an extension of her body. The model of the self that Aurora had in her mind has been expanded to get one more arm. Well, we did that 10 years ago. Just fast forward 10 years. Just last year we realized that you don't even need to have a robotic device. You can just build a computational body, an avatar, a monkey avatar. And you can actually use it for our monkeys to either interact with them, or you can train them to assume in a virtual world the first-person perspective of that avatar and use her brain activity to control the movements of the avatar's arms or legs. And what we did basically was to train the animals to learn how to control these avatars and explore objects that appear in the virtual world. And these objects are visually identical, but when the avatar crosses the surface of these objects, they send an electrical message that is proportional to the microtactile texture of the object that goes back directly to the monkey's brain, informing the brain what it is the avatar is touching. And in just four weeks, the brain learns to process this new sensation and acquires a new sensory pathway — like a new sense. And you truly liberate the brain now because you are allowing the brain to send motor commands to move this avatar. And the feedback that comes from the avatar is being processed directly by the brain without the interference of the skin. So what you see here is this is the design of the task. You're going to see an animal basically touching these three targets. And he has to select one because only one carries the reward, the orange juice that they want to get. And he has to select it by touch using a virtual arm, an arm that doesn't exist. And that's exactly what they do. This is a complete liberation of the brain from the physical constraints of the body and the motor in a perceptual task. The animal is controlling the avatar to touch the targets. And he's sensing the texture by receiving an electrical message directly in the brain. And the brain is deciding what is the texture associated with the reward. The legends that you see in the movie don't appear for the monkey. And by the way, they don't read English anyway, so they are here just for you to know that the correct target is shifting position. And yet, they can find them by tactile discrimination, and they can press it and select it. So when we look at the brains of these animals, on the top panel you see the alignment of 125 cells showing what happens with the brain activity, the electrical storms, of this sample of neurons in the brain when the animal is using a joystick. And that's a picture that every neurophysiologist knows. The basic alignment shows that these cells are coding for all possible directions. The bottom picture is what happens when the body stops moving and the animal starts controlling either a robotic device or a computational avatar. As fast as we can reset our computers, the brain activity shifts to start representing this new tool, as if this too was a part of that primate's body. The brain is assimilating that too, as fast as we can measure. So that suggests to us that our sense of self does not end at the last layer of the epithelium of our bodies, but it ends at the last layer of electrons of the tools that we're commanding with our brains. Our violins, our cars, our bicycles, our soccer balls, our clothing — they all become assimilated by this voracious, amazing, dynamic system called the brain. How far can we take it? Well, in an experiment that we ran a few years ago, we took this to the limit. We had an animal running on a treadmill at Duke University on the East Coast of the United States, producing the brainstorms necessary to move. And we had a robotic device, a humanoid robot, in Kyoto, Japan at ATR Laboratories that was dreaming its entire life to be controlled by a brain, a human brain, or a primate brain. What happens here is that the brain activity that generated the movements in the monkey was transmitted to Japan and made this robot walk while footage of this walking was sent back to Duke, so that the monkey could see the legs of this robot walking in front of her. So she could be rewarded, not by what her body was doing but for every correct step of the robot on the other side of the planet controlled by her brain activity. Funny thing, that round trip around the globe took 20 milliseconds less than it takes for that brainstorm to leave its head, the head of the monkey, and reach its own muscle. The monkey was moving a robot that was six times bigger, across the planet. This is one of the experiments in which that robot was able to walk autonomously. This is CB1 fulfilling its dream in Japan under the control of the brain activity of a primate. So where are we taking all this? What are we going to do with all this research, besides studying the properties of this dynamic universe that we have between our ears? Well the idea is to take all this knowledge and technology and try to restore one of the most severe neurological problems that we have in the world. Millions of people have lost the ability to translate these brainstorms into action, into movement. Although their brains continue to produce those storms and code for movements, they cannot cross a barrier that was created by a lesion on the spinal cord. So our idea is to create a bypass, is to use these brain-machine interfaces to read these signals, larger-scale brainstorms that contain the desire to move again, bypass the lesion using computational microengineering and send it to a new body, a whole body called an exoskeleton, a whole robotic suit that will become the new body of these patients. And you can see an image produced by this consortium. This is a nonprofit consortium called the Walk Again Project that is putting together scientists from Europe, from here in the United States, and in Brazil together to work to actually get this new body built — a body that we believe, through the same plastic mechanisms that allow Aurora and other monkeys to use these tools through a brain-machine interface and that allows us to incorporate the tools that we produce and use in our daily life. This same mechanism, we hope, will allow these patients, not only to imagine again the movements that they want to make and translate them into movements of this new body, but for this body to be assimilated as the new body that the brain controls. So I was told about 10 years ago that this would never happen, that this was close to impossible. And I can only tell you that as a scientist, I grew up in southern Brazil in the mid-'60s watching a few crazy guys telling [us] that they would go to the Moon. And I was five years old, and I never understood why NASA didn't hire Captain Kirk and Spock to do the job; after all, they were very proficient — but just seeing that as a kid made me believe, as my grandmother used to tell me, that "impossible is just the possible that someone has not put in enough effort to make it come true." So they told me that it's impossible to make someone walk. I think I'm going to follow my grandmother's advice. Thank you. (Applause) |
Could your language affect your ability to save money? | {0: "Keith Chen's research suggests that the language you speak may impact the way you think about your future."} | TEDGlobal 2012 | The global economic financial crisis has reignited public interest in something that's actually one of the oldest questions in economics, dating back to at least before Adam Smith. And that is, why is it that countries with seemingly similar economies and institutions can display radically different savings behavior? Now, many brilliant economists have spent their entire lives working on this question, and as a field we've made a tremendous amount of headway and we understand a lot about this. What I'm here to talk with you about today is an intriguing new hypothesis and some surprisingly powerful new findings that I've been working on about the link between the structure of the language you speak and how you find yourself with the propensity to save. Let me tell you a little bit about savings rates, a little bit about language, and then I'll draw that connection. Let's start by thinking about the member countries of the OECD, or the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. OECD countries, by and large, you should think about these as the richest, most industrialized countries in the world. And by joining the OECD, they were affirming a common commitment to democracy, open markets and free trade. Despite all of these similarities, we see huge differences in savings behavior. So all the way over on the left of this graph, what you see is many OECD countries saving over a quarter of their GDP every year, and some OECD countries saving over a third of their GDP per year. Holding down the right flank of the OECD, all the way on the other side, is Greece. And what you can see is that over the last 25 years, Greece has barely managed to save more than 10 percent of their GDP. It should be noted, of course, that the United States and the U.K. are the next in line. Now that we see these huge differences in savings rates, how is it possible that language might have something to do with these differences? Let me tell you a little bit about how languages fundamentally differ. Linguists and cognitive scientists have been exploring this question for many years now. And then I'll draw the connection between these two behaviors. Many of you have probably already noticed that I'm Chinese. I grew up in the Midwest of the United States. And something I realized quite early on was that the Chinese language forced me to speak about and — in fact, more fundamentally than that — ever so slightly forced me to think about family in very different ways. Now, how might that be? Let me give you an example. Suppose I were talking with you and I was introducing you to my uncle. You understood exactly what I just said in English. If we were speaking Mandarin Chinese with each other, though, I wouldn't have that luxury. I wouldn't have been able to convey so little information. What my language would have forced me to do, instead of just telling you, "This is my uncle," is to tell you a tremendous amount of additional information. My language would force me to tell you whether or not this was an uncle on my mother's side or my father's side, whether this was an uncle by marriage or by birth, and if this man was my father's brother, whether he was older than or younger than my father. All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn't let me ignore it. And in fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it. Now, that fascinated me endlessly as a child, but what fascinates me even more today as an economist is that some of these same differences carry through to how languages speak about time. So for example, if I'm speaking in English, I have to speak grammatically differently if I'm talking about past rain, "It rained yesterday," current rain, "It is raining now," or future rain, "It will rain tomorrow." Notice that English requires a lot more information with respect to the timing of events. Why? Because I have to consider that and I have to modify what I'm saying to say, "It will rain," or "It's going to rain." It's simply not permissible in English to say, "It rain tomorrow." In contrast to that, that's almost exactly what you would say in Chinese. A Chinese speaker can basically say something that sounds very strange to an English speaker's ears. They can say, "Yesterday it rain," "Now it rain," "Tomorrow it rain." In some deep sense, Chinese doesn't divide up the time spectrum in the same way that English forces us to constantly do in order to speak correctly. Is this difference in languages only between very, very distantly related languages, like English and Chinese? Actually, no. So many of you know, in this room, that English is a Germanic language. What you may not have realized is that English is actually an outlier. It is the only Germanic language that requires this. For example, most other Germanic language speakers feel completely comfortable talking about rain tomorrow by saying, "Morgen regnet es," quite literally to an English ear, "It rain tomorrow." This led me, as a behavioral economist, to an intriguing hypothesis. Could how you speak about time, could how your language forces you to think about time, affect your propensity to behave across time? You speak English, a futured language. And what that means is that every time you discuss the future, or any kind of a future event, grammatically you're forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it's something viscerally different. Now suppose that that visceral difference makes you subtly dissociate the future from the present every time you speak. If that's true and it makes the future feel like something more distant and more different from the present, that's going to make it harder to save. If, on the other hand, you speak a futureless language, the present and the future, you speak about them identically. If that subtly nudges you to feel about them identically, that's going to make it easier to save. Now this is a fanciful theory. I'm a professor, I get paid to have fanciful theories. But how would you actually go about testing such a theory? Well, what I did with that was to access the linguistics literature. And interestingly enough, there are pockets of futureless language speakers situated all over the world. This is a pocket of futureless language speakers in Northern Europe. Interestingly enough, when you start to crank the data, these pockets of futureless language speakers all around the world turn out to be, by and large, some of the world's best savers. Just to give you a hint of that, let's look back at that OECD graph that we were talking about. What you see is that these bars are systematically taller and systematically shifted to the left compared to these bars which are the members of the OECD that speak futured languages. What is the average difference here? Five percentage points of your GDP saved per year. Over 25 years that has huge long-run effects on the wealth of your nation. Now while these findings are suggestive, countries can be different in so many different ways that it's very, very difficult sometimes to account for all of these possible differences. What I'm going to show you, though, is something that I've been engaging in for a year, which is trying to gather all of the largest datasets that we have access to as economists, and I'm going to try and strip away all of those possible differences, hoping to get this relationship to break. And just in summary, no matter how far I push this, I can't get it to break. Let me show you how far you can do that. One way to imagine that is I gather large datasets from around the world. So for example, there is the Survey of Health, [Aging] and Retirement in Europe. From this dataset you actually learn that retired European families are extremely patient with survey takers. (Laughter) So imagine that you're a retired household in Belgium and someone comes to your front door. "Excuse me, would you mind if I peruse your stock portfolio? Do you happen to know how much your house is worth? Do you mind telling me? Would you happen to have a hallway that's more than 10 meters long? If you do, would you mind if I timed how long it took you to walk down that hallway? Would you mind squeezing as hard as you can, in your dominant hand, this device so I can measure your grip strength? How about blowing into this tube so I can measure your lung capacity?" The survey takes over a day. (Laughter) Combine that with a Demographic and Health Survey collected by USAID in developing countries in Africa, for example, which that survey actually can go so far as to directly measure the HIV status of families living in, for example, rural Nigeria. Combine that with a world value survey, which measures the political opinions and, fortunately for me, the savings behaviors of millions of families in hundreds of countries around the world. Take all of that data, combine it, and this map is what you get. What you find is nine countries around the world that have significant native populations which speak both futureless and futured languages. And what I'm going to do is form statistical matched pairs between families that are nearly identical on every dimension that I can measure, and then I'm going to explore whether or not the link between language and savings holds even after controlling for all of these levels. What are the characteristics we can control for? Well I'm going to match families on country of birth and residence, the demographics — what sex, their age — their income level within their own country, their educational achievement, a lot about their family structure. It turns out there are six different ways to be married in Europe. And most granularly, I break them down by religion where there are 72 categories of religions in the world — so an extreme level of granularity. There are 1.4 billion different ways that a family can find itself. Now effectively everything I'm going to tell you from now on is only comparing these basically nearly identical families. It's getting as close as possible to the thought experiment of finding two families both of whom live in Brussels who are identical on every single one of these dimensions, but one of whom speaks Flemish and one of whom speaks French; or two families that live in a rural district in Nigeria, one of whom speaks Hausa and one of whom speaks Igbo. Now even after all of this granular level of control, do futureless language speakers seem to save more? Yes, futureless language speakers, even after this level of control, are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year. Does this have cumulative effects? Yes, by the time they retire, futureless language speakers, holding constant their income, are going to retire with 25 percent more in savings. Can we push this data even further? Yes, because I just told you, we actually collect a lot of health data as economists. Now how can we think about health behaviors to think about savings? Well, think about smoking, for example. Smoking is in some deep sense negative savings. If savings is current pain in exchange for future pleasure, smoking is just the opposite. It's current pleasure in exchange for future pain. What we should expect then is the opposite effect. And that's exactly what we find. Futureless language speakers are 20 to 24 percent less likely to be smoking at any given point in time compared to identical families, and they're going to be 13 to 17 percent less likely to be obese by the time they retire, and they're going to report being 21 percent more likely to have used a condom in their last sexual encounter. I could go on and on with the list of differences that you can find. It's almost impossible not to find a savings behavior for which this strong effect isn't present. My linguistics and economics colleagues at Yale and I are just starting to do this work and really explore and understand the ways that these subtle nudges cause us to think more or less about the future every single time we speak. Ultimately, the goal, once we understand how these subtle effects can change our decision making, we want to be able to provide people tools so that they can consciously make themselves better savers and more conscious investors in their own future. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Three myths about corruption | {0: 'A leading expert in the fields of property valuation and project management, Afra Raymond is battling the government corruption rampant in his country, Trinidad and Tobago.'} | TEDxPortofSpain | Okay, this morning I'm speaking on the question of corruption. And corruption is defined as the abuse of a position of trust for the benefit of yourself — or, in the case of our context, your friends, your family or your financiers. Okay? Friends, family and financiers. But we need to understand what we understand about corruption, and we need to understand that we have been miseducated about it, and we have to admit that. We have to have the courage to admit that to start changing how we deal with it. The first thing is that the big myth, number one, is that in fact it's not really a crime. When we get together with friends and family and we discuss crime in our country, crime in Belmont or crime in Diego or crime in Marabella, nobody's speaking about corruption. That's the honest truth. When the Commissioner of Police comes on TV to talk about crime, he isn't speaking about corruption. And we know for sure when the Minister of National Security is speaking about crime, he's not talking about corruption either. The point I'm making is that it is a crime. It is an economic crime, because we're involving the looting of taxpayers' money. Public and private corruption is a reality. As somebody who comes from the private sector, I can tell you there's a massive amount of corruption in the private sector that has nothing to do with government. The same bribes and backhanders and things that take place under the table, it all takes place in the private sector. Today, I'm focusing on public sector corruption, which the private sector also participates in. The second important myth to understand — because we have to destroy these myths, dismantle them and destroy them and ridicule them — the second important myth to understand is the one that says that in fact corruption is only a small problem — if it is a problem, it's only a small problem, that in fact it's only a little 10 or 15 percent, it's been going on forever, it probably will continue forever, and there's no point passing any laws, because there's little we can do about it. And I want to demonstrate that that, too, is a dangerous myth, very dangerous. It's a piece of public mischief. And I want to speak a little bit, take us back about 30 years. We're coming out today from Trinidad and Tobago, a resource-rich, small Caribbean country, and in the early 1970s we had a massive increase in the country's wealth, and that increase was caused by the increase in world oil prices. We call them petrodollars. The treasury was bursting with money. And it's ironic, because we're standing today in the Central Bank. You see, history's rich in irony. We're standing today in the Central Bank, and the Central Bank is responsible for a lot of the things I'm going to be speaking about. Okay? We're talking about irresponsibility in public office. We're speaking about the fact that across the terrace, the next tower is the Ministry of Finance, and there's a lot of connection with us today, so we're speaking within your temple today. Okay? (Applause) The first thing I want to talk about is that when all of this money flowed into our country about 40 years ago, we embarked, the government of the day embarked on a series of government-to-government arrangements to have rapidly develop the country. And some of the largest projects in the country were being constructed through government-to-government arrangements with some of the leading countries in the world, the United States and Britain and France and so on and so on. As I said, even this building we're standing in — that's one of the ironies — this building was part of that series of complexes, what they called the Twin Towers. It became so outrageous, the whole situation, that in fact a commission of inquiry was appointed, and it reported in 1982, 30 years ago it reported — the Ballah Report — 30 years ago, and immediately the government-to-government arrangements were stopped. The then-Prime Minister went to Parliament to give a budget speech, and he said some things that I'll never forget. They went right in here. I was a young man at the time. It went right into my heart. And he said that, in fact — Let me see if this thing works. Are we getting a, yeah?— That's what he told us. He told us that, in fact, two out of every three dollars of our petrodollars that we spent, the taxpayers' money, was wasted or stolen. So the 10 or 15 percent is pure mischief. As we say, it's a nancy-story. Forget it. That's for little children. We are big people, and we're trying to deal with what's happening in our society. Okay? This is the size of the problem. Okay? Two thirds of the money stolen or wasted. That was 30 years ago. 1982 was Ballah. So what has changed? I don't like to bring up embarrassing secrets to an international audience, but I have to. Four months ago, we suffered a constitutional outrage in this country. We call it the Section 34 fiasco, the Section 34 fiasco, a suspicious piece of law, and I'm going to say it like it is, a suspicious piece of law was passed at a suspicious time to free some suspects. (Laughter) And it was called, those people are called the Piarco Airport accused. I'm going to have my own lexicon speaking here today. They are the Piarco Airport accused. It was a constitutional outrage of the first order, and I have labeled it the Plot to Pervert Parliament. Our highest institution in our country was perverted. We are dealing with perverts here of an economic and financial nature. Do you get how serious this problem is? There was massive protest. A lot of us in this room took part in the protest in different forms. Most importantly, the American embassy complained, so Parliament was swiftly reconvened, and the law was reversed, it was repealed. That's the word lawyers use. It was repealed. But the point is that Parliament was outwitted in the whole course of events, because what really happened is that, because of the suspicious passage of that law, the law was actually passed into effect on the weekend we celebrated our 50th anniversary of independence, our jubilee of independence. So that is the kind of outrage of the thing. It was kind of a nasty way to get maturation, but we got it, because we all understood it, and for the first time that I could remember, there were mass protests against this corruption. And that gave me a lot of hope. Okay? Those of us who are, sometimes you feel like you're a little bit on your own doing some of this work. That passage of the law and the repeal of the law fortified the case of the Piarco Airport accused. So it was one of those really superior double bluff kind of things that took place. But what were they accused of? What was it that they were accused of? I'm being a bit mysterious for those of you out there. What were they accused of? We were trying to build, or reconstruct largely, an airport that had grown outdated. The entire project cost about 1.6 billion dollars, Trinidad and Tobago dollars, and in fact, we had a lot of bid-rigging and suspicious activity, corrupt activity took place. And to get an idea of what it consisted of, and to put it in context in relationship to this whole second myth about it being no big thing, we can look at this second slide here. And what we have here — I am not saying so, this is the Director of Public Prosecutions in a written statement. He said so. And he's telling us that for the $1.6 billion cost of the project, one billion dollars has been traced to offshore bank accounts. One billion dollars of our taxpayers' money has been located in offshore bank accounts. Being the kind of suspicious person I am, I am outraged at that, and I'm going to pause here, I'm going to pause now and again and bring in different things. I'm going to pause here and bring in something I saw in November last year at Wall Street. I was at Zuccotti Park. It was autumn. It was cool. It was damp. It was getting dark. And I was walking around with the protesters looking at the One Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street movement walking around. And there was a lady with a sign, a very simple sign, a kind of battered-looking blonde lady, and the sign was made out of Bristol board, as we say in these parts, and it was made with a marker. And what it said on that sign hit me right in the center. It said, "If you're not outraged, you haven't been paying attention." If you're not outraged by all of this, you haven't been paying attention. So listen up, because we're getting into even deeper waters. My brain started thinking. Well, what if — because I'm suspicious like that. I read a lot of spy novels and stuff. What if — (Laughter) But to make it in these wrongs, you have to read a lot of spy novels and follow some of that stuff, right? (Laughter) But what if this wasn't the first time? What if this is just the first time that the so-and-sos had been caught? What if it had happened before? How would I find out? Now, the previous two examples I gave were to do with construction sector corruption, okay? And I have the privilege at this time to lead the Joint Consultative Council, which is a not-for-profit. We're at jcc.org.tt, and we have the — we are the leaders in the struggle to produce a new public procurement system about how public money is transacted. So those of you interested in finding out more about it, or joining us or signing up on any of our petitions, please get involved. But I'm going to segue to another thing that relates, because one of my private campaigns I've been conducting for over three and a half years is for transparency and accountability around the bailout of CL Financial. CL Financial is the Caribbean's largest ever conglomerate, okay? And without getting into all of the details, it is said to have collapsed — I'm using my words very carefully — it's said to have collapsed in January of '09, which is just coming up to nearly four years. In an unprecedented fit of generosity — and you have to be very suspicious about these people — in an unprecedented — and I'm using that word carefully — unprecedented fit of generosity, the government of the day signed, made a written commitment, to repay all of the creditors. And I can tell you without fear of contradiction that hasn't happened anywhere else on the planet. Let's understand, because we lack context. People are telling us it's just like Wall Street. It's not just like Wall Street. Trinidad and Tobago is like a place with different laws of physics or biology or something. It's not just like anywhere. (Applause) It's not just like anywhere. It's not just like anywhere. Here is here, and out there is out there. Okay? I'm serious now. Listen. They've had bailouts on Wall Street. They've had bailouts in London. They've had bailouts in Europe. In Africa, they've had bailouts. In Nigeria, six of the major commercial banks collapsed at the same time as ours, eh? It's interesting to parallel how the Nigerian experience has — how they've treated it, and they've treated it very well compared to us. Nowhere on the planet have all the creditors been bailed out in excess of what their statutory entitlements were. Only here. So what was the reason for the generosity? Is our government that generous? And maybe they are. Let's look at it. Let's look into it. So I started digging and writing and so and so on, and that work can be found, my personal work can be found at AfraRaymond.com, which is my name. It's a not-for-profit blog that I run. Not as popular as some of the other people, but there you go. (Laughter) But the point is that the bitter experience of Section 34, that plot to pervert Parliament, that bitter experience that took place in August, when we were supposed to be celebrating our independence, going into September, forced me to check myself and recalculate my bearings, and to go back into some of the work, some of the stuff I'd written and some of the exchanges I'd had with the officials to see what was really what. As we say in Trinidad and Tobago, who is who and what is what? Okay? We want to try to recalculate. And I made a Freedom of Information application in May this year to the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry of Finance is the next tower over. This is the other context. The Ministry of Finance, we are told, is subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. I'm going to take you through a worked example of whether that's really so. The Central Bank in which we stand this morning is immune from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. So in fact, you can't ask them anything, and they don't have to answer anything. That is the law since 1999. So I plunged into this struggle, and I asked four questions. And I'll relate the questions to you in the short form with the reply, so you could understand, as I said, where we are. Here is not like anywhere else. Question number one: I asked to see the accounts of CL Financial, and if you can't show me the accounts — the Minister of Finance is making statements, passing new laws and giving speeches and so on. What are the figures he's relying on? It's like that joke: I want whatever he's drinking. And they wrote back and said to me, well what do you really mean? So they hit my question with a question. Second point: I want to see who are the creditors of the group who have been repaid? Let me pause here to point out to you all that 24 billion dollars of our money has been spent on this. That is about three and a half billion U.S. dollars coming out of a small — we used to be resource-rich — Caribbean country. Okay? And I asked the question, who was getting that three and a half billion dollars? And I want to pause again to bring up context, because context helps us to get clarity understanding this thing. There's a particular individual who is in the government now. The name of the person doesn't matter. And that person made a career out of using the Freedom of Information Act to advance his political cause. Okay? His name isn't important. I wouldn't dignify it. I'm on a point. The point is, that person made a career out of using the Freedom of Information Act to advance his cause. And the most famous case was what we came to call the Secret Scholarship Scandal, where in fact there was about 60 million dollars in government money that had been dispersed in a series of scholarships, and the scholarships hadn't been advertised, and so and so on and so on. And he was able to get the court, using that act of Parliament, Freedom of Information Act, to release the information, and I thought that was excellent. Fantastic. But you see, the question is this: If it's right and proper for us to use the Freedom of Information Act and to use the court to force a disclosure about 60 million dollars in public money, it must be right and proper for us to force a disclosure about 24 billion dollars. You see? But the Ministry of Finance, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, wrote me and said to me, that information is exempt too. You see? This is what we're dealing with, okay? The third thing I will tell you is that I also asked for the directors of CL Financial, whether in fact they were making filings under our Integrity in Public Life Act. We have an Integrity in Public Life Act as part of our framework supposed to safeguard the nation's interest. And public officials are supposed to file to say what it is they have in terms of assets and liabilities. And of course I've since discovered that they're not filing, and in fact the Minister of Finance has not even asked them to file. So here we have it. We have a situation where the basic safeguards of integrity and accountability and transparency have all been discarded. I've asked the question in the legal and required fashion. It's been ignored. The sort of thing that motivated us around Section 34, we need to continue to work on that. We can't forget it. I have defined this as the single largest expenditure in the country's history. It's also the single largest example of public corruption according to this equation. And this is my reality check. Where you have an expenditure of public money and it is without accountability and it's without transparency, it will always be equal to corruption, whether you're in Russia or Nigeria or Alaska, it will always be equal to corruption, and that is what we are dealing with here. I'm going to continue the work to press on, to get some resolution of those matters at the Ministry of Finance. If it is I have to go to court personally, I will do that. We will continue to press on. We will continue to work within JCC. But I want to step back from the Trinidad and Tobago context and bring something new to the table in terms of an international example. We had the journalist [Heather] Brooke speaking about her battle against government corruption, and she introduced me to this website, Alaveteli.com. And Alaveteli.com is a way for us to have an open database for Freedom of Information applications, and speak with each other. I could see what you're applying for. You could see what I applied for and what replies I got. We can work on it together. We need to build a collective database and a collective understanding of where we are to go to the next point. We need to increase the consciousness. The final thing I want to say is in relation to this one, which is a lovely website from India called IPaidABribe.com. They have international branches, and it's important for us to tune into this one. IPaidABribe.com is really important, a good one to log on to and see. I'm going to pause there. I'm going to ask you for your courage. Discard the first myth; it is a crime. Discard the second myth; it is a big thing. It's a huge problem. It's an economic crime. And let us continue working together to betterment in this situation, stability and sustainability in our society. Thank you. |
Use data to build better schools | {0: 'What makes a great school system? To find out, Andreas Schleicher administers a test to compare student performance around the world.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | Radical openness is still a distant future in the field of school education. We have such a hard time figuring out that learning is not a place but an activity. But I want to tell you the story of PISA, OECD's test to measure the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds around the world, and it's really a story of how international comparisons have globalized the field of education that we usually treat as an affair of domestic policy. Look at how the world looked in the 1960s, in terms of the proportion of people who had completed high school. You can see the United States ahead of everyone else, and much of the economic success of the United States draws on its long-standing advantage as the first mover in education. But in the 1970s, some countries caught up. In the 1980s, the global expansion of the talent pool continued. And the world didn't stop in the 1990s. So in the '60s, the U.S. was first. In the '90s, it was 13th, and not because standards had fallen, but because they had risen so much faster elsewhere. Korea shows you what's possible in education. Two generations ago, Korea had the standard of living of Afghanistan today, and was one of the lowest education performers. Today, every young Korean finishes high school. So this tells us that, in a global economy, it is no longer national improvement that's the benchmark for success, but the best performing education systems internationally. The trouble is that measuring how much time people spend in school or what degree they have got is not always a good way of seeing what they can actually do. Look at the toxic mix of unemployed graduates on our streets, while employers say they cannot find the people with the skills they need. And that tells you that better degrees don't automatically translate into better skills and better jobs and better lives. So with PISA, we try to change this by measuring the knowledge and skills of people directly. And we took a very special angle to this. We were less interested in whether students can simply reproduce what they have learned in school, but we wanted to test whether they can extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge in novel situations. Now, some people have criticized us for this. They say, you know, such a way of measuring outcomes is terribly unfair to people, because we test students with problems they haven't seen before. But if you take that logic, you know, you should consider life unfair, because the test of truth in life is not whether we can remember what we learned in school, but whether we are prepared for change, whether we are prepared for jobs that haven't been created, to use technologies that haven't been invented, to solve problems we just can't anticipate today. And once hotly contested, our way of measuring outcomes has actually quickly become the standard. In our latest assessment in 2009, we measured 74 school systems that together cover 87 percent of the economy. This chart shows you the performance of countries. In red, sort of below OECD average. Yellow is so-so, and in green are the countries doing really well. You can see Shanghai, Korea, Singapore in Asia; Finland in Europe; Canada in North America doing really well. You can also see that there is a gap of almost three and a half school years between 15-year-olds in Shanghai and 15-year-olds in Chile, and the gap grows to seven school years when you include the countries with really poor performance. There's a world of difference in the way in which young people are prepared for today's economy. But I want to introduce a second important dimension into this picture. Educators like to talk about equity. With PISA, we wanted to measure how they actually deliver equity, in terms of ensuring that people from different social backgrounds have equal chances. And we see that in some countries, the impact of social background on learning outcomes is very, very strong. Opportunities are unequally distributed. A lot of potential of young children is wasted. We see in other countries that it matters much less into which social context you're born. We all want to be there, in the upper right quadrant, where performance is strong and learning opportunities are equally distributed. Nobody, and no country, can afford to be there, where performance is poor and there are large social disparities. And then we can debate, you know, is it better to be there, where performance is strong at the price of large disparities? Or do we want to focus on equity and accept mediocrity? But actually, if you look at how countries come out on this picture, you see there are a lot of countries that actually are combining excellence with equity. In fact, one of the most important lessons from this comparison is that you don't have to compromise equity to achieve excellence. These countries have moved on from providing excellence for just some to providing excellence for all, a very important lesson. And that also challenges the paradigms of many school systems that believe they are mainly there to sort people. And ever since those results came out, policymakers, educators, researchers from around the world have tried to figure out what's behind the success of those systems. But let's step back for a moment and focus on the countries that actually started PISA, and I'm giving them a colored bubble now. And I'm making the size of the bubble proportional to the amount of money that countries spent on students. If money would tell you everything about the quality of learning outcomes, you would find all the large bubbles at the top, no? But that's not what you see. Spending per student only explains about, well, less than 20 percent of the performance variation among countries, and Luxembourg, for example, the most expensive system, doesn't do particularly well. What you see is that two countries with similar spending achieve very different results. You also see — and I think that's one of the most encouraging findings — that we no longer live in a world that is neatly divided between rich and well-educated countries, and poor and badly-educated ones, a very, very important lesson. Let's look at this in greater detail. The red dot shows you spending per student relative to a country's wealth. One way you can spend money is by paying teachers well, and you can see Korea investing a lot in attracting the best people into the teaching profession. And Korea also invests into long school days, which drives up costs further. Last but not least, Koreans want their teachers not only to teach but also to develop. They invest in professional development and collaboration and many other things. All that costs money. How can Korea afford all of this? The answer is, students in Korea learn in large classes. This is the blue bar which is driving costs down. You go to the next country on the list, Luxembourg, and you can see the red dot is exactly where it is for Korea, so Luxembourg spends the same per student as Korea does. But, you know, parents and teachers and policymakers in Luxembourg all like small classes. You know, it's very pleasant to walk into a small class. So they have invested all their money into there, and the blue bar, class size, is driving costs up. But even Luxembourg can spend its money only once, and the price for this is that teachers are not paid particularly well. Students don't have long hours of learning. And basically, teachers have little time to do anything else than teaching. So you can see two countries spent their money very differently, and actually how they spent their money matters a lot more than how much they invest in education. Let's go back to the year 2000. Remember, that was the year before the iPod was invented. This is how the world looked then in terms of PISA performance. The first thing you can see is that the bubbles were a lot smaller, no? We spent a lot less on education, about 35 percent less on education. So you ask yourself, if education has become so much more expensive, has it become so much better? And the bitter truth really is that, you know, not in many countries. But there are some countries which have seen impressive improvements. Germany, my own country, in the year 2000, featured in the lower quadrant, below average performance, large social disparities. And remember, Germany, we used to be one of those countries that comes out very well when you just count people who have degrees. Very disappointing results. People were stunned by the results. And for the very first time, the public debate in Germany was dominated for months by education, not tax, not other kinds of issues, but education was the center of the public debate. And then policymakers began to respond to this. The federal government dramatically raised its investment in education. A lot was done to increase the life chances of students with an immigrant background or from social disadvantage. And what's really interesting is that this wasn't just about optimizing existing policies, but data transformed some of the beliefs and paradigms underlying German education. For example, traditionally, the education of the very young children was seen as the business of families, and you would have cases where women were seen as neglecting their family responsibilities when they sent their children to kindergarten. PISA has transformed that debate, and pushed early childhood education right at the center of public policy in Germany. Or traditionally, the German education divides children at the age of 10, very young children, between those deemed to pursue careers of knowledge workers and those who would end up working for the knowledge workers, and that mainly along socioeconomic lines, and that paradigm is being challenged now too. A lot of change. And the good news is, nine years later, you can see improvements in quality and equity. People have taken up the challenge, done something about it. Or take Korea, at the other end of the spectrum. In the year 2000, Korea did already very well, but the Koreans were concerned that only a small share of their students achieved the really high levels of excellence. They took up the challenge, and Korea was able to double the proportion of students achieving excellence in one decade in the field of reading. Well, if you only focus on your brightest students, you know what happens is disparities grow, and you can see this bubble moving slightly to the other direction, but still, an impressive improvement. A major overhaul of Poland's education helped to dramatically reduce between variability among schools, turn around many of the lowest-performing schools, and raise performance by over half a school year. And you can see other countries as well. Portugal was able to consolidate its fragmented school system, raise quality and improve equity, and so did Hungary. So what you can actually see, there's been a lot of change. And even those people who complain and say that the relative standing of countries on something like PISA is just an artifact of culture, of economic factors, of social issues, of homogeneity of societies, and so on, these people must now concede that education improvement is possible. You know, Poland hasn't changed its culture. It didn't change its economy. It didn't change the compositions of its population. It didn't fire its teachers. It changed its education policies and practice. Very impressive. And all that raises, of course, the question: What can we learn from those countries in the green quadrant who have achieved high levels of equity, high levels of performance, and raised outcomes? And, of course, the question is, can what works in one context provide a model elsewhere? Of course, you can't copy and paste education systems wholesale, but these comparisons have identified a range of factors that high-performing systems share. Everybody agrees that education is important. Everybody says that. But the test of truth is, how do you weigh that priority against other priorities? How do countries pay their teachers relative to other highly skilled workers? Would you want your child to become a teacher rather than a lawyer? How do the media talk about schools and teachers? Those are the critical questions, and what we have learned from PISA is that, in high-performing education systems, the leaders have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education, their future, more than consumption today. And you know what's interesting? You won't believe it, but there are countries in which the most attractive place to be is not the shopping center but the school. Those things really exist. But placing a high value on education is just part of the picture. The other part is the belief that all children are capable of success. You have some countries where students are segregated early in their ages. You know, students are divided up, reflecting the belief that only some children can achieve world-class standards. But usually that is linked to very strong social disparities. If you go to Japan in Asia, or Finland in Europe, parents and teachers in those countries expect every student to succeed, and you can see that actually mirrored in student behavior. When we asked students what counts for success in mathematics, students in North America would typically tell us, you know, it's all about talent. If I'm not born as a genius in math, I'd better study something else. Nine out of 10 Japanese students say that it depends on my own investment, on my own effort, and that tells you a lot about the system that is around them. In the past, different students were taught in similar ways. High performers on PISA embrace diversity with differentiated pedagogical practices. They realize that ordinary students have extraordinary talents, and they personalize learning opportunities. High-performing systems also share clear and ambitious standards across the entire spectrum. Every student knows what matters. Every student knows what's required to be successful. And nowhere does the quality of an education system exceed the quality of its teachers. High-performing systems are very careful in how they recruit and select their teachers and how they train them. They watch how they improve the performances of teachers in difficulties who are struggling, and how they structure teacher pay. They provide an environment also in which teachers work together to frame good practice. And they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers. In bureaucratic school systems, teachers are often left alone in classrooms with a lot of prescription on what they should be teaching. High-performing systems are very clear what good performance is. They set very ambitious standards, but then they enable their teachers to figure out, what do I need to teach to my students today? The past was about delivered wisdom in education. Now the challenge is to enable user-generated wisdom. High performers have moved on from professional or from administrative forms of accountability and control — sort of, how do you check whether people do what they're supposed to do in education — to professional forms of work organization. They enable their teachers to make innovations in pedagogy. They provide them with the kind of development they need to develop stronger pedagogical practices. The goal of the past was standardization and compliance. High-performing systems have made teachers and school principals inventive. In the past, the policy focus was on outcomes, on provision. The high-performing systems have helped teachers and school principals to look outwards to the next teacher, the next school around their lives. And the most impressive outcomes of world-class systems is that they achieve high performance across the entire system. You've seen Finland doing so well on PISA, but what makes Finland so impressive is that only five percent of the performance variation amongst students lies between schools. Every school succeeds. This is where success is systemic. And how do they do that? They invest resources where they can make the most difference. They attract the strongest principals into the toughest schools, and the most talented teachers into the most challenging classroom. Last but not least, those countries align policies across all areas of public policy. They make them coherent over sustained periods of time, and they ensure that what they do is consistently implemented. Now, knowing what successful systems are doing doesn't yet tell us how to improve. That's also clear, and that's where some of the limits of international comparisons of PISA are. That's where other forms of research need to kick in, and that's also why PISA doesn't venture into telling countries what they should be doing. But its strength lies in telling them what everybody else has been doing. And the example of PISA shows that data can be more powerful than administrative control of financial subsidy through which we usually run education systems. You know, some people argue that changing educational administration is like moving graveyards. You just can't rely on the people out there to help you with this. (Laughter) But PISA has shown what's possible in education. It has helped countries to see that improvement is possible. It has taken away excuses from those who are complacent. And it has helped countries to set meaningful targets in terms of measurable goals achieved by the world's leaders. If we can help every child, every teacher, every school, every principal, every parent see what improvement is possible, that only the sky is the limit to education improvement, we have laid the foundations for better policies and better lives. Thank you. (Applause) |
How a fly flies | {0: "Most people are irritated by the buzzing of a fly's wings. But biologist Michael Dickinson views the sound with a deep sense of wonder."} | TEDxCaltech | I grew up watching Star Trek. I love Star Trek. Star Trek made me want to see alien creatures, creatures from a far-distant world. But basically, I figured out that I could find those alien creatures right on Earth. And what I do is I study insects. I'm obsessed with insects, particularly insect flight. I think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life. Without insects, there'd be no flowering plants. Without flowering plants, there would be no clever, fruit-eating primates giving TED Talks. (Laughter) Now, David and Hidehiko and Ketaki gave a very compelling story about the similarities between fruit flies and humans, and there are many similarities, and so you might think that if humans are similar to fruit flies, the favorite behavior of a fruit fly might be this, for example — (Laughter) but in my talk, I don't want to emphasize on the similarities between humans and fruit flies, but rather the differences, and focus on the behaviors that I think fruit flies excel at doing. And so I want to show you a high-speed video sequence of a fly shot at 7,000 frames per second in infrared lighting, and to the right, off-screen, is an electronic looming predator that is going to go at the fly. The fly is going to sense this predator. It is going to extend its legs out. It's going to sashay away to live to fly another day. Now I have carefully cropped this sequence to be exactly the duration of a human eye blink, so in the time that it would take you to blink your eye, the fly has seen this looming predator, estimated its position, initiated a motor pattern to fly it away, beating its wings at 220 times a second as it does so. I think this is a fascinating behavior that shows how fast the fly's brain can process information. Now, flight — what does it take to fly? Well, in order to fly, just as in a human aircraft, you need wings that can generate sufficient aerodynamic forces, you need an engine sufficient to generate the power required for flight, and you need a controller, and in the first human aircraft, the controller was basically the brain of Orville and Wilbur sitting in the cockpit. Now, how does this compare to a fly? Well, I spent a lot of my early career trying to figure out how insect wings generate enough force to keep the flies in the air. And you might have heard how engineers proved that bumblebees couldn't fly. Well, the problem was in thinking that the insect wings function in the way that aircraft wings work. But they don't. And we tackle this problem by building giant, dynamically scaled model robot insects that would flap in giant pools of mineral oil where we could study the aerodynamic forces. And it turns out that the insects flap their wings in a very clever way, at a very high angle of attack that creates a structure at the leading edge of the wing, a little tornado-like structure called a leading edge vortex, and it's that vortex that actually enables the wings to make enough force for the animal to stay in the air. But the thing that's actually most — so, what's fascinating is not so much that the wing has some interesting morphology. What's clever is the way the fly flaps it, which of course ultimately is controlled by the nervous system, and this is what enables flies to perform these remarkable aerial maneuvers. Now, what about the engine? The engine of the fly is absolutely fascinating. They have two types of flight muscle: so-called power muscle, which is stretch-activated, which means that it activates itself and does not need to be controlled on a contraction-by-contraction basis by the nervous system. It's specialized to generate the enormous power required for flight, and it fills the middle portion of the fly, so when a fly hits your windshield, it's basically the power muscle that you're looking at. But attached to the base of the wing is a set of little, tiny control muscles that are not very powerful at all, but they're very fast, and they're able to reconfigure the hinge of the wing on a stroke-by-stroke basis, and this is what enables the fly to change its wing and generate the changes in aerodynamic forces which change its flight trajectory. And of course, the role of the nervous system is to control all this. So let's look at the controller. Now flies excel in the sorts of sensors that they carry to this problem. They have antennae that sense odors and detect wind detection. They have a sophisticated eye which is the fastest visual system on the planet. They have another set of eyes on the top of their head. We have no idea what they do. They have sensors on their wing. Their wing is covered with sensors, including sensors that sense deformation of the wing. They can even taste with their wings. One of the most sophisticated sensors a fly has is a structure called the halteres. The halteres are actually gyroscopes. These devices beat back and forth about 200 hertz during flight, and the animal can use them to sense its body rotation and initiate very, very fast corrective maneuvers. But all of this sensory information has to be processed by a brain, and yes, indeed, flies have a brain, a brain of about 100,000 neurons. Now several people at this conference have already suggested that fruit flies could serve neuroscience because they're a simple model of brain function. And the basic punchline of my talk is, I'd like to turn that over on its head. I don't think they're a simple model of anything. And I think that flies are a great model. They're a great model for flies. (Laughter) And let's explore this notion of simplicity. So I think, unfortunately, a lot of neuroscientists, we're all somewhat narcissistic. When we think of brain, we of course imagine our own brain. But remember that this kind of brain, which is much, much smaller — instead of 100 billion neurons, it has 100,000 neurons — but this is the most common form of brain on the planet and has been for 400 million years. And is it fair to say that it's simple? Well, it's simple in the sense that it has fewer neurons, but is that a fair metric? And I would propose it's not a fair metric. So let's sort of think about this. I think we have to compare — (Laughter) — we have to compare the size of the brain with what the brain can do. So I propose we have a Trump number, and the Trump number is the ratio of this man's behavioral repertoire to the number of neurons in his brain. We'll calculate the Trump number for the fruit fly. Now, how many people here think the Trump number is higher for the fruit fly? (Applause) It's a very smart, smart audience. Yes, the inequality goes in this direction, or I would posit it. Now I realize that it is a little bit absurd to compare the behavioral repertoire of a human to a fly. But let's take another animal just as an example. Here's a mouse. A mouse has about 1,000 times as many neurons as a fly. I used to study mice. When I studied mice, I used to talk really slowly. And then something happened when I started to work on flies. (Laughter) And I think if you compare the natural history of flies and mice, it's really comparable. They have to forage for food. They have to engage in courtship. They have sex. They hide from predators. They do a lot of the similar things. But I would argue that flies do more. So for example, I'm going to show you a sequence, and I have to say, some of my funding comes from the military, so I'm showing this classified sequence and you cannot discuss it outside of this room. Okay? So I want you to look at the payload at the tail of the fruit fly. Watch it very closely, and you'll see why my six-year-old son now wants to be a neuroscientist. Wait for it. Pshhew. So at least you'll admit that if fruit flies are not as clever as mice, they're at least as clever as pigeons. (Laughter) Now, I want to get across that it's not just a matter of numbers but also the challenge for a fly to compute everything its brain has to compute with such tiny neurons. So this is a beautiful image of a visual interneuron from a mouse that came from Jeff Lichtman's lab, and you can see the wonderful images of brains that he showed in his talk. But up in the corner, in the right corner, you'll see, at the same scale, a visual interneuron from a fly. And I'll expand this up. And it's a beautifully complex neuron. It's just very, very tiny, and there's lots of biophysical challenges with trying to compute information with tiny, tiny neurons. How small can neurons get? Well, look at this interesting insect. It looks sort of like a fly. It has wings, it has eyes, it has antennae, its legs, complicated life history, it's a parasite, it has to fly around and find caterpillars to parasatize, but not only is its brain the size of a salt grain, which is comparable for a fruit fly, it is the size of a salt grain. So here's some other organisms at the similar scale. This animal is the size of a paramecium and an amoeba, and it has a brain of 7,000 neurons that's so small — you know these things called cell bodies you've been hearing about, where the nucleus of the neuron is? This animal gets rid of them because they take up too much space. So this is a session on frontiers in neuroscience. I would posit that one frontier in neuroscience is to figure out how the brain of that thing works. But let's think about this. How can you make a small number of neurons do a lot? And I think, from an engineering perspective, you think of multiplexing. You can take a hardware and have that hardware do different things at different times, or have different parts of the hardware doing different things. And these are the two concepts I'd like to explore. And they're not concepts that I've come up with, but concepts that have been proposed by others in the past. And one idea comes from lessons from chewing crabs. And I don't mean chewing the crabs. I grew up in Baltimore, and I chew crabs very, very well. But I'm talking about the crabs actually doing the chewing. Crab chewing is actually really fascinating. Crabs have this complicated structure under their carapace called the gastric mill that grinds their food in a variety of different ways. And here's an endoscopic movie of this structure. The amazing thing about this is that it's controlled by a really tiny set of neurons, about two dozen neurons that can produce a vast variety of different motor patterns, and the reason it can do this is that this little tiny ganglion in the crab is actually inundated by many, many neuromodulators. You heard about neuromodulators earlier. There are more neuromodulators that alter, that innervate this structure than actually neurons in the structure, and they're able to generate a complicated set of patterns. And this is the work by Eve Marder and her many colleagues who've been studying this fascinating system that show how a smaller cluster of neurons can do many, many, many things because of neuromodulation that can take place on a moment-by-moment basis. So this is basically multiplexing in time. Imagine a network of neurons with one neuromodulator. You select one set of cells to perform one sort of behavior, another neuromodulator, another set of cells, a different pattern, and you can imagine you could extrapolate to a very, very complicated system. Is there any evidence that flies do this? Well, for many years in my laboratory and other laboratories around the world, we've been studying fly behaviors in little flight simulators. You can tether a fly to a little stick. You can measure the aerodynamic forces it's creating. You can let the fly play a little video game by letting it fly around in a visual display. So let me show you a little tiny sequence of this. Here's a fly and a large infrared view of the fly in the flight simulator, and this is a game the flies love to play. You allow them to steer towards the little stripe, and they'll just steer towards that stripe forever. It's part of their visual guidance system. But very, very recently, it's been possible to modify these sorts of behavioral arenas for physiologies. So this is the preparation that one of my former post-docs, Gaby Maimon, who's now at Rockefeller, developed, and it's basically a flight simulator but under conditions where you actually can stick an electrode in the brain of the fly and record from a genetically identified neuron in the fly's brain. And this is what one of these experiments looks like. It was a sequence taken from another post-doc in the lab, Bettina Schnell. The green trace at the bottom is the membrane potential of a neuron in the fly's brain, and you'll see the fly start to fly, and the fly is actually controlling the rotation of that visual pattern itself by its own wing motion, and you can see this visual interneuron respond to the pattern of wing motion as the fly flies. So for the first time we've actually been able to record from neurons in the fly's brain while the fly is performing sophisticated behaviors such as flight. And one of the lessons we've been learning is that the physiology of cells that we've been studying for many years in quiescent flies is not the same as the physiology of those cells when the flies actually engage in active behaviors like flying and walking and so forth. And why is the physiology different? Well it turns out it's these neuromodulators, just like the neuromodulators in that little tiny ganglion in the crabs. So here's a picture of the octopamine system. Octopamine is a neuromodulator that seems to play an important role in flight and other behaviors. But this is just one of many neuromodulators that's in the fly's brain. So I really think that, as we learn more, it's going to turn out that the whole fly brain is just like a large version of this stomatogastric ganglion, and that's one of the reasons why it can do so much with so few neurons. Now, another idea, another way of multiplexing is multiplexing in space, having different parts of a neuron do different things at the same time. So here's two sort of canonical neurons from a vertebrate and an invertebrate, a human pyramidal neuron from Ramon y Cajal, and another cell to the right, a non-spiking interneuron, and this is the work of Alan Watson and Malcolm Burrows many years ago, and Malcolm Burrows came up with a pretty interesting idea based on the fact that this neuron from a locust does not fire action potentials. It's a non-spiking cell. So a typical cell, like the neurons in our brain, has a region called the dendrites that receives input, and that input sums together and will produce action potentials that run down the axon and then activate all the output regions of the neuron. But non-spiking neurons are actually quite complicated because they can have input synapses and output synapses all interdigitated, and there's no single action potential that drives all the outputs at the same time. So there's a possibility that you have computational compartments that allow the different parts of the neuron to do different things at the same time. So these basic concepts of multitasking in time and multitasking in space, I think these are things that are true in our brains as well, but I think the insects are the true masters of this. So I hope you think of insects a little bit differently next time, and as I say up here, please think before you swat. (Applause) |
Agile programming -- for your family | {0: 'Bruce Feiler is the author of "The Secrets of Happy Families," and the writer/presenter of the PBS miniseries "Walking the Bible."'} | TEDSalon NY2013 | So here's the good news about families. The last 50 years have seen a revolution in what it means to be a family. We have blended families, adopted families, we have nuclear families living in separate houses and divorced families living in the same house. But through it all, the family has grown stronger. Eight in 10 say the family they have today is as strong or stronger than the family they grew up in. Now, here's the bad news. Nearly everyone is completely overwhelmed by the chaos of family life. Every parent I know, myself included, feels like we're constantly playing defense. Just when our kids stop teething, they start having tantrums. Just when they stop needing our help taking a bath, they need our help dealing with cyberstalking or bullying. And here's the worst news of all. Our children sense we're out of control. Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute asked 1,000 children, "If you were granted one wish about your parents, what would it be?" The parents predicted the kids would say, spending more time with them. They were wrong. The kids' number one wish? That their parents be less tired and less stressed. So how can we change this dynamic? Are there concrete things we can do to reduce stress, draw our family closer, and generally prepare our children to enter the world? I spent the last few years trying to answer that question, traveling around, meeting families, talking to scholars, experts ranging from elite peace negotiators to Warren Buffett's bankers to the Green Berets. I was trying to figure out, what do happy families do right and what can I learn from them to make my family happier? I want to tell you about one family that I met, and why I think they offer clues. At 7 p.m. on a Sunday in Hidden Springs, Idaho, where the six members of the Starr family are sitting down to the highlight of their week: the family meeting. The Starrs are a regular American family with their share of regular American family problems. David is a software engineer. Eleanor takes care of their four children, ages 10 to 15. One of those kids tutors math on the far side of town. One has lacrosse on the near side of town. One has Asperger syndrome. One has ADHD. "We were living in complete chaos," Eleanor said. What the Starrs did next, though, was surprising. Instead of turning to friends or relatives, they looked to David's workplace. They turned to a cutting-edge program called agile development that was just spreading from manufacturers in Japan to startups in Silicon Valley. In agile, workers are organized into small groups and do things in very short spans of time. So instead of having executives issue grand proclamations, the team in effect manages itself. You have constant feedback. You have daily update sessions. You have weekly reviews. You're constantly changing. David said when they brought this system into their home, the family meetings in particular increased communication, decreased stress, and made everybody happier to be part of the family team. When my wife and I adopted these family meetings and other techniques into the lives of our then-five-year-old twin daughters, it was the biggest single change we made since our daughters were born. And these meetings had this effect while taking under 20 minutes. So what is Agile, and why can it help with something that seems so different, like families? In 1983, Jeff Sutherland was a technologist at a financial firm in New England. He was very frustrated with how software got designed. Companies followed the waterfall method, right, in which executives issued orders that slowly trickled down to programmers below, and no one had ever consulted the programmers. Eighty-three percent of projects failed. They were too bloated or too out of date by the time they were done. Sutherland wanted to create a system where ideas didn't just percolate down but could percolate up from the bottom and be adjusted in real time. He read 30 years of Harvard Business Review before stumbling upon an article in 1986 called "The New New Product Development Game." It said that the pace of business was quickening — and by the way, this was in 1986 — and the most successful companies were flexible. It highlighted Toyota and Canon and likened their adaptable, tight-knit teams to rugby scrums. As Sutherland told me, we got to that article, and said, "That's it." In Sutherland's system, companies don't use large, massive projects that take two years. They do things in small chunks. Nothing takes longer than two weeks. So instead of saying, "You guys go off into that bunker and come back with a cell phone or a social network," you say, "You go off and come up with one element, then bring it back. Let's talk about it. Let's adapt." You succeed or fail quickly. Today, agile is used in a hundred countries, and it's sweeping into management suites. Inevitably, people began taking some of these techniques and applying it to their families. You had blogs pop up, and some manuals were written. Even the Sutherlands told me that they had an Agile Thanksgiving, where you had one group of people working on the food, one setting the table, and one greeting visitors at the door. Sutherland said it was the best Thanksgiving ever. So let's take one problem that families face, crazy mornings, and talk about how agile can help. A key plank is accountability, so teams use information radiators, these large boards in which everybody is accountable. So the Starrs, in adapting this to their home, created a morning checklist in which each child is expected to tick off chores. So on the morning I visited, Eleanor came downstairs, poured herself a cup of coffee, sat in a reclining chair, and she sat there, kind of amiably talking to each of her children as one after the other they came downstairs, checked the list, made themselves breakfast, checked the list again, put the dishes in the dishwasher, rechecked the list, fed the pets or whatever chores they had, checked the list once more, gathered their belongings, and made their way to the bus. It was one of the most astonishing family dynamics I have ever seen. And when I strenuously objected this would never work in our house, our kids needed way too much monitoring, Eleanor looked at me. "That's what I thought," she said. "I told David, 'keep your work out of my kitchen.' But I was wrong." So I turned to David: "So why does it work?" He said, "You can't underestimate the power of doing this." And he made a checkmark. He said, "In the workplace, adults love it. With kids, it's heaven." The week we introduced a morning checklist into our house, it cut parental screaming in half. (Laughter) But the real change didn't come until we had these family meetings. So following the agile model, we ask three questions: What worked well in our family this week, what didn't work well, and what will we agree to work on in the week ahead? Everyone throws out suggestions and then we pick two to focus on. And suddenly the most amazing things started coming out of our daughters' mouths. What worked well this week? Getting over our fear of riding bikes. Making our beds. What didn't work well? Our math sheets, or greeting visitors at the door. Like a lot of parents, our kids are something like Bermuda Triangles. Like, thoughts and ideas go in, but none ever comes out, I mean at least not that are revealing. This gave us access suddenly to their innermost thoughts. But the most surprising part was when we turned to, what are we going to work on in the week ahead? You know, the key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves, and it works in software and it turns out that it works with kids. Our kids love this process. So they would come up with all these ideas. You know, greet five visitors at the door this week, get an extra 10 minutes of reading before bed. Kick someone, lose desserts for a month. It turns out, by the way, our girls are little Stalins. We constantly have to kind of dial them back. Now look, naturally there's a gap between their kind of conduct in these meetings and their behavior the rest of the week, but the truth is it didn't really bother us. It felt like we were kind of laying these underground cables that wouldn't light up their world for many years to come. Three years later — our girls are almost eight now — We're still holding these meetings. My wife counts them among her most treasured moments as a mom. So what did we learn? The word "agile" entered the lexicon in 2001 when Jeff Sutherland and a group of designers met in Utah and wrote a 12-point Agile Manifesto. I think the time is right for an Agile Family Manifesto. I've taken some ideas from the Starrs and from many other families I met. I'm proposing three planks. Plank number one: Adapt all the time. When I became a parent, I figured, you know what? We'll set a few rules and we'll stick to them. That assumes, as parents, we can anticipate every problem that's going to arise. We can't. What's great about the agile system is you build in a system of change so that you can react to what's happening to you in real time. It's like they say in the Internet world: if you're doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you're doing the wrong thing. Parents can learn a lot from that. But to me, "adapt all the time" means something deeper, too. We have to break parents out of this straitjacket that the only ideas we can try at home are ones that come from shrinks or self-help gurus or other family experts. The truth is, their ideas are stale, whereas in all these other worlds there are these new ideas to make groups and teams work effectively. Let's just take a few examples. Let's take the biggest issue of all: family dinner. Everybody knows that having family dinner with your children is good for the kids. But for so many of us, it doesn't work in our lives. I met a celebrity chef in New Orleans who said, "No problem, I'll just time-shift family dinner. I'm not home, can't make family dinner? We'll have family breakfast. We'll meet for a bedtime snack. We'll make Sunday meals more important." And the truth is, recent research backs him up. It turns out there's only 10 minutes of productive time in any family meal. The rest of it's taken up with "take your elbows off the table" and "pass the ketchup." You can take that 10 minutes and move it to any part of the day and have the same benefit. So time-shift family dinner. That's adaptability. An environmental psychologist told me, "If you're sitting in a hard chair on a rigid surface, you'll be more rigid. If you're sitting on a cushioned chair, you'll be more open." She told me, "When you're discipling your children, sit in an upright chair with a cushioned surface. The conversation will go better." My wife and I actually moved where we sit for difficult conversations because I was sitting above in the power position. So move where you sit. That's adaptability. The point is there are all these new ideas out there. We've got to hook them up with parents. So plank number one: Adapt all the time. Be flexible, be open-minded, let the best ideas win. Plank number two: Empower your children. Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around. It's easier, and frankly, we're usually right. There's a reason that few systems have been more waterfall over time than the family. But the single biggest lesson we learned is to reverse the waterfall as much as possible. Enlist the children in their own upbringing. Just yesterday, we were having our family meeting, and we had voted to work on overreacting. So we said, "Okay, give us a reward and give us a punishment. Okay?" So one of my daughters threw out, you get five minutes of overreacting time all week. So we kind of liked that. But then her sister started working the system. She said, "Do I get one five-minute overreaction or can I get 10 30-second overreactions?" I loved that. Spend the time however you want. Now give us a punishment. Okay. If we get 15 minutes of overreaction time, that's the limit. Every minute above that, we have to do one pushup. So you see, this is working. Now look, this system isn't lax. There's plenty of parental authority going on. But we're giving them practice becoming independent, which of course is our ultimate goal. Just as I was leaving to come here tonight, one of my daughters started screaming. The other one said, "Overreaction! Overreaction!" and started counting, and within 10 seconds it had ended. To me that is a certified agile miracle. (Laughter) (Applause) And by the way, research backs this up too. Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules, evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives. The point is, we have to let our children succeed on their own terms, and yes, on occasion, fail on their own terms. I was talking to Warren Buffett's banker, and he was chiding me for not letting my children make mistakes with their allowance. And I said, "But what if they drive into a ditch?" He said, "It's much better to drive into a ditch with a $6 allowance than a $60,000-a-year salary or a $6 million inheritance." So the bottom line is, empower your children. Plank number three: Tell your story. Adaptability is fine, but we also need bedrock. Jim Collins, the author of "Good To Great," told me that successful human organizations of any kind have two things in common: they preserve the core, they stimulate progress. So agile is great for stimulating progress, but I kept hearing time and again, you need to preserve the core. So how do you do that? Collins coached us on doing something that businesses do, which is define your mission and identify your core values. So he led us through the process of creating a family mission statement. We did the family equivalent of a corporate retreat. We had a pajama party. I made popcorn. Actually, I burned one, so I made two. My wife bought a flip chart. And we had this great conversation, like, what's important to us? What values do we most uphold? And we ended up with 10 statements. We are travelers, not tourists. We don't like dilemmas. We like solutions. Again, research shows that parents should spend less time worrying about what they do wrong and more time focusing on what they do right, worry less about the bad times and build up the good times. This family mission statement is a great way to identify what it is that you do right. A few weeks later, we got a call from the school. One of our daughters had gotten into a spat. And suddenly we were worried, like, do we have a mean girl on our hands? And we didn't really know what to do, so we called her into my office. The family mission statement was on the wall, and my wife said, "So, anything up there seem to apply?" And she kind of looked down the list, and she said, "Bring people together?" Suddenly we had a way into the conversation. Another great way to tell your story is to tell your children where they came from. Researchers at Emory gave children a simple "what do you know" test. Do you know where your grandparents were born? Do you know where your parents went to high school? Do you know anybody in your family who had a difficult situation, an illness, and they overcame it? The children who scored highest on this "do you know" scale had the highest self-esteem and a greater sense they could control their lives. The "do you know" test was the single biggest predictor of emotional health and happiness. As the author of the study told me, children who have a sense of — they're part of a larger narrative have greater self-confidence. So my final plank is, tell your story. Spend time retelling the story of your family's positive moments and how you overcame the negative ones. If you give children this happy narrative, you give them the tools to make themselves happier. I was a teenager when I first read "Anna Karenina" and its famous opening sentence, "All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." When I first read that, I thought, "That sentence is inane. Of course all happy families aren't alike." But as I began working on this project, I began changing my mind. Recent scholarship has allowed us, for the first time, to identify the building blocks that successful families have. I've mentioned just three here today: Adapt all the time, empower the children, tell your story. Is it possible, all these years later, to say Tolstoy was right? The answer, I believe, is yes. When Leo Tolstoy was five years old, his brother Nikolay came to him and said he had engraved the secret to universal happiness on a little green stick, which he had hidden in a ravine on the family's estate in Russia. If the stick were ever found, all humankind would be happy. Tolstoy became consumed with that stick, but he never found it. In fact, he asked to be buried in that ravine where he thought it was hidden. He still lies there today, covered in a layer of green grass. That story perfectly captures for me the final lesson that I learned: Happiness is not something we find, it's something we make. Almost anybody who's looked at well-run organizations has come to pretty much the same conclusion. Greatness is not a matter of circumstance. It's a matter of choice. You don't need some grand plan. You don't need a waterfall. You just need to take small steps, accumulate small wins, keep reaching for that green stick. In the end, this may be the greatest lesson of all. What's the secret to a happy family? Try. (Applause) |
Dance, tiny robots! | {0: 'Bruno Maisonnier founded Aldebaran Robotics, maker of the tiny, compelling humanoid Nao.'} | TEDxConcorde | (Mechanical noises) (Music) (Applause) |
Build a School in the Cloud | {0: 'Educational researcher Sugata Mitra is the winner of the 2013 TED Prize. His wish: Build a School in the Cloud, where children can explore and learn from one another.'} | TED2013 | What is going to be the future of learning? I do have a plan, but in order for me to tell you what that plan is, I need to tell you a little story, which kind of sets the stage. I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? And you can look far back into the past, but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is, it's quite easy to figure out where it came from. It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet. ["The British Empire"] Imagine trying to run the show, trying to run the entire planet, without computers, without telephones, with data handwritten on pieces of paper, and traveling by ships. But the Victorians actually did it. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It's still with us today. It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must be identical to each other. They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional. The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists. The empire is gone, so what are we doing with that design that produces these identical people, and what are we going to do next if we ever are going to do anything else with it? ["Schools as we know them are obsolete"] So that's a pretty strong comment there. I said schools as we know them now, they're obsolete. I'm not saying they're broken. It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken. It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated. What are the kind of jobs that we have today? Well, the clerks are the computers. They're there in thousands in every office. And you have people who guide those computers to do their clerical jobs. Those people don't need to be able to write beautifully by hand. They don't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads. They do need to be able to read. In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly. Well, that's today, but we don't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like. We know that people will work from wherever they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they want. How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world? Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago. And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs? Or should they not? At the same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who had computers, and who used to tell me, "You know, my son, I think he's gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers. And my daughter — oh, surely she is extra-intelligent." And so on. So I suddenly figured that, how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children? (Laughter) What did the poor do wrong? I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office, and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was. The children came running in. It was three feet off the ground, and they said, "What is this?" And I said, "Yeah, it's, I don't know." (Laughter) They said, "Why have you put it there?" I said, "Just like that." And they said, "Can we touch it?"I said, "If you wish to." And I went away. About eight hours later, we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. So I said, "Well that's impossible, because — How is it possible? They don't know anything." My colleagues said, "No, it's a simple solution. One of your students must have been passing by, showed them how to use the mouse." So I said, "Yeah, that's possible." So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little. (Laughter) I repeated the experiment there. There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away, came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games on it. When they saw me, they said, "We want a faster processor and a better mouse." (Laughter) So I said, "How on Earth do you know all this?" And they said something very interesting to me. In an irritated voice, they said, "You've given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it." (Laughter) That's the first time, as a teacher, that I had heard the word "teach ourselves" said so casually. Here's a short glimpse from those years. That's the first day at the Hole in the Wall. On your right is an eight-year-old. To his left is his student. She's six. And he's teaching her how to browse. Then onto other parts of the country, I repeated this over and over again, getting exactly the same results that we were. ["Hole in the wall film - 1999"] An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do. And finally a girl explaining in Marathi what it is, and said, "There's a processor inside." So I started publishing. I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything, and I said, in nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West. I'd seen it happen over and over and over again. But I was curious to know, what else would they do if they could do this much? I started experimenting with other subjects, among them, for example, pronunciation. There's one community of children in southern India whose English pronunciation is really bad, and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs. I gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer, and I said, "Keep talking into it until it types what you say." (Laughter) They did that, and watch a little bit of this. Computer: Nice to meet you.Child: Nice to meet you. Sugata Mitra: The reason I ended with the face of this young lady over there is because I suspect many of you know her. She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad and may have tortured you about your credit card bills in a very clear English accent. So then people said, well, how far will it go? Where does it stop? I decided I would destroy my own argument by creating an absurd proposition. I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous hypothesis. Tamil is a south Indian language, and I said, can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a streetside computer? And I said, I'll measure them. They'll get a zero. I'll spend a couple of months, I'll leave it for a couple of months, I'll go back, they'll get another zero. I'll go back to the lab and say, we need teachers. I found a village. It was called Kallikuppam in southern India. I put in Hole in the Wall computers there, downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication, most of which I didn't understand. The children came rushing, said, "What's all this?" So I said, "It's very topical, very important. But it's all in English." So they said, "How can we understand such big English words and diagrams and chemistry?" So by now, I had developed a new pedagogical method, so I applied that. I said, "I haven't the foggiest idea." (Laughter) "And anyway, I am going away." (Laughter) So I left them for a couple of months. They'd got a zero. I gave them a test. I came back after two months and the children trooped in and said, "We've understood nothing." So I said, "Well, what did I expect?" So I said, "Okay, but how long did it take you before you decided that you can't understand anything?" So they said, "We haven't given up. We look at it every single day." So I said, "What? You don't understand these screens and you keep staring at it for two months? What for?" So a little girl who you see just now, she raised her hand, and she says to me in broken Tamil and English, she said, "Well, apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease, we haven't understood anything else." (Laughter) (Applause) So I tested them. I got an educational impossibility, zero to 30 percent in two months in the tropical heat with a computer under the tree in a language they didn't know doing something that's a decade ahead of their time. Absurd. But I had to follow the Victorian norm. Thirty percent is a fail. How do I get them to pass? I have to get them 20 more marks. I couldn't find a teacher. What I did find was a friend that they had, a 22-year-old girl who was an accountant and she played with them all the time. So I asked this girl, "Can you help them?" So she says, "Absolutely not. I didn't have science in school. I have no idea what they're doing under that tree all day long. I can't help you." I said, "I'll tell you what. Use the method of the grandmother." So she says, "What's that?" I said, "Stand behind them. Whenever they do anything, you just say, 'Well, wow, I mean, how did you do that? What's the next page? Gosh, when I was your age, I could have never done that.' You know what grannies do." So she did that for two more months. The scores jumped to 50 percent. Kallikuppam had caught up with my control school in New Delhi, a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher. When I saw that graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field. Here's Kallikuppam. (Children speaking) Neurons ... communication. I got the camera angle wrong. That one is just amateur stuff, but what she was saying, as you could make out, was about neurons, with her hands were like that, and she was saying neurons communicate. At 12. So what are jobs going to be like? Well, we know what they're like today. What's learning going to be like? We know what it's like today, children pouring over with their mobile phones on the one hand and then reluctantly going to school to pick up their books with their other hand. What will it be tomorrow? Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all? Could it be that, at the point in time when you need to know something, you can find out in two minutes? Could it be — a devastating question, a question that was framed for me by Nicholas Negroponte — could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in a future where knowing is obsolete? But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens. Knowing, that's what distinguishes us from the apes. But look at it this way. It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete. What an achievement that is. But we have to integrate that into our own future. Encouragement seems to be the key. If you look at Kuppam, if you look at all of the experiments that I did, it was simply saying, "Wow," saluting learning. There is evidence from neuroscience. The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down. Punishment and examinations are seen as threats. We take our children, we make them shut their brains down, and then we say, "Perform." Why did they create a system like that? Because it was needed. There was an age in the Age of Empires when you needed those people who can survive under threat. When you're standing in a trench all alone, if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed. If you didn't, you failed. But the Age of Empires is gone. What happens to creativity in our age? We need to shift that balance back from threat to pleasure. I came back to England looking for British grandmothers. I put out notices in papers saying, if you are a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera, can you give me one hour of your time per week for free? I got 200 in the first two weeks. I know more British grandmothers than anyone in the universe. (Laughter) They're called the Granny Cloud. The Granny Cloud sits on the Internet. If there's a child in trouble, we beam a Gran. She goes on over Skype and she sorts things out. I've seen them do it from a village called Diggles in northwestern England, deep inside a village in Tamil Nadu, India, 6,000 miles away. She does it with only one age-old gesture. "Shhh." Okay? Watch this. Grandmother: You can't catch me. You say it. You can't catch me. Children: You can't catch me. Grandmother: I'm the Gingerbread Man.Children: I'm the Gingerbread Man. Grandmother: Well done! Very good. SM: So what's happening here? I think what we need to look at is we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It's not about making learning happen. It's about letting it happen. The teacher sets the process in motion and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens. I think that's what all this is pointing at. But how will we know? How will we come to know? Well, I intend to build these Self-Organized Learning Environments. They are basically broadband, collaboration and encouragement put together. I've tried this in many, many schools. It's been tried all over the world, and teachers sort of stand back and say, "It just happens by itself?" And I said, "Yeah, it happens by itself.""How did you know that?" I said, "You won't believe the children who told me and where they're from." Here's a SOLE in action. (Children talking) This one is in England. He maintains law and order, because remember, there's no teacher around. Girl: The total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons — SM: Australia Girl: — giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge. The net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons in the ion minus the number of electrons. SM: A decade ahead of her time. So SOLEs, I think we need a curriculum of big questions. You already heard about that. You know what that means. There was a time when Stone Age men and women used to sit and look up at the sky and say, "What are those twinkling lights?" They built the first curriculum, but we've lost sight of those wondrous questions. We've brought it down to the tangent of an angle. But that's not sexy enough. The way you would put it to a nine-year-old is to say, "If a meteorite was coming to hit the Earth, how would you figure out if it was going to or not?" And if he says, "Well, what? how?" you say, "There's a magic word. It's called the tangent of an angle," and leave him alone. He'll figure it out. So here are a couple of images from SOLEs. I've tried incredible, incredible questions — "When did the world begin? How will it end?" — to nine-year-olds. This one is about what happens to the air we breathe. This is done by children without the help of any teacher. The teacher only raises the question, and then stands back and admires the answer. So what's my wish? My wish is that we design the future of learning. We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer, do we? So we need to design a future for learning. And I've got to — hang on, I've got to get this wording exactly right, because, you know, it's very important. My wish is to help design a future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together. Help me build this school. It will be called the School in the Cloud. It will be a school where children go on these intellectual adventures driven by the big questions which their mediators put in. The way I want to do this is to build a facility where I can study this. It's a facility which is practically unmanned. There's only one granny who manages health and safety. The rest of it's from the cloud. The lights are turned on and off by the cloud, etc., etc., everything's done from the cloud. But I want you for another purpose. You can do Self-Organized Learning Environments at home, in the school, outside of school, in clubs. It's very easy to do. There's a great document produced by TED which tells you how to do it. If you would please, please do it across all five continents and send me the data, then I'll put it all together, move it into the School of Clouds, and create the future of learning. That's my wish. And just one last thing. I'll take you to the top of the Himalayas. At 12,000 feet, where the air is thin, I once built two Hole in the Wall computers, and the children flocked there. And there was this little girl who was following me around. And I said to her, "You know, I want to give a computer to everybody, every child. I don't know, what should I do?" And I was trying to take a picture of her quietly. She suddenly raised her hand like this, and said to me, "Get on with it." (Laughter) (Applause) I think it was good advice. I'll follow her advice. I'll stop talking. Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Wow. (Applause) |
A clean energy proposal -- race to the top! | {0: 'A former two-term governor of Michigan, Jennifer M. Granholm makes the case for empowering states to create jobs through a Clean Energy Jobs Race to the Top.\r\n'} | TED2013 | Well, I was introduced as the former Governor of Michigan, but actually I'm a scientist. All right, a political scientist, it doesn't really count, but my laboratory was the laboratory of democracy that is Michigan, and, like any good scientist, I was experimenting with policy about what would achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. But there were three problems, three enigmas that I could not solve, and I want to share with you those problems, but most importantly, I think I figured out a proposal for a solution. The first problem that not just Michigan, but every state, faces is, how do you create good jobs in America in a global economy? So let me share with you some empirical data from my lab. I was elected in 2002 and, at the end of my first year in office in 2003, I got a call from one of my staff members, who said, "Gov, we have a big problem. We have a little tiny community called Greenville, Michigan, population 8,000, and they are about to lose their major employer, which is a refrigerator factory that's operated by Electrolux." And I said, "Well, how many people work at Electrolux?" And he said, "3,000 of the 8,000 people in Greenville." So it is a one-company town. And Electrolux was going to go to Mexico. So I said, "Forget that. I'm the new Governor. We can fix this. We're going to go to Greenville with my whole cabinet and we will just make Electrolux an offer they can't refuse." So I brought my whole cabinet, and we met with all of the pooh-bahs of little Greenville — the mayor, the city manager, the head of the community college — and we basically emptied our pockets and put all of our chips on the table, incentives, you name it, to convince Electrolux to stay, and as we made our pile of chips, we slid them across the table to the management of Electrolux. And in the pile were things like zero taxes for 20 years, or that we'd help to build a new factory for the company, we'd help to finance it. The UAW, who represented the workers, said they would offer unprecedented concessions, sacrifices to just keep those jobs in Greenville. So the management of Electrolux took our pile, our list of incentives, and they went outside the room for 17 minutes, and they came back in and they said, "Wow, this is the most generous any community has ever been to try to keep jobs here. But there's nothing you can do to compensate for the fact that we can pay $1.57 an hour in Juarez, Mexico. So we're leaving." And they did. And when they did, it was like a nuclear bomb went off in little Greenville. In fact, they did implode the factory. That's a guy that is walking on his last day of work. And on the month that the last refrigerator rolled off the assembly line, the employees of Electrolux in Greenville, Michigan, had a gathering for themselves that they called the last supper. It was in a big pavilion in Greenville, an indoor pavilion, and I went to it because I was so frustrated as Governor that I couldn't stop the outflow of these jobs, and I wanted to grieve with them, and as I went into the room— there's thousands of people there. It was a just big thing. People were eating boxed lunches on roundtop tables, and there was a sad band playing music, or a band playing sad music, probably both. (Laughter) And this guy comes up to me, and he's got tattoos and his ponytail and his baseball cap on, and he had his two daughters with him, and he said, "Gov, these are my two daughters." He said, "I'm 48 years old, and I have worked at this factory for 30 years. I went from high school to factory. My father worked at this factory," he said. "My grandfather worked at this factory. All I know is how to make refrigerators." And he looked at his daughters, and he puts his hand on his chest, and he says, "So, Gov, tell me, who is ever going to hire me? Who is ever going to hire me?" And that was asked not just by that guy but by everyone in the pavilion, and frankly, by every worker at one of the 50,000 factories that closed in the first decade of this century. Enigma number one: How do you create jobs in America in a global economy? Number two, very quickly: How do you solve global climate change when we don't even have a national energy policy in this country and when gridlock in Congress seems to be the norm? In fact, there was a poll that was done recently and the pollster compared Congress's approval ratings to a number of other unpleasant things, and it was found, in fact, that Congress's approval rating is worse than cockroaches, lice, Nickelback the band, root canals and Donald Trump. (Laughter) But wait, the good news is it's at least better than meth labs and gonorrhea. (Laughter) We got a problem, folks. So it got me thinking, what is it? What in the laboratory that I see out there, the laboratories of democracy, what has happened? What policy prescriptions have happened that actually cause changes to occur and that have been accepted in a bipartisan way? So if I asked you, for example, what was the Obama Administration policy that caused massive changes across the country, what would you say? You might say Obamacare, except for those were not voluntary changes. As we know, only half the states have opted in. We might say the Recovery Act, but those didn't require policy changes. The thing that caused massive policy changes to occur was Race to the Top for education. Why? The government put a $4.5 billion pot and said to the governors across the country, compete for it. Forty-eight governors competed, convincing 48 state legislatures to essentially raise standards for high schoolers so that they all take a college prep curriculum. Forty-eight states opted in, creating a national [education] policy from the bottom up. So I thought, well, why can't we do something like that and create a clean energy jobs race to the top? Because after all, if you look at the context, 1.6 trillion dollars has been invested in the past eight years from the private sector globally, and every dollar represents a job, and where are those jobs going? Well, they're going to places that have policy, like China. In fact, I was in China to see what they were doing, and they were putting on a dog-and-pony show for the group that I was with, and I was standing in the back of the room during one of the demonstrations and standing next to one of the Chinese officials, and we were watching, and he says, "So, Gov, when do you think the U.S. is going to get national energy policy?" And I said, "Oh my God — Congress, gridlock, who knows?" And this is what he did, he goes, he says, "Take your time." Because they see our passivity as their opportunity. So what if we decided to create a challenge to the governors of the country, and the price to entry into this competition used the same amount that the bipartisan group approved in Congress for the Race to the Top for education, 4.5 billion, which sounds like a lot, but actually it's less than one tenth of one percent of federal spending. It's a rounding error on the federal side. But price to entry into that competition would be, you could just, say, use the President's goal. He wants Congress to adopt a clean energy standard of 80 percent by 2030, in other words, that you'd have to get 80 percent of your energy from clean sources by the year 2030. Why not ask all of the states to do that instead? And imagine what might happen, because every region has something to offer. You might take states like Iowa and Ohio — two very important political states, by the way — those two governors, and they would say, we're going to lead the nation in producing the wind turbines and the wind energy. You might say the solar states, the sun belt, we're going to be the states that produce solar energy for the country, and maybe Jerry Brown says, "Well, I'm going to create an industry cluster in California to be able to produce the solar panels so that we're not buying them from China but we're buying them from the U.S." In fact, every region of the country could do this. You see, you've got solar and wind opportunity all across the nation. In fact, if you look just at the upper and northern states in the West, they could do geothermal, or you could look at Texas and say, we could lead the nation in the solutions to smart grid. In the middle eastern states which have access to forests and to agricultural waste, they might say, we're going to lead the nation in biofuels. In the upper northeast, we're going to lead the nation in energy efficiency solutions. Along the eastern seaboard, we're going to lead the nation in offshore wind. You might look at Michigan and say, we're going to lead the nation in producing the guts for the electric vehicle, like the lithium ion battery. Every region has something to offer, and if you created a competition, it respects the states and it respects federalism. It's opt-in. You might even get Texas and South Carolina, who didn't opt into the education Race to the Top, you might even get them to opt in. Why? Because Republican and Democratic governors love to cut ribbons. We want to bring jobs. I'm just saying. And it fosters innovation at the state level in these laboratories of democracy. Now, any of you who are watching anything about politics lately might say, "Okay, great idea, but really? Congress putting four and a half billion dollars on the table? They can't agree to anything." So you could wait and go through Congress, although you should be very impatient. Or, you renegades, we could go around Congress. Go around Congress. What if we created a private sector challenge to the governors? What if several of the high-net worth companies and individuals who are here at TED decided that they would create, band together, just a couple of them, and create a national competition to the governors to have a race to the top and see how the governors respond? What if it all started here at TED? What if you were here when we figured out how to crack the code to create good paying jobs in America — (Applause) — and get national energy policy and we created a national energy strategy from the bottom up? Because, dear TEDsters, if you are impatient like I am, you know that our economic competitors, our other nations, are in the game and are eating us for lunch. And we can get in the game or not. We can be at the table or we can be on the table. And I don't know about you, but I prefer to dine. Thank you all so much. (Applause) |
The art of asking | {0: "Alt-rock icon Amanda Fucking Palmer believes we shouldn't fight the fact that digital content is freely shareable -- and suggests that artists can and should be directly supported by fans."} | TED2013 | (Breathes in) (Breathes out) So, I didn't always make my living from music. For about the five years after graduating from an upstanding liberal arts university, this was my day job. (Laughter) I was a self-employed living statue called the Eight-Foot Bride, and I love telling people I did this for a job, because everybody always wants to know, who are these freaks in real life. (Laughter) Hello. I painted myself white one day, stood on a box, put a hat or a can at my feet, and when someone came by and dropped in money, I handed them a flower — and some intense eye contact. And if they didn't take the flower, I threw in a gesture of sadness and longing — as they walked away. (Laughter) So I had the most profound encounters with people, especially lonely people who looked like they hadn't talked to anyone in weeks, and we would get this beautiful moment of prolonged eye contact being allowed in a city street, and we would sort of fall in love a little bit. And my eyes would say — "Thank you. I see you." And their eyes would say — "Nobody ever sees me. Thank you." I would get harassed sometimes. People would yell at me from their cars. "Get a job!" (Laughing) And I'd be, like, "This is my job." But it hurt, because it made me fear that I was somehow doing something un-joblike and unfair, shameful. I had no idea how perfect a real education I was getting for the music business on this box. And for the economists out there, you may be interested to know I actually made a pretty predictable income, which was shocking to me, given I had no regular customers, but pretty much 60 bucks on a Tuesday, 90 bucks on a Friday. It was consistent. And meanwhile, I was touring locally and playing in nightclubs with my band, the Dresden Dolls. This was me on piano, a genius drummer. I wrote the songs, and eventually we started making enough money that I could quit being a statue, and as we started touring, I really didn't want to lose this sense of direct connection with people, because I loved it. So after all of our shows, we would sign autographs and hug fans and hang out and talk to people, and we made an art out of asking people to help us and join us, and I would track down local musicians and artists and they would set up outside of our shows, and they would pass the hat, and then they would come in and join us onstage, so we had this rotating smorgasbord of weird, random circus guests. And then Twitter came along, and made things even more magic, because I could ask instantly for anything anywhere. So I would need a piano to practice on, and an hour later I would be at a fan's house. This is in London. People would bring home-cooked food to us all over the world backstage and feed us and eat with us. This is in Seattle. Fans who worked in museums and stores and any kind of public space would wave their hands if I would decide to do a last-minute, spontaneous, free gig. This is a library in Auckland. On Saturday I tweeted for this crate and hat, because I did not want to schlep them from the East Coast, and they showed up care of this dude, Chris, from Newport Beach, who says hello. I once tweeted, "Where in Melbourne can I buy a neti pot?" And a nurse from a hospital drove one right at that moment to the cafe I was in, and I bought her a smoothie and we sat there talking about nursing and death. And I love this kind of random closeness, which is lucky, because I do a lot of couchsurfing. In mansions where everyone in my crew gets their own room but there's no wireless, and in punk squats, everyone on the floor in one room with no toilets but with wireless, clearly making it the better option. (Laughter) My crew once pulled our van up to a really poor Miami neighborhood and we found out that our couchsurfing host for the night was an 18-year-old girl, still living at home, and her family were all undocumented immigrants from Honduras. And that night, her whole family took the couches and she slept together with her mom so that we could take their beds. And I lay there thinking, these people have so little. Is this fair? And in the morning, her mom taught us how to try to make tortillas and wanted to give me a Bible, and she took me aside and she said to me in her broken English, "Your music has helped my daughter so much. Thank you for staying here. We're all so grateful." And I thought, this is fair. This is this. A couple of months later, I was in Manhattan, and I tweeted for a crash pad, and at midnight, I'm on the Lower East Side, and it occurs to me I've never actually done this alone. I've always been with my band or my crew. Is this what stupid people do? (Laughter) Is this how stupid people die? And before I can change my mind, the door busts open. She's an artist. He's a financial blogger for Reuters, and they're pouring me a glass of red wine and offering me a bath, and I have had thousands of nights like that and like that. So I couchsurf a lot. I also crowdsurf a lot. I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing. You're falling into the audience and you're trusting each other. I once asked an opening band of mine if they wanted to go out into the crowd and pass the hat to get some extra money, something that I did a lot. And as usual, the band was psyched, but there was this one guy in the band who told me he just couldn't bring himself to go out there. It felt too much like begging to stand there with the hat. And I recognized his fear of "Is this fair?" and "Get a job." And meanwhile, my band is becoming bigger and bigger. We sign with a major label. And our music is a cross between punk and cabaret. It's not for everybody. Well, maybe it's for you. (Laughter) We sign, and there's all this hype leading up to our next record. And it comes out and it sells about 25,000 copies in the first few weeks, and the label considers this a failure. I was like, "25,000, isn't that a lot?" They said, "No, the sales are going down. It's a failure." And they walk off. Right at this same time, I'm signing and hugging after a gig, and a guy comes up to me and hands me a $10 bill, and he says, "I'm sorry, I burned your CD from a friend." (Laughter) "But I read your blog, I know you hate your label. I just want you to have this money." And this starts happening all the time. I become the hat after my own gigs, but I have to physically stand there and take the help from people, and unlike the guy in the opening band, I've actually had a lot of practice standing there. Thank you. And this is the moment I decide I'm just going to give away my music for free online whenever possible, so it's like Metallica over here, Napster, bad; Amanda Palmer over here, and I'm going to encourage torrenting, downloading, sharing, but I'm going to ask for help, because I saw it work on the street. So I fought my way off my label, and for my next project with my new band, the Grand Theft Orchestra, I turned to crowdfunding. And I fell into those thousands of connections that I'd made, and I asked my crowd to catch me. And the goal was 100,000 dollars. My fans backed me at nearly 1.2 million, which was the biggest music crowdfunding project to date. (Applause) And you can see how many people it is. It's about 25,000 people. And the media asked, "Amanda, the music business is tanking and you encourage piracy. How did you make all these people pay for music?" And the real answer is, I didn't make them. I asked them. And through the very act of asking people, I'd connected with them, and when you connect with them, people want to help you. It's kind of counterintuitive for a lot of artists. They don't want to ask for things. But it's not easy. It's not easy to ask. And a lot of artists have a problem with this. Asking makes you vulnerable. And I got a lot of criticism online, after my Kickstarter went big, for continuing my crazy crowdsourcing practices, specifically for asking musicians who are fans if they wanted to join us on stage for a few songs in exchange for love and tickets and beer, and this was a doctored image that went up of me on a website. And this hurt in a really familiar way. And people saying, "You're not allowed anymore to ask for that kind of help," really reminded me of the people in their cars yelling, "Get a job." Because they weren't with us on the sidewalk, and they couldn't see the exchange that was happening between me and my crowd, an exchange that was very fair to us but alien to them. So this is slightly not safe for work. This is my Kickstarter backer party in Berlin. At the end of the night, I stripped and let everyone draw on me. Now let me tell you, if you want to experience the visceral feeling of trusting strangers — (Laughter) I recommend this, especially if those strangers are drunk German people. (Laughter) This was a ninja master-level fan connection, because what I was really saying here was, I trust you this much. Should I? Show me. For most of human history, musicians, artists, they've been part of the community. Connectors and openers, not untouchable stars. Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance, but the Internet and the content that we're freely able to share on it are taking us back. It's about a few people loving you up close and about those people being enough. So a lot of people are confused by the idea of no hard sticker price. They see it as an unpredictable risk, but the things I've done, the Kickstarter, the street, the doorbell, I don't see these things as risk. I see them as trust. Now, the online tools to make the exchange as easy and as instinctive as the street, they're getting there. But the perfect tools aren't going to help us if we can't face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but, more important — to ask without shame. My music career has been spent trying to encounter people on the Internet the way I could on the box. So blogging and tweeting not just about my tour dates and my new video but about our work and our art and our fears and our hangovers, our mistakes, and we see each other. And I think when we really see each other, we want to help each other. I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, "How do we make people pay for music?" What if we started asking, "How do we let people pay for music?" Thank you. (Applause) |
How to fight desertification and reverse climate change | {0: 'Allan Savory works to promote holistic management in the grasslands of the world.'} | TED2013 | The most massive tsunami perfect storm is bearing down upon us. This perfect storm is mounting a grim reality, increasingly grim reality, and we are facing that reality with the full belief that we can solve our problems with technology, and that's very understandable. Now, this perfect storm that we are facing is the result of our rising population, rising towards 10 billion people, land that is turning to desert, and, of course, climate change. Now there's no question about it at all: we will only solve the problem of replacing fossil fuels with technology. But fossil fuels, carbon — coal and gas — are by no means the only thing that is causing climate change. Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert, and this happens only when we create too much bare ground. There's no other cause. And I intend to focus on most of the world's land that is turning to desert. But I have for you a very simple message that offers more hope than you can imagine. We have environments where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year. On those, it is almost impossible to create vast areas of bare ground. No matter what you do, nature covers it up so quickly. And we have environments where we have months of humidity followed by months of dryness, and that is where desertification is occurring. Fortunately, with space technology now, we can look at it from space, and when we do, you can see the proportions fairly well. Generally, what you see in green is not desertifying, and what you see in brown is, and these are by far the greatest areas of the Earth. About two thirds, I would guess, of the world is desertifying. I took this picture in the Tihamah Desert while 25 millimeters — that's an inch of rain — was falling. Think of it in terms of drums of water, each containing 200 liters. Over 1,000 drums of water fell on every hectare of that land that day. The next day, the land looked like this. Where had that water gone? Some of it ran off as flooding, but most of the water that soaked into the soil simply evaporated out again, exactly as it does in your garden if you leave the soil uncovered. Now, because the fate of water and carbon are tied to soil organic matter, when we damage soils, you give off carbon. Carbon goes back to the atmosphere. Now you're told over and over, repeatedly, that desertification is only occurring in arid and semi-arid areas of the world, and that tall grasslands like this one in high rainfall are of no consequence. But if you do not look at grasslands but look down into them, you find that most of the soil in that grassland that you've just seen is bare and covered with a crust of algae, leading to increased runoff and evaporation. That is the cancer of desertification that we do not recognize till its terminal form. Now we know that desertification is caused by livestock, mostly cattle, sheep and goats, overgrazing the plants, leaving the soil bare and giving off methane. Almost everybody knows this, from nobel laureates to golf caddies, or was taught it, as I was. Now, the environments like you see here, dusty environments in Africa where I grew up, and I loved wildlife, and so I grew up hating livestock because of the damage they were doing. And then my university education as an ecologist reinforced my beliefs. Well, I have news for you. We were once just as certain that the world was flat. We were wrong then, and we are wrong again. And I want to invite you now to come along on my journey of reeducation and discovery. When I was a young man, a young biologist in Africa, I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas as future national parks. Now no sooner — this was in the 1950s — and no sooner did we remove the hunting, drum-beating people to protect the animals, than the land began to deteriorate, as you see in this park that we formed. Now, no livestock were involved, but suspecting that we had too many elephants now, I did the research and I proved we had too many, and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain. Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make, and it was political dynamite, frankly. So our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research. They did. They agreed with me, and over the following years, we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage. And it got worse, not better. Loving elephants as I do, that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life, and I will carry that to my grave. One good thing did come out of it. It made me absolutely determined to devote my life to finding solutions. When I came to the United States, I got a shock, to find national parks like this one desertifying as badly as anything in Africa. And there'd been no livestock on this land for over 70 years. And I found that American scientists had no explanation for this except that it is arid and natural. So I then began looking at all the research plots I could over the whole of the Western United States where cattle had been removed to prove that it would stop desertification, but I found the opposite, as we see on this research station, where this grassland that was green in 1961, by 2002 had changed to that situation. And the authors of the position paper on climate change from which I obtained these pictures attribute this change to "unknown processes." Clearly, we have never understood what is causing desertification, which has destroyed many civilizations and now threatens us globally. We have never understood it. Take one square meter of soil and make it bare like this is down here, and I promise you, you will find it much colder at dawn and much hotter at midday than that same piece of ground if it's just covered with litter, plant litter. You have changed the microclimate. Now, by the time you are doing that and increasing greatly the percentage of bare ground on more than half the world's land, you are changing macroclimate. But we have just simply not understood why was it beginning to happen 10,000 years ago? Why has it accelerated lately? We had no understanding of that. What we had failed to understand was that these seasonal humidity environments of the world, the soil and the vegetation developed with very large numbers of grazing animals, and that these grazing animals developed with ferocious pack-hunting predators. Now, the main defense against pack-hunting predators is to get into herds, and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals. Now, large herds dung and urinate all over their own food, and they have to keep moving, and it was that movement that prevented the overgrazing of plants, while the periodic trampling ensured good cover of the soil, as we see where a herd has passed. This picture is a typical seasonal grassland. It has just come through four months of rain, and it's now going into eight months of dry season. And watch the change as it goes into this long dry season. Now, all of that grass you see aboveground has to decay biologically before the next growing season, and if it doesn't, the grassland and the soil begin to die. Now, if it does not decay biologically, it shifts to oxidation, which is a very slow process, and this smothers and kills grasses, leading to a shift to woody vegetation and bare soil, releasing carbon. To prevent that, we have traditionally used fire. But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon, and worse than that, burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares of grasslands, and almost nobody is talking about it. We justify the burning, as scientists, because it does remove the dead material and it allows the plants to grow. Now, looking at this grassland of ours that has gone dry, what could we do to keep that healthy? And bear in mind, I'm talking of most of the world's land now. Okay? We cannot reduce animal numbers to rest it more without causing desertification and climate change. We cannot burn it without causing desertification and climate change. What are we going to do? There is only one option, I'll repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for former herds and predators, and mimic nature. There is no other alternative left to mankind. So let's do that. So on this bit of grassland, we'll do it, but just in the foreground. We'll impact it very heavily with cattle to mimic nature, and we've done so, and look at that. All of that grass is now covering the soil as dung, urine and litter or mulch, as every one of the gardeners amongst you would understand, and that soil is ready to absorb and hold the rain, to store carbon, and to break down methane. And we did that, without using fire to damage the soil, and the plants are free to grow. When I first realized that we had no option as scientists but to use much-vilified livestock to address climate change and desertification, I was faced with a real dilemma. How were we to do it? We'd had 10,000 years of extremely knowledgeable pastoralists bunching and moving their animals, but they had created the great manmade deserts of the world. Then we'd had 100 years of modern rain science, and that had accelerated desertification, as we first discovered in Africa and then confirmed in the United States, and as you see in this picture of land managed by the federal government. Clearly more was needed than bunching and moving the animals, and humans, over thousands of years, had never been able to deal with nature's complexity. But we biologists and ecologists had never tackled anything as complex as this. So rather than reinvent the wheel, I began studying other professions to see if anybody had. And I found there were planning techniques that I could take and adapt to our biological need, and from those I developed what we call holistic management and planned grazing, a planning process, and that does address all of nature's complexity and our social, environmental, economic complexity. Today, we have young women like this one teaching villages in Africa how to put their animals together into larger herds, plan their grazing to mimic nature, and where we have them hold their animals overnight — we run them in a predator-friendly manner, because we have a lot of lands, and so on — and where they do this and hold them overnight to prepare the crop fields, we are getting very great increases in crop yield as well. Let's look at some results. This is land close to land that we manage in Zimbabwe. It has just come through four months of very good rains it got that year, and it's going into the long dry season. But as you can see, all of that rain, almost of all it, has evaporated from the soil surface. Their river is dry despite the rain just having ended, and we have 150,000 people on almost permanent food aid. Now let's go to our land nearby on the same day, with the same rainfall, and look at that. Our river is flowing and healthy and clean. It's fine. The production of grass, shrubs, trees, wildlife, everything is now more productive, and we have virtually no fear of dry years. And we did that by increasing the cattle and goats 400 percent, planning the grazing to mimic nature and integrate them with all the elephants, buffalo, giraffe and other animals that we have. But before we began, our land looked like that. This site was bare and eroding for over 30 years regardless of what rain we got. Okay? Watch the marked tree and see the change as we use livestock to mimic nature. This was another site where it had been bare and eroding, and at the base of the marked small tree, we had lost over 30 centimeters of soil. Okay? And again, watch the change just using livestock to mimic nature. And there are fallen trees in there now, because the better land is now attracting elephants, etc. This land in Mexico was in terrible condition, and I've had to mark the hill because the change is so profound. (Applause) I began helping a family in the Karoo Desert in the 1970s turn the desert that you see on the right there back to grassland, and thankfully, now their grandchildren are on the land with hope for the future. And look at the amazing change in this one, where that gully has completely healed using nothing but livestock mimicking nature, and once more, we have the third generation of that family on that land with their flag still flying. The vast grasslands of Patagonia are turning to desert as you see here. The man in the middle is an Argentinian researcher, and he has documented the steady decline of that land over the years as they kept reducing sheep numbers. They put 25,000 sheep in one flock, really mimicking nature now with planned grazing, and they have documented a 50-percent increase in the production of the land in the first year. We now have in the violent Horn of Africa pastoralists planning their grazing to mimic nature and openly saying it is the only hope they have of saving their families and saving their culture. Ninety-five percent of that land can only feed people from animals. I remind you that I am talking about most of the world's land here that controls our fate, including the most violent region of the world, where only animals can feed people from about 95 percent of the land. What we are doing globally is causing climate change as much as, I believe, fossil fuels, and maybe more than fossil fuels. But worse than that, it is causing hunger, poverty, violence, social breakdown and war, and as I am talking to you, millions of men, women and children are suffering and dying. And if this continues, we are unlikely to be able to stop the climate changing, even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels. I believe I've shown you how we can work with nature at very low cost to reverse all this. We are already doing so on about 15 million hectares on five continents, and people who understand far more about carbon than I do calculate that, for illustrative purposes, if we do what I am showing you here, we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and safely store it in the grassland soils for thousands of years, and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands that I've shown you, we can take us back to pre-industrial levels, while feeding people. I can think of almost nothing that offers more hope for our planet, for your children, and their children, and all of humanity. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, Chris. Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have, and I'm sure everyone here has, A) a hundred questions, B) wants to hug you. I'm just going to ask you one quick question. When you first start this and you bring in a flock of animals, it's desert. What do they eat? How does that part work? How do you start? Allan Savory: Well, we have done this for a long time, and the only time we have ever had to provide any feed is during mine reclamation, where it's 100 percent bare. But many years ago, we took the worst land in Zimbabwe, where I offered a £5 note in a hundred-mile drive if somebody could find one grass in a hundred-mile drive, and on that, we trebled the stocking rate, the number of animals, in the first year with no feeding, just by the movement, mimicking nature, and using a sigmoid curve, that principle. It's a little bit technical to explain here, but just that. CA: Well, I would love to — I mean, this such an interesting and important idea. The best people on our blog are going to come and talk to you and try and — I want to get more on this that we could share along with the talk.AS: Wonderful. CA: That is an astonishing talk, truly an astonishing talk, and I think you heard that we all are cheering you on your way. Thank you so much.AS: Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. (Applause) |
How we found the giant squid | {0: 'Edith Widder combines her expertise in research and technological innovation with a commitment to stopping and reversing the degradation of our marine environment. '} | TED2013 | The Kraken, a beast so terrifying it was said to devour men and ships and whales, and so enormous it could be mistaken for an island. In assessing the merits of such tales, it's probably wise to keep in mind that old sailor's saw that the only difference between a fairytale and a sea story is a fairytale begins, "Once upon a time," and a sea story begins, "This ain't no shit." (Laughter) Every fish that gets away grows with every telling of the tale. Nevertheless, there are giants in the ocean, and we now have video proof, as those of you that saw the Discovery Channel documentary are no doubt aware. I was one of the three scientists on this expedition that took place last summer off Japan. I'm the short one. The other two are Dr. Tsunemi Kubodera and Dr. Steve O'Shea. I owe my participation in this now-historic event to TED. In 2010, there was a TED event called Mission Blue held aboard the Lindblad Explorer in the Galapagos as part of the fulfillment of Sylvia Earle's TED wish. I spoke about a new way of exploring the ocean, one that focuses on attracting animals instead of scaring them away. Mike deGruy was also invited, and he spoke with great passion about his love of the ocean, and he also talked to me about applying my approach to something he's been involved with for a very long time, which is the hunt for the giant squid. It was Mike that got me invited to the squid summit, a gathering of squid experts at the Discovery Channel that summer during Shark Week. (Laughter) I gave a talk on unobtrusive viewing and optical luring of deep sea squid in which I emphasized the importance of using quiet, unobtrusive platforms for exploration. This came out of hundreds of dives I have made, farting around in the dark using these platforms, and my impression that I saw more animals working from the submersible than I did with either of the remote-operated vehicles. But that could just be because the submersible has a wider field of view. But I also felt like I saw more animals working with the Tiburon than the Ventana, two vehicles with the same field of view but different propulsion systems. So my suspicion was that it might have something to do with the amount of noise they make. So I set up a hydrophone on the bottom of the ocean, and I had each of these fly by at the same speed and distance and recorded the sound they made. The Johnson Sea-Link — (whirring noise) — which you can probably just barely hear here, uses electric thrusters — very, very quiet. The Tiburon also uses electric powered thrusters. It's also pretty quiet, but a bit noisier. (Louder whirring noise) But most deep-diving ROVs these days use hydraulics and they sound like the Ventana. (Loud beeping noise) I think that's got to be scaring a lot of animals away. So for the deep sea squid hunt, I proposed using an optical lure attached to a camera platform with no thrusters, no motors, just a battery-powered camera, and the only illumination coming from red light that's invisible to most deep-sea animals that are adapted to see primarily blue. That's visible to our eye, but it's the equivalent of infrared in the deep sea. So this camera platform, which we called the Medusa, could just be thrown off the back of the ship, attached to a float at the surface with over 2,000 feet of line, it would just float around passively carried by the currents, and the only light visible to the animals in the deep would be the blue light of the optical lure, which we called the electronic jellyfish, or e-jelly, because it was designed to imitate the bioluminescent display of the common deep sea jellyfish Atolla. Now, this pinwheel of light that the Atolla produces is known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm and is a form of defense. The reason that the electronic jellyfish worked as a lure is not because giant squid eat jellyfish, but it's because this jellyfish only resorts to producing this light when it's being chewed on by a predator and its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of a larger predator that will attack its attacker and thereby afford it an opportunity for escape. It's a scream for help, a last-ditch attempt for escape, and a common form of defense in the deep sea. The approach worked. Whereas all previous expeditions had failed to garner a single video glimpse of the giant, we managed six, and the first triggered wild excitement. Edith Widder (on video): Oh my God. Oh my God! Are you kidding me?Other scientists: Oh ho ho! That's just hanging there. EW: It was like it was teasing us, doing a kind of fan dance — now you see me, now you don't — and we had four such teasing appearances, and then on the fifth, it came in and totally wowed us. (Music) Narrator: (Speaking in Japanese) Scientists: Ooh. Bang! Oh my God! Whoa! (Applause) EW: The full monty. What really wowed me about that was the way it came in up over the e-jelly and then attacked the enormous thing next to it, which I think it mistook for the predator on the e-jelly. But even more incredible was the footage shot from the Triton submersible. What was not mentioned in the Discovery documentary was that the bait squid that Dr. Kubodera used, a one-meter long diamondback squid had a light attached to it, a squid jig of the type that longline fishermen use, and I think it was this light that brought the giant in. Now, what you're seeing is the intensified camera's view under red light, and that's all Dr. Kubodera could see when the giant comes in here. And then he got so excited, he turned on his flashlight because he wanted to see better, and the giant didn't run away, so he risked turning on the white lights on the submersible, bringing a creature of legend from the misty history into high-resolution video. It was absolutely breathtaking, and had this animal had its feeding tentacles intact and fully extended, it would have been as tall as a two-story house. How could something that big live in our ocean and yet remain unfilmed until now? We've only explored about five percent of our ocean. There are great discoveries yet to be made down there, fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways that we can't even yet imagine. Yet we have spent only a tiny fraction of the money on ocean exploration that we've spent on space exploration. We need a NASA-like organization for ocean exploration, because we need to be exploring and protecting our life support systems here on Earth. We need — thank you. (Applause) Exploration is the engine that drives innovation. Innovation drives economic growth. So let's all go exploring, but let's do it in a way that doesn't scare the animals away, or, as Mike deGruy once said, "If you want to get away from it all and see something you've never seen, or have an excellent chance of seeing something that no one's ever seen, get in a sub." He should have been with us for this adventure. We miss him. (Applause) |
A guerrilla gardener in South Central LA | {0: 'Ron Finley grows a nourishing food culture in South Central L.A.’s food desert by planting the seeds and tools for healthy eating.'} | TED2013 | I live in South Central. This is South Central: liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. So the city planners, they get together and they figure they're going to change the name South Central to make it represent something else, so they change it to South Los Angeles, like this is going to fix what's really going wrong in the city. This is South Los Angeles. (Laughter) Liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. Just like 26.5 million other Americans, I live in a food desert, South Central Los Angeles, home of the drive-thru and the drive-by. Funny thing is, the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys. People are dying from curable diseases in South Central Los Angeles. For instance, the obesity rate in my neighborhood is five times higher than, say, Beverly Hills, which is probably eight, 10 miles away. I got tired of seeing this happening. And I was wondering, how would you feel if you had no access to healthy food, if every time you walk out your door you see the ill effects that the present food system has on your neighborhood? I see wheelchairs bought and sold like used cars. I see dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks. And I figured, this has to stop. So I figured that the problem is the solution. Food is the problem and food is the solution. Plus I got tired of driving 45 minutes round trip to get an apple that wasn't impregnated with pesticides. So what I did, I planted a food forest in front of my house. It was on a strip of land that we call a parkway. It's 150 feet by 10 feet. Thing is, it's owned by the city. But you have to maintain it. So I'm like, "Cool. I can do whatever the hell I want, since it's my responsibility and I gotta maintain it." And this is how I decided to maintain it. So me and my group, L.A. Green Grounds, we got together and we started planting my food forest, fruit trees, you know, the whole nine, vegetables. What we do, we're a pay-it-forward kind of group, where it's composed of gardeners from all walks of life, from all over the city, and it's completely volunteer, and everything we do is free. And the garden, it was beautiful. And then somebody complained. The city came down on me, and basically gave me a citation saying that I had to remove my garden, which this citation was turning into a warrant. And I'm like, "Come on, really? A warrant for planting food on a piece of land that you could care less about?" (Laughter) And I was like, "Cool. Bring it." Because this time it wasn't coming up. So L.A. Times got ahold of it. Steve Lopez did a story on it and talked to the councilman, and one of the Green Grounds members, they put up a petition on Change.org, and with 900 signatures, we were a success. We had a victory on our hands. My councilman even called in and said how they endorse and love what we're doing. I mean, come on, why wouldn't they? L.A. leads the United States in vacant lots that the city actually owns. They own 26 square miles of vacant lots. That's 20 Central Parks. That's enough space to plant 725 million tomato plants. Why in the hell would they not okay this? Growing one plant will give you 1,000, 10,000 seeds. When one dollar's worth of green beans will give you 75 dollars' worth of produce. It's my gospel, when I'm telling people, grow your own food. Growing your own food is like printing your own money. (Applause) See, I have a legacy in South Central. I grew up there. I raised my sons there. And I refuse to be a part of this manufactured reality that was manufactured for me by some other people, and I'm manufacturing my own reality. See, I'm an artist. Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art. Just like a graffiti artist, where they beautify walls, me, I beautify lawns, parkways. I use the garden, the soil, like it's a piece of cloth, and the plants and the trees, that's my embellishment for that cloth. You'd be surprised what the soil could do if you let it be your canvas. You just couldn't imagine how amazing a sunflower is and how it affects people. So what happened? I have witnessed my garden become a tool for the education, a tool for the transformation of my neighborhood. To change the community, you have to change the composition of the soil. We are the soil. You'd be surprised how kids are affected by this. Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. Plus you get strawberries. (Laughter) I remember this time, there was this mother and a daughter came, it was, like, 10:30 at night, and they were in my yard, and I came out and they looked so ashamed. So I'm like, man, it made me feel bad that they were there, and I told them, you know, you don't have to do this like this. This is on the street for a reason. It made me feel ashamed to see people that were this close to me that were hungry, and this only reinforced why I do this, and people asked me, "Fin, aren't you afraid people are going to steal your food?" And I'm like, "Hell no, I ain't afraid they're gonna steal it. That's why it's on the street. That's the whole idea. I want them to take it, but at the same time, I want them to take back their health." There's another time when I put a garden in this homeless shelter in downtown Los Angeles. These are the guys, they helped me unload the truck. It was cool, and they just shared the stories about how this affected them and how they used to plant with their mother and their grandmother, and it was just cool to see how this changed them, if it was only for that one moment. So Green Grounds has gone on to plant maybe 20 gardens. We've had, like, 50 people come to our dig-ins and participate, and it's all volunteers. If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. (Laughter) If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. (Applause) But when none of this is presented to them, if they're not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever the hell you put in front of them. I see young people and they want to work, but they're in this thing where they're caught up — I see kids of color and they're just on this track that's designed for them, that leads them to nowhere. So with gardening, I see an opportunity where we can train these kids to take over their communities, to have a sustainable life. And when we do this, who knows? We might produce the next George Washington Carver. but if we don't change the composition of the soil, we will never do this. Now this is one of my plans. This is what I want to do. I want to plant a whole block of gardens where people can share in the food in the same block. I want to take shipping containers and turn them into healthy cafes. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about no free shit, because free is not sustainable. The funny thing about sustainability, you have to sustain it. (Laughter) (Applause) What I'm talking about is putting people to work, and getting kids off the street, and letting them know the joy, the pride and the honor in growing your own food, opening farmer's markets. So what I want to do here, we gotta make this sexy. So I want us all to become ecolutionary renegades, gangstas, gangsta gardeners. We gotta flip the script on what a gangsta is. If you ain't a gardener, you ain't gangsta. Get gangsta with your shovel, okay? And let that be your weapon of choice. (Applause) So basically, if you want to meet with me, you know, if you want to meet, don't call me if you want to sit around in cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit — where you talk about doing some shit. If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit. Peace. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
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