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A girl who demanded school | {0: "Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya is the founder and president of Kakenya's Dream, an international nonprofit organization leveraging education to empower girls, end harmful traditional practices and transform communities in rural Kenya."} | TEDxMidAtlantic | There's a group of people in Kenya. People cross oceans to go see them. These people are tall. They jump high. They wear red. And they kill lions. You might be wondering, who are these people? These are the Maasais. And you know what's cool? I'm actually one of them. The Maasais, the boys are brought up to be warriors. The girls are brought up to be mothers. When I was five years old, I found out that I was engaged to be married as soon as I reached puberty. My mother, my grandmother, my aunties, they constantly reminded me that your husband just passed by. (Laughter) Cool, yeah? And everything I had to do from that moment was to prepare me to be a perfect woman at age 12. My day started at 5 in the morning, milking the cows, sweeping the house, cooking for my siblings, collecting water, firewood. I did everything that I needed to do to become a perfect wife. I went to school not because the Maasais' women or girls were going to school. It's because my mother was denied an education, and she constantly reminded me and my siblings that she never wanted us to live the life she was living. Why did she say that? My father worked as a policeman in the city. He came home once a year. We didn't see him for sometimes even two years. And whenever he came home, it was a different case. My mother worked hard in the farm to grow crops so that we can eat. She reared the cows and the goats so that she can care for us. But when my father came, he would sell the cows, he would sell the products we had, and he went and drank with his friends in the bars. Because my mother was a woman, she was not allowed to own any property, and by default, everything in my family anyway belongs to my father, so he had the right. And if my mother ever questioned him, he beat her, abused her, and really it was difficult. When I went to school, I had a dream. I wanted to become a teacher. Teachers looked nice. They wear nice dresses, high-heeled shoes. I found out later that they are uncomfortable, but I admired it. (Laughter) But most of all, the teacher was just writing on the board — not hard work, that's what I thought, compared to what I was doing in the farm. So I wanted to become a teacher. I worked hard in school, but when I was in eighth grade, it was a determining factor. In our tradition, there is a ceremony that girls have to undergo to become women, and it's a rite of passage to womanhood. And then I was just finishing my eighth grade, and that was a transition for me to go to high school. This was the crossroad. Once I go through this tradition, I was going to become a wife. Well, my dream of becoming a teacher will not come to pass. So I talked — I had to come up with a plan to figure these things out. I talked to my father. I did something that most girls have never done. I told my father, "I will only go through this ceremony if you let me go back to school." The reason why, if I ran away, my father will have a stigma, people will be calling him the father of that girl who didn't go through the ceremony. It was a shameful thing for him to carry the rest of his life. So he figured out. "Well," he said, "okay, you'll go to school after the ceremony." I did. The ceremony happened. It's a whole week long of excitement. It's a ceremony. People are enjoying it. And the day before the actual ceremony happens, we were dancing, having excitement, and through all the night we did not sleep. The actual day came, and we walked out of the house that we were dancing in. Yes, we danced and danced. We walked out to the courtyard, and there were a bunch of people waiting. They were all in a circle. And as we danced and danced, and we approached this circle of women, men, women, children, everybody was there. There was a woman sitting in the middle of it, and this woman was waiting to hold us. I was the first. There were my sisters and a couple of other girls, and as I approached her, she looked at me, and I sat down. And I sat down, and I opened my legs. As I opened my leg, another woman came, and this woman was carrying a knife. And as she carried the knife, she walked toward me and she held the clitoris, and she cut it off. As you can imagine, I bled. I bled. After bleeding for a while, I fainted thereafter. It's something that so many girls — I'm lucky, I never died — but many die. It's practiced, it's no anesthesia, it's a rusty old knife, and it was difficult. I was lucky because one, also, my mom did something that most women don't do. Three days later, after everybody has left the home, my mom went and brought a nurse. We were taken care of. Three weeks later, I was healed, and I was back in high school. I was so determined to be a teacher now so that I could make a difference in my family. Well, while I was in high school, something happened. I met a young gentleman from our village who had been to the University of Oregon. This man was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, camera, white sneakers — and I'm talking about white sneakers. There is something about clothes, I think, and shoes. They were sneakers, and this is in a village that doesn't even have paved roads. It was quite attractive. I told him, "Well, I want to go to where you are," because this man looked very happy, and I admired that. And he told me, "Well, what do you mean, you want to go? Don't you have a husband waiting for you?" And I told him, "Don't worry about that part. Just tell me how to get there." This gentleman, he helped me. While I was in high school also, my dad was sick. He got a stroke, and he was really, really sick, so he really couldn't tell me what to do next. But the problem is, my father is not the only father I have. Everybody who is my dad's age, male in the community, is my father by default — my uncles, all of them — and they dictate what my future is. So the news came, I applied to school and I was accepted to Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I couldn't come without the support of the village, because I needed to raise money to buy the air ticket. I got a scholarship but I needed to get myself here. But I needed the support of the village, and here again, when the men heard, and the people heard that a woman had gotten an opportunity to go to school, they said, "What a lost opportunity. This should have been given to a boy. We can't do this." So I went back and I had to go back to the tradition. There's a belief among our people that morning brings good news. So I had to come up with something to do with the morning, because there's good news in the morning. And in the village also, there is one chief, an elder, who if he says yes, everybody will follow him. So I went to him very early in the morning, as the sun rose. The first thing he sees when he opens his door is, it's me. "My child, what are you doing here?" "Well, Dad, I need help. Can you support me to go to America?" I promised him that I would be the best girl, I will come back, anything they wanted after that, I will do it for them. He said, "Well, but I can't do it alone." He gave me a list of another 15 men that I went — 16 more men — every single morning I went and visited them. They all came together. The village, the women, the men, everybody came together to support me to come to get an education. I arrived in America. As you can imagine, what did I find? I found snow! I found Wal-Marts, vacuum cleaners, and lots of food in the cafeteria. I was in a land of plenty. I enjoyed myself, but during that moment while I was here, I discovered a lot of things. I learned that that ceremony that I went through when I was 13 years old, it was called female genital mutilation. I learned that it was against the law in Kenya. I learned that I did not have to trade part of my body to get an education. I had a right. And as we speak right now, three million girls in Africa are at risk of going through this mutilation. I learned that my mom had a right to own property. I learned that she did not have to be abused because she is a woman. Those things made me angry. I wanted to do something. As I went back, every time I went, I found that my neighbors' girls were getting married. They were getting mutilated, and here, after I graduated from here, I worked at the U.N., I went back to school to get my graduate work, the constant cry of these girls was in my face. I had to do something. As I went back, I started talking to the men, to the village, and mothers, and I said, "I want to give back the way I had promised you that I would come back and help you. What do you need?" As I spoke to the women, they told me, "You know what we need? We really need a school for girls." Because there had not been any school for girls. And the reason they wanted the school for girls is because when a girl is raped when she's walking to school, the mother is blamed for that. If she got pregnant before she got married, the mother is blamed for that, and she's punished. She's beaten. They said, "We wanted to put our girls in a safe place." As we moved, and I went to talk to the fathers, the fathers, of course, you can imagine what they said: "We want a school for boys." And I said, "Well, there are a couple of men from my village who have been out and they have gotten an education. Why can't they build a school for boys, and I'll build a school for girls?" That made sense. And they agreed. And I told them, I wanted them to show me a sign of commitment. And they did. They donated land where we built the girls' school. We have. I want you to meet one of the girls in that school. Angeline came to apply for the school, and she did not meet any criteria that we had. She's an orphan. Yes, we could have taken her for that. But she was older. She was 12 years old, and we were taking girls who were in fourth grade. Angeline had been moving from one place — because she's an orphan, she has no mother, she has no father — moving from one grandmother's house to another one, from aunties to aunties. She had no stability in her life. And I looked at her, I remember that day, and I saw something beyond what I was seeing in Angeline. And yes, she was older to be in fourth grade. We gave her the opportunity to come to the class. Five months later, that is Angeline. A transformation had begun in her life. Angeline wants to be a pilot so she can fly around the world and make a difference. She was not the top student when we took her. Now she's the best student, not just in our school, but in the entire division that we are in. That's Sharon. That's five years later. That's Evelyn. Five months later, that is the difference that we are making. As a new dawn is happening in my school, a new beginning is happening. As we speak right now, 125 girls will never be mutilated. One hundred twenty-five girls will not be married when they're 12 years old. One hundred twenty-five girls are creating and achieving their dreams. This is the thing that we are doing, giving them opportunities where they can rise. As we speak right now, women are not being beaten because of the revolutions we've started in our community. (Applause) I want to challenge you today. You are listening to me because you are here, very optimistic. You are somebody who is so passionate. You are somebody who wants to see a better world. You are somebody who wants to see that war ends, no poverty. You are somebody who wants to make a difference. You are somebody who wants to make our tomorrow better. I want to challenge you today that to be the first, because people will follow you. Be the first. People will follow you. Be bold. Stand up. Be fearless. Be confident. Move out, because as you change your world, as you change your community, as we believe that we are impacting one girl, one family, one village, one country at a time. We are making a difference, so if you change your world, you are going to change your community, you are going to change your country, and think about that. If you do that, and I do that, aren't we going to create a better future for our children, for your children, for our grandchildren? And we will live in a very peaceful world. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
To This Day ... for the bullied and beautiful | {0: 'Shane Koyczan makes spoken-word poetry and music. His poem "To This Day" is a powerful story of bullying and survival, illustrated by animators from around the world.'} | TED2013 | There's so many of you. (Laughter) When I was a kid, I hid my heart under the bed, because my mother said, "If you're not careful, someday someone's going to break it." Take it from me: Under the bed is not a good hiding spot. I know because I've been shot down so many times, I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself. But that's what we were told. "Stand up for yourself." And that's hard to do if you don't know who you are. We were expected to define ourselves at such an early age, and if we didn't do it, others did it for us. Geek. Fatty. Slut. Fag. And at the same time we were being told what we were, we were being asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I always thought that was an unfair question. It presupposes that we can't be what we already are. We were kids. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a man. I wanted a registered retirement savings plan that would keep me in candy long enough to make old age sweet. (Laughter) When I was a kid, I wanted to shave. Now, not so much. (Laughter) When I was eight, I wanted to be a marine biologist. When I was nine, I saw the movie "Jaws," and thought to myself, "No, thank you." (Laughter) And when I was 10, I was told that my parents left because they didn't want me. When I was 11, I wanted to be left alone. When I was 12, I wanted to die. When I was 13, I wanted to kill a kid. When I was 14, I was asked to seriously consider a career path. I said, "I'd like to be a writer." And they said, "Choose something realistic." So I said, "Professional wrestler." And they said, "Don't be stupid." See, they asked me what I wanted to be, then told me what not to be. And I wasn't the only one. We were being told that we somehow must become what we are not, sacrificing what we are to inherit the masquerade of what we will be. I was being told to accept the identity that others will give me. And I wondered, what made my dreams so easy to dismiss? Granted, my dreams are shy, because they're Canadian. (Laughter) My dreams are self-conscious and overly apologetic. They're standing alone at the high school dance, and they've never been kissed. See, my dreams got called names too. Silly. Foolish. Impossible. But I kept dreaming. I was going to be a wrestler. I had it all figured out. I was going to be The Garbage Man. (Laughter) My finishing move was going to be The Trash Compactor. My saying was going to be, "I'm taking out the trash!" (Laughter) (Applause) And then this guy, Duke "The Dumpster" Droese, stole my entire shtick. (Laughter) I was crushed, as if by a trash compactor. (Laughter) I thought to myself, "What now? Where do I turn?" Poetry. (Laughter) Like a boomerang, the thing I loved came back to me. One of the first lines of poetry I can remember writing was in response to a world that demanded I hate myself. From age 15 to 18, I hated myself for becoming the thing that I loathed: a bully. When I was 19, I wrote, "I will love myself despite the ease with which I lean toward the opposite." Standing up for yourself doesn't have to mean embracing violence. When I was a kid, I traded in homework assignments for friendship, then gave each friend a late slip for never showing up on time, and in most cases, not at all. I gave myself a hall pass to get through each broken promise. And I remember this plan, born out of frustration from a kid who kept calling me "Yogi," then pointed at my tummy and said, "Too many picnic baskets." Turns out it's not that hard to trick someone, and one day before class, I said, "Yeah, you can copy my homework," and I gave him all the wrong answers that I'd written down the night before. He got his paper back expecting a near-perfect score, and couldn't believe it when he looked across the room at me and held up a zero. I knew I didn't have to hold up my paper of 28 out of 30, but my satisfaction was complete when he looked at me, puzzled, and I thought to myself, "Smarter than the average bear, motherfucker." (Laughter) (Applause) This is who I am. This is how I stand up for myself. When I was a kid, I used to think that pork chops and karate chops were the same thing. I thought they were both pork chops. My grandmother thought it was cute, and because they were my favorite, she let me keep doing it. Not really a big deal. One day, before I realized fat kids are not designed to climb trees, I fell out of a tree and bruised the right side of my body. I didn't want to tell my grandmother because I was scared I'd get in trouble for playing somewhere I shouldn't have been. The gym teacher noticed the bruise, and I got sent to the principal's office. From there, I was sent to another small room with a really nice lady who asked me all kinds of questions about my life at home. I saw no reason to lie. As far as I was concerned, life was pretty good. I told her, whenever I'm sad, my grandmother gives me karate chops. (Laughter) This led to a full-scale investigation, and I was removed from the house for three days, until they finally decided to ask how I got the bruises. News of this silly little story quickly spread through the school, and I earned my first nickname: Porkchop. To this day, I hate pork chops. I'm not the only kid who grew up this way, surrounded by people who used to say that rhyme about sticks and stones, as if broken bones hurt more than the names we got called, and we got called them all. So we grew up believing no one would ever fall in love with us, that we'd be lonely forever, that we'd never meet someone to make us feel like the sun was something they built for us in their toolshed. So broken heartstrings bled the blues, and we tried to empty ourselves so we'd feel nothing. Don't tell me that hurts less than a broken bone, that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away, that there's no way for it to metastasize; it does. She was eight years old, our first day of grade three when she got called ugly. We both got moved to the back of class so we would stop getting bombarded by spitballs. But the school halls were a battleground. We found ourselves outnumbered day after wretched day. We used to stay inside for recess, because outside was worse. Outside, we'd have to rehearse running away, or learn to stay still like statues, giving no clues that we were there. In grade five, they taped a sign to the front of her desk that read, "Beware of dog." To this day, despite a loving husband, she doesn't think she's beautiful, because of a birthmark that takes up a little less than half her face. Kids used to say, "She looks like a wrong answer that someone tried to erase, but couldn't quite get the job done." And they'll never understand that she's raising two kids whose definition of beauty begins with the word "Mom," because they see her heart before they see her skin, because she's only ever always been amazing. He was a broken branch grafted onto a different family tree, adopted, not because his parents opted for a different destiny. He was three when he became a mixed drink of one part left alone and two parts tragedy, started therapy in eighth grade, had a personality made up of tests and pills, lived like the uphills were mountains and the downhills were cliffs, four-fifths suicidal, a tidal wave of antidepressants, and an adolescent being called "Popper," one part because of the pills, 99 parts because of the cruelty. He tried to kill himself in grade 10 when a kid who could still go home to Mom and Dad had the audacity to tell him, "Get over it." As if depression is something that could be remedied by any of the contents found in a first-aid kit. To this day, he is a stick of TNT lit from both ends, could describe to you in detail the way the sky bends in the moment before it's about to fall, and despite an army of friends who all call him an inspiration, he remains a conversation piece between people who can't understand sometimes being drug-free has less to do with addiction and more to do with sanity. We weren't the only kids who grew up this way. To this day, kids are still being called names. The classics were "Hey, stupid," "Hey, spaz." Seems like every school has an arsenal of names getting updated every year. And if a kid breaks in a school and no one around chooses to hear, do they make a sound? Are they just background noise from a soundtrack stuck on repeat, when people say things like, "Kids can be cruel." Every school was a big top circus tent, and the pecking order went from acrobats to lion tamers, from clowns to carnies, all of these miles ahead of who we were. We were freaks — lobster-claw boys and bearded ladies, oddities juggling depression and loneliness, playing solitaire, spin the bottle, trying to kiss the wounded parts of ourselves and heal, but at night, while the others slept, we kept walking the tightrope. It was practice, and yes, some of us fell. But I want to tell them that all of this is just debris left over when we finally decide to smash all the things we thought we used to be, and if you can't see anything beautiful about yourself, get a better mirror, look a little closer, stare a little longer, because there's something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit. You built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself, "They were wrong." Because maybe you didn't belong to a group or a clique. Maybe they decided to pick you last for basketball or everything. Maybe you used to bring bruises and broken teeth to show-and-tell, but never told, because how can you hold your ground if everyone around you wants to bury you beneath it? You have to believe that they were wrong. They have to be wrong. Why else would we still be here? We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them. We stem from a root planted in the belief that we are not what we were called. We are not abandoned cars stalled out and sitting empty on some highway, and if in some way we are, don't worry. We only got out to walk and get gas. We are graduating members from the class of We Made It, not the faded echoes of voices crying out, "Names will never hurt me." Of course they did. But our lives will only ever always continue to be a balancing act that has less to do with pain and more to do with beauty. (Applause) |
The way we think about charity is dead wrong | {0: 'We dream boldly in the dimension of our doing, but set the bar no higher than stability in our emotional lives. It’s time to dream in multiple dimensions at the same time, says AIDSRide Founder Dan Pallotta. He aims to transform the way society thinks about giving, and being.'} | TED2013 | I want to talk about social innovation and social entrepreneurship. I happen to have triplets. They're little. They're five years old. Sometimes I tell people I have triplets. They say, "Really? How many?" (Laughter) Here's a picture of the kids — that's Sage, and Annalisa and Rider. Now, I also happen to be gay. Being gay and fathering triplets is by far the most socially innovative, socially entrepreneurial thing I have ever done. (Laughter) (Applause) The real social innovation I want to talk about involves charity. I want to talk about how the things we've been taught to think about giving and about charity and about the nonprofit sector, are actually undermining the causes we love, and our profound yearning to change the world. But before I do that, I want to ask if we even believe that the nonprofit sector has any serious role to play in changing the world. A lot of people say now that business will lift up the developing economies, and social business will take care of the rest. And I do believe that business will move the great mass of humanity forward. But it always leaves behind that 10 percent or more that is most disadvantaged or unlucky. And social business needs markets, and there are some issues for which you just can't develop the kind of money measures that you need for a market. I sit on the board of a center for the developmentally disabled, and these people want laughter and compassion and they want love. How do you monetize that? And that's where the nonprofit sector and philanthropy come in. Philanthropy is the market for love. It is the market for all those people for whom there is no other market coming. And so if we really want, like Buckminster Fuller said, a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out, then the nonprofit sector has to be a serious part of the conversation. But it doesn't seem to be working. Why have our breast cancer charities not come close to finding a cure for breast cancer, or our homeless charities not come close to ending homelessness in any major city? Why has poverty remained stuck at 12 percent of the U.S. population for 40 years? And the answer is, these social problems are massive in scale, our organizations are tiny up against them, and we have a belief system that keeps them tiny. We have two rulebooks. We have one for the nonprofit sector, and one for the rest of the economic world. It's an apartheid, and it discriminates against the nonprofit sector in five different areas, the first being compensation. So in the for-profit sector, the more value you produce, the more money you can make. But we don't like nonprofits to use money to incentivize people to produce more in social service. We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping other people. Interestingly, we don't have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people. You know, you want to make 50 million dollars selling violent video games to kids, go for it. We'll put you on the cover of Wired magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, and you're considered a parasite yourself. (Applause) And we think of this as our system of ethics, but what we don't realize is that this system has a powerful side effect, which is: It gives a really stark, mutually exclusive choice between doing very well for yourself and your family or doing good for the world, to the brightest minds coming out of our best universities, and sends tens of thousands of people who could make a huge difference in the nonprofit sector, marching every year directly into the for-profit sector because they're not willing to make that kind of lifelong economic sacrifice. Businessweek did a survey, looked at the compensation packages for MBAs 10 years out of business school. And the median compensation for a Stanford MBA, with bonus, at the age of 38, was 400,000 dollars. Meanwhile, for the same year, the average salary for the CEO of a $5 million-plus medical charity in the U.S. was 232,000 dollars, and for a hunger charity, 84,000 dollars. Now, there's no way you're going to get a lot of people with $400,000 talent to make a $316,000 sacrifice every year to become the CEO of a hunger charity. Some people say, "Well, that's just because those MBA types are greedy." Not necessarily. They might be smart. It's cheaper for that person to donate 100,000 dollars every year to the hunger charity; save 50,000 dollars on their taxes — so still be roughly 270,000 dollars a year ahead of the game — now be called a philanthropist because they donated 100,000 dollars to charity; probably sit on the board of the hunger charity; indeed, probably supervise the poor SOB who decided to become the CEO of the hunger charity; (Laughter) and have a lifetime of this kind of power and influence and popular praise still ahead of them. The second area of discrimination is advertising and marketing. So we tell the for-profit sector, "Spend, spend, spend on advertising, until the last dollar no longer produces a penny of value." But we don't like to see our donations spent on advertising in charity. Our attitude is, "Well, look, if you can get the advertising donated, you know, to air at four o'clock in the morning, I'm okay with that. But I don't want my donation spent on advertising, I want it go to the needy." As if the money invested in advertising could not bring in dramatically greater sums of money to serve the needy. In the 1990s, my company created the long-distance AIDSRide bicycle journeys, and the 60 mile-long breast cancer three-day walks, and over the course of nine years, we had 182,000 ordinary heroes participate, and they raised a total of 581 million dollars. (Applause) They raised more money more quickly for these causes than any events in history, all based on the idea that people are weary of being asked to do the least they can possibly do. People are yearning to measure the full distance of their potential on behalf of the causes that they care about deeply. But they have to be asked. We got that many people to participate by buying full-page ads in The New York Times, in The Boston Globe, in prime time radio and TV advertising. Do you know how many people we would've gotten if we put up fliers in the laundromat? Charitable giving has remained stuck in the U.S., at two percent of GDP, ever since we started measuring it in the 1970s. That's an important fact, because it tells us that in 40 years, the nonprofit sector has not been able to wrestle any market share away from the for-profit sector. And if you think about it, how could one sector possibly take market share away from another sector if it isn't really allowed to market? And if we tell the consumer brands, "You may advertise all the benefits of your product," but we tell charities, "You cannot advertise all the good that you do," where do we think the consumer dollars are going to flow? The third area of discrimination is the taking of risk in pursuit of new ideas for generating revenue. So Disney can make a new $200 million movie that flops, and nobody calls the attorney general. But you do a little $1 million community fundraiser for the poor, and it doesn't produce a 75 percent profit to the cause in the first 12 months, and your character is called into question. So nonprofits are really reluctant to attempt any brave, daring, giant-scale new fundraising endeavors, for fear that if the thing fails, their reputations will be dragged through the mud. Well, you and I know when you prohibit failure, you kill innovation. If you kill innovation in fundraising, you can't raise more revenue; if you can't raise more revenue, you can't grow; and if you can't grow, you can't possibly solve large social problems. The fourth area is time. So Amazon went for six years without returning any profit to investors, and people had patience. They knew that there was a long-term objective down the line, of building market dominance. But if a nonprofit organization ever had a dream of building magnificent scale that required that for six years, no money was going to go to the needy, it was all going to be invested in building this scale, we would expect a crucifixion. The last area is profit itself. So the for-profit sector can pay people profits in order to attract their capital for their new ideas, but you can't pay profits in a nonprofit sector, so the for-profit sector has a lock on the multi-trillion-dollar capital markets, and the nonprofit sector is starved for growth and risk and idea capital. Well, you put those five things together — you can't use money to lure talent away from the for-profit sector; you can't advertise on anywhere near the scale the for-profit sector does for new customers; you can't take the kinds of risks in pursuit of those customers that the for-profit sector takes; you don't have the same amount of time to find them as the for-profit sector; and you don't have a stock market with which to fund any of this, even if you could do it in the first place — and you've just put the nonprofit sector at an extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector, on every level. If we have any doubts about the effects of this separate rule book, this statistic is sobering: From 1970 to 2009, the number of nonprofits that really grew, that crossed the $50 million annual revenue barrier, is 144. In the same time, the number of for-profits that crossed it is 46,136. So we're dealing with social problems that are massive in scale, and our organizations can't generate any scale. All of the scale goes to Coca-Cola and Burger King. So why do we think this way? Well, like most fanatical dogma in America, these ideas come from old Puritan beliefs. The Puritans came here for religious reasons, or so they said, but they also came here because they wanted to make a lot of money. They were pious people, but they were also really aggressive capitalists, and they were accused of extreme forms of profit-making tendencies, compared to the other colonists. But at the same time, the Puritans were Calvinists, so they were taught literally to hate themselves. They were taught that self-interest was a raging sea that was a sure path to eternal damnation. This created a real problem for these people. Here they've come all the way across the Atlantic to make all this money, but making all this money will get you sent directly to Hell. What were they to do about this? Well, charity became their answer. It became this economic sanctuary, where they could do penance for their profit-making tendencies — at five cents on the dollar. So of course, how could you make money in charity if charity was your penance for making money? Financial incentive was exiled from the realm of helping others, so that it could thrive in the area of making money for yourself, and in 400 years, nothing has intervened to say, "That's counterproductive and that's unfair." Now, this ideology gets policed by this one very dangerous question, which is, "What percentage of my donation goes to the cause versus overhead?" There are a lot of problems with this question. I'm going to just focus on two. First, it makes us think that overhead is a negative, that it is somehow not part of the cause. But it absolutely is, especially if it's being used for growth. Now, this idea that overhead is somehow an enemy of the cause creates this second, much larger problem, which is, it forces organizations to go without the overhead things they really need to grow, in the interest of keeping overhead low. So we've all been taught that charities should spend as little as possible on overhead things like fundraising under the theory that, well, the less money you spend on fundraising, the more money there is available for the cause. Well, that's true if it's a depressing world in which this pie cannot be made any bigger. But if it's a logical world in which investment in fundraising actually raises more funds and makes the pie bigger, then we have it precisely backwards, and we should be investing more money, not less, in fundraising, because fundraising is the one thing that has the potential to multiply the amount of money available for the cause that we care about so deeply. I'll give you two examples. We launched the AIDSRides with an initial investment of 50,000 dollars in risk capital. Within nine years, we had multiplied that 1,982 times, into 108 million dollars after all expenses, for AIDS services. We launched the breast cancer three-days with an initial investment of 350,000 dollars in risk capital. Within just five years, we had multiplied that 554 times, into 194 million dollars after all expenses, for breast cancer research. Now, if you were a philanthropist really interested in breast cancer, what would make more sense: go out and find the most innovative researcher in the world and give her 350,000 dollars for research, or give her fundraising department the 350,000 dollars to multiply it into 194 million dollars for breast cancer research? 2002 was our most successful year ever. We netted for breast cancer alone, that year alone, 71 million dollars after all expenses. And then we went out of business, suddenly and traumatically. Why? Well, the short story is, our sponsors split on us. They wanted to distance themselves from us because we were being crucified in the media for investing 40 percent of the gross in recruitment and customer service and the magic of the experience, and there is no accounting terminology to describe that kind of investment in growth and in the future, other than this demonic label of "overhead." So on one day, all 350 of our great employees lost their jobs ... because they were labeled "overhead." Our sponsor went and tried the events on their own. The overhead went up. Net income for breast cancer research went down by 84 percent, or 60 million dollars, in one year. This is what happens when we confuse morality with frugality. We've all been taught that the bake sale with five percent overhead is morally superior to the professional fundraising enterprise with 40 percent overhead, but we're missing the most important piece of information, which is: What is the actual size of these pies? Who cares if the bake sale only has five percent overhead if it's tiny? What if the bake sale only netted 71 dollars for charity because it made no investment in its scale and the professional fundraising enterprise netted 71 million dollars because it did? Now which pie would we prefer, and which pie do we think people who are hungry would prefer? Here's how all of this impacts the big picture. I said that charitable giving is two percent of GDP in the United States. That's about 300 billion dollars a year. But only about 20 percent of that, or 60 billion dollars, goes to health and human services causes. The rest goes to religion and higher education and hospitals, and that 60 billion dollars is not nearly enough to tackle these problems. But if we could move charitable giving from two percent of GDP, up just one step to three percent of GDP, by investing in that growth, that would be an extra 150 billion dollars a year in contributions, and if that money could go disproportionately to health and human services charities, because those were the ones we encouraged to invest in their growth, that would represent a tripling of contributions to that sector. Now we're talking scale. Now we're talking the potential for real change. But it's never going to happen by forcing these organizations to lower their horizons to the demoralizing objective of keeping their overhead low. Our generation does not want its epitaph to read, "We kept charity overhead low." (Laughter) (Applause) We want it to read that we changed the world, and that part of the way we did that was by changing the way we think about these things. So the next time you're looking at a charity, don't ask about the rate of their overhead. Ask about the scale of their dreams, their Apple-, Google-, Amazon-scale dreams, how they measure their progress toward those dreams, and what resources they need to make them come true, regardless of what the overhead is. Who cares what the overhead is if these problems are actually getting solved? If we can have that kind of generosity — a generosity of thought — then the non-profit sector can play a massive role in changing the world for all those citizens most desperately in need of it to change. And if that can be our generation's enduring legacy — that we took responsibility for the thinking that had been handed down to us, that we revisited it, we revised it, and we reinvented the whole way humanity thinks about changing things, forever, for everyone — well, I thought I would let the kids sum up what that would be. Annalisa Smith-Pallotta: That would be Sage Smith-Pallotta: a real social Rider Smith-Pallotta: innovation. Dan Pallotta: Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Your brain is more than a bag of chemicals | {0: 'Through his lab at the California Institute of Technology, David Anderson seeks to find the neural underpinnings of emotions like fear, anxiety and anger.'} | TEDxCaltech | So raise your hand if you know someone in your immediate family or circle of friends who suffers from some form of mental illness. Yeah. I thought so. Not surprised. And raise your hand if you think that basic research on fruit flies has anything to do with understanding mental illness in humans. Yeah. I thought so. I'm also not surprised. I can see I've got my work cut out for me here. As we heard from Dr. Insel this morning, psychiatric disorders like autism, depression and schizophrenia take a terrible toll on human suffering. We know much less about their treatment and the understanding of their basic mechanisms than we do about diseases of the body. Think about it: In 2013, the second decade of the millennium, if you're concerned about a cancer diagnosis and you go to your doctor, you get bone scans, biopsies and blood tests. In 2013, if you're concerned about a depression diagnosis, you go to your doctor, and what do you get? A questionnaire. Now, part of the reason for this is that we have an oversimplified and increasingly outmoded view of the biological basis of psychiatric disorders. We tend to view them — and the popular press aids and abets this view — as chemical imbalances in the brain, as if the brain were some kind of bag of chemical soup full of dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. This view is conditioned by the fact that many of the drugs that are prescribed to treat these disorders, like Prozac, act by globally changing brain chemistry, as if the brain were indeed a bag of chemical soup. But that can't be the answer, because these drugs actually don't work all that well. A lot of people won't take them, or stop taking them, because of their unpleasant side effects. These drugs have so many side effects because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder is a bit like trying to change your engine oil by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block. Some of it will dribble into the right place, but a lot of it will do more harm than good. Now, an emerging view that you also heard about from Dr. Insel this morning, is that psychiatric disorders are actually disturbances of neural circuits that mediate emotion, mood and affect. When we think about cognition, we analogize the brain to a computer. That's no problem. Well it turns out that the computer analogy is just as valid for emotion. It's just that we don't tend to think about it that way. But we know much less about the circuit basis of psychiatric disorders because of the overwhelming dominance of this chemical imbalance hypothesis. Now, it's not that chemicals are not important in psychiatric disorders. It's just that they don't bathe the brain like soup. Rather, they're released in very specific locations and they act on specific synapses to change the flow of information in the brain. So if we ever really want to understand the biological basis of psychiatric disorders, we need to pinpoint these locations in the brain where these chemicals act. Otherwise, we're going to keep pouring oil all over our mental engines and suffering the consequences. Now to begin to overcome our ignorance of the role of brain chemistry in brain circuitry, it's helpful to work on what we biologists call "model organisms," animals like fruit flies and laboratory mice, in which we can apply powerful genetic techniques to molecularly identify and pinpoint specific classes of neurons, as you heard about in Allan Jones's talk this morning. Moreover, once we can do that, we can actually activate specific neurons or we can destroy or inhibit the activity of those neurons. So if we inhibit a particular type of neuron, and we find that a behavior is blocked, we can conclude that those neurons are necessary for that behavior. On the other hand, if we activate a group of neurons and we find that that produces the behavior, we can conclude that those neurons are sufficient for the behavior. So in this way, by doing this kind of test, we can draw cause and effect relationships between the activity of specific neurons in particular circuits and particular behaviors, something that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do right now in humans. But can an organism like a fruit fly, which is — it's a great model organism because it's got a small brain, it's capable of complex and sophisticated behaviors, it breeds quickly, and it's cheap. But can an organism like this teach us anything about emotion-like states? Do these organisms even have emotion-like states, or are they just little digital robots? Charles Darwin believed that insects have emotion and express them in their behaviors, as he wrote in his 1872 monograph on the expression of the emotions in man and animals. And my eponymous colleague, Seymour Benzer, believed it as well. Seymour is the man that introduced the use of drosophila here at CalTech in the '60s as a model organism to study the connection between genes and behavior. Seymour recruited me to CalTech in the late 1980s. He was my Jedi and my rabbi while he was here, and Seymour taught me both to love flies and also to play with science. So how do we ask this question? It's one thing to believe that flies have emotion-like states, but how do we actually find out whether that's true or not? Now, in humans we often infer emotional states, as you'll hear later today, from facial expressions. However, it's a little difficult to do that in fruit flies. (Laughter) It's kind of like landing on Mars and looking out the window of your spaceship at all the little green men who are surrounding it and trying to figure out, "How do I find out if they have emotions or not?" What can we do? It's not so easy. Well, one of the ways that we can start is to try to come up with some general characteristics or properties of emotion-like states such as arousal, and see if we can identify any fly behaviors that might exhibit some of those properties. So three important ones that I can think of are persistence, gradations in intensity, and valence. Persistence means long-lasting. We all know that the stimulus that triggers an emotion causes that emotion to last long after the stimulus is gone. Gradations of intensity means what it sounds like. You can dial up the intensity or dial down the intensity of an emotion. If you're a little bit unhappy, the corners of your mouth turn down and you sniffle, and if you're very unhappy, tears pour down your face and you might sob. Valence means good or bad, positive or negative. So we decided to see if flies could be provoked into showing the kind of behavior that you see by the proverbial wasp at the picnic table, you know, the one that keeps coming back to your hamburger the more vigorously you try to swat it away, and it seems to keep getting irritated. So we built a device, which we call a puff-o-mat, in which we could deliver little brief air puffs to fruit flies in these plastic tubes in our laboratory bench and blow them away. And what we found is that if we gave these flies in the puff-o-mat several puffs in a row, they became somewhat hyperactive and continued to run around for some time after the air puffs actually stopped and took a while to calm down. So we quantified this behavior using custom locomotor tracking software developed with my collaborator Pietro Perona, who's in the electrical engineering division here at CalTech. And what this quantification showed us is that, upon experiencing a train of these air puffs, the flies appear to enter a kind of state of hyperactivity which is persistent, long-lasting, and also appears to be graded. More puffs, or more intense puffs, make the state last for a longer period of time. So now we wanted to try to understand something about what controls the duration of this state. So we decided to use our puff-o-mat and our automated tracking software to screen through hundreds of lines of mutant fruit flies to see if we could find any that showed abnormal responses to the air puffs. And this is one of the great things about fruit flies. There are repositories where you can just pick up the phone and order hundreds of vials of flies of different mutants and screen them in your assay and then find out what gene is affected in the mutation. So doing the screen, we discovered one mutant that took much longer than normal to calm down after the air puffs, and when we examined the gene that was affected in this mutation, it turned out to encode a dopamine receptor. That's right — flies, like people, have dopamine, and it acts on their brains and on their synapses through the same dopamine receptor molecules that you and I have. Dopamine plays a number of important functions in the brain, including in attention, arousal, reward, and disorders of the dopamine system have been linked to a number of mental disorders including drug abuse, Parkinson's disease, and ADHD. Now, in genetics, it's a little counterintuitive. We tend to infer the normal function of something by what doesn't happen when we take it away, by the opposite of what we see when we take it away. So when we take away the dopamine receptor and the flies take longer to calm down, from that we infer that the normal function of this receptor and dopamine is to cause the flies to calm down faster after the puff. And that's a bit reminiscent of ADHD, which has been linked to disorders of the dopamine system in humans. Indeed, if we increase the levels of dopamine in normal flies by feeding them cocaine after getting the appropriate DEA license — oh my God — (Laughter) — we find indeed that these cocaine-fed flies calm down faster than normal flies do, and that's also reminiscent of ADHD, which is often treated with drugs like Ritalin that act similarly to cocaine. So slowly I began to realize that what started out as a rather playful attempt to try to annoy fruit flies might actually have some relevance to a human psychiatric disorder. Now, how far does this analogy go? As many of you know, individuals afflicted with ADHD also have learning disabilities. Is that true of our dopamine receptor mutant flies? Remarkably, the answer is yes. As Seymour showed back in the 1970s, flies, like songbirds, as you just heard, are capable of learning. You can train a fly to avoid an odor, shown here in blue, if you pair that odor with a shock. Then when you give those trained flies the chance to choose between a tube with the shock-paired odor and another odor, it avoids the tube containing the blue odor that was paired with shock. Well, if you do this test on dopamine receptor mutant flies, they don't learn. Their learning score is zero. They flunk out of CalTech. So that means that these flies have two abnormalities, or phenotypes, as we geneticists call them, that one finds in ADHD: hyperactivity and learning disability. Now what's the causal relationship, if anything, between these phenotypes? In ADHD, it's often assumed that the hyperactivity causes the learning disability. The kids can't sit still long enough to focus, so they don't learn. But it could equally be the case that it's the learning disabilities that cause the hyperactivity. Because the kids can't learn, they look for other things to distract their attention. And a final possibility is that there's no relationship at all between learning disabilities and hyperactivity, but that they are caused by a common underlying mechanism in ADHD. Now people have been wondering about this for a long time in humans, but in flies we can actually test this. And the way that we do this is to delve deeply into the mind of the fly and begin to untangle its circuitry using genetics. We take our dopamine receptor mutant flies and we genetically restore, or cure, the dopamine receptor by putting a good copy of the dopamine receptor gene back into the fly brain. But in each fly, we put it back only into certain neurons and not in others, and then we test each of these flies for their ability to learn and for hyperactivity. Remarkably, we find we can completely dissociate these two abnormalities. If we put a good copy of the dopamine receptor back in this elliptical structure called the central complex, the flies are no longer hyperactive, but they still can't learn. On the other hand, if we put the receptor back in a different structure called the mushroom body, the learning deficit is rescued, the flies learn well, but they're still hyperactive. What that tells us is that dopamine is not bathing the brain of these flies like soup. Rather, it's acting to control two different functions on two different circuits, so the reason there are two things wrong with our dopamine receptor flies is that the same receptor is controlling two different functions in two different regions of the brain. Whether the same thing is true in ADHD in humans we don't know, but these kinds of results should at least cause us to consider that possibility. So these results make me and my colleagues more convinced than ever that the brain is not a bag of chemical soup, and it's a mistake to try to treat complex psychiatric disorders just by changing the flavor of the soup. What we need to do is to use our ingenuity and our scientific knowledge to try to design a new generation of treatments that are targeted to specific neurons and specific regions of the brain that are affected in particular psychiatric disorders. If we can do that, we may be able to cure these disorders without the unpleasant side effects, putting the oil back in our mental engines, just where it's needed. Thank you very much. |
The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready? | {0: "Since the counterculture '60s, Stewart Brand has been creating our internet-worked world. Now, with biotech accelerating four times faster than digital technology, Stewart Brand has a bold new plan ..."} | TED2013 | Now, extinction is a different kind of death. It's bigger. We didn't really realize that until 1914, when the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati zoo. This had been the most abundant bird in the world that'd been in North America for six million years. Suddenly it wasn't here at all. Flocks that were a mile wide and 400 miles long used to darken the sun. Aldo Leopold said this was a biological storm, a feathered tempest. And indeed it was a keystone species that enriched the entire eastern deciduous forest, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, from Canada down to the Gulf. But it went from five billion birds to zero in just a couple decades. What happened? Well, commercial hunting happened. These birds were hunted for meat that was sold by the ton, and it was easy to do because when those big flocks came down to the ground, they were so dense that hundreds of hunters and netters could show up and slaughter them by the tens of thousands. It was the cheapest source of protein in America. By the end of the century, there was nothing left but these beautiful skins in museum specimen drawers. There's an upside to the story. This made people realize that the same thing was about to happen to the American bison, and so these birds saved the buffalos. But a lot of other animals weren't saved. The Carolina parakeet was a parrot that lit up backyards everywhere. It was hunted to death for its feathers. There was a bird that people liked on the East Coast called the heath hen. It was loved. They tried to protect it. It died anyway. A local newspaper spelled out, "There is no survivor, there is no future, there is no life to be recreated in this form ever again." There's a sense of deep tragedy that goes with these things, and it happened to lots of birds that people loved. It happened to lots of mammals. Another keystone species is a famous animal called the European aurochs. There was sort of a movie made about it recently. And the aurochs was like the bison. This was an animal that basically kept the forest mixed with grasslands across the entire Europe and Asian continent, from Spain to Korea. The documentation of this animal goes back to the Lascaux cave paintings. The extinctions still go on. There's an ibex in Spain called the bucardo. It went extinct in 2000. There was a marvelous animal, a marsupial wolf called the thylacine in Tasmania, south of Australia, called the Tasmanian tiger. It was hunted until there were just a few left to die in zoos. A little bit of film was shot. Sorrow, anger, mourning. Don't mourn. Organize. What if you could find out that, using the DNA in museum specimens, fossils maybe up to 200,000 years old could be used to bring species back, what would you do? Where would you start? Well, you'd start by finding out if the biotech is really there. I started with my wife, Ryan Phelan, who ran a biotech business called DNA Direct, and through her, one of her colleagues, George Church, one of the leading genetic engineers who turned out to be also obsessed with passenger pigeons and a lot of confidence that methodologies he was working on might actually do the deed. So he and Ryan organized and hosted a meeting at the Wyss Institute in Harvard bringing together specialists on passenger pigeons, conservation ornithologists, bioethicists, and fortunately passenger pigeon DNA had already been sequenced by a molecular biologist named Beth Shapiro. All she needed from those specimens at the Smithsonian was a little bit of toe pad tissue, because down in there is what is called ancient DNA. It's DNA which is pretty badly fragmented, but with good techniques now, you can basically reassemble the whole genome. Then the question is, can you reassemble, with that genome, the whole bird? George Church thinks you can. So in his book, "Regenesis," which I recommend, he has a chapter on the science of bringing back extinct species, and he has a machine called the Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering machine. It's kind of like an evolution machine. You try combinations of genes that you write at the cell level and then in organs on a chip, and the ones that win, that you can then put into a living organism. It'll work. The precision of this, one of George's famous unreadable slides, nevertheless points out that there's a level of precision here right down to the individual base pair. The passenger pigeon has 1.3 billion base pairs in its genome. So what you're getting is the capability now of replacing one gene with another variation of that gene. It's called an allele. Well that's what happens in normal hybridization anyway. So this is a form of synthetic hybridization of the genome of an extinct species with the genome of its closest living relative. Now along the way, George points out that his technology, the technology of synthetic biology, is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue. Okay, the closest living relative of the passenger pigeon is the band-tailed pigeon. They're abundant. There's some around here. Genetically, the band-tailed pigeon already is mostly living passenger pigeon. There's just some bits that are band-tailed pigeon. If you replace those bits with passenger pigeon bits, you've got the extinct bird back, cooing at you. Now, there's work to do. You have to figure out exactly what genes matter. So there's genes for the short tail in the band-tailed pigeon, genes for the long tail in the passenger pigeon, and so on with the red eye, peach-colored breast, flocking, and so on. Add them all up and the result won't be perfect. But it should be be perfect enough, because nature doesn't do perfect either. So this meeting in Boston led to three things. First off, Ryan and I decided to create a nonprofit called Revive and Restore that would push de-extinction generally and try to have it go in a responsible way, and we would push ahead with the passenger pigeon. Another direct result was a young grad student named Ben Novak, who had been obsessed with passenger pigeons since he was 14 and had also learned how to work with ancient DNA, himself sequenced the passenger pigeon, using money from his family and friends. We hired him full-time. Now, this photograph I took of him last year at the Smithsonian, he's looking down at Martha, the last passenger pigeon alive. So if he's successful, she won't be the last. The third result of the Boston meeting was the realization that there are scientists all over the world working on various forms of de-extinction, but they'd never met each other. And National Geographic got interested because National Geographic has the theory that the last century, discovery was basically finding things, and in this century, discovery is basically making things. De-extinction falls in that category. So they hosted and funded this meeting. And 35 scientists, they were conservation biologists and molecular biologists, basically meeting to see if they had work to do together. Some of these conservation biologists are pretty radical. There's three of them who are not just re-creating ancient species, they're recreating extinct ecosystems in northern Siberia, in the Netherlands, and in Hawaii. Henri, from the Netherlands, with a Dutch last name I won't try to pronounce, is working on the aurochs. The aurochs is the ancestor of all domestic cattle, and so basically its genome is alive, it's just unevenly distributed. So what they're doing is working with seven breeds of primitive, hardy-looking cattle like that Maremmana primitivo on the top there to rebuild, over time, with selective back-breeding, the aurochs. Now, re-wilding is moving faster in Korea than it is in America, and so the plan is, with these re-wilded areas all over Europe, they will introduce the aurochs to do its old job, its old ecological role, of clearing the somewhat barren, closed-canopy forest so that it has these biodiverse meadows in it. Another amazing story came from Alberto Fernández-Arias. Alberto worked with the bucardo in Spain. The last bucardo was a female named Celia who was still alive, but then they captured her, they got a little bit of tissue from her ear, they cryopreserved it in liquid nitrogen, released her back into the wild, but a few months later, she was found dead under a fallen tree. They took the DNA from that ear, they planted it as a cloned egg in a goat, the pregnancy came to term, and a live baby bucardo was born. It was the first de-extinction in history. (Applause) It was short-lived. Sometimes interspecies clones have respiration problems. This one had a malformed lung and died after 10 minutes, but Alberto was confident that cloning has moved along well since then, and this will move ahead, and eventually there will be a population of bucardos back in the mountains in northern Spain. Cryopreservation pioneer of great depth is Oliver Ryder. At the San Diego zoo, his frozen zoo has collected the tissues from over 1,000 species over the last 35 years. Now, when it's frozen that deep, minus 196 degrees Celsius, the cells are intact and the DNA is intact. They're basically viable cells, so someone like Bob Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology took some of that tissue from an endangered animal called the Javan banteng, put it in a cow, the cow went to term, and what was born was a live, healthy baby Javan banteng, who thrived and is still alive. The most exciting thing for Bob Lanza is the ability now to take any kind of cell with induced pluripotent stem cells and turn it into germ cells, like sperm and eggs. So now we go to Mike McGrew who is a scientist at Roslin Institute in Scotland, and Mike's doing miracles with birds. So he'll take, say, falcon skin cells, fibroblast, turn it into induced pluripotent stem cells. Since it's so pluripotent, it can become germ plasm. He then has a way to put the germ plasm into the embryo of a chicken egg so that that chicken will have, basically, the gonads of a falcon. You get a male and a female each of those, and out of them comes falcons. (Laughter) Real falcons out of slightly doctored chickens. Ben Novak was the youngest scientist at the meeting. He showed how all of this can be put together. The sequence of events: he'll put together the genomes of the band-tailed pigeon and the passenger pigeon, he'll take the techniques of George Church and get passenger pigeon DNA, the techniques of Robert Lanza and Michael McGrew, get that DNA into chicken gonads, and out of the chicken gonads get passenger pigeon eggs, squabs, and now you're getting a population of passenger pigeons. It does raise the question of, they're not going to have passenger pigeon parents to teach them how to be a passenger pigeon. So what do you do about that? Well birds are pretty hard-wired, as it happens, so most of that is already in their DNA, but to supplement it, part of Ben's idea is to use homing pigeons to help train the young passenger pigeons how to flock and how to find their way to their old nesting grounds and feeding grounds. There were some conservationists, really famous conservationists like Stanley Temple, who is one of the founders of conservation biology, and Kate Jones from the IUCN, which does the Red List. They're excited about all this, but they're also concerned that it might be competitive with the extremely important efforts to protect endangered species that are still alive, that haven't gone extinct yet. You see, you want to work on protecting the animals out there. You want to work on getting the market for ivory in Asia down so you're not using 25,000 elephants a year. But at the same time, conservation biologists are realizing that bad news bums people out. And so the Red List is really important, keep track of what's endangered and critically endangered, and so on. But they're about to create what they call a Green List, and the Green List will have species that are doing fine, thank you, species that were endangered, like the bald eagle, but they're much better off now, thanks to everybody's good work, and protected areas around the world that are very, very well managed. So basically, they're learning how to build on good news. And they see reviving extinct species as the kind of good news you might be able to build on. Here's a couple related examples. Captive breeding will be a major part of bringing back these species. The California condor was down to 22 birds in 1987. Everybody thought is was finished. Thanks to captive breeding at the San Diego Zoo, there's 405 of them now, 226 are out in the wild. That technology will be used on de-extincted animals. Another success story is the mountain gorilla in Central Africa. In 1981, Dian Fossey was sure they were going extinct. There were just 254 left. Now there are 880. They're increasing in population by three percent a year. The secret is, they have an eco-tourism program, which is absolutely brilliant. So this photograph was taken last month by Ryan with an iPhone. That's how comfortable these wild gorillas are with visitors. Another interesting project, though it's going to need some help, is the northern white rhinoceros. There's no breeding pairs left. But this is the kind of thing that a wide variety of DNA for this animal is available in the frozen zoo. A bit of cloning, you can get them back. So where do we go from here? These have been private meetings so far. I think it's time for the subject to go public. What do people think about it? You know, do you want extinct species back? Do you want extinct species back? (Applause) Tinker Bell is going to come fluttering down. It is a Tinker Bell moment, because what are people excited about with this? What are they concerned about? We're also going to push ahead with the passenger pigeon. So Ben Novak, even as we speak, is joining the group that Beth Shapiro has at UC Santa Cruz. They're going to work on the genomes of the passenger pigeon and the band-tailed pigeon. As that data matures, they'll send it to George Church, who will work his magic, get passenger pigeon DNA out of that. We'll get help from Bob Lanza and Mike McGrew to get that into germ plasm that can go into chickens that can produce passenger pigeon squabs that can be raised by band-tailed pigeon parents, and then from then on, it's passenger pigeons all the way, maybe for the next six million years. You can do the same thing, as the costs come down, for the Carolina parakeet, for the great auk, for the heath hen, for the ivory-billed woodpecker, for the Eskimo curlew, for the Caribbean monk seal, for the woolly mammoth. Because the fact is, humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. We have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage. Most of that we'll do by expanding and protecting wildlands, by expanding and protecting the populations of endangered species. But some species that we killed off totally we could consider bringing back to a world that misses them. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question. So, this is an emotional topic. Some people stand. I suspect there are some people out there sitting, kind of asking tormented questions, almost, about, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute, there's something wrong with mankind interfering in nature in this way. There's going to be unintended consequences. You're going to uncork some sort of Pandora's box of who-knows-what. Do they have a point? Stewart Brand: Well, the earlier point is we interfered in a big way by making these animals go extinct, and many of them were keystone species, and we changed the whole ecosystem they were in by letting them go. Now, there's the shifting baseline problem, which is, so when these things come back, they might replace some birds that are there that people really know and love. I think that's, you know, part of how it'll work. This is a long, slow process — One of the things I like about it, it's multi-generation. We will get woolly mammoths back. CA: Well it feels like both the conversation and the potential here are pretty thrilling. Thank you so much for presenting. SB: Thank you. CA: Thank you. (Applause) |
The good news on poverty (Yes, there's good news) | {0: 'Bono, the lead singer of U2, uses his celebrity to fight for social justice worldwide: to end hunger, poverty and disease, especially in Africa. His nonprofit ONE raises awareness via media, policy and calls to action.'} | TED2013 | Chris Anderson asked me if I could put the last 25 years of anti-poverty campaigning into 10 minutes for TED. That's an Englishman asking an Irishman to be succinct. (Laughter) I said, "Chris, that would take a miracle." He said, "Bono, wouldn't that be a good use of your messianic complex?" So, yeah. Then I thought, let's go even further than 25 years. Let's go back before Christ, three millennia, to a time when, at least in my head, the journey for justice, the march against inequality and poverty really began. Three thousand years ago, civilization just getting started on the banks of the Nile, some slaves, Jewish shepherds in this instance, smelling of sheep shit, I guess, proclaimed to the Pharaoh, sitting high on his throne, "We, your majesty-ness, are equal to you." And the Pharaoh replies, "Oh, no. You, your miserableness, have got to be kidding." And they say, "No, no, that's what it says here in our holy book." Cut to our century, same country, same pyramids, another people spreading the same idea of equality with a different book. This time it's called the Facebook. Crowds are gathered in Tahrir Square. They turn a social network from virtual to actual, and kind of rebooted the 21st century. Not to undersell how messy and ugly the aftermath of the Arab Spring has been, neither to oversell the role of technology, but these things have given a sense of what's possible when the age-old model of power, the pyramid, gets turned upside down, putting the people on top and the pharaohs of today on the bottom, as it were. It's also shown us that something as powerful as information and the sharing of it can challenge inequality, because facts, like people, want to be free, and when they're free, liberty is usually around the corner, even for the poorest of the poor — facts that can challenge cynicism and the apathy that leads to inertia, facts that tell us what's working and, more importantly, what's not, so we can fix it, facts that if we hear them and heed them could help us meet the challenge that Nelson Mandela made back in 2005, when he asked us to be that great generation that overcomes that most awful offense to humanity, extreme poverty, facts that build a powerful momentum. So I thought, forget the rock opera, forget the bombast, my usual tricks. The only thing singing today would be the facts, for I have truly embraced by inner nerd. So exit the rock star. Enter the evidence-based activist, the factivist. Because what the facts are telling us is that the long, slow journey, humanity's long, slow journey of equality, is actually speeding up. Look at what's been achieved. Look at the pictures these data sets print. Since the year 2000, since the turn of the millennium, there are eight million more AIDS patients getting life-saving antiretroviral drugs. Malaria: There are eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have their death rates cut by 75 percent. For kids under five, child mortality, kids under five, it's down by 2.65 million a year. That's a rate of 7,256 children's lives saved each day. Wow. Wow. (Applause) Let's just stop for a second, actually, and think about that. Have you read anything anywhere in the last week that is remotely as important as that number? Wow. Great news. It drives me nuts that most people don't seem to know this news. Seven thousand kids a day. Here's two of them. This is Michael and Benedicta, and they're alive thanks in large part to Dr. Patricia Asamoah — she's amazing — and the Global Fund, which all of you financially support, whether you know it or not. And the Global Fund provides antiretroviral drugs that stop mothers from passing HIV to their kids. This fantastic news didn't happen by itself. It was fought for, it was campaigned for, it was innovated for. And this great news gives birth to even more great news, because the historic trend is this. The number of people living in back-breaking, soul-crushing extreme poverty has declined from 43 percent of the world's population in 1990 to 33 percent by 2000 and then to 21 percent by 2010. Give it up for that. (Applause) Halved. Halved. Now, the rate is still too high — still too many people unnecessarily losing their lives. There's still work to do. But it's heart-stopping. It's mind-blowing stuff. And if you live on less than $1.25 a day, if you live in that kind of poverty, this is not just data. This is everything. If you're a parent who wants the best for your kids — and I am — this rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope. And guess what? If the trajectory continues, look where the amount of people living on $1.25 a day gets to by 2030. Can't be true, can it? That's what the data is telling us. If the trajectory continues, we get to, wow, the zero zone. For number-crunchers like us, that is the erogenous zone, and it's fair to say that I am, by now, sexually aroused by the collating of data. So virtual elimination of extreme poverty, as defined by people living on less than $1.25 a day, adjusted, of course, for inflation from a 1990 baseline. We do love a good baseline. That's amazing. Now I know that some of you think this progress is all in Asia or Latin America or model countries like Brazil — and who doesn't love a Brazilian model? — but look at sub-Saharan Africa. There's a collection of 10 countries, some call them the lions, who in the last decade have had a combination of 100 percent debt cancellation, a tripling of aid, a tenfold increase in FDI — that's foreign direct investment — which has unlocked a quadrupling of domestic resources — that's local money — which, when spent wisely — that's good governance — cut childhood mortality by a third, doubled education completion rates, and they, too, halved extreme poverty, and at this rate, these 10 get to zero too. So the pride of lions is the proof of concept. There are all kinds of benefits to this. For a start, you won't have to listen to an insufferable little jumped-up Jesus like myself. How about that? (Applause) And 2028, 2030? It's just around the corner. I mean, it's about three Rolling Stones farewell concerts away. (Laughter) I hope. I'm hoping. Makes us look really young. So why aren't we jumping up and down about this? Well, the opportunity is real, but so is the jeopardy. We can't get this done until we really accept that we can get this done. Look at this graph. It's called inertia. It's how we screw it up. And the next one is really beautiful. It's called momentum. And it's how we can bend the arc of history down towards zero, just doing the things that we know work. So inertia versus momentum. There is jeopardy, and of course, the closer you get, it gets harder. We know the obstacles that are in our way right now, in difficult times. In fact, today in your capital, in difficult times, some who mind the nation's purse want to cut life-saving programs like the Global Fund. But you can do something about that. You can tell politicians that these cuts [can cost] lives. Right now today, in Oslo as it happens, oil companies are fighting to keep secret their payments to governments for extracting oil in developing countries. You can do something about that too. You can join the One Campaign, and leaders like Mo Ibrahim, the telecom entrepreneur. We're pushing for laws that make sure that at least some of the wealth under the ground ends up in the hands of the people living above it. And right now, we know that the biggest disease of all is not a disease. It's corruption. But there's a vaccine for that too. It's called transparency, open data sets, something the TED community is really on it. Daylight, you could call it, transparency. And technology is really turbocharging this. It's getting harder to hide if you're doing bad stuff. So let me tell you about the U-report, which I'm really excited about. It's 150,000 millennials all across Uganda, young people armed with 2G phones, an SMS social network exposing government corruption and demanding to know what's in the budget and how their money is being spent. This is exciting stuff. Look, once you have these tools, you can't not use them. Once you have this knowledge, you can't un-know it. You can't delete this data from your brain, but you can delete the cliched image of supplicant, impoverished peoples not taking control of their own lives. You can erase that, you really can, because it's not true anymore. (Applause) It's transformational. 2030? By 2030, robots, not just serving us Guinness, but drinking it. By the time we get there, every place with a rough semblance of governance might actually be on their way. So I'm here to — I guess we're here to try and infect you with this virtuous, data-based virus, the one we call factivism. It's not going to kill you. In fact, it could save countless lives. I guess we in the One Campaign would love you to be contagious, spread it, share it, pass it on. By doing so, you will join us and countless others in what I truly believe is the greatest adventure ever taken, the ever-demanding journey of equality. Could we really be the great generation that Mandela asked us to be? Might we answer that clarion call with science, with reason, with facts, and, dare I say it, emotions? Because as is obvious, factivists have feelings too. I'm thinking of Wael Ghonim, though. Some of you know him. He set up one of the Facebook groups behind the Tahrir Square in Cairo. He got thrown in jail for it, but I have his words tattooed on my brain. "We are going to win because we don't understand politics. We are going to win because we don't play their dirty games. We are going to win because we don't have a party political agenda. We are going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts. We are going to win because we have dreams, and we're willing to stand up for those dreams." Wael is right. We're going to win if we work together as one, because the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you so much. (Applause) |
Play with smart materials | {0: 'A TEDGlobal Fellow, Catarina Mota plays with "smart materials" -- like shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric structures that react to voltage -- and encourages others to do so too.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I have a friend in Portugal whose grandfather built a vehicle out of a bicycle and a washing machine so he could transport his family. He did it because he couldn't afford a car, but also because he knew how to build one. There was a time when we understood how things worked and how they were made, so we could build and repair them, or at the very least make informed decisions about what to buy. Many of these do-it-yourself practices were lost in the second half of the 20th century. But now, the maker community and the open-source model are bringing this kind of knowledge about how things work and what they're made of back into our lives, and I believe we need to take them to the next level, to the components things are made of. For the most part, we still know what traditional materials like paper and textiles are made of and how they are produced. But now we have these amazing, futuristic composites — plastics that change shape, paints that conduct electricity, pigments that change color, fabrics that light up. Let me show you some examples. So conductive ink allows us to paint circuits instead of using the traditional printed circuit boards or wires. In the case of this little example I'm holding, we used it to create a touch sensor that reacts to my skin by turning on this little light. Conductive ink has been used by artists, but recent developments indicate that we will soon be able to use it in laser printers and pens. And this is a sheet of acrylic infused with colorless light-diffusing particles. What this means is that, while regular acrylic only diffuses light around the edges, this one illuminates across the entire surface when I turn on the lights around it. Two of the known applications for this material include interior design and multi-touch systems. And thermochromic pigments change color at a given temperature. So I'm going to place this on a hot plate that is set to a temperature only slightly higher than ambient and you can see what happens. So one of the principle applications for this material is, amongst other things, in baby bottles, so it indicates when the contents are cool enough to drink. So these are just a few of what are commonly known as smart materials. In a few years, they will be in many of the objects and technologies we use on a daily basis. We may not yet have the flying cars science fiction promised us, but we can have walls that change color depending on temperature, keyboards that roll up, and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch. So I'm a social scientist by training, so why am I here today talking about smart materials? Well first of all, because I am a maker. I'm curious about how things work and how they are made, but also because I believe we should have a deeper understanding of the components that make up our world, and right now, we don't know enough about these high-tech composites our future will be made of. Smart materials are hard to obtain in small quantities. There's barely any information available on how to use them, and very little is said about how they are produced. So for now, they exist mostly in this realm of trade secrets and patents only universities and corporations have access to. So a little over three years ago, Kirsty Boyle and I started a project we called Open Materials. It's a website where we, and anyone else who wants to join us, share experiments, publish information, encourage others to contribute whenever they can, and aggregate resources such as research papers and tutorials by other makers like ourselves. We would like it to become a large, collectively generated database of do-it-yourself information on smart materials. But why should we care how smart materials work and what they are made of? First of all, because we can't shape what we don't understand, and what we don't understand and use ends up shaping us. The objects we use, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, all have a profound impact on our behavior, health and quality of life. So if we are to live in a world made of smart materials, we should know and understand them. Secondly, and just as important, innovation has always been fueled by tinkerers. So many times, amateurs, not experts, have been the inventors and improvers of things ranging from mountain bikes to semiconductors, personal computers, airplanes. The biggest challenge is that material science is complex and requires expensive equipment. But that's not always the case. Two scientists at University of Illinois understood this when they published a paper on a simpler method for making conductive ink. Jordan Bunker, who had had no experience with chemistry until then, read this paper and reproduced the experiment at his maker space using only off-the-shelf substances and tools. He used a toaster oven, and he even made his own vortex mixer, based on a tutorial by another scientist/maker. Jordan then published his results online, including all the things he had tried and didn't work, so others could study and reproduce it. So Jordan's main form of innovation was to take an experiment created in a well-equipped lab at the university and recreate it in a garage in Chicago using only cheap materials and tools he made himself. And now that he published this work, others can pick up where he left and devise even simpler processes and improvements. Another example I'd like to mention is Hannah Perner-Wilson's Kit-of-No-Parts. Her project's goal is to highlight the expressive qualities of materials while focusing on the creativity and skills of the builder. Electronics kits are very powerful in that they teach us how things work, but the constraints inherent in their design influence the way we learn. So Hannah's approach, on the other hand, is to formulate a series of techniques for creating unusual objects that free us from pre-designed constraints by teaching us about the materials themselves. So amongst Hannah's many impressive experiments, this is one of my favorites. ["Paper speakers"] What we're seeing here is just a piece of paper with some copper tape on it connected to an mp3 player and a magnet. (Music: "Happy Together") So based on the research by Marcelo Coelho from MIT, Hannah created a series of paper speakers out of a wide range of materials from simple copper tape to conductive fabric and ink. Just like Jordan and so many other makers, Hannah published her recipes and allows anyone to copy and reproduce them. But paper electronics is one of the most promising branches of material science in that it allows us to create cheaper and flexible electronics. So Hannah's artisanal work, and the fact that she shared her findings, opens the doors to a series of new possibilities that are both aesthetically appealing and innovative. So the interesting thing about makers is that we create out of passion and curiosity, and we are not afraid to fail. We often tackle problems from unconventional angles, and, in the process, end up discovering alternatives or even better ways to do things. So the more people experiment with materials, the more researchers are willing to share their research, and manufacturers their knowledge, the better chances we have to create technologies that truly serve us all. So I feel a bit as Ted Nelson must have when, in the early 1970s, he wrote, "You must understand computers now." Back then, computers were these large mainframes only scientists cared about, and no one dreamed of even having one at home. So it's a little strange that I'm standing here and saying, "You must understand smart materials now." Just keep in mind that acquiring preemptive knowledge about emerging technologies is the best way to ensure that we have a say in the making of our future. Thank you. (Applause) |
The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B | {0: 'Inventor, scientist, author, engineer -- over his broad career, Danny Hillis has turned his ever-searching brain on an array of subjects, with surprising results.'} | TED2013 | So, this book that I have in my hand is a directory of everybody who had an email address in 1982. (Laughter) Actually, it's deceptively large. There's actually only about 20 people on each page, because we have the name, address and telephone number of every single person. And, in fact, everybody's listed twice, because it's sorted once by name and once by email address. Obviously a very small community. There were only two other Dannys on the Internet then. I knew them both. We didn't all know each other, but we all kind of trusted each other, and that basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network, and there was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things. So just to give you an idea of the level of trust in this community, let me tell you what it was like to register a domain name in the early days. Now, it just so happened that I got to register the third domain name on the Internet. So I could have anything I wanted other than bbn.com and symbolics.com. So I picked think.com, but then I thought, you know, there's a lot of really interesting names out there. Maybe I should register a few extras just in case. And then I thought, "Nah, that wouldn't be very nice." (Laughter) That attitude of only taking what you need was really what everybody had on the network in those days, and in fact, it wasn't just the people on the network, but it was actually kind of built into the protocols of the Internet itself. So the basic idea of I.P., or Internet protocol, and the way that the — the routing algorithm that used it, were fundamentally "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need." And so, if you had some extra bandwidth, you'd deliver a message for someone. If they had some extra bandwidth, they would deliver a message for you. You'd kind of depend on people to do that, and that was the building block. It was actually interesting that such a communist principle was the basis of a system developed during the Cold War by the Defense Department, but it obviously worked really well, and we all saw what happened with the Internet. It was incredibly successful. In fact, it was so successful that there's no way that these days you could make a book like this. My rough calculation is it would be about 25 miles thick. But, of course, you couldn't do it, because we don't know the names of all the people with Internet or email addresses, and even if we did know their names, I'm pretty sure that they would not want their name, address and telephone number published to everyone. So the fact is that there's a lot of bad guys on the Internet these days, and so we dealt with that by making walled communities, secure subnetworks, VPNs, little things that aren't really the Internet but are made out of the same building blocks, but we're still basically building it out of those same building blocks with those same assumptions of trust. And that means that it's vulnerable to certain kinds of mistakes that can happen, or certain kinds of deliberate attacks, but even the mistakes can be bad. So, for instance, in all of Asia recently, it was impossible to get YouTube for a little while because Pakistan made some mistakes in how it was censoring YouTube in its internal network. They didn't intend to screw up Asia, but they did because of the way that the protocols work. Another example that may have affected many of you in this audience is, you may remember a couple of years ago, all the planes west of the Mississippi were grounded because a single routing card in Salt Lake City had a bug in it. Now, you don't really think that our airplane system depends on the Internet, and in some sense it doesn't. I'll come back to that later. But the fact is that people couldn't take off because something was going wrong on the Internet, and the router card was down. And so, there are many of those things that start to happen. Now, there was an interesting thing that happened last April. All of a sudden, a very large percentage of the traffic on the whole Internet, including a lot of the traffic between U.S. military installations, started getting re-routed through China. So for a few hours, it all passed through China. Now, China Telecom says it was just an honest mistake, and it is actually possible that it was, the way things work, but certainly somebody could make a dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to, and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes. Imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks. So if somebody really wanted to attack the United States or Western civilization these days, they're not going to do it with tanks. That will not succeed. What they'll probably do is something very much like the attack that happened on the Iranian nuclear facility. Nobody has claimed credit for that. There was basically a factory of industrial machines. It didn't think of itself as being on the Internet. It thought of itself as being disconnected from the Internet, but it was possible for somebody to smuggle a USB drive in there, or something like that, and software got in there that causes the centrifuges, in that case, to actually destroy themselves. Now that same kind of software could destroy an oil refinery or a pharmaceutical factory or a semiconductor plant. And so there's a lot of — I'm sure you've read a lot in papers, about worries about cyberattacks and defenses against those. But the fact is, people are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there's been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium. And I think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that, because it's actually kind of fragile. So actually, in the early days, back when it was the ARPANET, there were actually times — there was a particular time it failed completely because one single message processor actually got a bug in it. And the way the Internet works is the routers are basically exchanging information about how they can get messages to places, and this one processor, because of a broken card, decided it could actually get a message to some place in negative time. So, in other words, it claimed it could deliver a message before you sent it. So of course, the fastest way to get a message anywhere was to send it to this guy, who would send it back in time and get it there super early, so every message in the Internet started getting switched through this one node, and of course that clogged everything up. Everything started breaking. The interesting thing was, though, that the sysadmins were able to fix it, but they had to basically turn every single thing on the Internet off. Now, of course you couldn't do that today. I mean, everything off, it's like the service call you get from the cable company, except for the whole world. Now, in fact, they couldn't do it for a lot of reasons today. One of the reasons is a lot of their telephones use IP protocol and use things like Skype and so on that go through the Internet right now, and so in fact we're becoming dependent on it for more and more different things, like when you take off from LAX, you're really not thinking you're using the Internet. When you pump gas, you really don't think you're using the Internet. What's happening increasingly, though, is these systems are beginning to use the Internet. Most of them aren't based on the Internet yet, but they're starting to use the Internet for service functions, for administrative functions, and so if you take something like the cell phone system, which is still relatively independent of the Internet for the most part, Internet pieces are beginning to sneak into it in terms of some of the control and administrative functions, and it's so tempting to use these same building blocks because they work so well, they're cheap, they're repeated, and so on. So all of our systems, more and more, are starting to use the same technology and starting to depend on this technology. And so even a modern rocket ship these days actually uses Internet protocol to talk from one end of the rocket ship to the other. That's crazy. It was never designed to do things like that. So we've built this system where we understand all the parts of it, but we're using it in a very, very different way than we expected to use it, and it's gotten a very, very different scale than it was designed for. And in fact, nobody really exactly understands all the things it's being used for right now. It's turning into one of these big emergent systems like the financial system, where we've designed all the parts but nobody really exactly understands how it operates and all the little details of it and what kinds of emergent behaviors it can have. And so if you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it can do this, or it does do this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather, or something like that. They have an informed opinion, but it's changing so quickly that even the experts don't know exactly what's going on. So if you see one of these maps of the Internet, it's just somebody's guess. Nobody really knows what the Internet is right now because it's different than it was an hour ago. It's constantly changing. It's constantly reconfiguring. And the problem with it is, I think we are setting ourselves up for a kind of disaster like the disaster we had in the financial system, where we take a system that's basically built on trust, was basically built for a smaller-scale system, and we've kind of expanded it way beyond the limits of how it was meant to operate. And so right now, I think it's literally true that we don't know what the consequences of an effective denial-of-service attack on the Internet would be, and whatever it would be is going to be worse next year, and worse next year, and so on. But so what we need is a plan B. There is no plan B right now. There's no clear backup system that we've very carefully kept to be independent of the Internet, made out of completely different sets of building blocks. So what we need is something that doesn't necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department even without the Internet, or the hospitals have to order fuel oil. This doesn't need to be a multi-billion-dollar government project. It's actually relatively simple to do, technically, because it can use existing fibers that are in the ground, existing wireless infrastructure. It's basically a matter of deciding to do it. But people won't decide to do it until they recognize the need for it, and that's the problem that we have right now. So there's been plenty of people, plenty of us have been quietly arguing that we should have this independent system for years, but it's very hard to get people focused on plan B when plan A seems to be working so well. So I think that, if people understand how much we're starting to depend on the Internet, and how vulnerable it is, we could get focused on just wanting this other system to exist, and I think if enough people say, "Yeah, I would like to use it, I'd like to have such a system," then it will get built. It's not that hard a problem. It could definitely be done by people in this room. And so I think that this is actually, of all the problems you're going to hear about at the conference, this is probably one of the very easiest to fix. So I'm happy to get a chance to tell you about it. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity ... | {0: 'Elon Musk is the CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and the CEO/CTO of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX).'} | TED2013 | Chris Anderson: Elon, what kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car? Elon Musk: Well, it goes back to when I was in university. I thought about, what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity? I think it's extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production. That sort of overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century, independent of environmental concerns. In fact, even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating. CA: Most of American electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. How can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help? EM: Right. There's two elements to that answer. One is that, even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars, you're still better off. So if you take, say, natural gas, which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel, if you burn that in a modern General Electric natural gas turbine, you'll get about 60 percent efficiency. If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car, you get about 20 percent efficiency. And the reason is, in the stationary power plant, you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more, is voluminous, and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source. So in effect, even after you've taken transmission loss into account and everything, even using the same source fuel, you're at least twice as better off charging an electric car, then burning it at the power plant. CA: That scale delivers efficiency. EM: Yes, it does. And then the other point is, we have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway, electricity generation. So given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation, then it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport. CA: So we've got some video here of the Tesla being assembled, which, if we could play that first video — So what is innovative about this process in this vehicle? EM: Sure. So, in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport, and I should say that I think, actually, all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets. There's just no way around Newton's third law. The question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport? And in order to do that for cars, you have to come up with a really energy efficient car, so that means making it incredibly light, and so what you're seeing here is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in North America. In fact, we applied a lot of rocket design techniques to make the car light despite having a very large battery pack. And then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size. So as a result, the energy usage is very low, and it has the most advanced battery pack, and that's what gives it the range that's competitive, so you can actually have on the order of a 250-mile range. CA: I mean, those battery packs are incredibly heavy, but you think the math can still work out intelligently — by combining light body, heavy battery, you can still gain spectacular efficiency. EM: Exactly. The rest of the car has to be very light to offset the mass of the pack, and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range. And in fact, customers of the Model S are sort of competing with each other to try to get the highest possible range. I think somebody recently got 420 miles out of a single charge. CA: Bruno Bowden, who's here, did that, broke the world record.EM: Congratulations. CA: That was the good news. The bad news was that to do it, he had to drive at 18 miles an hour constant speed and got pulled over by the cops. (Laughter) EM: I mean, you can certainly drive — if you drive it 65 miles an hour, under normal conditions, 250 miles is a reasonable number. CA: Let's show that second video showing the Tesla in action on ice. Not at all a dig at The New York Times, this, by the way. What is the most surprising thing about the experience of driving the car? EM: In creating an electric car, the responsiveness of the car is really incredible. So we wanted really to have people feel as though they've almost got to mind meld with the car, so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one, and as you corner and accelerate, it just happens, like the car has ESP. You can do that with an electric car because of its responsiveness. You can't do that with a gasoline car. I think that's really a profound difference, and people only experience that when they have a test drive. CA: I mean, this is a beautiful but expensive car. Is there a road map where this becomes a mass-market vehicle? EM: Yeah. The goal of Tesla has always been to have a sort of three-step process, where version one was an expensive car at low volume, version two is medium priced and medium volume, and then version three would be low price, high volume. So we're at step two at this point. So we had a $100,000 sports car, which was the Roadster. Then we've got the Model S, which starts at around 50,000 dollars. And our third generation car, which should hopefully be out in about three or four years will be a $30,000 car. But whenever you've got really new technology, it generally takes about three major versions in order to make it a compelling mass-market product. And so I think we're making progress in that direction, and I feel confident that we'll get there. CA: I mean, right now, if you've got a short commute, you can drive, you can get back, you can charge it at home. There isn't a huge nationwide network of charging stations now that are fast. Do you see that coming, really, truly, or just on a few key routes? EM: There actually are far more charging stations than people realize, and at Tesla we developed something called a Supercharging technology, and we're offering that if you buy a Model S for free, forever. And so this is something that maybe a lot of people don't realize. We actually have California and Nevada covered, and we've got the Eastern seaboard from Boston to D.C. covered. By the end of this year, you'll be able to drive from L.A. to New York just using the Supercharger network, which charges at five times the rate of anything else. And the key thing is to have a ratio of drive to stop, to stop time, of about six or seven. So if you drive for three hours, you want to stop for 20 or 30 minutes, because that's normally what people will stop for. So if you start a trip at 9 a.m., by noon you want to stop to have a bite to eat, hit the restroom, coffee, and keep going. CA: So your proposition to consumers is, for the full charge, it could take an hour. So it's common — don't expect to be out of here in 10 minutes. Wait for an hour, but the good news is, you're helping save the planet, and by the way, the electricity is free. You don't pay anything. EM: Actually, what we're expecting is for people to stop for about 20 to 30 minutes, not for an hour. It's actually better to drive for about maybe 160, 170 miles and then stop for half an hour and then keep going. That's the natural cadence of a trip. CA: All right. So this is only one string to your energy bow. You've been working on this solar company SolarCity. What's unusual about that? EM: Well, as I mentioned earlier, we have to have sustainable electricity production as well as consumption, so I'm quite confident that the primary means of power generation will be solar. I mean, it's really indirect fusion, is what it is. We've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun, and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization. What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered. CA: But in a gallon of gasoline, you have, effectively, thousands of years of sun power compressed into a small space, so it's hard to make the numbers work right now on solar, and to remotely compete with, for example, natural gas, fracked natural gas. How are you going to build a business here? EM: Well actually, I'm confident that solar will beat everything, hands down, including natural gas. (Applause)CA: How? EM: It must, actually. If it doesn't, we're in deep trouble. CA: But you're not selling solar panels to consumers. What are you doing? EM: No, we actually are. You can buy a solar system or you can lease a solar system. Most people choose to lease. And the thing about solar power is that it doesn't have any feed stock or operational costs, so once it's installed, it's just there. It works for decades. It'll work for probably a century. So therefore, the key thing to do is to get the cost of that initial installation low, and then get the cost of the financing low, because that interest — those are the two factors that drive the cost of solar. And we've made huge progress in that direction, and that's why I'm confident we'll actually beat natural gas. CA: So your current proposition to consumers is, don't pay so much up front. EM: Zero.CA: Pay zero up front. We will install panels on your roof. You will then pay, how long is a typical lease? EM: Typical leases are 20 years, but the value proposition is, as you're sort of alluding to, quite straightforward. It's no money down, and your utility bill decreases. Pretty good deal. CA: So that seems like a win for the consumer. No risk, you'll pay less than you're paying now. For you, the dream here then is that — I mean, who owns the electricity from those panels for the longer term? I mean, how do you, the company, benefit? EM: Well, essentially, SolarCity raises a chunk of capital from say, a company or a bank. Google is one of our big partners here. And they have an expected return on that capital. With that capital, SolarCity purchases and installs the panel on the roof and then charges the homeowner or business owner a monthly lease payment, which is less than the utility bill. CA: But you yourself get a long-term commercial benefit from that power. You're kind of building a new type of distributed utility. EM: Exactly. What it amounts to is a giant distributed utility. I think it's a good thing, because utilities have been this monopoly, and people haven't had any choice. So effectively it's the first time there's been competition for this monopoly, because the utilities have been the only ones that owned those power distribution lines, but now it's on your roof. So I think it's actually very empowering for homeowners and businesses. CA: And you really picture a future where a majority of power in America, within a decade or two, or within your lifetime, it goes solar? EM: I'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power, and most likely a majority, and I predict it will be a plurality in less than 20 years. I made that bet with someone —CA: Definition of plurality is? EM: More from solar than any other source. CA: Ah. Who did you make the bet with? EM: With a friend who will remain nameless. CA: Just between us. (Laughter) EM: I made that bet, I think, two or three years ago, so in roughly 18 years, I think we'll see more power from solar than any other source. CA: All right, so let's go back to another bet that you made with yourself, I guess, a kind of crazy bet. You'd made some money from the sale of PayPal. You decided to build a space company. Why on Earth would someone do that? (Laughter) EM: I got that question a lot, that's true. People would say, "Did you hear the joke about the guy who made a small fortune in the space industry?" Obviously, "He started with a large one," is the punchline. And so I tell people, well, I was trying to figure out the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one. And they'd look at me, like, "Is he serious?" CA: And strangely, you were. So what happened? EM: It was a close call. Things almost didn't work out. We came very close to failure, but we managed to get through that point in 2008. The goal of SpaceX is to try to advance rocket technology, and in particular to try to crack a problem that I think is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization, which is to have a rapidly and fully reusable rocket. CA: Would humanity become a space-faring civilization? So that was a dream of yours, in a way, from a young age? You've dreamed of Mars and beyond? EM: I did build rockets when I was a kid, but I didn't think I'd be involved in this. It was really more from the standpoint of what are the things that need to happen in order for the future to be an exciting and inspiring one? And I really think there's a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars, on multiple planets, and I think that's really exciting, compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event. CA: So you've somehow slashed the cost of building a rocket by 75 percent, depending on how you calculate it. How on Earth have you done that? NASA has been doing this for years. How have you done this? EM: Well, we've made significant advances in the technology of the airframe, the engines, the electronics and the launch operation. There's a long list of innovations that we've come up with there that are a little difficult to communicate in this talk, but — CA: Not least because you could still get copied, right? You haven't patented this stuff. It's really interesting to me. EM: No, we don't patent.CA: You didn't patent because you think it's more dangerous to patent than not to patent. EM: Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable.(Laughter) (Applause) CA: That's really, really interesting. But the big innovation is still ahead, and you're working on it now. Tell us about this. EM: Right, so the big innovation— CA: In fact, let's roll that video and you can talk us through it, what's happening here. EM: Absolutely. So the thing about rockets is that they're all expendable. All rockets that fly today are fully expendable. The space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket, but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time, and the parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight. So the space shuttle ended up costing a billion dollars per flight. Obviously that doesn't work very well for — CA: What just happened there? We just saw something land? EM: That's right. So it's important that the rocket stages be able to come back, to be able to return to the launch site and be ready to launch again within a matter of hours. CA: Wow. Reusable rockets.EM: Yes. (Applause) And so what a lot of people don't realize is, the cost of the fuel, of the propellant, is very small. It's much like on a jet. So the cost of the propellant is about .3 percent of the cost of the rocket. So it's possible to achieve, let's say, roughly 100-fold improvement in the cost of spaceflight if you can effectively reuse the rocket. That's why it's so important. Every mode of transport that we use, whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses, is reusable, but not rockets. So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization. CA: You asked me the question earlier of how popular traveling on cruises would be if you had to burn your ships afterward.EM: Certain cruises are apparently highly problematic. CA: Definitely more expensive. So that's potentially absolutely disruptive technology, and, I guess, paves the way for your dream to actually take, at some point, to take humanity to Mars at scale. You'd like to see a colony on Mars. EM: Yeah, exactly. SpaceX, or some combination of companies and governments, needs to make progress in the direction of making life multi-planetary, of establishing a base on another planet, on Mars — being the only realistic option — and then building that base up until we're a true multi-planet species. CA: So progress on this "let's make it reusable," how is that going? That was just a simulation video we saw. How's it going? EM: We're actually, we've been making some good progress recently with something we call the Grasshopper Test Project, where we're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight, the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky. And we've had some good tests. CA: Can we see that?EM: Yeah. So that's just to give a sense of scale. We dressed a cowboy as Johnny Cash and bolted the mannequin to the rocket. (Laughter) CA: All right, let's see that video then, because this is actually amazing when you think about it. You've never seen this before. A rocket blasting off and then — EM: Yeah, so that rocket is about the size of a 12-story building. (Rocket launch) So now it's hovering at about 40 meters, and it's constantly adjusting the angle, the pitch and yaw of the main engine, and maintaining roll with cold gas thrusters. CA: How cool is that? (Applause) Elon, how have you done this? These projects are so — Paypal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX, they're so spectacularly different, they're such ambitious projects at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way? What is it about you? EM: I don't know, actually. I don't have a good answer for you. I work a lot. I mean, a lot. CA: Well, I have a theory.EM: Okay. All right. CA: My theory is that you have an ability to think at a system level of design that pulls together design, technology and business, so if TED was TBD, design, technology and business, into one package, synthesize it in a way that very few people can and — and this is the critical thing — feel so damn confident in that clicked-together package that you take crazy risks. You bet your fortune on it, and you seem to have done that multiple times. I mean, almost no one can do that. Is that — could we have some of that secret sauce? Can we put it into our education system? Can someone learn from you? It is truly amazing what you've done. EM: Well, thanks. Thank you. Well, I do think there's a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are — what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn't be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive. So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful. CA: Boys and girls watching, study physics. Learn from this man. Elon Musk, I wish we had all day, but thank you so much for coming to TED. EM: Thank you. CA: That was awesome. That was really, really cool. Look at that. (Applause) Just take a bow. That was fantastic. Thank you so much. |
My escape from North Korea | {0: 'As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee thoght her country was the "best on the planet." It wasn\'t until the famine of the 90s that she began to wonder. She escaped the country at 17-years-old to begin a life in hiding as a refugee in China. Hers is a harrowing, personal tale of survival and hope -- and a powerful reminder of those who face constant danger, even when the border is far behind.'} | TED2013 | When I was little, I thought my country was the best on the planet. And I grew up singing a song called "Nothing To Envy." And I was very proud. In school, we spent a lot of time studying the history of Kim Il-Sung, but we never learned much about the outside world, except that America, South Korea, Japan are the enemies. Although I often wondered about the outside world, I thought I would spend my entire life in North Korea, until everything suddenly changed. When I was seven years old, I saw my first public execution. But I thought my life in North Korea was normal. My family was not poor, and myself, I had never experienced hunger. But one day, in 1995, my mom brought home a letter from a coworker's sister. It read, "When you read this, our five family members will not exist in this world, because we haven't eaten for the past three weeks. We are lying on the floor together, and our bodies are so weak, we are waiting to die." I was so shocked. This was the first time I heard that people in my country were suffering. Soon after, when I was walking past a train station, I saw something terrible that to this day I can't erase from my memory. A lifeless woman was lying on the ground, while an emaciated child in her arms just stared helplessly at his mother's face. But nobody helped them, because they were so focused on taking care of themselves and their families. A huge famine hit North Korea in the mid-1990s. Ultimately, more than a million North Koreans died during the famine, and many only survived by eating grass, bugs and tree bark. Power outages also became more and more frequent, so everything around me was completely dark at night, except for the sea of lights in China, just across the river from my home. I always wondered why they had lights, but we didn't. This is a satellite picture showing North Korea at night, compared to neighbors. This is the Amnok River, which serves as a part of the border between North Korea and China. As you can see, the river can be very narrow at certain points, allowing North Koreans to secretly cross. But many die. Sometimes, I saw dead bodies floating down the river. I can't reveal many details about how I left North Korea, but I only can say that during the ugly years of the famine, I was sent to China to live with distant relatives. But I only thought that I would be separated from my family for a short time. I could have never imagined that it would take 14 years to live together. In China, it was hard living as a young girl without my family. I had no idea what life was going to be like as a North Korean refugee. But I soon learned it's not only extremely difficult, it's also very dangerous, since North Korean refugees are considered in China as illegal migrants. So I was living in constant fear that my identity could be revealed, and I would be repatriated to a horrible fate, back in North Korea. One day, my worst nightmare came true, when I was caught by the Chinese police, and brought to the police station for interrogation. Someone had accused me of being North Korean, so they tested my Chinese language abilities, and asked me tons of questions. I was so scared. I thought my heart was going to explode. If anything seemed unnatural, I could be imprisoned and repatriated. I thought my life was over. But I managed to control all the emotions inside me, and answer the questions. After they finished questioning me, one official said to another, "This was a false report. She's not North Korean." And they let me go. It was a miracle. Some North Koreans in China seek asylum in foreign embassies. But many can be caught by the Chinese police, and repatriated. These girls were so lucky. Even though they were caught, they were eventually released, after heavy international pressure. These North Koreans were not so lucky. Every year, countless North Koreans are caught in China and repatriated to North Korea, where they can be tortured, imprisoned, or publicly executed. Even though I was really fortunate to get out, many other North Koreans have not been so lucky. It's tragic that North Koreans have to hide their identities and struggle so hard just to survive. Even after learning a new language and getting a job, their whole world can be turned upside down in an instant. That's why, after 10 years of hiding my identity, I decided to risk going to South Korea. And I started a new life yet again. Settling down in South Korea was a lot more challenging than I had expected. English was so important in South Korea, so I had to start learning my third language. Also, I realized there was a wide gap between North and South. We are all Korean, but inside, we have become very different, due to 67 years of division. I even went through an identity crisis. Am I South Korean or North Korean? Where am I from? Who am I? Suddenly, there was no country I could proudly call my own. Even though adjusting to life in South Korea was not easy, I made a plan — I started studying for the university entrance exam. Just as I was starting to get used to my new life, I received a shocking phone call. The North Korean authorities intercepted some money that I sent to my family, and, as a punishment, my family was going to be forcibly removed to a desolate location in the countryside. They had to get out quickly. So I started planning how to help them escape. North Koreans have to travel incredible distances on the path to freedom. It's almost impossible to cross the border between North Korea and South Korea. So, ironically, I took a flight back to China and headed toward the North Korean border. Since my family couldn't speak Chinese, I had to guide them somehow through more than 2,000 miles in China, and then into Southeast Asia. The journey by bus took one week, and we were almost caught several times. One time, our bus was stopped and boarded by a Chinese police officer. He took everyone's I.D. cards, and he started asking them questions. Since my family couldn't understand Chinese, I thought my family was going to be arrested. As the Chinese officer approached my family, I impulsively stood up, and I told him that these are deaf and dumb people that I was chaperoning. He looked at me suspiciously, but luckily, he believed me. We made it all the way to the border of Laos. But I had to spend almost all my money to bribe the border guards in Laos. But even after we got past the border, my family was arrested and jailed for illegal border crossing. After I paid the fine and bribe, my family was released in one month. But soon after, my family was arrested and jailed again, in the capital of Laos. This was one of the lowest points in my life. I did everything to get my family to freedom, and we came so close, but my family was thrown in jail, just a short distance from the South Korean embassy. I went back and forth between the immigration office and the police station, desperately trying to get my family out. but I didn't have enough money to pay a bribe or fine anymore. I lost all hope. At that moment, I heard one man's voice ask me, "What's wrong?" I was so surprised that a total stranger cared enough to ask. In my broken English, and with a dictionary, I explained the situation, and without hesitating, the man went to the ATM, and he paid the rest of the money for my family, and two other North Koreans to get out of jail. I thanked him with all my heart, and I asked him, "Why are you helping me?" "I'm not helping you," he said. "I'm helping the North Korean people." I realized that this was a symbolic moment in my life. The kind stranger symbolized new hope for me and the North Korean people, when we needed it most. And he showed me that the kindness of strangers and the support of the international community are truly the rays of hope we North Korean people need. Eventually, after our long journey, my family and I were reunited in South Korea. But getting to freedom is only half the battle. Many North Koreans are separated from their families, and when they arrive in a new country, they start with little or no money. So we can benefit from the international community for education, English language training, job training, and more. We can also act as a bridge between the people inside North Korea and the outside world. Because many of us stay in contact with family members still inside, and we send information and money that is helping to change North Korea from inside. I've been so lucky, received so much help and inspiration in my life, so I want to help give aspiring North Koreans a chance to prosper with international support. I'm confident that you will see more and more North Koreans succeeding all over the world, including the TED stage. Thank you. (Applause) |
We need better drugs -- now | {0: "A key player in the US' new brain-mapping project, Francis Collins is director of the National Institutes of Health. "} | TEDMED 2012 | So let me ask for a show of hands. How many people here are over the age of 48? Well, there do seem to be a few. Well, congratulations, because if you look at this particular slide of U.S. life expectancy, you are now in excess of the average life span of somebody who was born in 1900. But look what happened in the course of that century. If you follow that curve, you'll see that it starts way down there. There's that dip there for the 1918 flu. And here we are at 2010, average life expectancy of a child born today, age 79, and we are not done yet. Now, that's the good news. But there's still a lot of work to do. So, for instance, if you ask, how many diseases do we now know the exact molecular basis? Turns out it's about 4,000, which is pretty amazing, because most of those molecular discoveries have just happened in the last little while. It's exciting to see that in terms of what we've learned, but how many of those 4,000 diseases now have treatments available? Only about 250. So we have this huge challenge, this huge gap. You would think this wouldn't be too hard, that we would simply have the ability to take this fundamental information that we're learning about how it is that basic biology teaches us about the causes of disease and build a bridge across this yawning gap between what we've learned about basic science and its application, a bridge that would look maybe something like this, where you'd have to put together a nice shiny way to get from one side to the other. Well, wouldn't it be nice if it was that easy? Unfortunately, it's not. In reality, trying to go from fundamental knowledge to its application is more like this. There are no shiny bridges. You sort of place your bets. Maybe you've got a swimmer and a rowboat and a sailboat and a tugboat and you set them off on their way, and the rains come and the lightning flashes, and oh my gosh, there are sharks in the water and the swimmer gets into trouble, and, uh oh, the swimmer drowned and the sailboat capsized, and that tugboat, well, it hit the rocks, and maybe if you're lucky, somebody gets across. Well, what does this really look like? Well, what is it to make a therapeutic, anyway? What's a drug? A drug is made up of a small molecule of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and a few other atoms all cobbled together in a shape, and it's those shapes that determine whether, in fact, that particular drug is going to hit its target. Is it going to land where it's supposed to? So look at this picture here — a lot of shapes dancing around for you. Now what you need to do, if you're trying to develop a new treatment for autism or Alzheimer's disease or cancer is to find the right shape in that mix that will ultimately provide benefit and will be safe. And when you look at what happens to that pipeline, you start out maybe with thousands, tens of thousands of compounds. You weed down through various steps that cause many of these to fail. Ultimately, maybe you can run a clinical trial with four or five of these, and if all goes well, 14 years after you started, you will get one approval. And it will cost you upwards of a billion dollars for that one success. So we have to look at this pipeline the way an engineer would, and say, "How can we do better?" And that's the main theme of what I want to say to you this morning. How can we make this go faster? How can we make it more successful? Well, let me tell you about a few examples where this has actually worked. One that has just happened in the last few months is the successful approval of a drug for cystic fibrosis. But it's taken a long time to get there. Cystic fibrosis had its molecular cause discovered in 1989 by my group working with another group in Toronto, discovering what the mutation was in a particular gene on chromosome 7. That picture you see there? Here it is. That's the same kid. That's Danny Bessette, 23 years later, because this is the year, and it's also the year where Danny got married, where we have, for the first time, the approval by the FDA of a drug that precisely targets the defect in cystic fibrosis based upon all this molecular understanding. That's the good news. The bad news is, this drug doesn't actually treat all cases of cystic fibrosis, and it won't work for Danny, and we're still waiting for that next generation to help him. But it took 23 years to get this far. That's too long. How do we go faster? Well, one way to go faster is to take advantage of technology, and a very important technology that we depend on for all of this is the human genome, the ability to be able to look at a chromosome, to unzip it, to pull out all the DNA, and to be able to then read out the letters in that DNA code, the A's, C's, G's and T's that are our instruction book and the instruction book for all living things, and the cost of doing this, which used to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, has in the course of the last 10 years fallen faster than Moore's Law, down to the point where it is less than 10,000 dollars today to have your genome sequenced, or mine, and we're headed for the $1,000 genome fairly soon. Well, that's exciting. How does that play out in terms of application to a disease? I want to tell you about another disorder. This one is a disorder which is quite rare. It's called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria, and it is the most dramatic form of premature aging. Only about one in every four million kids has this disease, and in a simple way, what happens is, because of a mutation in a particular gene, a protein is made that's toxic to the cell and it causes these individuals to age at about seven times the normal rate. Let me show you a video of what that does to the cell. The normal cell, if you looked at it under the microscope, would have a nucleus sitting in the middle of the cell, which is nice and round and smooth in its boundaries and it looks kind of like that. A progeria cell, on the other hand, because of this toxic protein called progerin, has these lumps and bumps in it. So what we would like to do after discovering this back in 2003 is to come up with a way to try to correct that. Well again, by knowing something about the molecular pathways, it was possible to pick one of those many, many compounds that might have been useful and try it out. In an experiment done in cell culture and shown here in a cartoon, if you take that particular compound and you add it to that cell that has progeria, and you watch to see what happened, in just 72 hours, that cell becomes, for all purposes that we can determine, almost like a normal cell. Well that was exciting, but would it actually work in a real human being? This has led, in the space of only four years from the time the gene was discovered to the start of a clinical trial, to a test of that very compound. And the kids that you see here all volunteered to be part of this, 28 of them, and you can see as soon as the picture comes up that they are in fact a remarkable group of young people all afflicted by this disease, all looking quite similar to each other. And instead of telling you more about it, I'm going to invite one of them, Sam Berns from Boston, who's here this morning, to come up on the stage and tell us about his experience as a child affected with progeria. Sam is 15 years old. His parents, Scott Berns and Leslie Gordon, both physicians, are here with us this morning as well. Sam, please have a seat. (Applause) So Sam, why don't you tell these folks what it's like being affected with this condition called progeria? Sam Burns: Well, progeria limits me in some ways. I cannot play sports or do physical activities, but I have been able to take interest in things that progeria, luckily, does not limit. But when there is something that I really do want to do that progeria gets in the way of, like marching band or umpiring, we always find a way to do it, and that just shows that progeria isn't in control of my life. (Applause) Francis Collins: So what would you like to say to researchers here in the auditorium and others listening to this? What would you say to them both about research on progeria and maybe about other conditions as well? SB: Well, research on progeria has come so far in less than 15 years, and that just shows the drive that researchers can have to get this far, and it really means a lot to myself and other kids with progeria, and it shows that if that drive exists, anybody can cure any disease, and hopefully progeria can be cured in the near future, and so we can eliminate those 4,000 diseases that Francis was talking about. FC: Excellent. So Sam took the day off from school today to be here, and he is — (Applause) — He is, by the way, a straight-A+ student in the ninth grade in his school in Boston. Please join me in thanking and welcoming Sam. SB: Thank you very much. FC: Well done. Well done, buddy. (Applause) So I just want to say a couple more things about that particular story, and then try to generalize how could we have stories of success all over the place for these diseases, as Sam says, these 4,000 that are waiting for answers. You might have noticed that the drug that is now in clinical trial for progeria is not a drug that was designed for that. It's such a rare disease, it would be hard for a company to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars to generate a drug. This is a drug that was developed for cancer. Turned out, it didn't work very well for cancer, but it has exactly the right properties, the right shape, to work for progeria, and that's what's happened. Wouldn't it be great if we could do that more systematically? Could we, in fact, encourage all the companies that are out there that have drugs in their freezers that are known to be safe in humans but have never actually succeeded in terms of being effective for the treatments they were tried for? Now we're learning about all these new molecular pathways — some of those could be repositioned or repurposed, or whatever word you want to use, for new applications, basically teaching old drugs new tricks. That could be a phenomenal, valuable activity. We have many discussions now between NIH and companies about doing this that are looking very promising. And you could expect quite a lot to come from this. There are quite a number of success stories one can point to about how this has led to major advances. The first drug for HIV/AIDS was not developed for HIV/AIDS. It was developed for cancer. It was AZT. It didn't work very well for cancer, but became the first successful antiretroviral, and you can see from the table there are others as well. So how do we actually make that a more generalizable effort? Well, we have to come up with a partnership between academia, government, the private sector, and patient organizations to make that so. At NIH, we have started this new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. It just started last December, and this is one of its goals. Let me tell you another thing we could do. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to a test a drug to see if it's effective and safe without having to put patients at risk, because that first time you're never quite sure? How do we know, for instance, whether drugs are safe before we give them to people? We test them on animals. And it's not all that reliable, and it's costly, and it's time-consuming. Suppose we could do this instead on human cells. You probably know, if you've been paying attention to some of the science literature that you can now take a skin cell and encourage it to become a liver cell or a heart cell or a kidney cell or a brain cell for any of us. So what if you used those cells as your test for whether a drug is going to work and whether it's going to be safe? Here you see a picture of a lung on a chip. This is something created by the Wyss Institute in Boston, and what they have done here, if we can run the little video, is to take cells from an individual, turn them into the kinds of cells that are present in the lung, and determine what would happen if you added to this various drug compounds to see if they are toxic or safe. You can see this chip even breathes. It has an air channel. It has a blood channel. And it has cells in between that allow you to see what happens when you add a compound. Are those cells happy or not? You can do this same kind of chip technology for kidneys, for hearts, for muscles, all the places where you want to see whether a drug is going to be a problem, for the liver. And ultimately, because you can do this for the individual, we could even see this moving to the point where the ability to develop and test medicines will be you on a chip, what we're trying to say here is the individualizing of the process of developing drugs and testing their safety. So let me sum up. We are in a remarkable moment here. For me, at NIH now for almost 20 years, there has never been a time where there was more excitement about the potential that lies in front of us. We have made all these discoveries pouring out of laboratories across the world. What do we need to capitalize on this? First of all, we need resources. This is research that's high-risk, sometimes high-cost. The payoff is enormous, both in terms of health and in terms of economic growth. We need to support that. Second, we need new kinds of partnerships between academia and government and the private sector and patient organizations, just like the one I've been describing here, in terms of the way in which we could go after repurposing new compounds. And third, and maybe most important, we need talent. We need the best and the brightest from many different disciplines to come and join this effort — all ages, all different groups — because this is the time, folks. This is the 21st-century biology that you've been waiting for, and we have the chance to take that and turn it into something which will, in fact, knock out disease. That's my goal. I hope that's your goal. I think it'll be the goal of the poets and the muppets and the surfers and the bankers and all the other people who join this stage and think about what we're trying to do here and why it matters. It matters for now. It matters as soon as possible. If you don't believe me, just ask Sam. Thank you all very much. (Applause) |
Virtual Choir Live | {0: 'After creating and conducting a worldwide virtual choir on YouTube, Eric Whitacre is now touring with an astonishing live choir.'} | TED2013 | In 1991 I had maybe the most profound and transformative experience of my life. I was in the third year of my seven-year undergraduate degree. I took a couple victory laps in there. And I was on a college choir tour up in Northern California, and we had stopped for the day after all day on the bus, and we were relaxing next to this beautiful idyllic lake in the mountains. And there were crickets and birds and frogs making noise, and as we sat there, over the mountains coming in from the north were these Steven Spielbergian clouds rolling toward us, and as the clouds got about halfway over the valley, so help me God, every single animal in that place stopped making noise at the same time. (Whoosh) This electric hush, as if they could sense what was about to happen. And then the clouds came over us, and then, boom! This massive thunderclap, and sheets of rain. It was just extraordinary, and when I came back home I found a poem by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, and decided to set it to music, a piece for choir called "Cloudburst," which is the piece that we'll perform for you in just a moment. Now fast forward to just three years ago. (Music) And we released to YouTube this, the Virtual Choir Project, 185 singers from 12 different countries. You can see my little video there conducting these people, alone in their dorm rooms or in their living rooms at home. Two years ago, on this very stage, we premiered Virtual Choir 2, 2,052 singers from 58 different countries, this time performing a piece that I had written called "Sleep." And then just last spring we released Virtual Choir 3, "Water Night," another piece that I had written, this time nearly 4,000 singers from 73 different countries. (Music) And when I was speaking to Chris about the future of Virtual Choir and where we might be able to take this, he challenged me to push the technology as far as we possibly could. Could we do this all in real time? Could we have people singing together in real time? And with the help of Skype, that is what we are going to attempt today. Now, we'll perform "Cloudburst" for you. The first half will be performed by the live singers here on stage. I'm joined by singers from Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Fullerton and Riverside Community College, some of the best amateur choirs in the country, and — (Applause) — and in the second half of the piece, the virtual choir will join us, 30 different singers from 30 different countries. Now, we've pushed the technology as far as it can go, but there's still less than a second of latency, but in musical terms, that's a lifetime. We deal in milliseconds. So what I've done is, I've adapted "Cloudburst" so that it embraces the latency and the performers sing into the latency instead of trying to be exactly together. So with deep humility, and for your approval, we present "Cloudburst." (Applause) (Piano) [The rain ...] [Eyes of shadow-water] [eyes of well-water] [eyes of dream-water.] [Blue suns, green whirlwinds,] [birdbeaks of light pecking open] [pomegranate stars.] [But tell me, burnt earth, is there no water?] [Only blood, only dust,] [only naked footsteps on the thorns?] [The rain awakens...] [We must sleep with open eyes,] [we must dream with our hands,] [we must dream the dreams of a river seeking its course,] [of the sun dreaming its worlds.] [We must dream aloud,] [we must sing till the song puts forth roots,] [trunk, branches, birds, stars.] [We must find the lost word,] [and remember what the blood,] [the tides, the earth, and the body say,] [and return to the point of departure...] (Music) (Applause) ["Cloudburst" Octavio Paz][translation by Lysander Kemp, adapted by Eric Whitacre] Eric Whitacre: Beth. Annabelle, where are you? Jacob. (Applause) Thank you. |
We're covered in germs. Let's design for that. | {0: 'Jessica Green wants people to understand the important role microbes play in every facet of our lives: climate change, building ecosystems, human health, even roller derby -- using nontraditional tools like art, animation and film to help people visualize the invisible world.'} | TED2013 | Everything is covered in invisible ecosystems made of tiny lifeforms: bacteria, viruses and fungi. Our desks, our computers, our pencils, our buildings all harbor resident microbial landscapes. As we design these things, we could be thinking about designing these invisible worlds, and also thinking about how they interact with our personal ecosystems. Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes, and these creatures define who we are. The microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods. The microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system. The microbes in your mouth can freshen your breath, or not, and the key thing is that our personal ecosystems interact with ecosystems on everything we touch. So, for example, when you touch a pencil, microbial exchange happens. If we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings, this opens a path to influencing our health in unprecedented ways. I get asked all of the time from people, "Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems?" And I believe the answer is yes. I think we're doing it right now, but we're doing it unconsciously. I'm going to share data with you from one aspect of my research focused on architecture that demonstrates how, through both conscious and unconscious design, we're impacting these invisible worlds. This is the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon, and I worked with a team of architects and biologists to sample over 300 rooms in this building. We wanted to get something like a fossil record of the building, and to do this, we sampled dust. From the dust, we pulled out bacterial cells, broke them open, and compared their gene sequences. This means that people in my group were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project. This is a picture of Tim, who, right when I snapped this picture, reminded me, he said, "Jessica, the last lab group I worked in I was doing fieldwork in the Costa Rican rainforest, and things have changed dramatically for me." So I'm going to show you now first what we found in the offices, and we're going to look at the data through a visualization tool that I've been working on in partnership with Autodesk. The way that you look at this data is, first, look around the outside of the circle. You'll see broad bacterial groups, and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe, it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group. So at 12 o'clock, you'll see that offices have a lot of alphaproteobacteria, and at one o'clock you'll see that bacilli are relatively rare. Let's take a look at what's going on in different space types in this building. If you look inside the restrooms, they all have really similar ecosystems, and if you were to look inside the classrooms, those also have similar ecosystems. But if you look across these space types, you can see that they're fundamentally different from one another. I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest. I told Tim, "If you could just see the microbes, it's kind of like being in Costa Rica. Kind of." And I also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland. This perspective is a really powerful one for designers, because you can bring on principles of ecology, and a really important principle of ecology is dispersal, the way organisms move around. We know that microbes are dispersed around by people and by air. So the very first thing we wanted to do in this building was look at the air system. Mechanical engineers design air handling units to make sure that people are comfortable, that the air flow and temperature is just right. They do this using principles of physics and chemistry, but they could also be using biology. If you look at the microbes in one of the air handling units in this building, you'll see that they're all very similar to one another. And if you compare this to the microbes in a different air handling unit, you'll see that they're fundamentally different. The rooms in this building are like islands in an archipelago, and what that means is that mechanical engineers are like eco-engineers, and they have the ability to structure biomes in this building the way that they want to. Another facet of how microbes get around is by people, and designers often cluster rooms together to facilitate interactions among people, or the sharing of ideas, like in labs and in offices. Given that microbes travel around with people, you might expect to see rooms that are close together have really similar biomes. And that is exactly what we found. If you look at classrooms right adjacent to one another, they have very similar ecosystems, but if you go to an office that is a farther walking distance away, the ecosystem is fundamentally different. And when I see the power that dispersal has on these biogeographic patterns, it makes me think that it's possible to tackle really challenging problems, like hospital-acquired infections. I believe this has got to be, in part, a building ecology problem. All right, I'm going to tell you one more story about this building. I am collaborating with Charlie Brown. He's an architect, and Charlie is deeply concerned about global climate change. He's dedicated his life to sustainable design. When he met me and realized that it was possible for him to study in a quantitative way how his design choices impacted the ecology and biology of this building, he got really excited, because it added a new dimension to what he did. He went from thinking just about energy to also starting to think about human health. He helped design some of the air handling systems in this building and the way it was ventilated. So what I'm first going to show you is air that we sampled outside of the building. What you're looking at is a signature of bacterial communities in the outdoor air, and how they vary over time. Next I'm going to show you what happened when we experimentally manipulated classrooms. We blocked them off at night so that they got no ventilation. A lot of buildings are operated this way, probably where you work, and companies do this to save money on their energy bill. What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnant until Saturday, when we opened the vents up again. When you walked into those rooms, they smelled really bad, and our data suggests that it had something to do with leaving behind the airborne bacterial soup from people the day before. Contrast this to rooms that were designed using a sustainable passive design strategy where air came in from the outside through louvers. In these rooms, the air tracked the outdoor air relatively well, and when Charlie saw this, he got really excited. He felt like he had made a good choice with the design process because it was both energy efficient and it washed away the building's resident microbial landscape. The examples that I just gave you are about architecture, but they're relevant to the design of anything. Imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want in a plane or on a phone. There's a new microbe, I just discovered it. It's called BLIS, and it's been shown to both ward off pathogens and give you good breath. Wouldn't it be awesome if we all had BLIS on our phones? A conscious approach to design, I'm calling it bioinformed design, and I think it's possible. Thank you. (Applause) |
One very dry demo | {0: 'Mark Shaw develops technologies to contain hazardous waste, storm water and radioactives. '} | TED2013 | I'm here to show you how something you can't see can be so much fun to look at. You're about to experience a new, available and exciting technology that's going to make us rethink how we waterproof our lives. What I have here is a cinder block that we've coated half with a nanotechnology spray that can be applied to almost any material. It's called Ultra-Ever Dry, and when you apply it to any material, it turns into a superhydrophobic shield. So this is a cinder block, uncoated, and you can see that it's porous, it absorbs water. Not anymore. Porous, nonporous. So what's superhydrophobic? Superhydrophobic is how we measure a drop of water on a surface. The rounder it is, the more hydrophobic it is, and if it's really round, it's superhydrophobic. A freshly waxed car, the water molecules slump to about 90 degrees. A windshield coating is going to give you about 110 degrees. But what you're seeing here is 160 to 175 degrees, and anything over 150 is superhydrophobic. So as part of the demonstration, what I have is a pair of gloves, and we've coated one of the gloves with the nanotechnology coating, and let's see if you can tell which one, and I'll give you a hint. Did you guess the one that was dry? When you have nanotechnology and nanoscience, what's occurred is that we're able to now look at atoms and molecules and actually control them for great benefits. And we're talking really small here. The way you measure nanotechnology is in nanometers, and one nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and to put some scale to that, if you had a nanoparticle that was one nanometer thick, and you put it side by side, and you had 50,000 of them, you'd be the width of a human hair. So very small, but very useful. And it's not just water that this works with. It's a lot of water-based materials like concrete, water-based paint, mud, and also some refined oils as well. You can see the difference. Moving onto the next demonstration, we've taken a pane of glass and we've coated the outside of it, we've framed it with the nanotechnology coating, and we're going to pour this green-tinted water inside the middle, and you're going to see, it's going to spread out on glass like you'd normally think it would, except when it hits the coating, it stops, and I can't even coax it to leave. It's that afraid of the water. (Applause) So what's going on here? What's happening? Well, the surface of the spray coating is actually filled with nanoparticles that form a very rough and craggly surface. You'd think it'd be smooth, but it's actually not. And it has billions of interstitial spaces, and those spaces, along with the nanoparticles, reach up and grab the air molecules, and cover the surface with air. It's an umbrella of air all across it, and that layer of air is what the water hits, the mud hits, the concrete hits, and it glides right off. So if I put this inside this water here, you can see a silver reflective coating around it, and that silver reflective coating is the layer of air that's protecting the water from touching the paddle, and it's dry. So what are the applications? I mean, many of you right now are probably going through your head. Everyone that sees this gets excited, and says, "Oh, I could use it for this and this and this." The applications in a general sense could be anything that's anti-wetting. We've certainly seen that today. It could be anything that's anti-icing, because if you don't have water, you don't have ice. It could be anti-corrosion. No water, no corrosion. It could be anti-bacterial. Without water, the bacteria won't survive. And it could be things that need to be self-cleaning as well. So imagine how something like this could help revolutionize your field of work. And I'm going to leave you with one last demonstration, but before I do that, I would like to say thank you, and think small. (Applause) It's going to happen. Wait for it. Wait for it. Chris Anderson: You guys didn't hear about us cutting out the Design from TED? (Laughter) [Two minutes later...] He ran into all sorts of problems in terms of managing the medical research part. It's happening! (Applause) |
My invention that made peace with lions | {0: 'Young inventor Richard Turere invented "lion lights," an elegant way to protect his family\'s cattle from lion attacks.'} | TED2013 | This is where I live. I live in Kenya, at the south parts of the Nairobi National Park. Those are my dad's cows at the back, and behind the cows, that's the Nairobi National Park. Nairobi National Park is not fenced in the south widely, which means wild animals like zebras migrate out of the park freely. So predators like lions follow them, and this is what they do. They kill our livestock. This is one of the cows which was killed at night, and I just woke up in the morning and I found it dead, and I felt so bad, because it was the only bull we had. My community, the Maasai, we believe that we came from heaven with all our animals and all the land for herding them, and that's why we value them so much. So I grew up hating lions so much. The morans are the warriors who protect our community and the livestock, and they're also upset about this problem. So they kill the lions. It's one of the six lions which were killed in Nairobi. And I think this is why the Nairobi National Park lions are few. So a boy, from six to nine years old, in my community is responsible for his dad's cows, and that's the same thing which happened to me. So I had to find a way of solving this problem. And the first idea I got was to use fire, because I thought lions were scared of fire. But I came to realize that that didn't really help, because it was even helping the lions to see through the cowshed. So I didn't give up. I continued. And a second idea I got was to use a scarecrow. I was trying to trick the lions [into thinking] that I was standing near the cowshed. But lions are very clever. (Laughter) They will come the first day and they see the scarecrow, and they go back, but the second day, they'll come and they say, this thing is not moving here, it's always here. (Laughter) So he jumps in and kills the animals. So one night, I was walking around the cowshed with a torch, and that day, the lions didn't come. And I discovered that lions are afraid of a moving light. So I had an idea. Since I was a small boy, I used to work in my room for the whole day, and I even took apart my mom's new radio, and that day she almost killed me, but I learned a lot about electronics. (Laughter) So I got an old car battery, an indicator box. It's a small device found in a motorcycle, and it helps motorists when they want to turn right or left. It blinks. And I got a switch where I can switch on the lights, on and off. And that's a small torch from a broken flashlight. So I set up everything. As you can see, the solar panel charges the battery, and the battery supplies the power to the small indicator box. I call it a transformer. And the indicator box makes the lights flash. As you can see, the bulbs face outside, because that's where the lions come from. And that's how it looks to lions when they come at night. The lights flash and trick the lions into thinking I was walking around the cowshed, but I was sleeping in my bed. (Laughter) (Applause) Thanks. So I set it up in my home two years ago, and since then, we have never experienced any problem with lions. And my neighboring homes heard about this idea. One of them was this grandmother. She had a lot of her animals being killed by lions, and she asked me if I could put the lights for her. And I said, "Yes." So I put the lights. You can see at the back, those are the lion lights. Since now, I've set up seven homes around my community, and they're really working. And my idea is also being used now all over Kenya for scaring other predators like hyenas, leopards, and it's also being used to scare elephants away from people's farms. Because of this invention, I was lucky to get a scholarship in one of the best schools in Kenya, Brookhouse International School, and I'm really excited about this. My new school now is coming in and helping by fundraising and creating an awareness. I even took my friends back to my community, and we're installing the lights to the homes which don't have [any], and I'm teaching them how to put them. So one year ago, I was just a boy in the savanna grassland herding my father's cows, and I used to see planes flying over, and I told myself that one day, I'll be there inside. And here I am today. I got a chance to come by plane for my first time for TED. So my big dream is to become an aircraft engineer and pilot when I grow up. I used to hate lions, but now because my invention is saving my father's cows and the lions, we are able to stay with the lions without any conflict. Ashê olên. It means in my language, thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: You have no idea how exciting it is to hear a story like yours. So you got this scholarship.Richard Turere: Yep. CA: You're working on other electrical inventions. What's the next one on your list? RT: My next invention is, I want to make an electric fence.CA: Electric fence? RT: But I know electric fences are already invented, but I want to make mine. (Laughter) CA: You already tried it once, right, and you —RT: I tried it before, but I stopped because it gave me a shock. (Laughter) CA: In the trenches. Richard Turere, you are something else. We're going to cheer you on every step of the way, my friend. Thank you so much.RT: Thank you. (Applause) |
When you're making a deal, what's going on in your brain? | {0: 'Colin Camerer is a leading behavioral economist who studies the psychological and neural bases of choice and strategic decision-making.'} | TEDxCaltech | I'm going to talk about the strategizing brain. We're going to use an unusual combination of tools from game theory and neuroscience to understand how people interact socially when value is on the line. So game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone's actions affect everyone else. That's a lot of things: competition, cooperation, bargaining, games like hide-and-seek, and poker. Here's a simple game to get us started. Everyone chooses a number from zero to 100, we're going to compute the average of those numbers, and whoever's closest to two-thirds of the average wins a fixed prize. So you want to be a little bit below the average number, but not too far below, and everyone else wants to be a little bit below the average number as well. Think about what you might pick. As you're thinking, this is a toy model of something like selling in the stock market during a rising market. Right? You don't want to sell too early, because you miss out on profits, but you don't want to wait too late to when everyone else sells, triggering a crash. You want to be a little bit ahead of the competition, but not too far ahead. Okay, here's two theories about how people might think about this, and then we'll see some data. Some of these will sound familiar because you probably are thinking that way. I'm using my brain theory to see. A lot of people say, "I really don't know what people are going to pick, so I think the average will be 50." They're not being really strategic at all. "And I'll pick two-thirds of 50. That's 33." That's a start. Other people who are a little more sophisticated, using more working memory, say, "I think people will pick 33 because they're going to pick a response to 50, and so I'll pick 22, which is two-thirds of 33." They're doing one extra step of thinking, two steps. That's better. And of course, in principle, you could do three, four or more, but it starts to get very difficult. Just like in language and other domains, we know that it's hard for people to parse very complex sentences with a kind of recursive structure. This is called a cognitive hierarchy theory, by the way. It's something that I've worked on and a few other people, and it indicates a kind of hierarchy along with some assumptions about how many people stop at different steps and how the steps of thinking are affected by lots of interesting variables and variant people, as we'll see in a minute. A very different theory, a much more popular one, and an older one, due largely to John Nash of "A Beautiful Mind" fame, is what's called equilibrium analysis. So if you've ever taken a game theory course at any level, you will have learned a little bit about this. An equilibrium is a mathematical state in which everybody has figured out exactly what everyone else will do. It is a very useful concept, but behaviorally, it may not exactly explain what people do the first time they play these types of economic games or in situations in the outside world. In this case, the equilibrium makes a very bold prediction, which is everyone wants to be below everyone else, therefore they'll play zero. Let's see what happens. This experiment's been done many, many times. Some of the earliest ones were done in the '90s by me and Rosemarie Nagel and others. This is a beautiful data set of 9,000 people who wrote in to three newspapers and magazines that had a contest. The contest said, send in your numbers and whoever is close to two-thirds of the average will win a big prize. And as you can see, there's so much data here, you can see the spikes very visibly. There's a spike at 33. Those are people doing one step. There is another spike visible at 22. And notice, by the way, that most people pick numbers right around there. They don't necessarily pick exactly 33 and 22. There's something a little bit noisy around it. But you can see those spikes, and they're there. There's another group of people who seem to have a firm grip on equilibrium analysis, because they're picking zero or one. But they lose, right? Because picking a number that low is actually a bad choice if other people aren't doing equilibrium analysis as well. So they're smart, but poor. (Laughter) Where are these things happening in the brain? One study by Coricelli and Nagel gives a really sharp, interesting answer. So they had people play this game while they were being scanned in an fMRI, and two conditions: in some trials, they're told you're playing another person who's playing right now and we're going to match up your behavior at the end and pay you if you win. In the other trials, they're told, you're playing a computer. They're just choosing randomly. So what you see here is a subtraction of areas in which there's more brain activity when you're playing people compared to playing the computer. And you see activity in some regions we've seen today, medial prefrontal cortex, dorsomedial, however, up here, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, an area that's involved in lots of types of conflict resolution, like if you're playing "Simon Says," and also the right and left temporoparietal junction. And these are all areas which are fairly reliably known to be part of what's called a "theory of mind" circuit, or "mentalizing circuit." That is, it's a circuit that's used to imagine what other people might do. So these were some of the first studies to see this tied in to game theory. What happens with these one- and two-step types? So we classify people by what they picked, and then we look at the difference between playing humans versus playing computers, which brain areas are differentially active. On the top you see the one-step players. There's almost no difference. The reason is, they're treating other people like a computer, and the brain is too. The bottom players, you see all the activity in dorsomedial PFC. So we know that those two-step players are doing something differently. Now if you were to step back and say, "What can we do with this information?" you might be able to look at brain activity and say, "This person's going to be a good poker player," or, "This person's socially naive," and we might also be able to study things like development of adolescent brains once we have an idea of where this circuitry exists. Okay. Get ready. I'm saving you some brain activity, because you don't need to use your hair detector cells. You should use those cells to think carefully about this game. This is a bargaining game. Two players who are being scanned using EEG electrodes are going to bargain over one to six dollars. If they can do it in 10 seconds, they're going to actually earn that money. If 10 seconds goes by and they haven't made a deal, they get nothing. That's kind of a mistake together. The twist is that one player, on the left, is informed about how much on each trial there is. They play lots of trials with different amounts each time. In this case, they know there's four dollars. The uninformed player doesn't know, but they know that the informed player knows. So the uninformed player's challenge is to say, "Is this guy really being fair or are they giving me a very low offer in order to get me to think that there's only one or two dollars available to split?" in which case they might reject it and not come to a deal. So there's some tension here between trying to get the most money but trying to goad the other player into giving you more. And the way they bargain is to point on a number line that goes from zero to six dollars, and they're bargaining over how much the uninformed player gets, and the informed player's going to get the rest. So this is like a management-labor negotiation in which the workers don't know how much profits the privately held company has, right, and they want to maybe hold out for more money, but the company might want to create the impression that there's very little to split: "I'm giving you the most that I can." First some behavior. So a bunch of the subject pairs, they play face to face. We have some other data where they play across computers. That's an interesting difference, as you might imagine. But a bunch of the face-to-face pairs agree to divide the money evenly every single time. Boring. It's just not interesting neurally. It's good for them. They make a lot of money. But we're interested in, can we say something about when disagreements occur versus don't occur? So this is the other group of subjects who often disagree. So they have a chance of — they bicker and disagree and end up with less money. They might be eligible to be on "Real Housewives," the TV show. You see on the left, when the amount to divide is one, two or three dollars, they disagree about half the time, and when the amount is four, five, six, they agree quite often. This turns out to be something that's predicted by a very complicated type of game theory you should come to graduate school at CalTech and learn about. It's a little too complicated to explain right now, but the theory tells you that this shape kind of should occur. Your intuition might tell you that too. Now I'm going to show you the results from the EEG recording. Very complicated. The right brain schematic is the uninformed person, and the left is the informed. Remember that we scanned both brains at the same time, so we can ask about time-synced activity in similar or different areas simultaneously, just like if you wanted to study a conversation and you were scanning two people talking to each other and you'd expect common activity in language regions when they're actually kind of listening and communicating. So the arrows connect regions that are active at the same time, and the direction of the arrows flows from the region that's active first in time, and the arrowhead goes to the region that's active later. So in this case, if you look carefully, most of the arrows flow from right to left. That is, it looks as if the uninformed brain activity is happening first, and then it's followed by activity in the informed brain. And by the way, these were trials where their deals were made. This is from the first two seconds. We haven't finished analyzing this data, so we're still peeking in, but the hope is that we can say something in the first couple of seconds about whether they'll make a deal or not, which could be very useful in thinking about avoiding litigation and ugly divorces and things like that. Those are all cases in which a lot of value is lost by delay and strikes. Here's the case where the disagreements occur. You can see it looks different than the one before. There's a lot more arrows. That means that the brains are synced up more closely in terms of simultaneous activity, and the arrows flow clearly from left to right. That is, the informed brain seems to be deciding, "We're probably not going to make a deal here." And then later there's activity in the uninformed brain. Next I'm going to introduce you to some relatives. They're hairy, smelly, fast and strong. You might be thinking back to your last Thanksgiving. Maybe if you had a chimpanzee with you. Charles Darwin and I and you broke off from the family tree from chimpanzees about five million years ago. They're still our closest genetic kin. We share 98.8 percent of the genes. We share more genes with them than zebras do with horses. And we're also their closest cousin. They have more genetic relation to us than to gorillas. So how humans and chimpanzees behave differently might tell us a lot about brain evolution. So this is an amazing memory test from Nagoya, Japan, Primate Research Institute, where they've done a lot of this research. This goes back quite a ways. They're interested in working memory. The chimp is going to see, watch carefully, they're going to see 200 milliseconds' exposure — that's fast, that's eight movie frames — of numbers one, two, three, four, five. Then they disappear and they're replaced by squares, and they have to press the squares that correspond to the numbers from low to high to get an apple reward. Let's see how they can do it. This is a young chimp. The young ones are better than the old ones, just like humans. And they're highly experienced, so they've done this thousands and thousands of time. Obviously there's a big training effect, as you can imagine. (Laughter) You can see they're very blasé and kind of effortless. Not only can they do it very well, they do it in a sort of lazy way. Right? Who thinks you could beat the chimps? Wrong. (Laughter) We can try. We'll try. Maybe we'll try. Okay, so the next part of this study I'm going to go quickly through is based on an idea of Tetsuro Matsuzawa. He had a bold idea that — what he called the cognitive trade-off hypothesis. We know chimps are faster and stronger. They're also very obsessed with status. His thought was, maybe they've preserved brain activities and they practice them in development that are really, really important to them to negotiate status and to win, which is something like strategic thinking during competition. So we're going to check that out by having the chimps actually play a game by touching two touch screens. The chimps are actually interacting with each other through the computers. They're going to press left or right. One chimp is called a matcher. They win if they press left, left, like a seeker finding someone in hide-and-seek, or right, right. The mismatcher wants to mismatch. They want to press the opposite screen of the chimp. And the rewards are apple cube rewards. So here's how game theorists look at these data. This is a graph of the percentage of times the matcher picked right on the x-axis, and the percentage of times they predicted right by the mismatcher on the y-axis. So a point here is the behavior by a pair of players, one trying to match, one trying to mismatch. The NE square in the middle — actually NE, CH and QRE — those are three different theories of Nash equilibrium, and others, tells you what the theory predicts, which is that they should match 50-50, because if you play left too much, for example, I can exploit that if I'm the mismatcher by then playing right. And as you can see, the chimps, each chimp is one triangle, are circled around, hovering around that prediction. Now we move the payoffs. We're actually going to make the left, left payoff for the matcher a little bit higher. Now they get three apple cubes. Game theoretically, that should actually make the mismatcher's behavior shift, because what happens is, the mismatcher will think, oh, this guy's going to go for the big reward, and so I'm going to go to the right, make sure he doesn't get it. And as you can see, their behavior moves up in the direction of this change in the Nash equilibrium. Finally, we changed the payoffs one more time. Now it's four apple cubes, and their behavior again moves towards the Nash equilibrium. It's sprinkled around, but if you average the chimps out, they're really, really close, within .01. They're actually closer than any species we've observed. What about humans? You think you're smarter than a chimpanzee? Here's two human groups in green and blue. They're closer to 50-50. They're not responding to payoffs as closely, and also if you study their learning in the game, they aren't as sensitive to previous rewards. The chimps are playing better than the humans, better in the sense of adhering to game theory. And these are two different groups of humans from Japan and Africa. They replicate quite nicely. None of them are close to where the chimps are. So here are some things we learned today. People seem to do a limited amount of strategic thinking using theory of mind. We have some preliminary evidence from bargaining that early warning signs in the brain might be used to predict whether there will be a bad disagreement that costs money, and chimps are better competitors than humans, as judged by game theory. Thank you. (Applause) |
The technology of touch | {0: 'Katherine Kuchenbecker works on incorporating the sense of touch directly into virtual objects. Imagine being able to feel textures on your digital screens.'} | TEDYouth 2012 | I'm a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and my favorite hobby is photography. And as I travel around the world, I love taking photographs like these, so I can remember all the beautiful and interesting things that I've seen. But what I can't do is record and share how these objects feel to touch. And that's kind of surprising, because your sense of touch is really important. It's involved in every physical interaction you do every day, every manipulation task, anything you do in the world. So the sense of touch is actually pretty interesting. It has two main components. The first is tactile sensations, things you feel in your skin. And the second is kinesthetic sensations. This has to do with the position of your body and how it's moving, and the forces you encounter. And you're really good at incorporating both of these types of sensations together to understand the physical interactions you have with the world and understand as you touch a surface: is it a rock, is it a cat, is it a bunny, what is it? And so, as an engineer, I'm really fascinated and I have a lot of respect for how good people are with their hands. And I'm intrigued and curious about whether we could make technology better by doing a better job at leveraging the human capability with the sense of touch. Could I improve the interfaces to computers and machines by letting you take advantage of your hands? And indeed, I think we can, and that's at the core of a field called haptics, and this is the area that I work in. It's all about interactive touch technology. And the way it works is, as you move your body through the world, if, as an engineer, I can make a system that can measure that motion, and then present to you sensations over time that kind of make sense, that match up with what you might feel in the real world, I can fool you into thinking you're touching something even though there's nothing there. So here are three examples and these are all done from research in my lab at Penn. The first one is all about that same problem that I was showing you: how can we capture how objects feel and recreate those experiences? So the way we solve this problem is by creating a hand-held tool that has many different sensors inside. It has a force sensor, so we can tell how hard you're pushing; it has motion tracking, so we can tell exactly where you've moved it; and it has a vibration sensor, an accelerometer, inside, that detects the shaking back and forth of the tool that lets you know that's a piece of canvas and not a piece of silk or something else. Then we take the data we record from these interactions. Here's ten seconds of data. You can see how the vibrations get larger and smaller, depending on how you move. And we make a mathematical model of those relationships and program them into a tablet computer so that when you take the stylus and go and touch the screen, that voice-coil actuator in the white bracket plays vibrations to give you the illusion that you're touching the real surface, just like if you touched, dragged back and forth, on the real canvas. We can create very compelling illusions. We can do this for all kinds of surfaces and it's really a lot of fun. We call it haptography — haptic photography. And I think it has potential benefits in all sorts of areas like online shopping, maybe interactive museum exhibits, where you're not supposed to touch the precious artifacts, but you always want to. The second example I want to tell you about comes from a collaboration I have with Dr. Margrit Maggio at the Penn Dental School. Part of her job is to teach dental students how to tell where in a patient's mouth there are cavities. Of course they look at X-rays, but a large part of this clinical judgment comes from what they feel when they touch your teeth with a dental explorer. You've all had this happen, they go across. What they're feeling for is if the tooth is really hard, then it's healthy, but if it's kind of soft and sticky, that's a signal that the enamel is starting to decay. These types of judgments are hard for a new dental student to make, because they haven't touched a lot of teeth yet. And you want them to learn this before they start practicing on real human patients. So what we do is add an accelerometer on to the dental explorer, and then we record what Dr. Maggio feels as she touches different extracted teeth. And we can play it back for you as a video with a touch track — not just a sound track, but also a touch track, that you can feel by holding that repeating tool. You feel the same things the dentist felt when they did the recording, and practice making judgments. So here's a sample one. Here's a tooth that looks kind of suspicious, right? It has all those brown stains. You might be thinking, "We should definitely put a filling in this tooth." But if you pay attention to how it feels, all the surfaces of this tooth are hard and healthy, so this patient does not need a filling. And these are exactly the kind of judgments doctors make every day and I think this technology we've invented has a lot of potential for many different things in medical training, because it's really simple and it does a great job at recreating what people feel through tools. I think it could also help make games more interactive and fun and more realistic in the sensations that you feel. The last example I want to tell you about is again about human movement. So if any of you have ever learned sports, how do you get good at something like surfing? You practice. You practice some more and more, right? Making small corrections, maybe getting some input from a coach, learning how to improve your motions. I think we could use computers to help make that process more efficient and more fun. And so here, for example, if I have six different arm movements that I want you to learn, you come into my lab at Penn and try out our system. We use a Kinect to measure your motions, we show graphics on the screen, and then we also give you touch cues, haptic feedback on your arm, delivered by these haptic arm bands which have motors inside, and guide you as you move. So, if we put it together, as you're trying to track this motion, if you deviate — say, maybe, your arm is a little too high — we turn on the motors right there on the skin to let you know you should move down, almost like a coach gently guiding you and helping you master these movements more quickly and make more precise corrections. We developed this system for use in stroke rehabilitation, but I think there are a lot of applications, like maybe dance training or all sorts of sports training as well. So now you know a little bit about the field of haptics, which I think you'll hear more about in the coming years. I've shown you three examples. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the great students who work with me in my lab at Penn and my collaborators. They're a great group. I also want to thank you for your kind attention. (Applause) |
How a dead duck changed my life | {0: 'Kees Moeliker writes and speaks about natural history, especially birds and remarkable animal behavior, as well as improbable research and science-communication-with-a-laugh.'} | TED2013 | This is the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, where I work as a curator. It's my job to make sure the collection stays okay, and that it grows, and basically it means I collect dead animals. Back in 1995, we got a new wing next to the museum. It was made of glass, and this building really helped me to do my job good. The building was a true bird-killer. You may know that birds don't understand the concept of glass. They don't see it, so they fly into the windows and get killed. The only thing I had to do was go out, pick them up, and have them stuffed for the collection. (Laughter) And in those days, I developed an ear to identify birds just by the sound of the bangs they made against the glass. And it was on June 5, 1995, that I heard a loud bang against the glass that changed my life and ended that of a duck. And this is what I saw when I looked out of the window. This is the dead duck. It flew against the window. It's laying dead on its belly. But next to the dead duck is a live duck, and please pay attention. Both are of the male sex. And then this happened. The live duck mounted the dead duck, and started to copulate. Well, I'm a biologist. I'm an ornithologist. I said, "Something's wrong here." One is dead, one is alive. That must be necrophilia. I look. Both are of the male sex. Homosexual necrophilia. So I — (Laughter) I took my camera, I took my notebook, took a chair, and started to observe this behavior. After 75 minutes — (Laughter) — I had seen enough, and I got hungry, and I wanted to go home. So I went out, collected the duck, and before I put it in the freezer, I checked if the victim was indeed of the male sex. And here's a rare picture of a duck's penis, so it was indeed of the male sex. It's a rare picture because there are 10,000 species of birds and only 300 possess a penis. [The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves:Anatidae)] I knew I'd seen something special, but it took me six years to decide to publish it. (Laughter) I mean, it's a nice topic for a birthday party or at the coffee machine, but to share this among your peers is something different. I didn't have the framework. So after six years, my friends and colleagues urged me to publish, so I published "The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard." And here's the situation again. A is my office, B is the place where the duck hit the glass, and C is from where I watched it. And here are the ducks again. As you probably know, in science, when you write a kind of special paper, only six or seven people read it. (Laughter) But then something good happened. I got a phone call from a person called Marc Abrahams, and he told me, "You've won a prize with your duck paper: the Ig Nobel Prize." And the Ig Nobel Prize — (Laughter) (Applause) — the Ig Nobel Prize honors research that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think, with the ultimate goal to make more people interested in science. That's a good thing, so I accepted the prize. (Laughter) I went — let me remind you that Marc Abrahams didn't call me from Stockholm. He called me from Cambridge, Massachusetts. So I traveled to Boston, to Cambridge, and I went to this wonderful Ig Nobel Prize ceremony held at Harvard University, and this ceremony is a very nice experience. Real Nobel laureates hand you the prize. That's the first thing. And there are nine other winners who get prizes. Here's one of my fellow winners. That's Charles Paxton who won the 2000 biology prize for his paper, "Courtship behavior of ostriches towards humans under farming conditions in Britain." (Laughter) And I think there are one or two more Ig Nobel Prize winners in this room. Dan, where are you? Dan Ariely? Applause for Dan. (Applause) Dan won his prize in medicine for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine works better than low-priced fake medicine. (Laughter) So here's my one minute of fame, my acceptance speech, and here's the duck. This is its first time on the U.S. West Coast. I'm going to pass it around. (Laughter) Yeah? You can pass it around. Please note it's a museum specimen, but there's no chance you'll get the avian flu. After winning this prize, my life changed. In the first place, people started to send me all kinds of duck-related things, and I got a real nice collection. (Laughter) More importantly, people started to send me their observations of remarkable animal behavior, and believe me, if there's an animal misbehaving on this planet, I know about it. (Laughter) This is a moose. It's a moose trying to copulate with a bronze statue of a bison. This is in Montana, 2008. This is a frog that tries to copulate with a goldfish. This is the Netherlands, 2011. These are cane toads in Australia. This is roadkill. Please note that this is necrophilia. It's remarkable: the position. The missionary position is very rare in the animal kingdom. These are pigeons in Rotterdam. Barn swallows in Hong Kong, 2004. This is a turkey in Wisconsin on the premises of the Ethan Allen juvenile correctional institution. It took all day, and the prisoners had a great time. So what does this mean? I mean, the question I ask myself, why does this happen in nature? Well, what I concluded from reviewing all these cases is that it is important that this happens only when death is instant and in a dramatic way and in the right position for copulation. At least, I thought it was till I got these slides. And here you see a dead duck. It's been there for three days, and it's laying on its back. So there goes my theory of necrophilia. Another example of the impact of glass buildings on the life of birds. This is Mad Max, a blackbird who lives in Rotterdam. The only thing this bird did was fly against this window from 2004 to 2008, day in and day out. Here he goes, and here's a short video. (Music) (Clunk) (Clunk) (Clunk) (Clunk) So what this bird does is fight his own image. He sees an intruder in his territory, and it's coming all the time and he's there, so there is no end to it. And I thought, in the beginning — I studied this bird for a couple of years — that, well, shouldn't the brain of this bird be damaged? It's not. I show you here some slides, some frames from the video, and at the last moment before he hits the glass, he puts his feet in front, and then he bangs against the glass. So I'll conclude to invite you all to Dead Duck Day. That's on June 5 every year. At five minutes to six in the afternoon, we come together at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, the duck comes out of the museum, and we try to discuss new ways to prevent birds from colliding with windows. And as you know, or as you may not know, this is one of the major causes of death for birds in the world. In the U.S. alone, a billion birds die in collision with glass buildings. And when it's over, we go to a Chinese restaurant and we have a six-course duck dinner. So I hope to see you next year in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for Dead Duck Day. Thank you. (Applause) Oh, sorry. May I have my duck back, please? (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. |
A skateboard, with a boost | {0: "Sanjay Dastoor is the co-founder of Boosted Boards, a startup that aims to build the world's lightest electric vehicles."} | TED2013 | Today I'm going to show you an electric vehicle that weighs less than a bicycle, that you can carry with you anywhere, that you can charge off a normal wall outlet in 15 minutes, and you can run it for 1,000 kilometers on about a dollar of electricity. But when I say the word electric vehicle, people think about vehicles. They think about cars and motorcycles and bicycles, and the vehicles that you use every day. But if you come about it from a different perspective, you can create some more interesting, more novel concepts. So we built something. I've got some of the pieces in my pocket here. So this is the motor. This motor has enough power to take you up the hills of San Francisco at about 20 miles per hour, about 30 kilometers an hour, and this battery, this battery right here has about six miles of range, or 10 kilometers, which is enough to cover about half of the car trips in the U.S. alone. But the best part about these components is that we bought them at a toy store. These are from remote control airplanes. And the performance of these things has gotten so good that if you think about vehicles a little bit differently, you can really change things. So today we're going to show you one example of how you can use this. Pay attention to not only how fun this thing is, but also how the portability that comes with this can totally change the way you interact with a city like San Francisco. (Music) [6 Mile Range] [Top Speed Near 20mph] [Uphill Climbing] [Regenerative Braking] (Applause) (Cheers) So we're going to show you what this thing can do. It's really maneuverable. You have a hand-held remote, so you can pretty easily control acceleration, braking, go in reverse if you like, also have braking. It's incredible just how light this thing is. I mean, this is something you can pick up and carry with you anywhere you go. So I'll leave you with one of the most compelling facts about this technology and these kinds of vehicles. This uses 20 times less energy for every mile or kilometer that you travel than a car, which means not only is this thing fast to charge and really cheap to build, but it also reduces the footprint of your energy use in terms of your transportation. So instead of looking at large amounts of energy needed for each person in this room to get around in a city, now you can look at much smaller amounts and more sustainable transportation. So next time you think about a vehicle, I hope, like us, you're thinking about something new. Thank you. (Applause) |
We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim | {0: "Lawrence Lessig has already transformed intellectual-property law with his Creative Commons innovation. Now he's focused on an even bigger problem: The US' broken political system."} | TED2013 | Once upon a time, there was a place called Lesterland. Now Lesterland looks a lot like the United States. Like the United States, it has about 311 million people, and of that 311 million people, it turns out 144,000 are called Lester. If Matt's in the audience, I just borrowed that, I'll return it in a second, this character from your series. So 144,000 are called Lester, which means about .05 percent is named Lester. Now, Lesters in Lesterland have this extraordinary power. There are two elections every election cycle in Lesterland. One is called the general election. The other is called the Lester election. And in the general election, it's the citizens who get to vote, but in the Lester election, it's the Lesters who get to vote. And here's the trick. In order to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the Lester election. You don't necessarily have to win, but you must do extremely well. Now, what can we say about democracy in Lesterland? What we can say, number one, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, that people have the ultimate influence over elected officials, because, after all, there is a general election, but only after the Lesters have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in the general election. And number two, obviously, this dependence upon the Lesters is going to produce a subtle, understated, we could say camouflaged, bending to keep the Lesters happy. Okay, so we have a democracy, no doubt, but it's dependent upon the Lesters and dependent upon the people. It has competing dependencies, we could say conflicting dependencies, depending upon who the Lesters are. Okay. That's Lesterland. Now there are three things I want you to see now that I've described Lesterland. Number one, the United States is Lesterland. The United States is Lesterland. The United States also looks like this, also has two elections, one we called the general election, the second we should call the money election. In the general election, it's the citizens who get to vote, if you're over 18, in some states if you have an ID. In the money election, it's the funders who get to vote, the funders who get to vote, and just like in Lesterland, the trick is, to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the money election. You don't necessarily have to win. There is Jerry Brown. But you must do extremely well. And here's the key: There are just as few relevant funders in USA-land as there are Lesters in Lesterland. Now you say, really? Really .05 percent? Well, here are the numbers from 2010: .26 percent of America gave 200 dollars or more to any federal candidate, .05 percent gave the maximum amount to any federal candidate, .01 percent — the one percent of the one percent — gave 10,000 dollars or more to federal candidates, and in this election cycle, my favorite statistic is .000042 percent — for those of you doing the numbers, you know that's 132 Americans — gave 60 percent of the Super PAC money spent in the cycle we have just seen ending. So I'm just a lawyer, I look at this range of numbers, and I say it's fair for me to say it's .05 percent who are our relevant funders in America. In this sense, the funders are our Lesters. Now, what can we say about this democracy in USA-land? Well, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, we could say, of course the people have the ultimate influence over the elected officials. We have a general election, but only after the funders have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in that general election. And number two, obviously, this dependence upon the funders produces a subtle, understated, camouflaged bending to keep the funders happy. Candidates for Congress and members of Congress spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time raising money to get back to Congress or to get their party back into power, and the question we need to ask is, what does it do to them, these humans, as they spend their time behind the telephone, calling people they've never met, but calling the tiniest slice of the one percent? As anyone would, as they do this, they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money. They become, in the words of "The X-Files," shape-shifters, as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money, not on issues one to 10, but on issues 11 to 1,000. Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia, describes that when she went to Congress, she was told by a colleague, "Always lean to the green." Then to clarify, she went on, "He was not an environmentalist." (Laughter) So here too we have a democracy, a democracy dependent upon the funders and dependent upon the people, competing dependencies, possibly conflicting dependencies depending upon who the funders are. Okay, the United States is Lesterland, point number one. Here's point number two. The United States is worse than Lesterland, worse than Lesterland because you can imagine in Lesterland if we Lesters got a letter from the government that said, "Hey, you get to pick who gets to run in the general election," we would think maybe of a kind of aristocracy of Lesters. You know, there are Lesters from every part of social society. There are rich Lesters, poor Lesters, black Lesters, white Lesters, not many women Lesters, but put that to the side for one second. We have Lesters from everywhere. We could think, "What could we do to make Lesterland better?" It's at least possible the Lesters would act for the good of Lesterland. But in our land, in this land, in USA-land, there are certainly some sweet Lesters out there, many of them in this room here today, but the vast majority of Lesters act for the Lesters, because the shifting coalitions that are comprising the .05 percent are not comprising it for the public interest. It's for their private interest. In this sense, the USA is worse than Lesterland. And finally, point number three: Whatever one wants to say about Lesterland, against the background of its history, its traditions, in our land, in USA-land, Lesterland is a corruption, a corruption. Now, by corruption I don't mean brown paper bag cash secreted among members of Congress. I don't mean Rod Blagojevich sense of corruption. I don't mean any criminal act. The corruption I'm talking about is perfectly legal. It's a corruption relative to the framers' baseline for this republic. The framers gave us what they called a republic, but by a republic they meant a representative democracy, and by a representative democracy, they meant a government, as Madison put it in Federalist 52, that would have a branch that would be dependent upon the people alone. So here's the model of government. They have the people and the government with this exclusive dependency, but the problem here is that Congress has evolved a different dependence, no longer a dependence upon the people alone, increasingly a dependence upon the funders. Now this is a dependence too, but it's different and conflicting from a dependence upon the people alone so long as the funders are not the people. This is a corruption. Now, there's good news and bad news about this corruption. One bit of good news is that it's bipartisan, equal-opportunity corruption. It blocks the left on a whole range of issues that we on the left really care about. It blocks the right too, as it makes principled arguments of the right increasingly impossible. So the right wants smaller government. When Al Gore was Vice President, his team had an idea for deregulating a significant portion of the telecommunications industry. The chief policy man took this idea to Capitol Hill, and as he reported back to me, the response was, "Hell no! If we deregulate these guys, how are we going to raise money from them?" This is a system that's designed to save the status quo, including the status quo of big and invasive government. It works against the left and the right, and that, you might say, is good news. But here's the bad news. It's a pathological, democracy-destroying corruption, because in any system where the members are dependent upon the tiniest fraction of us for their election, that means the tiniest number of us, the tiniest, tiniest number of us, can block reform. I know that should have been, like, a rock or something. I can only find cheese. I'm sorry. So there it is. Block reform. Because there is an economy here, an economy of influence, an economy with lobbyists at the center which feeds on polarization. It feeds on dysfunction. The worse that it is for us, the better that it is for this fundraising. Henry David Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." This is the root. Okay, now, every single one of you knows this. You couldn't be here if you didn't know this, yet you ignore it. You ignore it. This is an impossible problem. You focus on the possible problems, like eradicating polio from the world, or taking an image of every single street across the globe, or building the first real universal translator, or building a fusion factory in your garage. These are the manageable problems, so you ignore — (Laughter) (Applause) — so you ignore this corruption. But we cannot ignore this corruption anymore. (Applause) We need a government that works. And not works for the left or the right, but works for the left and the right, the citizens of the left and right, because there is no sensible reform possible until we end this corruption. So I want you to take hold, to grab the issue you care the most about. Climate change is mine, but it might be financial reform or a simpler tax system or inequality. Grab that issue, sit it down in front of you, look straight in its eyes, and tell it there is no Christmas this year. There will never be a Christmas. We will never get your issue solved until we fix this issue first. So it's not that mine is the most important issue. It's not. Yours is the most important issue, but mine is the first issue, the issue we have to solve before we get to fix the issues you care about. No sensible reform, and we cannot afford a world, a future, with no sensible reform. Okay. So how do we do it? Turns out, the analytics here are easy, simple. If the problem is members spending an extraordinary amount of time fundraising from the tiniest slice of America, the solution is to have them spend less time fundraising but fundraise from a wider slice of Americans, to spread it out, to spread the funder influence so that we restore the idea of dependence upon the people alone. And to do this does not require a constitutional amendment, changing the First Amendment. To do this would require a single statute, a statute establishing what we think of as small dollar funded elections, a statute of citizen-funded campaigns, and there's any number of these proposals out there: Fair Elections Now Act, the American Anti-Corruption Act, an idea in my book that I call the Grant and Franklin Project to give vouchers to people to fund elections, an idea of John Sarbanes called the Grassroots Democracy Act. Each of these would fix this corruption by spreading out the influence of funders to all of us. The analytics are easy here. It's the politics that's hard, indeed impossibly hard, because this reform would shrink K Street, and Capitol Hill, as Congressman Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee, put it, has become a farm league for K Street, a farm league for K Street. Members and staffers and bureaucrats have an increasingly common business model in their head, a business model focused on their life after government, their life as lobbyists. Fifty percent of the Senate between 1998 and 2004 left to become lobbyists, 42 percent of the House. Those numbers have only gone up, and as United Republic calculated last April, the average increase in salary for those who they tracked was 1,452 percent. So it's fair to ask, how is it possible for them to change this? Now I get this skepticism. I get this cynicism. I get this sense of impossibility. But I don't buy it. This is a solvable issue. If you think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the 20th century, issues like racism, or sexism, or the issue that we've been fighting in this century, homophobia, those are hard issues. You don't wake up one day no longer a racist. It takes generations to tear that intuition, that DNA, out of the soul of a people. But this is a problem of just incentives, just incentives. Change the incentives, and the behavior changes, and the states that have adopted small dollar funded systems have seen overnight a change in the practice. When Connecticut adopted this system, in the very first year, 78 percent of elected representatives gave up large contributions and took small contributions only. It's solvable, not by being a Democrat, not by being a Republican. It's solvable by being citizens, by being citizens, by being TEDizens. Because if you want to kickstart reform, look, I could kickstart reform at half the price of fixing energy policy, I could give you back a republic. Okay. But even if you're not yet with me, even if you believe this is impossible, what the five years since I spoke at TED has taught me as I've spoken about this issue again and again is, even if you think it's impossible, that is irrelevant. Irrelevant. I spoke at Dartmouth once, and a woman stood up after I spoke, I write in my book, and she said to me, "Professor, you've convinced me this is hopeless. Hopeless. There's nothing we can do." When she said that, I scrambled. I tried to think, "How do I respond to that hopelessness? What is that sense of hopelessness?" And what hit me was an image of my six-year-old son. And I imagined a doctor coming to me and saying, "Your son has terminal brain cancer, and there's nothing you can do. Nothing you can do." So would I do nothing? Would I just sit there? Accept it? Okay, nothing I can do? I'm going off to build Google Glass. Of course not. I would do everything I could, and I would do everything I could because this is what love means, that the odds are irrelevant and that you do whatever the hell you can, the odds be damned. And then I saw the obvious link, because even we liberals love this country. (Laughter) And so when the pundits and the politicians say that change is impossible, what this love of country says back is, "That's just irrelevant." We lose something dear, something everyone in this room loves and cherishes, if we lose this republic, and so we act with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong. So here's my question: Do you have that love? Do you have that love? Because if you do, then what the hell are you, what are the hell are we doing? When Ben Franklin was carried from the constitutional convention in September of 1787, he was stopped in the street by a woman who said, "Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?" Franklin said, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it." A republic. A representative democracy. A government dependent upon the people alone. We have lost that republic. All of us have to act to get it back. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
The emergence of "4D printing" | null | TED2013 | This is me building a prototype for six hours straight. This is slave labor to my own project. This is what the DIY and maker movements really look like. And this is an analogy for today's construction and manufacturing world with brute-force assembly techniques. And this is exactly why I started studying how to program physical materials to build themselves. But there is another world. Today at the micro- and nanoscales, there's an unprecedented revolution happening. And this is the ability to program physical and biological materials to change shape, change properties and even compute outside of silicon-based matter. There's even a software called cadnano that allows us to design three-dimensional shapes like nano robots or drug delivery systems and use DNA to self-assemble those functional structures. But if we look at the human scale, there's massive problems that aren't being addressed by those nanoscale technologies. If we look at construction and manufacturing, there's major inefficiencies, energy consumption and excessive labor techniques. In infrastructure, let's just take one example. Take piping. In water pipes, we have fixed-capacity water pipes that have fixed flow rates, except for expensive pumps and valves. We bury them in the ground. If anything changes — if the environment changes, the ground moves, or demand changes — we have to start from scratch and take them out and replace them. So I'd like to propose that we can combine those two worlds, that we can combine the world of the nanoscale programmable adaptive materials and the built environment. And I don't mean automated machines. I don't just mean smart machines that replace humans. But I mean programmable materials that build themselves. And that's called self-assembly, which is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through only local interaction. So what do we need if we want to do this at the human scale? We need a few simple ingredients. The first ingredient is materials and geometry, and that needs to be tightly coupled with the energy source. And you can use passive energy — so heat, shaking, pneumatics, gravity, magnetics. And then you need smartly designed interactions. And those interactions allow for error correction, and they allow the shapes to go from one state to another state. So now I'm going to show you a number of projects that we've built, from one-dimensional, two-dimensional, three-dimensional and even four-dimensional systems. So in one-dimensional systems — this is a project called the self-folding proteins. And the idea is that you take the three-dimensional structure of a protein — in this case it's the crambin protein — you take the backbone — so no cross-linking, no environmental interactions — and you break that down into a series of components. And then we embed elastic. And when I throw this up into the air and catch it, it has the full three-dimensional structure of the protein, all of the intricacies. And this gives us a tangible model of the three-dimensional protein and how it folds and all of the intricacies of the geometry. So we can study this as a physical, intuitive model. And we're also translating that into two-dimensional systems — so flat sheets that can self-fold into three-dimensional structures. In three dimensions, we did a project last year at TEDGlobal with Autodesk and Arthur Olson where we looked at autonomous parts — so individual parts not pre-connected that can come together on their own. And we built 500 of these glass beakers. They had different molecular structures inside and different colors that could be mixed and matched. And we gave them away to all the TEDsters. And so these became intuitive models to understand how molecular self-assembly works at the human scale. This is the polio virus. You shake it hard and it breaks apart. And then you shake it randomly and it starts to error correct and built the structure on its own. And this is demonstrating that through random energy, we can build non-random shapes. We even demonstrated that we can do this at a much larger scale. Last year at TED Long Beach, we built an installation that builds installations. The idea was, could we self-assemble furniture-scale objects? So we built a large rotating chamber, and people would come up and spin the chamber faster or slower, adding energy to the system and getting an intuitive understanding of how self-assembly works and how we could use this as a macroscale construction or manufacturing technique for products. So remember, I said 4D. So today for the first time, we're unveiling a new project, which is a collaboration with Stratasys, and it's called 4D printing. The idea behind 4D printing is that you take multi-material 3D printing — so you can deposit multiple materials — and you add a new capability, which is transformation, that right off the bed, the parts can transform from one shape to another shape directly on their own. And this is like robotics without wires or motors. So you completely print this part, and it can transform into something else. We also worked with Autodesk on a software they're developing called Project Cyborg. And this allows us to simulate this self-assembly behavior and try to optimize which parts are folding when. But most importantly, we can use this same software for the design of nanoscale self-assembly systems and human scale self-assembly systems. These are parts being printed with multi-material properties. Here's the first demonstration. A single strand dipped in water that completely self-folds on its own into the letters M I T. I'm biased. This is another part, single strand, dipped in a bigger tank that self-folds into a cube, a three-dimensional structure, on its own. So no human interaction. And we think this is the first time that a program and transformation has been embedded directly into the materials themselves. And it also might just be the manufacturing technique that allows us to produce more adaptive infrastructure in the future. So I know you're probably thinking, okay, that's cool, but how do we use any of this stuff for the built environment? So I've started a lab at MIT, and it's called the Self-Assembly Lab. And we're dedicated to trying to develop programmable materials for the built environment. And we think there's a few key sectors that have fairly near-term applications. One of those is in extreme environments. These are scenarios where it's difficult to build, our current construction techniques don't work, it's too large, it's too dangerous, it's expensive, too many parts. And space is a great example of that. We're trying to design new scenarios for space that have fully reconfigurable and self-assembly structures that can go from highly functional systems from one to another. Let's go back to infrastructure. In infrastructure, we're working with a company out of Boston called Geosyntec. And we're developing a new paradigm for piping. Imagine if water pipes could expand or contract to change capacity or change flow rate, or maybe even undulate like peristaltics to move the water themselves. So this isn't expensive pumps or valves. This is a completely programmable and adaptive pipe on its own. So I want to remind you today of the harsh realities of assembly in our world. These are complex things built with complex parts that come together in complex ways. So I would like to invite you from whatever industry you're from to join us in reinventing and reimagining the world, how things come together from the nanoscale to the human scale, so that we can go from a world like this to a world that's more like this. Thank you. (Applause) |
Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all | {0: 'Ken Jennings holds the record for most consecutive wins on the classic American trivia game show, <em>Jeopardy</em>.'} | TEDxSeattleU | In two weeks time, that's the ninth anniversary of the day I first stepped out onto that hallowed "Jeopardy" set. I mean, nine years is a long time. And given "Jeopardy's" average demographics, I think what that means is most of the people who saw me on that show are now dead. (Laughter) But not all, a few are still alive. Occasionally I still get recognized at the mall or whatever. And when I do, it's as a bit of a know-it-all. I think that ship has sailed, it's too late for me. For better or for worse, that's what I'm going to be known as, as the guy who knew a lot of weird stuff. And I can't complain about this. I feel like that was always sort of my destiny, although I had for many years been pretty deeply in the trivia closet. If nothing else, you realize very quickly as a teenager, it is not a hit with girls to know Captain Kirk's middle name. (Laughter) And as a result, I was sort of the deeply closeted kind of know-it-all for many years. But if you go further back, if you look at it, it's all there. I was the kind of kid who was always bugging Mom and Dad with whatever great fact I had just read about — Haley's comet or giant squids or the size of the world's biggest pumpkin pie or whatever it was. I now have a 10-year-old of my own who's exactly the same. And I know how deeply annoying it is, so karma does work. (Laughter) And I loved game shows, fascinated with game shows. I remember crying on my first day of kindergarten back in 1979 because it had just hit me, as badly as I wanted to go to school, that I was also going to miss "Hollywood Squares" and "Family Feud." I was going to miss my game shows. And later, in the mid-'80s, when "Jeopardy" came back on the air, I remember running home from school every day to watch the show. It was my favorite show, even before it paid for my house. And we lived overseas, we lived in South Korea where my dad was working, where there was only one English language TV channel. There was Armed Forces TV, and if you didn't speak Korean, that's what you were watching. So me and all my friends would run home every day and watch "Jeopardy." I was always that kind of obsessed trivia kid. I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents back in the '80s and holding my own, back when that was a fad. There's a weird sense of mastery you get when you know some bit of boomer trivia that Mom and Dad don't know. You know some Beatles factoid that Dad didn't know. And you think, ah hah, knowledge really is power — the right fact deployed at exactly the right place. I never had a guidance counselor who thought this was a legitimate career path, that thought you could major in trivia or be a professional ex-game show contestant. And so I sold out way too young. I didn't try to figure out what one does with that. I studied computers because I heard that was the thing, and I became a computer programmer — not an especially good one, not an especially happy one at the time when I was first on "Jeopardy" in 2004. But that's what I was doing. And it made it doubly ironic — my computer background — a few years later, I think 2009 or so, when I got another phone call from "Jeopardy" saying, "It's early days yet, but IBM tells us they want to build a supercomputer to beat you at 'Jeopardy.' Are you up for this?" This was the first I'd heard of it. And of course I said yes, for several reasons. One, because playing "Jeopardy" is a great time. It's fun. It's the most fun you can have with your pants on. (Laughter) And I would do it for nothing. I don't think they know that, luckily, but I would go back and play for Arby's coupons. I just love "Jeopardy," and I always have. And second of all, because I'm a nerdy guy and this seemed like the future. People playing computers on game shows was the kind of thing I always imagined would happen in the future, and now I could be on the stage with it. I was not going to say no. The third reason I said yes is because I was pretty confident that I was going to win. I had taken some artificial intelligence classes. I knew there were no computers that could do what you need to do to win on "Jeopardy." People don't realize how tough it is to write that kind of program that can read a "Jeopardy" clue in a natural language like English and understand all the double meanings, the puns, the red herrings, unpack the meaning of the clue. The kind of thing that a three- or four-year-old human, little kid could do, very hard for a computer. And I thought, well this is going to be child's play. Yes, I will come destroy the computer and defend my species. (Laughter) But as the years went on, as IBM started throwing money and manpower and processor speed at this, I started to get occasional updates from them, and I started to get a little more worried. I remember a journal article about this new question answering software that had a graph. It was a scatter chart showing performance on "Jeopardy," tens of thousands of dots representing "Jeopardy" champions up at the top with their performance plotted on number of — I was going to say questions answered, but answers questioned, I guess, clues responded to — versus the accuracy of those answers. So there's a certain performance level that the computer would need to get to. And at first, it was very low. There was no software that could compete at this kind of arena. But then you see the line start to go up. And it's getting very close to what they call the winner's cloud. And I noticed in the upper right of the scatter chart some darker dots, some black dots, that were a different color. And thought, what are these? "The black dots in the upper right represent 74-time 'Jeopardy' champion Ken Jennings." And I saw this line coming for me. And I realized, this is it. This is what it looks like when the future comes for you. (Laughter) It's not the Terminator's gun sight; it's a little line coming closer and closer to the thing you can do, the only thing that makes you special, the thing you're best at. And when the game eventually happened about a year later, it was very different than the "Jeopardy" games I'd been used to. We were not playing in L.A. on the regular "Jeopardy" set. Watson does not travel. Watson's actually huge. It's thousands of processors, a terabyte of memory, trillions of bytes of memory. We got to walk through his climate-controlled server room. The only other "Jeopardy" contestant to this day I've ever been inside. And so Watson does not travel. You must come to it; you must make the pilgrimage. So me and the other human player wound up at this secret IBM research lab in the middle of these snowy woods in Westchester County to play the computer. And we realized right away that the computer had a big home court advantage. There was a big Watson logo in the middle of the stage. Like you're going to play the Chicago Bulls, and there's the thing in the middle of their court. And the crowd was full of IBM V.P.s and programmers cheering on their little darling, having poured millions of dollars into this hoping against hope that the humans screw up, and holding up "Go Watson" signs and just applauding like pageant moms every time their little darling got one right. I think guys had "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their bellies in grease paint. If you can imagine computer programmers with the letters "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their gut, it's an unpleasant sight. But they were right. They were exactly right. I don't want to spoil it, if you still have this sitting on your DVR, but Watson won handily. And I remember standing there behind the podium as I could hear that little insectoid thumb clicking. It had a robot thumb that was clicking on the buzzer. And you could hear that little tick, tick, tick, tick. And I remember thinking, this is it. I felt obsolete. I felt like a Detroit factory worker of the '80s seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line. I felt like quiz show contestant was now the first job that had become obsolete under this new regime of thinking computers. And it hasn't been the last. If you watch the news, you'll see occasionally — and I see this all the time — that pharmacists now, there's a machine that can fill prescriptions automatically without actually needing a human pharmacist. And a lot of law firms are getting rid of paralegals because there's software that can sum up case laws and legal briefs and decisions. You don't need human assistants for that anymore. I read the other day about a program where you feed it a box score from a baseball or football game and it spits out a news article as if a human had watched the game and was commenting on it. And obviously these new technologies can't do as clever or creative a job as the humans they're replacing, but they're faster, and crucially, they're much, much cheaper. So it makes me wonder what the economic effects of this might be. I've read economists saying that, as a result of these new technologies, we'll enter a new golden age of leisure when we'll all have time for the things we really love because all these onerous tasks will be taken over by Watson and his digital brethren. I've heard other people say quite the opposite, that this is yet another tier of the middle class that's having the thing they can do taken away from them by a new technology and that this is actually something ominous, something that we should worry about. I'm not an economist myself. All I know is how it felt to be the guy put out of work. And it was friggin' demoralizing. It was terrible. Here's the one thing that I was ever good at, and all it took was IBM pouring tens of millions of dollars and its smartest people and thousands of processors working in parallel and they could do the same thing. They could do it a little bit faster and a little better on national TV, and "I'm sorry, Ken. We don't need you anymore." And it made me think, what does this mean, if we're going to be able to start outsourcing, not just lower unimportant brain functions. I'm sure many of you remember a distant time when we had to know phone numbers, when we knew our friends' phone numbers. And suddenly there was a machine that did that, and now we don't need to remember that anymore. I have read that there's now actually evidence that the hippocampus, the part of our brain that handles spacial relationships, physically shrinks and atrophies in people who use tools like GPS, because we're not exercising our sense of direction anymore. We're just obeying a little talking voice on our dashboard. And as a result, a part of our brain that's supposed to do that kind of stuff gets smaller and dumber. And it made me think, what happens when computers are now better at knowing and remembering stuff than we are? Is all of our brain going to start to shrink and atrophy like that? Are we as a culture going to start to value knowledge less? As somebody who has always believed in the importance of the stuff that we know, this was a terrifying idea to me. The more I thought about it, I realized, no, it's still important. The things we know are still important. I came to believe there were two advantages that those of us who have these things in our head have over somebody who says, "Oh, yeah. I can Google that. Hold on a second." There's an advantage of volume, and there's an advantage of time. The advantage of volume, first, just has to do with the complexity of the world nowadays. There's so much information out there. Being a Renaissance man or woman, that's something that was only possible in the Renaissance. Now it's really not possible to be reasonably educated on every field of human endeavor. There's just too much. They say that the scope of human information is now doubling every 18 months or so, the sum total of human information. That means between now and late 2014, we will generate as much information, in terms of gigabytes, as all of humanity has in all the previous millenia put together. It's doubling every 18 months now. This is terrifying because a lot of the big decisions we make require the mastery of lots of different kinds of facts. A decision like where do I go to school? What should I major in? Who do I vote for? Do I take this job or that one? These are the decisions that require correct judgments about many different kinds of facts. If we have those facts at our mental fingertips, we're going to be able to make informed decisions. If, on the other hand, we need to look them all up, we may be in trouble. According to a National Geographic survey I just saw, somewhere along the lines of 80 percent of the people who vote in a U.S. presidential election about issues like foreign policy cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map. If you can't do that first step, are you really going to look up the other thousand facts you're going to need to know to master your knowledge of U.S. foreign policy? Quite probably not. At some point you're just going to be like, "You know what? There's too much to know. Screw it." And you'll make a less informed decision. The other issue is the advantage of time that you have if you have all these things at your fingertips. I always think of the story of a little girl named Tilly Smith. She was a 10-year-old girl from Surrey, England on vacation with her parents a few years ago in Phuket, Thailand. She runs up to them on the beach one morning and says, "Mom, Dad, we've got to get off the beach." And they say, "What do you mean? We just got here." And she said, "In Mr. Kearney's geography class last month, he told us that when the tide goes out abruptly out to sea and you see the waves churning way out there, that's the sign of a tsunami, and you need to clear the beach." What would you do if your 10-year-old daughter came up to you with this? Her parents thought about it, and they finally, to their credit, decided to believe her. They told the lifeguard, they went back to the hotel, and the lifeguard cleared over 100 people off the beach, luckily, because that was the day of the Boxing Day tsunami, the day after Christmas, 2004, that killed thousands of people in Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean. But not on that beach, not on Mai Khao Beach, because this little girl had remembered one fact from her geography teacher a month before. Now when facts come in handy like that — I love that story because it shows you the power of one fact, one remembered fact in exactly the right place at the right time — normally something that's easier to see on game shows than in real life. But in this case it happened in real life. And it happens in real life all the time. It's not always a tsunami, often it's a social situation. It's a meeting or job interview or first date or some relationship that gets lubricated because two people realize they share some common piece of knowledge. You say where you're from, and I say, "Oh, yeah." Or your alma mater or your job, and I know just a little something about it, enough to get the ball rolling. People love that shared connection that gets created when somebody knows something about you. It's like they took the time to get to know you before you even met. That's often the advantage of time. And it's not effective if you say, "Well, hold on. You're from Fargo, North Dakota. Let me see what comes up. Oh, yeah. Roger Maris was from Fargo." That doesn't work. That's just annoying. (Laughter) The great 18th-century British theologian and thinker, friend of Dr. Johnson, Samuel Parr once said, "It's always better to know a thing than not to know it." And if I have lived my life by any kind of creed, it's probably that. I have always believed that the things we know — that knowledge is an absolute good, that the things we have learned and carry with us in our heads are what make us who we are, as individuals and as a species. I don't know if I want to live in a world where knowledge is obsolete. I don't want to live in a world where cultural literacy has been replaced by these little bubbles of specialty, so that none of us know about the common associations that used to bind our civilization together. I don't want to be the last trivia know-it-all sitting on a mountain somewhere, reciting to himself the state capitals and the names of "Simpsons" episodes and the lyrics of Abba songs. I feel like our civilization works when this is a vast cultural heritage that we all share and that we know without having to outsource it to our devices, to our search engines and our smartphones. In the movies, when computers like Watson start to think, things don't always end well. Those movies are never about beautiful utopias. It's always a terminator or a matrix or an astronaut getting sucked out an airlock in "2001." Things always go terribly wrong. And I feel like we're sort of at the point now where we need to make that choice of what kind of future we want to be living in. This is a question of leadership, because it becomes a question of who leads the future. On the one hand, we can choose between a new golden age where information is more universally available than it's ever been in human history, where we all have the answers to our questions at our fingertips. And on the other hand, we have the potential to be living in some gloomy dystopia where the machines have taken over and we've all decided it's not important what we know anymore, that knowledge isn't valuable because it's all out there in the cloud, and why would we ever bother learning anything new. Those are the two choices we have. I know which future I would rather be living in. And we can all make that choice. We make that choice by being curious, inquisitive people who like to learn, who don't just say, "Well, as soon as the bell has rung and the class is over, I don't have to learn anymore," or "Thank goodness I have my diploma. I'm done learning for a lifetime. I don't have to learn new things anymore." No, every day we should be striving to learn something new. We should have this unquenchable curiosity for the world around us. That's where the people you see on "Jeopardy" come from. These know-it-alls, they're not Rainman-style savants sitting at home memorizing the phone book. I've met a lot of them. For the most part, they are just normal folks who are universally interested in the world around them, curious about everything, thirsty for this knowledge about whatever subject. We can live in one of these two worlds. We can live in a world where our brains, the things that we know, continue to be the thing that makes us special, or a world in which we've outsourced all of that to evil supercomputers from the future like Watson. Ladies and gentlemen, the choice is yours. Thank you very much. |
4 pillars of college success in science | {0: 'During his 20-year tenure as president of UMBC, Freeman Hrabowski has helped students of all backgrounds pursue degrees in arts, humanities and the sciences.'} | TED2013 | So I'll be talking about the success of my campus, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, in educating students of all types, across the arts and humanities and the science and engineering areas. What makes our story especially important is that we have learned so much from a group of students who are typically not at the top of the academic ladder — students of color, students underrepresented in selected areas. And what makes the story especially unique is that we have learned how to help African-American students, Latino students, students from low-income backgrounds, to become some of the best in the world in science and engineering. And so I begin with a story about my childhood. We all are products of our childhood experiences. It's hard for me to believe that it's been 50 years since I had the experience of being a ninth grade kid in Birmingham, Alabama, a kid who loved getting A's, a kid who loved math, who loved to read, a kid who would say to the teacher — when the teacher said, "Here are 10 problems," to the class, this little fat kid would say, "Give us 10 more." And the whole class would say, "Shut up, Freeman." And there was a designated kicker every day. And so I was always asking this question: "Well how could we get more kids to really love to learn?" And amazingly, one week in church, when I really didn't want to be there and I was in the back of the room being placated by doing math problems, I heard this man say this: "If we can get the children to participate in this peaceful demonstration here in Birmingham, we can show America that even children know the difference between right and wrong and that children really do want to get the best possible education." And I looked up and said, "Who is that man?" And they said his name was Dr. Martin Luther King. And I said to my parents, "I've got to go. I want to go. I want to be a part of this." And they said, "Absolutely not." (Laughter) And we had a rough go of it. And at that time, quite frankly, you really did not talk back to your parents. And somehow I said, "You know, you guys are hypocrites. You make me go to this. You make me listen. The man wants me to go, and now you say no." And they thought about it all night. And they came into my room the next morning. They had not slept. They had been literally crying and praying and thinking, "Will we let our 12-year-old participate in this march and probably have to go to jail?" And they decided to do it. And when they came in to tell me, I was at first elated. And then all of a sudden I began thinking about the dogs and the fire hoses, and I got really scared, I really did. And one of the points I make to people all the time is that sometimes when people do things that are courageous, it doesn't really mean that they're that courageous. It simply means that they believe it's important to do it. I wanted a better education. I did not want to have to have hand-me-down books. I wanted to know that the school I attended not only had good teachers, but the resources we needed. And as a result of that experience, in the middle of the week, while I was there in jail, Dr. King came and said with our parents, "What you children do this day will have an impact on children who have not been born." I recently realized that two-thirds of Americans today had not been born at the time of 1963. And so for them, when they hear about the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, in many ways, if they see it on TV, it's like our looking at the 1863 "Lincoln" movie: It's history. And the real question is, what lessons did we learn? Well amazingly, the most important for me was this: That children can be empowered to take ownership of their education. They can be taught to be passionate about wanting to learn and to love the idea of asking questions. And so it is especially significant that the university I now lead, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, was founded the very year I went to jail with Dr. King, in 1963. And what made that institutional founding especially important is that Maryland is the South, as you know, and, quite frankly, it was the first university in our state founded at a time when students of all races could go there. And so we had black and white students and others who began to attend. And it has been for 50 years an experiment. The experiment is this: Is it possible to have institutions in our country, universities, where people from all backgrounds can come and learn and learn to work together and learn to become leaders and to support each other in that experience? Now what is especially important about that experience for me is this: We found that we could do a lot in the arts and humanities and social sciences. And so we began to work on that, for years in the '60s. And we produced a number of people in law, all the way to the humanities. We produced great artists. Beckett is our muse. A lot of our students get into theater. It's great work. The problem that we faced was the same problem America continues to face — that students in the sciences and engineering, black students were not succeeding. But when I looked at the data, what I found was that, quite frankly, students in general, large numbers were not making it. And as a result of that, we decided to do something that would help, first of all, the group at the bottom, African-American students, and then Hispanic students. And Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, philanthropists, said, "We'd like to help." Robert Meyerhoff said, "Why is it that everything I see on TV about black boys, if it's not about basketball, is not positive? I'd like to make a difference, to do something that's positive." We married those ideas, and we created this Meyerhoff Scholars program. And what is significant about the program is that we learned a number of things. And the question is this: How is it that now we lead the country in producing African-Americans who go on to complete Ph.D.'s in science and engineering and M.D./Ph.D.'s? That's a big deal. Give me a hand for that. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. It really is. (Applause) You see, most people don't realize that it's not just minorities who don't do well in science and engineering. Quite frankly, you're talking about Americans. If you don't know it, while 20 percent of blacks and Hispanics who begin with a major in science and engineering will actually graduate in science and engineering, only 32 percent of whites who begin with majors in those areas actually succeed and graduate in those areas, and only 42 percent of Asian-Americans. And so, the real question is, what is the challenge? Well a part of it, of course, is K-12. We need to strengthen K-12. But the other part has to do with the culture of science and engineering on our campuses. Whether you know it or not, large numbers of students with high SAT's and large numbers of A.P. credits who go to the most prestigious universities in our country begin in pre-med or pre-engineering and engineering, and they end up changing their majors. And the number one reason, we find, quite frankly, is they did not do well in first year science courses. In fact, we call first year science and engineering, typically around America, weed-out courses or barrier courses. How many of you in this audience know somebody who started off in pre-med or engineering and changed their major within a year or two? It's an American challenge. Half of you in the room. I know. I know. I know. And what is interesting about that is that so many students are smart and can do it. We need to find ways of making it happen. So what are the four things we did to help minority students that now are helping students in general? Number one: high expectations. It takes an understanding of the academic preparation of students — their grades, the rigor of the course work, their test-taking skills, their attitude, the fire in their belly, the passion for the work, to make it. And so doing things to help students prepare to be in that position, very important. But equally important, it takes an understanding that it's hard work that makes the difference. I don't care how smart you are or how smart you think you are. Smart simply means you're ready to learn. You're excited about learning and you want to ask good questions. I. I. Rabi, a Nobel laureate, said that when he was growing up in New York, all of his friends' parents would ask them "What did you learn in school?" at the end of a day. And he said, in contrast, his Jewish mother would say, "Izzy, did you ask a good question today?" And so high expectations have to do with curiosity and encouraging young people to be curious. And as a result of those high expectations, we began to find students we wanted to work with to see what could we do to help them, not simply to survive in science and engineering, but to become the very best, to excel. Interestingly enough, an example: One young man who earned a C in the first course and wanted to go on to med school, we said, "We need to have you retake the course, because you need a strong foundation if you're going to move to the next level." Every foundation makes the difference in the next level. He retook the course. That young man went on to graduate from UMBC, to become the first black to get the M.D./Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He now works at Harvard. Nice story. Give him a hand for that too. (Applause) Secondly, it's not about test scores only. Test scores are important, but they're not the most important thing. One young woman had great grades, but test scores were not as high. But she had a factor that was very important. She never missed a day of school, K-12. There was fire in that belly. That young woman went on, and she is today with an M.D./Ph.D. from Hopkins. She's on the faculty, tenure track in psychiatry, Ph.D. in neuroscience. She and her adviser have a patent on a second use of Viagra for diabetes patients. Big hand for her. Big hand for her. (Applause) And so high expectations, very important. Secondly, the idea of building community among the students. You all know that so often in science and engineering we tend to think cutthroat. Students are not taught to work in groups. And that's what we work to do with that group to get them to understand each other, to build trust among them, to support each other, to learn how to ask good questions, but also to learn how to explain concepts with clarity. As you know, it's one thing to earn an A yourself, it's another thing to help someone else do well. And so to feel that sense of responsibility makes all the difference in the world. So building community among those students, very important. Third, the idea of, it takes researchers to produce researchers. Whether you're talking about artists producing artists or you're talking about people getting into the social sciences, whatever the discipline — and especially in science and engineering, as in art, for example — you need scientists to pull the students into the work. And so our students are working in labs regularly. And one great example that you'll appreciate: During a snowstorm in Baltimore several years ago, the guy on our campus with this Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant literally came back to work in his lab after several days, and all these students had refused to leave the lab. They had food they had packed out. They were in the lab working, and they saw the work, not as schoolwork, but as their lives. They knew they were working on AIDS research. They were looking at this amazing protein design. And what was interesting was each one of them focused on that work. And he said, "It doesn't get any better than that." And then finally, if you've got the community and you've got the high expectations and you've got researchers producing researchers, you have to have people who are willing as faculty to get involved with those students, even in the classroom. I'll never forget a faculty member calling the staff and saying, "I've got this young man in class, a young black guy, and he seems like he's just not excited about the work. He's not taking notes. We need to talk to him." What was significant was that the faculty member was observing every student to understand who was really involved and who was not and was saying, "Let me see how I can work with them. Let me get the staff to help me out." It was that connecting. That young man today is actually a faculty member M.D./Ph.D. in neuroengineering at Duke. Give him a big hand for that. (Applause) And so the significance is that we have now developed this model that is helping us, not only finally with evaluation, assessing what works. And what we learned was that we needed to think about redesigning courses. And so we redesigned chemistry, we redesigned physics. But now we are looking at redesigning the humanities and social sciences. Because so many students are bored in class. Do you know that? Many students, K-12 and in universities, don't want to just sit there and listen to somebody talk. They need to be engaged. And so we have done — if you look at our website at the Chemistry Discovery Center, you'll see people coming from all over the country to look at how we are redesigning courses, having an emphasis on collaboration, use of technology, using problems out of our biotech companies on our campus, and not giving students the theories, but having them struggle with those theories. And it's working so well that throughout our university system in Maryland, more and more courses are being redesigned. It's called academic innovation. And what does all of that mean? It means that now, not just in science and engineering, we now have programs in the arts, in the humanities, in the social sciences, in teacher education, even particularly for women in I.T. If you don't know it, there's been a 79-percent decline in the number of women majoring in computer science just since 2000. And what I'm saying is that what will make the difference will be building community among students, telling young women, young minority students and students in general, you can do this work. And most important, giving them a chance to build that community with faculty pulling them into the work and our assessing what works and what does not work. Most important, if a student has a sense of self, it is amazing how the dreams and the values can make all the difference in the world. When I was a 12-year-old child in the jail in Birmingham, I kept thinking, "I wonder what my future could be." I had no idea that it was possible for this little black boy in Birmingham to one day be president of a university that has students from 150 countries, where students are not there just to survive, where they love learning, where they enjoy being the best, where they will one day change the world. Aristotle said, "Excellence is never an accident. It is the result of high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution. It represents the wisest option among many alternatives." And then he said something that gives me goosebumps. He said, "Choice, not chance, determines your destiny." Choice, not chance, determines your destiny, dreams and values. Thank you all very much. (Applause) |
A mini robot -- powered by your phone | {0: "Keller Rinaudo is CEO and co-founder of Zipline, building drone delivery for global public health customers. (He's also co-founder of Romotive, makers of the tiny robot, Romo.)"} | TED2013 | So just by a show of hands, how many of you all have a robot at home? Not very many of you. Okay. And actually of those hands, if you don't include Roomba how many of you have a robot at home? So a couple. That's okay. That's the problem that we're trying to solve at Romotive — that I and the other 20 nerds at Romotive are obsessed with solving. So we really want to build a robot that anyone can use, whether you're eight or 80. And as it turns out, that's a really hard problem, because you have to build a small, portable robot that's not only really affordable, but it has to be something that people actually want to take home and have around their kids. This robot can't be creepy or uncanny. He should be friendly and cute. So meet Romo. Romo's a robot that uses a device you already know and love — your iPhone — as his brain. And by leveraging the power of the iPhone's processor, we can create a robot that is wi-fi enabled and computer vision-capable for 150 bucks, which is about one percent of what these kinds of robots have cost in the past. When Romo wakes up, he's in creature mode. So he's actually using the video camera on the device to follow my face. If I duck down, he'll follow me. He's wary, so he'll keep his eyes on me. If I come over here, he'll turn to follow me. If I come over here — (Laughs) He's smart. And if I get too close to him, he gets scared just like any other creature. So in a lot of ways, Romo is like a pet that has a mind of his own. Thanks, little guy. (Sneezing sound) Bless you. And if I want to explore the world — uh-oh, Romo's tired — if I want to explore the world with Romo, I can actually connect him from any other iOS device. So here's the iPad. And Romo will actually stream video to this device. So I can see everything that Romo sees, and I get a robot's-eye-view of the world. Now this is a free app on the App Store, so if any of you guys had this app on your phones, we could literally right now share control of the robot and play games together. So I'll show you really quickly, Romo actually — he's streaming video, so you can see me and the entire TED audience. If I get in front of Romo here. And if I want to control him, I can just drive. So I can drive him around, and I can take pictures of you. I've always wanted a picture of a 1,500-person TED audience. So I'll snap a picture. And in the same way that you scroll through content on an iPad, I can actually adjust the angle of the camera on the device. So there are all of you through Romo's eyes. And finally, because Romo is an extension of me, I can express myself through his emotions. So I can go in and I can say let's make Romo excited. But the most important thing about Romo is that we wanted to create something that was literally completely intuitive. You do not have to teach someone how to drive Romo. In fact, who would like to drive a robot? Okay. Awesome. Here you go. Thank you, Scott. And even cooler, you actually don't have to be in the same geographic location as the robot to control him. So he actually streams two-way audio and video between any two smart devices. So you can log in through the browser, and it's kind of like Skype on wheels. So we were talking before about telepresence, and this is a really cool example. You can imagine an eight-year-old girl, for example, who has an iPhone, and her mom buys her a robot. That girl can take her iPhone, put it on the robot, send an email to Grandma, who lives on the other side of the country. Grandma can log into that robot and play hide-and-go-seek with her granddaughter for fifteen minutes every single night, when otherwise she might only be able to get to see her granddaughter once or twice a year. Thanks, Scott. (Applause) So those are a couple of the really cool things that Romo can do today. But I just want to finish by talking about something that we're working on in the future. This is actually something that one of our engineers, Dom, built in a weekend. It's built on top of a Google open framework called Blockly. This allows you to drag and drop these blocks of semantic code and create any behavior for this robot you want. You do not have to know how to code to create a behavior for Romo. And you can actually simulate that behavior in the browser, which is what you see Romo doing on the left. And then if you have something you like, you can download it onto your robot and execute it in real life, run the program in real life. And then if you have something you're proud of, you can share it with every other person who owns a robot in the world. So all of these wi-fi–enabled robots actually learn from each other. The reason we're so focused on building robots that everyone can train is that we think the most compelling use cases in personal robotics are personal. They change from person to person. So we think that if you're going to have a robot in your home, that robot ought to be a manifestation of your own imagination. So I wish that I could tell you what the future of personal robotics looks like. To be honest, I have no idea. But what we do know is that it isn't 10 years or 10 billion dollars or a large humanoid robot away. The future of personal robotics is happening today, and it's going to depend on small, agile robots like Romo and the creativity of people like yourselves. So we can't wait to get you all robots, and we can't wait to see what you build. Thank you. (Applause) |
What makes us feel good about our work? | {0: 'The dismal science of economics is not as firmly grounded in actual behavior as was once supposed. In "Predictably Irrational," Dan Ariely told us why.'} | TEDxRiodelaPlata | I want to talk a little bit today about labor and work. When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor market looks like. At the same time, if you think about it, there's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it's all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, "This was a terrible mistake. I'll never do it again." (Laughter) "Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos." But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there's all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways. And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, "Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled." And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed. So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, "Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We'll pay you three dollars for it." And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?" If they said yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, "Do you want to build another one?" for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, "No more. It's not worth it for me." This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant. There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There's something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating. So in the second condition of this experiment, that's exactly what we did. We asked people, "Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?" And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, "Do you want to build another one for $2.70?" And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?" And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes. Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference. Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn't put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don't understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it's important. There was one other piece of data we looked at. If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don't. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that's actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built. What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people's eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it. Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can't tell you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I've ever talked to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, "How many of you now show up to work later than you used to?" And everybody raised their hand. I said, "How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?" Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, "How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?" And they didn't raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, "What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?" And they came up with all kinds of ideas. They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn't] care. And he would say, "At the moment I directed you in this way, and now that I'm directing you in this way, everything will be okay." But if you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it's actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about what they're doing. The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say "Uh huh," and put it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder. (Laughter) What happened in those three conditions? In this plot I'm showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet. And this is basically the result we had before. You shred people's efforts, output — you get them not to be as happy with what they're doing. But I should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you'd do good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder. Now there's good news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying "Uh huh," that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people's motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don't think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation. The next part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble. (Laughter) I don't know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it's much more effortful, it's much more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can't say I enjoy those pieces. I can't say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones. (Laughter) And there's an old story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the '40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, "Here is my cake." No, it was somebody else's cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn't really feel like your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder. (Laughter) Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, I think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love what they're doing to a higher degree. So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then we told them, "Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, but I'll tell you what, we'll sell it to you. How much do you want to pay for it?" And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami — (Laughter) and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, do you think [you'd say], "Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?" Or "I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?" Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well. In the next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more. (Laughter) They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than the first version. (Laughter) Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things. Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, "How much would you sell your kids for?" Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a lot of money. (Laughter) On good days. (Laughter) But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you went to the park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, "Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you're interested, they're for sale." (Laughter) How much would you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough. (Laughter) By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don't see that other people don't see things our way. Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person to do step one, and one person to do step two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe you don't care as much. I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we've switched, and now we're in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc. The good news is that if we added all of those components and thought about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get people to be both more productive and happier. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Health care should be a team sport | {0: 'Eric Dishman does health care research for Intel -- studying how new technology can solve big problems in the system for the sick, the aging and, well, all of us.'} | TED@Intel | I want to share some personal friends and stories with you that I've actually never talked about in public before to help illustrate the idea and the need and the hope for us to reinvent our health care system around the world. Twenty-four years ago, I had — a sophomore in college, I had a series of fainting spells. No alcohol was involved. And I ended up in student health, and they ran some labwork and came back right away, and said, "Kidney problems." And before I knew it, I was involved and thrown into this six months of tests and trials and tribulations with six doctors across two hospitals in this clash of medical titans to figure out which one of them was right about what was wrong with me. And I'm sitting in a waiting room some time later for an ultrasound, and all six of these doctors actually show up in the room at once, and I'm like, "Uh oh, this is bad news." And their diagnosis was this: They said, "You have two rare kidney diseases that are going to actually destroy your kidneys eventually, you have cancer-like cells in your immune system that we need to start treatment right away, and you'll never be eligible for a kidney transplant, and you're not likely to live more than two or three years." Now, with the gravity of this doomsday diagnosis, it just sucked me in immediately, as if I began preparing myself as a patient to die according to the schedule that they had just given to me, until I met a patient named Verna in a waiting room, who became a dear friend, and she grabbed me one day and took me off to the medical library and did a bunch of research on these diagnoses and these diseases, and said, "Eric, these people who get this are normally in their '70s and '80s. They don't know anything about you. Wake up. Take control of your health and get on with your life." And I did. Now, these people making these proclamations to me were not bad people. In fact, these professionals were miracle workers, but they're working in a flawed, expensive system that's set up the wrong way. It's dependent on hospitals and clinics for our every care need. It's dependent on specialists who just look at parts of us. It's dependent on guesswork of diagnoses and drug cocktails, and so something either works or you die. And it's dependent on passive patients who just take it and don't ask any questions. Now the problem with this model is that it's unsustainable globally. It's unaffordable globally. We need to invent what I call a personal health system. So what does this personal health system look like, and what new technologies and roles is it going to entail? Now, I'm going to start by actually sharing with you a new friend of mine, Libby, somebody I've become quite attached to over the last six months. This is Libby, or actually, this is an ultrasound image of Libby. This is the kidney transplant I was never supposed to have. Now, this is an image that we shot a couple of weeks ago for today, and you'll notice, on the edge of this image, there's some dark spots there, which was really concerning to me. So we're going to actually do a live exam to sort of see how Libby's doing. This is not a wardrobe malfunction. I have to take my belt off here. Don't you in the front row worry or anything. (Laughter) I'm going to use a device from a company called Mobisante. This is a portable ultrasound. It can plug into a smartphone. It can plug into a tablet. Mobisante is up in Redmond, Washington, and they kindly trained me to actually do this on myself. They're not approved to do this. Patients are not approved to do this. This is a concept demo, so I want to make that clear. All right, I gotta gel up. Now the people in the front row are very nervous. (Laughter) And I want to actually introduce you to Dr. Batiuk, who's another friend of mine. He's up in Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Oregon. So let me just make sure. Hey, Dr. Batiuk. Can you hear me okay? And actually, can you see Libby? Thomas Batuik: Hi there, Eric. You look busy. How are you? Eric Dishman: I'm good. I'm just taking my clothes off in front of a few hundred people. It's wonderful. So I just wanted to see, is this the image you need to get? And I know you want to look and see if those spots are still there. TB: Okay. Well let's scan around a little bit here, give me a lay of the land. ED: All right.TB: Okay. Turn it a little bit inside, a little bit toward the middle for me. Okay, that's good. How about up a little bit? Okay, freeze that image. That's a good one for me. ED: All right. Now last week, when I did this, you had me measure that spot to the right. Should I do that again? TB: Yeah, let's do that. ED: All right. This is kind of hard to do with one hand on your belly and one hand on measuring, but I've got it, I think, and I'll save that image and send it to you. So tell me a little bit about what this dark spot means. It's not something I was very happy about. TB: Many people after a kidney transplant will develop a little fluid collection around the kidney. Most of the time it doesn't create any kind of mischief, but it does warrant looking at, so I'm happy we've got an opportunity to look at it today, make sure that it's not growing, it's not creating any problems. Based on the other images we have, I'm really happy how it looks today. ED: All right. Well, I guess we'll double check it when I come in. I've got my six month biopsy in a couple of weeks, and I'm going to let you do that in the clinic, because I don't think I can do that one on myself. TB: Good choice.ED: All right, thanks, Dr. Batiuk. All right. So what you're sort of seeing here is an example of disruptive technologies, of mobile, social and analytic technologies. These are the foundations of what's going to make personal health possible. Now there's really three pillars of this personal health I want to talk to you about now, and it's care anywhere, care networking and care customization. And you just saw a little bit of the first two with my interaction with Dr. Batiuk. So let's start with care anywhere. Humans invented the idea of hospitals and clinics in the 1780s. It is time to update our thinking. We have got to untether clinicians and patients from the notion of traveling to a special bricks-and-mortar place for all of our care, because these places are often the wrong tool, and the most expensive tool, for the job. And these are sometimes unsafe places to send our sickest patients, especially in an era of superbugs and hospital-acquired infections. And many countries are going to go brickless from the start because they're never going to be able to afford the mega-medicalplexes that a lot of the rest of the world has built. Now I personally learned that hospitals can be a very dangerous place at a young age. This was me in third grade. I broke my elbow very seriously, had to have surgery, worried that they were going to actually lose the arm. Recovering from the surgery in the hospital, I get bedsores. Those bedsores become infected, and they give me an antibiotic which I end up being allergic to, and now my whole body breaks out, and now all of those become infected. The longer I stayed in the hospital, the sicker I became, and the more expensive it became, and this happens to millions of people around the world every year. The future of personal health that I'm talking about says care must occur at home as the default model, not in a hospital or clinic. You have to earn your way into those places by being sick enough to use that tool for the job. Now the smartphones that we're already carrying can clearly have diagnostic devices like ultrasounds plugged into them, and a whole array of others, today, and as sensing is built into these, we'll be able to do vital signs monitor and behavioral monitoring like we've never had before. Many of us will have implantables that will actually look real-time at what's going on with our blood chemistry and in our proteins right now. Now the software is also getting smarter, right? Think about a coach, an agent online, that's going to help me do safe self-care. That same interaction that we just did with the ultrasound will likely have real-time image processing, and the device will say, "Up, down, left, right, ah, Eric, that's the perfect spot to send that image off to your doctor." Now, if we've got all these networked devices that are helping us to do care anywhere, it stands to reason that we also need a team to be able to interact with all of that stuff, and that leads to the second pillar I want to talk about, care networking. We have got to go beyond this paradigm of isolated specialists doing parts care to multidisciplinary teams doing person care. Uncoordinated care today is expensive at best, and it is deadly at worst. Eighty percent of medical errors are actually caused by communication and coordination problems amongst medical team members. I had my own heart scare years ago in graduate school, when we're under treatment for the kidney, and suddenly, they're like, "Oh, we think you have a heart problem." And I have these palpitations that are showing up. They put me through five weeks of tests — very expensive, very scary — before the nurse finally notices the piece of the paper, my meds list that I've been carrying to every single appointment, and says, "Oh my gosh." Three different specialists had prescribed three different versions of the same drug to me. I did not have a heart problem. I had an overdose problem. I had a care coordination problem. And this happens to millions of people every year. I want to use technology that we're all working on and making happen to make health care a coordinated team sport. Now this is the most frightening thing to me. Out of all the care I've had in hospitals and clinics around the world, the first time I've ever had a true team-based care experience was at Legacy Good Sam these last six months for me to go get this. And this is a picture of my graduation team from Legacy. There's a couple of the folks here. You'll recognize Dr. Batiuk. We just talked to him. Here's Jenny, one of the nurses, Allison, who helped manage the transplant list, and a dozen other people who aren't pictured, a pharmacist, a psychologist, a nutritionist, even a financial counselor, Lisa, who helped us deal with all the insurance hassles. I wept the day I graduated. I should have been happy, because I was so well that I could go back to my normal doctors, but I wept because I was so actually connected to this team. And here's the most important part. The other people in this picture are me and my wife, Ashley. Legacy trained us on how to do care for me at home so that they could offload the hospitals and clinics. That's the only way that the model works. My team is actually working in China on one of these self-care models for a project we called Age-Friendly Cities. We're trying to help build a social network that can help track and train the care of seniors caring for themselves as well as the care provided by their family members or volunteer community health workers, as well as have an exchange network online, where, for example, I can donate three hours of care a day to your mom, if somebody else can help me with transportation to meals, and we exchange all of that online. The most important point I want to make to you about this is the sacred and somewhat over-romanticized doctor-patient one-on-one is a relic of the past. The future of health care is smart teams, and you'd better be on that team for yourself. Now, the last thing that I want to talk to you about is care customization, because if you've got care anywhere and you've got care networking, those are going to go a long way towards improving our health care system, but there's still too much guesswork. Randomized clinical trials were actually invented in 1948 to help invent the drugs that cured tuberculosis, and those are important things, don't get me wrong. These population studies that we've done have created tons of miracle drugs that have saved millions of lives, but the problem is that health care is treating us as averages, not unique individuals, because at the end of the day, the patient is not the same thing as the population who are studied. That's what's leading to the guesswork. The technologies that are coming, high-performance computing, analytics, big data that everyone's talking about, will allow us to build predictive models for each of us as individual patients. And the magic here is, experiment on my avatar in software, not my body in suffering. Now, I've had two examples I want to quickly share with you of this kind of care customization on my own journey. The first was quite simple. I finally realized some years ago that all my medical teams were optimizing my treatment for longevity. It's like a badge of honor to see how long they can get the patient to live. I was optimizing my life for quality of life, and quality of life for me means time in snow. So on my chart, I forced them to put, "Patient goal: low doses of drugs over longer periods of time, side effects friendly to skiing." And I think that's why I achieved longevity. I think that time-in-snow therapy was as important as the pharmaceuticals that I had. Now the second example of customization — and by the way, you can't customize care if you don't know your own goals, so health care can't know those until you know your own health care goals. But the second example I want to give you is, I happened to be an early guinea pig, and I got very lucky to have my whole genome sequenced. Now it took about two weeks of processing on Intel's highest-end servers to make this happen, and another six months of human and computing labor to make sense of all of that data. And at the end of all of that, they said, "Yes, those diagnoses of that clash of medical titans all of those years ago were wrong, and we have a better path forward." The future that Intel's working on now is to figure out how to make that computing for personalized medicine go from months and weeks to even hours, and make this kind of tool available, not just in the mainframes of tier-one research hospitals around the world, but in the mainstream — every patient, every clinic with access to whole genome sequencing. And I tell you, this kind of care customization for everything from your goals to your genetics will be the most game-changing transformation that we witness in health care during our lifetime. So these three pillars of personal health, care anywhere, care networking, care customization, are happening in pieces now, but this vision will completely fail if we don't step up as caregivers and as patients to take on new roles. It's what my friend Verna said: Wake up and take control of your health. Because at the end of the day these technologies are simply about people caring for other people and ourselves in some powerful new ways. And it's in that spirit that I want to introduce you to one last friend, very quickly. Tracey Gamley stepped up to give me the impossible kidney that I was never supposed to have. (Applause) So Tracey, just tell us a little bit quickly about what the donor experience was like with you. Tracey Gamley: For me, it was really easy. I only had one night in the hospital. The surgery was done laparoscopically, so I have just five very small scars on my abdomen, and I had four weeks away from work and went back to doing everything I'd done before without any changes. ED: Well, I probably will never get a chance to say this to you in such a large audience ever again. So "thank you" feel likes a really trite word, but thank you from the bottom of my heart for saving my life. (Applause) This TED stage and all of the TED stages are often about celebrating innovation and celebrating new technologies, and I've done that here today, and I've seen amazing things coming from TED speakers, I mean, my gosh, artificial kidneys, even printable kidneys, that are coming. But until such time that these amazing technologies are available to all of us, and even when they are, it's up to us to care for, and even save, one another. I hope you will go out and make personal health happen for yourselves and for everyone. Thanks so much. (Applause) |
The Philosophical Breakfast Club | {0: 'Laura Snyder weaves tales of Victorian-era scientists that have been described as “fit for Masterpiece Theater.”'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | I'd like you to come back with me for a moment to the 19th century, specifically to June 24, 1833. The British Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its third meeting at the University of Cambridge. It's the first night of the meeting, and a confrontation is about to take place that will change science forever. An elderly, white-haired man stands up. The members of the Association are shocked to realize that it's the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who hadn't even left his house in years until that day. They're even more shocked by what he says. "You must stop calling yourselves natural philosophers." Coleridge felt that true philosophers like himself pondered the cosmos from their armchairs. They were not mucking around in the fossil pits or conducting messy experiments with electrical piles like the members of the British Association. The crowd grew angry and began to complain loudly. A young Cambridge scholar named William Whewell stood up and quieted the audience. He politely agreed that an appropriate name for the members of the association did not exist. "If 'philosophers' is taken to be too wide and lofty a term," he said, "then, by analogy with 'artist,' we may form 'scientist.'" This was the first time the word scientist was uttered in public, only 179 years ago. I first found out about this confrontation when I was in graduate school, and it kind of blew me away. I mean, how could the word scientist not have existed until 1833? What were scientists called before? What had changed to make a new name necessary precisely at that moment? Prior to this meeting, those who studied the natural world were talented amateurs. Think of the country clergyman or squire collecting his beetles or fossils, like Charles Darwin, for example, or, the hired help of a nobleman, like Joseph Priestley, who was the literary companion to the Marquis of Lansdowne when he discovered oxygen. After this, they were scientists, professionals with a particular scientific method, goals, societies and funding. Much of this revolution can be traced to four men who met at Cambridge University in 1812: Charles Babbage, John Herschel, Richard Jones and William Whewell. These were brilliant, driven men who accomplished amazing things. Charles Babbage, I think known to most TEDsters, invented the first mechanical calculator and the first prototype of a modern computer. John Herschel mapped the stars of the southern hemisphere, and, in his spare time, co-invented photography. I'm sure we could all be that productive without Facebook or Twitter to take up our time. Richard Jones became an important economist who later influenced Karl Marx. And Whewell not only coined the term scientist, as well as the words anode, cathode and ion, but spearheaded international big science with his global research on the tides. In the Cambridge winter of 1812 and 1813, the four met for what they called philosophical breakfasts. They talked about science and the need for a new scientific revolution. They felt science had stagnated since the days of the scientific revolution that had happened in the 17th century. It was time for a new revolution, which they pledged to bring about, and what's so amazing about these guys is, not only did they have these grandiose undergraduate dreams, but they actually carried them out, even beyond their wildest dreams. And I'm going to tell you today about four major changes to science these men made. About 200 years before, Francis Bacon and then, later, Isaac Newton, had proposed an inductive scientific method. Now that's a method that starts from observations and experiments and moves to generalizations about nature called natural laws, which are always subject to revision or rejection should new evidence arise. However, in 1809, David Ricardo muddied the waters by arguing that the science of economics should use a different, deductive method. The problem was that an influential group at Oxford began arguing that because it worked so well in economics, this deductive method ought to be applied to the natural sciences too. The members of the philosophical breakfast club disagreed. They wrote books and articles promoting inductive method in all the sciences that were widely read by natural philosophers, university students and members of the public. Reading one of Herschel's books was such a watershed moment for Charles Darwin that he would later say, "Scarcely anything in my life made so deep an impression on me. It made me wish to add my might to the accumulated store of natural knowledge." It also shaped Darwin's scientific method, as well as that used by his peers. [Science for the public good] Previously, it was believed that scientific knowledge ought to be used for the good of the king or queen, or for one's own personal gain. For example, ship captains needed to know information about the tides in order to safely dock at ports. Harbormasters would gather this knowledge and sell it to the ship captains. The philosophical breakfast club changed that, working together. Whewell's worldwide study of the tides resulted in public tide tables and tidal maps that freely provided the harbormasters' knowledge to all ship captains. Herschel helped by making tidal observations off the coast of South Africa, and, as he complained to Whewell, he was knocked off the docks during a violent high tide for his trouble. The four men really helped each other in every way. They also relentlessly lobbied the British government for the money to build Babbage's engines because they believed these engines would have a huge practical impact on society. In the days before pocket calculators, the numbers that most professionals needed — bankers, insurance agents, ship captains, engineers — were to be found in lookup books like this, filled with tables of figures. These tables were calculated using a fixed procedure over and over by part-time workers known as — and this is amazing — computers, but these calculations were really difficult. I mean, this nautical almanac published the lunar differences for every month of the year. Each month required 1,365 calculations, so these tables were filled with mistakes. Babbage's difference engine was the first mechanical calculator devised to accurately compute any of these tables. Two models of his engine were built in the last 20 years by a team from the Science Museum of London using his own plans. This is the one now at the Computer History Museum in California, and it calculates accurately. It actually works. Later, Babbage's analytical engine was the first mechanical computer in the modern sense. It had a separate memory and central processor. It was capable of iteration, conditional branching and parallel processing, and it was programmable using punched cards, an idea Babbage took from Jacquard's loom. Tragically, Babbage's engines never were built in his day because most people thought that non-human computers would have no usefulness for the public. [New scientific institutions] Founded in Bacon's time, the Royal Society of London was the foremost scientific society in England and even in the rest of the world. By the 19th century, it had become a kind of gentleman's club populated mainly by antiquarians, literary men and the nobility. The members of the philosophical breakfast club helped form a number of new scientific societies, including the British Association. These new societies required that members be active researchers publishing their results. They reinstated the tradition of the Q&A after scientific papers were read, which had been discontinued by the Royal Society as being ungentlemanly. And for the first time, they gave women a foot in the door of science. Members were encouraged to bring their wives, daughters and sisters to the meetings of the British Association, and while the women were expected to attend only the public lectures and the social events like this one, they began to infiltrate the scientific sessions as well. The British Association would later be the first of the major national science organizations in the world to admit women as full members. [External funding for science] Up to the 19th century, natural philosophers were expected to pay for their own equipment and supplies. Occasionally, there were prizes, such as that given to John Harrison in the 18th century, for solving the so-called longitude problem, but prizes were only given after the fact, when they were given at all. On the advice of the philosophical breakfast club, the British Association began to use the extra money generated by its meetings to give grants for research in astronomy, the tides, fossil fish, shipbuilding, and many other areas. These grants not only allowed less wealthy men to conduct research, but they also encouraged thinking outside the box, rather than just trying to solve one pre-set question. Eventually, the Royal Society and the scientific societies of other countries followed suit, and this has become — fortunately it's become — a major part of the scientific landscape today. So the philosophical breakfast club helped invent the modern scientist. That's the heroic part of their story. There's a flip side as well. They did not foresee at least one consequence of their revolution. They would have been deeply dismayed by today's disjunction between science and the rest of culture. It's shocking to realize that only 28 percent of American adults have even a very basic level of science literacy, and this was tested by asking simple questions like, "Did humans and dinosaurs inhabit the Earth at the same time?" and "What proportion of the Earth is covered in water?" Once scientists became members of a professional group, they were slowly walled off from the rest of us. This is the unintended consequence of the revolution that started with our four friends. Charles Darwin said, "I sometimes think that general and popular treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work." In fact, "Origin of Species" was written for a general and popular audience, and was widely read when it first appeared. Darwin knew what we seem to have forgotten, that science is not only for scientists. Thank you. (Applause) |
Let's talk crap. Seriously. | {0: "Rose George looks deeply into topics that are unseen but fundamental, whether that's sewers or latrines or massive container ships or pirate hostages or menstrual hygiene."} | TED2013 | Let's talk dirty. A few years ago, oddly enough, I needed the bathroom, and I found one, a public bathroom, and I went into the stall, and I prepared to do what I'd done most of my life: use the toilet, flush the toilet, forget about the toilet. And for some reason that day, instead, I asked myself a question, and it was, where does this stuff go? And with that question, I found myself plunged into the world of sanitation — there's more coming — (Laughter) — sanitation, toilets and poop, and I have yet to emerge. And that's because it's such an enraging, yet engaging place to be. To go back to that toilet, it wasn't a particularly fancy toilet, it wasn't as nice as this one from the World Toilet Organization. That's the other WTO. (Laughter) But it had a lockable door, it had privacy, it had water, it had soap so I could wash my hands, and I did because I'm a woman, and we do that. (Laughter) (Applause) But that day, when I asked that question, I learned something, and that was that I'd grown up thinking that a toilet like that was my right, when in fact it's a privilege. 2.5 billion people worldwide have no adequate toilet. They don't have a bucket or a box. Forty percent of the world with no adequate toilet. And they have to do what this little boy is doing by the side of the Mumbai Airport expressway, which is called open defecation, or poo-pooing in the open. And he does that every day, and every day, probably, that guy in the picture walks on by, because he sees that little boy, but he doesn't see him. But he should, because the problem with all that poop lying around is that poop carries passengers. Fifty communicable diseases like to travel in human shit. All those things, the eggs, the cysts, the bacteria, the viruses, all those can travel in one gram of human feces. How? Well, that little boy will not have washed his hands. He's barefoot. He'll run back into his house, and he will contaminate his drinking water and his food and his environment with whatever diseases he may be carrying by fecal particles that are on his fingers and feet. In what I call the flushed-and-plumbed world that most of us in this room are lucky to live in, the most common symptoms associated with those diseases, diarrhea, is now a bit of a joke. It's the runs, the Hershey squirts, the squits. Where I come from, we call it Delhi belly, as a legacy of empire. But if you search for a stock photo of diarrhea in a leading photo image agency, this is the picture that you come up with. (Laughter) Still not sure about the bikini. And here's another image of diarrhea. This is Marie Saylee, nine months old. You can't see her, because she's buried under that green grass in a little village in Liberia, because she died in three days from diarrhea — the Hershey squirts, the runs, a joke. And that's her dad. But she wasn't alone that day, because 4,000 other children died of diarrhea, and they do every day. Diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide, and you've probably been asked to care about things like HIV/AIDS or T.B. or measles, but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together. It's a very potent weapon of mass destruction. And the cost to the world is immense: 260 billion dollars lost every year on the losses to poor sanitation. These are cholera beds in Haiti. You'll have heard of cholera, but we don't hear about diarrhea. It gets a fraction of the attention and funding given to any of those other diseases. But we know how to fix this. We know, because in the mid-19th century, wonderful Victorian engineers installed systems of sewers and wastewater treatment and the flush toilet, and disease dropped dramatically. Child mortality dropped by the most it had ever dropped in history. The flush toilet was voted the best medical advance of the last 200 years by the readers of the British Medical Journal, and they were choosing over the Pill, anesthesia, and surgery. It's a wonderful waste disposal device. But I think that it's so good — it doesn't smell, we can put it in our house, we can lock it behind a door — and I think we've locked it out of conversation too. We don't have a neutral word for it. Poop's not particularly adequate. Shit offends people. Feces is too medical. Because I can't explain otherwise, when I look at the figures, what's going on. We know how to solve diarrhea and sanitation, but if you look at the budgets of countries, developing and developed, you'll think there's something wrong with the math, because you'll expect absurdities like Pakistan spending 47 times more on its military than it does on water and sanitation, even though 150,000 children die of diarrhea in Pakistan every year. But then you look at that already minuscule water and sanitation budget, and 75 to 90 percent of it will go on clean water supply, which is great; we all need water. No one's going to refuse clean water. But the humble latrine, or flush toilet, reduces disease by twice as much as just putting in clean water. Think about it. That little boy who's running back into his house, he may have a nice, clean fresh water supply, but he's got dirty hands that he's going to contaminate his water supply with. And I think that the real waste of human waste is that we are wasting it as a resource and as an incredible trigger for development, because these are a few things that toilets and poop itself can do for us. So a toilet can put a girl back in school. Twenty-five percent of girls in India drop out of school because they have no adequate sanitation. They've been used to sitting through lessons for years and years holding it in. We've all done that, but they do it every day, and when they hit puberty and they start menstruating, it just gets too much. And I understand that. Who can blame them? So if you met an educationalist and said, "I can improve education attendance rates by 25 percent with just one simple thing," you'd make a lot of friends in education. That's not the only thing it can do for you. Poop can cook your dinner. It's got nutrients in it. We ingest nutrients. We excrete nutrients as well. We don't keep them all. In Rwanda, they are now getting 75 percent of their cooking fuel in their prison system from the contents of prisoners' bowels. So these are a bunch of inmates in a prison in Butare. They're genocidal inmates, most of them, and they're stirring the contents of their own latrines, because if you put poop in a sealed environment, in a tank, pretty much like a stomach, then, pretty much like a stomach, it gives off gas, and you can cook with it. And you might think it's just good karma to see these guys stirring shit, but it's also good economic sense, because they're saving a million dollars a year. They're cutting down on deforestation, and they've found a fuel supply that is inexhaustible, infinite and free at the point of production. It's not just in the poor world that poop can save lives. Here's a woman who's about to get a dose of the brown stuff in those syringes, which is what you think it is, except not quite, because it's actually donated. There is now a new career path called stool donor. It's like the new sperm donor. Because she has been suffering from a superbug called C. diff, and it's resistant to antibiotics in many cases. She's been suffering for years. She gets a dose of healthy human feces, and the cure rate for this procedure is 94 percent. It's astonishing, but hardly anyone is still doing it. Maybe it's the ick factor. That's okay, because there's a team of research scientists in Canada who have now created a stool sample, a fake stool sample which is called RePOOPulate. So you'd be thinking by now, okay, the solution's simple, we give everyone a toilet. And this is where it gets really interesting, because it's not that simple, because we are not simple. So the really interesting, exciting work — this is the engaging bit — in sanitation is that we need to understand human psychology. We need to understand software as well as just giving someone hardware. They've found in many developing countries that governments have gone in and given out free latrines and gone back a few years later and found that they've got lots of new goat sheds or temples or spare rooms with their owners happily walking past them and going over to the open defecating ground. So the idea is to manipulate human emotion. It's been done for decades. The soap companies did it in the early 20th century. They tried selling soap as healthy. No one bought it. They tried selling it as sexy. Everyone bought it. In India now there's a campaign which persuades young brides not to marry into families that don't have a toilet. It's called "No Loo, No I Do." (Laughter) And in case you think that poster's just propaganda, here's Priyanka, 23 years old. I met her last October in India, and she grew up in a conservative environment. She grew up in a rural village in a poor area of India, and she was engaged at 14, and then at 21 or so, she moved into her in-law's house. And she was horrified to get there and find that they didn't have a toilet. She'd grown up with a latrine. It was no big deal, but it was a latrine. And the first night she was there, she was told that at 4 o'clock in the morning — her mother-in-law got her up, told her to go outside and go and do it in the dark in the open. And she was scared. She was scared of drunks hanging around. She was scared of snakes. She was scared of rape. After three days, she did an unthinkable thing. She left. And if you know anything about rural India, you'll know that's an unspeakably courageous thing to do. But not just that. She got her toilet, and now she goes around all the other villages in India persuading other women to do the same thing. It's what I call social contagion, and it's really powerful and really exciting. Another version of this, another village in India near where Priyanka lives is this village, called Lakara, and about a year ago, it had no toilets whatsoever. Kids were dying of diarrhea and cholera. Some visitors came, using various behavioral change tricks like putting out a plate of food and a plate of shit and watching the flies go one to the other. Somehow, people who'd been thinking that what they were doing was not disgusting at all suddenly thought, "Oops." Not only that, but they were ingesting their neighbors' shit. That's what really made them change their behavior. So this woman, this boy's mother installed this latrine in a few hours. Her entire life, she'd been using the banana field behind, but she installed the latrine in a few hours. It cost nothing. It's going to save that boy's life. So when I get despondent about the state of sanitation, even though these are pretty exciting times because we've got the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation reinventing the toilet, which is great, we've got Matt Damon going on bathroom strike, which is great for humanity, very bad for his colon. But there are things to worry about. It's the most off-track Millennium Development Goal. It's about 50 or so years off track. We're not going to meet targets, providing people with sanitation at this rate. So when I get sad about sanitation, I think of Japan, because Japan 70 years ago was a nation of people who used pit latrines and wiped with sticks, and now it's a nation of what are called Woshurettos, washlet toilets. They have in-built bidet nozzles for a lovely, hands-free cleaning experience, and they have various other features like a heated seat and an automatic lid-raising device which is known as the "marriage-saver." (Laughter) But most importantly, what they have done in Japan, which I find so inspirational, is they've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door. They've made it conversational. People go out and upgrade their toilet. They talk about it. They've sanitized it. I hope that we can do that. It's not a difficult thing to do. All we really need to do is look at this issue as the urgent, shameful issue that it is. And don't think that it's just in the poor world that things are wrong. Our sewers are crumbling. Things are going wrong here too. The solution to all of this is pretty easy. I'm going to make your lives easy this afternoon and just ask you to do one thing, and that's to go out, protest, speak about the unspeakable, and talk shit. Thank you. (Applause) |
Toward a new understanding of mental illness | {0: 'The Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas Insel supports research that will help us understand, treat and even prevent mental disorders.'} | TEDxCaltech | So let's start with some good news, and the good news has to do with what do we know based on biomedical research that actually has changed the outcomes for many very serious diseases? Let's start with leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL, the most common cancer of children. When I was a student, the mortality rate was about 95 percent. Today, some 25, 30 years later, we're talking about a mortality rate that's reduced by 85 percent. Six thousand children each year who would have previously died of this disease are cured. If you want the really big numbers, look at these numbers for heart disease. Heart disease used to be the biggest killer, particularly for men in their 40s. Today, we've seen a 63-percent reduction in mortality from heart disease — remarkably, 1.1 million deaths averted every year. AIDS, incredibly, has just been named, in the past month, a chronic disease, meaning that a 20-year-old who becomes infected with HIV is expected not to live weeks, months, or a couple of years, as we said only a decade ago, but is thought to live decades, probably to die in his '60s or '70s from other causes altogether. These are just remarkable, remarkable changes in the outlook for some of the biggest killers. And one in particular that you probably wouldn't know about, stroke, which has been, along with heart disease, one of the biggest killers in this country, is a disease in which now we know that if you can get people into the emergency room within three hours of the onset, some 30 percent of them will be able to leave the hospital without any disability whatsoever. Remarkable stories, good-news stories, all of which boil down to understanding something about the diseases that has allowed us to detect early and intervene early. Early detection, early intervention, that's the story for these successes. Unfortunately, the news is not all good. Let's talk about one other story which has to do with suicide. Now this is, of course, not a disease, per se. It's a condition, or it's a situation that leads to mortality. What you may not realize is just how prevalent it is. There are 38,000 suicides each year in the United States. That means one about every 15 minutes. Third most common cause of death amongst people between the ages of 15 and 25. It's kind of an extraordinary story when you realize that this is twice as common as homicide and actually more common as a source of death than traffic fatalities in this country. Now, when we talk about suicide, there is also a medical contribution here, because 90 percent of suicides are related to a mental illness: depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia, borderline personality. There's a long list of disorders that contribute, and as I mentioned before, often early in life. But it's not just the mortality from these disorders. It's also morbidity. If you look at disability, as measured by the World Health Organization with something they call the Disability Adjusted Life Years, it's kind of a metric that nobody would think of except an economist, except it's one way of trying to capture what is lost in terms of disability from medical causes, and as you can see, virtually 30 percent of all disability from all medical causes can be attributed to mental disorders, neuropsychiatric syndromes. You're probably thinking that doesn't make any sense. I mean, cancer seems far more serious. Heart disease seems far more serious. But you can see actually they are further down this list, and that's because we're talking here about disability. What drives the disability for these disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar and depression? Why are they number one here? Well, there are probably three reasons. One is that they're highly prevalent. About one in five people will suffer from one of these disorders in the course of their lifetime. A second, of course, is that, for some people, these become truly disabling, and it's about four to five percent, perhaps one in 20. But what really drives these numbers, this high morbidity, and to some extent the high mortality, is the fact that these start very early in life. Fifty percent will have onset by age 14, 75 percent by age 24, a picture that is very different than what one would see if you're talking about cancer or heart disease, diabetes, hypertension — most of the major illnesses that we think about as being sources of morbidity and mortality. These are, indeed, the chronic disorders of young people. Now, I started by telling you that there were some good-news stories. This is obviously not one of them. This is the part of it that is perhaps most difficult, and in a sense this is a kind of confession for me. My job is to actually make sure that we make progress on all of these disorders. I work for the federal government. Actually, I work for you. You pay my salary. And maybe at this point, when you know what I do, or maybe what I've failed to do, you'll think that I probably ought to be fired, and I could certainly understand that. But what I want to suggest, and the reason I'm here is to tell you that I think we're about to be in a very different world as we think about these illnesses. What I've been talking to you about so far is mental disorders, diseases of the mind. That's actually becoming a rather unpopular term these days, and people feel that, for whatever reason, it's politically better to use the term behavioral disorders and to talk about these as disorders of behavior. Fair enough. They are disorders of behavior, and they are disorders of the mind. But what I want to suggest to you is that both of those terms, which have been in play for a century or more, are actually now impediments to progress, that what we need conceptually to make progress here is to rethink these disorders as brain disorders. Now, for some of you, you're going to say, "Oh my goodness, here we go again. We're going to hear about a biochemical imbalance or we're going to hear about drugs or we're going to hear about some very simplistic notion that will take our subjective experience and turn it into molecules, or maybe into some sort of very flat, unidimensional understanding of what it is to have depression or schizophrenia. When we talk about the brain, it is anything but unidimensional or simplistic or reductionistic. It depends, of course, on what scale or what scope you want to think about, but this is an organ of surreal complexity, and we are just beginning to understand how to even study it, whether you're thinking about the 100 billion neurons that are in the cortex or the 100 trillion synapses that make up all the connections. We have just begun to try to figure out how do we take this very complex machine that does extraordinary kinds of information processing and use our own minds to understand this very complex brain that supports our own minds. It's actually a kind of cruel trick of evolution that we simply don't have a brain that seems to be wired well enough to understand itself. In a sense, it actually makes you feel that when you're in the safe zone of studying behavior or cognition, something you can observe, that in a way feels more simplistic and reductionistic than trying to engage this very complex, mysterious organ that we're beginning to try to understand. Now, already in the case of the brain disorders that I've been talking to you about, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, while we don't have an in-depth understanding of how they are abnormally processed or what the brain is doing in these illnesses, we have been able to already identify some of the connectional differences, or some of the ways in which the circuitry is different for people who have these disorders. We call this the human connectome, and you can think about the connectome sort of as the wiring diagram of the brain. You'll hear more about this in a few minutes. The important piece here is that as you begin to look at people who have these disorders, the one in five of us who struggle in some way, you find that there's a lot of variation in the way that the brain is wired, but there are some predictable patterns, and those patterns are risk factors for developing one of these disorders. It's a little different than the way we think about brain disorders like Huntington's or Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease where you have a bombed-out part of your cortex. Here we're talking about traffic jams, or sometimes detours, or sometimes problems with just the way that things are connected and the way that the brain functions. You could, if you want, compare this to, on the one hand, a myocardial infarction, a heart attack, where you have dead tissue in the heart, versus an arrhythmia, where the organ simply isn't functioning because of the communication problems within it. Either one would kill you; in only one of them will you find a major lesion. As we think about this, probably it's better to actually go a little deeper into one particular disorder, and that would be schizophrenia, because I think that's a good case for helping to understand why thinking of this as a brain disorder matters. These are scans from Judy Rapoport and her colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in which they studied children with very early onset schizophrenia, and you can see already in the top there's areas that are red or orange, yellow, are places where there's less gray matter, and as they followed them over five years, comparing them to age match controls, you can see that, particularly in areas like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the superior temporal gyrus, there's a profound loss of gray matter. And it's important, if you try to model this, you can think about normal development as a loss of cortical mass, loss of cortical gray matter, and what's happening in schizophrenia is that you overshoot that mark, and at some point, when you overshoot, you cross a threshold, and it's that threshold where we say, this is a person who has this disease, because they have the behavioral symptoms of hallucinations and delusions. That's something we can observe. But look at this closely and you can see that actually they've crossed a different threshold. They've crossed a brain threshold much earlier, that perhaps not at age 22 or 20, but even by age 15 or 16 you can begin to see the trajectory for development is quite different at the level of the brain, not at the level of behavior. Why does this matter? Well first because, for brain disorders, behavior is the last thing to change. We know that for Alzheimer's, for Parkinson's, for Huntington's. There are changes in the brain a decade or more before you see the first signs of a behavioral change. The tools that we have now allow us to detect these brain changes much earlier, long before the symptoms emerge. But most important, go back to where we started. The good-news stories in medicine are early detection, early intervention. If we waited until the heart attack, we would be sacrificing 1.1 million lives every year in this country to heart disease. That is precisely what we do today when we decide that everybody with one of these brain disorders, brain circuit disorders, has a behavioral disorder. We wait until the behavior becomes manifest. That's not early detection. That's not early intervention. Now to be clear, we're not quite ready to do this. We don't have all the facts. We don't actually even know what the tools will be, nor what to precisely look for in every case to be able to get there before the behavior emerges as different. But this tells us how we need to think about it, and where we need to go. Are we going to be there soon? I think that this is something that will happen over the course of the next few years, but I'd like to finish with a quote about trying to predict how this will happen by somebody who's thought a lot about changes in concepts and changes in technology. "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10." — Bill Gates. Thanks very much. (Applause) |
In search of the man who broke my neck | {0: 'Joshua Prager’s journalism unravels historical secrets -- and his own.'} | TED2013 | One year ago, I rented a car in Jerusalem to go find a man I'd never met but who had changed my life. I didn't have a phone number to call to say I was coming. I didn't have an exact address, but I knew his name, Abed, I knew that he lived in a town of 15,000, Kfar Kara, and I knew that, 21 years before, just outside this holy city, he broke my neck. And so, on an overcast morning in January, I headed north off in a silver Chevy to find a man and some peace. The road dropped and I exited Jerusalem. I then rounded the very bend where his blue truck, heavy with four tons of floor tiles, had borne down with great speed onto the back left corner of the minibus where I sat. I was then 19 years old. I'd grown five inches and done some 20,000 pushups in eight months, and the night before the crash, I delighted in my new body, playing basketball with friends into the wee hours of a May morning. I palmed the ball in my large right hand, and when that hand reached the rim, I felt invincible. I was off in the bus to get the pizza I'd won on the court. I didn't see Abed coming. From my seat, I was looking up at a stone town on a hilltop, bright in the noontime sun, when from behind there was a great bang, as loud and violent as a bomb. My head snapped back over my red seat. My eardrum blew. My shoes flew off. I flew too, my head bobbing on broken bones, and when I landed, I was a quadriplegic. Over the coming months, I learned to breathe on my own, then to sit and to stand and to walk, but my body was now divided vertically. I was a hemiplegic, and back home in New York, I used a wheelchair for four years, all through college. College ended and I returned to Jerusalem for a year. There I rose from my chair for good, I leaned on my cane, and I looked back, finding all from my fellow passengers in the bus to photographs of the crash, and when I saw this photograph, I didn't see a bloody and unmoving body. I saw the healthy bulk of a left deltoid, and I mourned that it was lost, mourned all I had not yet done, but was now impossible. It was then I read the testimony that Abed gave the morning after the crash, of driving down the right lane of a highway toward Jerusalem. Reading his words, I welled with anger. It was the first time I'd felt anger toward this man, and it came from magical thinking. On this xeroxed piece of paper, the crash had not yet happened. Abed could still turn his wheel left so that I would see him whoosh by out my window and I would remain whole. "Be careful, Abed, look out. Slow down." But Abed did not slow, and on that xeroxed piece of paper, my neck again broke, and again, I was left without anger. I decided to find Abed, and when I finally did, he responded to my Hebrew hello which such nonchalance, it seemed he'd been awaiting my phone call. And maybe he had. I didn't mention to Abed his prior driving record — 27 violations by the age of 25, the last, his not shifting his truck into a low gear on that May day — and I didn't mention my prior record — the quadriplegia and the catheters, the insecurity and the loss — and when Abed went on about how hurt he was in the crash, I didn't say that I knew from the police report that he'd escaped serious injury. I said I wanted to meet. Abed said that I should call back in a few weeks, and when I did, and a recording told me that his number was disconnected, I let Abed and the crash go. Many years passed. I walked with my cane and my ankle brace and a backpack on trips in six continents. I pitched overhand in a weekly softball game that I started in Central Park, and home in New York, I became a journalist and an author, typing hundreds of thousands of words with one finger. A friend pointed out to me that all of my big stories mirrored my own, each centering on a life that had changed in an instant, owing, if not to a crash, then to an inheritance, a swing of the bat, a click of the shutter, an arrest. Each of us had a before and an after. I'd been working through my lot after all. Still, Abed was far from my mind, when last year, I returned to Israel to write of the crash, and the book I then wrote, "Half-Life," was nearly complete when I recognized that I still wanted to meet Abed, and finally I understood why: to hear this man say two words: "I'm sorry." People apologize for less. And so I got a cop to confirm that Abed still lived somewhere in his same town, and I was now driving to it with a potted yellow rose in the back seat, when suddenly flowers seemed a ridiculous offering. But what to get the man who broke your fucking neck? (Laughter) I pulled into the town of Abu Ghosh, and bought a brick of Turkish delight: pistachios glued in rosewater. Better. Back on Highway 1, I envisioned what awaited. Abed would hug me. Abed would spit at me. Abed would say, "I'm sorry." I then began to wonder, as I had many times before, how my life would have been different had this man not injured me, had my genes been fed a different helping of experience. Who was I? Was I who I had been before the crash, before this road divided my life like the spine of an open book? Was I what had been done to me? Were all of us the results of things done to us, done for us, the infidelity of a parent or spouse, money inherited? Were we instead our bodies, their inborn endowments and deficits? It seemed that we could be nothing more than genes and experience, but how to tease out the one from the other? As Yeats put that same universal question, "O body swayed to music, o brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?" I'd been driving for an hour when I looked in my rearview mirror and saw my own brightening glance. The light my eyes had carried for as long as they had been blue. The predispositions and impulses that had propelled me as a toddler to try and slip over a boat into a Chicago lake, that had propelled me as a teen to jump into wild Cape Cod Bay after a hurricane. But I also saw in my reflection that, had Abed not injured me, I would now, in all likelihood, be a doctor and a husband and a father. I would be less mindful of time and of death, and, oh, I would not be disabled, would not suffer the thousand slings and arrows of my fortune. The frequent furl of five fingers, the chips in my teeth come from biting at all the many things a solitary hand cannot open. The dancer and the dance were hopelessly entwined. It was approaching 11 when I exited right toward Afula, and passed a large quarry and was soon in Kfar Kara. I felt a pang of nerves. But Chopin was on the radio, seven beautiful mazurkas, and I pulled into a lot by a gas station to listen and to calm. I'd been told that in an Arab town, one need only mention the name of a local and it will be recognized. And I was mentioning Abed and myself, noting deliberately that I was here in peace, to the people in this town, when I met Mohamed outside a post office at noon. He listened to me. You know, it was most often when speaking to people that I wondered where I ended and my disability began, for many people told me what they told no one else. Many cried. And one day, after a woman I met on the street did the same and I later asked her why, she told me that, best she could tell, her tears had had something to do with my being happy and strong, but vulnerable too. I listened to her words. I suppose they were true. I was me, but I was now me despite a limp, and that, I suppose, was what now made me, me. Anyway, Mohamed told me what perhaps he would not have told another stranger. He led me to a house of cream stucco, then drove off. And as I sat contemplating what to say, a woman approached in a black shawl and black robe. I stepped from my car and said "Shalom," and identified myself, and she told me that her husband Abed would be home from work in four hours. Her Hebrew was not good, and she later confessed that she thought that I had come to install the Internet. (Laughter) I drove off and returned at 4:30, thankful to the minaret up the road that helped me find my way back. And as I approached the front door, Abed saw me, my jeans and flannel and cane, and I saw Abed, an average-looking man of average size. He wore black and white: slippers over socks, pilling sweatpants, a piebald sweater, a striped ski cap pulled down to his forehead. He'd been expecting me. Mohamed had phoned. And so at once, we shook hands, and smiled, and I gave him my gift, and he told me I was a guest in his home, and we sat beside one another on a fabric couch. It was then that Abed resumed at once the tale of woe he had begun over the phone 16 years before. He'd just had surgery on his eyes, he said. He had problems with his side and his legs too, and, oh, he'd lost his teeth in the crash. Did I wish to see him remove them? Abed then rose and turned on the TV so that I wouldn't be alone when he left the room, and returned with polaroids of the crash and his old driver's license. "I was handsome," he said. We looked down at his laminated mug. Abed had been less handsome than substantial, with thick black hair and a full face and a wide neck. It was this youth who on May 16, 1990, had broken two necks including mine, and bruised one brain and taken one life. Twenty-one years later, he was now thinner than his wife, his skin slack on his face, and looking at Abed looking at his young self, I remembered looking at that photograph of my young self after the crash, and recognized his longing. "The crash changed both of our lives," I said. Abed then showed me a picture of his mashed truck, and said that the crash was the fault of a bus driver in the left lane who did not let him pass. I did not want to recap the crash with Abed. I'd hoped for something simpler: to exchange a Turkish dessert for two words and be on my way. And so I didn't point out that in his own testimony the morning after the crash, Abed did not even mention the bus driver. No, I was quiet. I was quiet because I had not come for truth. I had come for remorse. And so I now went looking for remorse and threw truth under the bus. "I understand," I said, "that the crash was not your fault, but does it make you sad that others suffered?" Abed spoke three quick words. "Yes, I suffered." Abed then told me why he'd suffered. He'd lived an unholy life before the crash, and so God had ordained the crash, but now, he said, he was religious, and God was pleased. It was then that God intervened: news on the TV of a car wreck that hours before had killed three people up north. We looked up at the wreckage. "Strange," I said. "Strange," he agreed. I had the thought that there, on Route 804, there were perpetrators and victims, dyads bound by a crash. Some, as had Abed, would forget the date. Some, as had I, would remember. The report finished and Abed spoke. "It is a pity," he said, "that the police in this country are not tough enough on bad drivers." I was baffled. Abed had said something remarkable. Did it point up the degree to which he'd absolved himself of the crash? Was it evidence of guilt, an assertion that he should have been put away longer? He'd served six months in prison, lost his truck license for a decade. I forgot my discretion. "Um, Abed," I said, "I thought you had a few driving issues before the crash." "Well," he said, "I once went 60 in a 40." And so 27 violations — driving through a red light, driving at excessive speed, driving on the wrong side of a barrier, and finally, riding his brakes down that hill — reduced to one. And it was then I understood that no matter how stark the reality, the human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable. The goat becomes the hero. The perpetrator becomes the victim. It was then I understood that Abed would never apologize. Abed and I sat with our coffee. We'd spent 90 minutes together, and he was now known to me. He was not a particularly bad man or a particularly good man. He was a limited man who'd found it within himself to be kind to me. With a nod to Jewish custom, he told me that I should live to be 120 years old. But it was hard for me to relate to one who had so completely washed his hands of his own calamitous doing, to one whose life was so unexamined that he said he thought two people had died in the crash. There was much I wished to say to Abed. I wished to tell him that, were he to acknowledge my disability, it would be okay, for people are wrong to marvel at those like me who smile as we limp. People don't know that they have lived through worse, that problems of the heart hit with a force greater than a runaway truck, that problems of the mind are greater still, more injurious, than a hundred broken necks. I wished to tell him that what makes most of us who we are most of all is not our minds and not our bodies and not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us. "This," wrote the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, "is the last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." I wished to tell him that not only paralyzers and paralyzees must evolve, reconcile to reality, but we all must — the aging and the anxious and the divorced and the balding and the bankrupt and everyone. I wished to tell him that one does not have to say that a bad thing is good, that a crash is from God and so a crash is good, a broken neck is good. One can say that a bad thing sucks, but that this natural world still has many glories. I wished to tell him that, in the end, our mandate is clear: We have to rise above bad fortune. We have to be in the good and enjoy the good, study and work and adventure and friendship — oh, friendship — and community and love. But most of all, I wished to tell him what Herman Melville wrote, that "truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast." Yes, contrast. If you are mindful of what you do not have, you may be truly mindful of what you do have, and if the gods are kind, you may truly enjoy what you have. That is the one singular gift you may receive if you suffer in any existential way. You know death, and so may wake each morning pulsing with ready life. Some part of you is cold, and so another part may truly enjoy what it is to be warm, or even to be cold. When one morning, years after the crash, I stepped onto stone and the underside of my left foot felt the flash of cold, nerves at last awake, it was exhilarating, a gust of snow. But I didn't say these things to Abed. I told him only that he had killed one man, not two. I told him the name of that man. And then I said, "Goodbye." Thank you. (Applause) Thanks a lot. (Applause) |
Parkinson's, depression and the switch that might turn them off | {0: 'The chair of neurosurgery at the University of Toronto, Andres Lozano has pioneered the use of deep brain stimulation for treating Parkinson’s, depression, anorexia and Alzheimer’s disease.'} | TEDxCaltech | One of the things I want to establish right from the start is that not all neurosurgeons wear cowboy boots. I just wanted you to know that. So I am indeed a neurosurgeon, and I follow a long tradition of neurosurgery, and what I'm going to tell you about today is adjusting the dials in the circuits in the brain, being able to go anywhere in the brain and turning areas of the brain up or down to help our patients. So as I said, neurosurgery comes from a long tradition. It's been around for about 7,000 years. In Mesoamerica, there used to be neurosurgery, and there were these neurosurgeons that used to treat patients. And they were trying to — they knew that the brain was involved in neurological and psychiatric disease. They didn't know exactly what they were doing. Not much has changed, by the way. (Laughter) But they thought that, if you had a neurologic or psychiatric disease, it must be because you are possessed by an evil spirit. So if you are possessed by an evil spirit causing neurologic or psychiatric problems, then the way to treat this is, of course, to make a hole in your skull and let the evil spirit escape. So this was the thinking back then, and these individuals made these holes. Sometimes the patients were a little bit reluctant to go through this because, you can tell that the holes are made partially and then, I think, there was some trepanation, and then they left very quickly and it was only a partial hole, and we know they survived these procedures. But this was common. There were some sites where one percent of all the skulls have these holes, and so you can see that neurologic and psychiatric disease is quite common, and it was also quite common about 7,000 years ago. Now, in the course of time, we've come to realize that different parts of the brain do different things. So there are areas of the brain that are dedicated to controlling your movement or your vision or your memory or your appetite, and so on. And when things work well, then the nervous system works well, and everything functions. But once in a while, things don't go so well, and there's trouble in these circuits, and there are some rogue neurons that are misfiring and causing trouble, or sometimes they're underactive and they're not quite working as they should. Now, the manifestation of this depends on where in the brain these neurons are. So when these neurons are in the motor circuit, you get dysfunction in the movement system, and you get things like Parkinson's disease. When the malfunction is in a circuit that regulates your mood, you get things like depression, and when it is in a circuit that controls your memory and cognitive function, then you get things like Alzheimer's disease. So what we've been able to do is to pinpoint where these disturbances are in the brain, and we've been able to intervene within these circuits in the brain to either turn them up or turn them down. So this is very much like choosing the correct station on the radio dial. Once you choose the right station, whether it be jazz or opera, in our case whether it be movement or mood, we can put the dial there, and then we can use a second button to adjust the volume, to turn it up or turn it down. So what I'm going to tell you about is using the circuitry of the brain to implant electrodes and turning areas of the brain up and down to see if we can help our patients. And this is accomplished using this kind of device, and this is called deep brain stimulation. So what we're doing is placing these electrodes throughout the brain. Again, we are making holes in the skull about the size of a dime, putting an electrode in, and then this electrode is completely underneath the skin down to a pacemaker in the chest, and with a remote control very much like a television remote control, we can adjust how much electricity we deliver to these areas of the brain. We can turn it up or down, on or off. Now, about a hundred thousand patients in the world have received deep brain stimulation, and I'm going to show you some examples of using deep brain stimulation to treat disorders of movement, disorders of mood and disorders of cognition. So this looks something like this when it's in the brain. You see the electrode going through the skull into the brain and resting there, and we can place this really anywhere in the brain. I tell my friends that no neuron is safe from a neurosurgeon, because we can really reach just about anywhere in the brain quite safely now. Now the first example I'm going to show you is a patient with Parkinson's disease, and this lady has Parkinson's disease, and she has these electrodes in her brain, and I'm going to show you what she's like when the electrodes are turned off and she has her Parkinson's symptoms, and then we're going to turn it on. So this looks something like this. The electrodes are turned off now, and you can see that she has tremor. (Video) Man: Okay. Woman: I can't. Man: Can you try to touch my finger? (Video) Man: That's a little better. Woman: That side is better. We're now going to turn it on. It's on. Just turned it on. And this works like that, instantly. And the difference between shaking in this way and not — (Applause) The difference between shaking in this way and not is related to the misbehavior of 25,000 neurons in her subthalamic nucleus. So we now know how to find these troublemakers and tell them, "Gentlemen, that's enough. We want you to stop doing that." And we do that with electricity. So we use electricity to dictate how they fire, and we try to block their misbehavior using electricity. So in this case, we are suppressing the activity of abnormal neurons. We started using this technique in other problems, and I'm going to tell you about a fascinating problem that we encountered, a case of dystonia. So dystonia is a disorder affecting children. It's a genetic disorder, and it involves a twisting motion, and these children get progressively more and more twisting until they can't breathe, until they get sores, urinary infections, and then they die. So back in 1997, I was asked to see this young boy, perfectly normal. He has this genetic form of dystonia. There are eight children in the family. Five of them have dystonia. So here he is. This boy is nine years old, perfectly normal until the age six, and then he started twisting his body, first the right foot, then the left foot, then the right arm, then the left arm, then the trunk, and then by the time he arrived, within the course of one or two years of the disease onset, he could no longer walk, he could no longer stand. He was crippled, and indeed the natural progression as this gets worse is for them to become progressively twisted, progressively disabled, and many of these children do not survive. So he is one of five kids. The only way he could get around was crawling on his belly like this. He did not respond to any drugs. We did not know what to do with this boy. We did not know what operation to do, where to go in the brain, but on the basis of our results in Parkinson's disease, we reasoned, why don't we try to suppress the same area in the brain that we suppressed in Parkinson's disease, and let's see what happens? So here he was. We operated on him hoping that he would get better. We did not know. So here he is now, back in Israel where he lives, three months after the procedure, and here he is. (Applause) On the basis of this result, this is now a procedure that's done throughout the world, and there have been hundreds of children that have been helped with this kind of surgery. This boy is now in university and leads quite a normal life. This has been one of the most satisfying cases that I have ever done in my entire career, to restore movement and walking to this kind of child. (Applause) We realized that perhaps we could use this technology not only in circuits that control your movement but also circuits that control other things, and the next thing that we took on was circuits that control your mood. And we decided to take on depression, and the reason we took on depression is because it's so prevalent, and as you know, there are many treatments for depression, with medication and psychotherapy, even electroconvulsive therapy, but there are millions of people, and there are still 10 or 20 percent of patients with depression that do not respond, and it is these patients that we want to help. And let's see if we can use this technique to help these patients with depression. So the first thing we did was, we compared, what's different in the brain of someone with depression and someone who is normal, and what we did was PET scans to look at the blood flow of the brain, and what we noticed is that in patients with depression compared to normals, areas of the brain are shut down, and those are the areas in blue. So here you really have the blues, and the areas in blue are areas that are involved in motivation, in drive and decision-making, and indeed, if you're severely depressed as these patients were, those are impaired. You lack motivation and drive. The other thing we discovered was an area that was overactive, area 25, seen there in red, and area 25 is the sadness center of the brain. If I make any of you sad, for example, I make you remember the last time you saw your parent before they died or a friend before they died, this area of the brain lights up. It is the sadness center of the brain. And so patients with depression have hyperactivity. The area of the brain for sadness is on red hot. The thermostat is set at 100 degrees, and the other areas of the brain, involved in drive and motivation, are shut down. So we wondered, can we place electrodes in this area of sadness and see if we can turn down the thermostat, can we turn down the activity, and what will be the consequence of that? So we went ahead and implanted electrodes in patients with depression. This is work done with my colleague Helen Mayberg from Emory. And we placed electrodes in area 25, and in the top scan you see before the operation, area 25, the sadness area is red hot, and the frontal lobes are shut down in blue, and then, after three months of continuous stimulation, 24 hours a day, or six months of continuous stimulation, we have a complete reversal of this. We're able to drive down area 25, down to a more normal level, and we're able to turn back online the frontal lobes of the brain, and indeed we're seeing very striking results in these patients with severe depression. So now we are in clinical trials, and are in Phase III clinical trials, and this may become a new procedure, if it's safe and we find that it's effective, to treat patients with severe depression. I've shown you that we can use deep brain stimulation to treat the motor system in cases of Parkinson's disease and dystonia. I've shown you that we can use it to treat a mood circuit in cases of depression. Can we use deep brain stimulation to make you smarter? (Laughter) Anybody interested in that? (Applause) Of course we can, right? So what we've decided to do is we're going to try to turbocharge the memory circuits in the brain. We're going to place electrodes within the circuits that regulate your memory and cognitive function to see if we can turn up their activity. Now we're not going to do this in normal people. We're going to do this in people that have cognitive deficits, and we've chosen to treat patients with Alzheimer's disease who have cognitive and memory deficits. As you know, this is the main symptom of early onset Alzheimer's disease. So we've placed electrodes within this circuit in an area of the brain called the fornix, which is the highway in and out of this memory circuit, with the idea to see if we can turn on this memory circuit, and whether that can, in turn, help these patients with Alzheimer's disease. Now it turns out that in Alzheimer's disease, there's a huge deficit in glucose utilization in the brain. The brain is a bit of a hog when it comes to using glucose. It uses 20 percent of all your — even though it only weighs two percent — it uses 10 times more glucose than it should based on its weight. Twenty percent of all the glucose in your body is used by the brain, and as you go from being normal to having mild cognitive impairment, which is a precursor for Alzheimer's, all the way to Alzheimer's disease, then there are areas of the brain that stop using glucose. They shut down. They turn off. And indeed, what we see is that these areas in red around the outside ribbon of the brain are progressively getting more and more blue until they shut down completely. This is analogous to having a power failure in an area of the brain, a regional power failure. So the lights are out in parts of the brain in patients with Alzheimer's disease, and the question is, are the lights out forever, or can we turn the lights back on? Can we get those areas of the brain to use glucose once again? So this is what we did. We implanted electrodes in the fornix of patients with Alzheimer's disease, we turned it on, and we looked at what happens to glucose use in the brain. And indeed, at the top, you'll see before the surgery, the areas in blue are the areas that use less glucose than normal, predominantly the parietal and temporal lobes. These areas of the brain are shut down. The lights are out in these areas of the brain. We then put in the DBS electrodes and we wait for a month or a year, and the areas in red represent the areas where we increase glucose utilization. And indeed, we are able to get these areas of the brain that were not using glucose to use glucose once again. So the message here is that, in Alzheimer's disease, the lights are out, but there is someone home, and we're able to turn the power back on to these areas of the brain, and as we do so, we expect that their functions will return. So this is now in clinical trials. We are going to operate on 50 patients with early Alzheimer's disease to see whether this is safe and effective, whether we can improve their neurologic function. (Applause) So the message I want to leave you with today is that, indeed, there are several circuits in the brain that are malfunctioning across various disease states, whether we're talking about Parkinson's disease, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's. We are now learning to understand what are the circuits, what are the areas of the brain that are responsible for the clinical signs and the symptoms of those diseases. We can now reach those circuits. We can introduce electrodes within those circuits. We can graduate the activity of those circuits. We can turn them down if they are overactive, if they're causing trouble, trouble that is felt throughout the brain, or we can turn them up if they are underperforming, and in so doing, we think that we may be able to help the overall function of the brain. The implications of this, of course, is that we may be able to modify the symptoms of the disease, but I haven't told you but there's also some evidence that we might be able to help the repair of damaged areas of the brain using electricity, and this is something for the future, to see if, indeed, we not only change the activity but also some of the reparative functions of the brain can be harvested. So I envision that we're going to see a great expansion of indications of this technique. We're going to see electrodes being placed for many disorders of the brain. One of the most exciting things about this is that, indeed, it involves multidisciplinary work. It involves the work of engineers, of imaging scientists, of basic scientists, of neurologists, psychiatrists, neurosurgeons, and certainly at the interface of these multiple disciplines that there's the excitement. And I think that we will see that we will be able to chase more of these evil spirits out from the brain as time goes on, and the consequence of that, of course, will be that we will be able to help many more patients. Thank you very much. |
My journey to yo-yo mastery | {0: 'Twice the world yo-yo champion, BLACK mixes dance, sport and performance to create unforgettable yo-yo moments.'} | TED2013 | When I was 14 years old, I had low self-esteem. I felt I was not talented at anything. One day, I bought a yo-yo. When I tried my first trick, it looked like this: (Laughter) I couldn't even do the simplest trick, but it was very natural for me, because I was not dextrous, and hated all sports. But after one week of practicing, my throws became more like this: A bit better. I thought, the yo-yo is something for me to be good at. For the first time in my life, I found my passion. I was spending all my time practicing. It took me hours and hours a day to build my skills up to the next level. And then, four years later, when I was 18 years old, I was standing onstage at the World YoYo Contest. And I won. I was so excited. "Yes, I did it! I became a hero. I may get many sponsors, a lot of money, tons of interviews, and be on TV!" I thought. (Laughter) But after coming back to Japan, totally nothing changed in my life. (Laughter) I realized society didn't value my passion. So I went back to my college and became a typical Japanese worker as a systems engineer. I felt my passion, heart and soul, had left my body. I felt I was not alive anymore. So I started to consider what I should do, and I thought, I wanted to make my performance better, and to show onstage how spectacular the yo-yo could be to change the public's image of the yo-yo. So I quit my company and started a career as a professional performer. I started to learn classic ballet, jazz dance, acrobatics and other things to make my performance better. As a result of these efforts, and the help of many others, it happened. I won the World YoYo Contest again in the artistic performance division. I passed an audition for Cirque Du Soleil. Today, I am standing on the TED stage with the yo-yo in front of you. (Applause) What I learned from the yo-yo is, if I make enough effort with huge passion, there is no impossible. Could you let me share my passion with you through my performance? (Applause) (Water sound) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Applause ends) (Music) (Applause) |
Txtng is killing language. JK!!! | {0: 'Linguist John McWhorter thinks about language in relation to race, politics and our shared cultural history.'} | TED2013 | We always hear that texting is a scourge. The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability, among young people in the United States and now the whole world today. The fact of the matter is that it just isn't true, and it's easy to think that it is true, but in order to see it in another way, in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing, not just energetic, but a miraculous thing, a kind of emergent complexity that we're seeing happening right now, we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is, in which case, one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all. What do I mean by that? Basically, if we think about language, language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. People talked. That's what we're probably genetically specified for. That's how we use language most. Writing is something that came along much later, and as we saw in the last talk, there's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened, but according to traditional estimates, if humanity had existed for 24 hours, then writing only came along at about 11:07 p.m. That's how much of a latterly thing writing is. So first there's speech, and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice. Now don't get me wrong, writing has certain advantages. When you write, because it's a conscious process, because you can look backwards, you can do things with language that are much less likely if you're just talking. For example, imagine a passage from Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:" "The whole engagement lasted above twelve hours, till the graduate retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself." That's beautiful, but let's face it, nobody talks that way. Or at least, they shouldn't if they're interested in reproducing. That — (Laughter) is not the way any human being speaks casually. Casual speech is something quite different. Linguists have actually shown that when we're speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words. You'll notice this if you ever have occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking. That's what speech is like. Speech is much looser. It's much more telegraphic. It's much less reflective — very different from writing. So we naturally tend to think, because we see language written so often, that that's what language is, but actually what language is, is speech. They are two things. Now of course, as history has gone by, it's been natural for there to be a certain amount of bleed between speech and writing. So, for example, in a distant era now, it was common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing. So I mean the kind of speech that you see someone giving in an old movie where they clear their throat, and they go, "Ahem, ladies and gentlemen," and then they speak in a certain way which has nothing to do with casual speech. It's formal. It uses long sentences like this Gibbon one. It's basically talking like you write, and so, for example, we're thinking so much these days about Lincoln because of the movie. The Gettysburg Address was not the main meal of that event. For two hours before that, Edward Everett spoke on a topic that, frankly, cannot engage us today and barely did then. The point of it was to listen to him speaking like writing. Ordinary people stood and listened to that for two hours. It was perfectly natural. That's what people did then, speaking like writing. Well, if you can speak like writing, then logically it follows that you might want to also sometimes write like you speak. The problem was just that in the material, mechanical sense, that was harder back in the day for the simple reason that materials don't lend themselves to it. It's almost impossible to do that with your hand except in shorthand, and then communication is limited. On a manual typewriter it was very difficult, and even when we had electric typewriters, or then computer keyboards, the fact is that even if you can type easily enough to keep up with the pace of speech, more or less, you have to have somebody who can receive your message quickly. Once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message, then you have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak. And that's where texting comes in. And so, texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk? No, and so therefore why would you when you were texting? What texting is, despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing, is fingered speech. That's what texting is. Now we can write the way we talk. And it's a very interesting thing, but nevertheless easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline. We see this general bagginess of the structure, the lack of concern with rules and the way that we're used to learning on the blackboard, and so we think that something has gone wrong. It's a very natural sense. But the fact of the matter is that what is going on is a kind of emergent complexity. That's what we're seeing in this fingered speech. And in order to understand it, what we want to see is the way, in this new kind of language, there is new structure coming up. And so, for example, there is in texting a convention, which is LOL. Now LOL, we generally think of as meaning "laughing out loud." And of course, theoretically, it does, and if you look at older texts, then people used it to actually indicate laughing out loud. But if you text now, or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it's become, you'll notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud anymore. It's evolved into something that is much subtler. This is an actual text that was done by a non-male person of about 20 years old not too long ago. "I love the font you're using, btw." Julie: "lol thanks gmail is being slow right now" Now if you think about it, that's not funny. No one's laughing. (Laughter) And yet, there it is, so you assume there's been some kind of hiccup. Then Susan says "lol, I know," again more guffawing than we're used to when you're talking about these inconveniences. So Julie says, "I just sent you an email." Susan: "lol, I see it." Very funny people, if that's what LOL means. This Julie says, "So what's up?" Susan: "lol, I have to write a 10 page paper." She's not amused. Let's think about it. LOL is being used in a very particular way. It's a marker of empathy. It's a marker of accommodation. We linguists call things like that pragmatic particles. Any spoken language that's used by real people has them. If you happen to speak Japanese, think about that little word "ne" that you use at the end of a lot of sentences. If you listen to the way black youth today speak, think about the use of the word "yo." Whole dissertations could be written about it, and probably are being written about it. A pragmatic particle, that's what LOL has gradually become. It's a way of using the language between actual people. Another example is "slash." Now, we can use slash in the way that we're used to, along the lines of, "We're going to have a party-slash-networking session." That's kind of like what we're at. Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today. It's used to change the scene. So for example, this Sally person says, "So I need to find people to chill with" and Jake says, "Haha" — you could write a dissertation about "Haha" too, but we don't have time for that — "Haha so you're going by yourself? Why?" Sally: "For this summer program at NYU." Jake: "Haha. Slash I'm watching this video with suns players trying to shoot with one eye." The slash is interesting. I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic. Now that seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life, if we're having a conversation and we want to change the topic, there are ways of doing it gracefully. You don't just zip right into it. You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, "Hmm, makes you think —" when it really didn't, but what you're really — (Laughter) — what you're really trying to do is change the topic. You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. All spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker — or two, or three. Texting has developed one from this slash. So we have a whole battery of new constructions that are developing, and yet it's easy to think, well, something is still wrong. There's a lack of structure of some sort. It's not as sophisticated as the language of The Wall Street Journal. Well, the fact of the matter is, look at this person in 1956, and this is when texting doesn't exist, "I Love Lucy" is still on the air. "Many do not know the alphabet or multiplication table, cannot write grammatically — " We've heard that sort of thing before, not just in 1956. 1917, Connecticut schoolteacher. 1917. This is the time when we all assume that everything somehow in terms of writing was perfect because the people on "Downton Abbey" are articulate, or something like that. So, "From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.'" And so on. You can go even further back than this. It's the President of Harvard. It's 1871. There's no electricity. People have three names. "Bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing." And he's talking about people who are otherwise well prepared for college studies. You can go even further back. 1841, some long-lost superintendent of schools is upset because of what he has for a long time "noted with regret the almost entire neglect of the original" blah blah blah blah blah. Or you can go all the way back to 63 A.D. — (Laughter) — and there's this poor man who doesn't like the way people are speaking Latin. As it happens, he was writing about what had become French. And so, there are always — (Laughter) (Applause) — there are always people worrying about these things and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning. And so, the way I'm thinking of texting these days is that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, which they're using alongside their ordinary writing skills, and that means that they're able to do two things. Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial. That's also true of being bidialectal. That's certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing. And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously, of course, but it's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire. It's very simple. If somebody from 1973 looked at what was on a dormitory message board in 1993, the slang would have changed a little bit since the era of "Love Story," but they would understand what was on that message board. Take that person from 1993 — not that long ago, this is "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" — those people. Take those people and they read a very typical text written by a 20-year-old today. Often they would have no idea what half of it meant because a whole new language has developed among our young people doing something as mundane as what it looks like to us when they're batting around on their little devices. So in closing, if I could go into the future, if I could go into 2033, the first thing I would ask is whether David Simon had done a sequel to "The Wire." I would want to know. And — I really would ask that — and then I'd want to know actually what was going on on "Downton Abbey." That'd be the second thing. And then the third thing would be, please show me a sheaf of texts written by 16-year-old girls, because I would want to know where this language had developed since our times, and ideally I would then send them back to you and me now so we could examine this linguistic miracle happening right under our noses. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
The key to growth? Race with the machines | {0: 'Erik Brynjolfsson examines the effects of information technologies on business strategy, productivity and employment.'} | TED2013 | Growth is not dead. (Applause) Let's start the story 120 years ago, when American factories began to electrify their operations, igniting the Second Industrial Revolution. The amazing thing is that productivity did not increase in those factories for 30 years. Thirty years. That's long enough for a generation of managers to retire. You see, the first wave of managers simply replaced their steam engines with electric motors, but they didn't redesign the factories to take advantage of electricity's flexibility. It fell to the next generation to invent new work processes, and then productivity soared, often doubling or even tripling in those factories. Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign. Is there a general purpose technology of our era? Sure. It's the computer. But technology alone is not enough. Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny, and just as the earlier generations of managers needed to redesign their factories, we're going to need to reinvent our organizations and even our whole economic system. We're not doing as well at that job as we should be. As we'll see in a moment, productivity is actually doing all right, but it has become decoupled from jobs, and the income of the typical worker is stagnating. These troubles are sometimes misdiagnosed as the end of innovation, but they are actually the growing pains of what Andrew McAfee and I call the new machine age. Let's look at some data. So here's GDP per person in America. There's some bumps along the way, but the big story is you could practically fit a ruler to it. This is a log scale, so what looks like steady growth is actually an acceleration in real terms. And here's productivity. You can see a little bit of a slowdown there in the mid-'70s, but it matches up pretty well with the Second Industrial Revolution, when factories were learning how to electrify their operations. After a lag, productivity accelerated again. So maybe "history doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes." Today, productivity is at an all-time high, and despite the Great Recession, it grew faster in the 2000s than it did in the 1990s, the roaring 1990s, and that was faster than the '70s or '80s. It's growing faster than it did during the Second Industrial Revolution. And that's just the United States. The global news is even better. Worldwide incomes have grown at a faster rate in the past decade than ever in history. If anything, all these numbers actually understate our progress, because the new machine age is more about knowledge creation than just physical production. It's mind not matter, brain not brawn, ideas not things. That creates a problem for standard metrics, because we're getting more and more stuff for free, like Wikipedia, Google, Skype, and if they post it on the web, even this TED Talk. Now getting stuff for free is a good thing, right? Sure, of course it is. But that's not how economists measure GDP. Zero price means zero weight in the GDP statistics. According to the numbers, the music industry is half the size that it was 10 years ago, but I'm listening to more and better music than ever. You know, I bet you are too. In total, my research estimates that the GDP numbers miss over 300 billion dollars per year in free goods and services on the Internet. Now let's look to the future. There are some super smart people who are arguing that we've reached the end of growth, but to understand the future of growth, we need to make predictions about the underlying drivers of growth. I'm optimistic, because the new machine age is digital, exponential and combinatorial. When goods are digital, they can be replicated with perfect quality at nearly zero cost, and they can be delivered almost instantaneously. Welcome to the economics of abundance. But there's a subtler benefit to the digitization of the world. Measurement is the lifeblood of science and progress. In the age of big data, we can measure the world in ways we never could before. Secondly, the new machine age is exponential. Computers get better faster than anything else ever. A child's Playstation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996. But our brains are wired for a linear world. As a result, exponential trends take us by surprise. I used to teach my students that there are some things, you know, computers just aren't good at, like driving a car through traffic. (Laughter) That's right, here's Andy and me grinning like madmen because we just rode down Route 101 in, yes, a driverless car. Thirdly, the new machine age is combinatorial. The stagnationist view is that ideas get used up, like low-hanging fruit, but the reality is that each innovation creates building blocks for even more innovations. Here's an example. In just a matter of a few weeks, an undergraduate student of mine built an app that ultimately reached 1.3 million users. He was able to do that so easily because he built it on top of Facebook, and Facebook was built on top of the web, and that was built on top of the Internet, and so on and so forth. Now individually, digital, exponential and combinatorial would each be game-changers. Put them together, and we're seeing a wave of astonishing breakthroughs, like robots that do factory work or run as fast as a cheetah or leap tall buildings in a single bound. You know, robots are even revolutionizing cat transportation. (Laughter) But perhaps the most important invention, the most important invention is machine learning. Consider one project: IBM's Watson. These little dots here, those are all the champions on the quiz show "Jeopardy." At first, Watson wasn't very good, but it improved at a rate faster than any human could, and shortly after Dave Ferrucci showed this chart to my class at MIT, Watson beat the world "Jeopardy" champion. At age seven, Watson is still kind of in its childhood. Recently, its teachers let it surf the Internet unsupervised. The next day, it started answering questions with profanities. Damn. (Laughter) But you know, Watson is growing up fast. It's being tested for jobs in call centers, and it's getting them. It's applying for legal, banking and medical jobs, and getting some of them. Isn't it ironic that at the very moment we are building intelligent machines, perhaps the most important invention in human history, some people are arguing that innovation is stagnating? Like the first two industrial revolutions, the full implications of the new machine age are going to take at least a century to fully play out, but they are staggering. So does that mean we have nothing to worry about? No. Technology is not destiny. Productivity is at an all time high, but fewer people now have jobs. We have created more wealth in the past decade than ever, but for a majority of Americans, their income has fallen. This is the great decoupling of productivity from employment, of wealth from work. You know, it's not surprising that millions of people have become disillusioned by the great decoupling, but like too many others, they misunderstand its basic causes. Technology is racing ahead, but it's leaving more and more people behind. Today, we can take a routine job, codify it in a set of machine-readable instructions, and then replicate it a million times. You know, I recently overheard a conversation that epitomizes these new economics. This guy says, "Nah, I don't use H&R Block anymore. TurboTax does everything that my tax preparer did, but it's faster, cheaper and more accurate." How can a skilled worker compete with a $39 piece of software? She can't. Today, millions of Americans do have faster, cheaper, more accurate tax preparation, and the founders of Intuit have done very well for themselves. But 17 percent of tax preparers no longer have jobs. That is a microcosm of what's happening, not just in software and services, but in media and music, in finance and manufacturing, in retailing and trade — in short, in every industry. People are racing against the machine, and many of them are losing that race. What can we do to create shared prosperity? The answer is not to try to slow down technology. Instead of racing against the machine, we need to learn to race with the machine. That is our grand challenge. The new machine age can be dated to a day 15 years ago when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, played Deep Blue, a supercomputer. The machine won that day, and today, a chess program running on a cell phone can beat a human grandmaster. It got so bad that, when he was asked what strategy he would use against a computer, Jan Donner, the Dutch grandmaster, replied, "I'd bring a hammer." (Laughter) But today a computer is no longer the world chess champion. Neither is a human, because Kasparov organized a freestyle tournament where teams of humans and computers could work together, and the winning team had no grandmaster, and it had no supercomputer. What they had was better teamwork, and they showed that a team of humans and computers, working together, could beat any computer or any human working alone. Racing with the machine beats racing against the machine. Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny. Thank you. (Applause) |
The death of innovation, the end of growth | {0: 'Robert J. Gordon is among the most influential macroeconomists in the world. And the big picture he sees is not altogether rosy.'} | TED2013 | That's how we traveled in the year 1900. That's an open buggy. It doesn't have heating. It doesn't have air conditioning. That horse is pulling it along at one percent of the speed of sound, and the rutted dirt road turns into a quagmire of mud anytime it rains. That's a Boeing 707. Only 60 years later, it travels at 80 percent of the speed of sound, and we don't travel any faster today because commercial supersonic air travel turned out to be a bust. So I started wondering and pondering, could it be that the best years of American economic growth are behind us? And that leads to the suggestion, maybe economic growth is almost over. Some of the reasons for this are not really very controversial. There are four headwinds that are just hitting the American economy in the face. They're demographics, education, debt and inequality. They're powerful enough to cut growth in half. So we need a lot of innovation to offset this decline. And here's my theme: Because of the headwinds, if innovation continues to be as powerful as it has been in the last 150 years, growth is cut in half. If innovation is less powerful, invents less great, wonderful things, then growth is going to be even lower than half of history. Now here's eight centuries of economic growth. The vertical axis is just percent per year of growth, zero percent a year, one percent a year, two percent a year. The white line is for the U.K., and then the U.S. takes over as the leading nation in the year 1900, when the line switches to red. You'll notice that, for the first four centuries, there's hardly any growth at all, just 0.2 percent. Then growth gets better and better. It maxes out in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, and then it starts slowing down, and here's a cautionary note. That last downward notch in the red line is not actual data. That is a forecast that I made six years ago that growth would slow down to 1.3 percent. But you know what the actual facts are? You know what the growth in per-person income has been in the United States in the last six years? Negative. This led to a fantasy. What if I try to fit a curved line to this historical record? I can make the curved line end anywhere I wanted, but I decided I would end it at 0.2, just like the U.K. growth for the first four centuries. Now the history that we've achieved is that we've grown at 2.0 percent per year over the whole period, 1891 to 2007, and remember it's been a little bit negative since 2007. But if growth slows down, instead of doubling our standard of living every generation, Americans in the future can't expect to be twice as well off as their parents, or even a quarter [more well off than] their parents. Now we're going to change and look at the level of per capita income. The vertical axis now is thousands of dollars in today's prices. You'll notice that in 1891, over on the left, we were at about 5,000 dollars. Today we're at about 44,000 dollars of total output per member of the population. Now what if we could achieve that historic two-percent growth for the next 70 years? Well, it's a matter of arithmetic. Two-percent growth quadruples your standard of living in 70 years. That means we'd go from 44,000 to 180,000. Well, we're not going to do that, and the reason is the headwinds. The first headwind is demographics. It's a truism that your standard of living rises faster than productivity, rises faster than output per hour, if hours per person increased. And we got that gift back in the '70s and '80s when women entered the labor force. But now it's turned around. Now hours per person are shrinking, first because of the retirement of the baby boomers, and second because there's been a very significant dropping out of the labor force of prime age adult males who are in the bottom half of the educational distribution. The next headwind is education. We've got problems all over our educational system despite Race to the Top. In college, we've got cost inflation in higher education that dwarfs cost inflation in medical care. We have in higher education a trillion dollars of student debt, and our college completion rate is 15 points, 15 percentage points below Canada. We have a lot of debt. Our economy grew from 2000 to 2007 on the back of consumers massively overborrowing. Consumers paying off that debt is one of the main reasons why our economic recovery is so sluggish today. And everybody of course knows that the federal government debt is growing as a share of GDP at a very rapid rate, and the only way that's going to stop is some combination of faster growth in taxes or slower growth in entitlements, also called transfer payments. And that gets us down from the 1.5, where we've reached for education, down to 1.3. And then we have inequality. Over the 15 years before the financial crisis, the growth rate of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution was half a point slower than the averages we've been talking about before. All the rest went to the top one percent. So that brings us down to 0.8. And that 0.8 is the big challenge. Are we going to grow at 0.8? If so, that's going to require that our inventions are as important as the ones that happened over the last 150 years. So let's see what some of those inventions were. If you wanted to read in 1875 at night, you needed to have an oil or a gas lamp. They created pollution, they created odors, they were hard to control, the light was dim, and they were a fire hazard. By 1929, electric light was everywhere. We had the vertical city, the invention of the elevator. Central Manhattan became possible. And then, in addition to that, at the same time, hand tools were replaced by massive electric tools and hand-powered electric tools, all achieved by electricity. Electricity was also very helpful in liberating women. Women, back in the late 19th century, spent two days a week doing the laundry. They did it on a scrub board. Then they had to hang the clothes out to dry. Then they had to bring them in. The whole thing took two days out of the seven-day week. And then we had the electric washing machine. And by 1950, they were everywhere. But the women still had to shop every day, but no they didn't, because electricity brought us the electric refrigerator. Back in the late 19th century, the only source of heat in most homes was a big fireplace in the kitchen that was used for cooking and heating. The bedrooms were cold. They were unheated. But by 1929, certainly by 1950, we had central heating everywhere. What about the internal combustion engine, which was invented in 1879? In America, before the motor vehicle, transportation depended entirely on the urban horse, which dropped, without restraint, 25 to 50 pounds of manure on the streets every day together with a gallon of urine. That comes out at five to 10 tons daily per square mile in cities. Those horses also ate up fully one quarter of American agricultural land. That's the percentage of American agricultural land it took to feed the horses. Of course, when the motor vehicle was invented, and it became almost ubiquitous by 1929, that agricultural land could be used for human consumption or for export. And here's an interesting ratio: Starting from zero in 1900, only 30 years later, the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of households in the United States reached 90 percent in just 30 years. Back before the turn of the century, women had another problem. All the water for cooking, cleaning and bathing had to be carried in buckets and pails in from the outside. It's a historical fact that in 1885, the average North Carolina housewife walked 148 miles a year carrying 35 tons of water. But by 1929, cities around the country had put in underground water pipes. They had put in underground sewer pipes, and as a result, one of the great scourges of the late 19th century, waterborne diseases like cholera, began to disappear. And an amazing fact for techno-optimists is that in the first half of the 20th century, the rate of improvement of life expectancy was three times faster than it was in the second half of the 19th century. So it's a truism that things can't be more than 100 percent of themselves. And I'll just give you a few examples. We went from one percent to 90 percent of the speed of sound. Electrification, central heat, ownership of motor cars, they all went from zero to 100 percent. Urban environments make people more productive than on the farm. We went from 25 percent urban to 75 percent by the early postwar years. What about the electronic revolution? Here's an early computer. It's amazing. The mainframe computer was invented in 1942. By 1960 we had telephone bills, bank statements were being produced by computers. The earliest cell phones, the earliest personal computers were invented in the 1970s. The 1980s brought us Bill Gates, DOS, ATM machines to replace bank tellers, bar code scanning to cut down on labor in the retail sector. Fast forward through the '90s, we had the dotcom revolution and a temporary rise in productivity growth. But I'm now going to give you an experiment. You have to choose either option A or option B. (Laughter) Option A is you get to keep everything invented up till 10 years ago. So you get Google, you get Amazon, you get Wikipedia, and you get running water and indoor toilets. Or you get everything invented to yesterday, including Facebook and your iPhone, but you have to give up, go out to the outhouse, and carry in the water. Hurricane Sandy caused a lot of people to lose the 20th century, maybe for a couple of days, in some cases for more than a week, electricity, running water, heating, gasoline for their cars, and a charge for their iPhones. The problem we face is that all these great inventions, we have to match them in the future, and my prediction that we're not going to match them brings us down from the original two-percent growth down to 0.2, the fanciful curve that I drew you at the beginning. So here we are back to the horse and buggy. I'd like to award an Oscar to the inventors of the 20th century, the people from Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Edison to the Wright Brothers, I'd like to call them all up here, and they're going to call back to you. Your challenge is, can you match what we achieved? Thank you. (Applause) |
How much does a video weigh? | {0: 'Michael Stevens is the creator and host of Vsauce, an educational YouTube channel that addresses scientific oddities, like "Is Your Red the Same as My Red?"'} | TEDActive 2013 | Bean bags are awesome. But I see a few people out there who are standing, we've got some over here, and standing takes more work than lounging. Using the Live Strong Organization's online database of weight loss resources, you can calculate that by the time I'm done with this speech, those of you who are standing will have burned 7.5 more calories than those of you who are bean-bagging it. (Laughter) Okay, here's a question, speaking of weight loss, specifically weight, this speech is live. I'm actually here in front of you guys, we're all here together. But this speech is being recorded and it will become a video that people can access all over the world on computers, mobile devices, televisions. I weight about 190 pounds. How much will the video weigh? Asking questions like that is what I do every week on my channel Vsauce. For the last two years, I have been asking really fun questions, mind-boggling questions, and approaching them as sincerely as I can, celebrating scientific concepts and scientists. And I research and write and produce and host and edit and upload and run the social media all by myself, but it's not lonely, because Vsauce has more than 2 million subscribers, and every month, my videos are seen by more than 20 million people. Yeah. (Applause) It's very exciting. I've found that asking a strange question is a great way to get people in, not just people, but fans. And fans are different than just viewers or an audience, because fans want to come back. They subscribe to you on YouTube and they want to watch everything you've made and everything you plan to make in the future because we are curious people and sparking curiosity is great bait. It's a great way to catch a human. And once you've caught them, you have this captive audience that you can, with the goal in mind of answering the question, accidentally teach a lot of things to. So, let's take a look at some of my videos. Here are eight of them. But down here in the lower-right corner, "What Color is a Mirror?" When people see that, it's very difficult not to click, because you think, "Come on, are you serious? How could you possibly answer that question?" Well, so far, 7.6 million people have watched this five-minute video about what color a mirror is. And in that episode, I answer the question and I get a chance to explain what would normally be kind of dry topics: optics, diffuse versus specular reflection, how light works, how light works on the retina, and even the etymology of color terms like white and black. Okay, spoiler alert: mirrors are not clear, they are not silvery, like they're often illustrated. Mirrors, technically speaking, are just a tiny, tiny, little bit ... green. You can demonstrate this by putting two mirrors next to each other, facing so they reflect back and forth forever. Look down that infinite reflection, and it will get dimmer, because some light is lost or absorbed every time, but it will also become greener, because green light, that is light of a wavelength that we perceive as green, is best reflected by most mirrors. Okay, so, how much does a video weigh? Well, when you stream a video onto your computer, that information is temporarily stored using electrons. And the number of electrons on your device won't actually increase or decrease. But it takes energy to store them in one place, and, thanks to our friend Albert Einstein, we know that energy and mass are related. Okay, so here's the thing: let's say you're watching a YouTube video at a really nice resolution, 720p. Assuming a typical bit rate, we can figure that a minute of YouTube video is going to need to involve about 10 million electrons on your device. Plugging all those electrons and the energy it takes to hold them in the correct place for you to see the video, into that formula, we can figure out that one minute of YouTube video increases the mass of your computer by about 10 to the negative 19th grams. Written out, it looks like this. (Whistle) That's like nothing. You could call that nothing, and you wouldn't really get in trouble, because the best scales we've ever invented that we could try to use to actually to detect that change are only accurate to 10 to the negative 9th grams. So, we can't measure it, but we can, like we just did, calculate it. And that's really cool because when I was a kid, my school had two shelves of science books. That was really cool, but I read all of them within, like, two grades, and it was hard to get more books because books are heavy, you need space for them and moving books around is tougher than what we can do today. With numbers that small, I can fit thousands of books on my own little personal electronic reader. I can stream hours and hours and days and days of YouTube video without my computer ever getting measurably heavier. And as information becomes that light, it becomes a lot more democratic, meaning that more teachers and presenters and creators and viewers than ever before can be involved. Right now, on YouTube, there is an explosion of content like this happening. The three Vsauce channels are down there in the corner. But everyone else, all together, collectively, their views dwarf what I can do alone or with the people that I work with, and that is really, really exciting. It turns out that tapping into people's curiosity and responsibly answering their questions is a brilliant way to build fans and an audience and get in viewers. It's even a great way for brands and companies to build trust. So, calculating the weight of a video is kind of a funny question, but I cannot wait to see what we ask and answer next. As always, thanks for watching. (Applause) |
If cars could talk, accidents might be avoidable | {0: 'A research scientist at Intel, Jennifer Healey develops the mobile internet devices of the future. '} | TED@Intel | Let's face it: Driving is dangerous. It's one of the things that we don't like to think about, but the fact that religious icons and good luck charms show up on dashboards around the world betrays the fact that we know this to be true. Car accidents are the leading cause of death in people ages 16 to 19 in the United States — leading cause of death — and 75 percent of these accidents have nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. So what happens? No one can say for sure, but I remember my first accident. I was a young driver out on the highway, and the car in front of me, I saw the brake lights go on. I'm like, "Okay, all right, this guy is slowing down, I'll slow down too." I step on the brake. But no, this guy isn't slowing down. This guy is stopping, dead stop, dead stop on the highway. It was just going 65 — to zero? I slammed on the brakes. I felt the ABS kick in, and the car is still going, and it's not going to stop, and I know it's not going to stop, and the air bag deploys, the car is totaled, and fortunately, no one was hurt. But I had no idea that car was stopping, and I think we can do a lot better than that. I think we can transform the driving experience by letting our cars talk to each other. I just want you to think a little bit about what the experience of driving is like now. Get into your car. Close the door. You're in a glass bubble. You can't really directly sense the world around you. You're in this extended body. You're tasked with navigating it down partially-seen roadways, in and amongst other metal giants, at super-human speeds. Okay? And all you have to guide you are your two eyes. Okay, so that's all you have, eyes that weren't really designed for this task, but then people ask you to do things like, you want to make a lane change, what's the first thing they ask you do? Take your eyes off the road. That's right. Stop looking where you're going, turn, check your blind spot, and drive down the road without looking where you're going. You and everyone else. This is the safe way to drive. Why do we do this? Because we have to, we have to make a choice, do I look here or do I look here? What's more important? And usually we do a fantastic job picking and choosing what we attend to on the road. But occasionally we miss something. Occasionally we sense something wrong or too late. In countless accidents, the driver says, "I didn't see it coming." And I believe that. I believe that. We can only watch so much. But the technology exists now that can help us improve that. In the future, with cars exchanging data with each other, we will be able to see not just three cars ahead and three cars behind, to the right and left, all at the same time, bird's eye view, we will actually be able to see into those cars. We will be able to see the velocity of the car in front of us, to see how fast that guy's going or stopping. If that guy's going down to zero, I'll know. And with computation and algorithms and predictive models, we will be able to see the future. You may think that's impossible. How can you predict the future? That's really hard. Actually, no. With cars, it's not impossible. Cars are three-dimensional objects that have a fixed position and velocity. They travel down roads. Often they travel on pre-published routes. It's really not that hard to make reasonable predictions about where a car's going to be in the near future. Even if, when you're in your car and some motorcyclist comes — bshoom! — 85 miles an hour down, lane-splitting — I know you've had this experience — that guy didn't "just come out of nowhere." That guy's been on the road probably for the last half hour. (Laughter) Right? I mean, somebody's seen him. Ten, 20, 30 miles back, someone's seen that guy, and as soon as one car sees that guy and puts him on the map, he's on the map — position, velocity, good estimate he'll continue going 85 miles an hour. You'll know, because your car will know, because that other car will have whispered something in his ear, like, "By the way, five minutes, motorcyclist, watch out." You can make reasonable predictions about how cars behave. I mean, they're Newtonian objects. That's very nice about them. So how do we get there? We can start with something as simple as sharing our position data between cars, just sharing GPS. If I have a GPS and a camera in my car, I have a pretty precise idea of where I am and how fast I'm going. With computer vision, I can estimate where the cars around me are, sort of, and where they're going. And same with the other cars. They can have a precise idea of where they are, and sort of a vague idea of where the other cars are. What happens if two cars share that data, if they talk to each other? I can tell you exactly what happens. Both models improve. Everybody wins. Professor Bob Wang and his team have done computer simulations of what happens when fuzzy estimates combine, even in light traffic, when cars just share GPS data, and we've moved this research out of the computer simulation and into robot test beds that have the actual sensors that are in cars now on these robots: stereo cameras, GPS, and the two-dimensional laser range finders that are common in backup systems. We also attach a discrete short-range communication radio, and the robots talk to each other. When these robots come at each other, they track each other's position precisely, and they can avoid each other. We're now adding more and more robots into the mix, and we encountered some problems. One of the problems, when you get too much chatter, it's hard to process all the packets, so you have to prioritize, and that's where the predictive model helps you. If your robot cars are all tracking the predicted trajectories, you don't pay as much attention to those packets. You prioritize the one guy who seems to be going a little off course. That guy could be a problem. And you can predict the new trajectory. So you don't only know that he's going off course, you know how. And you know which drivers you need to alert to get out of the way. And we wanted to do — how can we best alert everyone? How can these cars whisper, "You need to get out of the way?" Well, it depends on two things: one, the ability of the car, and second the ability of the driver. If one guy has a really great car, but they're on their phone or, you know, doing something, they're not probably in the best position to react in an emergency. So we started a separate line of research doing driver state modeling. And now, using a series of three cameras, we can detect if a driver is looking forward, looking away, looking down, on the phone, or having a cup of coffee. We can predict the accident and we can predict who, which cars, are in the best position to move out of the way to calculate the safest route for everyone. Fundamentally, these technologies exist today. I think the biggest problem that we face is our own willingness to share our data. I think it's a very disconcerting notion, this idea that our cars will be watching us, talking about us to other cars, that we'll be going down the road in a sea of gossip. But I believe it can be done in a way that protects our privacy, just like right now, when I look at your car from the outside, I don't really know about you. If I look at your license plate number, I don't really know who you are. I believe our cars can talk about us behind our backs. (Laughter) And I think it's going to be a great thing. I want you to consider for a moment if you really don't want the distracted teenager behind you to know that you're braking, that you're coming to a dead stop. By sharing our data willingly, we can do what's best for everyone. So let your car gossip about you. It's going to make the roads a lot safer. Thank you. (Applause) |
10 top time-saving tech tips | {0: 'David Pogue is the personal technology columnist for the <em>New York Times</em> and a tech correspondent for CBS News. He\'s also one of the world\'s bestselling how-to authors, with titles in the For Dummies series and his own line of "Missing Manual" books. '} | TED2013 | I've noticed something interesting about society and culture. Everything risky requires a license. So, learning to drive, owning a gun, getting married. There's a certain — (Laughter) That's true in everything risky, except technology. For some reason, there's no standard syllabus, there's no basic course. They just sort of give you your computer and then kick you out of the nest. You're supposed to learn this stuff — how? Just by osmosis. Nobody ever sits down and tells you, "This is how it works." So today I'm going to tell you ten things that you thought everybody knew, but it turns out they don't. First of all, on the web, if you want to scroll down, don't pick up the mouse and use the scroll bar. That's a terrible waste of time. Do that only if you're paid by the hour. Instead, hit the space bar. The space bar scrolls down one page. Hold down the Shift key to scroll back up again. So, space bar to scroll down one page; works in every browser, in every kind of computer. Also on the web, when you're filling in one of these forms like your addresses, I assume you know that you can hit the Tab key to jump from box to box to box. But what about the pop-up menu where you put in your state? Don't open the pop-up menu. That's a terrible waste of calories. Type the first letter of your state over and over and over. So if you want Connecticut, go, C, C, C. If you want Texas, go T, T, and you jump right to that thing without even opening the pop-up menu. Also on the web, when the text is too small, what you do is hold down the Control key and hit plus, plus, plus. You make the text larger with each tap. Works on every computer, every web browser, or minus, minus, to get smaller again. If you're on the Mac, it might be Command instead. When you're typing on your Blackberry, Android, iPhone, don't bother switching layouts to the punctuation layout to hit the period and then a space, then try to capitalize the next letter. Just hit the space bar twice. The phone puts the period, the space, and the capital for you. Go space, space. It is totally amazing. Also when it comes to cell phones, on all phones, if you want to redial somebody that you've dialed before, all you have to do is hit the call button, and it puts the last phone number into the box for you, and at that point you can hit call again to actually dial it. No need to go to the recent calls list if you're trying to call somebody just hit the call button again. Something that drives me crazy: When I call you and leave a message on your voice mail, I hear you saying, "Leave a message," and then I get these 15 seconds of freaking instructions, like we haven't had answering machines for 45 years! (Laughter) I'm not bitter. (Laughter) So it turns out there's a keyboard shortcut that lets you jump directly to the beep like this. Phone: At the tone, please... (Beep) David Pogue: Unfortunately, the carriers didn't adopt the same keystroke, so it's different by carrier, so it devolves upon you to learn the keystroke for the person you're calling. I didn't say these were going to be perfect. So most of you think of Google as something that lets you look up a web page, but it is also a dictionary. Type the word "define" and the word you want to know. You don't even have to click anything. There's the definition as you type. It's also a complete FAA database. Type the name of the airline and the flight. It shows you where the flight is, the gate, the terminal, how long until it lands. You don't need an app. It's also unit and currency conversion. Again, you don't have to click one of the results. Just type it into the box, and there's your answer. While we're talking about text — When you want to highlight — this is just an example — (Laughter) When you want to highlight a word, please don't waste your life dragging across it with the mouse like a newbie. Double click the word. Watch "200" — I go double-click, it neatly selects just that word. Also, don't delete what you've highlighted. You can just type over it. This is in every program. Also, you can go double-click, drag, to highlight in one-word increments as you drag. Much more precise. Again, don't bother deleting. Just type over it. (Laughter) Shutter lag is the time between your pressing the shutter button and the moment the camera actually snaps. It's extremely frustrating on any camera under $1,000. (Camera click) (Laughter) So, that's because the camera needs time to calculate the focus and exposure, but if you pre-focus with a half-press, leave your finger down — no shutter lag! You get it every time. I've just turned your $50 camera into a $1,000 camera with that trick. And finally, it often happens that you're giving a talk, and for some reason, the audience is looking at the slide instead of at you! (Laughter) So when that happens — this works in Keynote, PowerPoint, it works in every program — all you do is hit the letter B key, B for blackout, to black out the slide, make everybody look at you, and then when you're ready to go on, you hit B again, and if you're really on a roll, you can hit the W key for "whiteout," and you white out the slide, and then you can hit W again to un-blank it. So I know I went super fast. If you missed anything, I'll be happy to send you the list of these tips. In the meantime, congratulations. You all get your California Technology License. Have a great day. (Applause) |
Got a meeting? Take a walk | {0: 'Business innovator Nilofer Merchant thinks deeply about the frameworks, strategies and cultural values of companies.'} | TED2013 | What you're doing, right now, at this very moment, is killing you. More than cars or the Internet or even that little mobile device we keep talking about, the technology you're using the most almost every day is this, your tush. Nowadays people are sitting 9.3 hours a day, which is more than we're sleeping, at 7.7 hours. Sitting is so incredibly prevalent, we don't even question how much we're doing it, and because everyone else is doing it, it doesn't even occur to us that it's not okay. In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation. Of course there's health consequences to this, scary ones, besides the waist. Things like breast cancer and colon cancer are directly tied to our lack of physical [activity], Ten percent in fact, on both of those. Six percent for heart disease, seven percent for type 2 diabetes, which is what my father died of. Now, any of those stats should convince each of us to get off our duff more, but if you're anything like me, it won't. What did get me moving was a social interaction. Someone invited me to a meeting, but couldn't manage to fit me in to a regular sort of conference room meeting, and said, "I have to walk my dogs tomorrow. Could you come then?" It seemed kind of odd to do, and actually, that first meeting, I remember thinking, "I have to be the one to ask the next question," because I knew I was going to huff and puff during this conversation. And yet, I've taken that idea and made it my own. So instead of going to coffee meetings or fluorescent-lit conference room meetings, I ask people to go on a walking meeting, to the tune of 20 to 30 miles a week. It's changed my life. But before that, what actually happened was, I used to think about it as, you could take care of your health, or you could take care of obligations, and one always came at the cost of the other. So now, several hundred of these walking meetings later, I've learned a few things. First, there's this amazing thing about actually getting out of the box that leads to out-of-the-box thinking. Whether it's nature or the exercise itself, it certainly works. And second, and probably the more reflective one, is just about how much each of us can hold problems in opposition when they're really not that way. And if we're going to solve problems and look at the world really differently, whether it's in governance or business or environmental issues, job creation, maybe we can think about how to reframe those problems as having both things be true. Because it was when that happened with this walk-and-talk idea that things became doable and sustainable and viable. So I started this talk talking about the tush, so I'll end with the bottom line, which is, walk and talk. Walk the talk. You'll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking, and in the way that you do, you'll bring into your life an entirely new set of ideas. Thank you. (Applause) |
My radical plan for small nuclear fission reactors | {0: 'At 14, Taylor Wilson became the youngest person to achieve fusion -- with a reactor born in his garage. Now he wants to save our seaports from nuclear terror.'} | TED2013 | Well, I have a big announcement to make today, and I'm really excited about this. And this may be a little bit of a surprise to many of you who know my research and what I've done well. I've really tried to solve some big problems: counterterrorism, nuclear terrorism, and health care and diagnosing and treating cancer, but I started thinking about all these problems, and I realized that the really biggest problem we face, what all these other problems come down to, is energy, is electricity, the flow of electrons. And I decided that I was going to set out to try to solve this problem. And this probably is not what you're expecting. You're probably expecting me to come up here and talk about fusion, because that's what I've done most of my life. But this is actually a talk about, okay — (Laughter) — but this is actually a talk about fission. It's about perfecting something old, and bringing something old into the 21st century. Let's talk a little bit about how nuclear fission works. In a nuclear power plant, you have a big pot of water that's under high pressure, and you have some fuel rods, and these fuel rods are encased in zirconium, and they're little pellets of uranium dioxide fuel, and a fission reaction is controlled and maintained at a proper level, and that reaction heats up water, the water turns to steam, steam turns the turbine, and you produce electricity from it. This is the same way we've been producing electricity, the steam turbine idea, for 100 years, and nuclear was a really big advancement in a way to heat the water, but you still boil water and that turns to steam and turns the turbine. And I thought, you know, is this the best way to do it? Is fission kind of played out, or is there something left to innovate here? And I realized that I had hit upon something that I think has this huge potential to change the world. And this is what it is. This is a small modular reactor. So it's not as big as the reactor you see in the diagram here. This is between 50 and 100 megawatts. But that's a ton of power. That's between, say at an average use, that's maybe 25,000 to 100,000 homes could run off that. Now the really interesting thing about these reactors is they're built in a factory. So they're modular reactors that are built essentially on an assembly line, and they're trucked anywhere in the world, you plop them down, and they produce electricity. This region right here is the reactor. And this is buried below ground, which is really important. For someone who's done a lot of counterterrorism work, I can't extol to you how great having something buried below the ground is for proliferation and security concerns. And inside this reactor is a molten salt, so anybody who's a fan of thorium, they're going to be really excited about this, because these reactors happen to be really good at breeding and burning the thorium fuel cycle, uranium-233. But I'm not really concerned about the fuel. You can run these off — they're really hungry, they really like down-blended weapons pits, so that's highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium that's been down-blended. It's made into a grade where it's not usable for a nuclear weapon, but they love this stuff. And we have a lot of it sitting around, because this is a big problem. You know, in the Cold War, we built up this huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, and that was great, and we don't need them anymore, and what are we doing with all the waste, essentially? What are we doing with all the pits of those nuclear weapons? Well, we're securing them, and it would be great if we could burn them, eat them up, and this reactor loves this stuff. So it's a molten salt reactor. It has a core, and it has a heat exchanger from the hot salt, the radioactive salt, to a cold salt which isn't radioactive. It's still thermally hot but it's not radioactive. And then that's a heat exchanger to what makes this design really, really interesting, and that's a heat exchanger to a gas. So going back to what I was saying before about all power being produced — well, other than photovoltaic — being produced by this boiling of steam and turning a turbine, that's actually not that efficient, and in fact, in a nuclear power plant like this, it's only roughly 30 to 35 percent efficient. That's how much thermal energy the reactor's putting out to how much electricity it's producing. And the reason the efficiencies are so low is these reactors operate at pretty low temperature. They operate anywhere from, you know, maybe 200 to 300 degrees Celsius. And these reactors run at 600 to 700 degrees Celsius, which means the higher the temperature you go to, thermodynamics tells you that you will have higher efficiencies. And this reactor doesn't use water. It uses gas, so supercritical CO2 or helium, and that goes into a turbine, and this is called the Brayton cycle. This is the thermodynamic cycle that produces electricity, and this makes this almost 50 percent efficient, between 45 and 50 percent efficiency. And I'm really excited about this, because it's a very compact core. Molten salt reactors are very compact by nature, but what's also great is you get a lot more electricity out for how much uranium you're fissioning, not to mention the fact that these burn up. Their burn-up is much higher. So for a given amount of fuel you put in the reactor, a lot more of it's being used. And the problem with a traditional nuclear power plant like this is, you've got these rods that are clad in zirconium, and inside them are uranium dioxide fuel pellets. Well, uranium dioxide's a ceramic, and ceramic doesn't like releasing what's inside of it. So you have what's called the xenon pit, and so some of these fission products love neutrons. They love the neutrons that are going on and helping this reaction take place. And they eat them up, which means that, combined with the fact that the cladding doesn't last very long, you can only run one of these reactors for roughly, say, 18 months without refueling it. So these reactors run for 30 years without refueling, which is, in my opinion, very, very amazing, because it means it's a sealed system. No refueling means you can seal them up and they're not going to be a proliferation risk, and they're not going to have either nuclear material or radiological material proliferated from their cores. But let's go back to safety, because everybody after Fukushima had to reassess the safety of nuclear, and one of the things when I set out to design a power reactor was it had to be passively and intrinsically safe, and I'm really excited about this reactor for essentially two reasons. One, it doesn't operate at high pressure. So traditional reactors like a pressurized water reactor or boiling water reactor, they're very, very hot water at very high pressures, and this means, essentially, in the event of an accident, if you had any kind of breach of this stainless steel pressure vessel, the coolant would leave the core. These reactors operate at essentially atmospheric pressure, so there's no inclination for the fission products to leave the reactor in the event of an accident. Also, they operate at high temperatures, and the fuel is molten, so they can't melt down, but in the event that the reactor ever went out of tolerances, or you lost off-site power in the case of something like Fukushima, there's a dump tank. Because your fuel is liquid, and it's combined with your coolant, you could actually just drain the core into what's called a sub-critical setting, basically a tank underneath the reactor that has some neutrons absorbers. And this is really important, because the reaction stops. In this kind of reactor, you can't do that. The fuel, like I said, is ceramic inside zirconium fuel rods, and in the event of an accident in one of these type of reactors, Fukushima and Three Mile Island — looking back at Three Mile Island, we didn't really see this for a while — but these zirconium claddings on these fuel rods, what happens is, when they see high pressure water, steam, in an oxidizing environment, they'll actually produce hydrogen, and that hydrogen has this explosive capability to release fission products. So the core of this reactor, since it's not under pressure and it doesn't have this chemical reactivity, means that there's no inclination for the fission products to leave this reactor. So even in the event of an accident, yeah, the reactor may be toast, which is, you know, sorry for the power company, but we're not going to contaminate large quantities of land. So I really think that in the, say, 20 years it's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality, this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity. Carbon-free electricity. And it's an amazing technology because not only does it combat climate change, but it's an innovation. It's a way to bring power to the developing world, because it's produced in a factory and it's cheap. You can put them anywhere in the world you want to. And maybe something else. As a kid, I was obsessed with space. Well, I was obsessed with nuclear science too, to a point, but before that I was obsessed with space, and I was really excited about, you know, being an astronaut and designing rockets, which was something that was always exciting to me. But I think I get to come back to this, because imagine having a compact reactor in a rocket that produces 50 to 100 megawatts. That is the rocket designer's dream. That's someone who is designing a habitat on another planet's dream. Not only do you have 50 to 100 megawatts to power whatever you want to provide propulsion to get you there, but you have power once you get there. You know, rocket designers who use solar panels or fuel cells, I mean a few watts or kilowatts — wow, that's a lot of power. I mean, now we're talking about 100 megawatts. That's a ton of power. That could power a Martian community. That could power a rocket there. And so I hope that maybe I'll have an opportunity to kind of explore my rocketry passion at the same time that I explore my nuclear passion. And people say, "Oh, well, you've launched this thing, and it's radioactive, into space, and what about accidents?" But we launch plutonium batteries all the time. Everybody was really excited about Curiosity, and that had this big plutonium battery on board that has plutonium-238, which actually has a higher specific activity than the low-enriched uranium fuel of these molten salt reactors, which means that the effects would be negligible, because you launch it cold, and when it gets into space is where you actually activate this reactor. So I'm really excited. I think that I've designed this reactor here that can be an innovative source of energy, provide power for all kinds of neat scientific applications, and I'm really prepared to do this. I graduated high school in May, and — (Laughter) (Applause) — I graduated high school in May, and I decided that I was going to start up a company to commercialize these technologies that I've developed, these revolutionary detectors for scanning cargo containers and these systems to produce medical isotopes, but I want to do this, and I've slowly been building up a team of some of the most incredible people I've ever had the chance to work with, and I'm really prepared to make this a reality. And I think, I think, that looking at the technology, this will be cheaper than or the same price as natural gas, and you don't have to refuel it for 30 years, which is an advantage for the developing world. And I'll just say one more maybe philosophical thing to end with, which is weird for a scientist. But I think there's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars, because the stars are giant fusion reactors. They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky. The energy that I'm able to talk to you today, while it was converted to chemical energy in my food, originally came from a nuclear reaction, and so there's something poetic about, in my opinion, perfecting nuclear fission and using it as a future source of innovative energy. So thank you guys. (Applause) |
The silent drama of photography | {0: 'Sebastião Salgado captures the dignity of the dispossessed through large-scale, long-term projects.'} | TED2013 | I'm not sure that every person here is familiar with my pictures. I want to start to show just a few pictures to you, and after I'll speak. I must speak to you a little bit of my history, because we'll be speaking on this during my speech here. I was born in 1944 in Brazil, in the times that Brazil was not yet a market economy. I was born on a farm, a farm that was more than 50 percent rainforest [still]. A marvelous place. I lived with incredible birds, incredible animals, I swam in our small rivers with our caimans. It was about 35 families that lived on this farm, and everything that we produced on this farm, we consumed. Very few things went to the market. Once a year, the only thing that went to the market was the cattle that we produced, and we made trips of about 45 days to reach the slaughterhouse, bringing thousands of head of cattle, and about 20 days traveling back to reach our farm again. When I was 15 years old, it was necessary for me to leave this place and go to a town a little bit bigger — much bigger — where I did the second part of secondary school. There I learned different things. Brazil was starting to urbanize, industrialize, and I knew the politics. I became a little bit radical, I was a member of leftist parties, and I became an activist. I [went to] university to become an economist. I [did] a master's degree in economics. And the most important thing in my life also happened in this time. I met an incredible girl who became my lifelong best friend, and my associate in everything that I have done till now, my wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado. Brazil radicalized very strongly. We fought very hard against the dictatorship, in a moment it was necessary to us: Either go into clandestinity with weapons in hand, or leave Brazil. We were too young, and our organization thought it was better for us to go out, and we went to France, where I did a PhD in economics, Léila became an architect. I worked after for an investment bank. We made a lot of trips, financed development, economic projects in Africa with the World Bank. And one day photography made a total invasion in my life. I became a photographer, abandoned everything and became a photographer, and I started to do the photography that was important for me. Many people tell me that you are a photojournalist, that you are an anthropologist photographer, that you are an activist photographer. But I did much more than that. I put photography as my life. I lived totally inside photography doing long term projects, and I want to show you just a few pictures of — again, you'll see inside the social projects, that I went to, I published many books on these photographs, but I'll just show you a few ones now. In the '90s, from 1994 to 2000, I photographed a story called Migrations. It became a book. It became a show. But during the time that I was photographing this, I lived through a very hard moment in my life, mostly in Rwanda. I saw in Rwanda total brutality. I saw deaths by thousands per day. I lost my faith in our species. I didn't believe that it was possible for us to live any longer, and I started to be attacked by my own Staphylococcus. I started to have infection everywhere. When I made love with my wife, I had no sperm that came out of me; I had blood. I went to see a friend's doctor in Paris, told him that I was completely sick. He made a long examination, and told me, "Sebastian, you are not sick, your prostate is perfect. What happened is, you saw so many deaths that you are dying. You must stop. Stop. You must stop because on the contrary, you will be dead." And I made the decision to stop. I was really upset with photography, with everything in the world, and I made the decision to go back to where I was born. It was a big coincidence. It was the moment that my parents became very old. I have seven sisters. I'm one of the only men in my family, and they made together the decision to transfer this land to Léila and myself. When we received this land, this land was as dead as I was. When I was a kid, it was more than 50 percent rainforest. When we received the land, it was less than half a percent rainforest, as in all my region. To build development, Brazilian development, we destroyed a lot of our forest. As you did here in the United States, or you did in India, everywhere in this planet. To build our development, we come to a huge contradiction that we destroy around us everything. This farm that had thousands of head of cattle had just a few hundreds, and we didn't know how to deal with these. And Léila came up with an incredible idea, a crazy idea. She said, why don't you put back the rainforest that was here before? You say that you were born in paradise. Let's build the paradise again. And I went to see a good friend that was engineering forests to prepare a project for us, and we started. We started to plant, and this first year we lost a lot of trees, second year less, and slowly, slowly this dead land started to be born again. We started to plant hundreds of thousands of trees, only local species, only native species, where we built an ecosystem identical to the one that was destroyed, and the life started to come back in an incredible way. It was necessary for us to transform our land into a national park. We transformed. We gave this land back to nature. It became a national park. We created an institution called Instituto Terra, and we built a big environmental project to raise money everywhere. Here in Los Angeles, in the Bay Area in San Francisco, it became tax deductible in the United States. We raised money in Spain, in Italy, a lot in Brazil. We worked with a lot of companies in Brazil that put money into this project, the government. And the life started to come, and I had a big wish to come back to photography, to photograph again. And this time, my wish was not to photograph anymore just one animal that I had photographed all my life: us. I wished to photograph the other animals, to photograph the landscapes, to photograph us, but us from the beginning, the time we lived in equilibrium with nature. And I went. I started in the beginning of 2004, and I finished at the end of 2011. We created an incredible amount of pictures, and the result — Lélia did the design of all my books, the design of all my shows. She is the creator of the shows. And what we want with these pictures is to create a discussion about what we have that is pristine on the planet and what we must hold on this planet if we want to live, to have some equilibrium in our life. And I wanted to see us when we used, yes, our instruments in stone. We exist yet. I was last week at the Brazilian National Indian Foundation, and only in the Amazon we have about 110 groups of Indians that are not contacted yet. We must protect the forest in this sense. And with these pictures, I hope that we can create information, a system of information. We tried to do a new presentation of the planet, and I want to show you now just a few pictures of this project, please. Well, this — (Applause) — Thank you. Thank you very much. This is what we must fight hard to hold like it is now. But there is another part that we must together rebuild, to build our societies, our modern family of societies, we are at a point where we cannot go back. But we create an incredible contradiction. To build all this, we destroy a lot. Our forest in Brazil, that antique forest that was the size of California, is destroyed today 93 percent. Here, on the West Coast, you've destroyed your forest. Around here, no? The redwood forests are gone. Gone very fast, disappeared. Coming the other day from Atlanta, here, two days ago, I was flying over deserts that we made, we provoked with our own hands. India has no more trees. Spain has no more trees. And we must rebuild these forests. That is the essence of our life, these forests. We need to breathe. The only factory capable to transform CO2 into oxygen, are the forests. The only machine capable to capture the carbon that we are producing, always, even if we reduce them, everything that we do, we produce CO2, are the trees. I put the question — three or four weeks ago, we saw in the newspapers millions of fish that die in Norway. A lack of oxygen in the water. I put to myself the question, if for a moment, we will not lack oxygen for all animal species, ours included — that would be very complicated for us. For the water system, the trees are essential. I'll give you a small example that you'll understand very easily. You happy people that have a lot of hair on your head, if you take a shower, it takes you two or three hours to dry your hair if you don't use a dryer machine. Me, one minute, it's dry. The same with the trees. The trees are the hair of our planet. When you have rain in a place that has no trees, in just a few minutes, the water arrives in the stream, brings soil, destroying our water source, destroying the rivers, and no humidity to retain. When you have trees, the root system holds the water. All the branches of the trees, the leaves that come down create a humid area, and they take months and months under the water, go to the rivers, and maintain our source, maintain our rivers. This is the most important thing, when we imagine that we need water for every activity in life. I want to show you now, to finish, just a few pictures that for me are very important in that direction. You remember that I told you, when I received the farm from my parents that was my paradise, that was the farm. Land completely destroyed, the erosion there, the land had dried. But you can see in this picture, we were starting to construct an educational center that became quite a large environmental center in Brazil. But you see a lot of small spots in this picture. In each point of those spots, we had planted a tree. There are thousands of trees. Now I'll show you the pictures made exactly in the same point two months ago. (Applause) I told you in the beginning that it was necessary for us to plant about 2.5 million trees of about 200 different species in order to rebuild the ecosystem. And I'll show you the last picture. We are with two million trees in the ground now. We are doing the sequestration of about 100,000 tons of carbon with these trees. My friends, it's very easy to do. We did it, no? By an accident that happened to me, we went back, we built an ecosystem. We here inside the room, I believe that we have the same concern, and the model that we created in Brazil, we can transplant it here. We can apply it everywhere around the world, no? And I believe that we can do it together. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Your online life, permanent as a tattoo | {0: 'Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about the profound changes that genomics and brain research will bring about in business, technology, politics and society.'} | TED2013 | All right, so let's take four subjects that obviously go together: big data, tattoos, immortality and the Greeks. Right? Now, the issue about tattoos is that, without a word, tattoos really do shout. [Beautiful] [Intriguing] So you don't have to say a lot. [Allegiance] [Very intimate] [Serious mistakes] (Laughter) And tattoos tell you a lot of stories. If I can ask an indiscreet question, how many of you have tattoos? A few, but not most. What happens if Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, cell phones, GPS, Foursquare, Yelp, Travel Advisor, all these things you deal with every day turn out to be electronic tattoos? And what if they provide as much information about who and what you are as any tattoo ever would? What's ended up happening over the past few decades is the kind of coverage that you had as a head of state or as a great celebrity is now being applied to you every day by all these people who are Tweeting, blogging, following you, watching your credit scores and what you do to yourself. And electronic tattoos also shout. And as you're thinking of the consequences of that, it's getting really hard to hide from this stuff, among other things, because it's not just the electronic tattoos, it's facial recognition that's getting really good. So you can take a picture with an iPhone and get all the names, although, again, sometimes it does make mistakes. (Laughter) But that means you can take a typical bar scene like this, take a picture, say, of this guy right here, get the name, and download all the records before you utter a word or speak to somebody, because everybody turns out to be absolutely plastered by electronic tattoos. And so there's companies like face.com that now have about 18 billion faces online. Here's what happened to this company. [Company sold to Facebook, June 18, 2012...] There are other companies that will place a camera like this — this has nothing to do with Facebook — they take your picture, they tie it to the social media, they figure out you really like to wear black dresses, so maybe the person in the store comes up and says, "Hey, we've got five black dresses that would just look great on you." So what if Andy was wrong? Here's Andy's theory. [In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes.] What if we flip this? What if you're only going to be anonymous for 15 minutes? (Laughter) Well, then, because of electronic tattoos, maybe all of you and all of us are very close to immortality, because these tattoos will live far longer than our bodies will. And if that's true, then what we want to do is we want to go through four lessons from the Greeks and one lesson from a Latin American. Why the Greeks? Well, the Greeks thought about what happens when gods and humans and immortality mix for a long time. So lesson number one: Sisyphus. Remember? He did a horrible thing, condemned for all time to roll this rock up, it would roll back down, roll back up, roll back down. It's a little like your reputation. Once you get that electronic tattoo, you're going to be rolling up and down for a long time, so as you go through this stuff, just be careful what you post. Myth number two: Orpheus, wonderful guy, charming to be around, great partier, great singer, loses his beloved, charms his way into the underworld, only person to charm his way into the underworld, charms the gods of the underworld, they release his beauty on the condition he never look at her until they're out. So he's walking out and walking out and walking out and he just can't resist. He looks at her, loses her forever. With all this data out here, it might be a good idea not to look too far into the past of those you love. Lesson number three: Atalanta. Greatest runner. She would challenge anybody. If you won, she would marry you. If you lost, you died. How did Hippomenes beat her? Well, he had all these wonderful little golden apples, and she'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple. She'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple. She kept getting distracted. He eventually won the race. Just remember the purpose as all these little golden apples come and reach you and you want to post about them or tweet about them or send a late-night message. And then, of course, there's Narcissus. Nobody here would ever be accused or be familiar with Narcissus. (Laughter) But as you're thinking about Narcissus, just don't fall in love with your own reflection. Last lesson, from a Latin American: This is the great poet Jorge Luis Borges. When he was threatened by the thugs of the Argentine military junta, he came back and said, "Oh, come on, how else can you threaten, other than with death?" The interesting thing, the original thing, would be to threaten somebody with immortality. And that, of course, is what we are all now threatened with today because of electronic tattoos. Thank you. (Applause) |
Every kid needs a champion | {0: 'Rita F. Pierson spent her entire life in or around the classroom, having followed both her parents and grandparents into a career as an educator. '} | TED Talks Education | I have spent my entire life either at the schoolhouse, on the way to the schoolhouse, or talking about what happens in the schoolhouse. (Laughter) Both my parents were educators, my maternal grandparents were educators, and for the past 40 years, I've done the same thing. And so, needless to say, over those years I've had a chance to look at education reform from a lot of perspectives. Some of those reforms have been good. Some of them have been not so good. And we know why kids drop out. We know why kids don't learn. It's either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences... We know why. But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection. Relationships. James Comer says that no significant learning can occur without a significant relationship. George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships. Everyone in this room has been affected by a teacher or an adult. For years, I have watched people teach. I have looked at the best and I've looked at some of the worst. A colleague said to me one time, "They don't pay me to like the kids. They pay me to teach a lesson. The kids should learn it. I should teach it, they should learn it, Case closed." Well, I said to her, "You know, kids don't learn from people they don't like." (Laughter) (Applause) She said, "That's just a bunch of hooey." And I said to her, "Well, your year is going to be long and arduous, dear." Needless to say, it was. Some people think that you can either have it in you to build a relationship, or you don't. I think Stephen Covey had the right idea. He said you ought to just throw in a few simple things, like seeking first to understand, as opposed to being understood. Simple things, like apologizing. You ever thought about that? Tell a kid you're sorry, they're in shock. (Laughter) I taught a lesson once on ratios. I'm not real good with math, but I was working on it. (Laughter) And I got back and looked at that teacher edition. I'd taught the whole lesson wrong. (Laughter) So I came back to class the next day and I said, "Look, guys, I need to apologize. I taught the whole lesson wrong. I'm so sorry." They said, "That's okay, Ms. Pierson. You were so excited, we just let you go." I have had classes that were so low, so academically deficient, that I cried. I wondered, "How am I going to take this group, in nine months, from where they are to where they need to be? And it was difficult, it was awfully hard. How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time? One year I came up with a bright idea. I told all my students, "You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students, they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it." One of the students said, "Really?" (Laughter) I said, "Really. We have to show the other classes how to do it, so when we walk down the hall, people will notice us, so you can't make noise. You just have to strut." (Laughter) And I gave them a saying to say: "I am somebody. I was somebody when I came. I'll be a better somebody when I leave. I am powerful, and I am strong. I deserve the education that I get here. I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go." And they said, "Yeah!" (Laughter) You say it long enough, it starts to be a part of you. (Applause) I gave a quiz, 20 questions. A student missed 18. I put a "+2" on his paper and a big smiley face. (Laughter) He said, "Ms. Pierson, is this an F?" I said, "Yes." (Laughter) He said, "Then why'd you put a smiley face?" I said, "Because you're on a roll. You got two right. You didn't miss them all." (Laughter) I said, "And when we review this, won't you do better?" He said, "Yes, ma'am, I can do better." You see, "-18" sucks all the life out of you. "+2" said, "I ain't all bad." For years, I watched my mother take the time at recess to review, go on home visits in the afternoon, buy combs and brushes and peanut butter and crackers to put in her desk drawer for kids that needed to eat, and a washcloth and some soap for the kids who didn't smell so good. See, it's hard to teach kids who stink. (Laughter) And kids can be cruel. And so she kept those things in her desk, and years later, after she retired, I watched some of those same kids come through and say to her, "You know, Ms. Walker, you made a difference in my life. You made it work for me. You made me feel like I was somebody, when I knew, at the bottom, I wasn't. And I want you to just see what I've become." And when my mama died two years ago at 92, there were so many former students at her funeral, it brought tears to my eyes, not because she was gone, but because she left a legacy of relationships that could never disappear. Can we stand to have more relationships? Absolutely. Will you like all your children? Of course not. (Laughter) And you know your toughest kids are never absent. (Laughter) Never. You won't like them all, and the tough ones show up for a reason. It's the connection. It's the relationships. So teachers become great actors and great actresses, and we come to work when we don't feel like it, and we're listening to policy that doesn't make sense, and we teach anyway. We teach anyway, because that's what we do. Teaching and learning should bring joy. How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion? Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be. Is this job tough? You betcha. Oh God, you betcha. But it is not impossible. We can do this. We're educators. We're born to make a difference. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
The economic case for preschool | {0: 'The author of "Investing in Kids," Timothy Bartik studies state and local economies -- and analyzes the benefits of preschool as an economic development program.'} | TEDxMiamiUniversity | In this talk today, I want to present a different idea for why investing in early childhood education makes sense as a public investment. It's a different idea, because usually, when people talk about early childhood programs, they talk about all the wonderful benefits for participants in terms of former participants, in preschool, they have better K-12 test scores, better adult earnings. Now that's all very important, but what I want to talk about is what preschool does for state economies and for promoting state economic development. And that's actually crucial because if we're going to get increased investment in early childhood programs, we need to interest state governments in this. The federal government has a lot on its plate, and state governments are going to have to step up. So we have to appeal to them, the legislators in the state government, and turn to something they understand, that they have to promote the economic development of their state economy. Now, by promoting economic development, I don't mean anything magical. All I mean is, is that early childhood education can bring more and better jobs to a state and can thereby promote higher per capita earnings for the state's residents. Now, I think it's fair to say that when people think about state and local economic development, they don't generally think first about what they're doing about childcare and early childhood programs. I know this. I've spent most of my career researching these programs. I've talked to a lot of directors of state economic development agencies about these issues, a lot of legislators about these issues. When legislators and others think about economic development, what they first of all think about are business tax incentives, property tax abatements, job creation tax credits, you know, there are a million of these programs all over the place. So for example, states compete very vigorously to attract new auto plants or expanded auto plants. They hand out all kinds of business tax breaks. Now, those programs can make sense if they in fact induce new location decisions, and the way they can make sense is, by creating more and better jobs, they raise employment rates, raise per capita earnings of state residents. So there is a benefit to state residents that corresponds to the costs that they're paying by paying for these business tax breaks. My argument is essentially that early childhood programs can do exactly the same thing, create more and better jobs, but in a different way. It's a somewhat more indirect way. These programs can promote more and better jobs by, you build it, you invest in high-quality preschool, it develops the skills of your local workforce if enough of them stick around, and, in turn, that higher-quality local workforce will be a key driver of creating jobs and creating higher earnings per capita in the local community. Now, let me turn to some numbers on this. Okay. If you look at the research evidence — that's extensive — on how much early childhood programs affect the educational attainment, wages and skills of former participants in preschool as adults, you take those known effects, you take how many of those folks will be expected to stick around the state or local economy and not move out, and you take research on how much skills drive job creation, you will conclude, from these three separate lines of research, that for every dollar invested in early childhood programs, the per capita earnings of state residents go up by two dollars and 78 cents, so that's a three-to-one return. Now you can get much higher returns, of up to 16-to-one, if you include anti-crime benefits, if you include benefits to former preschool participants who move to some other state, but there's a good reason for focusing on these three dollars because this is salient and important to state legislators and state policy makers, and it's the states that are going to have to act. So there is this key benefit that is relevant to state policy makers in terms of economic development. Now, one objection you often hear, or maybe you don't hear it because people are too polite to say it, is, why should I pay more taxes to invest in other people's children? What's in it for me? And the trouble with that objection, it reflects a total misunderstanding of how much local economies involve everyone being interdependent. Specifically, the interdependency here is, is that there are huge spillovers of skills — that when other people's children get more skills, that actually increases the prosperity of everyone, including people whose skills don't change. So for example, numerous research studies have shown if you look at what really drives the growth rate of metropolitan areas, it's not so much low taxes, low cost, low wages; it's the skills of the area. Particularly, the proxy for skills that people use is percentage of college graduates in the area. So when you look, for example, at metropolitan areas such as the Boston area, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Silicon Valley, these areas are not doing well economically because they're low-cost. I don't know if you ever tried to buy a house in Silicon Valley. It's not exactly a low-cost proposition. They are growing because they have high levels of skills. So when we invest in other people's children, and build up those skills, we increase the overall job growth of a metro area. As another example, if we look at what determines an individual's wages, and we do statistical exploration of that, what determines wages, we know that the individual's wages will depend, in part, on that individual's education, for example whether or not they have a college degree. One of the very interesting facts is that, in addition, we find that even once we hold constant, statistically, the effect of your own education, the education of everyone else in your metropolitan area also affects your wages. So specifically, if you hold constant your education, you stick in percentage of college graduates in your metro area, you will find that has a significant positive effect on your wages without changing your education at all. In fact, this effect is so strong that when someone gets a college degree, the spillover effects of this on the wages of others in the metropolitan area are actually greater than the direct effects. So if someone gets a college degree, their lifetime earnings go up by a huge amount, over 700,000 dollars. There's an effect on everyone else in the metro area of driving up the percentage of college graduates in the metro area, and if you add that up — it's a small effect for each person, but if you add that up across all the people in the metro area, you actually get that the increase in wages for everyone else in the metropolitan area adds up to almost a million dollars. That's actually greater than the direct benefits of the person choosing to get education. Now, what's going on here? What can explain these huge spillover effects of education? Well, let's think about it this way. I can be the most skilled person in the world, but if everyone else at my firm lacks skills, my employer is going to find it more difficult to introduce new technology, new production techniques. So as a result, my employer is going to be less productive. They will not be able to afford to pay me as good wages. Even if everyone at my firm has good skills, if the workers at the suppliers to my firm do not have good skills, my firm is going to be less competitive competing in national and international markets. And again, the firm that's less competitive will not be able to pay as good wages, and then, particularly in high-tech businesses, they're constantly stealing ideas and workers from other businesses. So clearly the productivity of firms in Silicon Valley has a lot to do with the skills not only of the workers at their firm, but the workers at all the other firms in the metro area. So as a result, if we can invest in other people's children through preschool and other early childhood programs that are high-quality, we not only help those children, we help everyone in the metropolitan area gain in wages and we'll have the metropolitan area gain in job growth. Another objection used sometimes here to invest in early childhood programs is concern about people moving out. So, you know, maybe Ohio's thinking about investing in more preschool education for children in Columbus, Ohio, but they're worried that these little Buckeyes will, for some strange reason, decide to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and become Wolverines. And maybe Michigan will be thinking about investing in preschool in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and be worried these little Wolverines will end up moving to Ohio and becoming Buckeyes. And so they'll both underinvest because everyone's going to move out. Well, the reality is, if you look at the data, Americans aren't as hyper-mobile as people sometimes assume. The data is that over 60 percent of Americans spend most of their working careers in the state they were born in, over 60 percent. That percentage does not vary much from state to state. It doesn't vary much with the state's economy, whether it's depressed or booming, it doesn't vary much over time. So the reality is, if you invest in kids, they will stay. Or at least, enough of them will stay that it will pay off for your state economy. Okay, so to sum up, there is a lot of research evidence that early childhood programs, if run in a high-quality way, pay off in higher adult skills. There's a lot of research evidence that those folks will stick around the state economy, and there's a lot of evidence that having more workers with higher skills in your local economy pays off in higher wages and job growth for your local economy, and if you calculate the numbers for each dollar, we get about three dollars back in benefits for the state economy. So in my opinion, the research evidence is compelling and the logic of this is compelling. So what are the barriers to getting it done? Well, one obvious barrier is cost. So if you look at what it would cost if every state government invested in universal preschool at age four, full-day preschool at age four, the total annual national cost would be roughly 30 billion dollars. So, 30 billion dollars is a lot of money. On the other hand, if you reflect on that the U.S.'s population is over 300 million, we're talking about an amount of money that amounts to 100 dollars per capita. Okay? A hundred dollars per capita, per person, is something that any state government can afford to do. It's just a simple matter of political will to do it. And, of course, as I mentioned, this cost has corresponding benefits. I mentioned there's a multiplier of about three, 2.78, for the state economy, in terms of over 80 billion in extra earnings. And if we want to translate that from just billions of dollars to something that might mean something, what we're talking about is that, for the average low-income kid, that would increase earnings by about 10 percent over their whole career, just doing the preschool, not improving K-12 or anything else after that, not doing anything with college tuition or access, just directly improving preschool, and we would get five percent higher earnings for middle-class kids. So this is an investment that pays off in very concrete terms for a broad range of income groups in the state's population and produces large and tangible benefits. Now, that's one barrier. I actually think the more profound barrier is the long-term nature of the benefits from early childhood programs. So the argument I'm making is, is that we're increasing the quality of our local workforce, and thereby increasing economic development. Obviously if we have a preschool with four-year-olds, we're not sending these kids out at age five to work in the sweatshops, right? At least I hope not. So we're talking about an investment that in terms of impacts on the state economy is not going to really pay off for 15 or 20 years, and of course America is notorious for being a short term-oriented society. Now one response you can make to this, and I sometimes have done this in talks, is people can talk about, there are benefits for these programs in reducing special ed and remedial education costs, there are benefits, parents care about preschool, maybe we'll get some migration effects from parents seeking good preschool, and I think those are true, but in some sense they're missing the point. Ultimately, this is something we're investing in now for the future. And so what I want to leave you with is what I think is the ultimate question. I mean, I'm an economist, but this is ultimately not an economic question, it's a moral question: Are we willing, as Americans, are we as a society still capable of making the political choice to sacrifice now by paying more taxes in order to improve the long-term future of not only our kids, but our community? Are we still capable of that as a country? And that's something that each and every citizen and voter needs to ask themselves. Is that something that you are still invested in, that you still believe in the notion of investment? That is the notion of investment. You sacrifice now for a return later. So I think the research evidence on the benefits of early childhood programs for the local economy is extremely strong. However, the moral and political choice is still up to us, as citizens and as voters. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Learn to read Chinese ... with ease! | {0: "ShaoLan want to help people understand China's culture and language, and to bridge the gap between East and West."} | TED2013 | Growing up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher, one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters. Ever since then, I was fascinated by this incredible language. But to an outsider, it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. Over the past few years, I've been wondering if I can break down this wall, so anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language could do so. I started thinking about how a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful. Since the age of five, I started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence. I learned new characters every day during the course of the next 15 years. Since we only have five minutes, it's better that we have a fast and simpler way. A Chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters. You only need 1,000 to understand the basic literacy. The top 200 will allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature — enough to read road signs, restaurant menus, to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers. Today I'm going to start with eight to show you how the method works. You are ready? Open your mouth as wide as possible until it's square. You get a mouth. This is a person going for a walk. Person. If the shape of the fire is a person with two arms on both sides, as if she was yelling frantically, "Help! I'm on fire!" — This symbol actually is originally from the shape of the flame, but I like to think that way. Whichever works for you. This is a tree. Tree. This is a mountain. The sun. The moon. The symbol of the door looks like a pair of saloon doors in the wild west. I call these eight characters radicals. They are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters. A person. If someone walks behind, that is "to follow." As the old saying goes, two is company, three is a crowd. If a person stretched their arms wide, this person is saying, "It was this big." The person inside the mouth, the person is trapped. He's a prisoner, just like Jonah inside the whale. One tree is a tree. Two trees together, we have the woods. Three trees together, we create the forest. Put a plank underneath the tree, we have the foundation. Put a mouth on the top of the tree, that's "idiot." (Laughter) Easy to remember, since a talking tree is pretty idiotic. Remember fire? Two fires together, I get really hot. Three fires together, that's a lot of flames. Set the fire underneath the two trees, it's burning. For us, the sun is the source of prosperity. Two suns together, prosperous. Three together, that's sparkles. Put the sun and the moon shining together, it's brightness. It also means tomorrow, after a day and a night. The sun is coming up above the horizon. Sunrise. A door. Put a plank inside the door, it's a door bolt. Put a mouth inside the door, asking questions. Knock knock. Is anyone home? This person is sneaking out of a door, escaping, evading. On the left, we have a woman. Two women together, they have an argument. (Laughter) Three women together, be careful, it's adultery. So we have gone through almost 30 characters. By using this method, the first eight radicals will allow you to build 32. The next group of eight characters will build an extra 32. So with very little effort, you will be able to learn a couple hundred characters, which is the same as a Chinese eight-year-old. So after we know the characters, we start building phrases. For example, the mountain and the fire together, we have fire mountain. It's a volcano. We know Japan is the land of the rising sun. This is a sun placed with the origin, because Japan lies to the east of China. So a sun, origin together, we build Japan. A person behind Japan, what do we get? A Japanese person. The character on the left is two mountains stacked on top of each other. In ancient China, that means in exile, because Chinese emperors, they put their political enemies in exile beyond mountains. Nowadays, exile has turned into getting out. A mouth which tells you where to get out is an exit. This is a slide to remind me that I should stop talking and get off of the stage. Thank you. (Applause) |
My story, from gangland daughter to star teacher | {0: 'Pearl Arredondo helped establish a pilot middle school that teaches students to be good communicators in the 21st century.'} | TED Talks Education | So I grew up in East Los Angeles, not even realizing I was poor. My dad was a high-ranking gang member who ran the streets. Everyone knew who I was, so I thought I was a pretty big deal, and I was protected, and even though my dad spent most of my life in and out of jail, I had an amazing mom who was just fiercely independent. She worked at the local high school as a secretary in the dean's office, so she got to see all the kids that got thrown out of class, for whatever reason, who were waiting to be disciplined. Man, her office was packed. So, see, kids like us, we have a lot of things to deal with outside of school, and sometimes we're just not ready to focus. But that doesn't mean that we can't. It just takes a little bit more. Like, I remember one day I found my dad convulsing, foaming at the mouth, OD-ing on the bathroom floor. Really, do you think that doing my homework that night was at the top of my priority list? Not so much. But I really needed a support network, a group of people who were going to help me make sure that I wasn't going to be a victim of my own circumstance, that they were going to push me beyond what I even thought I could do. I needed teachers, in the classroom, every day, who were going to say, "You can move beyond that." And unfortunately, the local junior high was not going to offer that. It was gang-infested, huge teacher turnover rate. So my mom said, "You're going on a bus an hour and a half away from where we live every day." So for the next two years, that's what I did. I took a school bus to the fancy side of town. And eventually, I ended up at a school where there was a mixture. There were some people who were really gang-affiliated, and then there were those of us really trying to make it to high school. Well, trying to stay out of trouble was a little unavoidable. You had to survive. You just had to do things sometimes. So there were a lot of teachers who were like, "She's never going to make it. She has an issue with authority. She's not going to go anywhere." Some teachers completely wrote me off as a lost cause. But then, they were very surprised when I graduated from high school. I was accepted to Pepperdine University, and I came back to the same school that I attended to be a special ed assistant. And then I told them, "I want to be a teacher." And boy, they were like, "What? Why? Why would you want to do that?" So I began my teaching career at the exact same middle school that I attended, and I really wanted to try to save more kids who were just like me. And so every year, I share my background with my kids, because they need to know that everyone has a story, everyone has a struggle, and everyone needs help along the way. And I am going to be their help along the way. So as a rookie teacher, I created opportunity. I had a kid one day come into my class having been stabbed the night before. I was like, "You need to go to a hospital, the school nurse, something." He's like, "No, Miss, I'm not going. I need to be in class because I need to graduate." So he knew that I was not going to let him be a victim of his circumstance, but we were going to push forward and keep moving on. And this idea of creating a safe haven for our kids and getting to know exactly what they're going through, getting to know their families — I wanted that, but I couldn't do it in a school with 1,600 kids, and teachers turning over year after year after year. How do you get to build those relationships? So we created a new school. And we created the San Fernando Institute for Applied Media. And we made sure that we were still attached to our school district for funding, for support. But with that, we were going to gain freedom: freedom to hire the teachers that we knew were going to be effective; freedom to control the curriculum so that we're not doing lesson 1.2 on page five, no; and freedom to control a budget, to spend money where it matters, not how a district or a state says you have to do it. We wanted those freedoms. But now, shifting an entire paradigm, it hasn't been an easy journey, nor is it even complete. But we had to do it. Our community deserved a new way of doing things. And as the very first pilot middle school in all of Los Angeles Unified School District, you better believe there was some opposition. And it was out of fear — fear of, well, what if they get it wrong? Yeah, what if we get it wrong? But what if we get it right? And we did. So even though teachers were against it because we employ one-year contracts — you can't teach, or you don't want to teach, you don't get to be at my school with my kids. (Applause) So in our third year, how did we do it? Well, we're making school worth coming to every day. We make our kids feel like they matter to us. We make our curriculum rigorous and relevant to them, and they use all the technology that they're used to. Laptops, computers, tablets — you name it, they have it. Animation, software, moviemaking software, they have it all. And because we connect it to what they're doing — For example, they made public service announcements for the Cancer Society. These were played in the local trolley system. Teaching elements of persuasion, it doesn't get any more real than that. Our state test scores have gone up more than 80 points since we've become our own school. But it's taken all stakeholders, working together — teachers and principals on one-year contracts, working over and above and beyond their contract hours without compensation. And it takes a school board member who is going to lobby for you and say, "Know, the district is trying to impose this, but you have the freedom to do otherwise." And it takes an active parent center who is not only there, showing a presence every day, but who is part of our governance, making decisions for their kids, our kids. Because why should our students have to go so far away from where they live? They deserve a quality school in their neighborhood, a school that they can be proud to say they attend, and a school that the community can be proud of as well, and they need teachers to fight for them every day and empower them to move beyond their circumstances. Because it's time that kids like me stop being the exception, and we become the norm. Thank you. (Applause) |
Our failing schools. Enough is enough! | {0: 'Geoffrey Canada has spent decades as head of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which supports kids from birth through college in order to break the cycle of poverty.'} | TED Talks Education | I'm a little nervous, because my wife Yvonne said to me, she said, "Geoff, you watch the TED Talks." I said, "Yes, honey, I love TED Talks." She said, "You know, they're like, really smart, talented — " I said, "I know, I know." (Laughter) She said, "They don't want, like, the angry black man." (Laughter) So I said, "No, I'm gonna be good, Honey, I'm gonna be good. I am." But I am angry. (Laughter) And the last time I looked, I'm — (Applause) So this is why I'm excited but I'm angry. This year, there are going to be millions of our children that we're going to needlessly lose, that we could — right now, we could save them all. You saw the quality of the educators who were here. Do not tell me they could not reach those kids and save them. I know they could. It is absolutely possible. Why haven't we fixed this? Those of us in education have held on to a business plan that we don't care how many millions of young people fail, we're going to continue to do the same thing that didn't work, and nobody is getting crazy about it — right? — enough to say, "Enough is enough." So here's a business plan that simply does not make any sense. You know, I grew up in the inner city, and there were kids who were failing in schools 56 years ago when I first went to school, and those schools are still lousy today, 56 years later. And you know something about a lousy school? It's not like a bottle of wine. Right? (Laughter) Where you say, like, '87 was like a good year, right? That's now how this thing — I mean, every single year, it's still the same approach, right? One size fits all, if you get it, fine, and if you don't, tough luck. Just tough luck. Why haven't we allowed innovation to happen? Do not tell me we can't do better than this. Look, you go into a place that's failed kids for 50 years, and you say, "So what's the plan?" And they say, "We'll, we're going to do what we did last year this year." What kind of business model is that? Banks used to open and operate between 10 and 3. They operated 10 to 3. They were closed for lunch hour. Now, who can bank between 10 and 3? The unemployed. They don't need banks. They got no money in the banks. Who created that business model? Right? And it went on for decades. You know why? Because they didn't care. It wasn't about the customers. It was about bankers. They created something that worked for them. How could you go to the bank when you were at work? It didn't matter. And they don't care whether or not Geoff is upset he can't go to the bank. Go find another bank. They all operate the same way. Right? Now, one day, some crazy banker had an idea. Maybe we should keep the bank open when people come home from work. They might like that. What about a Saturday? What about introducing technology? Now look, I'm a technology fan, but I have to admit to you all I'm a little old. So I was a little slow, and I did not trust technology, and when they first came out with those new contraptions, these tellers that you put in a card and they give you money, I was like, "There's no way that machine is going to count that money right. I am never using that, right?" So technology has changed. Things have changed. Yet not in education. Why? Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now? And if you come up with a plan to change things, people consider you radical. They will say the worst things about you. I said one day, well, look, if the science says — this is science, not me — that our poorest children lose ground in the summertime — You see where they are in June and say, okay, they're there. You look at them in September, they've gone down. You say, whoo! So I heard about that in '75 when I was at the Ed School at Harvard. I said, "Oh, wow, this is an important study." Because it suggests we should do something. (Laughter) Every 10 years they reproduce the same study. It says exactly the same thing: Poor kids lose ground in the summertime. The system decides you can't run schools in the summer. You know, I always wonder, who makes up those rules? For years I went to — Look, I went the Harvard Ed School. I thought I knew something. They said it was the agrarian calendar, and people had — but let me tell you why that doesn't make sense. I never got that. I never got that, because anyone knows if you farm, you don't plant crops in July and August. You plant them in the spring. So who came up with this idea? Who owns it? Why did we ever do it? Well it just turns out in the 1840s we did have, schools were open all year. They were open all year, because we had a lot of folks who had to work all day. They didn't have any place for their kids to go. It was a perfect place to have schools. So this is not something that is ordained from the education gods. So why don't we? Why don't we? Because our business has refused to use science. Science. You have Bill Gates coming out and saying, "Look, this works, right? We can do this." How many places in America are going to change? None. None. Okay, yeah, there are two. All right? Yes, there'll be some place, because some folks will do the right thing. As a profession, we have to stop this. The science is clear. Here's what we know. We know that the problem begins immediately. Right? This idea, zero to three. My wife, Yvonne, and I, we have four kids, three grown ones and a 15-year-old. That's a longer story. (Laughter) With our first kids, we did not know the science about brain development. We didn't know how critical those first three years were. We didn't know what was happening in those young brains. We didn't know the role that language, a stimulus and response, call and response, how important that was in developing those children. We know that now. What are we doing about it? Nothing. Wealthy people know. Educated people know. And their kids have an advantage. Poor people don't know, and we're not doing anything to help them at all. But we know this is critical. Now, you take pre-kindergarten. We know it's important for kids. Poor kids need that experience. Nope. Lots of places, it doesn't exist. We know health services matter. You know, we provide health services and people are always fussing at me about, you know, because I'm all into accountability and data and all of that good stuff, but we do health services, and I have to raise a lot of money. People used to say when they'd come fund us, "Geoff, why do you provide these health services?" I used to make stuff up. Right? I'd say, "Well, you know a child who has cavities is not going to, uh, be able to study as well." And I had to because I had to raise the money. But now I'm older, and you know what I tell them? You know why I provide kids with those health benefits and the sports and the recreation and the arts? Because I actually like kids. I actually like kids. (Laughter) (Applause) But when they really get pushy, people really get pushy, I say, "I do it because you do it for your kid." And you've never read a study from MIT that says giving your kid dance instruction is going to help them do algebra better, but you will give that kid dance instruction, and you will be thrilled that that kid wants to do dance instruction, and it will make your day. And why shouldn't poor kids have the same opportunity? It's the floor for these children. (Applause) So here's the other thing. I'm a tester guy. I believe you need data, you need information, because you work at something, you think it's working, and you find out it's not working. I mean, you're educators. You work, you say, you think you've got it, great, no? And you find out they didn't get it. But here's the problem with testing. The testing that we do — we're going to have our test in New York next week — is in April. You know when we're going to get the results back? Maybe July, maybe June. And the results have great data. They'll tell you Raheem really struggled, couldn't do two-digit multiplication — so great data, but you're getting it back after school is over. And so, what do you do? You go on vacation. (Laughter) You come back from vacation. Now you've got all of this test data from last year. You don't look at it. Why would you look at it? You're going to go and teach this year. So how much money did we just spend on all of that? Billions and billions of dollars for data that it's too late to use. I need that data in September. I need that data in November. I need to know you're struggling, and I need to know whether or not what I did corrected that. I need to know that this week. I don't need to know that at the end of the year when it's too late. Because in my older years, I've become somewhat of a clairvoyant. I can predict school scores. You take me to any school. I'm really good at inner city schools that are struggling. And you tell me last year 48 percent of those kids were on grade level. And I say, "Okay, what's the plan, what did we do from last year to this year?" You say, "We're doing the same thing." I'm going to make a prediction. (Laughter) This year, somewhere between 44 and 52 percent of those kids will be on grade level. And I will be right every single time. So we're spending all of this money, but we're getting what? Teachers need real information right now about what's happening to their kids. The high stakes is today, because you can do something about it. So here's the other issue that I just think we've got to be concerned about. We can't stifle innovation in our business. We have to innovate. And people in our business get mad about innovation. They get angry if you do something different. If you try something new, people are always like, "Ooh, charter schools." Hey, let's try some stuff. Let's see. This stuff hasn't worked for 55 years. Let's try something different. And here's the rub. Some of it's not going to work. You know, people tell me, "Yeah, those charter schools, a lot of them don't work." A lot of them don't. They should be closed. I mean, I really believe they should be closed. But we can't confuse figuring out the science and things not working with we shouldn't therefore do anything. Right? Because that's not the way the world works. If you think about technology, imagine if that's how we thought about technology. Every time something didn't work, we just threw in the towel and said, "Let's forget it." Right? You know, they convinced me. I'm sure some of you were like me — the latest and greatest thing, the PalmPilot. They told me, "Geoff, if you get this PalmPilot you'll never need another thing." That thing lasted all of three weeks. It was over. I was so disgusted I spent my money on this thing. Did anybody stop inventing? Not a person. Not a soul. The folks went out there. They kept inventing. The fact that you have failure, that shouldn't stop you from pushing the science forward. Our job as educators, there's some stuff we know that we can do. And we've got to do better. The evaluation, we have to start with kids earlier, we have to make sure that we provide the support to young people. We've got to give them all of these opportunities. So that we have to do. But this innovation issue, this idea that we've got to keep innovating until we really nail this science down is something that is absolutely critical. And this is something, by the way, that I think is going to be a challenge for our entire field. America cannot wait another 50 years to get this right. We have run out of time. I don't know about a fiscal cliff, but I know there's an educational cliff that we are walking over right this very second, and if we allow folks to continue this foolishness about saying we can't afford this — So Bill Gates says it's going to cost five billion dollars. What is five billion dollars to the United States? What did we spend in Afghanistan this year? How many trillions? (Applause) When the country cares about something, we'll spend a trillion dollars without blinking an eye. When the safety of America is threatened, we will spend any amount of money. The real safety of our nation is preparing this next generation so that they can take our place and be the leaders of the world when it comes to thinking and technology and democracy and all that stuff we care about. I dare say it's a pittance, what it would require for us to really begin to solve some of these problems. So once we do that, I'll no longer be angry. (Laughter) So, you guys, help me get there. Thank you all very much. Thank you. (Applause) John Legend: So what is the high school dropout rate at Harlem Children's Zone? Geoffrey Canada: Well, you know, John, 100 percent of our kids graduated high school last year in my school. A hundred percent of them went to college. This year's seniors will have 100 percent graduating high school. Last I heard we had 93 percent accepted to college. We'd better get that other seven percent. So that's just how this goes. (Applause) JL: So how do you stick with them after they leave high school? GC: Well, you know, one of the bad problems we have in this country is these kids, the same kids, these same vulnerable kids, when you get them in school, they drop out in record numbers. And so we've figured out that you've got to really design a network of support for these kids that in many ways mimics what a good parent does. They harass you, right? They call you, they say, "I want to see your grades. How'd you do on that last test? What are you talking about that you want to leave school? And you're not coming back here." So a bunch of my kids know you can't come back to Harlem because Geoff is looking for you. They're like, "I really can't come back." No. You'd better stay in school. But I'm not kidding about some of this, and it gets a little bit to the grit issue. When kids know that you refuse to let them fail, it puts a different pressure on them, and they don't give up as easy. So sometimes they don't have it inside, and they're, like, "You know, I don't want to do this, but I know my mother's going to be mad." Well, that matters to kids, and it helps get them through. We try to create a set of strategies that gets them tutoring and help and support, but also a set of encouragements that say to them, "You can do it. It is going to be hard, but we refuse to let you fail." JL: Well, thank you Dr. Canada. Please give it up for him one more time. (Applause) |
"High School Training Ground" | {0: 'Young spoken-word poet Malcolm London has been called the "Gil Scott-Heron of this generation" (by Cornel West). His feisty, passionate performances take on the issues of the day, including the Chicago education system in which he grew up.'} | TED Talks Education | At 7:45 a.m., I open the doors to a building dedicated to building, yet only breaks me down. I march down hallways cleaned up after me every day by regular janitors, but I never have the decency to honor their names. Lockers left open like teenage boys' mouths when teenage girls wear clothes that covers their insecurities but exposes everything else. Masculinity mimicked by men who grew up with no fathers, camouflage worn by bullies who are dangerously armed but need hugs. Teachers paid less than what it costs them to be here. Oceans of adolescents come here to receive lessons but never learn to swim, part like the Red Sea when the bell rings. This is a training ground. My high school is Chicago, diverse and segregated on purpose. Social lines are barbed wire. Labels like "Regulars" and "Honors" resonate. I am an Honors but go home with Regular students who are soldiers in territory that owns them. This is a training ground to sort out the Regulars from the Honors, a reoccurring cycle built to recycle the trash of this system. Trained at a young age to capitalize, letters taught now that capitalism raises you but you have to step on someone else to get there. This is a training ground where one group is taught to lead and the other is made to follow. No wonder so many of my people spit bars, because the truth is hard to swallow. The need for degrees has left so many people frozen. Homework is stressful, but when you go home every day and your home is work, you don't want to pick up any assignments. Reading textbooks is stressful, but reading does not matter when you feel your story is already written, either dead or getting booked. Taking tests is stressful, but bubbling in a Scantron does not stop bullets from bursting. I hear education systems are failing, but I believe they're succeeding at what they're built to do — to train you, to keep you on track, to track down an American dream that has failed so many of us all. (Applause) |
3 rules to spark learning | {0: 'As a high school chemistry teacher, Ramsey Musallam expands curiosity in the classroom through multimedia and new technology.'} | TED Talks Education | I teach chemistry. (Explosion) All right, all right. So more than just explosions, chemistry is everywhere. Have you ever found yourself at a restaurant spacing out just doing this over and over? Some people nodding yes. Recently, I showed this to my students, and I just asked them to try and explain why it happened. The questions and conversations that followed were fascinating. Check out this video that Maddie from my period three class sent me that evening. (Clang) (Laughs) Now obviously, as Maddie's chemistry teacher, I love that she went home and continued to geek out about this kind of ridiculous demonstration that we did in class. But what fascinated me more is that Maddie's curiosity took her to a new level. If you look inside that beaker, you might see a candle. Maddie's using temperature to extend this phenomenon to a new scenario. You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers, and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education. But if we place these technologies before student inquiry, we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions. For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time, but if it is the focus of our students' experience, it's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing. But if instead we have the guts to confuse our students, perplex them, and evoke real questions, through those questions, we as teachers have information that we can use to tailor robust and informed methods of blended instruction. So, 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside, the truth is, I've been teaching for 13 years now, and it took a life-threatening situation to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching and help me realize that student questions are the seeds of real learning, not some scripted curriculum that gave them tidbits of random information. In May of 2010, at 35 years old, with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way, I was diagnosed with a large aneurysm at the base of my thoracic aorta. This led to open-heart surgery. This is the actual real email from my doctor right there. Now, when I got this, I was — press Caps Lock — absolutely freaked out, okay? But I found surprising moments of comfort in the confidence that my surgeon embodied. Where did this guy get this confidence, the audacity of it? So when I asked him, he told me three things. He said first, his curiosity drove him to ask hard questions about the procedure, about what worked and what didn't work. Second, he embraced, and didn't fear, the messy process of trial and error, the inevitable process of trial and error. And third, through intense reflection, he gathered the information that he needed to design and revise the procedure, and then, with a steady hand, he saved my life. Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom, and before I went back into the classroom that fall, I wrote down three rules of my own that I bring to my lesson planning still today. Rule number one: Curiosity comes first. Questions can be windows to great instruction, but not the other way around. Rule number two: Embrace the mess. We're all teachers. We know learning is ugly. And just because the scientific method is allocated to page five of section 1.2 of chapter one of the one that we all skip, okay, trial and error can still be an informal part of what we do every single day at Sacred Heart Cathedral in room 206. And rule number three: Practice reflection. What we do is important. It deserves our care, but it also deserves our revision. Can we be the surgeons of our classrooms? As if what we are doing one day will save lives. Our students our worth it. And each case is different. (Explosion) All right. Sorry. The chemistry teacher in me just needed to get that out of my system before we move on. So these are my daughters. On the right we have little Emmalou — Southern family. And, on the left, Riley. Now Riley's going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here. She's going to be four years old, and anyone who knows a four-year-old knows that they love to ask, "Why?" Yeah. Why. I could teach this kid anything because she is curious about everything. We all were at that age. But the challenge is really for Riley's future teachers, the ones she has yet to meet. How will they grow this curiosity? You see, I would argue that Riley is a metaphor for all kids, and I think dropping out of school comes in many different forms — to the senior who's checked out before the year's even begun or that empty desk in the back of an urban middle school's classroom. But if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry, we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day, and spark their imagination. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Teachers need real feedback | {0: "A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. Now he's doing it again with his own style of philanthropy and passion for innovation."} | TED Talks Education | Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. (Laughter) My bridge coach, Sharon Osberg, says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else's in the world. (Laughter) Sorry, Sharon. Here you go. We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve. Unfortunately, there's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better, and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world. I'm talking about teachers. When Melinda and I learned how little useful feedback most teachers get, we were blown away. Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback: Satisfactory. If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was "satisfactory," I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently? Today, districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers, but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice. Our teachers deserve better. The system we have today isn't fair to them. It's not fair to students, and it's putting America's global leadership at risk. So today I want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve. Let's start by asking who's doing well. Well, unfortunately there's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems. So I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically, and looked at what they're doing to help their teachers improve. Consider the rankings for reading proficiency. The U.S. isn't number one. We're not even in the top 10. We're tied for 15th with Iceland and Poland. Now, out of all the places that do better than the U.S. in reading, how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve? Eleven out of 14. The U.S. is tied for 15th in reading, but we're 23rd in science and 31st in math. So there's really only one area where we're near the top, and that's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills. Let's look at the best academic performer: the province of Shanghai, China. Now, they rank number one across the board, in reading, math and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving. They made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work. They have weekly study groups, where teachers get together and talk about what's working. They even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues. You might ask, why is a system like this so important? It's because there's so much variation in the teaching profession. Some teachers are far more effective than others. In fact, there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains. If today's average teacher could become as good as those teachers, our students would be blowing away the rest of the world. So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best. What would that system look like? Well, to find out, our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called Measures of Effective Teaching. We had observers watch videos of teachers in the classroom and rate how they did on a range of practices. For example, did they ask their students challenging questions? Did they find multiple ways to explain an idea? We also had students fill out surveys with questions like, "Does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson?" "Do you learn to correct your mistakes?" And what we found is very exciting. First, the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes. So it tells us we're asking the right questions. And second, teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools, because they pointed to specific places where they can improve. I want to show you what this video component of MET looks like in action. (Music) (Video) Sarah Brown Wessling: Good morning everybody. Let's talk about what's going on today. To get started, we're doing a peer review day, okay? A peer review day, and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to prove in your essays. My name is Sarah Brown Wessling. I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa. Turn to somebody next to you. Tell them what you think I mean when I talk about moves to prove. I've talk about — I think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it. Okay, so I would like you to please bring up your papers. I think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality. You can't really dispute what you see on the video, and there is a lot to be learned from that, and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this. I just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens. At the beginning of class, I just perch it in the back of the classroom. It's not a perfect shot. It doesn't catch every little thing that's going on. But I can hear the sound. I can see a lot. And I'm able to learn a lot from it. So it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection. All right, let's take a look at the long one first, okay? Once I'm finished taping, then I put it in my computer, and then I'll scan it and take a peek at it. If I don't write things down, I don't remember them. So having the notes is a part of my thinking process, and I discover what I'm seeing as I'm writing. I really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management, and just all of those different facets of the classroom. I'm glad that we've actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works, what doesn't. I think that video exposes so much of what's intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand, and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about. I think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we cannot convey in a lesson plan, things you cannot convey in a standard, things that you cannot even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy. Alrighty, everybody, have a great weekend. I'll see you later. [Every classroom could look like that] (Applause) Bill Gates: One day, we'd like every classroom in America to look something like that. But we still have more work to do. Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle. We also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis. If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions, you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions. So building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system won't be easy. For example, I know some teachers aren't immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom. That's understandable, but our experience with MET suggests that if teachers manage the process, if they collect video in their own classrooms, and they pick the lessons they want to submit, a lot of them will be eager to participate. Building this system will also require a considerable investment. Our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars. Now that's a big number, but to put it in perspective, it's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries. The impact for teachers would be phenomenal. We would finally have a way to give them feedback, as well as the means to act on it. But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country. It would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that's fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams. This wouldn't just make us a more successful country. It would also make us a more fair and just one, too. I'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve. I hope you are too. Thank you. (Applause) |
Grit: The power of passion and perseverance | {0: 'At the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Lee Duckworth studies intangible concepts such as self-control and grit to determine how they might predict both academic and professional success.'} | TED Talks Education | When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I gave out homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades. What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. And that got me thinking. The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough. After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ. But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily? So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy. We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out. We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition. We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money? In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit. Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint. A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?" The honest answer is, I don't know. (Laughter) What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent. So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset." This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition. So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need more. And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, because that's where we are. That's the work that stands before us. We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned. In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to escape education's death valley | {0: "Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence. "} | TED Talks Education | Thank you very much. I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our two kids. Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los Angeles — (Laughter) thinking we were moving to America, but anyway — (Laughter) It's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to America. (Laughter) I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, "Americans don't get irony." (Laughter) Have you come across this idea? It's not true. I've traveled the whole length and breadth of this country. I have found no evidence that Americans don't get irony. It's one of those cultural myths, like, "The British are reserved." (Laughter) I don't know why people think this. We've invaded every country we've encountered. (Laughter) But it's not true Americans don't get irony, but I just want you to know that that's what people are saying about you behind your back. You know, so when you leave living rooms in Europe, people say, thankfully, nobody was ironic in your presence. (Laughter) But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation, "No Child Left Behind." (Laughter) Because whoever thought of that title gets irony. (Laughter) Don't they? (Applause) Because it's leaving millions of children behind. Now I can see that's not a very attractive name for legislation: "Millions of Children Left Behind." I can see that. What's the plan? We propose to leave millions of children behind, and here's how it's going to work. And it's working beautifully. (Laughter) In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school. In the Native American communities, it's 80 percent of kids. If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years, of nearly a trillion dollars. From an economic point of view, this is good math, isn't it, that we should do this? It actually costs an enormous amount to mop up the damage from the dropout crisis. But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it. And the reason is not that we're not spending enough money. America spends more money on education than most other countries. Class sizes are smaller than in many countries. And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education. The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction. There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure. The first is this, that human beings are naturally different and diverse. Can I ask you, how many of you have got children of your own? Okay. Or grandchildren. How about two children or more? Right. And the rest of you have seen such children. (Laughter) Small people wandering about. (Laughter) I will make you a bet, and I am confident that I will win the bet. If you've got two children or more, I bet you they are completely different from each other. Aren't they? (Applause) You would never confuse them, would you? Like, "Which one are you? Remind me." (Laughter) "Your mother and I need some color-coding system so we don't get confused." Education under "No Child Left Behind" is based on not diversity but conformity. What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement. One of the effects of "No Child Left Behind" has been to narrow the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines. They're very important. I'm not here to argue against science and math. On the contrary, they're necessary but they're not sufficient. A real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education. An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you — (Applause) One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder. ADHD. I'm not saying there's no such thing. I just don't believe it's an epidemic like this. If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget, you know? (Laughter) (Applause) Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. They're suffering from childhood. (Laughter) And I know this because I spent my early life as a child. I went through the whole thing. Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents, not just a small range of them. And by the way, the arts aren't just important because they improve math scores. They're important because they speak to parts of children's being which are otherwise untouched. The second, thank you — (Applause) The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. Children are natural learners. It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. Curiosity is the engine of achievement. Now the reason I say this is because one of the effects of the current culture here, if I can say so, has been to de-professionalize teachers. There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. But teaching is a creative profession. Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system. You know, you're not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. You see, in the end, education is about learning. If there's no learning going on, there's no education going on. And people can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning. The whole point of education is to get people to learn. An old friend of mine — actually very old, he's dead. (Laughter) That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid. (Laughter) But a wonderful guy he was, wonderful philosopher. He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. You can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting. (Laughter) It's a very good example. There he is. He's dieting. Is he losing any weight? Not really. (Laughter) Teaching is a word like that. You can say, "There's Deborah, she's in room 34, she's teaching." But if nobody's learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it. The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. That's it. And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. Now, testing is important. Standardized tests have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be diagnostic. They should help. (Applause) If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized tests. I do. I want to know what my cholesterol level is compared to everybody else's on a standard scale. I don't want to be told on some scale my doctor invented in the car. (Laughter) "Your cholesterol is what I call Level Orange." "Really?" (Laughter) "Is that good?" "We don't know." (Laughter) But all that should support learning. It shouldn't obstruct it, which of course it often does. So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. And the third principle is this: that human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different résumés. We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. It's the common currency of being a human being. It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic. I mean, other animals may well have imaginations and creativity, but it's not so much in evidence, is it, as ours? I mean, you may have a dog. And your dog may get depressed. You know, but it doesn't listen to Radiohead, does it? (Laughter) And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels. (Laughter) "Would you like to come for a walk?" "No, I'm fine." (Laughter) "You go. I'll wait. But take pictures." (Laughter) We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization. Now, it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't. Finland regularly comes out on top in math, science and reading. Now, we only know that's what they do well at, because that's all that's being tested. That's one of the problems of the test. They don't look for other things that matter just as much. The thing about work in Finland is this: they don't obsess about those disciplines. They have a very broad approach to education, which includes humanities, physical education, the arts. Second, there is no standardized testing in Finland. I mean, there's a bit, but it's not what gets people up in the morning, what keeps them at their desks. The third thing — and I was at a meeting recently with some people from Finland, actual Finnish people, and somebody from the American system was saying to the people in Finland, "What do you do about the drop-out rate in Finland?" And they all looked a bit bemused, and said, "Well, we don't have one. Why would you drop out? If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and we help and support them." Now people always say, "Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America." No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland. But you can compare it to a state in America. Many states in America have fewer people in them than that. I mean, I've been to some states in America and I was the only person there. (Laughter) Really. Really. I was asked to lock up when I left. (Laughter) But what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in America — I mean, as a whole. One is this: they individualize teaching and learning. They recognize that it's students who are learning and the system has to engage them, their curiosity, their individuality, and their creativity. That's how you get them to learn. The second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession. They recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and keep giving them constant support and professional development. Investing in professional development is not a cost. It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. They know that to be the case. And the third is, they devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done. You see, there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education — That's what happens in some systems. Central or state governments decide, they know best and they're going to tell you what to do. The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. You have to put it back to the people. (Applause) There is wonderful work happening in this country. But I have to say it's happening in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it. It's like people are sailing into a headwind all the time. And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. It won't, and it never did. The point is that education is not a mechanical system. It's a human system. It's about people, people who either do want to learn or don't want to learn. Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography. They may find it boring. They may find it irrelevant. They may find that it's at odds with the life they're living outside of school. There are trends, but the stories are always unique. I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of — they're called alternative education programs. These are programs designed to get kids back into education. They have certain common features. They're very personalized. They have strong support for the teachers, close links with the community and a broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs which involve students outside school as well as inside school. And they work. What's interesting to me is, these are called "alternative education." (Laughter) You know? And all the evidence from around the world is, if we all did that, there'd be no need for the alternative. (Applause) (Applause ends) So I think we have to embrace a different metaphor. We have to recognize that it's a human system, and there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don't. We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential. Culture is an organic term, isn't it? Not far from where I live is a place called Death Valley. Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in America, and nothing grows there. Nothing grows there because it doesn't rain. Hence, Death Valley. In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. And in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon. The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. What it proved is this: that Death Valley isn't dead. It's dormant. Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. It happens all the time. You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life. Great leaders know that. The real role of leadership in education — and I think it's true at the national level, the state level, at the school level — is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected. There's a wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin. "There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, or don't want to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen." And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. And that's what we need. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why 30 is not the new 20 | {0: 'In her book "The Defining Decade," Meg Jay suggests that many twentysomethings feel trivialized during what is actually the most transformative — and defining — period of our adult lives.'} | TED2013 | When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client. I was a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Berkeley. She was a 26-year-old woman named Alex. Now Alex walked into her first session wearing jeans and a big slouchy top, and she dropped onto the couch in my office and kicked off her flats and told me she was there to talk about guy problems. Now when I heard this, I was so relieved. My classmate got an arsonist for her first client. (Laughter) And I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys. This I thought I could handle. But I didn't handle it. With the funny stories that Alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road. "Thirty's the new 20," Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right. Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later. Twentysomethings like Alex and I had nothing but time. But before long, my supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love life. I pushed back. I said, "Sure, she's dating down, she's sleeping with a knucklehead, but it's not like she's going to marry the guy." And then my supervisor said, "Not yet, but she might marry the next one. Besides, the best time to work on Alex's marriage is before she has one." That's what psychologists call an "Aha!" moment. That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20. Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime. That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there, blowing it. That was when I realized that this sort of benign neglect was a real problem, and it had real consequences, not just for Alex and her love life but for the careers and the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere. There are 50 million twentysomethings in the United States right now. We're talking about 15 percent of the population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one's getting through adulthood without going through their 20s first. (Laughter) Raise your hand if you're in your 20s. I really want to see some twentysomethings here. Oh, yay! You are all awesome. If you work with twentysomethings, you love a twentysomething, you're losing sleep over twentysomethings, I want to see — Okay. Awesome, twentysomethings really matter. So, I specialize in twentysomethings because I believe that every single one of those 50 million twentysomethings deserves to know what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists and fertility specialists already know: that claiming your 20s is one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world. This is not my opinion. These are the facts. We know that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take place by age 35. That means that eight out of 10 of the decisions and experiences and "Aha!" moments that make your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s. People who are over 40, don't panic. This crowd is going to be fine, I think. We know that the first 10 years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you're going to earn. We know that more than half of Americans are married or are living with or dating their future partner by 30. We know that the brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever it is you want to change about yourself, now is the time to change it. We know that personality changes more during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we know that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35. So your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options. So when we think about child development, we all know that the first five years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain. It's a time when your ordinary, day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become. But what we hear less about is that there's such a thing as adult development, and our 20s are that critical period of adult development. But this isn't what twentysomethings are hearing. Newspapers talk about the changing timetable of adulthood. Researchers call the 20s an extended adolescence. Journalists coin silly nicknames for twentysomethings like "twixters" and "kidults." (Laughing) It's true! As a culture, we have trivialized what is actually the defining decade of adulthood. Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time. (Laughing) Isn't that true? So what do you think happens when you pat a twentysomething on the head and you say, "You have 10 extra years to start your life"? Nothing happens. You have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing happens. And then every day, smart, interesting twentysomethings like you or like your sons and daughters come into my office and say things like this: "I know my boyfriend's no good for me, but this relationship doesn't count. I'm just killing time." Or they say, "Everybody says as long as I get started on a career by the time I'm 30, I'll be fine." But then it starts to sound like this: "My 20s are almost over, and I have nothing to show for myself. I had a better résumé the day after I graduated from college." And then it starts to sound like this: "Dating in my 20s was like musical chairs. Everybody was running around and having fun, but then sometime around 30 it was like the music turned off and everybody started sitting down. I didn't want to be the only one left standing up, so sometimes I think I married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30." Where are the twentysomethings here? Do not do that. (Laughter) Okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake, the stakes are very high. When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period of time. Many of these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show, simply harder and more stressful to do all at once in our 30s. The post-millennial midlife crisis isn't buying a red sports car. It's realizing you can't have that career you now want. It's realizing you can't have that child you now want, or you can't give your child a sibling. Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room, and say about their 20s, "What was I doing? What was I thinking?" I want to change what twentysomethings are doing and thinking. Here's a story about how that can go. It's a story about a woman named Emma. At 25, Emma came to my office because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis. She said she thought she might like to work in art or entertainment, but she hadn't decided yet, so she'd spent the last few years waiting tables instead. Because it was cheaper, she lived with a boyfriend who displayed his temper more than his ambition. And as hard as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder. She often cried in our sessions, but then would collect herself by saying, "You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends." Well one day, Emma comes in and she hangs her head in her lap, and she sobbed for most of the hour. She'd just bought a new address book, and she'd spent the morning filling in her many contacts, but then she'd been left staring at that empty blank that comes after the words "In case of emergency, please call ..." She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, "Who's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck? Who's going to take care of me if I have cancer?" Now in that moment, it took everything I had not to say, "I will." But what Emma needed wasn't some therapist who really, really cared. Emma needed a better life, and I knew this was her chance. I had learned too much since I first worked with Alex to just sit there while Emma's defining decade went parading by. So over the next weeks and months, I told Emma three things that every twentysomething, male or female, deserves to hear. First, I told Emma to forget about having an identity crisis and get some identity capital. By "get identity capital," I mean do something that adds value to who you are. Do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next. I didn't know the future of Emma's career, and no one knows the future of work, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital. So now is the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startup you want to try. I'm not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that's not supposed to count, which, by the way, is not exploration. That's procrastination. I told Emma to explore work and make it count. Second, I told Emma that the urban tribe is overrated. Best friends are great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think, how they speak, and where they work. That new piece of capital, that new person to date almost always comes from outside the inner circle. New things come from what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends. So yes, half of twentysomethings are un- or under-employed. But half aren't, and weak ties are how you get yourself into that group. Half of new jobs are never posted, so reaching out to your neighbor's boss is how you get that unposted job. It's not cheating. It's the science of how information spreads. Last but not least, Emma believed that you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends. Now this was true for her growing up, but as a twentysomething, soon Emma would pick her family when she partnered with someone and created a family of her own. I told Emma the time to start picking your family is now. Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20, or even 25, and I agree with you. But grabbing whoever you're living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress. The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one, and that means being as intentional with love as you are with work. Picking your family is about consciously choosing who and what you want rather than just making it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you. So what happened to Emma? Well, we went through that address book, and she found an old roommate's cousin who worked at an art museum in another state. That weak tie helped her get a job there. That job offer gave her the reason to leave that live-in boyfriend. Now, five years later, she's a special events planner for museums. She's married to a man she mindfully chose. She loves her new career, she loves her new family, and she sent me a card that said, "Now the emergency contact blanks don't seem big enough." Now Emma's story made that sound easy, but that's what I love about working with twentysomethings. They are so easy to help. Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west. Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji. Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break, one good TED Talk, can have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come. So here's an idea worth spreading to every twentysomething you know. It's as simple as what I learned to say to Alex. It's what I now have the privilege of saying to twentysomethings like Emma every single day: Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family. Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do. You're deciding your life right now. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we need strangeness | {0: 'A principal engineer at Intel, Maria Bezaitis focuses on how constellations of personal data can form new business models. '} | TED@Intel | "Don't talk to strangers." You have heard that phrase uttered by your friends, family, schools and the media for decades. It's a norm. It's a social norm. But it's a special kind of social norm, because it's a social norm that wants to tell us who we can relate to and who we shouldn't relate to. "Don't talk to strangers" says, "Stay from anyone who's not familiar to you. Stick with the people you know. Stick with people like you." How appealing is that? It's not really what we do, is it, when we're at our best? When we're at our best, we reach out to people who are not like us, because when we do that, we learn from people who are not like us. My phrase for this value of being with "not like us" is "strangeness," and my point is that in today's digitally intensive world, strangers are quite frankly not the point. The point that we should be worried about is, how much strangeness are we getting? Why strangeness? Because our social relations are increasingly mediated by data, and data turns our social relations into digital relations, and that means that our digital relations now depend extraordinarily on technology to bring to them a sense of robustness, a sense of discovery, a sense of surprise and unpredictability. Why not strangers? Because strangers are part of a world of really rigid boundaries. They belong to a world of people I know versus people I don't know, and in the context of my digital relations, I'm already doing things with people I don't know. The question isn't whether or not I know you. The question is, what can I do with you? What can I learn with you? What can we do together that benefits us both? I spend a lot of time thinking about how the social landscape is changing, how new technologies create new constraints and new opportunities for people. The most important changes facing us today have to do with data and what data is doing to shape the kinds of digital relations that will be possible for us in the future. The economies of the future depend on that. Our social lives in the future depend on that. The threat to worry about isn't strangers. The threat to worry about is whether or not we're getting our fair share of strangeness. Now, 20th-century psychologists and sociologists were thinking about strangers, but they weren't thinking so dynamically about human relations, and they were thinking about strangers in the context of influencing practices. Stanley Milgram from the '60s and '70s, the creator of the small-world experiments, which became later popularized as six degrees of separation, made the point that any two arbitrarily selected people were likely connected from between five to seven intermediary steps. His point was that strangers are out there. We can reach them. There are paths that enable us to reach them. Mark Granovetter, Stanford sociologist, in 1973 in his seminal essay "The Strength of Weak Ties," made the point that these weak ties that are a part of our networks, these strangers, are actually more effective at diffusing information to us than are our strong ties, the people closest to us. He makes an additional indictment of our strong ties when he says that these people who are so close to us, these strong ties in our lives, actually have a homogenizing effect on us. They produce sameness. My colleagues and I at Intel have spent the last few years looking at the ways in which digital platforms are reshaping our everyday lives, what kinds of new routines are possible. We've been looking specifically at the kinds of digital platforms that have enabled us to take our possessions, those things that used to be very restricted to us and to our friends in our houses, and to make them available to people we don't know. Whether it's our clothes, whether it's our cars, whether it's our bikes, whether it's our books or music, we are able to take our possessions now and make them available to people we've never met. And we concluded a very important insight, which was that as people's relationships to the things in their lives change, so do their relations with other people. And yet recommendation system after recommendation system continues to miss the boat. It continues to try to predict what I need based on some past characterization of who I am, of what I've already done. Security technology after security technology continues to design data protection in terms of threats and attacks, keeping me locked into really rigid kinds of relations. Categories like "friends" and "family" and "contacts" and "colleagues" don't tell me anything about my actual relations. A more effective way to think about my relations might be in terms of closeness and distance, where at any given point in time, with any single person, I am both close and distant from that individual, all as a function of what I need to do right now. People aren't close or distant. People are always a combination of the two, and that combination is constantly changing. What if technologies could intervene to disrupt the balance of certain kinds of relationships? What if technologies could intervene to help me find the person that I need right now? Strangeness is that calibration of closeness and distance that enables me to find the people that I need right now, that enables me to find the sources of intimacy, of discovery, and of inspiration that I need right now. Strangeness is not about meeting strangers. It simply makes the point that we need to disrupt our zones of familiarity. So jogging those zones of familiarity is one way to think about strangeness, and it's a problem faced not just by individuals today, but also by organizations, organizations that are trying to embrace massively new opportunities. Whether you're a political party insisting to your detriment on a very rigid notion of who belongs and who does not, whether you're the government protecting social institutions like marriage and restricting access of those institutions to the few, whether you're a teenager in her bedroom who's trying to jostle her relations with her parents, strangeness is a way to think about how we pave the way to new kinds of relations. We have to change the norms. We have to change the norms in order to enable new kinds of technologies as a basis for new kinds of businesses. What interesting questions lie ahead for us in this world of no strangers? How might we think differently about our relations with people? How might we think differently about our relations with distributed groups of people? How might we think differently about our relations with technologies, things that effectively become social participants in their own right? The range of digital relations is extraordinary. In the context of this broad range of digital relations, safely seeking strangeness might very well be a new basis for that innovation. Thank you. (Applause) |
The invisible man | {0: 'Beijing-based artist Liu Bolin silently comments on modern sociopolitical conditions by disappearing into his art.'} | TED2013 | Liu Bolin: By making myself invisible, I try to question the inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development. Interpreter: By making myself invisible, I try to explore and question the contradictory and often inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development. LB: This is my first work, created in November 2005. And this is Beijing International Art Camp where I worked before the government forcibly demolished it.I used this work to express my objection. I also want to use this work to let more people pay attention to the living condition of artists and the condition of their creative freedom. In the meantime, from the beginning, this series has a protesting, reflective and uncompromising spirit. When applying makeup, I borrow a sniper's method to better protect myself and to detect the enemy, as he did. (Laughter) After finishing this series of protests, I started questioning why my fate was like this, and I realized that it's not just me — all Chinese are as confused as I am. As you can see, these works are about family planning, election in accordance with the law and propaganda of the institution of the People's Congress. This work is called Xia Gang ("leaving post"). "Xia Gang" is a Chinese euphemism for "laid off". It refers to those people who lost their jobs during China's transition from a planned economy to a market economy. From 1998 to 2000, 21.37 million people lost their jobs in China. The six people in the photo are Xia Gang workers. I made them invisible in the deserted shop wherethey had lived and worked all their lives. On the wall behind them is the slogan of the Cultural Revolution: "The core force leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party." For half a month I looked for these 6 people to participate in my work. We can only see six men in this picture,but in fact, those who are hidden here are all people who were laid off. They have just been made invisible. This piece is called The Studio. This spring, I happened to have an opportunity during my solo exhibition in Paris to shoot a work in the news studio of France 3 — I picked the news photos of the day. One is about the war in the Middle East, and another one is about a public demonstration in France. I found that any culture has its irreconcilable contradictions. This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR. Interpreter: This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR. (Applause) LB: I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR only uses models with big eyes. So I tried to make my eyes bigger with my fingers. But still they are not big enough for JR, unfortunately. Interpreter: So I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR uses only models with big eyes. So I tried to make my eyes bigger with this gesture. But it doesn't work, my eyes are still small. LB: This one is about 9/11 memories. This is an aircraft carrier moored alongside the Hudson River. Kenny Scharf's graffiti. (Laughter) This is Venice, Italy. Because global temperatures rise, the sea level rises, and it is said thatVenice will disappear in the coming decades. This is the ancient city of Pompeii. Interpreter: This is the ancient city of Pompeii. LB: This is the Borghese Gallery in Rome. When I work on a new piece, I pay more attention to the expression of ideas. For instance, why would I make myself invisible? What will making myself invisible here cause people to think? This one is called Instant Noodles. Interpreter: This one is called Instant Noodles. (Laughter) LB: Since August 2012, harmful phosphors have been found in the instant noodle package cups from every famous brand sold in China's supermarkets. These phosphors can even cause cancer. To create this artwork, I bought a lot of packaged instant noodle cups and put them in my studio, making it look like a supermarket. And my task is to stand there, trying to be still, setting up the camera position and coordinating with my assistant and drawing the colors and shapes that are behind my body on the front of my body. If the background is simple, I usually have to stand for three to four hours. The background of this piece is more complex, so I need three to four days in advance for preparation. This is the suit I wore when I did the supermarket shoot. There is no Photoshop involved. Interpreter: This is the suit I [was] wearing when I did the supermarket shoot. There is no Photoshop involved. (Laughter) LB: These works are on China's cultural memories. And this one, this is about food safety in China. Unsafe food can harm people's health, and a deluge of magazines can confuse people's minds. (Laughter) The next pieces of work show how I made myself invisible in magazines of different languages, in different countries and at different times. I think that in art, an artist's attitude is the most important element. If an artwork is to touch someone, it must be the result of not only technique, but also the artist's thinking and struggle in life. And the repeated struggles in life create artwork, no matter in what form. (Music) That's all I want to say. Thank you. (Applause) |
Hack a banana, make a keyboard! | {0: "Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum's MaKey MaKey kit lets you turn everyday objects into computer interfaces -- inspiring both fun and practical new inventions."} | TEDSalon NY2013 | Hey guys. It's funny, someone just mentioned MacGyver, because that was, like, I loved it, and when I was seven, I taped a fork to a drill and I was like, "Hey, Mom, I'm going to Olive Garden." And — (Drilling noise) (Laughter) And it worked really well there. And you know, it had a profound effect on me. It sounds silly, but I thought, okay, the way the world works can be changed, and it can be changed by me in these small ways. And my relationship to especially human-made objects which someone else said they work like this, well, I can say they work a different way, a little bit. And so, about 20 years later, I didn't realize the full effect of this, but I went to Costa Rica and I stayed with these Guaymí natives there, and they could pull leaves off of trees and make shingles out of them, and they could make beds out of trees, and they could — I watched this woman for three days. I was there. She was peeling this palm frond apart, these little threads off of it, and she'd roll the threads together and make little thicker threads, like strings, and she would weave the strings together, and as the materiality of this exact very bag formed before my eyes over those three days, the materiality of the way the world works, of reality, kind of started to unravel in my mind, because I realized that this bag and these clothes and the trampoline you have at home and the pencil sharpener, everything you have is made out of either a tree or a rock or something we dug out of the ground and did some process to, maybe a more complicated one, but still, everything was made that way. And so I had to start studying, who is it that's making these decisions? Who's making these things? How did they make them? What stops us from making them? Because this is how reality is created. So I started right away. I was at MIT Media Lab, and I was studying the maker movement and makers and creativity. And I started in nature, because I saw these Guaymís doing it in nature, and there just seems to be less barriers. So I went to Vermont to Not Back to School Camp, where there's unschoolers who are just kind of hanging out and willing to try anything. So I said, "Let's go into the woods near this stream and just put stuff together, you know, make something, I don't care, geometrical shapes, just grab some junk from around you. We won't bring anything with us. And, like, within minutes, this is very easy for adults and teens to do. Here's a triangle that was being formed underneath a flowing stream, and the shape of an oak leaf being made by other small oak leaves being put together. A leaf tied to a stick with a blade of grass. The materiality and fleshiness and meat of the mushroom being explored by how it can hold up different objects being stuck into it. And after about 45 minutes, you get really intricate projects like leaves sorted by hue, so you get a color fade and put in a circle like a wreath. And the creator of this, he said, "This is fire. I call this fire." And someone asked him, "How do you get those sticks to stay on that tree?" And he's like, "I don't know, but I can show you." And I'm like, "Wow, that's really amazing. He doesn't know, but he can show you." So his hands know and his intuition knows, but sometimes what we know gets in the way of what could be, especially when it comes to the human-made, human-built world. We think we already know how something works, so we can't imagine how it could work. We know how it's supposed to work, so we can't suppose all the things that could be possible. So kids don't have as hard of a time with this, and I saw in my own son, I gave him this book. I'm a good hippie dad, so I'm like, "Okay, you're going to learn to love the moon. I'm going to give you some building blocks and they're nonrectilinear cactus building blocks, so it's totally legit." But he doesn't really know what to do with these. I didn't show him. And so he's like, "Okay, I'll just mess around with this." This is no different than the sticks are to the teens in the forest. Just going to try to put them in shapes and push on them and stuff. And before long, he's kind of got this mechanism where you can almost launch and catapult objects around, and he enlists us in helping him. And at this point, I'm starting to wonder, what kind of tools can we give people, especially adults, who know too much, so that they can see the world as malleable, so they see themselves as agents of change in their everyday lives. Because the most advanced scientists are really just kind of pushing the way the world itself works, pushing what matter can do, the most advanced artists are just pushing the medium, and any sufficiently complicated task, whether you're a cook or a carpenter or you're raising a child — anything that's complicated — comes up with problems that aren't solved in the middle of it, and you can't do a good job getting it done unless you can say, "Okay, well we're just going to have to refigure this. I don't care that pencils are supposed to be for writing. I'm going to use them a different way." So let me show you a little demo. This is a little piano circuit right in here, and this is an ordinary paintbrush that I smashed it together with. (Beeping) And so, with some ketchup, — (musical notes) — and then I can kind of — (musical notes) — (Laughter) (Applause) And that's awesome, right? But this is not what's awesome. What's awesome is what happens when you give the piano circuit to people. A pencil is not just a pencil. Look what it has in the middle of it. That's a wire running down the middle, and not only is it a wire, if you take that piano circuit, you can thumbtack into the middle of a pencil, and you can lay out wire on the page, too, and get electrical current to run through it. And so you can kind of hack a pencil, just by thumbtacking into it with a little piano electrical circuit. And the electricity runs through your body too. And then you can take the little piano circuit off the pencil. You can make one of these brushes just on the fly. All you do is connect to the bristles, and the bristles are wet, so they conduct, and the person's body conducts, and leather is great to paint on, and then you can start hooking to everything, even the kitchen sink. The metal in the sink is conductive. Flowing water acts like a theremin or a violin. (Musical notes) And you can even hook to the trees. Anything in the world is either conductive or not conductive, and you can use those together. So — (Laughter) — I took this to those same teens, because those teens are really awesome, and they'll try things that I won't try. I don't even have access to a facial piercing if I wanted to. And this young woman, she made what she called a hula-looper, and as the hula hoop traveled around her body, she has a circuit taped to her shirt right there. You can see her pointing to it in the picture. And every time the hula hoop would smush against her body, it would connect two little pieces of copper tape, and it would make a sound, and the next sound, and it would loop the same sounds over and over again. I ran these workshops everywhere. In Taiwan, at an art museum, this 12-year-old girl made a mushroom organ out of some mushrooms that were from Taiwan and some electrical tape and hot glue. And professional designers were making artifacts with this thing strapped onto it. And big companies like Intel or smaller design firms like Ideo or startups like Bump, were inviting me to give workshops, just to practice this idea of smashing electronics and everyday objects together. And then we came up with this idea to not just use electronics, but let's just smash computers with everyday objects and see how that goes over. And so I just want to do a quick demo. So this is the MaKey MaKey circuit, and I'm just going to set it up from the beginning in front of you. So I'll just plug it in, and now it's on by USB. And I'll just hook up the forward arrow. You guys are facing that way, so I'll hook it to this one. And I'll just hook up a little ground wire to it. And now, if I touch this piece of pizza, the slides that I showed you before should go forward. And now if I hook up this wire just by connecting it to the left arrow, I'm kind of programming it by where I hook it up, now I have a left arrow and a right arrow, so I should be able to go forwards and backwards and forwards and backwards. Awesome. And so we're like, "We gotta put a video out about this." Because no one really believed that this was important or meaningful except me and, like, one other guy. So we made a video to prove that there's lots of stuff you can do. You can kind of sketch with Play-Doh and just Google for game controllers. Just ordinary Play-Doh, nothing special. And you can literally draw joysticks and just find Pacman on your computer and then just hook it up. (Video game noises) And you know the little plastic drawers you can get at Target? Well, if you take those out, they hold water great, but you can totally cut your toes, so yeah, just be careful. You know the Happiness Project, where the experts are setting up the piano stairs, and how cool that is? Well, I think it's cool, but we should be doing that stuff ourselves. It shouldn't be a set of experts engineering the way the world works. We should all be participating in changing the way the world works together. Aluminum foil. Everybody has a cat. Get a bowl of water. This is just Photo Booth on your Mac OS. Hover the mouse over the "take a photo" button, and you've got a little cat photo booth. And so we needed hundreds of people to buy this. If hundreds of people didn't buy this, we couldn't put it on the market. And so we put it up on Kickstarter, and hundreds of people bought it in the first day. And then 30 days later, 11,000 people had backed the project. And then what the best part is, we started getting a flood of videos in of people doing crazy things with it. So this is "The Star-Spangled Banner" by eating lunch, including drinking Listerine. And we actually sent this guy materials. We're like, "We're sponsoring you, man. You're, like, a pro maker." Okay, just wait for this one. This is good. (Laughter) (Applause) And these guys at the exploratorium are playing house plants as if they were drums. And dads and daughters are completing circuits in special ways. And then this brother — look at this diagram. See where it says "sister"? I love when people put humans on the diagram. I always add humans to any technical — if you're drawing a technical diagram, put a human in it. And this kid is so sweet. He made this trampoline slideshow advancer for his sister so that on her birthday, she could be the star of the show, jumping on the trampoline to advance the slides. And this guy rounded up his dogs and he made a dog piano. And this is fun, and what could be more useful than feeling alive and fun? But it's also very serious because all this accessibility stuff started coming up, where people can't use computers, necessarily. Like this dad who wrote us, his son has cerebral palsy and he can't use a normal keyboard. And so his dad couldn't necessarily afford to buy all these custom controllers. And so, with the MaKey MaKey, he planned to make these gloves to allow him to navigate the web. And a huge eruption of discussion around accessibility came, and we're really excited about that. We didn't plan for that at all. And then all these professional musicians started using it, like at Coachella, just this weekend Jurassic 5 was using this onstage, and this D.J. is just from Brooklyn, right around here, and he put this up last month. And I love the carrot on the turntable. (Music: Massive Attack — "Teardrop") Most people cannot play them that way. (Laughter) And when this started to get serious, I thought, I'd better put a really serious warning label on the box that this comes in, because otherwise people are going to be getting this and they're going to be turning into agents of creative change, and governments will be crumbling, and I wouldn't have told people, so I thought I'd better warn them. And I also put this little surprise. When you open the lid of the box, it says, "The world is a construction kit." And as you start to mess around this way, I think that, in some small ways, you do start to see the landscape of your everyday life a little bit more like something you could express yourself with, and a little bit more like you could participate in designing the future of the way the world works. And so next time you're on an escalator and you drop an M&M by accident, you know, maybe that's an M&M surfboard, not an escalator, so don't pick it up right away. Maybe take some more stuff out of your pockets and throw it down, and maybe some chapstick, whatever. I used to want to design a utopian society or a perfect world or something like that. But as I'm kind of getting older and kind of messing with all this stuff, I'm realizing that my idea of a perfect world really can't be designed by one person or even by a million experts. It's really going to be seven billion pairs of hands, each following their own passions, and each kind of like a mosaic coming up and creating this world in their backyards and in their kitchens. And that's the world I really want to live in. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why Google Glass? | {0: 'Sergey Brin is half of the team that founded Google.'} | TED2013 | Okay, it's great to be back at TED. Why don't I just start by firing away with the video? (Music) (Video) Man: Okay, Glass, record a video. Woman: This is it. We're on in two minutes. Man 2: Okay Glass, hang out with The Flying Club. Man 3: Google "photos of tiger heads." Hmm. Man 4: You ready? You ready? (Barking) Woman 2: Right there. Okay, Glass, take a picture. (Child shouting) Man 5: Go! Man 6: Holy [beep]! That is awesome. Child: Whoa! Look at that snake! Woman 3: Okay, Glass, record a video! Man 7: After this bridge, first exit. Man 8: Okay, A12, right there! (Applause) (Children singing) Man 9: Google, say "delicious" in Thai. Google Glass: อร่อยMan 9: Mmm, อร่อย. Woman 4: Google "jellyfish." (Music) Man 10: It's beautiful. (Applause) Sergey Brin: Oh, sorry, I just got this message from a Nigerian prince. He needs help getting 10 million dollars. I like to pay attention to these because that's how we originally funded the company, and it's gone pretty well. Though in all seriousness, this position that you just saw me in, looking down at my phone, that's one of the reasons behind this project, Project Glass. Because we ultimately questioned whether this is the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life, how you want to connect to information. Should it be by just walking around looking down? But that was the vision behind Glass, and that's why we've created this form factor. Okay. And I don't want to go through all the things it does and whatnot, but I want to tell you a little bit more about the motivation behind what led to it. In addition to potentially socially isolating yourself when you're out and about looking at your phone, it's kind of, is this what you're meant to do with your body? You're standing around there and you're just rubbing this featureless piece of glass. You're just kind of moving around. So when we developed Glass, we thought really about, can we make something that frees your hands? You saw all of the things people are doing in the video back there. They were all wearing Glass, and that's how we got that footage. And also you want something that frees your eyes. That's why we put the display up high, out of your line of sight, so it wouldn't be where you're looking and it wouldn't be where you're making eye contact with people. And also we wanted to free up the ears, so the sound actually goes through, conducts straight to the bones in your cranium, which is a little bit freaky at first, but you get used to it. And ironically, if you want to hear it better, you actually just cover your ear, which is kind of surprising, but that's how it works. My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn't have to have a search query at all. You'd just have information come to you as you needed it. And this is now, 15 years later, sort of the first form factor that I think can deliver that vision when you're out and about on the street talking to people and so forth. This project has lasted now, been just over two years. We've learned an amazing amount. It's been really important to make it comfortable. So our first prototypes we built were huge. It was like cell phones strapped to your head. It was very heavy, pretty uncomfortable. We had to keep it secret from our industrial designer until she actually accepted the job, and then she almost ran away screaming. But we've come a long way. And the other really unexpected surprise was the camera. Our original prototypes didn't have cameras at all, but it's been really magical to be able to capture moments spent with my family, my kids. I just never would have dug out a camera or a phone or something else to take that moment. And lastly I've realized, in experimenting with this device, that I also kind of have a nervous tic. The cell phone is — yeah, you have to look down on it and all that, but it's also kind of a nervous habit. Like if I smoked, I'd probably just smoke instead. I would just light up a cigarette. It would look cooler. You know, I'd be like — But in this case, you know, I whip this out and I sit there and look as if I have something very important to do or attend to. But it really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent just secluding away, be it email or social posts or whatnot, even though it wasn't really — there's nothing really that important or that pressing. And with this, I know I will get certain messages if I really need them, but I don't have to be checking them all the time. Yeah, I've really enjoyed actually exploring the world more, doing more of the crazy things like you saw in the video. Thank you all very much. (Applause) |
The why and how of effective altruism | {0: 'Sometimes controversial, always practical ethicist Peter Singer stirs public debate about morality, from animal welfare to global poverty.'} | TED2013 | There's something that I'd like you to see. (Video) Reporter: It's a story that's deeply unsettled millions in China: footage of a two-year-old girl hit by a van and left bleeding in the street by passersby, footage too graphic to be shown. The entire accident is caught on camera. The driver pauses after hitting the child, his back wheels seen resting on her for over a second. Within two minutes, three people pass two-year-old Wang Yue by. The first walks around the badly injured toddler completely. Others look at her before moving off. Peter Singer: There were other people who walked past Wang Yue, and a second van ran over her legs before a street cleaner raised the alarm. She was rushed to hospital, but it was too late. She died. I wonder how many of you, looking at that, said to yourselves just now, "I would not have done that. I would have stopped to help." Raise your hands if that thought occurred to you. As I thought, that's most of you. And I believe you. I'm sure you're right. But before you give yourself too much credit, look at this. UNICEF reports that in 2011, 6.9 million children under five died from preventable, poverty-related diseases. UNICEF thinks that that's good news because the figure has been steadily coming down from 12 million in 1990. That is good. But still, 6.9 million is 19,000 children dying every day. Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? Does it really matter that they're far away? I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference. The fact that they're not right in front of us, the fact, of course, that they're of a different nationality or race, none of that seems morally relevant to me. What is really important is, can we reduce that death toll? Can we save some of those 19,000 children dying every day? And the answer is, yes we can. Each of us spends money on things that we do not really need. You can think what your own habit is, whether it's a new car, a vacation or just something like buying bottled water when the water that comes out of the tap is perfectly safe to drink. You could take the money you're spending on those unnecessary things and give it to this organization, the Against Malaria Foundation, which would take the money you had given and use it to buy nets like this one to protect children like this one, and we know reliably that if we provide nets, they're used, and they reduce the number of children dying from malaria, just one of the many preventable diseases that are responsible for some of those 19,000 children dying every day. Fortunately, more and more people are understanding this idea, and the result is a growing movement: effective altruism. It's important because it combines both the heart and the head. The heart, of course, you felt. You felt the empathy for that child. But it's really important to use the head as well to make sure that what you do is effective and well-directed, and not only that, but also I think reason helps us to understand that other people, wherever they are, are like us, that they can suffer as we can, that parents grieve for the deaths of their children, as we do, and that just as our lives and our well-being matter to us, it matters just as much to all of these people. So I think reason is not just some neutral tool to help you get whatever you want. It does help us to put perspective on our situation. And I think that's why many of the most significant people in effective altruism have been people who have had backgrounds in philosophy or economics or math. And that might seem surprising, because a lot of people think, "Philosophy is remote from the real world; economics, we're told, just makes us more selfish, and we know that math is for nerds." But in fact it does make a difference, and in fact there's one particular nerd who has been a particularly effective altruist because he got this. This is the website of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and if you look at the words on the top right-hand side, it says, "All lives have equal value." That's the understanding, the rational understanding of our situation in the world that has led to these people being the most effective altruists in history, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. (Applause) No one, not Andrew Carnegie, not John D. Rockefeller, has ever given as much to charity as each one of these three, and they have used their intelligence to make sure that it is highly effective. According to one estimate, the Gates Foundation has already saved 5.8 million lives and many millions more, people, getting diseases that would have made them very sick, even if eventually they survived. Over the coming years, undoubtably the Gates Foundation is going to give a lot more, is going to save a lot more lives. Well, you might say, that's fine if you're a billionaire, you can have that kind of impact. But if I'm not, what can I do? So I'm going to look at four questions that people ask that maybe stand in the way of them giving. They worry how much of a difference they can make. But you don't have to be a billionaire. This is Toby Ord. He's a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford. He became an effective altruist when he calculated that with the money that he was likely to earn throughout his career, an academic career, he could give enough to cure 80,000 people of blindness in developing countries and still have enough left for a perfectly adequate standard of living. So Toby founded an organization called Giving What We Can to spread this information, to unite people who want to share some of their income, and to ask people to pledge to give 10 percent of what they earn over their lifetime to fighting global poverty. Toby himself does better than that. He's pledged to live on 18,000 pounds a year — that's less than 30,000 dollars — and to give the rest to those organizations. And yes, Toby is married and he does have a mortgage. This is a couple at a later stage of life, Charlie Bresler and Diana Schott, who, when they were young, when they met, were activists against the Vietnam War, fought for social justice, and then moved into careers, as most people do, didn't really do anything very active about those values, although they didn't abandon them. And then, as they got to the age at which many people start to think of retirement, they returned to them, and they've decided to cut back on their spending, to live modestly, and to give both money and time to helping to fight global poverty. Now, mentioning time might lead you to think, "Well, should I abandon my career and put all of my time into saving some of these 19,000 lives that are lost every day?" One person who's thought quite a bit about this issue of how you can have a career that will have the biggest impact for good in the world is Will Crouch. He's a graduate student in philosophy, and he's set up a website called 80,000 Hours, the number of hours he estimates most people spend on their career, to advise people on how to have the best, most effective career. But you might be surprised to know that one of the careers that he encourages people to consider, if they have the right abilities and character, is to go into banking or finance. Why? Because if you earn a lot of money, you can give away a lot of money, and if you're successful in that career, you could give enough to an aid organization so that it could employ, let's say, five aid workers in developing countries, and each one of them would probably do about as much good as you would have done. So you can quintuple the impact by leading that kind of career. Here's one young man who's taken this advice. His name is Matt Weiger. He was a student at Princeton in philosophy and math, actually won the prize for the best undergraduate philosophy thesis last year when he graduated. But he's gone into finance in New York. He's already earning enough so that he's giving a six-figure sum to effective charities and still leaving himself with enough to live on. Matt has also helped me to set up an organization that I'm working with that has the name taken from the title of a book I wrote, "The Life You Can Save," which is trying to change our culture so that more people think that if we're going to live an ethical life, it's not enough just to follow the thou-shalt-nots and not cheat, steal, maim, kill, but that if we have enough, we have to share some of that with people who have so little. And the organization draws together people of different generations, like Holly Morgan, who's an undergraduate, who's pledged to give 10 percent of the little amount that she has, and on the right, Ada Wan, who has worked directly for the poor, but has now gone to Yale to do an MBA to have more to give. Many people will think, though, that charities aren't really all that effective. So let's talk about effectiveness. Toby Ord is very concerned about this, and he's calculated that some charities are hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than others, so it's very important to find the effective ones. Take, for example, providing a guide dog for a blind person. That's a good thing to do, right? Well, right, it is a good thing to do, but you have to think what else you could do with the resources. It costs about 40,000 dollars to train a guide dog and train the recipient so that the guide dog can be an effective help to a blind person. It costs somewhere between 20 and 50 dollars to cure a blind person in a developing country if they have trachoma. So you do the sums, and you get something like that. You could provide one guide dog for one blind American, or you could cure between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness. I think it's clear what's the better thing to do. But if you want to look for effective charities, this is a good website to go to. GiveWell exists to really assess the impact of charities, not just whether they're well-run, and it's screened hundreds of charities and currently is recommending only three, of which the Against Malaria Foundation is number one. So it's very tough. If you want to look for other recommendations, thelifeyoucansave.com and Giving What We Can both have a somewhat broader list, but you can find effective organizations, and not just in the area of saving lives from the poor. I'm pleased to say that there is now also a website looking at effective animal organizations. That's another cause that I've been concerned about all my life, the immense amount of suffering that humans inflict on literally tens of billions of animals every year. So if you want to look for effective organizations to reduce that suffering, you can go to Effective Animal Activism. And some effective altruists think it's very important to make sure that our species survives at all. So they're looking at ways to reduce the risk of extinction. Here's one risk of extinction that we all became aware of recently, when an asteroid passed close to our planet. Possibly research could help us not only to predict the path of asteroids that might collide with us, but actually to deflect them. So some people think that would be a good thing to give to. There's many possibilities. My final question is, some people will think it's a burden to give. I don't really believe it is. I've enjoyed giving all of my life since I was a graduate student. It's been something fulfilling to me. Charlie Bresler said to me that he's not an altruist. He thinks that the life he's saving is his own. And Holly Morgan told me that she used to battle depression until she got involved with effective altruism, and now is one of the happiest people she knows. I think one of the reasons for this is that being an effective altruist helps to overcome what I call the Sisyphus problem. Here's Sisyphus as portrayed by Titian, condemned by the gods to push a huge boulder up to the top of the hill. Just as he gets there, the effort becomes too much, the boulder escapes, rolls all the way down the hill, he has to trudge back down to push it up again, and the same thing happens again and again for all eternity. Does that remind you of a consumer lifestyle, where you work hard to get money, you spend that money on consumer goods which you hope you'll enjoy using? But then the money's gone, you have to work hard to get more, spend more, and to maintain the same level of happiness, it's kind of a hedonic treadmill. You never get off, and you never really feel satisfied. Becoming an effective altruist gives you that meaning and fulfillment. It enables you to have a solid basis for self-esteem on which you can feel your life was really worth living. I'm going to conclude by telling you about an email that I received while I was writing this talk just a month or so ago. It's from a man named Chris Croy, who I'd never heard of. This is a picture of him showing him recovering from surgery. Why was he recovering from surgery? The email began, "Last Tuesday, I anonymously donated my right kidney to a stranger. That started a kidney chain which enabled four people to receive kidneys." There's about 100 people each year in the U.S. and more in other countries who do that. I was pleased to read it. Chris went on to say that he'd been influenced by my writings in what he did. Well, I have to admit, I'm also somewhat embarrassed by that, because I still have two kidneys. But Chris went on to say that he didn't think that what he'd done was all that amazing, because he calculated that the number of life-years that he had added to people, the extension of life, was about the same that you could achieve if you gave 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation. And that did make me feel a little bit better, because I have given more than 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation and to various other effective charities. So if you're feeling bad because you still have two kidneys as well, there's a way for you to get off the hook. Thank you. (Applause) |
Embrace the shake | {0: 'Taking a cue from his own artistic journey, Phil Hansen challenges us to spark our creativity by thinking inside the box.'} | TED2013 | So, when I was in art school, I developed a shake in my hand, and this was the straightest line I could draw. Now in hindsight, it was actually good for some things, like mixing a can of paint or shaking a Polaroid, but at the time this was really doomsday. This was the destruction of my dream of becoming an artist. The shake developed out of, really, a single-minded pursuit of pointillism, just years of making tiny, tiny dots. And eventually these dots went from being perfectly round to looking more like tadpoles, because of the shake. So to compensate, I'd hold the pen tighter, and this progressively made the shake worse, so I'd hold the pen tighter still. And this became a vicious cycle that ended up causing so much pain and joint issues, I had trouble holding anything. And after spending all my life wanting to do art, I left art school, and then I left art completely. But after a few years, I just couldn't stay away from art, and I decided to go to a neurologist about the shake and discovered I had permanent nerve damage. And he actually took one look at my squiggly line, and said, "Well, why don't you just embrace the shake?" So I did. I went home, I grabbed a pencil, and I just started letting my hand shake and shake. I was making all these scribble pictures. And even though it wasn't the kind of art that I was ultimately passionate about, it felt great. And more importantly, once I embraced the shake, I realized I could still make art. I just had to find a different approach to making the art that I wanted. Now, I still enjoyed the fragmentation of pointillism, seeing these little tiny dots come together to make this unified whole. So I began experimenting with other ways to fragment images where the shake wouldn't affect the work, like dipping my feet in paint and walking on a canvas, or, in a 3D structure consisting of two-by-fours, creating a 2D image by burning it with a blowtorch. I discovered that, if I worked on a larger scale and with bigger materials, my hand really wouldn't hurt, and after having gone from a single approach to art, I ended up having an approach to creativity that completely changed my artistic horizons. This was the first time I'd encountered this idea that embracing a limitation could actually drive creativity. At the time, I was finishing up school, and I was so excited to get a real job and finally afford new art supplies. I had this horrible little set of tools, and I felt like I could do so much more with the supplies I thought an artist was supposed to have. I actually didn't even have a regular pair of scissors. I was using these metal shears until I stole a pair from the office that I worked at. So I got out of school, I got a job, I got a paycheck, I got myself to the art store, and I just went nuts buying supplies. And then when I got home, I sat down and I set myself to task to really try to create something just completely outside of the box. But I sat there for hours, and nothing came to mind. The same thing the next day, and then the next, quickly slipping into a creative slump. And I was in a dark place for a long time, unable to create. And it didn't make any sense, because I was finally able to support my art, and yet I was creatively blank. But as I searched around in the darkness, I realized I was actually paralyzed by all of the choices that I never had before. And it was then that I thought back to my jittery hands. Embrace the shake. And I realized, if I ever wanted my creativity back, I had to quit trying so hard to think outside of the box and get back into it. I wondered, could you become more creative, then, by looking for limitations? What if I could only create with a dollar's worth of supplies? At this point, I was spending a lot of my evenings in — well, I guess I still spend a lot of my evenings in Starbucks — but I know you can ask for an extra cup if you want one, so I decided to ask for 50. Surprisingly, they just handed them right over, and then with some pencils I already had, I made this project for only 80 cents. It really became a moment of clarification for me that we need to first be limited in order to become limitless. I took this approach of thinking inside the box to my canvas, and wondered what if, instead of painting on a canvas, I could only paint on my chest? So I painted 30 images, one layer at a time, one on top of another, with each picture representing an influence in my life. Or what if, instead of painting with a brush, I could only paint with karate chops? (Laughter) So I'd dip my hands in paint, and I just attacked the canvas, and I actually hit so hard that I bruised a joint in my pinkie and it was stuck straight for a couple of weeks. (Laughter) (Applause) Or, what if instead of relying on myself, I had to rely on other people to create the content for the art? So for six days, I lived in front of a webcam. I slept on the floor and I ate takeout, and I asked people to call me and share a story with me about a life-changing moment. Their stories became the art as I wrote them onto the revolving canvas. (Applause) Or what if instead of making art to display, I had to destroy it? This seemed like the ultimate limitation, being an artist without art. This destruction idea turned into a yearlong project that I called Goodbye Art, where each and every piece of art had to be destroyed after its creation. In the beginning of Goodbye Art, I focused on forced destruction, like this image of Jimi Hendrix, made with over 7,000 matches. (Laughter) Then I opened it up to creating art that was destroyed naturally. I looked for temporary materials, like spitting out food — (Laughter) — sidewalk chalk and even frozen wine. The last iteration of destruction was to try to produce something that didn't actually exist in the first place. So I organized candles on a table, I lit them, and then blew them out, then repeated this process over and over with the same set of candles, then assembled the videos into the larger image. So the end image was never visible as a physical whole. It was destroyed before it ever existed. In the course of this Goodbye Art series, I created 23 different pieces with nothing left to physically display. What I thought would be the ultimate limitation actually turned out to be the ultimate liberation, as each time I created, the destruction brought me back to a neutral place where I felt refreshed and ready to start the next project. It did not happen overnight. There were times when my projects failed to get off the ground, or, even worse, after spending tons of time on them the end image was kind of embarrassing. But having committed to the process, I continued on, and something really surprising came out of this. As I destroyed each project, I was learning to let go, let go of outcomes, let go of failures, and let go of imperfections. And in return, I found a process of creating art that's perpetual and unencumbered by results. I found myself in a state of constant creation, thinking only of what's next and coming up with more ideas than ever. When I think back to my three years away from art, away from my dream, just going through the motions, instead of trying to find a different way to continue that dream, I just quit, I gave up. And what if I didn't embrace the shake? Because embracing the shake for me wasn't just about art and having art skills. It turned out to be about life, and having life skills. Because ultimately, most of what we do takes place here, inside the box, with limited resources. Learning to be creative within the confines of our limitations is the best hope we have to transform ourselves and, collectively, transform our world. Looking at limitations as a source of creativity changed the course of my life. Now, when I run into a barrier or I find myself creatively stumped, I sometimes still struggle, but I continue to show up for the process and try to remind myself of the possibilities, like using hundreds of real, live worms to make an image, using a pushpin to tattoo a banana, or painting a picture with hamburger grease. (Laughter) One of my most recent endeavors is to try to translate the habits of creativity that I've learned into something others can replicate. Limitations may be the most unlikely of places to harness creativity, but perhaps one of the best ways to get ourselves out of ruts, rethink categories and challenge accepted norms. And instead of telling each other to seize the day, maybe we can remind ourselves every day to seize the limitation. Thank you. (Applause) |
Prepare for a good end of life | {0: "By day, Judy MacDonald Johnston develops children's reading programs. By night, she helps others maintain their quality of life as they near death."} | TED2013 | What would be a good end of life? And I'm talking about the very end. I'm talking about dying. We all think a lot about how to live well. I'd like to talk about increasing our chances of dying well. I'm not a geriatrician. I design reading programs for preschoolers. What I know about this topic comes from a qualitative study with a sample size of two. In the last few years, I helped two friends have the end of life they wanted. Jim and Shirley Modini spent their 68 years of marriage living off the grid on their 1,700-acre ranch in the mountains of Sonoma County. They kept just enough livestock to make ends meet so that the majority of their ranch would remain a refuge for the bears and lions and so many other things that lived there. This was their dream. I met Jim and Shirley in their 80s. They were both only children who chose not to have kids. As we became friends, I became their trustee and their medical advocate, but more importantly, I became the person who managed their end-of-life experiences. And we learned a few things about how to have a good end. In their final years, Jim and Shirley faced cancers, fractures, infections, neurological illness. It's true. At the end, our bodily functions and independence are declining to zero. What we found is that, with a plan and the right people, quality of life can remain high. The beginning of the end is triggered by a mortality awareness event, and during this time, Jim and Shirley chose ACR nature preserves to take their ranch over when they were gone. This gave them the peace of mind to move forward. It might be a diagnosis. It might be your intuition. But one day, you're going to say, "This thing is going to get me." Jim and Shirley spent this time letting friends know that their end was near and that they were okay with that. Dying from cancer and dying from neurological illness are different. In both cases, last days are about quiet reassurance. Jim died first. He was conscious until the very end, but on his last day he couldn't talk. Through his eyes, we knew when he needed to hear again, "It is all set, Jim. We're going to take care of Shirley right here at the ranch, and ACR's going to take care of your wildlife forever." From this experience I'm going to share five practices. I've put worksheets online, so if you'd like, you can plan your own end. It starts with a plan. Most people say, "I'd like to die at home." Eighty percent of Americans die in a hospital or a nursing home. Saying we'd like to die at home is not a plan. A lot of people say, "If I get like that, just shoot me." This is not a plan either; this is illegal. (Laughter) A plan involves answering straightforward questions about the end you want. Where do you want to be when you're no longer independent? What do you want in terms of medical intervention? And who's going to make sure your plan is followed? You will need advocates. Having more than one increases your chance of getting the end you want. Don't assume the natural choice is your spouse or child. You want someone who has the time and proximity to do this job well, and you want someone who can work with people under the pressure of an ever-changing situation. Hospital readiness is critical. You are likely to be headed to the emergency room, and you want to get this right. Prepare a one-page summary of your medical history, medications and physician information. Put this in a really bright envelope with copies of your insurance cards, your power of attorney, and your do-not-resuscitate order. Have advocates keep a set in their car. Tape a set to your refrigerator. When you show up in the E.R. with this packet, your admission is streamlined in a material way. You're going to need caregivers. You'll need to assess your personality and financial situation to determine whether an elder care community or staying at home is your best choice. In either case, do not settle. We went through a number of not-quite-right caregivers before we found the perfect team led by Marsha, who won't let you win at bingo just because you're dying but will go out and take videos of your ranch for you when you can't get out there, and Caitlin, who won't let you skip your morning exercises but knows when you need to hear that your wife is in good hands. Finally, last words. What do you want to hear at the very end, and from whom would you like to hear it? In my experience, you'll want to hear that whatever you're worried about is going to be fine. When you believe it's okay to let go, you will. So, this is a topic that normally inspires fear and denial. What I've learned is if we put some time into planning our end of life, we have the best chance of maintaining our quality of life. Here are Jim and Shirley just after deciding who would take care of their ranch. Here's Jim just a few weeks before he died, celebrating a birthday he didn't expect to see. And here's Shirley just a few days before she died being read an article in that day's paper about the significance of the wildlife refuge at the Modini ranch. Jim and Shirley had a good end of life, and by sharing their story with you, I hope to increase our chances of doing the same. Thank you. (Applause) |
Architecture for the people by the people | {0: 'Alastair Parvin believes in making architecture accessible to 100 percent of the population.'} | TED2013 | When we use the word "architect" or "designer," what we usually mean is a professional, someone who gets paid, and we tend to assume that it's those professionals who are going to be the ones to help us solve the really big, systemic design challenges that we face like climate change, urbanization and social inequality. That's our kind of working presumption. And I think it's wrong, actually. In 2008, I was just about to graduate from architecture school after several years, and go out and get a job, and this happened. The economy ran out of jobs. And a couple of things struck me about this. One, don't listen to career advisers. And two, actually this is a fascinating paradox for architecture, which is that, as a society, we've never needed design thinking more, and yet architecture was literally becoming unemployed. It strikes me that we talk very deeply about design, but actually there's an economics behind architecture that we don't talk about, and I think we need to. And a good place to start is your own paycheck. So, as a bottom-of-the-rung architecture graduate, I might expect to earn about 24,000 pounds. That's about 36,000, 37,000 dollars. Now in terms of the whole world's population, that already puts me in the top 1.95 richest people, which raises the question of, who is it I'm working for? The uncomfortable fact is that actually almost everything that we call architecture today is actually the business of designing for about the richest one percent of the world's population, and it always has been. The reason why we forgot that is because the times in history when architecture did the most to transform society were those times when, actually, the one percent would build on behalf of the 99 percent, for various different reasons, whether that was through philanthropy in the 19th century, communism in the early 20th, the welfare state, and most recently, of course, through this inflated real estate bubble. And all of those booms, in their own various ways, have now kicked the bucket, and we're back in this situation where the smartest designers and architects in the world are only really able to work for one percent of the population. Now it's not just that that's bad for democracy, though I think it probably is, it's actually not a very clever business strategy, actually. I think the challenge facing the next generation of architects is, how are we going to turn our client from the one percent to the 100 percent? And I want to offer three slightly counterintuitive ideas for how it might be done. The first is, I think we need to question this idea that architecture is about making buildings. Actually, a building is about the most expensive solution you can think of to almost any given problem. And fundamentally, design should be much, much more interested in solving problems and creating new conditions. So here's a story. The office was working with a school, and they had an old Victorian school building. And they said to the architects, "Look, our corridors are an absolute nightmare. They're far too small. They get congested between classes. There's bullying. We can't control them. So what we want you to do is re-plan our entire building, and we know it's going to cost several million pounds, but we're reconciled to the fact." And the team thought about this, and they went away, and they said, "Actually, don't do that. Instead, get rid of the school bell. And instead of having one school bell that goes off once, have several smaller school bells that go off in different places and different times, distribute the traffic through the corridors." It solves the same problem, but instead of spending several million pounds, you spend several hundred pounds. Now, it looks like you're doing yourself out of a job, but you're not. You're actually making yourself more useful. Architects are actually really, really good at this kind of resourceful, strategic thinking. And the problem is that, like a lot of design professions, we got fixated on the idea of providing a particular kind of consumer product, and I don't think that needs to be the case anymore. The second idea worth questioning is this 20th-century thing that mass architecture is about big — big buildings and big finance. Actually, we've got ourselves locked into this Industrial Era mindset which says that the only people who can make cities are large organizations or corporations who build on our behalf, procuring whole neighborhoods in single, monolithic projects, and of course, form follows finance. So what you end up with are single, monolithic neighborhoods based on this kind of one-size-fits-all model. And a lot of people can't even afford them. But what if, actually, it's possible now for cities to be made not just by the few with a lot but also by the many with a bit? And when they do, they bring with them a completely different set of values about the place that they want to live. And it raises really interesting questions about, how will we plan cities? How will finance development? How will we sell design services? What would it mean for democratic societies to offer their citizens a right to build? And in a way it should be kind of obvious, right, that in the 21st century, maybe cities can be developed by citizens. And thirdly, we need to remember that, from a strictly economic point of view, design shares a category with sex and care of the elderly — mostly it's done by amateurs. And that's a good thing. Most of the work takes place outside of the monetary economy in what's called the social economy or the core economy, which is people doing it for themselves. And the problem is that, up until now, it was the monetary economy which had all the infrastructure and all the tools. So the challenge we face is, how are we going to build the tools, the infrastructure and the institutions for architecture's social economy? And that began with open-source software. And over the last few years, it's been moving into the physical world with open-source hardware, which are freely shared blueprints that anyone can download and make for themselves. And that's where 3D printing gets really, really interesting. Right? When suddenly you had a 3D printer that was open-source, the parts for which could be made on another 3D printer. Or the same idea here, which is for a CNC machine, which is like a large printer that can cut sheets of plywood. What these technologies are doing is radically lowering the thresholds of time and cost and skill. They're challenging the idea that if you want something to be affordable it's got to be one-size-fits-all. And they're distributing massively really complex manufacturing capabilities. We're moving into this future where the factory is everywhere, and increasingly that means that the design team is everyone. That really is an industrial revolution. And when we think that the major ideological conflicts that we inherited were all based around this question of who should control the means of production, and these technologies are coming back with a solution: actually, maybe no one. All of us. And we were fascinated by what that might mean for architecture. So about a year and a half ago, we started working on a project called WikiHouse, and WikiHouse is an open-source construction system. And the idea is to make it possible for anyone to go online, access a freely shared library of 3D models which they can download and adapt in, at the moment, SketchUp, because it's free, and it's easy to use, and almost at the click of a switch they can generate a set of cutting files which allow them, in effect, to print out the parts from a house using a CNC machine and a standard sheet material like plywood. And the parts are all numbered, and basically what you end up with is a really big IKEA kit. (Laughter) And it goes together without any bolts. It uses wedge and peg connections. And even the mallets to make it can be provided on the cutting sheets as well. And a team of about two or three people, working together, can build this. They don't need any traditional construction skills. They don't need a huge array of power tools or anything like that, and they can build a small house of about this size in about a day. (Applause) And what you end up with is just the basic chassis of a house onto which you can then apply systems like windows and cladding and insulation and services based on what's cheap and what's available. Of course, the house is never finished. We're shifting our heads here, so the house is not a finished product. With the CNC machine, you can make new parts for it over its life or even use it to make the house next door. So we can begin to see the seed of a completely open-source, citizen-led urban development model, potentially. And we and others have built a few prototypes around the world now, and some really interesting lessons here. One of them is that it's always incredibly sociable. People get confused between construction work and having fun. But the principles of openness go right down into the really mundane, physical details. Like, never designing a piece that can't be lifted up. Or, when you're designing a piece, make sure you either can't put it in the wrong way round, or, if you do, it doesn't matter, because it's symmetrical. Probably the principal which runs deepest with us is the principal set out by Linus Torvalds, the open-source pioneer, which was that idea of, "Be lazy like a fox." Don't reinvent the wheel every time. Take what already works, and adapt it for your own needs. Contrary to almost everything that you might get taught at an architecture school, copying is good. Which is appropriate, because actually, this approach is not innovative. It's actually how we built buildings for hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution in these sorts of community barn-raisings. The only difference between traditional vernacular architecture and open-source architecture might be a web connection, but it's a really, really big difference. We shared the whole of WikiHouse under a Creative Commons license, and now what's just beginning to happen is that groups around the world are beginning to take it and use it and hack it and tinker with it, and it's amazing. There's a cool group over in Christchurch in New Zealand looking at post-earthquake development housing, and thanks to the TED city Prize, we're working with an awesome group in one of Rio's favelas to set up a kind of community factory and micro-university. These are very, very small beginnings, and actually there's more people in the last week who have got in touch and they're not even on this map. I hope next time you see it, you won't even be able to see the map. We're aware that WikiHouse is a very, very small answer, but it's a small answer to a really, really big question, which is that globally, right now, the fastest-growing cities are not skyscraper cities. They're self-made cities in one form or another. If we're talking about the 21st-century city, these are the guys who are going to be making it. You know, like it or not, welcome to the world's biggest design team. So if we're serious about problems like climate change, urbanization and health, actually, our existing development models aren't going to do it. As I think Robert Neuwirth said, there isn't a bank or a corporation or a government or an NGO who's going to be able to do it if we treat citizens only as consumers. How extraordinary would it be, though, if collectively we were to develop solutions not just to the problem of structure that we've been working on, but to infrastructure problems like solar-powered air conditioning, off-grid energy, off-grid sanitation — low-cost, open-source, high-performance solutions that anyone can very, very easily make, and to put them all into a commons where they're owned by everyone and they're accessible by everyone? A kind of Wikipedia for stuff? And once something's in the commons, it will always be there. How much would that change the rules? And I think the technology's on our side. If design's great project in the 20th century was the democratization of consumption — that was Henry Ford, Levittown, Coca-Cola, IKEA — I think design's great project in the 21st century is the democratization of production. And when it comes to architecture in cities, that really matters. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The violin, and my dark night of the soul | {0: 'Ji-Hae Park spreads the joy of classical to music to those who might not otherwise hear it -- and in the process shows that you can rock out on the violin.'} | TED2013 | (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Hi, everybody. Ban-gap-seum-ni-da. I'd like to share with you a little bit of me playing my life. I might look successful and happy being in front of you today, but I once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair. The violin, which meant everything to me, became a grave burden on me. Although many people tried to comfort and encourage me, their words sounded like meaningless noise. When I was just about to give everything up after years of suffering, I started to rediscover the true power of music. (Music) In the midst of hardship, it was the music that gave me — that restored my soul. The comfort the music gave me was just indescribable, and it was a real eye-opening experience for me too, and it totally changed my perspective on life and set me free from the pressure of becoming a successful violinist. Do you feel like you are all alone? I hope that this piece will touch and heal your heart, as it did for me. (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Now, I use my music to reach people's hearts and have found there are no boundaries. My audience is anyone who is here to listen, even those who are not familiar with classical music. I not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center, but also hospitals, churches, prisons, and restricted facilities for leprosy patients, just to mention a few. Now, with my last piece, I'd like to show you that classical music can be so much fun, exciting, and that it can rock you. Let me introduce you to my brand new project, "Baroque in Rock," which became a golden disc most recently. It's such an honor for me. I think, while I'm enjoying my life as a happy musician, I'm earning a lot more recognition than I've ever imagined. But it's now your turn. Changing your perspectives will not only transform you but also the whole world. Just play your life with all you have, and share it with the world. I really look forward to witnessing a transforming world by you, TEDsters. Play your life, and stay tuned. (Music) (Applause) |
Why I brought Pac-Man to MoMA | {0: "Paola Antonelli is on a mission to introduce -- and explain -- design to the world. With her shows at New York's Museum of Modern Art, she celebrates design's presence in every part of life."} | TEDSalon NY2013 | I'm almost like a crazy evangelical. I've always known that the age of design is upon us, almost like a rapture. If the day is sunny, I think, "Oh, the gods have had a good design day." Or, I go to a show and I see a beautiful piece by an artist, particularly beautiful, I say he's so good because he clearly looked to design to understand what he needed to do. So I really do believe that design is the highest form of creative expression. That's why I'm talking to you today about the age of design, and the age of design is the age in which design is still cute furniture, is still posters, is still fast cars, what you see at MoMA today. But in truth, what I really would like to explain to the public and to the audiences of MoMA is that the most interesting chairs are the ones that are actually made by a robot, like this beautiful chair by Dirk Vander Kooij, where a robot deposits a toothpaste-like slur of recycled refrigerator parts, as if he were a big candy, and makes a chair out of it. Or good design is digital fonts that we use all the time and that become part of our identity. I want people to understand that design is so much more than cute chairs, that it is first and foremost everything that is around us in our life. And it's interesting how so much of what we're talking about tonight is not simply design but interaction design. And in fact, interaction design is what I've been trying to insert in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art for a few years, starting not very timidly but just pointedly with works, for instance, by Martin Wattenberg — the way a machine plays chess with itself, that you see here, or Lisa Strausfeld and her partners, the Sugar interface for One Laptop Per Child, Toshio Iwai's Tenori-On musical instruments, and Philip Worthington's Shadow Monsters, and John Maeda's Reactive Books, and also Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's I Want You To Want Me. These were some of the first acquisitions that really introduced the idea of interaction design to the public. But more recently, I've been trying really to go even deeper into interaction design with examples that are emotionally really suggestive and that really explain interaction design at a level that is almost undeniable. The Wind Map, by Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, I don't know if you've ever seen it — it's really fantastic. It looks at the territory of the United States as if it were a wheat field that is procured by the winds and that is really giving you a pictorial image of what's going on with the winds in the United States. But also, more recently, we started acquiring video games, and that's where all hell broke loose in a really interesting way. (Laughter) There are still people that believe that there's a high and there's a low. And that's really what I find so intriguing about the reactions that we've had to the anointment of video games in the MoMA collection. We've — No, first of all, New York Magazine always gets it. I love them. So we are in the right quadrant. We are in the Highbrow — that's daring, that's courageous — and Brilliant, which is great. Timidly, we've been higher on the diagonal in other situations, but it's okay. It's good. It's good. It's good. (Laughter) But here comes the art critic. Oh, that was fantastic. So the first was Jonathan Jones from The Guardian. "Sorry, MoMA, video games are not art." Did I ever say they were art? I was talking about interaction design. Excuse me. "Exhibiting Pac-Man and Tetris alongside Picasso and Van Gogh" — They're two floors away. (Laughter) — "will mean game over for any real understanding of art." I'm bringing in the end of the world. You know? We were talking about the rapture? It's coming. And Jonathan Jones is making it happen. So the same Guardian rebuts, "Are video games art: the debate that shouldn't be. Last week, Guardian art critic blah blah suggested that games cannot qualify as art. But is he right? And does it matter?" Thank you. Does it matter? You know, it's like once again there's this whole problem of design being often misunderstood for art, or the idea that is so diffuse that designers want to aspire to, would like to be called, artists. No. Designers aspire to be really great designers. Thank you very much. And that's more than enough. So my knight in shining armor, John Maeda, without any prompt, came out with this big declaration on why video games belong in the MoMA. And that was fantastic. And I thought that was it. But then there was another wonderfully pretentious article that came out in The New Republic, so pretentious, by Liel Leibovitz, and it said, "MoMA has mistaken video games for art." Again. "The museum is putting Pac-Man alongside Picasso." Again. "That misses the point." Excuse me. You're missing the point. And here, look, the above question is put bluntly: "Are video games art? No. Video games aren't art because they are quite thoroughly something else: code." Oh, so Picasso is not art because it's oil paint. Right? So it's so fantastic to see how these feathers that were ruffled, and these reactions, were so vehement. And you know what? The International Cat Video Film Festival didn't have that much of a reaction. (Laughter) I think this was truly fantastic. We were talking about dancing ponies, but I was really jealous of the Walker Arts Center for putting up this festival, because it's very, very wonderful. And there's this Flaubert quote that I love: "I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it." I consider myself the tide of shit. (Laughter) (Applause) You know, we have to go through that. Even in the 1930s, my colleagues that were trying to put together an abstract art show had all of these works stopped by the customs officers that decided they were not art. So it's happened before, and it will happen in the future, but right now I can tell you that I am so, so proud to be able to call Pac-Man part of the MoMA collection. And the same with, for instance, Tetris, original version, the Soviet one. And you know, the amount of work — yeah, Alexey Pajitnov was working for the Soviet government and that's how he developed Tetris, and Alexey himself reconstructed the whole game and even gave us a simulation of the cathode ray tube that makes it look slightly bombed. And it's fantastic. So behind these acquisitions is an enormous amount of work, because we're still the Museum of Modern Art, so even when we tackle popular culture, we tackle it as a form of interaction design and as something that has to go into the collection at MoMA, therefore, has to be researched. So to get to choosing Eric Chahi's wonderful Another World, amongst others, we put together a panel of experts, and we worked on this acquisition, and it's mostly myself and Kate Carmody and Paul Galloway. We worked on it for a year and a half. So many people helped us — designers of games, you might know Jamin Warren and his collaborators at Kill Screen magazine, and you know, Kevin Slavin. You name it. We bugged everybody, because we knew that we were ignorant. We were not real gamers enough, so we had to really talk to them. And so we decided, of course, to have Sim City 2000, not the other Sim City, that one in particular, so the criteria that we developed along the way were really strong, and were not only criteria of selection. They were also criteria of exhibition and of preservation. That's what makes this acquisition more than a little game or a little joke. It's truly a way to think of how to preserve and show artifacts that will more and more become part of our lives in the future. We live today, as you know very well, not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two. And that's really where interaction lies, and that's the importance of interaction. And in order to explain interaction, we need to really bring people in and make them realize how interaction is part of their lives. So when I talk about it, I don't talk only about video games, which are in a way the purest form of interaction, unadulterated by any kind of function or finality. I also talk about the MetroCard vending machine, which I consider a masterpiece of interaction. I mean, that interface is beautiful. It looks like a burly MTA guy coming out of the tunnel. You know, with your mitt you can actually paw the MetroCard, and I talk about how bad ATM machines usually are. So I let people understand that it's up to them to know how to judge interaction so as to know when it's good or when it's bad. So when I show The Sims, I try to make people really feel what it meant to have an interaction with The Sims, not only the fun but also the responsibility that came with the Tamagotchi. You know, video games can be truly deep even when they're completely mindless. I'm sure that all of you know Katamari Damacy. It's about rolling a ball and picking up as many objects as you can in a finite amount of time and hopefully you'll be able to make it into a planet. I've never made it into a planet, but that's it. Or, you know, Vib-Ribbon was not distributed here in the United States. It was a PlayStation game, but mostly for Japan. And it was one of the first video games in which you could choose your own music. So you would put into the PlayStation, you would put your own CD, and then the game would change alongside your music. So really fantastic. Not to mention Eve Online. Eve Online is an artificial universe, if you wish, but one of the diplomats that was killed in Benghazi, not Ambassador Stevens, but one of his collaborators, was a really big shot in Eve Online, so here you have a diplomat in the real world that spends his time in Eve Online to kind of test, maybe, all of his ideas about diplomacy and about universe-building, and to the point that the first announcement of the bombing was actually given on Eve Online, and after his death, several parts of the universe were named after him. And I was just recently at the Eve Online fan festival in Reykjavík that was quite amazing. I mean, we're talking about an experience that of course can seem weird to many, but that is very educational. Of course, there are games that are even more educational. Dwarf Fortress is like the holy grail of this kind of massive multiplayer online game, and in fact the two Adams brothers were in Reykjavík, and they were greeted by a standing ovation by all the Eve Online fans. It was amazing to see. And it's a beautiful game. So you start seeing here that the aesthetics that are so important to a museum collection like MoMA's are kept alive also by the selection of these games. And you know, Valve — you know, Portal — is an example of a video game in which you have a certain type of violence which also leads me to talk about one of the biggest issues that we had to discuss when we acquired the video games, what to do with violence. Right? We had to make decisions. At MoMA, interestingly, there's a lot of violence depicted in the art part of the collection, but when I came to MoMA 19 years ago, and as an Italian, I said, "You know what, we need a Beretta." And I was told, "No. No guns in the design collection." And I was like, "Why?" Interestingly, I learned that it's considered that in design and in the design collection, what you see is what you get. So when you see a gun, it's an instrument for killing in the design collection. If it's in the art collection, it might be a critique of the killing instrument. So it's very interesting. But we are acquiring our critical dimension also in design, so maybe one day we'll be able to acquire also the guns. But here, in this particular case, we decided, you know, with Kate and Paul, that we would have no gratuitous violence. So we have Portal because you shoot walls in order to create new spaces. We have Street Fighter II, because martial arts are good. (Laughter) But we don't have GTA because, maybe it's my own reflection, I've never been able to do anything but crashing cars and shooting prostitutes and pimps. So it was not very constructive. (Laughter) So, I'm making fun of it, but we discussed this for so many days. You have no idea. And to this day, I am ambivalent, but when you have instead games like Flow, there's no doubt. It's like, it's about serenity and it's about sublime. It's about experiencing what it means to be a sea creature. Then we have a few also side-scrollers — classical ones. So it's quite a hefty collection. And right now, we started with the first 14, but we have several that are coming up, and the reason why we haven't acquired them yet is because you don't acquire just the game. You acquire the relationship with the company. What we want, what we aspire to, is the code. It's very hard to get, of course. But that's what would enable us to preserve the video games for a really long time, and that's what museums do. They also preserve artifacts for posterity. In absence of the code, because, you know, video game companies are not very forthcoming in some cases, in absence of that, we acquire the relationship with the company. We're going to stay with them forever. They're not going to get rid of us. And one day, we'll get that code. (Laughter) But I want to explain to you the criteria that we chose for interaction design. Aesthetics are really important. And I'm showing you Core War here, which is an early game that takes advantage aesthetically of the limitations of the processor. So the kind of interferences that you see here that look like beautiful barriers in the game are actually a consequence of the processor's limitedness, which is fantastic. So aesthetics is always important. And so is space, the spatial aspect of games. You know, I feel that the best video games are the ones that have really savvy architects that are behind them, and if they're not architects, bona fide trained in architecture, they have that feeling. But the spatial evolution in video games is extremely important. Time. The way we experience time in video games, as in other forms of interaction design, is really quite amazing. It can be real time or it can be the time within the game, as is in Animal Crossing, where seasons follow each other at their own pace. So time, space, aesthetics, and then, most important, behavior. The real core issue of interaction design is behavior. Designers that deal with interaction design behaviors that go to influence the rest of our lives. They're not just limited to our interaction with the screen. In this case, I'm showing you Marble Madness, which is a beautiful game in which the controller is a big sphere that vibrates with you, so you have a sphere that's moving in this landscape, and the sphere, the controller itself, gives you a sense of the movement. In a way, you can see how video games are the purest aspect of interaction design and are very useful to explain what interaction is. We don't want to show the video games with the paraphernalia. No arcade nostalgia. If anything, we want to show the code, and here you see Ben Fry's distellamap of Pac-Man, of the Pac-Man code. So the way we acquired the games is very interesting and very unorthodox. You see them here displayed alongside other examples of design, furniture and other parts, but there's no paraphernalia, no nostalagia, only the screen and a little shelf with the controllers. The controllers are, of course, part of the experience, so you cannot do away with it. But interestingly, this choice was not condemned too vehemently by gamers. I was afraid that they would kill us, and instead they understood, especially when I told them that I was trying to apply the same stratagem that Philip Johnson applied in 1934 when he wanted to make people understand the importance of design, and he took propeller blades and pieces of machinery and in the MoMA galleries he put them on white pedestals against white walls, as if they were Brancusi sculptures. He created this strange distance, this shock, that made people realize how gorgeous formally, and also important functionally, design pieces were. I would like to do the same with video games. By getting rid of the sticky carpets and the cigarette butts and everything else that we might remember from our childhood, I want people to understand that those are important forms of design. And in a way, the video games, the fonts and everything else lead us to make people understand a wider meaning for design. One of my dream acquisitions, which has been on hold for a few years but now will come back on the front burner, is a 747. I would like to acquire it, but without owning it. I don't want it to be at MoMA and possessed by MoMA. I want it to keep flying. So it's an acquisition where MoMA makes an arrangement with an airline and keeps the Boeing 747 flying. And the same with the "@" sign that we acquired a few years ago. It was the first example of an acquisition of something that is in the public domain. And what I say to people, it's almost as if a butterfly were flying by and we captured the shadow on the wall, and just we're showing the shadow. So in a way, we're showing a manifestation of something that is truly important and that is part of our identity but that nobody can have. And it's too long to explain the acquisition, but if you want to go on the MoMA blog, there's a long post where I explain why it's such a great example of design. Along the way, I've had to burn a few chairs. You know? I've had to do away with a few concepts of design past. But I see that people are coming along, that the audiences, paradoxically, are much more responsive and much more understanding of this expansion of design than some of my colleagues are. Design is truly everywhere, and design is as important as anything, and I'm so glad that, because of its diversity and because of its centrality to our lives, many more people are coming to it as a profession, as a passion, and as, very simply, part of their own culture. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Violence against women -- it's a men's issue | {0: "Jackson Katz asks a very important question that gets at the root of why sexual abuse, rape and domestic abuse remain a problem: What's going on with men? "} | TEDxFiDiWomen | I'm going to share with you a paradigm-shifting perspective on the issues of gender violence: sexual assault, domestic violence, relationship abuse, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children. That whole range of issues that I'll refer to in shorthand as "gender violence issues," they've been seen as women's issues that some good men help out with, but I have a problem with that frame and I don't accept it. I don't see these as women's issues that some good men help out with. In fact, I'm going to argue that these are men's issues, first and foremost. Now obviously — (Applause) Obviously, they're also women's issues, so I appreciate that, but calling gender violence a women's issue is part of the problem, for a number of reasons. The first is that it gives men an excuse not to pay attention, right? A lot of men hear the term "women's issues" and we tend to tune it out, and we think, "I'm a guy; that's for the girls," or "that's for the women." And a lot of men literally don't get beyond the first sentence as a result. It's almost like a chip in our brain is activated, and the neural pathways take our attention in a different direction when we hear the term "women's issues." This is also true, by the way, of the word "gender," because a lot of people hear the word "gender" and they think it means "women." So they think that gender issues is synonymous with women's issues. There's some confusion about the term gender. And let me illustrate that confusion by way of analogy. So let's talk for a moment about race. In the US, when we hear the word "race," a lot of people think that means African-American, Latino, Asian-American, Native American, South Asian, Pacific Islander, on and on. A lot of people, when they hear the word "sexual orientation" think it means gay, lesbian, bisexual. And a lot of people, when they hear the word "gender," think it means women. In each case, the dominant group doesn't get paid attention to. As if white people don't have some sort of racial identity or belong to some racial category or construct, as if heterosexual people don't have a sexual orientation, as if men don't have a gender. This is one of the ways that dominant systems maintain and reproduce themselves, which is to say the dominant group is rarely challenged to even think about its dominance, because that's one of the key characteristics of power and privilege, the ability to go unexamined, lacking introspection, in fact being rendered invisible, in large measure, in the discourse about issues that are primarily about us. And this is amazing how this works in domestic and sexual violence, how men have been largely erased from so much of the conversation about a subject that is centrally about men. And I'm going to illustrate what I'm talking about by using the old tech. I'm old school on some fundamental regards. I make films and I work with high tech, but I'm still old school as an educator, and I want to share with you this exercise that illustrates on the sentence-structure level how the way that we think, literally the way that we use language, conspires to keep our attention off of men. This is about domestic violence in particular, but you can plug in other analogues. This comes from the work of the feminist linguist Julia Penelope. It starts with a very basic English sentence: "John beat Mary." That's a good English sentence. John is the subject, beat is the verb, Mary is the object, good sentence. Now we're going to move to the second sentence, which says the same thing in the passive voice. "Mary was beaten by John." And now a whole lot has happened in one sentence. We've gone from "John beat Mary" to "Mary was beaten by John." We've shifted our focus in one sentence from John to Mary, and you can see John is very close to the end of the sentence, well, close to dropping off the map of our psychic plain. The third sentence, John is dropped, and we have, "Mary was beaten," and now it's all about Mary. We're not even thinking about John, it's totally focused on Mary. Over the past generation, the term we've used synonymous with "beaten" is "battered," so we have "Mary was battered." And the final sentence in this sequence, flowing from the others, is, "Mary is a battered woman." So now Mary's very identity — Mary is a battered woman — is what was done to her by John in the first instance. But we've demonstrated that John has long ago left the conversation. Those of us who work in the domestic and sexual violence field know that victim-blaming is pervasive in this realm, which is to say, blaming the person to whom something was done rather than the person who did it. And we say: why do they go out with these men? Why are they attracted to them? Why do they keep going back? What was she wearing at that party? What a stupid thing to do. Why was she drinking with those guys in that hotel room? This is victim blaming, and there are many reasons for it, but one is that our cognitive structure is set up to blame victims. This is all unconscious. Our whole cognitive structure is set up to ask questions about women and women's choices and what they're doing, thinking, wearing. And I'm not going to shout down people who ask questions about women. It's a legitimate thing to ask. But's let's be clear: Asking questions about Mary is not going to get us anywhere in terms of preventing violence. We have to ask a different set of questions. The questions are not about Mary, they're about John. They include things like, why does John beat Mary? Why is domestic violence still a big problem in the US and all over the world? What's going on? Why do so many men abuse physically, emotionally, verbally, and other ways, the women and girls, and the men and boys, that they claim to love? What's going on with men? Why do so many adult men sexually abuse little girls and boys? Why is that a common problem in our society and all over the world today? Why do we hear over and over again about new scandals erupting in major institutions like the Catholic Church or the Penn State football program or the Boy Scouts of America, on and on and on? And then local communities all over the country and all over the world. We hear about it all the time. The sexual abuse of children. What's going on with men? Why do so many men rape women in our society and around the world? Why do so many men rape other men? What is going on with men? And then what is the role of the various institutions in our society that are helping to produce abusive men at pandemic rates? Because this isn't about individual perpetrators. That's a naive way to understanding what is a much deeper and more systematic social problem. The perpetrators aren't these monsters who crawl out of the swamp and come into town and do their nasty business and then retreat into the darkness. That's a very naive notion, right? Perpetrators are much more normal than that, and everyday than that. So the question is, what are we doing here in our society and in the world? What are the roles of various institutions in helping to produce abusive men? What's the role of religious belief systems, the sports culture, the pornography culture, the family structure, economics, and how that intersects, and race and ethnicity and how that intersects? How does all this work? And then, once we start making those kinds of connections and asking those important and big questions, then we can talk about how we can be transformative, in other words, how can we do something differently? How can we change the practices? How can we change the socialization of boys and the definitions of manhood that lead to these current outcomes? These are the kind of questions that we need to be asking and the kind of work that we need to be doing, but if we're endlessly focused on what women are doing and thinking in relationships or elsewhere, we're not going to get to that piece. I understand that a lot of women who have been trying to speak out about these issues, today and yesterday and for years and years, often get shouted down for their efforts. They get called nasty names like "male-basher" and "man-hater," and the disgusting and offensive "feminazi", right? And you know what all this is about? It's called kill the messenger. It's because the women who are standing up and speaking out for themselves and for other women as well as for men and boys, it's a statement to them to sit down and shut up, keep the current system in place, because we don't like it when people rock the boat. We don't like it when people challenge our power. You'd better sit down and shut up, basically. And thank goodness that women haven't done that. Thank goodness that we live in a world where there's so much women's leadership that can counteract that. But one of the powerful roles that men can play in this work is that we can say some things that sometimes women can't say, or, better yet, we can be heard saying some things that women often can't be heard saying. Now, I appreciate that that's a problem, it's sexism, but it's the truth. So one of the things that I say to men, and my colleagues and I always say this, is we need more men who have the courage and the strength to start standing up and saying some of this stuff, and standing with women and not against them and pretending that somehow this is a battle between the sexes and other kinds of nonsense. We live in the world together. And by the way, one of the things that really bothers me about some of the rhetoric against feminists and others who have built the battered women's and rape crisis movements around the world is that somehow, like I said, that they're anti-male. What about all the boys who are profoundly affected in a negative way by what some adult man is doing against their mother, themselves, their sisters? What about all those boys? What about all the young men and boys who have been traumatized by adult men's violence? You know what? The same system that produces men who abuse women, produces men who abuse other men. And if we want to talk about male victims, let's talk about male victims. Most male victims of violence are the victims of other men's violence. So that's something that both women and men have in common. We are both victims of men's violence. So we have it in our direct self-interest, not to mention the fact that most men that I know have women and girls that we care deeply about, in our families and our friendship circles and every other way. So there's so many reasons why we need men to speak out. It seems obvious saying it out loud, doesn't it? Now, the nature of the work that I do and my colleagues do in the sports culture and the US military, in schools, we pioneered this approach called the bystander approach to gender-violence prevention. And I just want to give you the highlights of the bystander approach, because it's a big thematic shift, although there's lots of particulars, but the heart of it is, instead of seeing men as perpetrators and women as victims, or women as perpetrators, men as victims, or any combination in there. I'm using the gender binary. I know there's more than men and women, there's more than male and female. And there are women who are perpetrators, and of course there are men who are victims. There's a whole spectrum. But instead of seeing it in the binary fashion, we focus on all of us as what we call bystanders, and a bystander is defined as anybody who is not a perpetrator or a victim in a given situation, so in other words friends, teammates, colleagues, coworkers, family members, those of us who are not directly involved in a dyad of abuse, but we are embedded in social, family, work, school, and other peer culture relationships with people who might be in that situation. What do we do? How do we speak up? How do we challenge our friends? How do we support our friends? But how do we not remain silent in the face of abuse? Now, when it comes to men and male culture, the goal is to get men who are not abusive to challenge men who are. And when I say abusive, I don't mean just men who are beating women. We're not just saying a man whose friend is abusing his girlfriend needs to stop the guy at the moment of attack. That's a naive way of creating a social change. It's along a continuum, we're trying to get men to interrupt each other. So, for example, if you're a guy and you're in a group of guys playing poker, talking, hanging out, no women present, and another guy says something sexist or degrading or harassing about women, instead of laughing along or pretending you didn't hear it, we need men to say, "Hey, that's not funny. that could be my sister you're talking about, and could you joke about something else? Or could you talk about something else? I don't appreciate that kind of talk." Just like if you're a white person and another white person makes a racist comment, you'd hope, I hope, that white people would interrupt that racist enactment by a fellow white person. Just like with heterosexism, if you're a heterosexual person and you yourself don't enact harassing or abusive behaviors towards people of varying sexual orientations, if you don't say something in the face of other heterosexual people doing that, then, in a sense, isn't your silence a form of consent and complicity? Well, the bystander approach is trying to give people tools to interrupt that process and to speak up and to create a peer culture climate where the abusive behavior will be seen as unacceptable, not just because it's illegal, but because it's wrong and unacceptable in the peer culture. And if we can get to the place where men who act out in sexist ways will lose status, young men and boys who act out in sexist and harassing ways towards girls and women, as well as towards other boys and men, will lose status as a result of it, guess what? We'll see a radical diminution of the abuse. Because the typical perpetrator is not sick and twisted. He's a normal guy in every other way, isn't he? Now, among the many great things that Martin Luther King said in his short life was, "In the end, what will hurt the most is not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends." In the end, what will hurt the most is not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. There's been an awful lot of silence in male culture about this ongoing tragedy of men's violence against women and children, hasn't there? There's been an awful lot of silence. And all I'm saying is that we need to break that silence, and we need more men to do that. Now, it's easier said than done, because I'm saying it now, but I'm telling you it's not easy in male culture for guys to challenge each other, which is one of the reasons why part of the paradigm shift that has to happen is not just understanding these issues as men's issues, but they're also leadership issues for men. Because ultimately, the responsibility for taking a stand on these issues should not fall on the shoulders of little boys or teenage boys in high school or college men. It should be on adult men with power. Adult men with power are the ones we need to be holding accountable for being leaders on these issues, because when somebody speaks up in a peer culture and challenges and interrupts, he or she is being a leader, really. But on a big scale, we need more adult men with power to start prioritizing these issues, and we haven't seen that yet, have we? Now, I was at a dinner a number of years ago, and I work extensively with the US military, all the services. And I was at this dinner and this woman said to me — I think she thought she was a little clever — she said, "So how long have you been doing sensitivity training with the Marines?" And I said, "With all due respect, I don't do sensitivity training with the Marines. I run a leadership program in the Marine Corps." Now, I know it's a bit pompous, my response, but it's an important distinction, because I don't believe that what we need is sensitivity training. We need leadership training, because, for example, when a professional coach or a manager of a baseball team or a football team — and I work extensively in that realm as well — makes a sexist comment, makes a homophobic statement, makes a racist comment, there will be discussions on the sports blogs and in sports talk radio. And some people will say, "He needs sensitivity training." Other people will say, "Well, get off it. That's political correctness run amok, he made a stupid statement, move on." My argument is, he doesn't need sensitivity training. He needs leadership training, because he's being a bad leader, because in a society with gender diversity and sexual diversity — (Applause) and racial and ethnic diversity, you make those kind of comments, you're failing at your leadership. If we can make this point that I'm making to powerful men and women in our society at all levels of institutional authority and power, it's going to change the paradigm of people's thinking. You know, for example, I work a lot in college and university athletics throughout North America. We know so much about how to prevent domestic and sexual violence, right? There's no excuse for a college or university to not have domestic and sexual violence prevention training mandated for all student athletes, coaches, administrators, as part of their educational process. We know enough to know that we can easily do that. But you know what's missing? The leadership. But it's not the leadership of student athletes. It's the leadership of the athletic director, the president of the university, the people in charge who make decisions about resources and who make decisions about priorities in the institutional settings. That's a failure, in most cases, of men's leadership. Look at Penn State. Penn State is the mother of all teachable moments for the bystander approach. You had so many situations in that realm where men in powerful positions failed to act to protect children, in this case, boys. It's unbelievable, really. But when you get into it, you realize there are pressures on men. There are constraints within peer cultures on men, which is why we need to encourage men to break through those pressures. And one of the ways to do that is to say there's an awful lot of men who care deeply about these issues. I know this, I work with men, and I've been working with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men for many decades now. It's scary, when you think about it, how many years. But there's so many men who care deeply about these issues, but caring deeply is not enough. We need more men with the guts, with the courage, with the strength, with the moral integrity to break our complicit silence and challenge each other and stand with women and not against them. By the way, we owe it to women. There's no question about it. But we also owe it to our sons. We also owe it to young men who are growing up all over the world in situations where they didn't make the choice to be a man in a culture that tells them that manhood is a certain way. They didn't make the choice. We that have a choice, have an opportunity and a responsibility to them as well. I hope that, going forward, men and women, working together, can begin the change and the transformation that will happen so that future generations won't have the level of tragedy that we deal with on a daily basis. I know we can do it, we can do better. Thank you very much. |
Bring back the woolly mammoth! | {0: 'Hendrik Poinar is a geneticist and biological anthropologist who focuses on extracting ancient DNA. He currently has his sights set on sequencing the genome of the woolly mammoth -- and cloning it.'} | TEDxDeExtinction | When I was a young boy, I used to gaze through the microscope of my father at the insects in amber that he kept in the house. And they were remarkably well preserved, morphologically just phenomenal. And we used to imagine that someday, they would actually come to life and they would crawl out of the resin, and, if they could, they would fly away. If you had asked me 10 years ago whether or not we would ever be able to sequence the genome of extinct animals, I would have told you, it's unlikely. If you had asked whether or not we would actually be able to revive an extinct species, I would have said, pipe dream. But I'm actually standing here today, amazingly, to tell you that not only is the sequencing of extinct genomes a possibility, actually a modern-day reality, but the revival of an extinct species is actually within reach, maybe not from the insects in amber — in fact, this mosquito was actually used for the inspiration for "Jurassic Park" — but from woolly mammoths, the well preserved remains of woolly mammoths in the permafrost. Woollies are a particularly interesting, quintessential image of the Ice Age. They were large. They were hairy. They had large tusks, and we seem to have a very deep connection with them, like we do with elephants. Maybe it's because elephants share many things in common with us. They bury their dead. They educate the next of kin. They have social knits that are very close. Or maybe it's actually because we're bound by deep time, because elephants, like us, share their origins in Africa some seven million years ago, and as habitats changed and environments changed, we actually, like the elephants, migrated out into Europe and Asia. So the first large mammoth that appears on the scene is meridionalis, which was standing four meters tall weighing about 10 tons, and was a woodland-adapted species and spread from Western Europe clear across Central Asia, across the Bering land bridge and into parts of North America. And then, again, as climate changed as it always does, and new habitats opened up, we had the arrival of a steppe-adapted species called trogontherii in Central Asia pushing meridionalis out into Western Europe. And the open grassland savannas of North America opened up, leading to the Columbian mammoth, a large, hairless species in North America. And it was really only about 500,000 years later that we had the arrival of the woolly, the one that we all know and love so much, spreading from an East Beringian point of origin across Central Asia, again pushing the trogontherii out through Central Europe, and over hundreds of thousands of years migrating back and forth across the Bering land bridge during times of glacial peaks and coming into direct contact with the Columbian relatives living in the south, and there they survive over hundreds of thousands of years during traumatic climatic shifts. So there's a highly plastic animal dealing with great transitions in temperature and environment, and doing very, very well. And there they survive on the mainland until about 10,000 years ago, and actually, surprisingly, on the small islands off of Siberia and Alaska until about 3,000 years ago. So Egyptians are building pyramids and woollies are still living on islands. And then they disappear. Like 99 percent of all the animals that have once lived, they go extinct, likely due to a warming climate and fast-encroaching dense forests that are migrating north, and also, as the late, great Paul Martin once put it, probably Pleistocene overkill, so the large game hunters that took them down. Fortunately, we find millions of their remains strewn across the permafrost buried deep in Siberia and Alaska, and we can actually go up there and actually take them out. And the preservation is, again, like those insects in [amber], phenomenal. So you have teeth, bones with blood which look like blood, you have hair, and you have intact carcasses or heads which still have brains in them. So the preservation and the survival of DNA depends on many factors, and I have to admit, most of which we still don't quite understand, but depending upon when an organism dies and how quickly he's buried, the depth of that burial, the constancy of the temperature of that burial environment, will ultimately dictate how long DNA will survive over geologically meaningful time frames. And it's probably surprising to many of you sitting in this room that it's not the time that matters, it's not the length of preservation, it's the consistency of the temperature of that preservation that matters most. So if we were to go deep now within the bones and the teeth that actually survived the fossilization process, the DNA which was once intact, tightly wrapped around histone proteins, is now under attack by the bacteria that lived symbiotically with the mammoth for years during its lifetime. So those bacteria, along with the environmental bacteria, free water and oxygen, actually break apart the DNA into smaller and smaller and smaller DNA fragments, until all you have are fragments that range from 10 base pairs to, in the best case scenarios, a few hundred base pairs in length. So most fossils out there in the fossil record are actually completely devoid of all organic signatures. But a few of them actually have DNA fragments that survive for thousands, even a few millions of years in time. And using state-of-the-art clean room technology, we've devised ways that we can actually pull these DNAs away from all the rest of the gunk in there, and it's not surprising to any of you sitting in the room that if I take a mammoth bone or a tooth and I extract its DNA that I'll get mammoth DNA, but I'll also get all the bacteria that once lived with the mammoth, and, more complicated, I'll get all the DNA that survived in that environment with it, so the bacteria, the fungi, and so on and so forth. Not surprising then again that a mammoth preserved in the permafrost will have something on the order of 50 percent of its DNA being mammoth, whereas something like the Columbian mammoth, living in a temperature and buried in a temperate environment over its laying-in will only have 3 to 10 percent endogenous. But we've come up with very clever ways that we can actually discriminate, capture and discriminate, the mammoth from the non-mammoth DNA, and with the advances in high-throughput sequencing, we can actually pull out and bioinformatically re-jig all these small mammoth fragments and place them onto a backbone of an Asian or African elephant chromosome. And so by doing that, we can actually get all the little points that discriminate between a mammoth and an Asian elephant, and what do we know, then, about a mammoth? Well, the mammoth genome is almost at full completion, and we know that it's actually really big. It's mammoth. So a hominid genome is about three billion base pairs, but an elephant and mammoth genome is about two billion base pairs larger, and most of that is composed of small, repetitive DNAs that make it very difficult to actually re-jig the entire structure of the genome. So having this information allows us to answer one of the interesting relationship questions between mammoths and their living relatives, the African and the Asian elephant, all of which shared an ancestor seven million years ago, but the genome of the mammoth shows it to share a most recent common ancestor with Asian elephants about six million years ago, so slightly closer to the Asian elephant. With advances in ancient DNA technology, we can actually now start to begin to sequence the genomes of those other extinct mammoth forms that I mentioned, and I just wanted to talk about two of them, the woolly and the Columbian mammoth, both of which were living very close to each other during glacial peaks, so when the glaciers were massive in North America, the woollies were pushed into these subglacial ecotones, and came into contact with the relatives living to the south, and there they shared refugia, and a little bit more than the refugia, it turns out. It looks like they were interbreeding. And that this is not an uncommon feature in Proboscideans, because it turns out that large savanna male elephants will outcompete the smaller forest elephants for their females. So large, hairless Columbians outcompeting the smaller male woollies. It reminds me a bit of high school, unfortunately. (Laughter) So this is not trivial, given the idea that we want to revive extinct species, because it turns out that an African and an Asian elephant can actually interbreed and have live young, and this has actually occurred by accident in a zoo in Chester, U.K., in 1978. So that means that we can actually take Asian elephant chromosomes, modify them into all those positions we've actually now been able to discriminate with the mammoth genome, we can put that into an enucleated cell, differentiate that into a stem cell, subsequently differentiate that maybe into a sperm, artificially inseminate an Asian elephant egg, and over a long and arduous procedure, actually bring back something that looks like this. Now, this wouldn't be an exact replica, because the short DNA fragments that I told you about will prevent us from building the exact structure, but it would make something that looked and felt very much like a woolly mammoth did. Now, when I bring up this with my friends, we often talk about, well, where would you put it? Where are you going to house a mammoth? There's no climates or habitats suitable. Well, that's not actually the case. It turns out that there are swaths of habitat in the north of Siberia and Yukon that actually could house a mammoth. Remember, this was a highly plastic animal that lived over tremendous climate variation. So this landscape would be easily able to house it, and I have to admit that there [is] a part of the child in me, the boy in me, that would love to see these majestic creatures walk across the permafrost of the north once again, but I do have to admit that part of the adult in me sometimes wonders whether or not we should. Thank you very much. (Applause) Ryan Phelan: Don't go away. You've left us with a question. I'm sure everyone is asking this. When you say, "Should we?" it feels like you're reticent there, and yet you've given us a vision of it being so possible. What's your reticence? Hendrik Poinar: I don't think it's reticence. I think it's just that we have to think very deeply about the implications, ramifications of our actions, and so as long as we have good, deep discussion like we're having now, I think we can come to a very good solution as to why to do it. But I just want to make sure that we spend time thinking about why we're doing it first. RP: Perfect. Perfect answer. Thank you very much, Hendrik. HP: Thank you. (Applause) |
How books can open your mind | {0: 'Lisa Bu has built a career helping people find great stories to listen to. Now she tells her own story.'} | TED2013 | So I was trained to become a gymnast for two years in Hunan, China in the 1970s. When I was in the first grade, the government wanted to transfer me to a school for athletes, all expenses paid. But my tiger mother said, "No." My parents wanted me to become an engineer like them. After surviving the Cultural Revolution, they firmly believed there's only one sure way to happiness: a safe and well-paid job. It is not important if I like the job or not. But my dream was to become a Chinese opera singer. That is me playing my imaginary piano. An opera singer must start training young to learn acrobatics, so I tried everything I could to go to opera school. I even wrote to the school principal and the host of a radio show. But no adults liked the idea. No adults believed I was serious. Only my friends supported me, but they were kids, just as powerless as I was. So at age 15, I knew I was too old to be trained. My dream would never come true. I was afraid that for the rest of my life some second-class happiness would be the best I could hope for. But that's so unfair. So I was determined to find another calling. Nobody around to teach me? Fine. I turned to books. I satisfied my hunger for parental advice from this book by a family of writers and musicians.["Correspondence in the Family of Fou Lei"] I found my role model of an independent woman when Confucian tradition requires obedience.["Jane Eyre"] And I learned to be efficient from this book.["Cheaper by the Dozen"] And I was inspired to study abroad after reading these. ["Complete Works of Sanmao" (aka Echo Chan)] ["Lessons From History" by Nan Huaijin] I came to the U.S. in 1995, so which books did I read here first? Books banned in China, of course. "The Good Earth" is about Chinese peasant life. That's just not convenient for propaganda. Got it. The Bible is interesting, but strange. (Laughter) That's a topic for a different day. But the fifth commandment gave me an epiphany: "You shall honor your father and mother." "Honor," I said. "That's so different, and better, than obey." So it becomes my tool to climb out of this Confucian guilt trap and to restart my relationship with my parents. Encountering a new culture also started my habit of comparative reading. It offers many insights. For example, I found this map out of place at first because this is what Chinese students grew up with. It had never occurred to me, China doesn't have to be at the center of the world. A map actually carries somebody's view. Comparative reading actually is nothing new. It's a standard practice in the academic world. There are even research fields such as comparative religion and comparative literature. Compare and contrast gives scholars a more complete understanding of a topic. So I thought, well, if comparative reading works for research, why not do it in daily life too? So I started reading books in pairs. So they can be about people — ["Benjamin Franklin" by Walter Isaacson]["John Adams" by David McCullough] — who are involved in the same event, or friends with shared experiences. ["Personal History" by Katharine Graham]["The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," by Alice Schroeder] I also compare the same stories in different genres — (Laughter) [Holy Bible: King James Version]["Lamb" by Chrisopher Moore] — or similar stories from different cultures, as Joseph Campbell did in his wonderful book.["The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell] For example, both the Christ and the Buddha went through three temptations. For the Christ, the temptations are economic, political and spiritual. For the Buddha, they are all psychological: lust, fear and social duty — interesting. So if you know a foreign language, it's also fun to read your favorite books in two languages. ["The Way of Chuang Tzu" Thomas Merton]["Tao: The Watercourse Way" Alan Watts] Instead of lost in translation, I found there is much to gain. For example, it's through translation that I realized "happiness" in Chinese literally means "fast joy." Huh! "Bride" in Chinese literally means "new mother." Uh-oh. (Laughter) Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present. I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again. Having a dream shattered really is nothing compared to what many others have suffered. I have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream. Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from. Even a shattered dream can do that for you. So because of books, I'm here today, happy, living again with a purpose and a clarity, most of the time. So may books be always with you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Love, no matter what | {0: 'Andrew Solomon writes about politics, culture and psychology. '} | TEDMED 2013 | "Even in purely nonreligious terms, homosexuality represents a misuse of the sexual faculty. It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality — a pitiable flight from life. As such, it deserves no compassion, it deserves no treatment as minority martyrdom, and it deserves not to be deemed anything but a pernicious sickness." That's from "Time" magazine in 1966, when I was three years old. And last year, the president of the United States came out in favor of gay marriage. (Applause) And my question is: How did we get from there to here? How did an illness become an identity? When I was perhaps six years old, I went to a shoe store with my mother and my brother. And at the end of buying our shoes, the salesman said to us that we could each have a balloon to take home. My brother wanted a red balloon, and I wanted a pink balloon. My mother said that she thought I'd really rather have a blue balloon. (Laughter) But I said that I definitely wanted the pink one. And she reminded me that my favorite color was blue. The fact that my favorite color now is blue, but I'm still gay — (Laughter) is evidence of both my mother's influence and its limits. (Laughter) (Applause) When I was little, my mother used to say, "The love you have for your children is like no other feeling in the world. And until you have children, you don't know what it's like." And when I was little, I took it as the greatest compliment in the world that she would say that about parenting my brother and me. And when I was an adolescent, I thought, "But I'm gay, and so I probably can't have a family." And when she said it, it made me anxious. And after I came out of the closet, when she continued to say it, it made me furious. I said, "I'm gay. That's not the direction that I'm headed in. And I want you to stop saying that." About 20 years ago, I was asked by my editors at the "New York Times Magazine" to write a piece about Deaf culture. And I was rather taken aback. I had thought of deafness entirely as an illness: those poor people, they couldn't hear, they lacked hearing, and what could we do for them? And then I went out into the Deaf world. I went to Deaf clubs. I saw performances of Deaf theater and of Deaf poetry. I even went to the Miss Deaf America contest in Nashville, Tennessee, where people complained about that slurry Southern signing. (Laughter) And as I plunged deeper and deeper into the Deaf world, I became convinced that Deafness was a culture and that the people in the Deaf world who said, "We don't lack hearing; we have membership in a culture," were saying something that was viable. It wasn't my culture, and I didn't particularly want to rush off and join it, but I appreciated that it was a culture and that for the people who were members of it, it felt as valuable as Latino culture or gay culture or Jewish culture. It felt as valid, perhaps, even as American culture. Then a friend of a friend of mine had a daughter who was a dwarf. And when her daughter was born, she suddenly found herself confronting questions that now began to seem quite resonant to me. She was facing the question of what to do with this child. Should she say, "You're just like everyone else but a little bit shorter?" Or should she try to construct some kind of dwarf identity, get involved in the Little People of America, become aware of what was happening for dwarfs? And I suddenly thought, "Most deaf children are born to hearing parents. Those hearing parents tend to try to cure them. Those deaf people discover community somehow in adolescence. Most gay people are born to straight parents. Those straight parents often want them to function in what they think of as the mainstream world, and those gay people have to discover identity later on. And here was this friend of mine, looking at these questions of identity with her dwarf daughter. And I thought, "There it is again: a family that perceives itself to be normal with a child who seems to be extraordinary." And I hatched the idea that there are really two kinds of identity. There are vertical identities, which are passed down generationally from parent to child. Those are things like ethnicity, frequently nationality, language, often religion. Those are things you have in common with your parents and with your children. And while some of them can be difficult, there's no attempt to cure them. You can argue that it's harder in the United States — our current presidency notwithstanding — to be a person of color. And yet, we have nobody who is trying to ensure that the next generation of children born to African-Americans and Asians come out with creamy skin and yellow hair. There are these other identities which you have to learn from a peer group, and I call them "horizontal identities," because the peer group is the horizontal experience. These are identities that are alien to your parents and that you have to discover when you get to see them in peers. And those identities, those horizontal identities, people have almost always tried to cure. And I wanted to look at what the process is through which people who have those identities come to a good relationship with them. And it seemed to me that there were three levels of acceptance that needed to take place. There's self-acceptance, there's family acceptance, and there's social acceptance. And they don't always coincide. And a lot of the time, people who have these conditions are very angry, because they feel as though their parents don't love them, when what actually has happened is that their parents don't accept them. Love is something that, ideally, is there unconditionally throughout the relationship between a parent and a child. But acceptance is something that takes time. It always takes time. One of the dwarfs I got to know was a guy named Clinton Brown. When he was born, he was diagnosed with diastrophic dwarfism, a very disabling condition, and his parents were told that he would never walk, he would never talk, he would have no intellectual capacity, and he would probably not even recognize them. And it was suggested to them that they leave him at the hospital so that he could die there quietly. His mother said she wasn't going to do it, and she took her son home. And even though she didn't have a lot of educational or financial advantages, she found the best doctor in the country for dealing with diastrophic dwarfism, and she got Clinton enrolled with him. And in the course of his childhood, he had 30 major surgical procedures. And he spent all this time stuck in the hospital while he was having those procedures, as a result of which, he now can walk. While he was there, they sent tutors around to help him with his schoolwork, and he worked very hard, because there was nothing else to do. He ended up achieving at a level that had never before been contemplated by any member of his family. He was the first one in his family, in fact, to go to college, where he lived on campus and drove a specially fitted car that accommodated his unusual body. And his mother told me the story of coming home one day — and he went to college nearby — and she said, "I saw that car, which you can always recognize, in the parking lot of a bar," she said. (Laughter) "And I thought to myself, 'They're six feet tall, he's three feet tall. Two beers for them is four beers for him.'" She said, "I knew I couldn't go in there and interrupt him, but I went home, and I left him eight messages on his cell phone." She said, "And then I thought, if someone had said to me, when he was born, that my future worry would be that he'd go drinking and driving with his college buddies ..." (Laughter) (Applause) And I said to her, "What do you think you did that helped him to emerge as this charming, accomplished, wonderful person?" And she said, "What did I do? I loved him, that's all. Clinton just always had that light in him. And his father and I were lucky enough to be the first to see it there." I'm going to quote from another magazine of the '60s. This one is from 1968 — "The Atlantic Monthly," voice of liberal America — written by an important bioethicist. He said, "There is no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down's syndrome child away, whether it is 'put away' in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible, lethal sense. It is sad, yes. Dreadful. But it carries no guilt. True guilt arises only from an offense against a person, and a Down's is not a person." There's been a lot of ink given to the enormous progress that we've made in the treatment of gay people. The fact that our attitude has changed is in the headlines every day. But we forget how we used to see people who had other differences, how we used to see people who were disabled, how inhuman we held people to be. And the change that's been accomplished there, which is almost equally radical, is one that we pay not very much attention to. One of the families I interviewed, Tom and Karen Robards, were taken aback when, as young and successful New Yorkers, their first child was diagnosed with Down syndrome. They thought the educational opportunities for him were not what they should be, and so they decided they would build a little center — two classrooms that they started with a few other parents — to educate kids with DS. And over the years, that center grew into something called the Cooke Center, where there are now thousands upon thousands of children with intellectual disabilities who are being taught. In the time since that "Atlantic Monthly" story ran, the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome has tripled. The experience of Down syndrome people includes those who are actors, those who are writers, some who are able to live fully independently in adulthood. The Robards had a lot to do with that. And I said, "Do you regret it? Do you wish your child didn't have Down syndrome? Do you wish you'd never heard of it?" And interestingly, his father said, "Well, for David, our son, I regret it, because for David, it's a difficult way to be in the world, and I'd like to give David an easier life. But I think if we lost everyone with Down syndrome, it would be a catastrophic loss." And Karen Robards said to me, "I'm with Tom. For David, I would cure it in an instant, to give him an easier life. But speaking for myself — well, I would never have believed 23 years ago when he was born that I could come to such a point. Speaking for myself, it's made me so much better and so much kinder and so much more purposeful in my whole life that, speaking for myself, I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world." We live at a point when social acceptance for these and many other conditions is on the up and up. And yet we also live at the moment when our ability to eliminate those conditions has reached a height we never imagined before. Most deaf infants born in the United States now will receive cochlear implants, which are put into the brain and connected to a receiver, and which allow them to acquire a facsimile of hearing and to use oral speech. A compound that has been tested in mice, BMN-111, is useful in preventing the action of the achondroplasia gene. Achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism, and mice who have been given that substance and who have the achondroplasia gene grow to full size. Testing in humans is around the corner. There are blood tests which are making progress that would pick up Down syndrome more clearly and earlier in pregnancies than ever before, making it easier and easier for people to eliminate those pregnancies, or to terminate them. So we have both social progress and medical progress. And I believe in both of them. I believe the social progress is fantastic and meaningful and wonderful, and I think the same thing about the medical progress. But I think it's a tragedy when one of them doesn't see the other. And when I see the way they're intersecting in conditions like the three I've just described, I sometimes think it's like those moments in grand opera when the hero realizes he loves the heroine at the exact moment that she lies expiring on a divan. (Laughter) We have to think about how we feel about cures altogether. And a lot of the time the question of parenthood is: What do we validate in our children, and what do we cure in them? Jim Sinclair, a prominent autism activist, said, "When parents say, 'I wish my child did not have autism,' what they're really saying is, 'I wish the child I have did not exist and I had a different, nonautistic child instead.' Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure: that your fondest wish for us is that someday we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces." It's a very extreme point of view, but it points to the reality that people engage with the life they have and they don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be. One of the families I interviewed for this project was the family of Dylan Klebold, who was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre. It took a long time to persuade them to talk to me, and once they agreed, they were so full of their story that they couldn't stop telling it, and the first weekend I spent with them, the first of many, I recorded more than 20 hours of conversation. And on Sunday night, we were all exhausted. We were sitting in the kitchen. Sue Klebold was fixing dinner. And I said, "If Dylan were here now, do you have a sense of what you'd want to ask him?" And his father said, "I sure do. I'd want to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing." And Sue looked at the floor, and she thought for a minute. And then she looked back up and said, "I would ask him to forgive me for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head." When I had dinner with her a couple of years later — one of many dinners that we had together — she said, "You know, when it first happened, I used to wish that I had never married, that I had never had children. If I hadn't gone to Ohio State and crossed paths with Tom, this child wouldn't have existed, and this terrible thing wouldn't have happened. But I've come to feel that I love the children I had so much that I don't want to imagine a life without them. I recognize the pain they caused to others, for which there can be no forgiveness, but the pain they caused to me, there is," she said. "So while I recognize that it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born, I've decided that it would not have been better for me." I thought it was surprising how all of these families had all of these children with all of these problems, problems that they mostly would have done anything to avoid, and that they had all found so much meaning in that experience of parenting. And then I thought, all of us who have children love the children we have, with their flaws. If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living-room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children — more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter — (Laughter) I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle. And ultimately, I feel that in the same way that we test flame-retardant pajamas in an inferno to ensure they won't catch fire when our child reaches across the stove, so these stories of families negotiating these extreme differences reflect on the universal experience of parenting, which is always that sometimes, you look at your child, and you think, "Where did you come from?" (Laughter) It turns out that while each of these individual differences is siloed — there are only so many families dealing with schizophrenia, only so many families of children who are transgender, only so many families of prodigies — who also face similar challenges in many ways — there are only so many families in each of those categories. But if you start to think that the experience of negotiating difference within your family is what people are addressing, then you discover that it's a nearly universal phenomenon. Ironically, it turns out, that it's our differences and our negotiation of difference that unite us. I decided to have children while I was working on this project. And many people were astonished and said, "But how can you decide to have children in the midst of studying everything that can go wrong?" And I said, "I'm not studying everything that can go wrong. What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong." I thought a lot about the mother of one disabled child I had seen, a severely disabled child who died through caregiver neglect. And when his ashes were interred, his mother said, "I pray here for forgiveness for having been twice robbed: once of the child I wanted, and once of the son I loved." And I figured it was possible, then, for anyone to love any child, if they had the effective will to do so. So, my husband is the biological father of two children with some lesbian friends in Minneapolis. I had a close friend from college who'd gone through a divorce and wanted to have children. And so she and I have a daughter, and mother and daughter live in Texas. And my husband and I have a son who lives with us all the time, of whom I am the biological father, and our surrogate for the pregnancy was Laura, the lesbian mother of Oliver and Lucy in Minneapolis. (Laughter) So — (Applause) The shorthand is: five parents of four children in three states. (Laughter) And there are people who think that the existence of my family somehow undermines or weakens or damages their family. And there are people who think that families like mine shouldn't be allowed to exist. And I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way that we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness. The day after our son was born, the pediatrician came into the hospital room and said she was concerned. He wasn't extending his legs appropriately. She said that might mean that he had brain damage. Insofar as he was extending them, he was doing so asymmetrically, which she thought could mean that there was a tumor of some kind in action. And he had a very large head, which she thought might indicate hydrocephalus. And as she told me all of these things, I felt the very center of my being pouring out onto the floor. And I thought, "Here I had been working for years on a book about how much meaning people had found in the experience of parenting children who were disabled, and I didn't want to join their number because what I was encountering was an idea of illness." And like all parents since the dawn of time, I wanted to protect my child from illness. And I wanted, also, to protect myself from illness. And yet, I knew from the work I had done that if he had any of the things we were about to start testing for, that those would ultimately be his identity, and if they were his identity, they would become my identity, that that illness was going to take a very different shape as it unfolded. We took him to the MRI machine, we took him to the CAT scanner, we took this day-old child and gave him over for an arterial blood draw. We felt helpless. And at the end of five hours, they said that his brain was completely clear and that he was by then extending his legs correctly. And when I asked the pediatrician what had been going on, she said she thought in the morning, he had probably had a cramp. (Laughter) But I thought — (Laughter) I thought how my mother was right. I thought, "The love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world. And until you have children, you don't know what it feels like. I think children had ensnared me the moment I connected fatherhood with loss. But I'm not sure I would have noticed that if I hadn't been so in the thick of this research project of mine. I'd encountered so much strange love, and I fell very naturally into its bewitching patterns. And I saw how splendor can illuminate even the most abject vulnerabilities. During these 10 years, I had witnessed and learned the terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility, and I had come to see how it conquers everything else. And while I had sometimes thought the parents I was interviewing were fools, enslaving themselves to a lifetime's journey with their thankless children and trying to breed identity out of misery, I realized that day that my research had built me a plank and that I was ready to join them on their ship. Thank you. (Applause and cheers) Thank you. |
How behavioral science can lower your energy bill | {0: 'Alex Laskey helps power companies to help their customers cut down -- using data analysis, marketing and a pinch of psychology.'} | TED2013 | How many of you have checked your email today? Come on, raise your hands. How many of you are checking it right now? (Laughter) And how about finances? Anybody check that today? Credit card, investment account? How about this week? Now, how about your household energy use? Anybody check that today? This week? Last week? A few energy geeks spread out across the room. It's good to see you guys. But the rest of us — this is a room filled with people who are passionate about the future of this planet, and even we aren't paying attention to the energy use that's driving climate change. The woman in the photo with me is Harriet. We met her on our first family vacation. Harriet's paying attention to her energy use, and she is decidedly not an energy geek. This is the story of how Harriet came to pay attention. This is coal, the most common source of electricity on the planet, and there's enough energy in this coal to light this bulb for more than a year. But unfortunately, between here and here, most of that energy is lost to things like transmission leakage and heat. In fact, only 10 percent ends up as light. So this coal will last a little bit more than a month. If you wanted to light this bulb for a year, you'd need this much coal. The bad news here is that, for every unit of energy we use, we waste nine. That means there's good news, because for every unit of energy we save, we save the other nine. So the question is, how can we get the people in this room and across the globe to start paying attention to the energy we're using, and start wasting less of it? The answer comes from a behavioral science experiment that was run one hot summer, 10 years ago, and only 90 miles from here, in San Marcos, California. Graduate students put signs on every door in a neighborhood, asking people to turn off their air conditioning and turn on their fans. One quarter of the homes received a message that said, did you know you could save 54 dollars a month this summer? Turn off your air conditioning, turn on your fans. Another group got an environmental message. And still a third group got a message about being good citizens, preventing blackouts. Most people guessed that money-saving message would work best of all. In fact, none of these messages worked. They had zero impact on energy consumption. It was as if the grad students hadn't shown up at all. But there was a fourth message, and this message simply said, "When surveyed, 77 percent of your neighbors said that they turned off their air conditioning and turned on their fans. Please join them. Turn off your air conditioning and turn on your fans." And wouldn't you know it, they did. The people who received this message showed a marked decrease in energy consumption simply by being told what their neighbors were doing. So what does this tell us? Well, if something is inconvenient, even if we believe in it, moral suasion, financial incentives, don't do much to move us — but social pressure, that's powerful stuff. And harnessed correctly, it can be a powerful force for good. In fact, it already is. Inspired by this insight, my friend Dan Yates and I started a company called Opower. We built software and partnered with utility companies who wanted to help their customers save energy. We deliver personalized home energy reports that show people how their consumption compares to their neighbors in similar-sized homes. Just like those effective door hangers, we have people comparing themselves to their neighbors, and then we give everyone targeted recommendations to help them save. We started with paper, we moved to a mobile application, web, and now even a controllable thermostat, and for the last five years we've been running the largest behavioral science experiment in the world. And it's working. Ordinary homeowners and renters have saved more than 250 million dollars on their energy bills, and we're just getting started. This year alone, in partnership with more than 80 utilities in six countries, we're going to generate another two terawatt hours of electricity savings. Now, the energy geeks in the room know two terawatt hours, but for the rest of us, two terawatt hours is more than enough energy to power every home in St. Louis and Salt Lake City combined for more than a year. Two terawatt hours, it's roughly half what the U.S. solar industry produced last year. And two terawatt hours? In terms of coal, we'd need to burn 34 of these wheelbarrows every minute around the clock every day for an entire year to get two terawatt hours of electricity. And we're not burning anything. We're just motivating people to pay attention and change their behavior. But we're just one company, and this is just scratching the surface. Twenty percent of the electricity in homes is wasted, and when I say wasted, I don't mean that people have inefficient lightbulbs. They may. I mean we leave the lights on in empty rooms, and we leave the air conditioning on when nobody's home. That's 40 billion dollars a year wasted on electricity that does not contribute to our well-being but does contribute to climate change. That's 40 billion — with a B — every year in the U.S. alone. That's half our coal usage right there. Now thankfully, some of the world's best material scientists are looking to replace coal with sustainable resources like these, and this is both fantastic and essential. But the most overlooked resource to get us to a sustainable energy future, it isn't on this slide. It's in this room. It's you, and it's me. And we can harness this resource with no new material science simply by applying behavioral science. We can do it today, we know it works, and it will save us money right away. So what are we waiting for? Well, in most places, utility regulation hasn't changed much since Thomas Edison. Utilities are still rewarded when their customers waste energy. They ought to be rewarded for helping their customers save it. But this story is much more than about household energy use. Take a look at the Prius. It's efficient not only because Toyota invested in material science but because they invested in behavioral science. The dashboard that shows drivers how much energy they're saving in real time makes former speed demons drive more like cautious grandmothers. Which brings us back to Harriet. We met her on our first family vacation. She came over to meet my young daughter, and she was tickled to learn that my daughter's name is also Harriet. She asked me what I did for a living, and I told her, I work with utilities to help people save energy. It was then that her eyes lit up. She looked at me, and she said, "You're exactly the person I need to talk to. You see, two weeks ago, my husband and I got a letter in the mail from our utility. It told us we were using twice as much energy as our neighbors." (Laughter) "And for the last two weeks, all we can think about, talk about, and even argue about, is what we should be doing to save energy. We did everything that letter told us to do, and still I know there must be more. Now I'm here with a genuine expert. Tell me. What should I do to save energy?" There are many experts who can help answer Harriet's question. My goal is to make sure we are all asking it. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I named, shamed and jailed | {0: 'Anas Aremeyaw Anas is a Ghanaian undercover journalist and private eye who gathers hard evidence of crime and corruption, putting the perpetrators behind bars. '} | TED2013 | I am sorry I cannot show you my face, because if I do, the bad guys will come for me. My journey started 14 years ago. I was a young reporter. I had just come out of college. Then I got a scoop. The scoop was quite a very simple story. Police officers were taking bribes from hawkers who were hawking on the streets. As a young reporter, I thought that I should do it in a different way, so that it has a maximum impact, since everybody knew that it was happening, and yet there was nothing that was keeping it out of the system. So I decided to go there and act as a seller. As part of selling, I was able to document the hard core evidence. The impact was great. It was fantastic. This was what many call immersion journalism, or undercover journalism. I am an undercover journalist. My journalism is hinged on three basic principles: naming, shaming and jailing. Journalism is about results. It's about affecting your community or your society in the most progressive way. I have worked on this for over 14 years, and I can tell you, the results are very good. One story that comes to mind in my undercover pieces is "Spirit Child." It was about children who were born with deformities, and their parents felt that once they were born with those deformities, they were not good enough to live in the society, so they were given some concoction to take and as a result they died. So I built a prosthetic baby, and I went into the village, pretended as though this baby had been born with a deformity, and here was the guys who do the killing. They got themselves ready. In their bids to kill, I got the police on standby, and they came that fateful morning to come and kill the child. I recall how they were seriously boiling the concoction. They put it on fire. It was boiling hot, getting ready to give to the kids. Whilst this was going on, the police I had alerted, they were on standby, and just as the concoction was ready, and they were about to give it to the kids, I phoned the police, and fortunately they came and busted them. As I speak now, they are before the courts. Don't forget the key principles: naming, shaming and jailing. The court process is taking place, and I'm very sure at the end of the day we will find them, and we will put them where they belong too. Another key story that comes to mind, which relates to this spirit child phenomenon, is "The Spell of the Albinos." I'm sure most of you may have heard, in Tanzania, children who are born with albinism are sometimes considered as being unfit to live in society. Their bodies are chopped up with machetes and are supposed to be used for some concoctions or some potions for people to get money — or so many, many stories people would tell about it. It was time to go undercover again. So I went undercover as a man who was interested in this particular business, of course. Again, a prosthetic arm was built. For the first time, I filmed on hidden camera the guys who do this, and they were ready to buy the arm and they were ready to use it to prepare those potions for people. I am glad today the Tanzanian government has taken action, but the key issue is that the Tanzanian government could only take action because the evidence was available. My journalism is about hard core evidence. If I say you have stolen, I show you the evidence that you have stolen. I show you how you stole it and when, or what you used what you had stolen to do. What is the essence of journalism if it doesn't benefit society? My kind of journalism is a product of my society. I know that sometimes people have their own criticisms about undercover journalism. (Video) Official: He brought out some money from his pockets and put it on the table, so that we should not be afraid. He wants to bring the cocoa and send it to Cote d'Ivoire. So with my hidden intention, I kept quiet. I didn't utter a word. But my colleagues didn't know. So after collecting the money, when he left, we were waiting for him to bring the goods. Immediately after he left, I told my colleagues that since I was the leader of the group, I told my colleagues that if they come, we will arrest them. Second official: I don't even know the place called [unclear]. I've never stepped there before. So I'm surprised. You see a hand counting money just in front of me. The next moment, you see the money in my hands, counting, whereas I have not come into contact with anybody. I have not done any business with anybody. Reporter: When Metro News contacted investigative reporter Anas Aremeyaw Anas for his reaction, he just smiled and gave this video extract he did not use in the documentary recently shown onscreen. The officer who earlier denied involvement pecks a calculator to compute the amount of money they will charge on the cocoa to be smuggled. Anas Aremeyaw Anas: This was another story on anticorruption. And here was him, denying. But you see, when you have the hard core evidence, you are able to affect society. Sometimes these are some of the headlines that come. (Music) [I will curse Anas to death] [Anas Lies] [Alarm Blows Over Anas' News for Cash Video] [Agenda Against Top CEPS Officials Exposed] [Anas Operates with Invisible Powers?] [Gov't Wobbles Over Anas Video] [Hunting the Hunter] [Anas 'Bribe' Men in Court] [15 Heads Roll Over Anas Tape] [Finance Minister Backs Anas] [11 Given Queries Over Anas' Story] [GJA Stands By Anas] [Prez. Mills Storms Tema Harbour Over Anas Video] ["Late Prof. John Evans Atta Mills: Former president of Ghana"] John Evans Atta Mills: What Anas says is not something which is unknown to many of us, but please, those of you who are agents, and who are leading the customs officers into temptation, I'm telling you, Ghana is not going to say any good things to you about this. AAA: That was my president. I thought that I couldn't come here without giving you something special. I have a piece, and I'm excited that I'm sharing it for the first time with you here. I have been undercover in the prisons. I have been there for a long time. And I can tell you, what I saw is not nice. But again, I can only affect society and affect government if I bring out the hard core evidence. Many times, the prison authorities have denied ever having issues of drug abuse, issues of sodomy, so many issues they would deny that it ever happens. How can you obtain the hard core evidence? So I was in the prison. ["Nsawan Prison"] Now, what you are seeing is a pile of dead bodies. Now, I happen to have followed one of my inmates, one of my friends, from his sick bed till death, and I can tell you it was not a nice thing at all. There were issues of bad food being served as I recall that some of the food I ate is just not good for a human being. Toilet facilities: very bad. I mean, you had to queue to get proper toilets to attend — and that's what I call proper, when four of us are on a manhole. It is something that if you narrate it to somebody, the person wouldn't believe it. The only way that you can let the person believe is when you show hard core evidence. Of course, drugs were abundant. It was easier to get cannabis, heroin and cocaine, faster even, in the prison than outside the prison. Evil in the society is an extreme disease. If you have extreme diseases, you need to get extreme remedies. My kind of journalism might not fit in other continents or other countries, but I can tell you, it works in my part of the continent of Africa, because usually, when people talk about corruption, they ask, "Where is the evidence? Show me the evidence." I say, "This is the evidence." And that has aided in me putting a lot of people behind bars. You see, we on the continent are able to tell the story better because we face the conditions and we see the conditions. That is why I was particularly excited when we launched our "Africa Investigates" series where we investigated a lot of African countries. As a result of the success of the "Africa Investigates" series, we are moving on to World Investigates. By the end of it, a lot more bad guys on our continent will be put behind bars. This will not stop. I'm going to carry on with this kind of journalism, because I know that when evil men destroy, good men must build and bind. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you. I have some questions for you. How did you end up in jail? This was just a few weeks ago, I believe, yeah? AAA: Sure. You know, undercover is all about setting the priorities right, so we got people to take me to court. So I went through the very legal process, because at the end of the day, the prison authorities want to check whether indeed you have been there or not, and that's how I got in there. CA: So someone sued you in court, and they took you there, and you were in remand custody for part of it, and you did that deliberately. AAA: Yes, yes. CA: Talk to me just about fear and how you manage that, because you're regularly putting your life at risk. How do you do that? AAA: You see, undercover is always a last resort. Before we go undercover, we follow the rules. And I'm only comfortable and I'm purged of fear whenever I am sure that all the steps have been taken. I don't do it alone. I have a backup team who help ensure that the safety and all the systems are put in place, but you've got to take very intelligent decisions whenever they are happening. If you don't, you will end up losing your life. So yes, when the backup systems are put in place, I'm okay, I go in. Risky, yes, but it's a hazard of a profession. I mean, everybody has their hazard. And once you say that is yours, you've got to take it, as and when it comes. CA: Well, you're an amazing human and you've done amazing work and you've taught us a story like no story I think any of us have heard before. And we're appreciative. We salute you. Thank you so much, Anas. AAA: Thank you. CA: Thank you. Stay safe. (Applause) |
Could we speak the language of dolphins? | {0: 'Denise Herzing has spent almost three decades researching and communicating with wild dolphins in their natural setting and on their own terms. The book "Dolphin Diaries" tells her remarkable story.'} | TED2013 | Well, now we're going to the Bahamas to meet a remarkable group of dolphins that I've been working with in the wild for the last 28 years. Now I'm interested in dolphins because of their large brains and what they might be doing with all that brainpower in the wild. And we know they use some of that brainpower for just living complicated lives, but what do we really know about dolphin intelligence? Well, we know a few things. We know that their brain-to-body ratio, which is a physical measure of intelligence, is second only to humans. Cognitively, they can understand artificially-created languages. And they pass self-awareness tests in mirrors. And in some parts of the world, they use tools, like sponges to hunt fish. But there's one big question left: do they have a language, and if so, what are they talking about? So decades ago, not years ago, I set out to find a place in the world where I could observe dolphins underwater to try to crack the code of their communication system. Now in most parts of the world, the water's pretty murky, so it's very hard to observe animals underwater, but I found a community of dolphins that live in these beautiful, clear, shallow sandbanks of the Bahamas which are just east of Florida. And they spend their daytime resting and socializing in the safety of the shallows, but at night, they go off the edge and hunt in deep water. Now, it's not a bad place to be a researcher, either. So we go out for about five months every summer in a 20-meter catamaran, and we live, sleep and work at sea for weeks at a time. My main tool is an underwater video with a hydrophone, which is an underwater microphone, and this is so I can correlate sound and behavior. And most of our work's pretty non-invasive. We try to follow dolphin etiquette while we're in the water, since we're actually observing them physically in the water. Now, Atlantic spotted dolphins are a really nice species to work with for a couple of reasons. They're born without spots, and they get spots with age, and they go through pretty distinct developmental phases, so that's fun to track their behavior. And by about the age of 15, they're fully spotted black and white. Now the mother you see here is Mugsy. She's 35 years old in this shot, but dolphins can actually live into their early 50s. And like all the dolphins in our community, we photographed Mugsy and tracked her little spots and nicks in her dorsal fin, and also the unique spot patterns as she matured over time. Now, young dolphins learn a lot as they're growing up, and they use their teenage years to practice social skills, and at about the age of nine, the females become sexually mature, so they can get pregnant, and the males mature quite a bit later, at around 15 years of age. And dolphins are very promiscuous, and so we have to determine who the fathers are, so we do paternity tests by collecting fecal material out of the water and extracting DNA. So what that means is, after 28 years, we are tracking three generations, including grandmothers and grandfathers. Now, dolphins are natural acousticians. They make sounds 10 times as high and hear sounds 10 times as high as we do. But they have other communication signals they use. They have good vision, so they use body postures to communicate. They have taste, not smell. And they have touch. And sound can actually be felt in the water, because the acoustic impedance of tissue and water's about the same. So dolphins can buzz and tickle each other at a distance. Now, we do know some things about how sounds are used with certain behaviors. Now, the signature whistle is a whistle that's specific to an individual dolphin, and it's like a name. (Dolphin whistling noises) And this is the best-studied sound, because it's easy to measure, really, and you'd find this whistle when mothers and calves are reuniting, for example. Another well studied sound are echolocation clicks. This is the dolphin's sonar. (Dolphin echolocation noises) And they use these clicks to hunt and feed. But they can also tightly pack these clicks together into buzzes and use them socially. For example, males will stimulate a female during a courtship chase. You know, I've been buzzed in the water. (Laughter) Don't tell anyone. It's a secret. And you can really feel the sound. That was my point with that. (Laughter) So dolphins are also political animals, so they have to resolve conflicts. (Dolphin noises) And they use these burst-pulsed sounds as well as their head-to-head behaviors when they're fighting. And these are very unstudied sounds because they're hard to measure. Now this is some video of a typical dolphin fight. (Dolphin noises) So you're going to see two groups, and you're going to see the head-to-head posturing, some open mouths, lots of squawking. There's a bubble. And basically, one of these groups will kind of back off and everything will resolve fine, and it doesn't really escalate into violence too much. Now, in the Bahamas, we also have resident bottlenose that interact socially with the spotted dolphins. For example, they babysit each other's calves. The males have dominance displays that they use when they're chasing each other's females. And the two species actually form temporary alliances when they're chasing sharks away. And one of the mechanisms they use to communicate their coordination is synchrony. They synchronize their sounds and their body postures to look bigger and sound stronger. (Dolphins noises) Now, these are bottlenose dolphins, and you'll see them starting to synchronize their behavior and their sounds. (Dolphin noises) You see, they're synchronizing with their partner as well as the other dyad. I wish I was that coordinated. Now, it's important to remember that you're only hearing the human-audible parts of dolphin sounds, and dolphins make ultrasonic sounds, and we use special equipment in the water to collect these sounds. Now, researchers have actually measured whistle complexity using information theory, and whistles rate very high relative to even human languages. But burst-pulsed sounds is a bit of a mystery. Now, these are three spectragrams. Two are human words, and one is a dolphin vocalizing. So just take a guess in your mind which one is the dolphin. Now, it turns out burst-pulsed sounds actually look a bit like human phonemes. Now, one way to crack the code is to interpret these signals and figure out what they mean, but it's a difficult job, and we actually don't have a Rosetta Stone yet. But a second way to crack the code is to develop some technology, an interface to do two-way communication, and that's what we've been trying to do in the Bahamas and in real time. Now, scientists have used keyboard interfaces to try to bridge the gap with species including chimpanzees and dolphins. This underwater keyboard in Orlando, Florida, at the Epcot Center, was actually the most sophisticated ever two-way interface designed for humans and dolphins to work together under the water and exchange information. So we wanted to develop an interface like this in the Bahamas, but in a more natural setting. And one of the reasons we thought we could do this is because the dolphins were starting to show us a lot of mutual curiosity. They were spontaneously mimicking our vocalizations and our postures, and they were also inviting us into dolphin games. Now, dolphins are social mammals, so they love to play, and one of their favorite games is to drag seaweed, or sargassum in this case, around. And they're very adept. They like to drag it and drop it from appendage to appendage. Now in this footage, the adult is Caroh. She's 25 years old here, and this is her newborn, Cobalt, and he's just learning how to play this game. (Dolphin noises) She's kind of teasing him and taunting him. He really wants that sargassum. Now, when dolphins solicit humans for this game, they'll often sink vertically in the water, and they'll have a little sargassum on their flipper, and they'll sort of nudge it and drop it sometimes on the bottom and let us go get it, and then we'll have a little seaweed keep away game. But when we don't dive down and get it, they'll bring it to the surface and they'll sort of wave it in front of us on their tail and drop it for us like they do their calves, and then we'll pick it up and have a game. And so we started thinking, well, wouldn't it be neat to build some technology that would allow the dolphins to request these things in real time, their favorite toys? So the original vision was to have a keyboard hanging from the boat attached to a computer, and the divers and dolphins would activate the keys on the keypad and happily exchange information and request toys from each other. But we quickly found out that dolphins simply were not going to hang around the boat using a keyboard. They've got better things to do in the wild. They might do it in captivity, but in the wild — So we built a portable keyboard that we could push through the water, and we labeled four objects they like to play with, the scarf, rope, sargassum, and also had a bow ride, which is a fun activity for a dolphin. (Whistle) And that's the scarf whistle, which is also associated with a visual symbol. And these are artificially created whistles. They're outside the dolphin's normal repertoire, but they're easily mimicked by the dolphins. And I spent four years with my colleagues Adam Pack and Fabienne Delfour, working out in the field with this keyboard using it with each other to do requests for toys while the dolphins were watching. And the dolphins could get in on the game. They could point at the visual object, or they could mimic the whistle. Now this is video of a session. The diver here has a rope toy, and I'm on the keyboard on the left, and I've just played the rope key, and that's the request for the toy from the human. So I've got the rope, I'm diving down, and I'm basically trying to get the dolphin's attention, because they're kind of like little kids. You have to keep their attention. I'm going to drop the rope, see if they come over. Here they come, and then they're going to pick up the rope and drag it around as a toy. Now, I'm at the keyboard on the left, and this is actually the first time that we tried this. I'm going to try to request this toy, the rope toy, from the dolphins using the rope sound. Let's see if they might actually understand what that means. (Whistle) That's the rope whistle. Up come the dolphins, and drop off the rope, yay. Wow. (Applause) So this is only once. We don't know for sure if they really understand the function of the whistles. Okay, so here's a second toy in the water. This is a scarf toy, and I'm trying to lead the dolphin over to the keyboard to show her the visual and the acoustic signal. Now this dolphin, we call her "the scarf thief," because over the years she's absconded with about 12 scarves. In fact, we think she has a boutique somewhere in the Bahamas. So I'm reaching over. She's got the scarf on her right side. And we try to not touch the animals too much, we really don't want to over-habituate them. And I'm trying to lead her back to the keyboard. And the diver there is going to activate the scarf sound to request the scarf. So I try to give her the scarf. Whoop. Almost lost it. But this is the moment where everything becomes possible. The dolphin's at the keyboard. You've got full attention. And this sometimes went on for hours. And I wanted to share this video with you not to show you any big breakthroughs, because they haven't happened yet, but to show you the level of intention and focus that these dolphins have, and interest in the system. And because of this, we really decided we needed some more sophisticated technology. So we joined forces with Georgia Tech, with Thad Starner's wearable computing group, to build us an underwater wearable computer that we're calling CHAT. [CHAT: Cetacean Hearing And Telemetry] Now, instead of pushing a keyboard through the water, the diver's wearing the complete system, and it's acoustic only, so basically the diver activates the sounds on a keypad on the forearm, the sounds go out through an underwater speaker, if a dolphin mimics the whistle or a human plays the whistle, the sounds come in and are localized by two hydrophones. The computer can localize who requested the toy if there's a word match. And the real power of the system is in the real-time sound recognition, so we can respond to the dolphins quickly and accurately. And we're at prototype stage, but this is how we hope it will play out. So Diver A and Diver B both have a wearable computer and the dolphin hears the whistle as a whistle, the diver hears the whistle as a whistle in the water, but also as a word through bone conduction. So Diver A plays the scarf whistle or Diver B plays the sargassum whistle to request a toy from whoever has it. What we hope will happen is that the dolphin mimics the whistle, and if Diver A has the sargassum, if that's the sound that was played and requested, then the diver will give the sargassum to the requesting dolphin and they'll swim away happily into the sunset playing sargassum for forever. Now, how far can this kind of communication go? Well, CHAT is designed specifically to empower the dolphins to request things from us. It's designed to really be two-way. Now, will they learn to mimic the whistles functionally? We hope so and we think so. But as we decode their natural sounds, we're also planning to put those back into the computerized system. For example, right now we can put their own signature whistles in the computer and request to interact with a specific dolphin. Likewise, we can create our own whistles, our own whistle names, and let the dolphins request specific divers to interact with. Now it may be that all our mobile technology will actually be the same technology that helps us communicate with another species down the road. In the case of a dolphin, you know, it's a species that, well, they're probably close to our intelligence in many ways and we might not be able to admit that right now, but they live in quite a different environment, and you still have to bridge the gap with the sensory systems. I mean, imagine what it would be like to really understand the mind of another intelligent species on the planet. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I made an impossible film | {0: 'In his film "Mars et Avril," Martin Villeneuve brings his sci-fi romance graphic novel to glorious life.'} | TED2013 | I made a film that was impossible to make, but I didn't know it was impossible, and that's how I was able to do it. "Mars et Avril" is a science fiction film. It's set in Montreal some 50 years in the future. No one had done that kind of movie in Quebec before because it's expensive, it's set in the future, and it's got tons of visual effects, and it's shot on green screen. Yet this is the kind of movie that I wanted to make ever since I was a kid, really, back when I was reading some comic books and dreaming about what the future might be. When American producers see my film, they think that I had a big budget to do it, like 23 million. But in fact I had 10 percent of that budget. I did "Mars et Avril" for only 2.3 million. So you might wonder, what's the deal here? How did I do this? Well, it's two things. First, it's time. When you don't have money, you must take time, and it took me seven years to do "Mars et Avril." The second aspect is love. I got tons and tons of generosity from everyone involved. And it seems like every department had nothing, so they had to rely on our creativity and turn every problem into an opportunity. And that brings me to the point of my talk, actually, how constraints, big creative constraints, can boost creativity. But let me go back in time a bit. In my early 20s, I did some graphic novels, but they weren't your usual graphic novels. They were books telling a science fiction story through images and text, and most of the actors who are now starring in the movie adaptation, they were already involved in these books portraying characters into a sort of experimental, theatrical, simplistic way. And one of these actors is the great stage director and actor Robert Lepage. And I just love this guy. I've been in love with this guy since I was a kid. His career I admire a lot. And I wanted this guy to be involved in my crazy project, and he was kind enough to lend his image to the character of Eugène Spaak, who is a cosmologist and artist who seeks relation in between time, space, love, music and women. And he was a perfect fit for the part, and Robert is actually the one who gave me my first chance. He was the one who believed in me and encouraged me to do an adaptation of my books into a film, and to write, direct, and produce the film myself. And Robert is actually the very first example of how constraints can boost creativity. Because this guy is the busiest man on the planet. I mean, his agenda is booked until 2042, and he's really hard to get, and I wanted him to be in the movie, to reprise his role in the movie. But the thing is, had I waited for him until 2042, my film wouldn't be a futuristic film anymore, so I just couldn't do that. Right? But that's kind of a big problem. How do you get somebody who is too busy to star in a movie? Well, I said as a joke in a production meeting — and this is a true story, by the way — I said, "Why don't we turn this guy into a hologram? Because, you know, he is everywhere and nowhere on the planet at the same time, and he's an illuminated being in my mind, and he's in between reality and virtual reality, so it would make perfect sense to turn this guy into a hologram." Everybody around the table laughed, but the joke was kind of a good solution, so that's what we ended up doing. Here's how we did it. We shot Robert with six cameras. He was dressed in green and he was like in a green aquarium. Each camera was covering 60 degrees of his head, so that in post-production we could use pretty much any angle we needed, and we shot only his head. Six months later there was a guy on set, a mime portraying the body, the vehicle for the head. And he was wearing a green hood so that we could erase the green hood in postproduction and replace it with Robert Lepage's head. So he became like a renaissance man, and here's what it looks like in the movie. (Music) (Video) Robert Lepage: [As usual, Arthur's drawing didn't account for the technical challenges. I welded the breech, but the valve is still gaping. I tried to lift the pallets to lower the pressure in the sound box, but I might have hit a heartstring. It still sounds too low.] Jacques Languirand: [That's normal. The instrument always ends up resembling its model.] (Music) Martin Villeneuve: Now these musical instruments that you see in this excerpt, they're my second example of how constraints can boost creativity, because I desperately needed these objects in my movie. They are objects of desire. They are imaginary musical instruments. And they carry a nice story with them. Actually, I knew what these things would look like in my mind for many, many years. But my problem was, I didn't have the money to pay for them. I couldn't afford them. So that's kind of a big problem too. How do you get something that you can't afford? And, you know, I woke up one morning with a pretty good idea. I said, "What if I have somebody else pay for them?" (Laughter) But who on Earth would be interested by seven not-yet-built musical instruments inspired by women's bodies? And I thought of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal, because who better to understand the kind of crazy poetry that I wanted to put on screen? So I found my way to Guy Laliberté, Cirque du Soleil's CEO, and I presented my crazy idea to him with sketches like this and visual references, and something pretty amazing happened. Guy was interested by this idea not because I was asking for his money, but because I came to him with a good idea in which everybody was happy. It was kind of a perfect triangle in which the art buyer was happy because he got the instruments at a cheaper price, because they weren't even made. He took a leap of faith. And the artist, Dominique Engel, brilliant guy, he was happy too because he had a dream project to work on for a year. And obviously I was happy because I got the instruments in my film for free, which was kind of what I tried to do. So here they are. And my last example of how constraints can boost creativity comes from the green, because this is a weird color, a crazy color, and you need to replace the green screens eventually and you must figure that out sooner rather than later. And I had, again, pretty much, ideas in my mind as to what the world would be, but then again I turned to my childhood imagination and went to the work of Belgian comic book master François Schuiten in Belgium. And this guy is another guy I admire a lot, and I wanted him to be involved in the movie as a production designer. But people told me, you know, Martin, it's impossible, the guy is too busy and he will say no. Well, I said, you know what, instead of mimicking his style, I might as well call the real guy and ask him, and I sent him my books, and he answered that he was interested in working on the film with me because he could be a big fish in a small aquarium. In other words, there was space for him to dream with me. So here I was with one of my childhood heroes, drawing every single frame that's in the film to turn that into Montreal in the future. And it was an amazing collaboration to work with this great artist whom I admire. But then, you know, eventually you have to turn all these drawings into reality. So, again, my solution was to aim for the best possible artist that I could think of. And there's this guy in Montreal, another Quebecois called Carlos Monzon, and he's a very good VFX artist. This guy had been lead compositor on such films as "Avatar" and "Star Trek" and "Transformers," and other unknown projects like this, and I knew he was the perfect fit for the job, and I had to convince him, and, instead of working on the next Spielberg movie, he accepted to work on mine. Why? Because I offered him a space to dream. So if you don't have money to offer to people, you must strike their imagination with something as nice as you can think of. So this is what happened on this movie, and that's how it got made, and we went to this very nice postproduction company in Montreal called Vision Globale, and they lent their 60 artists to work full time for six months to do this crazy film. So I want to tell you that, if you have some crazy ideas in your mind, and that people tell you that it's impossible to make, well, that's an even better reason to want to do it, because people have a tendency to see the problems rather than the final result, whereas if you start to deal with problems as being your allies rather than your opponents, life will start to dance with you in the most amazing way. I have experienced it. And you might end up doing some crazy projects, and who knows, you might even end up going to Mars. Thank you. (Applause) |
What will future jobs look like? | {0: 'Andrew McAfee studies how information technology affects businesses and society.'} | TED2013 | The writer George Eliot cautioned us that, among all forms of mistake, prophesy is the most gratuitous. The person that we would all acknowledge as her 20th-century counterpart, Yogi Berra, agreed. He said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." I'm going to ignore their cautions and make one very specific forecast. In the world that we are creating very quickly, we're going to see more and more things that look like science fiction, and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs. Our cars are very quickly going to start driving themselves, which means we're going to need fewer truck drivers. We're going to hook Siri up to Watson and use that to automate a lot of the work that's currently done by customer service reps and troubleshooters and diagnosers, and we're already taking R2D2, painting him orange, and putting him to work carrying shelves around warehouses, which means we need a lot fewer people to be walking up and down those aisles. Now, for about 200 years, people have been saying exactly what I'm telling you — the age of technological unemployment is at hand — starting with the Luddites smashing looms in Britain just about two centuries ago, and they have been wrong. Our economies in the developed world have coasted along on something pretty close to full employment. Which brings up a critical question: Why is this time different, if it really is? The reason it's different is that, just in the past few years, our machines have started demonstrating skills they have never, ever had before: understanding, speaking, hearing, seeing, answering, writing, and they're still acquiring new skills. For example, mobile humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive, but the research arm of the Defense Department just launched a competition to have them do things like this, and if the track record is any guide, this competition is going to be successful. So when I look around, I think the day is not too far off at all when we're going to have androids doing a lot of the work that we are doing right now. And we're creating a world where there is going to be more and more technology and fewer and fewer jobs. It's a world that Erik Brynjolfsson and I are calling "the new machine age." The thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news. This is the best economic news on the planet these days. Not that there's a lot of competition, right? This is the best economic news we have these days for two main reasons. The first is, technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing recent run that we're on where output goes up over time, while at the same time, prices go down, and volume and quality just continue to explode. Now, some people look at this and talk about shallow materialism, but that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it. This is abundance, which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide. The second reason that the new machine age is such great news is that, once the androids start doing jobs, we don't have to do them anymore, and we get freed up from drudgery and toil. Now, when I talk about this with my friends in Cambridge and Silicon Valley, they say, "Fantastic. No more drudgery, no more toil. This gives us the chance to imagine an entirely different kind of society, a society where the creators and the discoverers and the performers and the innovators come together with their patrons and their financiers to talk about issues, entertain, enlighten, provoke each other." It's a society really, that looks a lot like the TED Conference. And there's actually a huge amount of truth here. We are seeing an amazing flourishing taking place. In a world where it is just about as easy to generate an object as it is to print a document, we have amazing new possibilities. The people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists are now makers, and they're responsible for massive amounts of innovation. And artists who were formerly constrained can now do things that were never, ever possible for them before. So this is a time of great flourishing, and the more I look around, the more convinced I become that this quote, from the physicist Freeman Dyson, is not hyperbole at all. This is just a plain statement of the facts. We are in the middle of an astonishing period. ["Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences." — Freeman Dyson] Which brings up another great question: What could possibly go wrong in this new machine age? Right? Great, hang up, flourish, go home. We're going to face two really thorny sets of challenges as we head deeper into the future that we're creating. The first are economic, and they're really nicely summarized in an apocryphal story about a back-and-forth between Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther, who was the head of the auto workers union. They were touring one of the new modern factories, and Ford playfully turns to Reuther and says, "Hey Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?" And Reuther shoots back, "Hey Henry, how are you going to get them to buy cars?" Reuther's problem in that anecdote is that it is tough to offer your labor to an economy that's full of machines, and we see this very clearly in the statistics. If you look over the past couple decades at the returns to capital — in other words, corporate profits — we see them going up, and we see that they're now at an all-time high. If we look at the returns to labor, in other words total wages paid out in the economy, we see them at an all-time low and heading very quickly in the opposite direction. So this is clearly bad news for Reuther. It looks like it might be great news for Ford, but it's actually not. If you want to sell huge volumes of somewhat expensive goods to people, you really want a large, stable, prosperous middle class. We have had one of those in America for just about the entire postwar period. But the middle class is clearly under huge threat right now. We all know a lot of the statistics, but just to repeat one of them, median income in America has actually gone down over the past 15 years, and we're in danger of getting trapped in some vicious cycle where inequality and polarization continue to go up over time. The societal challenges that come along with that kind of inequality deserve some attention. There are a set of societal challenges that I'm actually not that worried about, and they're captured by images like this. This is not the kind of societal problem that I am concerned about. There is no shortage of dystopian visions about what happens when our machines become self-aware, and they decide to rise up and coordinate attacks against us. I'm going to start worrying about those the day my computer becomes aware of my printer. (Laughter) (Applause) So this is not the set of challenges we really need to worry about. To tell you the kinds of societal challenges that are going to come up in the new machine age, I want to tell a story about two stereotypical American workers. And to make them really stereotypical, let's make them both white guys. And the first one is a college-educated professional, creative type, manager, engineer, doctor, lawyer, that kind of worker. We're going to call him "Ted." He's at the top of the American middle class. His counterpart is not college-educated and works as a laborer, works as a clerk, does low-level white collar or blue collar work in the economy. We're going to call that guy "Bill." And if you go back about 50 years, Bill and Ted were leading remarkably similar lives. For example, in 1960 they were both very likely to have full-time jobs, working at least 40 hours a week. But as the social researcher Charles Murray has documented, as we started to automate the economy, and 1960 is just about when computers started to be used by businesses, as we started to progressively inject technology and automation and digital stuff into the economy, the fortunes of Bill and Ted diverged a lot. Over this time frame, Ted has continued to hold a full-time job. Bill hasn't. In many cases, Bill has left the economy entirely, and Ted very rarely has. Over time, Ted's marriage has stayed quite happy. Bill's hasn't. And Ted's kids have grown up in a two-parent home, while Bill's absolutely have not over time. Other ways that Bill is dropping out of society? He's decreased his voting in presidential elections, and he's started to go to prison a lot more often. So I cannot tell a happy story about these social trends, and they don't show any signs of reversing themselves. They're also true no matter which ethnic group or demographic group we look at, and they're actually getting so severe that they're in danger of overwhelming even the amazing progress we made with the Civil Rights Movement. And what my friends in Silicon Valley and Cambridge are overlooking is that they're Ted. They're living these amazingly busy, productive lives, and they've got all the benefits to show from that, while Bill is leading a very different life. They're actually both proof of how right Voltaire was when he talked about the benefits of work, and the fact that it saves us from not one but three great evils. ["Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice and need." — Voltaire] So with these challenges, what do we do about them? The economic playbook is surprisingly clear, surprisingly straightforward, in the short term especially. The robots are not going to take all of our jobs in the next year or two, so the classic Econ 101 playbook is going to work just fine: Encourage entrepreneurship, double down on infrastructure, and make sure we're turning out people from our educational system with the appropriate skills. But over the longer term, if we are moving into an economy that's heavy on technology and light on labor, and we are, then we have to consider some more radical interventions, for example, something like a guaranteed minimum income. Now, that's probably making some folk in this room uncomfortable, because that idea is associated with the extreme left wing and with fairly radical schemes for redistributing wealth. I did a little bit of research on this notion, and it might calm some folk down to know that the idea of a net guaranteed minimum income has been championed by those frothing-at-the-mouth socialists Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman. And if you find yourself worried that something like a guaranteed income is going to stifle our drive to succeed and make us kind of complacent, you might be interested to know that social mobility, one of the things we really pride ourselves on in the United States, is now lower than it is in the northern European countries that have these very generous social safety nets. So the economic playbook is actually pretty straightforward. The societal one is a lot more challenging. I don't know what the playbook is for getting Bill to engage and stay engaged throughout life. I do know that education is a huge part of it. I witnessed this firsthand. I was a Montessori kid for the first few years of my education, and what that education taught me is that the world is an interesting place and my job is to go explore it. The school stopped in third grade, so then I entered the public school system, and it felt like I had been sent to the Gulag. With the benefit of hindsight, I now know the job was to prepare me for life as a clerk or a laborer, but at the time it felt like the job was to kind of bore me into some submission with what was going on around me. We have to do better than this. We cannot keep turning out Bills. So we see some green shoots that things are getting better. We see technology deeply impacting education and engaging people, from our youngest learners up to our oldest ones. We see very prominent business voices telling us we need to rethink some of the things that we've been holding dear for a while. And we see very serious and sustained and data-driven efforts to understand how to intervene in some of the most troubled communities that we have. So the green shoots are out there. I don't want to pretend for a minute that what we have is going to be enough. We're facing very tough challenges. To give just one example, there are about five million Americans who have been unemployed for at least six months. We're not going to fix things for them by sending them back to Montessori. And my biggest worry is that we're creating a world where we're going to have glittering technologies embedded in kind of a shabby society and supported by an economy that generates inequality instead of opportunity. But I actually don't think that's what we're going to do. I think we're going to do something a lot better for one very straightforward reason: The facts are getting out there. The realities of this new machine age and the change in the economy are becoming more widely known. If we wanted to accelerate that process, we could do things like have our best economists and policymakers play "Jeopardy!" against Watson. We could send Congress on an autonomous car road trip. And if we do enough of these kinds of things, the awareness is going to sink in that things are going to be different. And then we're off to the races, because I don't believe for a second that we have forgotten how to solve tough challenges or that we have become too apathetic or hard-hearted to even try. I started my talk with quotes from wordsmiths who were separated by an ocean and a century. Let me end it with words from politicians who were similarly distant. Winston Churchill came to my home of MIT in 1949, and he said, "If we are to bring the broad masses of the people in every land to the table of abundance, it can only be by the tireless improvement of all of our means of technical production." Abraham Lincoln realized there was one other ingredient. He said, "I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to give them the plain facts." So the optimistic note, great point that I want to leave you with is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear, and I have every confidence that we're going to use them to chart a good course into the challenging, abundant economy that we're creating. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The astounding athletic power of quadcopters | {0: "Raffaello D'Andrea explores the possibilities of autonomous technology by collaborating with artists, engineers and entrepreneurs."} | TEDGlobal 2013 | So what does it mean for a machine to be athletic? We will demonstrate the concept of machine athleticism and the research to achieve it with the help of these flying machines called quadrocopters, or quads, for short. Quads have been around for a long time. They're so popular these days because they're mechanically simple. By controlling the speeds of these four propellers, these machines can roll, pitch, yaw, and accelerate along their common orientation. On board are also a battery, a computer, various sensors and wireless radios. Quads are extremely agile, but this agility comes at a cost. They are inherently unstable, and they need some form of automatic feedback control in order to be able to fly. So, how did it just do that? Cameras on the ceiling and a laptop serve as an indoor global positioning system. It's used to locate objects in the space that have these reflective markers on them. This data is then sent to another laptop that is running estimation and control algorithms, which in turn sends commands to the quad, which is also running estimation and control algorithms. The bulk of our research is algorithms. It's the magic that brings these machines to life. So how does one design the algorithms that create a machine athlete? We use something broadly called model-based design. We first capture the physics with a mathematical model of how the machines behave. We then use a branch of mathematics called control theory to analyze these models and also to synthesize algorithms for controlling them. For example, that's how we can make the quad hover. We first captured the dynamics with a set of differential equations. We then manipulate these equations with the help of control theory to create algorithms that stabilize the quad. Let me demonstrate the strength of this approach. Suppose that we want this quad to not only hover but to also balance this pole. With a little bit of practice, it's pretty straightforward for a human being to do this, although we do have the advantage of having two feet on the ground and the use of our very versatile hands. It becomes a little bit more difficult when I only have one foot on the ground and when I don't use my hands. Notice how this pole has a reflective marker on top, which means that it can be located in the space. (Audience) Oh! (Applause) (Applause ends) You can notice that this quad is making fine adjustments to keep the pole balanced. How did we design the algorithms to do this? We added the mathematical model of the pole to that of the quad. Once we have a model of the combined quad-pole system, we can use control theory to create algorithms for controlling it. Here, you see that it's stable, and even if I give it little nudges, it goes back — to the nice, balanced position. We can also augment the model to include where we want the quad to be in space. Using this pointer, made out of reflective markers, I can point to where I want the quad to be in space a fixed distance away from me. (Laughter) The key to these acrobatic maneuvers is algorithms, designed with the help of mathematical models and control theory. Let's tell the quad to come back here and let the pole drop, and I will next demonstrate the importance of understanding physical models and the workings of the physical world. Notice how the quad lost altitude when I put this glass of water on it. Unlike the balancing pole, I did not include the mathematical model of the glass in the system. In fact, the system doesn't even know that the glass is there. Like before, I could use the pointer to tell the quad where I want it to be in space. (Applause) (Applause ends) Okay, you should be asking yourself, why doesn't the water fall out of the glass? Two facts. The first is that gravity acts on all objects in the same way. The second is that the propellers are all pointing in the same direction of the glass, pointing up. You put these two things together, the net result is that all side forces on the glass are small and are mainly dominated by aerodynamic effects, which at these speeds are negligible. And that's why you don't need to model the glass. It naturally doesn't spill, no matter what the quad does. (Audience) Oh! (Applause) (Applause ends) The lesson here is that some high-performance tasks are easier than others, and that understanding the physics of the problem tells you which ones are easy and which ones are hard. In this instance, carrying a glass of water is easy. Balancing a pole is hard. We've all heard stories of athletes performing feats while physically injured. Can a machine also perform with extreme physical damage? Conventional wisdom says that you need at least four fixed motor propeller pairs in order to fly, because there are four degrees of freedom to control: roll, pitch, yaw and acceleration. Hexacopters and octocopters, with six and eight propellers, can provide redundancy, but quadrocopters are much more popular because they have the minimum number of fixed motor propeller pairs: four. Or do they? (Audience) Oh! (Laughter) If we analyze the mathematical model of this machine with only two working propellers, we discover that there's an unconventional way to fly it. We relinquish control of yaw, but roll, pitch and acceleration can still be controlled with algorithms that exploit this new configuration. Mathematical models tell us exactly when and why this is possible. In this instance, this knowledge allows us to design novel machine architectures or to design clever algorithms that gracefully handle damage, just like human athletes do, instead of building machines with redundancy. We can't help but hold our breath when we watch a diver somersaulting into the water, or when a vaulter is twisting in the air, the ground fast approaching. Will the diver be able to pull off a rip entry? Will the vaulter stick the landing? Suppose we want this quad here to perform a triple flip and finish off at the exact same spot that it started. This maneuver is going to happen so quickly that we can't use position feedback to correct the motion during execution. There simply isn't enough time. Instead, what the quad can do is perform the maneuver blindly, observe how it finishes the maneuver, and then use that information to modify its behavior so that the next flip is better. Similar to the diver and the vaulter, it is only through repeated practice that the maneuver can be learned and executed to the highest standard. (Laughter) (Applause) Striking a moving ball is a necessary skill in many sports. How do we make a machine do what an athlete does seemingly without effort? (Laughter) (Applause) (Applause ends) This quad has a racket strapped onto its head with a sweet spot roughly the size of an apple, so not too large. The following calculations are made every 20 milliseconds, or 50 times per second. We first figure out where the ball is going. We then next calculate how the quad should hit the ball so that it flies to where it was thrown from. Third, a trajectory is planned that carries the quad from its current state to the impact point with the ball. Fourth, we only execute 20 milliseconds' worth of that strategy. Twenty milliseconds later, the whole process is repeated until the quad strikes the ball. (Applause) Machines can not only perform dynamic maneuvers on their own, they can do it collectively. These three quads are cooperatively carrying a sky net. (Applause) (Applause ends) They perform an extremely dynamic and collective maneuver to launch the ball back to me. Notice that, at full extension, these quads are vertical. (Applause) In fact, when fully extended, this is roughly five times greater than what a bungee jumper feels at the end of their launch. The algorithms to do this are very similar to what the single quad used to hit the ball back to me. Mathematical models are used to continuously re-plan a cooperative strategy 50 times per second. Everything we have seen so far has been about the machines and their capabilities. What happens when we couple this machine athleticism with that of a human being? What I have in front of me is a commercial gesture sensor mainly used in gaming. It can recognize what my various body parts are doing in real time. Similar to the pointer that I used earlier, we can use this as inputs to the system. We now have a natural way of interacting with the raw athleticism of these quads with my gestures. (Applause) Interaction doesn't have to be virtual. It can be physical. Take this quad, for example. It's trying to stay at a fixed point in space. If I try to move it out of the way, it fights me, and moves back to where it wants to be. We can change this behavior, however. We can use mathematical models to estimate the force that I'm applying to the quad. Once we know this force, we can also change the laws of physics, as far as the quad is concerned, of course. Here, the quad is behaving as if it were in a viscous fluid. We now have an intimate way of interacting with a machine. I will use this new capability to position this camera-carrying quad to the appropriate location for filming the remainder of this demonstration. So we can physically interact with these quads and we can change the laws of physics. Let's have a little bit of fun with this. For what you will see next, these quads will initially behave as if they were on Pluto. As time goes on, gravity will be increased until we're all back on planet Earth, but I assure you we won't get there. Okay, here goes. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) Whew! You're all thinking now, these guys are having way too much fun, and you're probably also asking yourself, why exactly are they building machine athletes? Some conjecture that the role of play in the animal kingdom is to hone skills and develop capabilities. Others think that it has more of a social role, that it's used to bind the group. Similarly, we use the analogy of sports and athleticism to create new algorithms for machines to push them to their limits. What impact will the speed of machines have on our way of life? Like all our past creations and innovations, they may be used to improve the human condition or they may be misused and abused. This is not a technical choice we are faced with; it's a social one. Let's make the right choice, the choice that brings out the best in the future of machines, just like athleticism in sports can bring out the best in us. Let me introduce you to the wizards behind the green curtain. They're the current members of the Flying Machine Arena research team. (Applause) Federico Augugliaro, Dario Brescianini, Markus Hehn, Sergei Lupashin, Mark Muller and Robin Ritz. Look out for them. They're destined for great things. Thank you. (Applause) |
Imagine a European democracy without borders | {0: 'George Papandreou draws on lessons learned from the Greek debt crisis as he helps guide the EU through difficult waters.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | This will not be a speech like any one I have ever given. I will talk to you today about the failure of leadership in global politics and in our globalizing economy. And I won't provide some feel-good, ready-made solutions. But I will in the end urge you to rethink, actually take risks, and get involved in what I see as a global evolution of democracy. Failure of leadership. What is the failure of leadership today? And why is our democracy not working? Well, I believe that the failure of leadership is the fact that we have taken you out of the process. So let me, from my personal experiences, give you an insight, so that you can step back and maybe understand why it is so difficult to cope with the challenges of today and why politics is going down a blind alley. Let's start from the beginning. Let's start from democracy. Well, if you go back to the Ancient Greeks, it was a revelation, a discovery, that we had the potential, together, to be masters of our own fate, to be able to examine, to learn, to imagine, and then to design a better life. And democracy was the political innovation which protected this freedom, because we were liberated from fear so that our minds in fact, whether they be despots or dogmas, could be the protagonists. Democracy was the political innovation that allowed us to limit the power, whether it was of tyrants or of high priests, their natural tendency to maximize power and wealth. Well, I first began to understand this when I was 14 years old. I used to, to try to avoid homework, sneak down to the living room and listen to my parents and their friends debate heatedly. You see, then Greece was under control of a very powerful establishment which was strangling the country, and my father was heading a promising movement to reimagine Greece, to imagine a Greece where freedom reigned and where, maybe, the people, the citizens, could actually rule their own country. I used to join him in many of the campaigns, and you can see me here next to him. I'm the younger one there, to the side. You may not recognize me because I used to part my hair differently there. (Laughter) So in 1967, elections were coming, things were going well in the campaign, the house was electric. We really could sense that there was going to be a major progressive change in Greece. Then one night, military trucks drive up to our house. Soldiers storm the door. They find me up on the top terrace. A sergeant comes up to me with a machine gun, puts it to my head, and says, "Tell me where your father is or I will kill you." My father, hiding nearby, reveals himself, and was summarily taken to prison. Well, we survived, but democracy did not. Seven brutal years of dictatorship which we spent in exile. Now, today, our democracies are again facing a moment of truth. Let me tell you a story. Sunday evening, Brussels, April 2010. I'm sitting with my counterparts in the European Union. I had just been elected prime minister, but I had the unhappy privilege of revealing a truth that our deficit was not 6 percent, as had been officially reported only a few days earlier before the elections by the previous government, but actually 15.6 percent. But the deficit was only the symptom of much deeper problems that Greece was facing, and I had been elected on a mandate, a mission, actually, to tackle these problems, whether it was lack of transparency and accountability in governance, or whether it was a clientelistic state offering favors to the powerful — tax avoidance abetted and aided by a global tax evasion system, politics and media captured by special interests. But despite our electoral mandate, the markets mistrusted us. Our borrowing costs were skyrocketing, and we were facing possible default. So I went to Brussels on a mission to make the case for a united European response, one that would calm the markets and give us the time to make the necessary reforms. But time we didn't get. Picture yourselves around the table in Brussels. Negotiations are difficult, the tensions are high, progress is slow, and then, 10 minutes to 2, a prime minister shouts out, "We have to finish in 10 minutes." I said, "Why? These are important decisions. Let's deliberate a little bit longer." Another prime minister comes in and says, "No, we have to have an agreement now, because in 10 minutes, the markets are opening up in Japan, and there will be havoc in the global economy." We quickly came to a decision in those 10 minutes. This time it was not the military, but the markets, that put a gun to our collective heads. What followed were the most difficult decisions in my life, painful to me, painful to my countrymen, imposing cuts, austerity, often on those not to blame for the crisis. With these sacrifices, Greece did avoid bankruptcy and the eurozone avoided a collapse. Greece, yes, triggered the Euro crisis, and some people blame me for pulling the trigger. But I think today that most would agree that Greece was only a symptom of much deeper structural problems in the eurozone, vulnerabilities in the wider global economic system, vulnerabilities of our democracies. Our democracies are trapped by systems too big to fail, or, more accurately, too big to control. Our democracies are weakened in the global economy with players that can evade laws, evade taxes, evade environmental or labor standards. Our democracies are undermined by the growing inequality and the growing concentration of power and wealth, lobbies, corruption, the speed of the markets or simply the fact that we sometimes fear an impending disaster, have constrained our democracies, and they have constrained our capacity to imagine and actually use the potential, your potential, in finding solutions. Greece, you see, was only a preview of what is in store for us all. I, overly optimistically, had hoped that this crisis was an opportunity for Greece, for Europe, for the world, to make radical democratic transformations in our institutions. Instead, I had a very humbling experience. In Brussels, when we tried desperately again and again to find common solutions, I realized that not one, not one of us, had ever dealt with a similar crisis. But worse, we were trapped by our collective ignorance. We were led by our fears. And our fears led to a blind faith in the orthodoxy of austerity. Instead of reaching out to the common or the collective wisdom in our societies, investing in it to find more creative solutions, we reverted to political posturing. And then we were surprised when every ad hoc new measure didn't bring an end to the crisis, and of course that made it very easy to look for a whipping boy for our collective European failure, and of course that was Greece. Those profligate, idle, ouzo-swilling, Zorba-dancing Greeks, they are the problem. Punish them! Well, a convenient but unfounded stereotype that sometimes hurt even more than austerity itself. But let me warn you, this is not just about Greece. This could be the pattern that leaders follow again and again when we deal with these complex, cross-border problems, whether it's climate change, whether it's migration, whether it's the financial system. That is, abandoning our collective power to imagine our potential, falling victims to our fears, our stereotypes, our dogmas, taking our citizens out of the process rather than building the process around our citizens. And doing so will only test the faith of our citizens, of our peoples, even more in the democratic process. It's no wonder that many political leaders, and I don't exclude myself, have lost the trust of our people. When riot police have to protect parliaments, a scene which is increasingly common around the world, then there's something deeply wrong with our democracies. That's why I called for a referendum to have the Greek people own and decide on the terms of the rescue package. My European counterparts, some of them, at least, said, "You can't do this. There will be havoc in the markets again." I said, "We need to, before we restore confidence in the markets, we need to restore confidence and trust amongst our people." Since leaving office, I have had time to reflect. We have weathered the storm, in Greece and in Europe, but we remain challenged. If politics is the power to imagine and use our potential, well then 60-percent youth unemployment in Greece, and in other countries, certainly is a lack of imagination if not a lack of compassion. So far, we've thrown economics at the problem, actually mostly austerity, and certainly we could have designed alternatives, a different strategy, a green stimulus for green jobs, or mutualized debt, Eurobonds which would support countries in need from market pressures, these would have been much more viable alternatives. Yet I have come to believe that the problem is not so much one of economics as it is one of democracy. So let's try something else. Let's see how we can bring people back to the process. Let's throw democracy at the problem. Again, the Ancient Greeks, with all their shortcomings, believed in the wisdom of the crowd at their best moments. In people we trust. Democracy could not work without the citizens deliberating, debating, taking on public responsibilities for public affairs. Average citizens often were chosen for citizen juries to decide on critical matters of the day. Science, theater, research, philosophy, games of the mind and the body, they were daily exercises. Actually they were an education for participation, for the potential, for growing the potential of our citizens. And those who shunned politics, well, they were idiots. You see, in Ancient Greece, in ancient Athens, that term originated there. "Idiot" comes from the root "idio," oneself. A person who is self-centered, secluded, excluded, someone who doesn't participate or even examine public affairs. And participation took place in the agora, the agora having two meanings, both a marketplace and a place where there was political deliberation. You see, markets and politics then were one, unified, accessible, transparent, because they gave power to the people. They serve the demos, democracy. Above government, above markets was the direct rule of the people. Today we have globalized the markets but we have not globalized our democratic institutions. So our politicians are limited to local politics, while our citizens, even though they see a great potential, are prey to forces beyond their control. So how then do we reunite the two halves of the agora? How do we democratize globalization? And I'm not talking about the necessary reforms of the United Nations or the G20. I'm talking about, how do we secure the space, the demos, the platform of values, so that we can tap into all of your potential? Well, this is exactly where I think Europe fits in. Europe, despite its recent failures, is the world's most successful cross-border peace experiment. So let's see if it can't be an experiment in global democracy, a new kind of democracy. Let's see if we can't design a European agora, not simply for products and services, but for our citizens, where they can work together, deliberate, learn from each other, exchange between art and cultures, where they can come up with creative solutions. Let's imagine that European citizens actually have the power to vote directly for a European president, or citizen juries chosen by lottery which can deliberate on critical and controversial issues, a European-wide referendum where our citizens, as the lawmakers, vote on future treaties. And here's an idea: Why not have the first truly European citizens by giving our immigrants, not Greek or German or Swedish citizenship, but a European citizenship? And make sure we actually empower the unemployed by giving them a voucher scholarship where they can choose to study anywhere in Europe. Where our common identity is democracy, where our education is through participation, and where participation builds trust and solidarity rather than exclusion and xenophobia. Europe of and by the people, a Europe, an experiment in deepening and widening democracy beyond borders. Now, some might accuse me of being naive, putting my faith in the power and the wisdom of the people. Well, after decades in politics, I am also a pragmatist. Believe me, I have been, I am, part of today's political system, and I know things must change. We must revive politics as the power to imagine, reimagine, and redesign for a better world. But I also know that this disruptive force of change won't be driven by the politics of today. The revival of democratic politics will come from you, and I mean all of you. Everyone who participates in this global exchange of ideas, whether it's here in this room or just outside this room or online or locally, where everybody lives, everyone who stands up to injustice and inequality, everybody who stands up to those who preach racism rather than empathy, dogma rather than critical thinking, technocracy rather than democracy, everyone who stands up to the unchecked power, whether it's authoritarian leaders, plutocrats hiding their assets in tax havens, or powerful lobbies protecting the powerful few. It is in their interest that all of us are idiots. Let's not be. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: You seem to describe a political leadership that is kind of unprepared and a prisoner of the whims of the financial markets, and that scene in Brussels that you describe, to me, as a citizen, is terrifying. Help us understand how you felt after the decision. It was not a good decision, clearly, but how do you feel after that, not as the prime minister, but as George? George Papandreou: Well, obviously there were constraints which didn't allow me or others to make the types of decisions we would have wanted, and obviously I had hoped that we would have the time to make the reforms which would have dealt with the deficit rather than trying to cut the deficit which was the symptom of the problem. And that hurt. That hurt because that, first of all, hurt the younger generation, and not only, many of them are demonstrating outside, but I think this is one of our problems. When we face these crises, we have kept the potential, the huge potential of our society out of this process, and we are closing in on ourselves in politics, and I think we need to change that, to really find new participatory ways using the great capabilities that now exist even in technology but not only in technology, the minds that we have, and I think we can find solutions which are much better, but we have to be open. BG: You seem to suggest that the way forward is more Europe, and that is not to be an easy discourse right now in most European countries. It's rather the other way — more closed borders and less cooperation and maybe even stepping out of some of the different parts of the European construction. How do you reconcile that? GP: Well, I think one of the worst things that happened during this crisis is that we started a blame game. And the fundamental idea of Europe is that we can cooperate beyond borders, go beyond our conflicts and work together. And the paradox is that, because we have this blame game, we have less the potential to convince our citizens that we should work together, while now is the time when we really need to bring our powers together. Now, more Europe for me is not simply giving more power to Brussels. It is actually giving more power to the citizens of Europe, that is, really making Europe a project of the people. So that, I think, would be a way to answer some of the fears that we have in our society. BG: George, thank you for coming to TED. GP: Thank you very much.BG: Thank you.(Applause) |
The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot | {0: 'Daniel Suarez concocts thrilling reads from terrifying (and not-so-farfetched) near-future scenarios.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I write fiction sci-fi thrillers, so if I say "killer robots," you'd probably think something like this. But I'm actually not here to talk about fiction. I'm here to talk about very real killer robots, autonomous combat drones. Now, I'm not referring to Predator and Reaper drones, which have a human making targeting decisions. I'm talking about fully autonomous robotic weapons that make lethal decisions about human beings all on their own. There's actually a technical term for this: lethal autonomy. Now, lethally autonomous killer robots would take many forms — flying, driving, or just lying in wait. And actually, they're very quickly becoming a reality. These are two automatic sniper stations currently deployed in the DMZ between North and South Korea. Both of these machines are capable of automatically identifying a human target and firing on it, the one on the left at a distance of over a kilometer. Now, in both cases, there's still a human in the loop to make that lethal firing decision, but it's not a technological requirement. It's a choice. And it's that choice that I want to focus on, because as we migrate lethal decision-making from humans to software, we risk not only taking the humanity out of war, but also changing our social landscape entirely, far from the battlefield. That's because the way humans resolve conflict shapes our social landscape. And this has always been the case, throughout history. For example, these were state-of-the-art weapons systems in 1400 A.D. Now they were both very expensive to build and maintain, but with these you could dominate the populace, and the distribution of political power in feudal society reflected that. Power was focused at the very top. And what changed? Technological innovation. Gunpowder, cannon. And pretty soon, armor and castles were obsolete, and it mattered less who you brought to the battlefield versus how many people you brought to the battlefield. And as armies grew in size, the nation-state arose as a political and logistical requirement of defense. And as leaders had to rely on more of their populace, they began to share power. Representative government began to form. So again, the tools we use to resolve conflict shape our social landscape. Autonomous robotic weapons are such a tool, except that, by requiring very few people to go to war, they risk re-centralizing power into very few hands, possibly reversing a five-century trend toward democracy. Now, I think, knowing this, we can take decisive steps to preserve our democratic institutions, to do what humans do best, which is adapt. But time is a factor. Seventy nations are developing remotely-piloted combat drones of their own, and as you'll see, remotely-piloted combat drones are the precursors to autonomous robotic weapons. That's because once you've deployed remotely-piloted drones, there are three powerful factors pushing decision-making away from humans and on to the weapon platform itself. The first of these is the deluge of video that drones produce. For example, in 2004, the U.S. drone fleet produced a grand total of 71 hours of video surveillance for analysis. By 2011, this had gone up to 300,000 hours, outstripping human ability to review it all, but even that number is about to go up drastically. The Pentagon's Gorgon Stare and Argus programs will put up to 65 independently operated camera eyes on each drone platform, and this would vastly outstrip human ability to review it. And that means visual intelligence software will need to scan it for items of interest. And that means very soon drones will tell humans what to look at, not the other way around. But there's a second powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto machines, and that's electromagnetic jamming, severing the connection between the drone and its operator. Now we saw an example of this in 2011 when an American RQ-170 Sentinel drone got a bit confused over Iran due to a GPS spoofing attack, but any remotely-piloted drone is susceptible to this type of attack, and that means drones will have to shoulder more decision-making. They'll know their mission objective, and they'll react to new circumstances without human guidance. They'll ignore external radio signals and send very few of their own. Which brings us to, really, the third and most powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto weapons: plausible deniability. Now we live in a global economy. High-tech manufacturing is occurring on most continents. Cyber espionage is spiriting away advanced designs to parts unknown, and in that environment, it is very likely that a successful drone design will be knocked off in contract factories, proliferate in the gray market. And in that situation, sifting through the wreckage of a suicide drone attack, it will be very difficult to say who sent that weapon. This raises the very real possibility of anonymous war. This could tilt the geopolitical balance on its head, make it very difficult for a nation to turn its firepower against an attacker, and that could shift the balance in the 21st century away from defense and toward offense. It could make military action a viable option not just for small nations, but criminal organizations, private enterprise, even powerful individuals. It could create a landscape of rival warlords undermining rule of law and civil society. Now if responsibility and transparency are two of the cornerstones of representative government, autonomous robotic weapons could undermine both. Now you might be thinking that citizens of high-tech nations would have the advantage in any robotic war, that citizens of those nations would be less vulnerable, particularly against developing nations. But I think the truth is the exact opposite. I think citizens of high-tech societies are more vulnerable to robotic weapons, and the reason can be summed up in one word: data. Data powers high-tech societies. Cell phone geolocation, telecom metadata, social media, email, text, financial transaction data, transportation data, it's a wealth of real-time data on the movements and social interactions of people. In short, we are more visible to machines than any people in history, and this perfectly suits the targeting needs of autonomous weapons. What you're looking at here is a link analysis map of a social group. Lines indicate social connectedness between individuals. And these types of maps can be automatically generated based on the data trail modern people leave behind. Now it's typically used to market goods and services to targeted demographics, but it's a dual-use technology, because targeting is used in another context. Notice that certain individuals are highlighted. These are the hubs of social networks. These are organizers, opinion-makers, leaders, and these people also can be automatically identified from their communication patterns. Now, if you're a marketer, you might then target them with product samples, try to spread your brand through their social group. But if you're a repressive government searching for political enemies, you might instead remove them, eliminate them, disrupt their social group, and those who remain behind lose social cohesion and organization. Now in a world of cheap, proliferating robotic weapons, borders would offer very little protection to critics of distant governments or trans-national criminal organizations. Popular movements agitating for change could be detected early and their leaders eliminated before their ideas achieve critical mass. And ideas achieving critical mass is what political activism in popular government is all about. Anonymous lethal weapons could make lethal action an easy choice for all sorts of competing interests. And this would put a chill on free speech and popular political action, the very heart of democracy. And this is why we need an international treaty on robotic weapons, and in particular a global ban on the development and deployment of killer robots. Now we already have international treaties on nuclear and biological weapons, and, while imperfect, these have largely worked. But robotic weapons might be every bit as dangerous, because they will almost certainly be used, and they would also be corrosive to our democratic institutions. Now in November 2012 the U.S. Department of Defense issued a directive requiring a human being be present in all lethal decisions. This temporarily effectively banned autonomous weapons in the U.S. military, but that directive needs to be made permanent. And it could set the stage for global action. Because we need an international legal framework for robotic weapons. And we need it now, before there's a devastating attack or a terrorist incident that causes nations of the world to rush to adopt these weapons before thinking through the consequences. Autonomous robotic weapons concentrate too much power in too few hands, and they would imperil democracy itself. Now, don't get me wrong, I think there are tons of great uses for unarmed civilian drones: environmental monitoring, search and rescue, logistics. If we have an international treaty on robotic weapons, how do we gain the benefits of autonomous drones and vehicles while still protecting ourselves against illegal robotic weapons? I think the secret will be transparency. No robot should have an expectation of privacy in a public place. (Applause) Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility. But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles and drones while still preserving our open, civil society. We must ban the deployment and development of killer robots. Let's not succumb to the temptation to automate war. Autocratic governments and criminal organizations undoubtedly will, but let's not join them. Autonomous robotic weapons would concentrate too much power in too few unseen hands, and that would be corrosive to representative government. Let's make sure, for democracies at least, killer robots remain fiction. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
A Saudi woman who dared to drive | {0: 'Manal al-Sharif advocates for women’s right to drive, male guardianship annulment, and family protection in Saudi Arabia.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Allow me to start this talk with a question to everyone. You know that all over the world, people fight for their freedom, fight for their rights. Some battle oppressive governments. Others battle oppressive societies. Which battle do you think is harder? Allow me to try to answer this question in the few coming minutes. Let me take you back two years ago in my life. It was the bedtime of my son, Aboody. He was five at the time. After finishing his bedtime rituals, he looked at me and he asked a question: "Mommy, are we bad people?" I was shocked. "Why do you say such things, Aboody?" Earlier that day, I noticed some bruises on his face when he came from school. He wouldn't tell me what happened. [But now] he was ready to tell. "Two boys hit me today in school. They told me, 'We saw your mom on Facebook. You and your mom should be put in jail.'" I've never been afraid to tell Aboody anything. I've been always a proud woman of my achievements. But those questioning eyes of my son were my moment of truth, when it all came together. You see, I'm a Saudi woman who had been put in jail for driving a car in a country where women are not supposed to drive cars. Just for giving me his car keys, my own brother was detained twice, and he was harassed to the point he had to quit his job as a geologist, leave the country with his wife and two-year-old son. My father had to sit in a Friday sermon listening to the imam condemning women drivers and calling them prostitutes amongst tons of worshippers, some of them our friends and family of my own father. I was faced with an organized defamation campaign in the local media combined with false rumors shared in family gatherings, in the streets and in schools. It all hit me. It came into focus that those kids did not mean to be rude to my son. They were just influenced by the adults around them. And it wasn't about me, and it wasn't a punishment for taking the wheel and driving a few miles. It was a punishment for daring to challenge the society's rules. But my story goes beyond this moment of truth of mine. Allow me to give you a briefing about my story. It was May, 2011, and I was complaining to a work colleague about the harassments I had to face trying to find a ride back home, although I have a car and an international driver's license. As long as I've known, women in Saudi Arabia have been always complaining about the ban, but it's been 20 years since anyone tried to do anything about it, a whole generation ago. He broke the good/bad news in my face. "But there is no law banning you from driving." I looked it up, and he was right. There wasn't an actual law in Saudi Arabia. It was just a custom and traditions that are enshrined in rigid religious fatwas and imposed on women. That realization ignited the idea of June 17, where we encouraged women to take the wheel and go drive. It was a few weeks later, we started receiving all these "Man wolves will rape you if you go and drive." A courageous woman, her name is Najla Hariri, she's a Saudi woman in the city of Jeddah, she drove a car and she announced but she didn't record a video. We needed proof. So I drove. I posted a video on YouTube. And to my surprise, it got hundreds of thousands of views the first day. What happened next, of course? I started receiving threats to be killed, raped, just to stop this campaign. The Saudi authorities remained very quiet. That really creeped us out. I was in the campaign with other Saudi women and even men activists. We wanted to know how the authorities would respond on the actual day, June 17, when women go out and drive. So this time I asked my brother to come with me and drive by a police car. It went fast. We were arrested, signed a pledge not to drive again, released. Arrested again, he was sent to detention for one day, and I was sent to jail. I wasn't sure why I was sent there, because I didn't face any charges in the interrogation. But what I was sure of was my innocence. I didn't break a law, and I kept my abaya — it's a black cloak we wear in Saudi Arabia before we leave the house — and my fellow prisoners kept asking me to take it off, but I was so sure of my innocence, I kept saying, "No, I'm leaving today." Outside the jail, the whole country went into a frenzy, some attacking me badly, and others supportive and even collecting signatures in a petition to be sent to the king to release me. I was released after nine days. June 17 comes. The streets were packed with police cars and religious police cars, but some hundred brave Saudi women broke the ban and drove that day. None were arrested. We broke the taboo. (Applause) So I think by now, everyone knows that we can't drive, or women are not allowed to drive, in Saudi Arabia, but maybe few know why. Allow me to help you answer this question. There was this official study that was presented to the Shura Council — it's the consultative council appointed by the king in Saudi Arabia — and it was done by a local professor, a university professor. He claims it's done based on a UNESCO study. And the study states, the percentage of rape, adultery, illegitimate children, even drug abuse, prostitution in countries where women drive is higher than countries where women don't drive. (Laughter) I know, I was like this, I was shocked. I was like, "We are the last country in the world where women don't drive." So if you look at the map of the world, that only leaves two countries: Saudi Arabia, and the other society is the rest of the world. We started a hashtag on Twitter mocking the study, and it made headlines around the world. [BBC News: 'End of virginity' if women drive, Saudi cleric warns] (Laughter) And only then we realized it's so empowering to mock your oppressor. It strips it away of its strongest weapon: fear. This system is based on ultra-conservative traditions and customs that deal with women as if they are inferior and they need a guardian to protect them, so they need to take permission from this guardian, whether verbal or written, all their lives. We are minors until the day we die. And it becomes worse when it's enshrined in religious fatwas based on wrong interpretation of the sharia law, or the religious laws. What's worst, when they become codified as laws in the system, and when women themselves believe in their inferiority, and they even fight those who try to question these rules. So for me, it wasn't only about these attacks I had to face. It was about living two totally different perceptions of my personality, of my person — the villain back in my home country, and the hero outside. Just to tell you, two stories happened in the last two years. One of them is when I was in jail. I'm pretty sure when I was in jail, everyone saw titles in the international media something like this during these nine days I was in jail. But in my home country, it was a totally different picture. It was more like this: "Manal al-Sharif faces charges of disturbing public order and inciting women to drive." I know. "Manal al-Sharif withdraws from the campaign." Ah, it's okay. This is my favorite. "Manal al-Sharif breaks down and confesses: 'Foreign forces incited me.'" (Laughter) And it goes on, even trial and flogging me in public. So it's a totally different picture. I was asked last year to give a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum. I was surrounded by this love and the support of people around me, and they looked at me as an inspiration. At the same time, I flew back to my home country, they hated that speech so much. The way they called it: a betrayal to the Saudi country and the Saudi people, and they even started a hashtag called #OsloTraitor on Twitter. Some 10,000 tweets were written in that hashtag, while the opposite hashtag, #OsloHero, there was like a handful of tweets written. They even started a poll. More than 13,000 voters answered this poll: whether they considered me a traitor or not after that speech. Ninety percent said yes, she's a traitor. So it's these two totally different perceptions of my personality. For me, I'm a proud Saudi woman, and I do love my country, and because I love my country, I'm doing this. Because I believe a society will not be free if the women of that society are not free. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. (Applause) Thank you. But you learn lessons from these things that happen to you. I learned to be always there. The first thing, I got out of jail, of course after I took a shower, I went online, I opened my Twitter account and my Facebook page, and I've been always very respectful to those people who are opining to me. I would listen to what they say, and I would never defend myself with words only. I would use actions. When they said I should withdraw from the campaign, I filed the first lawsuit against the general directorate of traffic police for not issuing me a driver's license. There are a lot of people also — very big support, like those 3,000 people who signed the petition to release me. We sent a petition to the Shura Council in favor of lifting the ban on Saudi women, and there were, like, 3,500 citizens who believed in that and they signed that petition. There were people like that, I just showed some examples, who are amazing, who are believing in women's rights in Saudi Arabia, and trying, and they are also facing a lot of hate because of speaking up and voicing their views. Saudi Arabia today is taking small steps toward enhancing women's rights. The Shura Council that's appointed by the king, by royal decree of King Abdullah, last year there were 30 women assigned to that Council, like 20 percent. 20 percent of the Council. (Applause) The same time, finally, that Council, after rejecting our petition four times for women driving, they finally accepted it last February. (Applause) After being sent to jail or sentenced lashing, or sent to a trial, the spokesperson of the traffic police said, we will only issue traffic violation for women drivers. The Grand Mufti, who is the head of the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia, he said, it's not recommended for women to drive. It used to be haram, forbidden, by the previous Grand Mufti. So for me, it's not about only these small steps. It's about women themselves. A friend once asked me, she said, "So when do you think this women driving will happen?" I told her, "Only if women stop asking 'When?' and take action to make it now." So it's not only about the system, it's also about us women to drive our own life, I'd say. So I have no clue, really, how I became an activist. And I don't know how I became one now. But all I know, and all I'm sure of, in the future when someone asks me my story, I will say, "I'm proud to be amongst those women who lifted the ban, fought the ban, and celebrated everyone's freedom." So the question I started my talk with, who do you think is more difficult to face, oppressive governments or oppressive societies? I hope you find clues to answer that from my speech. Thank you, everyone. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How we can predict the next financial crisis | {0: 'Didier Sornette studies whether it is possible to anticipate big changes or predict crises in complex systems.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Once upon a time we lived in an economy of financial growth and prosperity. This was called the Great Moderation, the misguided belief by most economists, policymakers and central banks that we have transformed into a new world of never-ending growth and prosperity. This was seen by robust and steady GDP growth, by low and controlled inflation, by low unemployment, and controlled and low financial volatility. But the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008, the great crash, broke this illusion. A few hundred billion dollars of losses in the financial sector cascaded into five trillion dollars of losses in world GDP and almost $30 trillion losses in the global stock market. So the understanding of this Great Recession was that this was completely surprising, this came out of the blue, this was like the wrath of the gods. There was no responsibility. So, as a reflection of this, we started the Financial Crisis Observatory. We had the goal to diagnose in real time financial bubbles and identify in advance their critical time. What is the underpinning, scientifically, of this financial observatory? We developed a theory called "dragon-kings." Dragon-kings represent extreme events which are of a class of their own. They are special. They are outliers. They are generated by specific mechanisms that may make them predictable, perhaps controllable. Consider the financial price time series, a given stock, your perfect stock, or a global index. You have these up-and-downs. A very good measure of the risk of this financial market is the peaks-to-valleys that represent a worst case scenario when you bought at the top and sold at the bottom. You can look at the statistics, the frequency of the occurrence of peak-to-valleys of different sizes, which is represented in this graph. Now, interestingly, 99 percent of the peak-to-valleys of different amplitudes can be represented by a universal power law represented by this red line here. More interestingly, there are outliers, there are exceptions which are above this red line, occur 100 times more frequently, at least, than the extrapolation would predict them to occur based on the calibration of the 99 percent remaining peak-to-valleys. They are due to trenchant dependancies such that a loss is followed by a loss which is followed by a loss which is followed by a loss. These kinds of dependencies are largely missed by standard risk management tools, which ignore them and see lizards when they should see dragon-kings. The root mechanism of a dragon-king is a slow maturation towards instability, which is the bubble, and the climax of the bubble is often the crash. This is similar to the slow heating of water in this test tube reaching the boiling point, where the instability of the water occurs and you have the phase transition to vapor. And this process, which is absolutely non-linear — cannot be predicted by standard techniques — is the reflection of a collective emergent behavior which is fundamentally endogenous. So the cause of the crash, the cause of the crisis has to be found in an inner instability of the system, and any tiny perturbation will make this instability occur. Now, some of you may have come to the mind that is this not related to the black swan concept you have heard about frequently? Remember, black swan is this rare bird that you see once and suddenly shattered your belief that all swans should be white, so it has captured the idea of unpredictability, unknowability, that the extreme events are fundamentally unknowable. Nothing can be further from the dragon-king concept I propose, which is exactly the opposite, that most extreme events are actually knowable and predictable. So we can be empowered and take responsibility and make predictions about them. So let's have my dragon-king burn this black swan concept. (Laughter) There are many early warning signals that are predicted by this theory. Let me just focus on one of them: the super-exponential growth with positive feedback. What does it mean? Imagine you have an investment that returns the first year five percent, the second year 10 percent, the third year 20 percent, the next year 40 percent. Is that not marvelous? This is a super-exponential growth. A standard exponential growth corresponds to a constant growth rate, let's say, of 10 percent The point is that, many times during bubbles, there are positive feedbacks which can be of many times, such that previous growths enhance, push forward, increase the next growth through this kind of super-exponential growth, which is very trenchant, not sustainable. And the key idea is that the mathematical solution of this class of models exhibit finite-time singularities, which means that there is a critical time where the system will break, will change regime. It may be a crash. It may be just a plateau, something else. And the key idea is that the critical time, the information about the critical time is contained in the early development of this super-exponential growth. We have applied this theory early on, that was our first success, to the diagnostic of the rupture of key elements on the iron rocket. Using acoustic emission, you know, this little noise that you hear a structure emit, sing to you when they are stressed, and reveal the damage going on, there's a collective phenomenon of positive feedback, the more damage gives the more damage, so you can actually predict, within, of course, a probability band, when the rupture will occur. So this is now so successful that it is used in the initial phase of [unclear] the flight. Perhaps more surprisingly, the same type of theory applies to biology and medicine, parturition, the act of giving birth, epileptic seizures. From seven months of pregnancy, a mother starts to feel episodic precursory contractions of the uterus that are the sign of these maturations toward the instability, giving birth to the baby, the dragon-king. So if you measure the precursor signal, you can actually identify pre- and post-maturity problems in advance. Epileptic seizures also come in a large variety of size, and when the brain goes to a super-critical state, you have dragon-kings which have a degree of predictability and this can help the patient to deal with this illness. We have applied this theory to many systems, landslides, glacier collapse, even to the dynamics of prediction of success: blockbusters, YouTube videos, movies, and so on. But perhaps the most important application is for finance, and this theory illuminates, I believe, the deep reason for the financial crisis that we have gone through. This is rooted in 30 years of history of bubbles, starting in 1980, with the global bubble crashing in 1987, followed by many other bubbles. The biggest one was the "new economy" Internet bubble in 2000, crashing in 2000, the real estate bubbles in many countries, financial derivative bubbles everywhere, stock market bubbles also everywhere, commodity and all bubbles, debt and credit bubbles — bubbles, bubbles, bubbles. We had a global bubble. This is a measure of global overvaluation of all markets, expressing what I call an illusion of a perpetual money machine that suddenly broke in 2007. The problem is that we see the same process, in particular through quantitative easing, of a thinking of a perpetual money machine nowadays to tackle the crisis since 2008 in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan. This has very important implications to understand the failure of quantitative easing as well as austerity measures as long as we don't attack the core, the structural cause of this perpetual money machine thinking. Now, these are big claims. Why would you believe me? Well, perhaps because, in the last 15 years we have come out of our ivory tower, and started to publish ex ante — and I stress the term ex ante, it means "in advance" — before the crash confirmed the existence of the bubble or the financial excesses. These are a few of the major bubbles that we have lived through in recent history. Again, many interesting stories for each of them. Let me tell you just one or two stories that deal with massive bubbles. We all know the Chinese miracle. This is the expression of the stock market of a massive bubble, a factor of three, 300 percent in just a few years. In September 2007, I was invited as a keynote speaker of a macro hedge fund management conference, and I showed to the conference a prediction that by the end of 2007, this bubble would change regime. There might be a crash. Certainly not sustainable. Now, how do you believe the very smart, very motivated, very informed macro hedge fund managers reacted to this prediction? You know, they had made billions just surfing this bubble until now. They told me, "Didier, yeah, the market might be overvalued, but you forget something. There is the Beijing Olympic Games coming in August 2008, and it's very clear that the Chinese government is controlling the economy and doing what it takes to also avoid any wave and control the stock market." Three weeks after my presentation, the markets lost 20 percent and went through a phase of volatility, upheaval, and a total market loss of 70 percent until the end of the year. So how can we be so collectively wrong by misreading or ignoring the science of the fact that when an instability has developed, and the system is ripe, any perturbation makes it essentially impossible to control? The Chinese market collapsed, but it rebounded. In 2009, we also identified that this new bubble, a smaller one, was unsustainable, so we published again a prediction, in advance, stating that by August 2009, the market will correct, will not continue on this track. Our critics, reading the prediction, said, "No, it's not possible. The Chinese government is there. They have learned their lesson. They will control. They want to benefit from the growth." Perhaps these critics have not learned their lesson previously. So the crisis did occur. The market corrected. The same critics then said, "Ah, yes, but you published your prediction. You influenced the market. It was not a prediction." Maybe I am very powerful then. Now, this is interesting. It shows that it's essentially impossible until now to develop a science of economics because we are sentient beings who anticipate and there is a problem of self-fulfilling prophesies. So we invented a new way of doing science. We created the Financial Bubble Experiment. The idea is the following. We monitor the markets. We identify excesses, bubbles. We do our work. We write a report in which we put our prediction of the critical time. We don't release the report. It's kept secret. But with modern encrypting techniques, we have a hash, we publish a public key, and six months later, we release the report, and there is authentication. And all this is done on an international archive so that we cannot be accused of just releasing the successes. Let me tease you with a very recent analysis. 17th of May, 2013, just two weeks ago, we identified that the U.S. stock market was on an unsustainable path and we released this on our website on the 21st of May that there will be a change of regime. The next day, the market started to change regime, course. This is not a crash. This is just the third or fourth act of a massive bubble in the making. Scaling up the discussion at the size of the planet, we see the same thing. Wherever we look, it's observable: in the biosphere, in the atmosphere, in the ocean, showing these super-exponential trajectories characterizing an unsustainable path and announcing a phase transition. This diagram on the right shows a very beautiful compilation of studies suggesting indeed that there is a nonlinear — possibility for a nonlinear transition just in the next few decades. So there are bubbles everywhere. From one side, this is exciting for me, as a professor who chases bubbles and slays dragons, as the media has sometimes called me. But can we really slay the dragons? Very recently, with collaborators, we studied a dynamical system where you see the dragon-king as these big loops and we were able to apply tiny perturbations at the right times that removed, when control is on, these dragons. "Gouverner, c'est prévoir." Governing is the art of planning and predicting. But is it not the case that this is probably one of the biggest gaps of mankind, which has the responsibility to steer our societies and our planet toward sustainability in the face of growing challenges and crises? But the dragon-king theory gives hope. We learn that most systems have pockets of predictability. It is possible to develop advance diagnostics of crises so that we can be prepared, we can take measures, we can take responsibility, and so that never again will extremes and crises like the Great Recession or the European crisis take us by surprise. Thank you. (Applause) |
Meet BRCK, Internet access built for Africa | {0: 'Juliana Rotich is the co-founder of Ushahidi, open-source software for collecting and mapping information -- and of iHub, a collective tech space in Nairobi, Kenya. She is a TED Senior Fellow.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Living in Africa is to be on the edge, metaphorically, and quite literally when you think about connectivity before 2008. Though many human intellectual and technological leaps had happened in Europe and the rest of the world, but Africa was sort of cut off. And that changed, first with ships when we had the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and also the Industrial Revolution. And now we've got the digital revolution. These revolutions have not been evenly distributed across continents and nations. Never have been. Now, this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect Africa to the rest of the world. What I find amazing is that Africa is transcending its geography problem. Africa is connecting to the rest of the world and within itself. The connectivity situation has improved greatly, but some barriers remain. It is with this context that Ushahidi came to be. In 2008, one of the problems that we faced was lack of information flow. There was a media blackout in 2008, when there was post-election violence in Kenya. It was a very tragic time. It was a very difficult time. So we came together and we created software called Ushahidi. And Ushahidi means "testimony" or "witness" in Swahili. I'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators. This is David and Erik. I call them brothers from another mother. Clearly I have a German mother somewhere. And we worked together first with building and growing Ushahidi. And the idea of the software was to gather information from SMS, email and web, and put a map so that you could see what was happening where, and you could visualize that data. And after that initial prototype, we set out to make free and open-source software so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did. All the while, we also wanted to give back to the local tech community that helped us grow Ushahidi and supported us in those early days. And that's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi, an actual physical space where we could collaborate, and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya. We did that with the support of different organizations like the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network. And we were able to grow this software footprint, and a few years later it became very useful software, and we were quite humbled when it was used in Haiti where citizens could indicate where they are and what their needs were, and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis and the tsunami in Japan. Now, this year the Internet turns 20, and Ushahidi turned five. Ushahidi is not only the software that we made. It is the team, and it's also the community that uses this technology in ways that we could not foresee. We did not imagine that there would be this many maps around the world. There are crisis maps, election maps, corruption maps, and even environmental monitoring crowd maps. We are humbled that this has roots in Kenya and that it has some use to people around the world trying to figure out the different issues that they're dealing with. There is more that we're doing to explore this idea of collective intelligence, that I, as a citizen, if I share the information with whatever device that I have, could inform you about what is going on, and that if you do the same, we can have a bigger picture of what's going on. I moved back to Kenya in 2011. Erik moved in 2010. Very different reality. I used to live in Chicago where there was abundant Internet access. I had never had to deal with a blackout. And in Kenya, it's a very different reality, and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress and the digital revolution is the electricity problem. The day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this can be, let's just say very annoying. Blackouts are not fun. Imagine sitting down to start working, and all of a sudden the power goes out, your Internet connection goes down with it, so you have to figure out, okay, now, where's the modem, how do I switch back? And then, guess what? You have to deal with it again. Now, this is the reality of Kenya, where we live now, and other parts of Africa. The other problem that we're facing is that communication costs are also still a challenge. It costs me five Kenyan shillings, or .06 USD to call the U.S., Canada or China. Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria? Thirty Kenyan shillings. That's six times the cost to connect within Africa. And also, when traveling within Africa, you've got different settings for different mobile providers. This is the reality that we deal with. So we've got a joke in Ushahidi where we say, "If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere." [Most use technology to define the function. We use function to drive the technology.] What if we could overcome the problem of unreliable Internet and electricity and reduce the cost of connection? Could we leverage the cloud? We've built a crowd map, we've built Ushahidi. Could we leverage these technologies to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country? So we looked at the modem, an important part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and asked ourselves why the modems that we are using right now are built for a different context, where you've got ubiquitous internet, you've got ubiquitous electricity, yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury. We wanted to redesign the modem for the developing world, for our context, and for our reality. What if we could have connectivity with less friction? This is the BRCK. It acts as a backup to the Internet so that, when the power goes out, it fails over and connects to the nearest GSM network. Mobile connectivity in Africa is pervasive. It's actually everywhere. Most towns at least have a 3G connection. So why don't we leverage that? And that's why we built this. The other reason that we built this is when electricity goes down, this has eight hours of battery left, so you can continue working, you can continue being productive, and let's just say you are less stressed. And for rural areas, it can be the primary means of connection. The software sensibility at Ushahidi is still at play when we wondered how can we use the cloud to be more intelligent so that you can analyze the different networks, and whenever you switch on the backup, you pick on the fastest network, so we'll have multi-SIM capability so that you can put multiple SIMs, and if one network is faster, that's the one you hop on, and if the up time on that is not very good, then you hop onto the next one. The idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere. With load balancing, this can be possible. The other interesting thing for us — we like sensors — is this idea that you could have an on-ramp for the Internet of things. Imagine a weather station that can be attached to this. It's built in a modular way so that you can also attach a satellite module so that you could have Internet connectivity even in very remote areas. Out of adversity can come innovation, and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers in Kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure? And for us, we begin with solving the problem in our own backyard in Kenya. It is not without challenge. Our team has basically been mules carrying components from the U.S. to Kenya. We've had very interesting conversations with customs border agents. "What are you carrying?" And the local financing is not part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects. So we put it on Kickstarter, and I'm happy to say that, through the support of many people, not only here but online, the BRCK has been Kickstarted, and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins. I will close by saying that, if we solve this for the local market, it could be impactful not only for the coders in Nairobi but also for small business owners who need reliable connectivity, and it can reduce the cost of connecting, and hopefully collaboration within African countries. The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy are connectivity and entrepreneurship. The BRCK is our part to keep Africans connected, and to help them drive the global digital revolution. Thank you. (Applause) |
The family I lost in North Korea. And the family I gained. | {0: 'Joseph Kim escaped alone from North Korea at the age of 16, first to China and then to the United States.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I was born and raised in North Korea. Although my family constantly struggled against poverty, I was always loved and cared for first, because I was the only son and the youngest of two in the family. But then the great famine began in 1994. I was four years old. My sister and I would go searching for firewood starting at 5 in the morning and come back after midnight. I would wander the streets searching for food, and I remember seeing a small child tied to a mother's back eating chips, and wanting to steal them from him. Hunger is humiliation. Hunger is hopelessness. For a hungry child, politics and freedom are not even thought of. On my ninth birthday, my parents couldn't give me any food to eat. But even as a child, I could feel the heaviness in their hearts. Over a million North Koreans died of starvation in that time, and in 2003, when I was 13 years old, my father became one of them. I saw my father wither away and die. In the same year, my mother disappeared one day, and then my sister told me that she was going to China to earn money, but that she would return with money and food soon. Since we had never been separated, and I thought we would be together forever, I didn't even give her a hug when she left. It was the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life. But again, I didn't know it was going to be a long goodbye. I have not seen my mom or my sister since then. Suddenly, I became an orphan and homeless. My daily life became very hard, but very simple. My goal was to find a dusty piece of bread in the trash. But that is no way to survive. I started to realize, begging would not be the solution. So I started to steal from food carts in illegal markets. Sometimes, I found small jobs in exchange for food. Once, I even spent two months in the winter working in a coal mine, 33 meters underground without any protection for up to 16 hours a day. I was not uncommon. Many other orphans survived this way, or worse. When I could not fall asleep from bitter cold or hunger pains, I hoped that, the next morning, my sister would come back to wake me up with my favorite food. That hope kept me alive. I don't mean big, grand hope. I mean the kind of hope that made me believe that the next trash can had bread, even though it usually didn't. But if I didn't believe it, I wouldn't even try, and then I would die. Hope kept me alive. Every day, I told myself, no matter how hard things got, still I must live. After three years of waiting for my sister's return, I decided to go to China to look for her myself. I realized I couldn't survive much longer this way. I knew the journey would be risky, but I would be risking my life either way. I could die of starvation like my father in North Korea, or at least I could try for a better life by escaping to China. I had learned that many people tried to cross the border to China in the nighttime to avoid being seen. North Korean border guards often shoot and kill people trying to cross the border without permission. Chinese soldiers will catch and send back North Koreans, where they face severe punishment. I decided to cross during the day, first because I was still a kid and scared of the dark, second because I knew I was already taking a risk, and since not many people tried to cross during the day, I thought I might be able to cross without being seen by anyone. I made it to China on February 15, 2006. I was 16 years old. I thought things in China would be easier, since there was more food. I thought more people would help me. But it was harder than living in North Korea, because I was not free. I was always worried about being caught and sent back. By a miracle, some months later, I met someone who was running an underground shelter for North Koreans, and was allowed to live there and eat regular meals for the first time in many years. Later that year, an activist helped me escape China and go to the United States as a refugee. I went to America without knowing a word of English, yet my social worker told me that I had to go to high school. Even in North Korea, I was an F student. (Laughter) And I barely finished elementary school. And I remember I fought in school more than once a day. Textbooks and the library were not my playground. My father tried very hard to motivate me into studying, but it didn't work. At one point, my father gave up on me. He said, "You're not my son anymore." I was only 11 or 12, but it hurt me deeply. But nevertheless, my level of motivation still didn't change before he died. So in America, it was kind of ridiculous that they said I should go to high school. I didn't even go to middle school. I decided to go, just because they told me to, without trying much. But one day, I came home and my foster mother had made chicken wings for dinner. And during dinner, I wanted to have one more wing, but I realized there were not enough for everyone, so I decided against it. When I looked down at my plate, I saw the last chicken wing, that my foster father had given me his. I was so happy. I looked at him sitting next to me. He just looked back at me very warmly, but said no words. Suddenly I remembered my biological father. My foster father's small act of love reminded me of my father, who would love to share his food with me when he was hungry, even if he was starving. I felt so suffocated that I had so much food in America, yet my father died of starvation. My only wish that night was to cook a meal for him, and that night I also thought of what else I could do to honor him. And my answer was to promise to myself that I would study hard and get the best education in America to honor his sacrifice. I took school seriously, and for the first time ever in my life, I received an academic award for excellence, and made dean's list from the first semester in high school. (Applause) That chicken wing changed my life. (Laughter) Hope is personal. Hope is something that no one can give to you. You have to choose to believe in hope. You have to make it yourself. In North Korea, I made it myself. Hope brought me to America. But in America, I didn't know what to do, because I had this overwhelming freedom. My foster father at that dinner gave me a direction, and he motivated me and gave me a purpose to live in America. I did not come here by myself. I had hope, but hope by itself is not enough. Many people helped me along the way to get here. North Koreans are fighting hard to survive. They have to force themselves to survive, have hope to survive, but they cannot make it without help. This is my message to you. Have hope for yourself, but also help each other. Life can be hard for everyone, wherever you live. My foster father didn't intend to change my life. In the same way, you may also change someone's life with even the smallest act of love. A piece of bread can satisfy your hunger, and having the hope will bring you bread to keep you alive. But I confidently believe that your act of love and caring can also save another Joseph's life and change thousands of other Josephs who are still having hope to survive. Thank you. (Applause) Adrian Hong: Joseph, thank you for sharing that very personal and special story with us. I know you haven't seen your sister for, you said, it was almost exactly a decade, and in the off chance that she may be able to see this, we wanted to give you an opportunity to send her a message. Joseph Kim: In Korean? AH: You can do English, then Korean as well. (Laughter) JK: Okay, I'm not going to make it any longer in Korean because I don't think I can make it without tearing up. Nuna, it has been already 10 years that I haven’t seen you. I just wanted to say that I miss you, and I love you, and please come back to me and stay alive. And I — oh, gosh. I still haven't given up my hope to see you. I will live my life happily and study hard until I see you, and I promise I will not cry again. (Laughter) Yes, I'm just looking forward to seeing you, and if you can't find me, I will also look for you, and I hope to see you one day. And can I also make a small message to my mom? AH: Sure, please. JK: I haven't spent much time with you, but I know that you still love me, and you probably still pray for me and think about me. I just wanted to say thank you for letting me be in this world. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to reduce poverty? Fix homes | {0: 'Paul Pholeros was a director of Healthabitat, a longstanding effort to improve the health of indigenous people by improving their living housing.'} | TEDxSydney | The idea of eliminating poverty is a great goal. I don't think anyone in this room would disagree. What worries me is when politicians with money and charismatic rock stars — (Laughter) use the words, " ... it all just sounds so, so simple." Now, I've got no bucket of money today and I've got no policy to release, and I certainly haven't got a guitar. I'll leave that to others. But I do have an idea, and that idea is called Housing for Health. Housing for Health works with poor people. It works in the places where they live, and the work is done to improve their health. Over the last 28 years, this tough, grinding, dirty work has been done by literally thousands of people around Australia and, more recently, overseas, and their work has proven that focused design can improve even the poorest living environments. It can improve health and it can play a part in reducing, if not eliminating, poverty. I'm going to start where the story began — 1985, in Central Australia. A man called Yami Lester, an Aboriginal man, was running a health service. Eighty percent of what walked in the door, in terms of illness, was infectious disease — third world, developing world infectious disease, caused by a poor living environment. Yami assembled a team in Alice Springs. He got a medical doctor. He got an environmental health guy. And he hand-selected a team of local Aboriginal people to work on this project. Yami told us at that first meeting, "There's no money," — always a good start — " ... no money, you have six months, and I want you to start on a project —" which, in his language, he called "Uwankara Palyanku Kanyintjaku," which, translated, is "a plan to stop people getting sick" — a profound brief. That was our task. First step, the medical doctor went away for about six months. And he worked on what were to become these nine health goals — what were we aiming at? After six months of work, he came to my office and presented me with those nine words on a piece of paper. [The 9 Healthy Living Practices: Washing, clothes, wastewater, nutrition, crowding, animals, dust, temperature, injury] I was very unimpressed. Big ideas need big words, and preferably a lot of them. This didn't fit the bill. What I didn't see and what you can't see was that he'd assembled thousands of pages of local, national and international health research that filled out the picture as to why these were the health targets. The pictures that came a bit later had a very simple reason. The Aboriginal people who were our bosses and the senior people were most commonly illiterate, so the story had to be told in pictures of what these goals were. We worked with the community, not telling them what was going to happen in a language they didn't understand. So we had the goals and each one of these goals — and I won't go through them all — puts at the center the person and their health issue, and it then connects them to the bits of the physical environment that are actually needed to keep their health good. And the highest priority, you see on the screen, is washing people once a day, particularly children. And I hope most of you are thinking, "What? That sounds simple." Now, I'm going to ask you all a very personal question. This morning before you came, who could have had a wash using a shower? I'm not going to ask if you had a shower, because I'm too polite. That's it. (Laughter) All right, I think it's fair to say most people here could have had a shower this morning. I'm going to ask you to do some more work. I want you all to select one of the houses of the 25 houses you see on the screen. I want you to select one of them and note the position of that house and keep that in your head. Have you all got a house? I'm going to ask you to live there for a few months, so make sure you've got it right. It's in the northwest of Western Australia, very pleasant place. OK. Let's see if your shower in that house is working. I hear some "Aw!" and I hear some "Ah!" If you get a green tick, your shower's working. You and your kids are fine. If you get a red cross, well, I've looked carefully around the room and it's not going to make much difference to this crew. Why? Because you're all too old. I know that's going to come as a shock to some of you, but you are. And before you get offended and leave, I've got to say that being too old, in this case, means that pretty much everyone in the room, I think, is over five years of age. We're really concerned with kids naught to five. And why? Washing is the antidote to the sort of bugs, the common infectious diseases of the eyes, the ears, the chest and the skin that, if they occur in the first five years of life, permanently damage those organs. They leave a lifelong remnant. That means that by the age of five, you can't see as well for the rest of your life. You can't hear as well for the rest of your life. You can't breathe as well. You've lost a third of your lung capacity by the age of five. And even skin infection, which we originally thought wasn't that big a problem, mild skin infections naught to five give you a greatly increased chance of renal failure, needing dialysis at age 40. This is a big deal, so the ticks and crosses on the screen are actually critical for young kids. Those ticks and crosses represent the 7,800 houses we've looked at nationally around Australia, the same proportion. What you see on the screen — 35 percent of those not-so-famous houses lived in by 50,000 indigenous people — 35 percent had a working shower. Ten percent of those same 7,800 houses had safe electrical systems. And 58 percent of those houses had a working toilet. These are by a simple, standard test. In the case of the shower: does it have hot and cold water, two taps that work, a shower rose to get water onto your head or onto your body, and a drain that takes the water away? Not well-designed, not beautiful, not elegant — just that they function. And the same tests for the electrical system and the toilets. Housing for Health projects aren't about measuring failure — they're actually about improving houses. We start on day one of every project. We've learned — we don't make promises, we don't do reports. We arrive in the morning with tools, tons of equipment, trades, and we train up a local team on the first day to start work. By the evening of the first day, a few houses in that community are better than when we started in the morning. That work continues for six to 12 months, until all the houses are improved and we've spent our budget of 7,500 dollars total per house. That's our average budget. At the end of six months to a year, we test every house again. It's very easy to spend money. It's very difficult to improve the function of all those parts of the house. And for a whole house, the nine healthy living practices, we test, check and fix 250 items in every house. And these are the results we can get with our 7,500 dollars. We can get showers up to 86 percent working, we can get electrical systems up to 77 percent working and we can get 90 percent of toilets working in those 7,500 houses. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) The teams do a great job, and that's their work. I think there's an obvious question that I hope you're thinking about. Why do we have to do this work? Why are the houses in such poor condition? Seventy percent of the work we do is due to lack of routine maintenance — the sort of things that happen in all our houses. Things wear out, should have been done by state government or local government, simply not done, the house doesn't work. Twenty-one percent of the things we fix are due to faulty construction — literally things that are built upside down and back to front. They don't work, we have to fix them. And if you've lived in Australia in the last 30 years, the final cause — you will have heard always that indigenous people trash houses. It's one of the almost rock-solid pieces of evidence which I've never seen evidence for, that's always reeled out as "That's the problem with indigenous housing." Well, nine percent of what we spend is damage, misuse or abuse of any sort. We argue strongly that the people living in the house are simply not the problem. And we'll go a lot further than that; the people living in the house are actually a major part of the solution. Seventy-five percent of our national team in Australia — over 75 at the minute — are actually local, indigenous people from the communities we work in. They do all aspects of the work. (Applause) In 2010, for example, there were 831, all over Australia, and the Torres Strait Islands, all states, working to improve the houses where they and their families live, and that's an important thing. Our work's always had a focus on health. That's the key. The developing world bug, trachoma, causes blindness. It's a developing-world illness, and yet, the picture you see behind is in an Aboriginal community in the late 1990s, where 95 percent of school-aged kids had active trachoma in their eyes, doing damage. OK, what do we do? Well, first thing we do, we get showers working. Why? Because that flushes the bug out. We put washing facilities in the school as well, so kids can wash their faces many times during the day. We wash the bug out. Second, the eye doctors tell us that dust scours the eye and lets the bug in quick. So what do we do? We call up the doctor of dust, and there is such a person. He was loaned to us by a mining company. He controls dust on mining company sites. And he came out and, within a day, it worked out that most dust in this community was within a meter of the ground, the wind-driven dust — so he suggested making mounds to catch the dust before it went into the house area and affected the eyes of kids. So we used dirt to stop dust. We did it. He provided us dust monitors. We tested and we reduced the dust. Then we wanted to get rid of the bug generally. So how do we do that? Well, we call up the doctor of flies — and, yes, there is a doctor of flies. As our Aboriginal mate said, "You white fellows ought to get out more." (Laughter) And the doctor of flies very quickly determined that there was one fly that carried the bug. He could give school kids in this community the beautiful fly trap you see above in the slide. They could trap the flies, send them to him in Perth. When the bug was in the gut, he'd send back by return post some dung beetles. The dung beetles ate the camel dung, the flies died through lack of food, and trachoma dropped. And over the year, trachoma dropped radically in this place, and stayed low. We changed the environment, not just treated the eyes. And finally, you get a good eye. All these small health gains and small pieces of the puzzle make a big difference. The New South Wales Department of Health, that radical organization, did an independent trial over three years to look at 10 years of the work we've been doing in these sorts of projects in New South Wales. And they found a 40 percent reduction in hospital admissions for the illnesses that you could attribute to the poor environment — a 40 percent reduction. (Applause) Just to show that the principles we've used in Australia can be used in other places, I'm just going to go to one other place, and that's Nepal. And what a beautiful place to go. We were asked by a small village of 600 people to go in and make toilets where none existed. Health was poor. We went in with no grand plan, no grand promises of a great program, just the offer to build two toilets for two families. It was during the design of the first toilet that I went for lunch, invited by the family into their main room of the house. It was choking with smoke. People were cooking on their only fuel source, green timber. The smoke coming off that timber is choking, and in an enclosed house, you simply can't breathe. Later we found the leading cause of illness and death in this particular region is through respiratory failure. So all of a sudden, we had two problems. We were there originally to look at toilets and get human waste off the ground, that's fine. But all of a sudden now there was a second problem: How do we actually get the smoke down? So two problems, and design should be about more than one thing. Solution: Take human waste, take animal waste, put it into a chamber, out of that, extract biogas, methane gas. The gas gives three to four hours cooking a day — clean, smokeless and free for the family. (Applause) I put it to you: is this eliminating poverty? And the answer from the Nepali team who's working at the minute would say, don't be ridiculous — we have three million more toilets to build before we can even make a stab at that claim. And I don't pretend anything else. But as we all sit here today, there are now over 100 toilets built in this village and a couple nearby. Well over 1,000 people use those toilets. Yami Lama, he's a young boy. He's got significantly less gut infection because he's now got toilets, and there isn't human waste on the ground. Kanji Maya, she's a mother, and a proud one. She's probably right now cooking lunch for her family on biogas, smokeless fuel. Her lungs have got better, and they'll get better as time increases, because she's not cooking in the same smoke. Surya takes the waste out of the biogas chamber when it's shed the gas, he puts it on his crops. He's trebled his crop income, more food for the family and more money for the family. And finally Bishnu, the leader of the team, has now understood that not only have we built toilets, we've also built a team, and that team is now working in two villages where they're training up the next two villages to keep the work expanding. And that, to me, is the key. (Applause) People are not the problem. We've never found that. The problem: poor living environment, poor housing and the bugs that do people harm. None of those are limited by geography, by skin color or by religion. None of them. The common link between all the work we've had to do is one thing, and that's poverty. Nelson Mandela said, in the mid-2000s, not too far from here, he said that like slavery and apartheid, "Poverty is not natural. It is man-made and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings." I want to end by saying it's been the actions of thousands of ordinary human beings doing — I think — extraordinary work, that have actually improved health, and, maybe only in a small way, reduced poverty. Thank you very much for your time. (Applause) |
Photos from a storm chaser | {0: 'TED Senior Fellow Camille Seaman photographs big ice and big clouds.'} | TED2013 | Everything is interconnected. As a Shinnecock Indian, I was raised to know this. We are a small fishing tribe situated on the southeastern tip of Long Island near the town of Southampton in New York. When I was a little girl, my grandfather took me to sit outside in the sun on a hot summer day. There were no clouds in the sky. And after a while I began to perspire. And he pointed up to the sky, and he said, "Look, do you see that? That's part of you up there. That's your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals." In my continued exploration of subjects in nature that have the ability to illustrate the interconnection of all life, I started storm chasing in 2008 after my daughter said, "Mom, you should do that." And so three days later, driving very fast, I found myself stalking a single type of giant cloud called the super cell, capable of producing grapefruit-size hail and spectacular tornadoes, although only two percent actually do. These clouds can grow so big, up to 50 miles wide and reach up to 65,000 feet into the atmosphere. They can grow so big, blocking all daylight, making it very dark and ominous standing under them. Storm chasing is a very tactile experience. There's a warm, moist wind blowing at your back and the smell of the earth, the wheat, the grass, the charged particles. And then there are the colors in the clouds of hail forming, the greens and the turquoise blues. I've learned to respect the lightning. My hair used to be straight. (Laughter) I'm just kidding. (Laughter) What really excites me about these storms is their movement, the way they swirl and spin and undulate, with their lava lamp-like mammatus clouds. They become lovely monsters. When I'm photographing them, I cannot help but remember my grandfather's lesson. As I stand under them, I see not just a cloud, but understand that what I have the privilege to witness is the same forces, the same process in a small-scale version that helped to create our galaxy, our solar system, our sun and even this very planet. All my relations. Thank you. (Applause) |
The doubt essential to faith | {0: 'Writer, psychologist and former Middle East reporter Lesley Hazleton explores the vast and often terrifying arena in which politics and religion intersect. '} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Writing biography is a strange thing to do. It's a journey into the foreign territory of somebody else's life, a journey, an exploration that can take you places you never dreamed of going and still can't quite believe you've been, especially if, like me, you're an agnostic Jew and the life you've been exploring is that of Muhammad. Five years ago, for instance, I found myself waking each morning in misty Seattle to what I knew was an impossible question: What actually happened one desert night, half the world and almost half of history away? What happened, that is, on the night in the year 610 when Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran on a mountain just outside Mecca? This is the core mystical moment of Islam, and as such, of course, it defies empirical analysis. Yet the question wouldn't let go of me. I was fully aware that for someone as secular as I am, just asking it could be seen as pure chutzpah. (Laughter) And I plead guilty as charged, because all exploration, physical or intellectual, is inevitably in some sense an act of transgression, of crossing boundaries. Still, some boundaries are larger than others. So a human encountering the divine, as Muslims believe Muhammad did, to the rationalist, this is a matter not of fact but of wishful fiction, and like all of us, I like to think of myself as rational. Which might be why when I looked at the earliest accounts we have of that night, what struck me even more than what happened was what did not happen. Muhammad did not come floating off the mountain as though walking on air. He did not run down shouting, "Hallelujah!" and "Bless the Lord!" He did not radiate light and joy. There were no choirs of angels, no music of the spheres, no elation, no ecstasy, no golden aura surrounding him, no sense of an absolute, fore-ordained role as the messenger of God. That is, he did none of the things that might make it easy to cry foul, to put down the whole story as a pious fable. Quite the contrary. In his own reported words, he was convinced at first that what had happened couldn't have been real. At best, he thought, it had to have been a hallucination — a trick of the eye or the ear, perhaps, or his own mind working against him. At worst, possession — that he'd been seized by an evil jinn, a spirit out to deceive him, even to crush the life out of him. In fact, he was so sure that he could only be majnun, possessed by a jinn, that when he found himself still alive, his first impulse was to finish the job himself, to leap off the highest cliff and escape the terror of what he'd experienced by putting an end to all experience. So the man who fled down the mountain that night trembled not with joy but with a stark, primordial fear. He was overwhelmed not with conviction, but by doubt. And that panicked disorientation, that sundering of everything familiar, that daunting awareness of something beyond human comprehension, can only be called a terrible awe. This might be somewhat difficult to grasp now that we use the word "awesome" to describe a new app or a viral video. With the exception perhaps of a massive earthquake, we're protected from real awe. We close the doors and hunker down, convinced that we're in control, or, at least, hoping for control. We do our best to ignore the fact that we don't always have it, and that not everything can be explained. Yet whether you're a rationalist or a mystic, whether you think the words Muhammad heard that night came from inside himself or from outside, what's clear is that he did experience them, and that he did so with a force that would shatter his sense of himself and his world and transform this otherwise modest man into a radical advocate for social and economic justice. Fear was the only sane response, the only human response. Too human for some, like conservative Muslim theologians who maintain that the account of his wanting to kill himself shouldn't even be mentioned, despite the fact that it's in the earliest Islamic biographies. They insist that he never doubted for even a single moment, let alone despaired. Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection. Yet what, exactly, is imperfect about doubt? As I read those early accounts, I realized it was precisely Muhammad's doubt that brought him alive for me, that allowed me to begin to see him in full, to accord him the integrity of reality. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense that he doubted, because doubt is essential to faith. If this seems a startling idea at first, consider that doubt, as Graham Greene once put it, is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You're certain that you possess the Truth — inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T — and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism. It has to be one of the multiple ironies of history that a favorite expletive of Muslim fundamentalists is the same one once used by the Christian fundamentalists known as Crusaders: "infidel," from the Latin for "faithless." Doubly ironic, in this case, because their absolutism is in fact the opposite of faith. In effect, they are the infidels. Like fundamentalists of all religious stripes, they have no questions, only answers. They found the perfect antidote to thought and the ideal refuge of the hard demands of real faith. They don't have to struggle for it like Jacob wrestling through the night with the angel, or like Jesus in his 40 days and nights in the wilderness, or like Muhammad, not only that night on the mountain, but throughout his years as a prophet, with the Koran constantly urging him not to despair, and condemning those who most loudly proclaim that they know everything there is to know and that they and they alone are right. And yet we, the vast and still far too silent majority, have ceded the public arena to this extremist minority. We've allowed Judaism to be claimed by violently messianic West Bank settlers, Christianity by homophobic hypocrites and misogynistic bigots, Islam by suicide bombers. And we've allowed ourselves to be blinded to the fact that no matter whether they claim to be Christians, Jews or Muslims, militant extremists are none of the above. They're a cult all their own, blood brothers steeped in other people's blood. This isn't faith. It's fanaticism, and we have to stop confusing the two. We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers. It's difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand in hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it, and sometimes in conscious defiance of it. And this conscious defiance is why I, as an agnostic, can still have faith. I have faith, for instance, that peace in the Middle East is possible despite the ever-accumulating mass of evidence to the contrary. I'm not convinced of this. I can hardly say I believe it. I can only have faith in it, commit myself, that is, to the idea of it, and I do this precisely because of the temptation to throw up my hands in resignation and retreat into silence. Because despair is self-fulfilling. If we call something impossible, we act in such a way that we make it so. And I, for one, refuse to live that way. In fact, most of us do, whether we're atheist or theist or anywhere in between or beyond, for that matter, what drives us is that, despite our doubts and even because of our doubts, we reject the nihilism of despair. We insist on faith in the future and in each other. Call this naive if you like. Call it impossibly idealistic if you must. But one thing is sure: Call it human. Could Muhammad have so radically changed his world without such faith, without the refusal to cede to the arrogance of closed-minded certainty? I think not. After keeping company with him as a writer for the past five years, I can't see that he'd be anything but utterly outraged at the militant fundamentalists who claim to speak and act in his name in the Middle East and elsewhere today. He'd be appalled at the repression of half the population because of their gender. He'd be torn apart by the bitter divisiveness of sectarianism. He'd call out terrorism for what it is, not only criminal but an obscene travesty of everything he believed in and struggled for. He'd say what the Koran says: Anyone who takes a life takes the life of all humanity. Anyone who saves a life, saves the life of all humanity. And he'd commit himself fully to the hard and thorny process of making peace. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Is the obesity crisis hiding a bigger problem? | {0: 'Both a surgeon and a self-experimenter, Peter Attia hopes to ease the diabetes epidemic by challenging what we think we know and improving the scientific rigor in nutrition and obesity research. '} | TEDMED 2013 | I'll never forget that day back in the spring of 2006. I was a surgical resident at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, taking emergency call. I got paged by the E.R. around 2 in the morning to come and see a woman with a diabetic ulcer on her foot. I can still remember sort of that smell of rotting flesh as I pulled the curtain back to see her. And everybody there agreed this woman was very sick and she needed to be in the hospital. That wasn't being asked. The question that was being asked of me was a different one, which was, did she also need an amputation? Now, looking back on that night, I'd love so desperately to believe that I treated that woman on that night with the same empathy and compassion I'd shown the 27-year-old newlywed who came to the E.R. three nights earlier with lower back pain that turned out to be advanced pancreatic cancer. In her case, I knew there was nothing I could do that was actually going to save her life. The cancer was too advanced. But I was committed to making sure that I could do anything possible to make her stay more comfortable. I brought her a warm blanket and a cup of a coffee. I brought some for her parents. But more importantly, see, I passed no judgment on her, because obviously she had done nothing to bring this on herself. So why was it that, just a few nights later, as I stood in that same E.R. and determined that my diabetic patient did indeed need an amputation, why did I hold her in such bitter contempt? You see, unlike the woman the night before, this woman had type 2 diabetes. She was fat. And we all know that's from eating too much and not exercising enough, right? I mean, how hard can it be? As I looked down at her in the bed, I thought to myself, if you just tried caring even a little bit, you wouldn't be in this situation at this moment with some doctor you've never met about to amputate your foot. Why did I feel justified in judging her? I'd like to say I don't know. But I actually do. You see, in the hubris of my youth, I thought I had her all figured out. She ate too much. She got unlucky. She got diabetes. Case closed. Ironically, at that time in my life, I was also doing cancer research, immune-based therapies for melanoma, to be specific, and in that world I was actually taught to question everything, to challenge all assumptions and hold them to the highest possible scientific standards. Yet when it came to a disease like diabetes that kills Americans eight times more frequently than melanoma, I never once questioned the conventional wisdom. I actually just assumed the pathologic sequence of events was settled science. Three years later, I found out how wrong I was. But this time, I was the patient. Despite exercising three or four hours every single day, and following the food pyramid to the letter, I'd gained a lot of weight and developed something called metabolic syndrome. Some of you may have heard of this. I had become insulin-resistant. You can think of insulin as this master hormone that controls what our body does with the foods we eat, whether we burn it or store it. This is called fuel partitioning in the lingo. Now failure to produce enough insulin is incompatible with life. And insulin resistance, as its name suggests, is when your cells get increasingly resistant to the effect of insulin trying to do its job. Once you're insulin-resistant, you're on your way to getting diabetes, which is what happens when your pancreas can't keep up with the resistance and make enough insulin. Now your blood sugar levels start to rise, and an entire cascade of pathologic events sort of spirals out of control that can lead to heart disease, cancer, even Alzheimer's disease, and amputations, just like that woman a few years earlier. With that scare, I got busy changing my diet radically, adding and subtracting things most of you would find almost assuredly shocking. I did this and lost 40 pounds, weirdly while exercising less. I, as you can see, I guess I'm not overweight anymore. More importantly, I don't have insulin resistance. But most important, I was left with these three burning questions that wouldn't go away: How did this happen to me if I was supposedly doing everything right? If the conventional wisdom about nutrition had failed me, was it possible it was failing someone else? And underlying these questions, I became almost maniacally obsessed in trying to understand the real relationship between obesity and insulin resistance. Now, most researchers believe obesity is the cause of insulin resistance. Logically, then, if you want to treat insulin resistance, you get people to lose weight, right? You treat the obesity. But what if we have it backwards? What if obesity isn't the cause of insulin resistance at all? In fact, what if it's a symptom of a much deeper problem, the tip of a proverbial iceberg? I know it sounds crazy because we're obviously in the midst of an obesity epidemic, but hear me out. What if obesity is a coping mechanism for a far more sinister problem going on underneath the cell? I'm not suggesting that obesity is benign, but what I am suggesting is it may be the lesser of two metabolic evils. You can think of insulin resistance as the reduced capacity of our cells to partition fuel, as I alluded to a moment ago, taking those calories that we take in and burning some appropriately and storing some appropriately. When we become insulin-resistant, the homeostasis in that balance deviates from this state. So now, when insulin says to a cell, I want you to burn more energy than the cell considers safe, the cell, in effect, says, "No thanks, I'd actually rather store this energy." And because fat cells are actually missing most of the complex cellular machinery found in other cells, it's probably the safest place to store it. So for many of us, about 75 million Americans, the appropriate response to insulin resistance may actually be to store it as fat, not the reverse, getting insulin resistance in response to getting fat. This is a really subtle distinction, but the implication could be profound. Consider the following analogy: Think of the bruise you get on your shin when you inadvertently bang your leg into the coffee table. Sure, the bruise hurts like hell, and you almost certainly don't like the discolored look, but we all know the bruise per Se is not the problem. In fact, it's the opposite. It's a healthy response to the trauma, all of those immune cells rushing to the site of the injury to salvage cellular debris and prevent the spread of infection to elsewhere in the body. Now, imagine we thought bruises were the problem, and we evolved a giant medical establishment and a culture around treating bruises: masking creams, painkillers, you name it, all the while ignoring the fact that people are still banging their shins into coffee tables. How much better would we be if we treated the cause — telling people to pay attention when they walk through the living room — rather than the effect? Getting the cause and the effect right makes all the difference in the world. Getting it wrong, and the pharmaceutical industry can still do very well for its shareholders but nothing improves for the people with bruised shins. Cause and effect. So what I'm suggesting is maybe we have the cause and effect wrong on obesity and insulin resistance. Maybe we should be asking ourselves, is it possible that insulin resistance causes weight gain and the diseases associated with obesity, at least in most people? What if being obese is just a metabolic response to something much more threatening, an underlying epidemic, the one we ought to be worried about? Let's look at some suggestive facts. We know that 30 million obese Americans in the United States don't have insulin resistance. And by the way, they don't appear to be at any greater risk of disease than lean people. Conversely, we know that six million lean people in the United States are insulin-resistant, and by the way, they appear to be at even greater risk for those metabolic diseases I mentioned a moment ago than their obese counterparts. Now I don't know why, but it might be because, in their case, their cells haven't actually figured out the right thing to do with that excess energy. So if you can be obese and not have insulin resistance, and you can be lean and have it, this suggests that obesity may just be a proxy for what's going on. So what if we're fighting the wrong war, fighting obesity rather than insulin resistance? Even worse, what if blaming the obese means we're blaming the victims? What if some of our fundamental ideas about obesity are just wrong? Personally, I can't afford the luxury of arrogance anymore, let alone the luxury of certainty. I have my own ideas about what could be at the heart of this, but I'm wide open to others. Now, my hypothesis, because everybody always asks me, is this. If you ask yourself, what's a cell trying to protect itself from when it becomes insulin resistant, the answer probably isn't too much food. It's more likely too much glucose: blood sugar. Now, we know that refined grains and starches elevate your blood sugar in the short run, and there's even reason to believe that sugar may lead to insulin resistance directly. So if you put these physiological processes to work, I'd hypothesize that it might be our increased intake of refined grains, sugars and starches that's driving this epidemic of obesity and diabetes, but through insulin resistance, you see, and not necessarily through just overeating and under-exercising. When I lost my 40 pounds a few years ago, I did it simply by restricting those things, which admittedly suggests I have a bias based on my personal experience. But that doesn't mean my bias is wrong, and most important, all of this can be tested scientifically. But step one is accepting the possibility that our current beliefs about obesity, diabetes and insulin resistance could be wrong and therefore must be tested. I'm betting my career on this. Today, I devote all of my time to working on this problem, and I'll go wherever the science takes me. I've decided that what I can't and won't do anymore is pretend I have the answers when I don't. I've been humbled enough by all I don't know. For the past year, I've been fortunate enough to work on this problem with the most amazing team of diabetes and obesity researchers in the country, and the best part is, just like Abraham Lincoln surrounded himself with a team of rivals, we've done the same thing. We've recruited a team of scientific rivals, the best and brightest who all have different hypotheses for what's at the heart of this epidemic. Some think it's too many calories consumed. Others think it's too much dietary fat. Others think it's too many refined grains and starches. But this team of multi-disciplinary, highly skeptical and exceedingly talented researchers do agree on two things. First, this problem is just simply too important to continue ignoring because we think we know the answer. And two, if we're willing to be wrong, if we're willing to challenge the conventional wisdom with the best experiments science can offer, we can solve this problem. I know it's tempting to want an answer right now, some form of action or policy, some dietary prescription — eat this, not that — but if we want to get it right, we're going to have to do much more rigorous science before we can write that prescription. Briefly, to address this, our research program is focused around three meta-themes, or questions. First, how do the various foods we consume impact our metabolism, hormones and enzymes, and through what nuanced molecular mechanisms? Second, based on these insights, can people make the necessary changes in their diets in a way that's safe and practical to implement? And finally, once we identify what safe and practical changes people can make to their diet, how can we move their behavior in that direction so that it becomes more the default rather than the exception? Just because you know what to do doesn't mean you're always going to do it. Sometimes we have to put cues around people to make it easier, and believe it or not, that can be studied scientifically. I don't know how this journey is going to end, but this much seems clear to me, at least: We can't keep blaming our overweight and diabetic patients like I did. Most of them actually want to do the right thing, but they have to know what that is, and it's got to work. I dream of a day when our patients can shed their excess pounds and cure themselves of insulin resistance, because as medical professionals, we've shed our excess mental baggage and cured ourselves of new idea resistance sufficiently to go back to our original ideals: open minds, the courage to throw out yesterday's ideas when they don't appear to be working, and the understanding that scientific truth isn't final, but constantly evolving. Staying true to that path will be better for our patients and better for science. If obesity is nothing more than a proxy for metabolic illness, what good does it do us to punish those with the proxy? Sometimes I think back to that night in the E.R. seven years ago. I wish I could speak with that woman again. I'd like to tell her how sorry I am. I'd say, as a doctor, I delivered the best clinical care I could, but as a human being, I let you down. You didn't need my judgment and my contempt. You needed my empathy and compassion, and above all else, you needed a doctor who was willing to consider maybe you didn't let the system down. Maybe the system, of which I was a part, was letting you down. If you're watching this now, I hope you can forgive me. (Applause) |
Anatomy of a New Yorker cartoon | {0: 'Bob Mankoff is the cartoon editor of <em>The New Yorker</em>, as well as an accomplished cartoonist in his own right.'} | TEDSalon NY2013 | I'm going to be talking about designing humor, which is sort of an interesting thing, but it goes to some of the discussions about constraints, and how in certain contexts, humor is right, and in other contexts it's wrong. Now, I'm from New York, so it's 100 percent satisfaction here. Actually, that's ridiculous, because when it comes to humor, 75 percent is really absolutely the best you can hope for. Nobody is ever satisfied 100 percent with humor except this woman. (Video) Woman: (Laughs) Bob Mankoff: That's my first wife. (Laughter) That part of the relationship went fine. (Laughter) Now let's look at this cartoon. One of the things I'm pointing out is that cartoons appear within the context of The New Yorker magazine, that lovely Caslon type, and it seems like a fairly benign cartoon within this context. It's making a little bit fun of getting older, and, you know, people might like it. But like I said, you cannot satisfy everyone. You couldn't satisfy this guy. "Another joke on old white males. Ha ha. The wit. It's nice, I'm sure to be young and rude, but some day you'll be old, unless you drop dead as I wish." (Laughter) The New Yorker is rather a sensitive environment, very easy for people to get their nose out of joint. And one of the things that you realize is it's an unusual environment. Here I'm one person talking to you. You're all collective. You all hear each other laugh and know each other laugh. In The New Yorker, it goes out to a wide audience, and when you actually look at that, and nobody knows what anybody else is laughing at, and when you look at that the subjectivity involved in humor is really interesting. Let's look at this cartoon. "Discouraging data on the antidepressant." (Laughter) Indeed, it is discouraging. Now, you would think, well, look, most of you laughed at that. Right? You thought it was funny. In general, that seems like a funny cartoon, but let's look what online survey I did. Generally, about 85 percent of the people liked it. A hundred and nine voted it a 10, the highest. Ten voted it one. But look at the individual responses. "I like animals!!!!!" Look how much they like them. (Laughter) "I don't want to hurt them. That doesn't seem very funny to me." This person rated it a two. "I don't like to see animals suffer — even in cartoons." To people like this, I point out we use anesthetic ink. Other people thought it was funny. That actually is the true nature of the distribution of humor when you don't have the contagion of humor. Humor is a type of entertainment. All entertainment contains a little frisson of danger, something that might happen wrong, and yet we like it when there's protection. That's what a zoo is. It's danger. The tiger is there. The bars protect us. That's sort of fun, right? That's a bad zoo. (Laughter) It's a very politically correct zoo, but it's a bad zoo. But this is a worse one. (Laughter) So in dealing with humor in the context of The New Yorker, you have to see, where is that tiger going to be? Where is the danger going to exist? How are you going to manage it? My job is to look at 1,000 cartoons a week. But The New Yorker only can take 16 or 17 cartoons, and we have 1,000 cartoons. Of course, many, many cartoons must be rejected. Now, we could fit more cartoons in the magazine if we removed the articles. (Laughter) But I feel that would be a huge loss, one I could live with, but still huge. Cartoonists come in through the magazine every week. The average cartoonist who stays with the magazine does 10 or 15 ideas every week. But they mostly are going to be rejected. That's the nature of any creative activity. Many of them fade away. Some of them stay. Matt Diffee is one of them. Here's one of his cartoons. (Laughter) Drew Dernavich. "Accounting night at the improv." "Now is the part of the show when we ask the audience to shout out some random numbers." Paul Noth. "He's all right. I just wish he were a little more pro-Israel." (Laughter) Now I know all about rejection, because when I quit — actually, I was booted out of — psychology school and decided to become a cartoonist, a natural segue, from 1974 to 1977 I submitted 2,000 cartoons to The New Yorker, and got 2,000 cartoons rejected by The New Yorker. At a certain point, this rejection slip, in 1977 — [We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it.] — magically changed to this. [Hey! You sold one. No shit! You really sold a cartoon to the fucking New Yorker magazine.] (Laughter) Now of course that's not what happened, but that's the emotional truth. And of course, that is not New Yorker humor. What is New Yorker humor? Well, after 1977, I broke into The New Yorker and started selling cartoons. Finally, in 1980, I received the revered New Yorker contract, which I blurred out parts because it's none of your business. From 1980. "Dear Mr. Mankoff, confirming the agreement there of — " blah blah blah blah — blur — "for any idea drawings." With respect to idea drawings, nowhere in the contract is the word "cartoon" mentioned. The word "idea drawings," and that's the sine qua non of New Yorker cartoons. So what is an idea drawing? An idea drawing is something that requires you to think. Now that's not a cartoon. It requires thinking on the part of the cartoonist and thinking on your part to make it into a cartoon. (Laughter) Here are some, generally you get my cast of cartoon mind. "There is no justice in the world. There is some justice in the world. The world is just." This is What Lemmings Believe. (Laughter) The New Yorker and I, when we made comments, the cartoon carries a certain ambiguity about what it actually is. What is it, the cartoon? Is it really about lemmings? No. It's about us. You know, it's my view basically about religion, that the real conflict and all the fights between religion is who has the best imaginary friend. (Laughter) And this is my most well-known cartoon. "No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?" It's been reprinted thousands of times, totally ripped off. It's even on thongs, but compressed to "How about never — is never good for you?" Now these look like very different forms of humor but actually they bear a great similarity. In each instance, our expectations are defied. In each instance, the narrative gets switched. There's an incongruity and a contrast. In "No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?" what you have is the syntax of politeness and the message of being rude. That really is how humor works. It's a cognitive synergy where we mash up these two things which don't go together and temporarily in our minds exist. He is both being polite and rude. In here, you have the propriety of The New Yorker and the vulgarity of the language. Basically, that's the way humor works. So I'm a humor analyst, you would say. Now E.B. White said, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Nobody is much interested, and the frog dies. Well, I'm going to kill a few, but there won't be any genocide. But really, it makes me — Let's look at this picture. This is an interesting picture, The Laughing Audience. There are the people, fops up there, but everybody is laughing, everybody is laughing except one guy. This guy. Who is he? He's the critic. He's the critic of humor, and really I'm forced to be in that position, when I'm at The New Yorker, and that's the danger that I will become this guy. Now here's a little video made by Matt Diffee, sort of how they imagine if we really exaggerated that. (Video) Bob Mankoff: "Oooh, no. Ehhh. Oooh. Hmm. Too funny. Normally I would but I'm in a pissy mood. I'll enjoy it on my own. Perhaps. No. Nah. No. Overdrawn. Underdrawn. Drawn just right, still not funny enough. No. No. For God's sake no, a thousand times no. (Music) No. No. No. No. No. [Four hours later] Hey, that's good, yeah, whatcha got there? Office worker: Got a ham and swiss on rye?BM: No. Office worker: Okay. Pastrami on sourdough?BM: No. Office worker: Smoked turkey with bacon?BM: No. Office worker: Falafel?BM: Let me look at it. Eh, no. Office worker: Grilled cheese?BM: No. Office worker: BLT?BM: No. Office worker: Black forest ham and mozzarella with apple mustard?BM: No. Office worker: Green bean salad?BM: No. (Music) No. No. Definitely no. [Several hours after lunch] (Siren) No. Get out of here. (Laughter) That's sort of an exaggeration of what I do. Now, we do reject, many, many, many cartoons, so many that there are many books called "The Rejection Collection." "The Rejection Collection" is not quite New Yorker kind of humor. And you might notice the bum on the sidewalk here who is boozing and his ventriloquist dummy is puking. See, that's probably not going to be New Yorker humor. It's actually put together by Matt Diffee, one of our cartoonists. So I'll give you some examples of rejection collection humor. "I'm thinking about having a child." (Laughter) There you have an interesting — the guilty laugh, the laugh against your better judgment. (Laughter) "Ass-head. Please help." (Laughter) Now, in fact, within a context of this book, which says, "Cartoons you never saw and never will see in The New Yorker," this humor is perfect. I'm going to explain why. There's a concept about humor about it being a benign violation. In other words, for something to be funny, we've got to think it's both wrong and also okay at the same time. If we think it's completely wrong, we say, "That's not funny." And if it's completely okay, what's the joke? Okay? And so, this benign, that's true of "No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?" It's rude. The world really shouldn't be that way. Within that context, we feel it's okay. So within this context, "Asshead. Please help" is a benign violation. Within the context of The New Yorker magazine ... "T-Cell Army: Can the body's immune response help treat cancer?" Oh, goodness. You're reading about this smart stuff, this intelligent dissection of the immune system. You glance over at this, and it says, "Asshead. Please help"? God. So there the violation is malign. It doesn't work. There is no such thing as funny in and of itself. Everything will be within the context and our expectations. One way to look at it is this. It's sort of called a meta-motivational theory about how we look, a theory about motivation and the mood we're in and how the mood we're in determines the things we like or dislike. When we're in a playful mood, we want excitement. We want high arousal. We feel excited then. If we're in a purposeful mood, that makes us anxious. "The Rejection Collection" is absolutely in this field. You want to be stimulated. You want to be aroused. You want to be transgressed. It's like this, like an amusement park. Voice: Here we go. (Screams) He laughs. He is both in danger and safe, incredibly aroused. There's no joke. No joke needed. If you arouse people enough and get them stimulated enough, they will laugh at very, very little. This is another cartoon from "The Rejection Collection." "Too snug?" That's a cartoon about terrorism. The New Yorker occupies a very different space. It's a space that is playful in its own way, and also purposeful, and in that space, the cartoons are different. Now I'm going to show you cartoons The New Yorker did right after 9/11, a very, very sensitive area when humor could be used. How would The New Yorker attack it? It would not be with a guy with a bomb saying, "Too snug?" Or there was another cartoon I didn't show because actually I thought maybe people would be offended. The great Sam Gross cartoon, this happened after the Muhammad controversy where it's Muhammad in heaven, the suicide bomber is all in little pieces, and he's saying to the suicide bomber, "You'll get the virgins when we find your penis." (Laughter) Better left undrawn. The first week we did no cartoons. That was a black hole for humor, and correctly so. It's not always appropriate every time. But the next week, this was the first cartoon. "I thought I'd never laugh again. Then I saw your jacket." It basically was about, if we were alive, we were going to laugh. We were going to breathe. We were going to exist. Here's another one. "I figure if I don't have that third martini, then the terrorists win." These cartoons are not about them. They're about us. The humor reflects back on us. The easiest thing to do with humor, and it's perfectly legitimate, is a friend makes fun of an enemy. It's called dispositional humor. It's 95 percent of the humor. It's not our humor. Here's another cartoon. "I wouldn't mind living in a fundamentalist Islamic state." (Laughter) Humor does need a target. But interestingly, in The New Yorker, the target is us. The target is the readership and the people who do it. The humor is self-reflective and makes us think about our assumptions. Look at this cartoon by Roz Chast, the guy reading the obituary. "Two years younger than you, 12 years older than you, three years your junior, your age on the dot, exactly your age." That is a deeply profound cartoon. And so The New Yorker is also trying to, in some way, make cartoons say something besides funny and something about us. Here's another one. "I started my vegetarianism for health reasons, Then it became a moral choice, and now it's just to annoy people." (Laughter) "Excuse me — I think there's something wrong with this in a tiny way that no one other than me would ever be able to pinpoint." So it focuses on our obsessions, our narcissism, our foils and our foibles, really not someone else's. The New Yorker demands some cognitive work on your part, and what it demands is what Arthur Koestler, who wrote "The Act of Creation" about the relationship between humor, art and science, is what's called bisociation. You have to bring together ideas from different frames of reference, and you have to do it quickly to understand the cartoon. If the different frames of reference don't come together in about .5 seconds, it's not funny, but I think they will for you here. Different frames of reference. "You slept with her, didn't you?" (Laughter) "Lassie! Get help!!" (Laughter) It's called French Army Knife. (Laughter) And this is Einstein in bed. "To you it was fast." (Laughter) Now there are some cartoons that are puzzling. Like, this cartoon would puzzle many people. How many people know what this cartoon means? The dog is signaling he wants to go for a walk. This is the signal for a catcher to walk the dog. That's why we run a feature in the cartoon issue every year called "I Don't Get It: The New Yorker Cartoon I.Q. Test." (Laughter) The other thing The New Yorker plays around with is incongruity, and incongruity, I've shown you, is sort of the basis of humor. Something that's completely normal or logical isn't going to be funny. But the way incongruity works is, observational humor is humor within the realm of reality. "My boss is always telling me what to do." Okay? That could happen. It's humor within the realm of reality. Here, cowboy to a cow: "Very impressive. I'd like to find 5,000 more like you." We understand that. It's absurd. But we're putting the two together. Here, in the nonsense range: "Damn it, Hopkins, didn't you get yesterday's memo?" Now that's a little puzzling, right? It doesn't quite come together. In general, people who enjoy more nonsense, enjoy more abstract art, they tend to be liberal, less conservative, that type of stuff. But for us, and for me, helping design the humor, it doesn't make any sense to compare one to the other. It's sort of a smorgasbord that's made all interesting. So I want to sum all this up with a caption to a cartoon, and I think this sums up the whole thing, really, about The New Yorker cartoons. "It sort of makes you stop and think, doesn't it." (Laughter) And now, when you look at New Yorker cartoons, I'd like you to stop and think a little bit more about them. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How we'll resurrect the gastric brooding frog, the Tasmanian tiger | {0: 'Paleontologist Michael Archer is working to bring back his favorite extinct animal: the Tasmanian tiger.'} | TEDxDeExtinction | I do want to test this question we're all interested in: Does extinction have to be forever? I'm focused on two projects I want to tell you about. One is the Thylacine Project. The other one is the Lazarus Project, and that's focused on the gastric-brooding frog. And it would be a fair question to ask, why have we focused on these two animals? Well, point number one, each of them represents a unique family of its own. We've lost a whole family. That's a big chunk of the global genome gone. I'd like it back. The second reason is that we killed these things. In the case of the thylacine, regrettably, we shot every one that we saw. We slaughtered them. In the case of the gastric-brooding frog, we may have "fungicided" it to death. There's a dreadful fungus that's moving through the world that's called the chytrid fungus, and it's nailing frogs all over the world. We think that's probably what got this frog, and humans are spreading this fungus. And this introduces a very important ethical point, and I think you will have heard this many times when this topic comes up. What I think is important is that, if it's clear that we exterminated these species, then I think we not only have a moral obligation to see what we can do about it, but I think we've got a moral imperative to try to do something, if we can. OK. Let me talk to you about the Lazarus Project. It's a frog. And you think, frog. Yeah, but this was not just any frog. Unlike a normal frog, which lays its eggs in the water and goes away and wishes its froglets well, this frog swallowed its fertilized eggs, swallowed them into the stomach, where it should be having food, didn't digest the eggs, and turned its stomach into a uterus. In the stomach, the eggs went on to develop into tadpoles, and in the stomach, the tadpoles went on to develop into frogs, and they grew in the stomach until eventually the poor old frog was at risk of bursting apart. It has a little cough and a hiccup, and out comes sprays of little frogs. Now, when biologists saw this, they were agog. They thought, this is incredible. No animal, let alone a frog, has been known to do this, to change one organ in the body into another. And you can imagine the medical world went nuts over this as well. If we could understand how that frog is managing the way its tummy works, is there information here that we need to understand or could usefully use to help ourselves? Now, I'm not suggesting we want to raise our babies in our stomach, but I am suggesting it's possible we might want to manage gastric secretion in the gut. And just as everybody got excited about it, bang! It was extinct. I called up my friend, Professor Mike Tyler in the University of Adelaide. He was the last person who had this frog, a colony of these things, in his lab. And I said, "Mike, by any chance —" This was 30 or 40 years ago. "By any chance had you kept any frozen tissue of this frog?" And he thought about it, and he went to his deep freezer, minus 20 degrees centigrade, and he poured through everything in the freezer, and there in the bottom was a jar and it contained tissues of these frogs. This was very exciting, but there was no reason why we should expect that this would work, because this tissue had not had any antifreeze put in it, cryoprotectants, to look after it when it was frozen. And normally, when water freezes, as you know, it expands, and the same thing happens in a cell. If you freeze tissues, the water expands, damages or bursts the cell walls. Well, we looked at the tissue under the microscope. It actually didn't look bad. The cell walls looked intact. So we thought, let's give it a go. What we did is something called somatic cell nuclear transplantation. We took the eggs of a related species, a living frog, and we inactivated the nucleus of the egg. We used ultraviolet radiation to do that. And then we took the dead nucleus from the dead tissue of the extinct frog and we inserted those nuclei into that egg. Now, by rights, this is kind of like a cloning project, like what produced Dolly, but it's actually very different, because Dolly was live sheep into live sheep cells. That was a miracle, but it was workable. What we're trying to do is take a dead nucleus from an extinct species and put it into a completely different species and expect that to work. Well, we had no real reason to expect it would, and we tried hundreds and hundreds of these. And just last February, the last time we did these trials, I saw a miracle starting to happen. What we found was most of these eggs didn't work, but then suddenly, one of them began to divide. That was so exciting. And then the egg divided again. And then again. And pretty soon, we had early-stage embryos with hundreds of cells forming those. We even DNA-tested some of these cells, and the DNA of the extinct frog is in those cells. So we're very excited. This is not a tadpole. It's not a frog. But it's a long way along the journey to producing, or bringing back, an extinct species. And this is news. We haven't announced this publicly before. We're excited. We've got to get past this point. We now want this ball of cells to start to gastrulate, to turn in so that it will produce the other tissues. It'll go on and produce a tadpole and then a frog. Watch this space. I think we're going to have this frog hopping glad to be back in the world again. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) We haven't done it yet, but keep the applause ready. The second project I want to talk to you about is the Thylacine Project. The thylacine looks a bit, to most people, like a dog, or maybe like a tiger, because it has stripes. But it's not related to any of those. It's a marsupial. It raised its young in a pouch, like a koala or a kangaroo would do, and it has a long history, a long, fascinating history, that goes back 25 million years. But it's also a tragic history. The first one that we see occurs in the ancient rain forests of Australia about 25 million years ago, and the National Geographic Society is helping us to explore these fossil deposits. This is Riversleigh. In those fossil rocks are some amazing animals. We found marsupial lions. We found carnivorous kangaroos. It's not what you usually think about as a kangaroo, but these are meat-eating kangaroos. We found the biggest bird in the world, bigger than that thing that was in Madagascar, and it too was a flesh eater. It was a giant, weird duck. And crocodiles were not behaving at that time either. You think of crocodiles as doing their ugly thing, sitting in a pool of water. These crocodiles were actually out on the land and they were even climbing trees and jumping on prey on the ground. We had, in Australia, drop crocs. They really do exist. (Laughter) But what they were dropping on was not only other weird animals but also thylacines. There were five different kinds of thylacines in those ancient forests, and they ranged from great big ones to middle-sized ones to one that was about the size of a chihuahua. Paris Hilton would have been able to carry one of these things around in a little handbag, until a drop croc landed on her. At any rate, it was a fascinating place, but unfortunately, Australia didn't stay this way. Climate change has affected the world for a long period of time, and gradually, the forests disappeared, the country began to dry out, and the number of kinds of thylacines began to decline, until by five million years ago, only one left. By 10,000 years ago, they had disappeared from New Guinea, and unfortunately, by 4,000 years ago, somebodies, we don't know who this was, introduced dingoes — this is a very archaic kind of a dog — into Australia. And as you can see, dingoes are very similar in their body form to thylacines. That similarity meant they probably competed. They were eating the same kinds of foods. It's even possible that aborigines were keeping some of these dingoes as pets, and therefore they may have had an advantage in the battle for survival. All we know is, soon after the dingoes were brought in, thylacines were extinct in the Australian mainland, and after that they only survived in Tasmania. Then, unfortunately, the next sad part of the thylacine story is that Europeans arrived in 1788, and they brought with them the things they valued, and that included sheep. They took one look at the thylacine in Tasmania, and they thought, hang on, this is not going to work. That guy is going to eat all our sheep. That was not what happened, actually. Wild dogs did eat a few of the sheep, but the thylacine got a bad rap. But immediately, the government said, that's it, let's get rid of them, and they paid people to slaughter every one that they saw. By the early 1930s, 3,000 to 4,000 thylacines had been murdered. It was a disaster, and they were about to hit the wall. Have a look at this bit of film footage. It makes me very sad because, while it's a fascinating animal, and it's amazing to think that we had the technology to film it before it actually plunged off that cliff of extinction, we didn't, unfortunately, at this same time, have a molecule of concern about the welfare for this species. These are photos of the last surviving thylacine, Benjamin, who was in the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. To add insult to injury, having swept this species nearly off the table, this animal, when it died of neglect — The keepers didn't let it into the hutch on a cold night in Hobart. It died of exposure, and in the morning, when they found the body of Benjamin, they still cared so little for this animal that they threw the body in the dump. Does it have to stay this way? In 1990, I was in the Australian Museum. I was fascinated by thylacines. I've always been obsessed with these animals. And I was studying skulls, trying to figure out their relationships to other sorts of animals, and I saw this jar, and here, in the jar, was a little girl thylacine pup, perhaps six months old. The guy who had found it and killed the mother had pickled the pup, and they pickled it in alcohol. I'm a paleontologist, but I still knew alcohol was a DNA preservative. But this was 1990, and I asked my geneticist friends, couldn't we think about going into this pup and extracting DNA, if it's there, and then somewhere down the line in the future, we'll use this DNA to bring the thylacine back? The geneticists laughed. But this was six years before Dolly. Cloning was science fiction. It had not happened. But then suddenly cloning did happen. And I thought, when I became director of the Australian Museum, I'm going to give this a go. I put a team together. We went into that pup to see what was in it, and we did find thylacine DNA. It was a eureka moment. We were very excited. Unfortunately, we also found a lot of human DNA. Every old curator who'd been in that museum had seen this wonderful specimen, put their hand in the jar, pulled it out and thought, "Wow, look at that," plop, dropped it back in the jar, contaminating this specimen. And that was a worry. If the goal here was to get the DNA out and use the DNA down the track to try to bring a thylacine back, what we didn't want happening when the information was shoved into the machine and the wheel turned around and the lights flashed, was to have a wizened old horrible curator pop out the other end of the machine. It would've kept the curator very happy, but it wasn't going to keep us happy. So we went back to these specimens and we started digging around, and particularly, we looked into the teeth of skulls, hard parts where humans had not been able to get their fingers, and we found much better quality DNA. We found nuclear mitochondrial genes. It's there. So we got it. OK. What could we do with this stuff? Well, George Church, in his book, "Regenesis," has mentioned many of the techniques that are rapidly advancing to work with fragmented DNA. We would hope that we'll be able to get that DNA back into a viable form, and then, much like we've done with the Lazarus Project, get that stuff into an egg of a host species. It has to be a different species. What could it be? Why couldn't it be a Tasmanian devil? They're related, distantly, to thylacines. And then the Tasmanian devil is going to pop a thylacine out the south end. Critics of this project say, hang on. Thylacine, Tasmanian devil? That's going to hurt. No, it's not. These are marsupials. They give birth to babies that are the size of a jelly bean. That Tasmanian devil's not even going to know it gave birth. It is, shortly, going to think it's got the ugliest Tasmanian devil baby in the world, so maybe it'll need some help to keep it going. Andrew Pask and his colleagues have demonstrated this might not be a waste of time. And it's sort of in the future, we haven't got there yet, but it's the kind of thing we want to think about. They took some of this same pickled thylacine DNA and they spliced it into a mouse genome, but they put a tag on it so that anything that this thylacine DNA produced would appear blue-green in the mouse baby. In other words, if thylacine tissues were being produced by the thylacine DNA, it would be able to be recognized. When the baby popped up, it was filled with blue-green tissues. And that tells us if we can get that genome back together, get it into a live cell, it's going to produce thylacine stuff. Is this a risk? You've taken the bits of one animal and you've mixed them into the cell of a different kind of an animal. Are we going to get a Frankenstein? Some kind of weird hybrid chimera? And the answer is no. If the only nuclear DNA that goes into this hybrid cell is thylacine DNA, that's the only thing that can pop out the other end of the devil. OK, if we can do this, could we put it back? This is a key question for everybody. Does it have to stay in a laboratory, or could we put it back where it belongs? Could we put it back in the throne of the king of beasts in Tasmania, restore that ecosystem? Or has Tasmania changed so much that that's no longer possible? I've been to Tasmania. I've been to many of the areas where the thylacines were common. I've even spoken to people, like Peter Carter here, who when I spoke to him, was 90 years old, but in 1926, this man and his father and his brother caught thylacines. They trapped them. And when I spoke to this man, I was looking in his eyes and thinking, "Behind those eyes is a brain that has memories of what thylacines feel like, what they smelled like, what they sounded like." He led them around on a rope. He has personal experiences that I would give my left leg to have in my head. We'd all love to have this sort of thing happen. Anyway, I asked Peter, by any chance, could he take us back to where he caught those thylacines. My interest was in whether the environment had changed. He thought hard. It was nearly 80 years before this that he'd been at this hut. At any rate, he led us down this bush track, and there, right where he remembered, was the hut, and tears came into his eyes. He looked at the hut. We went inside. There were the wooden boards on the sides of the hut where he and his father and his brother had slept at night. And he told me, as it all was flooding back in memories. He said, "I remember the thylacines going around the hut wondering what was inside," and he said they made sounds like "Yip! Yip! Yip!" All of these are parts of his life and what he remembers. And the key question for me was to ask Peter, has it changed? And he said no. The southern beech forests surrounded his hut just like it was when he was there in 1926. The grasslands were sweeping away. That's classic thylacine habitat. And the animals in those areas were the same that were there when the thylacine was around. So could we put it back? Yes. Is that all we would do? And this is an interesting question. Sometimes you might be able to put it back, but is that the safest way to make sure it never goes extinct again? And I don't think so. I think gradually, as we see species all around the world, it's kind of a mantra that wildlife is increasingly not safe in the wild. We'd love to think it is, but we know it isn't. We need other parallel strategies coming online. And this one interests me. Some of the thylacines that were being turned in to zoos, sanctuaries, even at the museums, had collar marks on the neck. They were being kept as pets, and we know a lot of bush tales and memories of people who had them as pets, and they say they were wonderful, friendly. This particular one came in out of the forest to lick this boy and curled up around the fireplace to go to sleep. A wild animal. And I'd like to ask the question. We need to think about this. If it had not been illegal to keep these thylacines as pets then, would the thylacine be extinct now? And I'm positive it wouldn't. We need to think about this in today's world. Could it be that getting animals close to us so that we value them, maybe they won't go extinct? And this is such a critical issue for us because if we don't do that, we're going to watch more of these animals plunge off the precipice. As far as I'm concerned, this is why we're trying to do these kinds of de-extinction projects. We are trying to restore that balance of nature that we have upset. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we will rely on robots | {0: 'Rodney Brooks builds robots based on biological principles of movement and reasoning. The goal: a robot who can figure things out.'} | TED2013 | Well, Arthur C. Clarke, a famous science fiction writer from the 1950s, said that, "We overestimate technology in the short term, and we underestimate it in the long term." And I think that's some of the fear that we see about jobs disappearing from artificial intelligence and robots. That we're overestimating the technology in the short term. But I am worried whether we're going to get the technology we need in the long term. Because the demographics are really going to leave us with lots of jobs that need doing and that we, our society, is going to have to be built on the shoulders of steel of robots in the future. So I'm scared we won't have enough robots. But fear of losing jobs to technology has been around for a long time. Back in 1957, there was a Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn movie. So you know how it ended up, Spencer Tracy brought a computer, a mainframe computer of 1957, in to help the librarians. The librarians in the company would do things like answer for the executives, "What are the names of Santa's reindeer?" And they would look that up. And this mainframe computer was going to help them with that job. Well of course a mainframe computer in 1957 wasn't much use for that job. The librarians were afraid their jobs were going to disappear. But that's not what happened in fact. The number of jobs for librarians increased for a long time after 1957. It wasn't until the Internet came into play, the web came into play and search engines came into play that the need for librarians went down. And I think everyone from 1957 totally underestimated the level of technology we would all carry around in our hands and in our pockets today. And we can just ask: "What are the names of Santa's reindeer?" and be told instantly — or anything else we want to ask. By the way, the wages for librarians went up faster than the wages for other jobs in the U.S. over that same time period, because librarians became partners of computers. Computers became tools, and they got more tools that they could use and become more effective during that time. Same thing happened in offices. Back in the old days, people used spreadsheets. Spreadsheets were spread sheets of paper, and they calculated by hand. But here was an interesting thing that came along. With the revolution around 1980 of P.C.'s, the spreadsheet programs were tuned for office workers, not to replace office workers, but it respected office workers as being capable of being programmers. So office workers became programmers of spreadsheets. It increased their capabilities. They no longer had to do the mundane computations, but they could do something much more. Now today, we're starting to see robots in our lives. On the left there is the PackBot from iRobot. When soldiers came across roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of putting on a bomb suit and going out and poking with a stick, as they used to do up until about 2002, they now send the robot out. So the robot takes over the dangerous jobs. On the right are some TUGs from a company called Aethon in Pittsburgh. These are in hundreds of hospitals across the U.S. And they take the dirty sheets down to the laundry. They take the dirty dishes back to the kitchen. They bring the medicines up from the pharmacy. And it frees up the nurses and the nurse's aides from doing that mundane work of just mechanically pushing stuff around to spend more time with patients. In fact, robots have become sort of ubiquitous in our lives in many ways. But I think when it comes to factory robots, people are sort of afraid, because factory robots are dangerous to be around. In order to program them, you have to understand six-dimensional vectors and quaternions. And ordinary people can't interact with them. And I think it's the sort of technology that's gone wrong. It's displaced the worker from the technology. And I think we really have to look at technologies that ordinary workers can interact with. And so I want to tell you today about Baxter, which we've been talking about. And Baxter, I see, as a way — a first wave of robot that ordinary people can interact with in an industrial setting. So Baxter is up here. This is Chris Harbert from Rethink Robotics. We've got a conveyor there. And if the lighting isn't too extreme — Ah, ah! There it is. It's picked up the object off the conveyor. It's going to come bring it over here and put it down. And then it'll go back, reach for another object. The interesting thing is Baxter has some basic common sense. By the way, what's going on with the eyes? The eyes are on the screen there. The eyes look ahead where the robot's going to move. So a person that's interacting with the robot understands where it's going to reach and isn't surprised by its motions. Here Chris took the object out of its hand, and Baxter didn't go and try to put it down; it went back and realized it had to get another one. It's got a little bit of basic common sense, goes and picks the objects. And Baxter's safe to interact with. You wouldn't want to do this with a current industrial robot. But with Baxter it doesn't hurt. It feels the force, understands that Chris is there and doesn't push through him and hurt him. But I think the most interesting thing about Baxter is the user interface. And so Chris is going to come and grab the other arm now. And when he grabs an arm, it goes into zero-force gravity-compensated mode and graphics come up on the screen. You can see some icons on the left of the screen there for what was about its right arm. He's going to put something in its hand, he's going to bring it over here, press a button and let go of that thing in the hand. And the robot figures out, ah, he must mean I want to put stuff down. It puts a little icon there. He comes over here, and he gets the fingers to grasp together, and the robot infers, ah, you want an object for me to pick up. That puts the green icon there. He's going to map out an area of where the robot should pick up the object from. It just moves it around, and the robot figures out that was an area search. He didn't have to select that from a menu. And now he's going to go off and train the visual appearance of that object while we continue talking. So as we continue here, I want to tell you about what this is like in factories. These robots we're shipping every day. They go to factories around the country. This is Mildred. Mildred's a factory worker in Connecticut. She's worked on the line for over 20 years. One hour after she saw her first industrial robot, she had programmed it to do some tasks in the factory. She decided she really liked robots. And it was doing the simple repetitive tasks that she had had to do beforehand. Now she's got the robot doing it. When we first went out to talk to people in factories about how we could get robots to interact with them better, one of the questions we asked them was, "Do you want your children to work in a factory?" The universal answer was "No, I want a better job than that for my children." And as a result of that, Mildred is very typical of today's factory workers in the U.S. They're older, and they're getting older and older. There aren't many young people coming into factory work. And as their tasks become more onerous on them, we need to give them tools that they can collaborate with, so that they can be part of the solution, so that they can continue to work and we can continue to produce in the U.S. And so our vision is that Mildred who's the line worker becomes Mildred the robot trainer. She lifts her game, like the office workers of the 1980s lifted their game of what they could do. We're not giving them tools that they have to go and study for years and years in order to use. They're tools that they can just learn how to operate in a few minutes. There's two great forces that are both volitional but inevitable. That's climate change and demographics. Demographics is really going to change our world. This is the percentage of adults who are working age. And it's gone down slightly over the last 40 years. But over the next 40 years, it's going to change dramatically, even in China. The percentage of adults who are working age drops dramatically. And turned up the other way, the people who are retirement age goes up very, very fast, as the baby boomers get to retirement age. That means there will be more people with fewer social security dollars competing for services. But more than that, as we get older we get more frail and we can't do all the tasks we used to do. If we look at the statistics on the ages of caregivers, before our eyes those caregivers are getting older and older. That's happening statistically right now. And as the number of people who are older, above retirement age and getting older, as they increase, there will be less people to take care of them. And I think we're really going to have to have robots to help us. And I don't mean robots in terms of companions. I mean robots doing the things that we normally do for ourselves but get harder as we get older. Getting the groceries in from the car, up the stairs, into the kitchen. Or even, as we get very much older, driving our cars to go visit people. And I think robotics gives people a chance to have dignity as they get older by having control of the robotic solution. So they don't have to rely on people that are getting scarcer to help them. And so I really think that we're going to be spending more time with robots like Baxter and working with robots like Baxter in our daily lives. And that we will — Here, Baxter, it's good. And that we will all come to rely on robots over the next 40 years as part of our everyday lives. Thanks very much. (Applause) |
A tale of two political systems | {0: 'A venture capitalist and political scientist, Eric X Li argues that the universality claim of Western democratic systems is going to be "morally challenged" by China.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Good morning. My name is Eric Li, and I was born here. But no, I wasn't born there. This was where I was born: Shanghai, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. My grandmother tells me that she heard the sound of gunfire along with my first cries. When I was growing up, I was told a story that explained all I ever needed to know about humanity. It went like this. All human societies develop in linear progression, beginning with primitive society, then slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally, guess where we end up? Communism! Sooner or later, all of humanity, regardless of culture, language, nationality, will arrive at this final stage of political and social development. The entire world's peoples will be unified in this paradise on Earth and live happily ever after. But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil, the good of socialism against the evil of capitalism, and the good shall triumph. That, of course, was the meta-narrative distilled from the theories of Karl Marx. And the Chinese bought it. We were taught that grand story day in and day out. It became part of us, and we believed in it. The story was a bestseller. About one third of the entire world's population lived under that meta-narrative. Then, the world changed overnight. As for me, disillusioned by the failed religion of my youth, I went to America and became a Berkeley hippie. (Laughter) Now, as I was coming of age, something else happened. As if one big story wasn't enough, I was told another one. This one was just as grand. It also claims that all human societies develop in a linear progression towards a singular end. This one went as follows: All societies, regardless of culture, be it Christian, Muslim, Confucian, must progress from traditional societies in which groups are the basic units to modern societies in which atomized individuals are the sovereign units, and all these individuals are, by definition, rational, and they all want one thing: the vote. Because they are all rational, once given the vote, they produce good government and live happily ever after. Paradise on Earth, again. Sooner or later, electoral democracy will be the only political system for all countries and all peoples, with a free market to make them all rich. But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil. (Laughter) The good belongs to those who are democracies and are charged with a mission of spreading it around the globe, sometimes by force, against the evil of those who do not hold elections. (Video) George H.W. Bush: A new world order... (Video) George W. Bush:... ending tyranny in our world... (Video) Barack Obama:... a single standard for all who would hold power. Eric X. Li: Now — (Laughter) (Applause) This story also became a bestseller. According to Freedom House, the number of democracies went from 45 in 1970 to 115 in 2010. In the last 20 years, Western elites tirelessly trotted around the globe selling this prospectus: Multiple parties fight for political power and everyone voting on them is the only path to salvation to the long-suffering developing world. Those who buy the prospectus are destined for success. Those who do not are doomed to fail. But this time, the Chinese didn't buy it. Fool me once... (Laughter) The rest is history. In just 30 years, China went from one of the poorest agricultural countries in the world to its second-largest economy. Six hundred fifty million people were lifted out of poverty. Eighty percent of the entire world's poverty alleviation during that period happened in China. In other words, all the new and old democracies put together amounted to a mere fraction of what a single, one-party state did without voting. See, I grew up on this stuff: food stamps. Meat was rationed to a few hundred grams per person per month at one point. Needless to say, I ate all my grandmother's portions. So I asked myself, what's wrong with this picture? Here I am in my hometown, my business growing leaps and bounds. Entrepreneurs are starting companies every day. Middle class is expanding in speed and scale unprecedented in human history. Yet, according to the grand story, none of this should be happening. So I went and did the only thing I could. I studied it. Yes, China is a one-party state run by the Chinese Communist Party, the Party, and they don't hold elections. Three assumptions are made by the dominant political theories of our time. Such a system is operationally rigid, politically closed, and morally illegitimate. Well, the assumptions are wrong. The opposites are true. Adaptability, meritocracy, and legitimacy are the three defining characteristics of China's one-party system. Now, most political scientists will tell us that a one-party system is inherently incapable of self-correction. It won't last long because it cannot adapt. Now here are the facts. In 64 years of running the largest country in the world, the range of the Party's policies has been wider than any other country in recent memory, from radical land collectivization to the Great Leap Forward, then privatization of farmland, then the Cultural Revolution, then Deng Xiaoping's market reform, then successor Jiang Zemin took the giant political step of opening up Party membership to private businesspeople, something unimaginable during Mao's rule. So the Party self-corrects in rather dramatic fashions. Institutionally, new rules get enacted to correct previous dysfunctions. For example, term limits. Political leaders used to retain their positions for life, and they used that to accumulate power and perpetuate their rules. Mao was the father of modern China, yet his prolonged rule led to disastrous mistakes. So the Party instituted term limits with mandatory retirement age of 68 to 70. One thing we often hear is, "Political reforms have lagged far behind economic reforms," and "China is in dire need of political reform." But this claim is a rhetorical trap hidden behind a political bias. See, some have decided a priori what kinds of changes they want to see, and only such changes can be called political reform. The truth is, political reforms have never stopped. Compared with 30 years ago, 20 years, even 10 years ago, every aspect of Chinese society, how the country is governed, from the most local level to the highest center, are unrecognizable today. Now such changes are simply not possible without political reforms of the most fundamental kind. Now I would venture to suggest the Party is the world's leading expert in political reform. The second assumption is that in a one-party state, power gets concentrated in the hands of the few, and bad governance and corruption follow. Indeed, corruption is a big problem, but let's first look at the larger context. Now, this may be counterintuitive to you. The Party happens to be one of the most meritocratic political institutions in the world today. China's highest ruling body, the Politburo, has 25 members. In the most recent one, only five of them came from a background of privilege, so-called princelings. The other 20, including the president and the premier, came from entirely ordinary backgrounds. In the larger central committee of 300 or more, the percentage of those who were born into power and wealth was even smaller. The vast majority of senior Chinese leaders worked and competed their way to the top. Compare that with the ruling elites in both developed and developing countries, I think you'll find the Party being near the top in upward mobility. The question then is, how could that be possible in a system run by one party? Now we come to a powerful political institution, little-known to Westerners: the Party's Organization Department. The department functions like a giant human resource engine that would be the envy of even some of the most successful corporations. It operates a rotating pyramid made up of three components: civil service, state-owned enterprises, and social organizations like a university or a community program. They form separate yet integrated career paths for Chinese officials. They recruit college grads into entry-level positions in all three tracks, and they start from the bottom, called "keyuan" [clerk]. Then they could get promoted through four increasingly elite ranks: fuke [deputy section manager], ke [section manager], fuchu [deputy division manager], and chu [division manger]. Now these are not moves from "Karate Kid," okay? It's serious business. The range of positions is wide, from running health care in a village to foreign investment in a city district to manager in a company. Once a year, the department reviews their performance. They interview their superiors, their peers, their subordinates. They vet their personal conduct. They conduct public opinion surveys. Then they promote the winners. Throughout their careers, these cadres can move through and out of all three tracks. Over time, the good ones move beyond the four base levels to the fuju [deputy bureau chief] and ju [bureau chief] levels. There, they enter high officialdom. By that point, a typical assignment will be to manage a district with a population in the millions or a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Just to show you how competitive the system is, in 2012, there were 900,000 fuke and ke levels, 600,000 fuchu and chu levels, and only 40,000 fuju and ju levels. After the ju levels, the best few move further up several more ranks, and eventually make it to the Central Committee. The process takes two to three decades. Does patronage play a role? Yes, of course. But merit remains the fundamental driver. In essence, the Organization Department runs a modernized version of China's centuries-old mentoring system. China's new president, Xi Jinping, is the son of a former leader, which is very unusual, first of his kind to make the top job. Even for him, the career took 30 years. He started as a village manager, and by the time he entered the Politburo, he had managed areas with a total population of 150 million people and combined GDPs of 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars. Now, please don't get me wrong, okay? This is not a put-down of anyone. It's just a statement of fact. George W. Bush, remember him? This is not a put-down. (Laughter) Before becoming governor of Texas, or Barack Obama before running for president, could not make even a small county manager in China's system. Winston Churchill once said that democracy is a terrible system except for all the rest. Well, apparently he hadn't heard of the Organization Department. Now, Westerners always assume that multi-party election with universal suffrage is the only source of political legitimacy. I was asked once, "The Party wasn't voted in by election. Where is the source of legitimacy?" I said, "How about competency?" We all know the facts. In 1949, when the Party took power, China was mired in civil wars, dismembered by foreign aggression, average life expectancy at that time, 41 years old. Today, it's the second largest economy in the world, an industrial powerhouse, and its people live in increasing prosperity. Pew Research polls Chinese public attitudes, and here are the numbers in recent years. Satisfaction with the direction of the country: 85 percent. Those who think they're better off than five years ago: 70 percent. Those who expect the future to be better: a whopping 82 percent. Financial Times polls global youth attitudes, and these numbers, brand new, just came from last week. Ninety-three percent of China's Generation Y are optimistic about their country's future. Now, if this is not legitimacy, I'm not sure what is. In contrast, most electoral democracies around the world are suffering from dismal performance. I don't need to elaborate for this audience how dysfunctional it is, from Washington to European capitals. With a few exceptions, the vast number of developing countries that have adopted electoral regimes are still suffering from poverty and civil strife. Governments get elected, and then they fall below 50 percent approval in a few months and stay there and get worse until the next election. Democracy is becoming a perpetual cycle of elect and regret. At this rate, I'm afraid it is democracy, not China's one-party system, that is in danger of losing legitimacy. Now, I don't want to create the misimpression that China's hunky-dory, on the way to some kind of superpowerdom. The country faces enormous challenges. The social and economic problems that come with wrenching change like this are mind-boggling. Pollution is one. Food safety. Population issues. On the political front, the worst problem is corruption. Corruption is widespread and undermines the system and its moral legitimacy. But most analysts misdiagnose the disease. They say that corruption is the result of the one-party system, and therefore, in order to cure it, you have to do away with the entire system. But a more careful look would tell us otherwise. Transparency International ranks China between 70 and 80 in recent years among 170 countries, and it's been moving up. India, the largest democracy in the world, 94 and dropping. For the hundred or so countries that are ranked below China, more than half of them are electoral democracies. So if election is the panacea for corruption, how come these countries can't fix it? Now, I'm a venture capitalist. I make bets. It wouldn't be fair to end this talk without putting myself on the line and making some predictions. So here they are. In the next 10 years, China will surpass the U.S. and become the largest economy in the world. Income per capita will be near the top of all developing countries. Corruption will be curbed, but not eliminated, and China will move up 10 to 20 notches to above 60 in T.I. ranking. Economic reform will accelerate, political reform will continue, and the one-party system will hold firm. We live in the dusk of an era. Meta-narratives that make universal claims failed us in the 20th century and are failing us in the 21st. Meta-narrative is the cancer that is killing democracy from the inside. Now, I want to clarify something. I'm not here to make an indictment of democracy. On the contrary, I think democracy contributed to the rise of the West and the creation of the modern world. It is the universal claim that many Western elites are making about their political system, the hubris, that is at the heart of the West's current ills. If they would spend just a little less time on trying to force their way onto others, and a little bit more on political reform at home, they might give their democracy a better chance. China's political model will never supplant electoral democracy, because unlike the latter, it doesn't pretend to be universal. It cannot be exported. But that is the point precisely. The significance of China's example is not that it provides an alternative, but the demonstration that alternatives exist. Let us draw to a close this era of meta-narratives. Communism and democracy may both be laudable ideals, but the era of their dogmatic universalism is over. Let us stop telling people and our children there's only one way to govern ourselves and a singular future towards which all societies must evolve. It is wrong. It is irresponsible. And worst of all, it is boring. Let universality make way for plurality. Perhaps a more interesting age is upon us. Are we brave enough to welcome it? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Bruno Giussani: Eric, stay with me for a couple of minutes, because I want to ask you a couple of questions. I think many here, and in general in Western countries, would agree with your statement about analysis of democratic systems becoming dysfunctional, but at the same time, many would kind of find unsettling the thought that there is an unelected authority that, without any form of oversight or consultation, decides what the national interest is. What is the mechanism in the Chinese model that allows people to say, actually, the national interest as you defined it is wrong? EXL: You know, Frank Fukuyama, the political scientist, called the Chinese system "responsive authoritarianism." It's not exactly right, but I think it comes close. So I know the largest public opinion survey company in China, okay? Do you know who their biggest client is? The Chinese government. Not just from the central government, the city government, the provincial government, to the most local neighborhood districts. They conduct surveys all the time. Are you happy with the garbage collection? Are you happy with the general direction of the country? So there is, in China, there is a different kind of mechanism to be responsive to the demands and the thinking of the people. My point is, I think we should get unstuck from the thinking that there's only one political system — election, election, election — that could make it responsive. I'm not sure, actually, elections produce responsive government anymore in the world. (Applause) BG: Many seem to agree. One of the features of a democratic system is a space for civil society to express itself. And you have shown figures about the support that the government and the authorities have in China. But then you've just mentioned other elements like, you know, big challenges, and there are, of course, a lot of other data that go in a different direction: tens of thousands of unrests and protests and environmental protests, etc. So you seem to suggest the Chinese model doesn't have a space outside of the Party for civil society to express itself. EXL: There's a vibrant civil society in China, whether it's environment or what-have-you. But it's different. You wouldn't recognize it. Because, by Western definitions, a so-called civil society has to be separate or even in opposition to the political system, but that concept is alien for Chinese culture. For thousands of years, you have civil society, yet they are consistent and coherent and part of a political order, and I think it's a big cultural difference. BG: Eric, thank you for sharing this with TED. EXL: Thank you. |
The big-data revolution in health care | {0: 'Dr. Joel Selanikio combines technology and data to help solve global health challenges.'} | TEDxAustin | There's an old joke about a cop who's walking his beat in the middle of the night, and he comes across a guy under a street lamp who's looking at the ground and moving from side to side, and the cop asks him what he's doing. The guys says he's looking for his keys. So the cop takes his time and looks over and kind of makes a little matrix and looks for about two, three minutes. No keys. The cop says, "Are you sure? Hey buddy, are you sure you lost your keys here?" And the guy says, "No, actually I lost them down at the other end of the street, but the light is better here." (Laughter) There's a concept that people talk about nowadays called "big data." And what they're talking about is all of the information that we're generating through our interaction with and over the Internet, everything from Facebook and Twitter to music downloads, movies, streaming, all this kind of stuff, the live streaming of TED. And the folks who work with big data, for them, they talk about that their biggest problem is we have so much information. The biggest problem is: how do we organize all that information? I can tell you that, working in global health, that is not our biggest problem. Because for us, even though the light is better on the Internet, the data that would help us solve the problems we're trying to solve is not actually present on the Internet. So we don't know, for example, how many people right now are being affected by disasters or by conflict situations. We don't know for, really, basically, any of the clinics in the developing world, which ones have medicines and which ones don't. We have no idea of what the supply chain is for those clinics. We don't know — and this is really amazing to me — we don't know how many children were born — or how many children there are — in Bolivia or Botswana or Bhutan. We don't know how many kids died last week in any of those countries. We don't know the needs of the elderly, the mentally ill. For all of these different critically important problems or critically important areas that we want to solve problems in, we basically know nothing at all. And part of the reason why we don't know anything at all is that the information technology systems that we use in global health to find the data to solve these problems is what you see here. This is about a 5,000-year-old technology. Some of you may have used it before. It's kind of on its way out now, but we still use it for 99 percent of our stuff. This is a paper form. And what you're looking at is a paper form in the hand of a Ministry of Health nurse in Indonesia, who is tramping out across the countryside in Indonesia on, I'm sure, a very hot and humid day, and she is going to be knocking on thousands of doors over a period of weeks or months, knocking on the doors and saying, "Excuse me, we'd like to ask you some questions. Do you have any children? Were your children vaccinated?" Because the only way we can actually find out how many children were vaccinated in the country of Indonesia, what percentage were vaccinated, is actually not on the Internet, but by going out and knocking on doors, sometimes tens of thousands of doors. Sometimes it takes months to even years to do something like this. You know, a census of Indonesia would probably take two years to accomplish. And the problem, of course, with all of this is that, with all those paper forms — and I'm telling you, we have paper forms for every possible thing: We have paper forms for vaccination surveys. We have paper forms to track people who come into clinics. We have paper forms to track drug supplies, blood supplies — all these different paper forms for many different topics, they all have a single, common endpoint, and the common endpoint looks something like this. And what we're looking at here is a truckful of data. This is the data from a single vaccination coverage survey in a single district in the country of Zambia from a few years ago, that I participated in. The only thing anyone was trying to find out is what percentage of Zambian children are vaccinated, and this is the data, collected on paper over weeks, from a single district, which is something like a county in the United States. You can imagine that, for the entire country of Zambia, answering just that single question ... looks something like this. Truck after truck after truck, filled with stack after stack after stack of data. And what makes it even worse is that's just the beginning. Because once you've collected all that data, of course, someone — some unfortunate person — is going to have to type that into a computer. When I was a graduate student, I actually was that unfortunate person sometimes. I can tell you, I often wasn't really paying attention. I probably made a lot of mistakes when I did it that no one ever discovered, so data quality goes down. But eventually that data, hopefully, gets typed into a computer, and someone can begin to analyze it, and once they have an analysis and a report, hopefully, then you can take the results of that data collection and use it to vaccinate children better. Because if there's anything worse in the field of global public health — I don't know what's worse than allowing children on this planet to die of vaccine-preventable diseases — diseases for which the vaccine costs a dollar. And millions of children die of these diseases every year. And the fact is, millions is a gross estimate, because we don't really know how many kids die each year of this. What makes it even more frustrating is that the data-entry part, the part that I used to do as a grad student, can take sometimes six months. Sometimes it can take two years to type that information into a computer, And sometimes, actually not infrequently, it actually never happens. Now try and wrap your head around that for a second. You just had teams of hundreds of people. They went out into the field to answer a particular question. You probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on fuel and photocopying and per diem. And then for some reason, momentum is lost or there's no money left, and all of that comes to nothing, because no one actually types it into the computer at all. The process just stops. Happens all the time. This is what we base our decisions on in global health: little data, old data, no data. So back in 1995, I began to think about ways in which we could improve this process. Now 1995 — obviously, that was quite a long time ago. It kind of frightens me to think of how long ago that was. The top movie of the year was "Die Hard with a Vengeance." As you can see, Bruce Willis had a lot more hair back then. I was working in the Centers for Disease Control and I had a lot more hair back then as well. But to me, the most significant thing that I saw in 1995 was this. Hard for us to imagine, but in 1995, this was the ultimate elite mobile device. It wasn't an iPhone. It wasn't a Galaxy phone. It was a PalmPilot. And when I saw the PalmPilot for the first time, I thought, "Why can't we put the forms on these PalmPilots? And go out into the field just carrying one PalmPilot, which can hold the capacity of tens of thousands of paper forms? Why don't we try to do that? Because if we can do that, if we can actually just collect the data electronically, digitally, from the very beginning, we can just put a shortcut right through that whole process of typing, of having somebody type that stuff into the computer. We can skip straight to the analysis and then straight to the use of the data to actually save lives." So that's what I began to do. Working at CDC, I began to travel to different programs around the world and to train them in using PalmPilots to do data collection, instead of using paper. And it actually worked great. It worked exactly as well as anybody would have predicted. What do you know? Digital data collection is actually more efficient than collecting on paper. While I was doing it, my business partner, Rose, who's here with her husband, Matthew, here in the audience, Rose was out doing similar stuff for the American Red Cross. The problem was, after a few years of doing that, I realized — I had been to maybe six or seven programs — and I thought, you know, if I keep this up at this pace, over my whole career, maybe I'm going to go to maybe 20 or 30 programs. But the problem is, 20 or 30 programs, like, training 20 or 30 programs to use this technology, that is a tiny drop in the bucket. The demand for this, the need for data to run better programs just within health — not to mention all of the other fields in developing countries — is enormous. There are millions and millions and millions of programs, millions of clinics that need to track drugs, millions of vaccine programs. There are schools that need to track attendance. There are all these different things for us to get the data that we need to do. And I realized if I kept up the way that I was doing, I was basically hardly going to make any impact by the end of my career. And so I began to rack my brain, trying to think about, what was the process that I was doing? How was I training folks, and what were the bottlenecks and what were the obstacles to doing it faster and to doing it more efficiently? And, unfortunately, after thinking about this for some time, I identified the main obstacle. And the main obstacle, it turned out — and this is a sad realization — the main obstacle was me. So what do I mean by that? I had developed a process whereby I was the center of the universe of this technology. If you wanted to use this technology, you had to get in touch with me. That means you had to know I existed. Then you had to find the money to pay for me to fly out to your country and the money to pay for my hotel and my per diem and my daily rate. So you could be talking about 10- or 20- or 30,000 dollars, if I actually had the time or it fit my schedule and I wasn't on vacation. The point is that anything, any system that depends on a single human being or two or three or five human beings — it just doesn't scale. And this is a problem for which we need to scale this technology, and we need to scale it now. And so I began to think of ways in which I could basically take myself out of the picture. And, you know, I was thinking, "How could I take myself out of the picture?" for quite some time. I'd been trained that the way you distribute technology within international development is always consultant-based. It's always guys that look pretty much like me, flying from countries that look pretty much like this to other countries with people with darker skin. And you go out there, and you spend money on airfare and you spend time and you spend per diem and you spend for a hotel and all that stuff. As far as I knew, that was the only way you could distribute technology, and I couldn't figure out a way around it. But the miracle that happened — I'm going to call it Hotmail for short. You may not think of Hotmail as being miraculous, but for me it was miraculous, because I noticed, just as I was wrestling with this problem — I was working in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly, at the time — I noticed that every sub-Saharan African health worker that I was working with had a Hotmail account. And it struck me, "Wait a minute — I know the Hotmail people surely didn't fly to the Ministry of Health in Kenya to train people in how to use Hotmail. So these guys are distributing technology, getting software capacity out there, but they're not actually flying around the world. I need to think about this more." While I was thinking about it, people started using even more things like this, just as we were. They started using LinkedIn and Flickr and Gmail and Google Maps — all these things. Of course, all of these things are cloud based and don't require any training. They don't require any programmers. They don't require consultants. Because the business model for all these businesses requires that something be so simple we can use it ourselves, with little or no training. You just have to hear about it and go to the website. And so I thought, what would happen if we built software to do what I'd been consulting in? Instead of training people how to put forms onto mobile devices, let's create software that lets them do it themselves with no training and without me being involved. And that's exactly what we did. So we created software called Magpi, which has an online form creator. No one has to speak to me, you just have to hear about it and go to the website. You can create forms, and once you've created the forms, you push them to a variety of common mobile phones. Obviously, nowadays, we've moved past PalmPilots to mobile phones. And it doesn't have to be a smartphone, it can be a basic phone, like the phone on the right, the basic Symbian phone that's very common in developing countries. And the great part about this is it's just like Hotmail. It's cloud based, and it doesn't require any training, programming, consultants. But there are some additional benefits as well. Now we knew when we built this system, the whole point of it, just like with the PalmPilots, was that you'd be able to collect the data and immediately upload the data and get your data set. But what we found, of course, since it's already on a computer, we can deliver instant maps and analysis and graphing. We can take a process that took two years and compress that down to the space of five minutes. Unbelievable improvements in efficiency. Cloud based, no training, no consultants, no me. And I told you that in the first few years of trying to do this the old-fashioned way, going out to each country, we probably trained about 1,000 people. What happened after we did this? In the second three years, we had 14,000 people find the website, sign up and start using it to collect data: data for disaster response, Canadian pig farmers tracking pig disease and pig herds, people tracking drug supplies. One of my favorite examples, the IRC, International Rescue Committee, they have a program where semi-literate midwives, using $10 mobile phones, send a text message using our software, once a week, with the number of births and the number of deaths, which gives IRC something that no one in global health has ever had: a near-real-time system of counting babies, of knowing how many kids are born, of knowing how many children there are in Sierra Leone, which is the country where this is happening, and knowing how many children die. Physicians for Human Rights — this is moving a little bit outside the health field — they're basically training people to do rape exams in Congo, where this is an epidemic, a horrible epidemic, and they're using our software to document the evidence they find, including photographically, so that they can bring the perpetrators to justice. Camfed, another charity based out of the UK — Camfed pays girls' families to keep them in school. They understand this is the most significant intervention they can make. They used to track the disbursements, the attendance, the grades, on paper. The turnaround time between a teacher writing down grades or attendance and getting that into a report was about two to three years. Now it's real time. And because this is such a low-cost system and based in the cloud, it costs, for the entire five countries that Camfed runs this in, with tens of thousands of girls, the whole cost combined is 10,000 dollars a year. That's less than I used to get just traveling out for two weeks to do a consultation. So I told you before that when we were doing it the old-fashioned way, I realized all of our work was really adding up to just a drop in the bucket — 10, 20, 30 different programs. We've made a lot of progress, but I recognize that right now, even the work that we've done with 14,000 people using this is still a drop in the bucket. But something's changed, and I think it should be obvious. What's changed now is, instead of having a program in which we're scaling at such a slow rate that we can never reach all the people who need us, we've made it unnecessary for people to get reached by us. We've created a tool that lets programs keep kids in school, track the number of babies that are born and the number of babies that die, catch criminals and successfully prosecute them — to do all these different things to learn more about what's going on, to understand more, to see more ... and to save lives and improve lives. Thank you. (Applause) |
Reach into the computer and grab a pixel | {0: 'Jinha Lee wants to weave digital computing into the flow of our physical reality.'} | TED2013 | Throughout the history of computers we've been striving to shorten the gap between us and digital information, the gap between our physical world and the world in the screen where our imagination can go wild. And this gap has become shorter, shorter, and even shorter, and now this gap is shortened down to less than a millimeter, the thickness of a touch-screen glass, and the power of computing has become accessible to everyone. But I wondered, what if there could be no boundary at all? I started to imagine what this would look like. First, I created this tool which penetrates into the digital space, so when you press it hard on the screen, it transfers its physical body into pixels. Designers can materialize their ideas directly in 3D, and surgeons can practice on virtual organs underneath the screen. So with this tool, this boundary has been broken. But our two hands still remain outside the screen. How can you reach inside and interact with the digital information using the full dexterity of our hands? At Microsoft Applied Sciences, along with my mentor Cati Boulanger, I redesigned the computer and turned a little space above the keyboard into a digital workspace. By combining a transparent display and depth cameras for sensing your fingers and face, now you can lift up your hands from the keyboard and reach inside this 3D space and grab pixels with your bare hands. (Applause) Because windows and files have a position in the real space, selecting them is as easy as grabbing a book off your shelf. Then you can flip through this book while highlighting the lines, words on the virtual touch pad below each floating window. Architects can stretch or rotate the models with their two hands directly. So in these examples, we are reaching into the digital world. But how about reversing its role and having the digital information reach us instead? I'm sure many of us have had the experience of buying and returning items online. But now you don't have to worry about it. What I got here is an online augmented fitting room. This is a view that you get from head-mounted or see-through display when the system understands the geometry of your body. Taking this idea further, I started to think, instead of just seeing these pixels in our space, how can we make it physical so that we can touch and feel it? What would such a future look like? At MIT Media Lab, along with my advisor Hiroshi Ishii and my collaborator Rehmi Post, we created this one physical pixel. Well, in this case, this spherical magnet acts like a 3D pixel in our space, which means that both computers and people can move this object to anywhere within this little 3D space. What we did was essentially canceling gravity and controlling the movement by combining magnetic levitation and mechanical actuation and sensing technologies. And by digitally programming the object, we are liberating the object from constraints of time and space, which means that now, human motions can be recorded and played back and left permanently in the physical world. So choreography can be taught physically over distance and Michael Jordan's famous shooting can be replicated over and over as a physical reality. Students can use this as a tool to learn about the complex concepts such as planetary motion, physics, and unlike computer screens or textbooks, this is a real, tangible experience that you can touch and feel, and it's very powerful. And what's more exciting than just turning what's currently in the computer physical is to start imagining how programming the world will alter even our daily physical activities. (Laughter) As you can see, the digital information will not just show us something but it will start directly acting upon us as a part of our physical surroundings without disconnecting ourselves from our world. Today, we started by talking about the boundary, but if we remove this boundary, the only boundary left is our imagination. Thank you. (Applause) |
Bluegrass virtuosity from ... New Jersey? | {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.'} | TED2013 | (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Robbie Mizzone: Thank you. Tommy Mizzone: Thank you very much. We're so excited to be here. It's such an honor. Like he said, we're three brothers from New Jersey — you know, the bluegrass capital of the world. (Laughter) We discovered bluegrass a few years ago, and we fell in love with it. We hope you guys will too. This next song is an original we wrote called "Time Lapse," and it will probably live up to its name. (Tuning) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) TM: Thank you very much. RM: I'm just going to take a second to introduce the band. On guitar is my 15-year-old brother Tommy. (Applause) On banjo is 10-year-old Jonny. (Applause) He's also our brother. And I'm Robbie, and I'm 14, and I play the fiddle. (Applause) As you can see, we decided to make it hard on ourselves, and we chose to play three songs in three different keys. (Tuning) Yeah. I'm also going to explain, a lot of people want to know where we got the name "Sleepy Man Banjo Boys" from. So, it started when Jonny was little, and he first started the banjo, he would play on his back with his eyes closed, and we'd say it looked like he was sleeping. So you can probably piece the rest together. TM: We can't really figure out the reason. It might have been that it weighs about a million pounds. (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) TM: Thank you very much. (Cheering) RM: Thank you. (Applause) |
Meet global corruption's hidden players | {0: 'Charmian Gooch is the 2014 TED Prize winner. At Global Witness, she exposes how a global architecture of corruption is woven into the extraction and exploitation of natural resources.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | When we talk about corruption, there are typical types of individuals that spring to mind. There's the former Soviet megalomaniacs. Saparmurat Niyazov, he was one of them. Until his death in 2006, he was the all-powerful leader of Turkmenistan, a Central Asian country rich in natural gas. Now, he really loved to issue presidential decrees. And one renamed the months of the year including after himself and his mother. He spent millions of dollars creating a bizarre personality cult, and his crowning glory was the building of a 40-foot-high gold-plated statue of himself which stood proudly in the capital's central square and rotated to follow the sun. He was a slightly unusual guy. And then there's that cliché, the African dictator or minister or official. There's Teodorín Obiang. So his daddy is president for life of Equatorial Guinea, a West African nation that has exported billions of dollars of oil since the 1990s and yet has a truly appalling human rights record. The vast majority of its people are living in really miserable poverty despite an income per capita that's on a par with that of Portugal. So Obiang junior, well, he buys himself a $30 million mansion in Malibu, California. I've been up to its front gates. I can tell you it's a magnificent spread. He bought an €18 million art collection that used to belong to fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, a stack of fabulous sports cars, some costing a million dollars apiece — oh, and a Gulfstream jet, too. Now get this: Until recently, he was earning an official monthly salary of less than 7,000 dollars. And there's Dan Etete. Well, he was the former oil minister of Nigeria under President Abacha, and it just so happens he's a convicted money launderer too. We've spent a great deal of time investigating a $1 billion — that's right, a $1 billion — oil deal that he was involved with, and what we found was pretty shocking, but more about that later. So it's easy to think that corruption happens somewhere over there, carried out by a bunch of greedy despots and individuals up to no good in countries that we, personally, may know very little about and feel really unconnected to and unaffected by what might be going on. But does it just happen over there? Well, at 22, I was very lucky. My first job out of university was investigating the illegal trade in African ivory. And that's how my relationship with corruption really began. In 1993, with two friends who were colleagues, Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley, we set up an organization called Global Witness. Our first campaign was investigating the role of illegal logging in funding the war in Cambodia. So a few years later, and it's now 1997, and I'm in Angola undercover investigating blood diamonds. Perhaps you saw the film, the Hollywood film "Blood Diamond," the one with Leonardo DiCaprio. Well, some of that sprang from our work. Luanda, it was full of land mine victims who were struggling to survive on the streets and war orphans living in sewers under the streets, and a tiny, very wealthy elite who gossiped about shopping trips to Brazil and Portugal. And it was a slightly crazy place. So I'm sitting in a hot and very stuffy hotel room feeling just totally overwhelmed. But it wasn't about blood diamonds. Because I'd been speaking to lots of people there who, well, they talked about a different problem: that of a massive web of corruption on a global scale and millions of oil dollars going missing. And for what was then a very small organization of just a few people, trying to even begin to think how we might tackle that was an enormous challenge. And in the years that I've been, and we've all been campaigning and investigating, I've repeatedly seen that what makes corruption on a global, massive scale possible, well it isn't just greed or the misuse of power or that nebulous phrase "weak governance." I mean, yes, it's all of those, but corruption, it's made possible by the actions of global facilitators. So let's go back to some of those people I talked about earlier. Now, they're all people we've investigated, and they're all people who couldn't do what they do alone. Take Obiang junior. Well, he didn't end up with high-end art and luxury houses without help. He did business with global banks. A bank in Paris held accounts of companies controlled by him, one of which was used to buy the art, and American banks, well, they funneled 73 million dollars into the States, some of which was used to buy that California mansion. And he didn't do all of this in his own name either. He used shell companies. He used one to buy the property, and another, which was in somebody else's name, to pay the huge bills it cost to run the place. And then there's Dan Etete. Well, when he was oil minister, he awarded an oil block now worth over a billion dollars to a company that, guess what, yeah, he was the hidden owner of. Now, it was then much later traded on with the kind assistance of the Nigerian government — now I have to be careful what I say here — to subsidiaries of Shell and the Italian Eni, two of the biggest oil companies around. So the reality is, is that the engine of corruption, well, it exists far beyond the shores of countries like Equatorial Guinea or Nigeria or Turkmenistan. This engine, well, it's driven by our international banking system, by the problem of anonymous shell companies, and by the secrecy that we have afforded big oil, gas and mining operations, and, most of all, by the failure of our politicians to back up their rhetoric and do something really meaningful and systemic to tackle this stuff. Now let's take the banks first. Well, it's not going to come as any surprise for me to tell you that banks accept dirty money, but they prioritize their profits in other destructive ways too. For example, in Sarawak, Malaysia. Now this region, it has just five percent of its forests left intact. Five percent. So how did that happen? Well, because an elite and its facilitators have been making millions of dollars from supporting logging on an industrial scale for many years. So we sent an undercover investigator in to secretly film meetings with members of the ruling elite, and the resulting footage, well, it made some people very angry, and you can see that on YouTube, but it proved what we had long suspected, because it showed how the state's chief minister, despite his later denials, used his control over land and forest licenses to enrich himself and his family. And HSBC, well, we know that HSBC bankrolled the region's largest logging companies that were responsible for some of that destruction in Sarawak and elsewhere. The bank violated its own sustainability policies in the process, but it earned around 130 million dollars. Now shortly after our exposé, very shortly after our exposé earlier this year, the bank announced a policy review on this. And is this progress? Maybe, but we're going to be keeping a very close eye on that case. And then there's the problem of anonymous shell companies. Well, we've all heard about what they are, I think, and we all know they're used quite a bit by people and companies who are trying to avoid paying their proper dues to society, also known as taxes. But what doesn't usually come to light is how shell companies are used to steal huge sums of money, transformational sums of money, from poor countries. In virtually every case of corruption that we've investigated, shell companies have appeared, and sometimes it's been impossible to find out who is really involved in the deal. A recent study by the World Bank looked at 200 cases of corruption. It found that over 70 percent of those cases had used anonymous shell companies, totaling almost 56 billion dollars. Now many of these companies were in America or the United Kingdom, its overseas territories and Crown dependencies, and so it's not just an offshore problem, it's an on-shore one too. You see, shell companies, they're central to the secret deals which may benefit wealthy elites rather than ordinary citizens. One striking recent case that we've investigated is how the government in the Democratic Republic of Congo sold off a series of valuable, state-owned mining assets to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands. So we spoke to sources in country, trawled through company documents and other information trying to piece together a really true picture of the deal. And we were alarmed to find that these shell companies had quickly flipped many of the assets on for huge profits to major international mining companies listed in London. Now, the Africa Progress Panel, led by Kofi Annan, they've calculated that Congo may have lost more than 1.3 billion dollars from these deals. That's almost twice the country's annual health and education budget combined. And will the people of Congo, will they ever get their money back? Well, the answer to that question, and who was really involved and what really happened, well that's going to probably remain locked away in the secretive company registries of the British Virgin Islands and elsewhere unless we all do something about it. And how about the oil, gas and mining companies? Okay, maybe it's a bit of a cliché to talk about them. Corruption in that sector, no surprise. There's corruption everywhere, so why focus on that sector? Well, because there's a lot at stake. In 2011, natural resource exports outweighed aid flows by almost 19 to one in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Nineteen to one. Now that's a hell of a lot of schools and universities and hospitals and business startups, many of which haven't materialized and never will because some of that money has simply been stolen away. Now let's go back to the oil and mining companies, and let's go back to Dan Etete and that $1 billion deal. And now forgive me, I'm going to read the next bit because it's a very live issue, and our lawyers have been through this in some detail and they want me to get it right. Now, on the surface, the deal appeared straightforward. Subsidiaries of Shell and Eni paid the Nigerian government for the block. The Nigerian government transferred precisely the same amount, to the very dollar, to an account earmarked for a shell company whose hidden owner was Etete. Now, that's not bad going for a convicted money launderer. And here's the thing. After many months of digging around and reading through hundreds of pages of court documents, we found evidence that, in fact, Shell and Eni had known that the funds would be transferred to that shell company, and frankly, it's hard to believe they didn't know who they were really dealing with there. Now, it just shouldn't take these sorts of efforts to find out where the money in deals like this went. I mean, these are state assets. They're supposed to be used for the benefit of the people in the country. But in some countries, citizens and journalists who are trying to expose stories like this have been harassed and arrested and some have even risked their lives to do so. And finally, well, there are those who believe that corruption is unavoidable. It's just how some business is done. It's too complex and difficult to change. So in effect, what? We just accept it. But as a campaigner and investigator, I have a different view, because I've seen what can happen when an idea gains momentum. In the oil and mining sector, for example, there is now the beginning of a truly worldwide transparency standard that could tackle some of these problems. In 1999, when Global Witness called for oil companies to make payments on deals transparent, well, some people laughed at the extreme naiveté of that small idea. But literally hundreds of civil society groups from around the world came together to fight for transparency, and now it's fast becoming the norm and the law. Two thirds of the value of the world's oil and mining companies are now covered by transparency laws. Two thirds. So this is change happening. This is progress. But we're not there yet, by far. Because it really isn't about corruption somewhere over there, is it? In a globalized world, corruption is a truly globalized business, and one that needs global solutions, supported and pushed by us all, as global citizens, right here. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we should build wooden skyscrapers | {0: 'Michael Green wants to solve architecture’s biggest challenge -- meeting worldwide housing demand without increasing carbon emissions -- by building with carbon-sequestering wood instead of concrete and steel.'} | TED2013 | This is my grandfather. And this is my son. My grandfather taught me to work with wood when I was a little boy, and he also taught me the idea that if you cut down a tree to turn it into something, honor that tree's life and make it as beautiful as you possibly can. My little boy reminded me that for all the technology and all the toys in the world, sometimes just a small block of wood, if you stack it up tall, actually is an incredibly inspiring thing. These are my buildings. I build all around the world out of our office in Vancouver and New York. And we build buildings of different sizes and styles and different materials, depending on where we are. But wood is the material that I love the most, and I'm going to tell you the story about wood. And part of the reason I love it is that every time people go into my buildings that are wood, I notice they react completely differently. I've never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings and hug a steel or a concrete column, but I've actually seen that happen in a wood building. I've actually seen how people touch the wood, and I think there's a reason for it. Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can ever be the same anywhere on Earth. That's a wonderful thing. I like to think that wood gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. It's Mother Nature's fingerprints that make our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment. Now, I live in Vancouver, near a forest that grows to 33 stories tall. Down the coast here in California, the redwood forest grows to 40 stories tall. But the buildings that we think about in wood are only four stories tall in most places on Earth. Even building codes actually limit the ability for us to build much taller than four stories in many places, and that's true here in the United States. Now there are exceptions, but there needs to be some exceptions, and things are going to change, I'm hoping. And the reason I think that way is that today half of us live in cities, and that number is going to grow to 75 percent. Cities and density mean that our buildings are going to continue to be big, and I think there's a role for wood to play in cities. And I feel that way because three billion people in the world today, over the next 20 years, will need a new home. That's 40 percent of the world that are going to need a new building built for them in the next 20 years. Now, one in three people living in cities today actually live in a slum. That's one billion people in the world live in slums. A hundred million people in the world are homeless. The scale of the challenge for architects and for society to deal with in building is to find a solution to house these people. But the challenge is, as we move to cities, cities are built in these two materials, steel and concrete, and they're great materials. They're the materials of the last century. But they're also materials with very high energy and very high greenhouse gas emissions in their process. Steel represents about three percent of man's greenhouse gas emissions, and concrete is over five percent. So if you think about that, eight percent of our contribution to greenhouse gases today comes from those two materials alone. We don't think about it a lot, and unfortunately, we actually don't even think about buildings, I think, as much as we should. This is a U.S. statistic about the impact of greenhouse gases. Almost half of our greenhouse gases are related to the building industry, and if we look at energy, it's the same story. You'll notice that transportation's sort of second down that list, but that's the conversation we mostly hear about. And although a lot of that is about energy, it's also so much about carbon. The problem I see is that, ultimately, the clash of how we solve that problem of serving those three billion people that need a home, and climate change, are a head-on collision about to happen, or already happening. That challenge means that we have to start thinking in new ways, and I think wood is going to be part of that solution, and I'm going to tell you the story of why. As an architect, wood is the only material, big material, that I can build with that's already grown by the power of the sun. When a tree grows in the forest and gives off oxygen and soaks up carbon dioxide, and it dies and it falls to the forest floor, it gives that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere or into the ground. If it burns in a forest fire, it's going to give that carbon back to the atmosphere as well. But if you take that wood and you put it into a building or into a piece of furniture or into that wooden toy, it actually has an amazing capacity to store the carbon and provide us with a sequestration. One cubic meter of wood will store one tonne of carbon dioxide. Now our two solutions to climate are obviously to reduce our emissions and find storage. Wood is the only major material building material I can build with that actually does both those two things. So I believe that we have an ethic that the Earth grows our food, and we need to move to an ethic in this century that the Earth should grow our homes. Now, how are we going to do that when we're urbanizing at this rate and we think about wood buildings only at four stories? We need to reduce the concrete and steel and we need to grow bigger, and what we've been working on is 30-story tall buildings made of wood. We've been engineering them with an engineer named Eric Karsh who works with me on it, and we've been doing this new work because there are new wood products out there for us to use, and we call them mass timber panels. These are panels made with young trees, small growth trees, small pieces of wood glued together to make panels that are enormous: eight feet wide, 64 feet long, and of various thicknesses. The way I describe this best, I've found, is to say that we're all used to two-by-four construction when we think about wood. That's what people jump to as a conclusion. Two-by-four construction is sort of like the little eight-dot bricks of Lego that we all played with as kids, and you can make all kinds of cool things out of Lego at that size, and out of two-by-fours. But do remember when you were a kid, and you kind of sifted through the pile in your basement, and you found that big 24-dot brick of Lego, and you were kind of like, "Cool, this is awesome. I can build something really big, and this is going to be great." That's the change. Mass timber panels are those 24-dot bricks. They're changing the scale of what we can do, and what we've developed is something we call FFTT, which is a Creative Commons solution to building a very flexible system of building with these large panels where we tilt up six stories at a time if we want to. This animation shows you how the building goes together in a very simple way, but these buildings are available for architects and engineers now to build on for different cultures in the world, different architectural styles and characters. In order for us to build safely, we've engineered these buildings, actually, to work in a Vancouver context, where we're a high seismic zone, even at 30 stories tall. Now obviously, every time I bring this up, people even, you know, here at the conference, say, "Are you serious? Thirty stories? How's that going to happen?" And there's a lot of really good questions that are asked and important questions that we spent quite a long time working on the answers to as we put together our report and the peer reviewed report. I'm just going to focus on a few of them, and let's start with fire, because I think fire is probably the first one that you're all thinking about right now. Fair enough. And the way I describe it is this. If I asked you to take a match and light it and hold up a log and try to get that log to go on fire, it doesn't happen, right? We all know that. But to build a fire, you kind of start with small pieces of wood and you work your way up, and eventually you can add the log to the fire, and when you do add the log to the fire, of course, it burns, but it burns slowly. Well, mass timber panels, these new products that we're using, are much like the log. It's hard to start them on fire, and when they do, they actually burn extraordinarily predictably, and we can use fire science in order to predict and make these buildings as safe as concrete and as safe as steel. The next big issue, deforestation. Eighteen percent of our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide is the result of deforestation. The last thing we want to do is cut down trees. Or, the last thing we want to do is cut down the wrong trees. There are models for sustainable forestry that allow us to cut trees properly, and those are the only trees appropriate to use for these kinds of systems. Now I actually think that these ideas will change the economics of deforestation. In countries with deforestation issues, we need to find a way to provide better value for the forest and actually encourage people to make money through very fast growth cycles — 10-, 12-, 15-year-old trees that make these products and allow us to build at this scale. We've calculated a 20-story building: We'll grow enough wood in North America every 13 minutes. That's how much it takes. The carbon story here is a really good one. If we built a 20-story building out of cement and concrete, the process would result in the manufacturing of that cement and 1,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide. If we did it in wood, in this solution, we'd sequester about 3,100 tonnes, for a net difference of 4,300 tonnes. That's the equivalent of about 900 cars removed from the road in one year. Think back to that three billion people that need a new home, and maybe this is a contributor to reducing. We're at the beginning of a revolution, I hope, in the way we build, because this is the first new way to build a skyscraper in probably 100 years or more. But the challenge is changing society's perception of possibility, and it's a huge challenge. The engineering is, truthfully, the easy part of this. And the way I describe it is this. The first skyscraper, technically — and the definition of a skyscraper is 10 stories tall, believe it or not — but the first skyscraper was this one in Chicago, and people were terrified to walk underneath this building. But only four years after it was built, Gustave Eiffel was building the Eiffel Tower, and as he built the Eiffel Tower, he changed the skylines of the cities of the world, changed and created a competition between places like New York City and Chicago, where developers started building bigger and bigger buildings and pushing the envelope up higher and higher with better and better engineering. We built this model in New York, actually, as a theoretical model on the campus of a technical university soon to come, and the reason we picked this site to just show you what these buildings may look like, because the exterior can change. It's really just the structure that we're talking about. The reason we picked it is because this is a technical university, and I believe that wood is the most technologically advanced material I can build with. It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent, and we don't really feel comfortable with it. But that's the way it should be, nature's fingerprints in the built environment. I'm looking for this opportunity to create an Eiffel Tower moment, we call it. Buildings are starting to go up around the world. There's a building in London that's nine stories, a new building that just finished in Australia that I believe is 10 or 11. We're starting to push the height up of these wood buildings, and we're hoping, and I'm hoping, that my hometown of Vancouver actually potentially announces the world's tallest at around 20 stories in the not-so-distant future. That Eiffel Tower moment will break the ceiling, these arbitrary ceilings of height, and allow wood buildings to join the competition. And I believe the race is ultimately on. Thank you. (Applause) |
The interspecies internet? An idea in progress | {0: 'Diana Reiss studies animal cognition, and has found that bottlenose dolphins (and Asian elephants) can recognize themselves in the mirror.', 1: 'Peter Gabriel writes incredible songs but, as the co-founder of WITNESS and TheElders.org, is also a powerful human rights advocate.', 2: 'As Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, Neil Gershenfeld explores the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds.', 3: 'Vint Cerf, now the chief Internet evangelist at Google, helped lay the foundations for the internet as we know it more than 30 years ago.'} | TED2013 | Diana Reiss: You may think you're looking through a window at a dolphin spinning playfully, but what you're actually looking through is a two-way mirror at a dolphin looking at itself spinning playfully. This is a dolphin that is self-aware. This dolphin has self-awareness. It's a young dolphin named Bayley. I've been very interested in understanding the nature of the intelligence of dolphins for the past 30 years. How do we explore intelligence in this animal that's so different from us? And what I've used is a very simple research tool, a mirror, and we've gained great information, reflections of these animal minds. Dolphins aren't the only animals, the only non-human animals, to show mirror self-recognition. We used to think this was a uniquely human ability, but we learned that the great apes, our closest relatives, also show this ability. Then we showed it in dolphins, and then later in elephants. We did this work in my lab with the dolphins and elephants, and it's been recently shown in the magpie. Now, it's interesting, because we've embraced this Darwinian view of a continuity in physical evolution, this physical continuity. But we've been much more reticent, much slower at recognizing this continuity in cognition, in emotion, in consciousness in other animals. Other animals are conscious. They're emotional. They're aware. There have been multitudes of studies with many species over the years that have given us exquisite evidence for thinking and consciousness in other animals, other animals that are quite different than we are in form. We are not alone. We are not alone in these abilities. And I hope, and one of my biggest dreams, is that, with our growing awareness about the consciousness of others and our relationship with the rest of the animal world, that we'll give them the respect and protection that they deserve. So that's a wish I'm throwing out here for everybody, and I hope I can really engage you in this idea. Now, I want to return to dolphins, because these are the animals that I feel like I've been working up closely and personal with for over 30 years. And these are real personalities. They are not persons, but they're personalities in every sense of the word. And you can't get more alien than the dolphin. They are very different from us in body form. They're radically different. They come from a radically different environment. In fact, we're separated by 95 million years of divergent evolution. Look at this body. And in every sense of making a pun here, these are true non-terrestrials. I wondered how we might interface with these animals. In the 1980s, I developed an underwater keyboard. This was a custom-made touch-screen keyboard. What I wanted to do was give the dolphins choice and control. These are big brains, highly social animals, and I thought, well, if we give them choice and control, if they can hit a symbol on this keyboard — and by the way, it was interfaced by fiber optic cables from Hewlett-Packard with an Apple II computer. This seems prehistoric now, but this was where we were with technology. So the dolphins could hit a key, a symbol, they heard a computer-generated whistle, and they got an object or activity. Now here's a little video. This is Delphi and Pan, and you're going to see Delphi hitting a key, he hears a computer-generated whistle — (Whistle) — and gets a ball, so they can actually ask for things they want. What was remarkable is, they explored this keyboard on their own. There was no intervention on our part. They explored the keyboard. They played around with it. They figured out how it worked. And they started to quickly imitate the sounds they were hearing on the keyboard. They imitated on their own. Beyond that, though, they started learning associations between the symbols, the sounds and the objects. What we saw was self-organized learning, and now I'm imagining, what can we do with new technologies? How can we create interfaces, new windows into the minds of animals, with the technologies that exist today? So I was thinking about this, and then, one day, I got a call from Peter. Peter Gabriel: I make noises for a living. On a good day, it's music, and I want to talk a little bit about the most amazing music-making experience I ever had. I'm a farm boy. I grew up surrounded by animals, and I would look in these eyes and wonder what was going on there? So as an adult, when I started to read about the amazing breakthroughs with Penny Patterson and Koko, with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Kanzi, Panbanisha, Irene Pepperberg, Alex the parrot, I got all excited. What was amazing to me also was they seemed a lot more adept at getting a handle on our language than we were on getting a handle on theirs. I work with a lot of musicians from around the world, and often we don't have any common language at all, but we sit down behind our instruments, and suddenly there's a way for us to connect and emote. So I started cold-calling, and eventually got through to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and she invited me down. I went down, and the bonobos had had access to percussion instruments, musical toys, but never before to a keyboard. At first they did what infants do, just bashed it with their fists, and then I asked, through Sue, if Panbanisha could try with one finger only. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh: Can you play a grooming song? I want to hear a grooming song. Play a real quiet grooming song. PG: So groom was the subject of the piece. (Music) So I'm just behind, jamming, yeah, this is what we started with. Sue's encouraging her to continue a little more. (Music) She discovers a note she likes, finds the octave. She'd never sat at a keyboard before. Nice triplets. SSR: You did good. That was very good. PG: She hit good. (Applause) So that night, we began to dream, and we thought, perhaps the most amazing tool that man's created is the Internet, and what would happen if we could somehow find new interfaces, visual-audio interfaces that would allow these remarkable sentient beings that we share the planet with access? And Sue Savage-Rumbaugh got excited about that, called her friend Steve Woodruff, and we began hustling all sorts of people whose work related or was inspiring, which led us to Diana, and led us to Neil. Neil Gershenfeld: Thanks, Peter. PG: Thank you. (Applause) NG: So Peter approached me. I lost it when I saw that clip. He approached me with a vision of doing these things not for people, for animals. And then I was struck in the history of the Internet. This is what the Internet looked like when it was born and you can call that the Internet of middle-aged white men, mostly middle-aged white men. Vint Cerf: (Laughs) (Laughter) NG: Speaking as one. Then, when I first came to TED, which was where I met Peter, I showed this. This is a $1 web server, and at the time that was radical. And the possibility of making a web server for a dollar grew into what became known as the Internet of Things, which is literally an industry now with tremendous implications for health care, energy efficiency. And we were happy with ourselves. And then when Peter showed me that, I realized we had missed something, which is the rest of the planet. So we started up this interspecies Internet project. Now we started talking with TED about how you bring dolphins and great apes and elephants to TED, and we realized that wouldn't work. So we're going to bring you to them. So if we could switch to the audio from this computer, we've been video conferencing with cognitive animals, and we're going to have each of them just briefly introduce them. And so if we could also have this up, great. So the first site we're going to meet is Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, with orangutans. In the daytime they live outside. It's nighttime there now. So can you please go ahead? Terri Cox: Hi, I'm Terri Cox with the Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, Texas, and with me I have KeraJaan and Mei, two of our Bornean orangutans. During the day, they have a beautiful, large outdoor habitat, and at night, they come into this habitat, into their night quarters, where they can have a climate-controlled and secure environment to sleep in. We participate in the Apps for Apes program Orangutan Outreach, and we use iPads to help stimulate and enrich the animals, and also help raise awareness for these critically endangered animals. And they share 97 percent of our DNA and are incredibly intelligent, so it's so exciting to think of all the opportunities that we have via technology and the Internet to really enrich their lives and open up their world. We're really excited about the possibility of an interspecies Internet, and K.J. has been enjoying the conference very much. NG: That's great. When we were rehearsing last night, he had fun watching the elephants. Next user group are the dolphins at the National Aquarium. Please go ahead. Allison Ginsburg: Good evening. Well, my name is Allison Ginsburg, and we're live in Baltimore at the National Aquarium. Joining me are three of our eight Atlantic bottlenose dolphins: 20-year-old Chesapeake, who was our first dolphin born here, her four-year-old daughter Bayley, and her half sister, 11-year-old Maya. Now, here at the National Aquarium we are committed to excellence in animal care, to research, and to conservation. The dolphins are pretty intrigued as to what's going on here tonight. They're not really used to having cameras here at 8 o'clock at night. In addition, we are very committed to doing different types of research. As Diana mentioned, our animals are involved in many different research studies. NG: Those are for you. Okay, that's great, thank you. And the third user group, in Thailand, is Think Elephants. Go ahead, Josh. Josh Plotnik: Hi, my name is Josh Plotnik, and I'm with Think Elephants International, and we're here in the Golden Triangle of Thailand with the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation elephants. And we have 26 elephants here, and our research is focused on the evolution of intelligence with elephants, but our foundation Think Elephants is focused on bringing elephants into classrooms around the world virtually like this and showing people how incredible these animals are. So we're able to bring the camera right up to the elephant, put food into the elephant's mouth, show people what's going on inside their mouths, and show everyone around the world how incredible these animals really are. NG: Okay, that's great. Thanks Josh. And once again, we've been building great relationships among them just since we've been rehearsing. So at that point, if we can go back to the other computer, we were starting to think about how you integrate the rest of the biomass of the planet into the Internet, and we went to the best possible person I can think of, which is Vint Cerf, who is one of the founders who gave us the Internet. Vint? VC: Thank you, Neil. (Applause) A long time ago in a galaxy — oops, wrong script. Forty years ago, Bob Kahn and I did the design of the Internet. Thirty years ago, we turned it on. Just last year, we turned on the production Internet. You've been using the experimental version for the last 30 years. The production version, it uses IP version 6. It has 3.4 times 10 to the 38th possible terminations. That's a number only that Congress can appreciate. But it leads to what is coming next. When Bob and I did this design, we thought we were building a system to connect computers together. What we very quickly discovered is that this was a system for connecting people together. And what you've seen tonight tells you that we should not restrict this network to one species, that these other intelligent, sentient species should be part of the system too. This is the system as it looks today, by the way. This is what the Internet looks like to a computer that's trying to figure out where the traffic is supposed to go. This is generated by a program that's looking at the connectivity of the Internet, and how all the various networks are connected together. There are about 400,000 networks, interconnected, run independently by 400,000 different operating agencies, and the only reason this works is that they all use the same standard TCP/IP protocols. Well, you know where this is headed. The Internet of Things tell us that a lot of computer-enabled appliances and devices are going to become part of this system too: appliances that you use around the house, that you use in your office, that you carry around with yourself or in the car. That's the Internet of Things that's coming. Now, what's important about what these people are doing is that they're beginning to learn how to communicate with species that are not us but share a common sensory environment. We're beginning to explore what it means to communicate with something that isn't just another person. Well, you can see what's coming next. All kinds of possible sentient beings may be interconnected through this system, and I can't wait to see these experiments unfold. What happens after that? Well, let's see. There are machines that need to talk to machines and that we need to talk to, and so as time goes on, we're going to have to learn how to communicate with computers and how to get computers to communicate with us in the way that we're accustomed to, not with keyboards, not with mice, but with speech and gestures and all the natural human language that we're accustomed to. So we'll need something like C3PO to become a translator between ourselves and some of the other machines we live with. Now, there is a project that's underway called the interplanetary Internet. It's in operation between Earth and Mars. It's operating on the International Space Station. It's part of the spacecraft that's in orbit around the Sun that's rendezvoused with two planets. So the interplanetary system is on its way, but there's a last project, which the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funded the original ARPANET, funded the Internet, funded the interplanetary architecture, is now funding a project to design a spacecraft to get to the nearest star in 100 years' time. What that means is that what we're learning with these interactions with other species will teach us, ultimately, how we might interact with an alien from another world. I can hardly wait. (Applause) June Cohen: So first of all, thank you, and I would like to acknowledge that four people who could talk to us for full four days actually managed to stay to four minutes each, and we thank you for that. I have so many questions, but maybe a few practical things that the audience might want to know. You're launching this idea here at TED — PG: Today. JC: Today. This is the first time you're talking about it. Tell me a little bit about where you're going to take the idea. What's next? PG: I think we want to engage as many people here as possible in helping us think of smart interfaces that will make all this possible. NG: And just mechanically, there's a 501(c)(3) and web infrastructure and all of that, but it's not quite ready to turn on, so we'll roll that out, and contact us if you want the information on it. The idea is this will be — much like the Internet functions as a network of networks, which is Vint's core contribution, this will be a wrapper around all of these initiatives, that are wonderful individually, to link them globally. JC: Right, and do you have a web address that we might look for yet? NG: Shortly. JC: Shortly. We will come back to you on that. And very quickly, just to clarify. Some people might have looked at the video that you showed and thought, well, that's just a webcam. What's special about it? If you could talk for just a moment about how you want to go past that? NG: So this is scalable video infrastructure, not for a few to a few but many to many, so that it scales to symmetrical video sharing and content sharing across these sites around the planet. So there's a lot of back-end signal processing, not for one to many, but for many to many. JC: Right, and then on a practical level, which technologies are you looking at first? I know you mentioned that a keyboard is a really key part of this. DR: We're trying to develop an interactive touch screen for dolphins. This is sort of a continuation of some of the earlier work, and we just got our first seed money today towards that, so it's our first project. JC: Before the talk, even. DR: Yeah. JC: Wow. Well done. All right, well thank you all so much for joining us. It's such a delight to have you on the stage. DR: Thank you. VC: Thank you. (Applause) |
A promising test for pancreatic cancer ... from a teenager | {0: 'A paper on carbon nanotubes, a biology lecture on antibodies and a flash of insight led 15-year-old Jack Andraka to design a cheaper, more sensitive cancer detector.'} | TED2013 | Have you ever experienced a moment in your life that was so painful and confusing, that all you wanted to do was learn as much as you could to make sense of it all? When I was 13, a close family friend who was like an uncle to me passed away from pancreatic cancer. When the disease hit so close to home, I knew I needed to learn more. So I went online to find answers. Using the Internet, I found a variety of statistics on pancreatic cancer, and what I had found shocked me. Over 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late, when someone has less than a two percent chance of survival. Why are we so bad at detecting pancreatic cancer? The reason? Today's current "modern" medicine is a 60-year-old technique. That's older than my dad. (Laughter) But also, it's extremely expensive, costing 800 dollars per test, and it's grossly inaccurate, missing 30 percent of all pancreatic cancers. Your doctor would have to be ridiculously suspicious that you have the cancer in order to give you this test. Learning this, I knew there had to be a better way. So, I set up scientific criteria as to what a sensor would have to look like in order to effectively diagnose pancreatic cancer. The sensor would have to be: inexpensive, rapid, simple, sensitive, selective, and minimally invasive. Now, there's a reason why this test hasn't been updated in over six decades. And that's because when we're looking for pancreatic cancer, we're looking at your bloodstream, which is already abundant in all these tons and tons of protein, and you're looking for this miniscule difference in this tiny amount of protein. Just this one protein. That's next to impossible. However, undeterred due to my teenage optimism — (Laughter) (Applause) I went online to a teenager's two best friends, Google and Wikipedia. I got everything for my homework from those two sources. (Laughter) And what I had found was an article that listed a database of over 8,000 different proteins that are found when you have pancreatic cancer. So, I decided to go and make it my new mission to go through all these proteins, and see which ones could serve as a bio-marker for pancreatic cancer. And to make it a bit simpler for myself, I decided to map out scientific criteria, and here it is. Essentially, first, the protein would have to be found in all pancreatic cancers, at high levels in the bloodstream, in the earliest stages, but also only in cancer. And so I'm just plugging and chugging through this gargantuan task, and finally, on the 4,000th try, when I'm close to losing my sanity, I find the protein. And the name of the protein I'd located was called mesothelin, and it's just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill type protein, unless, of course, you have pancreatic, ovarian or lung cancer, in which case it's found at these very high levels in your bloodstream. But also, the key is that it's found in the earliest stages of the disease, when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival. So now that I'd found a reliable protein I could detect, I then shifted my focus to actually detecting that protein, and thus, pancreatic cancer. Now, my breakthrough came in a very unlikely place, possibly the most unlikely place for innovation — my high school biology class, the absolute stifler of innovation. (Laughter) (Applause) And I had snuck in this article on these things called carbon nanotubes, and that's just a long, thin pipe of carbon that's an atom thick, and one 50,000th the diameter of your hair. And despite their extremely small sizes, they have these incredible properties. They're kind of like the superheroes of material science. And while I was sneakily reading this article under my desk in my biology class, we were supposed to be paying attention to these other kind of cool molecules, called antibodies. And these are pretty cool because they only react with one specific protein, but they're not nearly as interesting as carbon nanotubes. And so then, I was sitting in class, and suddenly it hit me: I could combine what I was reading about, carbon nanotubes, with what I was supposed to be thinking about, antibodies. Essentially, I could weave a bunch of these antibodies into a network of carbon nanotubes, such that you have a network that only reacts with one protein, but also, due to the properties of these nanotubes, it will change its electrical properties, based on the amount of protein present. However, there's a catch. These networks of carbon nanotubes are extremely flimsy. And since they're so delicate, they need to be supported. So that's why I chose to use paper. Making a cancer sensor out of paper is about as simple as making chocolate chip cookies, which I love. (Laughs) You start with some water, pour in some nanotubes, add antibodies, mix it up, take some paper, dip it, dry it, and you can detect cancer. (Applause) Then, suddenly, a thought occurred that kind of put a blemish on my amazing plan here. I can't really do cancer research on my kitchen countertop. My mom wouldn't really like that. So instead, I decided to go for a lab. So I typed up a budget, a materials list, a timeline, and a procedure, and I emailed it to 200 different professors at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health — essentially, anyone that had anything to do with pancreatic cancer. I sat back waiting for these positive emails to be pouring in, saying, "You're a genius! You're going to save us all!" And — (Laughter) Then reality took hold, and over the course of a month, I got 199 rejections out of those 200 emails. One professor even went through my entire procedure, painstakingly — I'm not really sure where he got all this time — and he went through and said why each and every step was like the worst mistake I could ever make. Clearly, the professors did not have as high of an opinion of my work as I did. However, there is a silver lining. One professor said, "Maybe I might be able to help you, kid." So, I went in that direction. (Laughter) As you can never say no to a kid. And so then, three months later, I finally nailed down a harsh deadline with this guy, and I get into his lab, I get all excited, and then I sit down, I start opening my mouth and talking, and five seconds later, he calls in another Ph.D. Ph.D.s just flock into this little room, and they're just firing these questions at me, and by the end, I kind of felt like I was in a clown car. There were 20 Ph.D.s, plus me and the professor crammed into this tiny office space, with them firing these rapid-fire questions at me, trying to sink my procedure. How unlikely is that? I mean, pshhh. (Laughter) However, subjecting myself to that interrogation — I answered all their questions, and I guessed on quite a few but I got them right — and I finally landed the lab space I needed. But it was shortly afterwards that I discovered my once brilliant procedure had something like a million holes in it, and over the course of seven months, I painstakingly filled each and every one of those holes. The result? One small paper sensor that costs three cents and takes five minutes to run. This makes it 168 times faster, over 26,000 times less expensive, and over 400 times more sensitive than our current standard for pancreatic cancer detection. (Applause) One of the best parts of the sensor, though, is that it has close to 100 percent accuracy, and can detect the cancer in the earliest stages, when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival. And so in the next two to five years, this sensor could potentially lift the pancreatic cancer survival rates from a dismal 5.5 percent to close to 100 percent, and it would do similar for ovarian and lung cancer. But it wouldn't stop there. By switching out that antibody, you can look at a different protein, thus, a different disease — potentially any disease in the entire world. So that ranges from heart disease, to malaria, HIV, AIDS, as well as other forms of cancer — anything. And so, hopefully one day, we can all have that one extra uncle, that one mother, that one brother, sister, we can have that one more family member to love. And that our hearts will be rid of that one disease burden that comes from pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer, and potentially any disease. But through the Internet, anything is possible. Theories can be shared, and you don't have to be a professor with multiple degrees to have your ideas valued. It's a neutral space, where what you look like, age or gender — it doesn't matter. It's just your ideas that count. For me, it's all about looking at the Internet in an entirely new way, to realize that there's so much more to it than just posting duck-face pictures of yourself online. (Laughter) You could be changing the world. So if a 15 year-old who didn't even know what a pancreas was could find a new way to detect pancreatic cancer — just imagine what you could do. Thank you. (Applause) |
Sex needs a new metaphor. Here's one ... | {0: 'In his 12th-grade Sexuality and Society class, Al Vernacchio speaks honestly and positively about human sexuality.'} | TED2012 | I'd like to talk to you today about a whole new way to think about sexual activity and sexuality education, by comparison. If you talk to someone today in America about sexual activity, you'll find pretty soon you're not just talking about sexual activity. You're also talking about baseball. Because baseball is the dominant cultural metaphor that Americans use to think about and talk about sexual activity, and we know that because there's all this language in English that seems to be talking about baseball but that's really talking about sexual activity. So, for example, you can be a pitcher or a catcher, and that corresponds to whether you perform a sexual act or receive a sexual act. Of course, there are the bases, which refer to specific sexual activities that happen in a very specific order, ultimately resulting in scoring a run or hitting a home run, which is usually having vaginal intercourse to the point of orgasm, at least for the guy. (Laughter) You can strike out, which means you don't get to have any sexual activity. And if you're a benchwarmer, you might be a virgin or somebody who for whatever reason isn't in the game, maybe because of your age or because of your ability or because of your skillset. A bat's a penis, and a nappy dugout is a vulva, or a vagina. A glove or a catcher's mitt is a condom. A switch-hitter is a bisexual person, and we gay and lesbian folks play for the other team. And then there's this one: "if there's grass on the field, play ball." And that usually refers to if a young person, specifically often a young woman, is old enough to have pubic hair, she's old enough to have sex with. This baseball model is incredibly problematic. It's sexist. It's heterosexist. It's competitive. It's goal-directed. And it can't result in healthy sexuality developing in young people or in adults. So we need a new model. I'm here today to offer you that new model. And it's based on pizza. Now pizza is something that is universally understood and that most people associate with a positive experience. So let's do this. Let's take baseball and pizza and compare it when talking about three aspects of sexual activity: the trigger for sexual activity, what happens during sexual activity, and the expected outcome of sexual activity. So when do you play baseball? You play baseball when it's baseball season and when there's a game on the schedule. It's not exactly your choice. So if it's prom night or a wedding night or at a party or if our parents aren't home, hey, it's just batter up. Can you imagine saying to your coach, "Uh, I'm not really feeling it today, I think I'll sit this game out." That's just not the way it happens. And when you get together to play baseball, immediately you're with two opposing teams, one playing offense, one playing defense, somebody's trying to move deeper into the field. That's usually a sign to the boy. Somebody's trying to defend people moving into the field. That's often given to the girl. It's competitive. We're not playing with each other. We're playing against each other. And when you show up to play baseball, nobody needs to talk about what we're going to do or how this baseball game might be good for us. Everybody knows the rules. You just take your position and play the game. But when do you have pizza? Well, you have pizza when you're hungry for pizza. It starts with an internal sense, an internal desire, or a need. "Huh. I could go for some pizza." (Laughter) And because it's an internal desire, we actually have some sense of control over that. I could decide that I'm hungry but know that it's not a great time to eat. And then when we get together with someone for pizza, we're not competing with them, we're looking for an experience that both of us will share that's satisfying for both of us, and when you get together for pizza with somebody, what's the first thing you do? You talk about it. You talk about what you want. You talk about what you like. You may even negotiate it. "How do you feel about pepperoni?" (Laughter) "Not so much, I'm kind of a mushroom guy myself." "Well, maybe we can go half and half." And even if you've had pizza with somebody for a very long time, don't you still say things like, "Should we get the usual?" (Laughter) "Or maybe something a little more adventurous?" Okay, so when you're playing baseball, so if we talk about during sexual activity, when you're playing baseball, you're just supposed to round the bases in the proper order one at a time. You can't hit the ball and run to right field. That doesn't work. And you also can't get to second base and say, "I like it here. I'm going to stay here." No. And also, of course, with baseball, there's, like, the specific equipment and a specific skill set. Not everybody can play baseball. It's pretty exclusive. Okay, but what about pizza? When we're trying to figure out what's good for pizza, isn't it all about what's our pleasure? There are a million different kinds of pizza. There's a million different toppings. There's a million different ways to eat pizza. And none of them are wrong. They're different. And in this case, difference is good, because that's going to increase the chance that we're having a satisfying experience. And lastly, what's the expected outcome of baseball? Well, in baseball, you play to win. You score as many runs as you can. There's always a winner in baseball, and that means there's always a loser in baseball. But what about pizza? Well, in pizza, we're not really — there's no winning. How do you win pizza? You don't. But you do look for, "Are we satisfied?" And sometimes that can be different amounts over different times or with different people or on different days. And we get to decide when we feel satisfied. If we're still hungry, we might have some more. If you eat too much, though, you just feel gross. (Laughter) So what if we could take this pizza model and overlay it on top of sexuality education? A lot of sexuality education that happens today is so influenced by the baseball model, and it sets up education that can't help but produce unhealthy sexuality in young people. And those young people become older people. But if we could create sexuality education that was more like pizza, we could create education that invites people to think about their own desires, to make deliberate decisions about what they want, to talk about it with their partners, and to ultimately look for not some external outcome but for what feels satisfying, and we get to decide that. You may have noticed in the baseball and pizza comparison, under the baseball, it's all commands. They're all exclamation points. But under the pizza model, they're questions. And who gets to answer those questions? You do. I do. So remember, when we're thinking about sexuality education and sexual activity, baseball, you're out. Pizza is the way to think about healthy, satisfying sexual activity, and good, comprehensive sexuality education. Thank you very much for your time. (Applause) |
The voice of the natural world | {0: "Bernie Krause's legendary soundscapes uncover nature’s rich sonic tapestry -- along with some unexpected results."} | TEDGlobal 2013 | (Nature sounds) When I first began recording wild soundscapes 45 years ago, I had no idea that ants, insect larvae, sea anemones and viruses created a sound signature. But they do. And so does every wild habitat on the planet, like the Amazon rainforest you're hearing behind me. In fact, temperate and tropical rainforests each produce a vibrant animal orchestra, that instantaneous and organized expression of insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals. And every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information, and it's some of that information I want to share with you today. The soundscape is made up of three basic sources. The first is the geophony, or the nonbiological sounds that occur in any given habitat, like wind in the trees, water in a stream, waves at the ocean shore, movement of the Earth. The second of these is the biophony. The biophony is all of the sound that's generated by organisms in a given habitat at one time and in one place. And the third is all of the sound that we humans generate that's called anthrophony. Some of it is controlled, like music or theater, but most of it is chaotic and incoherent, which some of us refer to as noise. There was a time when I considered wild soundscapes to be a worthless artifact. They were just there, but they had no significance. Well, I was wrong. What I learned from these encounters was that careful listening gives us incredibly valuable tools by which to evaluate the health of a habitat across the entire spectrum of life. When I began recording in the late '60s, the typical methods of recording were limited to the fragmented capture of individual species like birds mostly, in the beginning, but later animals like mammals and amphibians. To me, this was a little like trying to understand the magnificence of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the context of the orchestra and hearing just that one part. Fortunately, more and more institutions are implementing the more holistic models that I and a few of my colleagues have introduced to the field of soundscape ecology. When I began recording over four decades ago, I could record for 10 hours and capture one hour of usable material, good enough for an album or a film soundtrack or a museum installation. Now, because of global warming, resource extraction, and human noise, among many other factors, it can take up to 1,000 hours or more to capture the same thing. Fully 50 percent of my archive comes from habitats so radically altered that they're either altogether silent or can no longer be heard in any of their original form. The usual methods of evaluating a habitat have been done by visually counting the numbers of species and the numbers of individuals within each species in a given area. However, by comparing data that ties together both density and diversity from what we hear, I'm able to arrive at much more precise fitness outcomes. And I want to show you some examples that typify the possibilities unlocked by diving into this universe. This is Lincoln Meadow. Lincoln Meadow's a three-and-a-half-hour drive east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, at about 2,000 meters altitude, and I've been recording there for many years. In 1988, a logging company convinced local residents that there would be absolutely no environmental impact from a new method they were trying called "selective logging," taking out a tree here and there rather than clear-cutting a whole area. With permission granted to record both before and after the operation, I set up my gear and captured a large number of dawn choruses to very strict protocol and calibrated recordings, because I wanted a really good baseline. This is an example of a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a graphic illustration of sound with time from left to right across the page — 15 seconds in this case is represented — and frequency from the bottom of the page to the top, lowest to highest. And you can see that the signature of a stream is represented here in the bottom third or half of the page, while birds that were once in that meadow are represented in the signature across the top. There were a lot of them. And here's Lincoln Meadow before selective logging. (Nature sounds) Well, a year later I returned, and using the same protocols and recording under the same conditions, I recorded a number of examples of the same dawn choruses, and now this is what we've got. This is after selective logging. You can see that the stream is still represented in the bottom third of the page, but notice what's missing in the top two thirds. (Nature sounds) Coming up is the sound of a woodpecker. Well, I've returned to Lincoln Meadow 15 times in the last 25 years, and I can tell you that the biophony, the density and diversity of that biophony, has not yet returned to anything like it was before the operation. But here's a picture of Lincoln Meadow taken after, and you can see that from the perspective of the camera or the human eye, hardly a stick or a tree appears to be out of place, which would confirm the logging company's contention that there's nothing of environmental impact. However, our ears tell us a very different story. Young students are always asking me what these animals are saying, and really I've got no idea. But I can tell you that they do express themselves. Whether or not we understand it is a different story. I was walking along the shore in Alaska, and I came across this tide pool filled with a colony of sea anemones, these wonderful eating machines, relatives of coral and jellyfish. And curious to see if any of them made any noise, I dropped a hydrophone, an underwater microphone covered in rubber, down the mouth part, and immediately the critter began to absorb the microphone into its belly, and the tentacles were searching out of the surface for something of nutritional value. The static-like sounds that are very low, that you're going to hear right now. (Static sounds) Yeah, but watch. When it didn't find anything to eat — (Honking sound) (Laughter) I think that's an expression that can be understood in any language. (Laughter) At the end of its breeding cycle, the Great Basin Spadefoot toad digs itself down about a meter under the hard-panned desert soil of the American West, where it can stay for many seasons until conditions are just right for it to emerge again. And when there's enough moisture in the soil in the spring, frogs will dig themselves to the surface and gather around these large, vernal pools in great numbers. And they vocalize in a chorus that's absolutely in sync with one another. And they do that for two reasons. The first is competitive, because they're looking for mates, and the second is cooperative, because if they're all vocalizing in sync together, it makes it really difficult for predators like coyotes, foxes and owls to single out any individual for a meal. This is a spectrogram of what the frog chorusing looks like when it's in a very healthy pattern. (Frogs croaking) Mono Lake is just to the east of Yosemite National Park in California, and it's a favorite habitat of these toads, and it's also favored by U.S. Navy jet pilots, who train in their fighters flying them at speeds exceeding 1,100 kilometers an hour and altitudes only a couple hundred meters above ground level of the Mono Basin, very fast, very low, and so loud that the anthrophony, the human noise, even though it's six and a half kilometers from the frog pond you just heard a second ago, it masked the sound of the chorusing toads. You can see in this spectrogram that all of the energy that was once in the first spectrogram is gone from the top end of the spectrogram, and that there's breaks in the chorusing at two and a half, four and a half, and six and a half seconds, and then the sound of the jet, the signature, is in yellow at the very bottom of the page. (Frogs croaking) Now at the end of that flyby, it took the frogs fully 45 minutes to regain their chorusing synchronicity, during which time, and under a full moon, we watched as two coyotes and a great horned owl came in to pick off a few of their numbers. The good news is that, with a little bit of habitat restoration and fewer flights, the frog populations, once diminishing during the 1980s and early '90s, have pretty much returned to normal. I want to end with a story told by a beaver. It's a very sad story, but it really illustrates how animals can sometimes show emotion, a very controversial subject among some older biologists. A colleague of mine was recording in the American Midwest around this pond that had been formed maybe 16,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. It was also formed in part by a beaver dam at one end that held that whole ecosystem together in a very delicate balance. And one afternoon, while he was recording, there suddenly appeared from out of nowhere a couple of game wardens, who for no apparent reason, walked over to the beaver dam, dropped a stick of dynamite down it, blowing it up, killing the female and her young babies. Horrified, my colleagues remained behind to gather his thoughts and to record whatever he could the rest of the afternoon, and that evening, he captured a remarkable event: the lone surviving male beaver swimming in slow circles crying out inconsolably for its lost mate and offspring. This is probably the saddest sound I've ever heard coming from any organism, human or other. (Beaver crying) Yeah. Well. There are many facets to soundscapes, among them the ways in which animals taught us to dance and sing, which I'll save for another time. But you have heard how biophonies help clarify our understanding of the natural world. You've heard the impact of resource extraction, human noise and habitat destruction. And where environmental sciences have typically tried to understand the world from what we see, a much fuller understanding can be got from what we hear. Biophonies and geophonies are the signature voices of the natural world, and as we hear them, we're endowed with a sense of place, the true story of the world we live in. In a matter of seconds, a soundscape reveals much more information from many perspectives, from quantifiable data to cultural inspiration. Visual capture implicitly frames a limited frontal perspective of a given spatial context, while soundscapes widen that scope to a full 360 degrees, completely enveloping us. And while a picture may be worth 1,000 words, a soundscape is worth 1,000 pictures. And our ears tell us that the whisper of every leaf and creature speaks to the natural sources of our lives, which indeed may hold the secrets of love for all things, especially our own humanity, and the last word goes to a jaguar from the Amazon. (Growling) Thank you for listening. (Applause) |
Cloudy with a chance of joy | {0: 'Cloud Appreciation Society founder Gavin Pretor-Pinney shows how seemingly idle pursuits provide unexpected paths to appreciating overlooked wonders.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Clouds. Have you ever noticed how much people moan about them? They get a bad rap. If you think about it, the English language has written into it negative associations towards the clouds. Someone who's down or depressed, they're under a cloud. And when there's bad news in store, there's a cloud on the horizon. I saw an article the other day. It was about problems with computer processing over the Internet. "A cloud over the cloud," was the headline. It seems like they're everyone's default doom-and-gloom metaphor. But I think they're beautiful, don't you? It's just that their beauty is missed because they're so omnipresent, so, I don't know, commonplace, that people don't notice them. They don't notice the beauty, but they don't even notice the clouds unless they get in the way of the sun. And so people think of clouds as things that get in the way. They think of them as the annoying, frustrating obstructions, and then they rush off and do some blue-sky thinking. (Laughter) But most people, when you stop to ask them, will admit to harboring a strange sort of fondness for clouds. It's like a nostalgic fondness, and they make them think of their youth. Who here can't remember thinking, well, looking and finding shapes in the clouds when they were kids? You know, when you were masters of daydreaming? Aristophanes, the ancient Greek playwright, he described the clouds as the patron godesses of idle fellows two and a half thousand years ago, and you can see what he means. It's just that these days, us adults seem reluctant to allow ourselves the indulgence of just allowing our imaginations to drift along in the breeze, and I think that's a pity. I think we should perhaps do a bit more of it. I think we should be a bit more willing, perhaps, to look at the beautiful sight of the sunlight bursting out from behind the clouds and go, "Wait a minute, that's two cats dancing the salsa!" (Laughter) (Applause) Or seeing the big, white, puffy one up there over the shopping center looks like the Abominable Snowman going to rob a bank. (Laughter) They're like nature's version of those inkblot images, you know, that shrinks used to show their patients in the '60s, and I think if you consider the shapes you see in the clouds, you'll save money on psychoanalysis bills. Let's say you're in love. All right? And you look up and what do you see? Right? Or maybe the opposite. You've just been dumped by your partner, and everywhere you look, it's kissing couples. (Laughter) Perhaps you're having a moment of existential angst. You know, you're thinking about your own mortality. And there, on the horizon, it's the Grim Reaper. (Laughter) Or maybe you see a topless sunbather. (Laughter) What would that mean? What would that mean? I have no idea. But one thing I do know is this: The bad press that clouds get is totally unfair. I think we should stand up for them, which is why, a few years ago, I started the Cloud Appreciation Society. Tens of thousands of members now in almost 100 countries around the world. And all these photographs that I'm showing, they were sent in by members. And the society exists to remind people of this: Clouds are not something to moan about. Far from it. They are, in fact, the most diverse, evocative, poetic aspect of nature. I think, if you live with your head in the clouds every now and then, it helps you keep your feet on the ground. And I want to show you why, with the help of some of my favorite types of clouds. Let's start with this one. It's the cirrus cloud, named after the Latin for a lock of hair. It's composed entirely of ice crystals cascading from the upper reaches of the troposphere, and as these ice crystals fall, they pass through different layers with different winds and they speed up and slow down, giving the cloud these brush-stroked appearances, these brush-stroke forms known as fall streaks. And these winds up there can be very, very fierce. They can be 200 miles an hour, 300 miles an hour. These clouds are bombing along, but from all the way down here, they appear to be moving gracefully, slowly, like most clouds. And so to tune into the clouds is to slow down, to calm down. It's like a bit of everyday meditation. Those are common clouds. What about rarer ones, like the lenticularis, the UFO-shaped lenticularis cloud? These clouds form in the region of mountains. When the wind passes, rises to pass over the mountain, it can take on a wave-like path in the lee of the peak, with these clouds hovering at the crest of these invisible standing waves of air, these flying saucer-like forms, and some of the early black-and-white UFO photos are in fact lenticularis clouds. It's true. A little rarer are the fallstreak holes. All right? This is when a layer is made up of very, very cold water droplets, and in one region they start to freeze, and this freezing sets off a chain reaction which spreads outwards with the ice crystals cascading and falling down below, giving the appearance of jellyfish tendrils down below. Rarer still, the Kelvin–Helmholtz cloud. Not a very snappy name. Needs a rebrand. This looks like a series of breaking waves, and it's caused by shearing winds — the wind above the cloud layer and below the cloud layer differ significantly, and in the middle, in between, you get this undulating of the air, and if the difference in those speeds is just right, the tops of the undulations curl over in these beautiful breaking wave-like vortices. All right. Those are rarer clouds than the cirrus, but they're not that rare. If you look up, and you pay attention to the sky, you'll see them sooner or later, maybe not quite as dramatic as these, but you'll see them. And you'll see them around where you live. Clouds are the most egalitarian of nature's displays, because we all have a good, fantastic view of the sky. And these clouds, these rarer clouds, remind us that the exotic can be found in the everyday. Nothing is more nourishing, more stimulating to an active, inquiring mind than being surprised, being amazed. It's why we're all here at TED, right? But you don't need to rush off away from the familiar, across the world to be surprised. You just need to step outside, pay attention to what's so commonplace, so everyday, so mundane that everybody else misses it. One cloud that people rarely miss is this one: the cumulonimbus storm cloud. It's what's produces thunder and lightning and hail. These clouds spread out at the top in this enormous anvil fashion stretching 10 miles up into the atmosphere. They are an expression of the majestic architecture of our atmosphere. But from down below, they are the embodiment of the powerful, elemental force and power that drives our atmosphere. To be there is to be connected in the driving rain and the hail, to feel connected to our atmosphere. It's to be reminded that we are creatures that inhabit this ocean of air. We don't live beneath the sky. We live within it. And that connection, that visceral connection to our atmosphere feels to me like an antidote. It's an antidote to the growing tendency we have to feel that we can really ever experience life by watching it on a computer screen, you know, when we're in a wi-fi zone. But the one cloud that best expresses why cloudspotting is more valuable today than ever is this one, the cumulus cloud. Right? It forms on a sunny day. If you close your eyes and think of a cloud, it's probably one of these that comes to mind. All those cloud shapes at the beginning, those were cumulus clouds. The sharp, crisp outlines of this formation make it the best one for finding shapes in. And it reminds us of the aimless nature of cloudspotting, what an aimless activity it is. You're not going to change the world by lying on your back and gazing up at the sky, are you? It's pointless. It's a pointless activity, which is precisely why it's so important. The digital world conspires to make us feel eternally busy, perpetually busy. You know, when you're not dealing with the traditional pressures of earning a living and putting food on the table, raising a family, writing thank you letters, you have to now contend with answering a mountain of unanswered emails, updating a Facebook page, feeding your Twitter feed. And cloudspotting legitimizes doing nothing. (Laughter) And sometimes we need — (Applause) Sometimes we need excuses to do nothing. We need to be reminded by these patron goddesses of idle fellows that slowing down and being in the present, not thinking about what you've got to do and what you should have done, but just being here, letting your imagination lift from the everyday concerns down here and just being in the present, it's good for you, and it's good for the way you feel. It's good for your ideas. It's good for your creativity. It's good for your soul. So keep looking up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and always remember to live life with your head in the clouds. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Where is home? | {0: 'Novelist and nonfiction author Pico Iyer writes on subjects ranging from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism, from Graham Greene to forgotten nations and the 21st-century global order.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Where do you come from? It's such a simple question, but these days, of course, simple questions bring ever more complicated answers. People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects. So I don't think I've really earned the right to call myself an Indian. And if "Where do you come from?" means "Where were you born and raised and educated?" then I'm entirely of that funny little country known as England, except I left England as soon as I completed my undergraduate education, and all the time I was growing up, I was the only kid in all my classes who didn't begin to look like the classic English heroes represented in our textbooks. And if "Where do you come from?" means "Where do you pay your taxes? Where do you see your doctor and your dentist?" then I'm very much of the United States, and I have been for 48 years now, since I was a really small child. Except, for many of those years, I've had to carry around this funny little pink card with green lines running through my face identifying me as a permanent alien. I do actually feel more alien the longer I live there. (Laughter) And if "Where do you come from?" means "Which place goes deepest inside you and where do you try to spend most of your time?" then I'm Japanese, because I've been living as much as I can for the last 25 years in Japan. Except, all of those years I've been there on a tourist visa, and I'm fairly sure not many Japanese would want to consider me one of them. And I say all this just to stress how very old-fashioned and straightforward my background is, because when I go to Hong Kong or Sydney or Vancouver, most of the kids I meet are much more international and multi-cultured than I am. And they have one home associated with their parents, but another associated with their partners, a third connected maybe with the place where they happen to be, a fourth connected with the place they dream of being, and many more besides. And their whole life will be spent taking pieces of many different places and putting them together into a stained glass whole. Home for them is really a work in progress. It's like a project on which they're constantly adding upgrades and improvements and corrections. And for more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, "Where's your home?" I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be. And I'd always felt this way, but it really came home to me, as it were, some years ago when I was climbing up the stairs in my parents' house in California, and I looked through the living room windows and I saw that we were encircled by 70-foot flames, one of those wildfires that regularly tear through the hills of California and many other such places. And three hours later, that fire had reduced my home and every last thing in it except for me to ash. And when I woke up the next morning, I was sleeping on a friend's floor, the only thing I had in the world was a toothbrush I had just bought from an all-night supermarket. Of course, if anybody asked me then, "Where is your home?" I literally couldn't point to any physical construction. My home would have to be whatever I carried around inside me. And in so many ways, I think this is a terrific liberation. Because when my grandparents were born, they pretty much had their sense of home, their sense of community, even their sense of enmity, assigned to them at birth, and didn't have much chance of stepping outside of that. And nowadays, at least some of us can choose our sense of home, create our sense of community, fashion our sense of self, and in so doing maybe step a little beyond some of the black and white divisions of our grandparents' age. No coincidence that the president of the strongest nation on Earth is half-Kenyan, partly raised in Indonesia, has a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law. The number of people living in countries not their own now comes to 220 million, and that's an almost unimaginable number, but it means that if you took the whole population of Canada and the whole population of Australia and then the whole population of Australia again and the whole population of Canada again and doubled that number, you would still have fewer people than belong to this great floating tribe. And the number of us who live outside the old nation-state categories is increasing so quickly, by 64 million just in the last 12 years, that soon there will be more of us than there are Americans. Already, we represent the fifth-largest nation on Earth. And in fact, in Canada's largest city, Toronto, the average resident today is what used to be called a foreigner, somebody born in a very different country. And I've always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the foreign is that it slaps you awake. You can't take anything for granted. Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked "on." Suddenly you're alert to the secret patterns of the world. The real voyage of discovery, as Marcel Proust famously said, consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes. And of course, once you have new eyes, even the old sights, even your home become something different. Many of the people living in countries not their own are refugees who never wanted to leave home and ache to go back home. But for the fortunate among us, I think the age of movement brings exhilarating new possibilities. Certainly when I'm traveling, especially to the major cities of the world, the typical person I meet today will be, let's say, a half-Korean, half-German young woman living in Paris. And as soon as she meets a half-Thai, half-Canadian young guy from Edinburgh, she recognizes him as kin. She realizes that she probably has much more in common with him than with anybody entirely of Korea or entirely of Germany. So they become friends. They fall in love. They move to New York City. (Laughter) Or Edinburgh. And the little girl who arises out of their union will of course be not Korean or German or French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian or even American, but a wonderful and constantly evolving mix of all those places. And potentially, everything about the way that young woman dreams about the world, writes about the world, thinks about the world, could be something different, because it comes out of this almost unprecedented blend of cultures. Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself. And yet, there is one great problem with movement, and that is that it's really hard to get your bearings when you're in midair. Some years ago, I noticed that I had accumulated one million miles on United Airlines alone. You all know that crazy system, six days in hell, you get the seventh day free. (Laughter) And I began to think that really, movement was only as good as the sense of stillness that you could bring to it to put it into perspective. And eight months after my house burned down, I ran into a friend who taught at a local high school, and he said, "I've got the perfect place for you." "Really?" I said. I'm always a bit skeptical when people say things like that. "No, honestly," he went on, "it's only three hours away by car, and it's not very expensive, and it's probably not like anywhere you've stayed before." "Hmm." I was beginning to get slightly intrigued. "What is it?" "Well —" Here my friend hemmed and hawed — "Well, actually it's a Catholic hermitage." This was the wrong answer. I had spent 15 years in Anglican schools, so I had had enough hymnals and crosses to last me a lifetime. Several lifetimes, actually. But my friend assured me that he wasn't Catholic, nor were most of his students, but he took his classes there every spring. And as he had it, even the most restless, distractible, testosterone-addled 15-year-old Californian boy only had to spend three days in silence and something in him cooled down and cleared out. He found himself. And I thought, "Anything that works for a 15-year-old boy ought to work for me." So I got in my car, and I drove three hours north along the coast, and the roads grew emptier and narrower, and then I turned onto an even narrower path, barely paved, that snaked for two miles up to the top of a mountain. And when I got out of my car, the air was pulsing. The whole place was absolutely silent, but the silence wasn't an absence of noise. It was really a presence of a kind of energy or quickening. And at my feet was the great, still blue plate of the Pacific Ocean. All around me were 800 acres of wild dry brush. And I went down to the room in which I was to be sleeping. Small but eminently comfortable, it had a bed and a rocking chair and a long desk and even longer picture windows looking out on a small, private, walled garden, and then 1,200 feet of golden pampas grass running down to the sea. And I sat down, and I began to write, and write, and write, even though I'd gone there really to get away from my desk. And by the time I got up, four hours had passed. Night had fallen, and I went out under this great overturned saltshaker of stars, and I could see the tail lights of cars disappearing around the headlands 12 miles to the south. And it really seemed like my concerns of the previous day vanishing. And the next day, when I woke up in the absence of telephones and TVs and laptops, the days seemed to stretch for a thousand hours. It was really all the freedom I know when I'm traveling, but it also profoundly felt like coming home. And I'm not a religious person, so I didn't go to the services. I didn't consult the monks for guidance. I just took walks along the monastery road and sent postcards to loved ones. I looked at the clouds, and I did what is hardest of all for me to do usually, which is nothing at all. And I started to go back to this place, and I noticed that I was doing my most important work there invisibly just by sitting still, and certainly coming to my most critical decisions the way I never could when I was racing from the last email to the next appointment. And I began to think that something in me had really been crying out for stillness, but of course I couldn't hear it because I was running around so much. I was like some crazy guy who puts on a blindfold and then complains that he can't see a thing. And I thought back to that wonderful phrase I had learned as a boy from Seneca, in which he says, "That man is poor not who has little but who hankers after more." And, of course, I'm not suggesting that anybody here go into a monastery. That's not the point. But I do think it's only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. And it's only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about and find a home. And I've noticed so many people now take conscious measures to sit quietly for 30 minutes every morning just collecting themselves in one corner of the room without their devices, or go running every evening, or leave their cell phones behind when they go to have a long conversation with a friend. Movement is a fantastic privilege, and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents could never have dreamed of doing. But movement, ultimately, only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to. And home, in the end, is of course not just the place where you sleep. It's the place where you stand. Thank you. (Applause) |
The orchestra in my mouth | {0: 'Tom Thum whirls together beatboxing, performance and an array of mouthsounds.'} | TEDxSydney | My name is Tom, and I've come here today to come clean about what I do for money. Basically, I use my mouth in strange ways in exchange for cash. (Laughter) I usually do this kind of thing in seedy downtown bars and on street corners, so this mightn't be the most appropriate setting, but I'd like to give you guys a bit of a demonstration about what I do. (Beatboxing) And now, for my next number, I'd like to return to the classics. (Applause) We're going to take it back, way back, back into time. (Beatboxing: "Billie Jean") ♫ Billie Jean is not my lover ♫ ♫ She's just a girl who claims that I am the one ♫ ♫ But the kid is not my son ♫ (Applause) All right. Wassup. Thank you very much, TEDx. If you guys haven't figured it out already, my name's Tom Thum, and I'm a beatboxer, which means all the sounds that you just heard were made entirely using just my voice, and the only thing was my voice. And I can assure you there are absolutely no effects on this microphone whatsoever. And I'm very, very stoked — (Applause) You guys are just applauding for everything. It's great. Look at this, Mom! I made it! I'm very, very stoked to be here today, representing my kinfolk and all those that haven't managed to make a career out of an innate ability for inhuman noisemaking. Because it is a bit of a niche market, and there's not much work going on, especially where I'm from. You know, I'm from Brisbane, which is a great city to live in. Yeah! All right! Most of Brisbane's here. That's good. (Laughter) You know, I'm from Brizzy, which is a great city to live in, but let's be honest — it's not exactly the cultural hub of the Southern Hemisphere. So I do a lot of my work outside Brisbane and outside Australia, and so the pursuit of this crazy passion of mine has enabled me to see so many amazing places in the world. So I'd like to share with you, if I may, my experiences. So ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take you on a journey throughout the continents and throughout sound itself. We start our journey in the central deserts. (Didgeridoo) (Airplane) India. (Beatboxing) (Sitar) China. (Guzheng) (Beatboxing) Germany. (Beatboxing) Party, party, yeah. (Laughter) And before we reach our final destination, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to share with you some technology that I brought all the way from the thriving metropolis of Brisbane. These things in front of me here are called Kaoss Pads, and they allow me to do a whole lot of different things with my voice. For example, the one on the left here allows me to add a little bit of reverb to my sound, which gives me that — (Trumpet) — flavor. (Laughter) And the other ones here, I can use them in unison to mimic the effect of a drum machine or something like that. I can sample in my own sounds and I can play it back just by hitting the pads here. (Noises) TEDx. (Music) (Applause) I got way too much time on my hands. And last but not least, the one on my right here allows me to loop loop loop loop loop loop loop loop my voice. So with all that in mind, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take you on a journey to a completely separate part of Earth as I transform the Sydney Opera House into a smoky downtown jazz bar. All right boys, take it away. (Music) Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to a very special friend of mine, one of the greatest double bassists I know. Mr. Smokey Jefferson, let's take it for a walk. Come on, baby. (Music) All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to the star of the show, one of the greatest jazz legends of our time. Music lovers and jazz lovers alike, please give a warm hand of applause for the one and only Mr. Peeping Tom. Take it away. (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Our shared condition -- consciousness | {0: 'John Searle has made countless contributions to contemporary thinking about consciousness, language, artificial intelligence and rationality itself.'} | TEDxCERN | I'm going to talk about consciousness. Why consciousness? Well, it's a curiously neglected subject, both in our scientific and our philosophical culture. Now why is that curious? Well, it is the most important aspect of our lives for a very simple, logical reason, namely, it's a necessary condition on anything being important in our lives that we're conscious. You care about science, philosophy, music, art, whatever — it's no good if you're a zombie or in a coma, right? So consciousness is number one. The second reason is that when people do get interested in it, as I think they should, they tend to say the most appalling things. And then, even when they're not saying appalling things and they're really trying to do serious research, well, it's been slow. Progress has been slow. When I first got interested in this, I thought, well, it's a straightforward problem in biology. Let's get these brain stabbers to get busy and figure out how it works in the brain. So I went over to UCSF and I talked to all the heavy-duty neurobiologists there, and they showed some impatience, as scientists often do when you ask them embarrassing questions. But the thing that struck me is, one guy said in exasperation, a very famous neurobiologist, he said, "Look, in my discipline it's okay to be interested in consciousness, but get tenure first. Get tenure first." Now I've been working on this for a long time. I think now you might actually get tenure by working on consciousness. If so, that's a real step forward. Okay, now why then is this curious reluctance and curious hostility to consciousness? Well, I think it's a combination of two features of our intellectual culture that like to think they're opposing each other but in fact they share a common set of assumptions. One feature is the tradition of religious dualism: Consciousness is not a part of the physical world. It's a part of the spiritual world. It belongs to the soul, and the soul is not a part of the physical world. That's the tradition of God, the soul and immortality. There's another tradition that thinks it's opposed to this but accepts the worst assumption. That tradition thinks that we are heavy-duty scientific materialists: Consciousness is not a part of the physical world. Either it doesn't exist at all, or it's something else, a computer program or some damn fool thing, but in any case it's not part of science. And I used to get in an argument that really gave me a stomachache. Here's how it went. Science is objective, consciousness is subjective, therefore there cannot be a science of consciousness. Okay, so these twin traditions are paralyzing us. It's very hard to get out of these twin traditions. And I have only one real message in this lecture, and that is, consciousness is a biological phenomenon like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis — you know all the biological phenomena — and once you accept that, most, though not all, of the hard problems about consciousness simply evaporate. And I'm going to go through some of them. Okay, now I promised you to tell you some of the outrageous things said about consciousness. One: Consciousness does not exist. It's an illusion, like sunsets. Science has shown sunsets and rainbows are illusions. So consciousness is an illusion. Two: Well, maybe it exists, but it's really something else. It's a computer program running in the brain. Three: No, the only thing that exists is really behavior. It's embarrassing how influential behaviorism was, but I'll get back to that. And four: Maybe consciousness exists, but it can't make any difference to the world. How could spirituality move anything? Now, whenever somebody tells me that, I think, you want to see spirituality move something? Watch. I decide consciously to raise my arm, and the damn thing goes up. (Laughter) Furthermore, notice this: We do not say, "Well, it's a bit like the weather in Geneva. Some days it goes up and some days it doesn't go up." No. It goes up whenever I damn well want it to. Okay. I'm going to tell you how that's possible. Now, I haven't yet given you a definition. You can't do this if you don't give a definition. People always say consciousness is very hard to define. I think it's rather easy to define if you're not trying to give a scientific definition. We're not ready for a scientific definition, but here's a common-sense definition. Consciousness consists of all those states of feeling or sentience or awareness. It begins in the morning when you wake up from a dreamless sleep, and it goes on all day until you fall asleep or die or otherwise become unconscious. Dreams are a form of consciousness on this definition. Now, that's the common-sense definition. That's our target. If you're not talking about that, you're not talking about consciousness. But they think, "Well, if that's it, that's an awful problem. How can such a thing exist as part of the real world?" And this, if you've ever had a philosophy course, this is known as the famous mind-body problem. I think that has a simple solution too. I'm going to give it to you. And here it is: All of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower-level neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the brain as higher-level or system features. It's about as mysterious as the liquidity of water. Right? The liquidity is not an extra juice squirted out by the H2O molecules. It's a condition that the system is in. And just as the jar full of water can go from liquid to solid depending on the behavior of the molecules, so your brain can go from a state of being conscious to a state of being unconscious, depending on the behavior of the molecules. The famous mind-body problem is that simple. All right? But now we get into some harder questions. Let's specify the exact features of consciousness, so that we can then answer those four objections that I made to it. Well, the first feature is, it's real and irreducible. You can't get rid of it. You see, the distinction between reality and illusion is the distinction between how things consciously seem to us and how they really are. It consciously seems like there's — I like the French "arc-en-ciel" — it seems like there's an arch in the sky, or it seems like the sun is setting over the mountains. It consciously seems to us, but that's not really happening. But for that distinction between how things consciously seem and how they really are, you can't make that distinction for the very existence of consciousness, because where the very existence of consciousness is concerned, if it consciously seems to you that you are conscious, you are conscious. I mean, if a bunch of experts come to me and say, "We are heavy-duty neurobiologists and we've done a study of you, Searle, and we're convinced you are not conscious, you are a very cleverly constructed robot," I don't think, "Well, maybe these guys are right, you know?" I don't think that for a moment, because, I mean, Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes, but he was right about this. You cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. Okay, that's the first feature of consciousness. It's real and irreducible. You cannot get rid of it by showing that it's an illusion in a way that you can with other standard illusions. Okay, the second feature is this one that has been such a source of trouble to us, and that is, all of our conscious states have this qualitative character to them. There's something that it feels like to drink beer which is not what it feels like to do your income tax or listen to music, and this qualitative feel automatically generates a third feature, namely, conscious states are by definition subjective in the sense that they only exist as experienced by some human or animal subject, some self that experiences them. Maybe we'll be able to build a conscious machine. Since we don't know how our brains do it, we're not in a position, so far, to build a conscious machine. Okay. Another feature of consciousness is that it comes in unified conscious fields. So I don't just have the sight of the people in front of me and the sound of my voice and the weight of my shoes against the floor, but they occur to me as part of one single great conscious field that stretches forward and backward. That is the key to understanding the enormous power of consciousness. And we have not been able to do that in a robot. The disappointment of robotics derives from the fact that we don't know how to make a conscious robot, so we don't have a machine that can do this kind of thing. Okay, the next feature of consciousness, after this marvelous unified conscious field, is that it functions causally in our behavior. I gave you a scientific demonstration by raising my hand, but how is that possible? How can it be that this thought in my brain can move material objects? Well, I'll tell you the answer. I mean, we don't know the detailed answer, but we know the basic part of the answer, and that is, there is a sequence of neuron firings, and they terminate where the acetylcholine is secreted at the axon end-plates of the motor neurons. Sorry to use philosophical terminology here, but when it's secreted at the axon end-plates of the motor neurons, a whole lot of wonderful things happen in the ion channels and the damned arm goes up. Now, think of what I told you. One and the same event, my conscious decision to raise my arm has a level of description where it has all of these touchy-feely spiritual qualities. It's a thought in my brain, but at the same time, it's busy secreting acetylcholine and doing all sorts of other things as it makes its way from the motor cortex down through the nerve fibers in the arm. Now, what that tells us is that our traditional vocabularies for discussing these issues are totally obsolete. One and the same event has a level of description where it's neurobiological, and another level of description where it's mental, and that's a single event, and that's how nature works. That's how it's possible for consciousness to function causally. Okay, now with that in mind, with going through these various features of consciousness, let's go back and answer some of those early objections. Well, the first one I said was, consciousness doesn't exist, it's an illusion. Well, I've already answered that. I don't think we need to worry about that. But the second one had an incredible influence, and may still be around, and that is, "Well, if consciousness exists, it's really something else. It's really a digital computer program running in your brain and that's what we need to do to create consciousness is get the right program. Yeah, forget about the hardware. Any hardware will do provided it's rich enough and stable enough to carry the program." Now, we know that that's wrong. I mean, anybody who's thought about computers at all can see that that's wrong, because computation is defined as symbol manipulation, usually thought of as zeros as ones, but any symbols will do. You get an algorithm that you can program in a binary code, and that's the defining trait of the computer program. But we know that that's purely syntactical. That's symbolic. We know that actual human consciousness has something more than that. It's got a content in addition to the syntax. It's got a semantics. Now that argument, I made that argument 30 — oh my God, I don't want to think about it — more than 30 years ago, but there's a deeper argument implicit in what I've told you, and I want to tell you that argument briefly, and that is, consciousness creates an observer-independent reality. It creates a reality of money, property, government, marriage, CERN conferences, cocktail parties and summer vacations, and all of those are creations of consciousness. Their existence is observer-relative. It's only relative to conscious agents that a piece of paper is money or that a bunch of buildings is a university. Now, ask yourself about computation. Is that absolute, like force and mass and gravitational attraction? Or is it observer-relative? Well, some computations are intrinsic. I add two plus two to get four. That's going on no matter what anybody thinks. But when I haul out my pocket calculator and do the calculation, the only intrinsic phenomenon is the electronic circuit and its behavior. That's the only absolute phenomenon. All the rest is interpreted by us. Computation only exists relative to consciousness. Either a conscious agent is carrying out the computation, or he's got a piece of machinery that admits of a computational interpretation. Now that doesn't mean computation is arbitrary. I spent a lot of money on this hardware. But we have this persistent confusion between objectivity and subjectivity as features of reality and objectivity and subjectivity as features of claims. And the bottom line of this part of my talk is this: You can have a completely objective science, a science where you make objectively true claims, about a domain whose existence is subjective, whose existence is in the human brain consisting of subjective states of sentience or feeling or awareness. So the objection that you can't have an objective science of consciousness because it's subjective and science is objective, that's a pun. That's a bad pun on objectivity and subjectivity. You can make objective claims about a domain that is subjective in its mode of existence, and indeed that's what neurologists do. I mean, you have patients that actually suffer pains, and you try to get an objective science of that. Okay, I promised to refute all these guys, and I don't have an awful lot of time left, but let me refute a couple more of them. I said that behaviorism ought to be one of the great embarrassments of our intellectual culture, because it's refuted the moment you think about it. Your mental states are identical with your behavior? Well, think about the distinction between feeling a pain and engaging in pain behavior. I won't demonstrate pain behavior, but I can tell you I'm not having any pains right now. So it's an obvious mistake. Why did they make the mistake? The mistake was — and you can go back and read the literature on this, you can see this over and over — they think if you accept the irreducible existence of consciousness, you're giving up on science. You're giving up on 300 years of human progress and human hope and all the rest of it. And the message I want to leave you with is, consciousness has to become accepted as a genuine biological phenomenon, as much subject to scientific analysis as any other phenomenon in biology, or, for that matter, the rest of science. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
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