title
stringlengths 6
88
| about_speakers
stringlengths 34
1.43k
⌀ | event
stringclasses 459
values | transcript
stringlengths 18
60.6k
|
|---|---|---|---|
DJ decks made of ... paper | {0: 'At Novalia, Kate Stone and her team use ordinary printing presses to manufacture interactive electronics, which combine touch-sensitive ink technology and printed circuits into unique and cost-effective products.'} | TED2013 | I love paper, and I love technology, and what I do is I make paper interactive. And that's what I say when people ask me what I do, but it really confuses most people, so really, the best way for me to convey it is to take the technology and be creative and create experiences. So I tried to think what I could use for here, and a couple of weeks ago I had a crazy idea that I wanted to print two DJ decks and to try and mix some music. And I'm going to try and show that at the end, and the suspense will be as much mine if it works. And I'm not a DJ, and I'm not a musician, so I'm a little bit scared of that. So I think, I found the best way to describe my journey is just to mention a few little things that have happened to me throughout my life. There's three particular things that I've done, and I'll just describe those first, and then talk about some of my work. So when I was a kid, I was obsessed with wires, and I used to thread them under my carpet and thread them behind the walls and have little switches and little speakers, and I wanted to make my bedroom be interactive but kind of all hidden away. And I was also really interested in wireless as well. So I bought one of those little kits that you could get to make a radio transmitter, and I got an old book and I carved out the inside and I hid it inside there, and then I placed it next to my dad and snuck back to my bedroom and tuned in on the radio so I could eavesdrop. I was not at all interested in what he was saying. It's more that I just liked the idea of an everyday object having something inside and doing something different. Several year later, I managed to successfully fail all of my exams and didn't really leave school with much to show for at all, and my parents, maybe as a reward, bought me what turned out to be a one-way ticket to Australia, and I came back home about four years later. I ended up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. It was in far western New South Wales. And this farm was 120,000 acres. There were 22,000 sheep, and it was about 40 degrees, or 100 or so Fahrenheit. And on this farm there was the farmer, his wife, and there was the four-year-old daughter. And they kind of took me into the farm and showed me what it was like to live and work. Obviously, one of the most important things was the sheep, and so my job was, well, pretty much to do everything, but it was about bringing the sheep back to the homestead. And we'd do that by building fences, using motorbikes and horses, and the sheep would make their way all the way back to the shearing shed for the different seasons. And what I learned was, although at the time, like everyone else, I thought sheep were pretty stupid because they didn't do what we wanted them to do, what I realize now, probably only just in the last few weeks looking back, is the sheep weren't stupid at all. We'd put them in an environment where they didn't want to be, and they didn't want to do what we wanted them to do. So the challenge was to try and get them to do what we wanted them to do by listening to the weather, the lay of the land, and creating things that would let the sheep flow and go where we wanted them to go. Another bunch of years later, I ended up at Cambridge University at the Cavendish Laboratory in the U.K. doing a Ph.D. in physics. My Ph.D. was to move electrons around, one at a time. And I realize — again, it's kind of these realizations looking back as to what I did — I realize now that it was pretty much the same as moving sheep around. It really is. It's just you do it by changing an environment. And that's kind of been a big lesson to me, that you can't act on any object. You change its environment, and the object will flow. So we made it very small, so things were about 30 nanometers in size; making it very cold, so at liquid helium temperatures; and changing environment by changing the voltage, and the electrons could make flow around a loop one at a time, on and off, a little memory node. And I wanted to go one step further, and I wanted to move one electron on and one electron off. And I was told that I wouldn't be able to do this, which, you know, as we've heard from other people, that's the thing that makes you do it. And I was determined, and I managed to show that I could do that. And a lot of that learning, I think, came from being on that farm, because when I was working on the farm, we'd have to use what was around us, we'd have to use the environment, and there was no such thing as something can't be done, because you're in an environment where, if you can't do what you need to do, you can die, and, you know, I had seen that sort of thing happen. So now my obsession is printing, and I'm really fascinated by the idea of using conventional printing processes, so the types of print that are used to create many of the things around us to make paper and card interactive. When I spoke to some printers when I started doing this and told them what I wanted to do, which was to print conductive inks onto paper, they told me it couldn't be done, again, that kind of favorite thing. So I got about 10 credit cards and loans and got myself very close to bankruptcy, really, and bought myself this huge printing press, which I had no idea how to use at all. It was about five meters long, and I covered myself and the floor with ink and made a massive mess, but I learned to print. And then I took it back to the printers and showed them what I've done, and they were like, "Of course you can do that. Why didn't you come here in the first place?" That's always the case. So what we do is we take conventional printing presses, we make conductive inks, and run those through a press, and basically just letting hundreds of thousands of electrons flow through pieces of paper so we can make that paper interactive. And it's pretty simple, really. It's just a collection of things that have been done before, but bringing them together in a different way. So we have a piece of paper with conductive ink on, and then add onto that a small circuit board with a couple of chips, one to run some capacitive touch software, so we know where we've touched it, and the other to run, quite often, some wireless software so the piece of paper can connect. So I'll just describe a couple of things that we've created. There's lots of different things we've created. This is one of them, because I love cake. And this one, it's a large poster, and you touch it and it has a little speaker behind it, and the poster talks to you when you touch it and asks you a series of questions, and it works out your perfect cake. But it doesn't tell you the cake there and then. It uploads a picture, and the reason why it chose that cake for you, to our Facebook page and to Twitter. So we're trying to create that connection between the physical and the digital, but have it not looking on a screen, and just looking like a regular poster. We've worked with a bunch of universities on a project looking at interactive newsprint. So for example, we've created a newspaper, a regular newspaper. You can wear a pair of headphones that are connected to it wirelessly, and when you touch it, you can hear the music that's described on the top, which is something you can't read. You can hear a press conference as well as reading what the editor has determined that press conference was about. And you can press a Facebook "like" button or you can vote on something as well. Something else that we created, and this was an idea that I had a couple of years ago, and so we've done a project on this. It was for funding from the government for user-centered design for energy-efficient buildings, difficult to say, and something I had no idea what it was when I went into the workshop, but quickly learned. And we wanted to try and encourage people to use energy better. And I really liked the idea that, instead of looking at dials and reading things to say — looking at your energy usage, I wanted to create a poster that was wirelessly connected and had color-changing inks on it, and so if your energy usage was trending better, than the leaves would appear and the rabbits would appear and all would be good. And if it wasn't, then there'd be graffiti and the leaves would fall off the trees. So it was trying to make you look after something in your immediate environment, which you don't want to see not looking so good, rather than expecting people to do things in the local environment because of the effect that it has a long way off. And I think, kind of like going back to the farm, it's about how to let people do what you want them to do rather than making people do what you want them to do. Okay. So this is the bit I'm really scared of. So a couple of things I've created are, there's a poster over here that you can play drums on. And I am not a musician. It seemed like a good idea at the time. If anyone wants to try and play drums, then they can. I'll just describe how this works. This poster is wirelessly connected to my cell phone, and when you touch it, it connects to the app. (Drums) And it has really good response time. It's using Bluetooth 4, so it's pretty instantaneous. Okay. Thanks. (Applause) And there's a couple of other things. So this one is like a sound board, so you can touch it, and I just love these horrible noises. (Sirens, explosions, breaking glass) Okay, and this is a D.J. turntable. So it's wirelessly linked to my iPad, and this is a software that's running on the iPad. Oh, yes. I just love doing that. I'm not a D.J., though, but I just always wanted to do that. (Scratching) So I have a crossfader, and I have the two decks. So I've made some new technology, and I love things being creative, and I love working with creative people. So my 15-year-old niece, she's amazing, and she's called Charlotte, and I asked her to record something, and I worked with a friend called Elliot to put some beats together. So this is my niece, Charlotte. (Music) Yay! (Applause) So that's pretty much what I do. I just love bringing technology together, having a lot of fun, being creative. But it's not about the technology. It's just about, I want to create some great experiences. So thank you very much. (Applause) |
In our baby's illness, a life lesson | {0: "Roberto D'Angelo and Francesca Fedeli created the social enterprise FightTheStroke.org to open up a dialogue about the devastating effects of strokes at a young age. This issue is important to them for a simple reason: because they've been through it themselves with their son Mario.\r\n"} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Francesca Fedeli: Ciao. So he's Mario. He's our son. He was born two and a half years ago, and I had a pretty tough pregnancy because I had to stay still in a bed for, like, eight months. But in the end everything seemed to be under control. So he got the right weight at birth. He got the right Apgar index. So we were pretty reassured by this. But at the end, 10 days later after he was born, we discovered that he had a stroke. As you might know, a stroke is a brain injury. A perinatal stroke could be something that can happen during the nine months of pregnancy or just suddenly after the birth, and in his case, as you can see, the right part of his brain has gone. So the effect that this stroke could have on Mario's body could be the fact that he couldn't be able to control the left side of his body. Just imagine, if you have a computer and a printer and you want to transmit, to input to print out a document, but the printer doesn't have the right drives, so the same is for Mario. It's just like, he would like to move his left side of his body, but he's not able to transmit the right input to move his left arm and left leg. So life had to change. We needed to change our schedule. We needed to change the impact that this birth had on our life. Roberto D'Angelo: As you may imagine, unfortunately, we were not ready. Nobody taught us how to deal with such kinds of disabilities, and as many questions as possible started to come to our minds. And that has been really a tough time. Questions, some basics, like, you know, why did this happen to us? And what went wrong? Some more tough, like, really, what will be the impact on Mario's life? I mean, at the end, will he be able to work? Will he be able to be normal? And, you know, as a parent, especially for the first time, why is he not going to be better than us? And this, indeed, really is tough to say, but a few months later, we realized that we were really feeling like a failure. I mean, the only real product of our life, at the end, was a failure. And you know, it was not a failure for ourselves in itself, but it was a failure that will impact his full life. Honestly, we went down. I mean we went really down, but at the end, we started to look at him, and we said, we have to react. So immediately, as Francesca said, we changed our life. We started physiotherapy, we started the rehabilitation, and one of the paths that we were following in terms of rehabilitation is the mirror neurons pilot. Basically, we spent months doing this with Mario. You have an object, and we showed him how to grab the object. Now, the theory of mirror neurons simply says that in your brains, exactly now, as you watch me doing this, you are activating exactly the same neurons as if you do the actions. It looks like this is the leading edge in terms of rehabilitation. But one day we found that Mario was not looking at our hand. He was looking at us. We were his mirror. And the problem, as you might feel, is that we were down, we were depressed, we were looking at him as a problem, not as a son, not from a positive perspective. And that day really changed our perspective. We realized that we had to become a better mirror for Mario. We restarted from our strengths, and at the same time we restarted from his strengths. We stopped looking at him as a problem, and we started to look at him as an opportunity to improve. And really, this was the change, and from our side, we said, "What are our strengths that we really can bring to Mario?" And we started from our passions. I mean, at the end, my wife and myself are quite different, but we have many things in common. We love to travel, we love music, we love to be in places like this, and we started to bring Mario with us just to show to him the best things that we can show to him. This short video is from last week. I am not saying — (Applause) — I am not saying it's a miracle. That's not the message, because we are just at the beginning of the path. But we want to share what was the key learning, the key learning that Mario drove to us, and it is to consider what you have as a gift and not only what you miss, and to consider what you miss just as an opportunity. And this is the message that we want to share with you. This is why we are here. Mario! And this is why — (Applause) — And this is why we decided to share the best mirror in the world with him. And we thank you so much, all of you. FF: Thank you. RD: Thank you. Bye. (Applause) FF: Thank you. (Applause) |
Bitcoin. Sweat. Tide. Meet the future of branded currency. | {0: 'Paul Kemp-Robertson is the Cofounder and Editorial Director of Contagious Communications, a multi-platform marketing resource.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | So if I was to ask you what the connection between a bottle of Tide detergent and sweat was, you'd probably think that's the easiest question that you're going to be asked in Edinburgh all week. But if I was to say that they're both examples of alternative or new forms of currency in a hyperconnected, data-driven global economy, you'd probably think I was a little bit bonkers. But trust me, I work in advertising. (Laughter) And I am going to tell you the answer, but obviously after this short break. So a more challenging question is one that I was asked, actually, by one of our writers a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't know the answer: What's the world's best performing currency? It's actually Bitcoin. Now, for those of you who may not be familiar, Bitcoin is a crypto-currency, a virtual currency, synthetic currency. It was founded in 2008 by this anonymous programmer using a pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. No one knows who or what he is. He's almost like the Banksy of the Internet. And I'm probably not going to do it proper service here, but my interpretation of how it works is that Bitcoins are released through this process of mining. So there's a network of computers that are challenged to solve a very complex mathematical problem and the person that manages to solve it first gets the Bitcoins. And the Bitcoins are released, they're put into a public ledger called the Blockchain, and then they float, so they become a currency, and completely decentralized, that's the sort of scary thing about this, which is why it's so popular. So it's not run by the authorities or the state. It's actually managed by the network. And the reason that it's proved very successful is it's private, it's anonymous, it's fast, and it's cheap. And you do get to the point where there's some wild fluctuations with Bitcoin. So in one level it went from something like 13 dollars to 266, literally in the space of four months, and then crashed and lost half of its value in six hours. And it's currently around that kind of 110 dollar mark in value. But what it does show is that it's sort of gaining ground, it's gaining respectability. You get services, like Reddit and Wordpress are actually accepting Bitcoin as a payment currency now. And that's showing you that people are actually placing trust in technology, and it's started to trump and disrupt and interrogate traditional institutions and how we think about currencies and money. And that's not surprising, if you think about the basket case that is the E.U. I think there was a Gallup survey out recently that said something like, in America, trust in banks is at an all-time low, it's something like 21 percent. And you can see here some photographs from London where Barclays sponsored the city bike scheme, and some activists have done some nice piece of guerrilla marketing here and doctored the slogans. "Sub-prime pedaling." "Barclays takes you for a ride." These are the more polite ones I could share with you today. But you get the gist, so people have really started to sort of lose faith in institutions. There's a P.R. company called Edelman, they do this very interesting survey every year precisely around trust and what people are thinking. And this is a global survey, so these numbers are global. And what's interesting is that you can see that hierarchy is having a bit of a wobble, and it's all about heterarchical now, so people trust people like themselves more than they trust corporations and governments. And if you look at these figures for the more developed markets like U.K., Germany, and so on, they're actually much lower. And I find that sort of scary. People are actually trusting businesspeople more than they're trusting governments and leaders. So what's starting to happen, if you think about money, if you sort of boil money down to an essence, it is literally just an expression of value, an agreed value. So what's happening now, in the digital age, is that we can quantify value in lots of different ways and do it more easily, and sometimes the way that we quantify those values, it makes it much easier to create new forms and valid forms of currency. In that context, you can see that networks like Bitcoin suddenly start to make a bit more sense. So if you think we're starting to question and disrupt and interrogate what money means, what our relationship with it is, what defines money, then the ultimate extension of that is, is there a reason for the government to be in charge of money anymore? So obviously I'm looking at this through a marketing prism, so from a brand perspective, brands literally stand or fall on their reputations. And if you think about it, reputation has now become a currency. You know, reputations are built on trust, consistency, transparency. So if you've actually decided that you trust a brand, you want a relationship, you want to engage with the brand, you're already kind of participating in lots of new forms of currency. So you think about loyalty. Loyalty essentially is a micro-economy. You think about rewards schemes, air miles. The Economist said a few years ago that there are actually more unredeemed air miles in the world than there are dollar bills in circulation. You know, when you are standing in line in Starbucks, 30 percent of transactions in Starbucks on any one day are actually being made with Starbucks Star points. So that's a sort of Starbucks currency staying within its ecosystem. And what I find interesting is that Amazon has recently launched Amazon coins. So admittedly it's a currency at the moment that's purely for the Kindle. So you can buy apps and make purchases within those apps, but you think about Amazon, you look at the trust barometer that I showed you where people are starting to trust businesses, especially businesses that they believe in and trust more than governments. So suddenly, you start thinking, well Amazon potentially could push this. It could become a natural extension, that as well as buying stuff — take it out of the Kindle — you could buy books, music, real-life products, appliances and goods and so on. And suddenly you're getting Amazon, as a brand, is going head to head with the Federal Reserve in terms of how you want to spend your money, what money is, what constitutes money. And I'll get you back to Tide, the detergent now, as I promised. This is a fantastic article I came across in New York Magazine, where it was saying that drug users across America are actually purchasing drugs with bottles of Tide detergent. So they're going into convenience stores, stealing Tide, and a $20 bottle of Tide is equal to 10 dollars of crack cocaine or weed. And what they're saying, so some criminologists have looked at this and they're saying, well, okay, Tide as a product sells at a premium. It's 50 percent above the category average. It's infused with a very complex cocktail of chemicals, so it smells very luxurious and very distinctive, and, being a Procter and Gamble brand, it's been supported by a lot of mass media advertising. So what they're saying is that drug users are consumers too, so they have this in their neural pathways. When they spot Tide, there's a shortcut. They say, that is trust. I trust that. That's quality. So it becomes this unit of currency, which the New York Magazine described as a very oddly loyal crime wave, brand-loyal crime wave, and criminals are actually calling Tide "liquid gold." Now, what I thought was funny was the reaction from the P&G spokesperson. They said, obviously tried to dissociate themselves from drugs, but said, "It reminds me of one thing and that's the value of the brand has stayed consistent." (Laughter) Which backs up my point and shows he didn't even break a sweat when he said that. So that brings me back to the connection with sweat. In Mexico, Nike has run a campaign recently called, literally, Bid Your Sweat. So you think about, these Nike shoes have got sensors in them, or you're using a Nike FuelBand that basically tracks your movement, your energy, your calorie consumption. And what's happening here, this is where you've actually elected to join that Nike community. You've bought into it. They're not advertising loud messages at you, and that's where advertising has started to shift now is into things like services, tools and applications. So Nike is literally acting as a well-being partner, a health and fitness partner and service provider. So what happens with this is they're saying, "Right, you have a data dashboard. We know how far you've run, how far you've moved, what your calorie intake, all that sort of stuff. What you can do is, the more you run, the more points you get, and we have an auction where you can buy Nike stuff but only by proving that you've actually used the product to do stuff." And you can't come into this. This is purely for the community that are sweating using Nike products. You can't buy stuff with pesos. This is literally a closed environment, a closed auction space. In Africa, you know, airtime has become literally a currency in its own right. People are used to, because mobile is king, they're very, very used to transferring money, making payments via mobile. And one of my favorite examples from a brand perspective going on is Vodafone, where, in Egypt, lots of people make purchases in markets and very small independent stores. Loose change, small change is a real problem, and what tends to happen is you buy a bunch of stuff, you're due, say, 10 cents, 20 cents in change. The shopkeepers tend to give you things like an onion or an aspirin, or a piece of gum, because they don't have small change. So when Vodafone came in and saw this problem, this consumer pain point, they created some small change which they call Fakka, which literally sits and is given by the shopkeepers to people, and it's credit that goes straight onto their mobile phone. So this currency becomes credit, which again, is really, really interesting. And we did a survey that backs up the fact that, you know, 45 percent of people in this very crucial demographic in the U.S. were saying that they're comfortable using an independent or branded currency. So that's getting really interesting here, a really interesting dynamic going on. And you think, corporations should start taking their assets and thinking of them in a different way and trading them. And you think, is it much of a leap? It seems farfetched, but when you think about it, in America in 1860, there were 1,600 corporations issuing banknotes. There were 8,000 kinds of notes in America. And the only thing that stopped that, the government controlled four percent of the supply, and the only thing that stopped it was the Civil War breaking out, and the government suddenly wanted to take control of the money. So government, money, war, nothing changes there, then. So what I'm going to ask is, basically, is history repeating itself? Is technology making paper money feel outmoded? Are we decoupling money from the government? You know, you think about, brands are starting to fill the gaps. Corporations are filling gaps that governments can't afford to fill. So I think, you know, will we be standing on stage buying a coffee — organic, fair trade coffee — next year using TED florins or TED shillings? Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How a penny made me feel like a millionaire | {0: 'Tania Luna is the co-CEO of LifeLabs Learning and co-host of the podcast "Talk Psych to Me."'} | TED@New York | I'm five years old, and I am very proud. My father has just built the best outhouse in our little village in Ukraine. Inside, it's a smelly, gaping hole in the ground, but outside, it's pearly white formica and it literally gleams in the sun. This makes me feel so proud, so important, that I appoint myself the leader of my little group of friends and I devise missions for us. So we prowl from house to house looking for flies captured in spider webs and we set them free. Four years earlier, when I was one, after the Chernobyl accident, the rain came down black, and my sister's hair fell out in clumps, and I spent nine months in the hospital. There were no visitors allowed, so my mother bribed a hospital worker. She acquired a nurse's uniform, and she snuck in every night to sit by my side. Five years later, an unexpected silver lining. Thanks to Chernobyl, we get asylum in the U.S. I am six years old, and I don't cry when we leave home and we come to America, because I expect it to be a place filled with rare and wonderful things like bananas and chocolate and Bazooka bubble gum, Bazooka bubble gum with the little cartoon wrappers inside, Bazooka that we'd get once a year in Ukraine and we'd have to chew one piece for an entire week. So the first day we get to New York, my grandmother and I find a penny in the floor of the homeless shelter that my family's staying in. Only, we don't know that it's a homeless shelter. We think that it's a hotel, a hotel with lots of rats. So we find this penny kind of fossilized in the floor, and we think that a very wealthy man must have left it there because regular people don't just lose money. And I hold this penny in the palm of my hand, and it's sticky and rusty, but it feels like I'm holding a fortune. I decide that I'm going to get my very own piece of Bazooka bubble gum. And in that moment, I feel like a millionaire. About a year later, I get to feel that way again when we find a bag full of stuffed animals in the trash, and suddenly I have more toys than I've ever had in my whole life. And again, I get that feeling when we get a knock on the door of our apartment in Brooklyn, and my sister and I find a deliveryman with a box of pizza that we didn't order. So we take the pizza, our very first pizza, and we devour slice after slice as the deliveryman stands there and stares at us from the doorway. And he tells us to pay, but we don't speak English. My mother comes out, and he asks her for money, but she doesn't have enough. She walks 50 blocks to and from work every day just to avoid spending money on bus fare. Then our neighbor pops her head in, and she turns red with rage when she realizes that those immigrants from downstairs have somehow gotten their hands on her pizza. Everyone's upset. But the pizza is delicious. It doesn't hit me until years later just how little we had. On our 10 year anniversary of being in the U.S., we decided to celebrate by reserving a room at the hotel that we first stayed in when we got to the U.S. The man at the front desk laughs, and he says, "You can't reserve a room here. This is a homeless shelter." And we were shocked. My husband Brian was also homeless as a kid. His family lost everything, and at age 11, he had to live in motels with his dad, motels that would round up all of their food and keep it hostage until they were able to pay the bill. And one time, when he finally got his box of Frosted Flakes back, it was crawling with roaches. But he did have one thing. He had this shoebox that he carried with him everywhere containing nine comic books, two G.I. Joes painted to look like Spider-Man and five Gobots. And this was his treasure. This was his own assembly of heroes that kept him from drugs and gangs and from giving up on his dreams. I'm going to tell you about one more formerly homeless member of our family. This is Scarlett. Once upon a time, Scarlet was used as bait in dog fights. She was tied up and thrown into the ring for other dogs to attack so they'd get more aggressive before the fight. And now, these days, she eats organic food and she sleeps on an orthopedic bed with her name on it, but when we pour water for her in her bowl, she still looks up and she wags her tail in gratitude. Sometimes Brian and I walk through the park with Scarlett, and she rolls through the grass, and we just look at her and then we look at each other and we feel gratitude. We forget about all of our new middle-class frustrations and disappointments, and we feel like millionaires. Thank you. (Applause) |
A 3D-printed jumbo jet? | {0: 'Bastian Schaefer and a team of designers at Airbus have been imagining the high-concept future of the jet airlplane -- in a future with less fuel and more passengers.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | What do we know about the future? Difficult question, simple answer: nothing. We cannot predict the future. We only can create a vision of the future, how it might be, a vision which reveals disruptive ideas, which is inspiring, and this is the most important reason which breaks the chains of common thinking. There are a lot of people who created their own vision about the future, for instance, this vision here from the early 20th century. It says here that this is the ocean plane of the future. It takes only one and a half days to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Today, we know that this future vision didn't come true. So this is our largest airplane which we have, the Airbus A380, and it's quite huge, so a lot of people fit in there and it's technically completely different than the vision I've shown to you. I'm working in a team with Airbus, and we have created our vision about a more sustainable future of aviation. So sustainability is quite important for us, which should incorporate social but as well as environmental and economic values. So we have created a very disruptive structure which mimics the design of bone, or a skeleton, which occurs in nature. So that's why it looks maybe a little bit weird, especially to the people who deal with structures in general. But at least it's just a kind of artwork to explore our ideas about a different future. What are the main customers of the future? So, we have the old, we have the young, we have the uprising power of women, and there's one mega-trend which affects all of us. These are the future anthropometrics. So our children are getting larger, but at the same time we are growing into different directions. So what we need is space inside the aircraft, inside a very dense area. These people have different needs. So we see a clear need of active health promotion, especially in the case of the old people. We want to be treated as individuals. We like to be productive throughout the entire travel chain, and what we are doing in the future is we want to use the latest man-machine interface, and we want to integrate this and show this in one product. So we combined these needs with technology's themes. So for instance, we are asking ourselves, how can we create more light? How can we bring more natural light into the airplane? So this airplane has no windows anymore, for example. What about the data and communication software which we need in the future? My belief is that the airplane of the future will get its own consciousness. It will be more like a living organism than just a collection of very complex technology. This will be very different in the future. It will communicate directly with the passenger in its environment. And then we are talking also about materials, synthetic biology, for example. And my belief is that we will get more and more new materials which we can put into structure later on, because structure is one of the key issues in aircraft design. So let's compare the old world with the new world. I just want to show you here what we are doing today. So this is a bracket of an A380 crew rest compartment. It takes a lot of weight, and it follows the classical design rules. This here is an equal bracket for the same purpose. It follows the design of bone. The design process is completely different. At the one hand, we have 1.2 kilos, and at the other hand 0.6 kilos. So this technology, 3D printing, and new design rules really help us to reduce the weight, which is the biggest issue in aircraft design, because it's directly linked to greenhouse gas emissions. Push this idea a little bit forward. So how does nature build its components and structures? So nature is very clever. It puts all the information into these small building blocks, which we call DNA. And nature builds large skeletons out of it. So we see a bottom-up approach here, because all the information, as I said, are inside the DNA. And this is combined with a top-down approach, because what we are doing in our daily life is we train our muscles, we train our skeleton, and it's getting stronger. And the same approach can be applied to technology as well. So our building block is carbon nanotubes, for example, to create a large, rivet-less skeleton at the end of the day. How this looks in particular, you can show it here. So imagine you have carbon nanotubes growing inside a 3D printer, and they are embedded inside a matrix of plastic, and follow the forces which occur in your component. And you've got trillions of them. So you really align them to wood, and you take this wood and make morphological optimization, so you make structures, sub-structures, which allows you to transmit electrical energy or data. And now we take this material, combine this with a top-down approach, and build bigger and bigger components. So how might the airplane of the future look? So we have very different seats which adapt to the shape of the future passenger, with the different anthropometrics. We have social areas inside the aircraft which might turn into a place where you can play virtual golf. And finally, this bionic structure, which is covered by a transparent biopolymer membrane, will really change radically how we look at aircrafts in the future. So as Jason Silva said, if we can imagine it, why not make it so? See you in the future. Thank you. (Applause) |
The fastest ambulance? A motorcycle | {0: 'Eli Beer, the founder and president of United Hatzalah, has re-imagined first response by training EMT volunteers to respond to local calls and keep people alive until official help arrives. '} | TEDMED 2013 | This is an ambucycle. This is the fastest way to reach any medical emergency. It has everything an ambulance has except for a bed. You see the defibrillator. You see the equipment. We all saw the tragedy that happened in Boston. When I was looking at these pictures, it brought me back many years to my past when I was a child. I grew up in a small neighborhood in Jerusalem. When I was six years old, I was walking back from school on a Friday afternoon with my older brother. We were passing by a bus stop. We saw a bus blow up in front of our eyes. The bus was on fire, and many people were hurt and killed. I remembered an old man yelling to us and crying to help us get him up. He just needed someone helping him. We were so scared and we just ran away. Growing up, I decided I wanted to become a doctor and save lives. Maybe that was because of what I saw when I was a child. When I was 15, I took an EMT course, and I went to volunteer on an ambulance. For two years, I volunteered on an ambulance in Jerusalem. I helped many people, but whenever someone really needed help, I never got there in time. We never got there. The traffic is so bad. The distance, and everything. We never got there when somebody really needed us. One day, we received a call about a seven-year-old child choking from a hot dog. Traffic was horrific, and we were coming from the other side of town in the north part of Jerusalem. When we got there, 20 minutes later, we started CPR on the kid. A doctor comes in from a block away, stop us, checks the kid, and tells us to stop CPR. That second he declared this child dead. At that moment, I understood that this child died for nothing. If this doctor, who lived one block away from there, would have come 20 minutes earlier, not have to wait until that siren he heard before coming from the ambulance, if he would have heard about it way before, he would have saved this child. He could have run from a block away. He could have saved this child. I said to myself, there must be a better way. Together with 15 of my friends — we were all EMTs — we decided, let's protect our neighborhood, so when something like that happens again, we will be there running to the scene a lot before the ambulance. So I went over to the manager of the ambulance company and I told him, "Please, whenever you have a call coming into our neighborhood, we have 15 great guys who are willing to stop everything they're doing and run and save lives. Just alert us by beeper. We'll buy these beepers, just tell your dispatch to send us the beeper, and we will run and save lives." Well, he was laughing. I was 17 years old. I was a kid. And he said to me — I remember this like yesterday — he was a great guy, but he said to me, "Kid, go to school, or go open a falafel stand. We're not really interested in these kinds of new adventures. We're not interested in your help." And he threw me out of the room. "I don't need your help," he said. I was a very stubborn kid. As you see now, I'm walking around like crazy, meshugenah. (Laughter) (Applause) So I decided to use the Israeli very famous technique you've probably all heard of, chutzpah. (Laughter) And the next day, I went and I bought two police scanners, and I said, "The hell with you, if you don't want to give me information, I'll get the information myself." And we did turns, who's going to listen to the radio scanners. The next day, while I was listening to the scanners, I heard about a call coming in of a 70-year-old man hurt by a car only one block away from me on the main street of my neighborhood. I ran there by foot. I had no medical equipment. When I got there, the 70-year-old man was lying on the floor, blood was gushing out of his neck. He was on Coumadin. I knew I had to stop his bleeding or else he would die. I took off my yarmulke, because I had no medical equipment, and with a lot of pressure, I stopped his bleeding. He was bleeding from his neck. When the ambulance arrived 15 minutes later, I gave them over a patient who was alive. (Applause) When I went to visit him two days later, he gave me a hug and was crying and thanking me for saving his life. At that moment, when I realized this is the first person I ever saved in my life after two years volunteering in an ambulance, I knew this is my life's mission. So today, 22 years later, we have United Hatzalah. (Applause) "Hatzalah" means "rescue," for all of you who don't know Hebrew. I forgot I'm not in Israel. So we have thousands of volunteers who are passionate about saving lives, and they're spread all around, so whenever a call comes in, they just stop everything and go and run and save a life. Our average response time today went down to less than three minutes in Israel. (Applause) I'm talking about heart attacks, I'm talking about car accidents, God forbid bomb attacks, shootings, whatever it is, even a woman 3 o'clock in the morning falling in her home and needs someone to help her. Three minutes, we'll have a guy with his pajamas running to her house and helping her get up. The reasons why we're so successful are because of three things. Thousands of passionate volunteers who will leave everything they do and run to help people they don't even know. We're not there to replace ambulances. We're just there to get the gap between the ambulance call until they arrive. And we save people that otherwise would not be saved. The second reason is because of our technology. You know, Israelis are good in technology. Every one of us has on his phone, no matter what kind of phone, a GPS technology done by NowForce, and whenever a call comes in, the closest five volunteers get the call, and they actually get there really quick, and navigated by a traffic navigator to get there and not waste time. And this is a great technology we use all over the country and reduce the response time. And the third thing are these ambucycles. These ambucycles are an ambulance on two wheels. We don't transfer people, but we stabilize them, and we save their lives. They never get stuck in traffic. They could even go on a sidewalk. They never, literally, get stuck in traffic. That's why we get there so fast. A few years after I started this organization, in a Jewish community, two Muslims from east Jerusalem called me up. They ask me to meet. They wanted to meet with me. Muhammad Asli and Murad Alyan. When Muhammad told me his personal story, how his father, 55 years old, collapsed at home, had a cardiac arrest, and it took over an hour for an ambulance arrive, and he saw his father die in front of his eyes, he asked me, "Please start this in east Jerusalem." I said to myself, I saw so much tragedy, so much hate, and it's not about saving Jews. It's not about saving Muslims. It's not about saving Christians. It's about saving people. So I went ahead, full force — (Applause) — and I started United Hatzalah in east Jerusalem, and that's why the names United and Hatzalah match so well. We started hand in hand saving Jews and Arabs. Arabs were saving Jews. Jews were saving Arabs. Something special happened. Arabs and Jews, they don't always get along together, but here in this situation, the communities, literally, it's an unbelievable situation that happened, the diversities, all of a sudden they had a common interest: Let's save lives together. Settlers were saving Arabs and Arabs were saving settlers. It's an unbelievable concept that could work only when you have such a great cause. And these are all volunteers. No one is getting money. They're all doing it for the purpose of saving lives. When my own father collapsed a few years ago from a cardiac arrest, one of the first volunteers to arrive to save my father was one of these Muslim volunteers from east Jerusalem who was in the first course to join Hatzalah. And he saved my father. Could you imagine how I felt in that moment? When I started this organization, I was 17 years old. I never imagined that one day I'd be speaking at TEDMED. I never even knew what TEDMED was then. I don't think it existed, but I never imagined, I never imagined that it's going to go all around, it's going to spread around, and this last year we started in Panama and Brazil. All I need is a partner who is a little meshugenah like me, passionate about saving lives, and willing to do it. And I'm actually starting it in India very soon with a friend who I met in Harvard just a while back. Hatzalah actually started in Brooklyn by a Hasidic Jew years before us in Williamsburg, and now it's all over the Jewish community in New York, even Australia and Mexico and many other Jewish communities. But it could spread everywhere. It's very easy to adopt. You even saw these volunteers in New York saving lives in the World Trade Center. Last year alone, we treated in Israel 207,000 people. Forty-two thousand of them were life-threatening situations. And we made a difference. I guess you could call this a lifesaving flash mob, and it works. When I look all around here, I see lots of people who would go an extra mile, run an extra mile to save other people, no matter who they are, no matter what religion, no matter who, where they come from. We all want to be heroes. We just need a good idea, motivation and lots of chutzpah, and we could save millions of people that otherwise would not be saved. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Spider-Man, The Lion King and life on the creative edge | {0: 'Julie Taymor is a film, theater and opera director. She is known for lavish movies such as Frida and for her hit Broadway musicals, The Lion King and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.'} | TED2011 | (Music) ["Oedipus Rex"] ["The Lion King"] ["Titus"] ["Frida"] ["The Magic Flute"] ["Across The Universe"] (Applause) Julie Taymor: Thank you. Thank you very much. That's a few samples of the theater, opera and films that I have done over the last 20 years. But what I'd like to begin with right now is to take you back to a moment that I went through in Indonesia, which is a seminal moment in my life and, like all myths, these stories need to be retold and told, lest we forget them. And when I'm in the turbulent times, as we know, that I am right now, through the crucible and the fire of transformation, which is what all of you do, actually. Anybody who creates knows there's that point where it hasn't quite become the phoenix or the burnt char. (Laughter) And I am right there on the edge, which I'll tell you about, another story. I want to go back to Indonesia where I was about 21, 22 years, a long time ago, on a fellowship. And I found myself, after two years there and performing and learning, on the island of Bali, on the edge of a crater, Gunung Batur. And I was in a village where there was an initiation ceremony for the young men, a rite of passage. Little did I know that it was mine as well. And as I sat in this temple square under this gigantic beringin banyan tree, in the dark, there was no electricity, just the full moon, down in this empty square, and I heard the most beautiful sounds, like a Charles Ives concert as I listened to the gamelan music from all the different villagers that came for this once-every-five-years ceremony. And I thought I was alone in the dark under this tree. And all of a sudden, out of the dark, from the other end of the square, I saw the glint of mirrors lit by the moon. And these 20 old men who I'd seen before all of a sudden stood up in these full warrior costumes with the headdress and the spears, and no one was in the square, and I was hidden in the shadows. No one was there, and they came out, and they did this incredible dance. "Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhahahahaha." And they moved their bodies and they came forward, and the lights bounced off these costumes. And I've been in theater since I was 11 years old, and performing, creating, and I went, "Who are they performing for with these elaborate costumes, these extraordinary headdresses?" And I realized that they were performing for God, whatever that means. But somehow, it didn't matter about the publicity. There was no money involved. It wasn't going to be written down. It was no news. And there were these incredible artists that felt for me like an eternity as they performed. The next moment, as soon as they finished and disappeared into the shadows, a young man with a propane lantern came on, hung it up on a tree, set up a curtain. The village square was filled with hundreds of people. And they put on an opera all night long. Human beings needed the light. They needed the light to see. So what I gained and gathered from this incredible, seminal moment in my life as a young artist was that you must be true to what you believe as an artist all the way through, but you also have to be aware that the audience is out there in our lives at this time, and they also need the light. And it's this incredible balance that I think that we walk when we are creating something that is breaking ground, that's trying to do something you've never seen before, that imaginary world where you actually don't know where you're going to end up, that's the fine line on the edge of a crater that I have walked my whole life. What I would like to do now is to tell you a little bit about how I work. Let's take "The Lion King." You saw many examples of my work up there, but it's one that people know. I start with the notion of the ideograph. An ideograph is like a brush painting, a Japanese brush painting. Three strokes, you get the whole bamboo forest. I go to the concept of "The Lion King" and I say, "What is the essence of it? What is the abstraction? If I were to reduce this entire story into one image, what would it be?" The circle. The circle. It's so obvious. The circle of life. The circle of Mufasa's mask. The circle that, when we come to Act II and there's a drought, how do you express drought? It's a circle of silk on the floor that disappears into the hole in the stage floor. The circle of life comes in the wheels of the gazelles that leap. And you see the mechanics. And being a theater person, what I know and love about the theater is that when the audience comes in and they suspend their disbelief, when you see men walking or women walking with a platter of grass on their heads, you know it's the savanna. You don't question that. I love the apparent truth of theater. I love that people are willing to fill in the blanks. The audience is willing to say, "Oh, I know that's not a real sun. You took pieces of sticks. You added silk to the bottom. You suspended these pieces. You let it fall flat on the floor. And as it rises with the strings, I see that it's a sun. But the beauty of it is that it's just silk and sticks. And in a way, that is what makes it spiritual. That's what moves you. It's not the actual literal sunrise that's coming. It's the art of it. So in the theater, as much as the story is critical and the book and the language, the telling of the story, how it's told, the mechanics, the methods that you use, is equal to the story itself. And I'm one who loves high tech and low tech. So I could go from — For instance, I'll show you some "Spider-Man" later, these incredible machines that move people along. But the fact is, without the dancer who knows how to use his body and swing on those wires, it's nothing. So now I'm going to show you some clips from the other big project of my life this year, "The Tempest." It's a movie. I did "The Tempest" on a stage three times in the theater since 1984, '86, and I love the play. I did it always with a male Prospero. And all of a sudden, I thought, "Well, who am I gonna get to play Prospero? Why not Helen Mirren? She's a great actor. Why not?" And this material really did work for a woman equally as well. So now, let's take a look at some of the images from "The Tempest." (Music) (Video) Prospera: Hast thou, spirit, performed to the point the tempest that I bade thee? Ariel: I boarded the king's ship. In every cabin, I flamed amazement. Prospera: At first sight, they have changed eyes. Miranda: Do you love me? Ferdinand: Beyond all limit. HM: They are both in either's powers. Trinculo: Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. (Music) Looking for business, governor? Caliban: Hast thou not dropped from heaven? Stephano: Out of the moon, I do assure thee. Prospera: Caliban! Caliban: This island is mine. Prospera: For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps. Antonio: Here lies your brother no better than the earth he lies upon. Sebastian: Draw thy sword. And I, the king, shall love thee. Prospera: I will plague them all, even to roaring. Ariel: I have made you mad. Prospera: We are such stuff as dreams are made on. and our little life is rounded with a sleep. (Music) JT: Okay. (Applause) So I went from theater, doing "The Tempest" on the stage in a very low-budget production many years ago, and I love the play, and I also think it's Shakespeare's last play, and it really lends itself, as you can see, to cinema. But I'm just going to give you a little example about how one stages it in theater and then how one takes that same idea or story and moves it into cinema. The ideograph that I talked to you about before, what is it for "The Tempest"? What, if I were to boil it down, would be the one image that I could hang my hat on for this? And it was the sand castle, the idea of nurture versus nature, that we build these civilizations — she speaks about it at the end, Helen Mirren's Prospera — we build them, but under nature, under the grand tempest, these cloud-capped towers, these gorgeous palaces will fade and there will — leave not a rack behind. So in the theater, I started the play, it was a black sand rake, white cyc, and there was a little girl, Miranda, on the horizon, building a drip castle, a sand castle. And as she was there on the edge of that stage, two stagehands all in black with watering cans ran along the top and started to pour water on the sand castle, and the sand castle started to drip and sink, but before it did, the audience saw the black-clad stagehands. The medium was apparent. It was banal. We saw it. But as they started to pour the water, the light changed from showing you the black-clad stagehands to focusing, this rough magic that we do in theater, it focused right on the water itself. And all of a sudden, the audience's perspective changes. It becomes something magically large. It becomes the rainstorm. The masked actors, the puppeteers, they disappear, and the audience makes that leap into this world, into this imaginary world of "The Tempest" actually happening. Now the difference when I went and did it in the cinema, I started the actual movie with a close-up of a sand castle, a black sand castle, and what cinema can do is, by using camera, perspective, and also long shots and close-ups, it started on a close-up of the sand castle, and as it pulled away, you saw that it was a miniature sitting in the palm of the girl's hands. And so I could play with the medium, and why I move from one medium to another is to be able to do this. Now I'm going to take you to "Spider-Man." (Music) (Video) Peter Parker: ♪ Standing on the precipice, I can soar away from this. ♪ JT: We're trying to do everything in live theater that you can't do in two dimensions in film and television. PP: ♪ Rise above yourself and take control. ♪ George Tsypin: We're looking at New York from a Spider-Man point of view. Spider Man is not bound by gravity. Manhattan in the show is not bound by gravity either. PP: ♪ Be yourself and rise above it all. ♪ Ensemble: ♪ Sock! Pow! ♪ ♪ Slam! Scratch! ♪ Danny Ezralow: I don't want you to even think there's a choreographer. It's real, what's happening. I prefer you to see people moving, and you're going, "Whoa, what was that?" (Music) JT: If I give enough movement in the sculpture, and the actor moves their head, you feel like it's alive. It's really comic book live. It's a comic book coming alive. (Music) Bono: They're mythologies. They're modern myths, these comic book heroes. PP: ♪ They believe. ♪ (Screams) (Music) (Applause) JT: Ohhhh. What was that? Circus, rock 'n' roll, drama. What the hell are we doing up there on that stage? Well, one last story, very quickly. After I was in that village, I crossed the lake, and I saw that the volcano was erupting on the other side, Gunung Batur, and there was a dead volcano next to the live volcano. I didn't think I'd be swallowed by the volcano, and I am here. But it's very easy to climb up, is it not? You hold on to the roots, you put your foot in the little rocks and climb up there, and you get to the top, and I was with a good friend who was an actor, and we said, "Let's go up there. Let's see if we can come close to the edge of that live volcano." And we climbed up and we got to the very top, and we're on the edge, on this precipice, Roland disappears into the sulfur smoke at the volcano at the other end, and I'm up there alone on this incredible precipice. Did you hear the lyrics? I'm on the precipice looking down into a dead volcano to my left. To my right is sheer shale. It's coming off. I'm in thongs and sarongs. It was many years ago. And no hiking boots. And he's disappeared, this mad French gypsy actor, off in the smoke, and I realize, I can't go back the way that I've come. I can't. So I throw away my camera. I throw away my thongs, and I looked at the line straight in front of me, and I got down on all fours like a cat, and I held with my knees to either side of this line in front of me, for 30 yards or 30 feet, I don't know. The wind was massively blowing, and the only way I could get to the other side was to look at the line straight in front of me. I know you've all been there. I'm in the crucible right now. It's my trial by fire. It's my company's trials by fire. We survive because our theme song is "Rise Above." Boy falls from the sky, rise above. It's right there in the palm of both of our hands, of all of my company's hands. I have beautiful collaborators, and we as creators only get there all together. I know you understand that. And you just stay going forward, and then you see this extraordinary thing in front of your eyes. Thank you. (Applause) |
Better baby care -- thanks to Formula 1 | {0: 'Peter van Manen is the Managing Director of McLaren Electronics, which provides data systems to major motorsports series.'} | TEDxNijmegen | Motor racing is a funny old business. We make a new car every year, and then we spend the rest of the season trying to understand what it is we've built to make it better, to make it faster. And then the next year, we start again. Now, the car you see in front of you is quite complicated. The chassis is made up of about 11,000 components, the engine another 6,000, the electronics about eight and a half thousand. So there's about 25,000 things there that can go wrong. So motor racing is very much about attention to detail. The other thing about Formula 1 in particular is we're always changing the car. We're always trying to make it faster. So every two weeks, we will be making about 5,000 new components to fit to the car. Five to 10 percent of the race car will be different every two weeks of the year. So how do we do that? Well, we start our life with the racing car. We have a lot of sensors on the car to measure things. On the race car in front of you here there are about 120 sensors when it goes into a race. It's measuring all sorts of things around the car. That data is logged. We're logging about 500 different parameters within the data systems, about 13,000 health parameters and events to say when things are not working the way they should do, and we're sending that data back to the garage using telemetry at a rate of two to four megabits per second. So during a two-hour race, each car will be sending 750 million numbers. That's twice as many numbers as words that each of us speaks in a lifetime. It's a huge amount of data. But it's not enough just to have data and measure it. You need to be able to do something with it. So we've spent a lot of time and effort in turning the data into stories to be able to tell, what's the state of the engine, how are the tires degrading, what's the situation with fuel consumption? So all of this is taking data and turning it into knowledge that we can act upon. Okay, so let's have a look at a little bit of data. Let's pick a bit of data from another three-month-old patient. This is a child, and what you're seeing here is real data, and on the far right-hand side, where everything starts getting a little bit catastrophic, that is the patient going into cardiac arrest. It was deemed to be an unpredictable event. This was a heart attack that no one could see coming. But when we look at the information there, we can see that things are starting to become a little fuzzy about five minutes or so before the cardiac arrest. We can see small changes in things like the heart rate moving. These were all undetected by normal thresholds which would be applied to data. So the question is, why couldn't we see it? Was this a predictable event? Can we look more at the patterns in the data to be able to do things better? So this is a child, about the same age as the racing car on stage, three months old. It's a patient with a heart problem. Now, when you look at some of the data on the screen above, things like heart rate, pulse, oxygen, respiration rates, they're all unusual for a normal child, but they're quite normal for the child there, and so one of the challenges you have in health care is, how can I look at the patient in front of me, have something which is specific for her, and be able to detect when things start to change, when things start to deteriorate? Because like a racing car, any patient, when things start to go bad, you have a short time to make a difference. So what we did is we took a data system which we run every two weeks of the year in Formula 1 and we installed it on the hospital computers at Birmingham Children's Hospital. We streamed data from the bedside instruments in their pediatric intensive care so that we could both look at the data in real time and, more importantly, to store the data so that we could start to learn from it. And then, we applied an application on top which would allow us to tease out the patterns in the data in real time so we could see what was happening, so we could determine when things started to change. Now, in motor racing, we're all a little bit ambitious, audacious, a little bit arrogant sometimes, so we decided we would also look at the children as they were being transported to intensive care. Why should we wait until they arrived in the hospital before we started to look? And so we installed a real-time link between the ambulance and the hospital, just using normal 3G telephony to send that data so that the ambulance became an extra bed in intensive care. And then we started looking at the data. So the wiggly lines at the top, all the colors, this is the normal sort of data you would see on a monitor — heart rate, pulse, oxygen within the blood, and respiration. The lines on the bottom, the blue and the red, these are the interesting ones. The red line is showing an automated version of the early warning score that Birmingham Children's Hospital were already running. They'd been running that since 2008, and already have stopped cardiac arrests and distress within the hospital. The blue line is an indication of when patterns start to change, and immediately, before we even started putting in clinical interpretation, we can see that the data is speaking to us. It's telling us that something is going wrong. The plot with the red and the green blobs, this is plotting different components of the data against each other. The green is us learning what is normal for that child. We call it the cloud of normality. And when things start to change, when conditions start to deteriorate, we move into the red line. There's no rocket science here. It is displaying data that exists already in a different way, to amplify it, to provide cues to the doctors, to the nurses, so they can see what's happening. In the same way that a good racing driver relies on cues to decide when to apply the brakes, when to turn into a corner, we need to help our physicians and our nurses to see when things are starting to go wrong. So we have a very ambitious program. We think that the race is on to do something differently. We are thinking big. It's the right thing to do. We have an approach which, if it's successful, there's no reason why it should stay within a hospital. It can go beyond the walls. With wireless connectivity these days, there is no reason why patients, doctors and nurses always have to be in the same place at the same time. And meanwhile, we'll take our little three-month-old baby, keep taking it to the track, keeping it safe, and making it faster and better. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The polyphonic me | {0: 'Beardyman, “ruler of beats and destroyer of dance floors,” has developed a real-time music-production system that places live looping at the center of a new musical paradigm.'} | TED2013 | I'd like you all to ask yourselves a question which you may never have asked yourselves before: What is possible with the human voice? What is possible with the human voice? (Beatboxing) ♪ Ooh baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying) ♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying) ♪ baby ♪ (Cat meowing) (Dog barking) Yeah. (Applause) (Boomerang noises) It was coming straight for me. I had to. It was, yeah. As you can probably well imagine, I was a strange child. (Laughter) Because the thing is, I was constantly trying to extend my repertoire of noises to be the very maximum that it could be. I was constantly experimenting with these noises. And I'm still on that mission. I'm still trying to find every noise that I can possibly make. And the thing is, I'm a bit older and wiser now, and I know that there's some noises I'll never be able to make because I'm hemmed in by my physical body, and there's things it can't do. And there's things that no one's voice can do. For example, no one can do two notes at the same time. You can do two-tone singing, which monks can do, which is like... (Two-tone singing) But that's cheating. And it hurts your throat. So there's things you can't do, and these limitations on the human voice have always really annoyed me, because beatbox is the best way of getting musical ideas out of your head and into the world, but they're sketches at best, which is what's annoyed me. If only, if only there was a way for these ideas to come out unimpeded by the restrictions which my body gives it. So I've been working with these guys, and we've made a machine. We've made a system which is basically a live production machine, a real-time music production machine, and it enables me to, using nothing but my voice, create music in real time as I hear it in my head unimpeded by any physical restrictions that my body might place on me. And I'm going to show you what it can do. And before I start making noises with it, and using it to manipulate my voice, I want to reiterate that everything that you're about to hear is being made by my voice. This system has — thank you, beautiful assistant — this system has no sounds in it itself until I start putting sounds in it, so there's no prerecorded samples of any kind. So once this thing really gets going, and it really starts to mangle the audio I'm putting into it, it becomes not obvious that it is the human voice, but it is, so I'm going to take you through it bit by bit and start nice and simple. So the polyphony problem: I've only got one voice. How do I get around the problem of really wanting to have as many different voices going on at the same time. The simplest way to do it is something like this. (Beatboxing) By dancing. It's like this. (Music) Thanks. (Applause) So that's probably the easiest way. But if you want to do something a little bit more immediate, something that you can't achieve with live looping, there's other ways to layer your voice up. There's things like pitch-shifting, which are awesome, and I'm going to show you now what that sounds like. So I'm going to start another beat for you, like this. (Beatboxing) There's always got to be a bit of a dance at the start, because it's just fun, so you can clap along if you want. You don't have to. It's fine. Check it out. I'm going to lay down a bass sound now. (Music) And now, a rockabilly guitar. Which is nice. But what if I want to make, say, a — (Applause) — Thanks. What if I want to make, say, a rock organ? Is that possible? Yes, it is, by recording myself like this. (Organ sound) And now I have that, I have that recorded. Assign it to a keyboard. (Music) So that's cool. (Applause) But what if I wanted to sound like the whole of Pink Floyd? Impossible, you say. No. It is possible, and you can do it very simply using this machine. It's really fantastic. Check it out. (Music) So every noise you can hear there is my voice. I didn't just trigger something which sounds like that. There's no samples. There's no synthesizers. That is literally all my voice being manipulated, and when you get to that point, you have to ask, don't you, what's the point? Why do this? (Laughter) Because it's cheaper than hiring the whole of Pink Floyd, I suppose, is the easy answer. But in actual fact, I haven't made this machine so that I can emulate things that already exist. I've made this so that I can make any noise that I can imagine. So with your permission, I'm going to do some things that are in my mind, and I hope you enjoy them, because they're rather unusual, especially when you're doing things which are as unusual as this, it can be hard to believe that it is all my voice, you see. (Voice effects) (Music) Like this. (Music) So, loosely defined, that is what's possible with the human voice. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (Applause) |
For argument's sake | {0: 'Philosopher Daniel H. Cohen studies language and the way we argue through reason.'} | TEDxColbyCollege | My name is Dan Cohen and I am an academic, as he said. And what that means is that I argue. It's an important part of my life. And I like to argue. And I'm not just an academic, I'm a philosopher, so I like to think that I'm actually pretty good at arguing. But I also like to think a lot about arguing. And in thinking about arguing, I've come across some puzzles. And one of the puzzles is that, as I've been thinking about arguing over the years — and it's been decades now — I've gotten better at arguing. But the more that I argue and the better I get at arguing, the more that I lose. And that's a puzzle. And the other puzzle is that I'm actually okay with that. Why is it that I'm okay with losing and why is it that I think good arguers are actually better at losing? Well, there are some other puzzles. One is: why do we argue? Who benefits from arguments? When I think about arguments, I'm talking about — let's call them academic arguments or cognitive arguments — where something cognitive is at stake: Is this proposition true? Is this theory a good theory? Is this a viable interpretation of the data or the text? And so on. I'm not interested really in arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes or who has to take out the garbage. Yeah, we have those arguments, too. I tend to win those arguments, because I know the tricks. But those aren't the important arguments. I'm interested in academic arguments, and here are the things that puzzle me. First, what do good arguers win when they win an argument? What do I win if I convince you that utilitarianism isn't really the right framework for thinking about ethical theories? What do we win when we win an argument? Even before that, what does it matter to me whether you have this idea that Kant's theory works or Mill is the right ethicist to follow? It's no skin off my back whether you think functionalism is a viable theory of mind. So why do we even try to argue? Why do we try to convince other people to believe things they don't want to believe, and is that even a nice thing to do? Is that a nice way to treat another human being, try and make them think something they don't want to think? Well, my answer is going to make reference to three models for arguments. The first model — let's call it the dialectical model — is we think of arguments as war; you know what that's like — a lot of screaming and shouting and winning and losing. That's not a very helpful model for arguing, but it's a pretty common and entrenched model for arguing. But there's a second model for arguing: arguments as proofs. Think of a mathematician's argument. Here's my argument. Does it work? Is it any good? Are the premises warranted? Are the inferences valid? Does the conclusion follow from the premises? No opposition, no adversariality — not necessarily any arguing in the adversarial sense. But there's a third model to keep in mind that I think is going to be very helpful, and that is arguments as performances, arguments in front of an audience. We can think of a politician trying to present a position, trying to convince the audience of something. But there's another twist on this model that I really think is important; namely, that when we argue before an audience, sometimes the audience has a more participatory role in the argument; that is, arguments are also [performances] in front of juries, who make a judgment and decide the case. Let's call this the rhetorical model, where you have to tailor your argument to the audience at hand. You know, presenting a sound, well-argued, tight argument in English before a francophone audience just isn't going to work. So we have these models — argument as war, argument as proof and argument as performance. Of those three, the argument as war is the dominant one. It dominates how we talk about arguments, it dominates how we think about arguments, and because of that, it shapes how we argue, our actual conduct in arguments. Now, when we talk about arguments, we talk in a very militaristic language. We want strong arguments, arguments that have a lot of punch, arguments that are right on target. We want to have our defenses up and our strategies all in order. We want killer arguments. That's the kind of argument we want. It is the dominant way of thinking about arguments. When I'm talking about arguments, that's probably what you thought of, the adversarial model. But the war metaphor, the war paradigm or model for thinking about arguments, has, I think, deforming effects on how we argue. First, it elevates tactics over substance. You can take a class in logic, argumentation. You learn all about the subterfuges that people use to try and win arguments — the false steps. It magnifies the us-versus them aspect of it. It makes it adversarial; it's polarizing. And the only foreseeable outcomes are triumph — glorious triumph — or abject, ignominious defeat. I think those are deforming effects, and worst of all, it seems to prevent things like negotiation or deliberation or compromise or collaboration. Think about that one — have you ever entered an argument thinking, "Let's see if we can hash something out, rather than fight it out. What can we work out together?" I think the argument-as-war metaphor inhibits those other kinds of resolutions to argumentation. And finally — this is really the worst thing — arguments don't seem to get us anywhere; they're dead ends. They are like roundabouts or traffic jams or gridlock in conversation. We don't get anywhere. And one more thing. And as an educator, this is the one that really bothers me: If argument is war, then there's an implicit equation of learning with losing. And let me explain what I mean. Suppose you and I have an argument. You believe a proposition, P, and I don't. And I say, "Well, why do you believe P?" And you give me your reasons. And I object and say, "Well, what about ...?" And you answer my objection. And I have a question: "Well, what do you mean? How does it apply over here?" And you answer my question. Now, suppose at the end of the day, I've objected, I've questioned, I've raised all sorts of counter counter-considerations and in every case you've responded to my satisfaction. And so at the end of the day, I say, "You know what? I guess you're right: P." So, I have a new belief. And it's not just any belief; it's well-articulated, examined — it's a battle-tested belief. Great cognitive gain. OK, who won that argument? Well, the war metaphor seems to force us into saying you won, even though I'm the only one who made any cognitive gain. What did you gain, cognitively, from convincing me? Sure, you got some pleasure out of it, maybe your ego stroked, maybe you get some professional status in the field — "This guy's a good arguer." But just from a cognitive point of view, who was the winner? The war metaphor forces us into thinking that you're the winner and I lost, even though I gained. And there's something wrong with that picture. And that's the picture I really want to change if we can. So, how can we find ways to make arguments yield something positive? What we need is new exit strategies for arguments. But we're not going to have new exit strategies for arguments until we have new entry approaches to arguments. We need to think of new kinds of arguments. In order to do that, well — I don't know how to do that. That's the bad news. The argument-as-war metaphor is just ... it's a monster. It's just taken up habitation in our mind, and there's no magic bullet that's going to kill it. There's no magic wand that's going to make it disappear. I don't have an answer. But I have some suggestions. Here's my suggestion: If we want to think of new kinds of arguments, what we need to do is think of new kinds of arguers. So try this: Think of all the roles that people play in arguments. There's the proponent and the opponent in an adversarial, dialectical argument. There's the audience in rhetorical arguments. There's the reasoner in arguments as proofs. All these different roles. Now, can you imagine an argument in which you are the arguer, but you're also in the audience, watching yourself argue? Can you imagine yourself watching yourself argue, losing the argument, and yet still, at the end of the argument, saying, "Wow, that was a good argument!" Can you do that? I think you can, and I think if you can imagine that kind of argument, where the loser says to the winner and the audience and the jury can say, "Yeah, that was a good argument," then you have imagined a good argument. And more than that, I think you've imagined a good arguer, an arguer that's worthy of the kind of arguer you should try to be. Now, I lose a lot of arguments. It takes practice to become a good arguer, in the sense of being able to benefit from losing, but fortunately, I've had many, many colleagues who have been willing to step up and provide that practice for me. Thank you. (Applause) |
Design for all 5 senses | {0: 'Jinsop Lee is an industrial designer who believes that great design appeals to all five senses. '} | TED2013 | In an age of global strife and climate change, I'm here to answer the all important question: Why is sex so damn good? If you're laughing, you know what I mean. Now, before we get to that answer, let me tell you about Chris Hosmer. Chris is a great friend of mine from my university days, but secretly, I hate him. Here's why. Back in university, we had a quick project to design some solar-powered clocks. Here's my clock. It uses something called the dwarf sunflower, which grows to about 12 inches in height. Now, as you know, sunflowers track the sun during the course of the day. So in the morning, you see which direction the sunflower is facing, and you mark it on the blank area in the base. At noon, you mark the changed position of the sunflower, and in the evening again, and that's your clock. Now, I know my clock doesn't tell you the exact time, but it does give you a general idea using a flower. So, in my completely unbiased, subjective opinion, it's brilliant. However, here's Chris's clock. It's five magnifying glasses with a shot glass under each one. In each shot glass is a different scented oil. In the morning, the sunlight will shine down on the first magnifying glass, focusing a beam of light on the shot glass underneath. This will warm up the scented oil inside, and a particular smell will be emitted. A couple of hours later, the sun will shine on the next magnifying glass, and a different smell will be emitted. So during the course of the day, five different smells are dispersed throughout that environment. Anyone living in that house can tell the time just by the smell. You can see why I hate Chris. I thought my idea was pretty good, but his idea is genius, and at the time, I knew his idea was better than mine, but I just couldn't explain why. One thing you have to know about me is I hate to lose. This problem's been bugging me for well over a decade. All right, let's get back to the question of why sex is so good. Many years after the solar powered clocks project, a young lady I knew suggested maybe sex is so good because of the five senses. And when she said this, I had an epiphany. So I decided to evaluate different experiences I had in my life from the point of view of the five senses. To do this, I devised something called the five senses graph. Along the y-axis, you have a scale from zero to 10, and along the x-axis, you have, of course, the five senses. Anytime I had a memorable experience in my life, I would record it on this graph like a five senses diary. Here's a quick video to show you how it works. (Video) Jinsop Lee: Hey, my name's Jinsop, and today, I'm going to show you what riding motorbikes is like from the point of view of the five senses. Hey! Bike designer: This is [unclear], custom bike designer. (Motorcyle revving) [Sound] [Touch] [Sight] [Smell] [Taste] JL: And that's how the five senses graph works. Now, for a period of three years, I gathered data, not just me but also some of my friends, and I used to teach in university, so I forced my — I mean, I asked my students to do this as well. So here are some other results. The first is for instant noodles. Now obviously, taste and smell are quite high, but notice sound is at three. Many people told me a big part of the noodle-eating experience is the slurping noise. You know. (Slurps) Needless to say, I no longer dine with these people. OK, next, clubbing. OK, here what I found interesting was that taste is at four, and many respondents told me it's because of the taste of drinks, but also, in some cases, kissing is a big part of the clubbing experience. These people I still do hang out with. All right, and smoking. Here I found touch is at [six], and one of the reasons is that smokers told me the sensation of holding a cigarette and bringing it up to your lips is a big part of the smoking experience, which shows, it's kind of scary to think how well cigarettes are designed by the manufacturers. OK. Now, what would the perfect experience look like on the five senses graph? It would, of course, be a horizontal line along the top. Now you can see, not even as intense an experience as riding a motorbike comes close. In fact, in the years that I gathered data, only one experience came close to being the perfect one. That is, of course, sex. Great sex. Respondents said that great sex hits all of the five senses at an extreme level. Here I'll quote one of my students who said, "Sex is so good, it's good even when it's bad." So the five senses theory does help explain why sex is so good. Now in the middle of all this five senses work, I suddenly remembered the solar-powered clocks project from my youth. And I realized this theory also explains why Chris's clock is so much better than mine. You see, my clock only focuses on sight, and a little bit of touch. Here's Chris's clock. It's the first clock ever that uses smell to tell the time. In fact, in terms of the five senses, Chris's clock is a revolution. And that's what this theory taught me about my field. You see, up till now, us designers, we've mainly focused on making things look very pretty, and a little bit of touch, which means we've ignored the other three senses. Chris's clock shows us that even raising just one of those other senses can make for a brilliant product. So what if we started using the five senses theory in all of our designs? Here's three quick ideas I came up with. This is an iron, you know, for your clothes, to which I added a spraying mechanism, so you fill up the vial with your favorite scent, and your clothes will smell nicer, but hopefully it should also make the ironing experience more enjoyable. We could call this "the perfumator." All right, next. So I brush my teeth twice a day, and what if we had a toothbrush that tastes like candy, and when the taste of candy ran out, you'd know it's time to change your toothbrush? Finally, I have a thing for the keys on a flute or a clarinet. It's not just the way they look, but I love the way they feel when you press down on them. Now, I don't play the flute or the clarinet, so I decided to combine these keys with an instrument I do play: the television remote control. Now, when we look at these three ideas together, you'll notice that the five senses theory doesn't only change the way we use these products but also the way they look. So in conclusion, I've found the five senses theory to be a very useful tool in evaluating different experiences in my life, and then taking those best experiences and hopefully incorporating them into my designs. Now, I realize the five senses isn't the only thing that makes life interesting. There's also the six emotions and that elusive x-factor. Maybe that could be the topic of my next talk. Until then, please have fun using the five senses in your own lives and your own designs. Oh, one last thing before I leave. Here's the experience you all had while listening to the TED Talks. However, it would be better if we could boost up a couple of the other senses like smell and taste. And the best way to do that is with free candy. You guys ready? All right. (Applause) |
Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets | {0: 'Saki Mafundikwa wrote the book on Africa’s graphic design heritage -- then opened a school of graphic arts in his native Zimbabwe. '} | TED2013 | I moved back home 15 years ago after a 20-year stay in the United States, and Africa called me back. And I founded my country's first graphic design and new media college. And I called it the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts. The idea, the dream, was really for a sort of Bauhaus sort of school where new ideas were interrogated and investigated, the creation of a new visual language based on the African creative heritage. We offer a two-year diploma to talented students who have successfully completed their high school education. And typography's a very important part of the curriculum and we encourage our students to look inward for influence. Here's a poster designed by one of the students under the theme "Education is a right." Some logos designed by my students. Africa has had a long tradition of writing, but this is not such a well-known fact, and I wrote the book "Afrikan Alphabets" to address that. The different types of writing in Africa, first was proto-writing, as illustrated by Nsibidi, which is the writing system of a secret society of the Ejagham people in southern Nigeria. So it's a special-interest writing system. The Akan of people of Ghana and [Cote d'Ivoire] developed Adinkra symbols some 400 years ago, and these are proverbs, historical sayings, objects, animals, plants, and my favorite Adinkra system is the first one at the top on the left. It's called Sankofa. It means, "Return and get it." Learn from the past. This pictograph by the Jokwe people of Angola tells the story of the creation of the world. At the top is God, at the bottom is man, mankind, and on the left is the sun, on the right is the moon. All the paths lead to and from God. These secret societies of the Yoruba, Kongo and Palo religions in Nigeria, Congo and Angola respectively, developed this intricate writing system which is alive and well today in the New World in Cuba, Brazil and Trinidad and Haiti. In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the Ituri society, the men pound out a cloth out of a special tree, and the women, who are also the praise singers, paint interweaving patterns that are the same in structure as the polyphonic structures that they use in their singing — a sort of a musical score, if you may. In South Africa, Ndebele women use these symbols and other geometric patterns to paint their homes in bright colors, and the Zulu women use the symbols in the beads that they weave into bracelets and necklaces. Ethiopia has had the longest tradition of writing, with the Ethiopic script that was developed in the fourth century A.D. and is used to write Amharic, which is spoken by over 24 million people. King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon developed Shü-mom at the age of 25. Shü-mom is a writing system. It's a syllabary. It's not exactly an alphabet. And here we see three stages of development that it went through in 30 years. The Vai people of Liberia had a long tradition of literacy before their first contact with Europeans in the 1800s. It's a syllabary and reads from left to right. Next door, in Sierra Leone, the Mende also developed a syllabary, but theirs reads from right to left. Africa has had a long tradition of design, a well-defined design sensibility, but the problem in Africa has been that, especially today, designers in Africa struggle with all forms of design because they are more apt to look outward for influence and inspiration. The creative spirit in Africa, the creative tradition, is as potent as it has always been, if only designers could look within. This Ethiopic cross illustrates what Dr. Ron Eglash has established: that Africa has a lot to contribute to computing and mathematics through their intuitive grasp of fractals. Africans of antiquity created civilization, and their monuments, which still stand today, are a true testimony of their greatness. Most probably, one of humanity's greatest achievements is the invention of the alphabet, and that has been attributed to Mesopotamia with their invention of cuneiform in 1600 BC, followed by hieroglyphics in Egypt, and that story has been cast in stone as historical fact. That is, until 1998, when one Yale professor John Coleman Darnell discovered these inscriptions in the Thebes desert on the limestone cliffs in western Egypt, and these have been dated at between 1800 and 1900 B.C., centuries before Mesopotamia. Called Wadi el-Hol because of the place that they were discovered, these inscriptions — research is still going on, a few of them have been deciphered, but there is consensus among scholars that this is really humanity's first alphabet. Over here, you see a paleographic chart that shows what has been deciphered so far, starting with the letter A, "ālep," at the top, and "bêt," in the middle, and so forth. It is time that students of design in Africa read the works of titans like Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal's Cheikh Anta Diop, whose seminal work on Egypt is vindicated by this discovery. The last word goes to the great Jamaican leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the Akan people of Ghana with their Adinkra symbol Sankofa, which encourages us to go to the past so as to inform our present and build on a future for us and our children. It is also time that designers in Africa stop looking outside. They've been looking outward for a long time, yet what they were looking for has been right there within grasp, right within them. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The voices in my head | {0: 'Eleanor Longden overcame her diagnosis of schizophrenia to earn a master’s in psychology and demonstrate that the voices in her head were “a sane reaction to insane circumstances.”'} | TED2013 | The day I left home for the first time to go to university was a bright day brimming with hope and optimism. I'd done well at school. Expectations for me were high, and I gleefully entered the student life of lectures, parties and traffic cone theft. Now appearances, of course, can be deceptive, and to an extent, this feisty, energetic persona of lecture-going and traffic cone stealing was a veneer, albeit a very well-crafted and convincing one. Underneath, I was actually deeply unhappy, insecure and fundamentally frightened — frightened of other people, of the future, of failure and of the emptiness that I felt was within me. But I was skilled at hiding it, and from the outside appeared to be someone with everything to hope for and aspire to. This fantasy of invulnerability was so complete that I even deceived myself, and as the first semester ended and the second began, there was no way that anyone could have predicted what was just about to happen. I was leaving a seminar when it started, humming to myself, fumbling with my bag just as I'd done a hundred times before, when suddenly I heard a voice calmly observe, "She is leaving the room." I looked around, and there was no one there, but the clarity and decisiveness of the comment was unmistakable. Shaken, I left my books on the stairs and hurried home, and there it was again. "She is opening the door." This was the beginning. The voice had arrived. And the voice persisted, days and then weeks of it, on and on, narrating everything I did in the third person. "She is going to the library." "She is going to a lecture." It was neutral, impassive and even, after a while, strangely companionate and reassuring, although I did notice that its calm exterior sometimes slipped and that it occasionally mirrored my own unexpressed emotion. So, for example, if I was angry and had to hide it, which I often did, being very adept at concealing how I really felt, then the voice would sound frustrated. Otherwise, it was neither sinister nor disturbing, although even at that point it was clear that it had something to communicate to me about my emotions, particularly emotions which were remote and inaccessible. Now it was then that I made a fatal mistake, in that I told a friend about the voice, and she was horrified. A subtle conditioning process had begun, the implication that normal people don't hear voices and the fact that I did meant that something was very seriously wrong. Such fear and mistrust was infectious. Suddenly the voice didn't seem quite so benign anymore, and when she insisted that I seek medical attention, I duly complied, and which proved to be mistake number two. I spent some time telling the college G.P. about what I perceived to be the real problem: anxiety, low self-worth, fears about the future, and was met with bored indifference until I mentioned the voice, upon which he dropped his pen, swung round and began to question me with a show of real interest. And to be fair, I was desperate for interest and help, and I began to tell him about my strange commentator. And I always wish, at this point, the voice had said, "She is digging her own grave." I was referred to a psychiatrist, who likewise took a grim view of the voice's presence, subsequently interpreting everything I said through a lens of latent insanity. For example, I was part of a student TV station that broadcast news bulletins around the campus, and during an appointment which was running very late, I said, "I'm sorry, doctor, I've got to go. I'm reading the news at six." Now it's down on my medical records that Eleanor has delusions that she's a television news broadcaster. It was at this point that events began to rapidly overtake me. A hospital admission followed, the first of many, a diagnosis of schizophrenia came next, and then, worst of all, a toxic, tormenting sense of hopelessness, humiliation and despair about myself and my prospects. But having been encouraged to see the voice not as an experience but as a symptom, my fear and resistance towards it intensified. Now essentially, this represented taking an aggressive stance towards my own mind, a kind of psychic civil war, and in turn this caused the number of voices to increase and grow progressively hostile and menacing. Helplessly and hopelessly, I began to retreat into this nightmarish inner world in which the voices were destined to become both my persecutors and my only perceived companions. They told me, for example, that if I proved myself worthy of their help, then they could change my life back to how it had been, and a series of increasingly bizarre tasks was set, a kind of labor of Hercules. It started off quite small, for example, pull out three strands of hair, but gradually it grew more extreme, culminating in commands to harm myself, and a particularly dramatic instruction: "You see that tutor over there? You see that glass of water? Well, you have to go over and pour it over him in front of the other students." Which I actually did, and which needless to say did not endear me to the faculty. In effect, a vicious cycle of fear, avoidance, mistrust and misunderstanding had been established, and this was a battle in which I felt powerless and incapable of establishing any kind of peace or reconciliation. Two years later, and the deterioration was dramatic. By now, I had the whole frenzied repertoire: terrifying voices, grotesque visions, bizarre, intractable delusions. My mental health status had been a catalyst for discrimination, verbal abuse, and physical and sexual assault, and I'd been told by my psychiatrist, "Eleanor, you'd be better off with cancer, because cancer is easier to cure than schizophrenia." I'd been diagnosed, drugged and discarded, and was by now so tormented by the voices that I attempted to drill a hole in my head in order to get them out. Now looking back on the wreckage and despair of those years, it seems to me now as if someone died in that place, and yet, someone else was saved. A broken and haunted person began that journey, but the person who emerged was a survivor and would ultimately grow into the person I was destined to be. Many people have harmed me in my life, and I remember them all, but the memories grow pale and faint in comparison with the people who've helped me. The fellow survivors, the fellow voice-hearers, the comrades and collaborators; the mother who never gave up on me, who knew that one day I would come back to her and was willing to wait for me for as long as it took; the doctor who only worked with me for a brief time but who reinforced his belief that recovery was not only possible but inevitable, and during a devastating period of relapse told my terrified family, "Don't give up hope. I believe that Eleanor can get through this. Sometimes, you know, it snows as late as May, but summer always comes eventually." Fourteen minutes is not enough time to fully credit those good and generous people who fought with me and for me and who waited to welcome me back from that agonized, lonely place. But together, they forged a blend of courage, creativity, integrity, and an unshakeable belief that my shattered self could become healed and whole. I used to say that these people saved me, but what I now know is they did something even more important in that they empowered me to save myself, and crucially, they helped me to understand something which I'd always suspected: that my voices were a meaningful response to traumatic life events, particularly childhood events, and as such were not my enemies but a source of insight into solvable emotional problems. Now, at first, this was very difficult to believe, not least because the voices appeared so hostile and menacing, so in this respect, a vital first step was learning to separate out a metaphorical meaning from what I'd previously interpreted to be a literal truth. So for example, voices which threatened to attack my home I learned to interpret as my own sense of fear and insecurity in the world, rather than an actual, objective danger. Now at first, I would have believed them. I remember, for example, sitting up one night on guard outside my parents' room to protect them from what I thought was a genuine threat from the voices. Because I'd had such a bad problem with self-injury that most of the cutlery in the house had been hidden, so I ended up arming myself with a plastic fork, kind of like picnic ware, and sort of sat outside the room clutching it and waiting to spring into action should anything happen. It was like, "Don't mess with me. I've got a plastic fork, don't you know?" Strategic. But a later response, and much more useful, would be to try and deconstruct the message behind the words, so when the voices warned me not to leave the house, then I would thank them for drawing my attention to how unsafe I felt — because if I was aware of it, then I could do something positive about it — but go on to reassure both them and myself that we were safe and didn't need to feel frightened anymore. I would set boundaries for the voices, and try to interact with them in a way that was assertive yet respectful, establishing a slow process of communication and collaboration in which we could learn to work together and support one another. Throughout all of this, what I would ultimately realize was that each voice was closely related to aspects of myself, and that each of them carried overwhelming emotions that I'd never had an opportunity to process or resolve, memories of sexual trauma and abuse, of anger, shame, guilt, low self-worth. The voices took the place of this pain and gave words to it, and possibly one of the greatest revelations was when I realized that the most hostile and aggressive voices actually represented the parts of me that had been hurt most profoundly, and as such, it was these voices that needed to be shown the greatest compassion and care. It was armed with this knowledge that ultimately I would gather together my shattered self, each fragment represented by a different voice, gradually withdraw from all my medication, and return to psychiatry, only this time from the other side. Ten years after the voice first came, I finally graduated, this time with the highest degree in psychology the university had ever given, and one year later, the highest masters, which shall we say isn't bad for a madwoman. In fact, one of the voices actually dictated the answers during the exam, which technically possibly counts as cheating. (Laughter) And to be honest, sometimes I quite enjoyed their attention as well. As Oscar Wilde has said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. It also makes you very good at eavesdropping, because you can listen to two conversations simultaneously. So it's not all bad. I worked in mental health services, I spoke at conferences, I published book chapters and academic articles, and I argued, and continue to do so, the relevance of the following concept: that an important question in psychiatry shouldn't be what's wrong with you but rather what's happened to you. And all the while, I listened to my voices, with whom I'd finally learned to live with peace and respect and which in turn reflected a growing sense of compassion, acceptance and respect towards myself. And I remember the most moving and extraordinary moment when supporting another young woman who was terrorized by her voices, and becoming fully aware, for the very first time, that I no longer felt that way myself but was finally able to help someone else who was. I'm now very proud to be a part of Intervoice, the organizational body of the International Hearing Voices Movement, an initiative inspired by the work of Professor Marius Romme and Dr. Sandra Escher, which locates voice hearing as a survival strategy, a sane reaction to insane circumstances, not as an aberrant symptom of schizophrenia to be endured, but a complex, significant and meaningful experience to be explored. Together, we envisage and enact a society that understands and respects voice hearing, supports the needs of individuals who hear voices, and which values them as full citizens. This type of society is not only possible, it's already on its way. To paraphrase Chavez, once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. For me, the achievements of the Hearing Voices Movement are a reminder that empathy, fellowship, justice and respect are more than words; they are convictions and beliefs, and that beliefs can change the world. In the last 20 years, the Hearing Voices Movement has established hearing voices networks in 26 countries across five continents, working together to promote dignity, solidarity and empowerment for individuals in mental distress, to create a new language and practice of hope, which, at its very center, lies an unshakable belief in the power of the individual. As Peter Levine has said, the human animal is a unique being endowed with an instinctual capacity to heal and the intellectual spirit to harness this innate capacity. In this respect, for members of society, there is no greater honor or privilege than facilitating that process of healing for someone, to bear witness, to reach out a hand, to share the burden of someone's suffering, and to hold the hope for their recovery. And likewise, for survivors of distress and adversity, that we remember we don't have to live our lives forever defined by the damaging things that have happened to us. We are unique. We are irreplaceable. What lies within us can never be truly colonized, contorted, or taken away. The light never goes out. As a very wonderful doctor once said to me, "Don't tell me what other people have told you about yourself. Tell me about you." Thank you. (Applause) |
In the key of genius | {0: 'Pianist Derek Paravicini understands music systematically. Once a child prodigy, he’s matured into a creative musician, able to reimagine songs in ways few can. ', 1: 'A composer and music teacher who has long worked with children with special needs, Adam Ockelford is interested in the psychology of music. '} | TEDxWarwick | Adam Ockelford: I promise there won't be too much of me talking, and a lot of Derek playing, but I thought it would just be nice to recap on how Derek got to where he is today. It's amazing now, because he's so much bigger than me, but when Derek was born, he could have fitted on the palm of your hand. He was born three and a half months premature, and really it was a fantastic fight for him to survive. He had to have a lot of oxygen, and that affected your eyes, Derek, and also the way you understand language and the way you understand the world. But that was the end of the bad news, because when Derek came home from the hospital, his family decided to employ the redoubtable nanny who was going to look after you, Derek, really for the rest of your childhood. And Nanny's great insight, really, was to think, here's a child who can't see. Music must be the thing for Derek. And sure enough, she sang, or as Derek called it, warbled, to him for his first few years of life. And I think it was that excitement with hearing her voice hour after hour every day that made him think maybe, you know, in his brain something was stirring, some sort of musical gift. Here's a little picture of Derek going up now, when you were with your nanny. Now Nanny's great other insight was to think, perhaps we should get Derek something to play, and sure enough, she dragged this little keyboard out of the loft, never thinking really that anything much would come of it. But Derek, your tiny hand must have gone out to that thing and actually bashed it, bashed it so hard they thought it was going to break. But out of all the bashing, after a few months, emerged the most fantastic music, and I think there was just a miracle moment, really, Derek, when you realized that all the sounds you hear in the world out there is something that you can copy on the keyboard. That was the great eureka moment. Now, not being able to see meant, of course, that you taught yourself. Derek Paravicini: I taught myself to play. AO: You did teach yourself to play, and as a consequence, playing the piano for you, Derek, was a lot of knuckles and karate chops, and even a bit of nose going on in there. And now, here's what Nanny did also do was to press the record button on one of those little early tape recorders that they had, and this is a wonderful tape, now, of Derek playing when you were four years old. DP: "Molly Malone (Cockles and Mussels)." AO: It wasn't actually "Cockles and Mussels." This one is "English Country Garden." DP: "English Country Garden." (Music: "English Country Garden") AO: There you are. (Applause) I think that's just fantastic. You know, there's this little child who can't see, can't really understand much about the world, has no one in the family who plays an instrument, and yet he taught himself to play that. And as you can see from the picture, there was quite a lot of body action going on while you were playing, Derek. Now, along — Derek and I met when he was four and a half years old, and at first, Derek, I thought you were mad, to be honest, because when you played the piano, you seemed to want to play every single note on the keyboard, and also you had this little habit of hitting me out of the way. So as soon as I tried to get near the piano, I was firmly shoved off. And having said to your dad, Nic, that I would try to teach you, I was then slightly confused as to how I might go about that if I wasn't allowed near the piano. But after a while, I thought, well, the only way is to just pick you up, shove Derek over to the other side of the room, and in the 10 seconds that I got before Derek came back, I could just play something very quickly for him to learn. And in the end, Derek, I think you agreed that we could actually have some fun playing the piano together. As you can see, there's me in my early, pre-marriage days with a brown beard, and little Derek concentrating there. I just realized this is going to be recorded, isn't it? Right. Okay. (Laughter) Now then, by the age of 10, Derek really had taken the world by storm. This is a photo of you, Derek, playing at the Barbican with the Royal Philharmonic Pops. Basically it was just an exciting journey, really. And in those days, Derek, you didn't speak very much, and so there was always a moment of tension as to whether you'd actually understood what it was we were going to play and whether you'd play the right piece in the right key, and all that kind of thing. But the orchestra were wowed as well, and the press of the world were fascinated by your ability to play these fantastic pieces. Now the question is, how do you do it, Derek? And hopefully we can show the audience now how it is you do what you do. I think that one of the first things that happened when you were very little, Derek, was that by the time you were two, your musical ear had already outstripped that of most adults. And so whenever you heard any note at all — if I just play a random note — (Piano notes) — you knew instantly what it was, and you'd got the ability as well to find that note on the piano. Now that's called perfect pitch, and some people have perfect pitch for a few white notes in the middle of the piano. (Piano notes) You can see how — you get a sense of playing with Derek. (Applause) But Derek, your ear is so much more than that. If I just put the microphone down for a bit, I'm going to play a cluster of notes. Those of you who can see will know how many notes, but Derek, of course, can't. Not only can you say how many notes, it's being able to play them all at the same time. Here we are. (Chords) Well, forget the terminology, Derek. Fantastic. And it's that ability, that ability to hear simultaneous sounds, not only just single sounds, but when a whole orchestra is playing, Derek, you can hear every note, and instantly, through all those hours and hours of practice, reproduce those on the keyboard, that makes you, I think, is the basis of all your ability. Now then. It's no use having that kind of raw ability without the technique, and luckily, Derek, you decided that, once we did start learning, you'd let me help you learn all the scale fingerings. So for example using your thumb under with C major. (Piano notes) Etc. And in the end, you got so quick, that things like "Flight of the Bumblebee" were no problem, were they? DP: No. AO: Right. So here, by the age of 11, Derek was playing things like this. DP: This. (Music: "Flight of the Bumblebee") (Applause) AO: Derek, let's have a bow. Well done. Now the truly amazing thing was, with all those scales, Derek, you could not only play "Flight of the Bumblebee" in the usual key, but any note I play, Derek can play it on. So if I just choose a note at random, like that one. (Piano notes) Can you play "Flight of the Bumblebee" on that note? DP: "Flight of the Bumblebee" on that note. (Music: "Flight of the Bumblebee") AO: Or another one? How about in G minor? DP: G minor. (Music: "Flight of the Bumblebee") AO: Fantastic. Well done, Derek. So you see, in your brain, Derek, is this amazing musical computer that can instantly recalibrate, recalculate, all the pieces in the world that are out there. Most pianists would have a heart attack if you said, "Sorry, do you mind playing 'Flight of the Bumblebee' in B minor instead of A minor?" as we went on. In fact, the first time, Derek, you played that with an orchestra, you'd learned the version that you'd learned, and then the orchestra, in fact, did have a different version, so while we were waiting in the two hours before the rehearsal and the concert, Derek listened to the different version and learned it quickly and then was able to play it with the orchestra. Fantastic chap. The other wonderful thing about you is memory. DP: Memory. AO: Your memory is truly amazing, and every concert we do, we ask the audience to participate, of course, by suggesting a piece Derek might like to play. And people say, "Well, that's terribly brave because what happens if Derek doesn't know it?" And I say, "No, it's not brave at all, because if you ask for something that Derek doesn't know, you're invited to come and sing it first, and then he'll pick it up." (Laughter) So just be thoughtful before you suggest something too outlandish. But seriously, would anyone like to choose a piece? DP: Choose a piece. Choose, choose, would you like to choose? AO: Because it's quite dark. You'll just have to shout out. Would you like to hear me play? (Audience: "Theme of Paganini.") AO: Paganini. DP: "The Theme of Paganini." (Laughter) (Music: "Theme of Paganini") (Applause) AO: Well done. Derek's going to L.A. soon, and it's a milestone, because it means that Derek and I will have spent over 100 hours on long-haul flights together, which is quite interesting, isn't it Derek? DP: Very interesting, Adam, yes. Long-haul flights. Yes. AO: You may think 13 hours is a long time to keep talking, but Derek does it effortlessly. Now then. (Laughter) But in America, they've coined this term, "the human iPod" for Derek, which I think is just missing the point, really, because Derek, you're so much more than an iPod. You're a fantastic, creative musician, and I think that was nowhere clearer to see, really, than when we went to Slovenia, and someone — in a longer concert we tend to get people joining in, and this person, very, very nervously came onto the stage. DP: He played "Chopsticks." AO: And played "Chopsticks." DP: "Chopsticks." AO: A bit like this. DP: Like this. Yes. (Piano notes) AO: I should really get Derek's manager to come and play it. He's sitting there. DP: Somebody played "Chopsticks" like this. AO: Just teasing, right? Here we go. (Music: "Chopsticks") DP: Let Derek play it. AO: What did you do with it, Derek? DP: I got to improvise with it, Adam. AO: This is Derek the musician. (Music: "Chopsticks" improvisation) (Applause) (Music) (Clapping) Keep up with Derek. (Music) (Applause) The TED people will kill me, but perhaps there's time for one encore. DP: For one encore. AO: One encore, yes. So this is one of Derek's heroes. It's the great Art Tatum — DP: Art Tatum. AO: — who also was a pianist who couldn't see, and also, I think, like Derek, thought that all the world was a piano, so whenever Art Tatum plays something, it sounds like there's three pianos in the room. And here is Derek's take on Art Tatum's take on "Tiger Rag." DP: "Tiger Rag." (Music: "Tiger Rag") (Applause) |
The dangers of willful blindness | {0: 'The former CEO of five businesses, Margaret Heffernan explores the all-too-human thought patterns that lead organizations and managers astray.'} | TEDxDanubia | In the northwest corner of the United States, right up near the Canadian border, there's a little town called Libby, Montana, and it's surrounded by pine trees and lakes and just amazing wildlife and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky. And in there is a little town called Libby, which I visited, which feels kind of lonely, a little isolated. And in Libby, Montana, there's a rather unusual woman named Gayla Benefield. She always felt a little bit of an outsider, although she's been there almost all her life, a woman of Russian extraction. She told me when she went to school, she was the only girl who ever chose to do mechanical drawing. Later in life, she got a job going house to house reading utility meters — gas meters, electricity meters. And she was doing the work in the middle of the day, and one thing particularly caught her notice, which was, in the middle of the day she met a lot of men who were at home, middle aged, late middle aged, and a lot of them seemed to be on oxygen tanks. It struck her as strange. Then, a few years later, her father died at the age of 59, five days before he was due to receive his pension. He'd been a miner. She thought he must just have been worn out by the work. But then a few years later, her mother died, and that seemed stranger still, because her mother came from a long line of people who just seemed to live forever. In fact, Gayla's uncle is still alive to this day, and learning how to waltz. It didn't make sense that Gayla's mother should die so young. It was an anomaly, and she kept puzzling over anomalies. And as she did, other ones came to mind. She remembered, for example, when her mother had broken a leg and went into the hospital, and she had a lot of x-rays, and two of them were leg x-rays, which made sense, but six of them were chest x-rays, which didn't. She puzzled and puzzled over every piece of her life and her parents' life, trying to understand what she was seeing. She thought about her town. The town had a vermiculite mine in it. Vermiculite was used for soil conditioners, to make plants grow faster and better. Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts, huge amounts of it put under the roof to keep houses warm during the long Montana winters. Vermiculite was in the playground. It was in the football ground. It was in the skating rink. What she didn't learn until she started working this problem is vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos. When she figured out the puzzle, she started telling everyone she could what had happened, what had been done to her parents and to the people that she saw on oxygen tanks at home in the afternoons. But she was really amazed. She thought, when everybody knows, they'll want to do something, but actually nobody wanted to know. In fact, she became so annoying as she kept insisting on telling this story to her neighbors, to her friends, to other people in the community, that eventually a bunch of them got together and they made a bumper sticker, which they proudly displayed on their cars, which said, "Yes, I'm from Libby, Montana, and no, I don't have asbestosis." But Gayla didn't stop. She kept doing research. The advent of the Internet definitely helped her. She talked to anybody she could. She argued and argued, and finally she struck lucky when a researcher came through town studying the history of mines in the area, and she told him her story, and at first, of course, like everyone, he didn't believe her, but he went back to Seattle and he did his own research and he realized that she was right. So now she had an ally. Nevertheless, people still didn't want to know. They said things like, "Well, if it were really dangerous, someone would have told us." "If that's really why everyone was dying, the doctors would have told us." Some of the guys used to very heavy jobs said, "I don't want to be a victim. I can't possibly be a victim, and anyway, every industry has its accidents." But still Gayla went on, and finally she succeeded in getting a federal agency to come to town and to screen the inhabitants of the town — 15,000 people — and what they discovered was that the town had a mortality rate 80 times higher than anywhere in the United States. That was in 2002, and even at that moment, no one raised their hand to say, "Gayla, look in the playground where your grandchildren are playing. It's lined with vermiculite." This wasn't ignorance. It was willful blindness. Willful blindness is a legal concept which means, if there's information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law deems that you're willfully blind. You have chosen not to know. There's a lot of willful blindness around these days. You can see willful blindness in banks, when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. You could see them in banks when interest rates were manipulated and everyone around knew what was going on, but everyone studiously ignored it. You can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church, where decades of child abuse went ignored. You could see willful blindness in the run-up to the Iraq War. Willful blindness exists on epic scales like those, and it also exists on very small scales, in people's families, in people's homes and communities, and particularly in organizations and institutions. Companies that have been studied for willful blindness can be asked questions like, "Are there issues at work that people are afraid to raise?" And when academics have done studies like this of corporations in the United States, what they find is 85 percent of people say yes. Eighty-five percent of people know there's a problem, but they won't say anything. And when I duplicated the research in Europe, asking all the same questions, I found exactly the same number. Eighty-five percent. That's a lot of silence. It's a lot of blindness. And what's really interesting is that when I go to companies in Switzerland, they tell me, "This is a uniquely Swiss problem." And when I go to Germany, they say, "Oh yes, this is the German disease." And when I go to companies in England, they say, "Oh, yeah, the British are really bad at this." And the truth is, this is a human problem. We're all, under certain circumstances, willfully blind. What the research shows is that some people are blind out of fear. They're afraid of retaliation. And some people are blind because they think, well, seeing anything is just futile. Nothing's ever going to change. If we make a protest, if we protest against the Iraq War, nothing changes, so why bother? Better not to see this stuff at all. And the recurrent theme that I encounter all the time is people say, "Well, you know, the people who do see, they're whistleblowers, and we all know what happens to them." So there's this profound mythology around whistleblowers which says, first of all, they're all crazy. But what I've found going around the world and talking to whistleblowers is, actually, they're very loyal and quite often very conservative people. They're hugely dedicated to the institutions that they work for, and the reason that they speak up, the reason they insist on seeing, is because they care so much about the institution and want to keep it healthy. And the other thing that people often say about whistleblowers is, "Well, there's no point, because you see what happens to them. They are crushed. Nobody would want to go through something like that." And yet, when I talk to whistleblowers, the recurrent tone that I hear is pride. I think of Joe Darby. We all remember the photographs of Abu Ghraib, which so shocked the world and showed the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq. But I wonder who remembers Joe Darby, the very obedient, good soldier who found those photographs and handed them in. And he said, "You know, I'm not the kind of guy to rat people out, but some things just cross the line. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but you can't put up with things like this." I talked to Steve Bolsin, a British doctor, who fought for five years to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies. And I asked him why he did it, and he said, "Well, it was really my daughter who prompted me to do it. She came up to me one night, and she just said, 'Dad, you can't let the kids die.'" Or I think of Cynthia Thomas, a really loyal army daughter and army wife, who, as she saw her friends and relations coming back from the Iraq War, was so shocked by their mental condition and the refusal of the military to recognize and acknowledge post-traumatic stress syndrome that she set up a cafe in the middle of a military town to give them legal, psychological and medical assistance. And she said to me, she said, "You know, Margaret, I always used to say I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grow up. But I've found myself in this cause, and I'll never be the same." We all enjoy so many freedoms today, hard-won freedoms: the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship, a freedom that wasn't here the last time I came to Hungary; a freedom to vote, which women in particular had to fight so hard for; the freedom for people of different ethnicities and cultures and sexual orientation to live the way that they want. But freedom doesn't exist if you don't use it, and what whistleblowers do, and what people like Gayla Benefield do is they use the freedom that they have. And what they're very prepared to do is recognize that yes, this is going to be an argument, and yes I'm going to have a lot of rows with my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends, but I'm going to become very good at this conflict. I'm going to take on the naysayers, because they'll make my argument better and stronger. I can collaborate with my opponents to become better at what I do. These are people of immense persistence, incredible patience, and an absolute determination not to be blind and not to be silent. When I went to Libby, Montana, I visited the asbestosis clinic that Gayla Benefield brought into being, a place where at first some of the people who wanted help and needed medical attention went in the back door because they didn't want to acknowledge that she'd been right. I sat in a diner, and I watched as trucks drove up and down the highway, carting away the earth out of gardens and replacing it with fresh, uncontaminated soil. I took my 12-year-old daughter with me, because I really wanted her to meet Gayla. And she said, "Why? What's the big deal?" I said, "She's not a movie star, and she's not a celebrity, and she's not an expert, and Gayla's the first person who'd say she's not a saint. The really important thing about Gayla is she is ordinary. She's like you, and she's like me. She had freedom, and she was ready to use it." Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Emergency shelters made from paper | {0: 'Most people look at cardboard tubes and see something fit for the recycling bin. But architect Shigeru Ban turns them into beautiful buildings. '} | TEDxTokyo | Hi. I am an architect. I am the only architect in the world making buildings out of paper like this cardboard tube, and this exhibition is the first one I did using paper tubes. 1986, much, much longer before people started talking about ecological issues and environmental issues, I just started testing the paper tube in order to use this as a building structure. It's very complicated to test the new material for the building, but this is much stronger than I expected, and also it's very easy to waterproof, and also, because it's industrial material, it's also possible to fireproof. Then I built the temporary structure, 1990. This is the first temporary building made out of paper. There are 330 tubes, diameter 55 [centimeters], there are only 12 tubes with a diameter of 120 centimeters, or four feet, wide. As you see it in the photo, inside is the toilet. In case you're finished with toilet paper, you can tear off the inside of the wall. (Laughter) So it's very useful. Year 2000, there was a big expo in Germany. I was asked to design the building, because the theme of the expo was environmental issues. So I was chosen to build the pavilion out of paper tubes, recyclable paper. My goal of the design is not when it's completed. My goal was when the building was demolished, because each country makes a lot of pavilions but after half a year, we create a lot of industrial waste, so my building has to be reused or recycled. After, the building was recycled. So that was the goal of my design. Then I was very lucky to win the competition to build the second Pompidou Center in France in the city of Metz. Because I was so poor, I wanted to rent an office in Paris, but I couldn't afford it, so I decided to bring my students to Paris to build our office on top of the Pompidou Center in Paris by ourselves. So we brought the paper tubes and the wooden joints to complete the 35-meter-long office. We stayed there for six years without paying any rent. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. I had one big problem. Because we were part of the exhibition, even if my friend wanted to see me, they had to buy a ticket to see me. That was the problem. Then I completed the Pompidou Center in Metz. It's a very popular museum now, and I created a big monument for the government. But then I was very disappointed at my profession as an architect, because we are not helping, we are not working for society, but we are working for privileged people, rich people, government, developers. They have money and power. Those are invisible. So they hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture. That is our profession, even historically it's the same, even now we are doing the same. So I was very disappointed that we are not working for society, even though there are so many people who lost their houses by natural disasters. But I must say they are no longer natural disasters. For example, earthquakes never kill people, but collapse of the buildings kill people. That's the responsibility of architects. Then people need some temporary housing, but there are no architects working there because we are too busy working for privileged people. So I thought, even as architects, we can be involved in the reconstruction of temporary housing. We can make it better. So that is why I started working in disaster areas. 1994, there was a big disaster in Rwanda, Africa. Two tribes, Hutu and Tutsi, fought each other. Over two million people became refugees. But I was so surprised to see the shelter, refugee camp organized by the U.N. They're so poor, and they are freezing with blankets during the rainy season, In the shelters built by the U.N., they were just providing a plastic sheet, and the refugees had to cut the trees, and just like this. But over two million people cut trees. It just became big, heavy deforestation and an environmental problem. That is why they started providing aluminum pipes, aluminum barracks. Very expensive, they throw them out for money, then cutting trees again. So I proposed my idea to improve the situation using these recycled paper tubes because this is so cheap and also so strong, but my budget is only 50 U.S. dollars per unit. We built 50 units to do that as a monitoring test for the durability and moisture and termites, so on. And then, year afterward, 1995, in Kobe, Japan, we had a big earthquake. Nearly 7,000 people were killed, and the city like this Nagata district, all the city was burned in a fire after the earthquake. And also I found out there's many Vietnamese refugees suffering and gathering at a Catholic church — all the building was totally destroyed. So I went there and also I proposed to the priests, "Why don't we rebuild the church out of paper tubes?" And he said, "Oh God, are you crazy? After a fire, what are you proposing?" So he never trusted me, but I didn't give up. I started commuting to Kobe, and I met the society of Vietnamese people. They were living like this with very poor plastic sheets in the park. So I proposed to rebuild. I raised — did fundraising. I made a paper tube shelter for them, and in order to make it easy to be built by students and also easy to demolish, I used beer crates as a foundation. I asked the Kirin beer company to propose, because at that time, the Asahi beer company made their plastic beer crates red, which doesn't go with the color of the paper tubes. The color coordination is very important. And also I still remember, we were expecting to have a beer inside the plastic beer crate, but it came empty. (Laughter) So I remember it was so disappointing. So during the summer with my students, we built over 50 units of the shelters. Finally the priest, finally he trusted me to rebuild. He said, "As long as you collect money by yourself, bring your students to build, you can do it." So we spent five weeks rebuilding the church. It was meant to stay there for three years, but actually it stayed there 10 years because people loved it. Then, in Taiwan, they had a big earthquake, and we proposed to donate this church, so we dismantled them, we sent them over to be built by volunteer people. It stayed there in Taiwan as a permanent church even now. So this building became a permanent building. Then I wonder, what is a permanent and what is a temporary building? Even a building made in paper can be permanent as long as people love it. Even a concrete building can be very temporary if that is made to make money. In 1999, in Turkey, the big earthquake, I went there to use the local material to build a shelter. 2001, in West India, I built also a shelter. In 2004, in Sri Lanka, after the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami, I rebuilt Islamic fishermen's villages. And in 2008, in Chengdu, Sichuan area in China, nearly 70,000 people were killed, and also especially many of the schools were destroyed because of the corruption between the authority and the contractor. I was asked to rebuild the temporary church. I brought my Japanese students to work with the Chinese students. In one month, we completed nine classrooms, over 500 square meters. It's still used, even after the current earthquake in China. In 2009, in Italy, L'Aquila, also they had a big earthquake. And this is a very interesting photo: former Prime Minister Berlusconi and Japanese former former former former Prime Minister Mr. Aso — you know, because we have to change the prime minister ever year. And they are very kind, affording my model. I proposed a big rebuilding, a temporary music hall, because L'Aquila is very famous for music and all the concert halls were destroyed, so musicians were moving out. So I proposed to the mayor, I'd like to rebuild the temporary auditorium. He said, "As long as you bring your money, you can do it." And I was very lucky. Mr. Berlusconi brought G8 summit, and our former prime minister came, so they helped us to collect money, and I got half a million euros from the Japanese government to rebuild this temporary auditorium. Year 2010 in Haiti, there was a big earthquake, but it's impossible to fly over, so I went to Santo Domingo, next-door country, to drive six hours to get to Haiti with the local students in Santo Domingo to build 50 units of shelter out of local paper tubes. This is what happened in Japan two years ago, in northern Japan. After the earthquake and tsunami, people had to be evacuated in a big room like a gymnasium. But look at this. There's no privacy. People suffer mentally and physically. So we went there to build partitions with all the student volunteers with paper tubes, just a very simple shelter out of the tube frame and the curtain. However, some of the facility authority doesn't want us to do it, because, they said, simply, it's become more difficult to control them. But it's really necessary to do it. They don't have enough flat area to build standard government single-story housing like this one. Look at this. Even civil government is doing such poor construction of the temporary housing, so dense and so messy because there is no storage, nothing, water is leaking, so I thought, we have to make multi-story building because there's no land and also it's not very comfortable. So I proposed to the mayor while I was making partitions. Finally I met a very nice mayor in Onagawa village in Miyagi. He asked me to build three-story housing on baseball [fields]. I used the shipping container and also the students helped us to make all the building furniture to make them comfortable, within the budget of the government but also the area of the house is exactly the same, but much more comfortable. Many of the people want to stay here forever. I was very happy to hear that. Now I am working in New Zealand, Christchurch. About 20 days before the Japanese earthquake happened, also they had a big earthquake, and many Japanese students were also killed, and the most important cathedral of the city, the symbol of Christchurch, was totally destroyed. And I was asked to come to rebuild the temporary cathedral. So this is under construction. And I'd like to keep building monuments that are beloved by people. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why do we sleep? | {0: 'Russell Foster studies sleep and its role in our lives, examining how our perception of light influences our sleep-wake rhythms.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | What I'd like to do today is talk about one of my favorite subjects, and that is the neuroscience of sleep. Now, there is a sound — (Alarm clock) Ah, it worked! A sound that is desperately familiar to most of us, and of course it's the sound of the alarm clock. And what that truly ghastly, awful sound does is stop the single most important behavioral experience that we have, and that's sleep. If you're an average sort of person, 36 percent of your life will be spent asleep, which means that if you live to 90, then 32 years will have been spent entirely asleep. Now what that 32 years is telling us is that sleep at some level is important. And yet, for most of us, we don't give sleep a second thought. We throw it away. We really just don't think about sleep. And so what I'd like to do today is change your views, change your ideas and your thoughts about sleep. And the journey that I want to take you on, we need to start by going back in time. "Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber." Any ideas who said that? Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Yes, let me give you a few more quotes. "O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?" Shakespeare again, from — I won't say it — the Scottish play. (Laughter) From the same time: "Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together." Extremely prophetic, by Thomas Dekker, another Elizabethan dramatist. But if we jump forward 400 years, the tone about sleep changes somewhat. This is from Thomas Edison, from the beginning of the 20th century: "Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days." Bang! (Laughter) And if we also jump into the 1980s, some of you may remember that Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said, "Sleep is for wimps." And of course the infamous — what was his name? — the infamous Gordon Gekko from "Wall Street" said, "Money never sleeps." What do we do in the 20th century about sleep? Well, of course, we use Thomas Edison's light bulb to invade the night, and we occupied the dark, and in the process of this occupation, we've treated sleep as an illness, almost. We've treated it as an enemy. At most now, I suppose, we tolerate the need for sleep, and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure. And our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound. Why is it? Why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts? Well, it's because you don't do anything much while you're asleep, it seems. You don't eat. You don't drink. And you don't have sex. Well, most of us anyway. And so, therefore it's — Sorry. It's a complete waste of time, right? Wrong. Actually, sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology, and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why it's so very important. So let's move to the brain. Now, here we have a brain. This is donated by a social scientist, and they said they didn't know what it was or indeed, how to use it, so — (Laughter) Sorry. So I borrowed it. I don't think they noticed. OK. (Laughter) The point I'm trying to make is that when you're asleep, this thing doesn't shut down. In fact, some areas of the brain are actually more active during the sleep state than during the wake state. The other thing that's really important about sleep is that it doesn't arise from a single structure within the brain, but is to some extent a network property. If we flip the brain on its back — I love this little bit of spinal cord here — this bit here is the hypothalamus, and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures, not least the biological clock. The biological clock tells us when it's good to be up, when it's good to be asleep, and what that structure does is interact with a whole raft of other areas within the hypothalamus, the lateral hypothalamus, the ventrolateral preoptic nuclei. All of those combine, and they send projections down to the brain stem here. The brain stem then projects forward and bathes the cortex, this wonderfully wrinkly bit over here, with neurotransmitters that keep us awake and essentially provide us with our consciousness. So sleep arises from a whole raft of different interactions within the brain, and essentially, sleep is turned on and off as a result of a range of interactions in here. OK. So where have we got to? We've said that sleep is complicated and it takes 32 years of our life. But what I haven't explained is what sleep is about. So why do we sleep? And it won't surprise any of you that, of course, as scientists, we don't have a consensus. There are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep, and I'm going to outline three of those. The first is sort of the restoration idea, and it's somewhat intuitive. Essentially, all the stuff we've burned up during the day, we restore, we replace, we rebuild during the night. And indeed, as an explanation, it goes back to Aristotle, so that's what — 2,300 years ago. It's gone in and out of fashion. It's fashionable at the moment because what's been shown is that within the brain, a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep, and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways. So there's good evidence for the whole restoration hypothesis. What about energy conservation? Again, perhaps intuitive. You essentially sleep to save calories. Now, when you do the sums, though, it doesn't really pan out. If you compare an individual who has slept at night, or stayed awake and hasn't moved very much, the energy saving of sleeping is about 110 calories a night. Now, that's the equivalent of a hot dog bun. Now, I would say that a hot dog bun is kind of a meager return for such a complicated and demanding behavior as sleep. So I'm less convinced by the energy conservation idea. But the third idea I'm quite attracted to, which is brain processing and memory consolidation. What we know is that, if after you've tried to learn a task, and you sleep-deprive individuals, the ability to learn that task is smashed. It's really hugely attenuated. So sleep and memory consolidation is also very important. However, it's not just the laying down of memory and recalling it. What's turned out to be really exciting is that our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep. In fact, it's been estimated to give us a threefold advantage. Sleeping at night enhances our creativity. And what seems to be going on is that, in the brain, those neural connections that are important, those synaptic connections that are important, are linked and strengthened, while those that are less important tend to fade away and be less important. OK. So we've had three explanations for why we might sleep, and I think the important thing to realize is that the details will vary, and it's probable we sleep for multiple different reasons. But sleep is not an indulgence. It's not some sort of thing that we can take on board rather casually. I think that sleep was once likened to an upgrade from economy to business class, you know, the equivalent of. It's not even an upgrade from economy to first class. The critical thing to realize is that if you don't sleep, you don't fly. Essentially, you never get there. And what's extraordinary about much of our society these days is that we are desperately sleep-deprived. So let's now look at sleep deprivation. Huge sectors of society are sleep-deprived, and let's look at our sleep-o-meter. So in the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us were getting around eight hours of sleep a night. Nowadays, we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night, so we're in the six-and-a-half-hours every-night league. For teenagers, it's worse, much worse. They need nine hours for full brain performance, and many of them, on a school night, are only getting five hours of sleep. It's simply not enough. If we think about other sectors of society — the aged; if you are aged, then your ability to sleep in a single block is somewhat disrupted, and many sleep, again, less than five hours a night. Shift work. Shift work is extraordinary, perhaps 20 percent of the working population, and the body clock does not shift to the demands of working at night. It's locked onto the same light-dark cycle as the rest of us. So when the poor old shift worker is going home to try and sleep during the day, desperately tired, the body clock is saying, "Wake up. This is the time to be awake." So the quality of sleep that you get as a night shift worker is usually very poor, again in that sort of five-hour region. And then, of course, tens of millions of people suffer from jet lag. So who here has jet lag? Well, my goodness gracious. Well, thank you very much indeed for not falling asleep, because that's what your brain is craving. One of the things that the brain does is indulge in micro-sleeps, this involuntary falling asleep, and you have essentially no control over it. Now, micro-sleeps can be sort of somewhat embarrassing, but they can also be deadly. It's been estimated that 31 percent of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their life, and in the US, the statistics are pretty good: 100,000 accidents on the freeway have been associated with tiredness, loss of vigilance, and falling asleep — a hundred thousand a year. It's extraordinary. At another level of terror, we dip into the tragic accidents at Chernobyl and indeed the space shuttle Challenger, which was so tragically lost. And in the investigations that followed those disasters, poor judgment as a result of extended shift work and loss of vigilance and tiredness was attributed to a big chunk of those disasters. When you're tired and you lack sleep, you have poor memory, you have poor creativity, you have increased impulsiveness, and you have overall poor judgment. But my friends, it's so much worse than that. (Laughter) If you are a tired brain, the brain is craving things to wake it up. So drugs, stimulants. Caffeine represents the stimulant of choice across much of the Western world. Much of the day is fueled by caffeine, and if you're a really naughty tired brain, nicotine. Of course, you're fueling the waking state with these stimulants, and then, of course, it gets to 11 o'clock at night, and the brain says to itself, "Actually, I need to be asleep fairly shortly. What do we do about that when I'm feeling completely wired?" Well, of course, you then resort to alcohol. Now alcohol, short-term, you know, once or twice, to use to mildly sedate you, can be very useful. It can actually ease the sleep transition. But what you must be so aware of is that alcohol doesn't provide sleep. A biological mimic for sleep, it sedates you. So it actually harms some of the neural processing that's going on during memory consolidation and memory recall. So it's a short-term acute measure, but for goodness sake, don't become addicted to alcohol as a way of getting to sleep every night. Another connection between loss of sleep is weight gain. If you sleep around about five hours or less every night, then you have a 50 percent likelihood of being obese. What's the connection here? Well, sleep loss seems to give rise to the release of the hormone ghrelin, the hunger hormone. Ghrelin is released. It gets to the brain. The brain says, "I need carbohydrates," and what it does is seek out carbohydrates and particularly sugars. So there's a link between tiredness and the metabolic predisposition for weight gain: stress. Tired people are massively stressed. And one of the things of stress, of course, is loss of memory, which is what I sort of just then had a little lapse of. But stress is so much more. So, if you're acutely stressed, not a great problem, but it's sustained stress associated with sleep loss that's the problem. Sustained stress leads to suppressed immunity. And so, tired people tend to have higher rates of overall infection, and there's some very good studies showing that shift workers, for example, have higher rates of cancer. Increased levels of stress throw glucose into the circulation. Glucose becomes a dominant part of the vasculature and essentially you become glucose intolerant. Therefore, diabetes 2. Stress increases cardiovascular disease as a result of raising blood pressure. So there's a whole raft of things associated with sleep loss that are more than just a mildly impaired brain, which is where I think most people think that sleep loss resides. So at this point in the talk, this is a nice time to think, "Well, do you think on the whole I'm getting enough sleep?" So a quick show of hands. Who feels that they're getting enough sleep here? Oh. Well, that's pretty impressive. Good. We'll talk more about that later, about what are your tips. So most of us, of course, ask the question, "How do I know whether I'm getting enough sleep?" Well, it's not rocket science. If you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning, if you are taking a long time to get up, if you need lots of stimulants, if you're grumpy, if you're irritable, if you're told by your work colleagues that you're looking tired and irritable, chances are you are sleep-deprived. Listen to them. Listen to yourself. What do you do? Well — and this is slightly offensive — sleep for dummies. (Laughter) Make your bedroom a haven for sleep. The first critical thing is make it as dark as you possibly can, and also make it slightly cool. Very important. Actually, reduce your amount of light exposure at least half an hour before you go to bed. Light increases levels of alertness and will delay sleep. What's the last thing that most of us do before we go to bed? We stand in a massively lit bathroom, looking into the mirror cleaning our teeth. It's the worst thing we can possibly do before we go to sleep. Turn off those mobile phones. Turn off those computers. Turn off all of those things that are also going to excite the brain. Try not to drink caffeine too late in the day, ideally not after lunch. Now, we've set about reducing light exposure before you go to bed, but light exposure in the morning is very good at setting the biological clock to the light-dark cycle. So seek out morning light. Basically, listen to yourself. Wind down. Do those sorts of things that you know are going to ease you off into the honey-heavy dew of slumber. OK. That's some facts. What about some myths? Teenagers are lazy. No. Poor things. They have a biological predisposition to go to bed late and get up late, so give them a break. We need eight hours of sleep a night. That's an average. Some people need more. Some people need less. And what you need to do is listen to your body. Do you need that much or do you need more? Simple as that. Old people need less sleep. Not true. The sleep demands of the aged do not go down. Essentially, sleep fragments and becomes less robust, but sleep requirements do not go down. And the fourth myth is early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Well, that's wrong at so many different levels. (Laughter) There is no evidence that getting up early and going to bed early gives you more wealth at all. There's no difference in socioeconomic status. In my experience, the only difference between morning people and evening people is that those people that get up in the morning early are just horribly smug. (Laughter) (Applause) OK. So for the last few minutes, what I want to do is change gears and talk about some really new, breaking areas of neuroscience, which is the association between mental health, mental illness and sleep disruption. We've known for 130 years that in severe mental illness, there is always, always sleep disruption, but it's been largely ignored. In the 1970s, when people started to think about this again, they said, "Yes, well, of course you have sleep disruption in schizophrenia, because they're on antipsychotics. It's the antipsychotics causing the sleep problems," ignoring the fact that for a hundred years previously, sleep disruption had been reported before antipsychotics. So what's going on? Several groups are studying conditions like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar and what's going on in terms of sleep disruption. We have a big study which we published last year on schizophrenia, and the data were quite extraordinary. In those individuals with schizophrenia, much of the time, they were awake during the night phase and then they were asleep during the day. Other groups showed no 24-hour patterns whatsoever — their sleep was absolutely smashed. And some had no ability to regulate their sleep by the light-dark cycle. They were getting up later and later and later and later each night. It was smashed. So what's going on? And the really exciting news is that mental illness and sleep are not simply associated, but they are physically linked within the brain. The neural networks that predispose you to normal sleep, give you normal sleep, and those that give you normal mental health, are overlapping. And what's the evidence for that? Well, genes that have been shown to be very important in the generation of normal sleep, when mutated, when changed, also predispose individuals to mental health problems. And last year, we published a study which showed that a gene that's been linked to schizophrenia, when mutated, also smashes the sleep. So we have evidence of a genuine mechanistic overlap between these two important systems. Other work flowed from these studies. The first was that sleep disruption actually precedes certain types of mental illness, and we've shown that in those young individuals who are at high risk of developing bipolar disorder, they already have a sleep abnormality prior to any clinical diagnosis of bipolar. The other bit of data was that sleep disruption may actually exacerbate, make worse, the mental illness state. My colleague Dan Freeman has used a range of agents which have stabilized sleep and reduced levels of paranoia in those individuals by 50 percent. So what have we got? We've got, in these connections, some really exciting things. In terms of the neuroscience, by understanding these two systems, we're really beginning to understand how both sleep and mental illness are generated and regulated within the brain. The second area is that if we can use sleep and sleep disruption as an early warning signal, then we have the chance of going in. If we know these individuals are vulnerable, early intervention then becomes possible. And the third, which I think is the most exciting, is that we can think of the sleep centers within the brain as a new therapeutic target. Stabilize sleep in those individuals who are vulnerable, we can certainly make them healthier, but also alleviate some of the appalling symptoms of mental illness. So let me just finish. What I started by saying is: Take sleep seriously. Our attitudes toward sleep are so very different from a pre-industrial age, when we were almost wrapped in a duvet. We used to understand intuitively the importance of sleep. And this isn't some sort of crystal-waving nonsense. This is a pragmatic response to good health. If you have good sleep, it increases your concentration, attention, decision-making, creativity, social skills, health. If you get sleep, it reduces your mood changes, your stress, your levels of anger, your impulsivity, and your tendency to drink and take drugs. And we finished by saying that an understanding of the neuroscience of sleep is really informing the way we think about some of the causes of mental illness, and indeed is providing us new ways to treat these incredibly debilitating conditions. Jim Butcher, the fantasy writer, said, "Sleep is God. Go worship." And I can only recommend that you do the same. Thank you for your attention. (Applause) |
A mouse. A laser beam. A manipulated memory. | {0: 'When Steve Ramirez published his latest study in <em>Science</em>, it caused a media frenzy. Why? Because the paper was on implanting false memories in the brains of mice.', 1: 'In his groundbreaking work, Xu Liu investigated how to activate and deactivate specific memories in mice.'} | TEDxBoston | Steve Ramirez: My first year of grad school, I found myself in my bedroom eating lots of Ben & Jerry's watching some trashy TV and maybe, maybe listening to Taylor Swift. I had just gone through a breakup. (Laughter) So for the longest time, all I would do is recall the memory of this person over and over again, wishing that I could get rid of that gut-wrenching, visceral "blah" feeling. Now, as it turns out, I'm a neuroscientist, so I knew that the memory of that person and the awful, emotional undertones that color in that memory, are largely mediated by separate brain systems. And so I thought, what if we could go into the brain and edit out that nauseating feeling but while keeping the memory of that person intact? Then I realized, maybe that's a little bit lofty for now. So what if we could start off by going into the brain and just finding a single memory to begin with? Could we jump-start that memory back to life, maybe even play with the contents of that memory? All that said, there is one person in the entire world right now that I really hope is not watching this talk. (Laughter) So there is a catch. There is a catch. These ideas probably remind you of "Total Recall," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," or of "Inception." But the movie stars that we work with are the celebrities of the lab. Xu Liu: Test mice. (Laughter) As neuroscientists, we work in the lab with mice trying to understand how memory works. And today, we hope to convince you that now we are actually able to activate a memory in the brain at the speed of light. To do this, there's only two simple steps to follow. First, you find and label a memory in the brain, and then you activate it with a switch. As simple as that. (Laughter) SR: Are you convinced? So, turns out finding a memory in the brain isn't all that easy. XL: Indeed. This is way more difficult than, let's say, finding a needle in a haystack, because at least, you know, the needle is still something you can physically put your fingers on. But memory is not. And also, there's way more cells in your brain than the number of straws in a typical haystack. So yeah, this task does seem to be daunting. But luckily, we got help from the brain itself. It turned out that all we need to do is basically to let the brain form a memory, and then the brain will tell us which cells are involved in that particular memory. SR: So what was going on in my brain while I was recalling the memory of an ex? If you were to just completely ignore human ethics for a second and slice up my brain right now, you would see that there was an amazing number of brain regions that were active while recalling that memory. Now one brain region that would be robustly active in particular is called the hippocampus, which for decades has been implicated in processing the kinds of memories that we hold near and dear, which also makes it an ideal target to go into and to try and find and maybe reactivate a memory. XL: When you zoom in into the hippocampus, of course you will see lots of cells, but we are able to find which cells are involved in a particular memory, because whenever a cell is active, like when it's forming a memory, it will also leave a footprint that will later allow us to know these cells are recently active. SR: So the same way that building lights at night let you know that somebody's probably working there at any given moment, in a very real sense, there are biological sensors within a cell that are turned on only when that cell was just working. They're sort of biological windows that light up to let us know that that cell was just active. XL: So we clipped part of this sensor, and attached that to a switch to control the cells, and we packed this switch into an engineered virus and injected that into the brain of the mice. So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cells for that memory will also have this switch installed. SR: So here is what the hippocampus looks like after forming a fear memory, for example. The sea of blue that you see here are densely packed brain cells, but the green brain cells, the green brain cells are the ones that are holding on to a specific fear memory. So you are looking at the crystallization of the fleeting formation of fear. You're actually looking at the cross-section of a memory right now. XL: Now, for the switch we have been talking about, ideally, the switch has to act really fast. It shouldn't take minutes or hours to work. It should act at the speed of the brain, in milliseconds. SR: So what do you think, Xu? Could we use, let's say, pharmacological drugs to activate or inactivate brain cells? XL: Nah. Drugs are pretty messy. They spread everywhere. And also it takes them forever to act on cells. So it will not allow us to control a memory in real time. So Steve, how about let's zap the brain with electricity? SR: So electricity is pretty fast, but we probably wouldn't be able to target it to just the specific cells that hold onto a memory, and we'd probably fry the brain. XL: Oh. That's true. So it looks like, hmm, indeed we need to find a better way to impact the brain at the speed of light. SR: So it just so happens that light travels at the speed of light. So maybe we could activate or inactive memories by just using light — XL: That's pretty fast. SR: — and because normally brain cells don't respond to pulses of light, so those that would respond to pulses of light are those that contain a light-sensitive switch. Now to do that, first we need to trick brain cells to respond to laser beams. XL: Yep. You heard it right. We are trying to shoot lasers into the brain. (Laughter) SR: And the technique that lets us do that is optogenetics. Optogenetics gave us this light switch that we can use to turn brain cells on or off, and the name of that switch is channelrhodopsin, seen here as these green dots attached to this brain cell. You can think of channelrhodopsin as a sort of light-sensitive switch that can be artificially installed in brain cells so that now we can use that switch to activate or inactivate the brain cell simply by clicking it, and in this case we click it on with pulses of light. XL: So we attach this light-sensitive switch of channelrhodopsin to the sensor we've been talking about and inject this into the brain. So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cell for that particular memory will also have this light-sensitive switch installed in it so that we can control these cells by the flipping of a laser just like this one you see. SR: So let's put all of this to the test now. What we can do is we can take our mice and then we can put them in a box that looks exactly like this box here, and then we can give them a very mild foot shock so that they form a fear memory of this box. They learn that something bad happened here. Now with our system, the cells that are active in the hippocampus in the making of this memory, only those cells will now contain channelrhodopsin. XL: When you are as small as a mouse, it feels as if the whole world is trying to get you. So your best response of defense is trying to be undetected. Whenever a mouse is in fear, it will show this very typical behavior by staying at one corner of the box, trying to not move any part of its body, and this posture is called freezing. So if a mouse remembers that something bad happened in this box, and when we put them back into the same box, it will basically show freezing because it doesn't want to be detected by any potential threats in this box. SR: So you can think of freezing as, you're walking down the street minding your own business, and then out of nowhere you almost run into an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, and now those terrifying two seconds where you start thinking, "What do I do? Do I say hi? Do I shake their hand? Do I turn around and run away? Do I sit here and pretend like I don't exist?" Those kinds of fleeting thoughts that physically incapacitate you, that temporarily give you that deer-in-headlights look. XL: However, if you put the mouse in a completely different new box, like the next one, it will not be afraid of this box because there's no reason that it will be afraid of this new environment. But what if we put the mouse in this new box but at the same time, we activate the fear memory using lasers just like we did before? Are we going to bring back the fear memory for the first box into this completely new environment? SR: All right, and here's the million-dollar experiment. Now to bring back to life the memory of that day, I remember that the Red Sox had just won, it was a green spring day, perfect for going up and down the river and then maybe going to the North End to get some cannolis, #justsaying. Now Xu and I, on the other hand, were in a completely windowless black room not making any ocular movement that even remotely resembles an eye blink because our eyes were fixed onto a computer screen. We were looking at this mouse here trying to activate a memory for the first time using our technique. XL: And this is what we saw. When we first put the mouse into this box, it's exploring, sniffing around, walking around, minding its own business, because actually by nature, mice are pretty curious animals. They want to know, what's going on in this new box? It's interesting. But the moment we turned on the laser, like you see now, all of a sudden the mouse entered this freezing mode. It stayed here and tried not to move any part of its body. Clearly it's freezing. So indeed, it looks like we are able to bring back the fear memory for the first box in this completely new environment. While watching this, Steve and I are as shocked as the mouse itself. (Laughter) So after the experiment, the two of us just left the room without saying anything. After a kind of long, awkward period of time, Steve broke the silence. SR: "Did that just work?" XL: "Yes," I said. "Indeed it worked!" We're really excited about this. And then we published our findings in the journal Nature. Ever since the publication of our work, we've been receiving numerous comments from all over the Internet. Maybe we can take a look at some of those. ["OMGGGGG FINALLY... so much more to come, virtual reality, neural manipulation, visual dream emulation... neural coding, 'writing and re-writing of memories', mental illnesses. Ahhh the future is awesome"] SR: So the first thing that you'll notice is that people have really strong opinions about this kind of work. Now I happen to completely agree with the optimism of this first quote, because on a scale of zero to Morgan Freeman's voice, it happens to be one of the most evocative accolades that I've heard come our way. (Laughter) But as you'll see, it's not the only opinion that's out there. ["This scares the hell out of me... What if they could do that easily in humans in a couple of years?! OH MY GOD WE'RE DOOMED"] XL: Indeed, if we take a look at the second one, I think we can all agree that it's, meh, probably not as positive. But this also reminds us that, although we are still working with mice, it's probably a good idea to start thinking and discussing about the possible ethical ramifications of memory control. SR: Now, in the spirit of the third quote, we want to tell you about a recent project that we've been working on in lab that we've called Project Inception. ["They should make a movie about this. Where they plant ideas into peoples minds, so they can control them for their own personal gain. We'll call it: Inception."] So we reasoned that now that we can reactivate a memory, what if we do so but then begin to tinker with that memory? Could we possibly even turn it into a false memory? XL: So all memory is sophisticated and dynamic, but if just for simplicity, let's imagine memory as a movie clip. So far what we've told you is basically we can control this "play" button of the clip so that we can play this video clip any time, anywhere. But is there a possibility that we can actually get inside the brain and edit this movie clip so that we can make it different from the original? Yes we can. Turned out that all we need to do is basically reactivate a memory using lasers just like we did before, but at the same time, if we present new information and allow this new information to incorporate into this old memory, this will change the memory. It's sort of like making a remix tape. SR: So how do we do this? Rather than finding a fear memory in the brain, we can start by taking our animals, and let's say we put them in a blue box like this blue box here and we find the brain cells that represent that blue box and we trick them to respond to pulses of light exactly like we had said before. Now the next day, we can take our animals and place them in a red box that they've never experienced before. We can shoot light into the brain to reactivate the memory of the blue box. So what would happen here if, while the animal is recalling the memory of the blue box, we gave it a couple of mild foot shocks? So here we're trying to artificially make an association between the memory of the blue box and the foot shocks themselves. We're just trying to connect the two. So to test if we had done so, we can take our animals once again and place them back in the blue box. Again, we had just reactivated the memory of the blue box while the animal got a couple of mild foot shocks, and now the animal suddenly freezes. It's as though it's recalling being mildly shocked in this environment even though that never actually happened. So it formed a false memory, because it's falsely fearing an environment where, technically speaking, nothing bad actually happened to it. XL: So, so far we are only talking about this light-controlled "on" switch. In fact, we also have a light-controlled "off" switch, and it's very easy to imagine that by installing this light-controlled "off" switch, we can also turn off a memory, any time, anywhere. So everything we've been talking about today is based on this philosophically charged principle of neuroscience that the mind, with its seemingly mysterious properties, is actually made of physical stuff that we can tinker with. SR: And for me personally, I see a world where we can reactivate any kind of memory that we'd like. I also see a world where we can erase unwanted memories. Now, I even see a world where editing memories is something of a reality, because we're living in a time where it's possible to pluck questions from the tree of science fiction and to ground them in experimental reality. XL: Nowadays, people in the lab and people in other groups all over the world are using similar methods to activate or edit memories, whether that's old or new, positive or negative, all sorts of memories so that we can understand how memory works. SR: For example, one group in our lab was able to find the brain cells that make up a fear memory and converted them into a pleasurable memory, just like that. That's exactly what I mean about editing these kinds of processes. Now one dude in lab was even able to reactivate memories of female mice in male mice, which rumor has it is a pleasurable experience. XL: Indeed, we are living in a very exciting moment where science doesn't have any arbitrary speed limits but is only bound by our own imagination. SR: And finally, what do we make of all this? How do we push this technology forward? These are the questions that should not remain just inside the lab, and so one goal of today's talk was to bring everybody up to speed with the kind of stuff that's possible in modern neuroscience, but now, just as importantly, to actively engage everybody in this conversation. So let's think together as a team about what this all means and where we can and should go from here, because Xu and I think we all have some really big decisions ahead of us. Thank you. XL: Thank you. (Applause) |
Making peace is a marathon | {0: 'The Beirut Marathon is the largest running event in the Middle East. May El-Khalil founded it as an instrument of peace.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I come from Lebanon, and I believe that running can change the world. I know what I have just said is simply not obvious. You know, Lebanon as a country has been once destroyed by a long and bloody civil war. Honestly, I don't know why they call it civil war when there is nothing civil about it. With Syria to the north, Israel and Palestine to the south, and our government even up till this moment is still fragmented and unstable. For years, the country has been divided between politics and religion. However, for one day a year, we truly stand united, and that's when the marathon takes place. I used to be a marathon runner. Long distance running was not only good for my well-being but it helped me meditate and dream big. So the longer distances I ran, the bigger my dreams became. Until one fateful morning, and while training, I was hit by a bus. I nearly died, was in a coma, stayed at the hospital for two years, and underwent 36 surgeries to be able to walk again. As soon as I came out of my coma, I realized that I was no longer the same runner I used to be, so I decided, if I couldn't run myself, I wanted to make sure that others could. So out of my hospital bed, I asked my husband to start taking notes, and a few months later, the marathon was born. Organizing a marathon as a reaction to an accident may sound strange, but at that time, even during my most vulnerable condition, I needed to dream big. I needed something to take me out of my pain, an objective to look forward to. I didn't want to pity myself, nor to be pitied, and I thought by organizing such a marathon, I'll be able to pay back to my community, build bridges with the outside world, and invite runners to come to Lebanon and run under the umbrella of peace. Organizing a marathon in Lebanon is definitely not like organizing one in New York. How do you introduce the concept of running to a nation that is constantly at the brink of war? How do you ask those who were once fighting and killing each other to come together and run next to each other? More than that, how do you convince people to run a distance of 26.2 miles at a time they were not even familiar with the word "marathon"? So we had to start from scratch. For almost two years, we went all over the country and even visited remote villages. I personally met with people from all walks of life — mayors, NGOs, schoolchildren, politicians, militiamen, people from mosques, churches, the president of the country, even housewives. I learned one thing: When you walk the talk, people believe you. Many were touched by my personal story, and they shared their stories in return. It was honesty and transparency that brought us together. We spoke one common language to each other, and that was from one human to another. Once that trust was built, everybody wanted to be part of the marathon to show the world the true colors of Lebanon and the Lebanese and their desire to live in peace and harmony. In October 2003, over 6,000 runners from 49 different nationalities came to the start line, all determined, and when the gunfire went off, this time it was a signal to run in harmony, for a change. The marathon grew. So did our political problems. But for every disaster we had, the marathon found ways to bring people together. In 2005, our prime minister was assassinated, and the country came to a complete standstill, so we organized a five-kilometer United We Run campaign. Over 60,000 people came to the start line, all wearing white T-shirts with no political slogans. That was a turning point for the marathon, where people started looking at it as a platform for peace and unity. Between 2006 up to 2009, our country, Lebanon, went through unstable years, invasions, and more assassinations that brought us close to a civil war. The country was divided again, so much that our parliament resigned, we had no president for a year, and no prime minister. But we did have a marathon. (Applause) So through the marathon, we learned that political problems can be overcome. When the opposition party decided to shut down part of the city center, we negotiated alternative routes. Government protesters became sideline cheerleaders. They even hosted juice stations. (Laughter) You know, the marathon has really become one of its kind. It gained credibility from both the Lebanese and the international community. Last November 2012, over 33,000 runners from 85 different nationalities came to the start line, but this time, they challenged a very stormy and rainy weather. The streets were flooded, but people didn't want to miss out on the opportunity of being part of such a national day. BMA has expanded. We include everyone: the young, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally challenged, the blind, the elite, the amateur runners, even moms with their babies. Themes have included runs for the environment, breast cancer, for the love of Lebanon, for peace, or just simply to run. The first annual all-women-and-girls race for empowerment, which is one of its kind in the region, has just taken place only a few weeks ago, with 4,512 women, including the first lady, and this is only the beginning. Thank you. (Applause) BMA has supported charities and volunteers who have helped reshape Lebanon, raising funds for their causes and encouraging others to give. The culture of giving and doing good has become contagious. Stereotypes have been broken. Change-makers and future leaders have been created. I believe these are the building blocks for future peace. BMA has become such a respected event in the region that government officials in the region, like Iraq, Egypt and Syria, have asked the organization to help them structure a similar sporting event. We are now one of the largest running events in the Middle East, but most importantly, it is a platform for hope and cooperation in an ever-fragile and unstable part of the world. From Boston to Beirut, we stand as one. (Applause) After 10 years in Lebanon, from national marathons or from national events to smaller regional races, we've seen that people want to run for a better future. After all, peacemaking is not a sprint. It is more of a marathon. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I fell in love with monster prime numbers | {0: "Radio host Adam Spencer fills Sydney's drive-time mornings with smart math and science talk."} | TED2013 | Ah yes, those university days, a heady mix of Ph.D-level pure mathematics and world debating championships, or, as I like to say, "Hello, ladies. Oh yeah." Didn't get much sexier than the Spence at university, let me tell you. It is such a thrill for a humble breakfast radio announcer from Sydney, Australia, to be here on the TED stage literally on the other side of the world. And I wanted to let you know, a lot of the things you've heard about Australians are true. From the youngest of ages, we display a prodigious sporting talent. On the field of battle, we are brave and noble warriors. What you've heard is true. Australians, we don't mind a bit of a drink, sometimes to excess, leading to embarrassing social situations. (Laughter) This is my father's work Christmas party, December 1973. I'm almost five years old. Fair to say, I'm enjoying the day a lot more than Santa was. But I stand before you today not as a breakfast radio host, not as a comedian, but as someone who was, is, and always will be a mathematician. And anyone who's been bitten by the numbers bug knows that it bites early and it bites deep. I cast my mind back when I was in second grade at a beautiful little government-run school called Boronia Park in the suburbs of Sydney, and as we came up towards lunchtime, our teacher, Ms. Russell, said to the class, "Hey, year two. What do you want to do after lunch? I've got no plans." It was an exercise in democratic schooling, and I am all for democratic schooling, but we were only seven. So some of the suggestions we made as to what we might want to do after lunch were a little bit impractical, and after a while, someone made a particularly silly suggestion and Ms. Russell patted them down with that gentle aphorism, "That wouldn't work. That'd be like trying to put a square peg through a round hole." Now I wasn't trying to be smart. I wasn't trying to be funny. I just politely raised my hand, and when Ms. Russell acknowledged me, I said, in front of my year two classmates, and I quote, "But Miss, surely if the diagonal of the square is less than the diameter of the circle, well, the square peg will pass quite easily through the round hole." (Laughter) "It'd be like putting a piece of toast through a basketball hoop, wouldn't it?" And there was that same awkward silence from most of my classmates, until sitting next to me, one of my friends, one of the cool kids in class, Steven, leaned across and punched me really hard in the head. (Laughter) Now what Steven was saying was, "Look, Adam, you are at a critical juncture in your life here, my friend. You can keep sitting here with us. Any more of that sort of talk, you've got to go and sit over there with them." I thought about it for a nanosecond. I took one look at the road map of life, and I ran off down the street marked "Geek" as fast as my chubby, asthmatic little legs would carry me. I fell in love with mathematics from the earliest of ages. I explained it to all my friends. Maths is beautiful. It's natural. It's everywhere. Numbers are the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written. The great Descartes said something quite similar. The universe "is written in the mathematical language." And today, I want to show you one of those musical notes, a number so beautiful, so massive, I think it will blow your mind. Today we're going to talk about prime numbers. Most of you I'm sure remember that six is not prime because it's 2 x 3. Seven is prime because it's 1 x 7, but we can't break it down into any smaller chunks, or as we call them, factors. Now a few things you might like to know about prime numbers. One is not prime. The proof of that is a great party trick that admittedly only works at certain parties. (Laughter) Another thing about primes, there is no final biggest prime number. They keep going on forever. We know there are an infinite number of primes due to the brilliant mathematician Euclid. Over thousands of years ago, he proved that for us. But the third thing about prime numbers, mathematicians have always wondered, well at any given moment in time, what is the biggest prime that we know about? Today we're going to hunt for that massive prime. Don't freak out. All you need to know, of all the mathematics you've ever learned, unlearned, crammed, forgotten, never understood in the first place, all you need to know is this: When I say 2 ^ 5, I'm talking about five little number twos next to each other all multiplied together, 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2. So 2 ^ 5 is 2 x 2 = 4, 8, 16, 32. If you've got that, you're with me for the entire journey. Okay? So 2 ^ 5, those five little twos multiplied together. (2 ^ 5) - 1 = 31. 31 is a prime number, and that five in the power is also a prime number. And the vast bulk of massive primes we've ever found are of that form: two to a prime number, take away one. I won't go into great detail as to why, because most of your eyes will bleed out of your head if I do, but suffice to say, a number of that form is fairly easy to test for primacy. A random odd number is a lot harder to test. But as soon as we go hunting for massive primes, we realize it's not enough just to put in any prime number in the power. (2 ^ 11) - 1 = 2,047, and you don't need me to tell you that's 23 x 89. (Laughter) But (2 ^ 13) - 1, (2 ^ 17) - 1 (2 ^ 19) - 1, are all prime numbers. After that point, they thin out a lot. And one of the things about the search for massive primes that I love so much is some of the great mathematical minds of all time have gone on this search. This is the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. In the 1700s, other mathematicians said he is simply the master of us all. He was so respected, they put him on European currency back when that was a compliment. (Laughter) Euler discovered at the time the world's biggest prime: (2 ^ 31) - 1. It's over two billion. He proved it was prime with nothing more than a quill, ink, paper and his mind. You think that's big. We know that (2 ^ 127) - 1 is a prime number. It's an absolute brute. Look at it here: 39 digits long, proven to be prime in 1876 by a mathematician called Lucas. Word up, L-Dog. (Laughter) But one of the great things about the search for massive primes, it's not just finding the primes. Sometimes proving another number not to be prime is just as exciting. Lucas again, in 1876, showed us (2 ^ 67) - 1, 21 digits long, was not prime. But he didn't know what the factors were. We knew it was like six, but we didn't know what are the 2 x 3 that multiply together to give us that massive number. We didn't know for almost 40 years until Frank Nelson Cole came along. And at a gathering of prestigious American mathematicians, he walked to the board, took up a piece of chalk, and started writing out the powers of two: two, four, eight, 16 — come on, join in with me, you know how it goes — 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048. I'm in geek heaven. We'll stop it there for a second. Frank Nelson Cole did not stop there. He went on and on and calculated 67 powers of two. He took away one and wrote that number on the board. A frisson of excitement went around the room. It got even more exciting when he then wrote down these two large prime numbers in your standard multiplication format — and for the rest of the hour of his talk Frank Nelson Cole busted that out. He had found the prime factors of (2 ^ 67) - 1. The room went berserk — (Laughter) — as Frank Nelson Cole sat down, having delivered the only talk in the history of mathematics with no words. He admitted afterwards it wasn't that hard to do. It took focus. It took dedication. It took him, by his estimate, "three years of Sundays." But then in the field of mathematics, as in so many of the fields that we've heard from in this TED, the age of the computer goes along and things explode. These are the largest prime numbers we knew decade by decade, each one dwarfing the one before as computers took over and our power to calculate just grew and grew. This is the largest prime number we knew in 1996, a very emotional year for me. It was the year I left university. I was torn between mathematics and media. It was a tough decision. I loved university. My arts degree was the best nine and a half years of my life. (Laughter) But I came to a realization about my own ability. Put simply, in a room full of randomly selected people, I'm a maths genius. In a roomful of maths Ph.Ds, I'm as dumb as a box of hammers. My skill is not in the mathematics. It is in telling the story of the mathematics. And during that time, since I've left university, these numbers have got bigger and bigger, each one dwarfing the last, until along came this man, Dr. Curtis Cooper, who a few years ago held the record for the largest ever prime, only to see it snatched away by a rival university. And then Curtis Cooper got it back. Not years ago, not months ago, days ago. In an amazing moment of serendipity, I had to send TED a new slide to show you what this guy had done. I still remember — (Applause) — I still remember when it happened. I was doing my breakfast radio show. I looked down on Twitter. There was a tweet: "Adam, have you seen the new largest prime number?" I shivered — (Laughter) — contacted the women who produced my radio show out in the other room, and said "Girls, hold the front page. We're not talking politics today. We're not talking sport today. They found another megaprime." The girls just shook their heads, put them in their hands, and let me go my own way. It's because of Curtis Cooper that we know, currently the largest prime number we know, is 2 ^ 57,885,161. Don't forget to subtract the one. This number is almost 17 and a half million digits long. If you typed it out on a computer and saved it as a text file, that's 22 meg. For the slightly less geeky of you, think about the Harry Potter novels, okay? This is the first Harry Potter novel. This is all seven Harry Potter novels, because she did tend to faff on a bit near the end. (Laughter) Written out as a book, this number would run the length of the Harry Potter novels and half again. Here's a slide of the first 1,000 digits of this prime. If, when TED had begun, at 11 o'clock on Tuesday, we'd walked out and simply hit one slide every second, it would have taken five hours to show you that number. I was keen to do it, could not convince Bono. That's the way it goes. This number is 17 and a half thousand slides long, and we know it is prime as confidently as we know the number seven is prime. That fills me with almost sexual excitement. And who am I kidding when I say almost? (Laughter) I know what you're thinking: Adam, we're happy that you're happy, but why should we care? Let me give you just three reasons why this is so beautiful. First of all, as I explained, to ask a computer "Is that number prime?" to type it in its abbreviated form, and then only about six lines of code is the test for primacy, is a remarkably simple question to ask. It's got a remarkably clear yes/no answer, and just requires phenomenal grunt. Large prime numbers are a great way of testing the speed and accuracy of computer chips. But secondly, as Curtis Cooper was looking for that monster prime, he wasn't the only guy searching. My laptop at home was looking through four potential candidate primes myself as part of a networked computer hunt around the world for these large numbers. The discovery of that prime is similar to the work people are doing in unraveling RNA sequences, in searching through data from SETI and other astronomical projects. We live in an age where some of the great breakthroughs are not going to happen in the labs or the halls of academia but on laptops, desktops, in the palms of people's hands who are simply helping out for the search. But for me it's amazing because it's a metaphor for the time in which we live, when human minds and machines can conquer together. We've heard a lot about robots in this TED. We've heard a lot about what they can and can't do. It is true, you can now download onto your smartphone an app that would beat most grandmasters at chess. You think that's cool. Here's a machine doing something cool. This is the CubeStormer II. It can take a randomly shuffled Rubik's Cube. Using the power of the smartphone, it can examine the cube and solve the cube in five seconds. (Applause) That scares some people. That excites me. How lucky are we to live in this age when mind and machine can work together? I was asked in an interview last year in my capacity as a lower-case "c" celebrity in Australia, "What was your highlight of 2012?" People were expecting me to talk about my beloved Sydney Swans football team. In our beautiful, indigenous sport of Australian football, they won the equivalent of the Super Bowl. I was there. It was the most emotional, exciting day. It wasn't my highlight of 2012. People thought it might have been an interview I'd done on my show. It might have been a politician. It might have been a breakthrough. It might have been a book I read, the arts. No, no, no. It might have been something my two gorgeous daughters had done. No, it wasn't. The highlight of 2012, so clearly, was the discovery of the Higgs boson. Give it up for the fundamental particle that bequeaths all other fundamental particles their mass. (Applause) And what was so gorgeous about this discovery was 50 years ago Peter Higgs and his team considered one of the deepest of all questions: How is it that the things that make us up have no mass? I've clearly got mass. Where does it come from? And he postulated a suggestion that there's this infinite, incredibly small field stretching throughout the universe, and as other particles go through those particles and interact, that's where they get their mass. The rest of the scientific community said, "Great idea, Higgsy. We've got no idea if we could ever prove it. It's beyond our reach." And within just 50 years, in his lifetime, with him sitting in the audience, we had designed the greatest machine ever to prove this incredible idea that originated just in a human mind. That's what is so exciting for me about this prime number. We thought it might be there, and we went and found it. That is the essence of being human. That is what we are all about. Or as my friend Descartes might put it, we think, therefore we are. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to make stress your friend | {0: 'Kelly McGonigal translates academic research into practical strategies for health, happiness and personal success.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I have a confession to make. But first, I want you to make a little confession to me. In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you've experienced relatively little stress. Anyone? How about a moderate amount of stress? Who has experienced a lot of stress? Yeah. Me too. But that is not my confession. My confession is this: I am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier. But I fear that something I've been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress. For years I've been telling people, stress makes you sick. It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. Basically, I've turned stress into the enemy. But I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours. Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they started by asking people, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?" And then they used public death records to find out who died. (Laughter) Okay. Some bad news first. People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health. (Laughter) People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress. Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you. (Laughter) That is over 20,000 deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide. (Laughter) You can see why this study freaked me out. Here I've been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health. So this study got me wondering: Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And here the science says yes. When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress. Now to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out. It's called the social stress test. You come into the laboratory, and you're told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you, and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your face, kind of like this. (Laughter) And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging, non-verbal feedback, like this. (Exhales) (Laughter) Now that you're sufficiently demoralized, time for part two: a math test. And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it. Now we're going to all do this together. It's going to be fun. For me. Okay. (Laughter) I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments of seven. You're going to do this out loud, as fast as you can, starting with 996. Go! (Audience counting) Go faster. Faster please. You're going too slow. (Audience counting) Stop. Stop, stop, stop. That guy made a mistake. We are going to have to start all over again. (Laughter) You're not very good at this, are you? Okay, so you get the idea. If you were actually in this study, you'd probably be a little stressed out. Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure. But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. That pounding heart is preparing you for action. If you're breathing faster, it's no problem. It's getting more oxygen to your brain. And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed. Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this. And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time. But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this. Their heart was still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage. Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s. And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters. So my goal as a health psychologist has changed. I no longer want to get rid of your stress. I want to make you better at stress. And we just did a little intervention. If you raised your hand and said you'd had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you're going to remember this talk and you're going to think to yourself, this is my body helping me rise to this challenge. And when you view stress in that way, your body believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier. Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from, so we are going to do one more intervention. I want to tell you about one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the stress response, and the idea is this: Stress makes you social. To understand this side of stress, we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin, and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. It even has its own cute nickname, the cuddle hormone, because it's released when you hug someone. But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in. Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts. It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about. Some people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin... to become more compassionate and caring. But here's what most people don't understand about oxytocin. It's a stress hormone. Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response. It's as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound. And when oxytocin is released in the stress response, it is motivating you to seek support. Your biological stress response is nudging you to tell someone how you feel, instead of bottling it up. Your stress response wants to make sure you notice when someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support each other. When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you. Okay, so how is knowing this side of stress going to make you healthier? Well, oxytocin doesn't only act on your brain. It also acts on your body, and one of its main roles in your body is to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress. It's a natural anti-inflammatory. It also helps your blood vessels stay relaxed during stress. But my favorite effect on the body is actually on the heart. Your heart has receptors for this hormone, and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-induced damage. This stress hormone strengthens your heart. And the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by social contact and social support. So when you reach out to others under stress, either to seek support or to help someone else, you release more of this hormone, your stress response becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. I find this amazing, that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience, and that mechanism is human connection. I want to finish by telling you about one more study. And listen up, because this study could also save a life. This study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States, and they ranged in age from 34 to 93, and they started the study by asking, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "How much time have you spent helping out friends, neighbors, people in your community?" And then they used public records for the next five years to find out who died. Okay, so the bad news first: For every major stressful life experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent. But — and I hope you are expecting a "but" by now — but that wasn't true for everyone. People who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying. Zero. Caring created resilience. And so we see once again that the harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience. Now I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life, but this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress. Stress gives us access to our hearts. The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength and energy. And when you choose to view stress in this way, you're not just getting better at stress, you're actually making a pretty profound statement. You're saying that you can trust yourself to handle life's challenges. And you're remembering that you don't have to face them alone. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: This is kind of amazing, what you're telling us. It seems amazing to me that a belief about stress can make so much difference to someone's life expectancy. How would that extend to advice, like, if someone is making a lifestyle choice between, say, a stressful job and a non-stressful job, does it matter which way they go? It's equally wise to go for the stressful job so long as you believe that you can handle it, in some sense? KM: Yeah, and one thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. And so I would say that's really the best way to make decisions, is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows. CA: Thank you so much, Kelly. It's pretty cool. (Applause) |
The rise of the new global super-rich | {0: 'In "Plutocrats," Chrystia Freeland explores the growing gap between the working poor and the increasingly disconnected mega-rich.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | So here's the most important economic fact of our time. We are living in an age of surging income inequality, particularly between those at the very top and everyone else. This shift is the most striking in the U.S. and in the U.K., but it's a global phenomenon. It's happening in communist China, in formerly communist Russia, it's happening in India, in my own native Canada. We're even seeing it in cozy social democracies like Sweden, Finland and Germany. Let me give you a few numbers to place what's happening. In the 1970s, the One Percent accounted for about 10 percent of the national income in the United States. Today, their share has more than doubled to above 20 percent. But what's even more striking is what's happening at the very tippy top of the income distribution. The 0.1 percent in the U.S. today account for more than eight percent of the national income. They are where the One Percent was 30 years ago. Let me give you another number to put that in perspective, and this is a figure that was calculated in 2005 by Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Reich took the wealth of two admittedly very rich men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and he found that it was equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population, 120 million people. Now, as it happens, Warren Buffett is not only himself a plutocrat, he is one of the most astute observers of that phenomenon, and he has his own favorite number. Buffett likes to point out that in 1992, the combined wealth of the people on the Forbes 400 list — and this is the list of the 400 richest Americans — was 300 billion dollars. Just think about it. You didn't even need to be a billionaire to get on that list in 1992. Well, today, that figure has more than quintupled to 1.7 trillion, and I probably don't need to tell you that we haven't seen anything similar happen to the middle class, whose wealth has stagnated if not actually decreased. So we're living in the age of the global plutocracy, but we've been slow to notice it. One of the reasons, I think, is a sort of boiled frog phenomenon. Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic. Think about what happened, after all, to the poor frog. But I think there's something else going on. Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger. And if you do happen to be on the Forbes 400 list, talking about income distribution, and inevitably its cousin, income redistribution, can be downright threatening. So we're living in the age of surging income inequality, especially at the top. What's driving it, and what can we do about it? One set of causes is political: lower taxes, deregulation, particularly of financial services, privatization, weaker legal protections for trade unions, all of these have contributed to more and more income going to the very, very top. A lot of these political factors can be broadly lumped under the category of "crony capitalism," political changes that benefit a group of well-connected insiders but don't actually do much good for the rest of us. In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult. Think of all the years reformers of various stripes have tried to get rid of corruption in Russia, for instance, or how hard it is to re-regulate the banks even after the most profound financial crisis since the Great Depression, or even how difficult it is to get the big multinational companies, including those whose motto might be "don't do evil," to pay taxes at a rate even approaching that paid by the middle class. But while getting rid of crony capitalism in practice is really, really hard, at least intellectually, it's an easy problem. After all, no one is actually in favor of crony capitalism. Indeed, this is one of those rare issues that unites the left and the right. A critique of crony capitalism is as central to the Tea Party as it is to Occupy Wall Street. But if crony capitalism is, intellectually at least, the easy part of the problem, things get trickier when you look at the economic drivers of surging income inequality. In and of themselves, these aren't too mysterious. Globalization and the technology revolution, the twin economic transformations which are changing our lives and transforming the global economy, are also powering the rise of the super-rich. Just think about it. For the first time in history, if you are an energetic entrepreneur with a brilliant new idea or a fantastic new product, you have almost instant, almost frictionless access to a global market of more than a billion people. As a result, if you are very, very smart and very, very lucky, you can get very, very rich very, very quickly. The latest poster boy for this phenomenon is David Karp. The 26-year-old founder of Tumblr recently sold his company to Yahoo for 1.1 billion dollars. Think about that for a minute: 1.1 billion dollars, 26 years old. It's easiest to see how the technology revolution and globalization are creating this sort of superstar effect in highly visible fields, like sports and entertainment. We can all watch how a fantastic athlete or a fantastic performer can today leverage his or her skills across the global economy as never before. But today, that superstar effect is happening across the entire economy. We have superstar technologists. We have superstar bankers. We have superstar lawyers and superstar architects. There are superstar cooks and superstar farmers. There are even, and this is my personal favorite example, superstar dentists, the most dazzling exemplar of whom is Bernard Touati, the Frenchman who ministers to the smiles of fellow superstars like Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich or European-born American fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. But while it's pretty easy to see how globalization and the technology revolution are creating this global plutocracy, what's a lot harder is figuring out what to think about it. And that's because, in contrast with crony capitalism, so much of what globalization and the technology revolution have done is highly positive. Let's start with technology. I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium. I'm even more of a fan of globalization. This is the transformation which has lifted hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people out of poverty and into the middle class, and if you happen to live in the rich part of the world, it's made many new products affordable — who do you think built your iPhone? — and things that we've relied on for a long time much cheaper. Think of your dishwasher or your t-shirt. So what's not to like? Well, a few things. One of the things that worries me is how easily what you might call meritocratic plutocracy can become crony plutocracy. Imagine you're a brilliant entrepreneur who has successfully sold that idea or that product to the global billions and become a billionaire in the process. It gets tempting at that point to use your economic nous to manipulate the rules of the global political economy in your own favor. And that's no mere hypothetical example. Think about Amazon, Apple, Google, Starbucks. These are among the world's most admired, most beloved, most innovative companies. They also happen to be particularly adept at working the international tax system so as to lower their tax bill very, very significantly. And why stop at just playing the global political and economic system as it exists to your own maximum advantage? Once you have the tremendous economic power that we're seeing at the very, very top of the income distribution and the political power that inevitably entails, it becomes tempting as well to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favor. Again, this is no mere hypothetical. It's what the Russian oligarchs did in creating the sale-of-the-century privatization of Russia's natural resources. It's one way of describing what happened with deregulation of the financial services in the U.S. and the U.K. A second thing that worries me is how easily meritocratic plutocracy can become aristocracy. One way of describing the plutocrats is as alpha geeks, and they are people who are acutely aware of how important highly sophisticated analytical and quantitative skills are in today's economy. That's why they are spending unprecedented time and resources educating their own children. The middle class is spending more on schooling too, but in the global educational arms race that starts at nursery school and ends at Harvard, Stanford or MIT, the 99 percent is increasingly outgunned by the One Percent. The result is something that economists Alan Krueger and Miles Corak call the Great Gatsby Curve. As income inequality increases, social mobility decreases. The plutocracy may be a meritocracy, but increasingly you have to be born on the top rung of the ladder to even take part in that race. The third thing, and this is what worries me the most, is the extent to which those same largely positive forces which are driving the rise of the global plutocracy also happen to be hollowing out the middle class in Western industrialized economies. Let's start with technology. Those same forces that are creating billionaires are also devouring many traditional middle-class jobs. When's the last time you used a travel agent? And in contrast with the industrial revolution, the titans of our new economy aren't creating that many new jobs. At its zenith, G.M. employed hundreds of thousands, Facebook fewer than 10,000. The same is true of globalization. For all that it is raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the emerging markets, it's also outsourcing a lot of jobs from the developed Western economies. The terrifying reality is that there is no economic rule which automatically translates increased economic growth into widely shared prosperity. That's shown in what I consider to be the most scary economic statistic of our time. Since the late 1990s, increases in productivity have been decoupled from increases in wages and employment. That means that our countries are getting richer, our companies are getting more efficient, but we're not creating more jobs and we're not paying people, as a whole, more. One scary conclusion you could draw from all of this is to worry about structural unemployment. What worries me more is a different nightmare scenario. After all, in a totally free labor market, we could find jobs for pretty much everyone. The dystopia that worries me is a universe in which a few geniuses invent Google and its ilk and the rest of us are employed giving them massages. So when I get really depressed about all of this, I comfort myself in thinking about the Industrial Revolution. After all, for all its grim, satanic mills, it worked out pretty well, didn't it? After all, all of us here are richer, healthier, taller — well, there are a few exceptions — and live longer than our ancestors in the early 19th century. But it's important to remember that before we learned how to share the fruits of the Industrial Revolution with the broad swathes of society, we had to go through two depressions, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Long Depression of the 1870s, two world wars, communist revolutions in Russia and in China, and an era of tremendous social and political upheaval in the West. We also, not coincidentally, went through an era of tremendous social and political inventions. We created the modern welfare state. We created public education. We created public health care. We created public pensions. We created unions. Today, we are living through an era of economic transformation comparable in its scale and its scope to the Industrial Revolution. To be sure that this new economy benefits us all and not just the plutocrats, we need to embark on an era of comparably ambitious social and political change. We need a new New Deal. (Applause) |
Your body is my canvas | {0: 'Alexa Meade paints mesmerizing, illusionistic portraits directly on living subjects, subverting familiar visual cues with perspective and color.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | You may want to take a closer look. There's more to this painting than meets the eye. And yes, it's an acrylic painting of a man, but I didn't paint it on canvas. I painted it directly on top of the man. What I do in my art is I skip the canvas altogether, and if I want to paint your portrait, I'm painting it on you, physically on you. That also means you're probably going to end up with an earful of paint, because I need to paint your ear on your ear. Everything in this scene, the person, the clothes, chairs, wall, gets covered in a mask of paint that mimics what's directly below it, and in this way, I'm able to take a three-dimensional scene and make it look like a two-dimensional painting. I can photograph it from any angle, and it will still look 2D. There's no Photoshop here. This is just a photo of one of my three-dimensional paintings. You might be wondering how I came up with this idea of turning people into paintings. But originally, this had nothing to do with either people or paint. It was about shadows. I was fascinated with the absence of light, and I wanted to find a way that I could give it materiality and pin it down before it changed. I came up with the idea of painting shadows. I loved that I could hide within this shadow my own painted version, and it would be almost invisible until the light changed, and all of a sudden my shadow would be brought to the light. I wanted to think about what else I could put shadows on, and I thought of my friend Bernie. But I didn't just want to paint the shadows. I also wanted to paint the highlights and create a mapping on his body in greyscale. I had a very specific vision of what this would look like, and as I was painting him, I made sure to follow that very closely. But something kept on flickering before my eyes. I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at. And then when I took that moment to take a step back, magic. I had turned my friend into a painting. I couldn't have foreseen that when I wanted to paint a shadow, I would pull out this whole other dimension, that I would collapse it, that I would take a painting and make it my friend and then bring him back to a painting. I was a little conflicted though, because I was so excited about what I'd found, but I was just about to graduate from college with a degree in political science, and I'd always had this dream of going to Washington, D.C., and sitting at a desk and working in government. (Laughter) Why did this have to get in the way of all that? I made the tough decision of going home after graduation and not going up to Capitol Hill, but going down to my parents' basement and making it my job to learn how to paint. I had no idea where to begin. The last time I'd painted, I was 16 years old at summer camp, and I didn't want to teach myself how to paint by copying the old masters or stretching a canvas and practicing over and over again on that surface, because that's not what this project was about for me. It was about space and light. My early canvases ended up being things that you wouldn't expect to be used as canvas, like fried food. It's nearly impossible to get paint to stick to the grease in an egg. (Laughter) Even harder was getting paint to stick to the acid in a grapefruit. It just would erase my brush strokes like invisible ink. I'd put something down, and instantly it would be gone. And if I wanted to paint on people, well, I was a little bit embarrassed to bring people down into my studio and show them that I spent my days in a basement putting paint on toast. It just seemed like it made more sense to practice by painting on myself. One of my favorite models actually ended up being a retired old man who not only didn't mind sitting still and getting the paint in his ears, but he also didn't really have much embarrassment about being taken out into very public places for exhibition, like the Metro. I was having so much fun with this process. I was teaching myself how to paint in all these different styles, and I wanted to see what else I could do with it. I came together with a collaborator, Sheila Vand, and we had the idea of creating paintings in a more unusual surface, and that was milk. We got a pool. We filled it with milk. We filled it with Sheila. And I began painting. And the images were always completely unexpected in the end, because I could have a very specific image about how it would turn out, I could paint it to match that, but the moment that Sheila laid back into the milk, everything would change. It was in constant flux, and we had to, rather than fight it, embrace it, see where the milk would take us and compensate to make it even better. Sometimes, when Sheila would lay down in the milk, it would wash all the paint off of her arms, and it might seem a little bit clumsy, but our solution would be, okay, hide your arms. And one time, she got so much milk in her hair that it just smeared all the paint off of her face. All right, well, hide your face. And we ended up with something far more elegant than we could have imagined, even though this is essentially the same solution that a frustrated kid uses when he can't draw hands, just hiding them in the pockets. When we started out on the milk project, and when I started out, I couldn't have foreseen that I would go from pursuing my dream in politics and working at a desk to tripping over a shadow and then turning people into paintings and painting on people in a pool of milk. But then again, I guess it's also not unforeseeable that you can find the strange in the familiar, as long as you're willing to look beyond what's already been brought to light, that you can see what's below the surface, hiding in the shadows, and recognize that there can be more there than meets the eye. Thank you. (Applause) |
For more wonder, rewild the world | {0: 'As an investigative journalist and self-described "professional troublemaker," George Monbiot uncovers the complicated truths behind the world\'s most persistent problems.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | When I was a young man, I spent six years of wild adventure in the tropics working as an investigative journalist in some of the most bewitching parts of the world. I was as reckless and foolish as only young men can be. This is why wars get fought. But I also felt more alive than I've ever done since. And when I came home, I found the scope of my existence gradually diminishing until loading the dishwasher seemed like an interesting challenge. And I found myself sort of scratching at the walls of life, as if I was trying to find a way out into a wider space beyond. I was, I believe, ecologically bored. Now, we evolved in rather more challenging times than these, in a world of horns and tusks and fangs and claws. And we still possess the fear and the courage and the aggression required to navigate those times. But in our comfortable, safe, crowded lands, we have few opportunities to exercise them without harming other people. And this was the sort of constraint that I found myself bumping up against. To conquer uncertainty, to know what comes next, that's almost been the dominant aim of industrialized societies, and having got there, or almost got there, we have just encountered a new set of unmet needs. We've privileged safety over experience and we've gained a lot in doing so, but I think we've lost something too. Now, I don't romanticize evolutionary time. I'm already beyond the lifespan of most hunter-gatherers, and the outcome of a mortal combat between me myopically stumbling around with a stone-tipped spear and an enraged giant aurochs isn't very hard to predict. Nor was it authenticity that I was looking for. I don't find that a useful or even intelligible concept. I just wanted a richer and rawer life than I've been able to lead in Britain, or, indeed, that we can lead in most parts of the industrialized world. And it was only when I stumbled across an unfamiliar word that I began to understand what I was looking for. And as soon as I found that word, I realized that I wanted to devote much of the rest of my life to it. The word is "rewilding," and even though rewilding is a young word, it already has several definitions. But there are two in particular that fascinate me. The first one is the mass restoration of ecosystems. One of the most exciting scientific findings of the past half century has been the discovery of widespread trophic cascades. A trophic cascade is an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles all the way down to the bottom, and the classic example is what happened in the Yellowstone National Park in the United States when wolves were reintroduced in 1995. Now, we all know that wolves kill various species of animals, but perhaps we're slightly less aware that they give life to many others. It sounds strange, but just follow me for a while. Before the wolves turned up, they'd been absent for 70 years. The numbers of deer, because there was nothing to hunt them, had built up and built up in the Yellowstone Park, and despite efforts by humans to control them, they'd managed to reduce much of the vegetation there to almost nothing, they'd just grazed it away. But as soon as the wolves arrived, even though they were few in number, they started to have the most remarkable effects. First, of course, they killed some of the deer, but that wasn't the major thing. Much more significantly, they radically changed the behavior of the deer. The deer started avoiding certain parts of the park, the places where they could be trapped most easily, particularly the valleys and the gorges, and immediately those places started to regenerate. In some areas, the height of the trees quintupled in just six years. Bare valley sides quickly became forests of aspen and willow and cottonwood. And as soon as that happened, the birds started moving in. The number of songbirds, of migratory birds, started to increase greatly. The number of beavers started to increase, because beavers like to eat the trees. And beavers, like wolves, are ecosystem engineers. They create niches for other species. And the dams they built in the rivers provided habitats for otters and muskrats and ducks and fish and reptiles and amphibians. The wolves killed coyotes, and as a result of that, the number of rabbits and mice began to rise, which meant more hawks, more weasels, more foxes, more badgers. Ravens and bald eagles came down to feed on the carrion that the wolves had left. Bears fed on it too, and their population began to rise as well, partly also because there were more berries growing on the regenerating shrubs, and the bears reinforced the impact of the wolves by killing some of the calves of the deer. But here's where it gets really interesting. The wolves changed the behavior of the rivers. They began to meander less. There was less erosion. The channels narrowed. More pools formed, more riffle sections, all of which were great for wildlife habitats. The rivers changed in response to the wolves, and the reason was that the regenerating forests stabilized the banks so that they collapsed less often, so that the rivers became more fixed in their course. Similarly, by driving the deer out of some places and the vegetation recovering on the valley sides, there was less soil erosion, because the vegetation stabilized that as well. So the wolves, small in number, transformed not just the ecosystem of the Yellowstone National Park, this huge area of land, but also its physical geography. Whales in the southern oceans have similarly wide-ranging effects. One of the many post-rational excuses made by the Japanese government for killing whales is that they said, "Well, the number of fish and krill will rise and then there'll be more for people to eat." Well, it's a stupid excuse, but it sort of kind of makes sense, doesn't it, because you'd think that whales eat huge amounts of fish and krill, so obviously take the whales away, there'll be more fish and krill. But the opposite happened. You take the whales away, and the number of krill collapses. Why would that possibly have happened? Well, it now turns out that the whales are crucial to sustaining that entire ecosystem, and one of the reasons for this is that they often feed at depth and then they come up to the surface and produce what biologists politely call large fecal plumes, huge explosions of poop right across the surface waters, up in the photic zone, where there's enough light to allow photosynthesis to take place, and those great plumes of fertilizer stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, the plant plankton at the bottom of the food chain, which stimulate the growth of zooplankton, which feed the fish and the krill and all the rest of it. The other thing that whales do is that, as they're plunging up and down through the water column, they're kicking the phytoplankton back up towards the surface where it can continue to survive and reproduce. And interestingly, well, we know that plant plankton in the oceans absorb carbon from the atmosphere — the more plant plankton there are, the more carbon they absorb — and eventually they filter down into the abyss and remove that carbon from the atmospheric system. Well, it seems that when whales were at their historic populations, they were probably responsible for sequestering some tens of millions of tons of carbon every year from the atmosphere. And when you look at it like that, you think, wait a minute, here are the wolves changing the physical geography of the Yellowstone National Park. Here are the whales changing the composition of the atmosphere. You begin to see that possibly, the evidence supporting James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which conceives of the world as a coherent, self-regulating organism, is beginning, at the ecosystem level, to accumulate. Trophic cascades tell us that the natural world is even more fascinating and complex than we thought it was. They tell us that when you take away the large animals, you are left with a radically different ecosystem to one which retains its large animals. And they make, in my view, a powerful case for the reintroduction of missing species. Rewilding, to me, means bringing back some of the missing plants and animals. It means taking down the fences, it means blocking the drainage ditches, it means preventing commercial fishing in some large areas of sea, but otherwise stepping back. It has no view as to what a right ecosystem or a right assemblage of species looks like. It doesn't try to produce a heath or a meadow or a rain forest or a kelp garden or a coral reef. It lets nature decide, and nature, by and large, is pretty good at deciding. Now, I mentioned that there are two definitions of rewilding that interest me. The other one is the rewilding of human life. And I don't see this as an alternative to civilization. I believe we can enjoy the benefits of advanced technology, as we're doing now, but at the same time, if we choose, have access to a richer and wilder life of adventure when we want to because there would be wonderful, rewilded habitats. And the opportunities for this are developing more rapidly than you might think possible. There's one estimate which suggests that in the United States, two thirds of the land which was once forested and then cleared has become reforested as loggers and farmers have retreated, particularly from the eastern half of the country. There's another one which suggests that 30 million hectares of land in Europe, an area the size of Poland, will be vacated by farmers between 2000 and 2030. Now, faced with opportunities like that, does it not seem a little unambitious to be thinking only of bringing back wolves, lynx, bears, beavers, bison, boar, moose, and all the other species which are already beginning to move quite rapidly across Europe? Perhaps we should also start thinking about the return of some of our lost megafauna. What megafauna, you say? Well, every continent had one, apart from Antarctica. When Trafalgar Square in London was excavated, the river gravels there were found to be stuffed with the bones of hippopotamus, rhinos, elephants, hyenas, lions. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there were lions in Trafalgar Square long before Nelson's Column was built. All these species lived here in the last interglacial period, when temperatures were pretty similar to our own. It's not climate, largely, which has got rid of the world's megafaunas. It's pressure from the human population hunting and destroying their habitats which has done so. And even so, you can still see the shadows of these great beasts in our current ecosystems. Why is it that so many deciduous trees are able to sprout from whatever point the trunk is broken? Why is it that they can withstand the loss of so much of their bark? Why do understory trees, which are subject to lower sheer forces from the wind and have to carry less weight than the big canopy trees, why are they so much tougher and harder to break than the canopy trees are? Elephants. They are elephant-adapted. In Europe, for example, they evolved to resist the straight-tusked elephant, elephas antiquus, which was a great beast. It was related to the Asian elephant, but it was a temperate animal, a temperate forest creature. It was a lot bigger than the Asian elephant. But why is it that some of our common shrubs have spines which seem to be over-engineered to resist browsing by deer? Perhaps because they evolved to resist browsing by rhinoceros. Isn't it an amazing thought that every time you wander into a park or down an avenue or through a leafy street, you can see the shadows of these great beasts? Paleoecology, the study of past ecosystems, crucial to an understanding of our own, feels like a portal through which you may pass into an enchanted kingdom. And if we really are looking at areas of land of the sort of sizes I've been talking about becoming available, why not reintroduce some of our lost megafauna, or at least species closely related to those which have become extinct everywhere? Why shouldn't all of us have a Serengeti on our doorsteps? And perhaps this is the most important thing that rewilding offers us, the most important thing that's missing from our lives: hope. In motivating people to love and defend the natural world, an ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair. The story rewilding tells us is that ecological change need not always proceed in one direction. It offers us the hope that our silent spring could be replaced by a raucous summer. Thank you. (Applause) |
The museum of you | {0: 'Principal of the New York media design firm, Local Projects, Jake Barton creates interactive and digital exhibits for the likes of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art and Storycorps.'} | TEDSalon NY2013 | This is Charley Williams. He was 94 when this photograph was taken. In the 1930s, Roosevelt put thousands and thousands of Americans back to work by building bridges and infrastructure and tunnels, but he also did something interesting, which was to hire a few hundred writers to scour America to capture the stories of ordinary Americans. Charley Williams, a poor sharecropper, wouldn't ordinarily be the subject of a big interview, but Charley had actually been a slave until he was 22 years old. And the stories that were captured of his life make up one of the crown jewels of histories, of human-lived experiences filled with ex-slaves. Anna Deavere Smith famously said that there's a literature inside of each of us, and three generations later, I was part of a project called StoryCorps, which set out to capture the stories of ordinary Americans by setting up a soundproof booth in public spaces. The idea is very, very simple. You go into these booths, you interview your grandmother or relative, you leave with a copy of the interview and an interview goes into the Library of Congress. It's essentially a way to make a national oral histories archive one conversation at a time. And the question is, who do you want to remember — if you had just 45 minutes with your grandmother? What's interesting, in conversations with the founder, Dave Isay, we always actually talked about this as a little bit of a subversive project, because when you think about it, it's actually not really about the stories that are being told, it's about listening, and it's about the questions that you get to ask, questions that you may not have permission to on any other day. I'm going to play you just a couple of quick excerpts from the project. [Jesus Melendez talking about poet Pedro Pietri's final moments] Jesus Melendez: We took off, and as we were ascending, before we had leveled off, our level-off point was 45,000 feet, so before we had leveled off, Pedro began leaving us, and the beauty about it is that I believe that there's something after life. You can see it in Pedro. [Danny Perasa to his wife Annie Perasa married 26 years] Danny Perasa: See, the thing of it is, I always feel guilty when I say "I love you" to you, and I say it so often. I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am, it's coming from me, it's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio, and it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house. (Laughter) [Michael Wolmetz with his girlfriend Debora Brakarz] Michael Wolmetz: So this is the ring that my father gave to my mother, and we can leave it there. And he saved up and he purchased this, and he proposed to my mother with this, and so I thought that I would give it to you so that he could be with us for this also. So I'm going to share a mic with you right now, Debora. Where's the right finger? Debora Brakarz: (Crying) MW: Debora, will you please marry me? DB: Yes. Of course. I love you. (Kissing) MW: So kids, this is how your mother and I got married, in a booth in Grand Central Station with my father's ring. My grandfather was a cab driver for 40 years. He used to pick people up here every day. So it seems right. Jake Barton: So I have to say I did not actually choose those individual samples to make you cry because they all make you cry. The entire project is predicated on this act of love which is listening itself. And that motion of building an institution out of a moment of conversation and listening is actually a lot of what my firm, Local Projects, is doing with our engagements in general. So we're a media design firm, and we're working with a broad array of different institutions building media installations for museums and public spaces. Our latest engagement is the Cleveland Museum of Art, which we've created an engagement called Gallery One for. And Gallery One is an interesting project because it started with this massive, $350 million expansion for the Cleveland Museum of Art, and we actually brought in this piece specifically to grow new capacity, new audiences, at the same time that the museum itself is growing. Glenn Lowry, the head of MoMA, put it best when he said, "We want visitors to actually cease being visitors. Visitors are transient. We want people who live here, people who have ownership." And so what we're doing is making a broad array of different ways for people to actually engage with the material inside of these galleries, so you can still have a traditional gallery experience, but if you're interested, you can actually engage with any individual artwork and see the original context from where it's from, or manipulate the work itself. So, for example, you can click on this individual lion head, and this is where it originated from, 1300 B.C. Or this individual piece here, you can see the actual bedroom. It really changes the way you think about this type of a tempera painting. This is one of my favorites because you see the studio itself. This is Rodin's bust. You get the sense of this incredible factory for creativity. And it makes you think about literally the hundreds or thousands of years of human creativity and how each individual artwork stands in for part of that story. This is Picasso, of course embodying so much of it from the 20th century. And so our next interface, which I'll show you, actually leverages that idea of this lineage of creativity. It's an algorithm that actually allows you to browse the actual museum's collection using facial recognition. So this person's making different faces, and it's actually drawing forth different objects from the collection that connect with exactly how she's looking. And so you can imagine that, as people are performing inside of the museum itself, you get this sense of this emotional connection, this way in which our face connects with the thousands and tens of thousands of years. This is an interface that actually allows you to draw and then draws forth objects using those same shapes. So more and more we're trying to find ways for people to actually author things inside of the museums themselves, to be creative even as they're looking at other people's creativity and understanding them. So in this wall, the collections wall, you can actually see all 3,000 artworks all at the same time, and you can actually author your own individual walking tours of the museum, so you can share them, and someone can take a tour with the museum director or a tour with their little cousin. But all the while that we've been working on this engagement for Cleveland, we've also been working in the background on really our largest engagement to date, and that's the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. So we started in 2006 as part of a team with Thinc Design to create the original master plan for the museum, and then we've done all the media design both for the museum and the memorial and then the media production. So the memorial opened in 2011, and the museum's going to open next year in 2014. And you can see from these images, the site is so raw and almost archaeological. And of course the event itself is so recent, somewhere between history and current events, it was a huge challenge to imagine how do you actually live up to a space like this, an event like this, to actually tell that story. And so what we started with was really a new way of thinking about building an institution, through a project called Make History, which we launched in 2009. So it's estimated that a third of the world watched 9/11 live, and a third of the world heard about it within 24 hours, making it really by nature of when it happened, this unprecedented moment of global awareness. And so we launched this to capture the stories from all around the world, through video, through photos, through written history, and so people's experiences on that day, which was, in fact, this huge risk for the institution to make its first move this open platform. But that was coupled together with this oral histories booth, really the simplest we've ever made, where you locate yourself on a map. It's in six languages, and you can tell your own story about what happened to you on that day. And when we started seeing the incredible images and stories that came forth from all around the world — this is obviously part of the landing gear — we really started to understand that there was this amazing symmetry between the event itself, between the way that people were telling the stories of the event, and how we ourselves needed to tell that story. This image in particular really captured our attention at the time, because it so much sums up that event. This is a shot from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. There's a firefighter that's stuck, actually, in traffic, and so the firefighters themselves are running a mile and a half to the site itself with upwards of 70 pounds of gear on their back. And we got this amazing email that said, "While viewing the thousands of photos on the site, I unexpectedly found a photo of my son. It was a shock emotionally, yet a blessing to find this photo," and he was writing because he said, "I'd like to personally thank the photographer for posting the photo, as it meant more than words can describe to me to have access to what is probably the last photo ever taken of my son." And it really made us recognize what this institution needed to be in order to actually tell that story. We can't have just a historian or a curator narrating objectively in the third person about an event like that, when you have the witnesses to history who are going to make their way through the actual museum itself. And so we started imagining the museum, along with the creative team at the museum and the curators, thinking about how the first voice that you would hear inside the museum would actually be of other visitors. And so we created this idea of an opening gallery called We Remember. And I'll just play you part of a mockup of it, but you get a sense of what it's like to actually enter into that moment in time and be transported back in history. (Video) Voice 1: I was in Honolulu, Hawaii. Voice 2: I was in Cairo, Egypt. Voice 3: Sur les Champs-Élysées, à Paris. Voice 4: In college, at U.C. Berkeley. Voice 5: I was in Times Square. Voice 6: São Paolo, Brazil. (Multiple voices) Voice 7: It was probably about 11 o'clock at night. Voice 8: I was driving to work at 5:45 local time in the morning. Voice 9: We were actually in a meeting when someone barged in and said, "Oh my God, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center." Voice 10: Trying to frantically get to a radio. Voice 11: When I heard it over the radio — Voice 12: Heard it on the radio. (Multiple voices) Voice 13: I got a call from my father. Voice 14: The phone rang, it woke me up. My business partner told me to turn on the television. Voice 15: So I switched on the television. Voice 16: All channels in Italy were displaying the same thing. Voice 17: The Twin Towers. Voice 18: The Twin Towers. JB: And you move from there into that open, cavernous space. This is the so-called slurry wall. It's the original, excavated wall at the base of the World Trade Center that withstood the actual pressure from the Hudson River for a full year after the event itself. And so we thought about carrying that sense of authenticity, of presence of that moment into the actual exhibition itself. And we tell the stories of being inside the towers through that same audio collage, so you're hearing people literally talking about seeing the planes as they make their way into the building, or making their way down the stairwells. And as you make your way into the exhibition where it talks about the recovery, we actually project directly onto these moments of twisted steel all of the experiences from people who literally excavated on top of the pile itself. And so you can hear oral histories — so people who were actually working the so-called bucket brigades as you're seeing literally the thousands of experiences from that moment. And as you leave that storytelling moment understanding about 9/11, we then turn the museum back into a moment of listening and actually talk to the individual visitors and ask them their own experiences about 9/11. And we ask them questions that are actually not really answerable, the types of questions that 9/11 itself draws forth for all of us. And so these are questions like, "How can a democracy balance freedom and security?" "How could 9/11 have happened?" "And how did the world change after 9/11?" And so these oral histories, which we've actually been capturing already for years, are then mixed together with interviews that we're doing with people like Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and you mix together these different players and these different experiences, these different reflection points about 9/11. And suddenly the institution, once again, turns into a listening experience. So I'll play you just a short excerpt of a mockup that we made of a couple of these voices, but you really get a sense of the poetry of everyone's reflection on the event. (Video) Voice 1: 9/11 was not just a New York experience. Voice 2: It's something that we shared, and it's something that united us. Voice 3: And I knew when I saw that, people who were there that day who immediately went to help people known and unknown to them was something that would pull us through. Voice 4: All the outpouring of affection and emotion that came from our country was something really that will forever, ever stay with me. Voice 5: Still today I pray and think about those who lost their lives, and those who gave their lives to help others, but I'm also reminded of the fabric of this country, the love, the compassIon, the strength, and I watched a nation come together in the middle of a terrible tragedy. JB: And so as people make their way out of the museum, reflecting on the experience, reflecting on their own thoughts of it, they then move into the actual space of the memorial itself, because they've gone back up to grade, and we actually got involved in the memorial after we'd done the museum for a few years. The original designer of the memorial, Michael Arad, had this image in his mind of all the names appearing undifferentiated, almost random, really a poetic reflection on top of the nature of a terrorism event itself, but it was a huge challenge for the families, for the foundation, certainly for the first responders, and there was a negotiation that went forth and a solution was found to actually create not an order in terms of chronology, or in terms of alphabetical, but through what's called meaningful adjacency. So these are groupings of the names themselves which appear undifferentiated but actually have an order, and we, along with Jer Thorp, created an algorithm to take massive amounts of data to actually start to connect together all these different names themselves. So this is an image of the actual algorithm itself with the names scrambled for privacy, but you can see that these blocks of color are actually the four different flights, the two different towers, the first responders, and you can actually see within that different floors, and then the green lines are the interpersonal connections that were requested by the families themselves. And so when you go to the memorial, you can actually see the overarching organization inside of the individual pools themselves. You can see the way that the geography of the event is reflected inside of the memorial, and you can search for an individual name, or in this case an employer, Cantor Fitzgerald, and see the way in which all of those names, those hundreds of names, are actually organized onto the memorial itself, and use that to navigate the memorial. And more importantly, when you're actually at the site of the memorial, you can see those connections. You can see the relationships between the different names themselves. So suddenly what is this undifferentiated, anonymous group of names springs into reality as an individual life. In this case, Harry Ramos, who was the head trader at an investment bank, who stopped to aid Victor Wald on the 55th floor of the South Tower. And Ramos told Wald, according to witnesses, "I'm not going to leave you." And Wald's widow requested that they be listed next to each other. Three generations ago, we had to actually get people to go out and capture the stories for common people. Today, of course, there's an unprecedented amount of stories for all of us that are being captured for future generations. And this is our hope, that's there's poetry inside of each of our stories. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How technology allowed me to read | {0: "Blind almost since birth, Ron McCallum is one of Australia's most respected legal scholars, and an activist on behalf of disabled people around the globe."} | TEDxSydney | When I was about three or four years old, I remember my mum reading a story to me and my two big brothers, and I remember putting up my hands to feel the page of the book, to feel the picture they were discussing. And my mum said, "Darling, remember that you can't see and you can't feel the picture and you can't feel the print on the page." And I thought to myself, "But that's what I want to do. I love stories. I want to read." Little did I know that I would be part of a technological revolution that would make that dream come true. I was born premature by about 10 weeks, which resulted in my blindness, some 64 years ago. The condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia, and it's now very rare in the developed world. Little did I know, lying curled up in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 that I'd been born at the right place and the right time, that I was in a country where I could participate in the technological revolution. There are 37 million totally blind people on our planet, but those of us who've shared in the technological changes mainly come from North America, Europe, Japan and other developed parts of the world. Computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world, but I think they've changed the lives of we blind people more than any other group. And so I want to tell you about the interaction between computer-based adaptive technology and the many volunteers who helped me over the years to become the person I am today. It's an interaction between volunteers, passionate inventors and technology, and it's a story that many other blind people could tell. But let me tell you a bit about it today. When I was five, I went to school and I learned braille. It's an ingenious system of six dots that are punched into paper, and I can feel them with my fingers. In fact, I think they're putting up my grade six report. I don't know where Julian Morrow got that from. (Laughter) I was pretty good in reading, but religion and musical appreciation needed more work. (Laughter) When you leave the opera house, you'll find there's braille signage in the lifts. Look for it. Have you noticed it? I do. I look for it all the time. (Laughter) When I was at school, the books were transcribed by transcribers, voluntary people who punched one dot at a time so I'd have volumes to read, and that had been going on, mainly by women, since the late 19th century in this country, but it was the only way I could read. When I was in high school, I got my first Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder, and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer medium of learning. I could have family and friends read me material, and I could then read it back as many times as I needed. And it brought me into contact with volunteers and helpers. For example, when I studied at graduate school at Queen's University in Canada, the prisoners at the Collins Bay jail agreed to help me. I gave them a tape recorder, and they read into it. As one of them said to me, "Ron, we ain't going anywhere at the moment." (Laughter) But think of it. These men, who hadn't had the educational opportunities I'd had, helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law by their dedicated help. Well, I went back and became an academic at Melbourne's Monash University, and for those 25 years, tape recorders were everything to me. In fact, in my office in 1990, I had 18 miles of tape. Students, family and friends all read me material. Mrs. Lois Doery, whom I later came to call my surrogate mum, read me many thousands of hours onto tape. One of the reasons I agreed to give this talk today was that I was hoping that Lois would be here so I could introduce you to her and publicly thank her. But sadly, her health hasn't permitted her to come today. But I thank you here, Lois, from this platform. (Applause) I saw my first Apple computer in 1984, and I thought to myself, "This thing's got a glass screen, not much use to me." How very wrong I was. In 1987, in the month our eldest son Gerard was born, I got my first blind computer, and it's actually here. See it up there? And you see it has no, what do you call it, no screen. (Laughter) It's a blind computer. (Laughter) It's a Keynote Gold 84k, and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory. (Laughter) Don't laugh, it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time. (Laughter) I think there's more memory in my watch. It was invented by Russell Smith, a passionate inventor in New Zealand who was trying to help blind people. Sadly, he died in a light plane crash in 2005, but his memory lives on in my heart. It meant, for the first time, I could read back what I had typed into it. It had a speech synthesizer. I'd written my first coauthored labor law book on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory. This now allowed me to read back what I'd written and to enter the computer world, even with its 84k of memory. In 1974, the great Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor, worked on building a machine that would scan books and read them out in synthetic speech. Optical character recognition units then only operated usually on one font, but by using charge-coupled device flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers, he developed a machine that could read any font. And his machine, which was as big as a washing machine, was launched on the 13th of January, 1976. I saw my first commercially available Kurzweil in March 1989, and it blew me away, and in September 1989, the month that my associate professorship at Monash University was announced, the law school got one, and I could use it. For the first time, I could read what I wanted to read by putting a book on the scanner. I didn't have to be nice to people! (Laughter) I no longer would be censored. For example, I was too shy then, and I'm actually too shy now, to ask anybody to read me out loud sexually explicit material. (Laughter) But, you know, I could pop a book on in the middle of the night, and — (Laughter) (Applause) Now, the Kurzweil reader is simply a program on my laptop. That's what it's shrunk to. And now I can scan the latest novel and not wait to get it into talking book libraries. I can keep up with my friends. There are many people who have helped me in my life, and many that I haven't met. One is another American inventor Ted Henter. Ted was a motorcycle racer, but in 1978 he had a car accident and lost his sight, which is devastating if you're trying to ride motorbikes. He then turned to being a waterskier and was a champion disabled waterskier. But in 1989, he teamed up with Bill Joyce to develop a program that would read out what was on the computer screen from the Net or from what was on the computer. It's called JAWS, Job Access With Speech, and it sounds like this. (JAWS speaking) Ron McCallum: Isn't that slow? (Laughter) You see, if I read like that, I'd fall asleep. I slowed it down for you. I'm going to ask that we play it at the speed I read it. Can we play that one? (JAWS speaking) (Laughter) RM: You know, when you're marking student essays, you want to get through them fairly quickly. (Laughter) (Applause) This technology that fascinated me in 1987 is now on my iPhone and on yours as well. But, you know, I find reading with machines a very lonely process. I grew up with family, friends, reading to me, and I loved the warmth and the breath and the closeness of people reading. Do you love being read to? And one of my most enduring memories is in 1999, Mary reading to me and the children down near Manly Beach "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." Isn't that a great book? I still love being close to someone reading to me. But I wouldn't give up the technology, because it's allowed me to lead a great life. Of course, talking books for the blind predated all this technology. After all, the long-playing record was developed in the early 1930s, and now we put talking books on CDs using the digital access system known as DAISY. But when I'm reading with synthetic voices, I love to come home and read a racy novel with a real voice. Now there are still barriers in front of we people with disabilities. Many websites we can't read using JAWS and the other technologies. Websites are often very visual, and there are all these sorts of graphs that aren't labeled and buttons that aren't labeled, and that's why the World Wide Web Consortium 3, known as W3C, has developed worldwide standards for the Internet. And we want all Internet users or Internet site owners to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision can have a level playing field. There are other barriers brought about by our laws. For example, Australia, like about one third of the world's countries, has copyright exceptions which allow books to be brailled or read for we blind persons. But those books can't travel across borders. For example, in Spain, there are a 100,000 accessible books in Spanish. In Argentina, there are 50,000. In no other Latin American country are there more than a couple of thousand. But it's not legal to transport the books from Spain to Latin America. There are hundreds of thousands of accessible books in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, etc., but they can't be transported to the 60 countries in our world where English is the first and the second language. And remember I was telling you about Harry Potter. Well, because we can't transport books across borders, there had to be separate versions read in all the different English-speaking countries: Britain, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all had to have separate readings of Harry Potter. And that's why, next month in Morocco, a meeting is taking place between all the countries. It's something that a group of countries and the World Blind Union are advocating, a cross-border treaty so that if books are available under a copyright exception and the other country has a copyright exception, we can transport those books across borders and give life to people, particularly in developing countries, blind people who don't have the books to read. I want that to happen. (Applause) My life has been extraordinarily blessed with marriage and children and certainly interesting work to do, whether it be at the University of Sydney Law School, where I served a term as dean, or now as I sit on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in Geneva. I've indeed been a very fortunate human being. I wonder what the future will hold. The technology will advance even further, but I can still remember my mum saying, 60 years ago, "Remember, darling, you'll never be able to read the print with your fingers." I'm so glad that the interaction between braille transcribers, volunteer readers and passionate inventors, has allowed this dream of reading to come true for me and for blind people throughout the world. I'd like to thank my researcher Hannah Martin, who is my slide clicker, who clicks the slides, and my wife, Professor Mary Crock, who's the light of my life, is coming on to collect me. I want to thank her too. I think I have to say goodbye now. Bless you. Thank you very much. (Applause) Yay! (Applause) Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. (Applause) |
3 reasons we still haven’t gotten rid of malaria | {0: 'Science historian Sonia Shah explores the surprisingly fascinating story behind an ancient scourge: malaria.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | So over the long course of human history, the infectious disease that's killed more humans than any other is malaria. It's carried in the bites of infected mosquitos, and it's probably our oldest scourge. We may have had malaria since we evolved from the apes. And to this day, malaria takes a huge toll on our species. We've got 300 million cases a year and over half a million deaths. Now this really makes no sense. We've known how to cure malaria since the 1600s. That's when Jesuit missionaries in Peru discovered the bark of the cinchona tree, and inside that bark was quinine, still an effective cure for malaria to this day. So we've known how to cure malaria for centuries. We've known how to prevent malaria since 1897. That's when the British army surgeon Ronald Ross discovered that it was mosquitos that carried malaria, not bad air or miasmas, as was previously thought. So malaria should be a relatively simple disease to solve, and yet to this day, hundreds of thousands of people are going to die from the bite of a mosquito. Why is that? This is a question that's personally intrigued me for a long time. I grew up as the daughter of Indian immigrants visiting my cousins in India every summer, and because I had no immunity to the local malarias, I was made to sleep under this hot, sweaty mosquito net every night while my cousins, they were allowed to sleep out on the terrace and have this nice, cool night breeze wafting over them. And I really hated the mosquitos for that. But at the same time, I come from a Jain family, and Jainism is a religion that espouses a very extreme form of nonviolence. So Jains are not supposed to eat meat. We're not supposed to walk on grass, because you could, you know, inadvertently kill some insects when you walk on grass. We're certainly not supposed to swat mosquitos. So the fearsome power of this little insect was apparent to me from a very young age, and it's one reason why I spent five years as a journalist trying to understand, why has malaria been such a horrible scourge for all of us for so very long? And I think there's three main reasons why. Those three reasons add up to the fourth reason, which is probably the biggest reason of all. The first reason is certainly scientific. This little parasite that causes malaria, it's probably one of the most complex and wily pathogens known to humankind. It lives half its life inside the cold-blooded mosquito and half its life inside the warm-blooded human. These two environments are totally different, but not only that, they're both utterly hostile. So the insect is continually trying to fight off the parasite, and so is the human body continually trying to fight it off. This little creature survives under siege like that, but not only does it survive, it has thrived. It has spread. It has more ways to evade attack than we know. It's a shape-shifter, for one thing. Just as a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, the malaria parasite transforms itself like that seven times in its life cycle. And each of those life stages not only looks totally different from each other, they have totally different physiology. So say you came up with some great drug that worked against one stage of the parasite's life cycle. It might do nothing at all to any of the other stages. It can hide in our bodies, undetected, unbeknownst to us, for days, for weeks, for months, for years, in some cases even decades. So the parasite is a very big scientific challenge to tackle, but so is the mosquito that carries the parasite. Only about 12 species of mosquitos carry most of the world's malaria, and we know quite a bit about the kinds of watery habitats that they specialize in. So you might think, then, well, why don't we just avoid the places where the killer mosquitos live? Right? We could avoid the places where the killer grizzly bears live and we avoid the places where the killer crocodiles live. But say you live in the tropics and you walk outside your hut one day and you leave some footprints in the soft dirt around your home. Or say your cow does, or say your pig does, and then, say, it rains, and that footprint fills up with a little bit of water. That's it. You've created the perfect malarial mosquito habitat that's right outside your door. So it's not easy for us to extricate ourselves from these insects. We kind of create places that they love to live just by living our own lives. So there's a huge scientific challenge, but there's a huge economic challenge too. Malaria occurs in some of the poorest and most remote places on Earth, and there's a reason for that. If you're poor, you're more likely to get malaria. If you're poor, you're more likely to live in rudimentary housing on marginal land that's poorly drained. These are places where mosquitos breed. You're less likely to have door screens or window screens. You're less likely to have electricity and all the indoor activities that electricity makes possible, so you're outside more. You're getting bitten by mosquitos more. So poverty causes malaria, but what we also know now is that malaria itself causes poverty. For one thing, it strikes hardest during harvest season, so exactly when farmers need to be out in the fields collecting their crops, they're home sick with a fever. But it also predisposes people to death from all other causes. So this has happened historically. We've been able to take malaria out of a society. Everything else stays the same, so we still have bad food, bad water, bad sanitation, all the things that make people sick. But just if you take malaria out, deaths from everything else go down. And the economist Jeff Sachs has actually quantified what this means for a society. What it means is, if you have malaria in your society, your economic growth is depressed by 1.3 percent every year, year after year after year, just this one disease alone. So this poses a huge economic challenge, because say you do come up with your great drug or your great vaccine — how do you deliver it in a place where there's no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no electricity for refrigeration to keep things cold, there's no clinics, there's no clinicians to deliver these things where they're needed? So there's a huge economic challenge in taming malaria. But along with the scientific challenge and the economic challenge, there's also a cultural challenge, and this is probably the part about malaria that people don't like to talk about. And it's the paradox that the people who have the most malaria in the world tend to care about it the least. This has been the finding of medical anthropologists again and again. They ask people in malarious parts of the world, "What do you think about malaria?" And they don't say, "It's a killer disease. We're scared of it." They say, "Malaria is a normal problem of life." And that was certainly my personal experience. When I told my relatives in India that I was writing a book about malaria, they kind of looked at me like I told them I was writing a book about warts or something. Like, why would you write about something so boring, so ordinary? You know? And it's simple risk perception, really. A child in Malawi, for example, she might have 12 episodes of malaria before the age of two, but if she survives, she'll continue to get malaria throughout her life, but she's much less likely to die of it. And so in her lived experience, malaria is something that comes and goes. And that's actually true for most of the world's malaria. Most of the world's malaria comes and goes on its own. It's just, there's so much malaria that this tiny fraction of cases that end in death add up to this big, huge number. So I think people in malarious parts of the world must think of malaria the way those of us who live in the temperate world think of cold and flu. Right? Cold and flu have a huge burden on our societies and on our own lives, but we don't really even take the most rudimentary precautions against it because we consider it normal to get cold and flu during cold and flu season. And so this poses a huge cultural challenge in taming malaria, because if people think it's normal to have malaria, then how do you get them to run to the doctor to get diagnosed, to pick up their prescription, to get it filled, to take the drugs, to put on the repellents, to tuck in the bed nets? This is a huge cultural challenge in taming this disease. So take all that together. We've got a disease. It's scientifically complicated, it's economically challenging to deal with, and it's one for which the people who stand to benefit the most care about it the least. And that adds up to the biggest problem of all, which, of course, is the political problem. How do you get a political leader to do anything about a problem like this? And the answer is, historically, you don't. Most malarious societies throughout history have simply lived with the disease. So the main attacks on malaria have come from outside of malarious societies, from people who aren't constrained by these rather paralyzing politics. But this, I think, introduces a whole host of other kinds of difficulties. The first concerted attack against malaria started in the 1950s. It was the brainchild of the U.S. State Department. And this effort well understood the economic challenge. They knew they had to focus on cheap, easy-to-use tools, and they focused on DDT. They understood the cultural challenge. In fact, their rather patronizing view was that people at risk of malaria shouldn't be asked to do anything at all. Everything should be done to them and for them. But they greatly underestimated the scientific challenge. They had so much faith in their tools that they stopped doing malaria research. And so when those tools started to fail, and public opinion started to turn against those tools, they had no scientific expertise to figure out what to do. The whole campaign crashed, malaria resurged back, but now it was even worse than before because it was corralled into the hardest-to-reach places in the most difficult-to-control forms. One WHO official at the time actually called that whole campaign "one of the greatest mistakes ever made in public health." The latest effort to tame malaria started in the late 1990s. It's similarly directed and financed primarily from outside of malarious societies. Now this effort well understands the scientific challenge. They are doing tons of malaria research. And they understand the economic challenge too. They're focusing on very cheap, very easy-to-use tools. But now, I think, the dilemma is the cultural challenge. The centerpiece of the current effort is the bed net. It's treated with insecticides. This thing has been distributed across the malarious world by the millions. And when you think about the bed net, it's sort of a surgical intervention. You know, it doesn't really have any value to a family with malaria except that it helps prevent malaria. And yet we're asking people to use these nets every night. They have to sleep under them every night. That's the only way they are effective. And they have to do that even if the net blocks the breeze, even if they might have to get up in the middle of the night and relieve themselves, even if they might have to move all their furnishings to put this thing up, even if, you know, they might live in a round hut in which it's difficult to string up a square net. Now that's no big deal if you're fighting a killer disease. I mean, these are minor inconveniences. But that's not how people with malaria think of malaria. So for them, the calculus must be quite different. Imagine, for example, if a bunch of well-meaning Kenyans came up to those of us in the temperate world and said, "You know, you people have a lot of cold and flu. We've designed this great, easy-to-use, cheap tool, we're going to give it to you for free. It's called a face mask, and all you need to do is wear it every day during cold and flu season when you go to school and when you go to work." Would we do that? And I wonder if that's how people in the malarious world thought of those nets when they first received them? Indeed, we know from studies that only 20 percent of the bed nets that were first distributed were actually used. And even that's probably an overestimate, because the same people who distributed the nets went back and asked the recipients, "Oh, did you use that net I gave you?" Which is like your Aunt Jane asking you, "Oh, did you use that vase I gave you for Christmas?" So it's probably an overestimate. But that's not an insurmountable problem. We can do more education, we can try to convince these people to use the nets. And that's what happening now. We're throwing a lot more time and money into workshops and trainings and musicals and plays and school meetings, all these things to convince people to use the nets we gave you. And that might work. But it takes time. It takes money. It takes resources. It takes infrastructure. It takes all the things that that cheap, easy-to-use bed net was not supposed to be. So it's difficult to attack malaria from inside malarious societies, but it's equally tricky when we try to attack it from outside of those societies. We end up imposing our own priorities on the people of the malarious world. That's exactly what we did in the 1950s, and that effort backfired. I would argue today, when we are distributing tools that we've designed and that don't necessarily make sense in people's lives, we run the risk of making the same mistake again. That's not to say that malaria is unconquerable, because I think it is, but what if we attacked this disease according to the priorities of the people who lived with it? Take the example of England and the United States. We had malaria in those countries for hundreds of years, and we got rid of it completely, not because we attacked malaria. We didn't. We attacked bad roads and bad houses and bad drainage and lack of electricity and rural poverty. We attacked the malarious way of life, and by doing that, we slowly built malaria out. Now attacking the malarious way of life, this is something — these are things people care about today. And attacking the malarious way of life, it's not fast, it's not cheap, it's not easy, but I think it's the only lasting way forward. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
The art of misdirection | {0: 'Apollo Robbins will take the phone from your pocket and the ring off your finger, then hand them back to you and (maybe) show you how he did it.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Do you think it's possible to control someone's attention? Even more than that, what about predicting human behavior? I think those are interesting ideas. For me, that would be the perfect superpower, actually kind of an evil way of approaching it. But for myself, in the past, I've spent the last 20 years studying human behavior from a rather unorthodox way: picking pockets. When we think of misdirection, we think of something as looking off to the side, when actually the things right in front of us are often the hardest to see, the things that you look at every day that you're blinded to. For example, how many of you still have your cell phones on you right now? Great. Double-check. Make sure you still have them. I was doing some shopping before. (Laughter) You've looked at them a few times today, but I'll ask you a question. Without looking at it directly yet, can you remember the icon in the bottom right corner? Bring them out, check and see how accurate you were. How'd you do? Show of hands. Did we get it? Now that you're done, close them down. Every phone has something in common. No matter how you organize the icons, you still have a clock on the front. So, without looking at your phone, what time was it? You just looked at your clock, right? Interesting idea. Let's take that a step further with a game of trust. Close your eyes. I realize I'm asking you to do that while you just heard there's a pickpocket in the room, but close your eyes. Now, you've been watching me for about 30 seconds. With your eyes closed, what am I wearing? Make your best guess. What color is my shirt? What color is my tie? Now open your eyes. Show of hands, were you right? Interesting, isn't it? Some of us are a little bit more perceptive than others, it seems. But I have a different theory about that model of attention. They have fancy models of attention, Posner's trinity model of attention. For me, I like to think of it very simple, like a surveillance system. It's kind of like you have all these fancy sensors, and inside your brain is a little security guard. For me, I like to call him Frank. So Frank is sitting at a desk. He's got lots of cool information in front of him, high-tech equipment, he's got cameras, he's got a little phone that he can pick up, listen to the ears, all these senses, all these perceptions. But attention is what steers your perceptions, it's what controls your reality. It's the gateway to the mind. If you don't attend to something, you can't be aware of it. But ironically, you can attend to something without being aware of it. For example, the cocktail effect: You're in a party, having conversations with someone, and yet you can recognize your name without realizing you were listening to that. Now, for my job, I have to play with techniques to exploit this, to play with your attention as a limited resource. So if I could control how you spend your attention, if I could maybe steal your attention through a distraction. Now, instead of doing it like misdirection and throwing it off to the side, instead, what I choose to focus on is Frank, to be able to play with the Frank inside your head, your security guard, and get you, instead of focusing on your external senses, just to go internal for a second. So if I ask you to access a memory, like, what is that? What just happened? Do you have a wallet? Do you have an American Express in your wallet? And when I do that, your Frank turns around. He accesses the file. He has to rewind the tape. What's interesting is, he can't rewind the tape at the same time that he's trying to process new data. This sounds like a good theory, but I could talk for a long time, tell you lots of things, and a portion of them may be true, but I think it's better if I tried to show that to you here live. If I come down, I'm going to do a bit of shopping. Just hold still where you are. Hello, how are you? It's lovely to see you. Wonderful job onstage. Lovely watch, it doesn't come off very well. Do you have a ring as well? Good. Just taking inventory. You're like a buffet. Hard to tell where to start, so many great things. Hi, how are you? Good to see you. Hi, sir, could you stand up, please? Just right where you are. You're married, you follow directions well. Nice to meet you, sir. You don't have a lot in your pockets. Anything down here? Hopefully so. Have a seat. There you go. You're doing well. Hi, sir, how are you? Good to see you, sir. You have a ring, a watch. Do you have a wallet on you? Joe: I don't. AR: Well, we'll find one for you. Come on up this way, Joe. Give Joe a round of applause. Come on up, Joe. Let's play a game. (Applause) AR: Pardon me. I don't think I need this clicker anymore. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Come on up to the stage, Joe. Let's play a little game now. Anything in your front pockets? J: Money. AR: Money! All right, let's try that. Can you stand right over this way for me? Turn around and, let's see, if I give you something that belongs to me, this is just something I have, a poker chip. Hold out your hand for me. Watch it closely. This is a task for you to focus on. You have your money in your front pocket? J: Yup. AR: Good. I won't put my hand in your pocket. I'm not ready for that kind of commitment. Once a guy had a hole in his pocket, and that was rather traumatizing for me. I wanted his wallet, he gave me his number. Big miscommunication. (Laughter) Let's do this simply. Squeeze your hand tight. Do you feel the poker chip in your hand? J: I do. AR: Would you be surprised if I took it? Say yes. J: Very. AR: Good. Open your hand. Thank you very much. I'll cheat if you give me a chance. Make it harder for me. Just use your hand. Grab my wrist, but squeeze, squeeze firm. Did you see it go? Joe: No. AR: No, it's not here. Open your hand. While we're focused on the hand, it's sitting on your shoulder. Go ahead and take it off. Now, let's try that again. Hold your hand out flat. Open it up. Put your hand up a little bit higher, but watch it close. If I did it slowly, it'd be on your shoulder. (Laughter) Joe, we're going to keep doing this till you catch it. You'll get it eventually. I have faith in you. Squeeze firm. You're human, you're not slow. It's back on your shoulder. You were focused on your hand, distracted. While you were watching, I couldn't get your watch off. Yet you had something inside your pocket. Do you remember what it was? J: Money. AR: Check your pocket. Is it still there? (Laughter) Oh, there it was. Put it away. We're just shopping. This trick's more about the timing. I'm going to try to push it inside your hand. Put your other hand on top, would you? It's amazingly obvious now, isn't it? Looks a lot like the watch I was wearing, doesn't it? (Laughter) (Applause) J: That's pretty good. AR: Oh, thanks. (Applause) But it's only a start. Let's try it a little bit differently. Hold your hands together. Your other hand on top. If you're watching this little token, this obviously has become a little target, like a red herring. If we watch this kind of close, it looks like it goes away. It's not back on your shoulder. It falls out of the air, lands right back in the hand. Did you see it go? Yeah, funny. We've got a little guy. He's union, works up there all day. If I do it slowly it goes straight away, it lands by your pocket. Is it in this pocket, sir? Don't reach in your pocket. That's a different show. (Squeaking) That's rather strange. They have shots for that. Can I show them? Rather bizarre. Is this yours, sir? I have no idea how that works. We'll send that over there. I need help with this one. Step over this way for me. Don't run away. You had something down by your pants pocket. I was checking mine. I couldn't find everything, but I noticed you had something here. Can I feel the outside for a moment? Down here I noticed this. Is this something of yours, sir? I have no idea. That's a shrimp. J: Yeah. I'm saving it for later. AR: You've entertained all of these people in a wonderful way, better than you know. So we'd love to give you this lovely watch as a gift. (Laughter) Hopefully it matches his taste. We have a couple of other things, a little bit of cash. And we have a few other things, these all belong to you, along with a big round of applause from all your friends. (Applause) Joe, thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause ends) So, same question I asked you before, but this time you don't have to close your eyes. What am I wearing? Audience: Oh! (Laughter) (Hesitant applause) (Applause ends) Attention is a powerful thing. Like I said, it shapes your reality. So, I guess I'd like to pose that question to you. If you could control somebody's attention, what would you do with it? Thank you. (Applause) |
Everyday cybercrime -- and what you can do about it | {0: 'Whether he’s taking on insecure hotspots, inept passwords, or lax OS designers, James Lyne exposes technology’s vulnerabilities while elevating the security awareness of everyday users.'} | TED2013 | I'm going to be showing some of the cybercriminals' latest and nastiest creations. So basically, please don't go and download any of the viruses that I show you. Some of you might be wondering what a cybersecurity specialist looks like, and I thought I'd give you a quick insight into my career so far. It's a pretty accurate description. This is what someone that specializes in malware and hacking looks like. So today, computer viruses and trojans, designed to do everything from stealing data to watching you in your webcam to the theft of billions of dollars. Some malicious code today goes as far as targeting power, utilities and infrastructure. Let me give you a quick snapshot of what malicious code is capable of today. Right now, every second, eight new users are joining the Internet. Today, we will see 250,000 individual new computer viruses. We will see 30,000 new infected websites. And, just to kind of tear down a myth here, lots of people think that when you get infected with a computer virus, it's because you went to a porn site. Right? Well, actually, statistically speaking, if you only visit porn sites, you're safer. People normally write that down, by the way. (Laughter) Actually, about 80 percent of these are small business websites getting infected. Today's cybercriminal, what do they look like? Well, many of you have the image, don't you, of the spotty teenager sitting in a basement, hacking away for notoriety. But actually today, cybercriminals are wonderfully professional and organized. In fact, they have product adverts. You can go online and buy a hacking service to knock your business competitor offline. Check out this one I found. (Video) Man: So you're here for one reason, and that reason is because you need your business competitors, rivals, haters, or whatever the reason is, or who, they are to go down. Well you, my friend, you've came to the right place. If you want your business competitors to go down, well, they can. If you want your rivals to go offline, well, they will. Not only that, we are providing a short-term-to-long-term DDOS service or scheduled attack, starting five dollars per hour for small personal websites to 10 to 50 dollars per hour. James Lyne: Now, I did actually pay one of these cybercriminals to attack my own website. Things got a bit tricky when I tried to expense it at the company. Turns out that's not cool. But regardless, it's amazing how many products and services are available now to cybercriminals. For example, this testing platform, which enables the cybercriminals to test the quality of their viruses before they release them on the world. For a small fee, they can upload it and make sure everything is good. But it goes further. Cybercriminals now have crime packs with business intelligence reporting dashboards to manage the distribution of their malicious code. This is the market leader in malware distribution, the Black Hole Exploit Pack, responsible for nearly one third of malware distribution in the last couple of quarters. It comes with technical installation guides, video setup routines, and get this, technical support. You can email the cybercriminals and they'll tell you how to set up your illegal hacking server. So let me show you what malicious code looks like today. What I've got here is two systems, an attacker, which I've made look all Matrix-y and scary, and a victim, which you might recognize from home or work. Now normally, these would be on different sides of the planet or of the Internet, but I've put them side by side because it makes things much more interesting. Now, there are many ways you can get infected. You will have come in contact with some of them. Maybe some of you have received an email that says something like, "Hi, I'm a Nigerian banker, and I'd like to give you 53 billion dollars because I like your face." Or funnycats.exe, which rumor has it was quite successful in China's recent campaign against America. Now there are many ways you can get infected. I want to show you a couple of my favorites. This is a little USB key. Now how do you get a USB key to run in a business? Well, you could try looking really cute. Awww. Or, in my case, awkward and pathetic. So imagine this scenario: I walk into one of your businesses, looking very awkward and pathetic, with a copy of my C.V. which I've covered in coffee, and I ask the receptionist to plug in this USB key and print me a new one. So let's have a look here on my victim computer. What I'm going to do is plug in the USB key. After a couple of seconds, things start to happen on the computer on their own, usually a bad sign. This would, of course, normally happen in a couple of seconds, really, really quickly, but I've kind of slowed it down so you can actually see the attack occurring. Malware is very boring otherwise. So this is writing out the malicious code, and a few seconds later, on the left-hand side, you'll see the attacker's screen get some interesting new text. Now if I place the mouse cursor over it, this is what we call a command prompt, and using this we can navigate around the computer. We can access your documents, your data. You can turn on the webcam. That can be very embarrassing. Or just to really prove a point, we can launch programs like my personal favorite, the Windows Calculator. So isn't it amazing how much control the attackers can get with such a simple operation? Let me show you how most malware is now distributed today. What I'm going to do is open up a website that I wrote. It's a terrible website. It's got really awful graphics. And it's got a comments section here where we can submit comments to the website. Many of you will have used something a bit like this before. Unfortunately, when this was implemented, the developer was slightly inebriated and managed to forget all of the secure coding practices he had learned. So let's imagine that our attacker, called Evil Hacker just for comedy value, inserts something a little nasty. This is a script. It's code which will be interpreted on the webpage. So I'm going to submit this post, and then, on my victim computer, I'm going to open up the web browser and browse to my website, www.incrediblyhacked.com. Notice that after a couple of seconds, I get redirected. That website address at the top there, which you can just about see, microshaft.com, the browser crashes as it hits one of these exploit packs, and up pops fake antivirus. This is a virus pretending to look like antivirus software, and it will go through and it will scan the system, have a look at what its popping up here. It creates some very serious alerts. Oh look, a child porn proxy server. We really should clean that up. What's really insulting about this is not only does it provide the attackers with access to your data, but when the scan finishes, they tell you in order to clean up the fake viruses, you have to register the product. Now I liked it better when viruses were free. (Laughter) People now pay cybercriminals money to run viruses, which I find utterly bizarre. So anyway, let me change pace a little bit. Chasing 250,000 pieces of malware a day is a massive challenge, and those numbers are only growing directly in proportion to the length of my stress line, you'll note here. So I want to talk to you briefly about a group of hackers we tracked for a year and actually found — and this is a rare treat in our job. Now this was a cross-industry collaboration, people from Facebook, independent researchers, guys from Sophos. So here we have a couple of documents which our cybercriminals had uploaded to a cloud service, kind of like Dropbox or SkyDrive, like many of you might use. At the top, you'll notice a section of source code. What this would do is send the cybercriminals a text message every day telling them how much money they'd made that day, so a kind of cybercriminal billings report, if you will. If you look closely, you'll notice a series of what are Russian telephone numbers. Now that's obviously interesting, because that gives us a way of finding our cybercriminals. Down below, highlighted in red, in the other section of source code, is this bit "leded:leded." That's a username, kind of like you might have on Twitter. So let's take this a little further. There are a few other interesting pieces the cybercriminals had uploaded. Lots of you here will use smartphones to take photos and post them from the conference. An interesting feature of lots of modern smartphones is that when you take a photo, it embeds GPS data about where that photo was taken. In fact, I've been spending a lot of time on Internet dating sites recently, obviously for research purposes, and I've noticed that about 60 percent of the profile pictures on Internet dating sites contain the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken, which is kind of scary because you wouldn't give out your home address to lots of strangers, but we're happy to give away our GPS coordinates to plus or minus 15 meters. And our cybercriminals had done the same thing. So here's a photo which resolves to St. Petersburg. We then deploy the incredibly advanced hacking tool. We used Google. Using the email address, the telephone number and the GPS data, on the left you see an advert for a BMW that one of our cybercriminals is selling, on the other side an advert for the sale of sphynx kittens. One of these was more stereotypical for me. A little more searching, and here's our cybercriminal. Imagine, these are hardened cybercriminals sharing information scarcely. Imagine what you could find about each of the people in this room. A bit more searching through the profile and there's a photo of their office. They were working on the third floor. And you can also see some photos from his business companion where he has a taste in a certain kind of image. It turns out he's a member of the Russian Adult Webmasters Federation. But this is where our investigation starts to slow down. The cybercriminals have locked down their profiles quite well. And herein is the greatest lesson of social media and mobile devices for all of us right now. Our friends, our families and our colleagues can break our security even when we do the right things. This is MobSoft, one of the companies that this cybercriminal gang owned, and an interesting thing about MobSoft is the 50-percent owner of this posted a job advert, and this job advert matched one of the telephone numbers from the code earlier. This woman was Maria, and Maria is the wife of one of our cybercriminals. And it's kind of like she went into her social media settings and clicked on every option imaginable to make herself really, really insecure. By the end of the investigation, where you can read the full 27-page report at that link, we had photos of the cybercriminals, even the office Christmas party when they were out on an outing. That's right, cybercriminals do have Christmas parties, as it turns out. Now you're probably wondering what happened to these guys. Let me come back to that in just a minute. I want to change pace to one last little demonstration, a technique that is wonderfully simple and basic, but is interesting in exposing how much information we're all giving away, and it's relevant because it applies to us as a TED audience. This is normally when people start kind of shuffling in their pockets trying to turn their phones onto airplane mode desperately. Many of you all know about the concept of scanning for wireless networks. You do it every time you take out your iPhone or your Blackberry and connect to something like TEDAttendees. But what you might not know is that you're also beaming out a list of networks you've previously connected to, even when you're not using wireless actively. So I ran a little scan. I was relatively inhibited compared to the cybercriminals, who wouldn't be so concerned by law, and here you can see my mobile device. Okay? So you can see a list of wireless networks. TEDAttendees, HyattLB. Where do you think I'm staying? My home network, PrettyFlyForAWifi, which I think is a great name. Sophos_Visitors, SANSEMEA, companies I work with. Loganwifi, that's in Boston. HiltonLondon. CIASurveillanceVan. We called it that at one of our conferences because we thought that would freak people out, which is quite fun. This is how geeks party. So let's make this a little bit more interesting. Let's talk about you. Twenty-three percent of you have been to Starbucks recently and used the wireless network. Things get more interesting. Forty-six percent of you I could link to a business, XYZ Employee network. This isn't an exact science, but it gets pretty accurate. Seven hundred and sixty-one of you I could identify a hotel you'd been to recently, absolutely with pinpoint precision somewhere on the globe. Two hundred and thirty-four of you, well, I know where you live. Your wireless network name is so unique that I was able to pinpoint it using data available openly on the Internet with no hacking or clever, clever tricks. And I should mention as well that some of you do use your names, "James Lyne's iPhone," for example. And two percent of you have a tendency to extreme profanity. So something for you to think about: As we adopt these new applications and mobile devices, as we play with these shiny new toys, how much are we trading off convenience for privacy and security? Next time you install something, look at the settings and ask yourself, "Is this information that I want to share? Would someone be able to abuse it?" We also need to think very carefully about how we develop our future talent pool. You see, technology's changing at a staggering rate, and that 250,000 pieces of malware won't stay the same for long. There's a very concerning trend that whilst many people coming out of schools now are much more technology-savvy, they know how to use technology, fewer and fewer people are following the feeder subjects to know how that technology works under the covers. In the U.K., a 60 percent reduction since 2003, and there are similar statistics all over the world. We also need to think about the legal issues in this area. The cybercriminals I talked about, despite theft of millions of dollars, actually still haven't been arrested, and at this point possibly never will. Most laws are national in their implementation, despite cybercrime conventions, where the Internet is borderless and international by definition. Countries do not agree, which makes this area exceptionally challenging from a legal perspective. But my biggest ask is this: You see, you're going to leave here and you're going to see some astonishing stories in the news. You're going to read about malware doing incredible and terrifying, scary things. However, 99 percent of it works because people fail to do the basics. So my ask is this: Go online, find these simple best practices, find out how to update and patch your computer. Get a secure password. Make sure you use a different password on each of your sites and services online. Find these resources. Apply them. The Internet is a fantastic resource for business, for political expression, for art and for learning. Help me and the security community make life much, much more difficult for cybercriminals. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why bees are disappearing | {0: 'Marla Spivak researches bees’ behavior and biology in an effort to preserve this threatened, but ecologically essential, insect.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | This is our life with bees, and this is our life without bees. Bees are the most important pollinators of our fruits and vegetables and flowers and crops like alfalfa hay that feed our farm animals. More than one third of the world's crop production is dependent on bee pollination. But the ironic thing is that bees are not out there pollinating our food intentionally. They're out there because they need to eat. Bees get all of the protein they need in their diet from pollen and all of the carbohydrates they need from nectar. They're flower-feeders, and as they move from flower to flower, basically on a shopping trip at the local floral mart, they end up providing this valuable pollination service. In parts of the world where there are no bees, or where they plant varieties that are not attractive to bees, people are paid to do the business of pollination by hand. These people are moving pollen from flower to flower with a paintbrush. Now this business of hand pollination is actually not that uncommon. Tomato growers often pollinate their tomato flowers with a hand-held vibrator. Now this one's the tomato tickler. (Laughter) Now this is because the pollen within a tomato flower is held very securely within the male part of the flower, the anther, and the only way to release this pollen is to vibrate it. So bumblebees are one of the few kinds of bees in the world that are able to hold onto the flower and vibrate it, and they do this by shaking their flight muscles at a frequency similar to the musical note C. So they vibrate the flower, they sonicate it, and that releases the pollen in this efficient swoosh, and the pollen gathers all over the fuzzy bee's body, and she takes it home as food. Tomato growers now put bumblebee colonies inside the greenhouse to pollinate the tomatoes because they get much more efficient pollination when it's done naturally and they get better quality tomatoes. So there's other, maybe more personal reasons, to care about bees. There's over 20,000 species of bees in the world, and they're absolutely gorgeous. These bees spend the majority of their life cycle hidden in the ground or within a hollow stem and very few of these beautiful species have evolved highly social behavior like honeybees. Now honeybees tend to be the charismatic representative for the other 19,900-plus species because there's something about honeybees that draws people into their world. Humans have been drawn to honeybees since early recorded history, mostly to harvest their honey, which is an amazing natural sweetener. I got drawn into the honeybee world completely by a fluke. I was 18 years old and bored, and I picked up a book in the library on bees and I spent the night reading it. I had never thought about insects living in complex societies. It was like the best of science fiction come true. And even stranger, there were these people, these beekeepers, that loved their bees like they were family, and when I put down the book, I knew I had to see this for myself. So I went to work for a commercial beekeeper, a family that owned 2,000 hives of bees in New Mexico. And I was permanently hooked. Honeybees can be considered a super-organism, where the colony is the organism and it's comprised of 40,000 to 50,000 individual bee organisms. Now this society has no central authority. Nobody's in charge. So how they come to collective decisions, and how they allocate their tasks and divide their labor, how they communicate where the flowers are, all of their collective social behaviors are mindblowing. My personal favorite, and one that I've studied for many years, is their system of healthcare. So bees have social healthcare. So in my lab, we study how bees keep themselves healthy. For example, we study hygiene, where some bees are able to locate and weed out sick individuals from the nest, from the colony, and it keeps the colony healthy. And more recently, we've been studying resins that bees collect from plants. So bees fly to some plants and they scrape these very, very sticky resins off the leaves, and they take them back to the nest where they cement them into the nest architecture where we call it propolis. We've found that propolis is a natural disinfectant. It's a natural antibiotic. It kills off bacteria and molds and other germs within the colony, and so it bolsters the colony health and their social immunity. Humans have known about the power of propolis since biblical times. We've been harvesting propolis out of bee colonies for human medicine, but we didn't know how good it was for the bees. So honeybees have these remarkable natural defenses that have kept them healthy and thriving for over 50 million years. So seven years ago, when honeybee colonies were reported to be dying en masse, first in the United States, it was clear that there was something really, really wrong. In our collective conscience, in a really primal way, we know we can't afford to lose bees. So what's going on? Bees are dying from multiple and interacting causes, and I'll go through each of these. The bottom line is, bees dying reflects a flowerless landscape and a dysfunctional food system. Now we have the best data on honeybees, so I'll use them as an example. In the United States, bees in fact have been in decline since World War II. We have half the number of managed hives in the United States now compared to 1945. We're down to about two million hives of bees, we think. And the reason is, after World War II, we changed our farming practices. We stopped planting cover crops. We stopped planting clover and alfalfa, which are natural fertilizers that fix nitrogen in the soil, and instead we started using synthetic fertilizers. Clover and alfalfa are highly nutritious food plants for bees. And after World War II, we started using herbicides to kill off the weeds in our farms. Many of these weeds are flowering plants that bees require for their survival. And we started growing larger and larger crop monocultures. Now we talk about food deserts, places in our cities, neighborhoods that have no grocery stores. The very farms that used to sustain bees are now agricultural food deserts, dominated by one or two plant species like corn and soybeans. Since World War II, we have been systematically eliminating many of the flowering plants that bees need for their survival. And these monocultures extend even to crops that are good for bees, like almonds. Fifty years ago, beekeepers would take a few colonies, hives of bees into the almond orchards, for pollination, and also because the pollen in an almond blossom is really high in protein. It's really good for bees. Now, the scale of almond monoculture demands that most of our nation's bees, over 1.5 million hives of bees, be transported across the nation to pollinate this one crop. And they're trucked in in semi-loads, and they must be trucked out, because after bloom, the almond orchards are a vast and flowerless landscape. Bees have been dying over the last 50 years, and we're planting more crops that need them. There has been a 300 percent increase in crop production that requires bee pollination. And then there's pesticides. After World War II, we started using pesticides on a large scale, and this became necessary because of the monocultures that put out a feast for crop pests. Recently, researchers from Penn State University have started looking at the pesticide residue in the loads of pollen that bees carry home as food, and they've found that every batch of pollen that a honeybee collects has at least six detectable pesticides in it, and this includes every class of insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and even inert and unlabeled ingredients that are part of the pesticide formulation that can be more toxic than the active ingredient. This small bee is holding up a large mirror. How much is it going to take to contaminate humans? One of these class of insecticides, the neonicontinoids, is making headlines around the world right now. You've probably heard about it. This is a new class of insecticides. It moves through the plant so that a crop pest, a leaf-eating insect, would take a bite of the plant and get a lethal dose and die. If one of these neonics, we call them, is applied in a high concentration, such as in this ground application, enough of the compound moves through the plant and gets into the pollen and the nectar, where a bee can consume, in this case, a high dose of this neurotoxin that makes the bee twitch and die. In most agricultural settings, on most of our farms, it's only the seed that's coated with the insecticide, and so a smaller concentration moves through the plant and gets into the pollen and nectar, and if a bee consumes this lower dose, either nothing happens or the bee becomes intoxicated and disoriented and she may not find her way home. And on top of everything else, bees have their own set of diseases and parasites. Public enemy number one for bees is this thing. It's called varroa destructor. It's aptly named. It's this big, blood-sucking parasite that compromises the bee's immune system and circulates viruses. Let me put this all together for you. I don't know what it feels like to a bee to have a big, bloodsucking parasite running around on it, and I don't know what it feels like to a bee to have a virus, but I do know what it feels like when I have a virus, the flu, and I know how difficult it is for me to get to the grocery store to get good nutrition. But what if I lived in a food desert? And what if I had to travel a long distance to get to the grocery store, and I finally got my weak body out there and I consumed, in my food, enough of a pesticide, a neurotoxin, that I couldn't find my way home? And this is what we mean by multiple and interacting causes of death. And it's not just our honeybees. All of our beautiful wild species of bees are at risk, including those tomato-pollinating bumblebees. These bees are providing backup for our honeybees. They're providing the pollination insurance alongside our honeybees. We need all of our bees. So what are we going to do? What are we going to do about this big bee bummer that we've created? It turns out, it's hopeful. It's hopeful. Every one of you out there can help bees in two very direct and easy ways. Plant bee-friendly flowers, and don't contaminate these flowers, this bee food, with pesticides. So go online and search for flowers that are native to your area and plant them. Plant them in a pot on your doorstep. Plant them in your front yard, in your lawns, in your boulevards. Campaign to have them planted in public gardens, community spaces, meadows. Set aside farmland. We need a beautiful diversity of flowers that blooms over the entire growing season, from spring to fall. We need roadsides seeded in flowers for our bees, but also for migrating butterflies and birds and other wildlife. And we need to think carefully about putting back in cover crops to nourish our soil and nourish our bees. And we need to diversify our farms. We need to plant flowering crop borders and hedge rows to disrupt the agricultural food desert and begin to correct the dysfunctional food system that we've created. So maybe it seems like a really small countermeasure to a big, huge problem — just go plant flowers — but when bees have access to good nutrition, we have access to good nutrition through their pollination services. And when bees have access to good nutrition, they're better able to engage their own natural defenses, their healthcare, that they have relied on for millions of years. So the beauty of helping bees this way, for me, is that every one of us needs to behave a little bit more like a bee society, an insect society, where each of our individual actions can contribute to a grand solution, an emergent property, that's much greater than the mere sum of our individual actions. So let the small act of planting flowers and keeping them free of pesticides be the driver of large-scale change. On behalf of the bees, thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. Just a quick question. The latest numbers on the die-off of bees, is there any sign of things bottoming out? What's your hope/depression level on this? Maria Spivak: Yeah. At least in the United States, an average of 30 percent of all bee hives are lost every winter. About 20 years ago, we were at a 15-percent loss. So it's getting precarious. CA: That's not 30 percent a year, that's — MS: Yes, thirty percent a year. CA: Thirty percent a year. MS: But then beekeepers are able to divide their colonies and so they can maintain the same number, they can recuperate some of their loss. We're kind of at a tipping point. We can't really afford to lose that many more. We need to be really appreciative of all the beekeepers out there. Plant flowers. CA: Thank you. (Applause) |
Mapping ideas worth spreading | {0: 'TED Senior Fellow Eric Berlow studies ecology and networks, exposing the interconnectedness of our ecosystems with climate change, government, corporations and more. ', 1: 'Sean Gourley, trained as a physicist, has turned his scientific mind to analyzing data about a messier topic: modern war and conflict. He is a TED Fellow.'} | TED2013 | Eric Berlow: I'm an ecologist, and Sean's a physicist, and we both study complex networks. And we met a couple years ago when we discovered that we had both given a short TED Talk about the ecology of war, and we realized that we were connected by the ideas we shared before we ever met. And then we thought, you know, there are thousands of other talks out there, especially TEDx Talks, that are popping up all over the world. How are they connected, and what does that global conversation look like? So Sean's going to tell you a little bit about how we did that. Sean Gourley: Exactly. So we took 24,000 TEDx Talks from around the world, 147 different countries, and we took these talks and we wanted to find the mathematical structures that underly the ideas behind them. And we wanted to do that so we could see how they connected with each other. And so, of course, if you're going to do this kind of stuff, you need a lot of data. So the data that you've got is a great thing called YouTube, and we can go down and basically pull all the open information from YouTube, all the comments, all the views, who's watching it, where are they watching it, what are they saying in the comments. But we can also pull up, using speech-to-text translation, we can pull the entire transcript, and that works even for people with kind of funny accents like myself. So we can take their transcript and actually do some pretty cool things. We can take natural language processing algorithms to kind of read through with a computer, line by line, extracting key concepts from this. And we take those key concepts and they sort of form this mathematical structure of an idea. And we call that the meme-ome. And the meme-ome, you know, quite simply, is the mathematics that underlies an idea, and we can do some pretty interesting analysis with it, which I want to share with you now. So each idea has its own meme-ome, and each idea is unique with that, but of course, ideas, they borrow from each other, they kind of steal sometimes, and they certainly build on each other, and we can go through mathematically and take the meme-ome from one talk and compare it to the meme-ome from every other talk, and if there's a similarity between the two of them, we can create a link and represent that as a graph, just like Eric and I are connected. So that's theory, that's great. Let's see how it works in actual practice. So what we've got here now is the global footprint of all the TEDx Talks over the last four years exploding out around the world from New York all the way down to little old New Zealand in the corner. And what we did on this is we analyzed the top 25 percent of these, and we started to see where the connections occurred, where they connected with each other. Cameron Russell talking about image and beauty connected over into Europe. We've got a bigger conversation about Israel and Palestine radiating outwards from the Middle East. And we've got something a little broader like big data with a truly global footprint reminiscent of a conversation that is happening everywhere. So from this, we kind of run up against the limits of what we can actually do with a geographic projection, but luckily, computer technology allows us to go out into multidimensional space. So we can take in our network projection and apply a physics engine to this, and the similar talks kind of smash together, and the different ones fly apart, and what we're left with is something quite beautiful. EB: So I want to just point out here that every node is a talk, they're linked if they share similar ideas, and that comes from a machine reading of entire talk transcripts, and then all these topics that pop out, they're not from tags and keywords. They come from the network structure of interconnected ideas. Keep going. SG: Absolutely. So I got a little quick on that, but he's going to slow me down. We've got education connected to storytelling triangulated next to social media. You've got, of course, the human brain right next to healthcare, which you might expect, but also you've got video games, which is sort of adjacent, as those two spaces interface with each other. But I want to take you into one cluster that's particularly important to me, and that's the environment. And I want to kind of zoom in on that and see if we can get a little more resolution. So as we go in here, what we start to see, apply the physics engine again, we see what's one conversation is actually composed of many smaller ones. The structure starts to emerge where we see a kind of fractal behavior of the words and the language that we use to describe the things that are important to us all around this world. So you've got food economy and local food at the top, you've got greenhouse gases, solar and nuclear waste. What you're getting is a range of smaller conversations, each connected to each other through the ideas and the language they share, creating a broader concept of the environment. And of course, from here, we can go and zoom in and see, well, what are young people looking at? And they're looking at energy technology and nuclear fusion. This is their kind of resonance for the conversation around the environment. If we split along gender lines, we can see females resonating heavily with food economy, but also out there in hope and optimism. And so there's a lot of exciting stuff we can do here, and I'll throw to Eric for the next part. EB: Yeah, I mean, just to point out here, you cannot get this kind of perspective from a simple tag search on YouTube. Let's now zoom back out to the entire global conversation out of environment, and look at all the talks together. Now often, when we're faced with this amount of content, we do a couple of things to simplify it. We might just say, well, what are the most popular talks out there? And a few rise to the surface. There's a talk about gratitude. There's another one about personal health and nutrition. And of course, there's got to be one about porn, right? And so then we might say, well, gratitude, that was last year. What's trending now? What's the popular talk now? And we can see that the new, emerging, top trending topic is about digital privacy. So this is great. It simplifies things. But there's so much creative content that's just buried at the bottom. And I hate that. How do we bubble stuff up to the surface that's maybe really creative and interesting? Well, we can go back to the network structure of ideas to do that. Remember, it's that network structure that is creating these emergent topics, and let's say we could take two of them, like cities and genetics, and say, well, are there any talks that creatively bridge these two really different disciplines. And that's — Essentially, this kind of creative remix is one of the hallmarks of innovation. Well here's one by Jessica Green about the microbial ecology of buildings. It's literally defining a new field. And we could go back to those topics and say, well, what talks are central to those conversations? In the cities cluster, one of the most central was one by Mitch Joachim about ecological cities, and in the genetics cluster, we have a talk about synthetic biology by Craig Venter. These are talks that are linking many talks within their discipline. We could go the other direction and say, well, what are talks that are broadly synthesizing a lot of different kinds of fields. We used a measure of ecological diversity to get this. Like, a talk by Steven Pinker on the history of violence, very synthetic. And then, of course, there are talks that are so unique they're kind of out in the stratosphere, in their own special place, and we call that the Colleen Flanagan index. And if you don't know Colleen, she's an artist, and I asked her, "Well, what's it like out there in the stratosphere of our idea space?" And apparently it smells like bacon. I wouldn't know. So we're using these network motifs to find talks that are unique, ones that are creatively synthesizing a lot of different fields, ones that are central to their topic, and ones that are really creatively bridging disparate fields. Okay? We never would have found those with our obsession with what's trending now. And all of this comes from the architecture of complexity, or the patterns of how things are connected. SG: So that's exactly right. We've got ourselves in a world that's massively complex, and we've been using algorithms to kind of filter it down so we can navigate through it. And those algorithms, whilst being kind of useful, are also very, very narrow, and we can do better than that, because we can realize that their complexity is not random. It has mathematical structure, and we can use that mathematical structure to go and explore things like the world of ideas to see what's being said, to see what's not being said, and to be a little bit more human and, hopefully, a little smarter. Thank you. (Applause) |
Leather and meat without killing animals | {0: 'Andras Forgacs produces animal products -- meat and leather -- without the animal.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | When my father and I started a company to 3D print human tissues and organs, some people initially thought we were a little crazy. But since then, much progress has been made, both in our lab and other labs around the world. And given this, we started getting questions like, "If you can grow human body parts, can you also grow animal products like meat and leather?" When someone first suggested this to me, quite frankly I thought they were a little crazy, but what I soon came to realize was that this is not so crazy after all. What's crazy is what we do today. I'm convinced that in 30 years, when we look back on today and on how we raise and slaughter billions of animals to make our hamburgers and our handbags, we'll see this as being wasteful and indeed crazy. Did you know that today we maintain a global herd of 60 billion animals to provide our meat, dairy, eggs and leather goods? And over the next few decades, as the world's population expands to 10 billion, this will need to nearly double to 100 billion animals. But maintaining this herd takes a major toll on our planet. Animals are not just raw materials. They're living beings, and already our livestock is one of the largest users of land, fresh water, and one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases which drive climate change. On top of this, when you get so many animals so close together, it creates a breeding ground for disease and opportunities for harm and abuse. Clearly, we cannot continue on this path which puts the environment, public health, and food security at risk. There is another way, because essentially, animal products are just collections of tissues, and right now we breed and raise highly complex animals only to create products that are made of relatively simple tissues. What if, instead of starting with a complex and sentient animal, we started with what the tissues are made of, the basic unit of life, the cell? This is biofabrication, where cells themselves can be used to grow biological products like tissues and organs. Already in medicine, biofabrication techniques have been used to grow sophisticated body parts, like ears, windpipes, skin, blood vessels and bone, that have been successfully implanted into patients. And beyond medicine, biofabrication can be a humane, sustainable and scalable new industry. And we should begin by reimagining leather. I emphasize leather because it is so widely used. It is beautiful, and it has long been a part of our history. Growing leather is also technically simpler than growing other animal products like meat. It mainly uses one cell type, and it is largely two-dimensional. It is also less polarizing for consumers and regulators. Until biofabrication is better understood, it is clear that, initially at least, more people would be willing to wear novel materials than would be willing to eat novel foods, no matter how delicious. In this sense, leather is a gateway material, a beginning for the mainstream biofabrication industry. If we can succeed here, it brings our other consumer bioproducts like meat closer on the horizon. Now how do we do it? To grow leather, we begin by taking cells from an animal, through a simple biopsy. The animal could be a cow, lamb, or even something more exotic. This process does no harm, and Daisy the cow can live a happy life. We then isolate the skin cells and multiply them in a cell culture medium. This takes millions of cells and expands them into billions. And we then coax these cells to produce collagen, as they would naturally. This collagen is the stuff between cells. It's natural connective tissue. It's the extracellular matrix, but in leather, it's the main building block. And what we next do is we take the cells and their collagen and we spread them out to form sheets, and then we layer these thin sheets on top of one another, like phyllo pastry, to form thicker sheets, which we then let mature. And finally, we take this multilayered skin and through a shorter and much less chemical tanning process, we create leather. And so I'm very excited to show you, for the first time, the first batch of our cultured leather, fresh from the lab. This is real, genuine leather, without the animal sacrifice. It can have all the characteristics of leather because it is made of the same cells, and better yet, there is no hair to remove, no scars or insect's bites, and no waste. This leather can be grown in the shape of a wallet, a handbag or a car seat. It is not limited to the irregular shape of a cow or an alligator. And because we make this material, we grow this leather from the ground up, we can control its properties in very interesting ways. This piece of leather is a mere seven tissue layers thick, and as you can see, it is nearly transparent. And this leather is 21 layers thick and quite opaque. You don't have that kind of fine control with conventional leather. And we can tune this leather for other desirable qualities, like softness, breathability, durability, elasticity and even things like pattern. We can mimic nature, but in some ways also improve upon it. This type of leather can do what today's leather does, but with imagination, probably much more. What could the future of animal products look like? It need not look like this, which is actually the state of the art today. Rather, it could be much more like this. Already, we have been manufacturing with cell cultures for thousands of years, beginning with products like wine, beer and yogurt. And speaking of food, our cultured food has evolved, and today we prepare cultured food in beautiful, sterile facilities like this. A brewery is essentially a bioreactor. It is where cell culture takes place. Imagine that in this facility, instead of brewing beer, we were brewing leather or meat. Imagine touring this facility, learning about how the leather or meat is cultured, seeing the process from beginning to end, and even trying some. It's clean, open and educational, and this is in contrast to the hidden, guarded and remote factories where leather and meat is produced today. Perhaps biofabrication is a natural evolution of manufacturing for mankind. It's environmentally responsible, efficient and humane. It allows us to be creative. We can design new materials, new products, and new facilities. We need to move past just killing animals as a resource to something more civilized and evolved. Perhaps we are ready for something literally and figuratively more cultured. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why mayors should rule the world | {0: 'Benjamin Barber suggested that the future of the world may lie with the politicians who implement practical change every day: mayors.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Democracy is in trouble, no question about that, and it comes in part from a deep dilemma in which it is embedded. It's increasingly irrelevant to the kinds of decisions we face that have to do with global pandemics, a cross-border problem; with HIV, a transnational problem; with markets and immigration, something that goes beyond national borders; with terrorism, with war, all now cross-border problems. In fact, we live in a 21st-century world of interdependence, and brutal interdependent problems, and when we look for solutions in politics and in democracy, we are faced with political institutions designed 400 years ago, autonomous, sovereign nation-states with jurisdictions and territories separate from one another, each claiming to be able to solve the problem of its own people. Twenty-first-century, transnational world of problems and challenges, 17th-century world of political institutions. In that dilemma lies the central problem of democracy. And like many others, I've been thinking about what can one do about this, this asymmetry between 21st-century challenges and archaic and increasingly dysfunctional political institutions like nation-states. And my suggestion is that we change the subject, that we stop talking about nations, about bordered states, and we start talking about cities. Because I think you will find, when we talk about cities, we are talking about the political institutions in which civilization and culture were born. We are talking about the cradle of democracy. We are talking about the venues in which those public spaces where we come together to create democracy, and at the same time protest those who would take our freedom, take place. Think of some great names: the Place de la Bastille, Zuccotti Park, Tahrir Square, Taksim Square in today's headlines in Istanbul, or, yes, Tiananmen Square in Beijing. (Applause) Those are the public spaces where we announce ourselves as citizens, as participants, as people with the right to write our own narratives. Cities are not only the oldest of institutions, they're the most enduring. If you think about it, Constantinople, Istanbul, much older than Turkey. Alexandria, much older than Egypt. Rome, far older than Italy. Cities endure the ages. They are the places where we are born, grow up, are educated, work, marry, pray, play, get old, and in time, die. They are home. Very different than nation-states, which are abstractions. We pay taxes, we vote occasionally, we watch the men and women we choose rule rule more or less without us. Not so in those homes known as our towns and cities where we live. Moreover, today, more than half of the world's population live in cities. In the developed world, it's about 78 percent. More than three out of four people live in urban institutions, urban places, in cities today. So cities are where the action is. Cities are us. Aristotle said in the ancient world, man is a political animal. I say we are an urban animal. We are an urban species, at home in our cities. So to come back to the dilemma, if the dilemma is we have old-fashioned political nation-states unable to govern the world, respond to the global challenges that we face like climate change, then maybe it's time for mayors to rule the world, for mayors and the citizens and the peoples they represent to engage in global governance. When I say if mayors ruled the world, when I first came up with that phrase, it occurred to me that actually, they already do. There are scores of international, inter-city, cross-border institutions, networks of cities in which cities are already, quite quietly, below the horizon, working together to deal with climate change, to deal with security, to deal with immigration, to deal with all of those tough, interdependent problems that we face. They have strange names: UCLG, United Cities and Local Governments; ICLEI, the International Council for Local Environmental Issues. And the list goes on: Citynet in Asia; City Protocol, a new organization out of Barcelona that is using the web to share best practices among countries. And then all the things we know a little better, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the Mexican Conference of Mayors, the European Conference of Mayors. Mayors are where this is happening. And so the question is, how can we create a world in which mayors and the citizens they represent play a more prominent role? Well, to understand that, we need to understand why cities are special, why mayors are so different than prime ministers and presidents, because my premise is that a mayor and a prime minister are at the opposite ends of a political spectrum. To be a prime minister or a president, you have to have an ideology, you have to have a meta-narrative, you have to have a theory of how things work, you have to belong to a party. Independents, on the whole, don't get elected to office. But mayors are just the opposite. Mayors are pragmatists, they're problem-solvers. Their job is to get things done, and if they don't, they're out of a job. Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia said, we could never get away here in Philadelphia with the stuff that goes on in Washington, the paralysis, the non-action, the inaction. Why? Because potholes have to get filled, because the trains have to run, because kids have to be able to get to school. And that's what we have to do, and to do that is about pragmatism in that deep, American sense, reaching outcomes. Washington, Beijing, Paris, as world capitals, are anything but pragmatic, but real city mayors have to be pragmatists. They have to get things done, they have to put ideology and religion and ethnicity aside and draw their cities together. We saw this a couple of decades ago when Teddy Kollek, the great mayor of Jerusalem in the '80s and the '90s, was besieged one day in his office by religious leaders from all of the backgrounds, Christian prelates, rabbis, imams. They were arguing with one another about access to the holy sites. And the squabble went on and on, and Kollek listened and listened, and he finally said, "Gentlemen, spare me your sermons, and I will fix your sewers." (Laughter) That's what mayors do. They fix sewers, they get the trains running. There isn't a left or a right way of doing. Boris Johnson in London calls himself an anarcho-Tory. Strange term, but in some ways, he is. He's a libertarian. He's an anarchist. He rides to work on a bike, but at the same time, he's in some ways a conservative. Bloomberg in New York was a Democrat, then he was a Republican, and finally he was an Independent, and said the party label just gets in the way. Luzhkov, 20 years mayor in Moscow, though he helped found a party, United Party with Putin, in fact refused to be defined by the party and finally, in fact, lost his job not under Brezhnev, not under Gorbachev, but under Putin, who wanted a more faithful party follower. So mayors are pragmatists and problem-solvers. They get things done. But the second thing about mayors is they are also what I like to call homeboys, or to include the women mayors, homies. They're from the neighborhood. They're part of the neighborhood. They're known. Ed Koch used to wander around New York City saying, "How am I doing?" Imagine David Cameron wandering around the United Kingdom asking, "How am I doing?" He wouldn't like the answer. Or Putin. Or any national leader. He could ask that because he knew New Yorkers and they knew him. Mayors are usually from the places they govern. It's pretty hard to be a carpetbagger and be a mayor. You can run for the Senate out of a different state, but it's hard to do that as a mayor. And as a result, mayors and city councillors and local authorities have a much higher trust level, and this is the third feature about mayors, than national governing officials. In the United States, we know the pathetic figures: 18 percent of Americans approve of Congress and what they do. And even with a relatively popular president like Obama, the figures for the Presidency run about 40, 45, sometimes 50 percent at best. The Supreme Court has fallen way down from what it used to be. But when you ask, "Do you trust your city councillor, do you trust your mayor?" the rates shoot up to 70, 75, even 80 percent, because they're from the neighborhood, because the people they work with are their neighbors, because, like Mayor Booker in Newark, a mayor is likely to get out of his car on the way to work and go in and pull people out of a burning building — that happened to Mayor Booker — or intervene in a mugging in the street as he goes to work because he sees it. No head of state would be permitted by their security details to do it, nor be in a position to do it. That's the difference, and the difference has to do with the character of cities themselves, because cities are profoundly multicultural, open, participatory, democratic, able to work with one another. When states face each other, China and the U.S., they face each other like this. When cities interact, they interact like this. China and the U.S., despite the recent meta-meeting in California, are locked in all kinds of anger, resentment, and rivalry for number one. We heard more about who will be number one. Cities don't worry about number one. They have to work together, and they do work together. They work together in climate change, for example. Organizations like the C40, like ICLEI, which I mentioned, have been working together many, many years before Copenhagen. In Copenhagen, four or five years ago, 184 nations came together to explain to one another why their sovereignty didn't permit them to deal with the grave, grave crisis of climate change, but the mayor of Copenhagen had invited 200 mayors to attend. They came, they stayed, and they found ways and are still finding ways to work together, city-to-city, and through inter-city organizations. Eighty percent of carbon emissions come from cities, which means cities are in a position to solve the carbon problem, or most of it, whether or not the states of which they are a part make agreements with one another. And they are doing it. Los Angeles cleaned up its port, which was 40 percent of carbon emissions, and as a result got rid of about 20 percent of carbon. New York has a program to upgrade its old buildings, make them better insulated in the winter, to not leak energy in the summer, not leak air conditioning. That's having an impact. Bogota, where Mayor Mockus, when he was mayor, he introduced a transportation system that saved energy, that allowed surface buses to run in effect like subways, express buses with corridors. It helped unemployment, because people could get across town, and it had a profound impact on climate as well as many other things there. Singapore, as it developed its high-rises and its remarkable public housing, also developed an island of parks, and if you go there, you'll see how much of it is green land and park land. Cities are doing this, but not just one by one. They are doing it together. They are sharing what they do, and they are making a difference by shared best practices. Bike shares, many of you have heard of it, started 20 or 30 years ago in Latin America. Now it's in hundreds of cities around the world. Pedestrian zones, congestion fees, emission limits in cities like California cities have, there's lots and lots that cities can do even when opaque, stubborn nations refuse to act. So what's the bottom line here? The bottom line is, we still live politically in a world of borders, a world of boundaries, a world of walls, a world where states refuse to act together. Yet we know that the reality we experience day to day is a world without borders, a world of diseases without borders and doctors without borders, maladies sans frontières, Médecins Sans Frontières, of economics and technology without borders, of education without borders, of terrorism and war without borders. That is the real world, and unless we find a way to globalize democracy or democratize globalization, we will increasingly not only risk the failure to address all of these transnational problems, but we will risk losing democracy itself, locked up in the old nation-state box, unable to address global problems democratically. So where does that leave us? I'll tell you. The road to global democracy doesn't run through states. It runs through cities. Democracy was born in the ancient polis. I believe it can be reborn in the global cosmopolis. In that journey from polis to cosmopolis, we can rediscover the power of democracy on a global level. We can create not a League of Nations, which failed, but a League of Cities, not a United or a dis-United Nations, but United Cities of the World. We can create a global parliament of mayors. That's an idea. It's in my conception of the coming world, but it's also on the table in City Halls in Seoul, Korea, in Amsterdam, in Hamburg, and in New York. Mayors are considering that idea of how you can actually constitute a global parliament of mayors, and I love that idea, because a parliament of mayors is a parliament of citizens and a parliament of citizens is a parliament of us, of you and of me. If ever there were citizens without borders, I think it's the citizens of TED who show the promise to be those citizens without borders. I am ready to reach out and embrace a new global democracy, to take back our democracy. And the only question is, are you? Thank you so much, my fellow citizens. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How reliable is your memory? | {0: 'Memory-manipulation expert Elizabeth Loftus explains how our memories might not be what they seem -- and how implanted memories can have real-life repercussions.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I'd like to tell you about a legal case that I worked on involving a man named Steve Titus. Titus was a restaurant manager. He was 31 years old, he lived in Seattle, Washington, he was engaged to Gretchen, about to be married, she was the love of his life. And one night, the couple went out for a romantic restaurant meal. They were on their way home, and they were pulled over by a police officer. You see, Titus' car sort of resembled a car that was driven earlier in the evening by a man who raped a female hitchhiker, and Titus kind of resembled that rapist. So the police took a picture of Titus, they put it in a photo lineup, they later showed it to the victim, and she pointed to Titus' photo. She said, "That one's the closest." The police and the prosecution proceeded with a trial, and when Steve Titus was put on trial for rape, the rape victim got on the stand and said, "I'm absolutely positive that's the man." And Titus was convicted. He proclaimed his innocence, his family screamed at the jury, his fiancée collapsed on the floor sobbing, and Titus is taken away to jail. So what would you do at this point? What would you do? Well, Titus lost complete faith in the legal system, and yet he got an idea. He called up the local newspaper, he got the interest of an investigative journalist, and that journalist actually found the real rapist, a man who ultimately confessed to this rape, a man who was thought to have committed 50 rapes in that area, and when this information was given to the judge, the judge set Titus free. And really, that's where this case should have ended. It should have been over. Titus should have thought of this as a horrible year, a year of accusation and trial, but over. It didn't end that way. Titus was so bitter. He'd lost his job. He couldn't get it back. He lost his fiancée. She couldn't put up with his persistent anger. He lost his entire savings, and so he decided to file a lawsuit against the police and others whom he felt were responsible for his suffering. And that's when I really started working on this case, trying to figure out how did that victim go from "That one's the closest" to "I'm absolutely positive that's the guy." Well, Titus was consumed with his civil case. He spent every waking moment thinking about it, and just days before he was to have his day in court, he woke up in the morning, doubled over in pain, and died of a stress-related heart attack. He was 35 years old. So I was asked to work on Titus' case because I'm a psychological scientist. I study memory. I've studied memory for decades. And if I meet somebody on an airplane — this happened on the way over to Scotland — if I meet somebody on an airplane, and we ask each other, "What do you do? What do you do?" and I say "I study memory," they usually want to tell me how they have trouble remembering names, or they've got a relative who's got Alzheimer's or some kind of memory problem, but I have to tell them I don't study when people forget. I study the opposite: when they remember, when they remember things that didn't happen or remember things that were different from the way they really were. I study false memories. Unhappily, Steve Titus is not the only person to be convicted based on somebody's false memory. In one project in the United States, information has been gathered on 300 innocent people, 300 defendants who were convicted of crimes they didn't do. They spent 10, 20, 30 years in prison for these crimes, and now DNA testing has proven that they are actually innocent. And when those cases have been analyzed, three quarters of them are due to faulty memory, faulty eyewitness memory. Well, why? Like the jurors who convicted those innocent people and the jurors who convicted Titus, many people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. I first started studying this constructive memory process in the 1970s. I did my experiments that involved showing people simulated crimes and accidents and asking them questions about what they remember. In one study, we showed people a simulated accident and we asked people, how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? And we asked other people, how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other? And if we asked the leading "smashed" question, the witnesses told us the cars were going faster, and moreover, that leading "smashed" question caused people to be more likely to tell us that they saw broken glass in the accident scene when there wasn't any broken glass at all. In another study, we showed a simulated accident where a car went through an intersection with a stop sign, and if we asked a question that insinuated it was a yield sign, many witnesses told us they remember seeing a yield sign at the intersection, not a stop sign. And you might be thinking, well, you know, these are filmed events, they are not particularly stressful. Would the same kind of mistakes be made with a really stressful event? In a study we published just a few months ago, we have an answer to this question, because what was unusual about this study is we arranged for people to have a very stressful experience. The subjects in this study were members of the U.S. military who were undergoing a harrowing training exercise to teach them what it's going to be like for them if they are ever captured as prisoners of war. And as part of this training exercise, these soldiers are interrogated in an aggressive, hostile, physically abusive fashion for 30 minutes and later on they have to try to identify the person who conducted that interrogation. And when we feed them suggestive information that insinuates it's a different person, many of them misidentify their interrogator, often identifying someone who doesn't even remotely resemble the real interrogator. And so what these studies are showing is that when you feed people misinformation about some experience that they may have had, you can distort or contaminate or change their memory. Well out there in the real world, misinformation is everywhere. We get misinformation not only if we're questioned in a leading way, but if we talk to other witnesses who might consciously or inadvertently feed us some erroneous information, or if we see media coverage about some event we might have experienced, all of these provide the opportunity for this kind of contamination of our memory. In the 1990s, we began to see an even more extreme kind of memory problem. Some patients were going into therapy with one problem — maybe they had depression, an eating disorder — and they were coming out of therapy with a different problem. Extreme memories for horrific brutalizations, sometimes in satanic rituals, sometimes involving really bizarre and unusual elements. One woman came out of psychotherapy believing that she'd endured years of ritualistic abuse, where she was forced into a pregnancy and that the baby was cut from her belly. But there were no physical scars or any kind of physical evidence that could have supported her story. And when I began looking into these cases, I was wondering, where do these bizarre memories come from? And what I found is that most of these situations involved some particular form of psychotherapy. And so I asked, were some of the things going on in this psychotherapy — like the imagination exercises or dream interpretation, or in some cases hypnosis, or in some cases exposure to false information — were these leading these patients to develop these very bizarre, unlikely memories? And I designed some experiments to try to study the processes that were being used in this psychotherapy so I could study the development of these very rich false memories. In one of the first studies we did, we used suggestion, a method inspired by the psychotherapy we saw in these cases, we used this kind of suggestion and planted a false memory that when you were a kid, five or six years old, you were lost in a shopping mall. You were frightened. You were crying. You were ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family. And we succeeded in planting this memory in the minds of about a quarter of our subjects. And you might be thinking, well, that's not particularly stressful. But we and other investigators have planted rich false memories of things that were much more unusual and much more stressful. So in a study done in Tennessee, researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid, you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a life guard. And in a study done in Canada, researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid, something as awful as being attacked by a vicious animal happened to you, succeeding with about half of their subjects. And in a study done in Italy, researchers planted the false memory, when you were a kid, you witnessed demonic possession. I do want to add that it might seem like we are traumatizing these experimental subjects in the name of science, but our studies have gone through thorough evaluation by research ethics boards that have made the decision that the temporary discomfort that some of these subjects might experience in these studies is outweighed by the importance of this problem for understanding memory processes and the abuse of memory that is going on in some places in the world. Well, to my surprise, when I published this work and began to speak out against this particular brand of psychotherapy, it created some pretty bad problems for me: hostilities, primarily from the repressed memory therapists, who felt under attack, and by the patients whom they had influenced. I had sometimes armed guards at speeches that I was invited to give, people trying to drum up letter-writing campaigns to get me fired. But probably the worst was I suspected that a woman was innocent of abuse that was being claimed by her grown daughter. She accused her mother of sexual abuse based on a repressed memory. And this accusing daughter had actually allowed her story to be filmed and presented in public places. I was suspicious of this story, and so I started to investigate, and eventually found information that convinced me that this mother was innocent. I published an exposé on the case, and a little while later, the accusing daughter filed a lawsuit. Even though I'd never mentioned her name, she sued me for defamation and invasion of privacy. And I went through nearly five years of dealing with this messy, unpleasant litigation, but finally, finally, it was over and I could really get back to my work. In the process, however, I became part of a disturbing trend in America where scientists are being sued for simply speaking out on matters of great public controversy. When I got back to my work, I asked this question: if I plant a false memory in your mind, does it have repercussions? Does it affect your later thoughts, your later behaviors? Our first study planted a false memory that you got sick as a child eating certain foods: hard-boiled eggs, dill pickles, strawberry ice cream. And we found that once we planted this false memory, people didn't want to eat the foods as much at an outdoor picnic. The false memories aren't necessarily bad or unpleasant. If we planted a warm, fuzzy memory involving a healthy food like asparagus, we could get people to want to eat asparagus more. And so what these studies are showing is that you can plant false memories and they have repercussions that affect behavior long after the memories take hold. Well, along with this ability to plant memories and control behavior obviously come some important ethical issues, like, when should we use this mind technology? And should we ever ban its use? Therapists can't ethically plant false memories in the mind of their patients even if it would help the patient, but there's nothing to stop a parent from trying this out on their overweight or obese teenager. And when I suggested this publicly, it created an outcry again. "There she goes. She's advocating that parents lie to their children." Hello, Santa Claus. (Laughter) I mean, another way to think about this is, which would you rather have, a kid with obesity, diabetes, shortened lifespan, all the things that go with it, or a kid with one little extra bit of false memory? I know what I would choose for a kid of mine. But maybe my work has made me different from most people. Most people cherish their memories, know that they represent their identity, who they are, where they came from. And I appreciate that. I feel that way too. But I know from my work how much fiction is already in there. If I've learned anything from these decades of working on these problems, it's this: just because somebody tells you something and they say it with confidence, just because they say it with lots of detail, just because they express emotion when they say it, it doesn't mean that it really happened. We can't reliably distinguish true memories from false memories. We need independent corroboration. Such a discovery has made me more tolerant of the everyday memory mistakes that my friends and family members make. Such a discovery might have saved Steve Titus, the man whose whole future was snatched away by a false memory. But meanwhile, we should all keep in mind, we'd do well to, that memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thanks very much. (Applause) |
The pursuit of ignorance | {0: 'Stuart Firestein teaches students and “citizen scientists” that ignorance is far more important to discovery than knowledge.'} | TED2013 | There is an ancient proverb that says it's very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat. I find this a particularly apt description of science and how science works — bumbling around in a dark room, bumping into things, trying to figure out what shape this might be, what that might be, there are reports of a cat somewhere around, they may not be reliable, they may be, and so forth and so on. Now I know this is different than the way most people think about science. Science, we generally are told, is a very well-ordered mechanism for understanding the world, for gaining facts, for gaining data, that it's rule-based, that scientists use this thing called the scientific method and we've been doing this for 14 generations or so now, and the scientific method is a set of rules for getting hard, cold facts out of the data. I'd like to tell you that's not the case. So there's the scientific method, but what's really going on is this. (Laughter) [The Scientific Method vs. Farting Around] And it's going on kind of like that. [... in the dark] (Laughter) So what is the difference, then, between the way I believe science is pursued and the way it seems to be perceived? So this difference first came to me in some ways in my dual role at Columbia University, where I'm both a professor and run a laboratory in neuroscience where we try to figure out how the brain works. We do this by studying the sense of smell, the sense of olfaction, and in the laboratory, it's a great pleasure and fascinating work and exciting to work with graduate students and post-docs and think up cool experiments to understand how this sense of smell works and how the brain might be working, and, well, frankly, it's kind of exhilarating. But at the same time, it's my responsibility to teach a large course to undergraduates on the brain, and that's a big subject, and it takes quite a while to organize that, and it's quite challenging and it's quite interesting, but I have to say, it's not so exhilarating. So what was the difference? Well, the course I was and am teaching is called Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience - I. (Laughs) It's 25 lectures full of all sorts of facts, it uses this giant book called "Principles of Neural Science" by three famous neuroscientists. This book comes in at 1,414 pages, it weighs a hefty seven and a half pounds. Just to put that in some perspective, that's the weight of two normal human brains. (Laughter) So I began to realize, by the end of this course, that the students maybe were getting the idea that we must know everything there is to know about the brain. That's clearly not true. And they must also have this idea, I suppose, that what scientists do is collect data and collect facts and stick them in these big books. And that's not really the case either. When I go to a meeting, after the meeting day is over and we collect in the bar over a couple of beers with my colleagues, we never talk about what we know. We talk about what we don't know. We talk about what still has to get done, what's so critical to get done in the lab. Indeed, this was, I think, best said by Marie Curie who said that one never notices what has been done but only what remains to be done. This was in a letter to her brother after obtaining her second graduate degree, I should say. I have to point out this has always been one of my favorite pictures of Marie Curie, because I am convinced that that glow behind her is not a photographic effect. (Laughter) That's the real thing. It is true that her papers are, to this day, stored in a basement room in the Bibliothèque Française in a concrete room that's lead-lined, and if you're a scholar and you want access to these notebooks, you have to put on a full radiation hazmat suit, so it's pretty scary business. Nonetheless, this is what I think we were leaving out of our courses and leaving out of the interaction that we have with the public as scientists, the what-remains-to-be-done. This is the stuff that's exhilarating and interesting. It is, if you will, the ignorance. That's what was missing. So I thought, well, maybe I should teach a course on ignorance, something I can finally excel at, perhaps, for example. So I did start teaching this course on ignorance, and it's been quite interesting and I'd like to tell you to go to the website. You can find all sorts of information there. It's wide open. And it's been really quite an interesting time for me to meet up with other scientists who come in and talk about what it is they don't know. Now I use this word "ignorance," of course, to be at least in part intentionally provocative, because ignorance has a lot of bad connotations and I clearly don't mean any of those. So I don't mean stupidity, I don't mean a callow indifference to fact or reason or data. The ignorant are clearly unenlightened, unaware, uninformed, and present company today excepted, often occupy elected offices, it seems to me. That's another story, perhaps. I mean a different kind of ignorance. I mean a kind of ignorance that's less pejorative, a kind of ignorance that comes from a communal gap in our knowledge, something that's just not there to be known or isn't known well enough yet or we can't make predictions from, the kind of ignorance that's maybe best summed up in a statement by James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, who said, "Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science." I think it's a wonderful idea: thoroughly conscious ignorance. So that's the kind of ignorance that I want to talk about today, but of course the first thing we have to clear up is what are we going to do with all those facts? So it is true that science piles up at an alarming rate. We all have this sense that science is this mountain of facts, this accumulation model of science, as many have called it, and it seems impregnable, it seems impossible. How can you ever know all of this? And indeed, the scientific literature grows at an alarming rate. In 2006, there were 1.3 million papers published. There's about a two-and-a-half-percent yearly growth rate, and so last year we saw over one and a half million papers being published. Divide that by the number of minutes in a year, and you wind up with three new papers per minute. So I've been up here a little over 10 minutes, I've already lost three papers. I have to get out of here actually. I have to go read. So what do we do about this? Well, the fact is that what scientists do about it is a kind of a controlled neglect, if you will. We just don't worry about it, in a way. The facts are important. You have to know a lot of stuff to be a scientist. That's true. But knowing a lot of stuff doesn't make you a scientist. You need to know a lot of stuff to be a lawyer or an accountant or an electrician or a carpenter. But in science, knowing a lot of stuff is not the point. Knowing a lot of stuff is there to help you get to more ignorance. So knowledge is a big subject, but I would say ignorance is a bigger one. So this leads us to maybe think about, a little bit about, some of the models of science that we tend to use, and I'd like to disabuse you of some of them. So one of them, a popular one, is that scientists are patiently putting the pieces of a puzzle together to reveal some grand scheme or another. This is clearly not true. For one, with puzzles, the manufacturer has guaranteed that there's a solution. We don't have any such guarantee. Indeed, there are many of us who aren't so sure about the manufacturer. (Laughter) So I think the puzzle model doesn't work. Another popular model is that science is busy unraveling things the way you unravel the peels of an onion. So peel by peel, you take away the layers of the onion to get at some fundamental kernel of truth. I don't think that's the way it works either. Another one, a kind of popular one, is the iceberg idea, that we only see the tip of the iceberg but underneath is where most of the iceberg is hidden. But all of these models are based on the idea of a large body of facts that we can somehow or another get completed. We can chip away at this iceberg and figure out what it is, or we could just wait for it to melt, I suppose, these days, but one way or another we could get to the whole iceberg. Right? Or make it manageable. But I don't think that's the case. I think what really happens in science is a model more like the magic well, where no matter how many buckets you take out, there's always another bucket of water to be had, or my particularly favorite one, with the effect and everything, the ripples on a pond. So if you think of knowledge being this ever-expanding ripple on a pond, the important thing to realize is that our ignorance, the circumference of this knowledge, also grows with knowledge. So the knowledge generates ignorance. This is really well said, I thought, by George Bernard Shaw. This is actually part of a toast that he delivered to celebrate Einstein at a dinner celebrating Einstein's work, in which he claims that science just creates more questions than it answers. ["Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more."] I find that kind of glorious, and I think he's precisely right, plus it's a kind of job security. As it turns out, he kind of cribbed that from the philosopher Immanuel Kant who a hundred years earlier had come up with this idea of question propagation, that every answer begets more questions. I love that term, "question propagation," this idea of questions propagating out there. So I'd say the model we want to take is not that we start out kind of ignorant and we get some facts together and then we gain knowledge. It's rather kind of the other way around, really. What do we use this knowledge for? What are we using this collection of facts for? We're using it to make better ignorance, to come up with, if you will, higher-quality ignorance. Because, you know, there's low-quality ignorance and there's high-quality ignorance. It's not all the same. Scientists argue about this all the time. Sometimes we call them bull sessions. Sometimes we call them grant proposals. But nonetheless, it's what the argument is about. It's the ignorance. It's the what we don't know. It's what makes a good question. So how do we think about these questions? I'm going to show you a graph that shows up quite a bit on happy hour posters in various science departments. This graph asks the relationship between what you know and how much you know about it. So what you know, you can know anywhere from nothing to everything, of course, and how much you know about it can be anywhere from a little to a lot. So let's put a point on the graph. There's an undergraduate. Doesn't know much but they have a lot of interest. They're interested in almost everything. Now you look at a master's student, a little further along in their education, and you see they know a bit more, but it's been narrowed somewhat. And finally you get your Ph.D., where it turns out you know a tremendous amount about almost nothing. (Laughter) What's really disturbing is the trend line that goes through that because, of course, when it dips below the zero axis, there, it gets into a negative area. That's where you find people like me, I'm afraid. So the important thing here is that this can all be changed. This whole view can be changed by just changing the label on the x-axis. So instead of how much you know about it, we could say, "What can you ask about it?" So yes, you do need to know a lot of stuff as a scientist, but the purpose of knowing a lot of stuff is not just to know a lot of stuff. That just makes you a geek, right? Knowing a lot of stuff, the purpose is to be able to ask lots of questions, to be able to frame thoughtful, interesting questions, because that's where the real work is. Let me give you a quick idea of a couple of these sorts of questions. I'm a neuroscientist, so how would we come up with a question in neuroscience? Because it's not always quite so straightforward. So, for example, we could say, well what is it that the brain does? Well, one thing the brain does, it moves us around. We walk around on two legs. That seems kind of simple, somehow or another. I mean, virtually everybody over 10 months of age walks around on two legs, right? So that maybe is not that interesting. So instead maybe we want to choose something a little more complicated to look at. How about the visual system? There it is, the visual system. I mean, we love our visual systems. We do all kinds of cool stuff. Indeed, there are over 12,000 neuroscientists who work on the visual system, from the retina to the visual cortex, in an attempt to understand not just the visual system but to also understand how general principles of how the brain might work. But now here's the thing: Our technology has actually been pretty good at replicating what the visual system does. We have TV, we have movies, we have animation, we have photography, we have pattern recognition, all of these sorts of things. They work differently than our visual systems in some cases, but nonetheless we've been pretty good at making a technology work like our visual system. Somehow or another, a hundred years of robotics, you never saw a robot walk on two legs, because robots don't walk on two legs because it's not such an easy thing to do. A hundred years of robotics, and we can't get a robot that can move more than a couple steps one way or the other. You ask them to go up an inclined plane, and they fall over. Turn around, and they fall over. It's a serious problem. So what is it that's the most difficult thing for a brain to do? What ought we to be studying? Perhaps it ought to be walking on two legs, or the motor system. I'll give you an example from my own lab, my own particularly smelly question, since we work on the sense of smell. But here's a diagram of five molecules and sort of a chemical notation. These are just plain old molecules, but if you sniff those molecules up these two little holes in the front of your face, you will have in your mind the distinct impression of a rose. If there's a real rose there, those molecules will be the ones, but even if there's no rose there, you'll have the memory of a molecule. How do we turn molecules into perceptions? What's the process by which that could happen? Here's another example: two very simple molecules, again in this kind of chemical notation. It might be easier to visualize them this way, so the gray circles are carbon atoms, the white ones are hydrogen atoms and the red ones are oxygen atoms. Now these two molecules differ by only one carbon atom and two little hydrogen atoms that ride along with it, and yet one of them, heptyl acetate, has the distinct odor of a pear, and hexyl acetate is unmistakably banana. So there are two really interesting questions here, it seems to me. One is, how can a simple little molecule like that create a perception in your brain that's so clear as a pear or a banana? And secondly, how the hell can we tell the difference between two molecules that differ by a single carbon atom? I mean, that's remarkable to me, clearly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. And you don't even think about it, do you? So this is a favorite quote of mine that takes us back to the ignorance and the idea of questions. I like to quote because I think dead people shouldn't be excluded from the conversation. And I also think it's important to realize that the conversation's been going on for a while, by the way. So Erwin Schrodinger, a great quantum physicist and, I think, philosopher, points out how you have to "abide by ignorance for an indefinite period" of time. And it's this abiding by ignorance that I think we have to learn how to do. This is a tricky thing. This is not such an easy business. I guess it comes down to our education system, so I'm going to talk a little bit about ignorance and education, because I think that's where it really has to play out. So for one, let's face it, in the age of Google and Wikipedia, the business model of the university and probably secondary schools is simply going to have to change. We just can't sell facts for a living anymore. They're available with a click of the mouse, or if you want to, you could probably just ask the wall one of these days, wherever they're going to hide the things that tell us all this stuff. So what do we have to do? We have to give our students a taste for the boundaries, for what's outside that circumference, for what's outside the facts, what's just beyond the facts. How do we do that? Well, one of the problems, of course, turns out to be testing. We currently have an educational system which is very efficient but is very efficient at a rather bad thing. So in second grade, all the kids are interested in science, the girls and the boys. They like to take stuff apart. They have great curiosity. They like to investigate things. They go to science museums. They like to play around. They're in second grade. They're interested. But by 11th or 12th grade, fewer than 10 percent of them have any interest in science whatsoever, let alone a desire to go into science as a career. So we have this remarkably efficient system for beating any interest in science out of everybody's head. Is this what we want? I think this comes from what a teacher colleague of mine calls "the bulimic method of education." You know. You can imagine what it is. We just jam a whole bunch of facts down their throats over here and then they puke it up on an exam over here and everybody goes home with no added intellectual heft whatsoever. This can't possibly continue to go on. So what do we do? Well the geneticists, I have to say, have an interesting maxim they live by. Geneticists always say, you always get what you screen for. And that's meant as a warning. So we always will get what we screen for, and part of what we screen for is in our testing methods. Well, we hear a lot about testing and evaluation, and we have to think carefully when we're testing whether we're evaluating or whether we're weeding, whether we're weeding people out, whether we're making some cut. Evaluation is one thing. You hear a lot about evaluation in the literature these days, in the educational literature, but evaluation really amounts to feedback and it amounts to an opportunity for trial and error. It amounts to a chance to work over a longer period of time with this kind of feedback. That's different than weeding, and usually, I have to tell you, when people talk about evaluation, evaluating students, evaluating teachers, evaluating schools, evaluating programs, that they're really talking about weeding. And that's a bad thing, because then you will get what you select for, which is what we've gotten so far. So I'd say what we need is a test that says, "What is x?" and the answers are "I don't know, because no one does," or "What's the question?" Even better. Or, "You know what, I'll look it up, I'll ask someone, I'll phone someone. I'll find out." Because that's what we want people to do, and that's how you evaluate them. And maybe for the advanced placement classes, it could be, "Here's the answer. What's the next question?" That's the one I like in particular. So let me end with a quote from William Butler Yeats, who said "Education is not about filling buckets; it is lighting fires." So I'd say, let's get out the matches. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
What we don't understand about trust | {0: "Baroness Onora O'Neill is a philosopher who focuses on international justice and the roles of trust and accountability in public life."} | TEDxHousesOfParliament | So I'm going to talk about trust, and I'm going to start by reminding you of the standard views that people have about trust. I think these are so commonplace, they've become clichés of our society. And I think there are three. One's a claim: there has been a great decline in trust, very widely believed. The second is an aim: we should have more trust. And the third is a task: we should rebuild trust. I think that the claim, the aim and the task are all misconceived. So what I'm going to try to tell you today is a different story about a claim, an aim and a task which I think give one quite a lot better purchase on the matter. First the claim: Why do people think trust has declined? And if I really think about it on the basis of my own evidence, I don't know the answer. I'm inclined to think it may have declined in some activities or some institutions and it might have grown in others. I don't have an overview. But, of course, I can look at the opinion polls, and the opinion polls are supposedly the source of a belief that trust has declined. When you actually look at opinion polls across time, there's not much evidence for that. That's to say, the people who were mistrusted 20 years ago, principally journalists and politicians, are still mistrusted. And the people who were highly trusted 20 years ago are still rather highly trusted: judges, nurses. The rest of us are in between, and by the way, the average person in the street is almost exactly midway. But is that good evidence? What opinion polls record is, of course, opinions. What else can they record? So they're looking at the generic attitudes that people report when you ask them certain questions. Do you trust politicians? Do you trust teachers? Now if somebody said to you, "Do you trust greengrocers? Do you trust fishmongers? Do you trust elementary school teachers?" you would probably begin by saying, "To do what?" And that would be a perfectly sensible response. And you might say, when you understood the answer to that, "Well, I trust some of them, but not others." That's a perfectly rational thing. In short, in our real lives, we seek to place trust in a differentiated way. We don't make an assumption that the level of trust that we will have in every instance of a certain type of official or office-holder or type of person is going to be uniform. I might, for example, say that I certainly trust a certain elementary school teacher I know to teach the reception class to read, but in no way to drive the school minibus. I might, after all, know that she wasn't a good driver. I might trust my most loquacious friend to keep a conversation going but not — but perhaps not to keep a secret. Simple. So if we've got those evidence in our ordinary lives of the way that trust is differentiated, why do we sort of drop all that intelligence when we think about trust more abstractly? I think the polls are very bad guides to the level of trust that actually exists, because they try to obliterate the good judgment that goes into placing trust. Secondly, what about the aim? The aim is to have more trust. Well frankly, I think that's a stupid aim. It's not what I would aim at. I would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy but not in the untrustworthy. In fact, I aim positively to try not to trust the untrustworthy. And I think, of those people who, for example, placed their savings with the very aptly named Mr. Madoff, who then made off with them, and I think of them, and I think, well, yes, too much trust. More trust is not an intelligent aim in this life. Intelligently placed and intelligently refused trust is the proper aim. Well once one says that, one says, yeah, okay, that means that what matters in the first place is not trust but trustworthiness. It's judging how trustworthy people are in particular respects. And I think that judgment requires us to look at three things. Are they competent? Are they honest? Are they reliable? And if we find that a person is competent in the relevant matters, and reliable and honest, we'll have a pretty good reason to trust them, because they'll be trustworthy. But if, on the other hand, they're unreliable, we might not. I have friends who are competent and honest, but I would not trust them to post a letter, because they're forgetful. I have friends who are very confident they can do certain things, but I realize that they overestimate their own competence. And I'm very glad to say, I don't think I have many friends who are competent and reliable but extremely dishonest. (Laughter) If so, I haven't yet spotted it. But that's what we're looking for: trustworthiness before trust. Trust is the response. Trustworthiness is what we have to judge. And, of course, it's difficult. Across the last few decades, we've tried to construct systems of accountability for all sorts of institutions and professionals and officials and so on that will make it easier for us to judge their trustworthiness. A lot of these systems have the converse effect. They don't work as they're supposed to. I remember I was talking with a midwife who said, "Well, you see, the problem is it takes longer to do the paperwork than to deliver the baby." And all over our public life, our institutional life, we find that problem, that the system of accountability that is meant to secure trustworthiness and evidence of trustworthiness is actually doing the opposite. It is distracting people who have to do difficult tasks, like midwives, from doing them by requiring them to tick the boxes, as we say. You can all give your own examples there. So so much for the aim. The aim, I think, is more trustworthiness, and that is going to be different if we are trying to be trustworthy and communicate our trustworthiness to other people, and if we are trying to judge whether other people or office-holders or politicians are trustworthy. It's not easy. It is judgment, and simple reaction, attitudes, don't do adequately here. Now thirdly, the task. Calling the task rebuilding trust, I think, also gets things backwards. It suggests that you and I should rebuild trust. Well, we can do that for ourselves. We can rebuild a bit of trustworthiness. We can do it two people together trying to improve trust. But trust, in the end, is distinctive because it's given by other people. You can't rebuild what other people give you. You have to give them the basis for giving you their trust. So you have to, I think, be trustworthy. And that, of course, is because you can't fool all of the people all of the time, usually. But you also have to provide usable evidence that you are trustworthy. How to do it? Well every day, all over the place, it's being done by ordinary people, by officials, by institutions, quite effectively. Let me give you a simple commercial example. The shop where I buy my socks says I may take them back, and they don't ask any questions. They take them back and give me the money or give me the pair of socks of the color I wanted. That's super. I trust them because they have made themselves vulnerable to me. I think there's a big lesson in that. If you make yourself vulnerable to the other party, then that is very good evidence that you are trustworthy and you have confidence in what you are saying. So in the end, I think what we are aiming for is not very difficult to discern. It is relationships in which people are trustworthy and can judge when and how the other person is trustworthy. So the moral of all this is, we need to think much less about trust, let alone about attitudes of trust detected or mis-detected by opinion polls, much more about being trustworthy, and how you give people adequate, useful and simple evidence that you're trustworthy. Thanks. (Applause) |
Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents' | {0: 'James Flynn challenges our fundamental assumptions about intelligence.'} | TED2013 | We are going to take a quick voyage over the cognitive history of the 20th century, because during that century, our minds have altered dramatically. As you all know, the cars that people drove in 1900 have altered because the roads are better and because of technology. And our minds have altered, too. We've gone from people who confronted a concrete world and analyzed that world primarily in terms of how much it would benefit them to people who confront a very complex world, and it's a world where we've had to develop new mental habits, new habits of mind. And these include things like clothing that concrete world with classification, introducing abstractions that we try to make logically consistent, and also taking the hypothetical seriously, that is, wondering about what might have been rather than what is. Now, this dramatic change was drawn to my attention through massive I.Q. gains over time, and these have been truly massive. That is, we don't just get a few more questions right on I.Q. tests. We get far more questions right on I.Q. tests than each succeeding generation back to the time that they were invented. Indeed, if you score the people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an average I.Q. of 70. If you score us against their norms, we would have an average I.Q. of 130. Now this has raised all sorts of questions. Were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation? Because 70 is normally the score for mental retardation. Or are we on the verge of all being gifted? Because 130 is the cutting line for giftedness. Now I'm going to try and argue for a third alternative that's much more illuminating than either of those, and to put this into perspective, let's imagine that a Martian came down to Earth and found a ruined civilization. And this Martian was an archaeologist, and they found scores, target scores, that people had used for shooting. And first they looked at 1865, and they found that in a minute, people had only put one bullet in the bullseye. And then they found, in 1898, that they'd put about five bullets in the bullseye in a minute. And then about 1918 they put a hundred bullets in the bullseye. And initially, that archaeologist would be baffled. They would say, look, these tests were designed to find out how much people were steady of hand, how keen their eyesight was, whether they had control of their weapon. How could these performances have escalated to this enormous degree? Well we now know, of course, the answer. If that Martian looked at battlefields, they would find that people had only muskets at the time of the Civil War and that they had repeating rifles at the time of the Spanish-American War, and then they had machine guns by the time of World War I. And, in other words, it was the equipment that was in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible, not greater keenness of eye or steadiness of hand. Now what we have to imagine is the mental artillery that we have picked up over those hundred years, and I think again that another thinker will help us here, and that's Luria. Luria looked at people just before they entered the scientific age, and he found that these people were resistant to classifying the concrete world. They wanted to break it up into little bits that they could use. He found that they were resistant to deducing the hypothetical, to speculating about what might be, and he found finally that they didn't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions. Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia. They'd only had, as people had in 1900, about four years of schooling. And he asked that particular person, what do crows and fish have in common? And the fellow said, "Absolutely nothing. You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. A crow can peck at a fish. A fish can't do anything to a crow." And Luria said, "But aren't they both animals?" And he said, "Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird." And he was interested, effectively, in what he could do with those concrete objects. And then Luria went to another person, and he said to them, "There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?" And the fellow said, "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." And Luria said, "But what do my words imply?" And he said, "Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels." In other words, he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem, and he was used to camels being in villages, and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany. A third interview was conducted with someone about the North Pole. And Luria said, "At the North Pole, there is always snow. Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. What color are the bears at the North Pole?" And the response was, "Such a thing is to be settled by testimony. If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white, I might believe him, but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear." Now you see again, this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience, and it was important to that person what color bears were — that is, they had to hunt bears. They weren't willing to engage in this. One of them said to Luria, "How can we solve things that aren't real problems? None of these problems are real. How can we address them?" Now, these three categories — classification, using logic on abstractions, taking the hypothetical seriously — how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room? And let me give you a few illustrations. First, almost all of us today get a high school diploma. That is, we've gone from four to eight years of education to 12 years of formal education, and 52 percent of Americans have actually experienced some type of tertiary education. Now, not only do we have much more education, and much of that education is scientific, and you can't do science without classifying the world. You can't do science without proposing hypotheses. You can't do science without making it logically consistent. And even down in grade school, things have changed. In 1910, they looked at the examinations that the state of Ohio gave to 14-year-olds, and they found that they were all for socially valued concrete information. They were things like, what are the capitals of the 44 or 45 states that existed at that time? When they looked at the exams that the state of Ohio gave in 1990, they were all about abstractions. They were things like, why is the largest city of a state rarely the capital? And you were supposed to think, well, the state legislature was rural-controlled, and they hated the big city, so rather than putting the capital in a big city, they put it in a county seat. They put it in Albany rather than New York. They put it in Harrisburg rather than Philadelphia. And so forth. So the tenor of education has changed. We are educating people to take the hypothetical seriously, to use abstractions, and to link them logically. What about employment? Well, in 1900, three percent of Americans practiced professions that were cognitively demanding. Only three percent were lawyers or doctors or teachers. Today, 35 percent of Americans practice cognitively demanding professions, not only to the professions proper like lawyer or doctor or scientist or lecturer, but many, many sub-professions having to do with being a technician, a computer programmer. A whole range of professions now make cognitive demands. And we can only meet the terms of employment in the modern world by being cognitively far more flexible. And it's not just that we have many more people in cognitively demanding professions. The professions have been upgraded. Compare the doctor in 1900, who really had only a few tricks up his sleeve, with the modern general practitioner or specialist, with years of scientific training. Compare the banker in 1900, who really just needed a good accountant and to know who was trustworthy in the local community for paying back their mortgage. Well, the merchant bankers who brought the world to their knees may have been morally remiss, but they were cognitively very agile. They went far beyond that 1900 banker. They had to look at computer projections for the housing market. They had to get complicated CDO-squared in order to bundle debt together and make debt look as if it were actually a profitable asset. They had to prepare a case to get rating agencies to give it a AAA, though in many cases, they had virtually bribed the rating agencies. And they also, of course, had to get people to accept these so-called assets and pay money for them even though they were highly vulnerable. Or take a farmer today. I take the farm manager of today as very different from the farmer of 1900. So it hasn't just been the spread of cognitively demanding professions. It's also been the upgrading of tasks like lawyer and doctor and what have you that have made demands on our cognitive faculties. But I've talked about education and employment. Some of the habits of mind that we have developed over the 20th century have paid off in unexpected areas. I'm primarily a moral philosopher. I merely have a holiday in psychology, and what interests me in general is moral debate. Now over the last century, in developed nations like America, moral debate has escalated because we take the hypothetical seriously, and we also take universals seriously and look for logical connections. When I came home in 1955 from university at the time of Martin Luther King, a lot of people came home at that time and started having arguments with their parents and grandparents. My father was born in 1885, and he was mildly racially biased. As an Irishman, he hated the English so much he didn't have much emotion for anyone else. (Laughter) But he did have a sense that black people were inferior. And when we said to our parents and grandparents, "How would you feel if tomorrow morning you woke up black?" they said that is the dumbest thing you've ever said. Who have you ever known who woke up in the morning — (Laughter) — that turned black? In other words, they were fixed in the concrete mores and attitudes they had inherited. They would not take the hypothetical seriously, and without the hypothetical, it's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground. You have to say, imagine you were in Iran, and imagine that your relatives all suffered from collateral damage even though they had done no wrong. How would you feel about that? And if someone of the older generation says, well, our government takes care of us, and it's up to their government to take care of them, they're just not willing to take the hypothetical seriously. Or take an Islamic father whose daughter has been raped, and he feels he's honor-bound to kill her. Well, he's treating his mores as if they were sticks and stones and rocks that he had inherited, and they're unmovable in any way by logic. They're just inherited mores. Today we would say something like, well, imagine you were knocked unconscious and sodomized. Would you deserve to be killed? And he would say, well that's not in the Koran. That's not one of the principles I've got. Well you, today, universalize your principles. You state them as abstractions and you use logic on them. If you have a principle such as, people shouldn't suffer unless they're guilty of something, then to exclude black people you've got to make exceptions, don't you? You have to say, well, blackness of skin, you couldn't suffer just for that. It must be that blacks are somehow tainted. And then we can bring empirical evidence to bear, can't we, and say, well how can you consider all blacks tainted when St. Augustine was black and Thomas Sowell is black. And you can get moral argument off the ground, then, because you're not treating moral principles as concrete entities. You're treating them as universals, to be rendered consistent by logic. Now how did all of this arise out of I.Q. tests? That's what initially got me going on cognitive history. If you look at the I.Q. test, you find the gains have been greatest in certain areas. The similarities subtest of the Wechsler is about classification, and we have made enormous gains on that classification subtest. There are other parts of the I.Q. test battery that are about using logic on abstractions. Some of you may have taken Raven's Progressive Matrices, and it's all about analogies. And in 1900, people could do simple analogies. That is, if you said to them, cats are like wildcats. What are dogs like? They would say wolves. But by 1960, people could attack Raven's on a much more sophisticated level. If you said, we've got two squares followed by a triangle, what follows two circles? They could say a semicircle. Just as a triangle is half of a square, a semicircle is half of a circle. By 2010, college graduates, if you said two circles followed by a semicircle, two sixteens followed by what, they would say eight, because eight is half of 16. That is, they had moved so far from the concrete world that they could even ignore the appearance of the symbols that were involved in the question. Now, I should say one thing that's very disheartening. We haven't made progress on all fronts. One of the ways in which we would like to deal with the sophistication of the modern world is through politics, and sadly you can have humane moral principles, you can classify, you can use logic on abstractions, and if you're ignorant of history and of other countries, you can't do politics. We've noticed, in a trend among young Americans, that they read less history and less literature and less material about foreign lands, and they're essentially ahistorical. They live in the bubble of the present. They don't know the Korean War from the war in Vietnam. They don't know who was an ally of America in World War II. Think how different America would be if every American knew that this is the fifth time Western armies have gone to Afghanistan to put its house in order, and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened on those four previous occasions. (Laughter) And that is, they had barely left, and there wasn't a trace in the sand. Or imagine how different things would be if most Americans knew that we had been lied into four of our last six wars. You know, the Spanish didn't sink the battleship Maine, the Lusitania was not an innocent vessel but was loaded with munitions, the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet, and, of course, Saddam Hussein hated al Qaeda and had nothing to do with it, and yet the administration convinced 45 percent of the people that they were brothers in arms, when he would hang one from the nearest lamppost. But I don't want to end on a pessimistic note. The 20th century has shown enormous cognitive reserves in ordinary people that we have now realized, and the aristocracy was convinced that the average person couldn't make it, that they could never share their mindset or their cognitive abilities. Lord Curzon once said he saw people bathing in the North Sea, and he said, "Why did no one tell me what white bodies the lower orders have?" As if they were a reptile. Well, Dickens was right and he was wrong. [Correction: Rudyard Kipling] [Kipling] said, "The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters underneath the skin." (Applause) |
Confessions of a depressed comic | {0: 'Writer, comic and mental health activist Kevin Breel speaks up about depression.'} | TEDxKids@Ambleside | For a long time in my life, I felt like I'd been living two different lives. There's the life that everyone sees, and then there's the life that only I see. And in the life that everyone sees, who I am is a friend, a son, a brother, a stand-up comedian and a teenager. That's the life everyone sees. If you were to ask my friends and family to describe me, that's what they would tell you. And that's a huge part of me. That is who I am. And if you were to ask me to describe myself, I'd probably say some of those same things. And I wouldn't be lying, but I wouldn't totally be telling you the truth, either, because the truth is, that's just the life everyone else sees. In the life that only I see, who I am, who I really am, is someone who struggles intensely with depression. I have for the last six years of my life, and I continue to every day. Now, for someone who has never experienced depression or doesn't really know what that means, that might surprise them to hear, because there's this pretty popular misconception that depression is just being sad when something in your life goes wrong, when you break up with your girlfriend, when you lose a loved one, when you don't get the job you wanted. But that's sadness. That's a natural thing. That's a natural human emotion. Real depression isn't being sad when something in your life goes wrong. Real depression is being sad when everything in your life is going right. That's real depression, and that's what I suffer from. And to be totally honest, that's hard for me to stand up here and say. It's hard for me to talk about, and it seems to be hard for everyone to talk about, so much so that no one's talking about it. And no one's talking about depression, but we need to be, because right now it's a massive problem. It's a massive problem. But we don't see it on social media, right? We don't see it on Facebook. We don't see it on Twitter. We don't see it on the news, because it's not happy, it's not fun, it's not light. And so because we don't see it, we don't see the severity of it. But the severity of it and the seriousness of it is this: every 30 seconds, every 30 seconds, somewhere, someone in the world takes their own life because of depression, and it might be two blocks away, it might be two countries away, it might be two continents away, but it's happening, and it's happening every single day. And we have a tendency, as a society, to look at that and go, "So what?" So what? We look at that, and we go, "That's your problem. That's their problem." We say we're sad and we say we're sorry, but we also say, "So what?" Well, two years ago it was my problem, because I sat on the edge of my bed where I'd sat a million times before and I was suicidal. I was suicidal, and if you were to look at my life on the surface, you wouldn't see a kid who was suicidal. You'd see a kid who was the captain of his basketball team, the drama and theater student of the year, the English student of the year, someone who was consistently on the honor roll and consistently at every party. So you would say I wasn't depressed, you would say I wasn't suicidal, but you would be wrong. You would be wrong. So I sat there that night beside a bottle of pills with a pen and paper in my hand and I thought about taking my own life and I came this close to doing it. I came this close to doing it. And I didn't, so that makes me one of the lucky ones, one of the people who gets to step out on the ledge and look down but not jump, one of the lucky ones who survives. Well, I survived, and that just leaves me with my story, and my story is this: In four simple words, I suffer from depression. I suffer from depression, and for a long time, I think, I was living two totally different lives, where one person was always afraid of the other. I was afraid that people would see me for who I really was, that I wasn't the perfect, popular kid in high school everyone thought I was, that beneath my smile, there was struggle, and beneath my light, there was dark, and beneath my big personality just hid even bigger pain. See, some people might fear girls not liking them back. Some people might fear sharks. Some people might fear death. But for me, for a large part of my life, I feared myself. I feared my truth, I feared my honesty, I feared my vulnerability, and that fear made me feel like I was forced into a corner, like I was forced into a corner and there was only one way out, and so I thought about that way every single day. I thought about it every single day, and if I'm being totally honest, standing here I've thought about it again since, because that's the sickness, that's the struggle, that's depression, and depression isn't chicken pox. You don't beat it once and it's gone forever. It's something you live with. It's something you live in. It's the roommate you can't kick out. It's the voice you can't ignore. It's the feelings you can't seem to escape, the scariest part is that after a while, you become numb to it. It becomes normal for you, and what you really fear the most isn't the suffering inside of you. It's the stigma inside of others, it's the shame, it's the embarrassment, it's the disapproving look on a friend's face, it's the whispers in the hallway that you're weak, it's the comments that you're crazy. That's what keeps you from getting help. That's what makes you hold it in and hide it. It's the stigma. So you hold it in and you hide it, and you hold it in and you hide it, and even though it's keeping you in bed every day and it's making your life feel empty no matter how much you try and fill it, you hide it, because the stigma in our society around depression is very real. It's very real, and if you think that it isn't, ask yourself this: Would you rather make your next Facebook status say you're having a tough time getting out of bed because you hurt your back or you're having a tough time getting out of bed every morning because you're depressed? That's the stigma, because unfortunately, we live in a world where if you break your arm, everyone runs over to sign your cast, but if you tell people you're depressed, everyone runs the other way. That's the stigma. We are so, so, so accepting of any body part breaking down other than our brains. And that's ignorance. That's pure ignorance, and that ignorance has created a world that doesn't understand depression, that doesn't understand mental health. And that's ironic to me, because depression is one of the best documented problems we have in the world, yet it's one of the least discussed. We just push it aside and put it in a corner and pretend it's not there and hope it'll fix itself. Well, it won't. It hasn't, and it's not going to, because that's wishful thinking, and wishful thinking isn't a game plan, it's procrastination, and we can't procrastinate on something this important. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. Well, we haven't done that, so we can't really expect to find an answer when we're still afraid of the question. And I don't know what the solution is. I wish I did, but I don't — but I think, I think it has to start here. It has to start with me, it has to start with you, it has to start with the people who are suffering, the ones who are hidden in the shadows. We need to speak up and shatter the silence. We need to be the ones who are brave for what we believe in, because if there's one thing that I've come to realize, if there's one thing that I see as the biggest problem, it's not in building a world where we eliminate the ignorance of others. It's in building a world where we teach the acceptance of ourselves, where we're okay with who we are, because when we get honest, we see that we all struggle and we all suffer. Whether it's with this, whether it's with something else, we all know what it is to hurt. We all know what it is to have pain in our heart, and we all know how important it is to heal. But right now, depression is society's deep cut that we're content to put a Band-Aid over and pretend it's not there. Well, it is there. It is there, and you know what? It's okay. Depression is okay. If you're going through it, know that you're okay. And know that you're sick, you're not weak, and it's an issue, not an identity, because when you get past the fear and the ridicule and the judgment and the stigma of others, you can see depression for what it really is, and that's just a part of life, just a part of life, and as much as I hate, as much as I hate some of the places, some of the parts of my life depression has dragged me down to, in a lot of ways I'm grateful for it. Because yeah, it's put me in the valleys, but only to show me there's peaks, and yeah it's dragged me through the dark but only to remind me there is light. My pain, more than anything in 19 years on this planet, has given me perspective, and my hurt, my hurt has forced me to have hope, have hope and to have faith, faith in myself, faith in others, faith that it can get better, that we can change this, that we can speak up and speak out and fight back against ignorance, fight back against intolerance, and more than anything, learn to love ourselves, learn to accept ourselves for who we are, the people we are, not the people the world wants us to be. Because the world I believe in is one where embracing your light doesn't mean ignoring your dark. The world I believe in is one where we're measured by our ability to overcome adversities, not avoid them. The world I believe in is one where I can look someone in the eye and say, "I'm going through hell," and they can look back at me and go, "Me too," and that's okay, and it's okay because depression is okay. We're people. We're people, and we struggle and we suffer and we bleed and we cry, and if you think that true strength means never showing any weakness, then I'm here to tell you you're wrong. You're wrong, because it's the opposite. We're people, and we have problems. We're not perfect, and that's okay. So we need to stop the ignorance, stop the intolerance, stop the stigma, and stop the silence, and we need to take away the taboos, take a look at the truth, and start talking, because the only way we're going to beat a problem that people are battling alone is by standing strong together, by standing strong together. And I believe that we can. I believe that we can. Thank you guys so much. This is a dream come true. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
The unheard story of David and Goliath | {0: "Detective of fads and emerging subcultures, chronicler of jobs-you-never-knew-existed, Malcolm Gladwell's work is toppling the popular understanding of bias, crime, food, marketing, race, consumers and intelligence."} | TEDSalon NY2013 | So I wanted to tell a story that really obsessed me when I was writing my new book, and it's a story of something that happened 3,000 years ago, when the Kingdom of Israel was in its infancy. And it takes place in an area called the Shephelah in what is now Israel. And the reason the story obsessed me is that I thought I understood it, and then I went back over it and I realized that I didn't understand it at all. Ancient Palestine had a — along its eastern border, there's a mountain range. Still same is true of Israel today. And in the mountain range are all of the ancient cities of that region, so Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron. And then there's a coastal plain along the Mediterranean, where Tel Aviv is now. And connecting the mountain range with the coastal plain is an area called the Shephelah, which is a series of valleys and ridges that run east to west, and you can follow the Shephelah, go through the Shephelah to get from the coastal plain to the mountains. And the Shephelah, if you've been to Israel, you'll know it's just about the most beautiful part of Israel. It's gorgeous, with forests of oak and wheat fields and vineyards. But more importantly, though, in the history of that region, it's served, it's had a real strategic function, and that is, it is the means by which hostile armies on the coastal plain find their way, get up into the mountains and threaten those living in the mountains. And 3,000 years ago, that's exactly what happens. The Philistines, who are the biggest of enemies of the Kingdom of Israel, are living in the coastal plain. They're originally from Crete. They're a seafaring people. And they may start to make their way through one of the valleys of the Shephelah up into the mountains, because what they want to do is occupy the highland area right by Bethlehem and split the Kingdom of Israel in two. And the Kingdom of Israel, which is headed by King Saul, obviously catches wind of this, and Saul brings his army down from the mountains and he confronts the Philistines in the Valley of Elah, one of the most beautiful of the valleys of the Shephelah. And the Israelites dig in along the northern ridge, and the Philistines dig in along the southern ridge, and the two armies just sit there for weeks and stare at each other, because they're deadlocked. Neither can attack the other, because to attack the other side you've got to come down the mountain into the valley and then up the other side, and you're completely exposed. So finally, to break the deadlock, the Philistines send their mightiest warrior down into the valley floor, and he calls out and he says to the Israelites, "Send your mightiest warrior down, and we'll have this out, just the two of us." This was a tradition in ancient warfare called single combat. It was a way of settling disputes without incurring the bloodshed of a major battle. And the Philistine who is sent down, their mighty warrior, is a giant. He's 6 foot 9. He's outfitted head to toe in this glittering bronze armor, and he's got a sword and he's got a javelin and he's got his spear. He is absolutely terrifying. And he's so terrifying that none of the Israelite soldiers want to fight him. It's a death wish, right? There's no way they think they can take him. And finally the only person who will come forward is this young shepherd boy, and he goes up to Saul and he says, "I'll fight him." And Saul says, "You can't fight him. That's ridiculous. You're this kid. This is this mighty warrior." But the shepherd is adamant. He says, "No, no, no, you don't understand, I have been defending my flock against lions and wolves for years. I think I can do it." And Saul has no choice. He's got no one else who's come forward. So he says, "All right." And then he turns to the kid, and he says, "But you've got to wear this armor. You can't go as you are." So he tries to give the shepherd his armor, and the shepherd says, "No." He says, "I can't wear this stuff." The Biblical verse is, "I cannot wear this for I have not proved it," meaning, "I've never worn armor before. You've got to be crazy." So he reaches down instead on the ground and picks up five stones and puts them in his shepherd's bag and starts to walk down the mountainside to meet the giant. And the giant sees this figure approaching, and calls out, "Come to me so I can feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field." He issues this kind of taunt towards this person coming to fight him. And the shepherd draws closer and closer, and the giant sees that he's carrying a staff. That's all he's carrying. Instead of a weapon, just this shepherd's staff, and he says — he's insulted — "Am I a dog that you would come to me with sticks?" And the shepherd boy takes one of his stones out of his pocket, puts it in his sling and rolls it around and lets it fly and it hits the giant right between the eyes — right here, in his most vulnerable spot — and he falls down either dead or unconscious, and the shepherd boy runs up and takes his sword and cuts off his head, and the Philistines see this and they turn and they just run. And of course, the name of the giant is Goliath and the name of the shepherd boy is David, and the reason that story has obsessed me over the course of writing my book is that everything I thought I knew about that story turned out to be wrong. So David, in that story, is supposed to be the underdog, right? In fact, that term, David and Goliath, has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger. Now why do we call David an underdog? Well, we call him an underdog because he's a kid, a little kid, and Goliath is this big, strong giant. We also call him an underdog because Goliath is an experienced warrior, and David is just a shepherd. But most importantly, we call him an underdog because all he has is — it's that Goliath is outfitted with all of this modern weaponry, this glittering coat of armor and a sword and a javelin and a spear, and all David has is this sling. Well, let's start there with the phrase "All David has is this sling," because that's the first mistake that we make. In ancient warfare, there are three kinds of warriors. There's cavalry, men on horseback and with chariots. There's heavy infantry, which are foot soldiers, armed foot soldiers with swords and shields and some kind of armor. And there's artillery, and artillery are archers, but, more importantly, slingers. And a slinger is someone who has a leather pouch with two long cords attached to it, and they put a projectile, either a rock or a lead ball, inside the pouch, and they whirl it around like this and they let one of the cords go, and the effect is to send the projectile forward towards its target. That's what David has, and it's important to understand that that sling is not a slingshot. It's not this, right? It's not a child's toy. It's in fact an incredibly devastating weapon. When David rolls it around like this, he's turning the sling around probably at six or seven revolutions per second, and that means that when the rock is released, it's going forward really fast, probably 35 meters per second. That's substantially faster than a baseball thrown by even the finest of baseball pitchers. More than that, the stones in the Valley of Elah were not normal rocks. They were barium sulphate, which are rocks twice the density of normal stones. If you do the calculations on the ballistics, on the stopping power of the rock fired from David's sling, it's roughly equal to the stopping power of a [.45 caliber] handgun. This is an incredibly devastating weapon. Accuracy, we know from historical records that slingers — experienced slingers could hit and maim or even kill a target at distances of up to 200 yards. From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate. When David lines up — and he's not 200 yards away from Goliath, he's quite close to Goliath — when he lines up and fires that thing at Goliath, he has every intention and every expectation of being able to hit Goliath at his most vulnerable spot between his eyes. If you go back over the history of ancient warfare, you will find time and time again that slingers were the decisive factor against infantry in one kind of battle or another. So what's Goliath? He's heavy infantry, and his expectation when he challenges the Israelites to a duel is that he's going to be fighting another heavy infantryman. When he says, "Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field," the key phrase is "Come to me." Come up to me because we're going to fight, hand to hand, like this. Saul has the same expectation. David says, "I want to fight Goliath," and Saul tries to give him his armor, because Saul is thinking, "Oh, when you say 'fight Goliath,' you mean 'fight him in hand-to-hand combat,' infantry on infantry." But David has absolutely no expectation. He's not going to fight him that way. Why would he? He's a shepherd. He's spent his entire career using a sling to defend his flock against lions and wolves. That's where his strength lies. So here he is, this shepherd, experienced in the use of a devastating weapon, up against this lumbering giant weighed down by a hundred pounds of armor and these incredibly heavy weapons that are useful only in short-range combat. Goliath is a sitting duck. He doesn't have a chance. So why do we keep calling David an underdog, and why do we keep referring to his victory as improbable? There's a second piece of this that's important. It's not just that we misunderstand David and his choice of weaponry. It's also that we profoundly misunderstand Goliath. Goliath is not what he seems to be. There's all kinds of hints of this in the Biblical text, things that are in retrospect quite puzzling and don't square with his image as this mighty warrior. So to begin with, the Bible says that Goliath is led onto the valley floor by an attendant. Now that is weird, right? Here is this mighty warrior challenging the Israelites to one-on-one combat. Why is he being led by the hand by some young boy, presumably, to the point of combat? Secondly, the Bible story makes special note of how slowly Goliath moves, another odd thing to say when you're describing the mightiest warrior known to man at that point. And then there's this whole weird thing about how long it takes Goliath to react to the sight of David. So David's coming down the mountain, and he's clearly not preparing for hand-to-hand combat. There is nothing about him that says, "I am about to fight you like this." He's not even carrying a sword. Why does Goliath not react to that? It's as if he's oblivious to what's going on that day. And then there's that strange comment he makes to David: "Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?" Sticks? David only has one stick. Well, it turns out that there's been a great deal of speculation within the medical community over the years about whether there is something fundamentally wrong with Goliath, an attempt to make sense of all of those apparent anomalies. There have been many articles written. The first one was in 1960 in the Indiana Medical Journal, and it started a chain of speculation that starts with an explanation for Goliath's height. So Goliath is head and shoulders above all of his peers in that era, and usually when someone is that far out of the norm, there's an explanation for it. So the most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly. So the tallest person of all time was a guy named Robert Wadlow who was still growing when he died at the age of 24 and he was 8 foot 11. He had acromegaly. Do you remember the wrestler André the Giant? Famous. He had acromegaly. There's even speculation that Abraham Lincoln had acromegaly. Anyone who's unusually tall, that's the first explanation we come up with. And acromegaly has a very distinct set of side effects associated with it, principally having to do with vision. The pituitary tumor, as it grows, often starts to compress the visual nerves in your brain, with the result that people with acromegaly have either double vision or they are profoundly nearsighted. So when people have started to speculate about what might have been wrong with Goliath, they've said, "Wait a minute, he looks and sounds an awful lot like someone who has acromegaly." And that would also explain so much of what was strange about his behavior that day. Why does he move so slowly and have to be escorted down into the valley floor by an attendant? Because he can't make his way on his own. Why is he so strangely oblivious to David that he doesn't understand that David's not going to fight him until the very last moment? Because he can't see him. When he says, "Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field," the phrase "come to me" is a hint also of his vulnerability. Come to me because I can't see you. And then there's, "Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?" He sees two sticks when David has only one. So the Israelites up on the mountain ridge looking down on him thought he was this extraordinarily powerful foe. What they didn't understand was that the very thing that was the source of his apparent strength was also the source of his greatest weakness. And there is, I think, in that, a very important lesson for all of us. Giants are not as strong and powerful as they seem. And sometimes the shepherd boy has a sling in his pocket. Thank you. (Applause) |
Life that doesn't end with death | {0: 'Kelli Swazey examines how religious and spiritual practices form group identity, and play a vital role in structuring the interactions of individuals within a culture. '} | TEDMED 2013 | I think it's safe to say that all humans will be intimate with death at least once in their lives. But what if that intimacy began long before you faced your own transition from life into death? What would life be like if the dead literally lived alongside you? In my husband's homeland in the highlands of Sulawesi island in eastern Indonesia, there is a community of people that experience death not as a singular event but as a gradual social process. In Tana Toraja, the most important social moments in people's lives, the focal points of social and cultural interaction are not weddings or births or even family dinners, but funerals. So these funerals are characterized by elaborate rituals that tie people in a system of reciprocal debt based on the amount of animals — pigs, chickens and, most importantly, water buffalo — that are sacrificed and distributed in the name of the deceased. So this cultural complex surrounding death, the ritual enactment of the end of life, has made death the most visible and remarkable aspect of Toraja's landscape. Lasting anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, funeral ceremonies are a raucous affair, where commemorating someone who's died is not so much a private sadness but more of a publicly shared transition. And it's a transition that's just as much about the identity of the living as it is about remembrance of the dead. So every year, thousands of visitors come to Tana Toraja to see, as it were, this culture of death, and for many people these grandiose ceremonies and the length of the ceremonies are somehow incommensurable with the way that we face our own mortality in the West. So even as we share death as a universal experience, it's not experienced the same way the world over. And as an anthropologist, I see these differences in experience being rooted in the cultural and social world through which we define the phenomena around us. So where we see an unquestionable reality, death as an irrefutable biological condition, Torajans see the expired corporeal form as part of a larger social genesis. So again, the physical cessation of life is not the same as death. In fact, a member of society is only truly dead when the extended family can agree upon and marshal the resources necessary to hold a funeral ceremony that is considered appropriate in terms of resources for the status of the deceased. And this ceremony has to take place in front of the eyes of the whole community with everyone's participation. So after a person's physical death, their body is placed in a special room in the traditional residence, which is called the tongkonan. And the tongkonan is symbolic not only of the family's identity but also of the human life cycle from birth to death. So essentially, the shape of the building that you're born into is the shape of the structure which carries you to your ancestral resting place. Until the funeral ceremony, which can be held years after a person's physical death, the deceased is referred to as "to makala," a sick person, or "to mama," a person who is asleep, and they continue to be a member of the household. They are symbolically fed and cared for, and the family at this time will begin a number of ritual injunctions, which communicates to the wider community around them that one of their members is undergoing the transition from this life into the afterlife known as Puya. So I know what some of you must be thinking right now. Is she really saying that these people live with the bodies of their dead relatives? And that's exactly what I'm saying. But instead of giving in to the sort of visceral reaction we have to this idea of proximity to bodies, proximity to death, or how this notion just does not fit into our very biological or medical sort of definition of death, I like to think about what the Torajan way of viewing death encompasses of the human experience that the medical definition leaves out. I think that Torajans socially recognize and culturally express what many of us feel to be true despite the widespread acceptance of the biomedical definition of death, and that is that our relationships with other humans, their impact on our social reality, doesn't cease with the termination of the physical processes of the body, that there's a period of transition as the relationship between the living and the dead is transformed but not ended. So Torajans express this idea of this enduring relationship by lavishing love and attention on the most visible symbol of that relationship, the human body. So my husband has fond memories of talking to and playing with and generally being around his deceased grandfather, and for him there is nothing unnatural about this. This is a natural part of the process as the family comes to terms with the transition in their relationship to the deceased, and this is the transition from relating to the deceased as a person who's living to relating to the deceased as a person who's an ancestor. And here you can see these wooden effigies of the ancestors, so these are people who have already been buried, already had a funeral ceremony. These are called tau tau. So the funeral ceremony itself embodies this relational perspective on death. It ritualizes the impact of death on families and communities. And it's also a moment of self-awareness. It's a moment when people think about who they are, their place in society, and their role in the life cycle in accordance with Torajan cosmology. There's a saying in Toraja that all people will become grandparents, and what this means is that after death, we all become part of the ancestral line that anchors us between the past and the present and will define who our loved ones are into the future. So essentially, we all become grandparents to the generations of human children that come after us. And this metaphor of membership in the greater human family is the way that children also describe the money that they invest in these sacrificial buffaloes that are thought to carry people's soul from here to the afterlife, and children will explain that they will invest the money in this because they want to repay their parents the debt for all of the years their parents spent investing and caring for them. But the sacrifice of buffalo and the ritual display of wealth also exhibits the status of the deceased, and, by extension, the deceased's family. So at funerals, relationships are reconfirmed but also transformed in a ritual drama that highlights the most salient feature about death in this place: its impact on life and the relationships of the living. So all of this focus on death doesn't mean that Torajans don't aspire to the ideal of a long life. They engage in many practices thought to confer good health and survival to an advanced age. But they don't put much stock in efforts to prolong life in the face of debilitating illness or in old age. It's said in Toraja that everybody has sort of a predetermined amount of life. It's called the sunga'. And like a thread, it should be allowed to unspool to its natural end. So by having death as a part of the cultural and social fabric of life, people's everyday decisions about their health and healthcare are affected. The patriarch of my husband's maternal clan, Nenet Katcha, is now approaching the age of 100, as far as we can tell. And there are increasing signs that he is about to depart on his own journey for Puya. And his death will be greatly mourned. But I know that my husband's family looks forward to the moment when they can ritually display what his remarkable presence has meant to their lives, when they can ritually recount his life's narrative, weaving his story into the history of their community. His story is their story. His funeral songs will sing them a song about themselves. And it's a story that has no discernible beginning, no foreseeable end. It's a story that goes on long after his body no longer does. People ask me if I'm frightened or repulsed by participating in a culture where the physical manifestations of death greet us at every turn. But I see something profoundly transformative in experiencing death as a social process and not just a biological one. In reality, the relationship between the living and the dead has its own drama in the U.S. healthcare system, where decisions about how long to stretch the thread of life are made based on our emotional and social ties with the people around us, not just on medicine's ability to prolong life. We, like the Torajans, base our decisions about life on the meanings and the definitions that we ascribe to death. So I'm not suggesting that anyone in this audience should run out and adopt the traditions of the Torajans. It might be a little bit difficult to put into play in the United States. But I want to ask what we can gain from seeing physical death not only as a biological process but as part of the greater human story. What would it be like to look on the expired human form with love because it's so intimately a part of who we all are? If we could expand our definition of death to encompass life, we could experience death as part of life and perhaps face death with something other than fear. Perhaps one of the answers to the challenges that are facing the U.S. healthcare system, particularly in the end-of-life care, is as simple as a shift in perspective, and the shift in perspective in this case would be to look at the social life of every death. It might help us recognize that the way we limit our conversation about death to something that's medical or biological is reflective of a larger culture that we all share of avoiding death, being afraid of talking about it. If we could entertain and value other kinds of knowledge about life, including other definitions of death, it has the potential to change the discussions that we have about the end of life. It could change the way that we die, but more importantly, it could transform the way that we live. (Applause) |
How I hacked online dating | {0: 'Amy Webb is a futurist and founder of the Future Today Institute, and is the award-winning author of three books, including “Data: A Love Story” and “The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream.”'} | TEDSalon NY2013 | So my name is Amy Webb, and a few years ago I found myself at the end of yet another fantastic relationship that came burning down in a spectacular fashion. And I thought, what's wrong with me? I don't understand why this keeps happening. So I asked everybody in my life what they thought. I turned to my grandmother, who always had plenty of advice, and she said, "Stop being so picky. You've got to date around. And most importantly, true love will find you when you least expect it." Now as it turns out, I'm somebody who thinks a lot about data, as you'll soon find. I am constantly swimming in numbers, formulas and charts. I also have a very tight-knit family, and I'm very, very close with my sister, and as a result, I wanted to have the same type of family when I grew up. So I'm at the end of this bad breakup, I'm 30 years old, I figure I'm probably going to have to date somebody for about six months before I'm ready to get monogamous and before we can sort of cohabitate, and we have to do that for a while before we can get engaged. And if I want to start having children by the time I'm 35, that meant that I would have had to have been on my way to marriage five years ago. So that wasn't going to work. If my strategy was to least-expect my way into true love, then the variable that I had to deal with was serendipity. In short, I was trying to figure out what's the probability of my finding Mr. Right? Well, at the time I was living in the city of Philadelphia, and it's a big city, and I figured, in this entire place, there are lots of possibilities. So again, I started doing some math. Population of Philadelphia: it has 1.5 million people. I figure about half of that are men, so that takes the number down to 750,000. I'm looking for a guy between the ages of 30 and 36, which was only four percent of the population, so now I'm dealing with the possibility of 30,000 men. I was looking for somebody who was Jewish, because I am and that was important to me. That's only 2.3 percent of the population. I figure I'm attracted to maybe one out of 10 of those men, and there was no way I was going to deal with somebody who was an avid golfer. So that basically meant there were 35 men for me that I could possibly date in the entire city of Philadelphia. In the meantime, my very large Jewish family was already all married and well on their way to having lots and lots of children, and I felt like I was under tremendous peer pressure to get my life going already. So I have two possible strategies at this point I'm sort of figuring out. One, I can take my grandmother's advice and sort of least-expect my way into maybe bumping into the one out of 35 possible men in the entire 1.5-million-person city of Philadelphia, or I could try online dating. Now, I like the idea of online dating, because it's predicated on an algorithm, and that's really just a simple way of saying I've got a problem, I'm going to use some data, run it through a system and get to a solution. So online dating is the second most popular way that people now meet each other, but as it turns out, algorithms have been around for thousands of years in almost every culture. In fact, in Judaism, there were matchmakers a long time ago, and though they didn't have an explicit algorithm per se, they definitely were running through formulas in their heads, like, is the girl going to like the boy? Are the families going to get along? What's the rabbi going to say? Are they going to start having children right away? The matchmaker would sort of think through all of this, put two people together, and that would be the end of it. So in my case, I thought, well, will data and an algorithm lead me to my Prince Charming? So I decided to sign on. Now, there was one small catch. As I'm signing on to the various dating websites, as it happens, I was really, really busy. But that actually wasn't the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that I hate filling out questionnaires of any kind, and I certainly don't like questionnaires that are like Cosmo quizzes. So I just copied and pasted from my résumé. (Laughter) So in the descriptive part up top, I said that I was an award-winning journalist and a future thinker. When I was asked about fun activities and my ideal date, I said monetization and fluency in Japanese. I talked a lot about JavaScript. (Laughter) So obviously this was not the best way to put my most sexy foot forward. But the real failure was that there were plenty of men for me to date. These algorithms had a sea full of men that wanted to take me out on lots of dates — what turned out to be truly awful dates. There was this guy Steve, the I.T. guy. The algorithm matched us up because we share a love of gadgets, we share a love of math and data and '80s music, and so I agreed to go out with him. So Steve the I.T. guy invited me out to one of Philadelphia's white-table-cloth, extremely expensive restaurants. And we went in, and right off the bat, our conversation really wasn't taking flight, but he was ordering a lot of food. In fact, he didn't even bother looking at the menu. He was ordering multiple appetizers, multiple entrées, for me as well, and suddenly there are piles and piles of food on our table, also lots and lots of bottles of wine. So we're nearing the end of our conversation and the end of dinner, and I've decided Steve the I.T. guy and I are really just not meant for each other, but we'll part ways as friends, when he gets up to go to the bathroom, and in the meantime, the bill comes to our table. And listen, I'm a modern woman. I am totally down with splitting the bill. But then Steve the I.T. guy didn't come back. (Gasping) And that was my entire month's rent. (Audience gasps) So needless to say, I was not having a good night. So I run home, I call my mother, I call my sister, and as I do, at the end of each one of these terrible, terrible dates, I regale them with the details. And they say to me, "Stop complaining." (Laughter) "You're just being too picky." So I said, fine, from here on out I'm only going on dates where I know there's Wi-Fi, and I'm bringing my laptop. I'm going to shove it into my bag, I'm going to have this email template, and I'm going to fill it out and collect information on all these different data points during the date to prove to everybody that empirically, these dates really are terrible. (Laughter) So I started tracking things like really stupid, awkward, sexual remarks; bad vocabulary; the number of times a man forced me to high-five him. (Laughter) So I started to crunch some numbers, and that allowed me to make some correlations. So as it turns out, for some reason, men who drink Scotch reference kinky sex immediately. (Laughter) Well, it turns out that these probably weren't bad guys. There were just bad for me. And as it happens, the algorithms that were setting us up, they weren't bad either. These algorithms were doing exactly what they were designed to do, which was to take our user-generated information, in my case, my résumé, and match it up with other people's information. See, the real problem here is that, while the algorithms work just fine, you and I don't, when confronted with blank windows where we're supposed to input our information online. Very few of us have the ability to be totally and brutally honest with ourselves. The other problem is that these websites are asking us questions like, are you a dog person or a cat person? Do you like horror films or romance films? I'm not looking for a pen pal. I'm looking for a husband. Right? So there's a certain amount of superficiality in that data. So I said fine, I've got a new plan. I'm going to keep using these online dating sites, but I'm going to treat them as databases, and rather than waiting for an algorithm to set me up, I think I'm going to try reverse-engineering this entire system. So knowing that there was superficial data that was being used to match me up with other people, I decided instead to ask my own questions. What was every single possible thing that I could think of that I was looking for in a mate? So I started writing and writing and writing, and at the end, I had amassed 72 different data points. I wanted somebody was Jew-ish, so I was looking for somebody who had the same background and thoughts on our culture, but wasn't going to force me to go to shul every Friday and Saturday. I wanted somebody who worked hard, because work for me is extremely important, but not too hard. For me, the hobbies that I have are really just new work projects that I've launched. I also wanted somebody who not only wanted two children, but was going to have the same attitude toward parenting that I do, so somebody who was going to be totally okay with forcing our child to start taking piano lessons at age three, and also maybe computer science classes if we could wrangle it. So things like that, but I also wanted somebody who would go to far-flung, exotic places, like Petra, Jordan. I also wanted somebody who would weigh 20 pounds more than me at all times, regardless of what I weighed. (Laughter) So I now have these 72 different data points, which, to be fair, is a lot. So what I did was, I went through and I prioritized that list. I broke it into a top tier and a second tier of points, and I ranked everything starting at 100 and going all the way down to 91, and listing things like I was looking for somebody who was really smart, who would challenge and stimulate me, and balancing that with a second tier and a second set of points. These things were also important to me but not necessarily deal-breakers. (Laughter) So once I had all this done, I then built a scoring system, because what I wanted to do was to sort of mathematically calculate whether or not I thought the guy that I found online would be a match with me. I figured there would be a minimum of 700 points before I would agree to email somebody or respond to an email message. For 900 points, I'd agree to go out on a date, and I wouldn't even consider any kind of relationship before somebody had crossed the 1,500 point threshold. Well, as it turns out, this worked pretty well. So I go back online now. I found Jewishdoc57 who's incredibly good-looking, incredibly well-spoken, he had hiked Mt. Fuji, he had walked along the Great Wall. He likes to travel as long as it doesn't involve a cruise ship. And I thought, I've done it! I've cracked the code. I have just found the Jewish Prince Charming of my family's dreams. There was only one problem: He didn't like me back. And I guess the one variable that I haven't considered is the competition. Who are all of the other women on these dating sites? I found SmileyGirl1978. She said she was a "Fun girl who is Happy and Outgoing." She listed her job as "teacher." She said she is "silly, nice and friendly." She likes to make people laugh "alot." At this moment I knew, clicking profile after profile that looked like this, that I needed to do some market research. So I created 10 fake male profiles. Now, before I lose all of you — (Laughter) — understand that I did this strictly to gather data about everybody else in the system. I didn't carry on crazy Catfish-style relationships with anybody. I really was just scraping their data. But I didn't want everybody's data. I only wanted data on the women who were going to be attracted to the type of man that I really, really wanted to marry. When I released these men into the wild, I did follow some rules. So I didn't reach out to any woman first. I just waited to see who these profiles were going to attract, and mainly what I was looking at was two different data sets. So I was looking at qualitative data, so what was the humor, the tone, the voice, the communication style that these women shared in common? And also quantitative data, so what was the average length of their profile, how much time was spent between messages? What I was trying to get at here was that I figured, in person, I would be just as competitive as a SmileyGirl1978. I wanted to figure out how to maximize my own profile online. Well, one month later, I had a lot of data, and I was able to do another analysis. And as it turns out, content matters a lot. So smart people tend to write a lot — 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 words about themselves, which may all be very, very interesting. The challenge here, though, is that the popular men and women are sticking to 97 words on average that are written very, very well, even though it may not seem like it all the time. The other hallmark of the people who do this well is that they're using non-specific language. So in my case, "The English Patient" is my most favorite movie ever, but it doesn't work to use that in a profile, because that's a superficial data point, and somebody may disagree and decide they don't want to go out because they didn't like sitting through the three-hour movie. Also, optimistic language matters a lot. So this is a word cloud highlighting the most popular words that were used by the most popular women, words like "fun" and "girl" and "love." And what I realized was not that I had to dumb down my own profile. Remember, I'm somebody who said that I speak fluent Japanese and I know JavaScript and I was okay with that. The difference is that it's about being more approachable and helping people understand the best way to reach out to you. And as it turns out, timing is also really, really important. Just because you have access to somebody's mobile phone number or their instant message account and it's 2 o'clock in the morning and you happen to be awake, doesn't mean that that's a good time to communicate with those people. The popular women on these online sites spend an average of 23 hours in between each communication. And that's what we would normally do in the usual process of courtship. And finally — there were the photos. All of the women who were popular showed some skin. They all looked really great, which turned out to be in sharp contrast to what I had uploaded. (Laughter) Once I had all of this information, I was able to create a super profile, so it was still me, but it was me optimized now for this ecosystem. And as it turns out, I did a really good job. I was the most popular person online. (Laughter) (Applause) And as it turns out, lots and lots of men wanted to date me. So I call my mom, I call my sister, I call my grandmother. I'm telling them about this fabulous news, and they say, "This is wonderful! How soon are you going out?" I said, "Actually, I'm not going to go out with anybody." Because remember, in my scoring system, they have to reach a minimum threshold of 700 points, and none of them have done that. They said, "What? You're still being too damn picky." Well, not too long after that, I found this guy, Thevenin, and he said that he was culturally Jewish, he said that his job was an arctic baby seal hunter, which I thought was very clever. He talked in detail about travel. He made a lot of really interesting cultural references. He looked and talked exactly like what I wanted, and immediately, he scored 850 points. It was enough for a date. Three weeks later, we met up in person for what turned out to be a 14-hour-long conversation that went from coffee shop to restaurant to another coffee shop to another restaurant, and when he dropped me back off at my house that night I re-scored him — [1,050 points!] Thought, you know what, this entire time, I haven't been picky enough. Well, a year and a half after that, we were non-cruise ship traveling through Petra, Jordan, when he got down on his knee and proposed. A year after that, we were married, and about a year and a half after that, our daughter, Petra, was born. Audience: Oh! (Applause) [What it means...] Obviously, I'm having a fabulous life, so — (Laughter) The question is, what does all of this mean for you? Well, as it turns out, there is an algorithm for love. It's just not the ones that we're being presented with online. In fact, it's something that you write yourself. So whether you're looking for a husband or a wife or you're trying to find your passion or you're trying to start a business, all you have to really do is figure out your own framework and play by your own rules, and feel free to be as picky as you want. Well, on my wedding day, I had a conversation again with my grandmother, and she said, "All right, maybe I was wrong. It looks like you did come up with a really, really great system. Now, your matzah balls ... They should be fluffy, not hard." (Laughter) And I'll take her advice on that. (Applause) |
Psychedelic science | {0: 'Fabian Oefner creates stunning visual representations of natural forces.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | An image is worth more than a thousand words, so I'm going to start my talk by stop talking and show you a few images that I recently captured. So by now, my talk is already 6,000 words long, and I feel like I should stop here. (Laughter) At the same time, I probably owe you some explanation about the images that you just saw. What I am trying to do as a photographer, as an artist, is to bring the world of art and science together. Whether it is an image of a soap bubble captured at the very moment where it's bursting, as you can see in this image, whether it's a universe made of tiny little beads of oil paint, strange liquids that behave in very peculiar ways, or paint that is modeled by centrifugal forces, I'm always trying to link those two fields together. What I find very intriguing about those two is that they both look at the same thing: They are a response to their surroundings. And yet, they do it in a very different way. If you look at science on one hand, science is a very rational approach to its surroundings, whereas art on the other hand is usually an emotional approach to its surroundings. What I am trying to do is I'm trying to bring those two views into one so that my images both speak to the viewer's heart but also to the viewer's brain. Let me demonstrate this based on three projects. The first one has to do with making sound visible. Now as you may know, sound travels in waves, so if you have a speaker, a speaker actually does nothing else than taking the audio signal, transform it into a vibration, which is then transported through the air, is captured by our ear, and transformed into an audio signal again. Now I was thinking, how can I make those sound waves visible? So I came up with the following setup. I took a speaker, I placed a thin foil of plastic on top of that speaker, and then I added tiny little crystals on top of that speaker. And now, if I would play a sound through that speaker, it would cause the crystals to move up and down. Now this happens very fast, in the blink of an eye, so, together with LG, we captured this motion with a camera that is able to capture more than 3,000 frames per second. Let me show you what this looks like. (Music: "Teardrop" by Massive Attack) (Applause) Thank you very much. I agree, it looks pretty amazing. But I have to tell you a funny story. I got an indoor sunburn doing this while shooting in Los Angeles. Now in Los Angeles, you could get a decent sunburn just on any of the beaches, but I got mine indoors, and what happened is that, if you're shooting at 3,000 frames per second, you need to have a silly amount of light, lots of lights. So we had this speaker set up, and we had the camera facing it, and lots of lights pointing at the speaker, and I would set up the speaker, put the tiny little crystals on top of that speaker, and we would do this over and over again, and it was until midday that I realized that I had a completely red face because of the lights pointing at the speaker. What was so funny about it was that the speaker was only coming from the right side, so the right side of my face was completely red and I looked like the Phantom of the Opera for the rest of the week. Let me now turn to another project which involves less harmful substances. Has anyone of you heard of ferrofluid? Ah, some of you have. Excellent. Should I skip that part? (Laughter) Ferrofluid has a very strange behavior. It's a liquid that is completely black. It's got an oily consistency. And it's got tiny little particles of metal in it, which makes it magnetic. So if I now put this liquid into a magnetic field, it would change its appearance. Now I've got a live demonstration over here to show this to you. So I've got a camera pointing down at this plate, and underneath that plate, there is a magnet. Now I'm going to add some of that ferrofluid to that magnet. Let's just slightly move it to the right and maybe focus it a little bit more. Excellent. So what you can see now is that the ferrofluid has formed spikes. This is due to the attraction and the repulsion of the individual particles inside the liquid. Now this looks already quite interesting, but let me now add some watercolors to it. Those are just standard watercolors that you would paint with. You wouldn't paint with syringes, but it works just the same. So what happened now is, when the watercolor was flowing into the structure, the watercolors do not mix with the ferrofluid. That's because the ferrofluid itself is hydrophobic. That means it doesn't mix with the water. And at the same time, it tries to maintain its position above the magnet, and therefore, it creates those amazing-looking structures of channels and tiny little ponds of colorful water paint. So that was the second project. Let me now turn to the last project, which involves the national beverage of Scotland. (Laughter) This image, and also this one, were made using whiskey. Now you might ask yourself, how did he do that? Did he drink half a bottle of whiskey and then draw the hallucination he got from being drunk onto paper? I can assure you I was fully conscious while I was taking those pictures. Now, whiskey contains 40 percent of alcohol, and alcohol has got some very interesting properties. Maybe you have experienced some of those properties before, but I am talking about the physical properties, not the other ones. So when I open the bottle, the alcohol molecules would spread in the air, and that's because alcohol is a very volatile substance. And at the same time, alcohol is highly flammable. And it was with those two properties that I was able to create the images that you're seeing right now. Let me demonstrate this over here. And what I have here is an empty glass vessel. It's got nothing in it. And now I'm going to fill it with oxygen and whiskey. Add some more. Now we just wait for a few seconds for the molecules to spread inside the bottle. And now, let's set that on fire. (Laughter) So that's all that happens. It goes really fast, and it's not that impressive. I could do it again to show it one more time, but some would argue that this is a complete waste of the whiskey, and that I should rather drink it. But let me show you a slow motion in a completely darkened room of what I just showed you in this live demonstration. So what happened is that the flame traveled through the glass vessel from top to bottom, burning the mix of the air molecules and the alcohol. So the images that you saw at the beginning, they are actually a flame stopped in time while it is traveling through the bottle, and you have to imagine it was flipped around 180 degrees. So that's how those images were made. (Applause) Thank you. So, I have now showed you three projects, and you might ask yourself, what is it good for? What's the idea behind it? Is it just a waste of whiskey? Is it just some strange materials? Those three projects, they're based on very simple scientific phenomena, such as magnetism, the sound waves, or over here, the physical properties of a substance, and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to use these phenomena and show them in a poetic and unseen way, and therefore invite the viewer to pause for a moment and think about all the beauty that is constantly surrounding us. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Can technology solve our big problems? | {0: 'Jason Pontin is the editor-in-chief and publisher of <em>MIT Technology Review</em>.'} | TED2013 | So, we used to solve big problems. On July 21st, 1969, Buzz Aldrin climbed out of Apollo 11's lunar module and descended onto the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong and Aldrin were alone, but their presence on the moon's gray surface was the culmination of a convulsive, collective effort. The Apollo program was the greatest peacetime mobilization in the history of the United States. To get to the moon, NASA spent around 180 billion dollars in today's money, or four percent of the federal budget. Apollo employed around 400,000 people and demanded the collaboration of 20,000 companies, universities and government agencies. People died, including the crew of Apollo 1. But before the Apollo program ended, 24 men flew to the moon. Twelve walked on its surface, of whom Aldrin, following the death of Armstrong last year, is now the most senior. So why did they go? They didn't bring much back: 841 pounds of old rocks, and something all 24 later emphasized — a new sense of the smallness and the fragility of our common home. Why did they go? The cynical answer is they went because President Kennedy wanted to show the Soviets that his nation had the better rockets. But Kennedy's own words at Rice University in 1962 provide a better clue. (Video) John F. Kennedy: But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. (Applause) We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Jason Pontin: To contemporaries, Apollo wasn't only a victory of West over East in the Cold War. At the time, the strongest emotion was of wonder at the transcendent powers of technology. They went because it was a big thing to do. Landing on the moon occurred in the context of a long series of technological triumphs. The first half of the 20th century produced the assembly line and the airplane, penicillin and a vaccine for tuberculosis. In the middle years of the century, polio was eradicated and smallpox eliminated. Technology itself seemed to possess what Alvin Toffler in 1970 called "accelerative thrust." For most of human history, we could go no faster than a horse or a boat with a sail, but in 1969, the crew of Apollo 10 flew at 25,000 miles an hour. Since 1970, no human beings have been back to the moon. No one has traveled faster than the crew of Apollo 10, and blithe optimism about technology's powers has evaporated as big problems we had imagined technology would solve, such as going to Mars, creating clean energy, curing cancer, or feeding the world have come to seem intractably hard. I remember watching the liftoff of Apollo 17. I was five years old, and my mother told me not to stare at the fiery exhaust of a Saturn V rocket. I vaguely knew this was to be the last of the moon missions, but I was absolutely certain there would be Mars colonies in my lifetime. So "Something happened to our capacity to solve big problems with technology" has become a commonplace. You hear it all the time. We've heard it over the last two days here at TED. It feels as if technologists have diverted us and enriched themselves with trivial toys, with things like iPhones and apps and social media, or algorithms that speed automated trading. There's nothing wrong with most of these things. They've expanded and enriched our lives. But they don't solve humanity's big problems. What happened? So there is a parochial explanation in Silicon Valley, which admits that it has been funding less ambitious companies than it did in the years when it financed Intel, Microsoft, Apple and Genentech. Silicon Valley says the markets are to blame, in particular the incentives that venture capitalists offer to entrepreneurs. Silicon Valley says that venture investing shifted away from funding transformational ideas and towards funding incremental problems or even fake problems. But I don't think that explanation is good enough. It mostly explains what's wrong with Silicon Valley. Even when venture capitalists were at their most risk-happy, they preferred small investments, tiny investments that offered an exit within 10 years. V.C.s have always struggled to invest profitably in technologies such as energy whose capital requirements are huge and whose development is long and lengthy, and V.C.s have never, never funded the development of technologies meant to solve big problems that possess no immediate commercial value. No, the reasons we can't solve big problems are more complicated and more profound. Sometimes we choose not to solve big problems. We could go to Mars if we want. NASA even has the outline of a plan. But going to Mars would follow a political decision with popular appeal, and that will never happen. We won't go to Mars, because everyone thinks there are more important things to do here on Earth. Sometimes, we can't solve big problems because our political systems fail. Today, less than two percent of the world's energy consumption derives from advanced, renewable sources such as solar, wind and biofuels, less than two percent, and the reason is purely economic. Coal and natural gas are cheaper than solar and wind, and petroleum is cheaper than biofuels. We want alternative energy sources that can compete on price. None exist. Now, technologists, business leaders and economists all basically agree on what national policies and international treaties would spur the development of alternative energy: mostly, a significant increase in energy research and development, and some kind of price on carbon. But there's no hope in the present political climate that we will see U.S. energy policy or international treaties that reflect that consensus. Sometimes, big problems that had seemed technological turn out not to be so. Famines were long understood to be caused by failures in food supply. But 30 years of research have taught us that famines are political crises that catastrophically affect food distribution. Technology can improve things like crop yields or systems for storing and transporting food, but there will be famines so long as there are bad governments. Finally, big problems sometimes elude solution because we don't really understand the problem. President Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, but we soon discovered there are many kinds of cancer, most of them fiendishly resistant to therapy, and it is only in the last 10 years that effective, viable therapies have come to seem real. Hard problems are hard. It's not true that we can't solve big problems through technology. We can, we must, but these four elements must all be present: Political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem; institutions must support its solution; It must really be a technological problem; and we must understand it. The Apollo mission, which has become a kind of metaphor for technology's capacity to solve big problems, met these criteria. But it is an irreproducible model for the future. It is not 1961. There is no galvanizing contest like the Cold War, no politician like John Kennedy who can heroize the difficult and the dangerous, and no popular science fictional mythology such as exploring the solar system. Most of all, going to the moon turned out to be easy. It was just three days away. And arguably it wasn't even solving much of a problem. We are left alone with our day, and the solutions of the future will be harder won. God knows, we don't lack for the challenges. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The case for letting business solve social problems | {0: 'Michael E. Porter wrote the books on modern competitive strategy for business. Now he is thinking deeply about the intersection between society and corporate interests.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I think we're all aware that the world today is full of problems. We've been hearing them today and yesterday and every day for decades. Serious problems, big problems, pressing problems. Poor nutrition, access to water, climate change, deforestation, lack of skills, insecurity, not enough food, not enough healthcare, pollution. There's problem after problem, and I think what really separates this time from any time I can remember in my brief time on Earth is the awareness of these problems. We're all very aware. Why are we having so much trouble dealing with these problems? That's the question I've been struggling with, coming from my very different perspective. I'm not a social problem guy. I'm a guy that works with business, helps business make money. God forbid. So why are we having so many problems with these social problems, and really is there any role for business, and if so, what is that role? I think that in order to address that question, we have to step back and think about how we've understood and pondered both the problems and the solutions to these great social challenges that we face. Now, I think many have seen business as the problem, or at least one of the problems, in many of the social challenges we face. You know, think of the fast food industry, the drug industry, the banking industry. You know, this is a low point in the respect for business. Business is not seen as the solution. It's seen as the problem now, for most people. And rightly so, in many cases. There's a lot of bad actors out there that have done the wrong thing, that actually have made the problem worse. So this perspective is perhaps justified. How have we tended to see the solutions to these social problems, these many issues that we face in society? Well, we've tended to see the solutions in terms of NGOs, in terms of government, in terms of philanthropy. Indeed, the kind of unique organizational entity of this age is this tremendous rise of NGOs and social organizations. This is a unique, new organizational form that we've seen grown up. Enormous innovation, enormous energy, enormous talent now has been mobilized through this structure to try to deal with all of these challenges. And many of us here are deeply involved in that. I'm a business school professor, but I've actually founded, I think, now, four nonprofits. Whenever I got interested and became aware of a societal problem, that was what I did, form a nonprofit. That was the way we've thought about how to deal with these issues. Even a business school professor has thought about it that way. But I think at this moment, we've been at this for quite a while. We've been aware of these problems for decades. We have decades of experience with our NGOs and with our government entities, and there's an awkward reality. The awkward reality is we're not making fast enough progress. We're not winning. These problems still seem very daunting and very intractable, and any solutions we're achieving are small solutions. We're making incremental progress. What's the fundamental problem we have in dealing with these social problems? If we cut all the complexity away, we have the problem of scale. We can't scale. We can make progress. We can show benefits. We can show results. We can make things better. We're helping. We're doing better. We're doing good. We can't scale. We can't make a large-scale impact on these problems. Why is that? Because we don't have the resources. And that's really clear now. And that's clearer now than it's been for decades. There's simply not enough money to deal with any of these problems at scale using the current model. There's not enough tax revenue, there's not enough philanthropic donations, to deal with these problems the way we're dealing with them now. We've got to confront that reality. And the scarcity of resources for dealing with these problems is only growing, certainly in the advanced world today, with all the fiscal problems we face. So if it's fundamentally a resource problem, where are the resources in society? How are those resources really created, the resources we're going to need to deal with all these societal challenges? Well there, I think the answer is very clear: They're in business. All wealth is actually created by business. Business creates wealth when it meets needs at a profit. That's how all wealth is created. It's meeting needs at a profit that leads to taxes and that leads to incomes and that leads to charitable donations. That's where all the resources come from. Only business can actually create resources. Other institutions can utilize them to do important work, but only business can create them. And business creates them when it's able to meet a need at a profit. The resources are overwhelmingly generated by business. The question then is, how do we tap into this? How do we tap into this? Business generates those resources when it makes a profit. That profit is that small difference between the price and the cost it takes to produce whatever solution business has created to whatever problem they're trying to solve. But that profit is the magic. Why? Because that profit allows whatever solution we've created to be infinitely scalable. Because if we can make a profit, we can do it for 10, 100, a million, 100 million, a billion. The solution becomes self-sustaining. That's what business does when it makes a profit. Now what does this all have to do with social problems? Well, one line of thinking is, let's take this profit and redeploy it into social problems. Business should give more. Business should be more responsible. And that's been the path that we've been on in business. But again, this path that we've been on is not getting us where we need to go. Now, I started out as a strategy professor, and I'm still a strategy professor. I'm proud of that. But I've also, over the years, worked more and more on social issues. I've worked on healthcare, the environment, economic development, reducing poverty, and as I worked more and more in the social field, I started seeing something that had a profound impact on me and my whole life, in a way. The conventional wisdom in economics and the view in business has historically been that actually, there's a tradeoff between social performance and economic performance. The conventional wisdom has been that business actually makes a profit by causing a social problem. The classic example is pollution. If business pollutes, it makes more money than if it tried to reduce that pollution. Reducing pollution is expensive, therefore businesses don't want to do it. It's profitable to have an unsafe working environment. It's too expensive to have a safe working environment, therefore business makes more money if they don't have a safe working environment. That's been the conventional wisdom. A lot of companies have fallen into that conventional wisdom. They resisted environmental improvement. They resisted workplace improvement. That thinking has led to, I think, much of the behavior that we have come to criticize in business, that I come to criticize in business. But the more deeply I got into all these social issues, one after another, and actually, the more I tried to address them myself, personally, in a few cases, through nonprofits that I was involved with, the more I found actually that the reality is the opposite. Business does not profit from causing social problems, actually not in any fundamental sense. That's a very simplistic view. The deeper we get into these issues, the more we start to understand that actually business profits from solving from social problems. That's where the real profit comes. Let's take pollution. We've learned today that actually reducing pollution and emissions is generating profit. It saves money. It makes the business more productive and efficient. It doesn't waste resources. Having a safer working environment actually, and avoiding accidents, it makes the business more profitable, because it's a sign of good processes. Accidents are expensive and costly. Issue by issue by issue, we start to learn that actually there's no trade-off between social progress and economic efficiency in any fundamental sense. Another issue is health. I mean, what we've found is actually health of employees is something that business should treasure, because that health allows those employees to be more productive and come to work and not be absent. The deeper work, the new work, the new thinking on the interface between business and social problems is actually showing that there's a fundamental, deep synergy, particularly if you're not thinking in the very short run. In the very short run, you can sometimes fool yourself into thinking that there's fundamentally opposing goals, but in the long run, ultimately, we're learning in field after field that this is simply not true. So how could we tap into the power of business to address the fundamental problems that we face? Imagine if we could do that, because if we could do it, we could scale. We could tap into this enormous resource pool and this organizational capacity. And guess what? That's happening now, finally, partly because of people like you who have raised these issues now for year after year and decade after decade. We see organizations like Dow Chemical leading the revolution away from trans fat and saturated fat with innovative new products. This is an example of Jain Irrigation. This is a company that's brought drip irrigation technology to thousands and millions of farmers, reducing substantially the use of water. We see companies like the Brazilian forestry company Fibria that's figured out how to avoid tearing down old growth forest and using eucalyptus and getting much more yield per hectare of pulp and making much more paper than you could make by cutting down those old trees. You see companies like Cisco that are training so far four million people in I.T. skills to actually, yes, be responsible, but help expand the opportunity to disseminate I.T. technology and grow the whole business. There's a fundamental opportunity for business today to impact and address these social problems, and this opportunity is the largest business opportunity we see in business. And the question is, how can we get business thinking to adapt this issue of shared value? This is what I call shared value: addressing a social issue with a business model. That's shared value. Shared value is capitalism, but it's a higher kind of capitalism. It's capitalism as it was ultimately meant to be, meeting important needs, not incrementally competing for trivial differences in product attributes and market share. Shared value is when we can create social value and economic value simultaneously. It's finding those opportunities that will unleash the greatest possibility we have to actually address these social problems because we can scale. We can address shared value at multiple levels. It's real. It's happening. But in order to get this solution working, we have to now change how business sees itself, and this is thankfully underway. Businesses got trapped into the conventional wisdom that they shouldn't worry about social problems, that this was sort of something on the side, that somebody else was doing it. We're now seeing companies embrace this idea. But we also have to recognize business is not going to do this as effectively as if we have NGOs and government working in partnership with business. The new NGOs that are really moving the needle are the ones that have found these partnerships, that have found these ways to collaborate. The governments that are making the most progress are the governments that have found ways to enable shared value in business rather than see government as the only player that has to call the shots. And government has many ways in which it could impact the willingness and the ability of companies to compete in this way. I think if we can get business seeing itself differently, and if we can get others seeing business differently, we can change the world. I know it. I'm seeing it. I'm feeling it. Young people, I think, my Harvard Business School students, are getting it. If we can break down this sort of divide, this unease, this tension, this sense that we're not fundamentally collaborating here in driving these social problems, we can break this down, and we finally, I think, can have solutions. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we shouldn't trust markets with our civic life | {0: 'Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard, exploring some of the most hotly contested moral and political issues of our time.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Here's a question we need to rethink together: What should be the role of money and markets in our societies? Today, there are very few things that money can't buy. If you're sentenced to a jail term in Santa Barbara, California, you should know that if you don't like the standard accommodations, you can buy a prison cell upgrade. It's true. For how much, do you think? What would you guess? Five hundred dollars? It's not the Ritz-Carlton. It's a jail! Eighty-two dollars a night. Eighty-two dollars a night. If you go to an amusement park and don't want to stand in the long lines for the popular rides, there is now a solution. In many theme parks, you can pay extra to jump to the head of the line. They call them Fast Track or VIP tickets. And this isn't only happening in amusement parks. In Washington, D.C., long lines, queues sometimes form for important Congressional hearings. Now some people don't like to wait in long queues, maybe overnight, even in the rain. So now, for lobbyists and others who are very keen to attend these hearings but don't like to wait, there are companies, line-standing companies, and you can go to them. You can pay them a certain amount of money, they hire homeless people and others who need a job to stand waiting in the line for as long as it takes, and the lobbyist, just before the hearing begins, can take his or her place at the head of the line and a seat in the front of the room. Paid line standing. It's happening, the recourse to market mechanisms and market thinking and market solutions, in bigger arenas. Take the way we fight our wars. Did you know that, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were more private military contractors on the ground than there were U.S. military troops? Now this isn't because we had a public debate about whether we wanted to outsource war to private companies, but this is what has happened. Over the past three decades, we have lived through a quiet revolution. We've drifted almost without realizing it from having a market economy to becoming market societies. The difference is this: A market economy is a tool, a valuable and effective tool, for organizing productive activity, but a market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale. It's a way of life, in which market thinking and market values begin to dominate every aspect of life: personal relations, family life, health, education, politics, law, civic life. Now, why worry? Why worry about our becoming market societies? For two reasons, I think. One of them has to do with inequality. The more things money can buy, the more affluence, or the lack of it, matters. If the only thing that money determined was access to yachts or fancy vacations or BMWs, then inequality wouldn't matter very much. But when money comes increasingly to govern access to the essentials of the good life — decent health care, access to the best education, political voice and influence in campaigns — when money comes to govern all of those things, inequality matters a great deal. And so the marketization of everything sharpens the sting of inequality and its social and civic consequence. That's one reason to worry. There's a second reason apart from the worry about inequality, and it's this: with some social goods and practices, when market thinking and market values enter, they may change the meaning of those practices and crowd out attitudes and norms worth caring about. I'd like to take an example of a controversial use of a market mechanism, a cash incentive, and see what you think about it. Many schools struggle with the challenge of motivating kids, especially kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, to study hard, to do well in school, to apply themselves. Some economists have proposed a market solution: Offer cash incentives to kids for getting good grades or high test scores or for reading books. They've tried this, actually. They've done some experiments in some major American cities. In New York, in Chicago, in Washington, D.C., they've tried this, offering 50 dollars for an A, 35 dollars for a B. In Dallas, Texas, they have a program that offers eight-year-olds two dollars for each book they read. So let's see what — Some people are in favor, some people are opposed to this cash incentive to motivate achievement. Let's see what people here think about it. Imagine that you are the head of a major school system, and someone comes to you with this proposal. And let's say it's a foundation. They will provide the funds. You don't have to take it out of your budget. How many would be in favor and how many would be opposed to giving it a try? Let's see by a show of hands. First, how many think it might at least be worth a try to see if it would work? Raise your hand. And how many would be opposed? How many would — So the majority here are opposed, but a sizable minority are in favor. Let's have a discussion. Let's start with those of you who object, who would rule it out even before trying. What would be your reason? Who will get our discussion started? Yes? Heike Moses: Hello everyone, I'm Heike, and I think it just kills the intrinsic motivation, so in the respect that children, if they would like to read, you just take this incentive away in just paying them, so it just changes behavior. Michael Sandel: Takes the intrinsic incentive away. What is, or should be, the intrinsic motivation? HM: Well, the intrinsic motivation should be to learn. MS: To learn. HM: To get to know the world. And then, if you stop paying them, what happens then? Then they stop reading? MS: Now, let's see if there's someone who favors, who thinks it's worth trying this. Elizabeth Loftus: I'm Elizabeth Loftus, and you said worth a try, so why not try it and do the experiment and measure things? MS: And measure. And what would you measure? You'd measure how many — EL: How many books they read and how many books they continued to read after you stopped paying them. MS: Oh, after you stopped paying. All right, what about that? HM: To be frank, I just think this is, not to offend anyone, a very American way. (Laughter) (Applause) MS: All right. What's emerged from this discussion is the following question: Will the cash incentive drive out or corrupt or crowd out the higher motivation, the intrinsic lesson that we hope to convey, which is to learn to love to learn and to read for their own sakes? And people disagree about what the effect will be, but that seems to be the question, that somehow a market mechanism or a cash incentive teaches the wrong lesson, and if it does, what will become of these children later? I should tell you what's happened with these experiments. The cash for good grades has had very mixed results, for the most part has not resulted in higher grades. The two dollars for each book did lead those kids to read more books. It also led them to read shorter books. (Laughter) But the real question is, what will become of these kids later? Will they have learned that reading is a chore, a form of piecework to be done for pay, that's the worry, or may it lead them to read maybe for the wrong reason initially but then lead them to fall in love with reading for its own sake? Now, what this, even this brief debate, brings out is something that many economists overlook. Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not touch or taint the goods they exchange. Market exchange, they assume, doesn't change the meaning or value of the goods being exchanged. This may be true enough if we're talking about material goods. If you sell me a flat screen television or give me one as a gift, it will be the same good. It will work the same either way. But the same may not be true if we're talking about nonmaterial goods and social practices such as teaching and learning or engaging together in civic life. In those domains, bringing market mechanisms and cash incentives may undermine or crowd out nonmarket values and attitudes worth caring about. Once we see that markets and commerce, when extended beyond the material domain, can change the character of the goods themselves, can change the meaning of the social practices, as in the example of teaching and learning, we have to ask where markets belong and where they don't, where they may actually undermine values and attitudes worth caring about. But to have this debate, we have to do something we're not very good at, and that is to reason together in public about the value and the meaning of the social practices we prize, from our bodies to family life to personal relations to health to teaching and learning to civic life. Now these are controversial questions, and so we tend to shrink from them. In fact, during the past three decades, when market reasoning and market thinking have gathered force and gained prestige, our public discourse during this time has become hollowed out, empty of larger moral meaning. For fear of disagreement, we shrink from these questions. But once we see that markets change the character of goods, we have to debate among ourselves these bigger questions about how to value goods. One of the most corrosive effects of putting a price on everything is on commonality, the sense that we are all in it together. Against the background of rising inequality, marketizing every aspect of life leads to a condition where those who are affluent and those who are of modest means increasingly live separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools. This isn't good for democracy, nor is it a satisfying way to live, even for those of us who can afford to buy our way to the head of the line. Here's why. Democracy does not require perfect equality, but what it does require is that citizens share in a common life. What matters is that people of different social backgrounds and different walks of life encounter one another, bump up against one another in the ordinary course of life, because this is what teaches us to negotiate and to abide our differences. And this is how we come to care for the common good. And so, in the end, the question of markets is not mainly an economic question. It's really a question of how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale, or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy? Thank you very much. (Applause) |
New York's streets? Not so mean any more | {0: 'As commissioner of the NYC Department of Transportation under the Bloomberg administration, Janette Sadik-Khan was responsible for the smooth running of a New York that hides in plain sight ... the streets, highways, bridges, signs and lights.'} | TEDCity2.0 | The work of a transportation commissioner isn't just about stop signs and traffic signals. It involves the design of cities and the design of city streets. Streets are some of the most valuable resources that a city has, and yet it's an asset that's largely hidden in plain sight. And the lesson from New York over the past six years is that you can update this asset. You can remake your streets quickly, inexpensively, it can provide immediate benefits, and it can be quite popular. You just need to look at them a little differently. This is important because we live in an urban age. For the first time in history, most people live in cities, and the U.N. estimates that over the next 40 years, the population is going to double on the planet. So the design of cities is a key issue for our future. Mayor Bloomberg recognized this when he launched PlaNYC in 2007. The plan recognized that cities are in a global marketplace, and that if we're going to continue to grow and thrive and to attract the million more people that are expected to move here, we need to focus on the quality of life and the efficiency of our infrastructure. For many cities, our streets have been in a kind of suspended animation for generations. This is a picture of Times Square in the '50s, and despite all of the technological innovation, cultural changes, political changes, this is Times Square in 2008. Not much has changed in those 50 years. So we worked hard to refocus our agenda, to maximize efficient mobility, providing more room for buses, more room for bikes, more room for people to enjoy the city, and to make our streets as safe as they can be for everybody that uses them. We set out a clear action plan with goals and benchmarks. Having goals is important, because if you want to change and steer the ship of a big city in a new direction, you need to know where you're going and why. The design of a street can tell you everything about what's expected on it. In this case, it's expected that you shelter in place. The design of this street is really to maximize the movement of cars moving as quickly as possible from point A to point B, and it misses all the other ways that a street is used. When we started out, we did some early surveys about how our streets were used, and we found that New York City was largely a city without seats. Pictures like this, people perched on a fire hydrant, not the mark of a world-class city. (Laughter) It's not great for parents with kids. It's not great for seniors. It's not great for retailers. It's probably not good for the fire hydrants. Certainly not good for the police department. So we worked hard to change that balance, and probably the best example of our new approach is in Times Square. Three hundred and fifty thousand people a day walk through Times Square, and people had tried for years to make changes. They changed signals, they changed lanes, everything they could do to make Times Square work better. It was dangerous, hard to cross the street. It was chaotic. And so, none of those approaches worked, so we took a different approach, a bigger approach, looked at our street differently. And so we did a six-month pilot. We closed Broadway from 42nd Street to 47th Street and created two and a half acres of new pedestrian space. And the temporary materials are an important part of the program, because we were able to show how it worked. And I work for a data-driven mayor, as you probably know. So it was all about the data. So if it worked better for traffic, if it was better for mobility, if it was safer, better for business, we would keep it, and if it didn't work, no harm, no foul, we could put it back the way that it was, because these were temporary materials. And that was a very big part of the buy-in, much less anxiety when you think that something can be put back. But the results were overwhelming. Traffic moved better. It was much safer. Five new flagship stores opened. It's been a total home run. Times Square is now one of the top 10 retail locations on the planet. And this is an important lesson, because it doesn't need to be a zero-sum game between moving traffic and creating public space. Every project has its surprises, and one of the big surprises with Times Square was how quickly people flocked to the space. We put out the orange barrels, and people just materialized immediately into the street. It was like a Star Trek episode, you know? They weren't there before, and then zzzzzt! All the people arrived. Where they'd been, I don't know, but they were there. And this actually posed an immediate challenge for us, because the street furniture had not yet arrived. So we went to a hardware store and bought hundreds of lawn chairs, and we put those lawn chairs out on the street. And the lawn chairs became the talk of the town. It wasn't about that we'd closed Broadway to cars. It was about those lawn chairs. "What did you think about the lawn chairs?" "Do you like the color of the lawn chairs?" So if you've got a big, controversial project, think about lawn chairs. (Laughter) This is the final design for Times Square, and it will create a level surface, sidewalk to sidewalk, beautiful pavers that have studs in them to reflect the light from the billboards, creating a great new energy on the street, and we think it's going to really create a great place, a new crossroads of the world that is worthy of its name. And we will be cutting the ribbon on this, the first phase, this December. With all of our projects, our public space projects, we work closely with local businesses and local merchant groups who maintain the spaces, move the furniture, take care of the plants. This is in front of Macy's, and they were a big supporter of this new approach, because they understood that more people on foot is better for business. And we've done these projects all across the city in all kinds of neighborhoods. This is in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and you can see the short leg that was there, used for cars, that's not really needed. So what we did is we painted over the street, put down epoxy gravel, and connected the triangle to the storefronts on Grand Avenue, created a great new public space, and it's been great for businesses along Grand Avenue. We did the same thing in DUMBO, in Brooklyn, and this is one of our first projects that we did, and we took an underutilized, pretty dingy-looking parking lot and used some paint and planters to transform it over a weekend. And in the three years since we've implemented the project, retail sales have increased 172 percent. And that's twice that of adjacent areas in the same neighborhood. We've moved very, very quickly with paint and temporary materials. Instead of waiting through years of planning studies and computer models to get something done, we've done it with paint and temporary materials. And the proof is not in a computer model. It is in the real-world performance of the street. You can have fun with paint. All told, we've created over 50 pedestrian plazas in all five boroughs across the city. We've repurposed 26 acres of active car lanes and turned them into new pedestrian space. I think one of the successes is in its emulation. You're seeing this kind of approach, since we've painted Times Square, you've seen this approach in Boston, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, you name it. This is actually in Los Angeles, and they actually copied even the green dots that we had on the streets. But I can't underscore enough how much more quickly this enables you to move over traditional construction methods. We also brought this quick-acting approach to our cycling program, and in six years turned cycling into a real transportation option in New York. I think it's fair to say — (Applause) — it used to be a fairly scary place to ride a bike, and now New York has become one of the cycling capitals in the United States. And we moved quickly to create an interconnected network of lanes. You can see the map in 2007. This is how it looked in 2013 after we built out 350 miles of on-street bike lanes. I love this because it looks so easy. You just click it, and they're there. We also brought new designs to the street. We created the first parking-protected bike lane in the United States. (Applause) We protected bikers by floating parking lanes, and it's been great. Bike volumes have spiked. Injuries to all users, pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, are all down 50 percent. And we've built 30 miles of these protected bike lanes, and now you're seeing them pop up all over the country. And you can see here that this strategy has worked. The blue line is the number of cyclists, soaring. The green line is the number of bike lanes. And the yellow line is the number of injuries, which has remained essentially flat. After this big expansion, you've seen no net increase in injuries, and so there is something to that axiom that there is safety in numbers. Not everybody liked the new bike lanes, and there was a lawsuit and somewhat of a media frenzy a couple years ago. One Brooklyn paper called this bike lane that we have on Prospect Park West "the most contested piece of land outside of the Gaza Strip." (Laughter) And this is what we had done. So if you dig below the headlines, though, you'll see that the people were far ahead of the press, far ahead of the politicians. In fact, I think most politicians would be happy to have those kind of poll numbers. Sixty-four percent of New Yorkers support these bike lanes. This summer, we launched Citi Bike, the largest bike share program in the United States, with 6,000 bikes and 330 stations located next to one another. Since we've launched the program, three million trips have been taken. People have ridden seven million miles. That's 280 times around the globe. And so with this little blue key, you can unlock the keys to the city and this brand new transportation option. And daily usage just continues to soar. What has happened is the average daily ridership on the streets of New York is 36,000 people. The high that we've had so far is 44,000 in August. Yesterday, 40,000 people used Citi Bike in New York City. The bikes are being used six times a day. And I think you also see it in the kinds of riders that are on the streets. In the past, it looked like the guy on the left, ninja-clad bike messenger. And today, cyclists look like New York City looks. It's diverse — young, old, black, white, women, kids, all getting on a bike. It's an affordable, safe, convenient way to get around. Quite radical. We've also brought this approach to our buses, and New York City has the largest bus fleet in North America, the slowest bus speeds. As everybody knows, you can walk across town faster than you can take the bus. And so we focused on the most congested areas of New York City, built out six bus rapid transit lines, 57 miles of new speedy bus lanes. You pay at a kiosk before you get on the bus. We've got dedicated lanes that keep cars out because they get ticketed by a camera if they use that lane, and it's been a huge success. I think one of my very favorite moments as transportation commissioner was the day that we launched Citi Bike, and I was riding Citi Bike up First Avenue in my protected bike lane, and I looked over and I saw pedestrians standing safely on the pedestrian islands, and the traffic was flowing, birds were singing — (Laughter) — the buses were speeding up their dedicated lanes. It was just fantastic. And this is how it looked six years ago. And so, I think that the lesson that we have from New York is that it's possible to change your streets quickly, it's not expensive, it can provide immediate benefits, and it can be quite popular. You just need to reimagine your streets. They're hidden in plain sight. Thank you. (Applause) |
Iran and Israel: Peace is possible | {0: 'Trita Parsi delves into Middle Eastern history and politics, uncovering fresh perspectives on Iranian, Israeli, and U.S. relations -- and discovers potential solutions to brewing conflicts.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | "Iran is Israel's best friend, and we do not intend to change our position in relation to Tehran." Believe it or not, this is a quote from an Israeli prime minister, but it's not Ben-Gurion or Golda Meir from the era of the Shah. It's actually from Yitzhak Rabin. The year is 1987. Ayatollah Khomeini is still alive, and much like Ahmadinejad today, he's using the worst rhetoric against Israel. Yet, Rabin referred to Iran as a geostrategic friend. Today, when we hear the threats of war and the high rhetoric, we're oftentimes led to believe that this is yet another one of those unsolvable Middle Eastern conflicts with roots as old as the region itself. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I hope today to show you why that is. The relations between the Iranian and the Jewish people throughout history has actually been quite positive, starting in 539 B.C., when King Cyrus the Great of Persia liberated the Jewish people from their Babylonian captivity. A third of the Jewish population stayed in Babylonia. They're today's Iraqi Jews. A third migrated to Persia. They're today's Iranian Jews, still 25,000 of them living in Iran, making them the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel itself. And a third returned to historic Palestine, did the second rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, financed, incidentally, by Persian tax money. But even in modern times, relations have been close at times. Rabin's statement was a reflection of decades of security and intelligence collaboration between the two, which in turn was born out of perception of common threats. Both states feared the Soviet Union and strong Arab states such as Egypt and Iraq. And, in addition, the Israeli doctrine of the periphery, the idea that Israel's security was best achieved by creating alliances with the non-Arab states in the periphery of the region in order to balance the Arab states in its vicinity. Now, from the Shah's perspective, though, he wanted to keep this as secret as possible, so when Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, traveled to Iran in the '70s, he usually wore a wig so that no one would recognize him. The Iranians built a special tarmac at the airport in Tehran, far away from the central terminal, so that no one would notice the large number of Israeli planes shuttling between Tel Aviv and Tehran. Now, did all of this end with the Islamic revolution in 1979? In spite of the very clear anti-Israeli ideology of the new regime, the geopolitical logic for their collaboration lived on, because they still had common threats. And when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Israel feared an Iraqi victory and actively helped Iran by selling it arms and providing it with spare parts for Iran's American weaponry at a moment when Iran was very vulnerable because of an American arms embargo that Israel was more than happy to violate. In fact, back in the 1980s, it was Israel that lobbied Washington to talk to Iran, to sell arms to Iran, and not pay attention to Iran's anti-Israeli ideology. And this, of course, climaxed in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. But with the end of the Cold War came also the end of the Israeli-Iranian cold peace. Suddenly, the two common threats that had pushed them closer together throughout decades, more or less evaporated. The Soviet Union collapsed, Iraq was defeated, and a new environment was created in the region in which both of them felt more secure, but they were also now left unchecked. Without Iraq balancing Iran, Iran could now become a threat, some in Israel argued. In fact, the current dynamic that you see between Iran and Israel has its roots more so in the geopolitical reconfiguration of the region after the Cold War than in the events of 1979, because at this point, Iran and Israel emerge as two of the most powerful states in the region, and rather than viewing each other as potential security partners, they increasingly came to view each other as rivals and competitors. So Israel, who in the 1980s lobbied for and improved U.S.-Iran relations now feared a U.S.-Iran rapprochement, thinking that it would come at Israel's security interests' expense, and instead sought to put Iran in increased isolation. Ironically, this was happening at a time when Iran was more interested in peacemaking with Washington than to see to Israel's destruction. Iran had put itself in isolation because of its radicalism, and after having helped the United States indirectly in the war against Iraq in 1991, the Iranians were hoping that they would be rewarded by being included in the post-war security architecture of the region. But Washington chose to ignore Iran's outreach, as it would a decade later in Afghanistan, and instead moved to intensify Iran's isolation, and it is at this point, around 1993, '94, that Iran begins to translate its anti-Israeli ideology into operational policy. The Iranians believed that whatever they did, even if they moderated their policies, the U.S. would continue to seek Iran's isolation, and the only way Iran could compel Washington to change its position was by imposing a cost on the U.S. if it didn't. The easiest target was the peace process, and now the Iranian ideological bark was to be accompanied by a nonconventional bite, and Iran began supporting extensively Palestinian Islamist groups that it previously had shunned. In some ways, this sounds paradoxical, but according to Martin Indyk of the Clinton administration, the Iranians had not gotten it entirely wrong, because the more peace there would be between Israel and Palestine, the U.S. believed, the more Iran would get isolated. The more Iran got isolated, the more peace there would be. So according to Indyk, and these are his words, the Iranians had an interest to do us in on the peace process in order to defeat our policy of containment. To defeat our policy of containment, not about ideology. But throughout even the worst times of their entanglement, all sides have reached out to each other. Netanyahu, when he got elected in 1996, reached out to the Iranians to see if there were any ways that the doctrine of the periphery could be resurrected. Tehran was not interested. A few years later, the Iranians sent a comprehensive negotiation proposal to the Bush administration, a proposal that revealed that there was some potential of getting Iran and Israel back on terms again. The Bush administration did not even respond. All sides have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. But this is not an ancient conflict. This is not even an ideological conflict. The ebbs and flows of hostility have not shifted with ideological zeal, but rather with changes in the geopolitical landscape. When Iran and Israel's security imperatives dictated collaboration, they did so in spite of lethal ideological opposition to each other. When Iran's ideological impulses collided with its strategic interests, the strategic interests always prevailed. This is good news, because it means that neither war nor enmity is a foregone conclusion. But some want war. Some believe or say that it's 1938, Iran is Germany, and Ahmadinejad is Hitler. If we accept this to be true, that indeed it is 1938, Iran is Germany, Ahmadinejad is Hitler, then the question we have to ask ourself is, who wishes to play the role of Neville Chamberlain? Who will risk peace? This is an analogy that is deliberately aimed at eliminating diplomacy, and when you eliminate diplomacy, you make war inevitable. In an ideological conflict, there can be no truce, no draw, no compromise, only victory or defeat. But rather than making war inevitable by viewing this as ideological, we would be wise to seek ways to make peace possible. Iran and Israel's conflict is a new phenomenon, only a few decades old in a history of 2,500 years, and precisely because its roots are geopolitical, it means that solutions can be found, compromises can be struck, however difficult it yet may be. After all, it was Yitzhak Rabin himself who said, "You don't make peace with your friends. You make it with your enemies." Thank you. (Applause) |
Let's treat violence like a contagious disease | {0: 'Could our culture have misdiagnosed violence? As the director of the initiative Cure Violence, Gary Slutkin approaches gunfire on neighborhood streets as a contagious disease, looking to science and public health for strategies to stop it.\r\n'} | TEDMED 2013 | I'm a physician trained in infectious diseases, and following my training, I moved to Somalia from San Francisco. And my goodbye greeting from the chief of infectious diseases at San Francisco General was, "Gary, this is the biggest mistake you'll ever make." But I landed in a refugee situation that had a million refugees in 40 camps, and there were six of us doctors. There were many epidemics there. My responsibilities were largely related to tuberculosis, and then we got struck by an epidemic of cholera. So it was the spread of tuberculosis and the spread of cholera that I was responsible for inhibiting. And in order to do this work, we, of course, because of the limitation in health workers, had to recruit refugees to be a specialized new category of health worker. Following three years of work in Somalia, I got picked up by the World Health Organization, and got assigned to the epidemics of AIDS. My primary responsibility was Uganda, but also I worked in Rwanda and Burundi and Zaire, now Congo, Tanzania, Malawi, and several other countries. And my last assignment there was to run a unit called intervention development, which was responsible for designing interventions. After 10 years of working overseas, I was exhausted. I really had very little left. I had been traveling to one country after another. I was emotionally feeling very isolated. I wanted to come home. I'd seen a lot of death, in particular epidemic death, and epidemic death has a different feel to it. It's full of panic and fear, and I'd heard the women wailing and crying in the desert. And I wanted to come home and take a break and maybe start over. I was not aware of any epidemic problems in America. In fact, I wasn't aware of any problems in America. In fact — seriously. And in fact I would visit friends of mine, and I noticed that they had water that came right into their homes. How many of you have such a situation? (Laughter) And some of them, many of them actually, had water that came into more than one room. And I noticed that they would move this little thermoregulatory device to change the temperature in their home by one degree or two degrees. And now I do that. And I really didn't know what I would do, but friends of mine began telling me about children shooting other children with guns. And I asked the question, what are you doing about it? What are you in America doing about it? And there were two essential explanations or ideas that were prevalent. And one was punishment. And this I had heard about before. We who had worked in behavior knew that punishment was something that was discussed but also that it was highly overvalued. It was not a main driver of behavior, nor was it a main driver of behavior change. And besides that, it reminded me of ancient epidemics that were previously completely misunderstood because the science hadn't been there before, epidemics of plague or typhus or leprosy, where the prevalent ideas were that there were bad people or bad humors or bad air, and widows were dragged around the moat, and dungeons were part of the solution. The other explanation or, in a way, the solution suggested, is please fix all of these things: the schools, the community, the homes, the families, everything. And I'd heard this before as well. I'd called this the "everything" theory, or EOE: Everything On Earth. But we'd also realized in treating other processes and problems that sometimes you don't need to treat everything. And so the sense that I had was there was a giant gap here. The problem of violence was stuck, and this has historically been the case in many other issues. Diarrheal diseases had been stuck. Malaria had been stuck. Frequently, a strategy has to be rethought. It's not as if I had any idea what it would look like, but there was a sense that we would have to do something with new categories of workers and something having to do with behavior change and something having to do with public education. But I began to ask questions and search out the usual things that I had been exploring before, like, what do the maps look like? What do the graphs look like? What does the data look like? And the maps of violence in most U.S. cities looked like this. There was clustering. This reminded me of clustering that we'd seen also in infectious epidemics, for example cholera. And then we looked at the maps, and the maps showed this typical wave upon wave upon wave, because all epidemics are combinations of many epidemics. And it also looked like infectious epidemics. And then we asked the question, well what really predicts a case of violence? And it turns out that the greatest predictor of a case of violence is a preceding case of violence. Which also sounds like, if there is a case of flu, someone gave someone a case of flu, or a cold, or the greatest risk factor of tuberculosis is having been exposed to tuberculosis. And so we see that violence is, in a way, behaving like a contagious disease. We're aware of this anyway even in our common experiences or our newspaper stories of the spread of violence from fights or in gang wars or in civil wars or even in genocides. And so there's good news about this, though, because there's a way to reverse epidemics, and there's really only three things that are done to reverse epidemics, and the first of it is interrupting transmission. In order to interrupt transmission, you need to detect and find first cases. In other words, for T.B. you have to find somebody who has active T.B. who is infecting other people. Make sense? And there's special workers for doing that. For this particular problem, we designed a new category of worker who, like a SARS worker or someone looking for bird flu, might find first cases. In this case, it's someone who's very angry because someone looked at his girlfriend or owes him money, and you can find workers and train them into these specialized categories. And the second thing to do, of course, is to prevent further spread, that means to find who else has been exposed, but may not be spreading so much right now like someone with a smaller case of T.B., or someone who is just hanging out in the neighborhoods, but in the same group, and then they need to be, in a way, managed as well, particular to the specific disease process. And then the third part, the shifting the norms, and that means a whole bunch of community activities, remodeling, public education, and then you've got what you might call group immunity. And that combination of factors is how the AIDS epidemic in Uganda was very successfully reversed. And so what we decided to do in the year 2000 is kind of put this together in a way by hiring in new categories of workers, the first being violence interruptors. And then we would put all of this into place in one neighborhood in what was the worst police district in the United States at the time. So violence interruptors hired from the same group, credibility, trust, access, just like the health workers in Somalia, but designed for a different category, and trained in persuasion, cooling people down, buying time, reframing. And then another category of worker, the outreach workers, to keep people in a way on therapy for six to 24 months. Just like T.B., but the object is behavior change. And then a bunch of community activities for changing norms. Now our first experiment of this resulted in a 67-percent drop in shootings and killings in the West Garfield neighborhood of Chicago. (Applause) And this was a beautiful thing for the neighborhood itself, first 50 or 60 days, then 90 days, and then there was unfortunately another shooting in another 90 days, and the moms were hanging out in the afternoon. They were using parks they weren't using before. The sun was out. Everybody was happy. But of course, the funders said, "Wait a second, do it again." And so we had to then, fortunately, get the funds to repeat this experience, and this is one of the next four neighborhoods that had a 45-percent drop in shootings and killings. And since that time, this has been replicated 20 times. There have been independent evaluations supported by the Justice Department and by the CDC and performed by Johns Hopkins that have shown 30-to-50-percent and 40-to-70-percent reductions in shootings and killings using this new method. In fact, there have been three independent evaluations of this now. Now we've gotten a lot of attention as a result of this, including being featured on The New York Times' Sunday magazine cover story. The Economist in 2009 said this is "the approach that will come to prominence." And even a movie was made around our work. [The Interrupters] However, not so fast, because a lot of people did not agree with this way of going about it. We got a lot of criticism, a lot of opposition, and a lot of opponents. In other words, what do you mean, health problem? What do you mean, epidemic? What do you mean, no bad guys? And there's whole industries designed for managing bad people. What do you mean, hiring people who have backgrounds? My business friends said, "Gary, you're being criticized tremendously. You must be doing something right." (Laughter) My musician friends added the word "dude." So anyway, additionally, there was still this problem, and we were getting highly criticized as well for not dealing with all of these other problems. Yet we were able to manage malaria and reduce HIV and reduce diarrheal diseases in places with awful economies without healing the economy. So what's actually happened is, although there is still some opposition, the movement is clearly growing. Many of the major cities in the U.S., including New York City and Baltimore and Kansas City, their health departments are running this now. Chicago and New Orleans, the health departments are having a very large role in this. This is being embraced more by law enforcement than it had been years ago. Trauma centers and hospitals are doing their part in stepping up. And the U.S. Conference of Mayors has endorsed not only the approach but the specific model. Where there's really been uptake even faster is in the international environment, where there's a 55-percent drop in the first neighborhood in Puerto Rico, where interruptions are just beginning in Honduras, where the strategy has been applied in Kenya for the recent elections, and where there have been 500 interruptions in Iraq. So violence is responding as a disease even as it behaves as a disease. So the theory, in a way, is kind of being validated by the treatment. And recently, the Institute of Medicine came out with a workshop report which went through some of the data, including the neuroscience, on how this problem is really transmitted. So I think this is good news, because it allows us an opportunity to come out of the Middle Ages, which is where I feel this field has been. It gives us an opportunity to consider the possibility of replacing some of these prisons with playgrounds or parks, and to consider the possibility of converting our neighborhoods into neighborhoods, and to allow there to be a new strategy, a new set of methods, a new set of workers: science, in a way, replacing morality. And moving away from emotions is the most important part of the solution to science as a more important part of the solution. So I didn't mean to come up with this at all. It was a matter of, I wanted actually a break, and we looked at maps, we looked at graphs, we asked some questions and tried some tools that actually have been used many times before for other things. For myself, I tried to get away from infectious diseases, and I didn't. Thank you. (Applause) |
Adventures in Twitter fiction | {0: 'Andrew Fitzgerald is shaping new ways for Twitter and journalists to work together.'} | TEDSalon NY2013 | So in my free time outside of Twitter I experiment a little bit with telling stories online, experimenting with what we can do with new digital tools. And in my job at Twitter, I actually spent a little bit of time working with authors and storytellers as well, helping to expand out the bounds of what people are experimenting with. And I want to talk through some examples today of things that people have done that I think are really fascinating using flexible identity and anonymity on the web and blurring the lines between fact and fiction. But I want to start and go back to the 1930s. Long before a little thing called Twitter, radio brought us broadcasts and connected millions of people to single points of broadcast. And from those single points emanated stories. Some of them were familiar stories. Some of them were new stories. And for a while they were familiar formats, but then radio began to evolve its own unique formats specific to that medium. Think about episodes that happened live on radio. Combining the live play and the serialization of written fiction, you get this new format. And the reason why I bring up radio is that I think radio is a great example of how a new medium defines new formats which then define new stories. And of course, today, we have an entirely new medium to play with, which is this online world. This is the map of verified users on Twitter and the connections between them. There are thousands upon thousands of them. Every single one of these points is its own broadcaster. We've gone to this world of many to many, where access to the tools is the only barrier to broadcasting. And I think that we should start to see wildly new formats emerge as people learn how to tell stories in this new medium. I actually believe that we are in a wide open frontier for creative experimentation, if you will, that we've explored and begun to settle this wild land of the Internet and are now just getting ready to start to build structures on it, and those structures are the new formats of storytelling that the Internet will allow us to create. I believe this starts with an evolution of existing methods. The short story, for example, people are saying that the short story is experiencing a renaissance of sorts thanks to e-readers, digital marketplaces. One writer, Hugh Howey, experimented with short stories on Amazon by releasing one very short story called "Wool." And he actually says that he didn't intend for "Wool" to become a series, but that the audience loved the first story so much they demanded more, and so he gave them more. He gave them "Wool 2," which was a little bit longer than the first one, "Wool 3," which was even longer, culminating in "Wool 5," which was a 60,000-word novel. I think Howey was able to do all of this because he had the quick feedback system of e-books. He was able to write and publish in relatively short order. There was no mediator between him and the audience. It was just him directly connected with his audience and building on the feedback and enthusiasm that they were giving him. So this whole project was an experiment. It started with the one short story, and I think the experimentation actually became a part of Howey's format. And that's something that this medium enabled, was experimentation being a part of the format itself. This is a short story by the author Jennifer Egan called "Black Box." It was originally written specifically with Twitter in mind. Egan convinced The New Yorker to start a New Yorker fiction account from which they could tweet all of these lines that she created. Now Twitter, of course, has a 140-character limit. Egan mocked that up just writing manually in this storyboard sketchbook, used the physical space constraints of those storyboard squares to write each individual tweet, and those tweets ended up becoming over 600 of them that were serialized by The New Yorker. Every night, at 8 p.m., you could tune in to a short story from The New Yorker's fiction account. I think that's pretty exciting: tune-in literary fiction. The experience of Egan's story, of course, like anything on Twitter, there were multiple ways to experience it. You could scroll back through it, but interestingly, if you were watching it live, there was this suspense that built because the actual tweets, you had no control over when you would read them. They were coming at a pretty regular clip, but as the story was building, normally, as a reader, you control how fast you move through a text, but in this case, The New Yorker did, and they were sending you bit by bit by bit, and you had this suspense of waiting for the next line. Another great example of fiction and the short story on Twitter, Elliott Holt is an author who wrote a story called "Evidence." It began with this tweet: "On November 28 at 10:13 p.m., a woman identified as Miranda Brown, 44, of Brooklyn, fell to her death from the roof of a Manhattan hotel." It begins in Elliott's voice, but then Elliott's voice recedes, and we hear the voices of Elsa, Margot and Simon, characters that Elliott created on Twitter specifically to tell this story, a story from multiple perspectives leading up to this moment at 10:13 p.m. when this woman falls to her death. These three characters brought an authentic vision from multiple perspectives. One reviewer called Elliott's story "Twitter fiction done right," because she did. She captured that voice and she had multiple characters and it happened in real time. Interestingly, though, it wasn't just Twitter as a distribution mechanism. It was also Twitter as a production mechanism. Elliott told me later she wrote the whole thing with her thumbs. She laid on the couch and just went back and forth between different characters tweeting out each line, line by line. I think that this kind of spontaneous creation of what was coming out of the characters' voices really lent an authenticity to the characters themselves, but also to this format that she had created of multiple perspectives in a single story on Twitter. As you begin to play with flexible identity online, it gets even more interesting as you start to interact with the real world. Things like Invisible Obama or the famous "binders full of women" that came up during the 2012 election cycle, or even the fan fiction universe of "West Wing" Twitter in which you have all of these accounts for every single one of the characters in "The West Wing," including the bird that taps at Josh Lyman's window in one single episode. (Laughter) All of these are rapid iterations on a theme. They are creative people experimenting with the bounds of what is possible in this medium. You look at something like "West Wing" Twitter, in which you have these fictional characters that engage with the real world. They comment on politics, they cry out against the evils of Congress. Keep in mind, they're all Democrats. And they engage with the real world. They respond to it. So once you take flexible identity, anonymity, engagement with the real world, and you move beyond simple homage or parody and you put these tools to work in telling a story, that's when things get really interesting. So during the Chicago mayoral election there was a parody account. It was Mayor Emanuel. It gave you everything you wanted from Rahm Emanuel, particularly in the expletive department. This foul-mouthed account followed the daily activities of the race, providing commentary as it went. It followed all of the natural tropes of a good, solid Twitter parody account, but then started to get weird. And as it progressed, it moved from this commentary to a multi-week, real-time science fiction epic in which your protagonist, Rahm Emanuel, engages in multi-dimensional travel on election day, which is — it didn't actually happen. I double checked the newspapers. And then, very interestingly, it came to an end. This is something that doesn't usually happen with a Twitter parody account. It ended, a true narrative conclusion. And so the author, Dan Sinker, who was a journalist, who was completely anonymous this whole time, I think Dan — it made a lot of sense for him to turn this into a book, because it was a narrative format in the end, and I think that turning it into a book is representative of this idea that he had created something new that needed to be translated into previous formats. One of my favorite examples of something that's happening on Twitter right now, actually, is the very absurdist Crimer Show. Crimer Show tells the story of a supercriminal and a hapless detective that face off in this exceptionally strange lingo, with all of the tropes of a television show. Crimer Show's creator has said that it is a parody of a popular type of show in the U.K., but, man, is it weird. And there are all these times where Crimer, the supercriminal, does all of these TV things. He's always taking off his sunglasses or turning to the camera, but these things just happen in text. I think borrowing all of these tropes from television and additionally presenting each Crimer Show as an episode, spelled E-P-P-A-S-O-D, "eppasod," presenting them as episodes really, it creates something new. There is a new "eppasod" of Crimer Show on Twitter pretty much every day, and they're archived that way. And I think this is an interesting experiment in format. Something totally new has been created here out of parodying something on television. I think in nonfiction real-time storytelling, there are a lot of really excellent examples as well. RealTimeWWII is an account that documents what was happening on this day 60 years ago in exceptional detail, as if you were reading the news reports from that day. And the author Teju Cole has done a lot of experimentation with putting a literary twist on events of the news. In this particular case, he's talking about drone strikes. I think that in both of these examples, you're beginning to see ways in which people are telling stories with nonfiction content that can be built into new types of fictional storytelling. So with real-time storytelling, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, the real world and the digital world, flexible identity, anonymity, these are all tools that we have accessible to us, and I think that they're just the building blocks. They are the bits that we use to create the structures, the frames, that then become our settlements on this wide open frontier for creative experimentation. Thank you. (Applause) |
The walkable city | {0: 'Jeff Speck is a city planner and the author of "Walkable City."'} | TEDCity2.0 | So I'm a city planner, an urban designer, former arts advocate, trained in architecture and art history, and I want to talk to you today not about design but about America and how America can be more economically resilient, how America can be healthier, and how America can be more environmentally sustainable. And I realize this is a global forum, but I think I need to talk about America because there is a history, in some places, not all, of American ideas being appropriated, being emulated, for better or for worse, around the world. And the worst idea we've ever had is suburban sprawl. It's being emulated in many places as we speak. By suburban sprawl, I refer to the reorganization of the landscape and the creation of the landscape around the requirement of automobile use, and that the automobile that was once an instrument of freedom has become a gas-belching, time-wasting and life-threatening prosthetic device that many of us need just to, most Americans, in fact, need, just to live their daily lives. And there's an alternative. You know, we say, half the world is living in cities. Well, in America, that living in cities, for many of them, they're living in cities still where they're dependent on that automobile. And what I work for, and to do, is to make our cities more walkable. But I can't give design arguments for that that will have as much impact as the arguments that I've learned from the economists, the epidemiologists and the environmentalists. So these are the three arguments that I'm going to give you quickly today. When I was growing up in the '70s, the typical American spent one tenth of their income, American family, on transportation. Since then, we've doubled the number of roads in America, and we now spend one fifth of our income on transportation. Working families, which are defined as earning between 20,000 and 50,000 dollars a year in America are spending more now on transportation than on housing, slightly more, because of this phenomenon called "drive till you qualify," finding homes further and further and further from the city centers and from their jobs, so that they're locked in this, two, three hours, four hours a day of commuting. And these are the neighborhoods, for example, in the Central Valley of California that weren't hurt when the housing bubble burst and when the price of gas went up; they were decimated. And in fact, these are many of the half-vacant communities that you see today. Imagine putting everything you have into your mortgage, it goes underwater, and you have to pay twice as much for all the driving that you're doing. So we know what it's done to our society and all the extra work we have to do to support our cars. What happens when a city decides it's going to set other priorities? And probably the best example we have here in America is Portland, Oregon. Portland made a bunch of decisions in the 1970s that began to distinguish it from almost every other American city. While most other cities were growing an undifferentiated spare tire of sprawl, they instituted an urban growth boundary. While most cities were reaming out their roads, removing parallel parking and trees in order to flow more traffic, they instituted a skinny streets program. And while most cities were investing in more roads and more highways, they actually invested in bicycling and in walking. And they spent 60 million dollars on bike facilities, which seems like a lot of money, but it was spent over about 30 years, so two million dollars a year — not that much — and half the price of the one cloverleaf that they decided to rebuild in that city. These changes and others like them changed the way that Portlanders live, and their vehicle-miles traveled per day, the amount that each person drives, actually peaked in 1996, has been dropping ever since, and they now drive 20 percent less than the rest of the country. The typical Portland citizen drives four miles less, and 11 minutes less per day than they did before. The economist Joe Cortright did the math and he found out that those four miles plus those 11 minutes adds up to fully three and a half percent of all income earned in the region. So if they're not spending that money on driving — and by the way, 85 percent of the money we spend on driving leaves the local economy — if they're not spending that money on driving, what are they spending it on? Well, Portland is reputed to have the most roof racks per capita, the most independent bookstores per capita, the most strip clubs per capita. These are all exaggerations, slight exaggerations of a fundamental truth, which is Portlanders spend a lot more on recreation of all kinds than the rest of America. Actually, Oregonians spend more on alcohol than most other states, which may be a good thing or a bad thing, but it makes you glad they're driving less. (Laughter) But actually, they're spending most of it in their homes, and home investment is about as local an investment as you can get. But there's a whole other Portland story, which isn't part of this calculus, which is that young, educated people have been moving to Portland in droves, so that between the last two censuses, they had a 50-percent increase in college-educated millennials, which is five times what you saw anywhere else in the country, or, I should say, of the national average. So on the one hand, a city saves money for its residents by being more walkable and more bikeable, but on the other hand, it also is the cool kind of city that people want to be in these days. So the best economic strategy you can have as a city is not the old way of trying to attract corporations and trying to have a biotech cluster or a medical cluster, or an aerospace cluster, but to become a place where people want to be. And millennials, certainly, these engines of entrepreneurship, 64 percent of whom decide first where they want to live, then they move there, then they look for a job, they will come to your city. The health argument is a scary one, and you've probably heard part of this argument before. Again, back in the '70s, a lot's changed since then, back in the '70s, one in 10 Americans was obese. Now one out of three Americans is obese, and a second third of the population is overweight. Twenty-five percent of young men and 40 percent of young women are too heavy to enlist in our own military forces. According to the Center for Disease Control, fully one third of all children born after 2000 will get diabetes. We have the first generation of children in America who are predicted to live shorter lives than their parents. I believe that this American healthcare crisis that we've all heard about is an urban design crisis, and that the design of our cities lies at the cure. Because we've talked a long time about diet, and we know that diet impacts weight, and weight of course impacts health. But we've only started talking about inactivity, and how inactivity born of our landscape, inactivity that comes from the fact that we live in a place where there is no longer any such thing as a useful walk, is driving our weight up. And we finally have the studies, one in Britain called "Gluttony versus sloth" that tracked weight against diet and tracked weight against inactivity, and found a much higher, stronger correlation between the latter two. Dr. James Levine at, in this case, the aptly-named Mayo Clinic put his test subjects in electronic underwear, held their diet steady, and then started pumping the calories in. Some people gained weight, some people didn't gain weight. Expecting some metabolic or DNA factor at work, they were shocked to learn that the only difference between the subjects that they could figure out was the amount they were moving, and that in fact those who gained weight were sitting, on average, two hours more per day than those who didn't. So we have these studies that tie weight to inactivity, but even more, we now have studies that tie weight to where you live. Do you live in a more walkable city or do you live in a less walkable city, or where in your city do you live? In San Diego, they used Walk Score — Walk Score rates every address in America and soon the world in terms of how walkable it is — they used Walk Score to designate more walkable neighborhoods and less walkable neighborhoods. Well guess what? If you lived in a more walkable neighborhood, you were 35 percent likely to be overweight. If you lived in a less walkable neighborhood, you were 60 percent likely to be overweight. So we have study after study now that's tying where you live to your health, particularly as in America, the biggest health crisis we have is this one that's stemming from environmental-induced inactivity. And I learned a new word last week. They call these neighborhoods "obesageneric." I may have that wrong, but you get the idea. Now that's one thing, of course. Briefly mentioning, we have an asthma epidemic in this country. You probably haven't thought that much about it. Fourteen Americans die each day from asthma, three times what it was in the '90s, and it's almost all coming from car exhaust. American pollution does not come from factories anymore, it comes from tailpipes, and the amount that people are driving in your city, your urban VMT, is a good prediction of the asthma problems in your city. And then finally, in terms of driving, there's the issue of the single-largest killer of healthy adults, and one of the largest killers of all people, is car crashes. And we take car crashes for granted. We figure it's a natural risk of being on the road. But in fact, here in America, 12 people out of every 100,000 die every year from car crashes. We're pretty safe here. Well, guess what? In England, it's seven per 100,000. It's Japan, it's four per 100,000. Do you know where it's three per 100,000? New York City. San Francisco, the same thing. Portland, the same thing. Oh, so cities make us safer because we're driving less? Tulsa: 14 per 100,000. Orlando: 20 per 100,000. It's not whether you're in the city or not, it's how is your city designed? Was it designed around cars or around people? Because if your city is designed around cars, it's really good at smashing them into each other. That's part of a much larger health argument. Finally, the environmental argument is fascinating, because the environmentalists turned on a dime about 10 years ago. The environmental movement in America has historically been an anti-city movement from Jefferson on. "Cities are pestilential to the health, to the liberties, to the morals of man. If we continue to pile upon ourselves in cities, as they do in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as they are in Europe and take to eating one another as they do there." He apparently had a sense of humor. And then the American environmental movement has been a classically Arcadian movement. To become more environmental, we move into the country, we commune with nature, we build suburbs. But, of course, we've seen what that does. The carbon mapping of America, where is the CO2 being emitted, for many years only hammered this argument in more strongly. If you look at any carbon map, because we map it per square mile, any carbon map of the U.S., it looks like a night sky satellite photo of the U.S., hottest in the cities, cooler in the suburbs, dark, peaceful in the countryside. Until some economists said, you know, is that the right way to measure CO2? There are only so many people in this country at any given time, and we can choose to live where perhaps we would have a lighter impact. And they said, let's measure CO2 per household, and when they did that, the maps just flipped, coolest in the center city, warmer in the suburbs, and red hot in these exurban "drive till you qualify" neighborhoods. So a fundamental shift, and now you have environmentalists and economists like Ed Glaeser saying we are a destructive species. If you love nature, the best thing you can do is stay the heck away from it, move to a city, and the denser the better, and the denser cities like Manhattan are the cities that perform the best. So the average Manhattanite is consuming gasoline at the rate the rest of the nation hasn't seen since the '20s, consuming half of the electricity of Dallas. But of course, we can do better. Canadian cities, they consume half the gasoline of American cities. European cities consume half as much again. So obviously, we can do better, and we want to do better, and we're all trying to be green. My final argument in this topic is that I think we're trying to be green the wrong way, and I'm one of many people who believes that this focus on gadgets, on accessorizing — What can I add to my house, what can I add to what I've already got to make my lifestyle more sustainable? — has kind of dominated the discussion. So I'm not immune to this. My wife and I built a new house on an abandoned lot in Washington, D.C., and we did our best to clear the shelves of the sustainability store. We've got the solar photovoltaic system, solar hot water heater, dual-flush toilets, bamboo floors. A log burning in my German high-tech stove apparently, supposedly, contributes less carbon to the atmosphere than were it left alone to decompose in the forest. Yet all of these innovations — That's what they said in the brochure. (Laughter) All of these innovations together contribute a fraction of what we contribute by living in a walkable neighborhood three blocks from a metro in the heart of a city. We've changed all our light bulbs to energy-savers, and you should do the same thing, but changing all your light bulbs to energy-savers saves as much energy in a year as moving to a walkable city does in a week. And we don't want to have this argument. Politicians and marketers are afraid of marketing green as a "lifestyle choice." You don't want to tell Americans, God forbid, that they have to change their lifestyle. But what if lifestyle was really about quality of life and about perhaps something that we would all enjoy more, something that would be better than what we have right now? Well, the gold standard of quality of life rankings, it's called the Mercer Survey. You may have heard of it. They rank hundreds of nations worldwide according to 10 criteria that they believe add up to quality of life: health, economics, education, housing, you name it. There's six more. Short talk. (Laughter) And it's very interesting to see that the highest-ranking American city, Honolulu, number 28, is followed by kind of the usual suspects of Seattle and Boston and all walkable cities. The driving cities in the Sun Belt, the Dallases and the Phoenixes and, sorry, Atlanta, these cities are not appearing on the list. But who's doing even better? The Canadian cities like Vancouver, where again, they're burning half the fuel. And then it's usually won by cities where they speak German, like Dusseldorf or Vienna, where they're burning, again, half as much fuel. And you see this alignment, this strange alignment. Is being more sustainble what gives you a higher quality of life? I would argue the same thing that makes you more sustainble is what gives you a higher quality of life, and that's living in a walkable neighborhood. So sustainability, which includes our wealth and our health may not be a direct function of our sustainability. But particularly here in America, we are polluting so much because we're throwing away our time and our money and our lives on the highway, then these two problems would seem to share the same solution, which is to make our cities more walkable. Doing so isn't easy, but it can be done, it has been done, and it's being done now in more than a few cities, around the globe and in our country. I take some solace from Winston Churchill, who put it this way: "The Americans can be counted on to do the right thing once they have exhausted the alternatives." (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
We need a heroic narrative for death | {0: 'In "The Cost of Hope," Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Amanda Bennett brings an investigative angle to the conversation about end-of-life care.'} | TEDMED 2013 | So I'd like you to come back with me just for a few minutes to a dark night in China, the night I met my husband. It was a city so long ago that it was still called Peking. So I went to a party. I sat down next to a stout, middle-aged man with owl glasses and a bow tie, and he turned out to be a Fulbright scholar, there in China specifically to study Sino-Soviet relations. What a gift it was to the eager, young foreign correspondent that I was then. I'd pump him for information, I'm mentally scribbling notes for the stories I plan to write. I talk to him for hours. Only months later, I discover who he really was. He was the China representative for the American Soybean Association. "I don't understand. Soybeans? You told me you were a Fulbright scholar." "Well, how long would you have talked to me if I told you we're in soybeans?" (Laughter) I said, "You jerk." Only jerk wasn't the word I used. I said, "You could've gotten me fired." And he said, "Let's get married." (Laughter) "Travel the world and have lots of kids." So we did. (Laughter) (Applause) And what an alive man Terence Bryan Foley turned out to be. He was a Chinese scholar who later, in his 60s, got a Ph.D. in Chinese history. He spoke six languages, he played 15 musical instruments, he was a licensed pilot, he had once been a San Francisco cable car operator, he was an expert in swine nutrition, dairy cattle, Dixieland jazz, film noir, and we did travel the country, and the world, and we did have a lot of kids. We followed my job, and it seemed like there was nothing that we couldn't do. So when we found the cancer, it doesn't seem strange to us at all that without saying a word to each other, we believed that, if we were smart enough and strong enough and brave enough, and we worked hard enough, we could keep him from dying ever. And for years, it seemed like we were succeeding. The surgeon emerged from the surgery. What'd he say? He said what surgeons always say: "We got it all." Then there was a setback when the pathologists looked at the kidney cancer closely. It turned out to be a rare, exceedingly aggressive type, with a diagnosis that was almost universally fatal in several weeks at most. And yet, he did not die. Mysteriously, he lived on. He coached Little League for our son. He built a playhouse for our daughter. And meanwhile, I'm burying myself in the Internet looking for specialists. I'm looking for a cure. So a year goes by before the cancer, as cancers do, reappears, and with it comes another death sentence, this time nine months. So we try another treatment, aggressive, nasty. It makes him so sick, he has to quit it, yet still he lives on. Then another year goes by. Two years go by. More specialists. We take the kids to Italy. We take the kids to Australia. And then more years pass, and the cancer begins to grow. This time, there's new treatments on the horizon. They're exotic. They're experimental. They're going to attack the cancer in new ways. So he enters a clinical trial, and it works. The cancer begins to shrink, and for the third time, we've dodged death. So now I ask you, how do I feel when the time finally comes and there's another dark night, sometime between midnight and 2 a.m.? This time it's on the intensive care ward when a twentysomething resident that I've never met before tells me that Terence is dying, perhaps tonight. So what do I say when he says, "What do you want me to do?" There's another drug out there. It's newer. It's more powerful. He started it just two weeks ago. Perhaps there's still hope ahead. So what do I say? I say, "Keep him alive if you can." And Terence died six days later. So we fought, we struggled, we triumphed. It was an exhilarating fight, and I'd repeat the fight today without a moment's hesitation. We fought together, we lived together. It turned what could have been seven of the grimmest years of our life into seven of the most glorious. It was also an expensive fight. It was the kind of fight and the kind of choices that everyone here agrees pump up the cost of end-of-life care, and of healthcare for all of us. And for me, for us, we pushed the fight right over the edge, and I never got the chance to say to him what I say to him now almost every day: "Hey, buddy, it was a hell of a ride." We never got the chance to say goodbye. We never thought it was the end. We always had hope. So what do we make of all of this? Being a journalist, after Terence died, I wrote a book, "The Cost Of Hope." I wrote it because I wanted to know why I did what I did, why he did what he did, why everyone around us did what they did. And what did I discover? Well, one of the things I discovered is that experts think that one answer to what I did at the end was a piece of paper, the advance directive, to help families get past the seemingly irrational choices. Yet I had that piece of paper. We both did. And they were readily available. I had them right at hand. Both of them said the same thing: Do nothing if there is no further hope. I knew Terence's wishes as clearly and as surely as I knew my own. Yet we never got to no further hope. Even with that clear-cut paper in our hands, we just kept redefining hope. I believed I could keep him from dying, and I'd be embarrassed to say that if I hadn't seen so many people and have talked to so many people who have felt exactly the same way. Right up until days before his death, I felt strongly and powerfully, and, you might say, irrationally, that I could keep him from dying ever. Now, what do the experts call this? They say it's denial. It's a strong word, isn't it? Yet I will tell you that denial isn't even close to a strong enough word to describe what those of us facing the death of our loved ones go through. And I hear the medical professionals say, "Well, we'd like to do such-and-such, but the family's in denial. The family won't listen to reason. They're in denial. How can they insist on this treatment at the end? It's so clear, yet they're in denial." Now, I think this maybe isn't a very useful way of thinking. It's not just families either. The medical professionals too, you out there, you're in denial too. You want to help. You want to fix. You want to do. You've succeeded in everything you've done, and having a patient die, well, that must feel like failure. I saw it firsthand. Just days before Terence died, his oncologist said, "Tell Terence that better days are just ahead." Days before he died. Yet Ira Byock, the director of palliative medicine at Dartmouth said, "You know, the best doctor in the world has never succeeded in making anyone immortal." So what the experts call "denial," I call "hope," and I'd like to borrow a phrase from my friends in software design. You just redefine denial and hope, and it becomes a feature of being human. It's not a bug. It's a feature. (Laughter) So we need to think more constructively about this very common, very profound and very powerful human emotion. It's part of the human condition, and yet our system and our thinking isn't built to accommodate it. So Terence told me a story on that long-ago night, and I believed it. Maybe I wanted to believe it. And during Terence's illness, I, we, we wanted to believe the story of our fight together too. Giving up the fight — for that's how it felt, it felt like giving up — meant giving up not only his life but also our story, our story of us as fighters, the story of us as invincible, and for the doctors, the story of themselves as healers. So what do we need? Maybe we don't need a new piece of paper. Maybe we need a new story, not a story about giving up the fight or of hopelessness, but rather a story of victory and triumph, of a valiant battle and, eventually, a graceful retreat, a story that acknowledges that not even the greatest general defeats every foe, that no doctor has ever succeeded in making anyone immortal, and that no wife, no matter how hard she tried, has ever stopped even the bravest, wittiest and most maddeningly lovable husband from dying when it was his time to go. People did mention hospice, but I wouldn't listen. Hospice was for people who were dying, and Terence wasn't dying. As a result, he spent just four days in hospice, which I'm sure, as you all know, is a pretty typical outcome, and we never said goodbye because we were unprepared for the end. We have a noble path to curing the disease, patients and doctors alike, but there doesn't seem to be a noble path to dying. Dying is seen as failing, and we had a heroic narrative for fighting together, but we didn't have a heroic narrative for letting go. So maybe we need a narrative for acknowledging the end, and for saying goodbye, and maybe our new story will be about a hero's fight, and a hero's goodbye. Terence loved poetry, and the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy is one of my favorite poets. So I'll give you a couple lines from him. This is a poem about Mark Antony. You know Mark Antony, the conquering hero, Cleopatra's guy? Actually, one of Cleopatra's guys. And he's been a pretty good general. He's won all the fights, he's eluded all the people that are out to get him, and yet this time, finally, he's come to the city of Alexandria and realized he's lost. The people are leaving. They're playing instruments. They're singing. And suddenly he knows he's been defeated. And he suddenly knows he's been deserted by the gods, and it's time to let go. And the poet tells him what to do. He tells him how to say a noble goodbye, a goodbye that's fit for a hero. "As if long-prepared, as if courageous, as it becomes you who were worthy of such a city, approach the window with a firm step, and with emotion, but not with the entreaties or the complaints of a coward, as a last enjoyment, listen to the sounds, the exquisite instruments of the musical troops, and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing." That's a goodbye for a man who was larger than life, a goodbye for a man for whom anything, well, almost anything, was possible, a goodbye for a man who kept hope alive. And isn't that what we're missing? How can we learn that people's decisions about their loved ones are often based strongly, powerfully, many times irrationally, on the slimmest of hopes? The overwhelming presence of hope isn't denial. It's part of our DNA as humans, and maybe it's time our healthcare system — doctors, patients, insurance companies, us, started accounting for the power of that hope. Hope isn't a bug. It's a feature. Thank you. (Applause) |
Ingenious homes in unexpected places | {0: 'Photographer Iwan Baan captures the many ways people shape their shared built environment -- from glossy starchitecture to handmade homes.'} | TEDCity2.0 | Throughout my career, I've been fortunate enough to work with many of the great international architects, documenting their work and observing how their designs have the capacity to influence the cities in which they sit. I think of new cities like Dubai or ancient cities like Rome with Zaha Hadid's incredible MAXXI museum, or like right here in New York with the High Line, a city which has been so much influenced by the development of this. But what I find really fascinating is what happens when architects and planners leave and these places become appropriated by people, like here in Chandigarh, India, the city which has been completely designed by the architect Le Corbusier. Now 60 years later, the city has been taken over by people in very different ways from whatever perhaps intended for, like here, where you have the people sitting in the windows of the assembly hall. But over the course of several years, I've been documenting Rem Koolhaas's CCTV building in Beijing and the olympic stadium in the same city by the architects Herzog and de Meuron. At these large-scale construction sites in China, you see a sort of makeshift camp where workers live during the entire building process. As the length of the construction takes years, workers end up forming a rather rough-and-ready informal city, making for quite a juxtaposition against the sophisticated structures that they're building. Over the past seven years, I've been following my fascination with the built environment, and for those of you who know me, you would say that this obsession has led me to live out of a suitcase 365 days a year. Being constantly on the move means that sometimes I am able to catch life's most unpredictable moments, like here in New York the day after the Sandy storm hit the city. Just over three years ago, I was for the first time in Caracas, Venezuela, and while flying over the city, I was just amazed by the extent to which the slums reach into every corner of the city, a place where nearly 70 percent of the population lives in slums, draped literally all over the mountains. During a conversation with local architects Urban-Think Tank, I learned about the Torre David, a 45-story office building which sits right in the center of Caracas. The building was under construction until the collapse of the Venezuelan economy and the death of the developer in the early '90s. About eight years ago, people started moving into the abandoned tower and began to build their homes right in between every column of this unfinished tower. There's only one little entrance to the entire building, and the 3,000 residents come in and out through that single door. Together, the inhabitants created public spaces and designed them to feel more like a home and less like an unfinished tower. In the lobby, they painted the walls and planted trees. They also made a basketball court. But when you look up closely, you see massive holes where elevators and services would have run through. Within the tower, people have come up with all sorts of solutions in response to the various needs which arise from living in an unfinished tower. With no elevators, the tower is like a 45-story walkup. Designed in very specific ways by this group of people who haven't had any education in architecture or design. And with each inhabitant finding their own unique way of coming by, this tower becomes like a living city, a place which is alive with micro-economies and small businesses. The inventive inhabitants, for instance, find opportunities in the most unexpected cases, like the adjacent parking garage, which has been reclaimed as a taxi route to shuttle the inhabitants up through the ramps in order to shorten the hike up to the apartments. A walk through the tower reveals how residents have figured out how to create walls, how to make an air flow, how to create transparency, circulation throughout the tower, essentially creating a home that's completely adapted to the conditions of the site. When a new inhabitant moves into the tower, they already have a roof over their head, so they just typically mark their space with a few curtains or sheets. Slowly, from found materials, walls rise, and people create a space out of any found objects or materials. It's remarkable to see the design decisions that they're making, like when everything is made out of red bricks, some residents will cover that red brick with another layer of red brick-patterned wallpaper just to make it a kind of clean finish. The inhabitants literally built up these homes with their own hands, and this labor of love instills a great sense of pride in many families living in this tower. They typically make the best out of their conditions, and try to make their spaces look nice and homey, or at least up until as far as they can reach. Throughout the tower, you come across all kinds of services, like the barber, small factories, and every floor has a little grocery store or shop. And you even find a church. And on the 30th floor, there is a gym where all the weights and barbells are made out of the leftover pulleys from the elevators which were never installed. From the outside, behind this always-changing facade, you see how the fixed concrete beams provide a framework for the inhabitants to create their homes in an organic, intuitive way that responds directly to their needs. Let's go now to Africa, to Nigeria, to a community called Makoko, a slum where 150,000 people live just meters above the Lagos Lagoon. While it may appear to be a completely chaotic place, when you see it from above, there seems to be a whole grid of waterways and canals connecting each and every home. From the main dock, people board long wooden canoes which carry them out to their various homes and shops located in the expansive area. When out on the water, it's clear that life has been completely adapted to this very specific way of living. Even the canoes become variety stores where ladies paddle from house to house, selling anything from toothpaste to fresh fruits. Behind every window and door frame, you'll see a small child peering back at you, and while Makoko seems to be packed with people, what's more shocking is actually the amount of children pouring out of every building. The population growth in Nigeria, and especially in these areas like Makoko, are painful reminders of how out of control things really are. In Makoko, very few systems and infrastructures exist. Electricity is rigged and freshest water comes from self-built wells throughout the area. This entire economic model is designed to meet a specific way of living on the water, so fishing and boat-making are common professions. You'll have a set of entrepreneurs who have set up businesses throughout the area, like barbershops, CD and DVD stores, movie theaters, tailors, everything is there. There is even a photo studio where you see the sort of aspiration to live in a real house or to be associated with a faraway place, like that hotel in Sweden. On this particular evening, I came across this live band dressed to the T in their coordinating outfits. They were floating through the canals in a large canoe with a fitted-out generator for all of the community to enjoy. By nightfall, the area becomes almost pitch black, save for a small lightbulb or a fire. What originally brought me to Makoko was this project from a friend of mine, Kunlé Adeyemi, who recently finished building this three-story floating school for the kids in Makoko. With this entire village existing on the water, public space is very limited, so now that the school is finished, the ground floor is a playground for the kids, but when classes are out, the platform is just like a town square, where the fishermen mend their nets and floating shopkeepers dock their boats. Another place I'd like to share with you is the Zabbaleen in Cairo. They're descendants of farmers who began migrating from the upper Egypt in the '40s, and today they make their living by collecting and recycling waste from homes from all over Cairo. For years, the Zabbaleen would live in makeshift villages where they would move around trying to avoid the local authorities, but in the early 1980s, they settled on the Mokattam rocks just at the eastern edge of the city. Today, they live in this area, approximately 50,000 to 70,000 people, who live in this community of self-built multi-story houses where up to three generations live in one structure. While these apartments that they built for themselves appear to lack any planning or formal grid, each family specializing in a certain form of recycling means that the ground floor of each apartment is reserved for garbage-related activities and the upper floor is dedicated to living space. I find it incredible to see how these piles and piles of garbage are invisible to the people who live there, like this very distinguished man who is posing while all this garbage is sort of streaming out behind him, or like these two young men who are sitting and chatting amongst these tons of garbage. While to most of us, living amongst these piles and piles of garbage may seem totally uninhabitable, to those in the Zabbaleen, this is just a different type of normal. In all these places I've talked about today, what I do find fascinating is that there's really no such thing as normal, and it proves that people are able to adapt to any kind of situation. Throughout the day, it's quite common to come across a small party taking place in the streets, just like this engagement party. In this tradition, the bride-to-be displays all of their belongings, which they soon bring to their new husband. A gathering like this one offers such a juxtaposition where all the new stuff is displayed and all the garbage is used as props to display all their new home accessories. Like Makoko and the Torre David, throughout the Zabbaleen you'll find all the same facilities as in any typical neighborhood. There are the retail shops, the cafes and the restaurants, and the community is this community of Coptic Christians, so you'll also find a church, along with the scores of religious iconographies throughout the area, and also all the everyday services like the electronic repair shops, the barbers, everything. Visiting the homes of the Zabbaleen is also full of surprises. While from the outside, these homes look like any other informal structure in the city, when you step inside, you are met with all manner of design decisions and interior decoration. Despite having limited access to space and money, the homes in the area are designed with care and detail. Every apartment is unique, and this individuality tells a story about each family's circumstances and values. Many of these people take their homes and interior spaces very seriously, putting a lot of work and care into the details. The shared spaces are also treated in the same manner, where walls are decorated in faux marble patterns. But despite this elaborate decor, sometimes these apartments are used in very unexpected ways, like this home which caught my attention while all the mud and the grass was literally seeping out under the front door. When I was let in, it appeared that this fifth-floor apartment was being transformed into a complete animal farm, where six or seven cows stood grazing in what otherwise would be the living room. But then in the apartment across the hall from this cow shed lives a newly married couple in what locals describe as one of the nicest apartments in the area. The attention to this detail astonished me, and as the owner of the home so proudly led me around this apartment, from floor to ceiling, every part was decorated. But if it weren't for the strangely familiar stomach-churning odor that constantly passes through the apartment, it would be easy to forget that you are standing next to a cow shed and on top of a landfill. What moved me the most was that despite these seemingly inhospitable conditions, I was welcomed with open arms into a home that was made with love, care, and unreserved passion. Let's move across the map to China, to an area called Shanxi, Henan and Gansu. In a region famous for the soft, porous Loess Plateau soil, there lived until recently an estimated 40 million people in these houses underground. These dwellings are called the yaodongs. Through this architecture by subtraction, these yaodongs are built literally inside of the soil. In these villages, you see an entirely altered landscape, and hidden behind these mounds of dirt are these square, rectangular houses which sit seven meters below the ground. When I asked people why they were digging their houses from the ground, they simply replied that they are poor wheat and apple farmers who didn't have the money to buy materials, and this digging out was their most logical form of living. From Makoko to Zabbaleen, these communities have approached the tasks of planning, design and management of their communities and neighborhoods in ways that respond specifically to their environment and circumstances. Created by these very people who live, work and play in these particular spaces, these neighborhoods are intuitively designed to make the most of their circumstances. In most of these places, the government is completely absent, leaving inhabitants with no choice but to reappropriate found materials, and while these communities are highly disadvantaged, they do present examples of brilliant forms of ingenuity, and prove that indeed we have the ability to adapt to all manner of circumstances. What makes places like the Torre David particularly remarkable is this sort of skeleton framework where people can have a foundation where they can tap into. Now imagine what these already ingenious communities could create themselves, and how highly particular their solutions would be, if they were given the basic infrastructures that they could tap into. Today, you see these large residential development projects which offer cookie-cutter housing solutions to massive amounts of people. From China to Brazil, these projects attempt to provide as many houses as possible, but they're completely generic and simply do not work as an answer to the individual needs of the people. I would like to end with a quote from a friend of mine and a source of inspiration, Zita Cobb, the founder of the wonderful Shorefast Foundation, based out of Fogo Island, Newfoundland. She says that "there's this plague of sameness which is killing the human joy," and I couldn't agree with her more. Thank you. (Applause) |
What will a future without secrets look like? | {0: 'What motivates you to share your personal information online? Alessandro Acquisti studies the behavioral economics of privacy (and information security) in social networks.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I would like to tell you a story connecting the notorious privacy incident involving Adam and Eve, and the remarkable shift in the boundaries between public and private which has occurred in the past 10 years. You know the incident. Adam and Eve one day in the Garden of Eden realize they are naked. They freak out. And the rest is history. Nowadays, Adam and Eve would probably act differently. [@Adam Last nite was a blast! loved dat apple LOL] [@Eve yep.. babe, know what happened to my pants tho?] We do reveal so much more information about ourselves online than ever before, and so much information about us is being collected by organizations. Now there is much to gain and benefit from this massive analysis of personal information, or big data, but there are also complex tradeoffs that come from giving away our privacy. And my story is about these tradeoffs. We start with an observation which, in my mind, has become clearer and clearer in the past few years, that any personal information can become sensitive information. Back in the year 2000, about 100 billion photos were shot worldwide, but only a minuscule proportion of them were actually uploaded online. In 2010, only on Facebook, in a single month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded, most of them identified. In the same span of time, computers' ability to recognize people in photos improved by three orders of magnitude. What happens when you combine these technologies together: increasing availability of facial data; improving facial recognizing ability by computers; but also cloud computing, which gives anyone in this theater the kind of computational power which a few years ago was only the domain of three-letter agencies; and ubiquitous computing, which allows my phone, which is not a supercomputer, to connect to the Internet and do there hundreds of thousands of face metrics in a few seconds? Well, we conjecture that the result of this combination of technologies will be a radical change in our very notions of privacy and anonymity. To test that, we did an experiment on Carnegie Mellon University campus. We asked students who were walking by to participate in a study, and we took a shot with a webcam, and we asked them to fill out a survey on a laptop. While they were filling out the survey, we uploaded their shot to a cloud-computing cluster, and we started using a facial recognizer to match that shot to a database of some hundreds of thousands of images which we had downloaded from Facebook profiles. By the time the subject reached the last page on the survey, the page had been dynamically updated with the 10 best matching photos which the recognizer had found, and we asked the subjects to indicate whether he or she found themselves in the photo. Do you see the subject? Well, the computer did, and in fact did so for one out of three subjects. So essentially, we can start from an anonymous face, offline or online, and we can use facial recognition to give a name to that anonymous face thanks to social media data. But a few years back, we did something else. We started from social media data, we combined it statistically with data from U.S. government social security, and we ended up predicting social security numbers, which in the United States are extremely sensitive information. Do you see where I'm going with this? So if you combine the two studies together, then the question becomes, can you start from a face and, using facial recognition, find a name and publicly available information about that name and that person, and from that publicly available information infer non-publicly available information, much more sensitive ones which you link back to the face? And the answer is, yes, we can, and we did. Of course, the accuracy keeps getting worse. [27% of subjects' first 5 SSN digits identified (with 4 attempts)] But in fact, we even decided to develop an iPhone app which uses the phone's internal camera to take a shot of a subject and then upload it to a cloud and then do what I just described to you in real time: looking for a match, finding public information, trying to infer sensitive information, and then sending back to the phone so that it is overlaid on the face of the subject, an example of augmented reality, probably a creepy example of augmented reality. In fact, we didn't develop the app to make it available, just as a proof of concept. In fact, take these technologies and push them to their logical extreme. Imagine a future in which strangers around you will look at you through their Google Glasses or, one day, their contact lenses, and use seven or eight data points about you to infer anything else which may be known about you. What will this future without secrets look like? And should we care? We may like to believe that the future with so much wealth of data would be a future with no more biases, but in fact, having so much information doesn't mean that we will make decisions which are more objective. In another experiment, we presented to our subjects information about a potential job candidate. We included in this information some references to some funny, absolutely legal, but perhaps slightly embarrassing information that the subject had posted online. Now interestingly, among our subjects, some had posted comparable information, and some had not. Which group do you think was more likely to judge harshly our subject? Paradoxically, it was the group who had posted similar information, an example of moral dissonance. Now you may be thinking, this does not apply to me, because I have nothing to hide. But in fact, privacy is not about having something negative to hide. Imagine that you are the H.R. director of a certain organization, and you receive résumés, and you decide to find more information about the candidates. Therefore, you Google their names and in a certain universe, you find this information. Or in a parallel universe, you find this information. Do you think that you would be equally likely to call either candidate for an interview? If you think so, then you are not like the U.S. employers who are, in fact, part of our experiment, meaning we did exactly that. We created Facebook profiles, manipulating traits, then we started sending out résumés to companies in the U.S., and we detected, we monitored, whether they were searching for our candidates, and whether they were acting on the information they found on social media. And they were. Discrimination was happening through social media for equally skilled candidates. Now marketers like us to believe that all information about us will always be used in a manner which is in our favor. But think again. Why should that be always the case? In a movie which came out a few years ago, "Minority Report," a famous scene had Tom Cruise walk in a mall and holographic personalized advertising would appear around him. Now, that movie is set in 2054, about 40 years from now, and as exciting as that technology looks, it already vastly underestimates the amount of information that organizations can gather about you, and how they can use it to influence you in a way that you will not even detect. So as an example, this is another experiment actually we are running, not yet completed. Imagine that an organization has access to your list of Facebook friends, and through some kind of algorithm they can detect the two friends that you like the most. And then they create, in real time, a facial composite of these two friends. Now studies prior to ours have shown that people don't recognize any longer even themselves in facial composites, but they react to those composites in a positive manner. So next time you are looking for a certain product, and there is an ad suggesting you to buy it, it will not be just a standard spokesperson. It will be one of your friends, and you will not even know that this is happening. Now the problem is that the current policy mechanisms we have to protect ourselves from the abuses of personal information are like bringing a knife to a gunfight. One of these mechanisms is transparency, telling people what you are going to do with their data. And in principle, that's a very good thing. It's necessary, but it is not sufficient. Transparency can be misdirected. You can tell people what you are going to do, and then you still nudge them to disclose arbitrary amounts of personal information. So in yet another experiment, this one with students, we asked them to provide information about their campus behavior, including pretty sensitive questions, such as this one. [Have you ever cheated in an exam?] Now to one group of subjects, we told them, "Only other students will see your answers." To another group of subjects, we told them, "Students and faculty will see your answers." Transparency. Notification. And sure enough, this worked, in the sense that the first group of subjects were much more likely to disclose than the second. It makes sense, right? But then we added the misdirection. We repeated the experiment with the same two groups, this time adding a delay between the time we told subjects how we would use their data and the time we actually started answering the questions. How long a delay do you think we had to add in order to nullify the inhibitory effect of knowing that faculty would see your answers? Ten minutes? Five minutes? One minute? How about 15 seconds? Fifteen seconds were sufficient to have the two groups disclose the same amount of information, as if the second group now no longer cares for faculty reading their answers. Now I have to admit that this talk so far may sound exceedingly gloomy, but that is not my point. In fact, I want to share with you the fact that there are alternatives. The way we are doing things now is not the only way they can done, and certainly not the best way they can be done. When someone tells you, "People don't care about privacy," consider whether the game has been designed and rigged so that they cannot care about privacy, and coming to the realization that these manipulations occur is already halfway through the process of being able to protect yourself. When someone tells you that privacy is incompatible with the benefits of big data, consider that in the last 20 years, researchers have created technologies to allow virtually any electronic transactions to take place in a more privacy-preserving manner. We can browse the Internet anonymously. We can send emails that can only be read by the intended recipient, not even the NSA. We can have even privacy-preserving data mining. In other words, we can have the benefits of big data while protecting privacy. Of course, these technologies imply a shifting of cost and revenues between data holders and data subjects, which is why, perhaps, you don't hear more about them. Which brings me back to the Garden of Eden. There is a second privacy interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden which doesn't have to do with the issue of Adam and Eve feeling naked and feeling ashamed. You can find echoes of this interpretation in John Milton's "Paradise Lost." In the garden, Adam and Eve are materially content. They're happy. They are satisfied. However, they also lack knowledge and self-awareness. The moment they eat the aptly named fruit of knowledge, that's when they discover themselves. They become aware. They achieve autonomy. The price to pay, however, is leaving the garden. So privacy, in a way, is both the means and the price to pay for freedom. Again, marketers tell us that big data and social media are not just a paradise of profit for them, but a Garden of Eden for the rest of us. We get free content. We get to play Angry Birds. We get targeted apps. But in fact, in a few years, organizations will know so much about us, they will be able to infer our desires before we even form them, and perhaps buy products on our behalf before we even know we need them. Now there was one English author who anticipated this kind of future where we would trade away our autonomy and freedom for comfort. Even more so than George Orwell, the author is, of course, Aldous Huxley. In "Brave New World," he imagines a society where technologies that we created originally for freedom end up coercing us. However, in the book, he also offers us a way out of that society, similar to the path that Adam and Eve had to follow to leave the garden. In the words of the Savage, regaining autonomy and freedom is possible, although the price to pay is steep. So I do believe that one of the defining fights of our times will be the fight for the control over personal information, the fight over whether big data will become a force for freedom, rather than a force which will hiddenly manipulate us. Right now, many of us do not even know that the fight is going on, but it is, whether you like it or not. And at the risk of playing the serpent, I will tell you that the tools for the fight are here, the awareness of what is going on, and in your hands, just a few clicks away. Thank you. (Applause) |
Who am I? Think again | {0: 'In his compelling stage works, Hetain Patel uses powerful imagery and storytelling to examine questions of identity.', 1: "Yuyu Rau's dance skills span a wide range, from ballet to contemporary to Chinese classical."} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Hetain Patel: (In Chinese) Yuyu Rau: Hi, I'm Hetain. I'm an artist. And this is Yuyu, who is a dancer I have been working with. I have asked her to translate for me. HP: (In Chinese) YR: If I may, I would like to tell you a little bit about myself and my artwork. HP: (In Chinese) YR: I was born and raised near Manchester, in England, but I'm not going to say it in English to you, because I'm trying to avoid any assumptions that might be made from my northern accent. (Laughter) HP: (In Chinese) YR: The only problem with masking it with Chinese Mandarin is I can only speak this paragraph, which I have learned by heart when I was visiting in China. (Laughter) So all I can do is keep repeating it in different tones and hope you won't notice. (Laughter) HP: (In Chinese) (Laughter) YR: Needless to say, I would like to apologize to any Mandarin speakers in the audience. As a child, I would hate being made to wear the Indian kurta pajama, because I didn't think it was very cool. It felt a bit girly to me, like a dress, and it had this baggy trouser part you had to tie really tight to avoid the embarrassment of them falling down. My dad never wore it, so I didn't see why I had to. Also, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, that people assume I represent something genuinely Indian when I wear it, because that's not how I feel. HP: (In Chinese) YR: Actually, the only way I feel comfortable wearing it is by pretending they are the robes of a kung fu warrior like Li Mu Bai from that film, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." (Music) Okay. So my artwork is about identity and language, challenging common assumptions based on how we look like or where we come from, gender, race, class. What makes us who we are anyway? HP: (In Chinese) YR: I used to read Spider-Man comics, watch kung fu movies, take philosophy lessons from Bruce Lee. He would say things like — HP: Empty your mind. (Laughter) Be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup. It becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. Put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. (Applause) YR: This year, I am 32 years old, the same age Bruce Lee was when he died. I have been wondering recently, if he were alive today, what advice he would give me about making this TED Talk. HP: Don't imitate my voice. It offends me. (Laughter) YR: Good advice, but I still think that we learn who we are by copying others. Who here hasn't imitated their childhood hero in the playground, or mum or father? I have. HP: A few years ago, in order to make this video for my artwork, I shaved off all my hair so that I could grow it back as my father had it when he first emigrated from India to the U.K. in the 1960s. He had a side parting and a neat mustache. At first, it was going very well. I even started to get discounts in Indian shops. (Laughter) But then very quickly, I started to underestimate my mustache growing ability, and it got way too big. It didn't look Indian anymore. Instead, people from across the road, they would shout things like — HP and YR: Arriba! Arriba! Ándale! Ándale! (Laughter) HP: Actually, I don't know why I am even talking like this. My dad doesn't even have an Indian accent anymore. He talks like this now. So it's not just my father that I've imitated. A few years ago I went to China for a few months, and I couldn't speak Chinese, and this frustrated me, so I wrote about this and had it translated into Chinese, and then I learned this by heart, like music, I guess. YR: This phrase is now etched into my mind clearer than the pin number to my bank card, so I can pretend I speak Chinese fluently. When I had learned this phrase, I had an artist over there hear me out to see how accurate it sounded. I spoke the phrase, and then he laughed and told me, "Oh yeah, that's great, only it kind of sounds like a woman." I said, "What?" He said, "Yeah, you learned from a woman?" I said, "Yes. So?" He then explained the tonal differences between male and female voices are very different and distinct, and that I had learned it very well, but in a woman's voice. (Laughter) (Applause) HP: Okay. So this imitation business does come with risk. It doesn't always go as you plan it, even with a talented translator. But I am going to stick with it, because contrary to what we might usually assume, imitating somebody can reveal something unique. So every time I fail to become more like my father, I become more like myself. Every time I fail to become Bruce Lee, I become more authentically me. This is my art. I strive for authenticity, even if it comes in a shape that we might not usually expect. It's only recently that I've started to understand that I didn't learn to sit like this through being Indian. I learned this from Spider-Man. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
Let's go all-in on selling sustainability | {0: 'Steve Howard leads the sustainability effort at Ikea, helping the low-price-furniture giant to bring sustainable products to millions of people.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I've spent my life working on sustainability. I set up a climate change NGO called The Climate Group. I worked on forestry issues in WWF. I worked on development and agriculture issues in the U.N. system. About 25 years in total, and then three years ago, I found myself talking to IKEA's CEO about joining his team. Like many people here, well, I want to maximize my personal impact in the world, so I'm going to explain why I joined the team there. But first, let's just take three numbers. The first number is three: three billion people. This is the number of people joining the global middle class by 2030, coming out of poverty. It's fantastic for them and their families, but we've got two billion people in the global middle class today, and this swells that number to five, a big challenge when we already have resource scarcity. The second number is six: This is six degrees centigrade, what we're heading towards in terms of global warming. We're not heading towards one degree or three degrees or four degrees, we're heading toward six degrees. And if you think about it, all of the weird weather we've been having the last few years, much of that is due to just one degree warming, and we need CO2 emissions to peak by the end of this decade globally and then come down. It's not inevitable, but we need to act decisively. The third number is 12: That's the number of cities in the world that had a million or more people when my grandmother was born. You can see my grandmother there. That was in the beginning of the last century. So just 12 cities. She was born in Manchester, England, the ninth largest city in the world. Now there are 500 cities, nearly, with a million people or more in them. And if you look at the century from 1950 to 2050, that's the century when we build all the world's cities, the century that we're in the middle of right now. Every other century was kind of practice, and this lays down a blueprint for how we live. So think about it. We're building cities like never before, bringing people out of poverty like never before, and changing the climate like never before. Sustainability has gone from a nice-to-do to a must-do. it's about what we do right here, right now, and for the rest of our working lives. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what business can do and what a business like IKEA can do, and we have a sustainability strategy called "people and planet positive" to help guide our business to have a positive impact on the world. Why would we not want to have a positive impact on the world as a business? Other companies have sustainability strategies. I'm going to refer to some of those as well, and I'm just going to mention a few of the commitments as illustrations that we've got. But first, let's think of customers. We know from asking people from China to the U.S. that the vast majority of people care about sustainability after the day-to-day issues, the day-to-day issues of, how do I get my kids to school? Can I pay the bills at the end of the month? Then they care about big issues like climate change. But they want it to be easy, affordable and attractive, and they expect business to help, and they're a little bit disappointed today. So take your mind back and think of the first sustainable products. We had detergents that could wash your whites grayer. We had the early energy-efficient light bulbs that took five minutes to warm up and then you were left looking a kind of sickly color. And we had the rough, recycled toilet paper. So every time you pulled on a t-shirt, or switched the light on, or went to the bathroom, or sometimes all three together, you were reminded sustainability was about compromise. It wasn't a great start. Today we have choices. We can make products that are beautiful or ugly, sustainable or unsustainable, affordable or expensive, functional or useless. So let's make beautiful, functional, affordable, sustainable products. Let's take the LED. The LED is the next best thing to daylight. The old-fashioned lightbulbs, the incandescent bulbs — I'm not going to ask for a show of hands of how many of you still have them in your homes, wasting energy every time you switch them on — change them after this — or whether we have them on the stage here at TED or not — but those old incandescent light bulbs really should have been sold as heaters. They were mis-sold for more than a hundred years. They produced heat and a little bit of light on the side. Now we have lights that produce light and a little bit of heat on the side. You save 85 percent of the electricity with an LED that you would have done in an old incandescent. And the best thing is, they'll also last for more than 20 years. So think about that. You'll change your smartphone seven or eight times, probably more if you're in this audience. You'll change your car, if you have one, three or four times. Your kids could go to school, go to college, go away and have kids of their own, come back, bring the grandkids, you'll have the same lightbulb saving you energy. So LEDs are fantastic. What we decided to do was not to sell LEDs on the side marked up high and continue to push all the old bulbs, the halogens and the CFLs. We decided, over the next two years, we will ban the halogens and the CFLs ourselves. We will go all in. And this is what business needs to do: go all-in, go 100 percent, because then you stop investing in the old stuff, you invest in the new stuff, you lower costs, you use your supply chain and your creativity and you get the prices down so everybody can afford the best lights so they can save energy. (Applause) It's not just about products in people's homes. We've got to think about the raw materials that produce our products. Obviously there's fantastic opportunities with recycled materials, and we can and will go zero waste. And there's opportunities in a circular economy. But we're still dependent on natural, raw materials. Let's take cotton. Cotton's brilliant. Probably many people are wearing cotton right now. It's a brilliant textile in use. It's really dirty in production. It uses lots of pesticides, lots of fertilizer, lots of water. So we've worked with others, with other businesses and NGOs, on the Better Cotton Initiative, working right back down to the farm, and there you can halve the amount of water and halve the chemical inputs, the yields increase, and 60 percent of the costs of running many of these farms with farmers with low incomes can be chemical imports. Yields increase, and you halve the input costs. Farmers are coming out of poverty. They love it. Already hundreds of thousands of farmers have been reached, and now we've got 60 percent better cotton in our business. Again, we're going all-in. By 2015, we'll be 100 percent Better Cotton. Take the topic of 100 percent targets, actually. People sometimes think that 100 percent's going to be hard, and we've had the conversation in the business. Actually, we found 100 percent is easier to do than 90 percent or 50 percent. If you have a 90 percent target, everyone in the business finds a reason to be in the 10 percent. When it's 100 percent, it's kind of clear, and businesspeople like clarity, because then you just get the job done. So, wood. We know with forestry, it's a choice. You've got illegal logging and deforestation still on a very large scale, or you can have fantastic, responsible forestry that we can be proud of. It's a simple choice, so we've worked for many years with the Forest Stewardship Council, with literally hundreds of other organizations, and there's a point here about collaboration. So hundreds of others, of NGOs, of forest workers' unions, and of businesses, have helped create the Forest Stewardship Council, which sets standards for forestry and then checks the forestry's good on the ground. Now together, through our supply chain, with partners, we've managed to certify 35 million hectares of forestry. That's about the size of Germany. And we've decided in the next three years, we will double the volume of certified material we put through our business. So be decisive on these issues. Use your supply chain to drive good. But then it comes to your operations. Some things are certain, I think. We know we'll use electricity in 20 or 30 years' time. We know the sun will be shining somewhere, and the wind will still be blowing in 20 or 30 years' time. So why not make our energy out of the sun and the wind? And why not take control of it ourselves? So we're going 100 percent renewable. By 2020, we'll produce more renewable energy than the energy we consume as a business. For all of our stores, our own factories, our distribution centers, we've installed 300,000 solar panels so far, and we've got 14 wind farms we own and operate in six countries, and we're not done yet. But think of a solar panel. A solar panel pays for itself in seven or eight years. The electricity is free. Every time the sun comes out after that, the electricity is free. So this is a good thing for the CFO, not just the sustainability guy. Every business can do things like this. But then we've got to look beyond our operations, and I think everybody would agree that now business has to take full responsibility for the impacts of your supply chain. Many businesses now, fortunately, have codes of conduct and audit their supply chains, but not every business. Far from it. And this came in IKEA actually in the '90s. We found there was a risk of child labor in the supply chain, and people in the business were shocked. And it was clearly totally unacceptable, so then you have to act. So a code of conduct was developed, and now we have 80 auditors out in the world every day making sure all our factories secure good working conditions and protect human rights and make sure there is no child labor. But it's not just as simple as making sure there's no child labor. You've got to say that's not enough today. I think we'd all agree that children are the most important people in the world and the most vulnerable. So what can a business do today to actually use your total value chain to support a better quality of life and protect child rights? We've worked with UNICEF and Save the Children on developing some new business principles with children's rights. Increasing numbers of businesses are signing up to these, but actually in a survey, many business leaders said they thought their business had nothing to do with children. So what we decided to do was, we will look and ask ourselves the tough questions with partners who know more than us, what can we do to go beyond our business to help improve the lives of children? We also have a foundation that's committed to work through partners and help improve the lives and protect the rights of 100 million children by 2015. You know the phrase, you can manage what you measure? Well, you should measure what you care about. If you're not measuring things, you don't care and you don't know. So let's take an example, measure the things that are important in your business. Isn't it about time that businesses were led equally by men and women? (Applause) So we know for our 17,000 managers across IKEA that 47 percent are women today, but it's not enough, and we want to close the gap and follow it all the way through to senior management. And we do not want to wait another hundred years. So we've launched a women's open network this week in IKEA, and we'll do whatever it takes to lead the change. So the message here is, measure what you care about and lead the change, and don't wait a hundred years. So we've gone from sustainability being a nice-to-do to a must-do. It's a must-do. It's still nice to do, but it's a must-do. And everybody can do something on this as an individual. Be a discerning consumer. Vote with your wallets. Search out the companies that are acting on this. But also, there are other businesses already acting. I mentioned renewable energy. You go to Google or Lego, they're going 100 percent renewable too, in the same way that we are. On having really good sustainability strategies, there are companies like Nike, Patagonia, Timberland, Marks & Spencer. But I don't think any of those businesses would say they're perfect. We certainly wouldn't. We'll make mistakes going forward, but it's about setting a clear direction, being transparent, having a dialogue with the right partners, and choosing to lead on the issues that really count. So if you're a business leader, if you're not already weaving sustainability right into the heart of your business model, I'd urge you to do so. And together, we can help create a sustainable world, and, if we get it right, we can make sustainability affordable for the many people, not a luxury for the few. Thank you. (Applause) |
Africa's next boom | {0: 'In "The Fastest Billion," Charles Robertson re-examines the narrative of economic growth in African nations.\r\n'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Africa is booming. Per capita incomes since the year 2000 have doubled, and this boom is impacting on everyone. Life expectancy has increased by one year every three years for the last decade. That means if an African child is born today, rather than three days ago, they will get an extra day of life at the end of their lifespan. It's that quick. And HIV infection rates are down 27 percent: 600,000 less people a year are getting HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. The battle against malaria is being won, with deaths from malaria down 27 percent, according to the latest World Bank data. And malaria nets actually are playing a role in that. This shouldn't surprise us, because actually, everybody grows. If you go back to Imperial Rome in the Year 1 A.D., there was admittedly about 1,800 years where there wasn't an awful lot of growth. But then the people that the Romans would have called Scottish barbarians, my ancestors, were actually part of the Industrial Revolution, and in the 19th century, growth began to accelerate, and you saw that get quicker and quicker, and it's been impacting everyone. It doesn't matter if this is the jungles of Singapore or the tundra of northern Finland. Everybody gets involved. It's just a matter of when the inevitable happens. Among the reasons I think it's happening right now is the quality of the leadership across Africa. I think most of us would agree that in the 1990s, the greatest politician in the world was African, but I'm meeting brilliant people across the continent the entire time, and they're doing the reforms which have transformed the economic situation for their countries. And the West is engaging with that. The West has given debt forgiveness programs which have halved sub-Saharan debt from about 70 percent of GDP down to about 40. At the same time, our debt level's gone up to 120 and we're all feeling slightly miserable as a result. Politics gets weaker when debt is high. When public sector debt is low, governments don't have to choose between investing in education and health and paying interest on that debt you owe. And it's not just the public sector which is looking so good. The private sector as well. Again, in the West, we have private sector debt of 200 percent of GDP in Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. That's an awful lot of debt. Africa, many African countries, are sitting at 10 to 30 percent of GDP. If there's any continent that can do what China has done — China's at about 130 percent of GDP on that chart — if anyone can do what China has done in the last 30 years, it'll be Africa in the next 30. So they've got great government finances, great private sector debt. Does anyone recognize this? In fact, they do. Foreign direct investment has poured into Africa in the last 15 years. Back in the '70s, no one touched the continent with a barge pole. And this investment is actually Western-led. We hear a lot about China, and they do lend a lot of money, but 60 percent of the FDI in the last couple of years has come from Europe, America, Australia, Canada. Ten percent's come from India. And they're investing in energy. Africa produces 10 million barrels a day of oil now. It's the same as Saudi Arabia or Russia. And they're investing in telecoms, shopping malls. And this very encouraging story, I think, is partly demographic-led. And it's not just about African demographics. I'm showing you the number of 15- to 24-year-olds in various parts of the world, and the blue line is the one I want you to focus on for a second. Ten years ago, say you're Foxconn setting up an iPhone factory, by chance. You might choose China, which is the bulk of that East Asian blue line, where there's 200 million young people, and every year until 2010 that's getting bigger. Which means you're going to have new guys knocking on the door saying, "Give us a job," and, "I don't need a big pay rise, just please give me a job." Now, that's completely changed now. This decade, we're going to see a 20- to 30-percent fall in the number of 15- to 24-year-olds in China. So where do you set up your new factory? You look at South Asia, and people are. They're looking at Pakistan and Bangladesh, and they're also looking at Africa. And they're looking at Africa because that yellow line is showing you that the number of young Africans is going to continue to get bigger decade after decade after decade out to 2050. Now, there's a problem with lots of young people coming into any market, particularly when they're young men. A bit dangerous, sometimes. I think one of the crucial factors is how educated is that demographic? If you look at the red line here, what you're going to see is that in 1975, just nine percent of kids were in secondary school education in sub-Saharan Africa. Would you set up a factory in sub-Sahara in the mid-1970s? Nobody else did. They chose instead Turkey and Mexico to set up the textiles factories, because their education levels were 25 to 30 percent. Today, sub-Sahara is at the levels that Turkey and Mexico were at in 1975. They will get the textiles jobs that will take people out of rural poverty and put them on the road to industrialization and wealth. So what's Africa looking like today? This is how I look at Africa. It's a bit odd, because I'm an economist. Each little box is about a billion dollars, and you see that I pay an awful lot of attention to Nigeria sitting there in the middle. South Africa is playing a role. But when I'm thinking about the future, I'm actually most interested in Central, Western and Southern Africa. If I look at Africa by population, East Africa stands out as so much potential. And I'm showing you something else with these maps. I'm showing you democracy versus autocracy. Fragile democracies is the beige color. Strong democracies are the orange color. And what you'll see here is that most Africans are now living in democracies. Why does that matter? Because what people want is what politicians try, they don't always succeed, but they try and deliver. And what you've got is a reinforcing positive circle going on. In Ghana in the elections, in December 2012, the battle between the two candidates was over education. One guy offered free secondary school education to all, not just 30 percent. The other guy had to say, I'm going to build 50 new schools. He won by a margin. So democracy is encouraging governments to invest in education. Education is helping growth and investment, and that's giving budget revenues, which is giving governments more money, which is helping growth through education. It's a positive, virtuous circle. But I get asked this question, and this particular question makes me quite sad: It's, "But what about corruption? How can you invest in Africa when there's corruption?" And what makes me sad about it is that this graph here is showing you that the biggest correlation with corruption is wealth. When you're poor, corruption is not your biggest priority. And the countries on the right hand side, you'll see the per capita GDP, basically every country with a per capita GDP of, say, less than 5,000 dollars, has got a corruption score of roughly, what's that, about three? Three out of 10. That's not good. Every poor country is corrupt. Every rich country is relatively uncorrupt. How do you get from poverty and corruption to wealth and less corruption? You see the middle class grow. And the way to do that is to invest, not to say I'm not investing in that continent because there's too much corruption. Now, I don't want to be an apologist for corruption. I've been arrested because I refused to pay a bribe — not in Africa, actually. But what I'm saying here is that we can make a difference and we can do that by investing. Now I'm going to let you in on a little not-so-secret. Economists aren't great at forecasting. Because the question really is, what happens next? And if you go back to the year 2000, what you'll find is The Economist had a very famous cover, "The Hopeless Continent," and what they'd done is they'd looked at growth in Africa over the previous 10 years — two percent — and they said, what's going to happen in the next 10 years? They assumed two percent, and that made it a pretty hopeless story, because population growth was two and a half. People got poorer in Africa in the 1990s. Now 2012, The Economist has a new cover, and what does that new cover show? That new cover shows, well, Africa rising, because the growth over the last 10 years has been about five and a half percent. I would like to see if you can all now become economists, because if growth for the last 10 years has been five and a half percent, what do you think the IMF is forecasting for the next five years of growth in Africa? Very good. I think you're secretly saying to your head, probably five and a half percent. You're all economists, and I think, like most economists, wrong. No offense. What I like to do is try and find the countries that are doing exactly what Africa has already done, and it means that jump from 1,800 years of nothing to whoof, suddenly shooting through the roof. India is one of those examples. This is Indian growth from 1960 to 2010. Ignore the scale on the bottom for a second. Actually, for the first 20 years, the '60s and '70s, India didn't really grow. It grew at two percent when population growth was about two and a half. If that's familiar, that's exactly what happened in sub-Sahara in the '80s and the '90s. And then something happened in 1980. Boom! India began to explode. It wasn't a "Hindu rate of growth," "democracies can't grow." Actually India could. And if I lay sub-Saharan growth on top of the Indian growth story, it's remarkably similar. Twenty years of not much growth and a trend line which is actually telling you that sub-Saharan African growth is slightly better than India. And if I then lay developing Asia on top of this, I'm saying India is 20 years ahead of Africa, I'm saying developing Asia is 10 years ahead of India, I can draw out some forecasts for the next 30 to 40 years which I think are better than the ones where you're looking backwards. And that tells me this: that Africa is going to go from a $2 trillion economy today to a $29 trillion economy by 2050. Now that's bigger than Europe and America put together in today's money. Life expectancy is going to go up by 13 years. The population's going to double from one billion to two billion, so household incomes are going to go up sevenfold in the next 35 years. And when I present this in Africa — Nairobi, Lagos, Accra — I get one question. "Charlie, why are you so pessimistic?" And you know what? Actually, I think they've got a point. Am I really saying that there can be nothing learned, yes from the positives in Asia and India, but also the negatives? Perhaps Africa can avoid some of the mistakes that have been made. Surely, the technologies that we're talking about here this last week, surely some of these can perhaps help Africa grow even faster? And I think here we can play a role. Because technology does let you help. You can go and download some of the great African literature from the Internet now. No, not right now, just 30 seconds. You can go and buy some of the great tunes. My iPod's full of them. Buy African products. Go on holiday and see for yourself the change that's happening. Invest. Perhaps hire people, give them the skills that they can take back to Africa, and their companies will grow an awful lot faster than most of ours here in the West. And then you and I can help make sure that for Africa, the 21st century is their century. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
An ode to envy | {0: 'Parul Sehgal is an editor for "The New York Times Book Review."'} | TEDSalon NY2013 | So when I was eight years old, a new girl came to join the class, and she was so impressive, as the new girl always seems to be. She had vast quantities of very shiny hair and a cute little pencil case, super strong on state capitals, just a great speller. And I just curdled with jealousy that year, until I hatched my devious plan. So one day I stayed a little late after school, a little too late, and I lurked in the girls' bathroom. When the coast was clear, I emerged, crept into the classroom, and took from my teacher's desk the grade book. And then I did it. I fiddled with my rival's grades, just a little, just demoted some of those A's. All of those A's. (Laughter) And I got ready to return the book to the drawer, when hang on, some of my other classmates had appallingly good grades too. So, in a frenzy, I corrected everybody's marks, not imaginatively. I gave everybody a row of D's and I gave myself a row of A's, just because I was there, you know, might as well. And I am still baffled by my behavior. I don't understand where the idea came from. I don't understand why I felt so great doing it. I felt great. I don't understand why I was never caught. I mean, it should have been so blatantly obvious. I was never caught. But most of all, I am baffled by, why did it bother me so much that this little girl, this tiny little girl, was so good at spelling? Jealousy baffles me. It's so mysterious, and it's so pervasive. We know babies suffer from jealousy. We know primates do. Bluebirds are actually very prone. We know that jealousy is the number one cause of spousal murder in the United States. And yet, I have never read a study that can parse to me its loneliness or its longevity or its grim thrill. For that, we have to go to fiction, because the novel is the lab that has studied jealousy in every possible configuration. In fact, I don't know if it's an exaggeration to say that if we didn't have jealousy, would we even have literature? Well no faithless Helen, no "Odyssey." No jealous king, no "Arabian Nights." No Shakespeare. There goes high school reading lists, because we're losing "Sound and the Fury," we're losing "Gatsby," "Sun Also Rises," we're losing "Madame Bovary," "Anna K." No jealousy, no Proust. And now, I mean, I know it's fashionable to say that Proust has the answers to everything, but in the case of jealousy, he kind of does. This year is the centennial of his masterpiece, "In Search of Lost Time," and it's the most exhaustive study of sexual jealousy and just regular competitiveness, my brand, that we can hope to have. (Laughter) And we think about Proust, we think about the sentimental bits, right? We think about a little boy trying to get to sleep. We think about a madeleine moistened in lavender tea. We forget how harsh his vision was. We forget how pitiless he is. I mean, these are books that Virginia Woolf said were tough as cat gut. I don't know what cat gut is, but let's assume it's formidable. Let's look at why they go so well together, the novel and jealousy, jealousy and Proust. Is it something as obvious as that jealousy, which boils down into person, desire, impediment, is such a solid narrative foundation? I don't know. I think it cuts very close to the bone, because let's think about what happens when we feel jealous. When we feel jealous, we tell ourselves a story. We tell ourselves a story about other people's lives, and these stories make us feel terrible because they're designed to make us feel terrible. As the teller of the tale and the audience, we know just what details to include, to dig that knife in. Right? Jealousy makes us all amateur novelists, and this is something Proust understood. In the first volume, Swann's Way, the series of books, Swann, one of the main characters, is thinking very fondly of his mistress and how great she is in bed, and suddenly, in the course of a few sentences, and these are Proustian sentences, so they're long as rivers, but in the course of a few sentences, he suddenly recoils and he realizes, "Hang on, everything I love about this woman, somebody else would love about this woman. Everything that she does that gives me pleasure could be giving somebody else pleasure, maybe right about now." And this is the story he starts to tell himself, and from then on, Proust writes that every fresh charm Swann detects in his mistress, he adds to his "collection of instruments in his private torture chamber." Now Swann and Proust, we have to admit, were notoriously jealous. You know, Proust's boyfriends would have to leave the country if they wanted to break up with him. But you don't have to be that jealous to concede that it's hard work. Right? Jealousy is exhausting. It's a hungry emotion. It must be fed. And what does jealousy like? Jealousy likes information. Jealousy likes details. Jealousy likes the vast quantities of shiny hair, the cute little pencil case. Jealousy likes photos. That's why Instagram is such a hit. (Laughter) Proust actually links the language of scholarship and jealousy. When Swann is in his jealous throes, and suddenly he's listening at doorways and bribing his mistress' servants, he defends these behaviors. He says, "You know, look, I know you think this is repugnant, but it is no different from interpreting an ancient text or looking at a monument." He says, "They are scientific investigations with real intellectual value." Proust is trying to show us that jealousy feels intolerable and makes us look absurd, but it is, at its crux, a quest for knowledge, a quest for truth, painful truth, and actually, where Proust is concerned, the more painful the truth, the better. Grief, humiliation, loss: These were the avenues to wisdom for Proust. He says, "A woman whom we need, who makes us suffer, elicits from us a gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us." Is he telling us to just go and find cruel women? No. I think he's trying to say that jealousy reveals us to ourselves. And does any other emotion crack us open in this particular way? Does any other emotion reveal to us our aggression and our hideous ambition and our entitlement? Does any other emotion teach us to look with such peculiar intensity? Freud would write about this later. One day, Freud was visited by this very anxious young man who was consumed with the thought of his wife cheating on him. And Freud says, it's something strange about this guy, because he's not looking at what his wife is doing. Because she's blameless; everybody knows it. The poor creature is just under suspicion for no cause. But he's looking for things that his wife is doing without noticing, unintentional behaviors. Is she smiling too brightly here, or did she accidentally brush up against a man there? [Freud] says that the man is becoming the custodian of his wife's unconscious. The novel is very good on this point. The novel is very good at describing how jealousy trains us to look with intensity but not accuracy. In fact, the more intensely jealous we are, the more we become residents of fantasy. And this is why, I think, jealousy doesn't just provoke us to do violent things or illegal things. Jealousy prompts us to behave in ways that are wildly inventive. Now I'm thinking of myself at eight, I concede, but I'm also thinking of this story I heard on the news. A 52-year-old Michigan woman was caught creating a fake Facebook account from which she sent vile, hideous messages to herself for a year. For a year. A year. And she was trying to frame her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend, and I have to confess when I heard this, I just reacted with admiration. (Laughter) Because, I mean, let's be real. What immense, if misplaced, creativity. Right? This is something from a novel. This is something from a Patricia Highsmith novel. Now Highsmith is a particular favorite of mine. She is the very brilliant and bizarre woman of American letters. She's the author of "Strangers on a Train" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley," books that are all about how jealousy, it muddles our minds, and once we're in the sphere, in that realm of jealousy, the membrane between what is and what could be can be pierced in an instant. Take Tom Ripley, her most famous character. Now, Tom Ripley goes from wanting you or wanting what you have to being you and having what you once had, and you're under the floorboards, he's answering to your name, he's wearing your rings, emptying your bank account. That's one way to go. But what do we do? We can't go the Tom Ripley route. I can't give the world D's, as much as I would really like to, some days. And it's a pity, because we live in envious times. We live in jealous times. I mean, we're all good citizens of social media, aren't we, where the currency is envy? Does the novel show us a way out? I'm not sure. So let's do what characters always do when they're not sure, when they are in possession of a mystery. Let's go to 221B Baker Street and ask for Sherlock Holmes. When people think of Holmes, they think of his nemesis being Professor Moriarty, right, this criminal mastermind. But I've always preferred [Inspector] Lestrade, who is the rat-faced head of Scotland Yard who needs Holmes desperately, needs Holmes' genius, but resents him. Oh, it's so familiar to me. So Lestrade needs his help, resents him, and sort of seethes with bitterness over the course of the mysteries. But as they work together, something starts to change, and finally in "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons," once Holmes comes in, dazzles everybody with his solution, Lestrade turns to Holmes and he says, "We're not jealous of you, Mr. Holmes. We're proud of you." And he says that there's not a man at Scotland Yard who wouldn't want to shake Sherlock Holmes' hand. It's one of the few times we see Holmes moved in the mysteries, and I find it very moving, this little scene, but it's also mysterious, right? It seems to treat jealousy as a problem of geometry, not emotion. You know, one minute Holmes is on the other side from Lestrade. The next minute they're on the same side. Suddenly, Lestrade is letting himself admire this mind that he's resented. Could it be so simple though? What if jealousy really is a matter of geometry, just a matter of where we allow ourselves to stand in relation to another? Well, maybe then we wouldn't have to resent somebody's excellence. We could align ourselves with it. But I like contingency plans. So while we wait for that to happen, let us remember that we have fiction for consolation. Fiction alone demystifies jealousy. Fiction alone domesticates it, invites it to the table. And look who it gathers: sweet Lestrade, terrifying Tom Ripley, crazy Swann, Marcel Proust himself. We are in excellent company. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why our universe might exist on a knife-edge | {0: 'Gian Giudice is a theoretical physicist who has contributed greatly to our present understanding of particle physics and cosmology. '} | TEDxCERN | So last year, on the Fourth of July, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson. It was a historical day. There's no doubt that from now on, the Fourth of July will be remembered not as the day of the Declaration of Independence, but as the day of the discovery of the Higgs boson. Well, at least, here at CERN. But for me, the biggest surprise of that day was that there was no big surprise. In the eye of a theoretical physicist, the Higgs boson is a clever explanation of how some elementary particles gain mass, but it seems a fairly unsatisfactory and incomplete solution. Too many questions are left unanswered. The Higgs boson does not share the beauty, the symmetry, the elegance, of the rest of the elementary particle world. For this reason, the majority of theoretical physicists believe that the Higgs boson could not be the full story. We were expecting new particles and new phenomena accompanying the Higgs boson. Instead, so far, the measurements coming from the LHC show no signs of new particles or unexpected phenomena. Of course, the verdict is not definitive. In 2015, the LHC will almost double the energy of the colliding protons, and these more powerful collisions will allow us to explore further the particle world, and we will certainly learn much more. But for the moment, since we have found no evidence for new phenomena, let us suppose that the particles that we know today, including the Higgs boson, are the only elementary particles in nature, even at energies much larger than what we have explored so far. Let's see where this hypothesis is going to lead us. We will find a surprising and intriguing result about our universe, and to explain my point, let me first tell you what the Higgs is about, and to do so, we have to go back to one tenth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. And according to the Higgs theory, at that instant, a dramatic event took place in the universe. Space-time underwent a phase transition. It was something very similar to the phase transition that occurs when water turns into ice below zero degrees. But in our case, the phase transition is not a change in the way the molecules are arranged inside the material, but is about a change of the very fabric of space-time. During this phase transition, empty space became filled with a substance that we now call Higgs field. And this substance may seem invisible to us, but it has a physical reality. It surrounds us all the time, just like the air we breathe in this room. And some elementary particles interact with this substance, gaining energy in the process. And this intrinsic energy is what we call the mass of a particle, and by discovering the Higgs boson, the LHC has conclusively proved that this substance is real, because it is the stuff the Higgs bosons are made of. And this, in a nutshell, is the essence of the Higgs story. But this story is far more interesting than that. By studying the Higgs theory, theoretical physicists discovered, not through an experiment but with the power of mathematics, that the Higgs field does not necessarily exist only in the form that we observe today. Just like matter can exist as liquid or solid, so the Higgs field, the substance that fills all space-time, could exist in two states. Besides the known Higgs state, there could be a second state in which the Higgs field is billions and billions times denser than what we observe today, and the mere existence of another state of the Higgs field poses a potential problem. This is because, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, it is possible to have transitions between two states, even in the presence of an energy barrier separating the two states, and the phenomenon is called, quite appropriately, quantum tunneling. Because of quantum tunneling, I could disappear from this room and reappear in the next room, practically penetrating the wall. But don't expect me to actually perform the trick in front of your eyes, because the probability for me to penetrate the wall is ridiculously small. You would have to wait a really long time before it happens, but believe me, quantum tunneling is a real phenomenon, and it has been observed in many systems. For instance, the tunnel diode, a component used in electronics, works thanks to the wonders of quantum tunneling. But let's go back to the Higgs field. If the ultra-dense Higgs state existed, then, because of quantum tunneling, a bubble of this state could suddenly appear in a certain place of the universe at a certain time, and it is analogous to what happens when you boil water. Bubbles of vapor form inside the water, then they expand, turning liquid into gas. In the same way, a bubble of the ultra-dense Higgs state could come into existence because of quantum tunneling. The bubble would then expand at the speed of light, invading all space, and turning the Higgs field from the familiar state into a new state. Is this a problem? Yes, it's a big a problem. We may not realize it in ordinary life, but the intensity of the Higgs field is critical for the structure of matter. If the Higgs field were only a few times more intense, we would see atoms shrinking, neutrons decaying inside atomic nuclei, nuclei disintegrating, and hydrogen would be the only possible chemical element in the universe. And the Higgs field, in the ultra-dense Higgs state, is not just a few times more intense than today, but billions of times, and if space-time were filled by this Higgs state, all atomic matter would collapse. No molecular structures would be possible, no life. So, I wonder, is it possible that in the future, the Higgs field will undergo a phase transition and, through quantum tunneling, will be transformed into this nasty, ultra-dense state? In other words, I ask myself, what is the fate of the Higgs field in our universe? And the crucial ingredient necessary to answer this question is the Higgs boson mass. And experiments at the LHC found that the mass of the Higgs boson is about 126 GeV. This is tiny when expressed in familiar units, because it's equal to something like 10 to the minus 22 grams, but it is large in particle physics units, because it is equal to the weight of an entire molecule of a DNA constituent. So armed with this information from the LHC, together with some colleagues here at CERN, we computed the probability that our universe could quantum tunnel into the ultra-dense Higgs state, and we found a very intriguing result. Our calculations showed that the measured value of the Higgs boson mass is very special. It has just the right value to keep the universe hanging in an unstable situation. The Higgs field is in a wobbly configuration that has lasted so far but that will eventually collapse. So according to these calculations, we are like campers who accidentally set their tent at the edge of a cliff. And eventually, the Higgs field will undergo a phase transition and matter will collapse into itself. So is this how humanity is going to disappear? I don't think so. Our calculation shows that quantum tunneling of the Higgs field is not likely to occur in the next 10 to the 100 years, and this is a very long time. It's even longer than the time it takes for Italy to form a stable government. (Laughter) Even so, we will be long gone by then. In about five billion years, our sun will become a red giant, as large as the Earth's orbit, and our Earth will be kaput, and in a thousand billion years, if dark energy keeps on fueling space expansion at the present rate, you will not even be able to see as far as your toes, because everything around you expands at a rate faster than the speed of light. So it is really unlikely that we will be around to see the Higgs field collapse. But the reason why I am interested in the transition of the Higgs field is because I want to address the question, why is the Higgs boson mass so special? Why is it just right to keep the universe at the edge of a phase transition? Theoretical physicists always ask "why" questions. More than how a phenomenon works, theoretical physicists are always interested in why a phenomenon works in the way it works. We think that this these "why" questions can give us clues about the fundamental principles of nature. And indeed, a possible answer to my question opens up new universes, literally. It has been speculated that our universe is only a bubble in a soapy multiverse made out of a multitude of bubbles, and each bubble is a different universe with different fundamental constants and different physical laws. And in this context, you can only talk about the probability of finding a certain value of the Higgs mass. Then the key to the mystery could lie in the statistical properties of the multiverse. It would be something like what happens with sand dunes on a beach. In principle, you could imagine to find sand dunes of any slope angle in a beach, and yet, the slope angles of sand dunes are typically around 30, 35 degrees. And the reason is simple: because wind builds up the sand, gravity makes it fall. As a result, the vast majority of sand dunes have slope angles around the critical value, near to collapse. And something similar could happen for the Higgs boson mass in the multiverse. In the majority of bubble universes, the Higgs mass could be around the critical value, near to a cosmic collapse of the Higgs field, because of two competing effects, just as in the case of sand. My story does not have an end, because we still don't know the end of the story. This is science in progress, and to solve the mystery, we need more data, and hopefully, the LHC will soon add new clues to this story. Just one number, the Higgs boson mass, and yet, out of this number we learn so much. I started from a hypothesis, that the known particles are all there is in the universe, even beyond the domain explored so far. From this, we discovered that the Higgs field that permeates space-time may be standing on a knife edge, ready for cosmic collapse, and we discovered that this may be a hint that our universe is only a grain of sand in a giant beach, the multiverse. But I don't know if my hypothesis is right. That's how physics works: A single measurement can put us on the road to a new understanding of the universe or it can send us down a blind alley. But whichever it turns out to be, there is one thing I'm sure of: The journey will be full of surprises. Thank you. (Applause) |
Architecture at home in its community | {0: 'Barcelona-based architect Xavier Vilalta works in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He adopts and updates traditional design principles to construct modern buildings that truly suit their environment.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | My work focuses on the connection of both thinking about our community life being part of the environment where architecture grows from the natural local conditions and traditions. Today I brought two recent projects as an example of this. Both projects are in emerging countries, one in Ethiopia and another one in Tunisia. And also they have in common that the different analyses from different perspectives becomes an essential part of the final piece of architecture. The first example started with an invitation to design a multistory shopping mall in Ethiopia's capital city Addis Ababa. And this is the type of building we were shown as an example, to my team and myself, of what we had to design. At first, the first thing I thought was, I want to run away. (Laughter) After seeing a few of these buildings — there are many in the city — we realized that they have three very big points. First, these buildings, they are almost empty because they have very large shops where people cannot afford to buy things. Second, they need tons of energy to perform because of the skin treatment with glass that creates heat in the inside, and then you need a lot of cooling. In a city where this shouldn't happen because they have really mild weather that ranges from 20 to 25 degrees the whole year. And third is that their image has nothing to do with Africa and with Ethiopia. It is a pity in a place that has such rich culture and traditions. Also during our first visit to Ethiopia, I was really captivated by the old merkato that is this open-air structure where thousands of people, they go and buy things every day from small vendors. And also it has this idea of the public space that uses the outdoors to create activity. So I thought, this is what I really want to design, not a shopping mall. But the question was how we could do a multistory, contemporary building with these principles. The next challenge was when we looked at the site, that is, in a really growing area of the city, where most of these buildings that you see in the image, they were not there. And it's also between two parallel streets that don't have any connection for hundreds of meters. So the first thing we did was to create a connection between these two streets, putting all the entrances of the building. And this extends with an inclined atrium that creates an open-air space in the building that self-protects itself with its own shape from the sun and the rain. And around this void we placed this idea of the market with small shops, that change in each floor because of the shape of the void. I also thought, how to close the building? And I really wanted to find a solution that would respond to the local climate conditions. And I started thinking about the textile like a shell made of concrete with perforations that would let the air in, and also the light, but in a filtered way. And then the inspiration came from these beautiful patterns of the Ethiopian women's dresses. That they have fractal geometry properties and this helped me to shape the whole facade. And we are building that with these small prefabricated pieces that are the windows that let the air and the light in a controlled way inside the building. And this is complemented by these small colored glasses that use the light from the inside of the building to light up the building at night. With these ideas it was not easy first to convince the developers because they were like, "This is not a shopping mall. We didn't ask for that." But then we all realized that this idea of the market happened to be a lot more profitable than the idea of the shopping mall because basically they had more shops to sell. And also that the idea of the facade was much, much cheaper, not only because of the material compared with the glass, but also because we didn't need to have air conditioning anymore. So we created some budget savings that we used to implement the project. And the first implementation was to think about how we could make the building self-sufficient in terms of energy in a city that has electricity cuts almost every day. So we created a huge asset by placing photovoltaics there on the roof. And then under those panels we thought about the roof like a new public space with gathering areas and bars that would create this urban oasis. And these porches on the roof, all together they collect the water to reuse for sanitation on the inside. Hopefully by the beginning of next year, because we are already on the fifth floor of the construction. The second example is a master plan of 2,000 apartments and facilities in the city of Tunis. And for doing such a big project, the biggest project I've ever designed, I really needed to understand the city of Tunis, but also its surroundings and the tradition and culture. During that analysis I paid special attention to the medina that is this 1,000-year-old structure that used to be closed by a wall, opened by twelve different gates, connected by almost straight lines. When I went to the site, the first design operation we did was to extend the existing streets, creating 12 initial blocks similar in size and characteristics to the ones we have in Barcelona and other cities in Europe with these courtyards. On top of that, we selected some strategic points reminded of this idea of the gates and connecting them by straight lines, and this modified this initial pattern. And the last operation was to think about the cell, the small cell of the project, like the apartment, as an essential part of the master plan. And for that I thought, what would be the best orientation in the Mediterranean climate for an apartment? And it's north-south, because it creates a thermal difference between both sides of the house and then a natural ventilation. So we overlap a pattern that makes sure that most of the apartments are perfectly oriented in that direction. And this is the result that is almost like a combination of the European block and the Arab city. It has these blocks with courtyards, and then on the ground floor you have all these connections for the pedestrians. And also it responds to the local regulations that establish a higher density on the upper levels and a lower density on the ground floor. And it also reinforces this idea of the gates. The volume has this connecting shape that shades itself with three different types of apartments and also lets the light go on the ground floor in a very dense neighborhood And in the courtyards there are the different facilities, such as a gym and a kindergarten and close by, a series of commercial [spaces] that bring activity to the ground floor. The roof, which is my favorite space of the project is almost like giving back to the community the space taken by the construction. And it's where all the neighbors, they can go up and socialize, and do activities such as having a two-kilometer run in the morning, jumping from one building to another. These two examples, they have a common approach in the design process. And also, they are in emerging countries where you can see the cities literally growing. In these cities, the impact of architecture in people's lives of today and tomorrow changes the local communities and economies at the same speed as the buildings grow. For this reason, I see even more importance to look at architecture finding simple but affordable solutions that enhance the relationship between the community and the environment and that aim to connect nature and people. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Government -- investor, risk-taker, innovator | {0: 'Mariana Mazzucato is dedicated to changing how policymakers understand the economy -- and how we think about value -- to make it harder for value extractors to pass for value creators.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Have you ever asked yourselves why it is that companies, the really cool companies, the innovative ones, the creative, new economy-type companies — Apple, Google, Facebook — are coming out of one particular country, the United States of America? Usually when I say this, someone says, "Spotify! That's Europe." But, yeah. It has not had the impact that these other companies have had. Now what I do is I'm an economist, and I actually study the relationship between innovation and economic growth at the level of the company, the industry and the nation, and I work with policymakers worldwide, especially in the European Commission, but recently also in interesting places like China, and I can tell you that that question is on the tip of all of their tongues: Where are the European Googles? What is the secret behind the Silicon Valley growth model, which they understand is different from this old economy growth model? And what is interesting is that often, even if we're in the 21st century, we kind of come down in the end to these ideas of market versus state. It's talked about in these modern ways, but the idea is that somehow, behind places like Silicon Valley, the secret have been different types of market-making mechanisms, the private initiative, whether this be about a dynamic venture capital sector that's actually able to provide that high-risk finance to these innovative companies, the gazelles as we often call them, which traditional banks are scared of, or different types of really successful commercialization policies which actually allow these companies to bring these great inventions, their products, to the market and actually get over this really scary Death Valley period in which many companies instead fail. But what really interests me, especially nowadays and because of what's happening politically around the world, is the language that's used, the narrative, the discourse, the images, the actual words. So we often are presented with the kind of words like that the private sector is also much more innovative because it's able to think out of the box. They are more dynamic. Think of Steve Jobs' really inspirational speech to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford, where he said to be innovative, you've got to stay hungry, stay foolish. Right? So these guys are kind of the hungry and foolish and colorful guys, right? And in places like Europe, it might be more equitable, we might even be a bit better dressed and eat better than the U.S., but the problem is this damn public sector. It's a bit too big, and it hasn't actually allowed these things like dynamic venture capital and commercialization to actually be able to really be as fruitful as it could. And even really respectable newspapers, some that I'm actually subscribed to, the words they use are, you know, the state as this Leviathan. Right? This monster with big tentacles. They're very explicit in these editorials. They say, "You know, the state, it's necessary to fix these little market failures when you have public goods or different types of negative externalities like pollution, but you know what, what is the next big revolution going to be after the Internet? We all hope it might be something green, or all of this nanotech stuff, and in order for that stuff to happen," they say — this was a special issue on the next industrial revolution — they say, "the state, just stick to the basics, right? Fund the infrastructure. Fund the schools. Even fund the basic research, because this is popularly recognized, in fact, as a big public good which private companies don't want to invest in, do that, but you know what? Leave the rest to the revolutionaries." Those colorful, out-of-the-box kind of thinkers. They're often called garage tinkerers, because some of them actually did some things in garages, even though that's partly a myth. And so what I want to do with you in, oh God, only 10 minutes, is to really think again this juxtaposition, because it actually has massive, massive implications beyond innovation policy, which just happens to be the area that I often talk with with policymakers. It has huge implications, even with this whole notion that we have on where, when and why we should actually be cutting back on public spending and different types of public services which, of course, as we know, are increasingly being outsourced because of this juxtaposition. Right? I mean, the reason that we need to maybe have free schools or charter schools is in order to make them more innovative without being emburdened by this heavy hand of the state curriculum, or something. So these kind of words are constantly, these juxtapositions come up everywhere, not just with innovation policy. And so to think again, there's no reason that you should believe me, so just think of some of the smartest revolutionary things that you have in your pockets and do not turn it on, but you might want to take it out, your iPhone. Ask who actually funded the really cool, revolutionary thinking-out-of-the-box things in the iPhone. What actually makes your phone a smartphone, basically, instead of a stupid phone? So the Internet, which you can surf the web anywhere you are in the world; GPS, where you can actually know where you are anywhere in the world; the touchscreen display, which makes it also a really easy-to-use phone for anybody. These are the very smart, revolutionary bits about the iPhone, and they're all government-funded. And the point is that the Internet was funded by DARPA, U.S. Department of Defense. GPS was funded by the military's Navstar program. Even Siri was actually funded by DARPA. The touchscreen display was funded by two public grants by the CIA and the NSF to two public university researchers at the University of Delaware. Now, you might be thinking, "Well, she's just said the word 'defense' and 'military' an awful lot," but what's really interesting is that this is actually true in sector after sector and department after department. So the pharmaceutical industry, which I am personally very interested in because I've actually had the fortune to study it in quite some depth, is wonderful to be asking this question about the revolutionary versus non-revolutionary bits, because each and every medicine can actually be divided up on whether it really is revolutionary or incremental. So the new molecular entities with priority rating are the revolutionary new drugs, whereas the slight variations of existing drugs — Viagra, different color, different dosage — are the less revolutionary ones. And it turns out that a full 75 percent of the new molecular entities with priority rating are actually funded in boring, Kafka-ian public sector labs. This doesn't mean that Big Pharma is not spending on innovation. They do. They spend on the marketing part. They spend on the D part of R&D. They spend an awful lot on buying back their stock, which is quite problematic. In fact, companies like Pfizer and Amgen recently have spent more money in buying back their shares to boost their stock price than on R&D, but that's a whole different TED Talk which one day I'd be fascinated to tell you about. Now, what's interesting in all of this is the state, in all these examples, was doing so much more than just fixing market failures. It was actually shaping and creating markets. It was funding not only the basic research, which again is a typical public good, but even the applied research. It was even, God forbid, being a venture capitalist. So these SBIR and SDTR programs, which give small companies early-stage finance have not only been extremely important compared to private venture capital, but also have become increasingly important. Why? Because, as many of us know, V.C. is actually quite short-term. They want their returns in three to five years. Innovation takes a much longer time than that, 15 to 20 years. And so this whole notion — I mean, this is the point, right? Who's actually funding the hard stuff? Of course, it's not just the state. The private sector does a lot. But the narrative that we've always been told is the state is important for the basics, but not really providing that sort of high-risk, revolutionary thinking out of the box. In all these sectors, from funding the Internet to doing the spending, but also the envisioning, the strategic vision, for these investments, it was actually coming within the state. The nanotechnology sector is actually fascinating to study this, because the word itself, nanotechnology, came from within government. And so there's huge implications of this. First of all, of course I'm not someone, this old-fashioned person, market versus state. What we all know in dynamic capitalism is that what we actually need are public-private partnerships. But the point is, by constantly depicting the state part as necessary but actually — pffff — a bit boring and often a bit dangerous kind of Leviathan, I think we've actually really stunted the possibility to build these public-private partnerships in a really dynamic way. Even the words that we often use to justify the "P" part, the public part — well, they're both P's — with public-private partnerships is in terms of de-risking. What the public sector did in all these examples I just gave you, and there's many more, which myself and other colleagues have been looking at, is doing much more than de-risking. It's kind of been taking on that risk. Bring it on. It's actually been the one thinking out of the box. But also, I'm sure you all have had experience with local, regional, national governments, and you're kind of like, "You know what, that Kafka-ian bureaucrat, I've met him." That whole juxtaposition thing, it's kind of there. Well, there's a self-fulfilling prophecy. By talking about the state as kind of irrelevant, boring, it's sometimes that we actually create those organizations in that way. So what we have to actually do is build these entrepreneurial state organizations. DARPA, that funded the Internet and Siri, actually thought really hard about this, how to welcome failure, because you will fail. You will fail when you innovative. One out of 10 experiments has any success. And the V.C. guys know this, and they're able to actually fund the other losses from that one success. And this brings me, actually, probably, to the biggest implication, and this has huge implications beyond innovation. If the state is more than just a market fixer, if it actually is a market shaper, and in doing that has had to take on this massive risk, what happened to the reward? We all know, if you've ever taken a finance course, the first thing you're taught is sort of the risk-reward relationship, and so some people are foolish enough or probably smart enough if they have time to wait, to actually invest in stocks, because they're higher risk which over time will make a greater reward than bonds, that whole risk-reward thing. Well, where's the reward for the state of having taken on these massive risks and actually been foolish enough to have done the Internet? The Internet was crazy. It really was. I mean, the probability of failure was massive. You had to be completely nuts to do it, and luckily, they were. Now, we don't even get to this question about rewards unless you actually depict the state as this risk-taker. And the problem is that economists often think, well, there is a reward back to the state. It's tax. You know, the companies will pay tax, the jobs they create will create growth so people who get those jobs and their incomes rise will come back to the state through the tax mechanism. Well, unfortunately, that's not true. Okay, it's not true because many of the jobs that are created go abroad. Globalization, and that's fine. We shouldn't be nationalistic. Let the jobs go where they have to go, perhaps. I mean, one can take a position on that. But also these companies that have actually had this massive benefit from the state — Apple's a great example. They even got the first — well, not the first, but 500,000 dollars actually went to Apple, the company, through this SBIC program, which predated the SBIR program, as well as, as I said before, all the technologies behind the iPhone. And yet we know they legally, as many other companies, pay very little tax back. So what we really need to actually rethink is should there perhaps be a return-generating mechanism that's much more direct than tax. Why not? It could happen perhaps through equity. This, by the way, in the countries that are actually thinking about this strategically, countries like Finland in Scandinavia, but also in China and Brazil, they're retaining equity in these investments. Sitra funded Nokia, kept equity, made a lot of money, it's a public funding agency in Finland, which then funded the next round of Nokias. The Brazilian Development Bank, which is providing huge amounts of funds today to clean technology, they just announced a $56 billion program for the future on this, is retaining equity in these investments. So to put it provocatively, had the U.S. government thought about this, and maybe just brought back just something called an innovation fund, you can bet that, you know, if even just .05 percent of the profits from what the Internet produced had come back to that innovation fund, there would be so much more money to spend today on green technology. Instead, many of the state budgets which in theory are trying to do that are being constrained. But perhaps even more important, we heard before about the one percent, the 99 percent. If the state is thought about in this more strategic way, as one of the lead players in the value creation mechanism, because that's what we're talking about, right? Who are the different players in creating value in the economy, and is the state's role, has it been sort of dismissed as being a backseat player? If we can actually have a broader theory of value creation and allow us to actually admit what the state has been doing and reap something back, it might just be that in the next round, and I hope that we all hope that the next big revolution will in fact be green, that that period of growth will not only be smart, innovation-led, not only green, but also more inclusive, so that the public schools in places like Silicon Valley can actually also benefit from that growth, because they have not. Thank you. (Applause) |
A simple solution to the coming phosphorus crisis | {0: 'Mohamed Hijri studies arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), seeking to understand the structure, evolution and reproduction of these organisms, which form a symbiotic relationship with plant roots.\r\n'} | TEDxUdeM | I'm going to start by asking you a question: Is anyone familiar with the blue algae problem? Okay, so most of you are. I think we can all agree it's a serious issue. Nobody wants to drink blue algae-contaminated water, or swim in a blue algae-infested lake. Right? I hope you won't be disappointed, but today, I won't be talking about blue algae. Instead, I'll be talking about the main cause at the root of this issue, which I will be referring to as the phosphorus crisis. Why have I chosen to talk to you about the phosphorus crisis today? For the simple reason that nobody else is talking about it. And by the end of my presentation, I hope that the general public will be more aware of this crisis and this issue. Now, the problem is that if I ask, why do we find ourselves in this situation with blue algae? The answer is that it comes from how we farm. We use fertilizers in our farming, chemical fertilizers. Why do we use chemical fertilizers in agriculture? Basically, to help plants grow and to produce a better yield. The issue is that this is set to engender an environmental problem that is without precedent. Before going further, let me give you a crash course in plant biology. So, what does a plant need in order to grow? A plant, quite simply, needs light, it needs CO2, but even more importantly, it needs nutrients, which it draws from the soil. Several of these nutrients are essential chemical elements: phosphorus, nitrogen and calcium. So, the plant’s roots will extract these resources. Today I'll be focusing on a major problem that is linked to phosphorus. Why phosphorus in particular? Because it is the most problematic chemical element. By the end of my presentation, you will have seen what these problems are, and where we are today. Phosphorus is a chemical element that is essential to life. This is a very important point. I’d like everyone to understand precisely what the phosphorus issue is. Phosphorus is a key component in several molecules, in many of our molecules of life. Experts in the field will know that cellular communication is phosphorus-based — phosphorylation, dephosphorylation. Cell membranes are phosphorus-based: These are called phospholipids. The energy in all living things, ATP, is phosphorus-based. And more importantly still, phosphorus is a key component of DNA, something everyone is familiar with, and which is shown in this image. DNA is our genetic heritage. It is extremely important, and once again, phosphorus is a key player. Now, where do we find this phosphorus? As humans, where do we find it? As I explained earlier, plants extract phosphorus from the soil, through water. So, we humans get it from the things we eat: plants, vegetables, fruits, and also from eggs, meat and milk. It’s true that some humans eat better than others. Some are happier than others. And now, looking at this picture, which speaks for itself, we see modern agriculture, which I also refer to as intensive agriculture. Intensive agriculture is based on the use of chemical fertilizers. Without them, we would not manage to produce enough to feed the world's population. Speaking of humans, there are currently 7 billion of us on Earth. In less than 40 years, there will be 9 billion of us. And the question is a simple one: Do we have enough phosphorus to feed our future generations? So, in order to understand these issues, where do we find our phosphorus? Let me explain. But first, let’s just suppose that we are using 100 percent of a given dose of phosphorus. Only 15 percent of this 100 percent goes to the plant. Eighty-five percent is lost. It goes into the soil, ending its journey in the lakes, resulting in lakes with extra phosphorus, which leads to the blue algae problem. So, you’ll see there’s a problem here, something that is illogical. A hundred percent of the phosphorus is used, but only 15 percent goes to the plant. You’re going to tell me it’s wasteful. Yes, it is. What is worse is that it is very expensive. Nobody wants to throw their money out the window, but unfortunately that's what is happening here. Eighty percent of each dose of phosphorus is lost. Modern agriculture depends on phosphorus. And because in order to get 15 percent of it to the plant, all the rest is lost, we have to add more and more. Now, where will we get this phosphorus from? Basically, we get it out of mines. This is the cover of an extraordinary article published in Nature in 2009, which really launched the discussion about the phosphorus crisis. Phosphorus, a nutrient essential to life, which is becoming increasingly scarce, yet nobody is talking about it. And everyone agrees: Politicians and scientists are in agreement that we are headed for a phosphorus crisis. What you are seeing here is an open-pit mine in the U.S., and to give you an idea of the dimensions of this mine, if you look in the top right-hand corner, the little crane you can see, that is a giant crane. So that really puts it into perspective. So, we get phosphorus from mines. And if I make a comparison with oil, there’s an oil crisis, we talk about it, we talk about global warming, yet we never mention the phosphorus crisis. To come back to the oil problem, oil is something we can replace. We can use biofuels, or solar power, or hydropower, but phosphorus is an essential element, indispensable to life, and we can’t replace it. What is the current state of the world's phosphorus reserves? This graph gives you a rough idea of where we are today. The black line represents predictions for phosphorus reserves. In 2030, we’ll reach the peak. By the end of this century, it will all be gone. The dotted line shows where we are today. As you can see, they meet in 2030, I’ll be retired by then. But we are indeed heading for a major crisis, and I’d like people to become aware of this problem. Do we have a solution? What are we to do? We are faced with a paradox. Less and less phosphorus will be available. By 2050 there will be 9 billion of us, and according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, we will need to produce twice as much food in 2050 than we do today. So, we will have less phosphorus, but we'll need to produce more food. What should we do? It truly is a paradoxical situation. Do we have a solution, or an alternative which will allow us to optimize phosphorus use? Remember that 80 percent is destined to be lost. The solution I'm offering today is one that has existed for a very long time, even before plants existed on Earth, and it's a microscopic mushroom that is very mysterious, very simple, and yet also extremely complex. I've been fascinated by this little mushroom for over 16 years now. It has led me to further my research and to use it as a model for my laboratory research. This mushroom exists in symbiosis with the roots. By symbiosis, I mean a bidirectional and mutually beneficial association which is also called mycorrhiza. This slide illustrates the elements of a mycorrhiza. You’re looking at the root of wheat, one of the world’s most important plants. Normally, a root will find phosphorus all by itself. It will go in search of phosphorus, but only within the one millimeter which surrounds it. Beyond one millimeter, the root is ineffective. It cannot go further in its search for phosphorus. Now, imagine this tiny, microscopic mushroom. It grows much faster, and is much better designed to seek out phosphorus. It can go beyond the root’s one-millimeter scope to seek out phosphorus. I haven’t invented anything at all; it's a biotechnology that has existed for 450 million years. And over time, this mushroom has evolved and adapted to seek out even the tiniest trace of phosphorus, and to put it to use, to make it available to the plant. What you’re seeing here, in the real world, is a carrot root, and the mushroom with its very fine filaments. Looking closer, we can see that this mushroom is very gentle in its penetration. It will proliferate between the root's cells, eventually penetrating a cell and starting to form a typical arbuscular structure, which will considerably increase the exchange interface between the plant and the mushroom. And it is through this structure that mutual exchanges will occur. It’s a win-win trade: I give you phosphorus, and you feed me. True symbiosis. Now let's add a mycorrhiza plant into the diagram I used earlier. And instead of using a 100 percent dose, I’m going to reduce it to 25 percent. You’ll see that of this 25 percent, most will benefit the plant, more than 90 percent. A very small amount of phosphorus will remain in the soil. That's completely natural. What's more is that in certain cases, we don't even need to add phosphorus. If you recall the graphs I showed you earlier, 85 percent of phosphorus is lost in the soil, and the plants are unable to access it. Even though it is present in the soil, it is in insoluble form. The plant is only able to seek out soluble forms. The mushroom is capable of dissolving this insoluble form and making it available for the plant to use. To further support my argument, here is a picture that speaks for itself. These are trials in a field of sorghum. On the left side, you see the yield produced using conventional agriculture, with a 100 percent phosphorus dose. On the other side, the dose was reduced to 50 percent, and just look at the yield. With only a half-dose, we achieved a better yield. This is to show you that this method works. And in some cases, in Cuba, Mexico and India, the dose can be reduced to 25 percent, and in several other cases, there's no need to add any phosphorus at all, because the mushrooms are so well adapted to finding phosphorus and drawing it from the soil. This is an example of soy production in Canada. Mycorrhiza was used in one field but not in the other. And here, where blue indicates a better yield, and yellow a weaker yield. The black rectangle is the plot from which the mycorrhiza was added. In other words, as I already said, I have invented nothing. Mycorrhiza has existed for 450 million years, and it has even helped modern-day plant species to diversify. So, this it isn't something that is still undergoing lab tests. Mycorrhiza exists, it works, it's produced at an industrial scale and commercialized worldwide. The problem is that people are not aware of it. People like food producers and farmers are still not aware of this problem. We have a technology that works, and one that, if used correctly, will alleviate some of the pressure we are putting on the world's phosphorus reserves. In conclusion, I am a scientist and a dreamer. I'm passionate about this topic. So if you were to ask me what my retirement dream is, which will be at the moment we reach that phosphorus peak, it would be that we use one label, "Made with mycorrhiza," and that my children and grandchildren buy products bearing that label too. Thank you for your attention. (Applause) |
Life in the "digital now" | {0: 'Abha Dawesar writes to make sense of the world -- herself included.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I was in New York during Hurricane Sandy, and this little white dog called Maui was staying with me. Half the city was dark because of a power cut, and I was living on the dark side. Now, Maui was terrified of the dark, so I had to carry him up the stairs, actually down the stairs first, for his walk, and then bring him back up. I was also hauling gallons of bottles of water up to the seventh floor every day. And through all of this, I had to hold a torch between my teeth. The stores nearby were out of flashlights and batteries and bread. For a shower, I walked 40 blocks to a branch of my gym. But these were not the major preoccupations of my day. It was just as critical for me to be the first person in at a cafe nearby with extension cords and chargers to juice my multiple devices. I started to prospect under the benches of bakeries and the entrances of pastry shops for plug points. I wasn't the only one. Even in the rain, people stood between Madison and 5th Avenue under their umbrellas charging their cell phones from outlets on the street. Nature had just reminded us that it was stronger than all our technology, and yet here we were, obsessed about being wired. I think there's nothing like a crisis to tell you what's really important and what's not, and Sandy made me realize that our devices and their connectivity matter to us right up there with food and shelter. The self as we once knew it no longer exists, and I think that an abstract, digital universe has become a part of our identity, and I want to talk to you about what I think that means. I'm a novelist, and I'm interested in the self because the self and fiction have a lot in common. They're both stories, interpretations. You and I can experience things without a story. We might run up the stairs too quickly and we might get breathless. But the larger sense that we have of our lives, the slightly more abstract one, is indirect. Our story of our life is based on direct experience, but it's embellished. A novel needs scene after scene to build, and the story of our life needs an arc as well. It needs months and years. Discrete moments from our lives are its chapters. But the story is not about these chapters. It's the whole book. It's not only about the heartbreak and the happiness, the victories and the disappointments, but it's because how because of these, and sometimes, more importantly, in spite of these, we find our place in the world and we change it and we change ourselves. Our story, therefore, needs two dimensions of time: a long arc of time that is our lifespan, and the timeframe of direct experience that is the moment. Now the self that experiences directly can only exist in the moment, but the one that narrates needs several moments, a whole sequence of them, and that's why our full sense of self needs both immersive experience and the flow of time. Now, the flow of time is embedded in everything, in the erosion of a grain of sand, in the budding of a little bud into a rose. Without it, we would have no music. Our own emotions and state of mind often encode time, regret or nostalgia about the past, hope or dread about the future. I think that technology has altered that flow of time. The overall time that we have for our narrative, our lifespan, has been increasing, but the smallest measure, the moment, has shrunk. It has shrunk because our instruments enable us in part to measure smaller and smaller units of time, and this in turn has given us a more granular understanding of the material world, and this granular understanding has generated reams of data that our brains can no longer comprehend and for which we need more and more complicated computers. All of this to say that the gap between what we can perceive and what we can measure is only going to widen. Science can do things with and in a picosecond, but you and I are never going to have the inner experience of a millionth of a millionth of a second. You and I answer only to nature's rhythm and flow, to the sun, the moon and the seasons, and this is why we need that long arc of time with the past, the present and the future to see things for what they are, to separate signal from noise and the self from sensations. We need time's arrow to understand cause and effect, not just in the material world, but in our own intentions and our motivations. What happens when that arrow goes awry? What happens when time warps? So many of us today have the sensation that time's arrow is pointing everywhere and nowhere at once. This is because time doesn't flow in the digital world in the same way that it does in the natural one. We all know that the Internet has shrunk space as well as time. Far away over there is now here. News from India is a stream on my smartphone app whether I'm in New York or New Delhi. And that's not all. Your last job, your dinner reservations from last year, your former friends, lie on a flat plain with today's friends, because the Internet also archives, and it warps the past. With no distinction left between the past, the present and the future, and the here or there, we are left with this moment everywhere, this moment that I'll call the digital now. Just how can we prioritize in the landscape of the digital now? This digital now is not the present, because it's always a few seconds ahead, with Twitter streams that are already trending and news from other time zones. This isn't the now of a shooting pain in your foot or the second that you bite into a pastry or the three hours that you lose yourself in a great book. This now bears very little physical or psychological reference to our own state. Its focus, instead, is to distract us at every turn on the road. Every digital landmark is an invitation to leave what you are doing now to go somewhere else and do something else. Are you reading an interview by an author? Why not buy his book? Tweet it. Share it. Like it. Find other books exactly like his. Find other people reading those books. Travel can be liberating, but when it is incessant, we become permanent exiles without repose. Choice is freedom, but not when it's constantly for its own sake. Not just is the digital now far from the present, but it's in direct competition with it, and this is because not just am I absent from it, but so are you. Not just are we absent from it, but so is everyone else. And therein lies its greatest convenience and horror. I can order foreign language books in the middle of the night, shop for Parisian macarons, and leave video messages that get picked up later. At all times, I can operate at a different rhythm and pace from you, while I sustain the illusion that I'm tapped into you in real time. Sandy was a reminder of how such an illusion can shatter. There were those with power and water, and those without. There are those who went back to their lives, and those who are still displaced after so many months. For some reason, technology seems to perpetuate the illusion for those who have it that everyone does, and then, like an ironic slap in the face, it makes it true. For example, it's said that there are more people in India with access to cell phones than toilets. Now if this rift, which is already so great in many parts of the world, between the lack of infrastructure and the spread of technology, isn't somehow bridged, there will be ruptures between the digital and the real. For us as individuals who live in the digital now and spend most of our waking moments in it, the challenge is to live in two streams of time that are parallel and almost simultaneous. How does one live inside distraction? We might think that those younger than us, those who are born into this, will adapt more naturally. Possibly, but I remember my childhood. I remember my grandfather revising the capitals of the world with me. Buda and Pest were separated by the Danube, and Vienna had a Spanish riding school. If I were a child today, I could easily learn this information with apps and hyperlinks, but it really wouldn't be the same, because much later, I went to Vienna, and I went to the Spanish riding school, and I could feel my grandfather right beside me. Night after night, he took me up on the terrace, on his shoulders, and pointed out Jupiter and Saturn and the Great Bear to me. And even here, when I look at the Great Bear, I get back that feeling of being a child, hanging onto his head and trying to balance myself on his shoulder, and I can get back that feeling of being a child again. What I had with my grandfather was wrapped so often in information and knowledge and fact, but it was about so much more than information or knowledge or fact. Time-warping technology challenges our deepest core, because we are able to archive the past and some of it becomes hard to forget, even as the current moment is increasingly unmemorable. We want to clutch, and we are left instead clutching at a series of static moments. They're like soap bubbles that disappear when we touch them. By archiving everything, we think that we can store it, but time is not data. It cannot be stored. You and I know exactly what it means like to be truly present in a moment. It might have happened while we were playing an instrument, or looking into the eyes of someone we've known for a very long time. At such moments, our selves are complete. The self that lives in the long narrative arc and the self that experiences the moment become one. The present encapsulates the past and a promise for the future. The present joins a flow of time from before and after. I first experienced these feelings with my grandmother. I wanted to learn to skip, and she found an old rope and she tucked up her sari and she jumped over it. I wanted to learn to cook, and she kept me in the kitchen, cutting, cubing and chopping for a whole month. My grandmother taught me that things happen in the time they take, that time can't be fought, and because it will pass and it will move, we owe the present moment our full attention. Attention is time. One of my yoga instructors once said that love is attention, and definitely from my grandmother, love and attention were one and the same thing. The digital world cannibalizes time, and in doing so, I want to suggest that what it threatens is the completeness of ourselves. It threatens the flow of love. But we don't need to let it. We can choose otherwise. We've seen again and again just how creative technology can be, and in our lives and in our actions, we can choose those solutions and those innovations and those moments that restore the flow of time instead of fragmenting it. We can slow down and we can tune in to the ebb and flow of time. We can choose to take time back. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why stay in Chernobyl? Because it's home. | {0: 'Holly Morris tells the stories of women around the world through documentary, television, print and the web.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Three years ago, I was standing about a hundred yards from Chernobyl nuclear reactor number four. My Geiger counter dosimeter, which measures radiation, was going berserk, and the closer I got, the more frenetic it became, and frantic. My God. I was there covering the 25th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident, as you can see by the look on my face, reluctantly so, but with good reason, because the nuclear fire that burned for 11 days back in 1986 released 400 times as much radiation as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the sarcophagus, which is the covering over reactor number four, which was hastily built 27 years ago, now sits cracked and rusted and leaking radiation. So I was filming. I just wanted to get the job done and get out of there fast. But then, I looked into the distance, and I saw some smoke coming from a farmhouse, and I'm thinking, who could be living here? I mean, after all, Chernobyl's soil, water and air, are among the most highly contaminated on Earth, and the reactor sits at the the center of a tightly regulated exclusion zone, or dead zone, and it's a nuclear police state, complete with border guards. You have to have dosimeter at all times, clicking away, you have to have a government minder, and there's draconian radiation rules and constant contamination monitoring. The point being, no human being should be living anywhere near the dead zone. But they are. It turns out an unlikely community of some 200 people are living inside the zone. They're called self-settlers. And almost all of them are women, the men having shorter lifespans in part due to overuse of alcohol, cigarettes, if not radiation. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated at the time of the accident, but not everybody accepted that fate. The women in the zone, now in their 70s and 80s, are the last survivors of a group who defied authorities and, it would seem, common sense, and returned to their ancestral homes inside the zone. They did so illegally. As one woman put it to a soldier who was trying to evacuate her for a second time, "Shoot me and dig the grave. Otherwise, I'm going home." Now why would they return to such deadly soil? I mean, were they unaware of the risks or crazy enough to ignore them, or both? The thing is, they see their lives and the risks they run decidedly differently. Now around Chernobyl, there are scattered ghost villages, eerily silent, strangely charming, bucolic, totally contaminated. Many were bulldozed under at the time of the accident, but a few are left like this, kind of silent vestiges to the tragedy. Others have a few residents in them, one or two "babushkas," or "babas," which are the Russian and Ukrainian words for grandmother. Another village might have six or seven residents. So this is the strange demographic of the zone — isolated alone together. And when I made my way to that piping chimney I'd seen in the distance, I saw Hanna Zavorotnya, and I met her. She's the self-declared mayor of Kapavati village, population eight. (Laughter) And she said to me, when I asked her the obvious, "Radiation doesn't scare me. Starvation does." And you have to remember, these women have survived the worst atrocities of the 20th century. Stalin's enforced famines of the 1930s, the Holodomor, killed millions of Ukrainians, and they faced the Nazis in the '40s, who came through slashing, burning, raping, and in fact many of these women were shipped to Germany as forced labor. So when a couple decades into Soviet rule, Chernobyl happened, they were unwilling to flee in the face of an enemy that was invisible. So they returned to their villages and are told they're going to get sick and die soon, but five happy years, their logic goes, is better than 10 stuck in a high rise on the outskirts of Kiev, separated from the graves of their mothers and fathers and babies, the whisper of stork wings on a spring afternoon. For them, environmental contamination may not be the worst sort of devastation. It turns out this holds true for other species as well. Wild boar, lynx, moose, they've all returned to the region in force, the very real, very negative effects of radiation being trumped by the upside of a mass exodus of humans. The dead zone, it turns out, is full of life. And there is a kind of heroic resilience, a kind of plain-spoken pragmatism to those who start their day at 5 a.m. pulling water from a well and end it at midnight poised to beat a bucket with a stick and scare off wild boar that might mess with their potatoes, their only company a bit of homemade moonshine vodka. And there's a patina of simple defiance among them. "They told us our legs would hurt, and they do. So what?" I mean, what about their health? The benefits of hardy, physical living, but an environment made toxic by a complicated, little-understood enemy, radiation. It's incredibly difficult to parse. Health studies from the region are conflicting and fraught. The World Health Organization puts the number of Chernobyl-related deaths at 4,000, eventually. Greenpeace and other organizations put that number in the tens of thousands. Now everybody agrees that thyroid cancers are sky high, and that Chernobyl evacuees suffer the trauma of relocated peoples everywhere: higher levels of anxiety, depression, alcoholism, unemployment and, importantly, disrupted social networks. Now, like many of you, I have moved maybe 20, 25 times in my life. Home is a transient concept. I have a deeper connection to my laptop than any bit of soil. So it's hard for us to understand, but home is the entire cosmos of the rural babushka, and connection to the land is palpable. And perhaps because these Ukrainian women were schooled under the Soviets and versed in the Russian poets, aphorisms about these ideas slip from their mouths all the time. "If you leave, you die." "Those who left are worse off now. They are dying of sadness." "Motherland is motherland. I will never leave." What sounds like faith, soft faith, may actually be fact, because the surprising truth — I mean, there are no studies, but the truth seems to be that these women who returned to their homes and have lived on some of the most radioactive land on Earth for the last 27 years, have actually outlived their counterparts who accepted relocation, by some estimates up to 10 years. How could this be? Here's a theory: Could it be that those ties to ancestral soil, the soft variables reflected in their aphorisms, actually affect longevity? The power of motherland so fundamental to that part of the world seems palliative. Home and community are forces that rival even radiation. Now radiation or not, these women are at the end of their lives. In the next decade, the zone's human residents will be gone, and it will revert to a wild, radioactive place, full only of animals and occasionally daring, flummoxed scientists. But the spirit and existence of the babushkas, whose numbers have been halved in the three years I've known them, will leave us with powerful new templates to think about and grapple with, about the relative nature of risk, about transformative connections to home, and about the magnificent tonic of personal agency and self-determination. Thank you. (Applause) |
The art of bow-making | {0: 'Dong Woo Jang turns an unusual stick of bamboo into an archer’s bow, an exploration of his cultural heritage and a metaphor for his perfect world.'} | TED2013 | It is said that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and I believe this is true, especially when I hear President Obama often talk about the Korean education system as a benchmark of success. Well, I can tell you that, in the rigid structure and highly competitive nature of the Korean school system, also known as pressure cooker, not everyone can do well in that environment. While many people responded in different ways about our education system, my response to the high-pressure environment was making bows with pieces of wood found near my apartment building. Why bows? I'm not quite sure. Perhaps, in the face of constant pressure, my caveman instinct of survival has connected with the bows. If you think about it, the bow has really helped drive human survival since prehistoric times. The area within three kilometers of my home used to be a mulberry forest during the Joseon dynasty, where silkworms were fed with mulberry leaves. In order to raise the historical awareness of this fact, the government has planted mulberry trees. The seeds from these trees also have spread by birds here and there nearby the soundproof walls of the city expressway that has been built around the 1988 Olympics. The area near these walls, which nobody bothers to pay attention to, had been left free from major intervention, and this is where I first found my treasures. As I fell deeper into bow making, I began to search far and beyond my neighborhood. When I went on school field trips, family vacations, or simply on my way home from extracurricular classes, I wandered around wooded areas and gathered tree branches with the tools that I sneaked inside my school bag. And they would be somethings like saws, knives, sickles and axes that I covered up with a piece of towel. I would bring the branches home, riding buses and subways, barely holding them in my hands. And I did not bring the tools here to Long Beach. Airport security. (Laughter) In the privacy of my room, covered in sawdust, I would saw, trim and polish wood all night long until a bow took shape. One day, I was changing the shape of a bamboo piece and ended up setting the place on fire. Where? The rooftop of my apartment building, a place where 96 families call home. A customer from a department store across from my building called 911, and I ran downstairs to tell my mom with half of my hair burned. I want to take this opportunity to tell my mom, in the audience today: Mom, I was really sorry, and I will be more careful with open fire from now on. My mother had to do a lot of explaining, telling people that her son did not commit a premeditated arson. I also researched extensively on bows around the world. In that process, I tried to combine the different bows from across time and places to create the most effective bow. I also worked with many different types of wood, such as maple, yew and mulberry, and did many shooting experiments in the wooded area near the urban expressway that I mentioned before. The most effective bow for me would be like this. One: Curved tips can maximize the springiness when you draw and shoot the arrow. Two: Belly is drawn inward for higher draw weight, which means more power. Three: Sinew used in the outer layer of the limb for maximum tension storage. And four: Horn used to store energy in compression. After fixing, breaking, redesigning, mending, bending and amending, my ideal bow began to take shape, and when it was finally done, it looked like this. I was so proud of myself for inventing a perfect bow on my own. This is a picture of Korean traditional bows taken from a museum, and see how my bow resembles them. Thanks to my ancestors for robbing me of my invention. (Laughter) Through bowmaking, I came in contact with part of my heritage. Learning the information that has accumulated over time and reading the message left by my ancestors were better than any consolation therapy or piece of advice any living adults could give me. You see, I searched far and wide, but never bothered to look close and near. From this realization, I began to take interest in Korean history, which had never inspired me before. In the end, the grass is often greener on my side of the fence, although we don't realize it. Now, I am going to show you how my bow works. And let's see how this one works. This is a bamboo bow, with 45-pound draw weights. (Noise of shooting arrow) (Applause) A bow may function in a simple mechanism, but in order to make a good bow, a great amount of sensitivity is required. You need to console and communicate with the wood material. Each fiber in the wood has its own reason and function for being, and only through cooperation and harmony among them comes a great bow. I may be an [odd] student with unconventional interests, but I hope I am making a contribution by sharing my story with all of you. My ideal world is a place where no one is left behind, where everyone is needed exactly where they are, like the fibers and the tendons in a bow, a place where the strong is flexible and the vulnerable is resilient. The bow resembles me, and I resemble the bow. Now, I am shooting a part of myself to you. No, better yet, a part of my mind has just been shot over to your mind. Did it strike you? Thank you. (Applause) |
The deadly genius of drug cartels | {0: 'Rodrigo Canales wants to understand how individuals influence organizations or systems--even those as complex as the Mexican drug cartels.'} | TEDSalon NY2013 | In December of 2010, the city of Apatzingán in the coastal state of Michoacán, in Mexico, awoke to gunfire. For two straight days, the city became an open battlefield between the federal forces and a well-organized group, presumably from the local criminal organization, La Familia Michoacana, or the Michoacán family. The citizens didn't only experience incessant gunfire but also explosions and burning trucks used as barricades across the city, so truly like a battlefield. After these two days, and during a particularly intense encounter, it was presumed that the leader of La Familia Michoacana, Nazario Moreno, was killed. In response to this terrifying violence, the mayor of Apatzingán decided to call the citizens to a march for peace. The idea was to ask for a softer approach to criminal activity in the state. And so, the day of the scheduled procession, thousands of people showed up. As the mayor was preparing to deliver the speech starting the march, his team noticed that, while half of the participants were appropriately dressed in white, and bearing banners asking for peace, the other half was actually marching in support of the criminal organization and its now-presumed-defunct leader. Shocked, the mayor decided to step aside rather than participate or lead a procession that was ostensibly in support of organized crime. And so his team stepped aside. The two marches joined together, and they continued their path towards the state capital. This story of horrific violence followed by a fumbled approach by federal and local authorities as they tried to engage civil society, who has been very well engaged by a criminal organization, is a perfect metaphor for what's happening in Mexico today, where we see that our current understanding of drug violence and what leads to it is probably at the very least incomplete. If you decided to spend 30 minutes trying to figure out what's going on with drug violence in Mexico by, say, just researching online, the first thing you would find out is that while the laws state that all Mexican citizens are equal, there are some that are more and there are some that are much less equal than others, because you will quickly find out that in the past six years anywhere between 60 and 100,000 people have lost their lives in drug-related violence. To put these numbers in perspective, this is eight times larger than the number of casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. It's also shockingly close to the number of people who have died in the Syrian civil war, which is an active civil war. This is happening just south of the border. Now as you're reading, however, you will be maybe surprised that you will quickly become numb to the numbers of deaths, because you will see that these are sort of abstract numbers of faceless, nameless dead people. Implicitly or explicitly, there is a narrative that all the people who are dying were somehow involved in the drug trade, and we infer this because they were either tortured or executed in a professional manner, or, most likely, both. And so clearly they were criminals because of the way they died. And so the narrative is that somehow these people got what they were deserved. They were part of the bad guys. And that creates some form of comfort for a lot of people. However, while it's easier to think of us, the citizens, the police, the army, as the good guys, and them, the narcos, the carteles, as the bad guys, if you think about it, the latter are only providing a service to the former. Whether we like it or not, the U.S. is the largest market for illegal substances in the world, accounting for more than half of global demand. It shares thousands of miles of border with Mexico that is its only route of access from the South, and so, as the former dictator of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz, used to say, "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States." The U.N. estimates that there are 55 million users of illegal drugs in the United States. Using very, very conservative assumptions, this yields a yearly drug market on the retail side of anywhere between 30 and 150 billion dollars. If we assume that the narcos only have access to the wholesale part, which we know is false, that still leaves you with yearly revenues of anywhere between 15 billion and 60 billion dollars. To put these numbers in perspective, Microsoft has yearly revenues of 60 billion dollars. And it so happens that this is a product that, because of its nature, a business model to address this market requires you to guarantee to your producers that their product will be reliably placed in the markets where it is consumed. And the only way to do this, because it's illegal, is to have absolute control of the geographic corridors that are used to transport drugs. Hence the violence. If you look at a map of cartel influence and violence, you will see that it almost perfectly aligns with the most efficient routes of transportation from the south to the north. The only thing that the cartels are doing is that they're trying to protect their business. It's not only a multi-billion dollar market, but it's also a complex one. For example, the coca plant is a fragile plant that can only grow in certain latitudes, and so it means that a business model to address this market requires you to have decentralized, international production, that by the way needs to have good quality control, because people need a good high that is not going to kill them and that is going to be delivered to them when they need it. And so that means they need to secure production and quality control in the south, and you need to ensure that you have efficient and effective distribution channels in the markets where these drugs are consumed. I urge you, but only a little bit, because I don't want to get you in trouble, to just ask around and see how difficult it would be to get whatever drug you want, wherever you want it, whenever you want it, anywhere in the U.S., and some of you may be surprised to know that there are many dealers that offer a service where if you send them a text message, they guarantee delivery of the drug in 30 minutes or less. Think about this for a second. Think about the complexity of the distribution network that I just described. It's very difficult to reconcile this with the image of faceless, ignorant goons that are just shooting each other, very difficult to reconcile. Now, as a business professor, and as any business professor would tell you, an effective organization requires an integrated strategy that includes a good organizational structure, good incentives, a solid identity and good brand management. This leads me to the second thing that you would learn in your 30-minute exploration of drug violence in Mexico. Because you would quickly realize, and maybe be confused by the fact, that there are three organizations that are constantly named in the articles. You will hear about Los Zetas, the Knights Templar, which is the new brand for the Familia Michoacana that I spoke about at the beginning, and the Sinaloa Federation. You will read that Los Zetas is this assortment of sociopaths that terrify the cities that they enter and they silence the press, and this is somewhat true, or mostly true. But this is the result of a very careful branding and business strategy. You see, Los Zetas is not just this random assortment of individuals, but was actually created by another criminal organization, the Gulf Cartel, that used to control the eastern corridor of Mexico. When that corridor became contested, they decided that they wanted to recruit a professional enforcement arm. So they recruited Los Zetas: an entire unit of elite paratroopers from the Mexican Army. They were incredibly effective as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, so much so that at some point, they decided to just take over the operations, which is why I ask you to never keep tigers as pets, because they grow up. Because the Zetas organization was founded in treason, they lost some of the linkages to the production and distribution in the most profitable markets like cocaine, but what they did have, and this is again based on their military origin, was a perfectly structured chain of command with a very clear hierarchy and a very clear promotion path that allowed them to supervise and operate across many, many markets very effectively, which is the essence of what a chain of command seeks to do. And so because they didn't have access to the more profitable drug markets, this pushed them and gave them the opportunity to diversify into other forms of crime. That includes kidnapping, prostitution, local drug dealing and human trafficking, including of migrants that go from the south to the U.S. So what they currently run is truly and quite literally a franchise business. They focus most of their recruiting on the army, and they very openly advertise for better salaries, better benefits, better promotion paths, not to mention much better food, than what the army can deliver. The way they operate is that when they arrive in a locality, they let people know that they are there, and they go to the most powerful local gang and they say, "I offer you to be the local representative of the Zeta brand." If they agree — and you don't want to know what happens if they don't — they train them and they supervise them on how to run the most efficient criminal operation for that town, in exchange for royalties. This kind of business model obviously depends entirely on having a very effective brand of fear, and so Los Zetas carefully stage acts of violence that are spectacular in nature, especially when they arrive first in a city, but again, that's just a brand strategy. I'm not saying they're not violent, but what I am saying is that even though you will read that they are the most violent of all, when you count, when you do the body count, they're actually all the same. In contrast to them, the Knights Templar that arose in Michoacán emerged in reaction to the incursion of the Zetas into the state of Michoacán. Michoacán is a geographically strategic state because it has one of the largest ports in Mexico, and it has very direct routes to the center of Mexico, which then gives you direct access to the U.S. The Knights Templar realized very quickly that they couldn't face the Zetas on violence alone, and so they developed a strategy as a social enterprise. They brand themselves as representative of and protecting of the citizens of Michoacán against organized crime. Their brand of social enterprise means that they require a lot of civic engagement, so they invest heavily in providing local services, like dealing with home violence, going after petty criminals, treating addicts, and keeping drugs out of the local markets where they are, and, of course, protecting people from other criminal organizations. Now, they kill a lot of people too, but when they kill them, they provide very careful narratives and descriptions for why they did them, through newspaper insertions, YouTube videos, and billboards that explain that the people who were killed were killed because they represented a threat not to us, as an organization, of course, but to you, as citizens. And so we're actually here to protect you. They, as social enterprises do, have created a moral and ethical code that they advertise around, and they have very strict recruiting practices. And here you have the types of explanations that they provide for some of their actions. They have actually retained access to the profitable drug trade, but the way they do it is, because they control all of Michoacán, and they control the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas, they leverage that to, for example, trade copper from Michoacán that is legally created and legally extracted with illegal ephedrine from China which is a critical precursor for methamphetamines that they produce, and then they have partnerships with larger organizations like the Sinaloa Federation that place their products in the U.S. Finally, the Sinaloa Federation. When you read about them, you will often read about them with an undertone of reverence and admiration, because they are the most integrated and the largest of all the Mexican organizations, and, many people argue, the world. They started as just sort of a transport organization that specialized in smuggling between the U.S. and the Mexican borders, but now they have grown into a truly integrated multinational that has partnerships in production in the south and partnerships in global distribution across the planet. They have cultivated a brand of professionalism, business acumen and innovation. They have designed new drug products and new drug processes. They have designed narco-tunnels that go across the border, and you can see that these are not "The Shawshank Redemption" types. They have invented narco-submarines and boats that are not detected by radar. They have invented drones to transport drugs, catapults, you name it. One of the leaders of the Sinaloa Federation actually made it to the Forbes list. [#701 Joaquin Guzman Loera] Like any multinational would, they have specialized and focused only in the most profitable part of the business, which is high-margin drugs like cocaine, heroine, methamphetamines. Like any traditional Latin American multinational would, the way they control their operations is through family ties. When they're entering a new market, they send a family member to supervise it, or, if they're partnering with a new organization, they create a family tie, either through marriages or other types of ties. Like any other multinational would, they protect their brand by outsourcing the more questionable parts of the business model, like for example, when they have to engage in violence against other criminal organizations, they recruit gangs and other smaller players to do the dirty work for them, and they try to separate their operations and their violence and be very discrete about this. To further strengthen their brand, they actually have professional P.R. firms that shape how the press talks about them. They have professional videographers on staff. They have incredibly productive ties with the security organizations on both sides of the border. And so, differences aside, what these three organizations share is on the one hand, a very clear understanding that institutions cannot be imposed from the top, but rather they are built from the bottom up one interaction at a time. They have created extremely coherent structures that they use to show the inconsistencies in government policies. And so what I want you to remember from this talk are three things. The first one is that drug violence is actually the result of a huge market demand and an institutional setup that forces the servicing of this market to necessitate violence to guarantee delivery routes. The second thing I want you to remember is that these are sophisticated, coherent organizations that are business organizations, and analyzing them and treating them as such is probably a much more useful approach. The third thing I want you to remember is that even though we're more comfortable with this idea of "them," a set of bad guys separated from us, we are actually accomplices to them, either through our direct consumption or through our acceptance of the inconsistency between our policies of prohibition and our actual behavior of tolerance or even encouragement of consumption. These organizations service, recruit from, and operate within our communities, so necessarily, they are much more integrated within them than we are comfortable acknowledging. And so to me the question is not whether these dynamics will continue the way they have. We see that the nature of this phenomenon guarantees that they will. The question is whether we are willing to continue our support of a failed strategy based on our stubborn, blissful, voluntary ignorance at the cost of the deaths of thousands of our young. Thank you. (Applause) |
What I discovered in New York City trash | {0: 'Robin Nagle is an anthropologist with a very particular focus... garbage.'} | TEDCity2.0 | I was about 10 years old on a camping trip with my dad in the Adirondack Mountains, a wilderness area in the northern part of New York State. It was a beautiful day. The forest was sparkling. The sun made the leaves glow like stained glass, and if it weren't for the path we were following, we could almost pretend we were the first human beings to ever walk that land. We got to our campsite. It was a lean-to on a bluff looking over a crystal, beautiful lake, when I discovered a horror. Behind the lean-to was a dump, maybe 40 feet square with rotting apple cores and balled-up aluminum foil, and a dead sneaker. And I was astonished, I was very angry, and I was deeply confused. The campers who were too lazy to take out what they had brought in, who did they think would clean up after them? That question stayed with me, and it simplified a little. Who cleans up after us? However you configure or wherever you place the us, who cleans up after us in Istanbul? Who cleans up after us in Rio or in Paris or in London? Here in New York, the Department of Sanitation cleans up after us, to the tune of 11,000 tons of garbage and 2,000 tons of recyclables every day. I wanted to get to know them as individuals. I wanted to understand who takes the job. What's it like to wear the uniform and bear that burden? So I started a research project with them. I rode in the trucks and walked the routes and interviewed people in offices and facilities all over the city, and I learned a lot, but I was still an outsider. I needed to go deeper. So I took the job as a sanitation worker. I didn't just ride in the trucks now. I drove the trucks. And I operated the mechanical brooms and I plowed the snow. It was a remarkable privilege and an amazing education. Everyone asks about the smell. It's there, but it's not as prevalent as you think, and on days when it is really bad, you get used to it rather quickly. The weight takes a long time to get used to. I knew people who were several years on the job whose bodies were still adjusting to the burden of bearing on your body tons of trash every week. Then there's the danger. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, sanitation work is one of the 10 most dangerous occupations in the country, and I learned why. You're in and out of traffic all day, and it's zooming around you. It just wants to get past you, so it's often the motorist is not paying attention. That's really bad for the worker. And then the garbage itself is full of hazards that often fly back out of the truck and do terrible harm. I also learned about the relentlessness of trash. When you step off the curb and you see a city from behind a truck, you come to understand that trash is like a force of nature unto itself. It never stops coming. It's also like a form of respiration or circulation. It must always be in motion. And then there's the stigma. You put on the uniform, and you become invisible until someone is upset with you for whatever reason like you've blocked traffic with your truck, or you're taking a break too close to their home, or you're drinking coffee in their diner, and they will come and scorn you, and tell you that they don't want you anywhere near them. I find the stigma especially ironic, because I strongly believe that sanitation workers are the most important labor force on the streets of the city, for three reasons. They are the first guardians of public health. If they're not taking away trash efficiently and effectively every day, it starts to spill out of its containments, and the dangers inherent to it threaten us in very real ways. Diseases we've had in check for decades and centuries burst forth again and start to harm us. The economy needs them. If we can't throw out the old stuff, we have no room for the new stuff, so then the engines of the economy start to sputter when consumption is compromised. I'm not advocating capitalism, I'm just pointing out their relationship. And then there's what I call our average, necessary quotidian velocity. By that I simply mean how fast we're used to moving in the contemporary day and age. We usually don't care for, repair, clean, carry around our coffee cup, our shopping bag, our bottle of water. We use them, we throw them out, we forget about them, because we know there's a workforce on the other side that's going to take it all away. So I want to suggest today a couple of ways to think about sanitation that will perhaps help ameliorate the stigma and bring them into this conversation of how to craft a city that is sustainable and humane. Their work, I think, is kind of liturgical. They're on the streets every day, rhythmically. They wear a uniform in many cities. You know when to expect them. And their work lets us do our work. They are almost a form of reassurance. The flow that they maintain keeps us safe from ourselves, from our own dross, our cast-offs, and that flow must be maintained always no matter what. On the day after September 11 in 2001, I heard the growl of a sanitation truck on the street, and I grabbed my infant son and I ran downstairs and there was a man doing his paper recycling route like he did every Wednesday. And I tried to thank him for doing his work on that day of all days, but I started to cry. And he looked at me, and he just nodded, and he said, "We're going to be okay. We're going to be okay." It was a little while later that I started my research with sanitation, and I met that man again. His name is Paulie, and we worked together many times, and we became good friends. I want to believe that Paulie was right. We are going to be okay. But in our effort to reconfigure how we as a species exist on this planet, we must include and take account of all the costs, including the very real human cost of the labor. And we also would be well informed to reach out to the people who do that work and get their expertise on how do we think about, how do we create systems around sustainability that perhaps take us from curbside recycling, which is a remarkable success across 40 years, across the United States and countries around the world, and lift us up to a broader horizon where we're looking at other forms of waste that could be lessened from manufacturing and industrial sources. Municipal waste, what we think of when we talk about garbage, accounts for three percent of the nation's waste stream. It's a remarkable statistic. So in the flow of your days, in the flow of your lives, next time you see someone whose job is to clean up after you, take a moment to acknowledge them. Take a moment to say thank you. (Applause) |
The paralyzed rat that walked | {0: 'Grégoire Courtine and his interdisciplinary lab imagine new ways to recover after devastating, mobility-impairing injury to the spinal cord. '} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I am a neuroscientist with a mixed background in physics and medicine. My lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology focuses on spinal cord injury, which affects more than 50,000 people around the world every year, with dramatic consequences for affected individuals, whose life literally shatters in a matter of a handful of seconds. And for me, the Man of Steel, Christopher Reeve, has best raised the awareness on the distress of spinal cord injured people. And this is how I started my own personal journey in this field of research, working with the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. I still remember this decisive moment. It was just at the end of a regular day of work with the foundation. Chris addressed us, the scientists and experts, "You have to be more pragmatic. When leaving your laboratory tomorrow, I want you to stop by the rehabilitation center to watch injured people fighting to take a step, struggling to maintain their trunk. And when you go home, think of what you are going to change in your research on the following day to make their lives better." These words, they stuck with me. This was more than 10 years ago, but ever since, my laboratory has followed the pragmatic approach to recovery after spinal cord injury. And my first step in this direction was to develop a new model of spinal cord injury that would more closely mimic some of the key features of human injury while offering well-controlled experimental conditions. And for this purpose, we placed two hemisections on opposite sides of the body. They completely interrupt the communication between the brain and the spinal cord, thus leading to complete and permanent paralysis of the leg. But, as observed, after most injuries in humans, there is this intervening gap of intact neural tissue through which recovery can occur. But how to make it happen? Well, the classical approach consists of applying intervention that would promote the growth of the severed fiber to the original target. And while this certainly remained the key for a cure, this seemed extraordinarily complicated to me. To reach clinical fruition rapidly, it was obvious: I had to think about the problem differently. It turned out that more than 100 years of research on spinal cord physiology, starting with the Nobel Prize Sherrington, had shown that the spinal cord, below most injuries, contained all the necessary and sufficient neural networks to coordinate locomotion, but because input from the brain is interrupted, they are in a nonfunctional state, like kind of dormant. My idea: We awaken this network. And at the time, I was a post-doctoral fellow in Los Angeles, after completing my Ph.D. in France, where independent thinking is not necessarily promoted. (Laughter) I was afraid to talk to my new boss, but decided to muster up my courage. I knocked at the door of my wonderful advisor, Reggie Edgerton, to share my new idea. He listened to me carefully, and responded with a grin. "Why don't you try?" And I promise to you, this was such an important moment in my career, when I realized that the great leader believed in young people and new ideas. And this was the idea: I'm going to use a simplistic metaphor to explain to you this complicated concept. Imagine that the locomotor system is a car. The engine is the spinal cord. The transmission is interrupted. The engine is turned off. How could we re-engage the engine? First, we have to provide the fuel; second, press the accelerator pedal; third, steer the car. It turned out that there are known neural pathways coming from the brain that play this very function during locomotion. My idea: Replace this missing input to provide the spinal cord with the kind of intervention that the brain would deliver naturally in order to walk. For this, I leveraged 20 years of past research in neuroscience, first to replace the missing fuel with pharmacological agents that prepare the neurons in the spinal cord to fire, and second, to mimic the accelerator pedal with electrical stimulation. So here imagine an electrode implanted on the back of the spinal cord to deliver painless stimulation. It took many years, but eventually we developed an electrochemical neuroprosthesis that transformed the neural network in the spinal cord from dormant to a highly functional state. Immediately, the paralyzed rat can stand. As soon as the treadmill belt starts moving, the animal shows coordinated movement of the leg, but without the brain. Here what I call "the spinal brain" cognitively processes sensory information arising from the moving leg and makes decisions as to how to activate the muscle in order to stand, to walk, to run, and even here, while sprinting, instantly stand if the treadmill stops moving. This was amazing. I was completely fascinated by this locomotion without the brain, but at the same time so frustrated. This locomotion was completely involuntary. The animal had virtually no control over the legs. Clearly, the steering system was missing. And it then became obvious from me that we had to move away from the classical rehabilitation paradigm, stepping on a treadmill, and develop conditions that would encourage the brain to begin voluntary control over the leg. With this in mind, we developed a completely new robotic system to support the rat in any direction of space. Imagine, this is really cool. So imagine the little 200-gram rat attached at the extremity of this 200-kilo robot, but the rat does not feel the robot. The robot is transparent, just like you would hold a young child during the first insecure steps. Let me summarize: The rat received a paralyzing lesion of the spinal cord. The electrochemical neuroprosthesis enabled a highly functional state of the spinal locomotor networks. The robot provided the safe environment to allow the rat to attempt anything to engage the paralyzed legs. And for motivation, we used what I think is the most powerful pharmacology of Switzerland: fine Swiss chocolate. (Laughter) Actually, the first results were very, very, very disappointing. Here is my best physical therapist completely failing to encourage the rat to take a single step, whereas the same rat, five minutes earlier, walked beautifully on the treadmill. We were so frustrated. But you know, one of the most essential qualities of a scientist is perseverance. We insisted. We refined our paradigm, and after several months of training, the otherwise paralyzed rat could stand, and whenever she decided, initiated full weight-bearing locomotion to sprint towards the rewards. This is the first recovery ever observed of voluntary leg movement after an experimental lesion of the spinal cord leading to complete and permanent paralysis. In fact — (Applause) Thank you. In fact, not only could the rat initiate and sustain locomotion on the ground, they could even adjust leg movement, for example, to resist gravity in order to climb a staircase. I can promise you this was such an emotional moment in my laboratory. It took us 10 years of hard work to reach this goal. But the remaining question was, how? I mean, how is it possible? And here, what we found was completely unexpected. This novel training paradigm encouraged the brain to create new connections, some relay circuits that relay information from the brain past the injury and restore cortical control over the locomotor networks below the injury. And here, you can see one such example, where we label the fibers coming from the brain in red. This blue neuron is connected with the locomotor center, and what this constellation of synaptic contacts means is that the brain is reconnected with the locomotor center with only one relay neuron. But the remodeling was not restricted to the lesion area. It occurred throughout the central nervous system, including in the brain stem, where we observed up to 300-percent increase in the density of fibers coming from the brain. We did not aim to repair the spinal cord, yet we were able to promote one of the more extensive remodeling of axonal projections ever observed in the central nervous system of adult mammal after an injury. And there is a very important message hidden behind this discovery. They are the result of a young team of very talented people: physical therapists, neurobiologists, neurosurgeons, engineers of all kinds, who have achieved together what would have been impossible by single individuals. This is truly a trans-disciplinary team. They are working so close to each other that there is horizontal transfer of DNA. We are creating the next generation of M.D.'s and engineers capable of translating discoveries all the way from bench to bedside. And me? I am only the maestro who orchestrated this beautiful symphony. Now, I am sure you are all wondering, aren't you, will this help injured people? Me too, every day. The truth is that we don't know enough yet. This is certainly not a cure for spinal cord injury, but I begin to believe that this may lead to an intervention to improve recovery and people's quality of life. I would like you all to take a moment and dream with me. Imagine a person just suffered a spinal cord injury. After a few weeks of recovery, we will implant a programmable pump to deliver a personalized pharmacological cocktail directly to the spinal cord. At the same time, we will implant an electrode array, a sort of second skin covering the area of the spinal cord controlling leg movement, and this array is attached to an electrical pulse generator that delivers stimulations that are tailored to the person's needs. This defines a personalized electrochemical neuroprosthesis that will enable locomotion during training with a newly designed supporting system. And my hope is that after several months of training, there may be enough remodeling of residual connection to allow locomotion without the robot, maybe even without pharmacology or stimulation. My hope here is to be able to create the personalized condition to boost the plasticity of the brain and the spinal cord. And this is a radically new concept that may apply to other neurological disorders, what I termed "personalized neuroprosthetics," where by sensing and stimulating neural interfaces, I implanted throughout the nervous system, in the brain, in the spinal cord, even in peripheral nerves, based on patient-specific impairments. But not to replace the lost function, no — to help the brain help itself. And I hope this enticed your imagination, because I can promise to you this is not a matter of whether this revolution will occur, but when. And remember, we are only as great as our imagination, as big as our dream. Thank you. (Applause) |
How the NSA betrayed the world's trust -- time to act | {0: "As computer access expands, Mikko Hypponen asks: What's the next killer virus, and will the world be able to cope with it? And also: How can we protect digital privacy in the age of government surveillance?"} | TEDxBrussels | The two most likely largest inventions of our generation are the Internet and the mobile phone. They've changed the world. However, largely to our surprise, they also turned out to be the perfect tools for the surveillance state. It turned out that the capability to collect data, information and connections about basically any of us and all of us is exactly what we've been hearing throughout of the summer through revelations and leaks about Western intelligence agencies, mostly U.S. intelligence agencies, watching over the rest of the world. We've heard about these starting with the revelations from June 6. Edward Snowden started leaking information, top secret classified information, from the U.S. intelligence agencies, and we started learning about things like PRISM and XKeyscore and others. And these are examples of the kinds of programs U.S. intelligence agencies are running right now, against the whole rest of the world. And if you look back about the forecasts on surveillance by George Orwell, well it turns out that George Orwell was an optimist. (Laughter) We are right now seeing a much larger scale of tracking of individual citizens than he could have ever imagined. And this here is the infamous NSA data center in Utah. Due to be opened very soon, it will be both a supercomputing center and a data storage center. You could basically imagine it has a large hall filled with hard drives storing data they are collecting. And it's a pretty big building. How big? Well, I can give you the numbers — 140,000 square meters — but that doesn't really tell you very much. Maybe it's better to imagine it as a comparison. You think about the largest IKEA store you've ever been in. This is five times larger. How many hard drives can you fit in an IKEA store? Right? It's pretty big. We estimate that just the electricity bill for running this data center is going to be in the tens of millions of dollars a year. And this kind of wholesale surveillance means that they can collect our data and keep it basically forever, keep it for extended periods of time, keep it for years, keep it for decades. And this opens up completely new kinds of risks to us all. And what this is is that it is wholesale blanket surveillance on everyone. Well, not exactly everyone, because the U.S. intelligence only has a legal right to monitor foreigners. They can monitor foreigners when foreigners' data connections end up in the United States or pass through the United States. And monitoring foreigners doesn't sound too bad until you realize that I'm a foreigner and you're a foreigner. In fact, 96 percent of the planet are foreigners. (Laughter) Right? So it is wholesale blanket surveillance of all of us, all of us who use telecommunications and the Internet. But don't get me wrong: There are actually types of surveillance that are okay. I love freedom, but even I agree that some surveillance is fine. If the law enforcement is trying to find a murderer, or they're trying to catch a drug lord or trying to prevent a school shooting, and they have leads and they have suspects, then it's perfectly fine for them to tap the suspect's phone, and to intercept his Internet communications. I'm not arguing that at all, but that's not what programs like PRISM are about. They are not about doing surveillance on people that they have reason to suspect of some wrongdoings. They're about doing surveillance on people they know are innocent. So the four main arguments supporting surveillance like this, well, the first of all is that whenever you start discussing about these revelations, there will be naysayers trying to minimize the importance of these revelations, saying that we knew all this already, we knew it was happening, there's nothing new here. And that's not true. Don't let anybody tell you that we knew this already, because we did not know this already. Our worst fears might have been something like this, but we didn't know this was happening. Now we know for a fact it's happening. We didn't know about this. We didn't know about PRISM. We didn't know about XKeyscore. We didn't know about Cybertrans. We didn't know about DoubleArrow. We did not know about Skywriter — all these different programs run by U.S. intelligence agencies. But now we do. And we did not know that U.S. intelligence agencies go to extremes such as infiltrating standardization bodies to sabotage encryption algorithms on purpose. And what that means is that you take something which is secure, an encryption algorithm which is so secure that if you use that algorithm to encrypt one file, nobody can decrypt that file. Even if they take every single computer on the planet just to decrypt that one file, it's going to take millions of years. So that's basically perfectly safe, uncrackable. You take something which is that good and then you weaken it on purpose, making all of us less secure as an end result. A real-world equivalent would be that intelligence agencies would force some secret pin code into every single house alarm so they could get into every single house because, you know, bad people might have house alarms, but it will also make all of us less secure as an end result. Backdooring encryption algorithms just boggles the mind. But of course, these intelligence agencies are doing their job. This is what they have been told to do: do signals intelligence, monitor telecommunications, monitor Internet traffic. That's what they're trying to do, and since most, a very big part of the Internet traffic today is encrypted, they're trying to find ways around the encryption. One way is to sabotage encryption algorithms, which is a great example about how U.S. intelligence agencies are running loose. They are completely out of control, and they should be brought back under control. So what do we actually know about the leaks? Everything is based on the files leaked by Mr. Snowden. The very first PRISM slides from the beginning of June detail a collection program where the data is collected from service providers, and they actually go and name the service providers they have access to. They even have a specific date on when the collection of data began for each of the service providers. So for example, they name the collection from Microsoft started on September 11, 2007, for Yahoo on the March 12, 2008, and then others: Google, Facebook, Skype, Apple and so on. And every single one of these companies denies. They all say that this simply isn't true, that they are not giving backdoor access to their data. Yet we have these files. So is one of the parties lying, or is there some other alternative explanation? And one explanation would be that these parties, these service providers, are not cooperating. Instead, they've been hacked. That would explain it. They aren't cooperating. They've been hacked. In this case, they've been hacked by their own government. That might sound outlandish, but we already have cases where this has happened, for example, the case of the Flame malware which we strongly believe was authored by the U.S. government, and which, to spread, subverted the security of the Windows Update network, meaning here, the company was hacked by their own government. And there's more evidence supporting this theory as well. Der Spiegel, from Germany, leaked more information about the operations run by the elite hacker units operating inside these intelligence agencies. Inside NSA, the unit is called TAO, Tailored Access Operations, and inside GCHQ, which is the U.K. equivalent, it's called NAC, Network Analysis Centre. And these recent leaks of these three slides detail an operation run by this GCHQ intelligence agency from the United Kingdom targeting a telecom here in Belgium. And what this really means is that an E.U. country's intelligence agency is breaching the security of a telecom of a fellow E.U. country on purpose, and they discuss it in their slides completely casually, business as usual. Here's the primary target, here's the secondary target, here's the teaming. They probably have a team building on Thursday evening in a pub. They even use cheesy PowerPoint clip art like, you know, "Success," when they gain access to services like this. What the hell? And then there's the argument that okay, yes, this might be going on, but then again, other countries are doing it as well. All countries spy. And maybe that's true. Many countries spy, not all of them, but let's take an example. Let's take, for example, Sweden. I'm speaking of Sweden because Sweden has a little bit of a similar law to the United States. When your data traffic goes through Sweden, their intelligence agency has a legal right by the law to intercept that traffic. All right, how many Swedish decisionmakers and politicians and business leaders use, every day, U.S.-based services, like, you know, run Windows or OSX, or use Facebook or LinkedIn, or store their data in clouds like iCloud or Skydrive or DropBox, or maybe use online services like Amazon web services or sales support? And the answer is, every single Swedish business leader does that every single day. And then we turn it around. How many American leaders use Swedish webmails and cloud services? And the answer is zero. So this is not balanced. It's not balanced by any means, not even close. And when we do have the occasional European success story, even those, then, typically end up being sold to the United States. Like, Skype used to be secure. It used to be end-to-end encrypted. Then it was sold to the United States. Today, it no longer is secure. So once again, we take something which is secure and then we make it less secure on purpose, making all of us less secure as an outcome. And then the argument that the United States is only fighting terrorists. It's the war on terror. You shouldn't worry about it. Well, it's not the war on terror. Yes, part of it is war on terror, and yes, there are terrorists, and they do kill and maim, and we should fight them, but we know through these leaks that they have used the same techniques to listen to phone calls of European leaders, to tap the email of residents of Mexico and Brazil, to read email traffic inside the United Nations Headquarters and E.U. Parliament, and I don't think they are trying to find terrorists from inside the E.U. Parliament, right? It's not the war on terror. Part of it might be, and there are terrorists, but are we really thinking about terrorists as such an existential threat that we are willing to do anything at all to fight them? Are the Americans ready to throw away the Constituion and throw it in the trash just because there are terrorists? And the same thing with the Bill of Rights and all the amendments and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the E.U. conventions on human rights and fundamental freedoms and the press freedom? Do we really think terrorism is such an existential threat, we are ready to do anything at all? But people are scared about terrorists, and then they think that maybe that surveillance is okay because they have nothing to hide. Feel free to survey me if that helps. And whoever tells you that they have nothing to hide simply hasn't thought about this long enough. (Applause) Because we have this thing called privacy, and if you really think that you have nothing to hide, please make sure that's the first thing you tell me, because then I know that I should not trust you with any secrets, because obviously you can't keep a secret. But people are brutally honest with the Internet, and when these leaks started, many people were asking me about this. And I have nothing to hide. I'm not doing anything bad or anything illegal. Yet, I have nothing that I would in particular like to share with an intelligence agency, especially a foreign intelligence agency. And if we indeed need a Big Brother, I would much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign Big Brother. And when the leaks started, the very first thing I tweeted about this was a comment about how, when you've been using search engines, you've been potentially leaking all that to U.S. intelligence. And two minutes later, I got a reply by somebody called Kimberly from the United States challenging me, like, why am I worried about this? What am I sending to worry about this? Am I sending naked pictures or something? And my answer to Kimberly was that what I'm sending is none of your business, and it should be none of your government's business either. Because that's what it's about. It's about privacy. Privacy is nonnegotiable. It should be built in to all the systems we use. (Applause) And one thing we should all understand is that we are brutally honest with search engines. You show me your search history, and I'll find something incriminating or something embarrassing there in five minutes. We are more honest with search engines than we are with our families. Search engines know more about you than your family members know about you. And this is all the kind of information we are giving away, we are giving away to the United States. And surveillance changes history. We know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon. Imagine if he would have had the kind of surveillance tools that are available today. And let me actually quote the president of Brazil, Ms. Dilma Rousseff. She was one of the targets of NSA surveillance. Her email was read, and she spoke at the United Nations Headquarters, and she said, "If there is no right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore, there can be no effective democracy." That's what it's about. Privacy is the building block of our democracies. And to quote a fellow security researcher, Marcus Ranum, he said that the United States is right now treating the Internet as it would be treating one of its colonies. So we are back to the age of colonization, and we, the foreign users of the Internet, we should think about Americans as our masters. So Mr. Snowden, he's been blamed for many things. Some are blaming him for causing problems for the U.S. cloud industry and software companies with these revelations — and blaming Snowden for causing problems for the U.S. cloud industry would be the equivalent of blaming Al Gore for causing global warming. (Laughter) (Applause) So, what is there to be done? Should we worry. No, we shouldn't worry. We should be angry, because this is wrong, and it's rude, and it should not be done. But that's not going to really change the situation. What's going to change the situation for the rest of the world is to try to steer away from systems built in the United States. And that's much easier said than done. How do you do that? A single country, any single country in Europe cannot replace and build replacements for the U.S.-made operating systems and cloud services. But maybe you don't have to do it alone. Maybe you can do it together with other countries. The solution is open source. By building together open, free, secure systems, we can go around such surveillance, and then one country doesn't have to solve the problem by itself. It only has to solve one little problem. And to quote a fellow security researcher, Haroon Meer, one country only has to make a small wave, but those small waves together become a tide, and the tide will lift all the boats up at the same time, and the tide we will build with secure, free, open-source systems, will become the tide that will lift all of us up and above the surveillance state. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The magic of Fibonacci numbers | {0: 'Using daring displays of algorithmic trickery, lightning calculator and number wizard Arthur Benjamin mesmerizes audiences with mathematical mystery and beauty.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | So why do we learn mathematics? Essentially, for three reasons: calculation, application, and last, and unfortunately least in terms of the time we give it, inspiration. Mathematics is the science of patterns, and we study it to learn how to think logically, critically and creatively, but too much of the mathematics that we learn in school is not effectively motivated, and when our students ask, "Why are we learning this?" then they often hear that they'll need it in an upcoming math class or on a future test. But wouldn't it be great if every once in a while we did mathematics simply because it was fun or beautiful or because it excited the mind? Now, I know many people have not had the opportunity to see how this can happen, so let me give you a quick example with my favorite collection of numbers, the Fibonacci numbers. (Applause) Yeah! I already have Fibonacci fans here. That's great. Now these numbers can be appreciated in many different ways. From the standpoint of calculation, they're as easy to understand as one plus one, which is two. Then one plus two is three, two plus three is five, three plus five is eight, and so on. Indeed, the person we call Fibonacci was actually named Leonardo of Pisa, and these numbers appear in his book "Liber Abaci," which taught the Western world the methods of arithmetic that we use today. In terms of applications, Fibonacci numbers appear in nature surprisingly often. The number of petals on a flower is typically a Fibonacci number, or the number of spirals on a sunflower or a pineapple tends to be a Fibonacci number as well. In fact, there are many more applications of Fibonacci numbers, but what I find most inspirational about them are the beautiful number patterns they display. Let me show you one of my favorites. Suppose you like to square numbers, and frankly, who doesn't? (Laughter) Let's look at the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers. So one squared is one, two squared is four, three squared is nine, five squared is 25, and so on. Now, it's no surprise that when you add consecutive Fibonacci numbers, you get the next Fibonacci number. Right? That's how they're created. But you wouldn't expect anything special to happen when you add the squares together. But check this out. One plus one gives us two, and one plus four gives us five. And four plus nine is 13, nine plus 25 is 34, and yes, the pattern continues. In fact, here's another one. Suppose you wanted to look at adding the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers. Let's see what we get there. So one plus one plus four is six. Add nine to that, we get 15. Add 25, we get 40. Add 64, we get 104. Now look at those numbers. Those are not Fibonacci numbers, but if you look at them closely, you'll see the Fibonacci numbers buried inside of them. Do you see it? I'll show it to you. Six is two times three, 15 is three times five, 40 is five times eight, two, three, five, eight, who do we appreciate? (Laughter) Fibonacci! Of course. Now, as much fun as it is to discover these patterns, it's even more satisfying to understand why they are true. Let's look at that last equation. Why should the squares of one, one, two, three, five and eight add up to eight times 13? I'll show you by drawing a simple picture. We'll start with a one-by-one square and next to that put another one-by-one square. Together, they form a one-by-two rectangle. Beneath that, I'll put a two-by-two square, and next to that, a three-by-three square, beneath that, a five-by-five square, and then an eight-by-eight square, creating one giant rectangle, right? Now let me ask you a simple question: what is the area of the rectangle? Well, on the one hand, it's the sum of the areas of the squares inside it, right? Just as we created it. It's one squared plus one squared plus two squared plus three squared plus five squared plus eight squared. Right? That's the area. On the other hand, because it's a rectangle, the area is equal to its height times its base, and the height is clearly eight, and the base is five plus eight, which is the next Fibonacci number, 13. Right? So the area is also eight times 13. Since we've correctly calculated the area two different ways, they have to be the same number, and that's why the squares of one, one, two, three, five and eight add up to eight times 13. Now, if we continue this process, we'll generate rectangles of the form 13 by 21, 21 by 34, and so on. Now check this out. If you divide 13 by eight, you get 1.625. And if you divide the larger number by the smaller number, then these ratios get closer and closer to about 1.618, known to many people as the Golden Ratio, a number which has fascinated mathematicians, scientists and artists for centuries. Now, I show all this to you because, like so much of mathematics, there's a beautiful side to it that I fear does not get enough attention in our schools. We spend lots of time learning about calculation, but let's not forget about application, including, perhaps, the most important application of all, learning how to think. If I could summarize this in one sentence, it would be this: Mathematics is not just solving for x, it's also figuring out why. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Is China the new idol for emerging economies? | {0: 'Dambisa Moyo is an international economist who analyzes the macroeconomy and global affairs.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | "Give me liberty or give me death." When Patrick Henry, the governor of Virginia, said these words in 1775, he could never have imagined just how much they would come to resonate with American generations to come. At the time, these words were earmarked and targeted against the British, but over the last 200 years, they've come to embody what many Westerners believe, that freedom is the most cherished value, and that the best systems of politics and economics have freedom embedded in them. Who could blame them? Over the past hundred years, the combination of liberal democracy and private capitalism has helped to catapult the United States and Western countries to new levels of economic development. In the United States over the past hundred years, incomes have increased 30 times, and hundreds of thousands of people have been moved out of poverty. Meanwhile, American ingenuity and innovation has helped to spur industrialization and also helped in the creation and the building of things like household appliances such as refrigerators and televisions, motor vehicles and even the mobile phones in your pockets. It's no surprise, then, that even at the depths of the private capitalism crisis, President Obama said, "The question before us is not whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and to expand freedom is unmatched." Thus, there's understandably a deep-seated presumption among Westerners that the whole world will decide to adopt private capitalism as the model of economic growth, liberal democracy, and will continue to prioritize political rights over economic rights. However, to many who live in the emerging markets, this is an illusion, and even though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed in 1948, was unanimously adopted, what it did was to mask a schism that has emerged between developed and developing countries, and the ideological beliefs between political and economic rights. This schism has only grown wider. Today, many people who live in the emerging markets, where 90 percent of the world's population lives, believe that the Western obsession with political rights is beside the point, and what is actually important is delivering on food, shelter, education and healthcare. "Give me liberty or give me death" is all well and good if you can afford it, but if you're living on less than one dollar a day, you're far too busy trying to survive and to provide for your family than to spend your time going around trying to proclaim and defend democracy. Now, I know many people in this room and around the world will think, "Well actually, this is hard to grasp," because private capitalism and liberal democracy are held sacrosanct. But I ask you today, what would you do if you had to choose? What if you had to choose between a roof over your head and the right to vote? Over the last 10 years, I've had the privilege to travel to over 60 countries, many of them in the emerging markets, in Latin America, Asia, and my own continent of Africa. I've met with presidents, dissidents, policymakers, lawyers, teachers, doctors and the man on the street, and through these conversations, it's become clear to me that many people in the emerging markets believe that there's actually a split occurring between what people believe ideologically in terms of politics and economics in the West and that which people believe in the rest of the world. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying people in the emerging markets don't understand democracy, nor am I saying that they wouldn't ideally like to pick their presidents or their leaders. Of course they would. However, I am saying that on balance, they worry more about where their living standard improvements are going to come from, and how it is their governments can deliver for them, than whether or not the government was elected by democracy. The fact of the matter is that this has become a very poignant question because there is for the first time in a long time a real challenge to the Western ideological systems of politics and economics, and this is a system that is embodied by China. And rather than have private capitalism, they have state capitalism. Instead of liberal democracy, they have de-prioritized the democratic system. And they have also decided to prioritize economic rights over political rights. I put it to you today that it is this system that is embodied by China that is gathering momentum amongst people in the emerging markets as the system to follow, because they believe increasingly that it is the system that will promise the best and fastest improvements in living standards in the shortest period of time. If you will indulge me, I will spend a few moments explaining to you first why economically they've come to this belief. First of all, it's China's economic performance over the past 30 years. She's been able to produce record economic growth and meaningfully move many people out of poverty, specifically putting a meaningful dent in poverty by moving over 300 million people out of indigence. It's not just in economics, but it's also in terms of living standards. We see that in China, 28 percent of people had secondary school access. Today, it's closer to 82 percent. So in its totality, economic improvement has been quite significant. Second, China has been able to meaningfully improve its income inequality without changing the political construct. Today, the United States and China are the two leading economies in the world. They have vastly different political systems and different economic systems, one with private capitalism, another one broadly with state capitalism. However, these two countries have the identical GINI Coefficient, which is a measure of income equality. Perhaps what is more disturbing is that China's income equality has been improving in recent times, whereas that of the United States has been declining. Thirdly, people in the emerging markets look at China's amazing and legendary infrastructure rollout. This is not just about China building roads and ports and railways in her own country — she's been able to build 85,000 kilometers of road network in China and surpass that of the United States — but even if you look to places like Africa, China has been able to help tar the distance of Cape Town to Cairo, which is 9,000 miles, or three times the distance of New York to California. Now this is something that people can see and point to. Perhaps it's no surprise that in a 2007 Pew survey, when surveyed, Africans in 10 countries said they thought that the Chinese were doing amazing things to improve their livelihoods by wide margins, by as much as 98 percent. Finally, China is also providing innovative solutions to age-old social problems that the world faces. If you travel to Mogadishu, Mexico City or Mumbai, you find that dilapidated infrastructure and logistics continue to be a stumbling block to the delivery of medicine and healthcare in the rural areas. However, through a network of state-owned enterprises, the Chinese have been able to go into these rural areas, using their companies to help deliver on these healthcare solutions. Ladies and gentlemen, it's no surprise that around the world, people are pointing at what China is doing and saying, "I like that. I want that. I want to be able to do what China's doing. That is the system that seems to work." I'm here to also tell you that there are lots of shifts occurring around what China is doing in the democratic stance. In particular, there is growing doubt among people in the emerging markets, when people now believe that democracy is no longer to be viewed as a prerequisite for economic growth. In fact, countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Chile, not just China, have shown that actually, it's economic growth that is a prerequisite for democracy. In a recent study, the evidence has shown that income is the greatest determinant of how long a democracy can last. The study found that if your per capita income is about 1,000 dollars a year, your democracy will last about eight and a half years. If your per capita income is between 2,000 and 4,000 dollars per year, then you're likely to only get 33 years of democracy. And only if your per capita income is above 6,000 dollars a year will you have democracy come hell or high water. What this is telling us is that we need to first establish a middle class that is able to hold the government accountable. But perhaps it's also telling us that we should be worried about going around the world and shoehorning democracy, because ultimately we run the risk of ending up with illiberal democracies, democracies that in some sense could be worse than the authoritarian governments that they seek to replace. The evidence around illiberal democracies is quite depressing. Freedom House finds that although 50 percent of the world's countries today are democratic, 70 percent of those countries are illiberal in the sense that people don't have free speech or freedom of movement. But also, we're finding from Freedom House in a study that they published last year that freedom has been on the decline every year for the past seven years. What this says is that for people like me who care about liberal democracy, is we've got to find a more sustainable way of ensuring that we have a sustainable form of democracy in a liberal way, and that has its roots in economics. But it also says that as China moves toward being the largest economy in the world, something that is expected to happen by experts in 2016, that this schism between the political and economic ideologies of the West and the rest is likely to widen. What might that world look like? Well, the world could look like more state involvement and state capitalism; greater protectionisms of nation-states; but also, as I just pointed out a moment ago, ever-declining political rights and individual rights. The question that is left for us in general is, what then should the West be doing? And I suggest that they have two options. The West can either compete or cooperate. If the West chooses to compete with the Chinese model, and in effect go around the world and continue to try and push an agenda of private capitalism and liberal democracy, this is basically going against headwinds, but it also would be a natural stance for the West to take because in many ways it is the antithesis of the Chinese model of de-prioritizing democracy, and state capitalism. Now the fact of the matter is, if the West decides to compete, it will create a wider schism. The other option is for the West to cooperate, and by cooperating I mean giving the emerging market countries the flexibility to figure out in an organic way what political and economic system works best for them. Now I'm sure some of you in the room will be thinking, well, this is like ceding to China, and this is a way, in other words, for the West to take a back seat. But I put it to you that if the United States and European countries want to remain globally influential, they may have to consider cooperating in the short term in order to compete, and by that, they might have to focus more aggressively on economic outcomes to help create the middle class and therefore be able to hold government accountable and create the democracies that we really want. The fact of the matter is that instead of going around the world and haranguing countries for engaging with China, the West should be encouraging its own businesses to trade and invest in these regions. Instead of criticizing China for bad behavior, the West should be showing how it is that their own system of politics and economics is the superior one. And instead of shoehorning democracy around the world, perhaps the West should take a leaf out of its own history book and remember that it takes a lot of patience in order to develop the models and the systems that you have today. Indeed, the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer reminds us that it took the United States nearly 170 years from the time that the Constitution was written for there to be equal rights in the United States. Some people would argue that today there is still no equal rights. In fact, there are groups who would argue that they still do not have equal rights under the law. At its very best, the Western model speaks for itself. It's the model that put food on the table. It's the refrigerators. It put a man on the moon. But the fact of the matter is, although people back in the day used to point at the Western countries and say, "I want that, I like that," there's now a new person in town in the form of a country, China. Today, generations are looking at China and saying, "China can produce infrastructure, China can produce economic growth, and we like that." Because ultimately, the question before us, and the question before seven billion people on the planet is, how can we create prosperity? People who care and will pivot towards the model of politics and economics in a very rational way, to those models that will ensure that they can have better living standards in the shortest period of time. As you leave here today, I would like to leave you with a very personal message, which is what it is that I believe we should be doing as individuals, and this is really about being open-minded, open-minded to the fact that our hopes and dreams of creating prosperity for people around the world, creating and meaningfully putting a dent in poverty for hundreds of millions of people, has to be based in being open-minded, because these systems have good things and they have bad things. Just to illustrate, I went into my annals of myself. That's a picture of me. Awww. (Laughter) I was born and raised in Zambia in 1969. At the time of my birth, blacks were not issued birth certificates, and that law only changed in 1973. This is an affidavit from the Zambian government. I bring this to you to tell you that in 40 years, I've gone from not being recognized as a human being to standing in front of the illustrious TED crowd today to talk to you about my views. In this vein, we can increase economic growth. We can meaningfully put a dent in poverty. But also, it's going to require that we look at our assumptions, assumptions and strictures that we've grown up with around democracy, around private capitalism, around what creates economic growth and reduces poverty and creates freedoms. We might have to tear those books up and start to look at other options and be open-minded to seek the truth. Ultimately, it's about transforming the world and making it a better place. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Design with the blind in mind | {0: 'Chris Downey is an architect who lost his sight and gained a new way of seeing the world.'} | TEDCity2.0 | So, stepping down out of the bus, I headed back to the corner to head west en route to a braille training session. It was the winter of 2009, and I had been blind for about a year. Things were going pretty well. Safely reaching the other side, I turned to the left, pushed the auto-button for the audible pedestrian signal, and waited my turn. As it went off, I took off and safely got to the other side. Stepping onto the sidewalk, I then heard the sound of a steel chair slide across the concrete sidewalk in front of me. I know there's a cafe on the corner, and they have chairs out in front, so I just adjusted to the left to get closer to the street. As I did, so slid the chair. I just figured I'd made a mistake, and went back to the right, and so slid the chair in perfect synchronicity. Now I was getting a little anxious. I went back to the left, and so slid the chair, blocking my path of travel. Now, I was officially freaking out. So I yelled, "Who the hell's out there? What's going on?" Just then, over my shout, I heard something else, a familiar rattle. It sounded familiar, and I quickly considered another possibility, and I reached out with my left hand, as my fingers brushed against something fuzzy, and I came across an ear, the ear of a dog, perhaps a golden retriever. Its leash had been tied to the chair as her master went in for coffee, and she was just persistent in her efforts to greet me, perhaps get a scratch behind the ear. Who knows, maybe she was volunteering for service. (Laughter) But that little story is really about the fears and misconceptions that come along with the idea of moving through the city without sight, seemingly oblivious to the environment and the people around you. So let me step back and set the stage a little bit. On St. Patrick's Day of 2008, I reported to the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor. The surgery was successful. Two days later, my sight started to fail. On the third day, it was gone. Immediately, I was struck by an incredible sense of fear, of confusion, of vulnerability, like anybody would. But as I had time to stop and think, I actually started to realize I had a lot to be grateful for. In particular, I thought about my dad, who had passed away from complications from brain surgery. He was 36. I was seven at the time. So although I had every reason to be fearful of what was ahead, and had no clue quite what was going to happen, I was alive. My son still had his dad. And besides, it's not like I was the first person ever to lose their sight. I knew there had to be all sorts of systems and techniques and training to have to live a full and meaningful, active life without sight. So by the time I was discharged from the hospital a few days later, I left with a mission, a mission to get out and get the best training as quickly as I could and get on to rebuilding my life. Within six months, I had returned to work. My training had started. I even started riding a tandem bike with my old cycling buddies, and was commuting to work on my own, walking through town and taking the bus. It was a lot of hard work. But what I didn't anticipate through that rapid transition was the incredible experience of the juxtaposition of my sighted experience up against my unsighted experience of the same places and the same people within such a short period of time. From that came a lot of insights, or outsights, as I called them, things that I learned since losing my sight. These outsights ranged from the trival to the profound, from the mundane to the humorous. As an architect, that stark juxtaposition of my sighted and unsighted experience of the same places and the same cities within such a short period of time has given me all sorts of wonderful outsights of the city itself. Paramount amongst those was the realization that, actually, cities are fantastic places for the blind. And then I was also surprised by the city's propensity for kindness and care as opposed to indifference or worse. And then I started to realize that it seemed like the blind seemed to have a positive influence on the city itself. That was a little curious to me. Let me step back and take a look at why the city is so good for the blind. Inherent with the training for recovery from sight loss is learning to rely on all your non-visual senses, things that you would otherwise maybe ignore. It's like a whole new world of sensory information opens up to you. I was really struck by the symphony of subtle sounds all around me in the city that you can hear and work with to understand where you are, how you need to move, and where you need to go. Similarly, just through the grip of the cane, you can feel contrasting textures in the floor below, and over time you build a pattern of where you are and where you're headed. Similarly, just the sun warming one side of your face or the wind at your neck gives you clues about your alignment and your progression through a block and your movement through time and space. But also, the sense of smell. Some districts and cities have their own smell, as do places and things around you, and if you're lucky, you can even follow your nose to that new bakery that you've been looking for. All this really surprised me, because I started to realize that my unsighted experienced was so far more multi-sensory than my sighted experience ever was. What struck me also was how much the city was changing around me. When you're sighted, everybody kind of sticks to themselves, you mind your own business. Lose your sight, though, and it's a whole other story. And I don't know who's watching who, but I have a suspicion that a lot of people are watching me. And I'm not paranoid, but everywhere I go, I'm getting all sorts of advice: Go here, move there, watch out for this. A lot of the information is good. Some of it's helpful. A lot of it's kind of reversed. You've got to figure out what they actually meant. Some of it's kind of wrong and not helpful. But it's all good in the grand scheme of things. But one time I was in Oakland walking along Broadway, and came to a corner. I was waiting for an audible pedestrian signal, and as it went off, I was just about to step out into the street, when all of a sudden, my right hand was just gripped by this guy, and he yanked my arm and pulled me out into the crosswalk and was dragging me out across the street, speaking to me in Mandarin. (Laughter) It's like, there was no escape from this man's death grip, but he got me safely there. What could I do? But believe me, there are more polite ways to offer assistance. We don't know you're there, so it's kind of nice to say "Hello" first. "Would you like some help?" But while in Oakland, I've really been struck by how much the city of Oakland changed as I lost my sight. I liked it sighted. It was fine. It's a perfectly great city. But once I lost my sight and was walking along Broadway, I was blessed every block of the way. "Bless you, man." "Go for it, brother." "God bless you." I didn't get that sighted. (Laughter) And even without sight, I don't get that in San Francisco. And I know it bothers some of my blind friends, it's not just me. Often it's thought that that's an emotion that comes up out of pity. I tend to think that it comes out of our shared humanity, out of our togetherness, and I think it's pretty cool. In fact, if I'm feeling down, I just go to Broadway in downtown Oakland, I go for a walk, and I feel better like that, in no time at all. But also that it illustrates how disability and blindness sort of cuts across ethnic, social, racial, economic lines. Disability is an equal-opportunity provider. Everybody's welcome. In fact, I've heard it said in the disability community that there are really only two types of people: There are those with disabilities, and there are those that haven't quite found theirs yet. It's a different way of thinking about it, but I think it's kind of beautiful, because it is certainly far more inclusive than the us-versus-them or the abled-versus-the-disabled, and it's a lot more honest and respectful of the fragility of life. So my final takeaway for you is that not only is the city good for the blind, but the city needs us. And I'm so sure of that that I want to propose to you today that the blind be taken as the prototypical city dwellers when imagining new and wonderful cities, and not the people that are thought about after the mold has already been cast. It's too late then. So if you design a city with the blind in mind, you'll have a rich, walkable network of sidewalks with a dense array of options and choices all available at the street level. If you design a city with the blind in mind, sidewalks will be predictable and will be generous. The space between buildings will be well-balanced between people and cars. In fact, cars, who needs them? If you're blind, you don't drive. (Laughter) They don't like it when you drive. (Laughter) If you design a city with the blind in mind, you design a city with a robust, accessible, well-connected mass transit system that connects all parts of the city and the region all around. If you design a city with the blind in mind, there'll be jobs, lots of jobs. Blind people want to work too. They want to earn a living. So, in designing a city for the blind, I hope you start to realize that it actually would be a more inclusive, a more equitable, a more just city for all. And based on my prior sighted experience, it sounds like a pretty cool city, whether you're blind, whether you have a disability, or you haven't quite found yours yet. So thank you. (Applause) |
The link between unemployment and terrorism | {0: 'Human rights advocate Mohamed Ali fights terrorism with entrepreneurship. '} | TEDCity2.0 | I would like to talk to you about a story about a small town kid. I don't know his name, but I do know his story. He lives in a small village in southern Somalia. His village is near Mogadishu. Drought drives the small village into poverty and to the brink of starvation. With nothing left for him there, he leaves for the big city, in this case, Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. When he arrives, there are no opportunities, no jobs, no way forward. He ends up living in a tent city on the outskirts of Mogadishu. Maybe a year passes, nothing. One day, he's approached by a gentleman who offers to take him to lunch, then to dinner, to breakfast. He meets this dynamic group of people, and they give him a break. He's given a bit of money to buy himself some new clothes, money to send back home to his family. He is introduced to this young woman. He eventually gets married. He starts this new life. He has a purpose in life. One beautiful day in Mogadishu, under an azure blue sky, a car bomb goes off. That small town kid with the big city dreams was the suicide bomber, and that dynamic group of people were al Shabaab, a terrorist organization linked to al Qaeda. So how does the story of a small town kid just trying to make it big in the city end up with him blowing himself up? He was waiting. He was waiting for an opportunity, waiting to begin his future, waiting for a way forward, and this was the first thing that came along. This was the first thing that pulled him out of what we call waithood. And his story repeats itself in urban centers around the world. It is the story of the disenfranchised, unemployed urban youth who sparks riots in Johannesburg, sparks riots in London, who reaches out for something other than waithood. For young people, the promise of the city, the big city dream is that of opportunity, of jobs, of wealth, but young people are not sharing in the prosperity of their cities. Often it's youth who suffer from the highest unemployment rates. By 2030, three out of five people living in cities will be under the age of 18. If we do not include young people in the growth of our cities, if we do not provide them opportunities, the story of waithood, the gateway to terrorism, to violence, to gangs, will be the story of cities 2.0. And in my city of birth, Mogadishu, 70 percent of young people suffer from unemployment. 70 percent don't work, don't go to school. They pretty much do nothing. I went back to Mogadishu last month, and I went to visit Madina Hospital, the hospital I was born in. I remember standing in front of that bullet-ridden hospital thinking, what if I had never left? What if I had been forced into that same state of waithood? Would I have become a terrorist? I'm not really sure about the answer. My reason for being in Mogadishu that month was actually to host a youth leadership and entrepreneurship summit. I brought together about 90 young Somali leaders. We sat down and brainstormed on solutions to the biggest challenges facing their city. One of the young men in the room was Aden. He went to university in Mogadishu, graduated. There were no jobs, no opportunities. I remember him telling me, because he was a college graduate, unemployed, frustrated, that he was the perfect target for al Shabaab and other terrorist organizations, to be recruited. They sought people like him out. But his story takes a different route. In Mogadishu, the biggest barrier to getting from point A to point B are the roads. Twenty-three years of civil war have completely destroyed the road system, and a motorbike can be the easiest way to get around. Aden saw an opportunity and seized it. He started a motorbike company. He began renting out motorbikes to local residents who couldn't normally afford them. He bought 10 bikes, with the help of family and friends, and his dream is to eventually expand to several hundred within the next three years. How is this story different? What makes his story different? I believe it is his ability to identify and seize a new opportunity. It's entrepreneurship, and I believe entrepreneurship can be the most powerful tool against waithood. It empowers young people to be the creators of the very economic opportunities they are so desperately seeking. And you can train young people to be entrepreneurs. I want to talk to you about a young man who attended one of my meetings, Mohamed Mohamoud, a florist. He was helping me train some of the young people at the summit in entrepreneurship and how to be innovative and how to create a culture of entrepreneurship. He's actually the first florist Mogadishu has seen in over 22 years, and until recently, until Mohamed came along, if you wanted flowers at your wedding, you used plastic bouquets shipped from abroad. If you asked someone, "When was the last time you saw fresh flowers?" for many who grew up under civil war, the answer would be, "Never." So Mohamed saw an opportunity. He started a landscaping and design floral company. He created a farm right outside of Mogadishu, and started growing tulips and lilies, which he said could survive the harsh Mogadishu climate. And he began delivering flowers to weddings, creating gardens at homes and businesses around the city, and he's now working on creating Mogadishu's first public park in 22 years. There's no public park in Mogadishu. He wants to create a space where families, young people, can come together, and, as he says, smell the proverbial roses. And he doesn't grow roses because they use too much water, by the way. So the first step is to inspire young people, and in that room, Mohamed's presence had a really profound impact on the youth in that room. They had never really thought about starting up a business. They've thought about working for an NGO, working for the government, but his story, his innovation, really had a strong impact on them. He forced them to look at their city as a place of opportunity. He empowered them to believe that they could be entrepreneurs, that they could be change makers. By the end of the day, they were coming up with innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing their city. They came up with entrepreneurial solutions to local problems. So inspiring young people and creating a culture of entrepreneurship is a really great step, but young people need capital to make their ideas a reality. They need expertise and mentorship to guide them in developing and launching their businesses. Connect young people with the resources they need, provide them the support they need to go from ideation to creation, and you will create catalysts for urban growth. For me, entrepreneurship is more than just starting up a business. It's about creating a social impact. Mohamed is not simply selling flowers. I believe he is selling hope. His Peace Park, and that's what he calls it, when it's created, will actually transform the way people see their city. Aden hired street kids to help rent out and maintain those bikes for him. He gave them the opportunity to escape the paralysis of waithood. These young entrepreneurs are having a tremendous impact in their cities. So my suggestion is, turn youth into entrepreneurs, incubate and nurture their inherent innovation, and you will have more stories of flowers and Peace Parks than of car bombs and waithood. Thank you. (Applause) |
What doctors can learn from each other | {0: 'A doctor by training, Stefan Larsson of BCG researches how transparency of medical outcomes and costs could radically transform the healthcare industry.'} | TED@BCG Singapore | Five years ago, I was on a sabbatical, and I returned to the medical university where I studied. I saw real patients and I wore the white coat for the first time in 17 years, in fact since I became a management consultant. There were two things that surprised me during the month I spent. The first one was that the common theme of the discussions we had were hospital budgets and cost-cutting, and the second thing, which really bothered me, actually, was that several of the colleagues I met, former friends from medical school, who I knew to be some of the smartest, most motivated, engaged and passionate people I'd ever met, many of them had turned cynical, disengaged, or had distanced themselves from hospital management. So with this focus on cost-cutting, I asked myself, are we forgetting the patient? Many countries that you represent and where I come from struggle with the cost of healthcare. It's a big part of the national budgets. And many different reforms aim at holding back this growth. In some countries, we have long waiting times for patients for surgery. In other countries, new drugs are not being reimbursed, and therefore don't reach patients. In several countries, doctors and nurses are the targets, to some extent, for the governments. After all, the costly decisions in health care are taken by doctors and nurses. You choose an expensive lab test, you choose to operate on an old and frail patient. So, by limiting the degrees of freedom of physicians, this is a way to hold costs down. And ultimately, some physicians will say today that they don't have the full liberty to make the choices they think are right for their patients. So no wonder that some of my old colleagues are frustrated. At BCG, we looked at this, and we asked ourselves, this can't be the right way of managing healthcare. And so we took a step back and we said, "What is it that we are trying to achieve?" Ultimately, in the healthcare system, we're aiming at improving health for the patients, and we need to do so at a limited, or affordable, cost. We call this value-based healthcare. On the screen behind me, you see what we mean by value: outcomes that matter to patients relative to the money we spend. This was described beautifully in a book in 2006 by Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg. On this picture, you have my father-in-law surrounded by his three beautiful daughters. When we started doing our research at BCG, we decided not to look so much at the costs, but to look at the quality instead, and in the research, one of the things that fascinated us was the variation we saw. You compare hospitals in a country, you'll find some that are extremely good, but you'll find a large number that are vastly much worse. The differences were dramatic. Erik, my father-in-law, he suffers from prostate cancer, and he probably needs surgery. Now living in Europe, he can choose to go to Germany that has a well-reputed healthcare system. If he goes there and goes to the average hospital, he will have the risk of becoming incontinent by about 50 percent, so he would have to start wearing diapers again. You flip a coin. Fifty percent risk. That's quite a lot. If he instead would go to Hamburg, and to a clinic called the Martini-Klinik, the risk would be only one in 20. Either you a flip a coin, or you have a one in 20 risk. That's a huge difference, a seven-fold difference. When we look at many hospitals for many different diseases, we see these huge differences. But you and I don't know. We don't have the data. And often, the data actually doesn't exist. Nobody knows. So going the hospital is a lottery. Now, it doesn't have to be that way. There is hope. In the late '70s, there were a group of Swedish orthopedic surgeons who met at their annual meeting, and they were discussing the different procedures they used to operate hip surgery. To the left of this slide, you see a variety of metal pieces, artificial hips that you would use for somebody who needs a new hip. They all realized they had their individual way of operating. They all argued that, "My technique is the best," but none of them actually knew, and they admitted that. So they said, "We probably need to measure quality so we know and can learn from what's best." So they in fact spent two years debating, "So what is quality in hip surgery?" "Oh, we should measure this." "No, we should measure that." And they finally agreed. And once they had agreed, they started measuring, and started sharing the data. Very quickly, they found that if you put cement in the bone of the patient before you put the metal shaft in, it actually lasted a lot longer, and most patients would never have to be re-operated on in their lifetime. They published the data, and it actually transformed clinical practice in the country. Everybody saw this makes a lot of sense. Since then, they publish every year. Once a year, they publish the league table: who's best, who's at the bottom? And they visit each other to try to learn, so a continuous cycle of improvement. For many years, Swedish hip surgeons had the best results in the world, at least for those who actually were measuring, and many were not. Now I found this principle really exciting. So the physicians get together, they agree on what quality is, they start measuring, they share the data, they find who's best, and they learn from it. Continuous improvement. Now, that's not the only exciting part. That's exciting in itself. But if you bring back the cost side of the equation, and look at that, it turns out, those who have focused on quality, they actually also have the lowest costs, although that's not been the purpose in the first place. So if you look at the hip surgery story again, there was a study done a couple years ago where they compared the U.S. and Sweden. They looked at how many patients have needed to be re-operated on seven years after the first surgery. In the United States, the number was three times higher than in Sweden. So many unnecessary surgeries, and so much unnecessary suffering for all the patients who were operated on in that seven year period. Now, you can imagine how much savings there would be for society. We did a study where we looked at OECD data. OECD does, every so often, look at quality of care where they can find the data across the member countries. The United States has, for many diseases, actually a quality which is below the average in OECD. Now, if the American healthcare system would focus a lot more on measuring quality, and raise quality just to the level of average OECD, it would save the American people 500 billion U.S. dollars a year. That's 20 percent of the budget, of the healthcare budget of the country. Now you may say that these numbers are fantastic, and it's all logical, but is it possible? This would be a paradigm shift in healthcare, and I would argue that not only can it be done, but it has to be done. The agents of change are the doctors and nurses in the healthcare system. In my practice as a consultant, I meet probably a hundred or more than a hundred doctors and nurses and other hospital or healthcare staff every year. The one thing they have in common is they really care about what they achieve in terms of quality for their patients. Physicians are, like most of you in the audience, very competitive. They were always best in class. We were always best in class. And if somebody can show them that the result they perform for their patients is no better than what others do, they will do whatever it takes to improve. But most of them don't know. But physicians have another characteristic. They actually thrive from peer recognition. If a cardiologist calls another cardiologist in a competing hospital and discusses why that other hospital has so much better results, they will share. They will share the information on how to improve. So it is, by measuring and creating transparency, you get a cycle of continuous improvement, which is what this slide shows. Now, you may say this is a nice idea, but this isn't only an idea. This is happening in reality. We're creating a global community, and a large global community, where we'll be able to measure and compare what we achieve. Together with two academic institutions, Michael Porter at Harvard Business School, and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, BCG has formed something we call ICHOM. You may think that's a sneeze, but it's not a sneeze, it's an acronym. It stands for the International Consortium for Health Outcome Measurement. We're bringing together leading physicians and patients to discuss, disease by disease, what is really quality, what should we measure, and to make those standards global. They've worked — four working groups have worked during the past year: cataracts, back pain, coronary artery disease, which is, for instance, heart attack, and prostate cancer. The four groups will publish their data in November of this year. That's the first time we'll be comparing apples to apples, not only within a country, but between countries. Next year, we're planning to do eight diseases, the year after, 16. In three years' time, we plan to have covered 40 percent of the disease burden. Compare apples to apples. Who's better? Why is that? Five months ago, I led a workshop at the largest university hospital in Northern Europe. They have a new CEO, and she has a vision: I want to manage my big institution much more on quality, outcomes that matter to patients. This particular day, we sat in a workshop together with physicians, nurses and other staff, discussing leukemia in children. The group discussed, how do we measure quality today? Can we measure it better than we do? We discussed, how do we treat these kids, what are important improvements? And we discussed what are the costs for these patients, can we do treatment more efficiently? There was an enormous energy in the room. There were so many ideas, so much enthusiasm. At the end of the meeting, the chairman of the department, he stood up. He looked over the group and he said — first he raised his hand, I forgot that — he raised his hand, clenched his fist, and then he said to the group, "Thank you. Thank you. Today, we're finally discussing what this hospital does the right way." By measuring value in healthcare, that is not only costs but outcomes that matter to patients, we will make staff in hospitals and elsewhere in the healthcare system not a problem but an important part of the solution. I believe measuring value in healthcare will bring about a revolution, and I'm convinced that the founder of modern medicine, the Greek Hippocrates, who always put the patient at the center, he would smile in his grave. Thank you. (Applause) |
Massively multi-player… thumb-wrestling? | {0: 'Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. Her work shows us how.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Today I am going to teach you how to play my favorite game: massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling. It's the only game in the world that I know of that allows you, the player, the opportunity to experience 10 positive emotions in 60 seconds or less. This is true, so if you play this game with me today for just one single minute, you will get to feel joy, relief, love, surprise, pride, curiosity, excitement, awe and wonder, contentment, and creativity, all in the span of one minute. So this sounds pretty good, right? Now you're willing to play. In order to teach you this game, I'm going to need some volunteers to come up onstage really quickly, and we're going to do a little hands-on demo. While they're coming up, I should let you know, this game was invented 10 years ago by an artists' collective in Austria named Monochrom. So thank you, Monochrom. Okay, so most people are familiar with traditional, two-person thumb-wrestling. Sunni, let's just remind them. One, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war, and we wrestle, and of course Sunni beats me because she's the best. Now the first thing about massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling, we're the gamer generation. There are a billion gamers on the planet now, so we need more of a challenge. So the first thing we need is more thumbs. So Eric, come on over. So we could get three thumbs together, and Peter could join us. We could even have four thumbs together, and the way you win is you're the first person to pin someone else's thumb. This is really important. You can't, like, wait while they fight it out and then swoop in at the last minute. That is not how you win. Ah, who did that? Eric you did that. So Eric would have won. He was the first person to pin my thumb. Okay, so that's the first rule, and we can see that three or four is kind of the typical number of thumbs in a node, but if you feel ambitious, you don't have to hold back. We can really go for it. So you can see up here. Now the only other rule you need to remember is, gamer generation, we like a challenge. I happen to notice you all have some thumbs you're not using. So I think we should kind of get some more involved. And if we had just four people, we would do it just like this, and we would try and wrestle both thumbs at the same time. Perfect. Now, if we had more people in the room, instead of just wrestling in a closed node, we might reach out and try and grab some other people. And in fact, that's what we're going to do right now. We're going to try and get all, something like, I don't know, 1,500 thumbs in this room connected in a single node. And we have to connect both levels, so if you're up there, you're going to be reaching down and reaching up. Now — (Laughter) — before we get started — This is great. You're excited to play. — before we get started, can I have the slides back up here really quick, because if you get good at this game, I want you to know there are some advanced levels. So this is the kind of simple level, right? But there are advanced configurations. This is called the Death Star Configuration. Any Star Wars fans? And this one's called the Möbius Strip. Any science geeks, you get that one. This is the hardest level. This is the extreme. So we'll stick with the normal one for now, and I'm going to give you 30 seconds, every thumb into the node, connect the upper and the lower levels, you guys go on down there. Thirty seconds. Into the network. Make the node. Stand up! It's easier if you stand up. Everybody, up up up up up! Stand up, my friends. All right. Don't start wrestling yet. If you have a free thumb, wave it around, make sure it gets connected. Okay. We need to do a last-minute thumb check. If you have a free thumb, wave it around to make sure. Grab that thumb! Reach behind you. There you go. Any other thumbs? Okay, on the count of three, you're going to go. Try to keep track. Grab, grab, grab it. Okay? One, two, three, go! (Laughter) Did you win? You got it? You got it? Excellent! (Applause) Well done. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. While you are basking in the glow of having won your first massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling game, let's do a quick recap on the positive emotions. So curiosity. I said "massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling." You were like, "What the hell is she talking about?" So I provoked a little curiosity. Creativity: it took creativity to solve the problem of getting all the thumbs into the node. I'm reaching around and I'm reaching up. So you used creativity. That was great. How about surprise? The actual feeling of trying to wrestle two thumbs at once is pretty surprising. You heard that sound go up in the room. We had excitement. As you started to wrestle, maybe you're starting to win or this person's, like, really into it, so you kind of get the excitement going. We have relief. You got to stand up. You've been sitting for awhile, so the physical relief, getting to shake it out. We had joy. You were laughing, smiling. Look at your faces. This room is full of joy. We had some contentment. I didn't see anybody sending text messages or checking their email while we were playing, so you were totally content to be playing. The most important three emotions, awe and wonder, we had everybody connected physically for a minute. When was the last time you were at TED and you got to connect physically with every single person in the room? And it's truly awesome and wondrous. And speaking of physical connection, you guys know I love the hormone oxytocin, you release oxytocin, you feel bonded to everyone in the room. You guys know that the best way to release oxytocin quickly is to hold someone else's hand for at least six seconds. You guys were all holding hands for way more than six seconds, so we are all now biochemically primed to love each other. That is great. And the last emotion of pride. How many people are like me. Just admit it. You lost both your thumbs. It just didn't work out for you. That's okay, because you learned a new skill today. You learned, from scratch, a game you never knew before. Now you know how to play it. You can teach other people. So congratulations. How many of you won just won thumb? All right. I have very good news for you. According to the official rules of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling, this makes you a grandmaster of the game. Because there aren't that many people who know how to play, we have to kind of accelerate the program more than a game like chess. So congratulations, grandmasters. Win one thumb once, you will become a grandmaster. Did anybody win both their thumbs? Yes. Awesome. Okay. Get ready to update your Twitter or Facebook status. You guys, according to the rules, are legendary grandmasters, so congratulations. I will just leave you with this tip, if you want to play again. The best way to become a legendary grandmaster, you've got your two nodes going on. Pick off the one that looks easiest. They're not paying attention. They look kind of weak. Focus on that one and do something crazy with this arm. As soon as you win, suddenly stop. Everybody is thrown off. You go in for the kill. That's how you become a legendary grandmaster of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling. Thank you for letting me teach you my favorite game. Wooo! (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
A drone's-eye view of conservation | {0: 'Lian Pin Koh expands conservation efforts by championing the use of low-cost autonomous aerial vehicles.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | When we think of Nepal, we tend to think of the snow-capped mountains of the Himalayas, the crystal-clear still waters of its alpine lakes, or the huge expanse of its grasslands. What some of us may not realize is that in the Himalayan foothills, where the climate is much warmer and the landscape much greener, there lives a great diversity of wildlife, including the one-horned rhinoceros, the Asian elephant and the Bengal tiger. But unfortunately, these animals are under constant threat from poachers who hunt and kill them for their body parts. To stop the killing of these animals, battalions of soldiers and rangers are sent to protect Nepal's national parks, but that is not an easy task, because these soldiers have to patrol thousands of hectares of forests on foot or elephant backs. It is also risky for these soldiers when they get into gunfights with poachers, and therefore Nepal is always looking for new ways to help with protecting the forests and wildlife. Well recently, Nepal acquired a new tool in the fight against wildlife crime, and these are drones, or more specifically, conservation drones. For about a year now, my colleagues and I have been building drones for Nepal and training the park protection personnel on the use of these drones. Not only does a drone give you a bird's-eye view of the landscape, but it also allows you to capture detailed, high-resolution images of objects on the ground. This, for example, is a pair of rhinoceros taking a cooling bath on a hot summer day in the lowlands of Nepal. Now we believe that drones have tremendous potential, not only for combating wildlife crime, but also for monitoring the health of these wildlife populations. So what is a drone? Well, the kind of drone I'm talking about is simply a model aircraft fitted with an autopilot system, and this autopilot unit contains a tiny computer, a GPS, a compass, a barometric altimeter and a few other sensors. Now a drone like this is meant to carry a useful payload, such as a video camera or a photographic camera. It also requires a software that allows the user to program a mission, to tell the drone where to go. Now people I talk to are often surprised when they hear that these are the only four components that make a conservation drone, but they are even more surprised when I tell them how affordable these components are. The facts is, a conservation drone doesn't cost very much more than a good laptop computer or a decent pair of binoculars. So now that you've built your own conservation drone, you probably want to go fly it, but how does one fly a drone? Well, actually, you don't, because the drone flies itself. All you have to do is to program a mission to tell the drone where to fly. But you simply do that by clicking on a few way points on the Google Maps interface using the open-source software. Those missions could be as simple as just a few way points, or they could be slightly longer and more complicated, to fly along a river system. Sometimes, we fly the drone in a lawnmower-type pattern and take pictures of that area, and those pictures can be processed to produce a map of that forest. Other researchers might want to fly the drone along the boundaries of a forest to watch out for poachers or people who might be trying to enter the forest illegally. Now whatever your mission is, once you've programmed it, you simply upload it to the autopilot system, bring your drone to the field, and launch it simply by tossing it in the air. And often we'll go about this mission taking pictures or videos along the way, and usually at that point, we will go grab ourselves a cup of coffee, sit back, and relax for the next few minutes, although some of us sit back and panic for the next few minutes worrying that the drone will not return. Usually it does, and when it does, it even lands automatically. So what can we do with a conservation drone? Well, when we built our first prototype drone, our main objective was to fly it over a remote rainforest in North Sumatra, Indonesia, to look for the nest of a species of great ape known as the orangutan. The reason we wanted to do that was because we needed to know how many individuals of this species are still left in that forest. Now the traditional method of surveying for orangutans is to walk the forest on foot carrying heavy equipment and to use a pair of binoculars to look up in the treetops where you might find an orangutan or its nest. Now as you can imagine, that is a very time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly process, so we were hoping that drones could significantly reduce the cost of surveying for orangutan populations in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. So we were very excited when we captured our first pair of orangutan nests on camera. And this is it; this is the first ever picture of orangutan nests taken with a drone. Since then we have taken pictures of dozens of these nests from around various parts of Southeast Asia, and we're now working with computer scientists to develop algorithms that can automatically count the number of nests from the thousands of photos we've collected so far. But nests are not the only objects these drones can detect. This is a wild orangutan happily feeding on top of a palm tree, seemingly oblivious to our drone that was flying overhead, not once but several times. We've also taken pictures of other animals including forest buffalos in Gabon, elephants, and even turtle nests. But besides taking pictures of just the animals themselves, we also take pictures of the habitats these animals live in, because we want to keep track of the health of these habitats. Sometimes, we zoom out a little and look at other things that might be happening in the landscape. This is an oil palm plantation in Sumatra. Now oil palm is a major driver of deforestation in that part of the world, so we wanted to use this new drone technology to keep track of the spread of these plantations in Southeast Asia. But drones could also be used to keep track of illegal logging activities. This is a recently logged forest, again in Sumatra. You could even still see the processed wooden planks left on the ground. But perhaps the most exciting part about taking pictures from the air is we could later stitch these pictures together using special software to create a map of the entire landscape, and this map gives us crucial information for monitoring land use change, to let us know where and when plantations might be expanding, where forests might be contracting, or where fires might be breaking out. Aerial images could also be processed to produce three-dimensional computer models of forests. Now these models are not just visually appealing, but they are also geometrically accurate, which means researchers can now measure the distance between trees, calculate surface area, the volume of vegetation, and so on, all of which are important information for monitoring the health of these forests. Recently, we've also begun experimenting with thermal imaging cameras. Now these cameras can detect heat-emitting objects from the ground, and therefore they are very useful for detecting poachers or their campfires at night. So I've told you quite a lot about what conservation drones are, how you might operate one of these drones, and what a drone could do for you. I will now tell you where conservation drones are being used around the world. We built our first prototype drones in Switzerland. We brought a few of these to Indonesia for the first few test flights. Since then, we've been building drones for our collaborators from around the world, and these include fellow biologists and partners from major conservation organizations. Perhaps the best and most rewarding part about working with these collaborators is the feedback they give us on how to improve our drones. Building drones for us is a constant work in progress. We are constantly trying to improve them in terms of their range, their ruggedness, and the amount of payload they can carry. We also work with collaborators to discover new ways of using these drones. For example, camera traps are a common tool used by biologists to take pictures of shy animals hiding in the forests, but these are motion-activated cameras, so they snap a picture every time an animal crosses their path. But the problem with camera traps is that the researcher has to go back to the forest every so often to retrieve those images, and that takes a lot of time, especially if there are dozens or hundreds of these cameras placed in the forest. Now a drone could be designed to perform the task much more efficiently. This drone, carrying a special sensor, could be flown over the forest and remotely download these images from wi-fi–enabled cameras. Radio collars are another tool that's commonly used by biologists. Now these collars are put onto animals. They transmit a radio signal which allows the researcher to track the movements of these animals across the landscape. But the traditional way of tracking animals is pretty ridiculous, because it requires the researcher to be walking on the ground carrying a huge and cumbersome radio antenna, not unlike those old TV antennae we used to have on our rooftops. Some of us still do. A drone could be used to do the same job much more efficiently. Why not equip a drone with a scanning radio receiver, fly that over the forest canopy in a certain pattern which would allow the user or the operator to triangulate the location of these radio-collared animals remotely without having to step foot in the forest. A third and perhaps most exciting way of using these drones is to fly them to a really remote, never-explored-before rainforest somewhere hidden in the tropics, and parachute down a tiny spy microphone that would allow us to eavesdrop on the calls of mammals, birds, amphibians, the Yeti, the Sasquatch, Bigfoot, whatever. That would give us biologists a pretty good idea of what animals might be living in those forests. And finally, I would like to show you the latest version of our conservation drone. The MAJA drone has a wingspan of about two meters. It weighs only about two kilograms, but it can carry half its weight. It is a fully autonomous system. During its mission, it can even transmit a live video feed back to a ground station laptop, which allows the user to see what the drone is seeing in real time. It carries a variety of sensors, and the photo quality of some of these sensors can be as high as one to two centimeters per pixel. This drone can stay in the air for 40 to 60 minutes, which gives it a range of up to 50 kilometers. That is quite sufficient for most of our conservation applications. Now, conservation drones began as a crazy idea from two biologists who are just deeply passionate about this technology. And we believe, strongly believe, that drones can and will be a game changer for conservation research and applications. We've had our fair share of skeptics and critics who thought that we were just fooling around with toy planes. And in a way, they are right. I mean, let's be honest, drones are the ultimate toys for boys. But at the same time, we've also gotten to know many wonderful colleagues and collaborators who share our vision and see the potential of conservation drones. To us, it is obvious that conservation biologists and practitioners should make full use of every available tool, including drones, in our fight to save the last remaining forests and wildlife of this planet. Thank you. (Applause) |
Ecology from the air | {0: 'Greg Asner’s mapping technology produces detailed, complex pictures of how humans’ activities affect our ecosystems.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Technology can change our understanding of nature. Take for example the case of lions. For centuries, it's been said that female lions do all of the hunting out in the open savanna, and male lions do nothing until it's time for dinner. You've heard this too, I can tell. Well recently, I led an airborne mapping campaign in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. Our colleagues put GPS tracking collars on male and female lions, and we mapped their hunting behavior from the air. The lower left shows a lion sizing up a herd of impala for a kill, and the right shows what I call the lion viewshed. That's how far the lion can see in all directions until his or her view is obstructed by vegetation. And what we found is that male lions are not the lazy hunters we thought them to be. They just use a different strategy. Whereas the female lions hunt out in the open savanna over long distances, usually during the day, male lions use an ambush strategy in dense vegetation, and often at night. This video shows the actual hunting viewsheds of male lions on the left and females on the right. Red and darker colors show more dense vegetation, and the white are wide open spaces. And this is the viewshed right literally at the eye level of hunting male and female lions. All of a sudden, you get a very clear understanding of the very spooky conditions under which male lions do their hunting. I bring up this example to begin, because it emphasizes how little we know about nature. There's been a huge amount of work done so far to try to slow down our losses of tropical forests, and we are losing our forests at a rapid rate, as shown in red on the slide. I find it ironic that we're doing so much, yet these areas are fairly unknown to science. So how can we save what we don't understand? Now I'm a global ecologist and an Earth explorer with a background in physics and chemistry and biology and a lot of other boring subjects, but above all, I'm obsessed with what we don't know about our planet. So I created this, the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, or CAO. It may look like a plane with a fancy paint job, but I packed it with over 1,000 kilos of high-tech sensors, computers, and a very motivated staff of Earth scientists and pilots. Two of our instruments are very unique: one is called an imaging spectrometer that can actually measure the chemical composition of plants as we fly over them. Another one is a set of lasers, very high-powered lasers, that fire out of the bottom of the plane, sweeping across the ecosystem and measuring it at nearly 500,000 times per second in high-resolution 3D. Here's an image of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, not far from where I live. Although we flew straight over this bridge, we imaged it in 3D, captured its color in just a few seconds. But the real power of the CAO is its ability to capture the actual building blocks of ecosystems. This is a small town in the Amazon, imaged with the CAO. We can slice through our data and see, for example, the 3D structure of the vegetation and the buildings, or we can use the chemical information to actually figure out how fast the plants are growing as we fly over them. The hottest pinks are the fastest-growing plants. And we can see biodiversity in ways that you never could have imagined. This is what a rainforest might look like as you fly over it in a hot air balloon. This is how we see a rainforest, in kaleidoscopic color that tells us that there are many species living with one another. But you have to remember that these trees are literally bigger than whales, and what that means is that they're impossible to understand just by walking on the ground below them. So our imagery is 3D, it's chemical, it's biological, and this tells us not only the species that are living in the canopy, but it tells us a lot of information about the rest of the species that occupy the rainforest. Now I created the CAO in order to answer questions that have proven extremely challenging to answer from any other vantage point, such as from the ground, or from satellite sensors. I want to share three of those questions with you today. The first questions is, how do we manage our carbon reserves in tropical forests? Tropical forests contain a huge amount of carbon in the trees, and we need to keep that carbon in those forests if we're going to avoid any further global warming. Unfortunately, global carbon emissions from deforestation now equals the global transportation sector. That's all ships, airplanes, trains and automobiles combined. So it's understandable that policy negotiators have been working hard to reduce deforestation, but they're doing it on landscapes that are hardly known to science. If you don't know where the carbon is exactly, in detail, how can you know what you're losing? Basically, we need a high-tech accounting system. With our system, we're able to see the carbon stocks of tropical forests in utter detail. The red shows, obviously, closed-canopy tropical forest, and then you see the cookie cutting, or the cutting of the forest in yellows and greens. It's like cutting a cake except this cake is about whale deep. And yet, we can zoom in and see the forest and the trees at the same time. And what's amazing is, even though we flew very high above this forest, later on in analysis, we can go in and actually experience the treetrops, leaf by leaf, branch by branch, just as the other species that live in this forest experience it along with the trees themselves. We've been using the technology to explore and to actually put out the first carbon geographies in high resolution in faraway places like the Amazon Basin and not-so-faraway places like the United States and Central America. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take you on a high-resolution, first-time tour of the carbon landscapes of Peru and then Panama. The colors are going to be going from red to blue. Red is extremely high carbon stocks, your largest cathedral forests you can imagine, and blue are very low carbon stocks. And let me tell you, Peru alone is an amazing place, totally unknown in terms of its carbon geography until today. We can fly to this area in northern Peru and see super high carbon stocks in red, and the Amazon River and floodplain cutting right through it. We can go to an area of utter devastation caused by deforestation in blue, and the virus of deforestation spreading out in orange. We can also fly to the southern Andes to see the tree line and see exactly how the carbon geography ends as we go up into the mountain system. And we can go to the biggest swamp in the western Amazon. It's a watery dreamworld akin to Jim Cameron's "Avatar." We can go to one of the smallest tropical countries, Panama, and see also a huge range of carbon variation, from high in red to low in blue. Unfortunately, most of the carbon is lost in the lowlands, but what you see that's left, in terms of high carbon stocks in greens and reds, is the stuff that's up in the mountains. One interesting exception to this is right in the middle of your screen. You're seeing the buffer zone around the Panama Canal. That's in the reds and yellows. The canal authorities are using force to protect their watershed and global commerce. This kind of carbon mapping has transformed conservation and resource policy development. It's really advancing our ability to save forests and to curb climate change. My second question: How do we prepare for climate change in a place like the Amazon rainforest? Let me tell you, I spend a lot of time in these places, and we're seeing the climate changing already. Temperatures are increasing, and what's really happening is we're getting a lot of droughts, recurring droughts. The 2010 mega-drought is shown here with red showing an area about the size of Western Europe. The Amazon was so dry in 2010 that even the main stem of the Amazon river itself dried up partially, as you see in the photo in the lower portion of the slide. What we found is that in very remote areas, these droughts are having a big negative impact on tropical forests. For example, these are all of the dead trees in red that suffered mortality following the 2010 drought. This area happens to be on the border of Peru and Brazil, totally unexplored, almost totally unknown scientifically. So what we think, as Earth scientists, is species are going to have to migrate with climate change from the east in Brazil all the way west into the Andes and up into the mountains in order to minimize their exposure to climate change. One of the problems with this is that humans are taking apart the western Amazon as we speak. Look at this 100-square-kilometer gash in the forest created by gold miners. You see the forest in green in 3D, and you see the effects of gold mining down below the soil surface. Species have nowhere to migrate in a system like this, obviously. If you haven't been to the Amazon, you should go. It's an amazing experience every time, no matter where you go. You're going to probably see it this way, on a river. But what happens is a lot of times the rivers hide what's really going on back in the forest itself. We flew over this same river, imaged the system in 3D. The forest is on the left. And then we can digitally remove the forest and see what's going on below the canopy. And in this case, we found gold mining activity, all of it illegal, set back away from the river's edge, as you'll see in those strange pockmarks coming up on your screen on the right. Don't worry, we're working with the authorities to deal with this and many, many other problems in the region. So in order to put together a conservation plan for these unique, important corridors like the western Amazon and the Andes Amazon corridor, we have to start making geographically explicit plans now. How do we do that if we don't know the geography of biodiversity in the region, if it's so unknown to science? So what we've been doing is using the laser-guided spectroscopy from the CAO to map for the first time the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest. Here you see actual data showing different species in different colors. Reds are one type of species, blues are another, and greens are yet another. And when we take this together and scale up to the regional level, we get a completely new geography of biodiversity unknown prior to this work. This tells us where the big biodiversity changes occur from habitat to habitat, and that's really important because it tells us a lot about where species may migrate to and migrate from as the climate shifts. And this is the pivotal information that's needed by decision makers to develop protected areas in the context of their regional development plans. And third and final question is, how do we manage biodiversity on a planet of protected ecosystems? The example I started out with about lions hunting, that was a study we did behind the fence line of a protected area in South Africa. And the truth is, much of Africa's nature is going to persist into the future in protected areas like I show in blue on the screen. This puts incredible pressure and responsibility on park management. They need to do and make decisions that will benefit all of the species that they're protecting. Some of their decisions have really big impacts. For example, how much and where to use fire as a management tool? Or, how to deal with a large species like elephants, which may, if their populations get too large, have a negative impact on the ecosystem and on other species. And let me tell you, these types of dynamics really play out on the landscape. In the foreground is an area with lots of fire and lots of elephants: wide open savanna in blue, and just a few trees. As we cross this fence line, now we're getting into an area that has had protection from fire and zero elephants: dense vegetation, a radically different ecosystem. And in a place like Kruger, the soaring elephant densities are a real problem. I know it's a sensitive issue for many of you, and there are no easy answers with this. But what's good is that the technology we've developed and we're working with in South Africa, for example, is allowing us to map every single tree in the savanna, and then through repeat flights we're able to see which trees are being pushed over by elephants, in the red as you see on the screen, and how much that's happening in different types of landscapes in the savanna. That's giving park managers a very first opportunity to use tactical management strategies that are more nuanced and don't lead to those extremes that I just showed you. So really, the way we're looking at protected areas nowadays is to think of it as tending to a circle of life, where we have fire management, elephant management, those impacts on the structure of the ecosystem, and then those impacts affecting everything from insects up to apex predators like lions. Going forward, I plan to greatly expand the airborne observatory. I'm hoping to actually put the technology into orbit so we can manage the entire planet with technologies like this. Until then, you're going to find me flying in some remote place that you've never heard of. I just want to end by saying that technology is absolutely critical to managing our planet, but even more important is the understanding and wisdom to apply it. Thank you. (Applause) |
Meet the robots for humanity | {0: "In 2003, Henry Evans became quadriplegic and mute after a stroke-like attack. Now, working with Robots for Humanity, he's a pioneer in adaptive robotic tech to help him, and other disabled people like him, navigate the world."} | TEDxMidAtlantic | Sarge Salman: All the way from Los Altos Hills, California, Mr. Henry Evans. (Applause) Henry Evans: Hello. My name is Henry Evans, and until August 29, 2002, I was living my version of the American dream. I grew up in a typical American town near St. Louis. My dad was a lawyer. My mom was a homemaker. My six siblings and I were good kids, but caused our fair share of trouble. After high school, I left home to study and learn more about the world. I went to Notre Dame University and graduated with degrees in accounting and German, including spending a year of study in Austria. Later on, I earned an MBA at Stanford. I married my high school sweetheart, Jane. I am lucky to have her. Together, we raised four wonderful children. I worked and studied hard to move up the career ladder, eventually becoming a chief financial officer in Silicon Valley, a job I really enjoyed. My family and I bought our first and only home on December 13, 2001, a fixer-upper in a beautiful spot of Los Altos Hills, California, from where I am speaking to you now. We were looking forward to rebuilding it, but eight months after we moved in, I suffered a stroke-like attack caused by a birth defect. Overnight, I became a mute quadriplegic at the ripe old age of 40. It took me several years, but with the help of an incredibly supportive family, I finally decided life was still worth living. I became fascinated with using technology to help the severely disabled. Head tracking devices sold commercially by the company Madentec convert my tiny head movements into cursor movements, and enable my use of a regular computer. I can surf the web, exchange email with people, and routinely destroy my friend Steve Cousins in online word games. This technology allows me to remain engaged, mentally active, and feel like I am a part of the world. One day, I was lying in bed watching CNN, when I was amazed by Professor Charlie Kemp of the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech demonstrating a PR2 robot. I emailed Charlie and Steve Cousins of Willow Garage, and we formed the Robots for Humanity project. For about two years, Robots for Humanity developed ways for me to use the PR2 as my body surrogate. I shaved myself for the first time in 10 years. From my home in California, I shaved Charlie in Atlanta. (Laughter) I handed out Halloween candy. I opened my refrigerator on my own. I began doing tasks around the house. I saw new and previously unthinkable possibilities to live and contribute, both for myself and others in my circumstance. All of us have disabilities in one form or another. For example, if either of us wants to go 60 miles an hour, both of us will need an assistive device called a car. Your disability doesn't make you any less of a person, and neither does mine. By the way, check out my sweet ride. (Laughter) Since birth, we have both suffered from the inability to fly on our own. Last year, Kaijen Hsiao of Willow Garage connected with me Chad Jenkins. Chad showed me how easy it is to purchase and fly aerial drones. It was then I realized that I could also use an aerial drone to expand the worlds of bedridden people through flight, giving a sense of movement and control that is incredible. Using a mouse cursor I control with my head, these web interfaces allow me to see video from the robot and send control commands by pressing buttons in a web browser. With a little practice, I became good enough with this interface to drive around my home on my own. I could look around our garden and see the grapes we are growing. I inspected the solar panels on our roof. (Laughter) One of my challenges as a pilot is to land the drone on our basketball hoop. I went even further by seeing if I could use a head-mounted display, the Oculus Rift, as modified by Fighting Walrus, to have an immersive experience controlling the drone. With Chad's group at Brown, I regularly fly drones around his lab several times a week, from my home 3,000 miles away. All work and no fun makes for a dull quadriplegic, so we also find time to play friendly games of robot soccer. (Laughter) I never thought I would be able to casually move around a campus like Brown on my own. I just wish I could afford the tuition. (Laughter) Chad Jenkins: Henry, all joking aside, I bet all of these people here would love to see you fly this drone from your bed in California 3,000 miles away. (Applause) Okay, Henry, have you been to D.C. lately? (Laughter) Are you excited to be at TEDxMidAtlantic? (Laughter) (Applause) Can you show us how excited you are? (Laughter) All right, big finish. Can you show us how good of a pilot you are? (Applause) All right, we still have a little ways to go with that, but I think it shows the promise. What makes Henry's story amazing is it's about understanding Henry's needs, understanding what people in Henry's situation need from technology, and then also understanding what advanced technology can provide, and then bringing those two things together for use in a wise and responsible way. What we're trying to do is democratize robotics, so that anybody can be a part of this. We're providing affordable, off-the-shelf robot platforms such as the A.R. drone, 300 dollars, the Suitable Technologies beam, only 17,000 dollars, along with open-source robotics software so that you can be a part of what we're trying to do. And our hope is that, by providing these tools, that you'll be able to think of better ways to provide movement for the disabled, to provide care for our aging population, to help better educate our children, to think about what the new types of middle class jobs could be for the future, to both monitor and protect our environment, and to explore the universe. Back to you, Henry. HE: Thank you, Chad. With this drone setup, we show the potential for bedridden people to once again be able to explore the outside world, and robotics will eventually provide a level playing field where one is only limited by their mental acuity and imagination, where the disabled are able to perform the same activities as everyone else, and perhaps better, and technology will even allow us to provide an outlet for many people who are presently considered vegetables. One hundred years ago, I would have been treated like a vegetable. Actually, that's not true. I would have died. It is up to us, all of us, to decide how robotics will be used, for good or for evil, for simply replacing people or for making people better, for allowing us to do and enjoy more. Our goal for robotics is to unlock everyone's mental power by making the world more physically accessible to people such as myself and others like me around the globe. With the help of people like you, we can make this dream a reality. Thank you. (Applause) |
No roads? There's a drone for that | {0: 'Andreas Raptopoulos and his colleagues are building the flying internet of things, using drones to carry essential goods to otherwise inaccessible areas.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | One billion people in the world today do not have access to all-season roads. One billion people. One seventh of the Earth's population are totally cut off for some part of the year. We cannot get medicine to them reliably, they cannot get critical supplies, and they cannot get their goods to market in order to create a sustainable income. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, 85 percent of roads are unusable in the wet season. Investments are being made, but at the current level, it's estimated it's going to take them 50 years to catch up. In the U.S. alone, there's more than four million miles of roads, very expensive to build, very expensive to maintain infrastructure, with a huge ecological footprint, and yet, very often, congested. So we saw this and we thought, can there be a better way? Can we create a system using today's most advanced technologies that can allow this part of the world to leapfrog in the same way they've done with mobile telephones in the last 10 years? Many of those nations have excellent telecommunications today without ever putting copper lines in the ground. Could we do the same for transportation? Imagine this scenario. Imagine you are in a maternity ward in Mali, and have a newborn in need of urgent medication. What would you do today? Well, you would place a request via mobile phone, and someone would get the request immediately. That's the part that works. The medication may take days to arrive, though, because of bad roads. That's the part that's broken. We believe we can deliver it within hours with an electric autonomous flying vehicle such as this. This can transport a small payload today, about two kilograms, over a short distance, about 10 kilometers, but it's part of a wider network that may cover the entire country, maybe even the entire continent. It's an ultra-flexible, automated logistics network. It's a network for a transportation of matter. We call it Matternet. We use three key technologies. The first is electric autonomous flying vehicles. The second is automated ground stations that the vehicles fly in and out of to swap batteries and fly farther, or pick up or deliver loads. And the third is the operating system that manages the whole network. Let's look at each one of those technologies in a bit more detail. First of all, the UAVs. Eventually, we're going to be using all sorts of vehicles for different payload capacities and different ranges. Today, we're using small quads. These are able to transport two kilograms over 10 kilometers in just about 15 minutes. Compare this with trying to trespass a bad road in the developing world, or even being stuck in traffic in a developed world country. These fly autonomously. This is the key to the technology. So they use GPS and other sensors on board to navigate between ground stations. Every vehicle is equipped with an automatic payload and battery exchange mechanism, so these vehicles navigate to those ground stations, they dock, swap a battery automatically, and go out again. The ground stations are located on safe locations on the ground. They secure the most vulnerable part of the mission, which is the landing. They are at known locations on the ground, so the paths between them are also known, which is very important from a reliability perspective from the whole network. Apart from fulfilling the energy requirements of the vehicles, eventually they're going to be becoming commercial hubs where people can take out loads or put loads into the network. The last component is the operating system that manages the whole network. It monitors weather data from all the ground stations and optimizes the routes of the vehicles through the system to avoid adverse weather conditions, avoid other risk factors, and optimize the use of the resources throughout the network. I want to show you what one of those flights looks like. Here we are flying in Haiti last summer, where we've done our first field trials. We're modeling here a medical delivery in a camp we set up after the 2010 earthquake. People there love this. And I want to show you what one of those vehicles looks like up close. So this is a $3,000 vehicle. Costs are coming down very rapidly. We use this in all sorts of weather conditions, very hot and very cold climates, very strong winds. They're very sturdy vehicles. Imagine if your life depended on this package, somewhere in Africa or in New York City, after Sandy. The next big question is, what's the cost? Well, it turns out that the cost to transport two kilograms over 10 kilometers with this vehicle is just 24 cents. (Applause) And it's counterintuitive, but the cost of energy expended for the flight is only two cents of a dollar today, and we're just at the beginning of this. When we saw this, we felt that this is something that can have significant impact in the world. So we said, okay, how much does it cost to set up a network somewhere in the world? And we looked at setting up a network in Lesotho for transportation of HIV/AIDS samples. The problem there is how do you take them from clinics where they're being collected to hospitals where they're being analyzed? And we said, what if we wanted to cover an area spanning around 140 square kilometers? That's roughly one and a half times the size of Manhattan. Well it turns out that the cost to do that there would be less than a million dollars. Compare this to normal infrastructure investments. We think this can be — this is the power of a new paradigm. So here we are: a new idea about a network for transportation that is based on the ideas of the Internet. It's decentralized, it's peer-to-peer, it's bidirectional, highly adaptable, with very low infrastructure investment, very low ecological footprint. If it is a new paradigm, though, there must be other uses for it. It can be used perhaps in other places in the world. So let's look at the other end of the spectrum: our cities and megacities. Half of the Earth's population lives in cities today. Half a billion of us live in megacities. We are living through an amazing urbanization trend. China alone is adding a megacity the size of New York City every two years. These are places that do have road infrastructure, but it's very inefficient. Congestion is a huge problem. So we think it makes sense in those places to set up a network of transportation that is a new layer that sits between the road and the Internet, initially for lightweight, urgent stuff, and over time, we would hope to develop this into a new mode of transportation that is truly a modern solution to a very old problem. It's ultimately scalable with a very small ecological footprint, operating in the background 24/7, just like the Internet. So when we started this a couple of years ago now, we've had a lot of people come up to us who said, "This is a very interesting but crazy idea, and certainly not something that you should engage with anytime soon." And of course, we're talking about drones, right, a technology that's not only unpopular in the West but one that has become a very, very unpleasant fact of life for many living in poor countries, especially those engaged in conflict. So why are we doing this? Well, we chose to do this one not because it's easy, but because it can have amazing impact. Imagine one billion people being connected to physical goods in the same way that mobile telecommunications connected them to information. Imagine if the next big network we built in the world was a network for the transportation of matter. In the developing world, we would hope to reach millions of people with better vaccines, reach them with better medication. It would give us an unfair advantage against battling HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other epidemics. Over time, we would hope it would become a new platform for economic transactions, lifting millions of people out of poverty. In the developed world and the emerging world, we would hope it would become a new mode of transportation that could help make our cities more livable. So for those that still believe that this is science fiction, I firmly say to you that it is not. We do need to engage, though, in social fiction to make it happen. Thank you. (Applause) |
How your "working memory" makes sense of the world | {0: 'Peter Doolittle is striving to understand the processes of human learning.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | So yesterday, I was out in the street in front of this building, and I was walking down the sidewalk, and I had company, several of us, and we were all abiding by the rules of walking down sidewalks. We're not talking each other. We're facing forward. We're moving. When the person in front of me slows down. And so I'm watching him, and he slows down, and finally he stops. Well, that wasn't fast enough for me, so I put on my turn signal, and I walked around him, and as I walked, I looked to see what he was doing, and he was doing this. He was texting, and he couldn't text and walk at the same time. Now we could approach this from a working memory perspective or from a multitasking perspective. We're going to do working memory today. Now, working memory is that part of our consciousness that we are aware of at any given time of day. You're going it right now. It's not something we can turn off. If you turn it off, that's called a coma, okay? So right now, you're doing just fine. Now working memory has four basic components. It allows us to store some immediate experiences and a little bit of knowledge. It allows us to reach back into our long-term memory and pull some of that in as we need it, mixes it, processes it in light of whatever our current goal is. Now the current goal isn't something like, I want to be president or the best surfer in the world. It's more mundane. I'd like that cookie, or I need to figure out how to get into my hotel room. Now working memory capacity is our ability to leverage that, our ability to take what we know and what we can hang onto and leverage it in ways that allow us to satisfy our current goal. Now working memory capacity has a fairly long history, and it's associated with a lot of positive effects. People with high working memory capacity tend to be good storytellers. They tend to solve and do well on standardized tests, however important that is. They're able to have high levels of writing ability. They're also able to reason at high levels. So what we're going to do here is play a little bit with some of that. So I'm going to ask you to perform a couple tasks, and we're going to take your working memory out for a ride. You up for that? Okay. I'm going to give you five words, and I just want you to hang on to them. Don't write them down. Just hang on to them. Five words. While you're hanging on to them, I'm going to ask you to answer three questions. I want to see what happens with those words. So here's the words: tree, highway, mirror, Saturn and electrode. So far so good? Okay. What I want you to do is I want you to tell me what the answer is to 23 times eight. Just shout it out. (Mumbling) (Laughter) In fact it's — (Mumbling) — exactly. (Laughter) All right. I want you to take out your left hand and I want you to go, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10." It's a neurological test, just in case you were wondering. All right, now what I want you to do is to recite the last five letters of the English alphabet backwards. You should have started with Z. (Laughter) All right. How many people here are still pretty sure you've got all five words? Okay. Typically we end up with about less than half, right, which is normal. There will be a range. Some people can hang on to five. Some people can hang on to 10. Some will be down to two or three. What we know is this is really important to the way we function, right? And it's going to be really important here at TED because you're going to be exposed to so many different ideas. Now the problem that we have is that life comes at us, and it comes at us very quickly, and what we need to do is to take that amorphous flow of experience and somehow extract meaning from it with a working memory that's about the size of a pea. Now don't get me wrong, working memory is awesome. Working memory allows us to investigate our current experience as we move forward. It allows us to make sense of the world around us. But it does have certain limits. Now working memory is great for allowing us to communicate. We can have a conversation, and I can build a narrative around that so I know where we've been and where we're going and how to contribute to this conversation. It allows us to problem-solve, critical think. We can be in the middle of a meeting, listen to somebody's presentation, evaluate it, decide whether or not we like it, ask follow-up questions. All of that occurs within working memory. It also allows us to go to the store and allows us to get milk and eggs and cheese when what we're really looking for is Red Bull and bacon. (Laughter) Gotta make sure we're getting what we're looking for. Now, a central issue with working memory is that it's limited. It's limited in capacity, limited in duration, limited in focus. We tend to remember about four things. Okay? It used to be seven, but with functional MRIs, apparently it's four, and we were overachieving. Now we can remember those four things for about 10 to 20 seconds unless we do something with it, unless we process it, unless we apply it to something, unless we talk to somebody about it. When we think about working memory, we have to realize that this limited capacity has lots of different impacts on us. Have you ever walked from one room to another and then forgotten why you're there? You do know the solution to that, right? You go back to that original room. (Laughter) Have you ever forgotten your keys? You ever forgotten your car? You ever forgotten your kids? Have you ever been involved in a conversation, and you realize that the conversation to your left is actually more interesting? (Laughter) So you're nodding and you're smiling, but you're really paying attention to this one over here, until you hear that last word go up, and you realize, you've been asked a question. (Laughter) And you're really hoping the answer is no, because that's what you're about to say. All of that talks about working memory, what we can do and what we can't do. We need to realize that working memory has a limited capacity, and that working memory capacity itself is how we negotiate that. We negotiate that through strategies. So what I want to do is talk a little bit about a couple of strategies here, and these will be really important because you are now in an information target-rich environment for the next several days. Now the first part of this that we need to think about and we need to process our existence, our life, immediately and repeatedly. We need to process what's going on the moment it happens, not 10 minutes later, not a week later, at the moment. So we need to think about, well, do I agree with him? What's missing? What would I like to know? Do I agree with the assumptions? How can I apply this in my life? It's a way of processing what's going on so that we can use it later. Now we also need to repeat it. We need to practice. So we need to think about it here. In between, we want to talk to people about it. We're going to write it down, and when you get home, pull out those notes and think about them and end up practicing over time. Practice for some reason became a very negative thing. It's very positive. The next thing is, we need to think elaboratively and we need to think illustratively. Oftentimes, we think that we have to relate new knowledge to prior knowledge. What we want to do is spin that around. We want to take all of our existence and wrap it around that new knowledge and make all of these connections and it becomes more meaningful. We also want to use imagery. We are built for images. We need to take advantage of that. Think about things in images, write things down that way. If you read a book, pull things up. I just got through reading "The Great Gatsby," and I have a perfect idea of what he looks like in my head, so my own version. The last one is organization and support. We are meaning-making machines. It's what we do. We try to make meaning out of everything that happens to us. Organization helps, so we need to structure what we're doing in ways that make sense. If we are providing knowledge and experience, we need to structure that. And the last one is support. We all started as novices. Everything we do is an approximation of sophistication. We should expect it to change over time. We have to support that. The support may come in asking people questions, giving them a sheet of paper that has an organizational chart on it or has some guiding images, but we need to support it. Now, the final piece of this, the take-home message from a working memory capacity standpoint is this: what we process, we learn. If we're not processing life, we're not living it. Live life. Thank you. (Applause) |
How societies can grow old better | {0: 'Jared Diamond investigates why cultures prosper or decline -- and what we can learn by taking a broad look across many kinds of societies.'} | TED2013 | To give me an idea of how many of you here may find what I'm about to tell you of practical value, let me ask you please to raise your hands: Who here is either over 65 years old or hopes to live past age 65 or has parents or grandparents who did live or have lived past 65, raise your hands please. (Laughter) Okay. You are the people to whom my talk will be of practical value. (Laughter) The rest of you won't find my talk personally relevant, but I think that you will still find the subject fascinating. I'm going to talk about growing older in traditional societies. This subject constitutes just one chapter of my latest book, which compares traditional, small, tribal societies with our large, modern societies, with respect to many topics such as bringing up children, growing older, health, dealing with danger, settling disputes, religion and speaking more than one language. Those tribal societies, which constituted all human societies for most of human history, are far more diverse than are our modern, recent, big societies. All big societies that have governments, and where most people are strangers to each other, are inevitably similar to each other and different from tribal societies. Tribes constitute thousands of natural experiments in how to run a human society. They constitute experiments from which we ourselves may be able to learn. Tribal societies shouldn't be scorned as primitive and miserable, but also they shouldn't be romanticized as happy and peaceful. When we learn of tribal practices, some of them will horrify us, but there are other tribal practices which, when we hear about them, we may admire and envy and wonder whether we could adopt those practices ourselves. Most old people in the U.S. end up living separately from their children and from most of their friends of their earlier years, and often they live in separate retirements homes for the elderly, whereas in traditional societies, older people instead live out their lives among their children, their other relatives, and their lifelong friends. Nevertheless, the treatment of the elderly varies enormously among traditional societies, from much worse to much better than in our modern societies. At the worst extreme, many traditional societies get rid of their elderly in one of four increasingly direct ways: by neglecting their elderly and not feeding or cleaning them until they die, or by abandoning them when the group moves, or by encouraging older people to commit suicide, or by killing older people. In which tribal societies do children abandon or kill their parents? It happens mainly under two conditions. One is in nomadic, hunter-gather societies that often shift camp and that are physically incapable of transporting old people who can't walk when the able-bodied younger people already have to carry their young children and all their physical possessions. The other condition is in societies living in marginal or fluctuating environments, such as the Arctic or deserts, where there are periodic food shortages, and occasionally there just isn't enough food to keep everyone alive. Whatever food is available has to be reserved for able-bodied adults and for children. To us Americans, it sounds horrible to think of abandoning or killing your own sick wife or husband or elderly mother or father, but what could those traditional societies do differently? They face a cruel situation of no choice. Their old people had to do it to their own parents, and the old people know what now is going to happen to them. At the opposite extreme in treatment of the elderly, the happy extreme, are the New Guinea farming societies where I've been doing my fieldwork for the past 50 years, and most other sedentary traditional societies around the world. In those societies, older people are cared for. They are fed. They remain valuable. And they continue to live in the same hut or else in a nearby hut near their children, relatives and lifelong friends. There are two main sets of reasons for this variation among societies in their treatment of old people. The variation depends especially on the usefulness of old people and on the society's values. First, as regards usefulness, older people continue to perform useful services. One use of older people in traditional societies is that they often are still effective at producing food. Another traditional usefulness of older people is that they are capable of babysitting their grandchildren, thereby freeing up their own adult children, the parents of those grandchildren, to go hunting and gathering food for the grandchildren. Still another traditional value of older people is in making tools, weapons, baskets, pots and textiles. In fact, they're usually the people who are best at it. Older people usually are the leaders of traditional societies, and the people most knowledgeable about politics, medicine, religion, songs and dances. Finally, older people in traditional societies have a huge significance that would never occur to us in our modern, literate societies, where our sources of information are books and the Internet. In contrast, in traditional societies without writing, older people are the repositories of information. It's their knowledge that spells the difference between survival and death for their whole society in a time of crisis caused by rare events for which only the oldest people alive have had experience. Those, then, are the ways in which older people are useful in traditional societies. Their usefulness varies and contributes to variation in the society's treatment of the elderly. The other set of reasons for variation in the treatment of the elderly is the society's cultural values. For example, there's particular emphasis on respect for the elderly in East Asia, associated with Confucius' doctrine of filial piety, which means obedience, respect and support for elderly parents. Cultural values that emphasize respect for older people contrast with the low status of the elderly in the U.S. Older Americans are at a big disadvantage in job applications. They're at a big disadvantage in hospitals. Our hospitals have an explicit policy called age-based allocation of healthcare resources. That sinister expression means that if hospital resources are limited, for example if only one donor heart becomes available for transplant, or if a surgeon has time to operate on only a certain number of patients, American hospitals have an explicit policy of giving preference to younger patients over older patients on the grounds that younger patients are considered more valuable to society because they have more years of life ahead of them, even though the younger patients have fewer years of valuable life experience behind them. There are several reasons for this low status of the elderly in the U.S. One is our Protestant work ethic which places high value on work, so older people who are no longer working aren't respected. Another reason is our American emphasis on the virtues of self-reliance and independence, so we instinctively look down on older people who are no longer self-reliant and independent. Still a third reason is our American cult of youth, which shows up even in our advertisements. Ads for Coca-Cola and beer always depict smiling young people, even though old as well as young people buy and drink Coca-Cola and beer. Just think, what's the last time you saw a Coke or beer ad depicting smiling people 85 years old? Never. Instead, the only American ads featuring white-haired old people are ads for retirement homes and pension planning. Well, what has changed in the status of the elderly today compared to their status in traditional societies? There have been a few changes for the better and more changes for the worse. Big changes for the better include the fact that today we enjoy much longer lives, much better health in our old age, and much better recreational opportunities. Another change for the better is that we now have specialized retirement facilities and programs to take care of old people. Changes for the worse begin with the cruel reality that we now have more old people and fewer young people than at any time in the past. That means that all those old people are more of a burden on the few young people, and that each old person has less individual value. Another big change for the worse in the status of the elderly is the breaking of social ties with age, because older people, their children, and their friends, all move and scatter independently of each other many times during their lives. We Americans move on the average every five years. Hence our older people are likely to end up living distant from their children and the friends of their youth. Yet another change for the worse in the status of the elderly is formal retirement from the workforce, carrying with it a loss of work friendships and a loss of the self-esteem associated with work. Perhaps the biggest change for the worse is that our elderly are objectively less useful than in traditional societies. Widespread literacy means that they are no longer useful as repositories of knowledge. When we want some information, we look it up in a book or we Google it instead of finding some old person to ask. The slow pace of technological change in traditional societies means that what someone learns there as a child is still useful when that person is old, but the rapid pace of technological change today means that what we learn as children is no longer useful 60 years later. And conversely, we older people are not fluent in the technologies essential for surviving in modern society. For example, as a 15-year-old, I was considered outstandingly good at multiplying numbers because I had memorized the multiplication tables and I know how to use logarithms and I'm quick at manipulating a slide rule. Today, though, those skills are utterly useless because any idiot can now multiply eight-digit numbers accurately and instantly with a pocket calculator. Conversely, I at age 75 am incompetent at skills essential for everyday life. My family's first TV set in 1948 had only three knobs that I quickly mastered: an on-off switch, a volume knob, and a channel selector knob. Today, just to watch a program on the TV set in my own house, I have to operate a 41-button TV remote that utterly defeats me. I have to telephone my 25-year-old sons and ask them to talk me through it while I try to push those wretched 41 buttons. What can we do to improve the lives of the elderly in the U.S., and to make better use of their value? That's a huge problem. In my remaining four minutes today, I can offer just a few suggestions. One value of older people is that they are increasingly useful as grandparents for offering high-quality childcare to their grandchildren, if they choose to do it, as more young women enter the workforce and as fewer young parents of either gender stay home as full-time caretakers of their children. Compared to the usual alternatives of paid babysitters and day care centers, grandparents offer superior, motivated, experienced child care. They've already gained experience from raising their own children. They usually love their grandchildren, and are eager to spend time with them. Unlike other caregivers, grandparents don't quit their job because they found another job with higher pay looking after another baby. A second value of older people is paradoxically related to their loss of value as a result of changing world conditions and technology. At the same time, older people have gained in value today precisely because of their unique experience of living conditions that have now become rare because of rapid change, but that could come back. For example, only Americans now in their 70s or older today can remember the experience of living through a great depression, the experience of living through a world war, and agonizing whether or not dropping atomic bombs would be more horrible than the likely consequences of not dropping atomic bombs. Most of our current voters and politicians have no personal experience of any of those things, but millions of older Americans do. Unfortunately, all of those terrible situations could come back. Even if they don't come back, we have to be able to plan for them on the basis of the experience of what they were like. Older people have that experience. Younger people don't. The remaining value of older people that I'll mention involves recognizing that while there are many things that older people can no longer do, there are other things that they can do better than younger people. A challenge for society is to make use of those things that older people are better at doing. Some abilities, of course, decrease with age. Those include abilities at tasks requiring physical strength and stamina, ambition, and the power of novel reasoning in a circumscribed situation, such as figuring out the structure of DNA, best left to scientists under the age of 30. Conversely, valuable attributes that increase with age include experience, understanding of people and human relationships, ability to help other people without your own ego getting in the way, and interdisciplinary thinking about large databases, such as economics and comparative history, best left to scholars over the age of 60. Hence older people are much better than younger people at supervising, administering, advising, strategizing, teaching, synthesizing, and devising long-term plans. I've seen this value of older people with so many of my friends in their 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, who are still active as investment managers, farmers, lawyers and doctors. In short, many traditional societies make better use of their elderly and give their elderly more satisfying lives than we do in modern, big societies. Paradoxically nowadays, when we have more elderly people than ever before, living healthier lives and with better medical care than ever before, old age is in some respects more miserable than ever before. The lives of the elderly are widely recognized as constituting a disaster area of modern American society. We can surely do better by learning from the lives of the elderly in traditional societies. But what's true of the lives of the elderly in traditional societies is true of many other features of traditional societies as well. Of course, I'm not advocating that we all give up agriculture and metal tools and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. There are many obvious respects in which our lives today are far happier than those in small, traditional societies. To mention just a few examples, our lives are longer, materially much richer, and less plagued by violence than are the lives of people in traditional societies. But there are also things to be admired about people in traditional societies, and perhaps to be learned from them. Their lives are usually socially much richer than our lives, although materially poorer. Their children are more self-confident, more independent, and more socially skilled than are our children. They think more realistically about dangers than we do. They almost never die of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and the other noncommunicable diseases that will be the causes of death of almost all of us in this room today. Features of the modern lifestyle predispose us to those diseases, and features of the traditional lifestyle protect us against them. Those are just some examples of what we can learn from traditional societies. I hope that you will find it as fascinating to read about traditional societies as I found it to live in those societies. Thank you. (Applause) |
What is so special about the human brain? | {0: 'Suzana Herculano-Houzel shrunk the human brain by 14 billion neurons -- by developing a new way to count them.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | What is so special about the human brain? Why is it that we study other animals instead of them studying us? What does a human brain have or do that no other brain does? When I became interested in these questions about 10 years ago, scientists thought they knew what different brains were made of. Though it was based on very little evidence, many scientists thought that all mammalian brains, including the human brain, were made in the same way, with a number of neurons that was always proportional to the size of the brain. This means that two brains of the same size, like these two, with a respectable 400 grams, should have similar numbers of neurons. Now, if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain, then the owners of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities. And yet, one is a chimp, and the other is a cow. Now maybe cows have a really rich internal mental life and are so smart that they choose not to let us realize it, but we eat them. I think most people will agree that chimps are capable of much more complex, elaborate and flexible behaviors than cows are. So this is a first indication that the "all brains are made the same way" scenario is not quite right. But let's play along. If all brains were made the same way and you were to compare animals with brains of different sizes, larger brains should always have more neurons than smaller brains, and the larger the brain, the more cognitively able its owner should be. So the largest brain around should also be the most cognitively able. And here comes the bad news: Our brain, not the largest one around. It seems quite vexing. Our brain weighs between 1.2 and 1.5 kilos, but elephant brains weigh between four and five kilos, and whale brains can weigh up to nine kilos, which is why scientists used to resort to saying that our brain must be special to explain our cognitive abilities. It must be really extraordinary, an exception to the rule. Theirs may be bigger, but ours is better, and it could be better, for example, in that it seems larger than it should be, with a much larger cerebral cortex than we should have for the size of our bodies. So that would give us extra cortex to do more interesting things than just operating the body. That's because the size of the brain usually follows the size of the body. So the main reason for saying that our brain is larger than it should be actually comes from comparing ourselves to great apes. Gorillas can be two to three times larger than we are, so their brains should also be larger than ours, but instead it's the other way around. Our brain is three times larger than a gorilla brain. The human brain also seems special in the amount of energy that it uses. Although it weighs only two percent of the body, it alone uses 25 percent of all the energy that your body requires to run per day. That's 500 calories out of a total of 2,000 calories, just to keep your brain working. So the human brain is larger than it should be, it uses much more energy than it should, so it's special. And this is where the story started to bother me. In biology, we look for rules that apply to all animals and to life in general, so why should the rules of evolution apply to everybody else but not to us? Maybe the problem was with the basic assumption that all brains are made in the same way. Maybe two brains of a similar size can actually be made of very different numbers of neurons. Maybe a very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more modest-sized brain. Maybe the human brain actually has the most neurons of any brain, regardless of its size, especially in the cerebral cortex. So this to me became the important question to answer: how many neurons does the human brain have, and how does that compare to other animals? Now, you may have heard or read somewhere that we have 100 billion neurons, so 10 years ago, I asked my colleagues if they knew where this number came from. But nobody did. I've been digging through the literature for the original reference for that number, and I could never find it. It seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of neurons in the human brain, or in any other brain for that matter. So I came up with my own way to count cells in the brain, and it essentially consists of dissolving that brain into soup. It works like this: You take a brain, or parts of that brain, and you dissolve it in detergent, which destroys the cell membranes but keeps the cell nuclei intact, so you end up with a suspension of free nuclei that looks like this, like a clear soup. This soup contains all the nuclei that once were a mouse brain. Now, the beauty of a soup is that because it is soup, you can agitate it and make those nuclei be distributed homogeneously in the liquid, so that now by looking under the microscope at just four or five samples of this homogeneous solution, you can count nuclei, and therefore tell how many cells that brain had. It's simple, it's straightforward, and it's really fast. So we've used that method to count neurons in dozens of different species so far, and it turns out that all brains are not made the same way. Take rodents and primates, for instance: In larger rodent brains, the average size of the neuron increases, so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons. But primate brains gain neurons without the average neuron becoming any larger, which is a very economical way to add neurons to your brain. The result is that a primate brain will always have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size, and the larger the brain, the larger this difference will be. Well, what about our brain then? We found that we have, on average, 86 billion neurons, 16 billion of which are in the cerebral cortex, and if you consider that the cerebral cortex is the seat of functions like awareness and logical and abstract reasoning, and that 16 billion is the most neurons that any cortex has, I think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. But just as important is what the 86 billion neurons mean. Because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and its number of neurons could be described mathematically, we could calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a rodent brain. So, a rodent brain with 86 billion neurons would weigh 36 kilos. That's not possible. A brain that huge would be crushed by its own weight, and this impossible brain would go in the body of 89 tons. I don't think it looks like us. So this brings us to a very important conclusion already, which is that we are not rodents. The human brain is not a large rat brain. Compared to a rat, we might seem special, yes, but that's not a fair comparison to make, given that we know that we are not rodents. We are primates, so the correct comparison is to other primates. And there, if you do the math, you find that a generic primate with 86 billion neurons would have a brain of about 1.2 kilos, which seems just right, in a body of some 66 kilos, which in my case is exactly right, which brings us to a very unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion: I am a primate. And all of you are primates. And so was Darwin. I love to think that Darwin would have really appreciated this. His brain, like ours, was made in the image of other primate brains. So the human brain may be remarkable, yes, but it is not special in its number of neurons. It is just a large primate brain. I think that's a very humbling and sobering thought that should remind us of our place in nature. Why does it cost so much energy, then? Well, other people have figured out how much energy the human brain and that of other species costs, and now that we knew how many neurons each brain was made of, we could do the math. And it turns out that both human and other brains cost about the same, an average of six calories per billion neurons per day. So the total energetic cost of a brain is a simple, linear function of its number of neurons, and it turns out that the human brain costs just as much energy as you would expect. So the reason why the human brain costs so much energy is simply because it has a huge number of neurons, and because we are primates with many more neurons for a given body size than any other animal, the relative cost of our brain is large, but just because we're primates, not because we're special. Last question, then: how did we come by this remarkable number of neurons, and in particular, if great apes are larger than we are, why don't they have a larger brain than we do, with more neurons? When we realized how much expensive it is to have a lot of neurons in the brain, I figured, maybe there's a simple reason. They just can't afford the energy for both a large body and a large number of neurons. So we did the math. We calculated on the one hand how much energy a primate gets per day from eating raw foods, and on the other hand, how much energy a body of a certain size costs and how much energy a brain of a certain number of neurons costs, and we looked for the combinations of body size and number of brain neurons that a primate could afford if it ate a certain number of hours per day. And what we found is that because neurons are so expensive, there is a tradeoff between body size and number of neurons. So a primate that eats eight hours per day can afford at most 53 billion neurons, but then its body cannot be any bigger than 25 kilos. To weigh any more than that, it has to give up neurons. So it's either a large body or a large number of neurons. When you eat like a primate, you can't afford both. One way out of this metabolic limitation would be to spend even more hours per day eating, but that gets dangerous, and past a certain point, it's just not possible. Gorillas and orangutans, for instance, afford about 30 billion neurons by spending eight and a half hours per day eating, and that seems to be about as much as they can do. Nine hours of feeding per day seems to be the practical limit for a primate. What about us? With our 86 billion neurons and 60 to 70 kilos of body mass, we should have to spend over nine hours per day every single day feeding, which is just not feasible. If we ate like a primate, we should not be here. How did we get here, then? Well, if our brain costs just as much energy as it should, and if we can't spend every waking hour of the day feeding, then the only alternative, really, is to somehow get more energy out of the same foods. And remarkably, that matches exactly what our ancestors are believed to have invented one and a half million years ago, when they invented cooking. To cook is to use fire to pre-digest foods outside of your body. Cooked foods are softer, so they're easier to chew and to turn completely into mush in your mouth, so that allows them to be completely digested and absorbed in your gut, which makes them yield much more energy in much less time. So cooking frees time for us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons than just thinking about food, looking for food, and gobbling down food all day long. So because of cooking, what once was a major liability, this large, dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons, could now become a major asset, now that we could both afford the energy for a lot of neurons and the time to do interesting things with them. So I think this explains why the human brain grew to become so large so fast in evolution, all of the while remaining just a primate brain. With this large brain now affordable by cooking, we went rapidly from raw foods to culture, agriculture, civilization, grocery stores, electricity, refrigerators, all of those things that nowadays allow us to get all the energy we need for the whole day in a single sitting at your favorite fast food joint. So what once was a solution now became the problem, and ironically, we look for the solution in raw food. So what is the human advantage? What is it that we have that no other animal has? My answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and I think that's the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. And what is it that we do that no other animal does, and which I believe was fundamental to allow us to reach that large, largest number of neurons in the cortex? In two words, we cook. No other animal cooks its food. Only humans do. And I think that's how we got to become human. Studying the human brain changed the way I think about food. I now look at my kitchen, and I bow to it, and I thank my ancestors for coming up with the invention that probably made us humans. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Want to be happy? Be grateful | {0: 'Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, meditates and writes on "the gentle power" of gratefulness.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | There is something you know about me, something very personal, and there is something I know about every one of you and that's very central to your concerns. There is something that we know about everyone we meet anywhere in the world, on the street, that is the very mainspring of whatever they do and whatever they put up with. And that is that all of us want to be happy. In this, we are all together. How we imagine our happiness, that differs from one another, but it's already a lot that we have all in common, that we want to be happy. Now my topic is gratefulness. What is the connection between happiness and gratefulness? Many people would say, well, that's very easy. When you are happy, you are grateful. But think again. Is it really the happy people that are grateful? We all know quite a number of people who have everything that it would take to be happy, and they are not happy, because they want something else or they want more of the same. And we all know people who have lots of misfortune, misfortune that we ourselves would not want to have, and they are deeply happy. They radiate happiness. You are surprised. Why? Because they are grateful. So it is not happiness that makes us grateful. It's gratefulness that makes us happy. If you think it's happiness that makes you grateful, think again. It's gratefulness that makes you happy. Now, we can ask, what do we really mean by gratefulness? And how does it work? I appeal to your own experience. We all know from experience how it goes. We experience something that's valuable to us. Something is given to us that's valuable to us. And it's really given. These two things have to come together. It has to be something valuable, and it's a real gift. You haven't bought it. You haven't earned it. You haven't traded it in. You haven't worked for it. It's just given to you. And when these two things come together, something that's really valuable to me and I realize it's freely given, then gratefulness spontaneously rises in my heart, happiness spontaneously rises in my heart. That's how gratefulness happens. Now the key to all this is that we cannot only experience this once in a while. We cannot only have grateful experiences. We can be people who live gratefully. Grateful living, that is the thing. And how can we live gratefully? By experiencing, by becoming aware that every moment is a given moment, as we say. It's a gift. You haven't earned it. You haven't brought it about in any way. You have no way of assuring that there will be another moment given to you, and yet, that's the most valuable thing that can ever be given to us, this moment, with all the opportunity that it contains. If we didn't have this present moment, we wouldn't have any opportunity to do anything or experience anything, and this moment is a gift. It's a given moment, as we say. Now, we say the gift within this gift is really the opportunity. What you are really grateful for is the opportunity, not the thing that is given to you, because if that thing were somewhere else and you didn't have the opportunity to enjoy it, to do something with it, you wouldn't be grateful for it. Opportunity is the gift within every gift, and we have this saying, opportunity knocks only once. Well, think again. Every moment is a new gift, over and over again, and if you miss the opportunity of this moment, another moment is given to us, and another moment. We can avail ourselves of this opportunity, or we can miss it, and if we avail ourselves of the opportunity, it is the key to happiness. Behold the master key to our happiness in our own hands. Moment by moment, we can be grateful for this gift. Does that mean that we can be grateful for everything? Certainly not. We cannot be grateful for violence, for war, for oppression, for exploitation. On the personal level, we cannot be grateful for the loss of a friend, for unfaithfulness, for bereavement. But I didn't say we can be grateful for everything. I said we can be grateful in every given moment for the opportunity, and even when we are confronted with something that is terribly difficult, we can rise to this occasion and respond to the opportunity that is given to us. It isn't as bad as it might seem. Actually, when you look at it and experience it, you find that most of the time, what is given to us is the opportunity to enjoy, and we only miss it because we are rushing through life and we are not stopping to see the opportunity. But once in a while, something very difficult is given to us, and when this difficult thing occurs to us, it's a challenge to rise to that opportunity, and we can rise to it by learning something which is sometimes painful. Learning patience, for instance. We have been told that the road to peace is not a sprint, but is more like a marathon. That takes patience. That's difficult. It may be to stand up for your opinion, to stand up for your conviction. That's an opportunity that is given to us. To learn, to suffer, to stand up, all these opportunities are given to us, but they are opportunities, and those who avail themselves of those opportunities are the ones that we admire. They make something out of life. And those who fail get another opportunity. We always get another opportunity. That's the wonderful richness of life. So how can we find a method that will harness this? How can each one of us find a method for living gratefully, not just once in a while being grateful, but moment by moment to be grateful. How can we do it? It's a very simple method. It's so simple that it's actually what we were told as children when we learned to cross the street. Stop. Look. Go. That's all. But how often do we stop? We rush through life. We don't stop. We miss the opportunity because we don't stop. We have to stop. We have to get quiet. And we have to build stop signs into our lives. When I was in Africa some years ago and then came back, I noticed water. In Africa where I was, I didn't have drinkable water. Every time I turned on the faucet, I was overwhelmed. Every time I clicked on the light, I was so grateful. It made me so happy. But after a while, this wears off. So I put little stickers on the light switch and on the water faucet, and every time I turned it on, water. So leave it up to your own imagination. You can find whatever works best for you, but you need stop signs in your life. And when you stop, then the next thing is to look. You look. You open your eyes. You open your ears. You open your nose. You open all your senses for this wonderful richness that is given to us. There is no end to it, and that is what life is all about, to enjoy, to enjoy what is given to us. And then we can also open our hearts, our hearts for the opportunities, for the opportunities also to help others, to make others happy, because nothing makes us more happy than when all of us are happy. And when we open our hearts to the opportunities, the opportunities invite us to do something, and that is the third. Stop, look, and then go, and really do something. And what we can do is whatever life offers to you in that present moment. Mostly it's the opportunity to enjoy, but sometimes it's something more difficult. But whatever it is, if we take this opportunity, we go with it, we are creative, those are the creative people. And that little stop, look, go, is such a potent seed that it can revolutionize our world. Because we are at the present moment in the middle of a change of consciousness, and you will be surprised if you — I am always surprised when I hear how many times this word "gratefulness" and "gratitude" comes up. Everywhere you find it, a grateful airline, a restaurant gratefulness, a café gratefulness, a wine that is gratefulness. Yes, I have even come across a toilet paper whose brand is called "Thank You." (Laughter) There is a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware how important this is and how this can change our world. It can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you're grateful, you're not fearful, and if you're not fearful, you're not violent. If you're grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live. And it doesn't make for equality, but it makes for equal respect, and that is the important thing. The future of the world will be a network, not a pyramid turned upside down. The revolution of which I am speaking is a nonviolent revolution, and it's so revolutionary that it even revolutionizes the very concept of a revolution, because the normal revolution is one where the power pyramid is turned upside down and those who were on the bottom are now on the top and are doing exactly the same thing that the ones before. What we need is a networking of smaller groups, smaller and smaller groups who know one another, who interact with one another, and that is a grateful world. A grateful world is a world of joyful people. Grateful people are joyful people, and joyful people — the more and more joyful people there are, the more and more we'll have a joyful world. We have a network for grateful living, and it has mushroomed. We couldn't understand why it mushroomed. We have an opportunity for people to light a candle when they are grateful for something. And there have been 15 million candles lit in one decade. People are becoming aware that a grateful world is a happy world, and we all have the opportunity by the simple stop, look, go, to transform the world, to make it a happy place. And that is what I hope for us, and if this has contributed a little to making you want to do the same, stop, look, go. Thank you. (Applause) |
Invest in social change | {0: 'Toby Eccles has created a radical financial instrument that helps private investors contribute to solving thorny public problems.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I'm here today to talk about social change, not a new therapy or a new intervention or a new way of working with kids or something like that, but a new business model for social change, a new way of tackling the problem. In Britain, 63 percent of all men who come out of short sentences from prison re-offend again within a year. Now how many previous offenses do you think they have on average managed to commit? Forty-three. And how many previous times do you think they've been in prison? Seven. So we went to talk to the Ministry of Justice, and we said to the Ministry of Justice, what's it worth to you if fewer of these guys re-offend? It's got to be worth something, right? I mean, there's prison costs, there's police costs, there's court costs, all these things that you're spending money on to deal with these guys. What's it worth? Now, of course, we care about the social value. Social Finance, the organization I helped set up, cares about social stuff. But we wanted to make the economic case, because if we could make the economic case, then the value of doing this would be completely compelling. And if we can agree on both a value and a way of measuring whether we've been successful at reducing that re-offending, then we can do something we think rather interesting. The idea is called the social impact bond. Now, the social impact bond is simply saying, if we can get the government to agree, that we can create a contract where they only pay if it worked. So that means that they can try out new stuff without the embarrassment of having to pay if it didn't work, which for still quite a lot of bits of government, that's a serious issue. Now, many of you may have noticed there's a problem at this point, and that is that it takes a long time to measure whether those outcomes have happened. So we have to raise some money. We use the contract to raise money from socially motivated investors. Socially motivated investors: there's an interesting idea, right? But actually, there's a lot of people who, if they're given the chance, would love to invest in something that does social good. And here's the opportunity. Do you want to also help government find whether there's a better economic model, not just leaving these guys to come out of prison and waiting till they re-offend and putting them back in again, but actually working with them to move to a different path to end up with fewer crimes and fewer victims? So we find some investors, and they pay for a set of services, and if those services are successful, then they improve outcomes, and with those measured reductions in re-offending, government saves money, and with those savings, they can pay outcomes. And the investors do not just get their money back, but they make a return. So in March 2010, we signed the first social impact bond with the Ministry of Justice around Peterborough Prison. It was to work with 3,000 offenders split into three cohorts of 1,000 each. Now, each of those cohorts would get measured over the two years that they were coming out of prison. They've got to have a year to commit their crimes, six months to get through the court system, and then they would be compared to a group taken from the police national computer, as similar as possible, and we would get paid providing we achieved a hurdle rate of 10-percent reduction, for every conviction event that didn't happen. So we get paid for crimes saved. Now if we achieved that 10-percent reduction across all three cohorts, then the investors get a seven and a half percent annualized return on their investment, and if we do better than that, they can get up to 13 percent annualized return on their investment, which is okay. So everyone wins here, right? The Ministry of Justice can try out a new program and they only pay if it works. Investors get two opportunities: for the first time, they can invest in social change. Also, they make a reasonable return, and they also know that first investors in these kinds of things, they're going to have to believers. They're going to have to care in the social program, but if this builds a track record over five or 10 years, then you can widen that investor community as more people have confidence in the product. The service providers, well, for the first time, they've got an opportunity to provide services and grow the evidence for what they're doing in a really constructive way and learn and demonstrate the value of what they're doing over five or six years, not just one or two as often happens at the moment. Society wins: fewer crimes, fewer victims. Now, the offenders, they also benefit. Instead of just coming out of the prison with 46 pounds in their pocket, half of them not knowing where they're spending their first night out of jail, actually, someone meets them in prison, learns about their issues, meets them at the gate, takes them through to somewhere to stay, connects them to benefits, connects them to employment, drug rehabilitation, mental health, whatever's needed. So let's think of another example: working with children in care. Social impact bonds work great for any area where there is at the moment very expensive provision that produces poor outcomes for people. So children in the state care tend to do very badly. Only 13 percent achieve a reasonable level of five GCSEs at 16, against 58 percent of the wider population. More troublingly, 27 percent of offenders in prison have spent some time in care. And even more worryingly, and this is a Home Office statistic, 70 percent of prostitutes have spent some time in care. The state is not a great parent. But there are great programs for adolescents who are on the edge of care, and 30 percent of kids going into care are adolescents. So we set up a program with Essex County Council to test out intensive family therapeutic support for those families with adolescents on the edge of the care system. Essex only pays in the event that it's saving them care costs. Investors have put in 3.1 million pounds. That program started last month. Others, around homelessness in London, around youth and employment and education elsewhere in the country. There are now 13 social impact bonds in Britain, and amazing levels of interest in this idea all over the world. So David Cameron's put 20 million pounds into a social outcomes fund to support this idea. Obama has suggested 300 million dollars in the U.S. budget for these kinds of ideas and structures to move it forward, and a lot of other countries are demonstrating considerable interest. So what's caused this excitement? Why is this so different for people? Well, the first piece, which we've talked about, is innovation. It enables testing of new ideas in a way that's less difficult for everybody. The second piece it brings is rigor. By working to outcomes, people really have to test and bring data into the situation that one's dealing with. So taking Peterborough as an example, we add case management across all of the different organizations that we're working with so they know what actually has been done with different prisoners, and at the same time they learn from the Ministry of Justice, and we learn, because we pushed for the data, what actually happens, whether they get re-arrested or not. And we learn and adapt the program accordingly. And this leads to the third element, which is new, and that's flexibility. Because normal contracting for things, when you're spending government money, you're spending our money, tax money, and the people who are in charge of that are very aware of it so the temptation is to control exactly how you spend it. Now any entrepreneur in the room knows that version 1.0, the business plan, is not the one that generally works. So when you're trying to do something like this, you need the flexibility to adapt the program. And again, in Peterborough, we started off with a program, but we also collected data, and over the period of time, we nuanced and changed that program to add a range of other elements, so that the service adapts and we meet the needs of the long term as well as the short term: greater engagement from the prisoners, longer-term engagement as well. The last element is partnership. There is, at the moment, a stale debate going on very often: state's better, public sector's better, private sector's better, social sector's better, for a lot of these programs. Actually, for creating social change, we need to bring in the expertise from all of those parties in order to make this work. And this creates a structure through which they can combine. So where does this leave us? This leaves us with a way that people can invest in social change. We've met thousands, possibly millions of people, who want the opportunity to invest in social change. We've met champions all over the public sector keen to make these kinds of differences. With this kind of model, we can help bring them together. Thank you. (Applause) |
Body parts on a chip | {0: 'Geraldine Hamilton builds organs and body parts on a chip -- to test new, custom cures.'} | TEDxBoston | We have a global health challenge in our hands today, and that is that the way we currently discover and develop new drugs is too costly, takes far too long, and it fails more often than it succeeds. It really just isn't working, and that means that patients that badly need new therapies are not getting them, and diseases are going untreated. We seem to be spending more and more money. So for every billion dollars we spend in R&D, we're getting less drugs approved into the market. More money, less drugs. Hmm. So what's going on here? Well, there's a multitude of factors at play, but I think one of the key factors is that the tools that we currently have available to test whether a drug is going to work, whether it has efficacy, or whether it's going to be safe before we get it into human clinical trials, are failing us. They're not predicting what's going to happen in humans. And we have two main tools available at our disposal. They are cells in dishes and animal testing. Now let's talk about the first one, cells in dishes. So, cells are happily functioning in our bodies. We take them and rip them out of their native environment, throw them in one of these dishes, and expect them to work. Guess what. They don't. They don't like that environment because it's nothing like what they have in the body. What about animal testing? Well, animals do and can provide extremely useful information. They teach us about what happens in the complex organism. We learn more about the biology itself. However, more often than not, animal models fail to predict what will happen in humans when they're treated with a particular drug. So we need better tools. We need human cells, but we need to find a way to keep them happy outside the body. Our bodies are dynamic environments. We're in constant motion. Our cells experience that. They're in dynamic environments in our body. They're under constant mechanical forces. So if we want to make cells happy outside our bodies, we need to become cell architects. We need to design, build and engineer a home away from home for the cells. And at the Wyss Institute, we've done just that. We call it an organ-on-a-chip. And I have one right here. It's beautiful, isn't it? But it's pretty incredible. Right here in my hand is a breathing, living human lung on a chip. And it's not just beautiful. It can do a tremendous amount of things. We have living cells in that little chip, cells that are in a dynamic environment interacting with different cell types. There's been many people trying to grow cells in the lab. They've tried many different approaches. They've even tried to grow little mini-organs in the lab. We're not trying to do that here. We're simply trying to recreate in this tiny chip the smallest functional unit that represents the biochemistry, the function and the mechanical strain that the cells experience in our bodies. So how does it work? Let me show you. We use techniques from the computer chip manufacturing industry to make these structures at a scale relevant to both the cells and their environment. We have three fluidic channels. In the center, we have a porous, flexible membrane on which we can add human cells from, say, our lungs, and then underneath, they had capillary cells, the cells in our blood vessels. And we can then apply mechanical forces to the chip that stretch and contract the membrane, so the cells experience the same mechanical forces that they did when we breathe. And they experience them how they did in the body. There's air flowing through the top channel, and then we flow a liquid that contains nutrients through the blood channel. Now the chip is really beautiful, but what can we do with it? We can get incredible functionality inside these little chips. Let me show you. We could, for example, mimic infection, where we add bacterial cells into the lung. then we can add human white blood cells. White blood cells are our body's defense against bacterial invaders, and when they sense this inflammation due to infection, they will enter from the blood into the lung and engulf the bacteria. Well now you're going to see this happening live in an actual human lung on a chip. We've labeled the white blood cells so you can see them flowing through, and when they detect that infection, they begin to stick. They stick, and then they try to go into the lung side from blood channel. And you can see here, we can actually visualize a single white blood cell. It sticks, it wiggles its way through between the cell layers, through the pore, comes out on the other side of the membrane, and right there, it's going to engulf the bacteria labeled in green. In that tiny chip, you just witnessed one of the most fundamental responses our body has to an infection. It's the way we respond to — an immune response. It's pretty exciting. Now I want to share this picture with you, not just because it's so beautiful, but because it tells us an enormous amount of information about what the cells are doing within the chips. It tells us that these cells from the small airways in our lungs, actually have these hairlike structures that you would expect to see in the lung. These structures are called cilia, and they actually move the mucus out of the lung. Yeah. Mucus. Yuck. But mucus is actually very important. Mucus traps particulates, viruses, potential allergens, and these little cilia move and clear the mucus out. When they get damaged, say, by cigarette smoke for example, they don't work properly, and they can't clear that mucus out. And that can lead to diseases such as bronchitis. Cilia and the clearance of mucus are also involved in awful diseases like cystic fibrosis. But now, with the functionality that we get in these chips, we can begin to look for potential new treatments. We didn't stop with the lung on a chip. We have a gut on a chip. You can see one right here. And we've put intestinal human cells in a gut on a chip, and they're under constant peristaltic motion, this trickling flow through the cells, and we can mimic many of the functions that you actually would expect to see in the human intestine. Now we can begin to create models of diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome. This is a disease that affects a large number of individuals. It's really debilitating, and there aren't really many good treatments for it. Now we have a whole pipeline of different organ chips that we are currently working on in our labs. Now, the true power of this technology, however, really comes from the fact that we can fluidically link them. There's fluid flowing across these cells, so we can begin to interconnect multiple different chips together to form what we call a virtual human on a chip. Now we're really getting excited. We're not going to ever recreate a whole human in these chips, but what our goal is is to be able to recreate sufficient functionality so that we can make better predictions of what's going to happen in humans. For example, now we can begin to explore what happens when we put a drug like an aerosol drug. Those of you like me who have asthma, when you take your inhaler, we can explore how that drug comes into your lungs, how it enters the body, how it might affect, say, your heart. Does it change the beating of your heart? Does it have a toxicity? Does it get cleared by the liver? Is it metabolized in the liver? Is it excreted in your kidneys? We can begin to study the dynamic response of the body to a drug. This could really revolutionize and be a game changer for not only the pharmaceutical industry, but a whole host of different industries, including the cosmetics industry. We can potentially use the skin on a chip that we're currently developing in the lab to test whether the ingredients in those products that you're using are actually safe to put on your skin without the need for animal testing. We could test the safety of chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis in our environment, such as chemicals in regular household cleaners. We could also use the organs on chips for applications in bioterrorism or radiation exposure. We could use them to learn more about diseases such as ebola or other deadly diseases such as SARS. Organs on chips could also change the way we do clinical trials in the future. Right now, the average participant in a clinical trial is that: average. Tends to be middle aged, tends to be female. You won't find many clinical trials in which children are involved, yet every day, we give children medications, and the only safety data we have on that drug is one that we obtained from adults. Children are not adults. They may not respond in the same way adults do. There are other things like genetic differences in populations that may lead to at-risk populations that are at risk of having an adverse drug reaction. Now imagine if we could take cells from all those different populations, put them on chips, and create populations on a chip. This could really change the way we do clinical trials. And this is the team and the people that are doing this. We have engineers, we have cell biologists, we have clinicians, all working together. We're really seeing something quite incredible at the Wyss Institute. It's really a convergence of disciplines, where biology is influencing the way we design, the way we engineer, the way we build. It's pretty exciting. We're establishing important industry collaborations such as the one we have with a company that has expertise in large-scale digital manufacturing. They're going to help us make, instead of one of these, millions of these chips, so that we can get them into the hands of as many researchers as possible. And this is key to the potential of that technology. Now let me show you our instrument. This is an instrument that our engineers are actually prototyping right now in the lab, and this instrument is going to give us the engineering controls that we're going to require in order to link 10 or more organ chips together. It does something else that's very important. It creates an easy user interface. So a cell biologist like me can come in, take a chip, put it in a cartridge like the prototype you see there, put the cartridge into the machine just like you would a C.D., and away you go. Plug and play. Easy. Now, let's imagine a little bit what the future might look like if I could take your stem cells and put them on a chip, or your stem cells and put them on a chip. It would be a personalized chip just for you. Now all of us in here are individuals, and those individual differences mean that we could react very differently and sometimes in unpredictable ways to drugs. I myself, a couple of years back, had a really bad headache, just couldn't shake it, thought, "Well, I'll try something different." I took some Advil. Fifteen minutes later, I was on my way to the emergency room with a full-blown asthma attack. Now, obviously it wasn't fatal, but unfortunately, some of these adverse drug reactions can be fatal. So how do we prevent them? Well, we could imagine one day having Geraldine on a chip, having Danielle on a chip, having you on a chip. Personalized medicine. Thank you. (Applause) |
Let’s try emotional correctness | {0: 'Sally Kohn searches for common ground among political foes by focusing on the compassion and humanity in everyone.\r\n'} | TED@NYC | So when I do my job, people hate me. In fact, the better I do my job, the more people hate me. And no, I'm not a meter maid, and I'm not an undertaker. I am a progressive, lesbian talking head on Fox News. (Applause) So y'all heard that, right? Just to make sure, right? I am a gay talking head on Fox News. I am going to tell you how I do it, and the most important thing I've learned. So I go on television. I debate people who literally want to obliterate everything I believe in — in some cases, who don't want me and people like me to even exist. It's sort of like Thanksgiving with your conservative uncle on steroids, with a live television audience of millions. It's totally almost just like that. And that's just on air. The hate mail I get is unbelievable. Last week alone, I got 238 pieces of nasty email and more hate tweets than I can even count. I was called an idiot, a traitor, a scourge, a cunt and an ugly man, and that was just in one email. (Laughter) So what have I realized, being on the receiving end of all this ugliness? Well, my biggest takeaway is that for decades, we've been focused on political correctness, but what matters more is emotional correctness. Let me give you a small example. I don't care if you call me a dyke. I really don't. I care about two things. One, I care that you spell it right. (Laughter) (Applause) Just quick refresher, it's D-Y-K-E. You'd totally be surprised. And second, I don't care about the word, I care about how you use it. Are you being friendly? Are you just being naive? Or do you really want to hurt me personally? Emotional correctness is the tone, the feeling, how we say what we say, the respect and compassion we show one another. And what I've realized is that political persuasion doesn't begin with ideas or facts or data. Political persuasion begins with being emotionally correct. So when I first went to go work at Fox News, true confession, I expected there to be marks in the carpet from all the knuckle-dragging. That, by the way, in case you're paying attention, is not emotionally correct. But liberals on my side, we can be self-righteous, we can be condescending, we can be dismissive of anyone who doesn't agree with us. In other words, we can be politically right but emotionally wrong. And incidentally, that means that people don't like us. Right? Now here's the kicker. Conservatives are really nice. I mean, not all of them, and not the ones who send me hate mail, but you would be surprised. Sean Hannity is one of the sweetest guys I've ever met. He spends his free time trying to fix up his staff on blind dates, and I know that if I ever had a problem, he would do anything he could to help. Now, I think Sean Hannity is 99 percent politically wrong, but his emotional correctness is strikingly impressive. And that's why people listen to him. Because you can't get anyone to agree with you if they don't even listen to you first. We spend so much time talking past each other and not enough time talking through our disagreements. And if we can start to find compassion for one another, then we have a shot at building common ground. It actually sounds really hokey to say it standing up here, but when you try to put it in practice, it's really powerful. So someone who says they hate immigrants, I try to imagine how scared they must be that their community is changing from what they've always known. Or someone who says they don't like teachers' unions, I bet they're really devastated to see their kid's school going into the gutter, and they're just looking for someone to blame. Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us. That is emotional correctness. I'm not saying it's easy. An average of, like, 5.6 times per day I have to stop myself from responding to all of my hate mail with a flurry of vile profanities. This whole finding compassion and common ground with your enemies thing is kind of like a political-spiritual practice for me, and I ain't the Dalai Lama. I'm not perfect, but what I am is optimistic. Because I don't just get hate mail. I get a lot of really nice letters, lots of them. And one of my all-time favorites begins: "I am not a big fan of your political leanings or your sometimes tortured logic, (Laughter) but I'm a big fan of you as a person." Now this guy doesn't agree with me — yet. (Laughter) But he's listening — not because of what I said, but because of how I said it. And somehow, even though we've never met, we've managed to form a connection. That's emotional correctness, and that's how we start the conversations that really lead to change. Thank you. (Applause) |
My underwater robot | {0: 'David Lang is the cofounder and CEO of OpenROV, designing and manufacturing underwater drones.'} | TED2013 | (Aquatic noises) So this video was taken at Aquarius undersea laboratory four miles off the coast of Key Largo, about 60 feet below the surface. NASA uses this extreme environment to train astronauts and aquanauts, and last year, they invited us along for the ride. All the footage was taken from our open ROV, which is a robot that we built in our garage. So ROV stands for Remote Operated Vehicle, which in our case means our little robot sends live video across that ultra-thin tether back to the computer topside. It's open source, meaning we publish and share all of our design files and all of our code online, allowing anyone to modify or improve or change the design. It's built with mostly off-the-shelf parts and costs about 1,000 times cheaper than the ROVs James Cameron used to explore the Titanic. So ROVs aren't new. They've been around for decades. Scientists use ROVs to explore the oceans. Oil and gas companies use them for exploration and construction. What we've built isn't unique. It's how we've built it that's really unique. So I want to give you a quick story of how it got started. So a few years ago, my friend Eric and I decided we wanted to explore this underwater cave in the foothills of the Sierras. We had heard this story about lost gold from a Gold Rush-era robbery, and we wanted to go up there. Unfortunately, we didn't have any money and we didn't have any tools to do it. So Eric had an initial design idea for a robot, but we didn't have all the parts figured out, so we did what anybody would do in our situation: we asked the Internet for help. More specifically, we created this website, openROV.com, and shared our intentions and our plans For the first few months, it was just Eric and I talking back to each other on the forums, but pretty soon, we started to get feedback from makers and hobbyists, and then actually professional ocean engineers who had some suggestions for what we should do. We kept working on it. We learned a lot. We kept prototyping, and eventually, we decided we wanted to go to the cave. We were ready. So about that time, our little expedition became quite a story, and it got picked up in The New York Times. And we were pretty much just overwhelmed with interest from people who wanted a kit that they could build this open ROV themselves. So we decided to put the project on Kickstarter, and when we did, we raised our funding goal in about two hours, and all of a sudden, had this money to make these kits. But then we had to learn how to make them. I mean, we had to learn small batch manufacturing. So we quickly learned that our garage was not big enough to hold our growing operation. But we were able to do it, we got all the kits made, thanks a lot to TechShop, which was a big help to us, and we shipped these kits all over the world just before Christmas of last year, so it was just a few months ago. But we're already starting to get video and photos back from all over the world, including this shot from under the ice in Antarctica. We've also learned the penguins love robots. (Laughter) So we're still publishing all the designs online, encouraging anyone to build these themselves. That's the only way that we could have done this. By being open source, we've created this distributed R&D network, and we're moving faster than any venture-backed counterpart. But the actual robot is really only half the story. The real potential, the long term potential, is with this community of DIY ocean explorers that are forming all over the globe. What can we discover when there's thousands of these devices roaming the seas? So you're probably all wondering: the cave. Did you find the gold? Well, we didn't find any gold, but we decided that what we found was much more valuable. It was the glimpse into a potential future for ocean exploration. It's something that's not limited to the James Camerons of the world, but something that we're all participating in. It's an underwater world we're all exploring together. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why buses represent democracy in action | {0: 'Enrique Peñalosa is the mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. He advocates for sustainability and mobility in the cities of the future.'} | TEDCity2.0 | Mobility in developing world cities is a very peculiar challenge, because different from health or education or housing, it tends to get worse as societies become richer. Clearly, a unsustainable model. Mobility, as most other developing country problems, more than a matter of money or technology, is a matter of equality, equity. The great inequality in developing countries makes it difficult to see, for example, that in terms of transport, an advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport. Or bicycles: For example, in Amsterdam, more than 30 percent of the population uses bicycles, despite the fact that the Netherlands has a higher income per capita than the United States. There is a conflict in developing world cities for money, for government investment. If more money is invested in highways, of course there is less money for housing, for schools, for hospitals, and also there is a conflict for space. There is a conflict for space between those with cars and those without them. Most of us accept today that private property and a market economy is the best way to manage most of society's resources. However, there is a problem with that, that market economy needs inequality of income in order to work. Some people must make more money, some others less. Some companies succeed. Others fail. Then what kind of equality can we hope for today with a market economy? I would propose two kinds which both have much to do with cities. The first one is equality of quality of life, especially for children, that all children should have, beyond the obvious health and education, access to green spaces, to sports facilities, to swimming pools, to music lessons. And the second kind of equality is one which we could call "democratic equality." The first article in every constitution states that all citizens are equal before the law. That is not just poetry. It's a very powerful principle. For example, if that is true, a bus with 80 passengers has a right to 80 times more road space than a car with one. We have been so used to inequality, sometimes, that it's before our noses and we do not see it. Less than 100 years ago, women could not vote, and it seemed normal, in the same way that it seems normal today to see a bus in traffic. In fact, when I became mayor, applying that democratic principle that public good prevails over private interest, that a bus with 100 people has a right to 100 times more road space than a car, we implemented a mass transit system based on buses in exclusive lanes. We called it TransMilenio, in order to make buses sexier. And one thing is that it is also a very beautiful democratic symbol, because as buses zoom by, expensive cars stuck in traffic, it clearly is almost a picture of democracy at work. In fact, it's not just a matter of equity. It doesn't take Ph.D.'s. A committee of 12-year-old children would find out in 20 minutes that the most efficient way to use scarce road space is with exclusive lanes for buses. In fact, buses are not sexy, but they are the only possible means to bring mass transit to all areas of fast growing developing cities. They also have great capacity. For example, this system in Guangzhou is moving more passengers our direction than all subway lines in China, except for one line in Beijing, at a fraction of the cost. We fought not just for space for buses, but we fought for space for people, and that was even more difficult. Cities are human habitats, and we humans are pedestrians. Just as fish need to swim or birds need to fly or deer need to run, we need to walk. There is a really enormous conflict, when we are talking about developing country cities, between pedestrians and cars. Here, what you see is a picture that shows insufficient democracy. What this shows is that people who walk are third-class citizens while those who go in cars are first-class citizens. In terms of transport infrastructure, what really makes a difference between advanced and backward cities is not highways or subways but quality sidewalks. Here they made a flyover, probably very useless, and they forgot to make a sidewalk. This is prevailing all over the world. Not even schoolchildren are more important than cars. In my city of Bogotá, we fought a very difficult battle in order to take space from cars, which had been parking on sidewalks for decades, in order to make space for people that should reflect dignity of human beings, and to make space for protected bikeways. First of all, I had black hair before that. (Laughter) And I was almost impeached in the process. It is a very difficult battle. However, it was possible, finally, after very difficult battles, to make a city that would reflect some respect for human dignity, that would show that those who walk are equally important to those who have cars. Indeed, a very important ideological and political issue anywhere is how to distribute that most valuable resource of a city, which is road space. A city could find oil or diamonds underground and it would not be so valuable as road space. How to distribute it between pedestrians, bicycles, public transport and cars? This is not a technological issue, and we should remember that in no constitution parking is a constitutional right when we make that distribution. We also built, and this was 15 years ago, before there were bikeways in New York or in Paris or in London, it was a very difficult battle as well, more than 350 kilometers of protected bicycle ways. I don't think protected bicycle ways are a cute architectural feature. They are a right, just as sidewalks are, unless we believe that only those with access to a motor vehicle have a right to safe mobility, without the risk of getting killed. And just as busways are, protected bikeways also are a powerful symbol of democracy, because they show that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important to one in a $30,000 car. And we are living in a unique moment in history. In the next 50 years, more than half of those cities which will exist in the year 2060 will be built. In many developing country cities, more than 80 and 90 percent of the city which will exist in 2060 will be built over the next four or five decades. But this is not just a matter for developing country cities. In the United States, for example, more than 70 million new homes must be built over the next 40 or 50 years. That's more than all the homes that today exist in Britain, France and Canada put together. And I believe that our cities today have severe flaws, and that different, better ones could be built. What is wrong with our cities today? Well, for example, if we tell any three-year-old child who is barely learning to speak in any city in the world today, "Watch out, a car," the child will jump in fright, and with a very good reason, because there are more than 10,000 children who are killed by cars every year in the world. We have had cities for 8,000 years, and children could walk out of home and play. In fact, only very recently, towards 1900, there were no cars. Cars have been here for really less than 100 years. They completely changed cities. In 1900, for example, nobody was killed by cars in the United States. Only 20 years later, between 1920 and 1930, almost 200,000 people were killed by cars in the United States. Only in 1925, almost 7,000 children were killed by cars in the United States. So we could make different cities, cities that will give more priority to human beings than to cars, that will give more public space to human beings than to cars, cities which show great respect for those most vulnerable citizens, such as children or the elderly. I will propose to you a couple of ingredients which I think would make cities much better, and it would be very simple to implement them in the new cities which are only being created. Hundreds of kilometers of greenways criss-crossing cities in all directions. Children will walk out of homes into safe spaces. They could go for dozens of kilometers safely without any risk in wonderful greenways, sort of bicycle highways, and I would invite you to imagine the following: a city in which every other street would be a street only for pedestrians and bicycles. In new cities which are going to be built, this would not be particularly difficult. When I was mayor of Bogotá, in only three years, we were able to create 70 kilometers, in one of the most dense cities in the world, of these bicycle highways. And this changes the way people live, move, enjoy the city. In this picture, you see in one of the very poor neighborhoods, we have a luxury pedestrian bicycle street, and the cars still in the mud. Of course, I would love to pave this street for cars. But what do we do first? Ninety-nine percent of the people in those neighborhoods don't have cars. But you see, when a city is only being created, it's very easy to incorporate this kind of infrastructure. Then the city grows around it. And of course this is just a glimpse of something which could be much better if we just create it, and it changes the way of life. And the second ingredient, which would solve mobility, that very difficult challenge in developing countries, in a very low-cost and simple way, would be to have hundreds of kilometers of streets only for buses, buses and bicycles and pedestrians. This would be, again, a very low-cost solution if implemented from the start, low cost, pleasant transit with natural sunlight. But unfortunately, reality is not as good as my dreams. Because of private property of land and high land prices, all developing country cities have a large problem of slums. In my country of Colombia, almost half the homes in cities initially were illegal developments. And of course it's very difficult to have mass transit or to use bicycles in such environments. But even legal developments have also been located in the wrong places, very far from the city centers where it's impossible to provide low-cost, high-frequency public transport. As a Latin American, and Latin America was the most recently organized region in the world, I would recommend, respectfully, passionately, to those countries which are yet to urbanize — Latin America went from 40 percent urban in 1950 to 80 percent urban in 2010 — I would recommend Asian and African countries which are yet to urbanize, such as India which is only 33 percent urban now, that governments should acquire all land around cities. In this way, their cities could grow in the right places with the right spaces, with the parks, with the greenways, with the busways. The cities we are going to build over the next 50 years will determine quality of life and even happiness for billions of people towards the future. What a fantastic opportunity for leaders and many young leaders to come, especially in the developing countries. They can create a much happier life for billions towards the future. I am sure, I am optimistic, that they will make cities better than our most ambitious dreams. (Applause) |
What I learned from Nelson Mandela | {0: 'In his native South Africa, Boyd Varty builds wildlife corridors to restore the environment and literacy centers to restore the human spirit.'} | TEDWomen 2013 | I'm a man who's trying to live from his heart, and so just before I get going, I wanted to tell you as a South African that one of the men who has inspired me most passed away a few hours ago. Nelson Mandela has come to the end of his long walk to freedom. And so this talk is going to be for him. I grew up in wonder. I grew up amongst those animals. I grew up in the wild eastern part of South Africa at a place called Londolozi Game Reserve. It's a place where my family has been in the safari business for four generations. Now for as long as I can remember, my job has been to take people out into nature, and so I think it's a lovely twist of fate today to have the opportunity to bring some of my experiences out in nature in to this gathering. Africa is a place where people still sit under starlit skies and around campfires and tell stories, and so what I have to share with you today is the simple medicine of a few campfire stories, stories about heroes of heart. Now my stories are not the stories that you'll hear on the news, and while it's true that Africa is a harsh place, I also know it to be a place where people, animals and ecosystems teach us about a more interconnected world. When I was nine years old, President Mandela came to stay with my family. He had just been released from his 27 years of incarceration, and was in a period of readjustment to his sudden global icon status. Members of the African National Congress thought that in the bush he would have time to rest and recuperate away from the public eye, and it's true that lions tend to be a very good deterrent to press and paparazzi. (Laughter) But it was a defining time for me as a young boy. I would take him breakfast in bed, and then, in an old track suit and slippers, he would go for a walk around the garden. At night, I would sit with my family around the snowy, bunny-eared TV, and watch images of that same quiet man from the garden surrounded by hundreds and thousands of people as scenes from his release were broadcast nightly. He was bringing peace to a divided and violent South Africa, one man with an unbelievable sense of his humanity. Mandela said often that the gift of prison was the ability to go within and to think, to create in himself the things he most wanted for South Africa: peace, reconciliation, harmony. Through this act of immense open-heartedness, he was to become the embodiment of what in South Africa we call "ubuntu." Ubuntu: I am because of you. Or, people are not people without other people. It's not a new idea or value but it's one that I certainly think at these times is worth building on. In fact, it is said that in the collective consciousness of Africa, we get to experience the deepest parts of our own humanity through our interactions with others. Ubuntu is at play right now. You are holding a space for me to express the deepest truth of who I am. Without you, I'm just a guy talking to an empty room, and I spent a lot of time last week doing that, and it's not the same as this. (Laughter) If Mandela was the national and international embodiment, then the man who taught me the most about this value personally was this man, Solly Mhlongo. Solly was born under a tree 60 kilometers from where I grew up in Mozambique. He would never have a lot of money, but he was to be one of the richest men I would ever meet. Solly grew up tending to his father's cattle. Now, I can tell you, I don't know what it is about people who grow up looking after cattle, but it makes for über-resourcefulness. The first job that he ever got in the safari business was fixing the safari trucks. Where he had learned to do that out in the bush I have no idea, but he could do it. He then moved across into what we called the habitat team. These were the people on the reserve who were responsible for its well-being. He fixed roads, he mended wetlands, he did some anti-poaching. And then one day we were out together, and he came across the tracks of where a female leopard had walked. And it was an old track, but for fun he turned and he began to follow it, and I tell you, I could tell by the speed at which he moved on those pad marks that this man was a Ph.D.-level tracker. If you drove past Solly somewhere out on the reserve, you look up in your rearview mirror, you'd see he'd stopped the car 20, 50 meters down the road just in case you need help with something. The only accusation I ever heard leveled at him was when one of our clients said, "Solly, you are pathologically helpful." (Laughter) When I started professionally guiding people out into this environment, Solly was my tracker. We worked together as a team. And the first guests we ever got were a philanthropy group from your East Coast, and they said to Solly, on the side, they said, "Before we even go out to see lions and leopards, we want to see where you live." So we took them up to his house, and this visit of the philanthropist to his house coincided with a time when Solly's wife, who was learning English, was going through a phase where she would open the door by saying, "Hello, I love you. Welcome, I love you." (Laughter) And there was something so beautifully African about it to me, this small house with a huge heart in it. Now on the day that Solly saved my life, he was already my hero. It was a hot day, and we found ourselves down by the river. Because of the heat, I took my shoes off, and I rolled up my pants, and I walked into the water. Solly remained on the bank. The water was clear running over sand, and we turned and we began to make our way upstream. And a few meters ahead of us, there was a place where a tree had fallen out of the bank, and its branches were touching the water, and it was shadowy. And if had been a horror movie, people in the audience would have started saying, "Don't go in there. Don't go in there." (Laughter) And of course, the crocodile was in the shadows. Now the first thing that you notice when a crocodile hits you is the ferocity of the bite. Wham! It hits me by my right leg. It pulls me. It turns. I throw my hand up. I'm able to grab a branch. It's shaking me violently. It's a very strange sensation having another creature try and eat you, and there are few things that promote vegetarianism like that. (Laughter) Solly on the bank sees that I'm in trouble. He turns. He begins to make his way to me. The croc again continues to shake me. It goes to bite me a second time. I notice a slick of blood in the water around me that gets washed downstream. As it bites the second time, I kick. My foot goes down its throat. It spits me out. I pull myself up into the branches, and as I come out of the water, I look over my shoulder. My leg from the knee down is mangled beyond description. The bone is cracked. The meat is torn up. I make an instant decision that I'll never look at that again. As I come out of the water, Solly arrives at a deep section, a channel between us. He knows, he sees the state of my leg, he knows that between him and I there is a crocodile, and I can tell you this man doesn't slow down for one second. He comes straight into the channel. He wades in to above his waist. He gets to me. He grabs me. I'm still in a vulnerable position. He picks me and puts me on his shoulder. This is the other thing about Solly, he's freakishly strong. He turns. He walks me up the bank. He lays me down. He pulls his shirt off. He wraps it around my leg, picks me up a second time, walks me to a vehicle, and he's able to get me to medical attention. And I survive. Now — (Applause) Now I don't know how many people you know that go into a deep channel of water that they know has a crocodile in it to come and help you, but for Solly, it was as natural as breathing. And he is one amazing example of what I have experienced all over Africa. In a more collective society, we realize from the inside that our own well-being is deeply tied to the well-being of others. Danger is shared. Pain is shared. Joy is shared. Achievement is shared. Houses are shared. Food is shared. Ubuntu asks us to open our hearts and to share, and what Solly taught me that day is the essence of this value, his animated, empathetic action in every moment. Now although the root word is about people, I thought that maybe ubuntu was only about people. And then I met this young lady. Her name was Elvis. In fact, Solly gave her the name Elvis because he said she walked like she was doing the Elvis the pelvis dance. She was born with very badly deformed back legs and pelvis. She arrived at our reserve from a reserve east of us on her migratory route. When I first saw her, I thought she would be dead in a matter of days. And yet, for the next five years she returned in the winter months. And we would be so excited to be out in the bush and to come across this unusual track. It looked like an inverted bracket, and we would drop whatever we were doing and we would follow, and then we would come around the corner, and there she would be with her herd. And that outpouring of emotion from people on our safari trucks as they saw her, it was this sense of kinship. And it reminded me that even people who grow up in cities feel a natural connection with the natural world and with animals. And yet still I remained amazed that she was surviving. And then one day we came across them at this small water hole. It was sort of a hollow in the ground. And I watched as the matriarch drank, and then she turned in that beautiful slow motion of elephants, looks like the arm in motion, and she began to make her way up the steep bank. The rest of the herd turned and began to follow. And I watched young Elvis begin to psych herself up for the hill. She got visibly — ears came forward, she had a full go of it and halfway up, her legs gave way, and she fell backwards. She attempted it a second time, and again, halfway up, she fell backwards. And on the third attempt, an amazing thing happened. Halfway up the bank, a young teenage elephant came in behind her, and he propped his trunk underneath her, and he began to shovel her up the bank. And it occurred to me that the rest of the herd was in fact looking after this young elephant. The next day I watched again as the matriarch broke a branch and she would put it in her mouth, and then she would break a second one and drop it on the ground. And a consensus developed between all of us who were guiding people in that area that that herd was in fact moving slower to accommodate that elephant. What Elvis and the herd taught me caused me to expand my definition of ubuntu, and I believe that in the cathedral of the wild, we get to see the most beautiful parts of ourselves reflected back at us. And it is not only through other people that we get to experience our humanity but through all the creatures that live on this planet. If Africa has a gift to share, it's a gift of a more collective society. And while it's true that ubuntu is an African idea, what I see is the essence of that value being invented here. Thank you. (Applause) Pat Mitchell: So Boyd, we know that you knew President Mandela from early childhood and that you heard the news as we all did today, and deeply distraught and know the tragic loss that it is to the world. But I just wondered if you wanted to share any additional thoughts, because we know that you heard that news just before coming in to do this session. Boyd Varty: Well thanks, Pat. I'm so happy because it was time for him to pass on. He was suffering. And so of course there's the mixed emotions. But I just think of so many occurrences like the time he went on the Oprah show and asked her what the show would be about. (Laughter) And she was like, "Well, it'll be about you." I mean, that's just incredible humility. (Laughter) He was the father of our nation and we've got a road to walk in South Africa. And everything, they used to call it Madiba magic. You know, he used to go to a rugby match and we would win. Anywhere he went, things went well. But I think that magic will be with us, and the important thing is that we carry what he stood for. And so that's what I'm going to try and do, and that's what people all over South Africa are trying to do. PM: And that's what you've done today. BV: Oh, thank you. PM: Thank you. BV: Thank you. Thanks very much. (Applause) |
How to build with clay ... and community | {0: 'Diébédo Francis Kéré and his architectural firm design buildings that are good for the environment -- and those who use them.'} | TEDCity2.0 | I would like to show you how architecture has helped to change the life of my community and has opened opportunities to hope. I am a native of Burkina Faso. According to the World Bank, Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, but what does it look like to grow up in a place like that? I am an example of that. I was born in a little village called Gando. In Gando, there was no electricity, no access to clean drinking water, and no school. But my father wanted me to learn how to read and write. For this reason, I had to leave my family when I was seven and to stay in a city far away from my village with no contact with my family. In this place I sat in a class like that with more than 150 other kids, and for six years. In this time, it just happened to me to come to school to realize that my classmate died. Today, not so much has changed. There is still no electricity in my village. People still are dying in Burkina Faso, and access to clean drinking water is still a big problem. I had luck. I was lucky, because this is a fact of life when you grow up in a place like that. But I was lucky. I had a scholarship. I could go to Germany to study. So now, I suppose, I don't need to explain to you how great a privilege it is for me to be standing before you today. From Gando, my home village in Burkina Faso, to Berlin in Germany to become an architect is a big, big step. But what to do with this privilege? Since I was a student, I wanted to open up better opportunities to other kids in Gando. I just wanted to use my skills and build a school. But how do you do it when you're still a student and you don't have money? Oh yes, I started to make drawings and asked for money. Fundraising was not an easy task. I even asked my classmates to spend less money on coffee and cigarettes, but to sponsor my school project. In real wonder, two years later, I was able to collect 50,000 U.S. dollars. When I came home to Gando to bring the good news, my people were over the moon, but when they realized that I was planning to use clay, they were shocked. "A clay building is not able to stand a rainy season, and Francis wants us to use it and build a school. Is this the reason why he spent so much time in Europe studying instead of working in the field with us?" My people build all the time with clay, but they don't see any innovation with mud. So I had to convince everybody. I started to speak with the community, and I could convince everybody, and we could start to work. And the women, the men, everybody from the village, was part of this building process. I was allowed to use even traditional techniques. So clay floor for example, the young men come and stand like that, beating, hours for hours, and then their mothers came, and they are beating in this position, for hours, giving water and beating. And then the polishers come. They start polishing it with a stone for hours. And then you have this result, very fine, like a baby bottom. (Laughter) It's not photoshopped. (Laughter) This is the school, built with the community. The walls are totally made out of compressed clay blocks from Gando. The roof structure is made with cheap steel bars normally hiding inside concrete. And the classroom, the ceiling is made out of both of them used together. In this school, there was a simple idea: to create comfort in a classroom. Don't forget, it can be 45 degrees in Burkina Faso, so with simple ventilation, I wanted to make the classroom good for teaching and learning. And this is the project today, 12 years old, still in best condition. And the kids, they love it. And for me and my community, this project was a huge success. It has opened up opportunities to do more projects in Gando. So I could do a lot of projects, and here I am going to share with you only three of them. The first one is the school extension, of course. How do you explain drawings and engineering to people who are neither able to read nor write? I started to build a prototype like that. The innovation was to build a clay vault. So then, I jumped on the top like that, with my team, and it works. The community is looking. It still works. So we can build. (Laughter) And we kept building, and that is the result. The kids are happy, and they love it. The community is very proud. We made it. And even animals, like these donkeys, love our buildings. (Laughter) The next project is the library in Gando. And see now, we tried to introduce different ideas in our buildings, but we often don't have so much material. Something we have in Gando are clay pots. We wanted to use them to create openings. So we just bring them like you can see to the building site. we start cutting them, and then we place them on top of the roof before we pour the concrete, and you have this result. The openings are letting the hot air out and light in. Very simple. My most recent project in Gando is a high school project. I would like to share with you this. The innovation in this project is to cast mud like you cast concrete. How do you cast mud? We start making a lot of mortars, like you can see, and when everything is ready, when you know what is the best recipe and the best form, you start working with the community. And sometimes I can leave. They will do it themselves. I came to speak to you like that. Another factor in Gando is rain. When the rains come, we hurry up to protect our fragile walls against the rain. Don't confound with Christo and Jeanne-Claude. It is simply how we protect our walls. (Laughter) The rain in Burkina comes very fast, and after that, you have floods everywhere in the country. But for us, the rain is good. It brings sand and gravel to the river we need to use to build. We just wait for the rain to go. We take the sand, we mix it with clay, and we keep building. That is it. The Gando project was always connected to training the people, because I just wanted, one day when I fall down and die, that at least one person from Gando keeps doing this work. But you will be surprised. I'm still alive. (Laughter) And my people now can use their skills to earn money themselves. Usually, for a young man from Gando to earn money, you have to leave the country to the city, sometimes leave the country and some never come back, making the community weaker. But now they can stay in the country and work on different building sites and earn money to feed their family. There's a new quality in this work. Yes, you know it. I have won a lot of awards through this work. For sure, it has opened opportunities. I have become myself known. But the reason why I do what I do is my community. When I was a kid, I was going to school, I was coming back every holiday to Gando. By the end of every holidays, I had to say goodbye to the community, going from one compound to another one. All women in Gando will open their clothes like that and give me the last penny. In my culture, this is a symbol of deep affection. As a seven-year-old guy, I was impressed. I just asked my mother one day, "Why do all these women love me so much?" (Laughter) She just answered, "They are contributing to pay for your education hoping that you will be successful and one day come back and help improve the quality of life of the community." I hope now that I was able to make my community proud through this work, and I hope I was able to prove you the power of community, and to show you that architecture can be inspiring for communities to shape their own future. Merci beaucoup. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
My glacier cave discoveries | {0: "A ranger at Deschutes National Forest in Oregon, Eddy Cartaya not only solves cave crimes -- he also explores the ever-changing system of caves within Mount Hood's Sandy Glacier."} | TEDYouth 2013 | So how many of you have ever been in a cave before? Okay, a few of you. When you think of a cave, most of you think of a tunnel going through solid rock, and in fact, that's how most caves are. Around this half of the country, most of your caves are made of limestone. Back where I'm from, most of our caves are made of lava rock, because we have a lot of volcanoes out there. But the caves I want to share with you today are made completely of ice, specifically glacier ice that's formed in the side of the tallest mountain in the state of Oregon, called Mount Hood. Now Mount Hood's only one hour's drive from Portland, the largest city in Oregon, where over two million people live. Now the most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to find a new cave and be the first human to ever go into it. The second most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to be the first one to make a map of a cave. Now these days, with so many people hiking around, it's pretty hard to find a new cave, so you can imagine how excited we were to find three new caves within sight of Oregon's largest city and realize that they had never been explored or mapped before. It was kind of like being an astronaut, because we were getting to see things and go places that no one had ever seen or gone to before. So what is a glacier? Well, those of you who have ever seen or touched snow, you know that it's really light, because it's just a bunch of tiny ice crystals clumped together, and it's mostly air. If you squish a handful of snow to make a snowball, it gets really small, hard and dense. Well, on a mountain like Hood, where it snows over 20 feet a year, it crushes the air out of it and gradually forms it into hard blue ice. Now each year, more and more ice stacks up on top of it, and eventually it gets so heavy that it starts to slide down the mountain under its own weight, forming a slow-moving river of ice. When ice packed like that starts to move, we call it a glacier, and we give it a name. The name of the glacier these caves are formed in is the Sandy Glacier. Now each year, as new snow lands on the glacier, it melts in the summer sun, and it forms little rivers of water on the flow along the ice, and they start to melt and bore their way down through the glacier, forming big networks of caves, sometimes going all the way down to the underlying bedrock. Now the crazy thing about glacier caves is that each year, new tunnels form. Different waterfalls pop up or move around from place to place inside the cave. Warm water from the top of the ice is boring its way down, and warm air from below the mountain actually rises up, gets into the cave, and melts the ceilings back taller and taller. But the weirdest thing about glacier caves is that the entire cave is moving, because it's formed inside a block of ice the size of a small city that's slowly sliding down the mountain. Now this is Brent McGregor, my cave exploration partner. He and I have both been exploring caves a long time and we've been climbing mountains a long time, but neither one of us had ever really explored a glacier cave before. Back in 2011, Brent saw a YouTube video of a couple of hikers that stumbled across the entrance to one of these caves. There were no GPS coordinates for it, and all we knew was that it was somewhere out on the Sandy Glacier. So in July of that year, we went out on the glacier, and we found a big crack in the ice. We had to build snow and ice anchors so that we could tie off ropes and rappel down into the hole. This is me looking into the entrance crevasse. At the end of this hole, we found a huge tunnel going right up the mountain underneath thousands of tons of glacier ice. We followed this cave back for about a half mile until it came to an end, and then with the help of our survey tools we made a three-dimensional map of the cave on our way back out. So how do you map a cave? Well, cave maps aren't like trail maps or road maps because they have pits and holes going to overlapping levels. To make a cave map, you have to set up survey stations every few feet inside the cave, and you use a laser to measure the distance between those stations. Then you use a compass and an inclinometer to measure the direction the cave is headed and measure the slope of the floor and the ceilings. Now those of you taking trigonometry, that particular type of math is very useful for making maps like this because it allows you to measure heights and distances without actually having to go there. In fact, the more I mapped and studied caves, the more useful I found all that math that I originally hated in school to be. So when you're done surveying, you take all this data and you punch it into a computer and you find someone that can draw really well, and you have them draft up a map that looks something like this, and it'll show you both a bird's-eye view of the passage as well as a profile view of the passage, kind of like an ant farm view. We named this cave Snow Dragon Cave because it was like a big dragon sleeping under the snow. Now later this summer, as more snow melted off the glacier, we found more caves, and we realized they were all connected. Not long after we mapped Snow Dragon, Brent discovered this new cave not very far away. The inside of it was coated with ice, so we had to wear big spikes on our feet called crampons so we could walk around without slipping. This cave was amazing. The ice in the ceiling was glowing blue anad green because the sunlight from far above was shining through the ice and lighting it all up. And we couldn't understand why this cave was so much colder than Snow Dragon until we got to the end and we found out why. There was a huge pit or shaft called a moulin going 130 feet straight up to the surface of the glacier. Cold air from the top of the mountain was flowing down this hole and blasting through the cave, freezing everything inside of it. And we were so excited about finding this new pit, we actually came back in January the following year so we could be the first ones to explore it. It was so cold outside, we actually had to sleep inside the cave. There's our camp on the left side of this entrance room. The next morning, we climbed out of the cave and hiked all the way to the top of the glacier, where we finally rigged and rappelled this pit for the very first time. Brent named this cave Pure Imagination, I think because the beautiful sights we saw in there were beyond what we could have ever imagined. So besides really cool ice, what else is inside these caves? Well not too much lives in them because they're so cold and the entrance is actually covered up with snow for about eight months of the year. But there are some really cool things in there. There's weird bacteria living in the water that actually eat and digest rocks to make their own food to live under this ice. In fact, this past summer, scientists collected samples of water and ice specifically to see if things called extremophiles, tiny lifeforms that are evolved to live in completely hostile conditions, might be living under the ice, kind of like what they hope to find on the polar icecaps of Mars someday. Another really cool things is that, as seeds and birds land on the surface of the glacier and die, they get buried in the snow and gradually become part of the glacier, sinking deeper and deeper into the ice. As these caves form and melt their way up into the ice, they make these artifacts rain down from the ceiling and fall onto the cave floor, where we end up finding them. For example, this is a noble fir seed we found. It's been frozen in the ice for over 100 years, and it's just now starting to sprout. This mallard duck feather was found over 1,800 feet in the back of Snow Dragon Cave. This duck died on the surface of the glacier long, long ago, and its feathers have finally made it down through over 100 feet of ice before falling inside the cave. And this beautiful quartz crystal was also found in the back of Snow Dragon. Even now, Brent and I find it hard to believe that all these discoveries were essentially in our own backyard, hidden away, just waiting to be found. Like I said earlier, the idea of discovering in this busy world we live in kind of seems like something you can only do with space travel now, but that's not true. Every year, new caves get discovered that no one has ever been in before. So it's actually not too late for one of you to become a discoverer yourself. You just have to be willing to look and go where people don't often go and focus your eyes and your mind to recognize the discovery when you see it, because it might be in your own backyard. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death | {0: 'Philosopher Stephen Cave wants to know: Why is humanity so obsessed with living forever?'} | TEDxBratislava | I have a question: Who here remembers when they first realized they were going to die? I do. I was a young boy, and my grandfather had just died, and I remember a few days later lying in bed at night trying to make sense of what had happened. What did it mean that he was dead? Where had he gone? It was like a hole in reality had opened up and swallowed him. But then the really shocking question occurred to me: If he could die, could it happen to me too? Could that hole in reality open up and swallow me? Would it open up beneath my bed and swallow me as I slept? Well, at some point, all children become aware of death. It can happen in different ways, of course, and usually comes in stages. Our idea of death develops as we grow older. And if you reach back into the dark corners of your memory, you might remember something like what I felt when my grandfather died and when I realized it could happen to me too, that sense that behind all of this the void is waiting. And this development in childhood reflects the development of our species. Just as there was a point in your development as a child when your sense of self and of time became sophisticated enough for you to realize you were mortal, so at some point in the evolution of our species, some early human's sense of self and of time became sophisticated enough for them to become the first human to realize, "I'm going to die." This is, if you like, our curse. It's the price we pay for being so damn clever. We have to live in the knowledge that the worst thing that can possibly happen one day surely will, the end of all our projects, our hopes, our dreams, of our individual world. We each live in the shadow of a personal apocalypse. And that's frightening. It's terrifying. And so we look for a way out. And in my case, as I was about five years old, this meant asking my mum. Now when I first started asking what happens when we die, the grown-ups around me at the time answered with a typical English mix of awkwardness and half-hearted Christianity, and the phrase I heard most often was that granddad was now "up there looking down on us," and if I should die too, which wouldn't happen of course, then I too would go up there, which made death sound a lot like an existential elevator. Now this didn't sound very plausible. I used to watch a children's news program at the time, and this was the era of space exploration. There were always rockets going up into the sky, up into space, going up there. But none of the astronauts when they came back ever mentioned having met my granddad or any other dead people. But I was scared, and the idea of taking the existential elevator to see my granddad sounded a lot better than being swallowed by the void while I slept. And so I believed it anyway, even though it didn't make much sense. And this thought process that I went through as a child, and have been through many times since, including as a grown-up, is a product of what psychologists call a bias. Now a bias is a way in which we systematically get things wrong, ways in which we miscalculate, misjudge, distort reality, or see what we want to see, and the bias I'm talking about works like this: Confront someone with the fact that they are going to die and they will believe just about any story that tells them it isn't true and they can, instead, live forever, even if it means taking the existential elevator. Now we can see this as the biggest bias of all. It has been demonstrated in over 400 empirical studies. Now these studies are ingenious, but they're simple. They work like this. You take two groups of people who are similar in all relevant respects, and you remind one group that they're going to die but not the other, then you compare their behavior. So you're observing how it biases behavior when people become aware of their mortality. And every time, you get the same result: People who are made aware of their mortality are more willing to believe stories that tell them they can escape death and live forever. So here's an example: One recent study took two groups of agnostics, that is people who are undecided in their religious beliefs. Now, one group was asked to think about being dead. The other group was asked to think about being lonely. They were then asked again about their religious beliefs. Those who had been asked to think about being dead were afterwards twice as likely to express faith in God and Jesus. Twice as likely. Even though the before they were all equally agnostic. But put the fear of death in them, and they run to Jesus. Now, this shows that reminding people of death biases them to believe, regardless of the evidence, and it works not just for religion, but for any kind of belief system that promises immortality in some form, whether it's becoming famous or having children or even nationalism, which promises you can live on as part of a greater whole. This is a bias that has shaped the course of human history. Now, the theory behind this bias in the over 400 studies is called terror management theory, and the idea is simple. It's just this. We develop our worldviews, that is, the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it, in order to help us manage the terror of death. And these immortality stories have thousands of different manifestations, but I believe that behind the apparent diversity there are actually just four basic forms that these immortality stories can take. And we can see them repeating themselves throughout history, just with slight variations to reflect the vocabulary of the day. Now I'm going to briefly introduce these four basic forms of immortality story, and I want to try to give you some sense of the way in which they're retold by each culture or generation using the vocabulary of their day. Now, the first story is the simplest. We want to avoid death, and the dream of doing that in this body in this world forever is the first and simplest kind of immortality story, and it might at first sound implausible, but actually, almost every culture in human history has had some myth or legend of an elixir of life or a fountain of youth or something that promises to keep us going forever. Ancient Egypt had such myths, ancient Babylon, ancient India. Throughout European history, we find them in the work of the alchemists, and of course we still believe this today, only we tell this story using the vocabulary of science. So 100 years ago, hormones had just been discovered, and people hoped that hormone treatments were going to cure aging and disease, and now instead we set our hopes on stem cells, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. But the idea that science can cure death is just one more chapter in the story of the magical elixir, a story that is as old as civilization. But betting everything on the idea of finding the elixir and staying alive forever is a risky strategy. When we look back through history at all those who have sought an elixir in the past, the one thing they now have in common is that they're all dead. So we need a backup plan, and exactly this kind of plan B is what the second kind of immortality story offers, and that's resurrection. And it stays with the idea that I am this body, I am this physical organism. It accepts that I'm going to have to die but says, despite that, I can rise up and I can live again. In other words, I can do what Jesus did. Jesus died, he was three days in the [tomb], and then he rose up and lived again. And the idea that we can all be resurrected to live again is orthodox believe, not just for Christians but also Jews and Muslims. But our desire to believe this story is so deeply embedded that we are reinventing it again for the scientific age, for example, with the idea of cryonics. That's the idea that when you die, you can have yourself frozen, and then, at some point when technology has advanced enough, you can be thawed out and repaired and revived and so resurrected. And so some people believe an omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again, and other people believe an omnipotent scientist will do it. But for others, the whole idea of resurrection, of climbing out of the grave, it's just too much like a bad zombie movie. They find the body too messy, too unreliable to guarantee eternal life, and so they set their hopes on the third, more spiritual immortality story, the idea that we can leave our body behind and live on as a soul. Now, the majority of people on Earth believe they have a soul, and the idea is central to many religions. But even though, in its current form, in its traditional form, the idea of the soul is still hugely popular, nonetheless we are again reinventing it for the digital age, for example with the idea that you can leave your body behind by uploading your mind, your essence, the real you, onto a computer, and so live on as an avatar in the ether. But of course there are skeptics who say if we look at the evidence of science, particularly neuroscience, it suggests that your mind, your essence, the real you, is very much dependent on a particular part of your body, that is, your brain. And such skeptics can find comfort in the fourth kind of immortality story, and that is legacy, the idea that you can live on through the echo you leave in the world, like the great Greek warrior Achilles, who sacrificed his life fighting at Troy so that he might win immortal fame. And the pursuit of fame is as widespread and popular now as it ever was, and in our digital age, it's even easier to achieve. You don't need to be a great warrior like Achilles or a great king or hero. All you need is an Internet connection and a funny cat. (Laughter) But some people prefer to leave a more tangible, biological legacy — children, for example. Or they like, they hope, to live on as part of some greater whole, a nation or a family or a tribe, their gene pool. But again, there are skeptics who doubt whether legacy really is immortality. Woody Allen, for example, who said, "I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I want to live on in my apartment." So those are the four basic kinds of immortality stories, and I've tried to give just some sense of how they're retold by each generation with just slight variations to fit the fashions of the day. And the fact that they recur in this way, in such a similar form but in such different belief systems, suggests, I think, that we should be skeptical of the truth of any particular version of these stories. The fact that some people believe an omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again and others believe an omnipotent scientist will do it suggests that neither are really believing this on the strength of the evidence. Rather, we believe these stories because we are biased to believe them, and we are biased to believe them because we are so afraid of death. So the question is, are we doomed to lead the one life we have in a way that is shaped by fear and denial, or can we overcome this bias? Well the Greek philosopher Epicurus thought we could. He argued that the fear of death is natural, but it is not rational. "Death," he said, "is nothing to us, because when we are here, death is not, and when death is here, we are gone." Now this is often quoted, but it's difficult to really grasp, to really internalize, because exactly this idea of being gone is so difficult to imagine. So 2,000 years later, another philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, put it like this: "Death is not an event in life: We do not live to experience death. And so," he added, "in this sense, life has no end." So it was natural for me as a child to fear being swallowed by the void, but it wasn't rational, because being swallowed by the void is not something that any of us will ever live to experience. Now, overcoming this bias is not easy because the fear of death is so deeply embedded in us, yet when we see that the fear itself is not rational, and when we bring out into the open the ways in which it can unconsciously bias us, then we can at least start to try to minimize the influence it has on our lives. Now, I find it helps to see life as being like a book: Just as a book is bounded by its covers, by beginning and end, so our lives are bounded by birth and death, and even though a book is limited by beginning and end, it can encompass distant landscapes, exotic figures, fantastic adventures. And even though a book is limited by beginning and end, the characters within it know no horizons. They only know the moments that make up their story, even when the book is closed. And so the characters of a book are not afraid of reaching the last page. Long John Silver is not afraid of you finishing your copy of "Treasure Island." And so it should be with us. Imagine the book of your life, its covers, its beginning and end, and your birth and your death. You can only know the moments in between, the moments that make up your life. It makes no sense for you to fear what is outside of those covers, whether before your birth or after your death. And you needn't worry how long the book is, or whether it's a comic strip or an epic. The only thing that matters is that you make it a good story. Thank you. (Applause) |
Inside the secret shipping industry | {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."} | TED@BCG Singapore | A couple of years ago, Harvard Business School chose the best business model of that year. It chose Somali piracy. Pretty much around the same time, I discovered that there were 544 seafarers being held hostage on ships, often anchored just off the Somali coast in plain sight. And I learned these two facts, and I thought, what's going on in shipping? And I thought, would that happen in any other industry? Would we see 544 airline pilots held captive in their jumbo jets on a runway for months, or a year? Would we see 544 Greyhound bus drivers? It wouldn't happen. So I started to get intrigued. And I discovered another fact, which to me was more astonishing almost for the fact that I hadn't known it before at the age of 42, 43. That is how fundamentally we still depend on shipping. Because perhaps the general public thinks of shipping as an old-fashioned industry, something brought by sailboat with Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows. But shipping isn't that. Shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been. Shipping brings us 90 percent of world trade. Shipping has quadrupled in size since 1970. We are more dependent on it now than ever. And yet, for such an enormous industry — there are a 100,000 working vessels on the sea — it's become pretty much invisible. Now that sounds absurd in Singapore to say that, because here shipping is so present that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel. (Laughter) But elsewhere in the world, if you ask the general public what they know about shipping and how much trade is carried by sea, you will get essentially a blank face. You will ask someone on the street if they've heard of Microsoft. I should think they'll say yes, because they'll know that they make software that goes on computers, and occasionally works. But if you ask them if they've heard of Maersk, I doubt you'd get the same response, even though Maersk, which is just one shipping company amongst many, has revenues pretty much on a par with Microsoft. [$60.2 billion] Now why is this? A few years ago, the first sea lord of the British admiralty — he is called the first sea lord, although the chief of the army is not called a land lord — he said that we, and he meant in the industrialized nations in the West, that we suffer from sea blindness. We are blind to the sea as a place of industry or of work. It's just something we fly over, a patch of blue on an airline map. Nothing to see, move along. So I wanted to open my own eyes to my own sea blindness, so I ran away to sea. A couple of years ago, I took a passage on the Maersk Kendal, a mid-sized container ship carrying nearly 7,000 boxes, and I departed from Felixstowe, on the south coast of England, and I ended up right here in Singapore five weeks later, considerably less jet-lagged than I am right now. And it was a revelation. We traveled through five seas, two oceans, nine ports, and I learned a lot about shipping. And one of the first things that surprised me when I got on board Kendal was, where are all the people? I have friends in the Navy who tell me they sail with 1,000 sailors at a time, but on Kendal there were only 21 crew. Now that's because shipping is very efficient. Containerization has made it very efficient. Ships have automation now. They can operate with small crews. But it also means that, in the words of a port chaplain I once met, the average seafarer you're going to find on a container ship is either tired or exhausted, because the pace of modern shipping is quite punishing for what the shipping calls its human element, a strange phrase which they don't seem to realize sounds a little bit inhuman. So most seafarers now working on container ships often have less than two hours in port at a time. They don't have time to relax. They're at sea for months at a time, and even when they're on board, they don't have access to what a five-year-old would take for granted, the Internet. And another thing that surprised me when I got on board Kendal was who I was sitting next to — Not the queen; I can't imagine why they put me underneath her portrait — But around that dining table in the officer's saloon, I was sitting next to a Burmese guy, I was opposite a Romanian, a Moldavian, an Indian. On the next table was a Chinese guy, and in the crew room, it was entirely Filipinos. So that was a normal working ship. Now how is that possible? Because the biggest dramatic change in shipping over the last 60 years, when most of the general public stopped noticing it, was something called an open registry, or a flag of convenience. Ships can now fly the flag of any nation that provides a flag registry. You can get a flag from the landlocked nation of Bolivia, or Mongolia, or North Korea, though that's not very popular. (Laughter) So we have these very multinational, global, mobile crews on ships. And that was a surprise to me. And when we got to pirate waters, down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait and into the Indian Ocean, the ship changed. And that was also shocking, because suddenly, I realized, as the captain said to me, that I had been crazy to choose to go through pirate waters on a container ship. We were no longer allowed on deck. There were double pirate watches. And at that time, there were those 544 seafarers being held hostage, and some of them were held hostage for years because of the nature of shipping and the flag of convenience. Not all of them, but some of them were, because for the minority of unscrupulous ship owners, it can be easy to hide behind the anonymity offered by some flags of convenience. What else does our sea blindness mask? Well, if you go out to sea on a ship or on a cruise ship, and look up to the funnel, you'll see very black smoke. And that's because shipping has very tight margins, and they want cheap fuel, so they use something called bunker fuel, which was described to me by someone in the tanker industry as the dregs of the refinery, or just one step up from asphalt. And shipping is the greenest method of transport. In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile, it emits about a thousandth of aviation and about a tenth of trucking. But it's not benign, because there's so much of it. So shipping emissions are about three to four percent, almost the same as aviation's. And if you put shipping emissions on a list of the countries' carbon emissions, it would come in about sixth, somewhere near Germany. It was calculated in 2009 that the 15 largest ships pollute in terms of particles and soot and noxious gases as much as all the cars in the world. And the good news is that people are now talking about sustainable shipping. There are interesting initiatives going on. But why has it taken so long? When are we going to start talking and thinking about shipping miles as well as air miles? I also traveled to Cape Cod to look at the plight of the North Atlantic right whale, because this to me was one of the most surprising things about my time at sea, and what it made me think about. We know about man's impact on the ocean in terms of fishing and overfishing, but we don't really know much about what's happening underneath the water. And in fact, shipping has a role to play here, because shipping noise has contributed to damaging the acoustic habitats of ocean creatures. Light doesn't penetrate beneath the surface of the water, so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins and even 800 species of fish communicate by sound. And a North Atlantic right whale can transmit across hundreds of miles. A humpback can transmit a sound across a whole ocean. But a supertanker can also be heard coming across a whole ocean, and because the noise that propellers make underwater is sometimes at the same frequency that whales use, then it can damage their acoustic habitat, and they need this for breeding, for finding feeding grounds, for finding mates. And the acoustic habitat of the North Atlantic right whale has been reduced by up to 90 percent. But there are no laws governing acoustic pollution yet. And when I arrived in Singapore, and I apologize for this, but I didn't want to get off my ship. I'd really loved being on board Kendal. I'd been well treated by the crew, I'd had a garrulous and entertaining captain, and I would happily have signed up for another five weeks, something that the captain also said I was crazy to think about. But I wasn't there for nine months at a time like the Filipino seafarers, who, when I asked them to describe their job to me, called it "dollar for homesickness." They had good salaries, but theirs is still an isolating and difficult life in a dangerous and often difficult element. But when I get to this part, I'm in two minds, because I want to salute those seafarers who bring us 90 percent of everything and get very little thanks or recognition for it. I want to salute the 100,000 ships that are at sea that are doing that work, coming in and out every day, bringing us what we need. But I also want to see shipping, and us, the general public, who know so little about it, to have a bit more scrutiny, to be a bit more transparent, to have 90 percent transparency. Because I think we could all benefit from doing something very simple, which is learning to see the sea. Thank you. (Applause) |
A new vision for rebuilding Detroit | {0: 'Toni Griffin is an urban planner working to make cities more just and resilient.'} | TEDCity2.0 | By 2010, Detroit had become the poster child for an American city in crisis. There was a housing collapse, an auto industry collapse, and the population had plummeted by 25 percent between 2000 and 2010, and many people were beginning to write it off, as it had topped the list of American shrinking cities. By 2010, I had also been asked by the Kresge Foundation and the city of Detroit to join them in leading a citywide planning process for the city to create a shared vision for its future. I come to this work as an architect and an urban planner, and I've spent my career working in other contested cities, like Chicago, my hometown; Harlem, which is my current home; Washington, D.C.; and Newark, New Jersey. All of these cities, to me, still had a number of unresolved issues related to urban justice, issues of equity, inclusion and access. Now by 2010, as well, popular design magazines were also beginning to take a closer look at cities like Detroit, and devoting whole issues to "fixing the city." I was asked by a good friend, Fred Bernstein, to do an interview for the October issue of Architect magazine, and he and I kind of had a good chuckle when we saw the magazine released with the title, "Can This Planner Save Detroit?" So I'm smiling with a little bit of embarrassment right now, because obviously, it's completely absurd that a single person, let alone a planner, could save a city. But I'm also smiling because I thought it represented a sense of hopefulness that our profession could play a role in helping the city to think about how it would recover from its severe crisis. So I'd like to spend a little bit of time this afternoon and tell you a little bit about our process for fixing the city, a little bit about Detroit, and I want to do that through the voices of Detroiters. So we began our process in September of 2010. It's just after a special mayoral election, and word has gotten out that there is going to be this citywide planning process, which brings a lot of anxiety and fears among Detroiters. We had planned to hold a number of community meetings in rooms like this to introduce the planning process, and people came out from all over the city, including areas that were stable neighborhoods, as well as areas that were beginning to see a lot of vacancy. And most of our audience was representative of the 82 percent African-American population in the city at that time. So obviously, we have a Q&A portion of our program, and people line up to mics to ask questions. Many of them step very firmly to the mic, put their hands across their chest, and go, "I know you people are trying to move me out of my house, right?" So that question is really powerful, and it was certainly powerful to us in the moment, when you connect it to the stories that some Detroiters had, and actually a lot of African-Americans' families have had that are living in Midwestern cities like Detroit. Many of them told us the stories about how they came to own their home through their grandparents or great-grandparents, who were one of 1.6 million people who migrated from the rural South to the industrial North, as depicted in this painting by Jacob Lawrence, "The Great Migration." They came to Detroit for a better way of life. Many found work in the automobile industry, the Ford Motor Company, as depicted in this mural by Diego Rivera in the Detroit Institute of Art. The fruits of their labors would afford them a home, for many the first piece of property that they would ever know, and a community with other first-time African-American home buyers. The first couple of decades of their life in the North is quite well, up until about 1950, which coincides with the city's peak population at 1.8 million people. Now it's at this time that Detroit begins to see a second kind of migration, a migration to the suburbs. Between 1950 and 2000, the region grows by 30 percent. But this time, the migration leaves African-Americans in place, as families and businesses flee the city, leaving the city pretty desolate of people as well as jobs. During that same period, between 1950 and 2000, 2010, the city loses 60 percent of its population, and today it hovers at above 700,000. The audience members who come and talk to us that night tell us the stories of what it's like to live in a city with such depleted population. Many tell us that they're one of only a few homes on their block that are occupied, and that they can see several abandoned homes from where they sit on their porches. Citywide, there are 80,000 vacant homes. They can also see vacant property. They're beginning to see illegal activities on these properties, like illegal dumping, and they know that because the city has lost so much population, their costs for water, electricity, gas are rising, because there are not enough people to pay property taxes to help support the services that they need. Citywide, there are about 100,000 vacant parcels. Now, to quickly give you all a sense of a scale, because I know that sounds like a big number, but I don't think you quite understand until you look at the city map. So the city is 139 square miles. You can fit Boston, San Francisco, and the island of Manhattan within its footprint. So if we take all of that vacant and abandoned property and we smush it together, it looks like about 20 square miles, and that's roughly equivalent to the size of the island we're sitting on today, Manhattan, at 22 square miles. So it's a lot of vacancy. Now some of our audience members also tell us about some of the positive things that are happening in their communities, and many of them are banding together to take control of some of the vacant lots, and they're starting community gardens, which are creating a great sense of community stewardship, but they're very, very clear to tell us that this is not enough, that they want to see their neighborhoods return to the way that their grandparents had found them. Now there's been a lot of speculation since 2010 about what to do with the vacant property, and a lot of that speculation has been around community gardening, or what we call urban agriculture. So many people would say to us, "What if you just take all that vacant land and you could make it farmland? It can provide fresh foods, and it can put Detroiters back to work too." When I hear that story, I always imagine the folks from the Great Migration rolling over in their graves, because you can imagine that they didn't sacrifice moving from the South to the North to create a better life for their families, only to see their great-grandchildren return to an agrarian lifestyle, especially in a city where they came with little less than a high school education or even a grammar school education and were able to afford the basic elements of the American dream: steady work and a home that they owned. Now, there's a third wave of migration happening in Detroit: a new ascendant of cultural entrepreneurs. These folks see that same vacant land and those same abandoned homes as opportunity for new, entrepreneurial ideas and profit, so much so that former models can move to Detroit, buy property, start successful businesses and restaurants, and become successful community activists in their neighborhood, bringing about very positive change. Similarly, we have small manufacturing companies making conscious decisions to relocate to the city. This company, Shinola, which is a luxury watch and bicycle company, deliberately chose to relocate to Detroit, and they quote themselves by saying they were drawn to the global brand of Detroit's innovation. And they also knew that they can tap into a workforce that was still very skilled in how to make things. Now we have community stewardship happening in neighborhoods, we have cultural entrepreneurs making decisions to move to the city and create enterprises, and we have businesses relocating, and this is all in the context of what is no secret to us all, a city that's under the control of an emergency manager, and just this July filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. So 2010, we started this process, and by 2013, we released Detroit Future City, which was our strategic plan to guide the city into a better and more prosperous and more sustainable existence — not what it was, but what it could be, looking at new ways of economic growth, new forms of land use, more sustainable and denser neighborhoods, a reconfigured infrastructure and city service system, and a heightened capacity for civic leaders to take action and implement change. Three key imperatives were really important to our work. One was that the city itself wasn't necessarily too large, but the economy was too small. There are only 27 jobs per 100 people in Detroit, very different from a Denver or an Atlanta or a Philadelphia that are anywhere between 35 to 70 jobs per 100 people. Secondly, there had to be an acceptance that we were not going to be able to use all of this vacant land in the way that we had before and maybe for some time to come. It wasn't going to be our traditional residential neighborhoods as we had before, and urban agriculture, while a very productive and successful intervention happening in Detroit, was not the only answer, that what we had to do is look at these areas where we had significant vacancy but still had a significant number of population of what could be new, productive, innovative, and entrepreneurial uses that could stabilize those communities, where still nearly 300,000 residents lived. So we came up with one neighborhood typology — there are several — called a live-make neighborhood, where folks could reappropriate abandoned structures and turn them into entrepreneurial enterprises, with a specific emphasis on looking at the, again, majority 82 percent African-American population. So they, too, could take businesses that they maybe were doing out of their home and grow them to more prosperous industries and actually acquire property so they were actually property owners as well as business owners in the communities with which they resided. Then we also wanted to look at other ways of using land in addition to growing food and transforming landscape into much more productive uses, so that it could be used for storm water management, for example, by using surface lakes and retention ponds, that created neighborhood amenities, places of recreation, and actually helped to elevate adjacent property levels. Or we could use it as research plots, where we can use it to remediate contaminated soils, or we could use it to generate energy. So the descendants of the Great Migration could either become precision watchmakers at Shinola, like Willie H., who was featured in one of their ads last year, or they can actually grow a business that would service companies like Shinola. The good news is, there is a future for the next generation of Detroiters, both those there now and those that want to come. So no thank you, Mayor Menino, who recently was quoted as saying, "I'd blow up the place and start over." There are very important people, business and land assets in Detroit, and there are real opportunities there. So while Detroit might not be what it was, Detroit will not die. Thank you. (Applause) |
Welcome to the age of the industrial internet | {0: 'The Chief Economist at General Electric, Marco Annunziata is a financial virtuoso with a passion for technology.'} | TED@BCG San Francisco | Einstein said that "I never think about the future — it comes soon enough." And he was right, of course. So today, I'm here to ask you to think of how the future is happening now. Over the past 200 years, the world has experienced two major waves of innovation. First, the Industrial Revolution brought us machines and factories, railways, electricity, air travel, and our lives have never been the same. Then the Internet revolution brought us computing power, data networks, unprecedented access to information and communication, and our lives have never been the same. Now we are experiencing another metamorphic change: the industrial Internet. It brings together intelligent machines, advanced analytics, and the creativity of people at work. It's the marriage of minds and machines. And our lives will never be the same. In my current role, I see up close how technology is beginning to transform industrial sectors that play a huge role in our economy and in our lives: energy, aviation, transportation, health care. For an economist, this is highly unusual, and it's extremely exciting, because this is a transformation as powerful as the Industrial Revolution and more, and before the Industrial Revolution, there was no economic growth to speak of. So what is this industrial Internet? Industrial machines are being equipped with a growing number of electronic sensors that allow them to see, hear, feel a lot more than ever before, generating prodigious amounts of data. Increasingly sophisticated analytics then sift through the data, providing insights that allow us to operate the machines in entirely new ways, a lot more efficiently. And not just individual machines, but fleets of locomotives, airplanes, entire systems like power grids, hospitals. It is asset optimization and system optimization. Of course, electronic sensors have been around for some time, but something has changed: a sharp decline in the cost of sensors and, thanks to advances in cloud computing, a rapid decrease in the cost of storing and processing data. So we are moving to a world where the machines we work with are not just intelligent; they are brilliant. They are self-aware, they are predictive, reactive and social. It's jet engines, locomotives, gas turbines, medical devices, communicating seamlessly with each other and with us. It's a world where information itself becomes intelligent and comes to us automatically when we need it without having to look for it. We are beginning to deploy throughout the industrial system embedded virtualization, multi-core processor technology, advanced cloud-based communications, a new software-defined machine infrastructure which allows machine functionality to become virtualized in software, decoupling machine software from hardware, and allowing us to remotely and automatically monitor, manage and upgrade industrial assets. Why does any of this matter at all? Well first of all, it's already allowing us to shift towards preventive, condition-based maintenance, which means fixing machines just before they break, without wasting time servicing them on a fixed schedule. And this, in turn, is pushing us towards zero unplanned downtime, which means there will be no more power outages, no more flight delays. So let me give you a few examples of how these brilliant machines work, and some of the examples may seem trivial, some are clearly more profound, but all of them are going to have a very powerful impact. Let's start with aviation. Today, 10 percent of all flights cancellations and delays are due to unscheduled maintenance events. Something goes wrong unexpectedly. This results in eight billion dollars in costs for the airline industry globally every year, not to mention the impact on all of us: stress, inconvenience, missed meetings as we sit helplessly in an airport terminal. So how can the industrial Internet help here? We've developed a preventive maintenance system which can be installed on any aircraft. It's self-learning and able to predict issues that a human operator would miss. The aircraft, while in flight, will communicate with technicians on the ground. By the time it lands, they will already know if anything needs to be serviced. Just in the U.S., a system like this can prevent over 60,000 delays and cancellations every year, helping seven million passengers get to their destinations on time. Or take healthcare. Today, nurses spend an average of 21 minutes per shift looking for medical equipment. That seems trivial, but it's less time spent caring for patients. St. Luke's Medical Center in Houston, Texas, which has deployed industrial Internet technology to electronically monitor and connect patients, staff and medical equipment, has reduced bed turnaround times by nearly one hour. If you need surgery, one hour matters. It means more patients can be treated, more lives can be saved. Another medical center, in Washington state, is piloting an application that allows medical images from city scanners and MRIs to be analyzed in the cloud, developing better analytics at a lower cost. Imagine a patient who has suffered a severe trauma, and needs the attention of several specialists: a neurologist, a cardiologist, an orthopedic surgeon. If all of them can have instantaneous and simultaneous access to scans and images as they are taken, they will be able to deliver better healthcare faster. So all of this translates into better health outcomes, but it can also deliver substantial economic benefits. Just a one-percent reduction in existing inefficiencies could yield savings of over 60 billion dollars to the healthcare industry worldwide, and that is just a drop in the sea compared to what we need to do to make healthcare affordable on a sustainable basis. Similar advances are happening in energy, including renewable energy. Wind farms equipped with new remote monitorings and diagnostics that allow wind turbines to talk to each other and adjust the pitch of their blades in a coordinated way, depending on how the wind is blowing, can now produce electricity at a cost of less than five cents per kilowatt/hour. Ten years ago, that cost was 30 cents, six times as much. The list goes on, and it will grow fast, because industrial data are now growing exponentially. By 2020, they will account for over 50 percent of all digital information. But this is not just about data, so let me switch gears and tell you how this is impacting already the jobs we do every day, because this new wave of innovation is bringing about new tools and applications that will allow us to collaborate in a smarter and faster way, making our jobs not just more efficient but more rewarding. Imagine a field engineer arriving at the wind farm with a handheld device telling her which turbines need servicing. She already has all the spare parts, because the problems were diagnosed in advanced. And if she faces an unexpected issue, the same handheld device will allow her to communicate with colleagues at the service center, let them see what she sees, transmit data that they can run through diagnostics, and they can stream videos that will guide her, step by step, through whatever complex procedure is needed to get the machines back up and running. And their interaction gets documented and stored in a searchable database. Let's stop and think about this for a minute, because this is a very important point. This new wave of innovation is fundamentally changing the way we work. And I know that many of you will be concerned about the impact that innovation might have on jobs. Unemployment is already high, and there is always a fear that innovation will destroy jobs. And innovation is disruptive. But let me stress two things here. First, we've already lived through mechanization of agriculture, automation of industry, and employment has gone up, because innovation is fundamentally about growth. It makes products more affordable. It creates new demand, new jobs. Second, there is a concern that in the future, there will only be room for engineers, data scientists, and other highly-specialized workers. And believe me, as an economist, I am also scared. But think about it: Just as a child can easily figure out how to operate an iPad, so a new generation of mobile and intuitive industrial applications will make life easier for workers of all skill levels. The worker of the future will be more like Iron Man than the Charlie Chaplin of "Modern Times." And to be sure, new high-skilled jobs will be created: mechanical digital engineers who understand both the machines and the data; managers who understand their industry and the analytics and can reorganize the business to take full advantage of the technology. But now let's take a step back. Let's look at the big picture. There are people who argue that today's innovation is all about social media and silly games, with nowhere near the transformational power of the Industrial Revolution. They say that all the growth-enhancing innovations are behind us. And every time I hear this, I can't help thinking that even back in the Stone Age, there must have been a group of cavemen sitting around a fire one day looking very grumpy, and looking disapprovingly at another group of cavemen rolling a stone wheel up and down a hill, and saying to each other, "Yeah, this wheel thing, cool toy, sure, but compared to fire, it will have no impact. The big discoveries are all behind us." (Laughter) This technological revolution is as inspiring and transformational as anything we have ever seen. Human creativity and innovation have always propelled us forward. They've created jobs. They've raised living standards. They've made our lives healthier and more rewarding. And the new wave of innovation which is beginning to sweep through industry is no different. In the U.S. alone, the industrial Internet could raise average income by 25 to 40 percent over the next 15 years, boosting growth to rates we haven't seen in a long time, and adding between 10 and 15 trillion dollars to global GDP. That is the size of the entire U.S. economy today. But this is not a foregone conclusion. We are just at the beginning of this transformation, and there will be barriers to break, obstacles to overcome. We will need to invest in the new technologies. We will need to adapt organizations and managerial practices. We will need a robust cybersecurity approach that protects sensitive information and intellectual property and safeguards critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. And the education system will need to evolve to ensure students are equipped with the right skills. It's not going to be easy, but it is going to be worth it. The economic challenges facing us are hard, but when I walk the factory floor, and I see how humans and brilliant machines are becoming interconnected, and I see the difference this makes in a hospital, in an airport, in a power generation plant, I'm not just optimistic, I'm enthusiastic. This new technological revolution is upon us. So think about the future — it will be here soon enough. Thank you. (Applause) |
Depression, the secret we share | {0: 'Andrew Solomon writes about politics, culture and psychology. '} | TEDxMet | "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, and Mourners to and fro kept treading — treading — till [it seemed] that Sense was breaking through — And when they all were seated, a Service, like a Drum — kept beating — beating — till I [thought] my Mind was going numb — And then I heard them lift a Box and creak across my Soul with those same Boots of Lead, again, then Space — began to toll, As [all] the Heavens were a Bell, and Being, [but] an Ear, and I, and Silence, some strange Race, wrecked, solitary, here — [And] then a Plank in Reason, broke, and I fell down and down — and hit a World, at every plunge, and Finished knowing — then —" We know depression through metaphors. Emily Dickinson was able to convey it in language, Goya in an image. Half the purpose of art is to describe such iconic states. As for me, I had always thought myself tough, one of the people who could survive if I'd been sent to a concentration camp. In 1991, I had a series of losses. My mother died, a relationship I'd been in ended, I moved back to the United States from some years abroad, and I got through all of those experiences intact. But in 1994, three years later, I found myself losing interest in almost everything. I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do, and I didn't know why. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality. And it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. I would come home and I would see the red light flashing on my answering machine, and instead of being thrilled to hear from my friends, I would think, "What a lot of people that is to have to call back." Or I would decide I should have lunch, and then I would think, but I'd have to get the food out and put it on a plate and cut it up and chew it and swallow it, and it felt to me like the Stations of the Cross. And one of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous while you're experiencing it. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages and eat lunch and organize themselves to take a shower and go out the front door and that it's not a big deal, and yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it. And so I began to feel myself doing less and thinking less and feeling less. It was a kind of nullity. And then the anxiety set in. If you told me that I'd have to be depressed for the next month, I would say, "As long I know it'll be over in November, I can do it." But if you said to me, "You have to have acute anxiety for the next month," I would rather slit my wrist than go through it. It was the feeling all the time like that feeling you have if you're walking and you slip or trip and the ground is rushing up at you, but instead of lasting half a second, the way that does, it lasted for six months. It's a sensation of being afraid all the time but not even knowing what it is that you're afraid of. And it was at that point that I began to think that it was just too painful to be alive, and that the only reason not to kill oneself was so as not to hurt other people. And finally one day, I woke up and I thought perhaps I'd had a stroke, because I lay in bed completely frozen, looking at the telephone, thinking, "Something is wrong and I should call for help," and I couldn't reach out my arm and pick up the phone and dial. And finally, after four full hours of my lying and staring at it, the phone rang, and somehow I managed to pick it up, and it was my father, and I said, "I'm in serious trouble. We need to do something." The next day I started with the medications and the therapy. And I also started reckoning with this terrible question: If I'm not the tough person who could have made it through a concentration camp, then who am I? And if I have to take medication, is that medication making me more fully myself, or is it making me someone else? And how do I feel about it if it's making me someone else? I had two advantages as I went into the fight. The first is that I knew that, objectively speaking, I had a nice life, and that if I could only get well, there was something at the other end that was worth living for. And the other was that I had access to good treatment. But I nonetheless emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and finally understood I would have to be on medication and in therapy forever. And I thought, "But is it a chemical problem or a psychological problem? And does it need a chemical cure or a philosophical cure?" And I couldn't figure out which it was. And then I understood that actually, we aren't advanced enough in either area for it to explain things fully. The chemical cure and the psychological cure both have a role to play, and I also figured out that depression was something that was braided so deep into us that there was no separating it from our character and personality. I want to say that the treatments we have for depression are appalling. They're not very effective. They're extremely costly. They come with innumerable side effects. They're a disaster. But I am so grateful that I live now and not 50 years ago, when there would have been almost nothing to be done. I hope that 50 years hence, people will hear about my treatments and be appalled that anyone endured such primitive science. Depression is the flaw in love. If you were married to someone and thought, "Well, if my wife dies, I'll find another one," it wouldn't be love as we know it. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss, and that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy. There are three things people tend to confuse: depression, grief and sadness. Grief is explicitly reactive. If you have a loss and you feel incredibly unhappy, and then, six months later, you are still deeply sad, but you're functioning a little better, it's probably grief, and it will probably ultimately resolve itself in some measure. If you experience a catastrophic loss, and you feel terrible, and six months later you can barely function at all, then it's probably a depression that was triggered by the catastrophic circumstances. The trajectory tells us a great deal. People think of depression as being just sadness. It's much, much too much sadness, much too much grief at far too slight a cause. As I set out to understand depression, and to interview people who had experienced it, I found that there were people who seemed, on the surface, to have what sounded like relatively mild depression who were nonetheless utterly disabled by it. And there were other people who had what sounded as they described it like terribly severe depression who nonetheless had good lives in the interstices between their depressive episodes. And I set out to find out what it is that causes some people to be more resilient than other people. What are the mechanisms that allow people to survive? And I went out and I interviewed person after person who was suffering with depression. One of the first people I interviewed described depression as a slower way of being dead, and that was a good thing for me to hear early on because it reminded me that that slow way of being dead can lead to actual deadness, that this is a serious business. It's the leading disability worldwide, and people die of it every day. One of the people I talked to when I was trying to understand this was a beloved friend who I had known for many years, and who had had a psychotic episode in her freshman year of college, and then plummeted into a horrific depression. She had bipolar illness, or manic depression, as it was then known. And then she did very well for many years on lithium, and then eventually, she was taken off her lithium to see how she would do without it, and she had another psychosis, and then plunged into the worst depression that I had ever seen in which she sat in her parents' apartment, more or less catatonic, essentially without moving, day after day after day. And when I interviewed her about that experience some years later — she's a poet and psychotherapist named Maggie Robbins — when I interviewed her, she said, "I was singing 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone,' over and over, to occupy my mind. I was singing to blot out the things my mind was saying, which were, 'You are nothing. You are nobody. You don't even deserve to live.' And that was when I really started thinking about killing myself." You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly. It's easier to help schizophrenics who perceive that there's something foreign inside of them that needs to be exorcised, but it's difficult with depressives, because we believe we are seeing the truth. But the truth lies. I became obsessed with that sentence: "But the truth lies." And I discovered, as I talked to depressive people, that they have many delusional perceptions. People will say, "No one loves me." And you say, "I love you, your wife loves you, your mother loves you." You can answer that one pretty readily, at least for most people. But people who are depressed will also say, "No matter what we do, we're all just going to die in the end." Or they'll say, "There can be no true communion between two human beings. Each of us is trapped in his own body." To which you have to say, "That's true, but I think we should focus right now on what to have for breakfast." (Laughter) A lot of the time, what they are expressing is not illness, but insight, and one comes to think what's really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions and they don't distract us very much. There was a study I particularly liked in which a group of depressed and a group of non-depressed people were asked to play a video game for an hour, and at the end of the hour, they were asked how many little monsters they thought they had killed. The depressive group was usually accurate to within about 10 percent, and the non-depressed people guessed between 15 and 20 times as many little monsters — (Laughter) as they had actually killed. A lot of people said, when I chose to write about my depression, that it must be very difficult to be out of that closet, to have people know. They said, "Do people talk to you differently?" I said, "Yes, people talk to me differently. They talk to me differently insofar as they start telling me about their experience, or their sister's experience, or their friend's experience. Things are different because now I know that depression is the family secret that everyone has. I went a few years ago to a conference, and on Friday of the three-day conference, one of the participants took me aside, and she said, "I suffer from depression and I'm a little embarrassed about it, but I've been taking this medication, and I just wanted to ask you what you think?" And so I did my best to give her such advice as I could. And then she said, "You know, my husband would never understand this. He's really the kind of guy to whom this wouldn't make any sense, so, you know, it's just between us." And I said, "Yes, that's fine." On Sunday of the same conference, her husband took me aside, (Laughter) and he said, "My wife wouldn't think that I was really much of a guy if she knew this, but I've been dealing with this depression and I'm taking some medication, and I wondered what you think?" They were hiding the same medication in two different places in the same bedroom. (Laughter) And I said that I thought communication within the marriage might be triggering some of their problems. (Laughter) But I was also struck by the burdensome nature of such mutual secrecy. Depression is so exhausting. It takes up so much of your time and energy, and silence about it, it really does make the depression worse. And then I began thinking about all the ways people make themselves better. I'd started off as a medical conservative. I thought there were a few kinds of therapy that worked, it was clear what they were — there was medication, there were certain psychotherapies, there was possibly electroconvulsive treatment, and that everything else was nonsense. But then I discovered something. If you have brain cancer, and you say that standing on your head for 20 minutes every morning makes you feel better, it may make you feel better, but you still have brain cancer, and you'll still probably die from it. But if you say that you have depression, and standing on your head for 20 minutes every day makes you feel better, then it's worked, because depression is an illness of how you feel, and if you feel better, then you are effectively not depressed anymore. So I became much more tolerant of the vast world of alternative treatments. And I get letters, I get hundreds of letters from people writing to tell me about what's worked for them. Someone was asking me backstage today about meditation. My favorite of the letters that I got was the one that came from a woman who wrote and said that she had tried therapy, medication, she had tried pretty much everything, and she had found a solution and hoped I would tell the world, and that was making little things from yarn. (Laughter) She sent me some of them. (Laughter) And I'm not wearing them right now. (Laughter) I suggested to her that she also should look up obsessive compulsive disorder in the DSM. And yet, when I went to look at alternative treatments, I also gained perspective on other treatments. I went through a tribal exorcism in Senegal that involved a great deal of ram's blood and that I'm not going to detail right now, but a few years afterwards I was in Rwanda, working on a different project, and I happened to describe my experience to someone, and he said, "Well, that's West Africa, and we're in East Africa, and our rituals are in some ways very different, but we do have some rituals that have something in common with what you're describing." And he said, "But we've had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers, especially the ones who came right after the genocide." I said, "What kind of trouble did you have?" And he said, "Well, they would do this bizarre thing. They didn't take people out in the sunshine where you begin to feel better. They didn't include drumming or music to get people's blood going. They didn't involve the whole community. They didn't externalize the depression as an invasive spirit. Instead what they did was they took people one at a time into dingy little rooms and had them talk for an hour about bad things that had happened to them." (Laughter) (Applause) He said, "We had to ask them to leave the country." (Laughter) Now at the other end of alternative treatments, let me tell you about Frank Russakoff. Frank Russakoff had the worst depression perhaps that I've ever seen in a man. He was constantly depressed. He was, when I met him, at a point at which every month, he would have electroshock treatment. Then he would feel sort of disoriented for a week. Then he would feel okay for a week. Then he would have a week of going downhill. And then he would have another electroshock treatment. And he said to me when I met him, "It's unbearable to go through my weeks this way. I can't go on this way, and I've figured out how I'm going to end it if I don't get better." "But," he said to me, "I heard about a protocol at Mass General for a procedure called a cingulotomy, which is a brain surgery, and I think I'm going to give that a try." And I remember being amazed at that point to think that someone who clearly had so many bad experiences with so many different treatments still had buried in him, somewhere, enough optimism to reach out for one more. And he had the cingulotomy, and it was incredibly successful. He's now a friend of mine. He has a lovely wife and two beautiful children. He wrote me a letter the Christmas after the surgery, and he said, "My father sent me two presents this year, First, a motorized CD rack from The Sharper Image that I didn't really need, but I knew he was giving it to me to celebrate the fact that I'm living on my own and have a job I seem to love. And the other present was a photo of my grandmother, who committed suicide. As I unwrapped it, I began to cry, and my mother came over and said, 'Are you crying because of the relatives you never knew?' And I said, 'She had the same disease I have.' I'm crying now as I write to you. It's not that I'm so sad, but I get overwhelmed, I think, because I could have killed myself, but my parents kept me going, and so did the doctors, and I had the surgery. I'm alive and grateful. We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it." I was struck by the fact that depression is broadly perceived to be a modern, Western, middle-class thing, and I went to look at how it operated in a variety of other contexts, and one of the things I was most interested in was depression among the indigent. And so I went out to try to look at what was being done for poor people with depression. And what I discovered is that poor people are mostly not being treated for depression. Depression is the result of a genetic vulnerability, which is presumably evenly distributed in the population, and triggering circumstances, which are likely to be more severe for people who are impoverished. And yet it turns out that if you have a really lovely life but feel miserable all the time, you think, "Why do I feel like this? I must have depression." And you set out to find treatment for it. But if you have a perfectly awful life, and you feel miserable all the time, the way you feel is commensurate with your life, and it doesn't occur to you to think, "Maybe this is treatable." And so we have an epidemic in this country of depression among impoverished people that's not being picked up and that's not being treated and that's not being addressed, and it's a tragedy of a grand order. And so I found an academic who was doing a research project in slums outside of D.C., where she picked up women who had come in for other health problems and diagnosed them with depression, and then provided six months of the experimental protocol. One of them, Lolly, came in, and this is what she said the day she came in. She said, and she was a woman, by the way, who had seven children. She said, "I used to have a job but I had to give it up because I couldn't go out of the house. I have nothing to say to my children. In the morning, I can't wait for them to leave, and then I climb in bed and pull the covers over my head, and three o'clock when they come home, it just comes so fast." She said, "I've been taking a lot of Tylenol, anything I can take so that I can sleep more. My husband has been telling me I'm stupid, I'm ugly. I wish I could stop the pain." Well, she was brought into this experimental protocol, and when I interviewed her six months later, she had taken a job working in childcare for the U.S. Navy, she had left the abusive husband, and she said to me, "My kids are so much happier now." She said, "There's one room in my new place for the boys and one room for the girls, but at night, they're just all up on my bed, and we're doing homework all together and everything. One of them wants to be a preacher, one of them wants to be a firefighter, and one of the girls says she's going to be a lawyer. They don't cry like they used to, and they don't fight like they did. That's all I need now, is my kids. Things keep on changing, the way I dress, the way I feel, the way I act. I can go outside not being afraid anymore, and I don't think those bad feelings are coming back, and if it weren't for Dr. Miranda and that, I would still be at home with the covers pulled over my head, if I were still alive at all. I asked the Lord to send me an angel, and He heard my prayers." I was really moved by these experiences, and I decided that I wanted to write about them not only in a book I was working on, but also in an article, and I got a commission from The New York Times Magazine to write about depression among the indigent. And I turned in my story, and my editor called me and said, "We really can't publish this." And I said, "Why not?" And she said, "It just is too far-fetched. These people who are sort of at the very bottom rung of society and then they get a few months of treatment and they're virtually ready to run Morgan Stanley? It's just too implausible." She said, "I've never even heard of anything like it." And I said, "The fact that you've never heard of it is an indication that it is news." (Laughter) (Applause) "And you are a news magazine." So after a certain amount of negotiation, they agreed to it. But I think a lot of what they said was connected in some strange way to this distaste that people still have for the idea of treatment, the notion that somehow if we went out and treated a lot of people in indigent communities, that would be exploitative, because we would be changing them. There is this false moral imperative that seems to be all around us, that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles. People then say, "But isn't depression part of what people are supposed to experience? Didn't we evolve to have depression? Isn't it part of your personality?" To which I would say, mood is adaptive. Being able to have sadness and fear and joy and pleasure and all of the other moods that we have, that's incredibly valuable. And major depression is something that happens when that system gets broken. It's maladaptive. People will come to me and say, "I think, though, if I just stick it out for another year, I think I can just get through this." And I always say to them, "You may get through it, but you'll never be 37 again. Life is short, and that's a whole year you're talking about giving up. Think it through." It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed of many other languages, that we use this same word, depression, to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide. People say to me, "Well, is it continuous with normal sadness?" And I say, in a way it's continuous with normal sadness. There is a certain amount of continuity, but it's the same way there's continuity between having an iron fence outside your house that gets a little rust spot that you have to sand off and do a little repainting, and what happens if you leave the house for 100 years and it rusts through until it's only a pile of orange dust. And it's that orange dust spot, that orange dust problem, that's the one we're setting out to address. So now people say, "You take these happy pills, and do you feel happy?" And I don't. But I don't feel sad about having to eat lunch, and I don't feel sad about my answering machine, and I don't feel sad about taking a shower. I feel more, in fact, I think, because I can feel sadness without nullity. I feel sad about professional disappointments, about damaged relationships, about global warming. Those are the things that I feel sad about now. And I said to myself, well, what is the conclusion? How did those people who have better lives even with bigger depression manage to get through? What is the mechanism of resilience? And what I came up with over time was that the people who deny their experience, and say, "I was depressed a long time ago, I never want to think about it again, I'm not going to look at it and I'm just going to get on with my life," ironically, those are the people who are most enslaved by what they have. Shutting out the depression strengthens it. While you hide from it, it grows. And the people who do better are the ones who are able to tolerate the fact that they have this condition. Those who can tolerate their depression are the ones who achieve resilience. So Frank Russakoff said to me, "If I had a do-over, I suppose I wouldn't do it this way, but in a strange way, I'm grateful for what I've experienced. I'm glad to have been in the hospital 40 times. It taught me so much about love, and my relationship with my parents and my doctors has been so precious to me, and will be always." And Maggie Robbins said, "I used to volunteer in an AIDS clinic, and I would just talk and talk and talk, and the people I was dealing with weren't very responsive, and I thought, 'That's not very friendly or helpful of them.'" (Laughter) "And then I realized, I realized that they weren't going to do more than make those first few minutes of small talk. It was simply going to be an occasion where I didn't have AIDS and I wasn't dying, but could tolerate the fact that they did and they were. Our needs are our greatest assets. It turns out I've learned to give all the things I need." Valuing one's depression does not prevent a relapse, but it may make the prospect of relapse and even relapse itself easier to tolerate. The question is not so much of finding great meaning and deciding your depression has been very meaningful. It's of seeking that meaning and thinking, when it comes again, "This will be hellish, but I will learn something from it." I have learned in my own depression how big an emotion can be, how it can be more real than facts, and I have found that that experience has allowed me to experience positive emotion in a more intense and more focused way. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and these days, my life is vital, even on the days when I'm sad. I felt that funeral in my brain, and I sat next to the colossus at the edge of the world, and I have discovered something inside of myself that I would have to call a soul that I had never formulated until that day 20 years ago when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. I think that while I hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, I've found a way to love my depression. I love it because it has forced me to find and cling to joy. I love it because each day I decide, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to cleave to the reasons for living. And that, I think, is a highly privileged rapture. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
The $80 prosthetic knee that's changing lives | {0: 'Krista Donaldson is the CEO of D-Rev, a non-profit product development company improving the health and incomes of people around the world.'} | TEDWomen 2013 | Nine years ago, I worked for the U.S. government in Iraq, helping rebuild the electricity infrastructure. And I was there, and I worked in that job because I believe that technology can improve people's lives. One afternoon, I had tea with a storekeeper at the Al Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad, and he said to me, "You Americans, you can put a man on the moon, but when I get home tonight, I won't be able to turn on my lights." At the time, the U.S. government had spent more than two billion dollars on electricity reconstruction. How do you ensure technology reaches users? How do you put it in their hands so that it is useful? So those are the questions that my colleagues and I at D-Rev ask ourselves. And D-Rev is short for Design Revolution. And I took over the organization four years ago and really focused it on developing products that actually reach users, and not just any users, but customers who live on less than four dollars a day. One of the key areas we've been working on recently is medical devices, and while it may not be obvious that medical devices have something in common with Iraq's electricity grid then, there are some commonalities. Despite the advanced technology, it's not reaching the people who need it most. So I'm going to tell you about one of the projects we've been working on, the ReMotion Knee, and it's a prosthetic knee for above-knee amputees. And this project started when the Jaipur Foot Organization, the largest fitter of prosthetic limbs in the world, came to the Bay Area and they said, "We need a better knee." Chances are, if you're living on less than four dollars a day, and you're an amputee, you've lost your limb in a vehicle accident. Most people think it's land mines, but it's a vehicle accident. You're walking by the side of the road and you're hit by a truck, or you're trying to to jump on a moving train, you're late for work, and your pant leg gets caught. And the reality is that if you don't have much money, like this young named Kamal right here, the option you really have is a bamboo staff to get around. And how big a problem is this? There's over three million amputees every year who need a new or replacement knee. And what are their options? This is a high-end. This is what we'd call a "smart knee." It's got a microprocessor inside. It can pretty much do anything, but it's 20,000 dollars, and to give you a sense of who wears this, veterans, American veterans coming back from Afghanistan or Iraq would be fit with something like this. This is a low-end titanium knee. It's a polycentric knee, and all that that means is the mechanism, is a four-bar mechanism, that mimics a natural human knee. But at 1,400 dollars, it's still too expensive for people like Kamal. And lastly, here you see a low-end knee. This is a knee that's been designed specifically for poor people. And while you have affordability, you've lost on functionality. The mechanism here is a single axis, and a single axis is like a door hinge. So you can think about how unstable that would be. And this is the type of mechanism that the Jaipur Foot Organization was using when they were looking for a better knee, and I just wanted to give you a sense of what a leg system looks like, because I'm showing you all these knees and I imagine it's hard to think how it all fits together. So at the top you have a socket, and this fits over someone's residual limb, and everyone's residual limb is a little bit different. And then you have the knee, and here I've got a single axis on the knee so you can see how it rotates, and then a pylon, and then a foot. And we've been able to develop a knee, a polycentric knee, so that type of knee that acts like a human knee, mimics human gait, for 80 dollars retail. (Applause) But the key is, you can have this great invention, you can have this great design, but how do you get it to the people who most need it? How do you ensure it gets to them and it improves their lives? So at D-Rev, we've done some other projects, and we looked at three things that we really believe gets technologies to customers, to users, to people who need it. And the first thing is that the product needs to be world class. It needs to perform on par or better than the best products on the market. Regardless of your income level, you want the most beautiful, the best product that there is. I'm going to show you a video now of a man named Ash. You can see him walking. He's wearing the same knee system here with a single axis knee. And he's doing a 10-meter walk test. And you'll notice that he's struggling with stability as he's walking. And something that's not obvious, that you can't see, is that it's psychologically draining to walk and to be preventing yourself from falling. Now this is a video of Kamal. You remember Kamal earlier, holding the bamboo staff. He's wearing one of the earlier versions of our knee, and he's doing that same 10-meter walk test. And you can see his stability is much better. So world class isn't just about technical performance. It's also about human performance. And most medical devices, we've learned, as we've dug in, are really designed for Westerners, for wealthier economies. But the reality is our users, our customers, they do different things. They sit cross-legged more. We see that they squat. They kneel in prayer. And we designed our knee to have the greatest range of motion of almost any other knee on the market. So the second thing we learned, and this leads into my second point, which is that we believe that products need to be designed to be user-centric. And at D-Rev, we go one step further and we say you need to be user-obsessed. So it's not just the end user that you're thinking about, but everyone who interacts with the product, so, for example, the prosthetist who fits the knee, but also the context in which the knee is being fit. What is the local market like? How do all these components get to the clinic? Do they all get there on time? The supply chain. Everything that goes into ensuring that this product gets to the end user, and it goes in as part of the system, and it's used. So I wanted to show you some of the iterations we did between the first version, the Jaipur Knee, so this is it right here. (Clicking) Notice anything about it? It clicks. We'd seen that users had actually modified it. So do you see that black strip right there? That's a homemade noise dampener. We also saw that our users had modified it in other ways. You can see there that that particular amputee, he had wrapped bandages around the knee. He'd made a cosmesis. And if you look at the knee, it's got those pointy edges, right? So if you're wearing it under pants or a skirt or a sari, it's really obvious that you're wearing a prosthetic limb, and in societies where there's social stigma around being disabled, people are particularly acute about this. So I'm going to show you some of the modifications we did. We did a lot of iterations, not just around this, but some other things. But here we have the version three, the ReMotion Knee, but if you look in here, you can see the noise dampener. It's quieter. The other thing we did is that we smoothed the profile. We made it thinner. And something that's not obvious is that we designed it for mass production. And this goes into my last point. We really, truly believe that if a product is going to reach users at the scale that it's needed, it needs to be market-driven, and market-driven means that products are sold. They're not donated. They're not heavily subsidized. Our product needs to be designed to offer value to the end user. It also has to be designed to be very affordable. But a product that is valued by a customer is used by a customer, and use is what creates impact. And we believe that as designers, it holds us accountable to our customers. And with centralized manufacturing, you can control the quality control, and you can hit that $80 price point with profit margins built in. And now, those profit margins are critical, because if you want to scale, if you want to reach all the people in the world who possibly need a knee, it needs to be economically sustainable. So I want to give you a sense of where we are at. We have fit over 5,000 amputees, and one of the big indicators we're looking at, of course, is, does it improve lives? Well, the standard is, is someone still wearing their knee six months later? The industry average is about 65 percent. Ours is 79 percent, and we're hoping to get that higher. Right now, our knees are worn in 12 countries. This is where we want to get, though, in the next three years. We'll double the impact in 2015, and we'll double it each of the following years after that. But then we hit a new challenge, and that's the number of skilled prosthetists who are able to fit knees. So I want to end with a story of Pournima. Pournima was 18 years old when she was in a car accident where she lost her leg, and she traveled 12 hours by train to come to the clinic to be fit with a knee, and while all of the amputees who wear our knees affect us as the designers, she's particularly meaningful to me as an engineer and as a woman, because she was in school, she had just started school to study engineering. And she said, "Well, now that I can walk again, I can go back and complete my studies." And to me she represents the next generation of engineers solving problems and ensuring meaningful technologies reach their users. So thank you. (Applause) |
Does money make you mean? | {0: 'Paul Piff studies how social hierarchy, inequality and emotion shape relations between individuals and groups.'} | TEDxMarin | I want you to, for a moment, think about playing a game of Monopoly. Except in this game, that combination of skill, talent and luck that helped earn you success in games, as in life, has been rendered irrelevant, because this game's been rigged, and you've got the upper hand. You've got more money, more opportunities to move around the board, and more access to resources. And as you think about that experience, I want you to ask yourself: How might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way you think about yourself and regard that other player? So, we ran a study on the UC Berkeley campus to look at exactly that question. We brought in more than 100 pairs of strangers into the lab, and with the flip of a coin, randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game. They got two times as much money; when they passed Go, they collected twice the salary; and they got to roll both dice instead of one, so they got to move around the board a lot more. (Laughter) And over the course of 15 minutes, we watched through hidden cameras what happened. What I want to do today, for the first time, is show you a little bit of what we saw. You'll to have to pardon the sound quality, because again, these were hidden cameras. So we've provided subtitles. [Video] Rich Player: How many 500s did you have? Poor Player: Just one. RP: Are you serious? PP: Yeah. RP: I have three. (Laughs) I don't know why they gave me so much. Paul Piff: So it was quickly apparent to players that something was up. One person clearly has a lot more money than the other person, and yet, as the game unfolded, we saw very notable differences, dramatic differences begin to emerge between the two players. The rich player started to move around the board louder, literally smacking the board with the piece as he went around. (Game piece smacks board) We were more likely to see signs of dominance and nonverbal signs, displays of power and celebration among the rich players. We had a bowl of pretzels positioned off to the side. It's on the bottom right corner. That allowed us to watch participants' consummatory behavior. So we're just tracking how many pretzels participants eat. [Video] RP: Are those pretzels a trick? PP: I don't know. Paul Piff: OK, so no surprises, people are on to us. They wonder what that bowl of pretzels is doing there in the first place. One even asks, like you just saw, "Is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick?" And yet, despite that, the power of the situation seems to inevitably dominate, and those rich players start to eat more pretzels. (Laughter) [Video] RP: I love pretzels. (Laughter) Paul Piff: And as the game went on, one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns that we observed begin to emerge was that the rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person — less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor, poor players, and more and more demonstrative of their material success, more likely to showcase how well they're doing. [Video] RP: I have money ... (Laughs) I have money for everything. PP: How much is that? RP: You owe me 24 dollars. You're going to lose all your money soon. I'll buy it. I have so much money. I have so much money, it takes me forever. RP 2: I'm going to buy out this whole board. RP 3: You're going to run out of money soon. I'm pretty much untouchable at this point. (Laughter) Paul Piff: And here's what I think was really, really interesting: it's that, at the end of the 15 minutes, we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game. And when the rich players talked about why they had inevitably won in this rigged game of Monopoly ... (Laughter) They talked about what they'd done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game. (Laughter) And they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation — including that flip of a coin — that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position in the first place. And that's a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage. Now, this game of Monopoly can be used as a metaphor for understanding society and its hierarchical structure, wherein some people have a lot of wealth and a lot of status, and a lot of people don't; they have a lot less wealth and a lot less status and a lot less access to valued resources. And what my colleagues and I for the last seven years have been doing is studying the effects of these kinds of hierarchies. What we've been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increase. In surveys, we've found that it's actually wealthier individuals who are more likely to moralize greed being good, and that the pursuit of self-interest is favorable and moral. Now, what I want to do today is talk about some of the implications of this ideology self-interest, talk about why we should care about those implications, and end with what might be done. Some of the first studies that we ran in this area looked at helping behavior, something social psychologists call "pro-social behavior." And we were really interested in who's more likely to offer help to another person: someone who's rich or someone who's poor. In one of the studies, we bring rich and poor members of the community into the lab, and give each of them the equivalent of 10 dollars. We told the participants they could keep these 10 dollars for themselves, or they could share a portion of it, if they wanted to, with a stranger, who's totally anonymous. They'll never meet that stranger; the stranger will never meet them. And we just monitor how much people give. Individuals who made 25,000, sometimes under 15,000 dollars a year, gave 44 percent more of their money to the stranger than did individuals making 150,000, 200,000 dollars a year. We've had people play games to see who's more or less likely to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize. In one of the games, we actually rigged a computer so that die rolls over a certain score were impossible — You couldn't get above 12 in this game, and yet ... the richer you were, the more likely you were to cheat in this game to earn credits toward a $50 cash prize — sometimes by three to four times as much. We ran another study where we looked at whether people would be inclined to take candy from a jar of candy that we explicitly identified as being reserved for children — (Laughter) I'm not kidding — I know it sounds like I'm making a joke. We explicitly told participants: "This candy is for children participating in a developmental lab nearby. They're in studies. This is for them." And we just monitored how much candy participants took. Participants who felt rich took two times as much candy as participants who felt poor. We've even studied cars. Not just any cars, but whether drivers of different kinds of cars are more or less inclined to break the law. In one of these studies, we looked at whether drivers would stop for a pedestrian that we had posed waiting to cross at a crosswalk. Now in California, as you all know, because I'm sure we all do this, it's the law to stop for a pedestrian who's waiting to cross. So here's an example of how we did it. That's our confederate off to the left, posing as a pedestrian. He approaches as the red truck successfully stops. In typical California fashion, it's overtaken by the bus who almost runs our pedestrian over. (Laughter) Now here's an example of a more expensive car, a Prius, driving through, and a BMW doing the same. So we did this for hundreds of vehicles on several days, just tracking who stops and who doesn't. What we found was as the expensiveness of a car increased ... (Laughter) the drivers' tendencies to break the law increased as well. None of the cars — none of the cars — in our least expensive car category broke the law. Close to 50 percent of the cars in our most expensive vehicle category broke the law. We've run other studies, finding that wealthier individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations, to endorse unethical behavior at work, like stealing cash from the cash register, taking bribes, lying to customers. Now, I don't mean to suggest that it's only wealthy people who show these patterns of behavior. Not at all — in fact, I think that we all, in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives, struggle with these competing motivations of when or if to put our own interests above the interests of other people. And that's understandable, because the American dream is an idea in which we all have an equal opportunity to succeed and prosper, as long as we apply ourselves and work hard. And a piece of that means that sometimes, you need to put your own interests above the interests and well-being of other people around you. But what we're finding is that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success, of achievement and accomplishment, to the detriment of others around you. Here I've plotted for you the mean household income received by each fifth and top five percent of the population over the last 20 years. In 1993, the differences between the different quintiles of the population, in terms of income, are fairly egregious. It's not difficult to discern that there are differences. But over the last 20 years, that significant difference has become a Grand Canyon of sorts between those at the top and everyone else. In fact, the top 20 percent of our population own close to 90 percent of the total wealth in this country. We're at unprecedented levels of economic inequality. What that means is that wealth is not only becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a select group of individuals, but the American dream is becoming increasingly unattainable for an increasing majority of us. And if it's the case, as we've been finding, that the wealthier you are, the more entitled you feel to that wealth, and the more likely you are to prioritize your own interests above the interests of other people, and be willing to do things to serve that self-interest, well, then, there's no reason to think that those patterns will change. In fact, there's every reason to think that they'll only get worse, and that's what it would look like if things just stayed the same, at the same linear rate, over the next 20 years. Now inequality — economic inequality — is something we should all be concerned about, and not just because of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but because individuals and groups with lots of economic inequality do worse ... not just the people at the bottom, everyone. There's a lot of really compelling research coming out from top labs all over the world, showcasing the range of things that are undermined as economic inequality gets worse. Social mobility, things we really care about, physical health, social trust, all go down as inequality goes up. Similarly, negative things in social collectives and societies, things like obesity, and violence, imprisonment, and punishment, are exacerbated as economic inequality increases. Again, these are outcomes not just experienced by a few, but that resound across all strata of society. Even people at the top experience these outcomes. So what do we do? This cascade of self-perpetuating, pernicious, negative effects could seem like something that's spun out of control, and there's nothing we can do about it, certainly nothing we as individuals could do. But in fact, we've been finding in our own laboratory research that small psychological interventions, small changes to people's values, small nudges in certain directions, can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy. For instance, reminding people of the benefits of cooperation or the advantages of community, cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian as poor people. In one study, we had people watch a brief video, just 46 seconds long, about childhood poverty that served as a reminder of the needs of others in the world around them. And after watching that, we looked at how willing people were to offer up their own time to a stranger presented to them in the lab, who was in distress. After watching this video, an hour later, rich people became just as generous of their own time to help out this other person, a stranger, as someone who's poor, suggesting that these differences are not innate or categorical, but are so malleable to slight changes in people's values, and little nudges of compassion and bumps of empathy. And beyond the walls of our lab, we're even beginning to see signs of change in society. Bill Gates, one of our nation's wealthiest individuals, in his Harvard commencement speech, talked about the problem of inequality facing society as being the most daunting challenge, and talked about what must be done to combat it, saying, "Humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries — but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity." And there's the Giving Pledge, in which more than 100 of our nation's wealthiest individuals are pledging half of their fortunes to charity. And there's the emergence of dozens of grassroots movements, like "We are the 1 percent," "Resource Generation," or "Wealth for Common Good," in which the most privileged members of the population, members of the one percent and elsewhere, people who are wealthy, are using their own economic resources, adults and youth alike — that's what's most striking to me — leveraging their own privilege, their own economic resources, to combat inequality by advocating for social policies, changes in social values and changes in people's behavior that work against their own economic interests, but that may ultimately restore the American dream. Thank you. (Applause) |
Never, ever give up | {0: 'A record-setting long-distance swimmer, Diana Nyad writes and thinks deeply about motivation.'} | TEDWomen 2013 | It's the fifth time I stand on this shore, the Cuban shore, looking out at that distant horizon, believing, again, that I'm going to make it all the way across that vast, dangerous wilderness of an ocean. Not only have I tried four times, but the greatest swimmers in the world have been trying since 1950, and it's still never been done. The team is proud of our four attempts. It's an expedition of some 30 people. Bonnie is my best friend and head handler, who somehow summons will, that last drop of will within me, when I think it's gone, after many, many hours and days out there. The shark experts are the best in the world — large predators below. The box jellyfish, the deadliest venom in all of the ocean, is in these waters, and I have come close to dying from them on a previous attempt. The conditions themselves, besides the sheer distance of over 100 miles in the open ocean — the currents and whirling eddies and the Gulf Stream itself, the most unpredictable of all of the planet Earth. And by the way — it's amusing to me that journalists and people, before these attempts, often ask me, "Well, are you going to go with any boats or any people or anything?" (Laughter) And I'm thinking, what are they imagining? That I'll just sort of do some celestial navigation — (Laughter) And carry a bowie knife in my mouth, and I'll hunt fish and skin them alive and eat them, and maybe drag a desalinization plant behind me for fresh water. (Laughter) Yes, I have a team. (Laughter) And the team is expert, and the team is courageous, and brimming with innovation and scientific discovery, as is true of any major expedition on the planet. And we've been on a journey. And the debate has raged, hasn't it, since the Greeks, of isn't it what it's all about? Isn't life about the journey, not really the destination? And here we've been on this journey, and the truth is, it's been thrilling. We haven't reached that other shore, and still, our sense of pride and commitment, unwavering commitment. When I turned 60, the dream was still alive from having tried this in my 20s — dreamed it and imagined it. The most famous body of water on the Earth today, I imagine, Cuba to Florida. And it was deep. It was deep in my soul. When I turned 60, it wasn't so much about the athletic accomplishment, it wasn't the ego of "I want to be the first." That's always there and it's undeniable. But it was deeper. It was "how much life is there left?" Let's face it — we're all on a one-way street, aren't we? And what are we going to do? What are we going to do as we go forward, to have no regrets looking back? And all this past year in training, I had that Teddy Roosevelt quote to paraphrase it, floating around in my brain. It says, "You go ahead. You go ahead and sit back in your comfortable chair and you be the critic, you be the observer, while the brave one gets in the ring and engages and gets bloody and gets dirty and fails over and over and over again, but yet isn't afraid and isn't timid and lives life in a bold way." And so of course I want to make it across. It is the goal, and I should be so shallow to say that this year, the destination was even sweeter than the journey. (Laughter) (Applause) But the journey itself was worthwhile taking. And at this point, by this summer, everybody — scientists, sports scientists, endurance experts, neurologists, my own team, Bonnie — said it's impossible. It just simply can't be done, and Bonnie said to me, "But if you're going to take the journey, I'm going to see you through to the end of it, so I'll be there." And now we're there. As we're looking out, kind of a surreal moment before the first stroke, standing on the rocks at Marina Hemingway, the Cuban flag is flying above, all my team is out in their boats, hands up in the air, "We're here! We're here for you!" Bonnie and I look at each other and say, this year, the mantra is — and I've been using it in training — Find a way. You have a dream and you have obstacles in front of you, as we all do. None of us ever get through this life without heartache, without turmoil, and if you believe and you have faith and you can get knocked down and get back up again and you believe in perseverance as a great human quality, you find your way. And Bonnie grabbed my shoulders, and she said, "Let's find our way to Florida." And we started, and for the next 53 hours, it was an intense, unforgettable life experience. The highs were high, the awe — I'm not a religious person, but I'll tell you, to be in the azure blue of the Gulf Stream as if, as you're breathing, you're looking down miles and miles and miles, to feel the majesty of this blue planet we live on — it's awe-inspiring. I have a playlist of about 85 songs, and especially in the middle of the night ... That night, because we use no lights — lights attract jellyfish, lights attract sharks, lights attract baitfish that attract sharks, so we go in the pitch black of the night. You've never seen black this black. You can't see the front of your hand, and the people on the boat, Bonnie and my team on the boat — they just hear the slapping of the arms, and they know where I am, because there's no visual at all. And I'm out there kind of tripping out on my little playlist. (Laughter) I've got tight rubber caps, I don't hear a thing. I've got goggles and I'm turning my head 50 times a minute, and I'm singing ... (Singing) Imagine there's no heaven (Laughter) doo doo doo doo doo It's easy if you try doo doo doo doo doo And I can sing that song a thousand times in a row. (Laughter) Now there's a talent unto itself. (Laughter) (Applause) And each time I get done with, (Singing) Oh, you may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one 222. (Singing) Imagine there's no heaven (Laughter) And when I get through the end of a thousand of John Lennon's "Imagine," I have swum nine hours and 45 minutes ... exactly. (Laughter) And then there are the crises. Of course there are. And the vomiting starts, the seawater — you're not well. You're wearing a jellyfish mask for the ultimate protection. It's difficult to swim in. It's causing abrasions on the inside of the mouth, but the tentacles can't get you. And the hypothermia sets in. The water's 85 degrees, and yet you're losing weight and using calories. And as you come over toward the side of the boat — not allowed to touch it, not allowed to get out, but Bonnie and her team hand me nutrition and ask me how I'm doing, am I all right. I am seeing the Taj Mahal — (Laughter) Over here. I'm in a very different state — (Laughter) And I'm thinking, "Wow! I never thought I'd be running into the Taj Mahal out here. It's gorgeous! I mean, how long did it take them to build that? It's just ... So, uh — wooo — you know? (Laughter) We kind of have a cardinal rule that I'm never told how far it is, because we don't know how far it is. What's going to happen to you between this point and that point? What's going to happen to the weather and the currents and, God forbid, you're stung, when you don't think you could be stung in all this armor. Bonnie made a decision coming into that third morning that I was suffering, and I was hanging on by a thread. And she said, "Come here," and I came close to the boat, and she said, "Look, look out there." And I saw light, because the day is easier than the night, and I thought we were coming into day. I saw a stream of white light along the horizon, and I said, "It's going to be morning soon." And she said, "No, those are the lights of Key West." It was 15 more hours, which for most swimmers would be a long time. (Laughter) (Applause) You have no idea how many 15-hour training swims I had done. So here we go, and I somehow, without a decision, went into no counting of strokes and no singing and no quoting Stephen Hawking on the parameters of the universe. I just went into thinking about this dream, and why and how. As I said, when I turned 60, it wasn't about that concrete "Can you do it?" That's the everyday machinations. That's the discipline, and it's the preparation, and there's a pride in that. But I decided to think, as I went along, about — you know, the phrase usually is, "reaching for the stars." And in my case, it's reaching for the horizon. And when you reach for the horizon, as I've proven, you may not get there. But what a tremendous build of character and spirit that you lay down; what a foundation you lay down in reaching for those horizons. And now, the shore is coming. And there's just a little part of me that's sad. The epic journey is going to be over. So many people come up to me now and say, "What's next?" (Laughter) "We love that!" (Laughter) "That little tracker on the computer? When are you going to do the next one? We can't wait to follow the next one." Well, they were just there for 53 hours, and I was there for years. And so there won't be another epic journey in the ocean. But the point is, and the point was, that every day of our lives is epic. And I'll tell you, when I walked up onto that beach, staggered up onto that beach ... I had so many times, in a very puffed-up ego way, rehearsed what I would say ... (Laughter) on the beach. When Bonnie thought the back of my throat was swelling up, she brought the medical team over to our boat to say, "She's really beginning to have trouble breathing; another 12, 24 hours in the saltwater ..." — the whole thing — I just thought, in my hallucinatory moment, that I heard the word "tracheotomy." (Laughter) Bonnie said to the doctor, "I'm not worried about her not breathing. If she can't talk when she gets to the shore, she's going to be pissed off." (Laughter) But the truth is, all those orations that I had practiced, just to get myself through some training swims as motivation — it wasn't like that. It was a very real moment, with that crowd, with my team. We did it. I didn't do it. We did it. And we'll never forget it. It'll always be part of us. The three things I did sort of blurt out when we got there, was first: Never, ever give up. I live it. What's the phrase from today from Socrates? Audience: To be is to do. Diana Nyad: To be is to do. So I don't stand up and say, "Don't ever give up." I didn't give up. There was action behind these words. The second is: You can chase your dreams at any age; you're never too old. Sixty-four; a thing no one, at any age, any gender, could ever do has done it. And there's no doubt in my mind that I am at the prime of my life today. (Applause) Yeah. (Applause) Thank you. And the third thing I said on that beach was, it looks like the most solitary endeavor in the world, and in many ways, of course, it is. And in other ways, and the most important ways, it's a team. And if you think I'm a badass, you want to meet Bonnie. (Laughter) Bonnie, where are you? Where are you? There's Bonnie Stoll. (Applause) My buddy. (Applause) The Henry David Thoreau quote goes, "When you achieve your dreams, it's not so much what you get as who you have become in achieving them." And yeah, I stand before you now. In the three months since that swim ended, I've sat down with Oprah, and I've been in President Obama's Oval Office; I've been invited to speak in front of esteemed groups such as yourselves; I've signed a wonderful major book contract. All of that's great, and I don't denigrate it. I'm proud of it all, but the truth is, I'm walking around tall because I am that bold, fearless person, and I will be, every day, until it's time for these days to be done. Thank you very much and enjoy the conference. Thank you. Thank you! (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you! Thank you. (Applause) Find a way! (Applause) |
How an obese town lost a million pounds | {0: 'Mick Cornett is mayor of Oklahoma City, OK.'} | TEDMED 2013 | How many of you have been to Oklahoma City? Raise your hand. Yeah? How many of you have not been to Oklahoma City and have no idea who I am? (Laughter) Most of you. Let me give you a little bit of background. Oklahoma City started in the most unique way imaginable. Back on a spring day in 1889, the federal government held what they called a land run. They literally lined up the settlers along an imaginary line, and they fired off a gun, and the settlers roared across the countryside and put down a stake, and wherever they put down that stake, that was their new home. And at the end of the very first day, the population of Oklahoma City had gone from zero to 10,000, and our planning department is still paying for that. The citizens got together on that first day and elected a mayor. And then they shot him. (Laughter) That's not really all that funny — (Laughter) — but it allows me to see what type of audience I'm dealing with, so I appreciate the feedback. The 20th century was fairly kind to Oklahoma City. Our economy was based on commodities, so the price of cotton or the price of wheat, and ultimately the price of oil and natural gas. And along the way, we became a city of innovation. The shopping cart was invented in Oklahoma City. (Applause) The parking meter, invented in Oklahoma City. You're welcome. Having an economy, though, that relates to commodities can give you some ups and some downs, and that was certainly the case in Oklahoma City's history. In the 1970s, when it appeared that the price of energy would never retreat, our economy was soaring, and then in the early 1980s, it cratered quickly. The price of energy dropped. Our banks began to fail. Before the end of the decade, 100 banks had failed in the state of Oklahoma. There was no bailout on the horizon. Our banking industry, our oil and gas industry, our commercial real estate industry, were all at the bottom of the economic scale. Young people were leaving Oklahoma City in droves for Washington and Dallas and Houston and New York and Tokyo, anywhere where they could find a job that measured up to their educational attainment, because in Oklahoma City, the good jobs just weren't there. But along at the end of the '80s came an enterprising businessman who became mayor named Ron Norick. Ron Norick eventually figured out that the secret to economic development wasn't incentivizing companies up front, it was about creating a place where businesses wanted to locate, and so he pushed an initiative called MAPS that basically was a penny-on-the-dollar sales tax to build a bunch of stuff. It built a new sports arena, a new canal downtown, it fixed up our performing arts center, a new baseball stadium downtown, a lot of things to improve the quality of life. And the economy indeed seemed to start showing some signs of life. The next mayor came along. He started MAPS for Kids, rebuilt the entire inner city school system, all 75 buildings either built anew or refurbished. And then, in 2004, in this rare collective lack of judgment bordering on civil disobedience, the citizens elected me mayor. Now the city I inherited was just on the verge of coming out of its slumbering economy, and for the very first time, we started showing up on the lists. Now you know the lists I'm talking about. The media and the Internet love to rank cities. And in Oklahoma City, we'd never really been on lists before. So I thought it was kind of cool when they came out with these positive lists and we were on there. We weren't anywhere close to the top, but we were on the list, we were somebody. Best city to get a job, best city to start a business, best downtown — Oklahoma City. And then came the list of the most obese cities in the country. And there we were. Now I like to point out that we were on that list with a lot of really cool places. (Laughter) Dallas and Houston and New Orleans and Atlanta and Miami. You know, these are cities that, typically, you're not embarrassed to be associated with. But nonetheless, I didn't like being on the list. And about that time, I got on the scales. And I weighed 220 pounds. And then I went to this website sponsored by the federal government, and I typed in my height, I typed in my weight, and I pushed Enter, and it came back and said "obese." I thought, "What a stupid website." (Laughter) "I'm not obese. I would know if I was obese." And then I started getting honest with myself about what had become my lifelong struggle with obesity, and I noticed this pattern, that I was gaining about two or three pounds a year, and then about every 10 years, I'd drop 20 or 30 pounds. And then I'd do it again. And I had this huge closet full of clothes, and I could only wear a third of it at any one time, and only I knew which part of the closet I could wear. But it all seemed fairly normal, going through it. Well, I finally decided I needed to lose weight, and I knew I could because I'd done it so many times before, so I simply stopped eating as much. I had always exercised. That really wasn't the part of the equation that I needed to work on. But I had been eating 3,000 calories a day, and I cut it to 2,000 calories a day, and the weight came off. I lost about a pound a week for about 40 weeks. Along the way, though, I started examining my city, its culture, its infrastructure, trying to figure out why our specific city seemed to have a problem with obesity. And I came to the conclusion that we had built an incredible quality of life if you happen to be a car. (Laughter) But if you happen to be a person, you are combatting the car seemingly at every turn. Our city is very spread out. We have a great intersection of highways, I mean, literally no traffic congestion in Oklahoma City to speak of. And so people live far, far away. Our city limits are enormous, 620 square miles, but 15 miles is less than 15 minutes. You literally can get a speeding ticket during rush hour in Oklahoma City. And as a result, people tend to spread out. Land's cheap. We had also not required developers to build sidewalks on new developments for a long, long time. We had fixed that, but it had been relatively recently, and there were literally 100,000 or more homes into our inventory in neighborhoods that had virtually no level of walkability. And as I tried to examine how we might deal with obesity, and was taking all of these elements into my mind, I decided that the first thing we need to do was have a conversation. You see, in Oklahoma City, we weren't talking about obesity. And so, on New Year's Eve of 2007, I went to the zoo, and I stood in front of the elephants, and I said, "This city is going on a diet, and we're going to lose a million pounds." Well, that's when all hell broke loose. (Laughter) The national media gravitated toward this story immediately, and they really could have gone with it one of two ways. They could have said, "This city is so fat that the mayor had to put them on a diet." But fortunately, the consensus was, "Look, this is a problem in a lot of places. This is a city that's wanting to do something about it." And so they started helping us drive traffic to the website. Now, the web address was thiscityisgoingonadiet.com. And I appeared on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" one weekday morning to talk about the initiative, and on that day, 150,000 visits were placed to our website. People were signing up, and so the pounds started to add up, and the conversation that I thought was so important to have was starting to take place. It was taking place inside the homes, mothers and fathers talking about it with their kids. It was taking place in churches. Churches were starting their own running groups and their own support groups for people who were dealing with obesity. Suddenly, it was a topic worth discussing at schools and in the workplace. And the large companies, they typically have wonderful wellness programs, but the medium-sized companies that typically fall between the cracks on issues like this, they started to get engaged and used our program as a model for their own employees to try and have contests to see who might be able to deal with their obesity situation in a way that could be proactively beneficial to others. And then came the next stage of the equation. It was time to push what I called MAPS 3. Now MAPS 3, like the other two programs, had had an economic development motive behind it, but along with the traditional economic development tasks like building a new convention center, we added some health-related infrastructure to the process. We added a new central park, 70 acres in size, to be right downtown in Oklahoma City. We're building a downtown streetcar to try and help the walkability formula for people who choose to live in the inner city and help us create the density there. We're building senior health and wellness centers throughout the community. We put some investments on the river that had originally been invested upon in the original MAPS, and now we are currently in the final stages of developing the finest venue in the world for the sports of canoe, kayak and rowing. We hosted the Olympic trials last spring. We have Olympic-caliber events coming to Oklahoma City, and athletes from all over the world moving in, along with inner city programs to get kids more engaged in these types of recreational activities that are a little bit nontraditional. We also, with another initiative that was passed, are building hundreds of miles of new sidewalks throughout the metro area. We're even going back into some inner city situations where we had built neighborhoods and we had built schools but we had not connected the two. We had built libraries and we had built neighborhoods, but we had never really connected the two with any sort of walkability. Through yet another funding source, we're redesigning all of our inner city streets to be more pedestrian-friendly. Our streets were really wide, and you'd push the button to allow you to walk across, and you had to run in order to get there in time. But now we've narrowed the streets, highly landscaped them, making them more pedestrian-friendly, really a redesign, rethinking the way we build our infrastructure, designing a city around people and not cars. We're completing our bicycle trail master plan. We'll have over 100 miles when we're through building it out. And so you see this culture starting to shift in Oklahoma City. And lo and behold, the demographic changes that are coming with it are very inspiring. Highly educated twentysomethings are moving to Oklahoma City from all over the region and, indeed, even from further away, in California. When we reached a million pounds, in January of 2012, I flew to New York with some our participants who had lost over 100 pounds, whose lives had been changed, and we appeared on the Rachael Ray show, and then that afternoon, I did a round of media in New York pushing the same messages that you're accustomed to hearing about obesity and the dangers of it. And I went into the lobby of Men's Fitness magazine, the same magazine that had put us on that list five years before. And as I'm sitting in the lobby waiting to talk to the reporter, I notice there's a magazine copy of the current issue right there on the table, and I pick it up, and I look at the headline across the top, and it says, "America's Fattest Cities: Do You Live in One?" Well, I knew I did, so I picked up the magazine and I began to look, and we weren't on it. (Applause) Then I looked on the list of fittest cities, and we were on that list. We were on the list as the 22nd fittest city in the United States. Our state health statistics are doing better. Granted, we have a long way to go. Health is still not something that we should be proud of in Oklahoma City, but we seem to have turned the cultural shift of making health a greater priority. And we love the idea of the demographics of highly educated twentysomethings, people with choices, choosing Oklahoma City in large numbers. We have the lowest unemployment in the United States, probably the strongest economy in the United States. And if you're like me, at some point in your educational career, you were asked to read a book called "The Grapes of Wrath." Oklahomans leaving for California in large numbers for a better future. When we look at the demographic shifts of people coming from the west, it appears that what we're seeing now is the wrath of grapes. (Laughter) (Applause) The grandchildren are coming home. You've been a great audience and very attentive. Thank you very much for having me here. (Applause) |
I got 99 problems ... palsy is just one | {0: 'Writer, actor, comedian, Maysoon Zayid is the co-founder of the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival.'} | TEDWomen 2013 | Hello, TEDWomen, what's up. (Cheering) Not good enough. Hello, TEDWomen, what is up? (Loud cheering) My name is Maysoon Zayid, and I am not drunk, but the doctor who delivered me was. He cut my mom six different times in six different directions, suffocating poor little me in the process. As a result, I have cerebral palsy, which means I shake all the time. Look. It's exhausting. I'm like Shakira, Shakira meets Muhammad Ali. (Laughter) CP is not genetic. It's not a birth defect. You can't catch it. No one put a curse on my mother's uterus, and I didn't get it because my parents are first cousins, which they are. (Laughter) It only happens from accidents, like what happened to me on my birth day. Now, I must warn you, I'm not inspirational. (Laughter) And I don't want anyone in this room to feel bad for me, because at some point in your life, you have dreamt of being disabled. Come on a journey with me. It's Christmas Eve, you're at the mall, you're driving around in circles looking for parking, and what do you see? Sixteen empty handicapped spaces. (Laughter) And you're like, "God, can't I just be a little disabled?" (Laughter) Also, I've got to tell you, I've got 99 problems, and palsy is just one. (Laughter) If there was an Oppression Olympics, I would win the gold medal. I'm Palestinian, Muslim, I'm female, I'm disabled, and I live in New Jersey. (Laughter) (Applause) If you don't feel better about yourself, maybe you should. (Laughter) Cliffside Park, New Jersey is my hometown. I have always loved the fact that my hood and my affliction share the same initials. I also love the fact that if I wanted to walk from my house to New York City, I could. A lot of people with CP don't walk, but my parents didn't believe in "can't." My father's mantra was, "You can do it, yes you can can." (Laughter) So, if my three older sisters were mopping, I was mopping. If my three older sisters went to public school, my parents would sue the school system and guarantee that I went too, and if we didn't all get A's, we all got my mother's slipper. (Laughter) My father taught me how to walk when I was five years old by placing my heels on his feet and just walking. Another tactic that he used is he would dangle a dollar bill in front of me and have me chase it. (Laughter) My inner stripper was very strong. (Laughter) Yeah. No, by the first day of kindergarten, I was walking like a champ who had been punched one too many times. (Laughter) Growing up, there were only six Arabs in my town, and they were all my family. (Laughter) Now there are 20 Arabs in town, and they are still all my family. (Laughter) I don't think anyone even noticed we weren't Italian. (Laughter) (Applause) This was before 9/11 and before politicians thought it was appropriate to use "I hate Muslims" as a campaign slogan. The people that I grew up with had no problem with my faith. They did, however, seem very concerned that I would starve to death during Ramadan. I would explain to them that I have enough fat to live off of for three whole months, so fasting from sunrise to sunset is a piece of cake. (Laughter) I have tap-danced on Broadway. Yeah, on Broadway. It's crazy. (Applause) My parents couldn't afford physical therapy, so they sent me to dancing school. I learned how to dance in heels, which means I can walk in heels. And I'm from Jersey, and we are really concerned with being chic, so if my friends wore heels, so did I. And when my friends went and spent their summer vacations on the Jersey Shore, I did not. I spent my summers in a war zone, because my parents were afraid that if we didn't go back to Palestine every single summer, we'd grow up to be Madonna. (Laughter) Summer vacations often consisted of my father trying to heal me, so I drank deer's milk, I had hot cups on my back, I was dunked in the Dead Sea, and I remember the water burning my eyes and thinking, "It's working! It's working!" (Laughter) But one miracle cure we did find was yoga. I have to tell you, it's very boring, but before I did yoga, I was a stand-up comedian who can't stand up. And now I can stand on my head. My parents reinforced this notion that I could do anything, that no dream was impossible, and my dream was to be on the daytime soap opera "General Hospital." (Laughter) I went to college during affirmative action and got a sweet scholarship to ASU, Arizona State University, because I fit every single quota. (Laughter) I was like the pet lemur of the theater department. Everybody loved me. I did all the less-than-intelligent kids' homework, I got A's in all of my classes, A's in all of their classes. (Laughter) Every time I did a scene from "The Glass Menagerie," my professors would weep. But I never got cast. Finally, my senior year, ASU decided to do a show called "They Dance Real Slow in Jackson." It's a play about a girl with CP. I was a girl with CP. So I start shouting from the rooftops, "I'm finally going to get a part! I have cerebral palsy! Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, I'm free at last!" I didn't get the part. (Laughter) Sherry Brown got the part. I went racing to the head of the theater department crying hysterically, like someone shot my cat, to ask her why, and she said it was because they didn't think I could do the stunts. I said, "Excuse me, if I can't do the stunts, neither can the character." (Laughter) (Applause) This was a part that I was literally born to play they gave it to a non-palsy actress. College was imitating life. Hollywood has a sordid history of casting able-bodied actors to play disabled onscreen. Upon graduating, I moved back home, and my first acting gig was as an extra on a daytime soap opera. My dream was coming true. And I knew that I would be promoted from "Diner Diner" to "Wacky Best Friend" in no time. (Laughter) But instead, I remained a glorified piece of furniture that you could only recognize from the back of my head, and it became clear to me that casting directors didn't hire fluffy, ethnic, disabled actors. They only hired perfect people. But there were exceptions to the rule. I grew up watching Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Ellen, and all of these women had one thing in common: they were comedians. So I became a comic. (Laughter) (Applause) My first gig was driving famous comics from New York City to shows in New Jersey, and I'll never forget the face of the first comic I ever drove when he realized that he was speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike with a chick with CP driving him. (Laughter) I've performed in clubs all over America, and I've also performed in Arabic in the Middle East, uncensored and uncovered. (Laughter) Some people say I'm the first stand-up comic in the Arab world. I never like to claim first, but I do know that they never heard that nasty little rumor that women aren't funny, and they find us hysterical. (Laughter) In 2003, my brother from another mother and father Dean Obeidallah and I started the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, now in its 10th year. Our goal was to change the negative image of Arab-Americans in media, while also reminding casting directors that South Asian and Arab are not synonymous. (Laughter) Mainstreaming Arabs was much, much easier than conquering the challenge against the stigma against disability. My big break came in 2010. I was invited to be a guest on the cable news show "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." I walked in looking like I was going to the prom, and they shuffle me into a studio and seat me on a spinning, rolling chair. (Laughter) So I looked at the stage manager and I'm like, "Excuse me, can I have another chair?" And she looked at me and she went, "Five, four, three, two ..." And we were live, right? So I had to grip onto the anchor's desk so that I wouldn't roll off the screen during the segment, and when the interview was over, I was livid. I had finally gotten my chance and I blew it, and I knew I would never get invited back. But not only did Mr. Olbermann invite me back, he made me a full-time contributor, and he taped down my chair. (Laughter) (Applause) One fun fact I learned while on the air with Keith Olbermann was that humans on the Internet are scumbags. (Laughter) People say children are cruel, but I was never made fun of as a child or an adult. Suddenly, my disability on the world wide web is fair game. I would look at clips online and see comments like, "Yo, why's she tweakin'?" "Yo, is she retarded?" And my favorite, "Poor Gumby-mouth terrorist. What does she suffer from? We should really pray for her." One commenter even suggested that I add my disability to my credits: screenwriter, comedian, palsy. Disability is as visual as race. If a wheelchair user can't play Beyoncé, then Beyoncé can't play a wheelchair user. The disabled are the largest — Yeah, clap for that, man. Come on. (Applause) People with disabilities are the largest minority in the world, and we are the most underrepresented in entertainment. The doctors said that I wouldn't walk, but I am here in front of you. However, if I grew up with social media, I don't think I would be. I hope that together, we can create more positive images of disability in the media and in everyday life. Perhaps if there were more positive images, it would foster less hate on the Internet. Or maybe not. Maybe it still takes a village to teach our children well. My crooked journey has taken me to some very spectacular places. I got to walk the red carpet flanked by soap diva Susan Lucci and the iconic Loreen Arbus. I got to act in a movie with Adam Sandler and work with my idol, the amazing Dave Matthews. I toured the world as a headliner on Arabs Gone Wild. I was a delegate representing the great state of New Jersey at the 2008 DNC. And I founded Maysoon's Kids, a charity that hopes to give Palestinian refugee children a sliver of the chance my parents gave me. But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got — before this moment — (Laughter) (Applause) But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got to perform for the man who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, has Parkinson's and shakes just like me, Muhammad Ali. (Applause) (Applause ends) It was the only time that my father ever saw me perform live, and I dedicate this talk to his memory. (Arabic) Allah yerhamak yaba. (English) My name is Maysoon Zayid, and if I can can, you can can. (Cheering) (Applause) |
Subsets and Splits