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Don't kill your language | {0: 'Suzanne Talhouk is an advocate for the Arabic language as a tool of power, pride and unity.'} | TEDxBeirut | Good morning! Are you awake? They took my name tag, but I wanted to ask you, did anyone here write their name on the tag in Arabic? Anyone! No one? All right, no problem. Once upon a time, not long ago, I was sitting in a restaurant with my friend, ordering food. So I looked at the waiter and said, "Do you have a menu (Arabic)?" He looked at me strangely, thinking that he misheard. He said, "Sorry? (English)." I said, "The menu (Arabic), please." He replied, "Don't you know what they call it?" "I do." He said, "No! It's called "menu" (English), or "menu" (French)." Is the French pronunciation correct? "Come, come, take care of this one!" said the waiter. He was disgusted when talking to me, as if he was saying to himself, "If this was the last girl on Earth, I wouldn't look at her!" What's the meaning of saying "menu" in Arabic? Two words made a Lebanese young man judge a girl as being backward and ignorant. How could she speak that way? At that moment, I started thinking. It made me mad. It definitely hurts! I'm denied the right to speak my own language in my own country? Where could this happen? How did we get here? Well, while we are here, there are many people like me, who would reach a stage in their lives, where they involuntarily give up everything that has happened to them in the past, just so they can say that they're modern and civilized. Should I forget all my culture, thoughts, intellect and all my memories? Childhood stories might be the best memories we have of the war! Should I forget everything I learned in Arabic, just to conform? To be one of them? Where's the logic in that? Despite all that, I tried to understand him. I didn't want to judge him with the same cruelty that he judged me. The Arabic language doesn't satisfy today's needs. It's not a language for science, research, a language we're used to in universities, a language we use in the workplace, a language we rely on if we were to perform an advanced research project, and it definitely isn't a language we use at the airport. If we did so, they'd strip us of our clothes. Where can I use it, then? We could all ask this question! So, you want us to use Arabic. Where are we to do so? This is one reality. But we have another more important reality that we ought to think about. Arabic is the mother tongue. Research says that mastery of other languages demands mastery of the mother tongue. Mastery of the mother tongue is a prerequisite for creative expression in other languages. How? Gibran Khalil Gibran, when he first started writing, he used Arabic. All his ideas, imagination and philosophy were inspired by this little boy in the village where he grew up, smelling a specific smell, hearing a specific voice, and thinking a specific thought. So, when he started writing in English, he had enough baggage. Even when he wrote in English, when you read his writings in English, you smell the same smell, sense the same feeling. You can imagine that that's him writing in English, the same boy who came from the mountain. From a village on Mount Lebanon. So, this is an example no one can argue with. Second, it's often said that if you want to kill a nation, the only way to kill a nation, is to kill its language. This is a reality that developed societies are aware of. The Germans, French, Japanese and Chinese, all these nations are aware of this. That's why they legislate to protect their language. They make it sacred. That's why they use it in production, they pay a lot of money to develop it. Do we know better than them? All right, we aren't from the developed world, this advanced thinking hasn't reached us yet, and we would like to catch up with the civilized world. Countries that were once like us, but decided to strive for development, do research, and catch up with those countries, such as Turkey, Malaysia and others, they carried their language with them as they were climbing the ladder, protected it like a diamond. They kept it close to them. Because if you get any product from Turkey or elsewhere and it's not labeled in Turkish, then it isn't a local product. You wouldn't believe it's a local product. They'd go back to being consumers, clueless consumers, like we are most of the time. So, in order for them to innovate and produce, they had to protect their language. If I say, "Freedom, sovereignty, independence (Arabic)," what does this remind you of? It doesn't ring a bell, does it? Regardless of the who, how and why. Language isn't just for conversing, just words coming out of our mouths. Language represents specific stages in our lives, and terminology that is linked to our emotions. So when we say, "Freedom, sovereignty, independence," each one of you draws a specific image in their own mind, there are specific feelings of a specific day in a specific historical period. Language isn't one, two or three words or letters put together. It's an idea inside that relates to how we think, and how we see each other and how others see us. What is our intellect? How do you say whether this guy understands or not? So, if I say, "Freedom, sovereignty, independence (English)," or if your son came up to you and said, "Dad, have you lived through the period of the freedom (English) slogan?" How would you feel? If you don't see a problem, then I'd better leave, and stop talking in vain. The idea is that these expressions remind us of a specific thing. I have a francophone friend who's married to a French man. I asked her once how things were going. She said, "Everything is fine, but once, I spent a whole night asking and trying to translate the meaning of the word 'toqborni' for him." (Laughter) (Applause) The poor woman had mistakenly told him "toqborni," and then spent the whole night trying to explain it to him. He was puzzled by the thought: "How could anyone be this cruel? Does she want to commit suicide? 'Bury me?' (English)" This is one of the few examples. It made us feel that she's unable to tell that word to her husband, since he won't understand, and he's right not to; his way of thinking is different. She said to me, "He listens to Fairuz with me, and one night, I tried to translate for him so he can feel what I feel when I listen to Fairuz." The poor woman tried to translate this for him: "From them I extended my hands and stole you —" (Laughter) And here's the pickle: "And because you belong to them, I returned my hands and left you." (Laughter) Translate that for me. (Applause) So, what have we done to protect the Arabic language? We turned this into a concern of the civil society, and we launched a campaign to preserve the Arabic language. Even though many people told me, "Why do you bother? Forget about this headache and go have fun." No problem! The campaign to preserve Arabic launched a slogan that says, "I talk to you from the East, but you reply from the West." We didn't say, "No! We do not accept this or that." We didn't adopt this style because that way, we wouldn't be understood. And when someone talks to me that way, I hate the Arabic language. We say— (Applause) We want to change our reality, and be convinced in a way that reflects our dreams, aspirations and day-to-day life. In a way that dresses like us and thinks like we do. So, "I talk to you from the East, but you reply from the West" has hit the spot. Something very easy, yet creative and persuasive. After that, we launched another campaign with scenes of letters on the ground. You've seen an example of it outside, a scene of a letter surrounded by black and yellow tape with "Don't kill your language!" written on it. Why? Seriously, don't kill your language. We really shouldn't kill our language. If we were to kill the language, we'd have to find an identity. We'd have to find an existence. We'd go back to the beginning. This is beyond just missing our chance of being modern and civilized. After that we released photos of guys and girls wearing the Arabic letter. Photos of "cool" guys and girls. We are very cool! And to whoever might say, "Ha! You used an English word!" I say, "No! I adopt the word 'cool.'" Let them object however they want, but give me a word that's nicer and matches the reality better. I will keep on saying "Internet" I wouldn't say: "I'm going to the world wide web" (Laughs) Because it doesn't fit! We shouldn't kid ourselves. But to reach this point, we all have to be convinced that we shouldn't allow anyone who is bigger or thinks they have any authority over us when it comes to language, to control us or make us think and feel what they want. Creativity is the idea. So, if we can't reach space or build a rocket and so on, we can be creative. At this moment, every one of you is a creative project. Creativity in your mother tongue is the path. Let's start from this moment. Let's write a novel or produce a short film. A single novel could make us global again. It could bring the Arabic language back to being number one. So, it's not true that there's no solution; there is a solution! But we have to know that, and be convinced that a solution exists, that we have a duty to be part of that solution. In conclusion, what can you do today? Now, tweets, who's tweeting? Please, I beg of you, even though my time has finished, either Arabic, English, French or Chinese. But don't write Arabic with Latin characters mixed with numbers! (Applause) It's a disaster! That's not a language. You'd be entering a virtual world with a virtual language. It's not easy to come back from such a place and rise. That's the first thing we can do. Second, there are many other things that we can do. We're not here today to convince each other. We're here to bring attention to the necessity of preserving this language. Now I will tell you a secret. A baby first identifies its father through language. When my daughter is born, I'll tell her, "This is your father, honey (Arabic)." I wouldn't say, "This is your dad, honey (English)." And in the supermarket, I promise my daughter Noor, that if she says to me, "Thanks (Arabic)," I won't say, "Dis, 'Merci, Maman,'" and hope no one has heard her. (Applause) Let's get rid of this cultural cringe. (Applause) |
A bold new way to fund drug research | {0: 'Roger Stein wants to bring financial engineering to the world of drug funding.'} | TED@State Street Boston | So this is a picture of my dad and me, at the beach in Far Rockaway, or actually Rockaway Park. I'm the one with the blond hair. My dad's the guy with the cigarette. It was the 60's. A lot of people smoked back then. In the summer of 2009, my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. Cancer is one of those things that actually touches everybody. If you're a man in the US, you've got about a one in two chance of being diagnosed with cancer during your lifetime. If you're a woman, you've got about a one in three chance of being diagnosed with cancer. Everybody knows somebody who's been diagnosed with cancer. Now, my dad's doing better today, and part of the reason for that is that he was able to participate in the trial of an experimental new drug that happened to be specially formulated and very good for his particular kind of cancer. There are over 200 kinds of cancer. And what I want to talk about today is how we can help more people like my dad, because we have to change the way we think about raising money to fund cancer research. So a while after my dad was diagnosed, I was having coffee with my friend Andrew Lo. He's the head of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at MIT, where I also have a position, and we were talking about cancer. And Andrew had been doing his own bits of research, and one of the things that he had been told and that he'd learned from studying the literature was that there's actually a big bottleneck. It's very difficult to develop new drugs, and the reason it's difficult to develop new drugs is because in the early stages of drug development, the drugs are very risky, and they're very expensive. So Andrew asked me if I'd want to maybe work with him a bit, work on some of the math and the analytics and see if we could figure out something we could do. Now I'm not a scientist. You know, I don't know how to build a drug. And none of my coauthors, Andrew Lo or Jose-Maria Fernandez or David Fagnan — none of those guys are scientists either. We don't know the first thing about how to make a cancer drug. But we know a little bit about risk mitigation and a little bit about financial engineering, and so we started thinking, what could we do? I'm going to tell you about some work we've been doing over the last couple years that we think could fundamentally change the way research for cancer and lots of other things gets done. We want to let the research drive the funding, not the other way around. So in order to get started, let me tell you how you get a drug financed. Imagine that you're in your lab — you're a scientist, you're not like me — and you've developed a new compound that you think might be therapeutic for somebody with cancer. Well, what you do is, you test in animals, you test in test tubes, but there's this notion of going from the bench to the bedside, and in order to get from the bench, the lab, to the bedside, to the patients, you've got to get the drug tested. And the way the drug gets tested is through a series of, basically, experiments, through these large, they're called trials, that they do to determine whether the drug is safe and whether it works and all these things. So the FDA has a very specific protocol. In the first phase of this testing, which is called testing for toxicity, it's called Phase I. In the first phase, you give the drug to healthy people and you see if it actually makes them sick. In other words, are the side effects just so severe that no matter how much good it does, it's not going to be worth it? Does it cause heart attacks, kill people, liver failure? And it turns out, that's a pretty high hurdle. About a third of all drugs drop out at that point. In the next phase, you test to see if the drug's effective, and you give it to people with cancer and you see if it makes them better. And that's also a higher hurdle. People drop out. And in the third phase, you test it on a very large sample, and you're trying to determine what the right dose is, is it better than what's available today? If not, then why build it? When you're done with all that, what you have is a very small percentage of drugs that start the process actually come out the other side. So those blue bottles — those blue bottles save lives, and they're also worth billions, sometimes billions a year. So now here's a question: if I were to ask you, for example, to make a one-time investment of, say, 200 million dollars to buy one of those bottles, so 200 million dollars up front, one time, to buy one of those bottles, I won't tell you which one it is, and in 10 years, I'll tell you whether you have one of the blue ones. Does that sound like a good deal for anybody? No. No, right? And of course, it's a very, very risky trial position, and that's why it's very hard to get funding, but to a first approximation, that's actually the proposal. You have to fund these things from the early stages on. It takes a long time. So Andrew said to me, he said, "What if we stop thinking about these as drugs? What if we start thinking about them as financial assets?" They've got really weird payoff structures and all that, but let's throw everything we know about financial engineering at them. Let's see if we can use all the tricks of the trade to figure out how to make these drugs work as financial assets. Let's create a giant fund. In finance, we know what to do with assets that are risky. You put them in a portfolio and you try to smooth out the returns. So we did some math, and it turned out you could make this work, but in order to make it work, you need about 80 to 150 drugs. Now the good news is, there's plenty of drugs that are waiting to be tested. We've been told that there's a backlog of about 20 years of drugs that are waiting to be tested but can't be funded. In fact, that early stage of the funding process, that Phase I and preclinical stuff, that's actually, in the industry, called the Valley of Death because it's where drugs go to die. It's very hard to for them to get through there, and of course, if you can't get through there, you can't get to the later stages. So we did this math, and we figured out, OK, well, you need about 80 to, say, 150, or something like that, drugs. And then we did a little more math, and we said, OK, well, that's a fund of about three to 15 billion dollars. So we kind of created a new problem by solving the old one. We got rid of the risk, but now we need a lot of capital, and you can only get that kind of capital in the capital markets. Venture capitalists and philanthropies don't have it. But we have to figure out how to get people in the capital markets, who traditionally don't invest in this, to want to invest in this stuff. So again, financial engineering was helpful here. Imagine the megafund starts empty, and what it does is it issues some debt and some equity, and that generates cash flow. That cash flow is used, then, to buy that big portfolio of drugs that you need, and those drugs start working their way through that approval process, and each time they go through a phase of approval, they gain value. Most of them don't make it, but a few of them do, and with the ones that gain value, you can sell some, and when you sell them, you have money to pay the interest on those bonds, but also to fund the next round of trials. It's almost self-funding. You do that for the course of the transaction, and when you're done, you liquidate the portfolio, pay back the bonds, and you can give the equity holders a nice return. That was the theory, and we talked about it, we did a bunch of experiments, and then we said, let's really try to test it. We spent the next two years doing research. We talked to hundreds of experts in drug financing and venture capital. We talked to people who have developed drugs. We talked to pharmaceutical companies. We actually looked at the data for drugs, over 2,000 drugs that had been approved or denied or withdrawn, and we also ran millions of simulations. And all that actually took a lot of time. But when we were done, we found something that was sort of surprising. It was feasible to structure that fund such that when you were done structuring it, you could actually produce low-risk bonds that would be attractive to bond holders, that would give you yields of about five to eight percent, and you could produce equity that would give equity holders about a 12 percent return. Now those returns aren't going to be attractive to a venture capitalist. They want to make those big bets and get those billion dollar payoffs. But it turns out there are lots of other folks that would be interested. That's right in the investment sweet spot of pension funds and 401(k) plans and all this other stuff. So we published some articles in the academic press, in medical journals, in finance journals. But it wasn't until we actually got the popular press interested in this that we began to get some traction. We wanted to do more than just make people aware of it. We wanted people to get involved. So we took all of our computer code and made that available online under an open-source license to anybody that wanted it. And you guys can download it today if you want to run your own experiments to see if this would work. And that was really effective, because people that didn't believe our assumptions could try their own and see how it would work. Now there's an obvious problem, which is, is there enough money in the world to fund this? I've told you there's enough drugs, but is there enough money? There's 100 trillion dollars of capital currently invested in fixed-income securities. That's a hundred thousand billion. There's plenty of money. (Laughter) But we realized it's more than just money that's required. We had to get people motivated, involved, and get them to understand this. And we started thinking about all the different things that could go wrong. What are all the challenges that might get in the way? And we had a long list. We assigned a bunch of people, including ourselves, different pieces of this problem. And we said, could you start a work stream on credit risk? Could you start a work stream on the regulatory aspects? Could you start a work stream on how you would manage so many projects? And we had all these experts get together and do these different work streams, and then we held a conference. The conference was held over this past summer. It was an invitation-only conference. It was sponsored by the American Cancer Society and done in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute. We had experts from every field we thought would be important, including the government, and people that run research centers, and for two days they heard the reports from those five work streams, and talked about it. It was the first time the people who could make this happen sat across the table from each other and had these conversations. Now these conferences, it's typical to have a dinner, and at that dinner, you get to know each other, sort of like what we're doing here. I happened to look out the window, and hand on my heart, on the night of this conference — it was the summertime — and that's what I saw, a double rainbow. So I'd like to think it was a good sign. Since the conference, we've got people working between Paris and San Francisco, lots of different folks working on this to try to see if we can really make it happen. We're not looking to start a fund, but we want somebody else to do this. Because, again, I'm not a scientist. I can't build a drug. I'm never going to have enough money to fund even one of those trials. But all of us together, with our 401(k)s, with our 529 plans, with our pension plans, all of us together can actually fund hundreds of trials and get paid well for doing it and save millions of lives like my dad. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why dieting doesn't usually work | {0: 'Sandra Aamodt explores the neuroscience of everyday life, examining new research and its impact on our understanding of ourselves.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Three and a half years ago, I made one of the best decisions of my life. As my New Year's resolution, I gave up dieting, stopped worrying about my weight, and learned to eat mindfully. Now I eat whenever I'm hungry, and I've lost 10 pounds. This was me at age 13, when I started my first diet. I look at that picture now, and I think, you did not need a diet, you needed a fashion consult. (Laughter) But I thought I needed to lose weight, and when I gained it back, of course I blamed myself. And for the next three decades, I was on and off various diets. No matter what I tried, the weight I'd lost always came back. I'm sure many of you know the feeling. As a neuroscientist, I wondered, why is this so hard? Obviously, how much you weigh depends on how much you eat and how much energy you burn. What most people don't realize is that hunger and energy use are controlled by the brain, mostly without your awareness. Your brain does a lot of its work behind the scenes, and that is a good thing, because your conscious mind — how do we put this politely? — it's easily distracted. It's good that you don't have to remember to breathe when you get caught up in a movie. You don't forget how to walk because you're thinking about what to have for dinner. Your brain also has its own sense of what you should weigh, no matter what you consciously believe. This is called your set point, but that's a misleading term, because it's actually a range of about 10 or 15 pounds. You can use lifestyle choices to move your weight up and down within that range, but it's much, much harder to stay outside of it. The hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates body weight, there are more than a dozen chemical signals in the brain that tell your body to gain weight, more than another dozen that tell your body to lose it, and the system works like a thermostat, responding to signals from the body by adjusting hunger, activity and metabolism, to keep your weight stable as conditions change. That's what a thermostat does, right? It keeps the temperature in your house the same as the weather changes outside. Now you can try to change the temperature in your house by opening a window in the winter, but that's not going to change the setting on the thermostat, which will respond by kicking on the furnace to warm the place back up. Your brain works exactly the same way, responding to weight loss by using powerful tools to push your body back to what it considers normal. If you lose a lot of weight, your brain reacts as if you were starving, and whether you started out fat or thin, your brain's response is exactly the same. We would love to think that your brain could tell whether you need to lose weight or not, but it can't. If you do lose a lot of weight, you become hungry, and your muscles burn less energy. Dr. Rudy Leibel of Columbia University has found that people who have lost 10 percent of their body weight burn 250 to 400 calories less because their metabolism is suppressed. That's a lot of food. This means that a successful dieter must eat this much less forever than someone of the same weight who has always been thin. From an evolutionary perspective, your body's resistance to weight loss makes sense. When food was scarce, our ancestors' survival depended on conserving energy, and regaining the weight when food was available would have protected them against the next shortage. Over the course of human history, starvation has been a much bigger problem than overeating. This may explain a very sad fact: Set points can go up, but they rarely go down. Now, if your mother ever mentioned that life is not fair, this is the kind of thing she was talking about. (Laughter) Successful dieting doesn't lower your set point. Even after you've kept the weight off for as long as seven years, your brain keeps trying to make you gain it back. If that weight loss had been due to a long famine, that would be a sensible response. In our modern world of drive-thru burgers, it's not working out so well for many of us. That difference between our ancestral past and our abundant present is the reason that Dr. Yoni Freedhoff of the University of Ottawa would like to take some of his patients back to a time when food was less available, and it's also the reason that changing the food environment is really going to be the most effective solution to obesity. Sadly, a temporary weight gain can become permanent. If you stay at a high weight for too long, probably a matter of years for most of us, your brain may decide that that's the new normal. Psychologists classify eaters into two groups, those who rely on their hunger and those who try to control their eating through willpower, like most dieters. Let's call them intuitive eaters and controlled eaters. The interesting thing is that intuitive eaters are less likely to be overweight, and they spend less time thinking about food. Controlled eaters are more vulnerable to overeating in response to advertising, super-sizing, and the all-you-can-eat buffet. And a small indulgence, like eating one scoop of ice cream, is more likely to lead to a food binge in controlled eaters. Children are especially vulnerable to this cycle of dieting and then binging. Several long-term studies have shown that girls who diet in their early teenage years are three times more likely to become overweight five years later, even if they started at a normal weight, and all of these studies found that the same factors that predicted weight gain also predicted the development of eating disorders. The other factor, by the way, those of you who are parents, was being teased by family members about their weight. So don't do that. (Laughter) I left almost all my graphs at home, but I couldn't resist throwing in just this one, because I'm a geek, and that's how I roll. (Laughter) This is a study that looked at the risk of death over a 14-year period based on four healthy habits: eating enough fruits and vegetables, exercise three times a week, not smoking, and drinking in moderation. Let's start by looking at the normal weight people in the study. The height of the bars is the risk of death, and those zero, one, two, three, four numbers on the horizontal axis are the number of those healthy habits that a given person had. And as you'd expect, the healthier the lifestyle, the less likely people were to die during the study. Now let's look at what happens in overweight people. The ones that had no healthy habits had a higher risk of death. Adding just one healthy habit pulls overweight people back into the normal range. For obese people with no healthy habits, the risk is very high, seven times higher than the healthiest groups in the study. But a healthy lifestyle helps obese people too. In fact, if you look only at the group with all four healthy habits, you can see that weight makes very little difference. You can take control of your health by taking control of your lifestyle, even If you can't lose weight and keep it off. Diets don't have very much reliability. Five years after a diet, most people have regained the weight. Forty percent of them have gained even more. If you think about this, the typical outcome of dieting is that you're more likely to gain weight in the long run than to lose it. If I've convinced you that dieting might be a problem, the next question is, what do you do about it? And my answer, in a word, is mindfulness. I'm not saying you need to learn to meditate or take up yoga. I'm talking about mindful eating: learning to understand your body's signals so that you eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full, because a lot of weight gain boils down to eating when you're not hungry. How do you do it? Give yourself permission to eat as much as you want, and then work on figuring out what makes your body feel good. Sit down to regular meals without distractions. Think about how your body feels when you start to eat and when you stop, and let your hunger decide when you should be done. It took about a year for me to learn this, but it's really been worth it. I am so much more relaxed around food than I have ever been in my life. I often don't think about it. I forget we have chocolate in the house. It's like aliens have taken over my brain. It's just completely different. I should say that this approach to eating probably won't make you lose weight unless you often eat when you're not hungry, but doctors don't know of any approach that makes significant weight loss in a lot of people, and that is why a lot of people are now focusing on preventing weight gain instead of promoting weight loss. Let's face it: If diets worked, we'd all be thin already. (Laughter) Why do we keep doing the same thing and expecting different results? Diets may seem harmless, but they actually do a lot of collateral damage. At worst, they ruin lives: Weight obsession leads to eating disorders, especially in young kids. In the U.S., we have 80 percent of 10-year-old girls say they've been on a diet. Our daughters have learned to measure their worth by the wrong scale. Even at its best, dieting is a waste of time and energy. It takes willpower which you could be using to help your kids with their homework or to finish that important work project, and because willpower is limited, any strategy that relies on its consistent application is pretty much guaranteed to eventually fail you when your attention moves on to something else. Let me leave you with one last thought. What if we told all those dieting girls that it's okay to eat when they're hungry? What if we taught them to work with their appetite instead of fearing it? I think most of them would be happier and healthier, and as adults, many of them would probably be thinner. I wish someone had told me that back when I was 13. Thanks. (Applause) |
How to build an information time machine | {0: 'Frederic Kaplan seeks to digitize vast archives of historical information to make maps that move -- through time.'} | TEDxCaFoscariU | This is an image of the planet Earth. It looks very much like the Apollo pictures that are very well known. There is something different; you can click on it, and if you click on it, you can zoom in on almost any place on the Earth. For instance, this is a bird's-eye view of the EPFL campus. In many cases, you can also see how a building looks from a nearby street. This is pretty amazing. But there's something missing in this wonderful tour: It's time. i'm not really sure when this picture was taken. I'm not even sure it was taken at the same moment as the bird's-eye view. In my lab, we develop tools to travel not only in space but also through time. The kind of question we're asking is Is it possible to build something like Google Maps of the past? Can I add a slider on top of Google Maps and just change the year, seeing how it was 100 years before, 1,000 years before? Is that possible? Can I reconstruct social networks of the past? Can I make a Facebook of the Middle Ages? So, can I build time machines? Maybe we can just say, "No, it's not possible." Or, maybe, we can think of it from an information point of view. This is what I call the information mushroom. Vertically, you have the time. and horizontally, the amount of digital information available. Obviously, in the last 10 years, we have much information. And obviously the more we go in the past, the less information we have. If we want to build something like Google Maps of the past, or Facebook of the past, we need to enlarge this space, we need to make that like a rectangle. How do we do that? One way is digitization. There's a lot of material available — newspaper, printed books, thousands of printed books. I can digitize all these. I can extract information from these. Of course, the more you go in the past, the less information you will have. So, it might not be enough. So, I can do what historians do. I can extrapolate. This is what we call, in computer science, simulation. If I take a log book, I can consider, it's not just a log book of a Venetian captain going to a particular journey. I can consider it is actually a log book which is representative of many journeys of that period. I'm extrapolating. If I have a painting of a facade, I can consider it's not just that particular building, but probably it also shares the same grammar of buildings where we lost any information. So if we want to construct a time machine, we need two things. We need very large archives, and we need excellent specialists. The Venice Time Machine, the project I'm going to talk to you about, is a joint project between the EPFL and the University of Venice Ca'Foscari. There's something very peculiar about Venice, that its administration has been very, very bureaucratic. They've been keeping track of everything, almost like Google today. At the Archivio di Stato, you have 80 kilometers of archives documenting every aspect of the life of Venice over more than 1,000 years. You have every boat that goes out, every boat that comes in. You have every change that was made in the city. This is all there. We are setting up a 10-year digitization program which has the objective of transforming this immense archive into a giant information system. The type of objective we want to reach is 450 books a day that can be digitized. Of course, when you digitize, that's not enough, because these documents, most of them are in Latin, in Tuscan, in Venetian dialect, so you need to transcribe them, to translate them in some cases, to index them, and this is obviously not easy. In particular, traditional optical character recognition method that can be used for printed manuscripts, they do not work well on the handwritten document. So the solution is actually to take inspiration from another domain: speech recognition. This is a domain of something that seems impossible, which can actually be done, simply by putting additional constraints. If you have a very good model of a language which is used, if you have a very good model of a document, how well they are structured. And these are administrative documents. They are well structured in many cases. If you divide this huge archive into smaller subsets where a smaller subset actually shares similar features, then there's a chance of success. If we reach that stage, then there's something else: we can extract from this document events. Actually probably 10 billion events can be extracted from this archive. And this giant information system can be searched in many ways. You can ask questions like, "Who lived in this palazzo in 1323?" "How much cost a sea bream at the Realto market in 1434?" "What was the salary of a glass maker in Murano maybe over a decade?" You can ask even bigger questions because it will be semantically coded. And then what you can do is put that in space, because much of this information is spatial. And from that, you can do things like reconstructing this extraordinary journey of that city that managed to have a sustainable development over a thousand years, managing to have all the time a form of equilibrium with its environment. You can reconstruct that journey, visualize it in many different ways. But of course, you cannot understand Venice if you just look at the city. You have to put it in a larger European context. So the idea is also to document all the things that worked at the European level. We can reconstruct also the journey of the Venetian maritime empire, how it progressively controlled the Adriatic Sea, how it became the most powerful medieval empire of its time, controlling most of the sea routes from the east to the south. But you can even do other things, because in these maritime routes, there are regular patterns. You can go one step beyond and actually create a simulation system, create a Mediterranean simulator which is capable actually of reconstructing even the information we are missing, which would enable us to have questions you could ask like if you were using a route planner. "If I am in Corfu in June 1323 and want to go to Constantinople, where can I take a boat?" Probably we can answer this question with one or two or three days' precision. "How much will it cost?" "What are the chance of encountering pirates?" Of course, you understand, the central scientific challenge of a project like this one is qualifying, quantifying and representing uncertainty and inconsistency at each step of this process. There are errors everywhere, errors in the document, it's the wrong name of the captain, some of the boats never actually took to sea. There are errors in translation, interpretative biases, and on top of that, if you add algorithmic processes, you're going to have errors in recognition, errors in extraction, so you have very, very uncertain data. So how can we detect and correct these inconsistencies? How can we represent that form of uncertainty? It's difficult. One thing you can do is document each step of the process, not only coding the historical information but what we call the meta-historical information, how is historical knowledge constructed, documenting each step. That will not guarantee that we actually converge toward a single story of Venice, but probably we can actually reconstruct a fully documented potential story of Venice. Maybe there's not a single map. Maybe there are several maps. The system should allow for that, because we have to deal with a new form of uncertainty, which is really new for this type of giant databases. And how should we communicate this new research to a large audience? Again, Venice is extraordinary for that. With the millions of visitors that come every year, it's actually one of the best places to try to invent the museum of the future. Imagine, horizontally you see the reconstructed map of a given year, and vertically, you see the document that served the reconstruction, paintings, for instance. Imagine an immersive system that permits to go and dive and reconstruct the Venice of a given year, some experience you could share within a group. On the contrary, imagine actually that you start from a document, a Venetian manuscript, and you show, actually, what you can construct out of it, how it is decoded, how the context of that document can be recreated. This is an image from an exhibit which is currently conducted in Geneva with that type of system. So to conclude, we can say that research in the humanities is about to undergo an evolution which is maybe similar to what happened to life sciences 30 years ago. It's really a question of scale. We see projects which are much beyond any single research team can do, and this is really new for the humanities, which very often take the habit of working in small groups or only with a couple of researchers. When you visit the Archivio di Stato, you feel this is beyond what any single team can do, and that should be a joint and common effort. So what we must do for this paradigm shift is actually foster a new generation of "digital humanists" that are going to be ready for this shift. I thank you very much. (Applause) |
To hear this music you have to be there. Literally | {0: 'Brothers Ryan and Hays Holladay explore the intersection of art and technology with an emphasis on music and sound, with projects ranging from multichannel audio installations to interactive performances to mobile apps.'} | TED@BCG San Francisco | (Music) For any of you who have visited or lived in New York City, these shots might start to look familiar. This is Central Park, one of the most beautifully designed public spaces in America. But to anyone who hasn't visited, these images can't really fully convey. To really understand Central Park, you have to physically be there. Well, the same is true of the music, which my brother and I composed and mapped specifically for Central Park. (Music) I'd like to talk to you today a little bit about the work that my brother Hays and I are doing — That's us there. That's both of us actually — specifically about a concept that we've been developing over the last few years, this idea of location-aware music. Now, my brother and I, we're musicians and music producers. We've been working together since, well, since we were kids, really. But recently, we've become more and more interested in projects where art and technology intersect, from creating sight-specific audio and video installation to engineering interactive concerts. But today I want to focus on this concept of composition for physical space. But before I go too much further into that, let me tell you a little bit about how we got started with this idea. My brother and I were living in New York City when the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude did their temporary installation, The Gates, in Central Park. Hundreds of these brightly-colored sculptures decorated the park for a number of weeks, and unlike work that's exhibited in a more neutral space, like on the walls of a gallery or a museum, this was work that was really in dialogue with this place, and in a lot of ways, The Gates was really a celebration of Frederick Olmsted's incredible design. This was an experience that stayed with us for a long time, and years later, my brother and I moved back to Washington, D.C., and we started to ask the question, would it be possible, in the same way that The Gates responded to the physical layout of the park, to compose music for a landscape? Which brought us to this. (Music) On Memorial Day, we released "The National Mall," a location-aware album released exclusively as a mobile app that uses the device's built-in GPS functionality to sonically map the entire park in our hometown of Washington, D.C. Hundreds of musical segments are geo-tagged throughout the entire park so that as a listener traverses the landscape, a musical score is actually unfolding around them. So this is not a playlist or a list of songs intended for the park, but rather an array of distinct melodies and rhythms that fit together like pieces of a puzzle and blend seamlessly based on a listener's chosen trajectory. So think of this as a choose-your-own-adventure of an album. Let's take a closer look. Let's look at one example here. So using the app, as you make your way towards the grounds surrounding the Washington Monument, you hear the sounds of instruments warming up, which then gives way to the sound of a mellotron spelling out a very simple melody. This is then joined by the sound of sweeping violins. Keep walking, and a full choir joins in, until you finally reach the top of the hill and you're hearing the sound of drums and fireworks and all sorts of musical craziness, as if all of these sounds are radiating out from this giant obelisk that punctuates the center of the park. But were you to walk in the opposite direction, this entire sequence happens in reverse. And were you to actually exit the perimeter of the park, the music would fade to silence, and the play button would disappear. We're sometimes contacted by people in other parts of the world who can't travel to the United States, but would like to hear this record. Well, unlike a normal album, we haven't been able to accommodate this request. When they ask for a C.D. or an MP3 version, we just can't make that happen, and the reason is because this isn't a promotional app or a game to promote or accompany the release of a traditional record. In this case, the app is the work itself, and the architecture of the landscape is intrinsic to the listening experience. Six months later, we did a location-aware album for Central Park, a park that is over two times the size of the National Mall, with music spanning from the Sheep's Meadow to the Ramble to the Reservoir. Currently, my brother and I are working on projects all over the country, but last spring we started a project, here actually at Stanford's Experimental Media Art Department, where we're creating our largest location-aware album to date, one that will span the entirety of Highway 1 here on the Pacific Coast. But what we're doing, integrating GPS with music, is really just one idea. But it speaks to a larger vision for a music industry that's sometimes struggled to find its footing in this digital age, that they begin to see these new technologies not simply as ways of adding bells and whistles to an existing model, but to dream up entirely new ways for people to interact with and experience music. Thank you. (Applause) |
Profit’s not always the point | {0: "Harish Manwani joined Unilever as a management trainee in 1976; he is now the company's chief operating officer."} | TED@BCG Singapore | The entire model of capitalism and the economic model that you and I did business in, and, in fact, continue to do business in, was built around what probably Milton Friedman put more succinctly. And Adam Smith, of course, the father of modern economics actually said many, many years ago, the invisible hand, which is, "If you continue to operate in your own self-interest you will do the best good for society." Now, capitalism has done a lot of good things and I've talked about a lot of good things that have happened, but equally, it has not been able to meet up with some of the challenges that we've seen in society. The model that at least I was brought up in and a lot of us doing business were brought up in was one which talked about what I call the three G's of growth: growth that is consistent, quarter on quarter; growth that is competitive, better than the other person; and growth that is profitable, so you continue to make more and more shareholder value. And I'm afraid this is not going to be good enough and we have to move from this 3G model to a model of what I call the fourth G: the G of growth that is responsible. And it is this that has to become a very important part of creating value. Of not just creating economic value but creating social value. And companies that will thrive are those that will actually embrace the fourth G. And the model of 4G is quite simple: Companies cannot afford to be just innocent bystanders in what's happening around in society. They have to begin to play their role in terms of serving the communities which actually sustain them. And we have to move to a model of an and/and model which is how do we make money and do good? How do we make sure that we have a great business but we also have a great environment around us? And that model is all about doing well and doing good. But the question is easier said than done. But how do we actually get that done? And I do believe that the answer to that is going to be leadership. It is going to be to redefine the new business models which understand that the only license to operate is to combine these things. And for that you need businesses that can actually define their role in society in terms of a much larger purpose than the products and brands that they sell. And companies that actually define a true north, things that are nonnegotiable whether times are good, bad, ugly — doesn't matter. There are things that you stand for. Values and purpose are going to be the two drivers of software that are going to create the companies of tomorrow. And I'm going to now shift to talking a little bit about my own experiences. I joined Unilever in 1976 as a management trainee in India. And on my first day of work I walked in and my boss tells me, "Do you know why you're here?" I said, "I'm here to sell a lot of soap." And he said, "No, you're here to change lives." You're here to change lives. You know, I thought it was rather facetious. We are a company that sells soap and soup. What are we doing about changing lives? And it's then I realized that simple acts like selling a bar of soap can save more lives than pharmaceutical companies. I don't know how many of you know that five million children don't reach the age of five because of simple infections that can be prevented by an act of washing their hands with soap. We run the largest hand-washing program in the world. We are running a program on hygiene and health that now touches half a billion people. It's not about selling soap, there is a larger purpose out there. And brands indeed can be at the forefront of social change. And the reason for that is, when two billion people use your brands that's the amplifier. Small actions can make a big difference. Take another example, I was walking around in one of our villages in India. Now those of you who have done this will realize that this is no walk in the park. And we had this lady who was one of our small distributors — beautiful, very, very modest, her home — and she was out there, dressed nicely, her husband in the back, her mother-in-law behind and her sister-in-law behind her. The social order was changing because this lady is part of our Project Shakti that is actually teaching women how to do small business and how to carry the message of nutrition and hygiene. We have 60,000 such women now in India. It's not about selling soap, it's about making sure that in the process of doing so you can change people's lives. Small actions, big difference. Our R&D folks are not only working to give us some fantastic detergents, but they're working to make sure we use less water. A product that we've just launched recently, One Rinse product that allows you to save water every time you wash your clothes. And if we can convert all our users to using this, that's 500 billion liters of water. By the way, that's equivalent to one month of water for a whole huge continent. So just think about it. There are small actions that can make a big difference. And I can go on and on. Our food chain, our brilliant products — and I'm sorry I'm giving you a word from the sponsors — Knorr, Hellman's and all those wonderful products. We are committed to making sure that all our agricultural raw materials are sourced from sustainable sources, 100-percent sustainable sources. We were the first to say we are going to buy all of our palm oil from sustainable sources. I don't know how many of you know that palm oil, and not buying it from sustainable sources, can create deforestation that is responsible for 20 percent of the greenhouse gasses in the world. We were the first to embrace that, and it's all because we market soap and soup. And the point I'm making here is that companies like yours, companies like mine have to define a purpose which embraces responsibility and understands that we have to play our part in the communities in which we operate. We introduced something called The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which said, "Our purpose is to make sustainable living commonplace, and we are gong to change the lives of one billion people over 2020." Now the question here is, where do we go from here? And the answer to that is very simple: We're not going to change the world alone. There are plenty of you and plenty of us who understand this. The question is, we need partnerships, we need coalitions and importantly, we need that leadership that will allow us to take this from here and to be the change that we want to see around us. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Demo: A needle-free vaccine patch that's safer and way cheaper | {0: 'Mark Kendall aims to shake up how vaccines are delivered with the Nanopatch.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | It's a pleasure to be here in Edinburgh, Scotland, the birthplace of the needle and syringe. Less than a mile from here in this direction, in 1853 a Scotsman filed his very first patent on the needle and syringe. His name was Alexander Wood, and it was at the Royal College of Physicians. This is the patent. What blows my mind when I look at it even today is that it looks almost identical to the needle in use today. Yet, it's 160 years old. So we turn to the field of vaccines. Most vaccines are delivered with the needle and syringe, this 160-year-old technology. And credit where it's due — on many levels, vaccines are a successful technology. After clean water and sanitation, vaccines are the one technology that has increased our life span the most. That's a pretty hard act to beat. But just like any other technology, vaccines have their shortcomings, and the needle and syringe is a key part within that narrative — this old technology. So let's start with the obvious: Many of us don't like the needle and syringe. I share that view. However, 20 percent of the population have a thing called needle phobia. That's more than disliking the needle; that is actively avoiding being vaccinated because of needle phobia. And that's problematic in terms of the rollout of vaccines. Now, related to this is another key issue, which is needlestick injuries. And the WHO has figures that suggest about 1.3 million deaths per year take place due to cross-contamination with needlestick injuries. These are early deaths that take place. Now, these are two things that you probably may have heard of, but there are two other shortcomings of the needle and syringe you may not have heard about. One is it could be holding back the next generation of vaccines in terms of their immune responses. And the second is that it could be responsible for the problem of the cold chain that I'll tell you about as well. I'm going to tell you about some work that my team and I are doing in Australia at the University of Queensland on a technology designed to tackle those four problems. And that technology is called the Nanopatch. Now, this is a specimen of the Nanopatch. To the naked eye it just looks like a square smaller than a postage stamp, but under a microscope what you see are thousands of tiny projections that are invisible to the human eye. And there's about 4,000 projections on this particular square compared to the needle. And I've designed those projections to serve a key role, which is to work with the skin's immune system. So that's a very important function tied in with the Nanopatch. Now we make the Nanopatch with a technique called deep reactive ion etching. And this particular technique is one that's been borrowed from the semiconductor industry, and therefore is low cost and can be rolled out in large numbers. Now we dry-coat vaccines to the projections of the Nanopatch and apply it to the skin. Now, the simplest form of application is using our finger, but our finger has some limitations, so we've devised an applicator. And it's a very simple device — you could call it a sophisticated finger. It's a spring-operated device. What we do is when we apply the Nanopatch to the skin as so — (Click) — immediately a few things happen. So firstly, the projections on the Nanopatch breach through the tough outer layer and the vaccine is very quickly released — within less than a minute, in fact. Then we can take the Nanopatch off and discard it. And indeed we can make a reuse of the applicator itself. So that gives you an idea of the Nanopatch, and immediately you can see some key advantages. We've talked about it being needle-free — these are projections that you can't even see — and, of course, we get around the needle phobia issue as well. Now, if we take a step back and think about these other two really important advantages: One is improved immune responses through delivery, and the second is getting rid of the cold chain. So let's start with the first one, this immunogenicity idea. It takes a little while to get our heads around, but I'll try to explain it in simple terms. So I'll take a step back and explain to you how vaccines work in a simple way. So vaccines work by introducing into our body a thing called an antigen which is a safe form of a germ. Now that safe germ, that antigen, tricks our body into mounting an immune response, learning and remembering how to deal with intruders. When the real intruder comes along the body quickly mounts an immune response to deal with that vaccine and neutralizes the infection. So it does that well. Now, the way it's done today with the needle and syringe, most vaccines are delivered that way — with this old technology and the needle. But it could be argued that the needle is holding back our immune responses; it's missing our immune sweet spot in the skin. To describe this idea, we need to take a journey through the skin, starting with one of those projections and applying the Nanopatch to the skin. And we see this kind of data. Now, this is real data — that thing that we can see there is one projection from the Nanopatch that's been applied to the skin and those colors are different layers. Now, to give you an idea of scale, if the needle was shown here, it would be too big. It would be 10 times bigger than the size of that screen, going 10 times deeper as well. It's off the grid entirely. You can see immediately that we have those projections in the skin. That red layer is a tough outer layer of dead skin, but the brown layer and the magenta layer are jammed full of immune cells. As one example, in the brown layer there's a certain type of cell called a Langerhans cell — every square millimeter of our body is jammed full of those Langerhans cells, those immune cells, and there's others shown as well that we haven't stained in this image. But you can immediately see that the Nanopatch achieves that penetration indeed. We target thousands upon thousands of these particular cells just residing within a hair's width of the surface of the skin. Now, as the guy that's invented this thing and designed it to do that, I found that exciting. But so what? So what if you've targeted cells? In the world of vaccines, what does that mean? The world of vaccines is getting better. It's getting more systematic. However, you still don't really know if a vaccine is going to work until you roll your sleeves up and vaccinate and wait. It's a gambler's game even today. So, we had to do that gamble. We obtained an influenza vaccine, we applied it to our Nanopatches and we applied the Nanopatches to the skin, and we waited — and this is in the live animal. We waited a month, and this is what we found out. This is a data slide showing the immune responses that we've generated with a Nanopatch compared to the needle and syringe into muscle. So on the horizontal axis we have the dose shown in nanograms. On the vertical axis we have the immune response generated, and that dashed line indicates the protection threshold. If we're above that line it's considered protective; if we're below that line it's not. So the red line is mostly below that curve and indeed there's only one point that is achieved with the needle that's protective, and that's with a high dose of 6,000 nanograms. But notice immediately the distinctly different curve that we achieve with the blue line. That's what's achieved with the Nanopatch; the delivered dose of the Nanopatch is a completely different immunogenicity curve. That's a real fresh opportunity. Suddenly we have a brand new lever in the world of vaccines. We can push it one way, where we can take a vaccine that works but is too expensive and can get protection with a hundredth of the dose compared to the needle. That can take a vaccine that's suddenly 10 dollars down to 10 cents, and that's particularly important within the developing world. But there's another angle to this as well — you can take vaccines that currently don't work and get them over that line and get them protective. And certainly in the world of vaccines that can be important. Let's consider the big three: HIV, malaria, tuberculosis. They're responsible for about 7 million deaths per year, and there is no adequate vaccination method for any of those. So potentially, with this new lever that we have with the Nanopatch, we can help make that happen. We can push that lever to help get those candidate vaccines over the line. Now, of course, we've worked within my lab with many other vaccines that have attained similar responses and similar curves to this, what we've achieved with influenza. I'd like to now switch to talk about another key shortcoming of today's vaccines, and that is the need to maintain the cold chain. As the name suggests — the cold chain — it's the requirements of keeping a vaccine right from production all the way through to when the vaccine is applied, to keep it refrigerated. Now, that presents some logistical challenges but we have ways to do it. This is a slightly extreme case in point but it helps illustrate the logistical challenges, in particular in resource-poor settings, of what's required to get vaccines refrigerated and maintain the cold chain. If the vaccine is too warm the vaccine breaks down, but interestingly it can be too cold and the vaccine can break down as well. Now, the stakes are very high. The WHO estimates that within Africa, up to half the vaccines used there are considered to not be working properly because at some point the cold chain has fallen over. So it's a big problem, and it's tied in with the needle and syringe because it's a liquid form vaccine, and when it's liquid it needs the refrigeration. A key attribute of our Nanopatch is that the vaccine is dry, and when it's dry it doesn't need refrigeration. Within my lab we've shown that we can keep the vaccine stored at 23 degrees Celsius for more than a year without any loss in activity at all. That's an important improvement. (Applause) We're delighted about it as well. And the thing about it is that we have well and truly proven the Nanopatch within the laboratory setting. And as a scientist, I love that and I love science. However, as an engineer, as a biomedical engineer and also as a human being, I'm not going to be satisfied until we've rolled this thing out, taken it out of the lab and got it to people in large numbers and particularly the people that need it the most. So we've commenced this particular journey, and we've commenced this journey in an unusual way. We've started with Papua New Guinea. Now, Papua New Guinea is an example of a developing world country. It's about the same size as France, but it suffers from many of the key barriers existing within the world of today's vaccines. There's the logistics: Within this country there are only 800 refrigerators to keep vaccines chilled. Many of them are old, like this one in Port Moresby, many of them are breaking down and many are not in the Highlands where they are required. That's a challenge. But also, Papua New Guinea has the world's highest incidence of HPV, human papillomavirus, the cervical cancer [risk factor]. Yet, that vaccine is not available in large numbers because it's too expensive. So for those two reasons, with the attributes of the Nanopatch, we've got into the field and worked with the Nanopatch, and taken it to Papua New Guinea and we'll be following that up shortly. Now, doing this kind of work is not easy. It's challenging, but there's nothing else in the world I'd rather be doing. And as we look ahead I'd like to share with you a thought: It's the thought of a future where the 17 million deaths per year that we currently have due to infectious disease is a historical footnote. And it's a historical footnote that has been achieved by improved, radically improved vaccines. Now standing here today in front of you at the birthplace of the needle and syringe, a device that's 160 years old, I'm presenting to you an alternative approach that could really help make that happen — and it's the Nanopatch with its attributes of being needle-free, pain-free, the ability for removing the cold chain and improving the immunogenicity. Thank you. (Applause) |
So we leaned in ... now what? | {0: 'As the COO at the helm of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg juggles the tasks of monetizing the world’s largest social networking site while keeping its users happy and engaged.'} | TEDWomen 2013 | Pat Mitchell: Your first time back on the TEDWomen stage. Sheryl Sandberg: First time back. Nice to see everyone. It's always so nice to look out and see so many women. It's so not my regular experience, as I know anyone else's. PM: So when we first started talking about, maybe the subject wouldn't be social media, which we assumed it would be, but that you had very much on your mind the missing leadership positions, particularly in the sector of technology and social media. But how did that evolve for you as a thought, and end up being the TED Talk that you gave? SS: So I was really scared to get on this stage and talk about women, because I grew up in the business world, as I think so many of us did. You never talk about being a woman, because someone might notice that you're a woman, right? They might notice. Or worse, if you say "woman," people on the other end of the table think you're asking for special treatment, or complaining. Or worse, about to sue them. And so I went through — (Laughter) Right? I went through my entire business career, and never spoke about being a woman, never spoke about it publicly. But I also had noticed that it wasn't working. I came out of college over 20 years ago, and I thought that all of my peers were men and women, all the people above me were all men, but that would change, because your generation had done such an amazing job fighting for equality, equality was now ours for the taking. And it wasn't. Because year after year, I was one of fewer and fewer, and now, often the only woman in a room. And I talked to a bunch of people about, should I give a speech at TEDWomen about women, and they said, oh no, no. It will end your business career. You cannot be a serious business executive and speak about being a woman. You'll never be taken seriously again. But fortunately, there were the few, the proud — like you — who told me I should give the speech, and I asked myself the question Mark Zuckerberg might — the founder of Facebook and my boss — asks all of us, which is, what would I do if I wasn't afraid? And the answer to what would I do if I wasn't afraid is I would get on the TED stage, and talk about women, and leadership. And I did, and survived. (Applause) PM: I would say, not only survived. I'm thinking of that moment, Sheryl, when you and I were standing backstage together, and you turned to me, and you told me a story. And I said — very last minute — you know, you really should share that story. SS: Oh, yeah. PM: What was that story? SS: Well, it's an important part of the journey. So I had — TEDWomen — the original one was in D.C. — so I live here, so I had gotten on a plane the day before, and my daughter was three, she was clinging to my leg: "Mommy, don't go." And Pat's a friend, and so, not related to the speech I was planning on giving, which was chock full of facts and figures, and nothing personal, I told Pat the story. I said, well, I'm having a hard day. Yesterday my daughter was clinging to my leg, and "Don't go." And you looked at me and said, you have to tell that story. I said, on the TED stage? Are you kidding? I'm going to get on a stage and admit my daughter was clinging to my leg? And you said yes, because if you want to talk about getting more women into leadership roles, you have to be honest about how hard it is. And I did. And I think that's a really important part of the journey. The same thing happened when I wrote my book. I started writing the book. I wrote a first chapter, I thought it was fabulous. It was chock-full of data and figures, I had three pages on matrilineal Maasai tribes, and their sociological patterns. My husband read it and he was like, this is like eating your Wheaties. (Laughter) No one — and I apologize to Wheaties if there's someone — no one, no one will read this book. And I realized through the process that I had to be more honest and more open, and I had to tell my stories. My stories of still not feeling as self-confident as I should, in many situations. My first and failed marriage. Crying at work. Felling like I didn't belong there, feeling guilty to this day. And part of my journey, starting on this stage, going to "Lean In," going to the foundation, is all about being more open and honest about those challenges, so that other women can be more open and honest, and all of us can work together towards real equality. PM: I think that one of the most striking parts about the book, and in my opinion, one of the reasons it's hit such a nerve and is resonating around the world, is that you are personal in the book, and that you do make it clear that, while you've observed some things that are very important for other women to know, that you've had the same challenges that many others of us have, as you faced the hurdles and the barriers and possibly the people who don't believe the same. So talk about that process: deciding you'd go public with the private part, and then you would also put yourself in the position of something of an expert on how to resolve those challenges. SS: After I did the TED Talk, what happened was — you know, I never really expected to write a book, I'm not an author, I'm not a writer, and it was viewed a lot, and it really started impacting people's lives. I got this great —- one of the first letters I got was from a woman who said that she was offered a really big promotion at work, and she turned it down, and she told her best friend she turned it down, and her best friend said, you really need to watch this TED Talk. And so she watched this TED Talk, and she went back the next day, she took the job, she went home, and she handed her husband the grocery list. (Laughter) And she said, I can do this. And what really mattered to me — it wasn't only women in the corporate world, even though I did hear from a lot of them, and it did impact a lot of them, it was also people of all different circumstances. There was a doctor I met who was an attending physician at Johns Hopkins, and he said that until he saw my TED Talk, it never really occurred to him that even though half the students in his med school classes were women, they weren't speaking as much as the men as he did his rounds. So he started paying attention, and as he waited for raised hands, he realized the men's hands were up. So he started encouraging the women to raise their hands more, and it still didn't work. So he told everyone, no more hand raising, I'm cold-calling. So he could call evenly on men and women. And what he proved to himself was that the women knew the answers just as well or better, and he was able to go back to them and tell them that. And then there was the woman, stay-at-home mom, lives in a really difficult neighborhood, with not a great school, she said that TED Talk — she's never had a corporate job, but that TED Talk inspired her to go to her school and fight for a better teacher for her child. And I guess it was part of was finding my own voice. And I realized that other women and men could find their voice through it, which is why I went from the talk to the book. PM: And in the book, you not only found your voice, which is clear and strong in the book, but you also share what you've learned — the experiences of other people in the lessons. And that's what I'm thinking about in terms of putting yourself in a — you became a sort of expert in how you lean in. So what did that feel like, and become like in your life? To launch not just a book, not just a best-selling, best-viewed talk, but a movement, where people began to literally describe their actions at work as, I'm leaning in. SS: I mean, I'm grateful, I'm honored, I'm happy, and it's the very beginning. So I don't know if I'm an expert, or if anyone is an expert. I certainly have done a lot of research. I have read every study, I have pored over the materials, and the lessons are very clear. Because here's what we know: What we know is that stereotypes are holding women back from leadership roles all over the world. It's so striking. "Lean In" is very global, I've been all over the world, talking about it, and — cultures are so different. Even within our own country, to Japan, to Korea, to China, to Asia, Europe, they're so different. Except for one thing: gender. All over the world, no matter what our cultures are, we think men should be strong, assertive, aggressive, have voice; we think women should speak when spoken to, help others. Now we have, all over the world, women are called "bossy." There is a word for "bossy," for little girls, in every language there's one. It's a word that's pretty much not used for little boys, because if a little boy leads, there's no negative word for it, it's expected. But if a little girl leads, she's bossy. Now I know there aren't a lot of men here, but bear with me. If you're a man, you'll have to represent your gender. Please raise your hand if you've been told you're too aggressive at work. (Laughter) There's always a few, it runs about five percent. Okay, get ready, gentlemen. If you're a woman, please raise your hand if you've ever been told you're too aggressive at work. (Laughter) That is what audiences have said in every country in the world, and it's deeply supported by the data. Now, do we think women are more aggressive than men? Of course not. It's just that we judge them through a different lens, and a lot of the character traits that you must exhibit to perform at work, to get results, to lead, are ones that we think, in a man, he's a boss, and in a woman, she's bossy. And the good news about this is that we can change this by acknowledging it. One of the happiest moments I had in this whole journey is, after the book came out, I stood on a stage with John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco. He read the book. He stood on a stage with me, he invited me in front of his whole management team, men and women, and he said, I thought we were good at this. I thought I was good at this. And then I read this book, and I realized that we — my company — we have called all of our senior women too aggressive, and I'm standing on this stage, and I'm sorry. And I want you to know we're never going to do it again. PM: Can we send that to a lot of other people that we know? (Applause) SS: And so John is doing that because he believes it's good for his company, and so this kind of acknowledgement of these biases can change it. And so next time you all see someone call a little girl "bossy," you walk right up to that person, big smile, and you say, "That little girl's not bossy. That little girl has executive leadership skills." (Laughter) PM: I know that's what you're telling your daughter. SS: Absolutely. PM: And you did focus in the book — and the reason, as you said, in writing it, was to create a dialogue about this. I mean, let's just put it out there, face the fact that women are — in a time when we have more open doors, and more opportunities — are still not getting to the leadership positions. So in the months that have come since the book, in which "Lean In" focused on that and said, here are some of the challenges that remain, and many of them we have to own within ourselves and look at ourselves. What has changed? Have you seen changes? SS: Well, there's certainly more dialogue, which is great. But what really matters to me, and I think all of us, is action. So everywhere I go, CEOs, they're mostly men, say to me, you're costing me so much money because all the women want to be paid as much as the men. And to them I say, I'm not sorry at all. (Laughter) At all. I mean, the women should be paid as much as the men. Everywhere I go, women tell me they ask for raises. Everywhere I go, women say they're getting better relationships with their spouses, asking for more help at home, asking for the promotions they should be getting at work, and importantly, believing it themselves. Even little things. One of the governors of one of the states told me that he didn't realize that more women were, in fact, literally sitting on the side of the room, which they are, and now he made a rule that all the women on his staff need to sit at the table. The foundation I started along with the book "Lean In" helps women, or men, start circles — small groups, it can be 10, it can be however many you want, which meet once a month. I would have hoped that by now, we'd have about 500 circles. That would've been great. You know, 500 times roughly 10. There are over 12,000 circles in 50 countries in the world. PM: Wow, that's amazing. SS: And these are people who are meeting every single month. I met one of them, I was in Beijing. A group of women, they're all about 29 or 30, they started the first Lean In circle in Beijing, several of them grew up in very poor, rural China. These women are 29, they are told by their society that they are "left over," because they are not yet married, and the process of coming together once a month at a meeting is helping them define who they are for themselves. What they want in their careers. The kind of partners they want, if at all. I looked at them, we went around and introduced ourselves, and they all said their names and where they're from, and I said, I'm Sheryl Sandberg, and this was my dream. And I kind of just started crying. Right, which, I admit, I do. Right? I've talked about it before. But the fact that a woman so far away out in the world, who grew up in a rural village, who's being told to marry someone she doesn't want to marry, can now go meet once a month with a group of people and refuse that, and find life on her own terms. That's the kind of change we have to hope for. PM: Have you been surprised by the global nature of the message? Because I think when the book first came out, many people thought, well, this is a really important handbook for young women on their way up. They need to look at this, anticipate the barriers, and recognize them, put them out in the open, have the dialogue about it, but that it's really for women who are that. Doing that. Pursuing the corporate world. And yet the book is being read, as you say, in rural and developing countries. What part of that has surprised you, and perhaps led to a new perspective on your part? SS: The book is about self-confidence, and about equality. And it turns out, everywhere in the world, women need more self-confidence, because the world tells us we're not equal to men. Everywhere in the world, we live in a world where the men get "and," and women get "or." I've never met a man who's been asked how he does it all. (Laughter) Again, I'm going to turn to the men in the audience: Please raise your hand if you've been asked, how do you do it all? (Laughter) Men only. Women, women. Please raise your hand if you've been asked how you do it all? We assume men can do it all, slash — have jobs and children. We assume women can't, and that's ridiculous, because the great majority of women everywhere in the world, including the United States, work full time and have children. And I think people don't fully understand how broad the message is. There is a circle that's been started for rescued sex workers in Miami. They're using "Lean In" to help people make the transition back to what would be a fair life, really rescuing them from their pimps, and using it. There are dress-for-success groups in Texas which are using the book, for women who have never been to college. And we know there are groups all the way to Ethiopia. And so these messages of equality — of how women are told they can't have what men can have — how we assume that leadership is for men, how we assume that voice is for men, these affect all of us, and I think they are very universal. And it's part of what TEDWomen does. It unites all of us in a cause we have to believe in, which is more women, more voice, more equality. PM: If you were invited now to make another TEDWomen talk, what would you say that is a result of this experience, for you personally, and what you've learned about women, and men, as you've made this journey? SS: I think I would say — I tried to say this strongly, but I think I can say it more strongly — I want to say that the status quo is not enough. That it's not good enough, that it's not changing quickly enough. Since I gave my TED Talk and published my book, another year of data came out from the U.S. Census. And you know what we found? No movement in the wage gap for women in the United States. Seventy-seven cents to the dollar. If you are a black woman, 64 cents. If you are a Latina, we're at 54 cents. Do you know when the last time those numbers went up? 2002. We are stagnating, we are stagnating in so many ways. And I think we are not really being honest about that, for so many reasons. It's so hard to talk about gender. We shy away from the word "feminist," a word I really think we need to embrace. We have to get rid of the word bossy and bring back — (Applause) I think I would say in a louder voice, we need to get rid of the word "bossy" and bring back the word "feminist," because we need it. (Applause) PM: And we all need to do a lot more leaning in. SS: A lot more leaning in. PM: Thank you, Sheryl. Thanks for leaning in and saying yes. SS: Thank you. (Applause) |
How I learned to stop worrying and love "useless" art | {0: 'As a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Luke Syson accesses the richness of European history through sculpture.'} | TEDxMet | Two years ago, I have to say there was no problem. Two years ago, I knew exactly what an icon looked like. It looks like this. Everybody's icon, but also the default position of a curator of Italian Renaissance paintings, which I was then. And in a way, this is also another default selection. Leonardo da Vinci's exquisitely soulful image of the "Lady with an Ermine." And I use that word, soulful, deliberately. Or then there's this, or rather these: the two versions of Leonardo's "Virgin of the Rocks" that were about to come together in London for the very first time. In the exhibition that I was then in the absolute throes of organizing. I was literally up to my eyes in Leonardo, and I had been for three years. So, he was occupying every part of my brain. Leonardo had taught me, during that three years, about what a picture can do. About taking you from your own material world into a spiritual world. He said, actually, that he believed the job of the painter was to paint everything that was visible and invisible in the universe. That's a huge task. And yet, somehow he achieves it. He shows us, I think, the human soul. He shows us the capacity of ourselves to move into a spiritual realm. To see a vision of the universe that's more perfect than our own. To see God's own plan, in some sense. So this, in a sense, was really what I believed an icon was. At about that time, I started talking to Tom Campbell, director here of the Metropolitan Museum, about what my next move might be. The move, in fact, back to an earlier life, one I'd begun at the British Museum, back to the world of three dimensions — of sculpture and of decorative arts — to take over the department of European sculpture and decorative arts, here at the Met. But it was an incredibly busy time. All the conversations were done at very peculiar times of the day — over the phone. In the end, I accepted the job without actually having been here. Again, I'd been there a couple of years before, but on that particular visit. So, it was just before the time that the Leonardo show was due to open when I finally made it back to the Met, to New York, to see my new domain. To see what European sculpture and decorative arts looked like, beyond those Renaissance collections with which I was so already familiar. And I thought, on that very first day, I better tour the galleries. Fifty-seven of these galleries — like 57 varieties of baked beans, I believe. I walked through and I started in my comfort zone in the Italian Renaissance. And then I moved gradually around, feeling a little lost sometimes. My head, also still full of the Leonardo exhibition that was about to open, and I came across this. And I thought to myself: What the hell have I done? There was absolutely no connection in my mind at all and, in fact, if there was any emotion going on, it was a kind of repulsion. This object felt utterly and completely alien. Silly at a level that I hadn't yet understood silliness to be. And then it was made worse — there were two of them. (Laughter) So, I started thinking about why it was, in fact, that I disliked this object so much. What was the anatomy of my distaste? Well, so much gold, so vulgar. You know, so nouveau riche, frankly. Leonardo himself had preached against the use of gold, so it was absolutely anathema at that moment. And then there's little pretty sprigs of flowers everywhere. (Laughter) And finally, that pink. That damned pink. It's such an extraordinarily artificial color. I mean, it's a color that I can't think of anything that you actually see in nature, that looks that shade. The object even has its own tutu. (Laughter) This little flouncy, spangly, bottomy bit that sits at the bottom of the vase. It reminded me, in an odd kind of way, of my niece's fifth birthday party. Where all the little girls would come either as a princess or a fairy. There was one who would come as a fairy princess. You should have seen the looks. (Laughter) And I realize that this object was in my mind, born from the same mind, from the same womb, practically, as Barbie Ballerina. (Laughter) And then there's the elephants. (Laughter) Those extraordinary elephants with their little, sort of strange, sinister expressions and Greta Garbo eyelashes, with these golden tusks and so on. I realized this was an elephant that had absolutely nothing to do with a majestic march across the Serengeti. It was a Dumbo nightmare. (Laughter) But something more profound was happening as well. These objects, it seemed to me, were quintessentially the kind that I and my liberal left friends in London had always seen as summing up something deplorable about the French aristocracy in the 18th century. The label had told me that these pieces were made by the Sèvres Manufactory, made of porcelain in the late 1750s, and designed by a designer called Jean-Claude Duplessis, actually somebody of extraordinary distinction as I later learned. But for me, they summed up a kind of, that sort of sheer uselessness of the aristocracy in the 18th century. I and my colleagues had always thought that these objects, in way, summed up the idea of, you know — no wonder there was a revolution. Or, indeed, thank God there was a revolution. There was a sort of idea really, that, if you owned a vase like this, then there was really only one fate possible. (Laughter) So, there I was — in a sort of paroxysm of horror. But I took the job and I went on looking at these vases. I sort of had to because they're on a through route in the Met. So, almost anywhere I went, there they were. They had this kind of odd sort of fascination, like a car accident. Where I couldn't stop looking. And as I did so, I started thinking: Well, what are we actually looking at here? And what I started with was understanding this as really a supreme piece of design. It took me a little time. But, that tutu for example — actually, this is a piece that does dance in its own way. It has an extraordinary lightness and yet, it is also amazing balanced. It has these kinds of sculptural ingredients. And then the play between — actually really quite carefully disposed color and gilding, and the sculptural surface, is really rather remarkable. And then I realized that this piece went into the kiln four times, at least four times in order to arrive at this. How many moments for accident can you think of that could have happened to this piece? And then remember, not just one, but two. So he's having to arrive at two exactly matched vases of this kind. And then this question of uselessness. Well actually, the end of the trunks were originally candle holders. So what you would have had were candles on either side. Imagine that effect of candlelight on that surface. On the slightly uneven pink, on the beautiful gold. It would have glittered in an interior, a little like a little firework. And at that point, actually, a firework went off in my brain. Somebody reminded me that, that word 'fancy' — which in a sense for me, encapsulated this object — actually comes from the same root as the word 'fantasy.' And that what this object was just as much in a way, in its own way, as a Leonardo da Vinci painting, is a portal to somewhere else. This is an object of the imagination. If you think about the mad 18th-century operas of the time — set in the Orient. If you think about divans and perhaps even opium-induced visions of pink elephants, then at that point, this object starts to make sense. This is an object which is all about escapism. It's about an escapism that happens — that the aristocracy in France sought very deliberately to distinguish themselves from ordinary people. It's not an escapism that we feel particularly happy with today, however. And again, going on thinking about this, I realize that in a way we're all victims of a certain kind of tyranny of the triumph of modernism whereby form and function in an object have to follow one another, or are deemed to do so. And the extraneous ornament is seen as really, essentially, criminal. It's a triumph, in a way, of bourgeois values rather than aristocratic ones. And that seems fine. Except for the fact that it becomes a kind of sequestration of imagination. So just as in the 20th century, so many people had the idea that their faith took place on the Sabbath day, and the rest of their lives — their lives of washing machines and orthodontics — took place on another day. Then, I think we've started doing the same. We've allowed ourselves to lead our fantasy lives in front of screens. In the dark of the cinema, with the television in the corner of the room. We've eliminated, in a sense, that constant of the imagination that these vases represented in people's lives. So maybe it's time we got this back a little. I think it's beginning to happen. In London, for example, with these extraordinary buildings that have been appearing over the last few years. Redolent, in a sense, of science fiction, turning London into a kind of fantasy playground. It's actually amazing to look out of a high building nowadays there. But even then, there's a resistance. London has called these buildings the Gherkin, the Shard, the Walkie Talkie — bringing these soaring buildings down to Earth. There's an idea that we don't want these anxious-making, imaginative journeys to happen in our daily lives. I feel lucky in a way, I've encountered this object. (Laughter) I found him on the Internet when I was looking up a reference. And there he was. And unlike the pink elephant vase, this was a kind of love at first sight. In fact, reader, I married him. I bought him. And he now adorns my office. He's a Staffordshire figure made in the middle of the 19th century. He represents the actor, Edmund Kean, playing Shakespeare's Richard III. And it's based, actually, on a more elevated piece of porcelain. So I loved, on an art historical level, I loved that layered quality that he has. But more than that, I love him. In a way that I think would have been impossible without the pink Sèvres vase in my Leonardo days. I love his orange and pink breeches. I love the fact that he seems to be going off to war, having just finished the washing up. (Laughter) He seems also to have forgotten his sword. I love his pink little cheeks, his munchkin energy. In a way, he's become my sort of alter ego. He's, I hope, a little bit dignified, but mostly rather vulgar. (Laughter) And energetic, I hope, too. I let him into my life because the Sèvres pink elephant vase allowed me to do so. And before that Leonardo, I understood that this object could become part of a journey for me every day, sitting in my office. I really hope that others, all of you, visiting objects in the museum, and taking them home and finding them for yourselves, will allow those objects to flourish in your imaginative lives. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Robots with "soul" | {0: 'Can robots and humans interact the way that human beings interact with each other? Guy Hoffman researches embodied cognition and intelligence in robots. '} | TEDxJaffa 2013 | My job is to design, build and study robots that communicate with people. But this story doesn't start with robotics at all, it starts with animation. When I first saw Pixar's "Luxo Jr.," I was amazed by how much emotion they could put into something as trivial as a desk lamp. I mean, look at them — at the end of this movie, you actually feel something for two pieces of furniture. (Laughter) And I said, I have to learn how to do this. So I made a really bad career decision. (Laughter) And that's what my mom was like when I did it. (Laughter) I left a very cozy tech job in Israel at a nice software company and I moved to New York to study animation. And there I lived in a collapsing apartment building in Harlem with roommates. I'm not using this phrase metaphorically — the ceiling actually collapsed one day in our living room. Whenever they did news stories about building violations in New York, they would put the report in front of our building, as kind of, like, a backdrop to show how bad things are. Anyway, during the day, I went to school and at night I would sit and draw frame by frame of pencil animation. And I learned two surprising lessons. One of them was that when you want to arouse emotions, it doesn't matter so much how something looks; it's all in the motion, in the timing of how the thing moves. And the second was something one of our teachers told us. He actually did the weasel in "Ice Age." And he said, "As an animator, you're not a director — you're an actor." So, if you want to find the right motion for a character, don't think about it — go use your body to find it. Stand in front of a mirror, act it out in front of a camera — whatever you need — and then put it back in your character. A year later I found myself at MIT in the Robotic Life Group. It was one of the first groups researching the relationships between humans and robots. And I still had this dream to make an actual, physical Luxo Jr. lamp. But I found that robots didn't move at all in this engaging way that I was used to from my animation studies. Instead, they were all — how should I put it — they were all kind of robotic. (Laughter) And I thought, what if I took whatever I learned in animation school, and used that to design my robotic desk lamp. So I went and designed frame by frame to try to make this robot as graceful and engaging as possible. And here when you see the robot interacting with me on a desktop — and I'm actually redesigning the robot, so, unbeknownst to itself, it's kind of digging its own grave by helping me. (Laughter) I wanted it to be less of a mechanical structure giving me light, and more of a helpful, kind of quiet apprentice that's always there when you need it and doesn't really interfere. And when, for example, I'm looking for a battery that I can't find, in a subtle way, it'll show me where the battery is. So you can see my confusion here. I'm not an actor. And I want you to notice how the same mechanical structure can, at one point, just by the way it moves, seem gentle and caring and in the other case, seem violent and confrontational. And it's the same structure, just the motion is different. Actor: "You want to know something? Well, you want to know something? He was already dead! Just laying there, eyes glazed over!" (Laughter) But, moving in a graceful way is just one building block of this whole structure called human-robot interaction. I was, at the time, doing my PhD, I was working on human-robot teamwork, teams of humans and robots working together. I was studying the engineering, the psychology, the philosophy of teamwork, and at the same time, I found myself in my own kind of teamwork situation, with a good friend of mine, who's actually here. And in that situation, we can easily imagine robots in the near future being there with us. It was after a Passover Seder. We were folding up a lot of folding chairs, and I was amazed at how quickly we found our own rhythm. Everybody did their own part, we didn't have to divide our tasks. We didn't have to communicate verbally about this — it all just happened. And I thought, humans and robots don't look at all like this. When humans and robots interact, it's much more like a chess game: the human does a thing, the robot analyzes whatever the human did, the robot decides what to do next, plans it and does it. Then the human waits, until it's their turn again. So it's much more like a chess game, and that makes sense, because chess is great for mathematicians and computer scientists. It's all about information, analysis, decision-making and planning. But I wanted my robot to be less of a chess player, and more like a doer that just clicks and works together. So I made my second horrible career choice: I decided to study acting for a semester. I took off from the PhD, I went to acting classes. I actually participated in a play — I hope there’s no video of that around still. (Laughter) And I got every book I could find about acting, including one from the 19th century that I got from the library. And I was really amazed, because my name was the second name on the list — the previous name was in 1889. (Laughter) And this book was kind of waiting for 100 years to be rediscovered for robotics. And this book shows actors how to move every muscle in the body to match every kind of emotion that they want to express. But the real revelation was when I learned about method acting. It became very popular in the 20th century. And method acting said you don't have to plan every muscle in your body; instead, you have to use your body to find the right movement. You have to use your sense memory to reconstruct the emotions and kind of think with your body to find the right expression — improvise, play off your scene partner. And this came at the same time as I was reading about this trend in cognitive psychology, called embodied cognition, which also talks about the same ideas. We use our bodies to think; we don't just think with our brains and use our bodies to move, but our bodies feed back into our brain to generate the way that we behave. And it was like a lightning bolt. I went back to my office, I wrote this paper, which I never really published, called "Acting Lessons for Artificial Intelligence." And I even took another month to do what was then the first theater play with a human and a robot acting together. That's what you saw before with the actors. And I thought: How can we make an artificial intelligence model — a computer, computational model — that will model some of these ideas of improvisation, of taking risks, of taking chances, even of making mistakes? Maybe it can make for better robotic teammates. So I worked for quite a long time on these models and I implemented them on a number of robots. Here you can see a very early example with the robots trying to use this embodied artificial intelligence to try to match my movements as closely as possible. It's sort of like a game. Let's look at it. You can see when I psych it out, it gets fooled. And it's a little bit like what you might see actors do when they try to mirror each other to find the right synchrony between them. And then, I did another experiment, and I got people off the street to use the robotic desk lamp, and try out this idea of embodied artificial intelligence. So, I actually used two kinds of brains for the same robot. The robot is the same lamp that you saw, and I put two brains in it. For one half of the people, I put in a brain that's kind of the traditional, calculated robotic brain. It waits for its turn, it analyzes everything, it plans. Let's call it the calculated brain. The other got more the stage actor, risk-taker brain. Let's call it the adventurous brain. It sometimes acts without knowing everything it has to know. It sometimes makes mistakes and corrects them. And I had them do this very tedious task that took almost 20 minutes, and they had to work together, somehow simulating, like, a factory job of repetitively doing the same thing. What I found is that people actually loved the adventurous robot. They thought it was more intelligent, more committed, a better member of the team, contributed to the success of the team more. They even called it "he" and "she," whereas people with the calculated brain called it "it," and nobody ever called it "he" or "she." When they talked about it after the task, with the adventurous brain, they said, "By the end, we were good friends and high-fived mentally." Whatever that means. (Laughter) Sounds painful. Whereas the people with the calculated brain said it was just like a lazy apprentice. It only did what it was supposed to do and nothing more, which is almost what people expect robots to do, so I was surprised that people had higher expectations of robots than what anybody in robotics thought robots should be doing. And in a way, I thought, maybe it's time — just like method acting changed the way people thought about acting in the 19th century, from going from the very calculated, planned way of behaving, to a more intuitive, risk-taking, embodied way of behaving — maybe it's time for robots to have the same kind of revolution. A few years later, I was at my next research job at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and I was working in a group dealing with robotic musicians. And I thought, music: that's the perfect place to look at teamwork, coordination, timing, improvisation — and we just got this robot playing marimba. And the marimba, for everybody like me, it was this huge, wooden xylophone. And when I was looking at this, I looked at other works in human-robot improvisation — yes, there are other works in human-robot improvisation — and they were also a little bit like a chess game. The human would play, the robot analyzed what was played, and would improvise their own part. So, this is what musicians called a call-and-response interaction, and it also fits very well robots and artificial intelligence. But I thought, if I use the same ideas I used in the theater play and in the teamwork studies, maybe I can make the robots jam together like a band. Everybody's riffing off each other, nobody is stopping for a moment. And so I tried to do the same things, this time with music, where the robot doesn't really know what it's about to play, it just sort of moves its body and uses opportunities to play, and does what my jazz teacher when I was 17 taught me. She said, when you improvise, sometimes you don't know what you're doing, and you still do it. So I tried to make a robot that doesn't actually know what it's doing, but is still doing it. So let's look at a few seconds from this performance, where the robot listens to the human musician and improvises. And then, look how the human musician also responds to what the robot is doing and picking up from its behavior, and at some point can even be surprised by what the robot came up with. (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Being a musician is not just about making notes, otherwise nobody would ever go see a live show. Musicians also communicate with their bodies, with other band members, with the audience, they use their bodies to express the music. And I thought, we already have a robot musician on stage, why not make it be a full-fledged musician? And I started designing a socially expressive head for the robot. The head doesn’t actually touch the marimba, it just expresses what the music is like. These are some napkin sketches from a bar in Atlanta that was dangerously located exactly halfway between my lab and my home. So I spent, I would say, on average, three to four hours a day there. I think. (Laughter) And I went back to my animation tools and tried to figure out not just what a robotic musician would look like, but especially what a robotic musician would move like, to sort of show that it doesn't like what the other person is playing — and maybe show whatever beat it's feeling at the moment. So we ended up actually getting the money to build this robot, which was nice. I'm going to show you now the same kind of performance, this time with a socially expressive head. And notice one thing — how the robot is really showing us the beat it's picking up from the human, while also giving the human a sense that the robot knows what it's doing. And also how it changes the way it moves as soon as it starts its own solo. (Music) Now it's looking at me, showing that it's listening. (Music) Now look at the final chord of the piece again. And this time the robot communicates with its body when it's busy doing its own thing, and when it's ready to coordinate the final chord with me. (Music) (Music ending) (Final chord) (Applause) Thanks. I hope you see how much this part of the body that doesn't touch the instrument actually helps with the musical performance. And at some point — we are in Atlanta, so obviously some rapper will come into our lab at some point — and we had this rapper come in and do a little jam with the robot. Here you can see the robot basically responding to the beat. Notice two things: one, how irresistible it is to join the robot while it's moving its head. You kind of want to move your own head when it does it. And second, even though the rapper is really focused on his iPhone, as soon as the robot turns to him, he turns back. So even though it's just in the periphery of his vision, in the corner of his eye, it's very powerful. And the reason is that we can't ignore physical things moving in our environment. We are wired for that. So if you have a problem — maybe your partner is looking at their iPhone or smartphone too much — you might want to have a robot there to get their attention. (Laughter) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Just to introduce the last robot that we've worked on, it came out of something surprising that we found: Some point people didn't care about the robot being intelligent, able to improvise and listen, and do all these embodied intelligence things that I spent years developing. They really liked that the robot was enjoying the music. (Laughter) And they didn't say the robot was moving to the music, they said "enjoying" the music. And we thought, why don't we take this idea, and I designed a new piece of furniture. This time it wasn't a desk lamp, it was a speaker dock, one of those things you plug your smartphone in. And I thought, what would happen if your speaker dock didn't just play the music for you, but would actually enjoy it, too? And so again, here are some animation tests from an early stage. (Laughter) And this is what the final product looked like. (Music) (Music ends) So, a lot of bobbing heads. (Applause) A lot of bobbing heads in the audience, so we can still see robots influence people. And it's not just fun and games. I think one of the reasons I care so much about robots that use their body to communicate and use their body to move is — I'm going to let you in on a little secret we roboticists are hiding — is that every one of you is going to be living with a robot at some point in your life. Somewhere in your future, there will be a robot in your life. If not in yours, your children's lives. And I want these robots to be more fluent, more engaging, more graceful than currently they seem to be. And for that I think maybe robots need to be less like chess players and more like stage actors and more like musicians. Maybe they should be able to take chances and improvise. Maybe they should be able to anticipate what you're about to do. Maybe they even need to be able to make mistakes and correct them, because in the end, we are human. And maybe as humans, robots that are a little less than perfect are just perfect for us. Thank you. (Applause) |
A little-told tale of sex and sensuality | {0: 'Shereen El Feki works and writes on sexuality and social change in the Arab world.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | So when I was in Morocco, in Casablanca, not so long ago, I met a young unmarried mother called Faiza. Faiza showed me photos of her infant son and she told me the story of his conception, pregnancy, and delivery. It was a remarkable tale, but Faiza saved the best for last. "You know, I am a virgin," she told me. "I have two medical certificates to prove it." This is the modern Middle East, where two millennia after the coming of Christ, virgin births are still a fact of life. Faiza's story is just one of hundreds I've heard over the years, traveling across the Arab region talking to people about sex. Now, I know this might sound like a dream job, or possibly a highly dubious occupation, but for me, it's something else altogether. I'm half Egyptian, and I'm Muslim. But I grew up in Canada, far from my Arab roots. Like so many who straddle East and West, I've been drawn, over the years, to try to better understand my origins. That I chose to look at sex comes from my background in HIV/AIDS, as a writer and a researcher and an activist. Sex lies at the heart of an emerging epidemic in the Middle East and North Africa, which is one of only two regions in the world where HIV/AIDS is still on the rise. Now sexuality is an incredibly powerful lens with which to study any society, because what happens in our intimate lives is reflected by forces on a bigger stage: in politics and economics, in religion and tradition, in gender and generations. As I found, if you really want to know a people, you start by looking inside their bedrooms. Now to be sure, the Arab world is vast and varied. But running across it are three red lines — these are topics you are not supposed to challenge in word or deed. The first of these is politics. But the Arab Spring has changed all that, in uprisings which have blossomed across the region since 2011. Now while those in power, old and new, continue to cling to business as usual, millions are still pushing back, and pushing forward to what they hope will be a better life. That second red line is religion. But now religion and politics are connected, with the rise of such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood. And some people, at least, are starting to ask questions about the role of Islam in public and private life. You know, as for that third red line, that off-limits subject, what do you think it might be? Audience: Sex. Shereen El Feki: Louder, I can't hear you. Audience: Sex. SEF: Again, please don't be shy. Audience: Sex. SEF: Absolutely, that's right, it's sex. (Laughter) Across the Arab region, the only accepted context for sex is marriage — approved by your parents, sanctioned by religion and registered by the state. Marriage is your ticket to adulthood. If you don't tie the knot, you can't move out of your parents' place, and you're not supposed to be having sex, and you're definitely not supposed to be having children. It's a social citadel; it's an impregnable fortress which resists any assault, any alternative. And around the fortress is this vast field of taboo against premarital sex, against condoms, against abortion, against homosexuality, you name it. Faiza was living proof of this. Her virginity statement was not a piece of wishful thinking. Although the major religions of the region extoll premarital chastity, in a patriarchy, boys will be boys. Men have sex before marriage, and people more or less turn a blind eye. Not so for women, who are expected to be virgins on their wedding night — that is, to turn up with your hymen intact. This is not a question of individual concern, this is a matter of family honor, and in particular, men's honor. And so women and their relatives will go to great lengths to preserve this tiny piece of anatomy — from female genital mutilation, to virginity testing, to hymen repair surgery. Faiza chose a different route: non-vaginal sex. Only she became pregnant all the same. But Faiza didn't actually realize this, because there's so little sexuality education in schools, and so little communication in the family. When her condition became hard to hide, Faiza's mother helped her flee her father and brothers. This is because honor killings are a real threat for untold numbers of women in the Arab region. And so when Faiza eventually fetched up at a hospital in Casablanca, the man who offered to help her, instead tried to rape her. Sadly, Faiza is not alone. In Egypt, where my research is focused, I have seen plenty of trouble in and out of the citadel. There are legions of young men who can't afford to get married, because marriage has become a very expensive proposition. They are expected to bear the burden of costs in married life, but they can't find jobs. This is one of the major drivers of the recent uprisings, and it is one of the reasons for the rising age of marriage in much of the Arab region. There are career women who want to get married, but can't find a husband, because they defy gender expectations, or as one young female doctor in Tunisia put it to me, "The women, they are becoming more and more open. But the man, he is still at the prehistoric stage." And then there are men and women who cross the heterosexual line, who have sex with their own sex, or who have a different gender identity. They are on the receiving end of laws which punish their activities, even their appearance. And they face a daily struggle with social stigma, with family despair, and with religious fire and brimstone. Now, it's not as if it's all rosy in the marital bed either. Couples who are looking for greater happiness, greater sexual happiness in their married lives, but are at a loss of how to achieve it, especially wives, who are afraid of being seen as bad women if they show some spark in the bedroom. And then there are those whose marriages are actually a veil for prostitution. They have been sold by their families, often to wealthy Arab tourists. This is just one face of a booming sex trade across the Arab region. Now raise your hand if any of this is sounding familiar to you, from your part of the world. Yeah. It's not as if the Arab world has a monopoly on sexual hangups. And although we don't yet have an Arab Kinsey Report to tell us exactly what's happening inside bedrooms across the Arab region, It's pretty clear that something is not right. Double standards for men and women, sex as a source of shame, family control limiting individual choices, and a vast gulf between appearance and reality: what people are doing and what they're willing to admit to, and a general reluctance to move beyond private whispers to a serious and sustained public discussion. As one doctor in Cairo summed it up for me, "Here, sex is the opposite of sport. Football, everybody talks about it, but hardly anyone plays. But sex, everybody is doing it, but nobody wants to talk about it." (Laughter) (Music) (In Arabic) SEF: I want to give you a piece of advice, which if you follow it, will make you happy in life. When your husband reaches out to you, when he seizes a part of your body, sigh deeply and look at him lustily. When he penetrates you with his penis, try to talk flirtatiously and move yourself in harmony with him. Hot stuff! And it might sound that these handy hints come from "The Joy of Sex" or YouPorn. But in fact, they come from a 10th-century Arabic book called "The Encyclopedia of Pleasure," which covers sex from aphrodisiacs to zoophilia, and everything in between. The Encyclopedia is just one in a long line of Arabic erotica, much of it written by religious scholars. Going right back to the Prophet Muhammad, there is a rich tradition in Islam of talking frankly about sex: not just its problems, but also its pleasures, and not just for men, but also for women. A thousand years ago, we used to have whole dictionaries of sex in Arabic. Words to cover every conceivable sexual feature, position and preference, a body of language that was rich enough to make up the body of the woman you see on this page. Today, this history is largely unknown in the Arab region. Even by educated people, who often feel more comfortable talking about sex in a foreign language than they do in their own tongue. Today's sexual landscape looks a lot like Europe and America on the brink of the sexual revolution. But while the West has opened on sex, what we found is that Arab societies appear to have been moving in the opposite direction. In Egypt and many of its neighbors, this closing down is part of a wider closing in political, social and cultural thought. And it is the product of a complex historical process, one which has gained ground with the rise of Islamic conservatism since the late 1970s. "Just say no" is what conservatives around the world say to any challenge to the sexual status quo. In the Arab region, they brand these attempts as a Western conspiracy to undermine traditional Arab and Islamic values. But what's really at stake here is one of their most powerful tools of control: sex wrapped up in religion. But history shows us that even as recently as our fathers' and grandfathers' day, there have been times of greater pragmatism, and tolerance, and a willingness to consider other interpretations: be it abortion, or masturbation, or even the incendiary topic of homosexuality. It is not black and white, as conservatives would have us believe. In these, as in so many other matters, Islam offers us at least 50 shades of gray. (Laughter) Over my travels, I've met men and women across the Arab region who've been exploring that spectrum — sexologists who are trying to help couples find greater happiness in their marriages, innovators who are managing to get sexuality education into schools, small groups of men and women, lesbian, gay, transgendered, transsexual, who are reaching out to their peers with online initiatives and real-world support. Women, and increasingly men, who are starting to speak out and push back against sexual violence on the streets and in the home. Groups that are trying to help sex workers protect themselves against HIV and other occupational hazards, and NGOs that are helping unwed mothers like Faiza find a place in society, and critically, stay with their kids. Now these efforts are small, they're often underfunded, and they face formidable opposition. But I am optimistic that, in the long run, times are changing, and they and their ideas will gain ground. Social change doesn't happen in the Arab region through dramatic confrontation, beating or indeed baring of breasts, but rather through negotiation. What we're talking here is not about a sexual revolution, but a sexual evolution, learning from other parts of the world, adapting to local conditions, forging our own path, not following one blazed by another. That path, I hope, will one day lead us to the right to control our own bodies, and to access the information and services we need to lead satisfying and safe sexual lives. The right to express our ideas freely, to marry whom we choose, to choose our own partners, to be sexually active or not, to decide whether to have children and when, all this without violence or force or discrimination. Now we are very far from this across the Arab region, and so much needs to change: law, education, media, the economy, the list goes on and on, and it is the work of a generation, at least. But it begins with a journey that I myself have made, asking hard questions of received wisdoms in sexual life. And it is a journey which has only served to strengthen my faith, and my appreciation of local histories and cultures by showing me possibilities where I once only saw absolutes. Now given the turmoil in many countries in the Arab region, talking about sex, challenging the taboos, seeking alternatives might sound like something of a luxury. But at this critical moment in history, if we do not anchor freedom and justice, dignity and equality, privacy and autonomy in our personal lives, in our sexual lives, we will find it very hard to achieve in public life. The political and the sexual are intimate bedfellows, and that is true for us all. no matter where we live and love. Thank you. (Applause) |
His and hers ... health care | {0: "Dr. Paula Johnson is a pioneer in looking at health from a woman's perspective. "} | TEDWomen 2013 | Some of my most wonderful memories of childhood are of spending time with my grandmother, Mamar, in our four-family home in Brooklyn, New York. Her apartment was an oasis. It was a place where I could sneak a cup of coffee, which was really warm milk with just a touch of caffeine. She loved life. And although she worked in a factory, she saved her pennies and she traveled to Europe. And I remember poring over those pictures with her and then dancing with her to her favorite music. And then, when I was eight and she was 60, something changed. She no longer worked or traveled. She no longer danced. There were no more coffee times. My mother missed work and took her to doctors who couldn't make a diagnosis. And my father, who worked at night, would spend every afternoon with her, just to make sure she ate. Her care became all-consuming for our family. And by the time a diagnosis was made, she was in a deep spiral. Now many of you will recognize her symptoms. My grandmother had depression. A deep, life-altering depression, from which she never recovered. And back then, so little was known about depression. But even today, 50 years later, there's still so much more to learn. Today, we know that women are 70 percent more likely to experience depression over their lifetimes compared with men. And even with this high prevalence, women are misdiagnosed between 30 and 50 percent of the time. Now we know that women are more likely to experience the symptoms of fatigue, sleep disturbance, pain and anxiety compared with men. And these symptoms are often overlooked as symptoms of depression. And it isn't only depression in which these sex differences occur, but they occur across so many diseases. So it's my grandmother's struggles that have really led me on a lifelong quest. And today, I lead a center in which the mission is to discover why these sex differences occur and to use that knowledge to improve the health of women. Today, we know that every cell has a sex. Now, that's a term coined by the Institute of Medicine. And what it means is that men and women are different down to the cellular and molecular levels. It means that we're different across all of our organs. From our brains to our hearts, our lungs, our joints. Now, it was only 20 years ago that we hardly had any data on women's health beyond our reproductive functions. But then in 1993, the NIH Revitalization Act was signed into law. And what this law did was it mandated that women and minorities be included in clinical trials that were funded by the National Institutes of Health. And in many ways, the law has worked. Women are now routinely included in clinical studies, and we've learned that there are major differences in the ways that women and men experience disease. But remarkably, what we have learned about these differences is often overlooked. So, we have to ask ourselves the question: Why leave women's health to chance? And we're leaving it to chance in two ways. The first is that there is so much more to learn and we're not making the investment in fully understanding the extent of these sex differences. And the second is that we aren't taking what we have learned, and routinely applying it in clinical care. We are just not doing enough. So, I'm going to share with you three examples of where sex differences have impacted the health of women, and where we need to do more. Let's start with heart disease. It's the number one killer of women in the United States today. This is the face of heart disease. Linda is a middle-aged woman, who had a stent placed in one of the arteries going to her heart. When she had recurring symptoms she went back to her doctor. Her doctor did the gold standard test: a cardiac catheterization. It showed no blockages. Linda's symptoms continued. She had to stop working. And that's when she found us. When Linda came to us, we did another cardiac catheterization and this time, we found clues. But we needed another test to make the diagnosis. So we did a test called an intracoronary ultrasound, where you use soundwaves to look at the artery from the inside out. And what we found was that Linda's disease didn't look like the typical male disease. The typical male disease looks like this. There's a discrete blockage or stenosis. Linda's disease, like the disease of so many women, looks like this. The plaque is laid down more evenly, more diffusely along the artery, and it's harder to see. So for Linda, and for so many women, the gold standard test wasn't gold. Now, Linda received the right treatment. She went back to her life and, fortunately, today she is doing well. But Linda was lucky. She found us, we found her disease. But for too many women, that's not the case. We have the tools. We have the technology to make the diagnosis. But it's all too often that these sex diffferences are overlooked. So what about treatment? A landmark study that was published two years ago asked the very important question: What are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women? The authors looked at papers written over a 10-year period, and hundreds had to be thrown out. And what they found out was that of those that were tossed out, 65 percent were excluded because even though women were included in the studies, the analysis didn't differentiate between women and men. What a lost opportunity. The money had been spent and we didn't learn how women fared. And these studies could not contribute one iota to the very, very important question, what are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women? I want to introduce you to Hortense, my godmother, Hung Wei, a relative of a colleague, and somebody you may recognize — Dana, Christopher Reeve's wife. All three women have something very important in common. All three were diagnosed with lung cancer, the number one cancer killer of women in the United States today. All three were nonsmokers. Sadly, Dana and Hung Wei died of their disease. Today, what we know is that women who are nonsmokers are three times more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer than are men who are nonsmokers. Now interestingly, when women are diagnosed with lung cancer, their survival tends to be better than that of men. Now, here are some clues. Our investigators have found that there are certain genes in the lung tumor cells of both women and men. And these genes are activated mainly by estrogen. And when these genes are over-expressed, it's associated with improved survival only in young women. Now this is a very early finding and we don't yet know whether it has relevance to clinical care. But it's findings like this that may provide hope and may provide an opportunity to save lives of both women and men. Now, let me share with you an example of when we do consider sex differences, it can drive the science. Several years ago a new lung cancer drug was being evaluated, and when the authors looked at whose tumors shrank, they found that 82 percent were women. This led them to ask the question: Well, why? And what they found was that the genetic mutations that the drug targeted were far more common in women. And what this has led to is a more personalized approach to the treatment of lung cancer that also includes sex. This is what we can accomplish when we don't leave women's health to chance. We know that when you invest in research, you get results. Take a look at the death rate from breast cancer over time. And now take a look at the death rates from lung cancer in women over time. Now let's look at the dollars invested in breast cancer — these are the dollars invested per death — and the dollars invested in lung cancer. Now, it's clear that our investment in breast cancer has produced results. They may not be fast enough, but it has produced results. We can do the same for lung cancer and for every other disease. So let's go back to depression. Depression is the number one cause of disability in women in the world today. Our investigators have found that there are differences in the brains of women and men in the areas that are connected with mood. And when you put men and women in a functional MRI scanner — that's the kind of scanner that shows how the brain is functioning when it's activated — so you put them in the scanner and you expose them to stress. You can actually see the difference. And it's findings like this that we believe hold some of the clues for why we see these very significant sex differences in depression. But even though we know that these differences occur, 66 percent of the brain research that begins in animals is done in either male animals or animals in whom the sex is not identified. So, I think we have to ask again the question: Why leave women's health to chance? And this is a question that haunts those of us in science and medicine who believe that we are on the verge of being able to dramatically improve the health of women. We know that every cell has a sex. We know that these differences are often overlooked. And therefore we know that women are not getting the full benefit of modern science and medicine today. We have the tools but we lack the collective will and momentum. Women's health is an equal rights issue as important as equal pay. And it's an issue of the quality and the integrity of science and medicine. (Applause) So imagine the momentum we could achieve in advancing the health of women if we considered whether these sex differences were present at the very beginning of designing research. Or if we analyzed our data by sex. So, people often ask me: What can I do? And here's what I suggest: First, I suggest that you think about women's health in the same way that you think and care about other causes that are important to you. And second, and equally as important, that as a woman, you have to ask your doctor and the doctors who are caring for those who you love: Is this disease or treatment different in women? Now, this is a profound question because the answer is likely yes, but your doctor may not know the answer, at least not yet. But if you ask the question, your doctor will very likely go looking for the answer. And this is so important, not only for ourselves, but for all of those whom we love. Whether it be a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend or a grandmother. It was my grandmother's suffering that inspired my work to improve the health of women. That's her legacy. Our legacy can be to improve the health of women for this generation and for generations to come. Thank you. (Applause) |
As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify | {0: "BCG's Yves Morieux researches how corporations can adapt to a modern and complex business landscape."} | TED@BCG San Francisco | I have spent the last years trying to resolve two enigmas: Why is productivity so disappointing in all the companies where I work? I have worked with more than 500 companies. Despite all the technological advances — computers, I.T., communications, telecommunications, the Internet. Enigma number two: Why is there so little engagement at work? Why do people feel so miserable, even actively disengaged? Disengaging their colleagues. Acting against the interest of their company. Despite all the affiliation events, the celebration, the people initiatives, the leadership development programs to train managers on how to better motivate their teams. At the beginning, I thought there was a chicken and egg issue: Because people are less engaged, they are less productive. Or vice versa, because they are less productive, we put more pressure and they are less engaged. But as we were doing our analysis we realized that there was a common root cause to these two issues that relates, in fact, to the basic pillars of management. The way we organize is based on two pillars. The hard — structure, processes, systems. The soft — feelings, sentiments, interpersonal relationships, traits, personality. And whenever a company reorganizes, restructures, reengineers, goes through a cultural transformation program, it chooses these two pillars. Now, we try to refine them, we try to combine them. The real issue is — and this is the answer to the two enigmas — these pillars are obsolete. Everything you read in business books is based either on one or the other or their combination. They are obsolete. How do they work when you try to use these approaches in front of the new complexity of business? The hard approach, basically is that you start from strategy, requirements, structures, processes, systems, KPIs, scorecards, committees, headquarters, hubs, clusters, you name it. I forgot all the metrics, incentives, committees, middle offices and interfaces. What happens basically on the left, you have more complexity, the new complexity of business. We need quality, cost, reliability, speed. And every time there is a new requirement, we use the same approach. We create dedicated structure processed systems, basically to deal with the new complexity of business. The hard approach creates just complicatedness in the organization. Let's take an example. An automotive company, the engineering division is a five-dimensional matrix. If you open any cell of the matrix, you find another 20-dimensional matrix. You have Mr. Noise, Mr. Petrol Consumption, Mr. Anti-Collision Properties. For any new requirement, you have a dedicated function in charge of aligning engineers against the new requirement. What happens when the new requirement emerges? Some years ago, a new requirement appeared on the marketplace: the length of the warranty period. So therefore the new requirement is repairability, making cars easy to repair. Otherwise when you bring the car to the garage to fix the light, if you have to remove the engine to access the lights, the car will have to stay one week in the garage instead of two hours, and the warranty budget will explode. So, what was the solution using the hard approach? If repairability is the new requirement, the solution is to create a new function, Mr. Repairability. And Mr. Repairability creates the repairability process. With a repairability scorecard, with a repairability metric and eventually repairability incentive. That came on top of 25 other KPIs. What percentage of these people is variable compensation? Twenty percent at most, divided by 26 KPIs, repairability makes a difference of 0.8 percent. What difference did it make in their actions, their choices to simplify? Zero. But what occurs for zero impact? Mr. Repairability, process, scorecard, evaluation, coordination with the 25 other coordinators to have zero impact. Now, in front of the new complexity of business, the only solution is not drawing boxes with reporting lines. It is basically the interplay. How the parts work together. The connections, the interactions, the synapses. It is not the skeleton of boxes, it is the nervous system of adaptiveness and intelligence. You know, you could call it cooperation, basically. Whenever people cooperate, they use less resources. In everything. You know, the repairability issue is a cooperation problem. When you design cars, please take into account the needs of those who will repair the cars in the after sales garages. When we don't cooperate we need more time, more equipment, more systems, more teams. We need — When procurement, supply chain, manufacturing don't cooperate we need more stock, more inventories, more working capital. Who will pay for that? Shareholders? Customers? No, they will refuse. So who is left? The employees, who have to compensate through their super individual efforts for the lack of cooperation. Stress, burnout, they are overwhelmed, accidents. No wonder they disengage. How do the hard and the soft try to foster cooperation? The hard: In banks, when there is a problem between the back office and the front office, they don't cooperate. What is the solution? They create a middle office. What happens one year later? Instead of one problem between the back and the front, now I have two problems. Between the back and the middle and between the middle and the front. Plus I have to pay for the middle office. The hard approach is unable to foster cooperation. It can only add new boxes, new bones in the skeleton. The soft approach: To make people cooperate, we need to make them like each other. Improve interpersonal feelings, the more people like each other, the more they will cooperate. It is totally wrong. It is even counterproductive. Look, at home I have two TVs. Why? Precisely not to have to cooperate with my wife. (Laughter) Not to have to impose tradeoffs to my wife. And why I try not to impose tradeoffs to my wife is precisely because I love my wife. If I didn't love my wife, one TV would be enough: You will watch my favorite football game, if you are not happy, how is the book or the door? (Laughter) The more we like each other, the more we avoid the real cooperation that would strain our relationships by imposing tough tradeoffs. And we go for a second TV or we escalate the decision above for arbitration. Definitely, these approaches are obsolete. To deal with complexity, to enhance the nervous system, we have created what we call the smart simplicity approach based on simple rules. Simple rule number one: Understand what others do. What is their real work? We need to go beyond the boxes, the job descriptions, beyond the surface of the container, to understand the real content. Me, designer, if I put a wire here, I know that it will mean that we will have to remove the engine to access the lights. Second, you need to reenforce integrators. Integrators are not middle offices, they are managers, existing managers that you reinforce so that they have power and interest to make others cooperate. How can you reinforce your managers as integrators? By removing layers. When there are too many layers people are too far from the action, therefore they need KPIs, metrics, they need poor proxies for reality. They don't understand reality and they add the complicatedness of metrics, KPIs. By removing rules — the bigger we are, the more we need integrators, therefore the less rules we must have, to give discretionary power to managers. And we do the opposite — the bigger we are, the more rules we create. And we end up with the Encyclopedia Britannica of rules. You need to increase the quanitity of power so that you can empower everybody to use their judgment, their intelligence. You must give more cards to people so that they have the critical mass of cards to take the risk to cooperate, to move out of insulation. Otherwise, they will withdraw. They will disengage. These rules, they come from game theory and organizational sociology. You can increase the shadow of the future. Create feedback loops that expose people to the consequences of their actions. This is what the automotive company did when they saw that Mr. Repairability had no impact. They said to the design engineers: Now, in three years, when the new car is launched on the market, you will move to the after sales network, and become in charge of the warranty budget, and if the warranty budget explodes, it will explode in your face. (Laughter) Much more powerful than 0.8 percent variable compensation. You need also to increase reciprocity, by removing the buffers that make us self-sufficient. When you remove these buffers, you hold me by the nose, I hold you by the ear. We will cooperate. Remove the second TV. There are many second TVs at work that don't create value, they just provide dysfunctional self-sufficiency. You need to reward those who cooperate and blame those who don't cooperate. The CEO of The Lego Group, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, has a great way to use it. He says, blame is not for failure, it is for failing to help or ask for help. It changes everything. Suddenly it becomes in my interest to be transparent on my real weaknesses, my real forecast, because I know I will not be blamed if I fail, but if I fail to help or ask for help. When you do this, it has a lot of implications on organizational design. You stop drawing boxes, dotted lines, full lines; you look at their interplay. It has a lot of implications on financial policies that we use. On human resource management practices. When you do that, you can manage complexity, the new complexity of business, without getting complicated. You create more value with lower cost. You simultaneously improve performance and satisfaction at work because you have removed the common root cause that hinders both. Complicatedness: This is your battle, business leaders. The real battle is not against competitors. This is rubbish, very abstract. When do we meet competitors to fight them? The real battle is against ourselves, against our bureaucracy, our complicatedness. Only you can fight, can do it. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I beat stage fright | {0: "By day he's a graphic designer, and by night Joe Kowan is a quirky folk singer-songwriter."} | TED@State Street Boston | Joe Kowan: I have stage fright. I've always had stage fright, and not just a little bit, it's a big bit. And it didn't even matter until I was 27. That's when I started writing songs, and even then I only played them for myself. Just knowing my roommates were in the same house made me uncomfortable. But after a couple of years, just writing songs wasn't enough. I had all these stories and ideas, and I wanted to share them with people, but physiologically, I couldn't do it. I had this irrational fear. But the more I wrote, and the more I practiced, the more I wanted to perform. So on the week of my 30th birthday, I decided I was going to go to this local open mic, and put this fear behind me. Well, when I got there, it was packed. There were like 20 people there. (Laughter) And they all looked angry. But I took a deep breath, and I signed up to play, and I felt pretty good. Pretty good, until about 10 minutes before my turn, when my whole body rebelled, and this wave of anxiety just washed over me. Now, when you experience fear, your sympathetic nervous system kicks in. So you have a rush of adrenaline, your heart rate increases, your breathing gets faster. Next your non-essential systems start to shut down, like digestion. (Laughter) So your mouth gets dry, and blood is routed away from your extremities, so your fingers don't work anymore. Your pupils dilate, your muscles contract, your Spidey sense tingles, basically your whole body is trigger-happy. (Laughter) That condition is not conducive to performing folk music. (Laughter) I mean, your nervous system is an idiot. Really? Two hundred thousand years of human evolution, and it still can't tell the difference between a saber tooth tiger and 20 folksingers on a Tuesday night open mic? (Laughter) I have never been more terrified — until now. (Laughter and cheers) So then it was my turn, and somehow, I get myself onto the stage, I start my song, I open my mouth to sing the first line, and this completely horrible vibrato — you know, when your voice wavers — comes streaming out. And this is not the good kind of vibrato, like an opera singer has, this is my whole body just convulsing with fear. I mean, it's a nightmare. I'm embarrassed, the audience is clearly uncomfortable, they're focused on my discomfort. It was so bad. But that was my first real experience as a solo singer-songwriter. And something good did happen — I had the tiniest little glimpse of that audience connection that I was hoping for. And I wanted more. But I knew I had to get past this nervousness. That night I promised myself: I would go back every week until I wasn't nervous anymore. And I did. I went back every single week, and sure enough, week after week, it didn't get any better. The same thing happened every week. (Laughter) I couldn't shake it. And that's when I had an epiphany. And I remember it really well, because I don't have a lot of epiphanies. (Laughter) All I had to do was write a song that exploits my nervousness. That only seems authentic when I have stage fright, and the more nervous I was, the better the song would be. Easy. So I started writing a song about having stage fright. First, fessing up to the problem, the physical manifestations, how I would feel, how the listener might feel. And then accounting for things like my shaky voice, and I knew I would be singing about a half-octave higher than normal, because I was nervous. By having a song that explained what was happening to me, while it was happening, that gave the audience permission to think about it. They didn't have to feel bad for me because I was nervous, they could experience that with me, and we were all one big happy, nervous, uncomfortable family. (Laughter) By thinking about my audience, by embracing and exploiting my problem, I was able to take something that was blocking my progress, and turn it into something that was essential for my success. And having the stage fright song let me get past that biggest issue right in the beginning of a performance. And then I could move on, and play the rest of my songs with just a little bit more ease. And eventually, over time, I didn't have to play the stage fright song at all. Except for when I was really nervous, like now. (Laughter) Would it be okay if I played the stage fright song for you? (Applause) Can I have a sip of water? (Music) Thank you. ♫ I'm not joking, you know, ♫ ♫ this stage fright is real. ♫ ♫ And if I'm up here trembling and singing, ♫ ♫ well, you'll know how I feel. ♫ ♫ And the mistake I'd be making, ♫ ♫ the tremolo caused by my whole body shaking. ♫ ♫ As you sit there feeling embarrassed for me, ♫ ♫ well, you don't have to be. ♫ ♫ Well, maybe just a little bit. ♫ (Laughter) ♫ And maybe I'll try to imagine you all without clothes. ♫ ♫ But singing in front of all naked strangers scares me more than anyone knows. ♫ ♫ Not to discuss this at length, ♫ ♫ but my body image was never my strength. ♫ ♫ So frankly, I wish that you all would get dressed, ♫ ♫ I mean, you're not even really naked. ♫ ♫ And I'm the one with the problem. ♫ ♫ And you tell me, don't worry so much, you'll be great. ♫ ♫ But I'm the one living with me ♫ ♫ and I know how I get. ♫ ♫ Your advice is gentle but late. ♫ ♫ If not just a bit patronizing. ♫ ♫ And that sarcastic tone doesn't help me when I sing. ♫ ♫ But we shouldn't talk about these things right now, ♫ ♫ really, I'm up on stage, and you're in the crowd. Hi. ♫ ♫ And I'm not making fun of unnurtured, irrational fear, ♫ ♫ and if I wasn't ready to face this, ♫ ♫ I sure as hell wouldn't be here. ♫ ♫ But if I belt one note out clearly, ♫ ♫ you'll know I'm recovering slowly but surely. ♫ ♫ And maybe next week, I'll set my guitar ringin' ♫ ♫ my voice clear as water, and everyone singin'. ♫ ♫ But probably I'll just get up and start groovin', ♫ ♫ my vocal cords movin', ♫ ♫ at speeds slightly faster than sound. ♫ (Applause) |
Why massive open online courses (still) matter | {0: 'Through blended courses Anant Agarwal is pairing online education with face-to-face student-faculty interactions, reshaping the university campus experience.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I'd like to reimagine education. The last year has seen the invention of a new four-letter word. It starts with an M. MOOC: massive open online courses. Many organizations are offering these online courses to students all over the world, in the millions, for free. Anybody who has an Internet connection and the will to learn can access these great courses from excellent universities and get a credential at the end of it. Now, in this discussion today, I'm going to focus on a different aspect of MOOCs. We are taking what we are learning and the technologies we are developing in the large and applying them in the small to create a blended model of education to really reinvent and reimagine what we do in the classroom. Now, our classrooms could use change. So, here's a classroom at this little three-letter institute in the Northeast of America, MIT. And this was a classroom about 50 or 60 years ago, and this is a classroom today. What's changed? The seats are in color. Whoop-de-do. Education really hasn't changed in the past 500 years. The last big innovation in education was the printing press and the textbooks. Everything else has changed around us. You know, from healthcare to transportation, everything is different, but education hasn't changed. It's also been a real issue in terms of access. So what you see here is not a rock concert. And the person you see at the end of the stage is not Madonna. This is a classroom at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. Now, we've all heard of distance education, but the students way in the back, 200 feet away from the instructor, I think they are undergoing long-distance education. Now, I really believe that we can transform education, both in quality and scale and access, through technology. For example, at edX, we are trying to transform education through online technologies. Given education has been calcified for 500 years, we really cannot think about reengineering it, micromanaging it. We really have to completely reimagine it. It's like going from ox carts to the airplane. Even the infrastructure has to change. Everything has to change. We need to go from lectures on the blackboard to online exercises, online videos. We have to go to interactive virtual laboratories and gamification. We have to go to completely online grading and peer interaction and discussion boards. Everything really has to change. So at edX and a number of other organizations, we are applying these technologies to education through MOOCs to really increase access to education. And you heard of this example, where, when we launched our very first course — and this was an MIT-hard circuits and electronics course — about a year and a half ago, 155,000 students from 162 countries enrolled in this course. And we had no marketing budget. Now, 155,000 is a big number. This number is bigger than the total number of alumni of MIT in its 150-year history. 7,200 students passed the course, and this was a hard course. 7,200 is also a big number. If I were to teach at MIT two semesters every year, I would have to teach for 40 years before I could teach this many students. Now these large numbers are just one part of the story. So today, I want to discuss a different aspect, the other side of MOOCs, take a different perspective. We are taking what we develop and learn in the large and applying it in the small to the classroom, to create a blended model of learning. But before I go into that, let me tell you a story. When my daughter turned 13, became a teenager, she stopped speaking English, and she began speaking this new language. I call it teen-lish. It's a digital language. It's got two sounds: a grunt and a silence. "Honey, come over for dinner." "Hmm." "Did you hear me?" Silence. (Laughter) "Can you listen to me?" "Hmm." So we had a real issue with communicating, and we were just not communicating, until one day I had this epiphany. I texted her. (Laughter) I got an instant response. I said, no, that must have been by accident. She must have thought, you know, some friend of hers was calling her. So I texted her again. Boom, another response. I said, this is great. And so since then, our life has changed. I text her, she responds. It's just been absolutely great. (Applause) So our millennial generation is built differently. Now, I'm older, and my youthful looks might belie that, but I'm not in the millennial generation. But our kids are really different. The millennial generation is completely comfortable with online technology. So why are we fighting it in the classroom? Let's not fight it. Let's embrace it. In fact, I believe — and I have two fat thumbs, I can't text very well — but I'm willing to bet that with evolution, our kids and their grandchildren will develop really, really little, itty-bitty thumbs to text much better, that evolution will fix all of that stuff. But what if we embraced technology, embraced the millennial generation's natural predilections, and really think about creating these online technologies, blend them into their lives. So here's what we can do. So rather than driving our kids into a classroom, herding them out there at 8 o'clock in the morning — I hated going to class at 8 o'clock in the morning, so why are we forcing our kids to do that? So instead what you do is you have them watch videos and do interactive exercises in the comfort of their dorm rooms, in their bedroom, in the dining room, in the bathroom, wherever they're most creative. Then they come into the classroom for some in-person interaction. They can have discussions amongst themselves. They can solve problems together. They can work with the professor and have the professor answer their questions. In fact, with edX, when we were teaching our first course on circuits and electronics around the world, this was happening unbeknownst to us. Two high school teachers at the Sant High School in Mongolia had flipped their classroom, and they were using our video lectures and interactive exercises, where the learners in the high school, 15-year-olds, mind you, would go and do these things in their own homes and they would come into class, and as you see from this image here, they would interact with each other and do some physical laboratory work. And the only way we discovered this was they wrote a blog and we happened to stumble upon that blog. We were also doing other pilots. So we did a pilot experimental blended courses, working with San Jose State University in California, again, with the circuits and electronics course. You'll hear that a lot. That course has become sort of like our petri dish of learning. So there, the students would, again, the instructors flipped the classroom, blended online and in person, and the results were staggering. Now don't take these results to the bank just yet. Just wait a little bit longer as we experiment with this some more, but the early results are incredible. So traditionally, semester upon semester, for the past several years, this course, again, a hard course, had a failure rate of about 40 to 41 percent every semester. With this blended class late last year, the failure rate fell to nine percent. So the results can be extremely, extremely good. Now before we go too far into this, I'd like to spend some time discussing some key ideas. What are some key ideas that makes all of this work? One idea is active learning. The idea here is, rather than have students walk into class and watch lectures, we replace this with what we call lessons. Lessons are interleaved sequences of videos and interactive exercises. So a student might watch a five-, seven-minute video and follow that with an interactive exercise. Think of this as the ultimate Socratization of education. You teach by asking questions. And this is a form of learning called active learning, and really promoted by a very early paper, in 1972, by Craik and Lockhart, where they said and discovered that learning and retention really relates strongly to the depth of mental processing. Students learn much better when they are interacting with the material. The second idea is self-pacing. Now, when I went to a lecture hall, and if you were like me, by the fifth minute I would lose the professor. I wasn't all that smart, and I would be scrambling, taking notes, and then I would lose the lecture for the rest of the hour. Instead, wouldn't it be nice with online technologies, we offer videos and interactive engagements to students? They can hit the pause button. They can rewind the professor. Heck, they can even mute the professor. So this form of self-pacing can be very helpful to learning. The third idea that we have is instant feedback. With instant feedback, the computer grades exercises. I mean, how else do you teach 150,000 students? Your computer is grading all the exercises. And we've all submitted homeworks, and your grades come back two weeks later, you've forgotten all about it. I don't think I've still received some of my homeworks from my undergraduate days. Some are never graded. So with instant feedback, students can try to apply answers. If they get it wrong, they can get instant feedback. They can try it again and try it again, and this really becomes much more engaging. They get the instant feedback, and this little green check mark that you see here is becoming somewhat of a cult symbol at edX. Learners are telling us that they go to bed at night dreaming of the green check mark. In fact, one of our learners who took the circuits course early last year, he then went on to take a software course from Berkeley at the end of the year, and this is what the learner had to say on our discussion board when he just started that course about the green check mark: "Oh god; have I missed you." When's the last time you've seen students posting comments like this about homework? My colleague Ed Bertschinger, who heads up the physics department at MIT, has this to say about instant feedback: He indicated that instant feedback turns teaching moments into learning outcomes. The next big idea is gamification. You know, all learners engage really well with interactive videos and so on. You know, they would sit down and shoot alien spaceships all day long until they get it. So we applied these gamification techniques to learning, and we can build these online laboratories. How do you teach creativity? How do you teach design? We can do this through online labs and use computing power to build these online labs. So as this little video shows here, you can engage students much like they design with Legos. So here, the learners are building a circuit with Lego-like ease. And this can also be graded by the computer. Fifth is peer learning. So here, we use discussion forums and discussions and Facebook-like interaction not as a distraction, but to really help students learn. Let me tell you a story. When we did our circuits course for the 155,000 students, I didn't sleep for three nights leading up to the launch of the course. I told my TAs, okay, 24/7, we're going to be up monitoring the forum, answering questions. They had answered questions for 100 students. How do you do that for 150,000? So one night I'm sitting up there, at 2 a.m. at night, and I think there's this question from a student from Pakistan, and he asked a question, and I said, okay, let me go and type up an answer, I don't type all that fast, and I begin typing up the answer, and before I can finish, another student from Egypt popped in with an answer, not quite right, so I'm fixing the answer, and before I can finish, a student from the U.S. had popped in with a different answer. And then I sat back, fascinated. Boom, boom, boom, boom, the students were discussing and interacting with each other, and by 4 a.m. that night, I'm totally fascinated, having this epiphany, and by 4 a.m. in the morning, they had discovered the right answer. And all I had to do was go and bless it, "Good answer." So this is absolutely amazing, where students are learning from each other, and they're telling us that they are learning by teaching. Now this is all not just in the future. This is happening today. So we are applying these blended learning pilots in a number of universities and high schools around the world, from Tsinghua in China to the National University of Mongolia in Mongolia to Berkeley in California — all over the world. And these kinds of technologies really help, the blended model can really help revolutionize education. It can also solve a practical problem of MOOCs, the business aspect. We can also license these MOOC courses to other universities, and therein lies a revenue model for MOOCs, where the university that licenses it with the professor can use these online courses like the next-generation textbook. They can use as much or as little as they like, and it becomes a tool in the teacher's arsenal. Finally, I would like to have you dream with me for a little bit. I would like us to really reimagine education. We will have to move from lecture halls to e-spaces. We have to move from books to tablets like the Aakash in India or the Raspberry Pi, 20 dollars. The Aakash is 40 dollars. We have to move from bricks-and-mortar school buildings to digital dormitories. But I think at the end of the day, I think we will still need one lecture hall in our universities. Otherwise, how else do we tell our grandchildren that your grandparents sat in that room in neat little rows like cornstalks and watched this professor at the end talk about content and, you know, you didn't even have a rewind button? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why smart statistics are the key to fighting crime | {0: 'Anne Milgram is committed to using data and analytics to fight crime.'} | TED@BCG San Francisco | In 2007, I became the attorney general of the state of New Jersey. Before that, I'd been a criminal prosecutor, first in the Manhattan district attorney's office, and then at the United States Department of Justice. But when I became the attorney general, two things happened that changed the way I see criminal justice. The first is that I asked what I thought were really basic questions. I wanted to understand who we were arresting, who we were charging, and who we were putting in our nation's jails and prisons. I also wanted to understand if we were making decisions in a way that made us safer. And I couldn't get this information out. It turned out that most big criminal justice agencies like my own didn't track the things that matter. So after about a month of being incredibly frustrated, I walked down into a conference room that was filled with detectives and stacks and stacks of case files, and the detectives were sitting there with yellow legal pads taking notes. They were trying to get the information I was looking for by going through case by case for the past five years. And as you can imagine, when we finally got the results, they weren't good. It turned out that we were doing a lot of low-level drug cases on the streets just around the corner from our office in Trenton. The second thing that happened is that I spent the day in the Camden, New Jersey police department. Now, at that time, Camden, New Jersey, was the most dangerous city in America. I ran the Camden Police Department because of that. I spent the day in the police department, and I was taken into a room with senior police officials, all of whom were working hard and trying very hard to reduce crime in Camden. And what I saw in that room, as we talked about how to reduce crime, were a series of officers with a lot of little yellow sticky notes. And they would take a yellow sticky and they would write something on it and they would put it up on a board. And one of them said, "We had a robbery two weeks ago. We have no suspects." And another said, "We had a shooting in this neighborhood last week. We have no suspects." We weren't using data-driven policing. We were essentially trying to fight crime with yellow Post-it notes. Now, both of these things made me realize fundamentally that we were failing. We didn't even know who was in our criminal justice system, we didn't have any data about the things that mattered, and we didn't share data or use analytics or tools to help us make better decisions and to reduce crime. And for the first time, I started to think about how we made decisions. When I was an assistant D.A., and when I was a federal prosecutor, I looked at the cases in front of me, and I generally made decisions based on my instinct and my experience. When I became attorney general, I could look at the system as a whole, and what surprised me is that I found that that was exactly how we were doing it across the entire system — in police departments, in prosecutors's offices, in courts and in jails. And what I learned very quickly is that we weren't doing a good job. So I wanted to do things differently. I wanted to introduce data and analytics and rigorous statistical analysis into our work. In short, I wanted to moneyball criminal justice. Now, moneyball, as many of you know, is what the Oakland A's did, where they used smart data and statistics to figure out how to pick players that would help them win games, and they went from a system that was based on baseball scouts who used to go out and watch players and use their instinct and experience, the scouts' instincts and experience, to pick players, from one to use smart data and rigorous statistical analysis to figure out how to pick players that would help them win games. It worked for the Oakland A's, and it worked in the state of New Jersey. We took Camden off the top of the list as the most dangerous city in America. We reduced murders there by 41 percent, which actually means 37 lives were saved. And we reduced all crime in the city by 26 percent. We also changed the way we did criminal prosecutions. So we went from doing low-level drug crimes that were outside our building to doing cases of statewide importance, on things like reducing violence with the most violent offenders, prosecuting street gangs, gun and drug trafficking, and political corruption. And all of this matters greatly, because public safety to me is the most important function of government. If we're not safe, we can't be educated, we can't be healthy, we can't do any of the other things we want to do in our lives. And we live in a country today where we face serious criminal justice problems. We have 12 million arrests every single year. The vast majority of those arrests are for low-level crimes, like misdemeanors, 70 to 80 percent. Less than five percent of all arrests are for violent crime. Yet we spend 75 billion, that's b for billion, dollars a year on state and local corrections costs. Right now, today, we have 2.3 million people in our jails and prisons. And we face unbelievable public safety challenges because we have a situation in which two thirds of the people in our jails are there waiting for trial. They haven't yet been convicted of a crime. They're just waiting for their day in court. And 67 percent of people come back. Our recidivism rate is amongst the highest in the world. Almost seven in 10 people who are released from prison will be rearrested in a constant cycle of crime and incarceration. So when I started my job at the Arnold Foundation, I came back to looking at a lot of these questions, and I came back to thinking about how we had used data and analytics to transform the way we did criminal justice in New Jersey. And when I look at the criminal justice system in the United States today, I feel the exact same way that I did about the state of New Jersey when I started there, which is that we absolutely have to do better, and I know that we can do better. So I decided to focus on using data and analytics to help make the most critical decision in public safety, and that decision is the determination of whether, when someone has been arrested, whether they pose a risk to public safety and should be detained, or whether they don't pose a risk to public safety and should be released. Everything that happens in criminal cases comes out of this one decision. It impacts everything. It impacts sentencing. It impacts whether someone gets drug treatment. It impacts crime and violence. And when I talk to judges around the United States, which I do all the time now, they all say the same thing, which is that we put dangerous people in jail, and we let non-dangerous, nonviolent people out. They mean it and they believe it. But when you start to look at the data, which, by the way, the judges don't have, when we start to look at the data, what we find time and time again, is that this isn't the case. We find low-risk offenders, which makes up 50 percent of our entire criminal justice population, we find that they're in jail. Take Leslie Chew, who was a Texas man who stole four blankets on a cold winter night. He was arrested, and he was kept in jail on 3,500 dollars bail, an amount that he could not afford to pay. And he stayed in jail for eight months until his case came up for trial, at a cost to taxpayers of more than 9,000 dollars. And at the other end of the spectrum, we're doing an equally terrible job. The people who we find are the highest-risk offenders, the people who we think have the highest likelihood of committing a new crime if they're released, we see nationally that 50 percent of those people are being released. The reason for this is the way we make decisions. Judges have the best intentions when they make these decisions about risk, but they're making them subjectively. They're like the baseball scouts 20 years ago who were using their instinct and their experience to try to decide what risk someone poses. They're being subjective, and we know what happens with subjective decision making, which is that we are often wrong. What we need in this space are strong data and analytics. What I decided to look for was a strong data and analytic risk assessment tool, something that would let judges actually understand with a scientific and objective way what the risk was that was posed by someone in front of them. I looked all over the country, and I found that between five and 10 percent of all U.S. jurisdictions actually use any type of risk assessment tool, and when I looked at these tools, I quickly realized why. They were unbelievably expensive to administer, they were time-consuming, they were limited to the local jurisdiction in which they'd been created. So basically, they couldn't be scaled or transferred to other places. So I went out and built a phenomenal team of data scientists and researchers and statisticians to build a universal risk assessment tool, so that every single judge in the United States of America can have an objective, scientific measure of risk. In the tool that we've built, what we did was we collected 1.5 million cases from all around the United States, from cities, from counties, from every single state in the country, the federal districts. And with those 1.5 million cases, which is the largest data set on pretrial in the United States today, we were able to basically find that there were 900-plus risk factors that we could look at to try to figure out what mattered most. And we found that there were nine specific things that mattered all across the country and that were the most highly predictive of risk. And so we built a universal risk assessment tool. And it looks like this. As you'll see, we put some information in, but most of it is incredibly simple, it's easy to use, it focuses on things like the defendant's prior convictions, whether they've been sentenced to incarceration, whether they've engaged in violence before, whether they've even failed to come back to court. And with this tool, we can predict three things. First, whether or not someone will commit a new crime if they're released. Second, for the first time, and I think this is incredibly important, we can predict whether someone will commit an act of violence if they're released. And that's the single most important thing that judges say when you talk to them. And third, we can predict whether someone will come back to court. And every single judge in the United States of America can use it, because it's been created on a universal data set. What judges see if they run the risk assessment tool is this — it's a dashboard. At the top, you see the New Criminal Activity Score, six of course being the highest, and then in the middle you see, "Elevated risk of violence." What that says is that this person is someone who has an elevated risk of violence that the judge should look twice at. And then, towards the bottom, you see the Failure to Appear Score, which again is the likelihood that someone will come back to court. Now I want to say something really important. It's not that I think we should be eliminating the judge's instinct and experience from this process. I don't. I actually believe the problem that we see and the reason that we have these incredible system errors, where we're incarcerating low-level, nonviolent people and we're releasing high-risk, dangerous people, is that we don't have an objective measure of risk. But what I believe should happen is that we should take that data-driven risk assessment and combine that with the judge's instinct and experience to lead us to better decision making. The tool went statewide in Kentucky on July 1, and we're about to go up in a number of other U.S. jurisdictions. Our goal, quite simply, is that every single judge in the United States will use a data-driven risk tool within the next five years. We're now working on risk tools for prosecutors and for police officers as well, to try to take a system that runs today in America the same way it did 50 years ago, based on instinct and experience, and make it into one that runs on data and analytics. Now, the great news about all this, and we have a ton of work left to do, and we have a lot of culture to change, but the great news about all of it is that we know it works. It's why Google is Google, and it's why all these baseball teams use moneyball to win games. The great news for us as well is that it's the way that we can transform the American criminal justice system. It's how we can make our streets safer, we can reduce our prison costs, and we can make our system much fairer and more just. Some people call it data science. I call it moneyballing criminal justice. Thank you. (Applause) |
Want to be an activist? Start with your toys | {0: 'When McKenna Pope was 13 she petitioned Hasbro to market its Easy-Bake Oven to boys as well as girls, and to make it available in gender-neutral colors. It worked.'} | TEDYouth 2013 | I'm McKenna Pope. I'm 14 years old, and when I was 13, I convinced one of the largest toy companies, toymakers, in the world, Hasbro, to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products. So allow me to tell you about it. So I have a brother, Gavin. When this whole shebang happened, he was four. He loved to cook. He was always getting ingredients out of the fridge and mixing them into these, needless to say, uneatable concoctions, or making invisible macaroni and cheese. He wanted to be a chef really badly. And so what better gift for a kid who wanted to be a chef than an Easy-Bake Oven. Right? I mean, we all had those when we were little. And he wanted one so badly. But then he started to realize something. In the commercials, and on the boxes for the Easy-Bake Ovens, Hasbro marketed them specifically to girls. And the way that they did this was they would only feature girls on the boxes or in the commercials, and there would be flowery prints all over the ovens and it would be in bright pink and purple, very gender-specific colors to females, right? So it kind of was sending a message that only girls are supposed to cook; boys aren't. And this discouraged my brother a lot. He thought that he wasn't supposed to want to be a chef, because that was something that girls did. Girls cooked; boys didn't, or so was the message that Hasbro was sending. And this got me thinking, God, I wish there was a way that I could change this, that could I have my voice heard by Hasbro so I could ask them and tell them what they were doing wrong and ask them to change it. And that got me thinking about a website that I had learned about a few months prior called Change.org. Change.org is an online petition-sharing platform where you can create a petition and share it across all of these social media networks, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever you can think of. And so I created a petition along with the YouTube video that I added to the petition basically asking Hasbro to change the way that they marketed it, in featuring boys in the commercials, on the boxes, and most of all creating them in less gender-specific colors. So this petition started to take off — humongously fast, you have no idea. I was getting interviewed by all these national news outlets and press outlets, and it was amazing. In three weeks, maybe three and a half, I had 46,000 signatures on this petition. (Applause) Thank you. So, needless to say, it was crazy. Eventually, Hasbro themselves invited me to their headquarters so they could go and unveil their new Easy-Bake Oven product to me in black, silver and blue. It was literally one of the best moments of my life. It was like "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." That thing was amazing. What I didn't realize at the time, however, was that I had become an activist, I could change something, that even as a kid, or maybe even especially as a kid, my voice mattered, and your voice matters too. I want to let you know it's not going to be easy, and it wasn't easy for me, because I faced a lot of obstacles. People online, and sometimes even in real life, were disrespectful to me and my family, and talked about how the whole thing was a waste of time, and it really discouraged me. And actually, I have some examples, because what's better revenge than displaying their idiocy? So, let's see. From user name Liquidsore29 — interesting user names we have here— "Disgusting liberal moms making their sons gay." Liquidsore29, really? Really? Okay. How about from Whiteboy77AGS: "People always need something to (female dog) about." From Jeffrey Gutierrez: "OMG, shut up. You just want money and attention." So it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because I thought, people don't care, people think it's a waste of time, and people are going to be disrespectful to me and my family. It hurt me, and it made me think, what's the point of making change in the future? But then I started to realize something. Haters gonna hate. Come on, say it with me. One, two, three: Haters gonna hate. So let your haters hate, you know what, and make your change, because I know you can. I look out into this crowd, and I see 400 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change, and I know that you can, and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you can do and that you believe in, and you can trade it across all these social media, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever else you can think of. And you can make that change. You can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it. And that spark that you've been hearing about all day today, you can use that spark that you have within you and turn it into a fire. Thank you. (Applause) |
Puppies! Now that I’ve got your attention, complexity theory | {0: 'Nicolas Perony models the movement of animal groups to understand: what is the individual behavior that guides the behavior of the larger society?'} | TEDxZurich 2013 | Science, science has allowed us to know so much about the far reaches of the universe, which is at the same time tremendously important and extremely remote, and yet much, much closer, much more directly related to us, there are many things we don't really understand. And one of them is the extraordinary social complexity of the animals around us, and today I want to tell you a few stories of animal complexity. But first, what do we call complexity? What is complex? Well, complex is not complicated. Something complicated comprises many small parts, all different, and each of them has its own precise role in the machinery. On the opposite, a complex system is made of many, many similar parts, and it is their interaction that produces a globally coherent behavior. Complex systems have many interacting parts which behave according to simple, individual rules, and this results in emergent properties. The behavior of the system as a whole cannot be predicted from the individual rules only. As Aristotle wrote, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But from Aristotle, let's move onto a more concrete example of complex systems. These are Scottish terriers. In the beginning, the system is disorganized. Then comes a perturbation: milk. Every individual starts pushing in one direction and this is what happens. The pinwheel is an emergent property of the interactions between puppies whose only rule is to try to keep access to the milk and therefore to push in a random direction. So it's all about finding the simple rules from which complexity emerges. I call this simplifying complexity, and it's what we do at the chair of systems design at ETH Zurich. We collect data on animal populations, analyze complex patterns, try to explain them. It requires physicists who work with biologists, with mathematicians and computer scientists, and it is their interaction that produces cross-boundary competence to solve these problems. So again, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In a way, collaboration is another example of a complex system. And you may be asking yourself which side I'm on, biology or physics? In fact, it's a little different, and to explain, I need to tell you a short story about myself. When I was a child, I loved to build stuff, to create complicated machines. So I set out to study electrical engineering and robotics, and my end-of-studies project was about building a robot called ER-1 — it looked like this— that would collect information from its environment and proceed to follow a white line on the ground. It was very, very complicated, but it worked beautifully in our test room, and on demo day, professors had assembled to grade the project. So we took ER-1 to the evaluation room. It turned out, the light in that room was slightly different. The robot's vision system got confused. At the first bend in the line, it left its course, and crashed into a wall. We had spent weeks building it, and all it took to destroy it was a subtle change in the color of the light in the room. That's when I realized that the more complicated you make a machine, the more likely that it will fail due to something absolutely unexpected. And I decided that, in fact, I didn't really want to create complicated stuff. I wanted to understand complexity, the complexity of the world around us and especially in the animal kingdom. Which brings us to bats. Bechstein's bats are a common species of European bats. They are very social animals. Mostly they roost, or sleep, together. And they live in maternity colonies, which means that every spring, the females meet after the winter hibernation, and they stay together for about six months to rear their young, and they all carry a very small chip, which means that every time one of them enters one of these specially equipped bat boxes, we know where she is, and more importantly, we know with whom she is. So I study roosting associations in bats, and this is what it looks like. During the day, the bats roost in a number of sub-groups in different boxes. It could be that on one day, the colony is split between two boxes, but on another day, it could be together in a single box, or split between three or more boxes, and that all seems rather erratic, really. It's called fission-fusion dynamics, the property for an animal group of regularly splitting and merging into different subgroups. So what we do is take all these data from all these different days and pool them together to extract a long-term association pattern by applying techniques with network analysis to get a complete picture of the social structure of the colony. Okay? So that's what this picture looks like. In this network, all the circles are nodes, individual bats, and the lines between them are social bonds, associations between individuals. It turns out this is a very interesting picture. This bat colony is organized in two different communities which cannot be predicted from the daily fission-fusion dynamics. We call them cryptic social units. Even more interesting, in fact: Every year, around October, the colony splits up, and all bats hibernate separately, but year after year, when the bats come together again in the spring, the communities stay the same. So these bats remember their friends for a really long time. With a brain the size of a peanut, they maintain individualized, long-term social bonds, We didn't know that was possible. We knew that primates and elephants and dolphins could do that, but compared to bats, they have huge brains. So how could it be that the bats maintain this complex, stable social structure with such limited cognitive abilities? And this is where complexity brings an answer. To understand this system, we built a computer model of roosting, based on simple, individual rules, and simulated thousands and thousands of days in the virtual bat colony. It's a mathematical model, but it's not complicated. What the model told us is that, in a nutshell, each bat knows a few other colony members as her friends, and is just slightly more likely to roost in a box with them. Simple, individual rules. This is all it takes to explain the social complexity of these bats. But it gets better. Between 2010 and 2011, the colony lost more than two thirds of its members, probably due to the very cold winter. The next spring, it didn't form two communities like every year, which may have led the whole colony to die because it had become too small. Instead, it formed a single, cohesive social unit, which allowed the colony to survive that season and thrive again in the next two years. What we know is that the bats are not aware that their colony is doing this. All they do is follow simple association rules, and from this simplicity emerges social complexity which allows the colony to be resilient against dramatic changes in the population structure. And I find this incredible. Now I want to tell you another story, but for this we have to travel from Europe to the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. This is where meerkats live. I'm sure you know meerkats. They're fascinating creatures. They live in groups with a very strict social hierarchy. There is one dominant pair, and many subordinates, some acting as sentinels, some acting as babysitters, some teaching pups, and so on. What we do is put very small GPS collars on these animals to study how they move together, and what this has to do with their social structure. And there's a very interesting example of collective movement in meerkats. In the middle of the reserve which they live in lies a road. On this road there are cars, so it's dangerous. But the meerkats have to cross it to get from one feeding place to another. So we asked, how exactly do they do this? We found that the dominant female is mostly the one who leads the group to the road, but when it comes to crossing it, crossing the road, she gives way to the subordinates, a manner of saying, "Go ahead, tell me if it's safe." What I didn't know, in fact, was what rules in their behavior the meerkats follow for this change at the edge of the group to happen and if simple rules were sufficient to explain it. So I built a model, a model of simulated meerkats crossing a simulated road. It's a simplistic model. Moving meerkats are like random particles whose unique rule is one of alignment. They simply move together. When these particles get to the road, they sense some kind of obstacle, and they bounce against it. The only difference between the dominant female, here in red, and the other individuals, is that for her, the height of the obstacle, which is in fact the risk perceived from the road, is just slightly higher, and this tiny difference in the individual's rule of movement is sufficient to explain what we observe, that the dominant female leads her group to the road and then gives way to the others for them to cross first. George Box, who was an English statistician, once wrote, "All models are false, but some models are useful." And in fact, this model is obviously false, because in reality, meerkats are anything but random particles. But it's also useful, because it tells us that extreme simplicity in movement rules at the individual level can result in a great deal of complexity at the level of the group. So again, that's simplifying complexity. I would like to conclude on what this means for the whole species. When the dominant female gives way to a subordinate, it's not out of courtesy. In fact, the dominant female is extremely important for the cohesion of the group. If she dies on the road, the whole group is at risk. So this behavior of risk avoidance is a very old evolutionary response. These meerkats are replicating an evolved tactic that is thousands of generations old, and they're adapting it to a modern risk, in this case a road built by humans. They adapt very simple rules, and the resulting complex behavior allows them to resist human encroachment into their natural habitat. In the end, it may be bats which change their social structure in response to a population crash, or it may be meerkats who show a novel adaptation to a human road, or it may be another species. My message here — and it's not a complicated one, but a simple one of wonder and hope — my message here is that animals show extraordinary social complexity, and this allows them to adapt and respond to changes in their environment. In three words, in the animal kingdom, simplicity leads to complexity which leads to resilience. Thank you. (Applause) Dania Gerhardt: Thank you very much, Nicolas, for this great start. Little bit nervous? Nicolas Perony: I'm okay, thanks. DG: Okay, great. I'm sure a lot of people in the audience somehow tried to make associations between the animals you were talking about — the bats, meerkats — and humans. You brought some examples: The females are the social ones, the females are the dominant ones, I'm not sure who thinks how. But is it okay to do these associations? Are there stereotypes you can confirm in this regard that can be valid across all species? NP: Well, I would say there are also counter-examples to these stereotypes. For examples, in sea horses or in koalas, in fact, it is the males who take care of the young always. And the lesson is that it's often difficult, and sometimes even a bit dangerous, to draw parallels between humans and animals. So that's it. DG: Okay. Thank you very much for this great start. Thank you, Nicolas Perony. |
Meet a young entrepreneur, cartoonist, designer, activist ... | {0: 'Maya Penn makes eco-friendly clothes and accessories, which she sells on a site she built -- and gives away a percent of the profits.'} | TEDWomen 2013 | Server: May I help you, sir? Customer: Uh, let's see. Server: We have pan seared registry error sprinkled with the finest corrupted data, binary brioche, RAM sandwiches, Conficker fitters, and a scripting salad with or without polymorphic dressing, and a grilled coding kabob. Customer: I'd like a RAM sandwich and a glass of your finest Code 39. Server: Would you like any desserts, sir? Our special is tracking cookie. Customer: I'd like a batch of some zombie tracking cookies, thank you. Server: Coming right up, sir. Your food will be served shortly. (Applause) Maya Penn: I've been drawing ever since I could hold a crayon, and I've been making animated flip books since I was three years old. At that age, I also learned about what an animator was. There was a program on TV about jobs most kids don't know about. When I understood that an animator makes the cartoons I saw on TV, I immediately said, "That's what I want to be." I don't know if I said it mentally or out loud, but that was a greatly defining moment in my life. Animation and art has always been my first love. It was my love for technology that sparked the idea for "Malicious Dishes." There was a virus on my computer, and I was trying to get rid of it, and all of a sudden, I just thought, what if viruses have their own little world inside the computer? Maybe a restaurant where they meet up and do virusy things? And thus, "Malicious Dishes" was born. At four years old, my dad showed me how to take apart a computer and put it back together again. That started my love for technology. I built my first website myself in HTML, and I'm learning JavaScript and Python. I'm also working on an animated series called "The Pollinators." It's about bees and other pollinators in our environment and why they're so important. If plants aren't pollinated by the pollinators, then all creatures, including ourselves, that depend on these plants, would starve. So I decided to take these cool creatures and make a superhero team. (Applause) (Foot stomp) (Music) (Roar) Pollinator: Deforestsaurus! I should have known! I need to call on the rest of the Pollinators! (Music) Thank you. (Applause) All of my animations start with ideas, but what are ideas? Ideas can spark a movement. Ideas are opportunities and innovation. Ideas truly are what make the world go round. If it wasn't for ideas, we wouldn't be where we are now with technology, medicine, art, culture, and how we even live our lives. At eight years old, I took my ideas and started my own business called Maya's Ideas, and my nonprofit, Maya's Ideas for the Planet. (Laughter) And I make eco-friendly clothing and accessories. I'm 13 now, and although I started my business in 2008, my artistic journey started way before then. I was greatly influenced by art, and I wanted to incorporate it in everything I did, even my business. I would find different fabrics around the house, and say, "This could be a scarf or a hat," and I had all these ideas for designs. I noticed when I wore my creations, people would stop me and say, "Wow, that's really cute. Where can I get one?" And I thought, I can start my own business. Now I didn't have any business plans at only eight years old. I only knew I wanted to make pretty creations that were safe for the environment and I wanted to give back. My mom taught me how to sew, and on my back porch, I would sit and make little headbands out of ribbon, and I would write down the names and the price of each item. I started making more items like hats, scarves and bags. Soon, my items began selling all over the world, and I had customers in Denmark, Italy, Australia, Canada and more. Now, I had a lot to learn about my business, like branding and marketing, staying engaged with my customers, and seeing what sold the most and the least. Soon, my business really started to take off. Then one day, Forbes magazine contacted me when I was 10 years old. (Laughter) They wanted to feature me and my company in their article. Now a lot of people ask me, why is your business eco-friendly? I've had a passion for protecting the environment and its creatures since I was little. My parents taught me at an early age about giving back and being a good steward to the environment. I heard about how the dyes in some clothing or the process of even making the items was harmful to the people and the planet, so I started doing my own research, and I discovered that even after dyeing has being completed, there is a waste issue that gives a negative impact on the environment. For example, the grinding of materials, or the dumping of dried powder materials. These actions can pollute the air, making it toxic to anyone or anything that inhales it. So when I started my business, I knew two things: All of my items had to be eco-friendly, and 10 to 20 percent of the profits I made went to local and global charities and environmental organizations. (Applause) I feel I'm part of the new wave of entrepreneurs that not only seeks to have a successful business, but also a sustainable future. I feel that I can meet the needs of my customers without compromising the ability of future generations to live in a greener tomorrow. We live in a big, diverse and beautiful world, and that makes me even more passionate to save it. But it's never enough to just to get it through your heads about the things that are happening in our world. It takes to get it through your hearts, because when you get it through your heart, that is when movements are sparked. That is when opportunities and innovation are created, and that is why ideas come to life. Thank you, and peace and blessings. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Pat Mitchell: So, you heard Maya talk about the amazing parents who are behind this incredible woman. Where are they? Please, Mr. and Mrs. Penn. Would you just — Ah! (Applause) |
How we turned the tide on domestic violence (Hint: the Polaroid helped) | {0: 'In 1994, Esta Soler was among the key advocates for a US law to combat the devastating effects of violence against women. Today, her mission is global.'} | TEDWomen 2013 | I want you to imagine what a breakthrough this was for women who were victims of violence in the 1980s. They would come into the emergency room with what the police would call "a lovers' quarrel," and I would see a woman who was beaten, I would see a broken nose and a fractured wrist and swollen eyes. And as activists, we would take our Polaroid camera, we would take her picture, we would wait 90 seconds, and we would give her the photograph. And she would then have the evidence she needed to go to court. We were making what was invisible visible. I've been doing this for 30 years. I've been part of a social movement that has been working on ending violence against women and children. And for all those years, I've had an absolutely passionate and sometimes not popular belief that this violence is not inevitable, that it is learned, and if it's learned, it can be un-learned, and it can be prevented. (Applause) Why do I believe this? Because it's true. It is absolutely true. Between 1993 and 2010, domestic violence among adult women in the United States has gone down by 64 percent, and that is great news. (Applause) Sixty-four percent. Now, how did we get there? Our eyes were wide open. Thirty years ago, women were beaten, they were stalked, they were raped, and no one talked about it. There was no justice. And as an activist, that was not good enough. And so step one on this journey is we organized, and we created this extraordinary underground network of amazing women who opened shelters, and if they didn't open a shelter, they opened their home so that women and children could be safe. And you know what else we did? We had bake sales, we had car washes, and we did everything we could do to fundraise, and then at one point we said, you know, it's time that we went to the federal government and asked them to pay for these extraordinary services that are saving people's lives. Right? (Applause) And so, step number two, we knew we needed to change the laws. And so we went to Washington, and we lobbied for the first piece of legislation. And I remember walking through the halls of the U.S. Capitol, and I was in my 30s, and my life had purpose, and I couldn't imagine that anybody would ever challenge this important piece of legislation. I was probably 30 and naive. But I heard about a congressman who had a very, very different point of view. Do you know what he called this important piece of legislation? He called it the Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act. The Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act. Ladies and gentlemen, that was in 1984 in the United States, and I wish I had Twitter. (Laughter) Ten years later, after lots of hard work, we finally passed the Violence Against Women Act, which is a life-changing act that has saved so many lives. (Applause) Thank you. I was proud to be part of that work, and it changed the laws and it put millions of dollars into local communities. And you know what else it did? It collected data. And I have to tell you, I'm passionate about data. In fact, I am a data nerd. I'm sure there are a lot of data nerds here. I am a data nerd, and the reason for that is I want to make sure that if we spend a dollar, that the program works, and if it doesn't work, we should change the plan. And I also want to say one other thing: We are not going to solve this problem by building more jails or by even building more shelters. It is about economic empowerment for women, it is about healing kids who are hurt, and it is about prevention with a capital P. And so, step number three on this journey: We know, if we're going to keep making this progress, we're going to have to turn up the volume, we're going to have to increase the visibility, and we're going to have to engage the public. And so knowing that, we went to the Advertising Council, and we asked them to help us build a public education campaign. And we looked around the world to Canada and Australia and Brazil and parts of Africa, and we took this knowledge and we built the first national public education campaign called There's No Excuse for Domestic Violence. Take a look at one of our spots. (Video) Man: Where's dinner? Woman: Well, I thought you'd be home a couple hours ago, and I put everything away, so— Man: What is this? Pizza. Woman: If you had just called me, I would have known— Man: Dinner? Dinner ready is a pizza? Woman: Honey, please don't be so loud. Please don't—Let go of me! Man: Get in the kitchen! Woman: No! Help! Man: You want to see what hurts? (Slaps woman) That's what hurts! That's what hurts! (Breaking glass) Woman: Help me! ["Children have to sit by and watch. What's your excuse?"] Esta Soler: As we were in the process of releasing this campaign, O.J. Simpson was arrested for the murder of his wife and her friend. We learned that he had a long history of domestic violence. The media became fixated. The story of domestic violence went from the back page, but actually from the no-page, to the front page. Our ads blanketed the airwaves, and women, for the first time, started to tell their stories. Movements are about moments, and we seized this moment. And let me just put this in context. Before 1980, do you have any idea how many articles were in The New York Times on domestic violence? I'll tell you: 158. And in the 2000s, over 7,000. We were obviously making a difference. But we were still missing a critical element. So, step four: We needed to engage men. We couldn't solve this problem with 50 percent of the population on the sidelines. And I already told you I'm a data nerd. National polling told us that men felt indicted and not invited into this conversation. So we wondered, how can we include men? How can we get men to talk about violence against women and girls? And a male friend of mine pulled me aside and he said, "You want men to talk about violence against women and girls. Men don't talk." (Laughter) I apologize to the men in the audience. I know you do. But he said, "Do you know what they do do? They do talk to their kids. They talk to their kids as parents, as coaches." And that's what we did. We met men where they were at and we built a program. And then we had this one event that stays in my heart forever where a basketball coach was talking to a room filled with male athletes and men from all walks of life. And he was talking about the importance of coaching boys into men and changing the culture of the locker room and giving men the tools to have healthy relationships. And all of a sudden, he looked at the back of the room, and he saw his daughter, and he called out his daughter's name, Michaela, and he said, "Michaela, come up here." And she's nine years old, and she was kind of shy, and she got up there, and he said, "Sit down next to me." She sat right down next to him. He gave her this big hug, and he said, "People ask me why I do this work. I do this work because I'm her dad, and I don't want anyone ever to hurt her." And as a parent, I get it. I get it, knowing that there are so many sexual assaults on college campuses that are so widespread and so under-reported. We've done a lot for adult women. We've got to do a better job for our kids. We just do. We have to. (Applause) We've come a long way since the days of the Polaroid. Technology has been our friend. The mobile phone is a global game changer for the empowerment of women, and Facebook and Twitter and Google and YouTube and all the social media helps us organize and tell our story in a powerful way. And so those of you in this audience who have helped build those applications and those platforms, as an organizer, I say, thank you very much. Really. I clap for you. (Applause) I'm the daughter of a man who joined one club in his life, the Optimist Club. You can't make that one up. And it is his spirit and his optimism that is in my DNA. I have been doing this work for over 30 years, and I am convinced, now more than ever, in the capacity of human beings to change. I believe we can bend the arc of human history toward compassion and equality, and I also fundamentally believe and passionately believe that this violence does not have to be part of the human condition. And I ask you, stand with us as we create futures without violence for women and girls and men and boys everywhere. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The world is one big dataset. Now, how to photograph it ... | {0: 'Dan Berkenstock and his team at Skybox Imaging are rethinking how to take photographs from space.'} | TED@BCG San Francisco | Five years ago, I was a Ph.D. student living two lives. In one, I used NASA supercomputers to design next-generation spacecraft, and in the other I was a data scientist looking for potential smugglers of sensitive nuclear technologies. As a data scientist, I did a lot of analyses, mostly of facilities, industrial facilities around the world. And I was always looking for a better canvas to tie these all together. And one day, I was thinking about how all data has a location, and I realized that the answer had been staring me in the face. Although I was a satellite engineer, I hadn't thought about using satellite imagery in my work. Now, like most of us, I'd been online, I'd see my house, so I thought, I'll hop in there and I'll start looking up some of these facilities. And what I found really surprised me. The pictures that I was finding were years out of date, and because of that, it had relatively little relevance to the work that I was doing today. But I was intrigued. I mean, satellite imagery is pretty amazing stuff. There are millions and millions of sensors surrounding us today, but there's still so much we don't know on a daily basis. How much oil is stored in all of China? How much corn is being produced? How many ships are in all of our world's ports? Now, in theory, all of these questions could be answered by imagery, but not if it's old. And if this data was so valuable, then how come I couldn't get my hands on more recent pictures? So the story begins over 50 years ago with the launch of the first generation of U.S. government photo reconnaissance satellites. And today, there's a handful of the great, great grandchildren of these early Cold War machines which are now operated by private companies and from which the vast majority of satellite imagery that you and I see on a daily basis comes. During this period, launching things into space, just the rocket to get the satellite up there, has cost hundreds of millions of dollars each, and that's created tremendous pressure to launch things infrequently and to make sure that when you do, you cram as much functionality in there as possible. All of this has only made satellites bigger and bigger and bigger and more expensive, now nearly a billion, with a b, dollars per copy. Because they are so expensive, there aren't very many of them. Because there aren't very many of them, the pictures that we see on a daily basis tend to be old. I think a lot of people actually understand this anecdotally, but in order to visualize just how sparsely our planet is collected, some friends and I put together a dataset of the 30 million pictures that have been gathered by these satellites between 2000 and 2010. As you can see in blue, huge areas of our world are barely seen, less than once a year, and even the areas that are seen most frequently, those in red, are seen at best once a quarter. Now as aerospace engineering grad students, this chart cried out to us as a challenge. Why do these things have to be so expensive? Does a single satellite really have to cost the equivalent of three 747 jumbo jets? Wasn't there a way to build a smaller, simpler, new satellite design that could enable more timely imaging? I realize that it does sound a little bit crazy that we were going to go out and just begin designing satellites, but fortunately we had help. In the late 1990s, a couple of professors proposed a concept for radically reducing the price of putting things in space. This was hitchhiking small satellites alongside much larger satellites. This dropped the cost of putting objects up there by over a factor of 100, and suddenly we could afford to experiment, to take a little bit of risk, and to realize a lot of innovation. And a new generation of engineers and scientists, mostly out of universities, began launching these very small, breadbox-sized satellites called CubeSats. And these were built with electronics obtained from RadioShack instead of Lockheed Martin. Now it was using the lessons learned from these early missions that my friends and I began a series of sketches of our own satellite design. And I can't remember a specific day where we made a conscious decision that we were actually going to go out and build these things, but once we got that idea in our minds of the world as a dataset, of being able to capture millions of data points on a daily basis describing the global economy, of being able to unearth billions of connections between them that had never before been found, it just seemed boring to go work on anything else. And so we moved into a cramped, windowless office in Palo Alto, and began working to take our design from the drawing board into the lab. The first major question we had to tackle was just how big to build this thing. In space, size drives cost, and we had worked with these very small, breadbox-sized satellites in school, but as we began to better understand the laws of physics, we found that the quality of pictures those satellites could take was very limited, because the laws of physics dictate that the best picture you can take through a telescope is a function of the diameter of that telescope, and these satellites had a very small, very constrained volume. And we found that the best picture we would have been able to get looked something like this. Although this was the low-cost option, quite frankly it was just too blurry to see the things that make satellite imagery valuable. So about three or four weeks later, we met a group of engineers randomly who had worked on the first private imaging satellite ever developed, and they told us that back in the 1970s, the U.S. government had found a powerful optimal tradeoff — that in taking pictures at right about one meter resolution, being able to see objects one meter in size, they had found that they could not just get very high-quality images, but get a lot of them at an affordable price. From our own computer simulations, we quickly found that one meter really was the minimum viable product to be able to see the drivers of our global economy, for the first time, being able to count the ships and cars and shipping containers and trucks that move around our world on a daily basis, while conveniently still not being able to see individuals. We had found our compromise. We would have to build something larger than the original breadbox, now more like a mini-fridge, but we still wouldn't have to build a pickup truck. So now we had our constraint. The laws of physics dictated the absolute minimum-sized telescope that we could build. What came next was making the rest of the satellite as small and as simple as possible, basically a flying telescope with four walls and a set of electronics smaller than a phone book that used less power than a 100 watt lightbulb. The big challenge became actually taking the pictures through that telescope. Traditional imaging satellites use a line scanner, similar to a Xerox machine, and as they traverse the Earth, they take pictures, scanning row by row by row to build the complete image. Now people use these because they get a lot of light, which means less of the noise you see in a low-cost cell phone image. The problem with them is they require very sophisticated pointing. You have to stay focused on a 50-centimeter target from over 600 miles away while moving at more than seven kilometers a second, which requires an awesome degree of complexity. So instead, we turned to a new generation of video sensors, originally created for use in night vision goggles. Instead of taking a single, high quality image, we could take a videostream of individually noisier frames, but then we could recombine all of those frames together into very high-quality images using sophisticated pixel processing techniques here on the ground, at a cost of one one hundredth a traditional system. And we applied this technique to many of the other systems on the satellite as well, and day by day, our design evolved from CAD to prototypes to production units. A few short weeks ago, we packed up SkySat 1, put our signatures on it, and waved goodbye for the last time on Earth. Today, it's sitting in its final launch configuration ready to blast off in a few short weeks. And soon, we'll turn our attention to launching a constellation of 24 or more of these satellites and beginning to build the scalable analytics that will allow us to unearth the insights in the petabytes of data we will collect. So why do all of this? Why build these satellites? Well, it turns out imaging satellites have a unique ability to provide global transparency, and providing that transparency on a timely basis is simply an idea whose time has come. We see ourselves as pioneers of a new frontier, and beyond economic data, unlocking the human story, moment by moment. For a data scientist that just happened to go to space camp as a kid, it just doesn't get much better than that. Thank you. (Applause) |
How architectural innovations migrate across borders | {0: 'Teddy Cruz looks for clues to the "city of the future" in the emerging urban areas of today.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | The urban explosion of the last years of economic boom also produced dramatic marginalization, resulting in the explosion of slums in many parts of the world. This polarization of enclaves of mega-wealth surrounded by sectors of poverty and the socioeconomic inequalities they have engendered is really at the center of today's urban crisis. But I want to begin tonight by suggesting that this urban crisis is not only economic or environmental. It's particularly a cultural crisis, a crisis of the institutions unable to reimagine the stupid ways which we have been growing, unable to challenge the oil-hungry, selfish urbanization that have perpetuated cities based on consumption, from southern California to New York to Dubai. So I just really want to share with you a reflection that the future of cities today depends less on buildings and, in fact, depends more on the fundamental reorganization of socioeconomic relations, that the best ideas in the shaping of the city in the future will not come from enclaves of economic power and abundance, but in fact from sectors of conflict and scarcity from which an urgent imagination can really inspire us to rethink urban growth today. And let me illustrate what I mean by understanding or engaging sites of conflict as harboring creativity, as I briefly introduce you to the Tijuana-San Diego border region, which has been the laboratory to rethink my practice as an architect. This is the wall, the border wall, that separates San Diego and Tijuana, Latin America and the United States, a physical emblem of exclusionary planning policies that have perpetuated the division of communities, jurisdictions and resources across the world. In this border region, we find some of the wealthiest real estate, as I once found in the edges of San Diego, barely 20 minutes away from some of the poorest settlements in Latin America. And while these two cities have the same population, San Diego has grown six times larger than Tijuana in the last decades, immediately thrusting us to confront the tensions and conflicts between sprawl and density, which are at the center of today's discussion about environmental sustainability. So I've been arguing in the last years that, in fact, the slums of Tijuana can teach a lot to the sprawls of San Diego when it comes to socioeconomic sustainability, that we should pay attention and learn from the many migrant communities on both sides of this border wall so that we can translate their informal processes of urbanization. What do I mean by the informal in this case? I'm really just talking about the compendium of social practices of adaptation that enable many of these migrant communities to transgress imposed political and economic recipes of urbanization. I'm talking simply about the creative intelligence of the bottom-up, whether manifested in the slums of Tijuana that build themselves, in fact, with the waste of San Diego, or the many migrant neighborhoods in Southern California that have begun to be retrofitted with difference in the last decades. So I've been interested as an artist in the measuring, the observation, of many of the trans-border informal flows across this border: in one direction, from south to north, the flow of immigrants into the United States, and from north to south the flow of waste from southern California into Tijuana. I'm referring to the recycling of these old post-war bungalows that Mexican contractors bring to the border as American developers are disposing of them in the process of building a more inflated version of suburbia in the last decades. So these are houses waiting to cross the border. Not only people cross the border here, but entire chunks of one city move to the next, and when these houses are placed on top of these steel frames, they leave the first floor to become the second to be in-filled with more house, with a small business. This layering of spaces and economies is very interesting to notice. But not only houses, also small debris from one city, from San Diego, to Tijuana. Probably a lot of you have seen the rubber tires that are used in the slums to build retaining walls. But look at what people have done here in conditions of socioeconomic emergency. They have figured out how to peel off the tire, how to thread it and interlock it to construct a more efficient retaining wall. Or the garage doors that are brought from San Diego in trucks to become the new skin of emergency housing in many of these slums surrounding the edges of Tijuana. So while, as an architect, this is a very compelling thing to witness, this creative intelligence, I also want to keep myself in check. I don't want to romanticize poverty. I just want to suggest that this informal urbanization is not just the image of precariousness, that informality here, the informal, is really a set of socioeconomic and political procedures that we could translate as artists, that this is about a bottom-up urbanization that performs. See here, buildings are not important just for their looks, but, in fact, they are important for what they can do. They truly perform as they transform through time and as communities negotiate the spaces and boundaries and resources. So while waste flows southbound, people go north in search of dollars, and most of my research has had to do with the impact of immigration in the alteration of the homogeneity of many neighborhoods in the United States, particularly in San Diego. And I'm talking about how this begins to suggest that the future of Southern California depends on the retrofitting of the large urbanization — I mean, on steroids — with the small programs, social and economic. I'm referring to how immigrants, when they come to these neighborhoods, they begin to alter the one-dimensionality of parcels and properties into more socially and economically complex systems, as they begin to plug an informal economy into a garage, or as they build an illegal granny flat to support an extended family. This socioeconomic entrepreneurship on the ground within these neighborhoods really begins to suggest ways of translating that into new, inclusive and more equitable land use policies. So many stories emerge from these dynamics of alteration of space, such as "the informal Buddha," which tells the story of a small house that saved itself, it did not travel to Mexico, but it was retrofitted in the end into a Buddhist temple, and in so doing, this small house transforms or mutates from a singular dwelling into a small, or a micro, socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure inside a neighborhood. So these action neighborhoods, as I call them, really become the inspiration to imagine other interpretations of citizenship that have less to do, in fact, with belonging to the nation-state, and more with upholding the notion of citizenship as a creative act that reorganizes institutional protocols in the spaces of the city. As an artist, I've been interested, in fact, in the visualization of citizenship, the gathering of many anecdotes, urban stories, in order to narrativize the relationship between social processes and spaces. This is a story of a group of teenagers that one night, a few months ago, decided to invade this space under the freeway to begin constructing their own skateboard park. With shovels in hand, they started to dig. Two weeks later, the police stopped them. They barricaded the place, and the teenagers were evicted, and the teenagers decided to fight back, not with bank cards or slogans but with constructing a critical process. The first thing they did was to recognize the specificity of political jurisdiction inscribed in that empty space. They found out that they had been lucky because they had not begun to dig under Caltrans territoy. Caltrans is a state agency that governs the freeway, so it would have been very difficult to negotiate with them. They were lucky, they said, because they began to dig under an arm of the freeway that belongs to the local municipality. They were also lucky, they said, because they began to dig in a sort of Bermuda Triangle of jurisdiction, between port authority, airport authority, two city districts, and a review board. All these red lines are the invisible political institutions that were inscribed in that leftover empty space. With this knowledge, these teenagers as skaters confronted the city. They came to the city attorney's office. The city attorney told them that in order to continue the negotiation they had to become an NGO, and of course they didn't know what an NGO was. They had to talk to their friends in Seattle who had gone through the same experience. And they began to realize the necessity to organize themselves even deeper and began to fundraise, to organize budgets, to really be aware of all the knowledge embedded in the urban code in San Diego so that they could begin to redefine the very meaning of public space in the city, expanding it to other categories. At the end, the teenagers won the case with that evidence, and they were able to construct their skateboard park under that freeway. Now for many of you, this story might seem trivial or naive. For me as an architect, it has become a fundamental narrative, because it begins to teach me that this micro-community not only designed another category of public space but they also designed the socioeconomic protocols that were necessary to be inscribed in that space for its long-term sustainability. They also taught me that similar to the migrant communities on both sides of the border, they engaged conflict itself as a creative tool, because they had to produce a process that enabled them to reorganize resources and the politics of the city. In that act, that informal, bottom-up act of transgression, really began to trickle up to transform top-down policy. Now this journey from the bottom-up to the transformation of the top-down is where I find hope today. And I'm thinking of how these modest alterations with space and with policy in many cities in the world, in primarily the urgency of a collective imagination as these communities reimagine their own forms of governance, social organization, and infrastructure, really is at the center of the new formation of democratic politics of the urban. It is, in fact, this that could become the framework for producing new social and economic justice in the city. I want to say this and emphasize it, because this is the only way I see that can enable us to move from urbanizations of consumption to neighborhoods of production today. Thank you. (Applause) |
A new equation for intelligence | {0: 'Alex Wissner-Gross applies science and engineering principles to big (and diverse) questions, like: "What is the equation for intelligence?" and "What\'s the best way to raise awareness about climate change?"'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | Intelligence — what is it? If we take a look back at the history of how intelligence has been viewed, one seminal example has been Edsger Dijkstra's famous quote that "the question of whether a machine can think is about as interesting as the question of whether a submarine can swim." Now, Edsger Dijkstra, when he wrote this, intended it as a criticism of the early pioneers of computer science, like Alan Turing. However, if you take a look back and think about what have been the most empowering innovations that enabled us to build artificial machines that swim and artificial machines that [fly], you find that it was only through understanding the underlying physical mechanisms of swimming and flight that we were able to build these machines. And so, several years ago, I undertook a program to try to understand the fundamental physical mechanisms underlying intelligence. Let's take a step back. Let's first begin with a thought experiment. Pretend that you're an alien race that doesn't know anything about Earth biology or Earth neuroscience or Earth intelligence, but you have amazing telescopes and you're able to watch the Earth, and you have amazingly long lives, so you're able to watch the Earth over millions, even billions of years. And you observe a really strange effect. You observe that, over the course of the millennia, Earth is continually bombarded with asteroids up until a point, and that at some point, corresponding roughly to our year, 2000 AD, asteroids that are on a collision course with the Earth that otherwise would have collided mysteriously get deflected or they detonate before they can hit the Earth. Now of course, as earthlings, we know the reason would be that we're trying to save ourselves. We're trying to prevent an impact. But if you're an alien race who doesn't know any of this, doesn't have any concept of Earth intelligence, you'd be forced to put together a physical theory that explains how, up until a certain point in time, asteroids that would demolish the surface of a planet mysteriously stop doing that. And so I claim that this is the same question as understanding the physical nature of intelligence. So in this program that I undertook several years ago, I looked at a variety of different threads across science, across a variety of disciplines, that were pointing, I think, towards a single, underlying mechanism for intelligence. In cosmology, for example, there have been a variety of different threads of evidence that our universe appears to be finely tuned for the development of intelligence, and, in particular, for the development of universal states that maximize the diversity of possible futures. In game play, for example, in Go — everyone remembers in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess — fewer people are aware that in the past 10 years or so, the game of Go, arguably a much more challenging game because it has a much higher branching factor, has also started to succumb to computer game players for the same reason: the best techniques right now for computers playing Go are techniques that try to maximize future options during game play. Finally, in robotic motion planning, there have been a variety of recent techniques that have tried to take advantage of abilities of robots to maximize future freedom of action in order to accomplish complex tasks. And so, taking all of these different threads and putting them together, I asked, starting several years ago, is there an underlying mechanism for intelligence that we can factor out of all of these different threads? Is there a single equation for intelligence? And the answer, I believe, is yes. ["F = T ∇ Sτ"] What you're seeing is probably the closest equivalent to an E = mc² for intelligence that I've seen. So what you're seeing here is a statement of correspondence that intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action. It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, tau. In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped. Intelligence tries to maximize future freedom of action and keep options open. And so, given this one equation, it's natural to ask, so what can you do with this? How predictive is it? Does it predict human-level intelligence? Does it predict artificial intelligence? So I'm going to show you now a video that will, I think, demonstrate some of the amazing applications of just this single equation. (Video) Narrator: Recent research in cosmology has suggested that universes that produce more disorder, or "entropy," over their lifetimes should tend to have more favorable conditions for the existence of intelligent beings such as ourselves. But what if that tentative cosmological connection between entropy and intelligence hints at a deeper relationship? What if intelligent behavior doesn't just correlate with the production of long-term entropy, but actually emerges directly from it? To find out, we developed a software engine called Entropica, designed to maximize the production of long-term entropy of any system that it finds itself in. Amazingly, Entropica was able to pass multiple animal intelligence tests, play human games, and even earn money trading stocks, all without being instructed to do so. Here are some examples of Entropica in action. Just like a human standing upright without falling over, here we see Entropica automatically balancing a pole using a cart. This behavior is remarkable in part because we never gave Entropica a goal. It simply decided on its own to balance the pole. This balancing ability will have appliactions for humanoid robotics and human assistive technologies. Just as some animals can use objects in their environments as tools to reach into narrow spaces, here we see that Entropica, again on its own initiative, was able to move a large disk representing an animal around so as to cause a small disk, representing a tool, to reach into a confined space holding a third disk and release the third disk from its initially fixed position. This tool use ability will have applications for smart manufacturing and agriculture. In addition, just as some other animals are able to cooperate by pulling opposite ends of a rope at the same time to release food, here we see that Entropica is able to accomplish a model version of that task. This cooperative ability has interesting implications for economic planning and a variety of other fields. Entropica is broadly applicable to a variety of domains. For example, here we see it successfully playing a game of pong against itself, illustrating its potential for gaming. Here we see Entropica orchestrating new connections on a social network where friends are constantly falling out of touch and successfully keeping the network well connected. This same network orchestration ability also has applications in health care, energy, and intelligence. Here we see Entropica directing the paths of a fleet of ships, successfully discovering and utilizing the Panama Canal to globally extend its reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific. By the same token, Entropica is broadly applicable to problems in autonomous defense, logistics and transportation. Finally, here we see Entropica spontaneously discovering and executing a buy-low, sell-high strategy on a simulated range traded stock, successfully growing assets under management exponentially. This risk management ability will have broad applications in finance and insurance. Alex Wissner-Gross: So what you've just seen is that a variety of signature human intelligent cognitive behaviors such as tool use and walking upright and social cooperation all follow from a single equation, which drives a system to maximize its future freedom of action. Now, there's a profound irony here. Going back to the beginning of the usage of the term robot, the play "RUR," there was always a concept that if we developed machine intelligence, there would be a cybernetic revolt. The machines would rise up against us. One major consequence of this work is that maybe all of these decades, we've had the whole concept of cybernetic revolt in reverse. It's not that machines first become intelligent and then megalomaniacal and try to take over the world. It's quite the opposite, that the urge to take control of all possible futures is a more fundamental principle than that of intelligence, that general intelligence may in fact emerge directly from this sort of control-grabbing, rather than vice versa. Another important consequence is goal seeking. I'm often asked, how does the ability to seek goals follow from this sort of framework? And the answer is, the ability to seek goals will follow directly from this in the following sense: just like you would travel through a tunnel, a bottleneck in your future path space, in order to achieve many other diverse objectives later on, or just like you would invest in a financial security, reducing your short-term liquidity in order to increase your wealth over the long term, goal seeking emerges directly from a long-term drive to increase future freedom of action. Finally, Richard Feynman, famous physicist, once wrote that if human civilization were destroyed and you could pass only a single concept on to our descendants to help them rebuild civilization, that concept should be that all matter around us is made out of tiny elements that attract each other when they're far apart but repel each other when they're close together. My equivalent of that statement to pass on to descendants to help them build artificial intelligences or to help them understand human intelligence, is the following: Intelligence should be viewed as a physical process that tries to maximize future freedom of action and avoid constraints in its own future. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Art that craves your attention | {0: 'A part of the Bangalore-based artist duo Pors & Rao, TED Senior Fellow Aparna Rao works with electro-mechanical systems and interactive installations.'} | TED Fellows Retreat 2013 | Hi. So today, I'd like to share some works in progress. Since we are still realizing these works, we are largely working within the realm of intuition and mystery, still. So I'm going to try and describe some of the experiences that we're looking for through each of the works. So the first work is called the Imperial Monochromes. A viewer sort of unsuspectingly walks into the room, and catches a glimpse of these panels in a messy composition on the wall. Within seconds, as if the panels have noticed the presence of the viewer, they appear to panic and sort of get into a strict symmetry. (Laughter) So this is the sketch of the two states. One is total chaos. The other is absolute order. And we were interested in seeing how little change it takes to move from one state to the other state. This also reminded us of two very different pictorial traditions. One is the altar tablets of the 15th century, and the other is about 100 years ago, Malevich's abstract compositions. So I'm just going to take you to a video. To give you a sense of scale, the largest panel is about two meters high. That's about this much. And the smallest one is an A4. So a viewer enters the space, and they snap to attention. And after a while, if the viewer continues to remain in the space, the panels will sort of become immune to the presence of the viewer and become lax and autonomous again, until they sort of sense a presence in the room or a movement, when they will again snap to attention. (Laughter) So here it appears as if it's the viewer that's sort of instigating the sense of order among the panels, but it could also be the other way around, that the panels are so stuck within their preconditioned behaviors that they sort of thrust the viewer with the role of a tyrant. So this brings me to a quieter, small work called Handheld. The viewer sees a piece of paper that's mounted on the far end of the wall, but when you go closer, you see that it's a blank A4, or a letter-sized piece of paper, that's held on either side by two small hands that appear to be carved with a great deal of attention and care from a small block of wood. The viewer also sees that this entire sculpture is sort of moving very slightly, as if these two hands are trying to hold the paper very still for a long period of time, and somehow are not managing to. So this instability in the movement very closely resembles the unsteady nature of images seen through a handheld camera. So here I'm going to show you two tandem clips. One is through a still camera and the other is through a handheld camera. And you immediately see how the unsteady nature of the video suggests the presence of an observer and a subjective point of view. So we've just removed the camera and transferred that movement onto the panel. So here's a video. You have to imagine the other hand. It's not there yet. But to us, we're sort of trying to evoke a self-effacing gesture, as if there's a little person with outstretched arms behind this enormous piece of paper. That sort of likens it to the amount of strain to be at the service of the observer and present this piece of paper very delicately to the viewer in front of them. The next work is Decoy. This is a cardboard model, so the object is about as tall as I am. It has a rounded body, two arms, and a very tall, head-like antenna, and its sole purpose is to attract attention towards itself. So when a viewer passes by, it sort of tilts from side to side, and moves its arms more and more frantically as the person gets closer. So here is the first test scenario. You see the two movements integrated, and the object seems to be employing its entire being in this expression of desperation. But the idea is that once it's got the person's attention, it's no longer interested, and it looks for the next person whose attention to get. (Laughter) So this is the final fabricated body of the Decoy. It appears to be mass-manufactured like it came out of a factory like vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Because we are always working from a very personal space, we like how this consumer aesthetic sort of depersonalizes the object and gives us a bit of distance in its appearance, at least. And so to us this is a kind of sinister being which is trying to distract you from the things that actually need your attention, but it could also be a figure that needs a lot of help. The next work is an object, that's also a kind of sound instrument. In the shape of an amphitheater that's scaled to the size of an audience as perceived from somebody from the stage. So from where I'm standing, each of you appears to be this big, and the audience sort of takes the entire field of my vision. Seated in this audience are 996 small figures. They're mechanically enabled to clap of their own free will. This means that each of them can decide if and when they want to clap, how hard, for how long, how they want to be influenced by those around them or influence others, and if they want to contribute to innovation. So when the viewer steps in front of the audience, there will be a response. It could be a few claps or a strong applause, and then nothing happens until the viewer leaves the stage, and again the audience will respond. It could be anything from a few feeble claps from members in the audience, or it could be a very loud ovation. So to us, I think we're really looking at an audience as its own object or its own organism that's also got a sort of musical-like quality to it, an instrument. So the viewer can play it by eliciting quite complex and varied, nuanced musical or sound patterns, but cannot really provoke the audience into any particular kind of response. So there's a sense of judgment and capriciousness and uneasiness involved. It also has an alluring and trap-like quality to it. So here if you see we're quite excited about the image of the head splitting to form the two hands. So here's a small visual animation, as if the two sides of the brain are sort of clashing against each other to kind of make sense of the duality and the tension. And here is a prototype. So we can't wait to be engulfed by 996 of them. Okay, this is the last work. It's called the Framerunners. It comes out of the idea of a window. This is an actual window in our studio, and as you can see, it's made up of three different thicknesses of wooden sections. So we used the same window vocabulary to construct our own frame or grid that's suspended in the room and that can be viewed from two sides. This grid is inhabited by a tribe of small figures. They're also made up of three different sizes, as if to suggest a kind of perspective or landscape on the single plain. Each of these figures can also run backward and forward in the track and hide behind two adjacent tracks. So in contrast to this very tight grid, we wanted to give these figures a very comical and slapstick-like quality, as if a puppeteer has taken them and physically animated them down the path. So we like the idea of these figures sort of skipping along like they're oblivious and carefree and happy-go-lucky and content, until they sort of sense a movement from the viewer and they will hide behind the fastest wall. So to us, this work also presents its own contradiction. These figures are sort of entrapped within this very strong grid, which is like a prison, but also a fortress, because it allows them to be oblivious and naive and carefree and quite oblivious of the external world. So all these real life qualities that I talk about are sort of translated to a very specific technical configuration, and we were very lucky to collaborate with ETH Zurich to develop the first prototype. So you see they extracted the motion cogs from our animations and created a wiggle that integrated the head-bobbing movement and the back-and-forth movement. So it's really quite small. You can see it can fit into the palm of my hand. So imagine our excitement when we saw it really working in the studio, and here it is. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
Does the media have a "duty of care"? | {0: 'After a much-awarded career as a film producer, Lord David Puttnam now works at the intersection of education, media and policy. '} | TEDxHousesOfParliament | I'd like to start, if I may, with the story of the Paisley snail. On the evening of the 26th of August, 1928, May Donoghue took a train from Glasgow to the town of Paisley, seven miles east of the city, and there at the Wellmeadow Café, she had a Scots ice cream float, a mix of ice cream and ginger beer bought for her by a friend. The ginger beer came in a brown, opaque bottle labeled "D. Stevenson, Glen Lane, Paisley." She drank some of the ice cream float, but as the remaining ginger beer was poured into her tumbler, a decomposed snail floated to the surface of her glass. Three days later, she was admitted to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis and shock. The case of Donoghue vs. Stevenson that followed set a very important legal precedent: Stevenson, the manufacturer of the ginger beer, was held to have a clear duty of care towards May Donoghue, even though there was no contract between them, and, indeed, she hadn't even bought the drink. One of the judges, Lord Atkin, described it like this: You must take care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbor. Indeed, one wonders that without a duty of care, how many people would have had to suffer from gastroenteritis before Stevenson eventually went out of business. Now please hang on to that Paisley snail story, because it's an important principle. Last year, the Hansard Society, a nonpartisan charity which seeks to strengthen parliamentary democracy and encourage greater public involvement in politics published, alongside their annual audit of political engagement, an additional section devoted entirely to politics and the media. Here are a couple of rather depressing observations from that survey. Tabloid newspapers do not appear to advance the political citizenship of their readers, relative even to those who read no newspapers whatsoever. Tabloid-only readers are twice as likely to agree with a negative view of politics than readers of no newspapers. They're not just less politically engaged. They are consuming media that reinforces their negative evaluation of politics, thereby contributing to a fatalistic and cynical attitude to democracy and their own role within it. Little wonder that the report concluded that in this respect, the press, particularly the tabloids, appear not to be living up to the importance of their role in our democracy. Now I doubt if anyone in this room would seriously challenge that view. But if Hansard are right, and they usually are, then we've got a very serious problem on our hands, and it's one that I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes focusing upon. Since the Paisley snail, and especially over the past decade or so, a great deal of thinking has been developed around the notion of a duty of care as it relates to a number of aspects of civil society. Generally a duty of care arises when one individual or a group of individuals undertakes an activity which has the potential to cause harm to another, either physically, mentally or economically. This is principally focused on obvious areas, such as our empathetic response to children and young people, to our service personnel, and to the elderly and infirm. It is seldom, if ever, extended to equally important arguments around the fragility of our present system of government, to the notion that honesty, accuracy and impartiality are fundamental to the process of building and embedding an informed, participatory democracy. And the more you think about it, the stranger that is. A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of opening a brand new school in the northeast of England. It had been renamed by its pupils as Academy 360. As I walked through their impressive, glass-covered atrium, in front of me, emblazoned on the wall in letters of fire was Marcus Aurelius's famous injunction: If it's not true, don't say it; if it's not right, don't do it. The head teacher saw me staring at it, and he said, "Oh, that's our school motto." On the train back to London, I couldn't get it out of my mind. I kept thinking, can it really have taken us over 2,000 years to come to terms with that simple notion as being our minimum expectation of each other? Isn't it time that we develop this concept of a duty of care and extended it to include a care for our shared but increasingly endangered democratic values? After all, the absence of a duty of care within many professions can all too easily amount to accusations of negligence, and that being the case, can we be really comfortable with the thought that we're in effect being negligent in respect of the health of our own societies and the values that necessarily underpin them? Could anyone honestly suggest, on the evidence, that the same media which Hansard so roundly condemned have taken sufficient care to avoid behaving in ways which they could reasonably have foreseen would be likely to undermine or even damage our inherently fragile democratic settlement. Now there will be those who will argue that this could all too easily drift into a form of censorship, albeit self-censorship, but I don't buy that argument. It has to be possible to balance freedom of expression with wider moral and social responsibilities. Let me explain why by taking the example from my own career as a filmmaker. Throughout that career, I never accepted that a filmmaker should set about putting their own work outside or above what he or she believed to be a decent set of values for their own life, their own family, and the future of the society in which we all live. I'd go further. A responsible filmmaker should never devalue their work to a point at which it becomes less than true to the world they themselves wish to inhabit. As I see it, filmmakers, journalists, even bloggers are all required to face up to the social expectations that come with combining the intrinsic power of their medium with their well-honed professional skills. Obviously this is not a mandated duty, but for the gifted filmmaker and the responsible journalist or even blogger, it strikes me as being utterly inescapable. We should always remember that our notion of individual freedom and its partner, creative freedom, is comparatively new in the history of Western ideas, and for that reason, it's often undervalued and can be very quickly undermined. It's a prize easily lost, and once lost, once surrendered, it can prove very, very hard to reclaim. And its first line of defense has to be our own standards, not those enforced on us by a censor or legislation, our own standards and our own integrity. Our integrity as we deal with those with whom we work and our own standards as we operate within society. And these standards of ours need to be all of a piece with a sustainable social agenda. They're part of a collective responsibility, the responsibility of the artist or the journalist to deal with the world as it really is, and this, in turn, must go hand in hand with the responsibility of those governing society to also face up to that world, and not to be tempted to misappropriate the causes of its ills. Yet, as has become strikingly clear over the last couple of years, such responsibility has to a very great extent been abrogated by large sections of the media. And as a consequence, across the Western world, the over-simplistic policies of the parties of protest and their appeal to a largely disillusioned, older demographic, along with the apathy and obsession with the trivial that typifies at least some of the young, taken together, these and other similarly contemporary aberrations are threatening to squeeze the life out of active, informed debate and engagement, and I stress active. The most ardent of libertarians might argue that Donoghue v. Stevenson should have been thrown out of court and that Stevenson would eventually have gone out of business if he'd continued to sell ginger beer with snails in it. But most of us, I think, accept some small role for the state to enforce a duty of care, and the key word here is reasonable. Judges must ask, did they take reasonable care and could they have reasonably foreseen the consequences of their actions? Far from signifying overbearing state power, it's that small common sense test of reasonableness that I'd like us to apply to those in the media who, after all, set the tone and the content for much of our democratic discourse. Democracy, in order to work, requires that reasonable men and women take the time to understand and debate difficult, sometimes complex issues, and they do so in an atmosphere which strives for the type of understanding that leads to, if not agreement, then at least a productive and workable compromise. Politics is about choices, and within those choices, politics is about priorities. It's about reconciling conflicting preferences wherever and whenever possibly based on fact. But if the facts themselves are distorted, the resolutions are likely only to create further conflict, with all the stresses and strains on society that inevitably follow. The media have to decide: Do they see their role as being to inflame or to inform? Because in the end, it comes down to a combination of trust and leadership. Fifty years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy made two epoch-making speeches, the first on disarmament and the second on civil rights. The first led almost immediately to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the second led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, both of which represented giant leaps forward. Democracy, well-led and well-informed, can achieve very great things, but there's a precondition. We have to trust that those making those decisions are acting in the best interest not of themselves but of the whole of the people. We need factually-based options, clearly laid out, not those of a few powerful and potentially manipulative corporations pursuing their own frequently narrow agendas, but accurate, unprejudiced information with which to make our own judgments. If we want to provide decent, fulfilling lives for our children and our children's children, we need to exercise to the very greatest degree possible that duty of care for a vibrant, and hopefully a lasting, democracy. Thank you very much for listening to me. (Applause) |
Paper beats plastic? How to rethink environmental folklore | {0: 'Leyla Acaroglu uses innovative design and systems thinking to create positive change. '} | TED2013 | So imagine, you're in the supermarket, you're buying some groceries, and you get given the option for a plastic or a paper shopping bag. Which one do you choose if you want to do the right thing by the environment? Most people do pick the paper. Okay, let's think of why. It's brown to start with. Therefore, it must be good for the environment. It's biodegradable. It's reusable. In some cases, it's recyclable. So when people are looking at the plastic bag, it's likely they're thinking of something like this, which we all know is absolutely terrible, and we should be avoiding at all expenses these kinds of environmental damages. But people are often not thinking of something like this, which is the other end of the spectrum. When we produce materials, we need to extract them from the environment, and we need a whole bunch of environmental impacts. You see, what happens is, when we need to make complex choices, us humans like really simple solutions, and so we often ask for simple solutions. And I work in design. I advise designers and innovators around sustainability, and everyone always says to me, "Oh Leyla, I just want the eco-materials." And I say, "Well, that's very complex, and we'll have to spend four hours talking about what exactly an eco-material means, because everything at some point comes from nature, and it's how you use the material that dictates the environmental impact. So what happens is, we have to rely on some sort of intuitive framework when we make decisions. So I like to call that intuitive framework our environmental folklore. It's either the little voice at the back of your head, or it's that gut feeling you get when you've done the right thing, so when you've picked the paper bag or when you've bought a fuel-efficient car. And environmental folklore is a really important thing because we're trying to do the right thing. But how do we know if we're actually reducing the net environmental impacts that our actions as individuals and as professionals and as a society are actually having on the natural environment? So the thing about environmental folklore is it tends to be based on our experiences, the things we've heard from other people. It doesn't tend to be based on any scientific framework. And this is really hard, because we live in incredibly complex systems. We have the human systems of how we communicate and interrelate and have our whole constructed society, We have the industrial systems, which is essentially the entire economy, and then all of that has to operate within the biggest system, and, I would argue, the most important, the ecosystem. And you see, the choices that we make as an individual, but the choices that we make in every single job that we have, no matter how high or low you are in the pecking order, has an impact on all of these systems. And the thing is that we have to find ways if we're actually going to address sustainability of interlocking those complex systems and making better choices that result in net environmental gains. What we need to do is we need to learn to do more with less. We have an increasing population, and everybody likes their mobile phones, especially in this situation here. So we need to find innovative ways of solving some of these problems that we face. And that's where this process called life cycle thinking comes in. So essentially, everything that is created goes through a series of life cycle stages, and we use this scientific process called life cycle assessment, or in America, you guys say life cycle analysis, in order to have a clearer picture of how everything that we do in the technical part of those systems affects the natural environment. So we go all the way back to the extraction of raw materials, and then we look at manufacturing, we look at packaging and transportation, use, and end of life, and at every single one of these stages, the things that we do have an interaction with the natural environment, and we can monitor how that interaction is actually affecting the systems and services that make life on Earth possible. And through doing this, we've learned some absolutely fascinating things. And we've busted a bunch of myths. So to start with, there's a word that's used a lot. It's used a lot in marketing, and it's used a lot, I think, in our conversation when we're talking about sustainability, and that's the word biodegradability. Now biodegradability is a material property; it is not a definition of environmental benefits. Allow me to explain. When something natural, something that's made from a cellulose fiber like a piece of bread, even, or any food waste, or even a piece of paper, when something natural ends up in the natural environment, it degrades normally. Its little carbon molecules that it stored up as it was growing are naturally released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, but this is a net situation. Most natural things don't actually end up in nature. Most of the things, the waste that we produce, end up in landfill. Landfill is a different environment. In landfill, those same carbon molecules degrade in a different way, because a landfill is anaerobic. It's got no oxygen. It's tightly compacted and hot. Those same molecules, they become methane, and methane is a 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So our old lettuces and products that we have thrown out that are made out of biodegradable materials, if they end up in landfill, contribute to climate change. You see, there are facilities now that can actually capture that methane and generate power, displacing the need for fossil fuel power, but we need to be smart about this. We need to identify how we can start to leverage these types of things that are already happening and start to design systems and services that alleviate these problems. Because right now, what people do is they turn around and they say, "Let's ban plastic bags. We'll give people paper because that is better for the environment." But if you're throwing it in the bin, and your local landfill facility is just a normal one, then we're having what's called a double negative. I'm a product designer by trade. I then did social science. And so I'm absolutely fascinated by consumer goods and how the consumer goods that we have kind of become immune to that fill our lives have an impact on the natural environment. And these guys are, like, serial offenders, and I'm pretty sure everyone in this room has a refrigerator. Now America has this amazing ability to keep growing refrigerators. In the last few years, they've grown one cubic foot on average, the standard size of a refrigerator. And the problem is, they're so big now, it's easier for us to buy more food that we can't eat or find. I mean, I have things at the back of my refrigerator that have been there for years, all right? And so what happens is, we waste more food. And as I was just explaining, food waste is a problem. In fact, here in the U.S., 40 percent of food purchased for the home is wasted. Half of the world's produced food is wasted. That's the latest U.N. stats. Up to half of the food. It's insane. It's 1.3 billion tons of food per annum. And I blame it on the refrigerator, well, especially in Western cultures, because it makes it easier. I mean, there's a lot of complex systems going on here. I don't want to make it so simplistic. But the refrigerator is a serious contributor to this, and one of the features of it is the crisper drawer. You all got crisper drawers? The drawer that you put your lettuces in? Lettuces have a habit of going soggy in the crisper drawers, don't they? Yeah? Soggy lettuces? In the U.K., this is such a problem that there was a government report a few years ago that actually said the second biggest offender of wasted food in the U.K. is the soggy lettuce. It was called the Soggy Lettuce Report. Okay? So this is a problem, people. These poor little lettuces are getting thrown out left, right and center because the crisper drawers are not designed to actually keep things crisp. Okay. You need a tight environment. You need, like, an airless environment to prevent the degrading that would happen naturally. But the crisper drawers, they're just a drawer with a slightly better seal. Anyway, I'm clearly obsessed. Don't ever invite me over because I'll just start going through your refrigerator and looking at all sorts of things like that. But essentially, this is a big problem. Because when we lose something like the lettuce from the system, not only do we have that impact I just explained at the end of life, but we actually have had to grow that lettuce. The life cycle impact of that lettuce is astronomical. We've had to clear land. We've had to plant seeds, phosphorus, fertilizers, nutrients, water, sunlight. All of the embodied impacts in that lettuce get lost from the system, which makes it a far bigger environmental impact than the loss of the energy from the fridge. So we need to design things like this far better if we're going to start addressing serious environmental problems. We could start with the crisper drawer and the size. For those of you in the room who do design fridges, that would be great. The problem is, imagine if we actually started to reconsider how we designed things. So I look at the refrigerator as a sign of modernity, but we actually haven't really changed the design of them that much since the 1950s. A little bit, but essentially they're still big boxes, cold boxes that we store stuff in. So imagine if we actually really started to identify these problems and use that as the foundation for finding innovative and elegant design solutions that will solve those problems. This is design-led system change, design dictating the way in which the system can be far more sustainable. Forty percent food waste is a major problem. Imagine if we designed fridges that halved that. Another item that I find fascinating is the electric tea kettle, which I found out that you don't do tea kettles in this country, really, do you? But that's really big in the U.K. Ninety-seven percent of households in the United Kingdom own an electric tea kettle. So they're very popular. And, I mean, if I were to work with a design firm or a designer, and they were designing one of these, and they wanted to do it eco, they'd usually ask me two things. They'd say, "Leyla, how do I make it technically efficient?" Because obviously energy's a problem with this product. Or, "How do I make it green materials? How do I make the materials green in the manufacturing?" Would you ask me those questions? They seem logical, right? Yeah. Well I'd say, "You're looking at the wrong problems." Because the problem is with use. It's with how people use the product. Sixty-five percent of Brits admit to over-filling their kettle when they only need one cup of tea. All of this extra water that's being boiled requires energy, and it's been calculated that in one day of extra energy use from boiling kettles is enough to light all of the streetlights in England for a night. But this is the thing. This is what I call a product-person failure. But we've got a product-system failure going on with these little guys, and they're so ubiquitous, you don't even notice they're there. And this guy over here, though, he does. He's named Simon. Simon works for the national electricity company in the U.K. He has a very important job of monitoring all of the electricity coming into the system to make sure there is enough so it powers everybody's homes. He's also watching television. The reason is because there's a unique phenomenon that happens in the U.K. the moment that very popular TV shows end. The minute the ad break comes on, this man has to rush to buy nuclear power from France, because everybody turns their kettles on at the same time. (Laughter) 1.5 million kettles, seriously problematic. So imagine if you designed kettles, you actually found a way to solve these system failures, because this is a huge amount of pressure on the system, just because the product hasn't thought about the problem that it's going to have when it exists in the world. Now, I looked at a number of kettles available on the market, and found the minimum fill lines, so the little piece of information that tells you how much you need to put in there, was between two and a five-and-a-half cups of water just to make one cup of tea. So this kettle here is an example of one where it actually has two reservoirs. One's a boiling chamber, and one's the water holder. The user actually has to push that button to get their hot water boiled, which means, because we're all lazy, you only fill exactly what you need. And this is what I call behavior-changing products: products, systems or services that intervene and solve these problems up front. Now, this is a technology arena, so obviously these things are quite popular, but I think if we're going to keep designing, buying and using and throwing out these kinds of products at the rate we currently do, which is astronomically high, there are seven billion people who live in the world right now. There are six billion mobile phone subscriptions as of last year. Every single year, 1.5 billion mobile phones roll off production lines, and some companies report their production rate as being greater than the human birth rate. One hundred fifty-two million phones were thrown out in the U.S. last year; only 11 percent were recycled. I'm from Australia. We have a population of 22 million — don't laugh — and it's been reported that 22 million phones are in people's drawers. We need to find ways of solving the problems around this, because these things are so complicated. They have so much locked up inside them. Gold! Did you know that it's actually cheaper now to get gold out of a ton of old mobile phones than it is out of a ton of gold ore? There's a number of highly complex and valuable materials embodied inside these things, so we need to find ways of encouraging disassembly, because this is otherwise what happens. This is a community in Ghana, and e-waste is reported, or electronic waste is reported by the U.N. as being up to 50 million tons trafficked. This is how they get the gold and the other valuable materials out. They burn the electronic waste in open spaces. These are communities, and this is happening all over the world. And because we don't see the ramifications of the choices that we make as designers, as businesspeople, as consumers, then these kinds of externalities happen, and these are people's lives. So we need to find smarter, more systems-based, innovative solutions to these problems, if we're going to start to live sustainably within this world. So imagine if, when you bought your mobile phone, your new one because you replaced your old one — after 15 to 18 months is the average time that people replace their phones, by the way — so if we're going to keep this kind of expedient mobile phone replacing, then we should be looking at closing the loop on these systems. The people who produce these phones, and some of which I'm sure are in the room right now, could potentially look at doing what we call closed-loop systems, or product system services, so identifying that there is a market demand and that market demand's not going to go anywhere, so you design the product to solve the problem. Design for disassembly, design for light-weighting. We heard some of those kinds of strategies being used in the Tesla Motors car today. These kinds of approaches are not hard, but understanding the system and then looking for viable, market-driven consumer demand alternatives is how we can start radically altering the sustainability agenda, because I hate to break it to you all: Consumption is the biggest problem. But design is one of the best solutions. These kinds of products are everywhere. By identifying alternative ways of doing things, we can actually start to innovate, and I say actually start to innovate. I'm sure everyone in this room is very innovative. But in the regards to using sustainability as a parameter, as a criteria for fueling systems-based solutions, because as I've just demonstrated with these simple products, they're participating in these major problems. So we need to look across the entire life of the things that we do. If you just had paper or plastic — obviously reusable is far more beneficial — then the paper is worse, and the paper is worse because it weighs four to 10 times more than the plastic, and when we actually compare, from a life cycle perspective, a kilo of plastic and a kilo of paper, the paper is far better, but the functionality of a plastic or a paper bag to carry your groceries home is not done with a kilo of each material. It's done with a very small amount of plastic and quite a lot more paper. Because functionality defines environmental impact, and I said earlier that the designers always ask me for the eco-materials. I say, there's only a few materials that you should completely avoid. The rest of them, it's all about application, and at the end of the day, everything we design and produce in the economy or buy as consumers is done so for function. We want something, therefore we buy it. So breaking things back down and delivering smartly, elegantly, sophisticated solutions that take into consideration the entire system and the entire life of the thing, everything, all the way back to the extraction through to the end of life, we can start to actually find really innovative solutions. And I'll just leave you with one very quick thing that a designer said to me recently who I work with, a senior designer. I said, "How come you're not doing sustainability? I know you know this." And he said, "Well, recently I pitched a sustainability project to a client, and turned and he said to me, 'I know it's going to cost less, I know it's going to sell more, but we're not pioneers, because pioneers have arrows in their backs.'" I think we've got a roomful of pioneers, and I hope there are far more pioneers out there, because we need to solve these problems. Thank you. (Applause) |
The investment logic for sustainability | {0: 'Chris McKnett helps institutional investors put money toward sustainable and socially-forward assets.'} | TED@State Street Boston | The world is changing in some really profound ways, and I worry that investors aren't paying enough attention to some of the biggest drivers of change, especially when it comes to sustainability. And by sustainability, I mean the really juicy things, like environmental and social issues and corporate governance. I think it's reckless to ignore these things, because doing so can jeopardize future long-term returns. And here's something that may surprise you: the balance of power to really influence sustainability rests with institutional investors, the large investors like pension funds, foundations and endowments. I believe that sustainable investing is less complicated than you think, better-performing than you believe, and more important than we can imagine. Let me remind you what we already know. We have a population that's both growing and aging; we have seven billion souls today heading to 10 billion at the end of the century; we consume natural resources faster than they can be replenished; and the emissions that are mainly responsible for climate change just keep increasing. Now clearly, these are environmental and social issues, but that's not all. They're economic issues, and that makes them relevant to risk and return. And they are really complex and they can seem really far off, that the temptation may be to do this: bury our heads in the sand and not think about it. Resist this, if you can. Don't do this at home. (Laughter) But it makes me wonder if the investment rules of today are fit for purpose tomorrow. We know that investors, when they look at a company and decide whether to invest, they look at financial data, metrics like sales growth, cash flow, market share, valuation — you know, the really sexy stuff. And these things are fundamental, of course, but they're not enough. Investors should also look at performance metrics in what we call ESG: environment, social and governance. Environment includes energy consumption, water availability, waste and pollution, just making efficient uses of resources. Social includes human capital, things like employee engagement and innovation capacity, as well as supply chain management and labor rights and human rights. And governance relates to the oversight of companies by their boards and investors. See, I told you this is the really juicy stuff. But ESG is the measure of sustainability, and sustainable investing incorporates ESG factors with financial factors into the investment process. It means limiting future risk by minimizing harm to people and planet, and it means providing capital to users who deploy it towards productive and sustainable outcomes. So if sustainability matters financially today, and all signs indicate more tomorrow, is the private sector paying attention? Well, the really cool thing is that most CEOs are. They started to see sustainability not just as important but crucial to business success. About 80 percent of global CEOs see sustainability as the root to growth in innovation and leading to competitive advantage in their industries. But 93 percent see ESG as the future, or as important to the future of their business. So the views of CEOs are clear. There's tremendous opportunity in sustainability. So how are companies actually leveraging ESG to drive hard business results? One example is near and dear to our hearts. In 2012, State Street migrated 54 applications to the cloud environment, and we retired another 85. We virtualized our operating system environments, and we completed numerous automation projects. Now these initiatives create a more mobile workplace, and they reduce our real estate footprint, and they yield savings of 23 million dollars in operating costs annually, and avoid the emissions of a 100,000 metric tons of carbon. That's the equivalent of taking 21,000 cars off the road. So awesome, right? Another example is Pentair. Pentair is a U.S. industrial conglomerate, and about a decade ago, they sold their core power tools business and reinvested those proceeds in a water business. That's a really big bet. Why did they do that? Well, with apologies to the Home Improvement fans, there's more growth in water than in power tools, and this company has their sights set on what they call "the new New World." That's four billion middle class people demanding food, energy and water. Now, you may be asking yourself, are these just isolated cases? I mean, come on, really? Do companies that take sustainability into account really do well financially? The answer that may surprise you is yes. The data shows that stocks with better ESG performance perform just as well as others. In blue, we see the MSCI World. It's an index of large companies from developed markets across the world. And in gold, we see a subset of companies rated as having the best ESG performance. Over three plus years, no performance tradeoff. So that's okay, right? We want more. I want more. In some cases, there may be outperformance from ESG. In blue, we see the performance of the 500 largest global companies, and in gold, we see a subset of companies with best practice in climate change strategy and risk management. Now over almost eight years, they've outperformed by about two thirds. So yes, this is correlation. It's not causation. But it does illustrate that environmental leadership is compatible with good returns. So if the returns are the same or better and the planet benefits, wouldn't this be the norm? Are investors, particularly institutional investors, engaged? Well, some are, and a few are really at the vanguard. Hesta. Hesta is a retirement fund for health and community services employees in Australia, with assets of 22 billion [dollars]. They believe that ESG has the potential to impact risks and returns, so incorporating it into the investment process is core to their duty to act in the best interest of fund members, core to their duty. You gotta love the Aussies, right? CalPERS is another example. CalPERS is the pension fund for public employees in California, and with assets of 244 billion [dollars], they are the second largest in the U.S. and the sixth largest in the world. Now, they're moving toward 100 percent sustainable investment by systematically integrated ESG across the entire fund. Why? They believe it's critical to superior long-term returns, full stop. In their own words, "long-term value creation requires the effective management of three forms of capital: financial, human, and physical. This is why we are concerned with ESG." Now, I do speak to a lot of investors as part of my job, and not all of them see it this way. Often I hear, "We are required to maximize returns, so we don't do that here," or, "We don't want to use the portfolio to make policy statements." The one that just really gets under my skin is, "If you want to do something about that, just make money, give the profits to charities." It's eyes rolling, eyes rolling. I mean, let me clarify something right here. Companies and investors are not singularly responsible for the fate of the planet. They don't have indefinite social obligations, and prudent investing and finance theory aren't subordinate to sustainability. They're compatible. So I'm not talking about tradeoffs here. But institutional investors are the x-factor in sustainability. Why do they hold the key? The answer, quite simply, is, they have the money. (Laughter) A lot of it. I mean, a really lot of it. The global stock market is worth 55 trillion dollars. The global bond market, 78 trillion. That's 133 trillion combined. That's eight and a half times the GDP of the U.S. That's the world's largest economy. That's some serious freaking firepower. So we can reconsider some of these pressing challenges, like fresh water, clean air, feeding 10 billion mouths, if institutional investors integrated ESG into investment. What if they used that firepower to allocate more of their capital to companies working the hardest at solving these challenges or at least not exacerbating them? What if we work and save and invest, only to find that the world we retire into is more stressed and less secure than it is now? What if there isn't enough clean air and fresh water? Now a fair question might be, what if all this sustainability risk stuff is exaggerated, overstated, it's not urgent, something for virtuous consumers or lifestyle choice? Well, President John F. Kennedy said something about this that is just spot on: "There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction." I can appreciate that there is estimation risk in this, but since this is based on widespread scientific consensus, the odds that it's not completely wrong are better than the odds that our house will burn down or we'll get in a car accident. Well, maybe not if you live in Boston. (Laughter) But my point is that we buy insurance to protect ourselves financially in case those things happen, right? So by investing sustainably we're doing two things. We're creating insurance, reducing the risk to our planet and to our economy, and at the same time, in the short term, we're not sacrificing performance. [Man in comic: "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"] Good, you like it. I like it too. (Laughter) I like it because it pokes fun at both sides of the climate change issue. I bet you can't guess which side I'm on. But what I really like about it is that it reminds me of something Mark Twain said, which is, "Plan for the future, because that's where you're going to spend the rest of your life." Thank you. (Applause) |
Synthetic voices, as unique as fingerprints | {0: 'People relying on synthetic speech use the voice they’re given, not their own. Rupal Patel created the vocaliD project to change that.'} | TEDWomen 2013 | I'd like to talk today about a powerful and fundamental aspect of who we are: our voice. Each one of us has a unique voiceprint that reflects our age, our size, even our lifestyle and personality. In the words of the poet Longfellow, "the human voice is the organ of the soul." As a speech scientist, I'm fascinated by how the voice is produced, and I have an idea for how it can be engineered. That's what I'd like to share with you. I'm going to start by playing you a sample of a voice that you may recognize. (Recording) Stephen Hawking: "I would have thought it was fairly obvious what I meant." Rupal Patel: That was the voice of Professor Stephen Hawking. What you may not know is that same voice may also be used by this little girl who is unable to speak because of a neurological condition. In fact, all of these individuals may be using the same voice, and that's because there's only a few options available. In the U.S. alone, there are 2.5 million Americans who are unable to speak, and many of whom use computerized devices to communicate. Now that's millions of people worldwide who are using generic voices, including Professor Hawking, who uses an American-accented voice. This lack of individuation of the synthetic voice really hit home when I was at an assistive technology conference a few years ago, and I recall walking into an exhibit hall and seeing a little girl and a grown man having a conversation using their devices, different devices, but the same voice. And I looked around and I saw this happening all around me, literally hundreds of individuals using a handful of voices, voices that didn't fit their bodies or their personalities. We wouldn't dream of fitting a little girl with the prosthetic limb of a grown man. So why then the same prosthetic voice? It really struck me, and I wanted to do something about this. I'm going to play you now a sample of someone who has, two people actually, who have severe speech disorders. I want you to take a listen to how they sound. They're saying the same utterance. (First voice) (Second voice) You probably didn't understand what they said, but I hope that you heard their unique vocal identities. So what I wanted to do next is, I wanted to find out how we could harness these residual vocal abilities and build a technology that could be customized for them, voices that could be customized for them. So I reached out to my collaborator, Tim Bunnell. Dr. Bunnell is an expert in speech synthesis, and what he'd been doing is building personalized voices for people by putting together pre-recorded samples of their voice and reconstructing a voice for them. These are people who had lost their voice later in life. We didn't have the luxury of pre-recorded samples of speech for those born with speech disorder. But I thought, there had to be a way to reverse engineer a voice from whatever little is left over. So we decided to do exactly that. We set out with a little bit of funding from the National Science Foundation, to create custom-crafted voices that captured their unique vocal identities. We call this project VocaliD, or vocal I.D., for vocal identity. Now before I get into the details of how the voice is made and let you listen to it, I need to give you a real quick speech science lesson. Okay? So first, we know that the voice is changing dramatically over the course of development. Children sound different from teens who sound different from adults. We've all experienced this. Fact number two is that speech is a combination of the source, which is the vibrations generated by your voice box, which are then pushed through the rest of the vocal tract. These are the chambers of your head and neck that vibrate, and they actually filter that source sound to produce consonants and vowels. So the combination of source and filter is how we produce speech. And that happens in one individual. Now I told you earlier that I'd spent a good part of my career understanding and studying the source characteristics of people with severe speech disorder, and what I've found is that even though their filters were impaired, they were able to modulate their source: the pitch, the loudness, the tempo of their voice. These are called prosody, and I've been documenting for years that the prosodic abilities of these individuals are preserved. So when I realized that those same cues are also important for speaker identity, I had this idea. Why don't we take the source from the person we want the voice to sound like, because it's preserved, and borrow the filter from someone about the same age and size, because they can articulate speech, and then mix them? Because when we mix them, we can get a voice that's as clear as our surrogate talker — that's the person we borrowed the filter from— and is similar in identity to our target talker. It's that simple. That's the science behind what we're doing. So once you have that in mind, how do you go about building this voice? Well, you have to find someone who is willing to be a surrogate. It's not such an ominous thing. Being a surrogate donor only requires you to say a few hundred to a few thousand utterances. The process goes something like this. (Video) Voice: Things happen in pairs. I love to sleep. The sky is blue without clouds. RP: Now she's going to go on like this for about three to four hours, and the idea is not for her to say everything that the target is going to want to say, but the idea is to cover all the different combinations of the sounds that occur in the language. The more speech you have, the better sounding voice you're going to have. Once you have those recordings, what we need to do is we have to parse these recordings into little snippets of speech, one- or two-sound combinations, sometimes even whole words that start populating a dataset or a database. We're going to call this database a voice bank. Now the power of the voice bank is that from this voice bank, we can now say any new utterance, like, "I love chocolate" — everyone needs to be able to say that— fish through that database and find all the segments necessary to say that utterance. (Video) Voice: I love chocolate. RP: So that's speech synthesis. It's called concatenative synthesis, and that's what we're using. That's not the novel part. What's novel is how we make it sound like this young woman. This is Samantha. I met her when she was nine, and since then, my team and I have been trying to build her a personalized voice. We first had to find a surrogate donor, and then we had to have Samantha produce some utterances. What she can produce are mostly vowel-like sounds, but that's enough for us to extract her source characteristics. What happens next is best described by my daughter's analogy. She's six. She calls it mixing colors to paint voices. It's beautiful. It's exactly that. Samantha's voice is like a concentrated sample of red food dye which we can infuse into the recordings of her surrogate to get a pink voice just like this. (Video) Samantha: Aaaaaah. RP: So now, Samantha can say this. (Video) Samantha: This voice is only for me. I can't wait to use my new voice with my friends. RP: Thank you. (Applause) I'll never forget the gentle smile that spread across her face when she heard that voice for the first time. Now there's millions of people around the world like Samantha, millions, and we've only begun to scratch the surface. What we've done so far is we have a few surrogate talkers from around the U.S. who have donated their voices, and we have been using those to build our first few personalized voices. But there's so much more work to be done. For Samantha, her surrogate came from somewhere in the Midwest, a stranger who gave her the gift of voice. And as a scientist, I'm so excited to take this work out of the laboratory and finally into the real world so it can have real-world impact. What I want to share with you next is how I envision taking this work to that next level. I imagine a whole world of surrogate donors from all walks of life, different sizes, different ages, coming together in this voice drive to give people voices that are as colorful as their personalities. To do that as a first step, we've put together this website, VocaliD.org, as a way to bring together those who want to join us as voice donors, as expertise donors, in whatever way to make this vision a reality. They say that giving blood can save lives. Well, giving your voice can change lives. All we need is a few hours of speech from our surrogate talker, and as little as a vowel from our target talker, to create a unique vocal identity. So that's the science behind what we're doing. I want to end by circling back to the human side that is really the inspiration for this work. About five years ago, we built our very first voice for a little boy named William. When his mom first heard this voice, she said, "This is what William would have sounded like had he been able to speak." And then I saw William typing a message on his device. I wondered, what was he thinking? Imagine carrying around someone else's voice for nine years and finally finding your own voice. Imagine that. This is what William said: "Never heard me before." Thank you. (Applause) |
Love -- you're doing it wrong | {0: "Yann Dall'Aglio is a philosopher who thinks deeply about modern love."} | TEDxParis 2012 | What is love? It's a hard term to define in so far as it has a very wide application. I can love jogging. I can love a book, a movie. I can love escalopes. I can love my wife. (Laughter) But there's a great difference between an escalope and my wife, for instance. That is, if I value the escalope, the escalope, on the other hand, it doesn't value me back. Whereas my wife, she calls me the star of her life. (Laughter) Therefore, only another desiring conscience can conceive me as a desirable being. I know this, that's why love can be defined in a more accurate way as the desire of being desired. Hence the eternal problem of love: how to become and remain desirable? The individual used to find an answer to this problem by submitting his life to community rules. You had a specific part to play according to your sex, your age, your social status, and you only had to play your part to be valued and loved by the whole community. Think about the young woman who must remain chaste before marriage. Think about the youngest son who must obey the eldest son, who in turn must obey the patriarch. But a phenomenon started in the 13th century, mainly in the Renaissance, in the West, that caused the biggest identity crisis in the history of humankind. This phenomenon is modernity. We can basically summarize it through a triple process. First, a process of rationalization of scientific research, which has accelerated technical progress. Next, a process of political democratization, which has fostered individual rights. And finally, a process of rationalization of economic production and of trade liberalization. These three intertwined processes have completely annihilated all the traditional bearings of Western societies, with radical consequences for the individual. Now individuals are free to value or disvalue any attitude, any choice, any object. But as a result, they are themselves confronted with this same freedom that others have to value or disvalue them. In other words, my value was once ensured by submitting myself to the traditional authorities. Now it is quoted in the stock exchange. On the free market of individual desires, I negotiate my value every day. Hence the anxiety of contemporary man. He is obsessed: "Am I desirable? How desirable? How many people are going to love me?" And how does he respond to this anxiety? Well, by hysterically collecting symbols of desirability. (Laughter) I call this act of collecting, along with others, seduction capital. Indeed, our consumer society is largely based on seduction capital. It is said about this consumption that our age is materialistic. But it's not true! We only accumulate objects in order to communicate with other minds. We do it to make them love us, to seduce them. Nothing could be less materialistic, or more sentimental, than a teenager buying brand new jeans and tearing them at the knees, because he wants to please Jennifer. (Laughter) Consumerism is not materialism. It is rather what is swallowed up and sacrificed in the name of the god of love, or rather in the name of seduction capital. In light of this observation on contemporary love, how can we think of love in the years to come? We can envision two hypotheses: The first one consists of betting that this process of narcissistic capitalization will intensify. It is hard to say what shape this intensification will take, because it largely depends on social and technical innovations, which are by definition difficult to predict. But we can, for instance, imagine a dating website which, a bit like those loyalty points programs, uses seduction capital points that vary according to my age, my height/weight ratio, my degree, my salary, or the number of clicks on my profile. We can also imagine a chemical treatment for breakups that weakens the feelings of attachment. By the way, there's a program on MTV already in which seduction teachers treat heartache as a disease. These teachers call themselves "pick-up artists." "Artist" in French is easy, it means "artiste." "Pick-up" is to pick someone up, but not just any picking up — it's picking up chicks. So they are artists of picking up chicks. (Laughter) And they call heartache "one-itis." In English, "itis" is a suffix that signifies infection. One-itis can be translated as "an infection from one." It's a bit disgusting. Indeed, for the pick-up artists, falling in love with someone is a waste of time, it's squandering your seduction capital, so it must be eliminated like a disease, like an infection. We can also envision a romantic use of the genome. Everyone would carry it around and present it like a business card to verify if seduction can progress to reproduction. (Laughter) Of course, this race for seduction, like every fierce competition, will create huge disparities in narcissistic satisfaction, and therefore a lot of loneliness and frustration too. So we can expect that modernity itself, which is the origin of seduction capital, would be called into question. I'm thinking particularly of the reaction of neo-fascist or religious communes. But such a future doesn't have to be. Another path to thinking about love may be possible. But how? How to renounce the hysterical need to be valued? Well, by becoming aware of my uselessness. (Laughter) Yes, I'm useless. But rest assured: so are you. (Laughter) (Applause) We are all useless. This uselessness is easily demonstrated, because in order to be valued I need another to desire me, which shows that I do not have any value of my own. I don't have any inherent value. We all pretend to have an idol; we all pretend to be an idol for someone else, but actually we are all impostors, a bit like a man on the street who appears totally cool and indifferent, while he has actually anticipated and calculated so that all eyes are on him. I think that becoming aware of this general imposture that concerns all of us would ease our love relationships. It is because I want to be loved from head to toe, justified in my every choice, that the seduction hysteria exists. And therefore I want to seem perfect so that another can love me. I want them to be perfect so that I can be reassured of my value. It leads to couples obsessed with performance who will break up, just like that, at the slightest underachievement. In contrast to this attitude, I call upon tenderness — love as tenderness. What is tenderness? To be tender is to accept the loved one's weaknesses. It's not about becoming a sad couple of orderlies. (Laughter) That's pretty bad. On the contrary, there's plenty of charm and happiness in tenderness. I refer specifically to a kind of humor that is unfortunately underused. It is a sort of poetry of deliberate awkwardness. I refer to self-mockery. For a couple who is no longer sustained, supported by the constraints of tradition, I believe that self-mockery is one of the best means for the relationship to endure. |
A new way to grow bone | {0: 'Molly Stevens studies and creates new biomaterials that could be used to detect disease and repair bones and human tissue.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | As humans, it's in our nature to want to improve our health and minimize our suffering. Whatever life throws at us, whether it's cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or even broken bones, we want to try and get better. Now I'm head of a biomaterials lab, and I'm really fascinated by the way that humans have used materials in really creative ways in the body over time. Take, for example, this beautiful blue nacre shell. This was actually used by the Mayans as an artificial tooth replacement. We're not quite sure why they did it. It's hard. It's durable. But it also had other very nice properties. In fact, when they put it into the jawbone, it could integrate into the jaw, and we know now with very sophisticated imaging technologies that part of that integration comes from the fact that this material is designed in a very specific way, has a beautiful chemistry, has a beautiful architecture. And I think in many ways we can sort of think of the use of the blue nacre shell and the Mayans as the first real application of the bluetooth technology. (Laughter) But if we move on and think throughout history how people have used different materials in the body, very often it's been physicians that have been quite creative. They've taken things off the shelf. One of my favorite examples is that of Sir Harold Ridley, who was a famous ophthalmologist, or at least became a famous ophthalmologist. And during World War II, what he would see would be pilots coming back from their missions, and he noticed that within their eyes they had shards of small bits of material lodged within the eye, but the very interesting thing about it was that material, actually, wasn't causing any inflammatory response. So he looked into this, and he figured out that actually that material was little shards of plastic that were coming from the canopy of the Spitfires. And this led him to propose that material as a new material for intraocular lenses. It's called PMMA, and it's now used in millions of people every year and helps in preventing cataracts. And that example, I think, is a really nice one, because it helps remind us that in the early days, people often chose materials because they were bioinert. Their very purpose was to perform a mechanical function. You'd put them in the body and you wouldn't get an adverse response. And what I want to show you is that in regenerative medicine, we've really shifted away from that idea of taking a bioinert material. We're actually actively looking for materials that will be bioactive, that will interact with the body, and that furthermore we can put in the body, they'll have their function, and then they'll dissolve away over time. If we look at this schematic, this is showing you what we think of as the typical tissue-engineering approach. We have cells there, typically from the patient. We can put those onto a material, and we can make that material very complex if we want to, and we can then grow that up in the lab or we can put it straight back into the patient. And this is an approach that's used all over the world, including in our lab. But one of the things that's really important when we're thinking about stem cells is that obviously stem cells can be many different things, and they want to be many different things, and so we want to make sure that the environment we put them into has enough information so that they can become the right sort of specialist tissue. And if we think about the different types of tissues that people are looking at regenerating all over the world, in all the different labs in the world, there's pretty much every tissue you can think of. And actually, the structure of those tissues is quite different, and it's going to really depend on whether your patient has any underlying disease, other conditions, in terms of how you're going to regenerate your tissue, and you're going to need to think about the materials you're going to use really carefully, their biochemistry, their mechanics, and many other properties as well. Our tissues all have very different abilities to regenerate, and here we see poor Prometheus, who made a rather tricky career choice and was punished by the Greek gods. He was tied to a rock, and an eagle would come every day to eat his liver. But of course his liver would regenerate every day, and so day after day he was punished for eternity by the gods. And liver will regenerate in this very nice way, but actually if we think of other tissues, like cartilage, for example, even the simplest nick and you're going to find it really difficult to regenerate your cartilage. So it's going to be very different from tissue to tissue. Now, bone is somewhere in between, and this is one of the tissues that we work on a lot in our lab. And bone is actually quite good at repairing. It has to be. We've probably all had fractures at some point or other. And one of the ways that you can think about repairing your fracture is this procedure here, called an iliac crest harvest. And what the surgeon might do is take some bone from your iliac crest, which is just here, and then transplant that somewhere else in the body. And it actually works really well, because it's your own bone, and it's well vascularized, which means it's got a really good blood supply. But the problem is, there's only so much you can take, and also when you do that operation, your patients might actually have significant pain in that defect site even two years after the operation. So what we were thinking is, there's a tremendous need for bone repair, of course, but this iliac crest-type approach really has a lot of limitations to it, and could we perhaps recreate the generation of bone within the body on demand and then be able to transplant it without these very, very painful aftereffects that you would have with the iliac crest harvest? And so this is what we did, and the way we did it was by coming back to this typical tissue-engineering approach but actually thinking about it rather differently. And we simplified it a lot, so we got rid of a lot of these steps. We got rid of the need to harvest cells from the patient, we got rid of the need to put in really fancy chemistries, and we got rid of the need to culture these scaffolds in the lab. And what we really focused on was our material system and making it quite simple, but because we used it in a really clever way, we were able to generate enormous amounts of bone using this approach. So we were using the body as really the catalyst to help us to make lots of new bone. And it's an approach that we call the in vivo bioreactor, and we were able to make enormous amounts of bone using this approach. And I'll talk you through this. So what we do is, in humans, we all have a layer of stem cells on the outside of our long bones. That layer is called the periosteum. And that layer is actually normally very, very tightly bound to the underlying bone, and it's got stem cells in it. Those stem cells are really important in the embryo when it develops, and they also sort of wake up if you have a fracture to help you with repairing the bone. So we take that periosteum layer and we developed a way to inject underneath it a liquid that then, within 30 seconds, would turn into quite a rigid gel and can actually lift the periosteum away from the bone. So it creates, in essence, an artificial cavity that is right next to both the bone but also this really rich layer of stem cells. And we go in through a pinhole incision so that no other cells from the body can get in, and what happens is that that artificial in vivo bioreactor cavity can then lead to the proliferation of these stem cells, and they can form lots of new tissue, and then over time, you can harvest that tissue and use it elsewhere in the body. This is a histology slide of what we see when we do that, and essentially what we see is very large amounts of bone. So in this picture, you can see the middle of the leg, so the bone marrow, then you can see the original bone, and you can see where that original bone finishes, and just to the left of that is the new bone that's grown within that bioreactor cavity, and you can actually make it even larger. And that demarcation that you can see between the original bone and the new bone acts as a very slight point of weakness, so actually now the surgeon can come along, can harvest away that new bone, and the periosteum can grow back, so you're left with the leg in the same sort of state as if you hadn't operated on it in the first place. So it's very, very low in terms of after-pain compared to an iliac crest harvest. And you can grow different amounts of bone depending on how much gel you put in there, so it really is an on demand sort of procedure. Now, at the time that we did this, this received a lot of attention in the press, because it was a really nice way of generating new bone, and we got many, many contacts from different people that were interested in using this. And I'm just going to tell you, sometimes those contacts are very strange, slightly unexpected, and the very most interesting, let me put it that way, contact that I had, was actually from a team of American footballers that all wanted to have double-thickness skulls made on their head. And so you do get these kinds of contacts, and of course, being British and also growing up in France, I tend to be very blunt, and so I had to explain to them very nicely that in their particular case, there probably wasn't that much in there to protect in the first place. (Laughter) (Applause) So this was our approach, and it was simple materials, but we thought about it carefully. And actually we know that those cells in the body, in the embryo, as they develop can form a different kind of tissue, cartilage, and so we developed a gel that was slightly different in nature and slightly different chemistry, put it in there, and we were able to get 100 percent cartilage instead. And this approach works really well, I think, for pre-planned procedures, but it's something you do have to pre-plan. So for other kinds of operations, there's definitely a need for other scaffold-based approaches. And when you think about designing those other scaffolds, actually, you need a really multi-disciplinary team. And so our team has chemists, it has cell biologists, surgeons, physicists even, and those people all come together and we think really hard about designing the materials. But we want to make them have enough information that we can get the cells to do what we want, but not be so complex as to make it difficult to get to clinic. And so one of the things we think about a lot is really trying to understand the structure of the tissues in the body. And so if we think of bone, obviously my own favorite tissue, we zoom in, we can see, even if you don't know anything about bone structure, it's beautifully organized, really beautifully organized. We've lots of blood vessels in there. And if we zoom in again, we see that the cells are actually surrounded by a 3D matrix of nano-scale fibers, and they give a lot of information to the cells. And if we zoom in again, actually in the case of bone, the matrix around the cells is beautifully organized at the nano scale, and it's a hybrid material that's part organic, part inorganic. And that's led to a whole field, really, that has looked at developing materials that have this hybrid kind of structure. And so I'm showing here just two examples where we've made some materials that have that sort of structure, and you can really tailor it. You can see here a very squishy one and now a material that's also this hybrid sort of material but actually has remarkable toughness, and it's no longer brittle. And an inorganic material would normally be really brittle, and you wouldn't be able to have that sort of strength and toughness in it. One other thing I want to quickly mention is that many of the scaffolds we make are porous, and they have to be, because you want blood vessels to grow in there. But the pores are actually oftentimes much bigger than the cells, and so even though it's 3D, the cell might see it more as a slightly curved surface, and that's a little bit unnatural. And so one of the things you can think about doing is actually making scaffolds with slightly different dimensions that might be able to surround your cells in 3D and give them a little bit more information. And there's a lot of work going on in both of these areas. Now finally, I just want to talk a little bit about applying this sort of thing to cardiovascular disease, because this is a really big clinical problem. And one of the things that we know is that, unfortunately, if you have a heart attack, then that tissue can start to die, and your outcome may not be very good over time. And it would be really great, actually, if we could stop that dead tissue either from dying or help it to regenerate. And there's lots and lots of stem cell trials going on worldwide, and they use many different types of cells, but one common theme that seems to be coming out is that actually, very often, those cells will die once you've implanted them. And you can either put them into the heart or into the blood system, but either way, we don't seem to be able to get quite the right number of cells getting to the location we want them to and being able to deliver the sort of beautiful cell regeneration that we would like to have to get good clinical outcomes. And so some of the things that we're thinking of, and many other people in the field are thinking of, are actually developing materials for that. But there's a difference here. We still need chemistry, we still need mechanics, we still need really interesting topography, and we still need really interesting ways to surround the cells. But now, the cells also would probably quite like a material that's going to be able to be conductive, because the cells themselves will respond very well and will actually conduct signals between themselves. You can see them now beating synchronously on these materials, and that's a very, very exciting development that's going on. So just to wrap up, I'd like to actually say that being able to work in this sort of field, all of us that work in this field that's not only super-exciting science, but also has the potential to impact on patients, however big or small they are, is really a great privilege. And so for that, I'd like to thank all of you as well. Thank you. (Applause) |
What it takes to be a great leader | {0: "BCG's Roselinde Torres studies what makes great leaders tick -- and figures out how to teach others the same skills."} | TED@BCG San Francisco | What makes a great leader today? Many of us carry this image of this all-knowing superhero who stands and commands and protects his followers. But that's kind of an image from another time, and what's also outdated are the leadership development programs that are based on success models for a world that was, not a world that is or that is coming. We conducted a study of 4,000 companies, and we asked them, let's see the effectiveness of your leadership development programs. Fifty-eight percent of the companies cited significant talent gaps for critical leadership roles. That means that despite corporate training programs, off-sites, assessments, coaching, all of these things, more than half the companies had failed to grow enough great leaders. You may be asking yourself, is my company helping me to prepare to be a great 21st-century leader? The odds are, probably not. Now, I've spent 25 years of my professional life observing what makes great leaders. I've worked inside Fortune 500 companies, I've advised over 200 CEOs, and I've cultivated more leadership pipelines than you can imagine. But a few years ago, I noticed a disturbing trend in leadership preparation. I noticed that, despite all the efforts, there were familiar stories that kept resurfacing about individuals. One story was about Chris, a high-potential, superstar leader who moves to a new unit and fails, destroying unrecoverable value. And then there were stories like Sidney, the CEO, who was so frustrated because her company is cited as a best company for leaders, but only one of the top 50 leaders is equipped to lead their crucial initiatives. And then there were stories like the senior leadership team of a once-thriving business that's surprised by a market shift, finds itself having to force the company to reduce its size in half or go out of business. Now, these recurring stories cause me to ask two questions. Why are the leadership gaps widening when there's so much more investment in leadership development? And what are the great leaders doing distinctly different to thrive and grow? One of the things that I did, I was so consumed by these questions and also frustrated by those stories, that I left my job so that I could study this full time, and I took a year to travel to different parts of the world to learn about effective and ineffective leadership practices in companies, countries and nonprofit organizations. And so I did things like travel to South Africa, where I had an opportunity to understand how Nelson Mandela was ahead of his time in anticipating and navigating his political, social and economic context. I also met a number of nonprofit leaders who, despite very limited financial resources, were making a huge impact in the world, often bringing together seeming adversaries. And I spent countless hours in presidential libraries trying to understand how the environment had shaped the leaders, the moves that they made, and then the impact of those moves beyond their tenure. And then, when I returned to work full time, in this role, I joined with wonderful colleagues who were also interested in these questions. Now, from all this, I distilled the characteristics of leaders who are thriving and what they do differently, and then I also distilled the preparation practices that enable people to grow to their potential. I want to share some of those with you now. ("What makes a great leader in the 21st century?") In a 21st-century world, which is more global, digitally enabled and transparent, with faster speeds of information flow and innovation, and where nothing big gets done without some kind of a complex matrix, relying on traditional development practices will stunt your growth as a leader. In fact, traditional assessments like narrow 360 surveys or outdated performance criteria will give you false positives, lulling you into thinking that you are more prepared than you really are. Leadership in the 21st century is defined and evidenced by three questions. Where are you looking to anticipate the next change to your business model or your life? The answer to this question is on your calendar. Who are you spending time with? On what topics? Where are you traveling? What are you reading? And then how are you distilling this into understanding potential discontinuities, and then making a decision to do something right now so that you're prepared and ready? There's a leadership team that does a practice where they bring together each member collecting, here are trends that impact me, here are trends that impact another team member, and they share these, and then make decisions, to course-correct a strategy or to anticipate a new move. Great leaders are not head-down. They see around corners, shaping their future, not just reacting to it. The second question is, what is the diversity measure of your personal and professional stakeholder network? You know, we hear often about good ol' boy networks and they're certainly alive and well in many institutions. But to some extent, we all have a network of people that we're comfortable with. So this question is about your capacity to develop relationships with people that are very different than you. And those differences can be biological, physical, functional, political, cultural, socioeconomic. And yet, despite all these differences, they connect with you and they trust you enough to cooperate with you in achieving a shared goal. Great leaders understand that having a more diverse network is a source of pattern identification at greater levels and also of solutions, because you have people that are thinking differently than you are. Third question: are you courageous enough to abandon a practice that has made you successful in the past? There's an expression: Go along to get along. But if you follow this advice, chances are as a leader, you're going to keep doing what's familiar and comfortable. Great leaders dare to be different. They don't just talk about risk-taking, they actually do it. And one of the leaders shared with me the fact that the most impactful development comes when you are able to build the emotional stamina to withstand people telling you that your new idea is naïve or reckless or just plain stupid. Now interestingly, the people who will join you are not your usual suspects in your network. They're often people that think differently and therefore are willing to join you in taking a courageous leap. And it's a leap, not a step. More than traditional leadership programs, answering these three questions will determine your effectiveness as a 21st-century leader. So what makes a great leader in the 21st century? I've met many, and they stand out. They are women and men who are preparing themselves not for the comfortable predictability of yesterday but also for the realities of today and all of those unknown possibilities of tomorrow. Thank you. (Applause) |
Are we designed to be sexual omnivores? | {0: 'The co-author of "Sex at Dawn," Christopher Ryan explores the prehistoric roots of human sexuality.'} | TED2013 | I'm going to go off script and make Chris quite nervous here by making this audience participation. All right. Are you with me? Yeah. Yeah. All right. So what I'd like to do is have you raise your hand if you've ever heard a heterosexual couple having sex. Could be the neighbors, hotel room, your parents. Sorry. Okay. Pretty much everybody. Now raise your hand if the man was making more noise than the woman. I see one guy there. It doesn't count if it was you, sir. (Laughter) So his hand's down. And one woman. Okay. Sitting next to a loud guy. Now what does this tell us? It tells us that human beings make noise when they have sex, and it's generally the woman who makes more noise. This is known as female copulatory vocalization to the clipboard crowd. I wasn't even going to mention this, but somebody told me that Meg Ryan might be here, and she is the world's most famous female copulatory vocalizer. So I thought, got to talk about that. We'll get back to that a little bit later. Let me start by saying human beings are not descended from apes, despite what you may have heard. We are apes. We are more closely related to the chimp and the bonobo than the African elephant is to the Indian elephant, as Jared Diamond pointed out in one of his early books. We're more closely related to chimps and bonobos than chimps and bonobos are related to any other primate — gorillas, orangutans, what have you. So we're extremely closely related to them, and as you'll see in terms of our behavior, we've got some relationship as well. So what I'm asking today, the question I want to explore with you today is, what kind of ape are we in terms of our sexuality? Now, since Darwin's day there's been what Cacilda and I have called the standard narrative of human sexual evolution, and you're all familiar with it, even if you haven't read this stuff. The idea is that, as part of human nature, from the beginning of our species' time, men have sort of leased women's reproductive potential by providing them with certain goods and services. Generally we're talking about meat, shelter, status, protection, things like that. And in exchange, women have offered fidelity, or at least a promise of fidelity. Now this sets men and women up in an oppositional relationship. The war between the sexes is built right into our DNA, according to this vision. Right? What Cacilda and I have argued is that no, this economic relationship, this oppositional relationship, is actually an artifact of agriculture, which only arose about 10,000 years ago at the earliest. Anatomically modern human beings have been around for about 200,000 years, so we're talking about five percent, at most, of our time as a modern, distinct species. So before agriculture, before the agricultural revolution, it's important to understand that human beings lived in hunter-gatherer groups that are characterized wherever they're found in the world by what anthropologists called fierce egalitarianism. They not only share things, they demand that things be shared: meat, shelter, protection, all these things that were supposedly being traded to women for their sexual fidelity, it turns out, are shared widely among these societies. Now I'm not saying that our ancestors were noble savages, and I'm not saying modern day hunter-gatherers are noble savages either. What I'm saying is that this is simply the best way to mitigate risk in a foraging context. And there's really no argument about this among anthropologists. All Cacilda and I have done is extend this sharing behavior to sexuality. So we've argued that human sexuality has essentially evolved, until agriculture, as a way of establishing and maintaining the complex, flexible social systems, networks, that our ancestors were very good at, and that's why our species has survived so well. Now, this makes some people uncomfortable, and so I always need to take a moment in these talks to say, listen, I'm saying our ancestors were promiscuous, but I'm not saying they were having sex with strangers. There were no strangers. Right? In a hunter-gatherer band, there are no strangers. You've known these people your entire life. So I'm saying, yes, there were overlapping sexual relationships, that our ancestors probably had several different sexual relationships going on at any given moment in their adult lives. But I'm not saying they were having sex with strangers. I'm not saying that they didn't love the people they were having sex with. And I'm not saying there was no pair-bonding going on. I'm just saying it wasn't sexually exclusive. And those of us who have chosen to be monogamous — my parents, for example, have been married for 52 years monogamously, and if it wasn't monogamously, Mom and Dad, I don't want to hear about it— I'm not criticizing this and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this. What I'm saying is that to argue that our ancestors were sexual omnivores is no more a criticism of monogamy than to argue that our ancestors were dietary omnivores is a criticism of vegetarianism. You can choose to be a vegetarian, but don't think that just because you've made that decision, bacon suddenly stops smelling good. Okay? So this is my point. (Laughter) That one took a minute to sink in, huh? Now, in addition to being a great genius, a wonderful man, a wonderful husband, a wonderful father, Charles Darwin was also a world-class Victorian prude. All right? He was perplexed by the sexual swellings of certain primates, including chimps and bonobos, because these sexual swellings tend to provoke many males to mate with the females. So he couldn't understand why on Earth would the female have developed this thing if all they were supposed to be doing is forming their pair bond, right? Chimps and bonobos, Darwin didn't really know this, but chimps and bonobos mate one to four times per hour with up to a dozen males per day when they have their sexual swellings. Interestingly, chimps have sexual swellings through 40 percent, roughly, of their menstrual cycle, bonobos 90 percent, and humans are among the only species on the planet where the female is available for sex throughout the menstrual cycle, whether she's menstruating, whether she's post-menopausal, whether she's already pregnant. This is vanishingly rare among mammals. So it's a very interesting aspect of human sexuality. Now, Darwin ignored the reflections of the sexual swelling in his own day, as scientists tend to do sometimes. So what we're talking about is sperm competition. Now the average human ejaculate has about 300 million sperm cells, so it's already a competitive environment. The question is whether these sperm are competing against other men's sperm or just their own. There's a lot to talk about in this chart. The one thing I'll call your attention to right away is the little musical note above the female chimp and bonobo and human. That indicates female copulatory vocalization. Just look at the numbers. The average human has sex about 1,000 times per birth. If that number seems high for some of you, I assure you it seems low for others in the room. We share that ratio with chimps and bonobos. We don't share it with the other three apes, the gorilla, the orangutan and the gibbon, who are more typical of mammals, having sex only about a dozen times per birth. Humans and bonobos are the only animals that have sex face-to-face when both of them are alive. (Laughter) And you'll see that the human, chimp and bonobo all have external testicles, which in our book we equate to a special fridge you have in the garage just for beer. If you're the kind of guy who has a beer fridge in the garage, you expect a party to happen at any moment, and you need to be ready. That's what the external testicles are. They keep the sperm cells cool so you can have frequent ejaculations. I'm sorry. It's true. The human, some of you will be happy to hear, has the largest, thickest penis of any primate. Now, this evidence goes way beyond anatomy. It goes into anthropology as well. Historical records are full of accounts of people around the world who have sexual practices that should be impossible given what we have assumed about human sexual evolution. These women are the Mosuo from southwestern China. In their society, everyone, men and women, are completely sexually autonomous. There's no shame associated with sexual behavior. Women have hundreds of partners. It doesn't matter. Nobody cares. Nobody gossips. It's not an issue. When the woman becomes pregnant, the child is cared for by her, her sisters, and her brothers. The biological father is a nonissue. On the other side of the planet, in the Amazon, we've got many tribes which practice what anthropologists call partible paternity. These people actually believe — and they have no contact among them, no common language or anything, so it's not an idea that spread, it's an idea that's arisen around the world — they believe that a fetus is literally made of accumulated semen. So a woman who wants to have a child who's smart and funny and strong makes sure she has lots of sex with the smart guy, the funny guy and the strong guy, to get the essence of each of these men into the baby, and then when the child is born, these different men will come forward and acknowledge their paternity of the child. So paternity is actually sort of a team endeavor in this society. So there are all sorts of examples like this that we go through in the book. Now, why does this matter? Edward Wilson says we need to understand that human sexuality is first a bonding device and only secondarily procreation. I think that's true. This matters because our evolved sexuality is in direct conflict with many aspects of the modern world. The contradictions between what we're told we should feel and what we actually do feel generates a huge amount of unnecessary suffering. My hope is that a more accurate, updated understanding of human sexuality will lead us to have greater tolerance for ourselves, for each other, greater respect for unconventional relationship configurations like same-sex marriage or polyamorous unions, and that we'll finally put to rest the idea that men have some innate, instinctive right to monitor and control women's sexual behavior. (Applause) Thank you. And we'll see that it's not only gay people that have to come out of the closet. We all have closets we have to come out of. Right? And when we do come out of those closets, we'll recognize that our fight is not with each other, our fight is with an outdated, Victorian sense of human sexuality that conflates desire with property rights, generates shame and confusion in place of understanding and empathy. It's time we moved beyond Mars and Venus, because the truth is that men are from Africa and women are from Africa. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. Christopher Ryan: Thank you. CA: So a question. It's so perplexing, trying to use arguments about evolutionary history to turn that into what we ought to do today. Someone could give a talk and say, look at us, we've got these really sharp teeth and muscles and a brain that's really good at throwing weapons, and if you look at lots of societies around the world, you'll see very high rates of violence. Nonviolence is a choice like vegetarianism, but it's not who you are. How is that different from the talk you gave? CR: Well first of all, the evidence for high levels of violence in prehistory is very debatable. But that's just an example. Certainly, you know, lots of people say to me, just because we lived a certain way in the past doesn't mean we should live that way now, and I agree with that. Everyone has to respond to the modern world. But the body does have its inherent evolved trajectories. And so you could live on McDonald's and milkshakes, but your body will rebel against that. We have appetites. I think it was Schopenhauer who said, a person can do what they want but not want what they want. And so what I'm arguing against is the shame that's associated with desires. It's the idea that if you love your husband or wife but you still are attracted to other people, there's something wrong with you, there's something wrong with your marriage, something wrong with your partner. I think a lot of families are fractured by unrealistic expectations that are based upon this false vision of human sexuality. That's what I'm trying to get at. CA: Thank you. Communicated powerfully. Thanks a lot. CR: Thank you, Chris. (Applause) |
We're all hiding something. Let's find the courage to open up | {0: 'Ash Beckham approaches hard conversations from a place of compassion and empathy. '} | TEDxBoulder | I'm going to talk to you tonight about coming out of the closet, and not in the traditional sense, not just the gay closet. I think we all have closets. Your closet may be telling someone you love her for the first time, or telling someone that you're pregnant, or telling someone you have cancer, or any of the other hard conversations we have throughout our lives. All a closet is is a hard conversation, and although our topics may vary tremendously, the experience of being in and coming out of the closet is universal. It is scary, and we hate it, and it needs to be done. Several years ago, I was working at the South Side Walnut Cafe, a local diner in town, and during my time there I would go through phases of militant lesbian intensity: not shaving my armpits, quoting Ani DiFranco lyrics as gospel. And depending on the bagginess of my cargo shorts and how recently I had shaved my head, the question would often be sprung on me, usually by a little kid: "Um, are you a boy or are you a girl?" And there would be an awkward silence at the table. I'd clench my jaw a little tighter, hold my coffee pot with a little more vengeance. The dad would awkwardly shuffle his newspaper and the mom would shoot a chilling stare at her kid. But I would say nothing, and I would seethe inside. And it got to the point where every time I walked up to a table that had a kid anywhere between three and 10 years old, I was ready to fight. (Laughter) And that is a terrible feeling. So I promised myself, the next time, I would say something. I would have that hard conversation. So within a matter of weeks, it happens again. "Are you a boy or are you a girl?" Familiar silence, but this time I'm ready, and I am about to go all Women's Studies 101 on this table. (Laughter) I've got my Betty Friedan quotes. I've got my Gloria Steinem quotes. I've even got this little bit from "Vagina Monologues" I'm going to do. So I take a deep breath and I look down and staring back at me is a four-year-old girl in a pink dress, not a challenge to a feminist duel, just a kid with a question: "Are you a boy or are you a girl?" So I take another deep breath, squat down to next to her, and say, "Hey, I know it's kind of confusing. My hair is short like a boy's, and I wear boy's clothes, but I'm a girl, and you know how sometimes you like to wear a pink dress, and sometimes you like to wear your comfy jammies? Well, I'm more of a comfy jammies kind of girl." And this kid looks me dead in the eye, without missing a beat, and says, "My favorite pajamas are purple with fish. Can I get a pancake, please?" (Laughter) And that was it. Just, "Oh, okay. You're a girl. How about that pancake?" It was the easiest hard conversation I have ever had. And why? Because Pancake Girl and I, we were both real with each other. So like many of us, I've lived in a few closets in my life, and yeah, most often, my walls happened to be rainbow. But inside, in the dark, you can't tell what color the walls are. You just know what it feels like to live in a closet. So really, my closet is no different than yours or yours or yours. Sure, I'll give you 100 reasons why coming out of my closet was harder than coming out of yours, but here's the thing: Hard is not relative. Hard is hard. Who can tell me that explaining to someone you've just declared bankruptcy is harder than telling someone you just cheated on them? Who can tell me that his coming out story is harder than telling your five-year-old you're getting a divorce? There is no harder, there is just hard. We need to stop ranking our hard against everyone else's hard to make us feel better or worse about our closets and just commiserate on the fact that we all have hard. At some point in our lives, we all live in closets, and they may feel safe, or at least safer than what lies on the other side of that door. But I am here to tell you, no matter what your walls are made of, a closet is no place for a person to live. Thanks. (Applause) So imagine yourself 20 years ago. Me, I had a ponytail, a strapless dress, and high-heeled shoes. I was not the militant lesbian ready to fight any four-year-old that walked into the cafe. I was frozen by fear, curled up in the corner of my pitch-black closet clutching my gay grenade, and moving one muscle is the scariest thing I have ever done. My family, my friends, complete strangers — I had spent my entire life trying to not disappoint these people, and now I was turning the world upside down on purpose. I was burning the pages of the script we had all followed for so long, but if you do not throw that grenade, it will kill you. One of my most memorable grenade tosses was at my sister's wedding. (Laughter) It was the first time that many in attendance knew I was gay, so in doing my maid of honor duties, in my black dress and heels, I walked around to tables and finally landed on a table of my parents' friends, folks that had known me for years. And after a little small talk, one of the women shouted out, "I love Nathan Lane!" And the battle of gay relatability had begun. "Ash, have you ever been to the Castro?" "Well, yeah, actually, we have friends in San Francisco." "Well, we've never been there but we've heard it's fabulous." "Ash, do you know my hairdresser Antonio? He's really good and he has never talked about a girlfriend." "Ash, what's your favorite TV show? Our favorite TV show? Favorite: Will & Grace. And you know who we love? Jack. Jack is our favorite." And then one woman, stumped but wanting so desperately to show her support, to let me know she was on my side, she finally blurted out, "Well, sometimes my husband wears pink shirts." (Laughter) And I had a choice in that moment, as all grenade throwers do. I could go back to my girlfriend and my gay-loving table and mock their responses, chastise their unworldliness and their inability to jump through the politically correct gay hoops I had brought with me, or I could empathize with them and realize that that was maybe one of the hardest things they had ever done, that starting and having that conversation was them coming out of their closets. Sure, it would have been easy to point out where they felt short. It's a lot harder to meet them where they are and acknowledge the fact that they were trying. And what else can you ask someone to do but try? If you're going to be real with someone, you gotta be ready for real in return. So hard conversations are still not my strong suit. Ask anybody I have ever dated. But I'm getting better, and I follow what I like to call the three Pancake Girl principles. Now, please view this through gay-colored lenses, but know what it takes to come out of any closet is essentially the same. Number one: Be authentic. Take the armor off. Be yourself. That kid in the cafe had no armor, but I was ready for battle. If you want someone to be real with you, they need to know that you bleed too. Number two: Be direct. Just say it. Rip the Band-Aid off. If you know you are gay, just say it. If you tell your parents you might be gay, they will hold out hope that this will change. Do not give them that sense of false hope. (Laughter) And number three, and most important — (Laughter) Be unapologetic. You are speaking your truth. Never apologize for that. And some folks may have gotten hurt along the way, so sure, apologize for what you've done, but never apologize for who you are. And yeah, some folks may be disappointed, but that is on them, not on you. Those are their expectations of who you are, not yours. That is their story, not yours. The only story that matters is the one that you want to write. So the next time you find yourself in a pitch-black closet clutching your grenade, know we have all been there before. And you may feel so very alone, but you are not. And we know it's hard but we need you out here, no matter what your walls are made of, because I guarantee you there are others peering through the keyholes of their closets looking for the next brave soul to bust a door open, so be that person and show the world that we are bigger than our closets and that a closet is no place for a person to truly live. Thank you, Boulder. Enjoy your night. (Applause) |
Can the damaged brain repair itself? | {0: 'Siddharthan Chandran explores how to heal damage from degenerative disorders such as MS and motor neuron disease (ALS).'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I'm very pleased to be here today to talk to you all about how we might repair the damaged brain, and I'm particularly excited by this field, because as a neurologist myself, I believe that this offers one of the great ways that we might be able to offer hope for patients who today live with devastating and yet untreatable diseases of the brain. So here's the problem. You can see here the picture of somebody's brain with Alzheimer's disease next to a healthy brain, and what's obvious is, in the Alzheimer's brain, ringed red, there's obvious damage — atrophy, scarring. And I could show you equivalent pictures from other disease: multiple sclerosis, motor neuron disease, Parkinson's disease, even Huntington's disease, and they would all tell a similar story. And collectively these brain disorders represent one of the major public health threats of our time. And the numbers here are really rather staggering. At any one time, there are 35 million people today living with one of these brain diseases, and the annual cost globally is 700 billion dollars. I mean, just think about that. That's greater than one percent of the global GDP. And it gets worse, because all these numbers are rising because these are by and large age-related diseases, and we're living longer. So the question we really need to ask ourselves is, why, given the devastating impact of these diseases to the individual, never mind the scale of the societal problem, why are there no effective treatments? Now in order to consider this, I first need to give you a crash course in how the brain works. So in other words, I need to tell you everything I learned at medical school. (Laughter) But believe me, this isn't going to take very long. Okay? (Laughter) So the brain is terribly simple: it's made up of four cells, and two of them are shown here. There's the nerve cell, and then there's the myelinating cell, or the insulating cell. It's called oligodendrocyte. And when these four cells work together in health and harmony, they create an extraordinary symphony of electrical activity, and it is this electrical activity that underpins our ability to think, to emote, to remember, to learn, move, feel and so on. But equally, each of these individual four cells alone or together, can go rogue or die, and when that happens, you get damage. You get damaged wiring. You get disrupted connections. And that's evident here with the slower conduction. But ultimately, this damage will manifest as disease, clearly. And if the starting dying nerve cell is a motor nerve, for example, you'll get motor neuron disease. So I'd like to give you a real-life illustration of what happens with motor neuron disease. So this is a patient of mine called John. John I saw just last week in the clinic. And I've asked John to tell us something about what were his problems that led to the initial diagnosis of motor neuron disease. John: I was diagnosed in October in 2011, and the main problem was a breathing problem, difficulty breathing. Siddharthan Chandran: I don't know if you caught all of that, but what John was telling us was that difficulty with breathing led eventually to the diagnosis of motor neuron disease. So John's now 18 months further down in that journey, and I've now asked him to tell us something about his current predicament. John: What I've got now is the breathing's gotten worse. I've got weakness in my hands, my arms and my legs. So basically I'm in a wheelchair most of the time. SC: John's just told us he's in a wheelchair most of the time. So what these two clips show is not just the devastating consequence of the disease, but they also tell us something about the shocking pace of the disease, because in just 18 months, a fit adult man has been rendered wheelchair- and respirator-dependent. And let's face it, John could be anybody's father, brother or friend. So that's what happens when the motor nerve dies. But what happens when that myelin cell dies? You get multiple sclerosis. So the scan on your left is an illustration of the brain, and it's a map of the connections of the brain, and superimposed upon which are areas of damage. We call them lesions of demyelination. But they're damage, and they're white. So I know what you're thinking here. You're thinking, "My God, this bloke came up and said he's going to talk about hope, and all he's done is give a really rather bleak and depressing tale." I've told you these diseases are terrible. They're devastating, numbers are rising, the costs are ridiculous, and worst of all, we have no treatment. Where's the hope? Well, you know what? I think there is hope. And there's hope in this next section, of this brain section of somebody else with M.S., because what it illustrates is, amazingly, the brain can repair itself. It just doesn't do it well enough. And so again, there are two things I want to show you. First of all is the damage of this patient with M.S. And again, it's another one of these white masses. But crucially, the area that's ringed red highlights an area that is pale blue. But that area that is pale blue was once white. So it was damaged. It's now repaired. Just to be clear: It's not because of doctors. It's in spite of doctors, not because of doctors. This is spontaneous repair. It's amazing and it's occurred because there are stem cells in the brain, even, which can enable new myelin, new insulation, to be laid down over the damaged nerves. And this observation is important for two reasons. The first is it challenges one of the orthodoxies that we learnt at medical school, or at least I did, admittedly last century, which is that the brain doesn't repair itself, unlike, say, the bone or the liver. But actually it does, but it just doesn't do it well enough. And the second thing it does, and it gives us a very clear direction of travel for new therapies — I mean, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know what to do here. You simply need to find ways of promoting the endogenous, spontaneous repair that occurs anyway. So the question is, why, if we've known that for some time, as we have, why do we not have those treatments? And that in part reflects the complexity of drug development. Now, drug development you might think of as a rather expensive but risky bet, and the odds of this bet are roughly this: they're 10,000 to one against, because you need to screen about 10,000 compounds to find that one potential winner. And then you need to spend 15 years and spend over a billion dollars, and even then, you may not have a winner. So the question for us is, can you change the rules of the game and can you shorten the odds? And in order to do that, you have to think, where is the bottleneck in this drug discovery? And one of the bottlenecks is early in drug discovery. All that screening occurs in animal models. But we know that the proper study of mankind is man, to borrow from Alexander Pope. So the question is, can we study these diseases using human material? And of course, absolutely we can. We can use stem cells, and specifically we can use human stem cells. And human stem cells are these extraordinary but simple cells that can do two things: they can self-renew or make more of themselves, but they can also become specialized to make bone, liver or, crucially, nerve cells, maybe even the motor nerve cell or the myelin cell. And the challenge has long been, can we harness the power, the undoubted power of these stem cells in order to realize their promise for regenerative neurology? And I think we can now, and the reason we can is because there have been several major discoveries in the last 10, 20 years. One of them was here in Edinburgh, and it must be the only celebrity sheep, Dolly. So Dolly was made in Edinburgh, and Dolly was an example of the first cloning of a mammal from an adult cell. But I think the even more significant breakthrough for the purposes of our discussion today was made in 2006 by a Japanese scientist called Yamanaka. And what Yamaka did, in a fantastic form of scientific cookery, was he showed that four ingredients, just four ingredients, could effectively convert any cell, adult cell, into a master stem cell. And the significance of this is difficult to exaggerate, because what it means that from anybody in this room, but particularly patients, you could now generate a bespoke, personalized tissue repair kit. Take a skin cell, make it a master pluripotent cell, so you could then make those cells that are relevant to their disease, both to study but potentially to treat. Now, the idea of that at medical school — this is a recurring theme, isn't it, me and medical school? — would have been ridiculous, but it's an absolute reality today. And I see this as the cornerstone of regeneration, repair and hope. And whilst we're on the theme of hope, for those of you who might have failed at school, there's hope for you as well, because this is the school report of John Gerdon. ["I believe he has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous."] So they didn't think much of him then. But what you may not know is that he got the Nobel Prize for medicine just three months ago. So to return to the original problem, what is the opportunity of these stem cells, or this disruptive technology, for repairing the damaged brain, which we call regenerative neurology? I think there are two ways you can think about this: as a fantastic 21st-century drug discovery tool, and/or as a form of therapy. So I want to tell you a little bit about both of those in the next few moments. Drug discovery in a dish is how people often talk about this. It's very simple: You take a patient with a disease, let's say motor neuron disease, you take a skin sample, you do the pluripotent reprogramming, as I've already told you, and you generate live motor nerve cells. That's straightforward, because that's what pluripotent cells can do. But crucially, you can then compare their behavior to their equivalent but healthy counterparts, ideally from an unaffected relative. That way, you're matching for genetic variation. And that's exactly what we did here. This was a collaboration with colleagues: in London, Chris Shaw; in the U.S., Steve Finkbeiner and Tom Maniatis. And what you're looking at, and this is amazing, these are living, growing, motor nerve cells from a patient with motor neuron disease. It happens to be an inherited form. I mean, just imagine that. This would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. So apart from seeing them grow and put out processes, we can also engineer them so that they fluoresce, but crucially, we can then track their individual health and compare the diseased motor nerve cells to the healthy ones. And when you do all that and put it together, you realize that the diseased ones, which is represented in the red line, are two and a half times more likely to die than the healthy counterpart. And the crucial point about this is that you then have a fantastic assay to discover drugs, because what would you ask of the drugs, and you could do this through a high-throughput automated screening system, you'd ask the drugs, give me one thing: find me a drug that will bring the red line closer to the blue line, because that drug will be a high-value candidate that you could probably take direct to human trial and almost bypass that bottleneck that I've told you about in drug discovery with the animal models, if that makes sense. It's fantastic. But I want to come back to how you might use stem cells directly to repair damage. And again there are two ways to think about this, and they're not mutually exclusive. The first, and I think in the long run the one that will give us the biggest dividend, but it's not thought of that way just yet, is to think about those stem cells that are already in your brain, and I've told you that. All of us have stem cells in the brain, even the diseased brain, and surely the smart way forward is to find ways that you can promote and activate those stem cells in your brain already to react and respond appropriately to damage to repair it. That will be the future. There will be drugs that will do that. But the other way is to effectively parachute in cells, transplant them in, to replace dying or lost cells, even in the brain. And I want to tell you now an experiment, it's a clinical trial that we did, which recently completed, which is with colleagues in UCL, David Miller in particular. So this study was very simple. We took patients with multiple sclerosis and asked a simple question: Would stem cells from the bone marrow be protective of their nerves? So what we did was we took this bone marrow, grew up the stem cells in the lab, and then injected them back into the vein. I'm making this sound really simple. It took five years off a lot of people, okay? And it put gray hair on me and caused all kinds of issues. But conceptually, it's essentially simple. So we've given them into the vein, right? So in order to measure whether this was successful or not, we measured the optic nerve as our outcome measure. And that's a good thing to measure in M.S., because patients with M.S. sadly suffer with problems with vision — loss of vision, unclear vision. And so we measured the size of the optic nerve using the scans with David Miller three times — 12 months, six months, and before the infusion — and you can see the gently declining red line. And that's telling you that the optic nerve is shrinking, which makes sense, because their nerves are dying. We then gave the stem cell infusion and repeated the measurement twice — three months and six months — and to our surprise, almost, the line's gone up. That suggests that the intervention has been protective. I don't think myself that what's happened is that those stem cells have made new myelin or new nerves. What I think they've done is they've promoted the endogenous stem cells, or precursor cells, to do their job, wake up, lay down new myelin. So this is a proof of concept. I'm very excited about that. So I just want to end with the theme I began on, which was regeneration and hope. So here I've asked John what his hopes are for the future. John: I would hope that sometime in the future through the research that you people are doing, we can come up with a cure so that people like me can lead a normal life. SC: I mean, that speaks volumes. But I'd like to close by first of all thanking John — thanking John for allowing me to share his insights and these clips with you all. But I'd also like to add to John and to others that my own view is, I'm hopeful for the future. I do believe that the disruptive technologies like stem cells that I've tried to explain to you do offer very real hope. And I do think that the day that we might be able to repair the damaged brain is sooner than we think. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why good hackers make good citizens | {0: 'Catherine Bracy is the director of community organizing at Code for America.'} | TEDCity2.0 | I'm going to talk about hackers. And the image that comes to your mind when I say that word is probably not of Benjamin Franklin, but I'm going to explain to you why it should be. The image that comes to your mind is probably more likely of a pasty kid sitting in a basement doing something mischievous, or of a shady criminal who is trying to steal your identity, or of an international rogue with a political agenda. And mainstream culture has kind of fed this idea that hackers are people that we should be afraid of. But like most things in technology and the technology world, hacking has equal power for good as it has for evil. For every hacker that's trying to steal your identity there's one that's building a tool that will help you find your loved ones after a disaster or to monitor environmental quality after an oil spill. Hacking is really just any amateur innovation on an existing system, and it is a deeply democratic activity. It's about critical thinking. It's about questioning existing ways of doing things. It's the idea that if you see a problem, you work to fix it, and not just complain about it. And in many ways, hacking is what built America. Betsy Ross was a hacker. The Underground Railroad was a brilliant hack. And from the Wright brothers to Steve Jobs, hacking has always been at the foundation of American democracy. So if there's one thing I want to leave you here with today, it's that the next time you think about who a hacker is, you think not of this guy but of this guy, Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the greatest hackers of all time. He was one of America's most prolific inventors, though he famously never filed a patent, because he thought that all human knowledge should be freely available. He brought us bifocals and the lightning rod, and of course there was his collaboration on the invention of American democracy. And in Code For America, we really try to embody the spirit of Ben Franklin. He was a tinkerer and a statesman whose conception of citizenship was always predicated on action. He believed that government could be built by the people, and we call those people civic hackers. So it's no wonder that the values that underly a healthy democracy, like collaboration and empowerment and participation and enterprise, are the same values that underly the Internet. And so it's no surprise that many hackers are turning their attention to the problem of government. But before I give you a few examples of what civic hacking looks like, I want to make clear that you don't have to be a programmer to be a civic hacker. You just have to believe that you can bring a 21st-century tool set to bear on the problems that government faces. And we hear all the time from our community of civic hackers at Code for America that they didn't understand how much nontechnical work actually went into civic hacking projects. So keep that in mind. All of you are potential civic hackers. So what does civic hacking look like? Our team last year in Honolulu, which in this case was three full-time fellows who were doing a year of public service, were asked by the city to rebuild the website. And it's a massive thing of tens of thousands of pages which just wasn't going to be possible in the few months that they had. So instead, they decided to build a parallel site that better conformed to how citizens actually want to interact with information on a city website. They're looking for answers to questions, and they want to take action when they're done, which is really hard to do from a site that looks like this. So our team built Honolulu Answers, which is a super-simple search interface where you enter a search term or a question and get back plain language answers that drive a user towards action. Now the site itself was easy enough to build, but the team was faced with the challenge of how they populate all of the content. It would have taken the three of them a very long time, especially given that none of them are actually from Honolulu. And so they did something that's really radical, when you think about how government is used to working. They asked citizens to write the content. So you've heard of a hack-a-thon. They held a write-a-thon, where on one Saturday afternoon — ("What do I do about wild pigs being a nuisance?") (Laughter) — Wild pigs are a huge problem in Honolulu, apparently. In one Saturday afternoon, they were able to populate most of the content for most of the frequently asked questions, but more importantly than that, they created a new way for citizens to participate in their government. Now, I think this is a really cool story in and of itself, but it gets more awesome. On the National Day of Civic Hacking this past June in Oakland, where I live, the Code For America team in Oakland took the open source code base of Honolulu Answers and turned it into Oakland Answers, and again we held a write-a-thon where we took the most frequently asked questions and had citizens write the answers to them, and I got into the act. I authored this answer, and a few others. And I'm trying to this day to articulate the sense of empowerment and responsibility that I feel for the place that I live based simply on this small act of participation. And by stitching together my small act with the thousands of other small acts of participation that we're enabling through civic hacking, we think we can reenergize citizenship and restore trust in government. At this point, you may be wondering what city officials think of all this. They actually love it. As most of you guys know, cities are being asked every day to do more with less, and they're always looking for innovative solutions to entrenched problems. So when you give citizens a way to participate beyond attending a town hall meeting, cities can actually capture the capacity in their communities to do the business of government. Now I don't want to leave the impression that civic hacking is just an American phenomenon. It's happening across the globe, and one of my favorite examples is from Mexico City, where earlier this year, the Mexico House of Representatives entered into a contract with a software development firm to build an app that legislators would use to track bills. So this was just for the handful of legislators in the House. And the contract was a two-year contract for 9.3 million dollars. Now a lot of people were really angry about this, especially geeks who knew that 9.3 million dollars was an absolutely outrageous amount of money for what was a very simple app. But instead of taking to the streets, they issued a challenge. They asked programmers in Mexico to build something better and cheaper, and they offered a prize of 9,300 dollars — 10,000 times cheaper than the government contract, and they gave the entrants 10 days. And in those 10 days, they submitted 173 apps, five of which were presented to Congress and are still in the app store today. And because of this action, that contract was vacated, and now this has sparked a movement in Mexico City which is home to one of our partners, Code for Mexico City. And so what you see in all three of these places, in Honolulu and in Oakland and in Mexico City, are the elements that are at the core of civic hacking. It's citizens who saw things that could be working better and they decided to fix them, and through that work, they're creating a 21st-century ecosystem of participation. They're creating a whole new set of ways for citizens to be involved, besides voting or signing a petition or protesting. They can actually build government. So back to our friend Ben Franklin, who, one of his lesser-known accomplishments was that in 1736 he founded the first volunteer firefighting company in Philadelphia, called a brigade. And it's because he and his friends noticed that the city was having trouble keeping up with all the fires that were happening in the city, so in true civic hacker fashion, they built a solution. And we have our own brigades at Code for America working on the projects that I've just described, and we want to ask you to follow in Ben Franklin's footsteps and come join us. We have 31 brigades in the U.S. We are pleased to announce today that we're opening up the brigade to international cities for the first time, starting with cities in Poland and Japan and Ireland. You can find out if there's a brigade where you live at brigade.codeforamerica.org, and if there's not a brigade where you live, we will help you. We've created a tool kit which also lives at brigade.codeforamerica.org, and we will support you along the way. Our goal is to create a global network of civic hackers who are innovating on the existing system in order to build tools that will solve entrenched problems, that will support local government, and that will empower citizens. So please come hack with us. Thank you. (Applause) |
We need money for aid. So let’s print it. | {0: 'A senior managing director and head of global macro strategy at State Street Global Markets, Michael Metcalfe provides high quality capital flow research.'} | TED@State Street Boston | Thirteen years ago, we set ourselves a goal to end poverty. After some success, we've hit a big hurdle. The aftermath of the financial crisis has begun to hit aid payments, which have fallen for two consecutive years. My question is whether the lessons learned from saving the financial system can be used to help us overcome that hurdle and help millions. Can we simply print money for aid? "Surely not." It's a common reaction. (Laughter) It's a quick talk. Others channel John McEnroe. "You cannot be serious!" Now, I can't do the accent, but I am serious, thanks to these two children, who, as you'll learn, are very much at the heart of my talk. On the left, we have Pia. She lives in England. She has two loving parents, one of whom is standing right here. Dorothy, on the right, lives in rural Kenya. She's one of 13,000 orphans and vulnerable children who are assisted by a charity that I support. I do that because I believe that Dorothy, like Pia, deserves the best life chances that we can afford to give her. You'll all agree with me, I'm sure. The U.N. agrees too. Their overriding aim for international aid is to strive for a life of dignity for all. But — and here's that hurdle — can we afford our aid aspirations? History suggests not. In 1970, governments set themselves a target to increase overseas aid payments to 0.7 percent of their national income. As you can see, a big gap opens up between actual aid and that target. But then come the Millennium Development Goals, eight ambitious targets to be met by 2015. If I tell you that just one of those targets is to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty, you get a sense of the ambition. There's also been some success. The number of people living on less than $1.25 a day has halved. But a lot remains to be done in two years. One in eight remain hungry. In the context of this auditorium, the front two rows aren't going to get any food. We can't settle for that, which is why the concern about the eighth goal, which relates to funding, which I said at the beginning is falling, is so troubling. So what can be done? Well, I work in financial markets, not development. I study the behavior of investors, how they react to policy and the economy. It gives me a different angle on the aid issue. But it took an innocent question from my then-four-year-old daughter to make me appreciate that. Pia and I were on the way to a local cafe and we passed a man collecting for charity. I didn't have any change to give him, and she was disappointed. Once in the cafe, Pia takes out her coloring book and starts scribbling. After a little while, I ask her what she's doing, and she shows me a drawing of a £5 note to give to the man outside. It's so sweet, and more generous than Dad would have been. But of course I explained to her, "You can't do that; it's not allowed." To which I get the classic four-year-old response: "Why not?" Now I'm excited, because I actually think I can answer this time. So I launch into an explanation of how an unlimited supply of money chasing a limited number of goods sends prices to the moon. Something about that exchange stuck with me, not because of the look of relief on Pia's face when I finally finished, but because it related to the sanctity of the money supply, a sanctity that had been challenged and questioned by the reaction of central banks to the financial crisis. To reassure investors, central banks began buying assets to try and encourage investors to do the same. They funded these purchases with money they created themselves. The money wasn't actually physically printed. It's still sort of locked away in the banking system today. But the amount created was unprecedented. Together, the central banks of the U.S., U.K and Japan increased the stock of money in their economies by 3.7 trillion dollars. That's three times, in fact that's more than three times, the total physical stock of dollar notes in circulation. Three times! Before the crisis, this would have been utterly unthinkable, yet it was accepted remarkably quickly. The price of gold, an asset thought to protect against inflation, did jump, but investors bought other assets that offered little protection from inflation. They bought fixed income securities, bonds. They bought equities too. For all the scare stories, the actual actions of investors spoke of rapid acceptance and confidence. That confidence was based on two pillars. The first was that, after years of keeping inflation under control, central banks were trusted to take the money-printing away if inflation became a threat. Secondly, inflation simply never became a threat. As you can see, in the United States, inflation for most of this period remained below average. It was the same elsewhere. So how does all this relate to aid? Well, this is where Dorothy and the Mango Tree charity that supports her comes in. I was at one of their fundraising events earlier this year, and I was inspired to give a one-off donation when I remembered that my firm offers to match the charitable contributions its employees make. So think of this: Instead of just being able to help Dorothy and four of her classmates to go through secondary school for a few years, I was able to double my contribution. Brilliant. So following that conversation with my daughter, and seeing the absence of inflation in the face of money-printing, and knowing that international aid payments were falling at just the wrong time, this made me wonder: Could we match but just on a much grander scale? Let's call this scheme "Print Aid." And here's how it might work. Provided it saw little inflation risk from doing so, the central bank would be mandated to match the government's overseas aid payments up to a certain limit. Governments have been aiming to get aid to 0.7 percent for years, so let's set the limit at half of that, 0.35 percent of their income. So it would work like this: If in a given year the government gave 0.2 percent of its income to overseas aid, the central bank would simply top it up with a further 0.2 percent. So far so good. How risky is this? Well, this involves the creation of money to buy goods, not assets. It sounds more inflationary already, doesn't it. But there are two important mitigating factors here. The first is that by definition, this money printed would be spent overseas. So it's not obvious how it leads to inflation in the country doing the actual printing unless it leads to a currency depreciation of that country. That is unlikely for the second reason: the scale of the money that would be printed under this scheme. So let's think of an example where Print Aid was in place in the U.S., U.K. and Japan. To match the aid payments made by those governments over the last four years, Print Aid would have generated 200 billion dollars' worth of extra aid. What would that look like in the context of the increase in the money stock that had already happened in those countries to save the financial system? Are you read for this? You might struggle to see that at the back, because the gap is quite small. So what we're saying here is that we took a $3.7 trillion gamble to save our financial systems, and you know what, it paid off. There was no inflation. Are we really saying that it's not worth the risk to print an extra 200 billion for aid? Would the risks really be that different? To me, it's not that clear. What is clear is the impact on aid. Even though this is the printing of just three central banks, the global aid that's given over this period is up by almost 40 percent. Aid as a proportion of national income all of a sudden is at a 40-year high. Now, we don't get to 0.7 percent. Governments are still incentivized to give. But you know what, that's the point of a matching scheme. So I think what we've learned is that the risks from this money creation scheme are quite modest, but the benefits are potentially huge. Imagine what we could do with 40 percent more funding. We might be able to feed the front row. The thing that I fear, the only thing that I fear, apart from the fact that I've run out of time, is that the window of opportunity for this idea is a short one. Today, money creation by central banks is an accepted policy tool. That may not always be the case. Today there are universally agreed aims for international aid. That may not always be the case. Today might be the only time that these two things coincide, such that we can afford the aid that we've always aspired to give. So, can we print money for international aid? I seriously believe the question should be, why not? Thank you very much. (Applause) |
What we can learn from galaxies far, far away | {0: 'At 17, Henry Lin won an Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award for his mathematical models of distant galaxy clusters.'} | TEDYouth 2013 | Here are some images of clusters of galaxies. They're exactly what they sound like. They are these huge collections of galaxies, bound together by their mutual gravity. So most of the points that you see on the screen are not individual stars, but collections of stars, or galaxies. Now, by showing you some of these images, I hope that you will quickly see that galaxy clusters are these beautiful objects, but more than that, I think galaxy clusters are mysterious, they are surprising, and they're useful. Useful as the universe's most massive laboratories. And as laboratories, to describe galaxy clusters is to describe the experiments that you can do with them. And I think there are four major types, and the first type that I want to describe is probing the very big. So, how big? Well, here is an image of a particular galaxy cluster. It is so massive that the light passing through it is being bent, it's being distorted by the extreme gravity of this cluster. And, in fact, if you look very carefully you'll be able to see rings around this cluster. Now, to give you a number, this particular galaxy cluster has a mass of over one million billion suns. It's just mind-boggling how massive these systems can get. But more than their mass, they have this additional feature. They are essentially isolated systems, so if we like, we can think of them as a scaled-down version of the entire universe. And many of the questions that we might have about the universe at large scales, such as, how does gravity work? might be answered by studying these systems. So that was very big. The second things is very hot. Okay, if I take an image of a galaxy cluster, and I subtract away all of the starlight, what I'm left with is this big, blue blob. This is in false color. It's actually X-ray light that we're seeing. And the question is, if it's not galaxies, what is emitting this light? The answer is hot gas, million-degree gas — in fact, it's plasma. And the reason why it's so hot goes back to the previous slide. The extreme gravity of these systems is accelerating particles of gas to great speeds, and great speeds means great temperatures. So this is the main idea, but science is a rough draft. There are many basic properties about this plasma that still confuse us, still puzzle us, and still push our understanding of the physics of the very hot. Third thing: probing the very small. Now, to explain this, I need to tell you a very disturbing fact. Most of the universe's matter is not made up of atoms. You were lied to. Most of it is made up of something very, very mysterious, which we call dark matter. Dark matter is something that doesn't like to interact very much, except through gravity, and of course we would like to learn more about it. If you're a particle physicist, you want to know what happens when we smash things together. And dark matter is no exception. Well, how do we do this? To answer that question, I'm going to have to ask another one, which is, what happens when galaxy clusters collide? Here is an image. Since galaxy clusters are representative slices of the universe, scaled-down versions. They are mostly made up of dark matter, and that's what you see in this bluish purple. The red represents the hot gas, and, of course, you can see many galaxies. What's happened is a particle accelerator at a huge, huge scale. And this is very important, because what it means is that very, very small effects that might be difficult to detect in the lab, might be compounded and compounded into something that we could possibly observe in nature. So, it's very funny. The reason why galaxy clusters can teach us about dark matter, the reason why galaxy clusters can teach us about the physics of the very small, is precisely because they are so very big. Fourth thing: the physics of the very strange. Certainly what I've said so far is crazy. Okay, if there's anything stranger I think it has to be dark energy. If I throw a ball into the air, I expect it to go up. What I don't expect is that it go up at an ever-increasing rate. Similarly, cosmologists understand why the universe is expanding. They don't understand why it's expanding at an ever-increasing rate. They give the cause of this accelerated expansion a name, and they call it dark energy. And, again, we want to learn more about it. So, one particular question that we have is, how does dark energy affect the universe at the largest scales? Depending on how strong it is, maybe structure forms faster or slower. Well, the problem with the large-scale structure of the universe is that it's horribly complicated. Here is a computer simulation. And we need a way to simplify it. Well, I like to think about this using an analogy. If I want to understand the sinking of the Titanic, the most important thing to do is not to model the little positions of every single little piece of the boat that broke off. The most important thing to do is to track the two biggest parts. Similarly, I can learn a lot about the universe at the largest scales by tracking its biggest pieces and those biggest pieces are clusters of galaxies. So, as I come to a close, you might feel slightly cheated. I mean, I began by talking about how galaxy clusters are useful, and I've given some reasons, but what is their use really? Well, to answer this, I want to give you a quote by Henry Ford when he was asked about cars. He had this to say: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Today, we as a society are faced with many, many difficult problems. And the solutions to these problems are not obvious. They are not faster horses. They will require an enormous amount of scientific ingenuity. So, yes, we need to focus, yes, we need to concentrate, but we also need to remember that innovation, ingenuity, inspiration — these things come when we broaden our field of vision when we step back when we zoom out. And I can't think of a better way to do this than by studying the universe around us. Thanks. (Applause) |
The 3 agencies with the power to make or break economies | {0: 'Annette Heuser proposes critical reforms to loosen the iron grip of rating agencies on national credit scores.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Almost two years ago, I was driving in my car in Germany, and I turned on the radio. Europe at the time was in the middle of the Euro crisis, and all the headlines were about European countries getting downgraded by rating agencies in the United States. I listened and thought to myself, "What are these rating agencies, and why is everybody so upset about their work?" Well, if you were sitting next to me in the car that day and would have told me that I would devote the next years to trying to reform them, obviously I would have called you crazy. But guess what's really crazy: the way these rating agencies are run. And I would like to explain to you not only why it's time to change this, but also how we can do it. So let me tell you a little bit about what rating agencies really do. As you would read a car magazine before purchasing a new car or taking a look at a product review before deciding which kind of tablet or phone to get, investors are reading ratings before they decide in which kind of product they are investing their money. A rating can range from a so-called AAA, which means it's a top-performing product, and it can go down to the level of the so-called BBB-, which means it's a fairly risky investment. Rating agencies are rating companies. They are rating banks. They are rating even financial products like the infamous mortgage-backed securities. But they can also rate countries, and these ratings are called sovereign ratings, and I would like to focus in particular on these sovereign ratings. And I can tell, as you're listening to me right now, you're thinking, so why should I really care about this, right? Be honest. Well, ratings affect you. They affect all of us. If a rating agency rates a country, it basically assesses and evaluates a country's debt and the ability and willingness of a country to repay its debt. So if a country gets downgraded by a rating agency, the country has to pay more in order to borrow money on the international markets. So it affects you as a citizen and as a taxpayer, because you and your fellow countrymen have to pony up more in order to borrow. But what if a country can't afford to pay more because it's maybe too expensive? Well, then the country has less available for other services, like roads, schools, healthcare. And this is the reason why you should care, because sovereign ratings affect everyone. And that is the reason why I believe they should be defined as public goods. They should be transparent, accessible, and available to everyone at no cost. But here's the situation: the rating agency market is dominated by three players and three players only — Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch — and we know whenever there is a market concentration, there is really no competition. There is no incentive to improve the quality of your product. And let's face it, the credit rating agencies have contributed, putting the global economy on the brink, and yet they have to change the way they operate. The second point, would you really buy a car just based on the advice of the dealer? Obviously not, right? That would be irresponsible. But that's actually what's going on in the rating agency sector every single day. The customers of these rating agencies, like countries or companies, they are paying for their own ratings, and obviously this is creating a conflict of interest. The third point is, the rating agencies are not really telling us how they are coming up with their ratings, but in this day and age, you can't even sell a candy bar without listing everything that's inside. But for ratings, a crucial element of our economy, we really do not know what all the different ingredients are. We are allowing the rating agencies to be intransparent about their work, and we need to change this. I think there is no doubt that the sector needs a complete overhaul, not just a trimming at the margins. I think it's time for a bold move. I think it's time to upgrade the system. And this is why we at the Bertelsmann Foundation have invested a lot of time and effort thinking about an alternative for the sector. And we have developed the first model for a nonprofit rating agency for sovereign risk, and we call it by its acronym, INCRA. INCRA would make a difference to the current system by adding another nonprofit player to the mix. It would be based on a nonprofit model that would be based on a sustainable endowment. The endowment would create income that would allow us to run the operation, to run the rating agency, and it would also allow us to make our ratings publicly available. But this is not enough to make a difference, right? INCRA would also be based on a very, very clear governance structure that would avoid any conflict of interest, and it would include many stakeholders from society. INCRA would not only be a European or an American rating agency, it would be a truly international one, in which, in particular, the emerging economies would have an equal interest, voice and representation. The second big difference that INCRA would make is that would it base its sovereign risk assessment on a broader set of indicators. Think about it that way. If we conduct a sovereign rating, we basically take a look at the economic soil of a country, its macroeconomic fundamentals. But we also have to ask the question, who is cultivating the economic soil of a country, right? Well, a country has many gardeners, and one of them is the government, so we have to ask the question, how is a country governed? How is it managed? And this is the reason why we have developed what we call forward-looking indicators. These are indicators that give you a much better read about the socioeconomic development of a country. I hope you would agree it's important for you to know if your government is willing to invest in renewable energy and education. It's important for you to know if the government of your country is able to manage a crisis, if the government is finally able to implement the reforms that it's promised. For example, if INCRA would rate South Africa right now, of course we would take a very, very close look at the youth unemployment of the country, the highest in the world. If over 70 percent of a country's population under the age of 35 is unemployed, of course this has a huge impact on the economy today and even more so in the future. Well, our friends at Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch will tell us we would take this into account as well. But guess what? We do not know exactly how they will take this into account. And this leads me to the third big difference that INCRA would make. INCRA would not only release its ratings but it would also release its indicators and methodology. So in contrast to the current system, INCRA would be fully transparent. So in a nutshell, INCRA would offer an alternative to the current system of the big three rating agencies by adding a new, nonprofit player to the mix that would increase the competition, it would increase the transparency of the sector, and it would also increase the quality. I can tell that sovereign ratings may still look to you like this very small piece of this very complex global financial world, but I tell you it's a very important one, and a very important one to fix, because sovereign ratings affect all of us, and they should be addressed and should be defined as public goods. And this is why we are testing our model right now, and why we are trying to find out if it can bring together a group of able and willing actors to bring INCRA to life. I truly believe building up INCRA is in everyone's interest, and that we have the unique opportunity right now to turn INCRA into a cornerstone of a new, more inclusive financial system. Because for way too long, we have left the big financial players on their own. It's time to give them some company. Thank you. (Applause) |
Could future devices read images from our brains? | {0: "Mary Lou Jepsen pushes the edges of what's possible in optics and physics, to make new types of devices, leading teams and working with huge factories that can ship vast volumes of these strange, new things."} | TED2013 | I had brain surgery 18 years ago, and since that time, brain science has become a personal passion of mine. I'm actually an engineer. And first let me say, I recently joined Google's Moonshot group, where I had a division, the display division in Google X, and the brain science work I'm speaking about today is work I did before I joined Google and on the side outside of Google. So that said, there's a stigma when you have brain surgery. Are you still smart or not? And if not, can you make yourself smart again? After my neurosurgery, part of my brain was missing, and I had to deal with that. It wasn't the grey matter, but it was the gooey part dead center that makes key hormones and neurotransmitters. Immediately after my surgery, I had to decide what amounts of each of over a dozen powerful chemicals to take each day, because if I just took nothing, I would die within hours. Every day now for 18 years — every single day — I've had to try to decide the combinations and mixtures of chemicals, and try to get them, to stay alive. There have been several close calls. But luckily, I'm an experimentalist at heart, so I decided I would experiment to try to find more optimal dosages because there really isn't a clear road map on this that's detailed. I began to try different mixtures, and I was blown away by how tiny changes in dosages dramatically changed my sense of self, my sense of who I was, my thinking, my behavior towards people. One particularly dramatic case: for a couple months I actually tried dosages and chemicals typical of a man in his early 20s, and I was blown away by how my thoughts changed. (Laughter) I was angry all the time, I thought about sex constantly, and I thought I was the smartest person in the entire world, and —(Laughter)— of course over the years I'd met guys kind of like that, or maybe kind of toned-down versions of that. I was kind of extreme. But to me, the surprise was, I wasn't trying to be arrogant. I was actually trying, with a little bit of insecurity, to actually fix a problem in front of me, and it just didn't come out that way. So I couldn't handle it. I changed my dosages. But that experience, I think, gave me a new appreciation for men and what they might walk through, and I've gotten along with men a lot better since then. What I was trying to do with tuning these hormones and neurotransmitters and so forth was to try to get my intelligence back after my illness and surgery, my creative thought, my idea flow. And I think mostly in images, and so for me that became a key metric — how to get these mental images that I use as a way of rapid prototyping, if you will, my ideas, trying on different new ideas for size, playing out scenarios. This kind of thinking isn't new. Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking. So after several years, I tuned myself up and I have lots of great, really vivid mental images with a lot of sophistication and the analytical backbone behind them. And so now I'm working on, how can I get these mental images in my mind out to my computer screen faster? Can you imagine, if you will, a movie director being able to use her imagination alone to direct the world in front of her? Or a musician to get the music out of his head? There are incredible possibilities with this as a way for creative people to share at light speed. And the truth is, the remaining bottleneck in being able to do this is just upping the resolution of brain scan systems. So let me show you why I think we're pretty close to getting there by sharing with you two recent experiments from two top neuroscience groups. Both used fMRI technology — functional magnetic resonance imaging technology — to image the brain, and here is a brain scan set from Giorgio Ganis and his colleagues at Harvard. And the left-hand column shows a brain scan of a person looking at an image. The middle column shows the brainscan of that same individual imagining, seeing that same image. And the right column was created by subtracting the middle column from the left column, showing the difference to be nearly zero. This was repeated on lots of different individuals with lots of different images, always with a similar result. The difference between seeing an image and imagining seeing that same image is next to nothing. Next let me share with you one other experiment, this from Jack Gallant's lab at Cal Berkeley. They've been able to decode brainwaves into recognizable visual fields. So let me set this up for you. In this experiment, individuals were shown hundreds of hours of YouTube videos while scans were made of their brains to create a large library of their brain reacting to video sequences. Then a new movie was shown with new images, new people, new animals in it, and a new scan set was recorded. The computer, using brain scan data alone, decoded that new brain scan to show what it thought the individual was actually seeing. On the right-hand side, you see the computer's guess, and on the left-hand side, the presented clip. This is the jaw-dropper. We are so close to being able to do this. We just need to up the resolution. And now remember that when you see an image versus when you imagine that same image, it creates the same brain scan. So this was done with the highest-resolution brain scan systems available today, and their resolution has increased really about a thousandfold in the last several years. Next we need to increase the resolution another thousandfold to get a deeper glimpse. How do we do that? There's a lot of techniques in this approach. One way is to crack open your skull and put in electrodes. I'm not for that. There's a lot of new imaging techniques being proposed, some even by me, but given the recent success of MRI, first we need to ask the question, is it the end of the road with this technology? Conventional wisdom says the only way to get higher resolution is with bigger magnets, but at this point bigger magnets only offer incremental resolution improvements, not the thousandfold we need. I'm putting forward an idea: instead of bigger magnets, let's make better magnets. There's some new technology breakthroughs in nanoscience when applied to magnetic structures that have created a whole new class of magnets, and with these magnets, we can lay down very fine detailed magnetic field patterns throughout the brain, and using those, we can actually create holographic-like interference structures to get precision control over many patterns, as is shown here by shifting things. We can create much more complicated structures with slightly different arrangements, kind of like making Spirograph. So why does that matter? A lot of effort in MRI over the years has gone into making really big, really huge magnets, right? But yet most of the recent advances in resolution have actually come from ingeniously clever encoding and decoding solutions in the F.M. radio frequency transmitters and receivers in the MRI systems. Let's also, instead of a uniform magnetic field, put down structured magnetic patterns in addition to the F.M. radio frequencies. So by combining the magnetics patterns with the patterns in the F.M. radio frequencies processing which can massively increase the information that we can extract in a single scan. And on top of that, we can then layer our ever-growing knowledge of brain structure and memory to create a thousandfold increase that we need. And using fMRI, we should be able to measure not just oxygenated blood flow, but the hormones and neurotransmitters I've talked about and maybe even the direct neural activity, which is the dream. We're going to be able to dump our ideas directly to digital media. Could you imagine if we could leapfrog language and communicate directly with human thought? What would we be capable of then? And how will we learn to deal with the truths of unfiltered human thought? You think the Internet was big. These are huge questions. It might be irresistible as a tool to amplify our thinking and communication skills. And indeed, this very same tool may prove to lead to the cure for Alzheimer's and similar diseases. We have little option but to open this door. Regardless, pick a year — will it happen in five years or 15 years? It's hard to imagine it taking much longer. We need to learn how to take this step together. Thank you. (Applause) |
How data will transform business | {0: "BCG's Philip Evans has a bold prediction for the future of business strategy -- and it starts with Big Data."} | TED@BCG San Francisco | I'm going to talk a little bit about strategy and its relationship with technology. We tend to think of business strategy as being a rather abstract body of essentially economic thought, perhaps rather timeless. I'm going to argue that, in fact, business strategy has always been premised on assumptions about technology, that those assumptions are changing, and, in fact, changing quite dramatically, and that therefore what that will drive us to is a different concept of what we mean by business strategy. Let me start, if I may, with a little bit of history. The idea of strategy in business owes its origins to two intellectual giants: Bruce Henderson, the founder of BCG, and Michael Porter, professor at the Harvard Business School. Henderson's central idea was what you might call the Napoleonic idea of concentrating mass against weakness, of overwhelming the enemy. What Henderson recognized was that, in the business world, there are many phenomena which are characterized by what economists would call increasing returns — scale, experience. The more you do of something, disproportionately the better you get. And therefore he found a logic for investing in such kinds of overwhelming mass in order to achieve competitive advantage. And that was the first introduction of essentially a military concept of strategy into the business world. Porter agreed with that premise, but he qualified it. He pointed out, correctly, that that's all very well, but businesses actually have multiple steps to them. They have different components, and each of those components might be driven by a different kind of strategy. A company or a business might actually be advantaged in some activities but disadvantaged in others. He formed the concept of the value chain, essentially the sequence of steps with which a, shall we say, raw material, becomes a component, becomes assembled into a finished product, and then is distributed, for example, and he argued that advantage accrued to each of those components, and that the advantage of the whole was in some sense the sum or the average of that of its parts. And this idea of the value chain was predicated on the recognition that what holds a business together is transaction costs, that in essence you need to coordinate, organizations are more efficient at coordination than markets, very often, and therefore the nature and role and boundaries of the cooperation are defined by transaction costs. It was on those two ideas, Henderson's idea of increasing returns to scale and experience, and Porter's idea of the value chain, encompassing heterogenous elements, that the whole edifice of business strategy was subsequently erected. Now what I'm going to argue is that those premises are, in fact, being invalidated. First of all, let's think about transaction costs. There are really two components to transaction costs. One is about processing information, and the other is about communication. These are the economics of processing and communicating as they have evolved over a long period of time. As we all know from so many contexts, they have been radically transformed since the days when Porter and Henderson first formulated their theories. In particular, since the mid-'90s, communications costs have actually been falling even faster than transaction costs, which is why communication, the Internet, has exploded in such a dramatic fashion. Now, those falling transaction costs have profound consequences, because if transaction costs are the glue that hold value chains together, and they are falling, there is less to economize on. There is less need for vertically integrated organization, and value chains at least can break up. They needn't necessarily, but they can. In particular, it then becomes possible for a competitor in one business to use their position in one step of the value chain in order to penetrate or attack or disintermediate the competitor in another. That is not just an abstract proposition. There are many very specific stories of how that actually happened. A poster child example was the encyclopedia business. The encyclopedia business in the days of leatherbound books was basically a distribution business. Most of the cost was the commission to the salesmen. The CD-ROM and then the Internet came along, new technologies made the distribution of knowledge many orders of magnitude cheaper, and the encyclopedia industry collapsed. It's now, of course, a very familiar story. This, in fact, more generally was the story of the first generation of the Internet economy. It was about falling transaction costs breaking up value chains and therefore allowing disintermediation, or what we call deconstruction. One of the questions I was occasionally asked was, well, what's going to replace the encyclopedia when Britannica no longer has a business model? And it was a while before the answer became manifest. Now, of course, we know what it is: it's the Wikipedia. Now what's special about the Wikipedia is not its distribution. What's special about the Wikipedia is the way it's produced. The Wikipedia, of course, is an encyclopedia created by its users. And this, in fact, defines what you might call the second decade of the Internet economy, the decade in which the Internet as a noun became the Internet as a verb. It became a set of conversations, the era in which user-generated content and social networks became the dominant phenomenon. Now what that really meant in terms of the Porter-Henderson framework was the collapse of certain kinds of economies of scale. It turned out that tens of thousands of autonomous individuals writing an encyclopedia could do just as good a job, and certainly a much cheaper job, than professionals in a hierarchical organization. So basically what was happening was that one layer of this value chain was becoming fragmented, as individuals could take over where organizations were no longer needed. But there's another question that obviously this graph poses, which is, okay, we've gone through two decades — does anything distinguish the third? And what I'm going to argue is that indeed something does distinguish the third, and it maps exactly on to the kind of Porter-Henderson logic that we've been talking about. And that is, about data. If we go back to around 2000, a lot of people were talking about the information revolution, and it was indeed true that the world's stock of data was growing, indeed growing quite fast. but it was still at that point overwhelmingly analog. We go forward to 2007, not only had the world's stock of data exploded, but there'd been this massive substitution of digital for analog. And more important even than that, if you look more carefully at this graph, what you will observe is that about a half of that digital data is information that has an I.P. address. It's on a server or it's on a P.C. But having an I.P. address means that it can be connected to any other data that has an I.P. address. It means it becomes possible to put together half of the world's knowledge in order to see patterns, an entirely new thing. If we run the numbers forward to today, it probably looks something like this. We're not really sure. If we run the numbers forward to 2020, we of course have an exact number, courtesy of IDC. It's curious that the future is so much more predictable than the present. And what it implies is a hundredfold multiplication in the stock of information that is connected via an I.P. address. Now, if the number of connections that we can make is proportional to the number of pairs of data points, a hundredfold multiplication in the quantity of data is a ten-thousandfold multiplication in the number of patterns that we can see in that data, this just in the last 10 or 11 years. This, I would submit, is a sea change, a profound change in the economics of the world that we live in. The first human genome, that of James Watson, was mapped as the culmination of the Human Genome Project in the year 2000, and it took about 200 million dollars and about 10 years of work to map just one person's genomic makeup. Since then, the costs of mapping the genome have come down. In fact, they've come down in recent years very dramatically indeed, to the point where the cost is now below 1,000 dollars, and it's confidently predicted that by the year 2015 it will be below 100 dollars — a five or six order of magnitude drop in the cost of genomic mapping in just a 15-year period, an extraordinary phenomenon. Now, in the days when mapping a genome cost millions, or even tens of thousands, it was basically a research enterprise. Scientists would gather some representative people, and they would see patterns, and they would try and make generalizations about human nature and disease from the abstract patterns they find from these particular selected individuals. But when the genome can be mapped for 100 bucks, 99 dollars while you wait, then what happens is, it becomes retail. It becomes above all clinical. You go the doctor with a cold, and if he or she hasn't done it already, the first thing they do is map your genome, at which point what they're now doing is not starting from some abstract knowledge of genomic medicine and trying to work out how it applies to you, but they're starting from your particular genome. Now think of the power of that. Think of where that takes us when we can combine genomic data with clinical data with data about drug interactions with the kind of ambient data that devices like our phone and medical sensors will increasingly be collecting. Think what happens when we collect all of that data and we can put it together in order to find patterns we wouldn't see before. This, I would suggest, perhaps it will take a while, but this will drive a revolution in medicine. Fabulous, lots of people talk about this. But there's one thing that doesn't get much attention. How is that model of colossal sharing across all of those kinds of databases compatible with the business models of institutions and organizations and corporations that are involved in this business today? If your business is based on proprietary data, if your competitive advantage is defined by your data, how on Earth is that company or is that society in fact going to achieve the value that's implicit in the technology? They can't. So essentially what's happening here, and genomics is merely one example of this, is that technology is driving the natural scaling of the activity beyond the institutional boundaries within which we have been used to thinking about it, and in particular beyond the institutional boundaries in terms of which business strategy as a discipline is formulated. The basic story here is that what used to be vertically integrated, oligopolistic competition among essentially similar kinds of competitors is evolving, by one means or another, from a vertical structure to a horizontal one. Why is that happening? It's happening because transaction costs are plummeting and because scale is polarizing. The plummeting of transaction costs weakens the glue that holds value chains together, and allows them to separate. The polarization of scale economies towards the very small — small is beautiful — allows for scalable communities to substitute for conventional corporate production. The scaling in the opposite direction, towards things like big data, drive the structure of business towards the creation of new kinds of institutions that can achieve that scale. But either way, the typically vertical structure gets driven to becoming more horizontal. The logic isn't just about big data. If we were to look, for example, at the telecommunications industry, you can tell the same story about fiber optics. If we look at the pharmaceutical industry, or, for that matter, university research, you can say exactly the same story about so-called "big science." And in the opposite direction, if we look, say, at the energy sector, where all the talk is about how households will be efficient producers of green energy and efficient conservers of energy, that is, in fact, the reverse phenomenon. That is the fragmentation of scale because the very small can substitute for the traditional corporate scale. Either way, what we are driven to is this horizontalization of the structure of industries, and that implies fundamental changes in how we think about strategy. It means, for example, that we need to think about strategy as the curation of these kinds of horizontal structure, where things like business definition and even industry definition are actually the outcomes of strategy, not something that the strategy presupposes. It means, for example, we need to work out how to accommodate collaboration and competition simultaneously. Think about the genome. We need to accommodate the very large and the very small simultaneously. And we need industry structures that will accommodate very, very different motivations, from the amateur motivations of people in communities to maybe the social motivations of infrastructure built by governments, or, for that matter, cooperative institutions built by companies that are otherwise competing, because that is the only way that they can get to scale. These kinds of transformations render the traditional premises of business strategy obsolete. They drive us into a completely new world. They require us, whether we are in the public sector or the private sector, to think very fundamentally differently about the structure of business, and, at last, it makes strategy interesting again. Thank you. (Applause) |
Government surveillance — this is just the beginning | {0: 'Christopher Soghoian researches and exposes the high-tech surveillance tools that governments use to spy on their own citizens, and he is a champion of digital privacy rights.\r\n'} | TED Fellows Retreat 2013 | The 2011 Arab Spring captured the attention of the world. It also captured the attention of authoritarian governments in other countries, who were worried that revolution would spread. To respond, they ramped up surveillance of activists, journalists and dissidents who they feared would inspire revolution in their own countries. One prominent Bahraini activist, who was arrested and tortured by his government, has said that the interrogators showed him transcripts of his telephone calls and text messages. Of course, it's no secret that governments are able to intercept telephone calls and text messages. It's for that reason that many activists specifically avoid using the telephone. Instead, they use tools like Skype, which they think are immune to interception. They're wrong. There have now been over the last few years an industry of companies who provide surveillance technology to governments, specifically technology that allows those governments to hack into the computers of surveillance targets. Rather than intercepting the communications as they go over the wire, instead they now hack into your computer, enable your webcam, enable your microphone, and steal documents from your computer. When the government of Egypt fell in 2011, activists raided the office of the secret police, and among the many documents they found was this document by the Gamma Corporation, by Gamma International. Gamma is a German company that manufactures surveillance software and sells it only to governments. It's important to note that most governments don't really have the in-house capabilities to develop this software. Smaller ones don't have the resources or the expertise, and so there's this market of Western companies who are happy to supply them with the tools and techniques for a price. Gamma is just one of these companies. I should note also that Gamma never actually sold their software to the Egyptian government. They'd sent them an invoice for a sale, but the Egyptians never bought it. Instead, apparently, the Egyptian government used a free demo version of Gamma's software. (Laughter) So this screenshot is from a sales video that Gamma produced. Really, they're just emphasizing in a relatively slick presentation the fact that the police can sort of sit in an air-conditioned office and remotely monitor someone without them having any idea that it's going on. You know, your webcam light won't turn on. There's nothing to indicate that the microphone is enabled. This is the managing director of Gamma International. His name is Martin Muench. There are many photos of Mr. Muench that exist. This is perhaps my favorite. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit onto his webcam. You can see there's a little sticker that's placed over his camera. He knows what kind of surveillance is possible, and so clearly he doesn't want it to be used against him. Muench has said that he intends for his software to be used to capture terrorists and locate pedophiles. Of course, he's also acknowledged that once the software has been sold to governments, he has no way of knowing how it can be used. Gamma's software has been located on servers in countries around the world, many with really atrocious track records and human rights violations. They really are selling their software around the world. Gamma is not the only company in the business. As I said, it's a $5 billion industry. One of the other big guys in the industry is an Italian company called Hacking Team. Now, Hacking Team has what is probably the slickest presentation. The video they've produced is very sexy, and so I'm going to play you a clip just so you can get a feel both for the capabilities of the software but also how it's marketed to their government clients. (Video) Narrator: You want to look through your target's eyes. (Music) You have to hack your target. ["While your target is browsing the web, exchanging documents, receiving SMS, crossing the borders"] You have to hit many different platforms. ["Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Linux"] You have to overcome encryption and capture relevant data. [Skype & encrypted calls, target location, messaging, relationships, web browsing, audio & video"] Being stealth and untraceable. ["Immune to any protection system Hidden collection infrastructure"] Deployed all over your country. ["Up to hundreds of thousands of targets Managed from a single spot"] Exactly what we do. Christopher Soghoian: So, it would be funny if it wasn't true, but, in fact, Hacking Team's software is being sold to governments around the world. Last year we learned, for example, that it's been used to target Moroccan journalists by the Moroccan government. Many, many countries it's been found in. So, Hacking Team has also been actively courting the U.S. law enforcement market. In the last year or so, the company has opened a sales office in Maryland. The company has also hired a spokesperson. They've been attending surveillance industry conferences where law enforcement officials show up. They've spoken at the conferences. What I thought was most fascinating was they've actually paid for the coffee break at one of the law enforcement conferences earlier this year. I can't tell you for sure that Hacking Team has sold their technology in the United States, but what I can tell you that if they haven't sold it, it isn't because they haven't been trying hard. So as I said before, governments that don't really have the resources to build their own tools will buy off-the-shelf surveillance software, and so for that reason, you see that the government of, say, Tunisia, might use the same software as the government of Germany. They're all buying off-the-shelf stuff. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States does have the budget to build their own surveillance technology, and so for several years, I've been trying to figure out if and how the FBI is hacking into the computers of surveillance targets. My friends at an organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation — they're a civil society group — obtained hundreds of documents from the FBI detailing their next generation of surveillance technologies. Most of these documents were heavily redacted, but what you can see from the slides, if I zoom in, is this term: Remote Operations Unit. Now, when I first looked into this, I'd never heard of this unit before. I've been studying surveillance for more than six years. I'd never heard of it. And so I went online and I did some research, and ultimately I hit the mother lode when I went to LinkedIn, the social networking site for job seekers. There were lots of former U.S. government contractors who had at one point worked for the Remote Operating Unit, and were describing in surprising detail on their CVs what they had done in their former job. (Laughter) So I took this information and I gave it to a journalist that I know and trust at the Wall Street Journal, and she was able to contact several other former law enforcement officials who spoke on background and confirmed that yes, in fact, the FBI has a dedicated team that does nothing but hack into the computers of surveillance targets. Like Gamma and Hacking Team, the FBI also has the capability to remotely activate webcams, microphones, steal documents, get web browsing information, the works. There's sort of a big problem with governments going into hacking, and that's that terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, journalists and human rights activists all use the same kinds of computers. There's no drug dealer phone and there's no journalist laptop. We all use the same technology, and what that means then is that for governments to have the capability to hack into the computers of the real bad guys, they also have to have the capability to hack into our devices too. So governments around the world have been embracing this technology. They've been embracing hacking as a law enforcement technique, but without any real debate. In the United States, where I live, there have been no congressional hearings. There's no law that's been passed specifically authorizing this technique, and because of its power and potential for abuse, it's vital that we have an informed public debate. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
My DNA vending machine | {0: 'Gabe Barcia-Colombo creates madcap art inspired both by Renaissance era curiosity cabinets and the modern-day digital chronicling of everyday life. Think: miniature people projected in objects and a DNA Vending Machine.'} | TED Fellows Retreat 2013 | This is a vending machine in Los Angeles. It's in a shopping mall, and it sells fish eggs. It's a caviar-vending machine. This is the Art-o-mat, an art-vending machine that sells small artistic creations by different artists, usually on small wood blocks or matchboxes, in limited edition. This is Oliver Medvedik. He is not a vending machine, but he is one of the founders of Genspace, a community biolab in Brooklyn, New York, where anybody can go and take classes and learn how to do things like grow E. coli that glows in the dark or learn how to take strawberry DNA. In fact, I saw Oliver do one of these strawberry DNA extractions about a year ago, and this is what led me into this bizarre path that I'm going to talk to you right now. Strawberry DNA is really fascinating, because it's so beautiful. I'd never thought about DNA being a beautiful thing before, before I saw it in this form. A lot of people, especially in the art community, don't necessarily engage in science in this way. I instantly joined Genspace after this, and asked Oliver, "If we can do this with strawberries, can we do this with people?" About 10 minutes later, we were both spitting in vials, coming up with a protocol for human DNA extraction. I started doing this on my own. This is what my DNA actually looks like. And I was at a dinner party with some artist friends, and I was telling them about this project, and they couldn't believe that you could actually see DNA. So I said, all right, let's get out some supplies right now. And I started having these bizarre dinner parties on Friday nights, where people would come over and we'd do DNA extractions, and I would capture them on video, because it created this kind of funny portrait as well. (Laughter) These are people who don't necessarily regularly engage with science. You can kind of tell from their reactions. (Laughter) But they became fascinated by it, and it was really exciting for me to see them get excited about science. And so I started doing this regularly. (Laughter) It's an odd thing to do with your Friday nights, but this is what I started doing. I started collecting a whole group of my friends' DNA in small vials and categorizing them. This is what that looked like. And it started to make me think about a couple of things. First, this looked a lot like my Facebook wall. So in a way, I created sort of a genetic social network. And the second thing was, one time a friend came over and looked at this on my table and was like, "Uh ... why are they numbered? Is this person more rare than the other one?" And I hadn't even thought about that. They were just numbered because that was the order that I extracted the DNA in. But that made me think about collecting toys, and what's going on right now in the toy world with blind box toys, and being able to collect these rare toys. You buy these boxes, but aren't sure what's going to be inside. But when you open them, you have different rarities of the toys. I thought that was interesting; I thought about this and the caviar vending machine and the Art-o-mat all together. And for some reason, I was one night drawing a vending machine, thinking of doing paintings of a vending machine. The vial of my DNA was sitting there, and I saw a beautiful collaboration between the strands of DNA and the coils of a vending machine. So I decided to create an art installation called the DNA Vending Machine. Here it is. (Music) [DNA Vending Machine is an art installation about our increasing access to biotechnology.] (Music) [For a reasonable cost, you can purchase a sample of human DNA from a traditional vending machine.] (Music) [Each sample comes packaged with a collectible limited edition portrait of the human specimen.] (Music) [DNA Vending Machine treats DNA as a collectible material and brings to light legal issues over the ownership of DNA.] (Music ends) Gabriel Barcia-Colombo: The DNA Vending Machine is currently in a couple of galleries in New York, and it's selling out pretty well. We're in the first edition of 100 pieces, hoping to do another edition pretty soon. I'd like to get it into more of a metro hub, like Grand Central or Penn Station, next to some of the other vending machines in that location. But really, with this and a lot of my art projects, I want to ask the audience a question: When biotechnology and DNA sequencing becomes as cheap as, say, laser cutting or 3D printing or buying caviar from a vending machine, will you submit your sample of DNA to be part of the vending machine? How much will these samples be worth? Will you buy someone else's sample? And what will you be able to do with that sample? Thank you. (Applause) |
A 50-cent microscope that folds like origami | {0: 'TED Fellow Manu Prakash is on a mission to bring radical new technology to global health.'} | TEDGlobal 2012 | The year is 1800. A curious little invention is being talked about. It's called a microscope. What it allows you to do is see tiny little lifeforms that are invisible to the naked eye. Soon comes the medical discovery that many of these lifeforms are actually causes of terrible human diseases. Imagine what happened to the society when they realized that an English mom in her teacup actually was drinking a monster soup, not very far from here. This is from London. Fast forward 200 years. We still have this monster soup around, and it's taken hold in the developing countries around the tropical belt. Just for malaria itself, there are a million deaths a year, and more than a billion people that need to be tested because they are at risk for different species of malarial infections. Now it's actually very simple to put a face to many of these monsters. You take a stain, like acridine orange or a fluorescent stain or Giemsa, and a microscope, and you look at them. They all have faces. Why is that so, that Alex in Kenya, Fatima in Bangladesh, Navjoot in Mumbai, and Julie and Mary in Uganda still wait months to be able to diagnose why they are sick? And that's primarily because scalability of the diagnostics is completely out of reach. And remember that number: one billion. The problem lies with the microscope itself. Even though the pinnacle of modern science, research microscopes are not designed for field testing. Neither were they first designed for diagnostics at all. They are heavy, bulky, really hard to maintain, and cost a lot of money. This picture is Mahatma Gandhi in the '40s using the exact same setup that we actually use today for diagnosing T.B. in his ashram in Sevagram in India. Two of my students, Jim and James, traveled around India and Thailand, starting to think about this problem a lot. We saw all kinds of donated equipment. We saw fungus growing on microscope lenses. And we saw people who had a functional microscope but just didn't know how to even turn it on. What grew out of that work and that trip was actually the idea of what we call Foldscopes. So what is a Foldscope? A Foldscope is a completely functional microscope, a platform for fluorescence, bright-field, polarization, projection, all kinds of advanced microscopy built purely by folding paper. So, now you think, how is that possible? I'm going to show you some examples here, and we will run through some of them. It starts with a single sheet of paper. What you see here is all the possible components to build a functional bright-field and fluorescence microscope. So, there are three stages: There is the optical stage, the illumination stage and the mask-holding stage. And there are micro optics at the bottom that's actually embedded in the paper itself. What you do is, you take it on, and just like you are playing like a toy, which it is, I tab it off, and I break it off. This paper has no instructions and no languages. There is a code, a color code embedded, that tells you exactly how to fold that specific microscope. When it's done, it looks something like this, has all the functionalities of a standard microscope, just like an XY stage, a place where a sample slide could go, for example right here. We didn't want to change this, because this is the standard that's been optimized for over the years, and many health workers are actually used to this. So this is what changes, but the standard stains all remain the same for many different diseases. You pop this in. There is an XY stage, and then there is a focusing stage, which is a flexure mechanism that's built in paper itself that allows us to move and focus the lenses by micron steps. So what's really interesting about this object, and my students hate when I do this, but I'm going to do this anyway, is these are rugged devices. I can turn it on and throw it on the floor and really try to stomp on it. And they last, even though they're designed from a very flexible material, like paper. Another fun fact is, this is what we actually send out there as a standard diagnostic tool, but here in this envelope I have 30 different foldscopes of different configurations all in a single folder. And I'm going to pick one randomly. This one, it turns out, is actually designed specifically for malaria, because it has the fluorescent filters built specifically for diagnosing malaria. So the idea of very specific diagnostic microscopes comes out of this. So up till now, you didn't actually see what I would see from one of these setups. So what I would like to do is, if we could dim the lights, please, it turns out foldscopes are also projection microscopes. I have these two microscopes that I'm going to turn — go to the back of the wall — and just project, and this way you will see exactly what I would see. What you're looking at — (Applause) — This is a cross-section of a compound eye, and when I'm going to zoom in closer, right there, I am going through the z-axis. You actually see how the lenses are cut together in the cross-section pattern. Another example, one of my favorite insects, I love to hate this one, is a mosquito, and you're seeing the antenna of a culex pipiens. Right there. All from the simple setup that I actually described. So my wife has been field testing some of our microscopes by washing my clothes whenever I forget them in the dryer. So it turns out they're waterproof, and — (Laughter) — right here is just fluorescent water, and I don't know if you can actually see this. This also shows you how the projection scope works. You get to see the beam the way it's projected and bent. Can we get the lights back on again? So I'm quickly going to show you, since I'm running out of time, in terms of how much it costs for us to manufacture, the biggest idea was roll-to-roll manufacturing, so we built this out of 50 cents of parts and costs. (Applause) And what this allows us to do is to think about a new paradigm in microscopy, which we call use-and-throw microscopy. I'm going to give you a quick snapshot of some of the parts that go in. Here is a sheet of paper. This is when we were thinking about the idea. This is an A4 sheet of paper. These are the three stages that you actually see. And the optical components, if you look at the inset up on the right, we had to figure out a way to manufacture lenses in paper itself at really high throughputs, so it uses a process of self-assembly and surface tension to build achromatic lenses in the paper itself. So that's where the lenses go. There are some light sources. And essentially, in the end, all the parts line up because of origami, because of the fact that origami allows us micron-scale precision of optical alignment. So even though this looks like a simple toy, the aspects of engineering that go in something like this are fairly sophisticated. So here is another obvious thing that we would do, typically, if I was going to show that these microscopes are robust, is go to the third floor and drop it from the floor itself. There it is, and it survives. So for us, the next step actually is really finishing our field trials. We are starting at the end of the summer. We are at a stage where we'll be making thousands of microscopes. That would be the first time where we would be doing field trials with the highest density of microscopes ever at a given place. We've started collecting data for malaria, Chagas disease and giardia from patients themselves. And I want to leave you with this picture. I had not anticipated this before, but a really interesting link between hands-on science education and global health. What are the tools that we're actually providing the kids who are going to fight this monster soup for tomorrow? I would love for them to be able to just print out a Foldscope and carry them around in their pockets. Thank you. (Applause) |
A word game to communicate in any language | {0: 'Ajit Narayanan is the inventor of Avaz, an affordable, tablet-based communication device for people who are speech-impaired.'} | TED2013 | I work with children with autism. Specifically, I make technologies to help them communicate. Now, many of the problems that children with autism face, they have a common source, and that source is that they find it difficult to understand abstraction, symbolism. And because of this, they have a lot of difficulty with language. Let me tell you a little bit about why this is. You see that this is a picture of a bowl of soup. All of us can see it. All of us understand this. These are two other pictures of soup, but you can see that these are more abstract These are not quite as concrete. And when you get to language, you see that it becomes a word whose look, the way it looks and the way it sounds, has absolutely nothing to do with what it started with, or what it represents, which is the bowl of soup. So it's essentially a completely abstract, a completely arbitrary representation of something which is in the real world, and this is something that children with autism have an incredible amount of difficulty with. Now that's why most of the people that work with children with autism — speech therapists, educators — what they do is, they try to help children with autism communicate not with words, but with pictures. So if a child with autism wanted to say, "I want soup," that child would pick three different pictures, "I," "want," and "soup," and they would put these together, and then the therapist or the parent would understand that this is what the kid wants to say. And this has been incredibly effective; for the last 30, 40 years people have been doing this. In fact, a few years back, I developed an app for the iPad which does exactly this. It's called Avaz, and the way it works is that kids select different pictures. These pictures are sequenced together to form sentences, and these sentences are spoken out. So Avaz is essentially converting pictures, it's a translator, it converts pictures into speech. Now, this was very effective. There are thousands of children using this, you know, all over the world, and I started thinking about what it does and what it doesn't do. And I realized something interesting: Avaz helps children with autism learn words. What it doesn't help them do is to learn word patterns. Let me explain this in a little more detail. Take this sentence: "I want soup tonight." Now it's not just the words here that convey the meaning. It's also the way in which these words are arranged, the way these words are modified and arranged. And that's why a sentence like "I want soup tonight" is different from a sentence like "Soup want I tonight," which is completely meaningless. So there is another hidden abstraction here which children with autism find a lot of difficulty coping with, and that's the fact that you can modify words and you can arrange them to have different meanings, to convey different ideas. Now, this is what we call grammar. And grammar is incredibly powerful, because grammar is this one component of language which takes this finite vocabulary that all of us have and allows us to convey an infinite amount of information, an infinite amount of ideas. It's the way in which you can put things together in order to convey anything you want to. And so after I developed Avaz, I worried for a very long time about how I could give grammar to children with autism. The solution came to me from a very interesting perspective. I happened to chance upon a child with autism conversing with her mom, and this is what happened. Completely out of the blue, very spontaneously, the child got up and said, "Eat." Now what was interesting was the way in which the mom was trying to tease out the meaning of what the child wanted to say by talking to her in questions. So she asked, "Eat what? Do you want to eat ice cream? You want to eat? Somebody else wants to eat? You want to eat cream now? You want to eat ice cream in the evening?" And then it struck me that what the mother had done was something incredible. She had been able to get that child to communicate an idea to her without grammar. And it struck me that maybe this is what I was looking for. Instead of arranging words in an order, in sequence, as a sentence, you arrange them in this map, where they're all linked together not by placing them one after the other but in questions, in question-answer pairs. And so if you do this, then what you're conveying is not a sentence in English, but what you're conveying is really a meaning, the meaning of a sentence in English. Now, meaning is really the underbelly, in some sense, of language. It's what comes after thought but before language. And the idea was that this particular representation might convey meaning in its raw form. So I was very excited by this, you know, hopping around all over the place, trying to figure out if I can convert all possible sentences that I hear into this. And I found that this is not enough. Why is this not enough? This is not enough because if you wanted to convey something like negation, you want to say, "I don't want soup," then you can't do that by asking a question. You do that by changing the word "want." Again, if you wanted to say, "I wanted soup yesterday," you do that by converting the word "want" into "wanted." It's a past tense. So this is a flourish which I added to make the system complete. This is a map of words joined together as questions and answers, and with these filters applied on top of them in order to modify them to represent certain nuances. Let me show you this with a different example. Let's take this sentence: "I told the carpenter I could not pay him." It's a fairly complicated sentence. The way that this particular system works, you can start with any part of this sentence. I'm going to start with the word "tell." So this is the word "tell." Now this happened in the past, so I'm going to make that "told." Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to ask questions. So, who told? I told. I told whom? I told the carpenter. Now we start with a different part of the sentence. We start with the word "pay," and we add the ability filter to it to make it "can pay." Then we make it "can't pay," and we can make it "couldn't pay" by making it the past tense. So who couldn't pay? I couldn't pay. Couldn't pay whom? I couldn't pay the carpenter. And then you join these two together by asking this question: What did I tell the carpenter? I told the carpenter I could not pay him. Now think about this. This is —(Applause)— this is a representation of this sentence without language. And there are two or three interesting things about this. First of all, I could have started anywhere. I didn't have to start with the word "tell." I could have started anywhere in the sentence, and I could have made this entire thing. The second thing is, if I wasn't an English speaker, if I was speaking in some other language, this map would actually hold true in any language. So long as the questions are standardized, the map is actually independent of language. So I call this FreeSpeech, and I was playing with this for many, many months. I was trying out so many different combinations of this. And then I noticed something very interesting about FreeSpeech. I was trying to convert language, convert sentences in English into sentences in FreeSpeech, and vice versa, and back and forth. And I realized that this particular configuration, this particular way of representing language, it allowed me to actually create very concise rules that go between FreeSpeech on one side and English on the other. So I could actually write this set of rules that translates from this particular representation into English. And so I developed this thing. I developed this thing called the FreeSpeech Engine which takes any FreeSpeech sentence as the input and gives out perfectly grammatical English text. And by putting these two pieces together, the representation and the engine, I was able to create an app, a technology for children with autism, that not only gives them words but also gives them grammar. So I tried this out with kids with autism, and I found that there was an incredible amount of identification. They were able to create sentences in FreeSpeech which were much more complicated but much more effective than equivalent sentences in English, and I started thinking about why that might be the case. And I had an idea, and I want to talk to you about this idea next. In about 1997, about 15 years back, there were a group of scientists that were trying to understand how the brain processes language, and they found something very interesting. They found that when you learn a language as a child, as a two-year-old, you learn it with a certain part of your brain, and when you learn a language as an adult — for example, if I wanted to learn Japanese right now — a completely different part of my brain is used. Now I don't know why that's the case, but my guess is that that's because when you learn a language as an adult, you almost invariably learn it through your native language, or through your first language. So what's interesting about FreeSpeech is that when you create a sentence or when you create language, a child with autism creates language with FreeSpeech, they're not using this support language, they're not using this bridge language. They're directly constructing the sentence. And so this gave me this idea. Is it possible to use FreeSpeech not for children with autism but to teach language to people without disabilities? And so I tried a number of experiments. The first thing I did was I built a jigsaw puzzle in which these questions and answers are coded in the form of shapes, in the form of colors, and you have people putting these together and trying to understand how this works. And I built an app out of it, a game out of it, in which children can play with words and with a reinforcement, a sound reinforcement of visual structures, they're able to learn language. And this, this has a lot of potential, a lot of promise, and the government of India recently licensed this technology from us, and they're going to try it out with millions of different children trying to teach them English. And the dream, the hope, the vision, really, is that when they learn English this way, they learn it with the same proficiency as their mother tongue. All right, let's talk about something else. Let's talk about speech. This is speech. So speech is the primary mode of communication delivered between all of us. Now what's interesting about speech is that speech is one-dimensional. Why is it one-dimensional? It's one-dimensional because it's sound. It's also one-dimensional because our mouths are built that way. Our mouths are built to create one-dimensional sound. But if you think about the brain, the thoughts that we have in our heads are not one-dimensional. I mean, we have these rich, complicated, multi-dimensional ideas. Now, it seems to me that language is really the brain's invention to convert this rich, multi-dimensional thought on one hand into speech on the other hand. Now what's interesting is that we do a lot of work in information nowadays, and almost all of that is done in the language domain. Take Google, for example. Google trawls all these countless billions of websites, all of which are in English, and when you want to use Google, you go into Google search, and you type in English, and it matches the English with the English. What if we could do this in FreeSpeech instead? I have a suspicion that if we did this, we'd find that algorithms like searching, like retrieval, all of these things, are much simpler and also more effective, because they don't process the data structure of speech. Instead they're processing the data structure of thought. The data structure of thought. That's a provocative idea. But let's look at this in a little more detail. So this is the FreeSpeech ecosystem. We have the Free Speech representation on one side, and we have the FreeSpeech Engine, which generates English. Now if you think about it, FreeSpeech, I told you, is completely language-independent. It doesn't have any specific information in it which is about English. So everything that this system knows about English is actually encoded into the engine. That's a pretty interesting concept in itself. You've encoded an entire human language into a software program. But if you look at what's inside the engine, it's actually not very complicated. It's not very complicated code. And what's more interesting is the fact that the vast majority of the code in that engine is not really English-specific. And that gives this interesting idea. It might be very easy for us to actually create these engines in many, many different languages, in Hindi, in French, in German, in Swahili. And that gives another interesting idea. For example, supposing I was a writer, say, for a newspaper or for a magazine. I could create content in one language, FreeSpeech, and the person who's consuming that content, the person who's reading that particular information could choose any engine, and they could read it in their own mother tongue, in their native language. I mean, this is an incredibly attractive idea, especially for India. We have so many different languages. There's a song about India, and there's a description of the country as, it says, (in Sanskrit). That means "ever-smiling speaker of beautiful languages." Language is beautiful. I think it's the most beautiful of human creations. I think it's the loveliest thing that our brains have invented. It entertains, it educates, it enlightens, but what I like the most about language is that it empowers. I want to leave you with this. This is a photograph of my collaborators, my earliest collaborators when I started working on language and autism and various other things. The girl's name is Pavna, and that's her mother, Kalpana. And Pavna's an entrepreneur, but her story is much more remarkable than mine, because Pavna is about 23. She has quadriplegic cerebral palsy, so ever since she was born, she could neither move nor talk. And everything that she's accomplished so far, finishing school, going to college, starting a company, collaborating with me to develop Avaz, all of these things she's done with nothing more than moving her eyes. Daniel Webster said this: He said, "If all of my possessions were taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of communication, for with it, I would regain all the rest." And that's why, of all of these incredible applications of FreeSpeech, the one that's closest to my heart still remains the ability for this to empower children with disabilities to be able to communicate, the power of communication, to get back all the rest. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can we all "have it all"? | {0: 'Anne-Marie Slaughter has exploded the conversation around women’s work-life balance.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | So my moment of truth did not come all at once. In 2010, I had the chance to be considered for promotion from my job as director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department. This was my moment to lean in, to push myself forward for what are really only a handful of the very top foreign policy jobs, and I had just finished a big, 18-month project for Secretary Clinton, successfully, and I knew I could handle a bigger job. The woman I thought I was would have said yes. But I had been commuting for two years between Washington and Princeton, New Jersey, where my husband and my two teenage sons lived, and it was not going well. I tried on the idea of eking out another two years in Washington, or maybe uprooting my sons from their school and my husband from his work and asking them to join me. But deep down, I knew that the right decision was to go home, even if I didn't fully recognize the woman who was making that choice. That was a decision based on love and responsibility. I couldn't keep watching my oldest son make bad choices without being able to be there for him when and if he needed me. But the real change came more gradually. Over the next year, while my family was righting itself, I started to realize that even if I could go back into government, I didn't want to. I didn't want to miss the last five years that my sons were at home. I finally allowed myself to accept what was really most important to me, not what I was conditioned to want or maybe what I conditioned myself to want, and that decision led to a reassessment of the feminist narrative that I grew up with and have always championed. I am still completely committed to the cause of male-female equality, but let's think about what that equality really means, and how best to achieve it. I always accepted the idea that the most respected and powerful people in our society are men at the top of their careers, so that the measure of male-female equality ought to be how many women are in those positions: prime ministers, presidents, CEOs, directors, managers, Nobel laureates, leaders. I still think we should do everything we possibly can to achieve that goal. But that's only half of real equality, and I now think we're never going to get there unless we recognize the other half. I suggest that real equality, full equality, does not just mean valuing women on male terms. It means creating a much wider range of equally respected choices for women and for men. And to get there, we have to change our workplaces, our policies and our culture. In the workplace, real equality means valuing family just as much as work, and understanding that the two reinforce each other. As a leader and as a manager, I have always acted on the mantra, if family comes first, work does not come second — life comes together. If you work for me, and you have a family issue, I expect you to attend to it, and I am confident, and my confidence has always been borne out, that the work will get done, and done better. Workers who have a reason to get home to care for their children or their family members are more focused, more efficient, more results-focused. And breadwinners who are also caregivers have a much wider range of experiences and contacts. Think about a lawyer who spends part of his time at school events for his kids talking to other parents. He's much more likely to bring in new clients for his firm than a lawyer who never leaves his office. And caregiving itself develops patience — a lot of patience — and empathy, creativity, resilience, adaptability. Those are all attributes that are ever more important in a high-speed, horizontal, networked global economy. The best companies actually know this. The companies that win awards for workplace flexibility in the United States include some of our most successful corporations, and a 2008 national study on the changing workforce showed that employees in flexible and effective workplaces are more engaged with their work, they're more satisfied and more loyal, they have lower levels of stress and higher levels of mental health. And a 2012 study of employers showed that deep, flexible practices actually lowered operating costs and increased adaptability in a global service economy. So you may think that the privileging of work over family is only an American problem. Sadly, though, the obsession with work is no longer a uniquely American disease. Twenty years ago, when my family first started going to Italy, we used to luxuriate in the culture of siesta. Siesta is not just about avoiding the heat of the day. It's actually just as much about embracing the warmth of a family lunch. Now, when we go, fewer and fewer businesses close for siesta, reflecting the advance of global corporations and 24-hour competition. So making a place for those we love is actually a global imperative. In policy terms, real equality means recognizing that the work that women have traditionally done is just as important as the work that men have traditionally done, no matter who does it. Think about it: Breadwinning and caregiving are equally necessary for human survival. At least if we get beyond a barter economy, somebody has to earn an income and someone else has to convert that income to care and sustenance for loved ones. Now most of you, when you hear me talk about breadwinning and caregiving, instinctively translate those categories into men's work and women's work. And we don't typically challenge why men's work is advantaged. But consider a same-sex couple like my friends Sarah and Emily. They're psychiatrists. They got married five years ago, and now they have two-year-old twins. They love being mothers, but they also love their work, and they're really good at what they do. So how are they going to divide up breadwinning and caregiving responsibilities? Should one of them stop working or reduce hours to be home? Or should they both change their practices so they can have much more flexible schedules? And what criteria should they use to make that decision? Is it who makes the most money or who is most committed to her career? Or who has the most flexible boss? The same-sex perspective helps us see that juggling work and family are not women's problems, they're family problems. And Sarah and Emily are the lucky ones, because they have a choice about how much they want to work. Millions of men and women have to be both breadwinners and caregivers just to earn the income they need, and many of those workers are scrambling. They're patching together care arrangements that are inadequate and often actually unsafe. If breadwinning and caregiving are really equal, then why shouldn't a government invest as much in an infrastructure of care as the foundation of a healthy society as it invests in physical infrastructure as the backbone of a successful economy? The governments that get it — no surprises here — the governments that get it, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, provide universal child care, support for caregivers at home, school and early childhood education, protections for pregnant women, and care for the elderly and the disabled. Those governments invest in that infrastructure the same way they invest in roads and bridges and tunnels and trains. Those societies also show you that breadwinning and caregiving reinforce each other. They routinely rank among the top 15 countries of the most globally competitive economies, but at the same time, they rank very high on the OECD Better Life Index. In fact, they rank higher than other governments, like my own, the U.S., or Switzerland, that have higher average levels of income but lower rankings on work-life balance. So changing our workplaces and building infrastructures of care would make a big difference, but we're not going to get equally valued choices unless we change our culture, and the kind of cultural change required means re-socializing men. (Applause) Increasingly in developed countries, women are socialized to believe that our place is no longer only in the home, but men are actually still where they always were. Men are still socialized to believe that they have to be breadwinners, that to derive their self-worth from how high they can climb over other men on a career ladder. The feminist revolution still has a long way to go. It's certainly not complete. But 60 years after "The Feminine Mystique" was published, many women actually have more choices than men do. We can decide to be a breadwinner, a caregiver, or any combination of the two. When a man, on the other hand, decides to be a caregiver, he puts his manhood on the line. His friends may praise his decision, but underneath, they're scratching their heads. Isn't the measure of a man his willingness to compete with other men for power and prestige? And as many women hold that view as men do. We know that lots of women still judge the attractiveness of a man based in large part on how successful he is in his career. A woman can drop out of the work force and still be an attractive partner. For a man, that's a risky proposition. So as parents and partners, we should be socializing our sons and our husbands to be whatever they want to be, either caregivers or breadwinners. We should be socializing them to make caregiving cool for guys. (Applause) I can almost hear lots of you thinking, "No way." But in fact, the change is actually already happening. At least in the United States, lots of men take pride in cooking, and frankly obsess over stoves. They are in the birthing rooms. They take paternity leave when they can. They can walk a baby or soothe a toddler just as well as their wives can, and they are increasingly doing much more of the housework. Indeed, there are male college students now who are starting to say, "I want to be a stay-at-home dad." That was completely unthinkable 50 or even 30 years ago. And in Norway, where men have an automatic three month's paternity leave, but they lose it if they decide not to take it, a high government official told me that companies are starting to look at prospective male employees and raise an eyebrow if they didn't in fact take their leave when they had kids. That means that it's starting to seem like a character defect not to want to be a fully engaged father. So I was raised to believe that championing women's rights meant doing everything we could to get women to the top. And I still hope that I live long enough to see men and women equally represented at all levels of the work force. But I've come to believe that we have to value family every bit as much as we value work, and that we should entertain the idea that doing right by those we love will make all of us better at everything we do. Thirty years ago, Carol Gilligan, a wonderful psychologist, studied adolescent girls and identified an ethic of care, an element of human nature every bit as important as the ethic of justice. It turns out that "you don't care" is just as much a part of who we are as "that's not fair." Bill Gates agrees. He argues that the two great forces of human nature are self-interest and caring for others. Let's bring them both together. Let's make the feminist revolution a humanist revolution. As whole human beings, we will be better caregivers and breadwinners. You may think that can't happen, but I grew up in a society where my mother put out small vases of cigarettes for dinner parties, where blacks and whites used separate bathrooms, and where everybody claimed to be heterosexual. Today, not so much. The revolution for human equality can happen. It is happening. It will happen. How far and how fast is up to us. Thank you. (Applause) |
You don't need an app for that | {0: 'The publisher and editor of Stuff magazine, Toby Shapshak is a South African writer focusing on innovation — and the role it plays in Africa. '} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Let me start by asking you a question, just with a show of hands: Who has an iPhone? Who has an Android phone? Who has a Blackberry? Who will admit in public to having a Blackberry? (Laughter) And let me guess, how many of you, when you arrived here, like me, went and bought a pay-as-you-go SIM card? Yeah? I'll bet you didn't even know you're using African technology. Pay-as-you-go was a technology, or an idea, pioneered in Africa by a company called Vodacom a good 15 years ago, and now, like franchising, pay-as-you-go is one of the most dominant forces of economic activity in the world. So I'm going to talk about innovation in Africa, which I think is the purest form, innovation out of necessity. But first, I'm going to ask you some other questions. You don't have to put your hands up. These are rhetorical. Why did Nikola Tesla have to invent the alternating current that powers the lights in this building or the city that we're in? Why did Henry Ford have to invent the production line to produce these Fords that came in anything as long as they were black? And why did Eric Merrifield have to invent the dolos? Blank stares. That is what a dolos looks like, and in the background, you can see Robben Island. This is a small dolos, and Eric Merrifield is the most famous inventor you've never heard of. In 1963, a storm ripped up the harbor in a small South African town called East London, and while he was watching his kids playing with toys made from oxen bones called dolosse, he had the idea for this. It's a bit like a huge jumping jack, and they have used this in every harbor in the world as a breakwater. The global shipping economy would not be possible without African technology like this. So whenever you talk about Africa, you have to put up this picture of the world from space, and people go, "Look, it's the Dark Continent." Actually, it isn't. What it is is a map of innovation. And it's really easy to see where innovation's going on. All the places with lots of electricity, it isn't. (Laughter) (Applause) And the reason it isn't is because everybody's watching television or playing Angry Birds. (Laughter) (Applause) So where it's happening is in Africa. Now, this is real innovation, not the way people have expropriated the word to talk about launching new products. This is real innovation, and I define it as problem-solving. People are solving real problems in Africa. Why? Because we have to. Because we have real problems. And when we solve real problems for people, we solve them for the rest of the world at the same time. So in California, everybody's really excited about a little square of plastic that you plug into a phone and you can swipe your credit card, and people say, "We've liberated the credit card from the point of sale terminal." Fantastic. Why do you even need a credit card? In Africa, we've been doing that for years, and we've been doing it on phones like this. This is a picture I took at a place called Kitengela, about an hour south of Nairobi, and the thing that's so remarkable about the payment system that's been pioneered in Africa called M-Pesa is that it works on phones like this. It works on every single phone possible, because it uses SMS. You can pay bills with it, you can buy your groceries, you can pay your kids' school fees, and I'm told you can even bribe customs officials. (Laughter) Something like 25 million dollars a day is transacted through M-Pesa. Forty percent of Kenya's GDP moves through M-Pesa using phones like this. And you think this is just a feature phone. Actually it's the smartphone of Africa. It's also a radio, and it's also a torch, and more than anything else, it has really superb battery life. Why? Because that's what we need. We have really severe energy problems in Africa. By the way, you can update Facebook and send Gmail from a phone like this. So we have found a way to use the available technology to send money via M-Pesa, which is a bit like a check system for the mobile age. I come from Johannesburg, which is a mining town. It's built on gold. This is a picture I Instagrammed earlier. And the difference today is that the gold of today is mobile. If you think about the railroad system in North America and how that worked, first came the infrastructure, then came the industry around it, the brothels — it's a bit like the Internet today, right? — and everything else that worked with it: bars, saloons, etc. The gold of today is mobile, and mobile is the enabler that makes all of this possible. So what are some of the things that you can do with it? Well, this is by a guy called Bright Simons from Ghana, and what you do is you take medication, something that some people might spend their entire month's salary on, and you scratch off the code, and you send that to an SMS number, and it tells you if that is legitimate or if it's expired. Really simple, really effective, really life-saving. In Kenya, there's a service called iCow, which just sends you really important information about how to look after your dairy. The dairy business in Kenya is a $463 million business, and the difference between a subsistence farmer and an abundance farmer is only a couple of liters of milk a day. And if you can do that, you can rise out of poverty. Really simple, using a basic phone. If you don't have electricity, no problem! We'll just make it out of old bicycle parts using a windmill, as William Kamkwamba did. There's another great African that you've heard that's busy disrupting the automobile industry in the world. He's also finding a way to reinvent solar power and the electricity industry in North America, and if he's lucky, he'll get us to Mars, hopefully in my lifetime. He comes from Pretoria, the capital of [South Africa], about 50 kilometers from where I live. So back to Joburg, which is sometimes called Egoli, which means City of Gold. And not only is mobile the gold of today, I don't believe that the gold is under the ground. I believe we are the gold. Like you've heard the other economists say, we are at the point where China was when its boom years began, and that's where we're going. So, you hear the West talk about innovation at the edge. Well, of course it's happening at the edge, because in the middle, everybody's updating Facebook, or worse still, they're trying to understand Facebook's privacy settings. (Laughter) This is not that catchy catchphrase. This is innovation over the edge. So, people like to call Africa a mobile-first continent, but actually it's mobile-only, so while everybody else is doing all of those things, we're solving the world's problems. So there's only one thing left to say. ["You're welcome"] (Laughter) (Applause) |
The birds and the bees are just the beginning | {0: 'Carin Bondar is an expert on the sexual life of animals -- and loves to tell their wild sex stories.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | Anyone in the room thought about sex today? (Laughter) Yeah, you did. Thank you for putting your hand up over there. Well, I'm here to provide you with some biological validation for your sordid daydreams. I'm here to tell you a few things that you might not have known about wild sex. Now, when humans think about sex, male and female forms are generally what come to mind, but for many millions of years, such specific categories didn't even exist. Sex was a mere fusion of bodies or a trickle of DNA shared between two or more beings. It wasn't until about 500 million years ago that we start to see structures akin to a penis or a thing that gives DNA out, and a vagina, something that receives it. Now invariably, you're probably thinking about what belongs to our own species, these very familiar structures, but the diversity that we see in sexual structures in the animal kingdom that has evolved in response to the multitude of factors surrounding reproduction is pretty mind-blowing. Penile diversity is especially profuse. So this is a paper nautilus. It's a close relative of squid and octopus, and males have a hectocotylus. Just what is a hectocotylus? A detachable, swimming penis. It leaves the [body of the male], finds the female through pheromonal cues in the water, attaches itself to her body and deposits the sperm. For many decades, biologists actually felt that the hectocotylus was a separate organism altogether. Now, the tapir is a mammal from South America. And the tapir has a prehensile penis. It actually has a level of dexterity in its penis much akin to what we have with our hands. And it uses this dexterity to bypass the vagina altogether and deposit sperm directly into the female's uterus, not to mention it's a pretty good size. The biggest penis in the animal kingdom, however, is not that of the tapir. The biggest penis-to-body-size ratio in the animal kingdom actually belongs to the meager beach barnacle, and this video is actually showing you what the human penis would look like if it were the same size as that of a barnacle. (Laughter) Mm-hm. (Laughter) So with all of this diversity in structure, one might think, then, that penises are fitting neatly into vaginas all over the place for the purposes of successful reproduction. Simply insert part A into slot B, and we should all be good to go. But of course, that doesn't exactly happen, and that's because we can't just take form into account. We have to think about function as well, and when it comes to sex, function relates to the contributions made by the gametes, or the sperm and the eggs. And these contributions are far from equal. Eggs are very expensive to make, so it makes sense for females to be very choosy about who she shares them with. Sperm, on the other hand, is abundant and cheap, so it makes more sense for males to have a more-sex-is-better strategy when it comes to siring members of future generations. So how do animals cope with these very incongruent needs between the sexes? I mean, if a female doesn't choose a particular male, or if she has the ability to store sperm and she simply has enough, then it makes more sense for her to spend her time doing other biologically relevant things: avoiding predators, taking care of offspring, gathering and ingesting food. This is, of course, bad news for any male who has yet to make a deposit in her sperm bank, and this sets the scene for some pretty drastic strategies for successful fertilization. This is bedbug sex, and it's aptly termed traumatic insemination. Males have a spiked, barbed penis that they literally stab into the female, and they don't stab it anywhere near her vagina. They stab it anywhere in her body, and the sperm simply migrates through her hemolymph to her ovaries. If a female gets too many stab wounds, or if a stab wound happens to become infected, she can actually die from it. Now if you've ever been out for a nice, peaceful walk by the lake and happened to see some ducks having sex, you've undoubtedly been alarmed, because it looks like gang rape. And quite frankly, that's exactly what it is. A group of males will grab a female, hold her down, and ballistically ejaculate their spiral-shaped penis into her corkscrew-shaped vagina over and over and over again. From flaccid to ejaculation in less than a second. Now the female actually gets the last laugh, though, because she can actually manipulate her posture so as to allow the sperm of certain suitors better access to her ovaries. Now, I like to share stories like this with my audiences because, yeah, we humans, we tend to think sex, sex is fun, sex is good, there's romance, and there's orgasm. But orgasm didn't actually evolve until about 65 million years ago with the advent of mammals. But some animals had it going on quite a bit before that. There are some more primitive ways of pleasing one's partner. Earwig males have either really large penile appendages or really small ones. It's a very simple genetically inherited trait and the males are not otherwise any different. Those that have long penile appendages are not bigger or stronger or otherwise any different at all. So going back to our biological minds, then, we might think that females should choose to have sex with the guys that have the shorter appendages, because she can use her time for other things: avoiding predators, taking care of young, finding and ingesting food. But biologists have repeatedly observed that females choose to have sex with the males that have the long appendages. Why do they do this? Well, according to the biological literature, "During copulation, the genitalia of certain males may elicit more favorable female responses through superior mechanical or stimulatory interaction with the female reproductive tract." Mm-hm. These are Mexican guppies, and what you see on their upper maxilla is an outgrowth of epidermal filaments, and these filaments basically form a fish mustache, if you will. Now males have been observed to prod the female's genital opening prior to copulating with her, and in what I have lovingly termed the Magnum, P.I. hypothesis, females are overwhelmingly more likely to be found with males that have these fish mustaches. A little guppy porn for you right there. So we've seen very different strategies that males are using when it comes to winning a female partner. We've seen a coercion strategy in which sexual structures are used in a forceful way to basically make a female have sex. We've also seen a titillation strategy where males are actually pleasing their female partners into choosing them as a sex partner. Now unfortunately, in the animal kingdom, it's the coercion strategy that we see time and time again. It's very common in many phyla, from invertebrates to avian species, mammals, and, of course, even in primates. Now interestingly, there are a few mammalian species in which females have evolved specialized genitalia that doesn't allow for sexual coercion to take place. Female elephants and female hyenas have a penile clitoris, or an enlarged clitoral tissue that hangs externally, much like a penis, and in fact it's very difficult to sex these animals by merely looking at their external morphology. So before a male can insert his penis into a female's vagina, she has to take this penile clitoris and basically inside-out it in her own body. I mean, imagine putting a penis into another penis. It's simply not going to happen unless the female is on board with the action. Now, even more interesting is the fact that elephant and hyena societies are entirely matriarchal: they're run by females, groups of females, sisters, aunts and offspring, and when young males attain sexual maturity, they're turfed out of the group. In hyena societies, adult males are actually the lowest on the social scale. They can take part in a kill only after everybody else, including the offspring. So it seems that when you take the penis power away from a male, you take away all the social power he has. So what are my take-home messages from my talk today? Well, sex is just so much more than insert part A into slot B and hope that the offspring run around everywhere. The sexual strategies and reproductive structures that we see in the animal kingdom basically dictate how males and females will react to each other, which then dictates how populations and societies form and evolve. So it may not be surprising to any of you that animals, including ourselves, spend a good amount of time thinking about sex, but what might surprise you is the extent to which so many other aspects of their lives and our lives are influenced by it. So thank you, and happy daydreaming. (Applause) |
The long reach of reason | {0: 'Rebecca Newberger Goldstein writes novels and nonfiction that explore questions of philosophy, morality and being.', 1: 'Steven Pinker is a professor of cognitive science (the study of the human mind) who writes about language, mind and human nature. '} | TED2012 | ["Rebecca Newberger Goldstein"] ["Steven Pinker"] ["The Long Reach of Reason"] Cabbie: Twenty-two dollars. Steven Pinker: Okay. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Reason appears to have fallen on hard times: Popular culture plumbs new depths of dumbth and political discourse has become a race to the bottom. We're living in an era of scientific creationism, 9/11 conspiracy theories, psychic hotlines, and a resurgence of religious fundamentalism. People who think too well are often accused of elitism, and even in the academy, there are attacks on logocentrism, the crime of letting logic dominate our thinking. SP: But is this necessarily a bad thing? Perhaps reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact. RNG: How could a reasoned argument logically entail the ineffectiveness of reasoned arguments? Look, you're trying to persuade us of reason's impotence. You're not threatening us or bribing us, suggesting that we resolve the issue with a show of hands or a beauty contest. By the very act of trying to reason us into your position, you're conceding reason's potency. Reason isn't up for grabs here. It can't be. You show up for that debate and you've already lost it. SP: But can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste? RNG: All on its own, the answer is no, but it doesn't take much to switch it to yes. You need two conditions: The first is that reasoners all care about their own well-being. That's one of the passions that has to be present in order for reason to go to work, and it's obviously present in all of us. We all care passionately about our own well-being. The second condition is that reasoners are members of a community of reasoners who can affect one another's well-being, can exchange messages, and comprehend each other's reasoning. And that's certainly true of our gregarious and loquatious species, well endowed with the instinct for language. SP: Well, that sounds good in theory, but has it worked that way in practice? In particular, can it explain a momentous historical development that I spoke about five years ago here at TED? Namely, we seem to be getting more humane. Centuries ago, our ancestors would burn cats alive as a form of popular entertainment. Knights waged constant war on each other by trying to kill as many of each other's peasants as possible. Governments executed people for frivolous reasons, like stealing a cabbage or criticizing the royal garden. The executions were designed to be as prolonged and as painful as possible, like crucifixion, disembowelment, breaking on the wheel. Respectable people kept slaves. For all our flaws, we have abandoned these barbaric practices. RNG: So, do you think it's human nature that's changed? SP: Not exactly. I think we still harbor instincts that can erupt in violence, like greed, tribalism, revenge, dominance, sadism. But we also have instincts that can steer us away, like self-control, empathy, a sense of fairness, what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. RNG: So if human nature didn't change, what invigorated those better angels? SP: Well, among other things, our circle of empathy expanded. Years ago, our ancestors would feel the pain only of their family and people in their village. But with the expansion of literacy and travel, people started to sympathize with wider and wider circles, the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race, and perhaps eventually, all of humanity. RNG: Can hard-headed scientists really give so much credit to soft-hearted empathy? SP: They can and do. Neurophysiologists have found neurons in the brain that respond to other people's actions the same way they respond to our own. Empathy emerges early in life, perhaps before the age of one. Books on empathy have become bestsellers, like "The Empathic Civilization" and "The Age of Empathy." RNG: I'm all for empathy. I mean, who isn't? But all on its own, it's a feeble instrument for making moral progress. For one thing, it's innately biased toward blood relations, babies and warm, fuzzy animals. As far as empathy is concerned, ugly outsiders can go to hell. And even our best attempts to work up sympathy for those who are unconnected with us fall miserably short, a sad truth about human nature that was pointed out by Adam Smith. Adam Smith: Let us suppose that the great empire of China was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe would react on receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people. He would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure with the same ease and tranquility as if no such accident had happened. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight, but provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren. SP: But if empathy wasn't enough to make us more humane, what else was there? RNG: Well, you didn't mention what might be one of our most effective better angels: reason. Reason has muscle. It's reason that provides the push to widen that circle of empathy. Every one of the humanitarian developments that you mentioned originated with thinkers who gave reasons for why some practice was indefensible. They demonstrated that the way people treated some particular group of others was logically inconsistent with the way they insisted on being treated themselves. SP: Are you saying that reason can actually change people's minds? Don't people just stick with whatever conviction serves their interests or conforms to the culture that they grew up in? RNG: Here's a fascinating fact about us: Contradictions bother us, at least when we're forced to confront them, which is just another way of saying that we are susceptible to reason. And if you look at the history of moral progress, you can trace a direct pathway from reasoned arguments to changes in the way that we actually feel. Time and again, a thinker would lay out an argument as to why some practice was indefensible, irrational, inconsistent with values already held. Their essay would go viral, get translated into many languages, get debated at pubs and coffee houses and salons, and at dinner parties, and influence leaders, legislators, popular opinion. Eventually their conclusions get absorbed into the common sense of decency, erasing the tracks of the original argument that had gotten us there. Few of us today feel any need to put forth a rigorous philosophical argument as to why slavery is wrong or public hangings or beating children. By now, these things just feel wrong. But just those arguments had to be made, and they were, in centuries past. SP: Are you saying that people needed a step-by-step argument to grasp why something might be a wee bit wrong with burning heretics at the stake? RNG: Oh, they did. Here's the French theologian Sebastian Castellio making the case. Sebastian Castellio: Calvin says that he's certain, and other sects say that they are. Who shall be judge? If the matter is certain, to whom is it so? To Calvin? But then, why does he write so many books about manifest truth? In view of the uncertainty, we must define heretics simply as one with whom we disagree. And if then we are going to kill heretics, the logical outcome will be a war of extermination, since each is sure of himself. SP: Or with hideous punishments like breaking on the wheel? RNG: The prohibition in our constitution of cruel and unusual punishments was a response to a pamphlet circulated in 1764 by the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria. Cesare Beccaria: As punishments become more cruel, the minds of men, which like fluids always adjust to the level of the objects that surround them, become hardened, and after a hundred years of cruel punishments, breaking on the wheel causes no more fear than imprisonment previously did. For a punishment to achieve its objective, it is only necessary that the harm that it inflicts outweighs the benefit that derives from the crime, and into this calculation ought to be factored the certainty of punishment and the loss of the good that the commission of the crime will produce. Everything beyond this is superfluous, and therefore tyrannical. SP: But surely antiwar movements depended on mass demonstrations and catchy tunes by folk singers and wrenching photographs of the human costs of war. RNG: No doubt, but modern anti-war movements reach back to a long chain of thinkers who had argued as to why we ought to mobilize our emotions against war, such as the father of modernity, Erasmus. Erasmus: The advantages derived from peace diffuse themselves far and wide, and reach great numbers, while in war, if anything turns out happily, the advantage redounds only to a few, and those unworthy of reaping it. One man's safety is owing to the destruction of another. One man's prize is derived from the plunder of another. The cause of rejoicings made by one side is to the other a cause of mourning. Whatever is unfortunate in war, is severely so indeed, and whatever, on the contrary, is called good fortune, is a savage and a cruel good fortune, an ungenerous happiness deriving its existence from another's woe. SP: But everyone knows that the movement to abolish slavery depended on faith and emotion. It was a movement spearheaded by the Quakers, and it only became popular when Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" became a bestseller. RNG: But the ball got rolling a century before. John Locke bucked the tide of millennia that had regarded the practice as perfectly natural. He argued that it was inconsistent with the principles of rational government. John Locke: Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by common to everyone of that society and made by the legislative power erected in it, a liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not, not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man, as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature. SP: Those words sound familiar. Where have I read them before? Ah, yes. Mary Astell: If absolute sovereignty be not necessary in a state, how comes it to be so in a family? Or if in a family, why not in a state? Since no reason can be alleged for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other, if all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves, as they must be if being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of men be the perfect condition of slavery? RNG: That sort of co-option is all in the job description of reason. One movement for the expansion of rights inspires another because the logic is the same, and once that's hammered home, it becomes increasingly uncomfortable to ignore the inconsistency. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement inspired the movements for women's rights, children's rights, gay rights and even animal rights. But fully two centuries before, the Enlightenment thinker Jeremy Bentham had exposed the indefensibility of customary practices such as the cruelty to animals. Jeremy Bentham: The question is not, can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer? RNG: And the persecution of homosexuals. JB: As to any primary mischief, it's evident that it produces no pain in anyone. On the contrary, it produces pleasure. The partners are both willing. If either of them be unwilling, the act is an offense, totally different in its nature of effects. It's a personal injury. It's a kind of rape. As to the any danger exclusive of pain, the danger, if any, much consist in the tendency of the example. But what is the tendency of this example? To dispose others to engage in the same practices. But this practice produces not pain of any kind to anyone. SP: Still, in every case, it took at least a century for the arguments of these great thinkers to trickle down and infiltrate the population as a whole. It kind of makes you wonder about our own time. Are there practices that we engage in where the arguments against them are there for all to see but nonetheless we persist in them? RNG: When our great grandchildren look back at us, will they be as appalled by some of our practices as we are by our slave-owning, heretic-burning, wife-beating, gay-bashing ancestors? SP: I'm sure everyone here could think of an example. RNG: I opt for the mistreatment of animals in factory farms. SP: The imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders and the toleration of rape in our nation's prisons. RNG: Scrimping on donations to life-saving charities in the developing world. SP: The possession of nuclear weapons. RNG: The appeal to religion to justify the otherwise unjustifiable, such as the ban on contraception. SP: What about religious faith in general? RNG: Eh, I'm not holding my breath. SP: Still, I have become convinced that reason is a better angel that deserves the greatest credit for the moral progress our species has enjoyed and that holds out the greatest hope for continuing moral progress in the future. RNG: And if, our friends, you detect a flaw in this argument, just remember you'll be depending on reason to point it out. Thank you. SP: Thank you. (Applause) |
The neuroscience of restorative justice | {0: 'Dan Reisel searches for the roots of human behavior, including the development of morality.'} | TED2013 | I'd like to talk today about how we can change our brains and our society. Meet Joe. Joe's 32 years old and a murderer. I met Joe 13 years ago on the lifer wing at Wormwood Scrubs high-security prison in London. I'd like you to imagine this place. It looks and feels like it sounds: Wormwood Scrubs. Built at the end of the Victorian Era by the inmates themselves, it is where England's most dangerous prisoners are kept. These individuals have committed acts of unspeakable evil. And I was there to study their brains. I was part of a team of researchers from University College London, on a grant from the U.K. department of health. My task was to study a group of inmates who had been clinically diagnosed as psychopaths. That meant they were the most callous and the most aggressive of the entire prison population. What lay at the root of their behavior? Was there a neurological cause for their condition? And if there was a neurological cause, could we find a cure? So I'd like to speak about change, and especially about emotional change. Growing up, I was always intrigued by how people change. My mother, a clinical psychotherapist, would occasionally see patients at home in the evening. She would shut the door to the living room, and I imagined magical things happened in that room. At the age of five or six I would creep up in my pajamas and sit outside with my ear glued to the door. On more than one occasion, I fell asleep and they had to push me out of the way at the end of the session. And I suppose that's how I found myself walking into the secure interview room on my first day at Wormwood Scrubs. Joe sat across a steel table and greeted me with this blank expression. The prison warden, looking equally indifferent, said, "Any trouble, just press the red buzzer, and we'll be around as soon as we can." (Laughter) I sat down. The heavy metal door slammed shut behind me. I looked up at the red buzzer far behind Joe on the opposite wall. (Laughter) I looked at Joe. Perhaps detecting my concern, he leaned forward, and said, as reassuringly as he could, "Ah, don't worry about the buzzer, it doesn't work anyway." (Laughter) Over the subsequent months, we tested Joe and his fellow inmates, looking specifically at their ability to categorize different images of emotion. And we looked at their physical response to those emotions. So, for example, when most of us look at a picture like this of somebody looking sad, we instantly have a slight, measurable physical response: increased heart rate, sweating of the skin. Whilst the psychopaths in our study were able to describe the pictures accurately, they failed to show the emotions required. They failed to show a physical response. It was as though they knew the words but not the music of empathy. So we wanted to look closer at this to use MRI to image their brains. That turned out to be not such an easy task. Imagine transporting a collection of clinical psychopaths across central London in shackles and handcuffs in rush hour, and in order to place each of them in an MRI scanner, you have to remove all metal objects, including shackles and handcuffs, and, as I learned, all body piercings. After some time, however, we had a tentative answer. These individuals were not just the victims of a troubled childhood. There was something else. People like Joe have a deficit in a brain area called the amygdala. The amygdala is an almond-shaped organ deep within each of the hemispheres of the brain. It is thought to be key to the experience of empathy. Normally, the more empathic a person is, the larger and more active their amygdala is. Our population of inmates had a deficient amygdala, which likely led to their lack of empathy and to their immoral behavior. So let's take a step back. Normally, acquiring moral behavior is simply part of growing up, like learning to speak. At the age of six months, virtually every one of us is able to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects. At the age of 12 months, most children are able to imitate the purposeful actions of others. So for example, your mother raises her hands to stretch, and you imitate her behavior. At first, this isn't perfect. I remember my cousin Sasha, two years old at the time, looking through a picture book and licking one finger and flicking the page with the other hand, licking one finger and flicking the page with the other hand. (Laughter) Bit by bit, we build the foundations of the social brain so that by the time we're three, four years old, most children, not all, have acquired the ability to understand the intentions of others, another prerequisite for empathy. The fact that this developmental progression is universal, irrespective of where you live in the world or which culture you inhabit, strongly suggests that the foundations of moral behavior are inborn. If you doubt this, try, as I've done, to renege on a promise you've made to a four-year-old. You will find that the mind of a four-year old is not naïve in the slightest. It is more akin to a Swiss army knife with fixed mental modules finely honed during development and a sharp sense of fairness. The early years are crucial. There seems to be a window of opportunity, after which mastering moral questions becomes more difficult, like adults learning a foreign language. That's not to say it's impossible. A recent, wonderful study from Stanford University showed that people who have played a virtual reality game in which they took on the role of a good and helpful superhero actually became more caring and helpful towards others afterwards. Now I'm not suggesting we endow criminals with superpowers, but I am suggesting that we need to find ways to get Joe and people like him to change their brains and their behavior, for their benefit and for the benefit of the rest of us. So can brains change? For over 100 years, neuroanatomists and later neuroscientists held the view that after initial development in childhood, no new brain cells could grow in the adult human brain. The brain could only change within certain set limits. That was the dogma. But then, in the 1990s, studies starting showing, following the lead of Elizabeth Gould at Princeton and others, studies started showing the evidence of neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells in the adult mammalian brain, first in the olfactory bulb, which is responsible for our sense of smell, then in the hippocampus involving short-term memory, and finally in the amygdala itself. In order to understand how this process works, I left the psychopaths and joined a lab in Oxford specializing in learning and development. Instead of psychopaths, I studied mice, because the same pattern of brain responses appears across many different species of social animals. So if you rear a mouse in a standard cage, a shoebox, essentially, with cotton wool, alone and without much stimulation, not only does it not thrive, but it will often develop strange, repetitive behaviors. This naturally sociable animal will lose its ability to bond with other mice, even becoming aggressive when introduced to them. However, mice reared in what we called an enriched environment, a large habitation with other mice with wheels and ladders and areas to explore, demonstrate neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells, and as we showed, they also perform better on a range of learning and memory tasks. Now, they don't develop morality to the point of carrying the shopping bags of little old mice across the street, but their improved environment results in healthy, sociable behavior. Mice reared in a standard cage, by contrast, not dissimilar, you might say, from a prison cell, have dramatically lower levels of new neurons in the brain. It is now clear that the amygdala of mammals, including primates like us, can show neurogenesis. In some areas of the brain, more than 20 percent of cells are newly formed. We're just beginning to understand what exact function these cells have, but what it implies is that the brain is capable of extraordinary change way into adulthood. However, our brains are also exquisitely sensitive to stress in our environment. Stress hormones, glucocorticoids, released by the brain, suppress the growth of these new cells. The more stress, the less brain development, which in turn causes less adaptability and causes higher stress levels. This is the interplay between nature and nurture in real time in front of our eyes. When you think about it, it is ironic that our current solution for people with stressed amygdalae is to place them in an environment that actually inhibits any chance of further growth. Of course, imprisonment is a necessary part of the criminal justice system and of protecting society. Our research does not suggest that criminals should submit their MRI scans as evidence in court and get off the hook because they've got a faulty amygdala. The evidence is actually the other way. Because our brains are capable of change, we need to take responsibility for our actions, and they need to take responsibility for their rehabilitation. One way such rehabilitation might work is through restorative justice programs. Here victims, if they choose to participate, and perpetrators meet face to face in safe, structured encounters, and the perpetrator is encouraged to take responsibility for their actions, and the victim plays an active role in the process. In such a setting, the perpetrator can see, perhaps for the first time, the victim as a real person with thoughts and feelings and a genuine emotional response. This stimulates the amygdala and may be a more effective rehabilitative practice than simple incarceration. Such programs won't work for everyone, but for many, it could be a way to break the frozen sea within. So what can we do now? How can we apply this knowledge? I'd like to leave you with three lessons that I learned. The first thing that I learned was that we need to change our mindset. Since Wormwood Scrubs was built 130 years ago, society has advanced in virtually every aspect, in the way we run our schools, our hospitals. Yet the moment we speak about prisons, it's as though we're back in Dickensian times, if not medieval times. For too long, I believe, we've allowed ourselves to be persuaded of the false notion that human nature cannot change, and as a society, it's costing us dearly. We know that the brain is capable of extraordinary change, and the best way to achieve that, even in adults, is to change and modulate our environment. The second thing I have learned is that we need to create an alliance of people who believe that science is integral to bringing about social change. It's easy enough for a neuroscientist to place a high-security inmate in an MRI scanner. Well actually, that turns out not to be so easy, but ultimately what we want to show is whether we're able to reduce the reoffending rates. In order to answer complex questions like that, we need people of different backgrounds — lab-based scientists and clinicians, social workers and policy makers, philanthropists and human rights activists — to work together. Finally, I believe we need to change our own amygdalae, because this issue goes to the heart not just of who Joe is, but who we are. We need to change our view of Joe as someone wholly irredeemable, because if we see Joe as wholly irredeemable, how is he going to see himself as any different? In another decade, Joe will be released from Wormwood Scrubs. Will he be among the 70 percent of inmates who end up reoffending and returning to the prison system? Wouldn't it be better if, while serving his sentence, Joe was able to train his amygdala, which would stimulate the growth of new brain cells and connections, so that he will be able to face the world once he gets released? Surely, that would be in the interest of all of us. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Here's how we take back the Internet | {0: "In 2013 Edward Snowden leaked thousands of classified American National Security Agency documents, sparking a global conversation about citizens' rights to privacy on the Internet."} | TED2014 | Chris Anderson: The rights of citizens, the future of the Internet. So I would like to welcome to the TED stage the man behind those revelations, Ed Snowden. (Applause) Ed is in a remote location somewhere in Russia controlling this bot from his laptop, so he can see what the bot can see. Ed, welcome to the TED stage. What can you see, as a matter of fact? Edward Snowden: Ha, I can see everyone. This is amazing. (Laughter) CA: Ed, some questions for you. You've been called many things in the last few months. You've been called a whistleblower, a traitor, a hero. What words would you describe yourself with? ES: You know, everybody who is involved with this debate has been struggling over me and my personality and how to describe me. But when I think about it, this isn't the question that we should be struggling with. Who I am really doesn't matter at all. If I'm the worst person in the world, you can hate me and move on. What really matters here are the issues. What really matters here is the kind of government we want, the kind of Internet we want, the kind of relationship between people and societies. And that's what I'm hoping the debate will move towards, and we've seen that increasing over time. If I had to describe myself, I wouldn't use words like "hero." I wouldn't use "patriot," and I wouldn't use "traitor." I'd say I'm an American and I'm a citizen, just like everyone else. CA: So just to give some context for those who don't know the whole story — (Applause) — this time a year ago, you were stationed in Hawaii working as a consultant to the NSA. As a sysadmin, you had access to their systems, and you began revealing certain classified documents to some handpicked journalists leading the way to June's revelations. Now, what propelled you to do this? ES: You know, when I was sitting in Hawaii, and the years before, when I was working in the intelligence community, I saw a lot of things that had disturbed me. We do a lot of good things in the intelligence community, things that need to be done, and things that help everyone. But there are also things that go too far. There are things that shouldn't be done, and decisions that were being made in secret without the public's awareness, without the public's consent, and without even our representatives in government having knowledge of these programs. When I really came to struggle with these issues, I thought to myself, how can I do this in the most responsible way, that maximizes the public benefit while minimizing the risks? And out of all the solutions that I could come up with, out of going to Congress, when there were no laws, there were no legal protections for a private employee, a contractor in intelligence like myself, there was a risk that I would be buried along with the information and the public would never find out. But the First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees us a free press for a reason, and that's to enable an adversarial press, to challenge the government, but also to work together with the government, to have a dialogue and debate about how we can inform the public about matters of vital importance without putting our national security at risk. And by working with journalists, by giving all of my information back to the American people, rather than trusting myself to make the decisions about publication, we've had a robust debate with a deep investment by the government that I think has resulted in a benefit for everyone. And the risks that have been threatened, the risks that have been played up by the government have never materialized. We've never seen any evidence of even a single instance of specific harm, and because of that, I'm comfortable with the decisions that I made. CA: So let me show the audience a couple of examples of what you revealed. If we could have a slide up, and Ed, I don't know whether you can see, the slides are here. This is a slide of the PRISM program, and maybe you could tell the audience what that was that was revealed. ES: The best way to understand PRISM, because there's been a little bit of controversy, is to first talk about what PRISM isn't. Much of the debate in the U.S. has been about metadata. They've said it's just metadata, it's just metadata, and they're talking about a specific legal authority called Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That allows sort of a warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the entire country's phone records, things like that — who you're talking to, when you're talking to them, where you traveled. These are all metadata events. PRISM is about content. It's a program through which the government could compel corporate America, it could deputize corporate America to do its dirty work for the NSA. And even though some of these companies did resist, even though some of them — I believe Yahoo was one of them — challenged them in court, they all lost, because it was never tried by an open court. They were only tried by a secret court. And something that we've seen, something about the PRISM program that's very concerning to me is, there's been a talking point in the U.S. government where they've said 15 federal judges have reviewed these programs and found them to be lawful, but what they don't tell you is those are secret judges in a secret court based on secret interpretations of law that's considered 34,000 warrant requests over 33 years, and in 33 years only rejected 11 government requests. These aren't the people that we want deciding what the role of corporate America in a free and open Internet should be. CA: Now, this slide that we're showing here shows the dates in which different technology companies, Internet companies, are alleged to have joined the program, and where data collection began from them. Now, they have denied collaborating with the NSA. How was that data collected by the NSA? ES: Right. So the NSA's own slides refer to it as direct access. What that means to an actual NSA analyst, someone like me who was working as an intelligence analyst targeting, Chinese cyber-hackers, things like that, in Hawaii, is the provenance of that data is directly from their servers. It doesn't mean that there's a group of company representatives sitting in a smoky room with the NSA palling around and making back-room deals about how they're going to give this stuff away. Now each company handles it different ways. Some are responsible. Some are somewhat less responsible. But the bottom line is, when we talk about how this information is given, it's coming from the companies themselves. It's not stolen from the lines. But there's an important thing to remember here: even though companies pushed back, even though companies demanded, hey, let's do this through a warrant process, let's do this where we actually have some sort of legal review, some sort of basis for handing over these users' data, we saw stories in the Washington Post last year that weren't as well reported as the PRISM story that said the NSA broke in to the data center communications between Google to itself and Yahoo to itself. So even these companies that are cooperating in at least a compelled but hopefully lawful manner with the NSA, the NSA isn't satisfied with that, and because of that, we need our companies to work very hard to guarantee that they're going to represent the interests of the user, and also advocate for the rights of the users. And I think over the last year, we've seen the companies that are named on the PRISM slides take great strides to do that, and I encourage them to continue. CA: What more should they do? ES: The biggest thing that an Internet company in America can do today, right now, without consulting with lawyers, to protect the rights of users worldwide, is to enable SSL web encryption on every page you visit. The reason this matters is today, if you go to look at a copy of "1984" on Amazon.com, the NSA can see a record of that, the Russian intelligence service can see a record of that, the Chinese service can see a record of that, the French service, the German service, the services of Andorra. They can all see it because it's unencrypted. The world's library is Amazon.com, but not only do they not support encryption by default, you cannot choose to use encryption when browsing through books. This is something that we need to change, not just for Amazon, I don't mean to single them out, but they're a great example. All companies need to move to an encrypted browsing habit by default for all users who haven't taken any action or picked any special methods on their own. That'll increase the privacy and the rights that people enjoy worldwide. CA: Ed, come with me to this part of the stage. I want to show you the next slide here. (Applause) This is a program called Boundless Informant. What is that? ES: So, I've got to give credit to the NSA for using appropriate names on this. This is one of my favorite NSA cryptonyms. Boundless Informant is a program that the NSA hid from Congress. The NSA was previously asked by Congress, was there any ability that they had to even give a rough ballpark estimate of the amount of American communications that were being intercepted. They said no. They said, we don't track those stats, and we can't track those stats. We can't tell you how many communications we're intercepting around the world, because to tell you that would be to invade your privacy. Now, I really appreciate that sentiment from them, but the reality, when you look at this slide is, not only do they have the capability, the capability already exists. It's already in place. The NSA has its own internal data format that tracks both ends of a communication, and if it says, this communication came from America, they can tell Congress how many of those communications they have today, right now. And what Boundless Informant tells us is more communications are being intercepted in America about Americans than there are in Russia about Russians. I'm not sure that's what an intelligence agency should be aiming for. CA: Ed, there was a story broken in the Washington Post, again from your data. The headline says, "NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year." Tell us about that. ES: We also heard in Congressional testimony last year, it was an amazing thing for someone like me who came from the NSA and who's seen the actual internal documents, knows what's in them, to see officials testifying under oath that there had been no abuses, that there had been no violations of the NSA's rules, when we knew this story was coming. But what's especially interesting about this, about the fact that the NSA has violated their own rules, their own laws thousands of times in a single year, including one event by itself, one event out of those 2,776, that affected more than 3,000 people. In another event, they intercepted all the calls in Washington, D.C., by accident. What's amazing about this, this report, that didn't get that much attention, is the fact that not only were there 2,776 abuses, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, had not seen this report until the Washington Post contacted her asking for comment on the report. And she then requested a copy from the NSA and received it, but had never seen this before that. What does that say about the state of oversight in American intelligence when the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has no idea that the rules are being broken thousands of times every year? CA: Ed, one response to this whole debate is this: Why should we care about all this surveillance, honestly? I mean, look, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about. What's wrong with that point of view? ES: Well, so the first thing is, you're giving up your rights. You're saying hey, you know, I don't think I'm going to need them, so I'm just going to trust that, you know, let's get rid of them, it doesn't really matter, these guys are going to do the right thing. Your rights matter because you never know when you're going to need them. Beyond that, it's a part of our cultural identity, not just in America, but in Western societies and in democratic societies around the world. People should be able to pick up the phone and to call their family, people should be able to send a text message to their loved ones, people should be able to buy a book online, they should be able to travel by train, they should be able to buy an airline ticket without wondering about how these events are going to look to an agent of the government, possibly not even your government years in the future, how they're going to be misinterpreted and what they're going to think your intentions were. We have a right to privacy. We require warrants to be based on probable cause or some kind of individualized suspicion because we recognize that trusting anybody, any government authority, with the entirety of human communications in secret and without oversight is simply too great a temptation to be ignored. CA: Some people are furious at what you've done. I heard a quote recently from Dick Cheney who said that Julian Assange was a flea bite, Edward Snowden is the lion that bit the head off the dog. He thinks you've committed one of the worst acts of betrayal in American history. What would you say to people who think that? ES: Dick Cheney's really something else. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Laughter) I think it's amazing, because at the time Julian Assange was doing some of his greatest work, Dick Cheney was saying he was going to end governments worldwide, the skies were going to ignite and the seas were going to boil off, and now he's saying it's a flea bite. So we should be suspicious about the same sort of overblown claims of damage to national security from these kind of officials. But let's assume that these people really believe this. I would argue that they have kind of a narrow conception of national security. The prerogatives of people like Dick Cheney do not keep the nation safe. The public interest is not always the same as the national interest. Going to war with people who are not our enemy in places that are not a threat doesn't make us safe, and that applies whether it's in Iraq or on the Internet. The Internet is not the enemy. Our economy is not the enemy. American businesses, Chinese businesses, and any other company out there is a part of our society. It's a part of our interconnected world. There are ties of fraternity that bond us together, and if we destroy these bonds by undermining the standards, the security, the manner of behavior, that nations and citizens all around the world expect us to abide by. CA: But it's alleged that you've stolen 1.7 million documents. It seems only a few hundred of them have been shared with journalists so far. Are there more revelations to come? ES: There are absolutely more revelations to come. I don't think there's any question that some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come. CA: Come here, because I want to ask you about this particular revelation. Come and take a look at this. I mean, this is a story which I think for a lot of the techies in this room is the single most shocking thing that they have heard in the last few months. It's about a program called "Bullrun." Can you explain what that is? ES: So Bullrun, and this is again where we've got to thank the NSA for their candor, this is a program named after a Civil War battle. The British counterpart is called Edgehill, which is a U.K. civil war battle. And the reason that I believe they're named this way is because they target our own infrastructure. They're programs through which the NSA intentionally misleads corporate partners. They tell corporate partners that these are safe standards. They say hey, we need to work with you to secure your systems, but in reality, they're giving bad advice to these companies that makes them degrade the security of their services. They're building in backdoors that not only the NSA can exploit, but anyone else who has time and money to research and find it can then use to let themselves in to the world's communications. And this is really dangerous, because if we lose a single standard, if we lose the trust of something like SSL, which was specifically targeted by the Bullrun program, we will live a less safe world overall. We won't be able to access our banks and we won't be able to access commerce without worrying about people monitoring those communications or subverting them for their own ends. CA: And do those same decisions also potentially open America up to cyberattacks from other sources? ES: Absolutely. One of the problems, one of the dangerous legacies that we've seen in the post-9/11 era, is that the NSA has traditionally worn two hats. They've been in charge of offensive operations, that is hacking, but they've also been in charge of defensive operations, and traditionally they've always prioritized defense over offense based on the principle that American secrets are simply worth more. If we hack a Chinese business and steal their secrets, if we hack a government office in Berlin and steal their secrets, that has less value to the American people than making sure that the Chinese can't get access to our secrets. So by reducing the security of our communications, they're not only putting the world at risk, they're putting America at risk in a fundamental way, because intellectual property is the basis, the foundation of our economy, and if we put that at risk through weak security, we're going to be paying for it for years. CA: But they've made a calculation that it was worth doing this as part of America's defense against terrorism. Surely that makes it a price worth paying. ES: Well, when you look at the results of these programs in stopping terrorism, you will see that that's unfounded, and you don't have to take my word for it, because we've had the first open court, the first federal court that's reviewed this, outside the secrecy arrangement, called these programs Orwellian and likely unconstitutional. Congress, who has access to be briefed on these things, and now has the desire to be, has produced bills to reform it, and two independent White House panels who reviewed all of the classified evidence said these programs have never stopped a single terrorist attack that was imminent in the United States. So is it really terrorism that we're stopping? Do these programs have any value at all? I say no, and all three branches of the American government say no as well. CA: I mean, do you think there's a deeper motivation for them than the war against terrorism? ES: I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you, say again? CA: Sorry. Do you think there's a deeper motivation for them other than the war against terrorism? ES: Yeah. The bottom line is that terrorism has always been what we in the intelligence world would call a cover for action. Terrorism is something that provokes an emotional response that allows people to rationalize authorizing powers and programs that they wouldn't give otherwise. The Bullrun and Edgehill-type programs, the NSA asked for these authorities back in the 1990s. They asked the FBI to go to Congress and make the case. The FBI went to Congress and did make the case. But Congress and the American people said no. They said, it's not worth the risk to our economy. They said it's worth too much damage to our society to justify the gains. But what we saw is, in the post-9/11 era, they used secrecy and they used the justification of terrorism to start these programs in secret without asking Congress, without asking the American people, and it's that kind of government behind closed doors that we need to guard ourselves against, because it makes us less safe, and it offers no value. CA: Okay, come with me here for a sec, because I've got a more personal question for you. Speaking of terror, most people would find the situation you're in right now in Russia pretty terrifying. You obviously heard what happened, what the treatment that Bradley Manning got, Chelsea Manning as now is, and there was a story in Buzzfeed saying that there are people in the intelligence community who want you dead. How are you coping with this? How are you coping with the fear? ES: It's no mystery that there are governments out there that want to see me dead. I've made clear again and again and again that I go to sleep every morning thinking about what I can do for the American people. I don't want to harm my government. I want to help my government, but the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society, and say hey, this is not appropriate. We shouldn't be threatening dissidents. We shouldn't be criminalizing journalism. And whatever part I can do to see that end, I'm happy to do despite the risks. CA: So I'd actually like to get some feedback from the audience here, because I know there's widely differing reactions to Edward Snowden. Suppose you had the following two choices, right? You could view what he did as fundamentally a reckless act that has endangered America or you could view it as fundamentally a heroic act that will work towards America and the world's long-term good? Those are the two choices I'll give you. I'm curious to see who's willing to vote with the first of those, that this was a reckless act? There are some hands going up. Some hands going up. It's hard to put your hand up when the man is standing right here, but I see them. ES: I can see you. (Laughter) CA: And who goes with the second choice, the fundamentally heroic act? (Applause) (Cheers) And I think it's true to say that there are a lot of people who didn't show a hand and I think are still thinking this through, because it seems to me that the debate around you doesn't split along traditional political lines. It's not left or right, it's not really about pro-government, libertarian, or not just that. Part of it is almost a generational issue. You're part of a generation that grew up with the Internet, and it seems as if you become offended at almost a visceral level when you see something done that you think will harm the Internet. Is there some truth to that? ES: It is. I think it's very true. This is not a left or right issue. Our basic freedoms, and when I say our, I don't just mean Americans, I mean people around the world, it's not a partisan issue. These are things that all people believe, and it's up to all of us to protect them, and to people who have seen and enjoyed a free and open Internet, it's up to us to preserve that liberty for the next generation to enjoy, and if we don't change things, if we don't stand up to make the changes we need to do to keep the Internet safe, not just for us but for everyone, we're going to lose that, and that would be a tremendous loss, not just for us, but for the world. CA: Well, I have heard similar language recently from the founder of the world wide web, who I actually think is with us, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Tim, actually, would you like to come up and say, do we have a microphone for Tim? (Applause) Tim, good to see you. Come up there. Which camp are you in, by the way, traitor, hero? I have a theory on this, but — Tim Berners-Lee: I've given much longer answers to that question, but hero, if I have to make the choice between the two. CA: And Ed, I think you've read the proposal that Sir Tim has talked about about a new Magna Carta to take back the Internet. Is that something that makes sense? ES: Absolutely. I mean, my generation, I grew up not just thinking about the Internet, but I grew up in the Internet, and although I never expected to have the chance to defend it in such a direct and practical manner and to embody it in this unusual, almost avatar manner, I think there's something poetic about the fact that one of the sons of the Internet has actually become close to the Internet as a result of their political expression. And I believe that a Magna Carta for the Internet is exactly what we need. We need to encode our values not just in writing but in the structure of the Internet, and it's something that I hope, I invite everyone in the audience, not just here in Vancouver but around the world, to join and participate in. CA: Do you have a question for Ed? TBL: Well, two questions, a general question — CA: Ed, can you still hear us? ES: Yes, I can hear you. CA: Oh, he's back. TBL: The wiretap on your line got a little interfered with for a moment. (Laughter) ES: It's a little bit of an NSA problem. TBL: So, from the 25 years, stepping back and thinking, what would you think would be the best that we could achieve from all the discussions that we have about the web we want? ES: When we think about in terms of how far we can go, I think that's a question that's really only limited by what we're willing to put into it. I think the Internet that we've enjoyed in the past has been exactly what we as not just a nation but as a people around the world need, and by cooperating, by engaging not just the technical parts of society, but as you said, the users, the people around the world who contribute through the Internet, through social media, who just check the weather, who rely on it every day as a part of their life, to champion that. We'll get not just the Internet we've had, but a better Internet, a better now, something that we can use to build a future that'll be better not just than what we hoped for but anything that we could have imagined. CA: It's 30 years ago that TED was founded, 1984. A lot of the conversation since then has been along the lines that actually George Orwell got it wrong. It's not Big Brother watching us. We, through the power of the web, and transparency, are now watching Big Brother. Your revelations kind of drove a stake through the heart of that rather optimistic view, but you still believe there's a way of doing something about that. And you do too. ES: Right, so there is an argument to be made that the powers of Big Brother have increased enormously. There was a recent legal article at Yale that established something called the Bankston-Soltani Principle, which is that our expectation of privacy is violated when the capabilities of government surveillance have become cheaper by an order of magnitude, and each time that occurs, we need to revisit and rebalance our privacy rights. Now, that hasn't happened since the government's surveillance powers have increased by several orders of magnitude, and that's why we're in the problem that we're in today, but there is still hope, because the power of individuals have also been increased by technology. I am living proof that an individual can go head to head against the most powerful adversaries and the most powerful intelligence agencies around the world and win, and I think that's something that we need to take hope from, and we need to build on to make it accessible not just to technical experts but to ordinary citizens around the world. Journalism is not a crime, communication is not a crime, and we should not be monitored in our everyday activities. CA: I'm not quite sure how you shake the hand of a bot, but I imagine it's, this is the hand right here. TBL: That'll come very soon. ES: Nice to meet you, and I hope my beam looks as nice as my view of you guys does. CA: Thank you, Tim. (Applause) I mean, The New York Times recently called for an amnesty for you. Would you welcome the chance to come back to America? ES: Absolutely. There's really no question, the principles that have been the foundation of this project have been the public interest and the principles that underly the journalistic establishment in the United States and around the world, and I think if the press is now saying, we support this, this is something that needed to happen, that's a powerful argument, but it's not the final argument, and I think that's something that public should decide. But at the same time, the government has hinted that they want some kind of deal, that they want me to compromise the journalists with which I've been working, to come back, and I want to make it very clear that I did not do this to be safe. I did this to do what was right, and I'm not going to stop my work in the public interest just to benefit myself. (Applause) CA: In the meantime, courtesy of the Internet and this technology, you're here, back in North America, not quite the U.S., Canada, in this form. I'm curious, how does that feel? ES: Canada is different than what I expected. It's a lot warmer. (Laughter) CA: At TED, the mission is "ideas worth spreading." If you could encapsulate it in a single idea, what is your idea worth spreading right now at this moment? ES: I would say the last year has been a reminder that democracy may die behind closed doors, but we as individuals are born behind those same closed doors, and we don't have to give up our privacy to have good government. We don't have to give up our liberty to have security. And I think by working together we can have both open government and private lives, and I look forward to working with everyone around the world to see that happen. Thank you very much. CA: Ed, thank you. (Applause) |
What I learned from going blind in space | {0: 'Tweeting (and covering Bowie) from the International Space Station last year, Colonel Chris Hadfield reminded the world how much we love space.'} | TED2014 | What's the scariest thing you've ever done? Or another way to say it is, what's the most dangerous thing that you've ever done? And why did you do it? I know what the most dangerous thing is that I've ever done because NASA does the math. You look back to the first five shuttle launches, the odds of a catastrophic event during the first five shuttle launches was one in nine. And even when I first flew in the shuttle back in 1995, 74 shuttle flight, the odds were still now that we look back about one in 38 or so — one in 35, one in 40. Not great odds, so it's a really interesting day when you wake up at the Kennedy Space Center and you're going to go to space that day because you realize by the end of the day you're either going to be floating effortlessly, gloriously in space, or you'll be dead. You go into, at the Kennedy Space Center, the suit-up room, the same room that our childhood heroes got dressed in, that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got suited in to go ride the Apollo rocket to the moon. And I got my pressure suit built around me and rode down outside in the van heading out to the launchpad — in the Astro van — heading out to the launchpad, and as you come around the corner at the Kennedy Space Center, it's normally predawn, and in the distance, lit up by the huge xenon lights, is your spaceship — the vehicle that is going to take you off the planet. The crew is sitting in the Astro van sort of hushed, almost holding hands, looking at that as it gets bigger and bigger. We ride the elevator up and we crawl in, on your hands and knees into the spaceship, one at a time, and you worm your way up into your chair and plunk yourself down on your back. And the hatch is closed, and suddenly, what has been a lifetime of both dreams and denial is becoming real, something that I dreamed about, in fact, that I chose to do when I was nine years old, is now suddenly within not too many minutes of actually happening. In the astronaut business — the shuttle is a very complicated vehicle; it's the most complicated flying machine ever built. And in the astronaut business, we have a saying, which is, there is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse. (Laughter) And so you're very conscious in the cockpit; you're thinking about all of the things that you might have to do, all the switches and all the wickets you have to go through. And as the time gets closer and closer, this excitement is building. And then about three and a half minutes before launch, the huge nozzles on the back, like the size of big church bells, swing back and forth and the mass of them is such that it sways the whole vehicle, like the vehicle is alive underneath you, like an elephant getting up off its knees or something. And then about 30 seconds before launch, the vehicle is completely alive — it is ready to go — the APUs are running, the computers are all self-contained, it's ready to leave the planet. And 15 seconds before launch, this happens: (Video) Voice: 12, 11, 10, nine, eight, seven, six — (Space shuttle preparing for takeoff) — start, two, one, booster ignition, and liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery, returning to the space station, paving the way ... (Space shuttle taking off) Chris Hadfield: It is incredibly powerful to be on board one of these things. You are in the grip of something that is vastly more powerful than yourself. It's shaking you so hard you can't focus on the instruments in front of you. It's like you're in the jaws of some enormous dog and there's a foot in the small of your back pushing you into space, accelerating wildly straight up, shouldering your way through the air, and you're in a very complex place — paying attention, watching the vehicle go through each one of its wickets with a steadily increasing smile on your face. After two minutes, those solid rockets explode off and then you just have the liquid engines, the hydrogen and oxygen, and it's as if you're in a dragster with your foot to the floor and accelerating like you've never accelerated. You get lighter and lighter, the force gets on us heavier and heavier. It feels like someone's pouring cement on you or something. Until finally, after about eight minutes and 40 seconds or so, we are finally at exactly the right altitude, exactly the right speed, the right direction, the engine shut off, and we're weightless. And we're alive. It's an amazing experience. But why would we take that risk? Why would you do something that dangerous? In my case the answer is fairly straightforward. I was inspired as a youngster that this was what I wanted to do. I watched the first people walk on the moon and to me, it was just an obvious thing — I want to somehow turn myself into that. But the real question is, how do you deal with the danger of it and the fear that comes from it? How do you deal with fear versus danger? And having the goal in mind, thinking about where it might lead, directed me to a life of looking at all of the small details to allow this to become possible, to be able to launch and go help build a space station where you are on board a million-pound creation that's going around the world at five miles a second, eight kilometers a second, around the world 16 times a day, with experiments on board that are teaching us what the substance of the universe is made of and running 200 experiments inside. But maybe even more importantly, allowing us to see the world in a way that is impossible through any other means, to be able to look down and have — if your jaw could drop, it would — the jaw-dropping gorgeousness of the turning orb like a self-propelled art gallery of fantastic, constantly changing beauty that is the world itself. And you see, because of the speed, a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes for half a year. And the most magnificent part of all that is to go outside on a spacewalk. You are in a one-person spaceship that is your spacesuit, and you're going through space with the world. It's an entirely different perspective, you're not looking up at the universe, you and the Earth are going through the universe together. And you're holding on with one hand, looking at the world turn beside you. It's roaring silently with color and texture as it pours by mesmerizingly next to you. And if you can tear your eyes away from that and you look under your arm down at the rest of everything, it's unfathomable blackness, with a texture you feel like you could stick your hand into. and you are holding on with one hand, one link to the other seven billion people. And I was outside on my first spacewalk when my left eye went blind, and I didn't know why. Suddenly my left eye slammed shut in great pain and I couldn't figure out why my eye wasn't working. I was thinking, what do I do next? I thought, well maybe that's why we have two eyes, so I kept working. But unfortunately, without gravity, tears don't fall. So you just get a bigger and bigger ball of whatever that is mixed with your tears on your eye until eventually, the ball becomes so big that the surface tension takes it across the bridge of your nose like a tiny little waterfall and goes "goosh" into your other eye, and now I was completely blind outside the spaceship. So what's the scariest thing you've ever done? (Laughter) Maybe it's spiders. A lot of people are afraid of spiders. I think you should be afraid of spiders — spiders are creepy and they've got long, hairy legs, and spiders like this one, the brown recluse — it's horrible. If a brown recluse bites you, you end with one of these horrible, big necrotic things on your leg and there might be one right now sitting on the chair behind you, in fact. And how do you know? And so a spider lands on you, and you go through this great, spasmy attack because spiders are scary. But then you could say, well is there a brown recluse sitting on the chair beside me or not? I don't know. Are there brown recluses here? So if you actually do the research, you find out that in the world there are about 50,000 different types of spiders, and there are about two dozen that are venomous out of 50,000. And if you're in Canada, because of the cold winters here in B.C., there's about 720, 730 different types of spiders and there's one — one — that is venomous, and its venom isn't even fatal, it's just kind of like a nasty sting. And that spider — not only that, but that spider has beautiful markings on it, it's like "I'm dangerous. I got a big radiation symbol on my back, it's the black widow." So, if you're even slightly careful you can avoid running into the one spider — and it lives close the ground, you're walking along, you are never going to go through a spider web where a black widow bites you. Spider webs like this, it doesn't build those, it builds them down in the corners. And its a black widow because the female spider eats the male; it doesn't care about you. So in fact, the next time you walk into a spiderweb, you don't need to panic and go with your caveman reaction. The danger is entirely different than the fear. How do you get around it, though? How do you change your behavior? Well, next time you see a spiderweb, have a good look, make sure it's not a black widow spider, and then walk into it. And then you see another spiderweb and walk into that one. It's just a little bit of fluffy stuff. It's not a big deal. And the spider that may come out is no more threat to you than a lady bug or a butterfly. And then I guarantee you if you walk through 100 spiderwebs you will have changed your fundamental human behavior, your caveman reaction, and you will now be able to walk in the park in the morning and not worry about that spiderweb — or into your grandma's attic or whatever, into your own basement. And you can apply this to anything. If you're outside on a spacewalk and you're blinded, your natural reaction would be to panic, I think. It would make you nervous and worried. But we had considered all the venom, and we had practiced with a whole variety of different spiderwebs. We knew everything there is to know about the spacesuit and we trained underwater thousands of times. And we don't just practice things going right, we practice things going wrong all the time, so that you are constantly walking through those spiderwebs. And not just underwater, but also in virtual reality labs with the helmet and the gloves so you feel like it's realistic. So when you finally actually get outside on a spacewalk, it feels much different than it would if you just went out first time. And even if you're blinded, your natural, panicky reaction doesn't happen. Instead you kind of look around and go, "Okay, I can't see, but I can hear, I can talk, Scott Parazynski is out here with me. He could come over and help me." We actually practiced incapacitated crew rescue, so he could float me like a blimp and stuff me into the airlock if he had to. I could find my own way back. It's not nearly as big a deal. And actually, if you keep on crying for a while, whatever that gunk was that's in your eye starts to dilute and you can start to see again, and Houston, if you negotiate with them, they will let you then keep working. We finished everything on the spacewalk and when we came back inside, Jeff got some cotton batting and took the crusty stuff around my eyes, and it turned out it was just the anti-fog, sort of a mixture of oil and soap, that got in my eye. And now we use Johnson's No More Tears, which we probably should've been using right from the very beginning. (Laughter) But the key to that is by looking at the difference between perceived danger and actual danger, where is the real risk? What is the real thing that you should be afraid of? Not just a generic fear of bad things happening. You can fundamentally change your reaction to things so that it allows you to go places and see things and do things that otherwise would be completely denied to you ... where you could see the hardpan south of the Sahara, or you can see New York City in a way that is almost dreamlike, or the unconscious gingham of Eastern Europe fields or the Great Lakes as a collection of small puddles. You can see the fault lines of San Francisco and the way the water pours out under the bridge, just entirely different than any other way that you could have if you had not found a way to conquer your fear. You see a beauty that otherwise never would have happened. It's time to come home at the end. This is our spaceship, the Soyuz, that little one. Three of us climb in, and then this spaceship detaches from the station and falls into the atmosphere. These two parts here actually melt, we jettison them and they burn up in the atmosphere. The only part that survives is the little bullet that we're riding in, and it falls into the atmosphere, and in essence you are riding a meteorite home, and riding meteorites is scary, and it ought to be. But instead of riding into the atmosphere just screaming, like you would if suddenly you found yourself riding a meteorite back to Earth — (Laughter) — instead, 20 years previously we had started studying Russian, and then once you learn Russian, then we learned orbital mechanics in Russian, and then we learned vehicle control theory, and then we got into the simulator and practiced over and over and over again. And in fact, you can fly this meteorite and steer it and land in about a 15-kilometer circle anywhere on the Earth. So in fact, when our crew was coming back into the atmosphere inside the Soyuz, we weren't screaming, we were laughing; it was fun. And when the great big parachute opened, we knew that if it didn't open there's a second parachute, and it runs on a nice little clockwork mechanism. So we came back, we came thundering back to Earth and this is what it looked like to land in a Soyuz, in Kazakhstan. (Video) Reporter: And you can see one of those search and recovery helicopters, once again that helicopter part of dozen such Russian Mi-8 helicopters. Touchdown — 3:14 and 48 seconds, a.m. Central Time. CH: And you roll to a stop as if someone threw your spaceship at the ground and it tumbles end over end, but you're ready for it you're in a custom-built seat, you know how the shock absorber works. And then eventually the Russians reach in, drag you out, plunk you into a chair, and you can now look back at what was an incredible experience. You have taken the dreams of that nine-year-old boy, which were impossible and dauntingly scary, dauntingly terrifying, and put them into practice, and figured out a way to reprogram yourself, to change your primal fear so that it allowed you to come back with a set of experiences and a level of inspiration for other people that never could have been possible otherwise. Just to finish, they asked me to play that guitar. I know this song, and it's really a tribute to the genius of David Bowie himself, but it's also, I think, a reflection of the fact that we are not machines exploring the universe, we are people, and we're taking that ability to adapt and that ability to understand and the ability to take our own self-perception into a new place. (Music) ♫ This is Major Tom to ground control ♫ ♫ I've left forevermore ♫ ♫ And I'm floating in a most peculiar way ♫ ♫ And the stars look very different today ♫ ♫ For here am I floating in the tin can ♫ ♫ A last glimpse of the world ♫ ♫ Planet Earth is blue and there's so much left to do ♫ (Music) Fear not. (Applause) That's very nice of you. Thank you very much. Thank you. |
My wish: To launch a new era of openness in business | {0: 'Charmian Gooch is the 2014 TED Prize winner. At Global Witness, she exposes how a global architecture of corruption is woven into the extraction and exploitation of natural resources.'} | TED2014 | I've come here today to talk to you about a problem. It's a very simple yet devastating problem, one that spans the globe and is affecting all of us. The problem is anonymous companies. It sounds like a really dry and technical thing, doesn't it? But anonymous companies are making it difficult and sometimes impossible to find out the actual human beings responsible sometimes for really terrible crimes. So, why am I here talking to all of you? Well, I guess I am a lifelong troublemaker and when my parents taught my twin brother and I to question authority, I don't think they knew where it might lead. (Laughter) And, they probably really regretted it during my stroppy teenage years when, predictably, I questioned their authority a lot. And a lot of my school teachers didn't appreciate it much either. You see, since the age of about five I've always asked the question, but why? But why does the Earth go around the sun? But why is blood red? But why do I have to go to school? But why do I have to respect the teachers and authority? And little did I realize that this question would become the basis of everything I would do. And so it was in my twenties, a long time ago, that one rainy Sunday afternoon in North London I was sitting with Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley and we were busy stuffing envelopes for a mail out in the office of the campaign group where we worked at the time. And as usual, we were talking about the world's problems. And in particular, we were talking about the civil war in Cambodia. And we had talked about that many, many times before. But then suddenly we stopped and looked at each other and said, but why don't we try and change this? And from that slightly crazy question, over two decades and many campaigns later, including alerting the world to the problem of blood diamonds funding war, from that crazy question, Global Witness is now an 80-strong team of campaigners, investigators, journalists and lawyers. And we're all driven by the same belief, that change really is possible. So, what exactly does Global Witness do? We investigate, we report, to uncover the people really responsible for funding conflict — for stealing millions from citizens around the world, also known as state looting, and for destroying the environment. And then we campaign hard to change the system itself. And we're doing this because so many of the countries rich in natural resources like oil or diamonds or timber are home to some of the poorest and most dispossessed people on the planet. And much of this injustice is made possible by currently accepted business practices. And one of these is anonymous companies. Now we've come up against anonymous companies in lots of our investigations, like in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where we exposed how secretive deals involving anonymous companies had deprived the citizens of one of the poorest countries on the planet of well over a billion dollars. That's twice the country's health and education budget combined. Or in Liberia, where an international predatory logging company used front companies as it attempted to grab a really huge chunk of Liberia's unique forests. Or political corruption in Sarawak, Malaysia, which has led to the destruction of much of its forests. Well, that uses anonymous companies too. We secretly filmed some of the family of the former chief minister and a lawyer as they told our undercover investigator exactly how these dubious deals are done using such companies. And the awful thing is, there are so many other examples out there from all walks of life. This truly is a scandal of epic proportions hidden in plain sight. Whether it's the ruthless Mexican drugs cartel, the Zetas, who use anonymous companies to launder profits while their drugs-related violence is tearing communities apart across the Americas. Or the anonymous company, which bought up Americans' tax debts, piled on the legal fees and then gave homeowners a choice: Pay up or lose your home. Imagine being threatened with losing your home sometimes over a debt of just a few hundred dollars, and not being able to find out who you were really up against. Now anonymous companies are great for sanctions busting too. As the Iranian government found out when, through a series of front companies, it owned a building in the very heart of Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue, despite American sanctions. And Juicy Couture, home of of the velvet track suit, and other companies were the unwitting, unknowing tenants there. There are just so many examples, the horesemeat scandal in Europe, the Italian mafia, they've used these companies for decades. The $100 million American Medicare fraud, the supply of weapons to wars around the world including those in Eastern Europe in the early '90s. Anonymous companies have even come to light in the recent revolution in the Ukraine. But, for every case that we and others expose there are so many more that will remain hidden away because of the current system. And it's just a simple truth that some of the people responsible for outrageous crimes, for stealing from you and me and millions of others, they are remaining faceless and they are escaping accountability and they're doing this with ease, and they're doing it using legal structures. And really, that is unfair. Well, you might well ask, what exactly is an anonymous company, and can I really set one up, and use it, without anyone knowing who I am? Well, the answer is, yes you can. But if you're anything like me, you'll want to see some of that for yourself, so let me show you. Well first you need to work out where you want to set it up. Now, at this point you might be imagining one of those lovely tropical island tax havens but here's the thing, shockingly, my own hometown, London, and indeed the U.K., is one of the best places in the world to set up an anonymous company. And the other, even better, I'm afraid that's America. Do you know, in some states across America you need less identification to open up a company than you do to get a library card, like Delaware, which is one of the easiest places in the world to set up an anonymous company. Okay, so let's say it's America, and let's say it's Delaware, and now you can simply go online and find yourself a company service provider. These are the companies that can set your one up for you, and remember, it's all legal, routine business practice. So, here's one, but there are plenty of others to choose from. And having made your choice, you then pick what type of company you want and then fill in a contact, name and address. But don't worry, it doesn't have to be your name. It can be your lawyer's or your service provider's, and it's not for the public record anyway. And then you add the owner of the company. Now this is the key part, and again it doesn't have to be you, because you can get creative, because there is a whole universe out there of nominees to choose from. And nominees are the people that you can legally pay to be your company's owner. And if you don't want to involve anyone else, it doesn't even have to be an actual human being. It could be another company. And then finally, give your company a name add a few more details and make your payment. And then the service provider will take a few hours or more to process it. But there you are, in 10 minutes of online shopping you can create yourself an anonymous company. And not only is it easy, really, really easy and cheap, it's totally legal too. But the fun doesn't have to end there, maybe you want to be even more anonymous. Well, that's no problem either. You can simply keep adding layers, companies owned by companies. You can have hundreds of layers with hundreds of companies spread across lots of different countries, like a giant web, each layer adds anonymity. Each layer makes it more difficult for law enforcement and others to find out who the real owner is. But whose interests is this all serving? It might be in the interests of the company or a particular individual, but what about all of us, the public? There hasn't even been a global conversation yet about whether it's okay to misuse companies in this way. And what does it all mean for us? Well, an example that really haunts me is one I came across recently. And it's that of a horrific fire in a nightclub in Buenos Aires about a decade ago. It was the night before New Year's Eve. Three thousand very happy revelers, many of them teenagers, were crammed into a space meant for 1,000. And then tragedy struck, a fire broke out plastic decorations were melting from the ceiling and toxic smoke filled the club. So people tried to escape only to find that some of the fire doors had been chained shut. Over 200 people died. Seven hundred were injured trying to get out. And as the victims' families and the city and the country reeled in shock, investigators tried to find out who was responsible. And as they looked for the owners of the club, they found instead anonymous companies, and confusion surrounded the identities of those involved with the companies. Now ultimately, a range of people were charged and some went to jail. But this was an awful tragedy, and it shouldn't have been so difficult just to try and find out who was responsible for those deaths. Because in an age when there is so much information out there in the open, why should this crucial information about company ownership stay hidden away? Why should tax evaders, corrupt government officials, arms traders and more, be able to hide their identities from us, the public? Why should this secrecy be such an accepted business practice? Anonymous companies might be the norm right now but it wasn't always this way. Companies were created to give people a chance to innovate and not have to put everything on the line. Companies were created to limit financial risk, they were never intended to be used as a moral shield. Companies were never intended to be anonymous, and they don't have to be. And so I come to my wish. My wish is for us to know who owns and controls companies so that they can no longer be used anonymously against the public good. Together let's ignite world opinion, change the law, and launch a new era of openness in business. So what might this look like? Well, imagine if you could go online and look up the real owner of a company. Imagine if this data were open and free, accessible across borders for citizens and businesses and law enforcement alike. Imagine what a game changer that would be. So how are we going to do this? Well, there is only one way. Together, we have to change the law globally to create public registries which list the true owners of companies and can be accessed by all with no loopholes. And yes, this is ambitious, but there is momentum on this issue, and over the years I have seen the sheer power of momentum, and it's just starting on this issue. There is such an opportunity right now. And the TED community of creative and innovative thinkers and doers across all of society could make the crucial difference. You really can make this change happen. Now, a simple starting point is the address behind me for a Facebook page that you can join now to support the campaign and spread the word. It's going to be a springboard for our global campaigning. And the techies among you, you could really help us create a prototype public registry to demonstrate what a powerful tool this could be. Campaign groups from around the world have come together to work on this issue. The U.K. government is already on board; it supports these public registries. And just last week, the European Parliament came on board with a vote 600 to 30 in favor of public registries. That is momentum. (Applause) But it's early days. America still needs to come on board, as do so many other countries. And to succeed we will all together need to help and push our politicians, because without that, real far-reaching, world-shifting change just isn't going to happen. Because this isn't just about changing the law, this is about starting a conversation about what it's okay for companies to do, and in what ways is it acceptable to use company structures. This isn't just a dry policy issue. This is a human issue which affects us all. This is about being on the right side of history. Global citizens, innovators, business leaders, individuals, we need you. Together, let's kickstart this global movement. Let's just do it, let's end anonymous companies. Thank you. (Applause) |
Where's Google going next? | {0: 'Larry Page is the CEO and cofounder of Google, making him one of the ruling minds of the web. '} | TED2014 | Charlie Rose: So Larry sent me an email and he basically said, we've got to make sure that we don't seem like we're a couple of middle-aged boring men. I said, I'm flattered by that — (Laughter) — because I'm a bit older, and he has a bit more net worth than I do. Larry Page: Well, thank you. CR: So we'll have a conversation about the Internet, and we'll have a conversation Google, and we'll have a conversation about search and privacy, and also about your philosophy and a sense of how you've connected the dots and how this journey that began some time ago has such interesting prospects. Mainly we want to talk about the future. So my first question: Where is Google and where is it going? LP: Well, this is something we think about a lot, and our mission we defined a long time ago is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And people always say, is that really what you guys are still doing? And I always kind of think about that myself, and I'm not quite sure. But actually, when I think about search, it's such a deep thing for all of us, to really understand what you want, to understand the world's information, and we're still very much in the early stages of that, which is totally crazy. We've been at it for 15 years already, but it's not at all done. CR: When it's done, how will it be? LP: Well, I guess, in thinking about where we're going — you know, why is it not done? — a lot of it is just computing's kind of a mess. You know, your computer doesn't know where you are, it doesn't know what you're doing, it doesn't know what you know, and a lot we've been trying to do recently is just make your devices work, make them understand your context. Google Now, you know, knows where you are, knows what you may need. So really having computing work and understand you and understand that information, we really haven't done that yet. It's still very, very clunky. CR: Tell me, when you look at what Google is doing, where does Deep Mind fit? LP: Yeah, so Deep Mind is a company we just acquired recently. It's in the U.K. First, let me tell you the way we got there, which was looking at search and really understanding, trying to understand everything, and also make the computers not clunky and really understand you — like, voice was really important. So what's the state of the art on speech recognition? It's not very good. It doesn't really understand you. So we started doing machine learning research to improve that. That helped a lot. And we started just looking at things like YouTube. Can we understand YouTube? But we actually ran machine learning on YouTube and it discovered cats, just by itself. Now, that's an important concept. And we realized there's really something here. If we can learn what cats are, that must be really important. So I think Deep Mind, what's really amazing about Deep Mind is that it can actually — they're learning things in this unsupervised way. They started with video games, and really just, maybe I can show the video, just playing video games, and learning how to do that automatically. CR: Take a look at the video games and how machines are coming to be able to do some remarkable things. LP: The amazing thing about this is this is, I mean, obviously, these are old games, but the system just sees what you see, the pixels, and it has the controls and it has the score, and it's learned to play all of these games, same program. It's learned to play all of these games with superhuman performance. We've not been able to do things like this with computers before. And maybe I'll just narrate this one quickly. This is boxing, and it figures out it can sort of pin the opponent down. The computer's on the left, and it's just racking up points. So imagine if this kind of intelligence were thrown at your schedule, or your information needs, or things like that. We're really just at the beginning of that, and that's what I'm really excited about. CR: When you look at all that's taken place with Deep Mind and the boxing, also a part of where we're going is artificial intelligence. Where are we, when you look at that? LP: Well, I think for me, this is kind of one of the most exciting things I've seen in a long time. The guy who started this company, Demis, has a neuroscience and a computer science background. He went back to school to get his Ph.D. to study the brain. And so I think we're seeing a lot of exciting work going on that sort of crosses computer science and neuroscience in terms of really understanding what it takes to make something smart and do really interesting things. CR: But where's the level of it now? And how fast do you think we are moving? LP: Well, this is the state of the art right now, understanding cats on YouTube and things like that, improving voice recognition. We used a lot of machine learning to improve things incrementally, but I think for me, this example's really exciting, because it's one program that can do a lot of different things. CR: I don't know if we can do this, but we've got the image of the cat. It would be wonderful to see this. This is how machines looked at cats and what they came up with. Can we see that image? LP: Yeah. CR: There it is. Can you see the cat? Designed by machines, seen by machines. LP: That's right. So this is learned from just watching YouTube. And there's no training, no notion of a cat, but this concept of a cat is something important that you would understand, and now that the machines can kind of understand. Maybe just finishing also on the search part, it started with search, really understanding people's context and their information. I did have a video I wanted to show quickly on that that we actually found. (Video) ["Soy, Kenya"] Zack Matere: Not long ago, I planted a crop of potatoes. Then suddenly they started dying one after the other. I checked out the books and they didn't tell me much. So, I went and I did a search. ["Zack Matere, Farmer"] Potato diseases. One of the websites told me that ants could be the problem. It said, sprinkle wood ash over the plants. Then after a few days the ants disappeared. I got excited about the Internet. I have this friend who really would like to expand his business. So I went with him to the cyber cafe and we checked out several sites. When I met him next, he was going to put a windmill at the local school. I felt proud because something that wasn't there before was suddenly there. I realized that not everybody can be able to access what I was able to access. I thought that I need to have an Internet that my grandmother can use. So I thought about a notice board. A simple wooden notice board. When I get information on my phone, I'm able to post the information on the notice board. So it's basically like a computer. I use the Internet to help people. I think I am searching for a better life for me and my neighbors. So many people have access to information, but there's no follow-up to that. I think the follow-up to that is our knowledge. When people have the knowledge, they can find solutions without having to helped out. Information is powerful, but it is how we use it that will define us. (Applause) LP: Now, the amazing thing about that video, actually, was we just read about it in the news, and we found this gentlemen, and made that little clip. CR: When I talk to people about you, they say to me, people who know you well, say, Larry wants to change the world, and he believes technology can show the way. And that means access to the Internet. It has to do with languages. It also means how people can get access and do things that will affect their community, and this is an example. LP: Yeah, that's right, and I think for me, I have been focusing on access more, if we're talking about the future. We recently released this Loon Project which is using balloons to do it. It sounds totally crazy. We can show the video here. Actually, two out of three people in the world don't have good Internet access now. We actually think this can really help people sort of cost-efficiently. CR: It's a balloon. LP: Yeah, get access to the Internet. CR: And why does this balloon give you access to the Internet? Because there was some interesting things you had to do to figure out how to make balloons possible, they didn't have to be tethered. LP: Yeah, and this is a good example of innovation. Like, we've been thinking about this idea for five years or more before we started working on it, but it was just really, how do we get access points up high, cheaply? You normally have to use satellites and it takes a long time to launch them. But you saw there how easy it is to launch a balloon and get it up, and actually again, it's the power of the Internet, I did a search on it, and I found, 30, 40 years ago, someone had put up a balloon and it had gone around the Earth multiple times. And I thought, why can't we do that today? And that's how this project got going. CR: But are you at the mercy of the wind? LP: Yeah, but it turns out, we did some weather simulations which probably hadn't really been done before, and if you control the altitude of the balloons, which you can do by pumping air into them and other ways, you can actually control roughly where they go, and so I think we can build a worldwide mesh of these balloons that can cover the whole planet. CR: Before I talk about the future and transportation, where you've been a nerd for a while, and this fascination you have with transportation and automated cars and bicycles, let me talk a bit about what's been the subject here earlier with Edward Snowden. It is security and privacy. You have to have been thinking about that. LP: Yeah, absolutely. I saw the picture of Sergey with Edward Snowden yesterday. Some of you may have seen it. But I think, for me, I guess, privacy and security are a really important thing. We think about it in terms of both things, and I think you can't have privacy without security, so let me just talk about security first, because you asked about Snowden and all of that, and then I'll say a little bit about privacy. I think for me, it's tremendously disappointing that the government secretly did all this stuff and didn't tell us. I don't think we can have a democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government for stuff that we've never had a conversation about. And I don't mean we have to know what the particular terrorist attack is they're worried about protecting us from, but we do need to know what the parameters of it is, what kind of surveillance the government's going to do and how and why, and I think we haven't had that conversation. So I think the government's actually done itself a tremendous disservice by doing all that in secret. CR: Never coming to Google to ask for anything. LP: Not Google, but the public. I think we need to have a debate about that, or we can't have a functioning democracy. It's just not possible. So I'm sad that Google's in the position of protecting you and our users from the government doing secret thing that nobody knows about. It doesn't make any sense. CR: Yeah. And then there's a privacy side of it. LP: Yes. The privacy side, I think it's — the world is changing. You carry a phone. It knows where you are. There's so much more information about you, and that's an important thing, and it makes sense why people are asking difficult questions. We spend a lot of time thinking about this and what the issues are. I'm a little bit — I think the main thing that we need to do is just provide people choice, show them what data's being collected — search history, location data. We're excited about incognito mode in Chrome, and doing that in more ways, just giving people more choice and more awareness of what's going on. I also think it's very easy. What I'm worried is that we throw out the baby with the bathwater. And I look at, on your show, actually, I kind of lost my voice, and I haven't gotten it back. I'm hoping that by talking to you I'm going to get it back. CR: If I could do anything, I would do that. LP: All right. So get out your voodoo doll and whatever you need to do. But I think, you know what, I look at that, I made that public, and I got all this information. We got a survey done on medical conditions with people who have similar issues, and I look at medical records, and I say, wouldn't it be amazing if everyone's medical records were available anonymously to research doctors? And when someone accesses your medical record, a research doctor, they could see, you could see which doctor accessed it and why, and you could maybe learn about what conditions you have. I think if we just did that, we'd save 100,000 lives this year. CR: Absolutely. Let me go — (Applause) LP: So I guess I'm just very worried that with Internet privacy, we're doing the same thing we're doing with medical records, is we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and we're not really thinking about the tremendous good that can come from people sharing information with the right people in the right ways. CR: And the necessary condition that people have to have confidence that their information will not be abused. LP: Yeah, and I had this problem with my voice stuff. I was scared to share it. Sergey encouraged me to do that, and it was a great thing to do. CR: And the response has been overwhelming. LP: Yeah, and people are super positive. We got thousands and thousands of people with similar conditions, which there's no data on today. So it was a really good thing. CR: So talking about the future, what is it about you and transportation systems? LP: Yeah. I guess I was just frustrated with this when I was at college in Michigan. I had to get on the bus and take it and wait for it. And it was cold and snowing. I did some research on how much it cost, and I just became a bit obsessed with transportation systems. CR: And that began the idea of an automated car. LP: Yeah, about 18 years ago I learned about people working on automated cars, and I became fascinated by that, and it takes a while to get these projects going, but I'm super excited about the possibilities of that improving the world. There's 20 million people or more injured per year. It's the leading cause of death for people under 34 in the U.S. CR: So you're talking about saving lives. LP: Yeah, and also saving space and making life better. Los Angeles is half parking lots and roads, half of the area, and most cities are not far behind, actually. It's just crazy that that's what we use our space for. CR: And how soon will we be there? LP: I think we can be there very, very soon. We've driven well over 100,000 miles now totally automated. I'm super excited about getting that out quickly. CR: But it's not only you're talking about automated cars. You also have this idea for bicycles. LP: Well at Google, we got this idea that we should just provide free bikes to everyone, and that's been amazing, most of the trips. You see bikes going everywhere, and the bikes wear out. They're getting used 24 hours a day. CR: But you want to put them above the street, too. LP: Well I said, how do we get people using bikes more? CR: We may have a video here. LP: Yeah, let's show the video. I just got excited about this. (Music) So this is actually how you might separate bikes from cars with minimal cost. Anyway, it looks totally crazy, but I was actually thinking about our campus, working with the Zippies and stuff, and just trying to get a lot more bike usage, and I was thinking about, how do you cost-effectively separate the bikes from traffic? And I went and searched, and this is what I found. And we're not actually working on this, that particular thing, but it gets your imagination going. CR: Let me close with this. Give me a sense of the philosophy of your own mind. You have this idea of [Google X]. You don't simply want to go in some small, measurable arena of progress. LP: Yeah, I think many of the things we just talked about are like that, where they're really — I almost use the economic concept of additionality, which means that you're doing something that wouldn't happen unless you were actually doing it. And I think the more you can do things like that, the bigger impact you have, and that's about doing things that people might not think are possible. And I've been amazed, the more I learn about technology, the more I realize I don't know, and that's because this technological horizon, the thing that you can see to do next, the more you learn about technology, the more you learn what's possible. You learn that the balloons are possible because there's some material that will work for them. CR: What's interesting about you too, though, for me, is that, we have lots of people who are thinking about the future, and they are going and looking and they're coming back, but we never see the implementation. I think of somebody you knew and read about, Tesla. The principle of that for you is what? LP: Well, I think invention is not enough. If you invent something, Tesla invented electric power that we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. That had to be done by other people. It took a long time. And I think if we can actually combine both things, where we have an innovation and invention focus, plus the ability to really — a company that can really commercialize things and get them to people in a way that's positive for the world and to give people hope. You know, I'm amazed with the Loon Project just how excited people were about that, because it gave them hope for the two thirds of the world that doesn't have Internet right now that's any good. CR: Which is a second thing about corporations. You are one of those people who believe that corporations are an agent of change if they are run well. LP: Yeah. I'm really dismayed most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that's somewhat correct. Companies are doing the same incremental thing that they did 50 years ago or 20 years ago. That's not really what we need. We need, especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change. CR: You once said, actually, as I think I've got this about right, that you might consider, rather than giving your money, if you were leaving it to some cause, just simply giving it to Elon Musk, because you had confidence that he would change the future, and that you would therefore — LP: Yeah, if you want to go Mars, he wants to go to Mars, to back up humanity, that's a worthy goal, but it's a company, and it's philanthropical. So I think we aim to do kind of similar things. And I think, you ask, we have a lot of employees at Google who have become pretty wealthy. People make a lot of money in technology. A lot of people in the room are pretty wealthy. You're working because you want to change the world. You want to make it better. Why isn't the company that you work for worthy not just of your time but your money as well? I mean, but we don't have a concept of that. That's not how we think about companies, and I think it's sad, because companies are most of our effort. They're where most of people's time is, where a lot of the money is, and so I think I'd like for us to help out more than we are. CR: When I close conversations with lots of people, I always ask this question: What state of mind, what quality of mind is it that has served you best? People like Rupert Murdoch have said curiosity, and other people in the media have said that. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have said focus. What quality of mind, as I leave this audience, has enabled you to think about the future and at the same time change the present? LP: You know, I think the most important thing — I looked at lots of companies and why I thought they don't succeed over time. We've had a more rapid turnover of companies. And I said, what did they fundamentally do wrong? What did those companies all do wrong? And usually it's just that they missed the future. And so I think, for me, I just try to focus on that and say, what is that future really going to be and how do we create it, and how do we cause our organization, to really focus on that and drive that at a really high rate? And so that's been curiosity, it's been looking at things people might not think about, working on things that no one else is working on, because that's where the additionality really is, and be willing to do that, to take that risk. Look at Android. I felt guilty about working on Android when it was starting. It was a little startup we bought. It wasn't really what we were really working on. And I felt guilty about spending time on that. That was stupid. That was the future, right? That was a good thing to be working on. CR: It is great to see you here. It's great to hear from you, and a pleasure to sit at this table with you. Thanks, Larry. LP: Thank you. (Applause) CR: Larry Page. |
The NSA responds to Edward Snowden's TED Talk | {0: 'Richard Ledgett is deputy director and senior civilian leader of the National Security Agency. He acts as the agency’s chief operating officer, responsible for guiding and directing studies, operations and policy.'} | TED2014 | Chris Anderson: We had Edward Snowden here a couple days ago, and this is response time. And several of you have written to me with questions to ask our guest here from the NSA. So Richard Ledgett is the 15th deputy director of the National Security Agency, and he's a senior civilian officer there, acts as its chief operating officer, guiding strategies, setting internal policies, and serving as the principal advisor to the director. And all being well, welcome, Rick Ledgett, to TED. (Applause) Richard Ledgett: I'm really thankful for the opportunity to talk to folks here. I look forward to the conversation, so thanks for arranging for that. CA: Thank you, Rick. We appreciate you joining us. It's certainly quite a strong statement that the NSA is willing to reach out and show a more open face here. You saw, I think, the talk and interview that Edward Snowden gave here a couple days ago. What did you make of it? RL: So I think it was interesting. We didn't realize that he was going to show up there, so kudos to you guys for arranging a nice surprise like that. I think that, like a lot of the things that have come out since Mr. Snowden started disclosing classified information, there were some kernels of truth in there, but a lot of extrapolations and half-truths in there, and I'm interested in helping to address those. I think this is a really important conversation that we're having in the United States and internationally, and I think it is important and of import, and so given that, we need to have that be a fact-based conversation, and we want to help make that happen. CA: So the question that a lot of people have here is, what do you make of Snowden's motivations for doing what he did, and did he have an alternative way that he could have gone? RL: He absolutely did have alternative ways that he could have gone, and I actually think that characterizing him as a whistleblower actually hurts legitimate whistleblowing activities. So what if somebody who works in the NSA — and there are over 35,000 people who do. They're all great citizens. They're just like your husbands, fathers, sisters, brothers, neighbors, nephews, friends and relatives, all of whom are interested in doing the right thing for their country and for our allies internationally, and so there are a variety of venues to address if folks have a concern. First off, there's their supervisor, and up through the supervisory chain within their organization. If folks aren't comfortable with that, there are a number of inspectors general. In the case of Mr. Snowden, he had the option of the NSA inspector general, the Navy inspector general, the Pacific Command inspector general, the Department of Defense inspector general, and the intelligence community inspector general, any of whom would have both kept his concerns in classified channels and been happy to address them. (CA and RL speaking at once) He had the option to go to congressional committees, and there are mechanisms to do that that are in place, and so he didn't do any of those things. CA: Now, you had said that Ed Snowden had other avenues for raising his concerns. The comeback on that is a couple of things: one, that he certainly believes that as a contractor, the avenues that would have been available to him as an employee weren't available, two, there's a track record of other whistleblowers, like [Thomas Andrews Drake] being treated pretty harshly, by some views, and thirdly, what he was taking on was not one specific flaw that he'd discovered, but programs that had been approved by all three branches of government. I mean, in that circumstance, couldn't you argue that what he did was reasonable? RL: No, I don't agree with that. I think that the — sorry, I'm getting feedback through the microphone there — the actions that he took were inappropriate because of the fact that he put people's lives at risk, basically, in the long run, and I know there's been a lot of talk in public by Mr. Snowden and some of the journalists that say that the things that have been disclosed have not put national security and people at risk, and that is categorically not true. They actually do. I think there's also an amazing arrogance to the idea that he knows better than the framers of the Constitution in how the government should be designed and work for separation of powers and the fact that the executive and the legislative branch have to work together and they have checks and balances on each other, and then the judicial branch, which oversees the entire process. I think that's extremely arrogant on his part. CA: Can you give a specific example of how he put people's lives at risk? RL: Yeah, sure. So the things that he's disclosed, the capabilities, and the NSA is a capabilities-based organization, so when we have foreign intelligence targets, legitimate things of interest — like, terrorists is the iconic example, but it includes things like human traffickers, drug traffickers, people who are trying to build advanced weaponry, nuclear weapons, and build delivery systems for those, and nation-states who might be executing aggression against their immediate neighbors, which you may have some visibility into some of that that's going on right now, the capabilities are applied in very discrete and measured and controlled ways. So the unconstrained disclosure of those capabilities means that as adversaries see them and recognize, "Hey, I might be vulnerable to this," they move away from that, and we have seen targets in terrorism, in the nation-state area, in smugglers of various types, and other folks who have, because of the disclosures, moved away from our ability to have insight into what they're doing. The net effect of that is that our people who are overseas in dangerous places, whether they're diplomats or military, and our allies who are in similar situations, are at greater risk because we don't see the threats that are coming their way. CA: So that's a general response saying that because of his revelations, access that you had to certain types of information has been shut down, has been closed down. But the concern is that the nature of that access was not necessarily legitimate in the first place. I mean, describe to us this Bullrun program where it's alleged that the NSA specifically weakened security in order to get the type of access that you've spoken of. RL: So there are, when our legitimate foreign intelligence targets of the type that I described before, use the global telecommunications system as their communications methodology, and they do, because it's a great system, it's the most complex system ever devised by man, and it is a wonder, and lots of folks in the room there are responsible for the creation and enhancement of that, and it's just a wonderful thing. But it's also used by people who are working against us and our allies. And so if I'm going to pursue them, I need to have the capability to go after them, and again, the controls are in how I apply that capability, not that I have the capability itself. Otherwise, if we could make it so that all the bad guys used one corner of the Internet, we could have a domain, badguy.com. That would be awesome, and we could just concentrate all our efforts there. That's not how it works. They're trying to hide from the government's ability to isolate and interdict their actions, and so we have to swim in that same space. But I will tell you this. So NSA has two missions. One is the Signals Intelligence mission that we've unfortunately read so much about in the press. The other one is the Information Assurance mission, which is to protect the national security systems of the United States, and by that, that's things like the communications that the president uses, the communications that control our nuclear weapons, the communications that our military uses around the world, and the communications that we use with our allies, and that some of our allies themselves use. And so we make recommendations on standards to use, and we use those same standards, and so we are invested in making sure that those communications are secure for their intended purposes. CA: But it sounds like what you're saying is that when it comes to the Internet at large, any strategy is fair game if it improves America's safety. And I think this is partly where there is such a divide of opinion, that there's a lot of people in this room and around the world who think very differently about the Internet. They think of it as a momentous invention of humanity, kind of on a par with the Gutenberg press, for example. It's the bringer of knowledge to all. It's the connector of all. And it's viewed in those sort of idealistic terms. And from that lens, what the NSA has done is equivalent to the authorities back in Germany inserting some device into every printing press that would reveal which books people bought and what they read. Can you understand that from that viewpoint, it feels outrageous? RL: I do understand that, and I actually share the view of the utility of the Internet, and I would argue it's bigger than the Internet. It is a global telecommunications system. The Internet is a big chunk of that, but there is a lot more. And I think that people have legitimate concerns about the balance between transparency and secrecy. That's sort of been couched as a balance between privacy and national security. I don't think that's the right framing. I think it really is transparency and secrecy. And so that's the national and international conversation that we're having, and we want to participate in that, and want people to participate in it in an informed way. So there are things, let me talk there a little bit more, there are things that we need to be transparent about: our authorities, our processes, our oversight, who we are. We, NSA, have not done a good job of that, and I think that's part of the reason that this has been so revelational and so sensational in the media. Nobody knew who we were. We were the No Such Agency, the Never Say Anything. There's takeoffs of our logo of an eagle with headphones on around it. And so that's the public characterization. And so we need to be more transparent about those things. What we don't need to be transparent about, because it's bad for the U.S., it's bad for all those other countries that we work with and that we help provide information that helps them secure themselves and their people, it's bad to expose operations and capabilities in a way that allows the people that we're all working against, the generally recognized bad guys, to counter those. CA: But isn't it also bad to deal a kind of body blow to the American companies that have essentially given the world most of the Internet services that matter? RL: It is. It's really the companies are in a tough position, as are we, because the companies, we compel them to provide information, just like every other nation in the world does. Every industrialized nation in the world has a lawful intercept program where they are requiring companies to provide them with information that they need for their security, and the companies that are involved have complied with those programs in the same way that they have to do when they're operating in Russia or the U.K. or China or India or France, any country that you choose to name. And so the fact that these revelations have been broadly characterized as "you can't trust company A because your privacy is suspect with them" is actually only accurate in the sense that it's accurate with every other company in the world that deals with any of those countries in the world. And so it's being picked up by people as a marketing advantage, and it's being marketed that way by several countries, including some of our allied countries, where they are saying, "Hey, you can't trust the U.S., but you can trust our telecom company, because we're safe." And they're actually using that to counter the very large technological edge that U.S. companies have in areas like the cloud and Internet-based technologies. CA: You're sitting there with the American flag, and the American Constitution guarantees freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. How do you characterize the American citizen's right to privacy? Is there such a right? RL: Yeah, of course there is. And we devote an inordinate amount of time and pressure, inordinate and appropriate, actually I should say, amount of time and effort in order to ensure that we protect that privacy. and beyond that, the privacy of citizens around the world, it's not just Americans. Several things come into play here. First, we're all in the same network. My communications, I'm a user of a particular Internet email service that is the number one email service of choice by terrorists around the world, number one. So I'm there right beside them in email space in the Internet. And so we need to be able to pick that apart and find the information that's relevant. In doing so, we're going to necessarily encounter Americans and innocent foreign citizens who are just going about their business, and so we have procedures in place that shreds that out, that says, when you find that, not if you find it, when you find it, because you're certain to find it, here's how you protect that. These are called minimization procedures. They're approved by the attorney general and constitutionally based. And so we protect those. And then, for people, citizens of the world who are going about their lawful business on a day-to-day basis, the president on his January 17 speech, laid out some additional protections that we are providing to them. So I think absolutely, folks do have a right to privacy, and that we work very hard to make sure that that right to privacy is protected. CA: What about foreigners using American companies' Internet services? Do they have any privacy rights? RL: They do. They do, in the sense of, the only way that we are able to compel one of those companies to provide us information is when it falls into one of three categories: We can identify that this particular person, identified by a selector of some kind, is associated with counterterrorist or proliferation or other foreign intelligence target. CA: Much has been made of the fact that a lot of the information that you've obtained through these programs is essentially metadata. It's not necessarily the actual words that someone has written in an email or given on a phone call. It's who they wrote to and when, and so forth. But it's been argued, and someone here in the audience has talked to a former NSA analyst who said metadata is actually much more invasive than the core data, because in the core data you present yourself as you want to be presented. With metadata, who knows what the conclusions are that are drawn? Is there anything to that? RL: I don't really understand that argument. I think that metadata's important for a couple of reasons. Metadata is the information that lets you find connections that people are trying to hide. So when a terrorist is corresponding with somebody else who's not known to us but is engaged in doing or supporting terrorist activity, or someone who's violating international sanctions by providing nuclear weapons-related material to a country like Iran or North Korea, is trying to hide that activity because it's illicit activity. What metadata lets you do is connect that. The alternative to that is one that's much less efficient and much more invasive of privacy, which is gigantic amounts of content collection. So metadata, in that sense, actually is privacy-enhancing. And we don't, contrary to some of the stuff that's been printed, we don't sit there and grind out metadata profiles of average people. If you're not connected to one of those valid intelligence targets, you are not of interest to us. CA: So in terms of the threats that face America overall, where would you place terrorism? RL: I think terrorism is still number one. I think that we have never been in a time where there are more places where things are going badly and forming the petri dish in which terrorists take advantage of the lack of governance. An old boss of mine, Tom Fargo, Admiral Fargo, used to describe it as arcs of instability. And so you have a lot of those arcs of instability in the world right now, in places like Syria, where there's a civil war going on and you have massive numbers, thousands and thousands of foreign fighters who are coming into Syria to learn how to be terrorists and practice that activity, and lots of those people are Westerners who hold passports to European countries or in some cases the United States, and so they are basically learning how to do jihad and have expressed intent to go out and do that later on in their home countries. You've got places like Iraq, which is suffering from a high level of sectarian violence, again a breeding ground for terrorism. And you have the activity in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel area of Africa. Again, lots of weak governance which forms a breeding ground for terrorist activity. So I think it's very serious. I think it's number one. I think number two is cyber threat. I think cyber is a threat in three ways: One way, and probably the most common way that people have heard about it, is due to the theft of intellectual property, so basically, foreign countries going in, stealing companies' secrets, and then providing that information to state-owned enterprises or companies connected to the government to help them leapfrog technology or to gain business intelligence that's then used to win contracts overseas. That is a hugely costly set of activities that's going on right now. Several nation-states are doing it. Second is the denial-of-service attacks. You're probably aware that there have been a spate of those directed against the U.S. financial sector since 2012. Again, that's a nation-state who is executing those attacks, and they're doing that as a semi-anonymous way of reprisal. And the last one is destructive attacks, and those are the ones that concern me the most. Those are on the rise. You have the attack against Saudi Aramco in 2012, August of 2012. It took down about 35,000 of their computers with a Wiper-style virus. You had a follow-on a week later to a Qatari company. You had March of 2013, you had a South Korean attack that was attributed in the press to North Korea that took out thousands of computers. Those are on the rise, and we see people expressing interest in those capabilities and a desire to employ them. CA: Okay, so a couple of things here, because this is really the core of this, almost. I mean, first of all, a lot of people who look at risk and look at the numbers don't understand this belief that terrorism is still the number one threat. Apart from September 11, I think the numbers are that in the last 30 or 40 years about 500 Americans have died from terrorism, mostly from homegrown terrorists. The chance in the last few years of being killed by terrorism is far less than the chance of being killed by lightning. I guess you would say that a single nuclear incident or bioterrorism act or something like that would change those numbers. Would that be the point of view? RL: Well, I'd say two things. One is, the reason that there hasn't been a major attack in the United States since 9/11, that is not an accident. That's a lot of hard work that we have done, that other folks in the intelligence community have done, that the military has done, and that our allies around the globe have done. You've heard the numbers about the tip of the iceberg in terms of numbers of terrorist attacks that NSA programs contributed to stopping was 54, 25 of those in Europe, and of those 25, 18 of them occurred in three countries, some of which are our allies, and some of which are beating the heck out of us over the NSA programs, by the way. So that's not an accident that those things happen. That's hard work. That's us finding intelligence on terrorist activities and interdicting them through one way or another, through law enforcement, through cooperative activities with other countries and sometimes through military action. The other thing I would say is that your idea of nuclear or chem-bio-threat is not at all far-fetched and in fact there are a number of groups who have for several years expressed interest and desire in obtaining those capabilities and work towards that. CA: It's also been said that, of those 54 alleged incidents, that as few as zero of them were actually anything to do with these controversial programs that Mr. Snowden revealed, that it was basically through other forms of intelligence, that you're looking for a needle in a haystack, and the effects of these programs, these controversial programs, is just to add hay to the stack, not to really find the needle. The needle was found by other methods. Isn't there something to that? RL: No, there's actually two programs that are typically implicated in that discussion. One is the section 215 program, the U.S. telephony metadata program, and the other one is popularly called the PRISM program, and it's actually section 702 of the FISA Amendment Act. But the 215 program is only relevant to threats that are directed against the United States, and there have been a dozen threats where that was implicated. Now what you'll see people say publicly is there is no "but for" case, and so there is no case where, but for that, the threat would have happened. But that actually indicates a lack of understanding of how terrorist investigations actually work. You think about on television, you watch a murder mystery. What do you start with? You start with a body, and then they work their way from there to solve the crime. We're actually starting well before that, hopefully before there are any bodies, and we're trying to build the case for who the people are, what they're trying to do, and that involves massive amounts of information. Think of it is as mosaic, and it's hard to say that any one piece of a mosaic was necessary to building the mosaic, but to build the complete picture, you need to have all the pieces of information. On the other, the non-U.S.-related threats out of those 54, the other 42 of them, the PRISM program was hugely relevant to that, and in fact was material in contributing to stopping those attacks. CA: Snowden said two days ago that terrorism has always been what is called in the intelligence world "a cover for action," that it's something that, because it invokes such a powerful emotional response in people, it allows the initiation of these programs to achieve powers that an organization like yours couldn't otherwise have. Is there any internal debate about that? RL: Yeah. I mean, we debate these things all the time, and there is discussion that goes on in the executive branch and within NSA itself and the intelligence community about what's right, what's proportionate, what's the correct thing to do. And it's important to note that the programs that we're talking about were all authorized by two different presidents, two different political parties, by Congress twice, and by federal judges 16 different times, and so this is not NSA running off and doing its own thing. This is a legitimate activity of the United States foreign government that was agreed to by all the branches of the United States government, and President Madison would have been proud. CA: And yet, when congressmen discovered what was actually being done with that authorization, many of them were completely shocked. Or do you think that is not a legitimate reaction, that it's only because it's now come out publicly, that they really knew exactly what you were doing with the powers they had granted you? RL: Congress is a big body. There's 535 of them, and they change out frequently, in the case of the House, every two years, and I think that the NSA provided all the relevant information to our oversight committees, and then the dissemination of that information by the oversight committees throughout Congress is something that they manage. I think I would say that Congress members had the opportunity to make themselves aware, and in fact a significant number of them, the ones who are assigned oversight responsibility, did have the ability to do that. And you've actually had the chairs of those committees say that in public. CA: Now, you mentioned the threat of cyberattacks, and I don't think anyone in this room would disagree that that is a huge concern, but do you accept that there's a tradeoff between offensive and defensive strategies, and that it's possible that the very measures taken to, "weaken encryption," and allow yourself to find the bad guys, might also open the door to forms of cyberattack? RL: So I think two things. One is, you said weaken encryption. I didn't. And the other one is that the NSA has both of those missions, and we are heavily biased towards defense, and, actually, the vulnerabilities that we find in the overwhelming majority of cases, we disclose to the people who are responsible for manufacturing or developing those products. We have a great track record of that, and we're actually working on a proposal right now to be transparent and to publish transparency reports in the same way that the Internet companies are being allowed to publish transparency reports for them. We want to be more transparent about that. So again, we eat our own dog food. We use the standards, we use the products that we recommend, and so it's in our interest to keep our communications protected in the same way that other people's need to be. CA: Edward Snowden, when, after his talk, was wandering the halls here in the bot, and I heard him say to a couple of people, they asked him about what he thought of the NSA overall, and he was very complimentary about the people who work with you, said that it's a really impassioned group of employees who are seeking to do the right thing, and that the problems have come from just some badly conceived policies. He came over certainly very reasonably and calmly. He didn't come over like a crazy man. Would you accept that at least, even if you disagree with how he did it, that he has opened a debate that matters? RL: So I think that the discussion is an important one to have. I do not like the way that he did it. I think there were a number of other ways that he could have done that that would have not endangered our people and the people of other nations through losing visibility into what our adversaries are doing. But I do think it's an important conversation. CA: It's been reported that there's almost a difference of opinion with you and your colleagues over any scenario in which he might be offered an amnesty deal. I think your boss, General Keith Alexander, has said that that would be a terrible example for others; you can't negotiate with someone who's broken the law in that way. But you've been quoted as saying that, if Snowden could prove that he was surrendering all undisclosed documents, that a deal maybe should be considered. Do you still think that? RL: Yeah, so actually, this is my favorite thing about that "60 Minutes" interview was all the misquotes that came from that. What I actually said, in response to a question about, would you entertain any discussions of mitigating action against Snowden, I said, yeah, it's worth a conversation. This is something that the attorney general of the United States and the president also actually have both talked about this, and I defer to the attorney general, because this is his lane. But there is a strong tradition in American jurisprudence of having discussions with people who have been charged with crimes in order to, if it benefits the government, to get something out of that, that there's always room for that kind of discussion. So I'm not presupposing any outcome, but there is always room for discussion. CA: To a lay person it seems like he has certain things to offer the U.S., the government, you, others, in terms of putting things right and helping figure out a smarter policy, a smarter way forward for the future. Do you see, has that kind of possibility been entertained at all? RL: So that's out of my lane. That's not an NSA thing. That would be a Department of Justice sort of discussion. I'll defer to them. CA: Rick, when Ed Snowden ended his talk, I offered him the chance to share an idea worth spreading. What would be your idea worth spreading for this group? RL: So I think, learn the facts. This is a really important conversation, and it impacts, it's not just NSA, it's not just the government, it's you, it's the Internet companies. The issue of privacy and personal data is much bigger than just the government, and so learn the facts. Don't rely on headlines, don't rely on sound bites, don't rely on one-sided conversations. So that's the idea, I think, worth spreading. We have a sign, a badge tab, we wear badges at work with lanyards, and if I could make a plug, my badge lanyard at work says, "Dallas Cowboys." Go Dallas. I've just alienated half the audience, I know. So the lanyard that our people who work in the organization that does our crypto-analytic work have a tab that says, "Look at the data." So that's the idea worth spreading. Look at the data. CA: Rick, it took a certain amount of courage, I think, actually, to come and speak openly to this group. It's not something the NSA has done a lot of in the past, and plus the technology has been challenging. We truly appreciate you doing that and sharing in this very important conversation. Thank you so much. RL: Thanks, Chris. (Applause) |
My daughter, Malala | {0: 'Despite an attack on his daughter Malala in 2012, Ziauddin Yousafzai continues his fight to educate children in the developing world.'} | TED2014 | In many patriarchal societies and tribal societies, fathers are usually known by their sons, but I'm one of the few fathers who is known by his daughter, and I am proud of it. (Applause) Malala started her campaign for education and stood for her rights in 2007, and when her efforts were honored in 2011, and she was given the national youth peace prize, and she became a very famous, very popular young girl of her country. Before that, she was my daughter, but now I am her father. Ladies and gentlemen, if we glance to human history, the story of women is the story of injustice, inequality, violence and exploitation. You see, in patriarchal societies, right from the very beginning, when a girl is born, her birth is not celebrated. She is not welcomed, neither by father nor by mother. The neighborhood comes and commiserates with the mother, and nobody congratulates the father. And a mother is very uncomfortable for having a girl child. When she gives birth to the first girl child, first daughter, she is sad. When she gives birth to the second daughter, she is shocked, and in the expectation of a son, when she gives birth to a third daughter, she feels guilty like a criminal. Not only the mother suffers, but the daughter, the newly born daughter, when she grows old, she suffers too. At the age of five, while she should be going to school, she stays at home and her brothers are admitted in a school. Until the age of 12, somehow, she has a good life. She can have fun. She can play with her friends in the streets, and she can move around in the streets like a butterfly. But when she enters her teens, when she becomes 13 years old, she is forbidden to go out of her home without a male escort. She is confined under the four walls of her home. She is no more a free individual. She becomes the so-called honor of her father and of her brothers and of her family, and if she transgresses the code of that so-called honor, she could even be killed. And it is also interesting that this so-called code of honor, it does not only affect the life of a girl, it also affects the life of the male members of the family. I know a family of seven sisters and one brother, and that one brother, he has migrated to the Gulf countries, to earn a living for his seven sisters and parents, because he thinks that it will be humiliating if his seven sisters learn a skill and they go out of the home and earn some livelihood. So this brother, he sacrifices the joys of his life and the happiness of his sisters at the altar of so-called honor. And there is one more norm of the patriarchal societies that is called obedience. A good girl is supposed to be very quiet, very humble and very submissive. It is the criteria. The role model good girl should be very quiet. She is supposed to be silent and she is supposed to accept the decisions of her father and mother and the decisions of elders, even if she does not like them. If she is married to a man she doesn't like or if she is married to an old man, she has to accept, because she does not want to be dubbed as disobedient. If she is married very early, she has to accept. Otherwise, she will be called disobedient. And what happens at the end? In the words of a poetess, she is wedded, bedded, and then she gives birth to more sons and daughters. And it is the irony of the situation that this mother, she teaches the same lesson of obedience to her daughter and the same lesson of honor to her sons. And this vicious cycle goes on, goes on. Ladies and gentlemen, this plight of millions of women could be changed if we think differently, if women and men think differently, if men and women in the tribal and patriarchal societies in the developing countries, if they can break a few norms of family and society, if they can abolish the discriminatory laws of the systems in their states, which go against the basic human rights of the women. Dear brothers and sisters, when Malala was born, and for the first time, believe me, I don't like newborn children, to be honest, but when I went and I looked into her eyes, believe me, I got extremely honored. And long before she was born, I thought about her name, and I was fascinated with a heroic legendary freedom fighter in Afghanistan. Her name was Malalai of Maiwand, and I named my daughter after her. A few days after Malala was born, my daughter was born, my cousin came — and it was a coincidence — he came to my home and he brought a family tree, a family tree of the Yousafzai family, and when I looked at the family tree, it traced back to 300 years of our ancestors. But when I looked, all were men, and I picked my pen, drew a line from my name, and wrote, "Malala." And when she grow old, when she was four and a half years old, I admitted her in my school. You will be asking, then, why should I mention about the admission of a girl in a school? Yes, I must mention it. It may be taken for granted in Canada, in America, in many developed countries, but in poor countries, in patriarchal societies, in tribal societies, it's a big event for the life of girl. Enrollment in a school means recognition of her identity and her name. Admission in a school means that she has entered the world of dreams and aspirations where she can explore her potentials for her future life. I have five sisters, and none of them could go to school, and you will be astonished, two weeks before, when I was filling out the Canadian visa form, and I was filling out the family part of the form, I could not recall the surnames of some of my sisters. And the reason was that I have never, never seen the names of my sisters written on any document. That was the reason that I valued my daughter. What my father could not give to my sisters and to his daughters, I thought I must change it. I used to appreciate the intelligence and the brilliance of my daughter. I encouraged her to sit with me when my friends used to come. I encouraged her to go with me to different meetings. And all these good values, I tried to inculcate in her personality. And this was not only she, only Malala. I imparted all these good values to my school, girl students and boy students as well. I used education for emancipation. I taught my girls, I taught my girl students, to unlearn the lesson of obedience. I taught my boy students to unlearn the lesson of so-called pseudo-honor. Dear brothers and sisters, we were striving for more rights for women, and we were struggling to have more, more and more space for the women in society. But we came across a new phenomenon. It was lethal to human rights and particularly to women's rights. It was called Talibanization. It means a complete negation of women's participation in all political, economical and social activities. Hundreds of schools were lost. Girls were prohibited from going to school. Women were forced to wear veils and they were stopped from going to the markets. Musicians were silenced, girls were flogged and singers were killed. Millions were suffering, but few spoke, and it was the most scary thing when you have all around such people who kill and who flog, and you speak for your rights. It's really the most scary thing. At the age of 10, Malala stood, and she stood for the right of education. She wrote a diary for the BBC blog, she volunteered herself for the New York Times documentaries, and she spoke from every platform she could. And her voice was the most powerful voice. It spread like a crescendo all around the world. And that was the reason the Taliban could not tolerate her campaign, and on October 9 2012, she was shot in the head at point blank range. It was a doomsday for my family and for me. The world turned into a big black hole. While my daughter was on the verge of life and death, I whispered into the ears of my wife, "Should I be blamed for what happened to my daughter and your daughter?" And she abruptly told me, "Please don't blame yourself. You stood for the right cause. You put your life at stake for the cause of truth, for the cause of peace, and for the cause of education, and your daughter in inspired from you and she joined you. You both were on the right path and God will protect her." These few words meant a lot to me, and I didn't ask this question again. When Malala was in the hospital, and she was going through the severe pains and she had had severe headaches because her facial nerve was cut down, I used to see a dark shadow spreading on the face of my wife. But my daughter never complained. She used to tell us, "I'm fine with my crooked smile and with my numbness in my face. I'll be okay. Please don't worry." She was a solace for us, and she consoled us. Dear brothers and sisters, we learned from her how to be resilient in the most difficult times, and I'm glad to share with you that despite being an icon for the rights of children and women, she is like any 16-year old girl. She cries when her homework is incomplete. She quarrels with her brothers, and I am very happy for that. People ask me, what special is in my mentorship which has made Malala so bold and so courageous and so vocal and poised? I tell them, don't ask me what I did. Ask me what I did not do. I did not clip her wings, and that's all. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) |
To create for the ages, let's combine art and engineering | {0: 'Once known for entertaining millions by creating special effects for Hollywood, theme parks and Broadway, Applied Minds cofounder Bran Ferren now solves impossible tech challenges with previously unimaginable inventions.'} | TED2014 | Good morning. When I was a little boy, I had an experience that changed my life, and is in fact why I'm here today. That one moment profoundly affected how I think about art, design and engineering. As background, I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family of loving and talented artists in one of the world's great cities. My dad, John Ferren, who died when I was 15, was an artist by both passion and profession, as is my mom, Rae. He was one of the New York School abstract expressionists who, together with his contemporaries, invented American modern art, and contributed to moving the American zeitgeist towards modernism in the 20th century. Isn't it remarkable that, after thousands of years of people doing mostly representational art, that modern art, comparatively speaking, is about 15 minutes old, yet now pervasive. As with many other important innovations, those radical ideas required no new technology, just fresh thinking and a willingness to experiment, plus resiliency in the face of near-universal criticism and rejection. In our home, art was everywhere. It was like oxygen, around us and necessary for life. As I watched him paint, Dad taught me that art was not about being decorative, but was a different way of communicating ideas, and in fact one that could bridge the worlds of knowledge and insight. Given this rich artistic environment, you'd assume that I would have been compelled to go into the family business, but no. I followed the path of most kids who are genetically programmed to make their parents crazy. I had no interest in becoming an artist, certainly not a painter. What I did love was electronics and machines — taking them apart, building new ones, and making them work. Fortunately, my family also had engineers in it, and with my parents, these were my first role models. What they all had in common was they worked very, very hard. My grandpa owned and operated a sheet metal kitchen cabinet factory in Brooklyn. On weekends, we would go together to Cortlandt Street, which was New York City's radio row. There we would explore massive piles of surplus electronics, and for a few bucks bring home treasures like Norden bombsights and parts from the first IBM tube-based computers. I found these objects both useful and fascinating. I learned about engineering and how things worked, not at school but by taking apart and studying these fabulously complex devices. I did this for hours every day, apparently avoiding electrocution. Life was good. However, every summer, sadly, the machines got left behind while my parents and I traveled overseas to experience history, art and design. We visited the great museums and historic buildings of both Europe and the Middle East, but to encourage my growing interest in science and technology, they would simply drop me off in places like the London Science Museum, where I would wander endlessly for hours by myself studying the history of science and technology. Then, when I was about nine years old, we went to Rome. On one particularly hot summer day, we visited a drum-shaped building that from the outside was not particularly interesting. My dad said it was called the Pantheon, a temple for all of the gods. It didn't look all that special from the outside, as I said, but when we walked inside, I was immediately struck by three things: First of all, it was pleasantly cool despite the oppressive heat outside. It was very dark, the only source of light being an big open hole in the roof. Dad explained that this wasn't a big open hole, but it was called the oculus, an eye to the heavens. And there was something about this place, I didn't know why, that just felt special. As we walked to the center of the room, I looked up at the heavens through the oculus. This was the first church that I'd been to that provided an unrestricted view between God and man. But I wondered, what about when it rained? Dad may have called this an oculus, but it was, in fact, a big hole in the roof. I looked down and saw floor drains had been cut into the stone floor. As I became more accustomed to the dark, I was able to make out details of the floor and the surrounding walls. No big deal here, just the same statuary stuff that we'd seen all over Rome. In fact, it looked like the Appian Way marble salesman showed up with his sample book, showed it to Hadrian, and Hadrian said, "We'll take all of it." (Laughter) But the ceiling was amazing. It looked like a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. I'd seen these before, and Bucky was friends with my dad. It was modern, high-tech, impressive, a huge 142-foot clear span which, not coincidentally, was exactly its height. I loved this place. It was really beautiful and unlike anything I'd ever seen before, so I asked my dad, "When was this built?" He said, "About 2,000 years ago." And I said, "No, I mean, the roof." You see, I assumed that this was a modern roof that had been put on because the original was destroyed in some long-past war. He said, "It's the original roof." That moment changed my life, and I can remember it as if it were yesterday. For the first time, I realized people were smart 2,000 years ago. (Laughter) This had never crossed my mind. I mean, to me, the pyramids at Giza, we visited those the year before, and sure they're impressive, nice enough design, but look, give me an unlimited budget, 20,000 to 40,000 laborers, and about 10 to 20 years to cut and drag stone blocks across the countryside, and I'll build you pyramids too. But no amount of brute force gets you the dome of the Pantheon, not 2,000 years ago, nor today. And incidentally, it is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome that's ever been built. To build the Pantheon took some miracles. By miracles, I mean things that are technically barely possible, very high-risk, and might not be actually accomplishable at this moment in time, certainly not by you. For example, here are some of the Pantheon's miracles. To make it even structurally possible, they had to invent super-strong concrete, and to control weight, varied the density of the aggregate as they worked their way up the dome. For strength and lightness, the dome structure used five rings of coffers, each of diminishing size, which imparts a dramatic forced perspective to the design. It was wonderfully cool inside because of its huge thermal mass, natural convection of air rising up through the oculus, and a Venturi effect when wind blows across the top of the building. I discovered for the first time that light itself has substance. The shaft of light beaming through the oculus was both beautiful and palpable, and I realized for the first time that light could be designed. Further, that of all of the forms of design, visual design, they were all kind of irrelevant without it, because without light, you can't see any of them. I also realized that I wasn't the first person to think that this place was really special. It survived gravity, barbarians, looters, developers and the ravages of time to become what I believe is the longest continuously occupied building in history. Largely because of that visit, I came to understand that, contrary to what I was being told in school, the worlds of art and design were not, in fact, incompatible with science and engineering. I realized, when combined, you could create things that were amazing that couldn't be done in either domain alone. But in school, with few exceptions, they were treated as separate worlds, and they still are. My teachers told me that I had to get serious and focus on one or the other. However, urging me to specialize only caused me to really appreciate those polymaths like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, people who did exactly the opposite. And this led me to embrace and want to be in both worlds. So then how do these projects of unprecedented creative vision and technical complexity like the Pantheon actually happen? Someone themselves, perhaps Hadrian, needed a brilliant creative vision. They also needed the storytelling and leadership skills necessary to fund and execute it, and a mastery of science and technology with the ability and knowhow to push existing innovations even farther. It is my belief that to create these rare game changers requires you to pull off at least five miracles. The problem is, no matter how talented, rich or smart you are, you only get one to one and a half miracles. That's it. That's the quota. Then you run out of time, money, enthusiasm, whatever. Remember, most people can't even imagine one of these technical miracles, and you need at least five to make a Pantheon. In my experience, these rare visionaries who can think across the worlds of art, design and engineering have the ability to notice when others have provided enough of the miracles to bring the goal within reach. Driven by the clarity of their vision, they summon the courage and determination to deliver the remaining miracles and they often take what other people think to be insurmountable obstacles and turn them into features. Take the oculus of the Pantheon. By insisting that it be in the design, it meant you couldn't use much of the structural technology that had been developed for Roman arches. However, by instead embracing it and rethinking weight and stress distribution, they came up with a design that only works if there's a big hole in the roof. That done, you now get the aesthetic and design benefits of light, cooling and that critical direct connection with the heavens. Not bad. These people not only believed that the impossible can be done, but that it must be done. Enough ancient history. What are some recent examples of innovations that combine creative design and technological advances in a way so profound that they will be remembered a thousand years from now? Well, putting a man on the moon was a good one, and returning him safely to Earth wasn't bad either. Talk about one giant leap: It's hard to imagine a more profound moment in human history than when we first left our world to set foot on another. So what came after the moon? One is tempted to say that today's pantheon is the Internet, but I actually think that's quite wrong, or at least it's only part of the story. The Internet isn't a Pantheon. It's more like the invention of concrete: important, absolutely necessary to build the Pantheon, and enduring, but entirely insufficient by itself. However, just as the technology of concrete was critical in realization of the Pantheon, new designers will use the technologies of the Internet to create novel concepts that will endure. The smartphone is a perfect example. Soon the majority of people on the planet will have one, and the idea of connecting everyone to both knowledge and each other will endure. So what's next? What imminent advance will be the equivalent of the Pantheon? Thinking about this, I rejected many very plausible and dramatic breakthroughs to come, such as curing cancer. Why? Because Pantheons are anchored in designed physical objects, ones that inspire by simply seeing and experiencing them, and will continue to do so indefinitely. It is a different kind of language, like art. These other vital contributions that extend life and relieve suffering are, of course, critical, and fantastic, but they're part of the continuum of our overall knowledge and technology, like the Internet. So what is next? Perhaps counterintuitively, I'm guessing it's a visionary idea from the late 1930s that's been revived every decade since: autonomous vehicles. Now you're thinking, give me a break. How can a fancy version of cruise control be profound? Look, much of our world has been designed around roads and transportation. These were as essential to the success of the Roman Empire as the interstate highway system to the prosperity and development of the United States. Today, these roads that interconnect our world are dominated by cars and trucks that have remained largely unchanged for 100 years. Although perhaps not obvious today, autonomous vehicles will be the key technology that enables us to redesign our cities and, by extension, civilization. Here's why: Once they become ubiquitous, each year, these vehicles will save tens of thousands of lives in the United States alone and a million globally. Automotive energy consumption and air pollution will be cut dramatically. Much of the road congestion in and out of our cities will disappear. They will enable compelling new concepts in how we design cities, work, and the way we live. We will get where we're going faster and society will recapture vast amounts of lost productivity now spent sitting in traffic basically polluting. But why now? Why do we think this is ready? Because over the last 30 years, people from outside the automotive industry have spent countless billions creating the needed miracles, but for entirely different purposes. It took folks like DARPA, universities, and companies completely outside of the automotive industry to notice that if you were clever about it, autonomy could be done now. So what are the five miracles needed for autonomous vehicles? One, you need to know where you are and exactly what time it is. This was solved neatly by the GPS system, Global Positioning System, that the U.S. Government put in place. You need to know where all the roads are, what the rules are, and where you're going. The various needs of personal navigation systems, in-car navigation systems, and web-based maps address this. You must have near-continuous communication with high-performance computing networks and with others nearby to understand their intent. The wireless technologies developed for mobile devices, with some minor modifications, are completely suitable to solve this. You'll probably want some restricted roadways to get started that both society and its lawyers agree are safe to use for this. This will start with the HOV lanes and move from there. But finally, you need to recognize people, signs and objects. Machine vision, special sensors, and high-performance computing can do a lot of this, but it turns out a lot is not good enough when your family is on board. Occasionally, humans will need to do sense-making. For this, you might actually have to wake up your passenger and ask them what the hell that big lump is in the middle of the road. Not so bad, and it will give us a sense of purpose in this new world. Besides, once the first drivers explain to their confused car that the giant chicken at the fork in the road is actually a restaurant, and it's okay to keep driving, every other car on the surface of the Earth will know that from that point on. Five miracles, mostly delivered, and now you just need a clear vision of a better world filled with autonomous vehicles with seductively beautiful and new functional designs plus a lot of money and hard work to bring it home. The beginning is now only a handful of years away, and I predict that autonomous vehicles will permanently change our world over the next several decades. In conclusion, I've come to believe that the ingredients for the next Pantheons are all around us, just waiting for visionary people with the broad knowledge, multidisciplinary skills, and intense passion to harness them to make their dreams a reality. But these people don't spontaneously pop into existence. They need to be nurtured and encouraged from when they're little kids. We need to love them and help them discover their passions. We need to encourage them to work hard and help them understand that failure is a necessary ingredient for success, as is perseverance. We need to help them to find their own role models, and give them the confidence to believe in themselves and to believe that anything is possible, and just as my grandpa did when he took me shopping for surplus, and just as my parents did when they took me to science museums, we need to encourage them to find their own path, even if it's very different from our own. But a cautionary note: We also need to periodically pry them away from their modern miracles, the computers, phones, tablets, game machines and TVs, take them out into the sunlight so they can experience both the natural and design wonders of our world, our planet and our civilization. If we don't, they won't understand what these precious things are that someday they will be resopnsible for protecting and improving. We also need them to understand something that doesn't seem adequately appreciated in our increasingly tech-dependent world, that art and design are not luxuries, nor somehow incompatible with science and engineering. They are in fact essential to what makes us special. Someday, if you get the chance, perhaps you can take your kids to the actual Pantheon, as we will our daughter Kira, to experience firsthand the power of that astonishing design, which on one otherwise unremarkable day in Rome, reached 2,000 years into the future to set the course for my life. Thank you. (Applause) |
Zombie roaches and other parasite tales | {0: 'Ed Yong blogs with a mission: to ignite excitement for science in everyone, regardless of their education or background.'} | TED2014 | A herd of wildebeests, a shoal of fish, a flock of birds. Many animals gather in large groups that are among the most wonderful spectacles in the natural world. But why do these groups form? The common answers include things like seeking safety in numbers or hunting in packs or gathering to mate or breed, and all of these explanations, while often true, make a huge assumption about animal behavior, that the animals are in control of their own actions, that they are in charge of their bodies. And that is often not the case. This is Artemia, a brine shrimp. You probably know it better as a sea monkey. It's small, and it typically lives alone, but it can gather in these large red swarms that span for meters, and these form because of a parasite. These shrimp are infected with a tapeworm. A tapeworm is effectively a long, living gut with genitals at one end and a hooked mouth at the other. As a freelance journalist, I sympathize. (Laughter) The tapeworm drains nutrients from Artemia's body, but it also does other things. It castrates them, it changes their color from transparent to bright red, it makes them live longer, and as biologist Nicolas Rode has found, it makes them swim in groups. Why? Because the tapeworm, like many other parasites, has a complicated life cycle involving many different hosts. The shrimp are just one step on its journey. Its ultimate destination is this, the greater flamingo. Only in a flamingo can the tapeworm reproduce, so to get there, it manipulates its shrimp hosts into forming these conspicuous colored swarms that are easier for a flamingo to spot and to devour, and that is the secret of the Artemia swarm. They aren't sociable through their own volition, but because they are being controlled. It's not safety in numbers. It's actually the exact opposite. The tapeworm hijacks their brains and their bodies, turning them into vehicles for getting itself into a flamingo. And here is another example of a parasitic manipulation. This is a suicidal cricket. This cricket swallowed the larvae of a Gordian worm, or horsehair worm. The worm grew to adult size within it, but it needs to get into water in order to mate, and it does that by releasing proteins that addle the cricket's brain, causing it to behave erratically. When the cricket nears a body of water, such as this swimming pool, it jumps in and drowns, and the worm wriggles out of its suicidal corpse. Crickets are really roomy. Who knew? The tapeworm and the Gordian worm are not alone. They are part of an entire cavalcade of mind-controlling parasites, of fungi, viruses, and worms and insects and more that all specialize in subverting and overriding the wills of their hosts. Now, I first learned about this way of life through David Attenborough's "Trials of Life" about 20 years ago, and then later through a wonderful book called "Parasite Rex" by my friend Carl Zimmer. And I've been writing about these creatures ever since. Few topics in biology enthrall me more. It's like the parasites have subverted my own brain. Because after all, they are always compelling and they are delightfully macabre. When you write about parasites, your lexicon swells with phrases like "devoured alive" and "bursts out of its body." (Laughter) But there's more to it than that. I'm a writer, and fellow writers in the audience will know that we love stories. Parasites invite us to resist the allure of obvious stories. Their world is one of plot twists and unexpected explanations. Why, for example, does this caterpillar start violently thrashing about when another insect gets close to it and those white cocoons that it seems to be standing guard over? Is it maybe protecting its siblings? No. This caterpillar was attacked by a parasitic wasp which laid eggs inside it. The eggs hatched and the young wasps devoured the caterpillar alive before bursting out of its body. See what I mean? Now, the caterpillar didn't die. Some of the wasps seemed to stay behind and controlled it into defending their siblings which are metamorphosing into adults within those cocoons. This caterpillar is a head-banging zombie bodyguard defending the offspring of the creature that killed it. (Applause) We have a lot to get through. I only have 13 minutes. (Laughter) Now, some of you are probably just desperately clawing for some solace in the idea that these things are oddities of the natural world, that they are outliers, and that point of view is understandable, because by their nature, parasites are quite small and they spend a lot of their time inside the bodies of other things. They're easy to overlook, but that doesn't mean that they aren't important. A few years back, a man called Kevin Lafferty took a group of scientists into three Californian estuaries and they pretty much weighed and dissected and recorded everything they could find, and what they found were parasites in extreme abundance. Especially common were trematodes, tiny worms that specialize in castrating their hosts like this unfortunate snail. Now, a single trematode is tiny, microscopic, but collectively they weighed as much as all the fish in the estuaries and three to nine times more than all the birds. And remember the Gordian worm that I showed you, the cricket thing? One Japanese scientist called Takuya Sato found that in one stream, these things drive so many crickets and grasshoppers into the water that the drowned insects make up some 60 percent of the diet of local trout. Manipulation is not an oddity. It is a critical and common part of the world around us, and scientists have now found hundreds of examples of such manipulators, and more excitingly, they're starting to understand exactly how these creatures control their hosts. And this is one of my favorite examples. This is Ampulex compressa, the emerald cockroach wasp, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that an emerald cockroach wasp in possession of some fertilized eggs must be in want of a cockroach. When she finds one, she stabs it with a stinger that is also a sense organ. This discovery came out three weeks ago. She stabs it with a stinger that is a sense organ equipped with small sensory bumps that allow her to feel the distinctive texture of a roach's brain. So like a person blindly rooting about in a bag, she finds the brain, and she injects it with venom into two very specific clusters of neurons. Israeli scientists Frederic Libersat and Ram Gal found that the venom is a very specific chemical weapon. It doesn't kill the roach, nor does it sedate it. The roach could walk away or fly or run if it chose to, but it doesn't choose to, because the venom nixes its motivation to walk, and only that. The wasp basically un-checks the escape-from-danger box in the roach's operating system, allowing her to lead her helpless victim back to her lair by its antennae like a person walking a dog. And once there, she lays an egg on it, egg hatches, devoured alive, bursts out of body, yadda yadda yadda, you know the drill. (Laughter) (Applause) Now I would argue that, once stung, the cockroach isn't a roach anymore. It's more of an extension of the wasp, just like the cricket was an extension of the Gordian worm. These hosts won't get to survive or reproduce. They have as much control over their own fates as my car. Once the parasites get in, the hosts don't get a say. Now humans, of course, are no stranger to manipulation. We take drugs to shift the chemistries of our brains and to change our moods, and what are arguments or advertising or big ideas if not an attempt to influence someone else's mind? But our attempts at doing this are crude and blundering compared to the fine-grained specificity of the parasites. Don Draper only wishes he was as elegant and precise as the emerald cockroach wasp. Now, I think this is part of what makes parasites so sinister and so compelling. We place such a premium on our free will and our independence that the prospect of losing those qualities to forces unseen informs many of our deepest societal fears. Orwellian dystopias and shadowy cabals and mind-controlling supervillains — these are tropes that fill our darkest fiction, but in nature, they happen all the time. Which leads me to an obvious and disquieting question: Are there dark, sinister parasites that are influencing our behavior without us knowing about it, besides the NSA? If there are any — (Laughter) (Applause) I've got a red dot on my forehead now, don't I? (Laughter) If there are any, this is a good candidate for them. This is Toxoplasma gondii, or Toxo, for short, because the terrifying creature always deserves a cute nickname. Toxo infects mammals, a wide variety of mammals, but it can only sexually reproduce in a cat. And scientists like Joanne Webster have shown that if Toxo gets into a rat or a mouse, it turns the rodent into a cat-seeking missile. If the infected rat smells the delightful odor of cat piss, it runs towards the source of the smell rather than the more sensible direction of away. The cat eats the rat. Toxo gets to have sex. It's a classic tale of Eat, Prey, Love. (Laughter) (Applause) You're very charitable, generous people. Hi, Elizabeth, I loved your talk. How does the parasite control its host in this way? We don't really know. We know that Toxo releases an enzyme that makes dopamine, a substance involved in reward and motivation. We know it targets certain parts of a rodent's brain, including those involved in sexual arousal. But how those puzzle pieces fit together is not immediately clear. What is clear is that this thing is a single cell. This has no nervous system. It has no consciousness. It doesn't even have a body. But it's manipulating a mammal? We are mammals. We are more intelligent than a mere rat, to be sure, but our brains have the same basic structure, the same types of cells, the same chemicals running through them, and the same parasites. Estimates vary a lot, but some figures suggest that one in three people around the world have Toxo in their brains. Now typically, this doesn't lead to any overt illness. The parasite holds up in a dormant state for a long period of time. But there's some evidence that those people who are carriers score slightly differently on personality questionnaires than other people, that they have a slightly higher risk of car accidents, and there's some evidence that people with schizophrenia are more likely to be infected. Now, I think this evidence is still inconclusive, and even among Toxo researchers, opinion is divided as to whether the parasite is truly influencing our behavior. But given the widespread nature of such manipulations, it would be completely implausible for humans to be the only species that weren't similarly affected. And I think that this capacity to constantly subvert our way of thinking about the world makes parasites amazing. They're constantly inviting us to look at the natural world sideways, and to ask if the behaviors we're seeing, whether they're simple and obvious or baffling and puzzling, are not the results of individuals acting through their own accord but because they are being bent to the control of something else. And while that idea may be disquieting, and while parasites' habits may be very grisly, I think that ability to surprise us makes them as wonderful and as charismatic as any panda or butterfly or dolphin. At the end of "On the Origin of Species," Charles Darwin writes about the grandeur of life, and of endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, and I like to think he could easily have been talking about a tapeworm that makes shrimp sociable or a wasp that takes cockroaches for walks. But perhaps, that's just a parasite talking. Thank you. (Applause) |
Protecting Twitter users (sometimes from themselves) | {0: 'Del Harvey works to define policy and to ensure user safety and security in the challenging realm of modern social media.'} | TED2014 | My job at Twitter is to ensure user trust, protect user rights and keep users safe, both from each other and, at times, from themselves. Let's talk about what scale looks like at Twitter. Back in January 2009, we saw more than two million new tweets each day on the platform. January 2014, more than 500 million. We were seeing two million tweets in less than six minutes. That's a 24,900-percent increase. Now, the vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm's way. There's no risk involved. My job is to root out and prevent activity that might. Sounds straightforward, right? You might even think it'd be easy, given that I just said the vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm's way. Why spend so much time searching for potential calamities in innocuous activities? Given the scale that Twitter is at, a one-in-a-million chance happens 500 times a day. It's the same for other companies dealing at this sort of scale. For us, edge cases, those rare situations that are unlikely to occur, are more like norms. Say 99.999 percent of tweets pose no risk to anyone. There's no threat involved. Maybe people are documenting travel landmarks like Australia's Heart Reef, or tweeting about a concert they're attending, or sharing pictures of cute baby animals. After you take out that 99.999 percent, that tiny percentage of tweets remaining works out to roughly 150,000 per month. The sheer scale of what we're dealing with makes for a challenge. You know what else makes my role particularly challenging? People do weird things. (Laughter) And I have to figure out what they're doing, why, and whether or not there's risk involved, often without much in terms of context or background. I'm going to show you some examples that I've run into during my time at Twitter — these are all real examples — of situations that at first seemed cut and dried, but the truth of the matter was something altogether different. The details have been changed to protect the innocent and sometimes the guilty. We'll start off easy. ["Yo bitch"] If you saw a Tweet that only said this, you might think to yourself, "That looks like abuse." After all, why would you want to receive the message, "Yo, bitch." Now, I try to stay relatively hip to the latest trends and memes, so I knew that "yo, bitch" was also often a common greeting between friends, as well as being a popular "Breaking Bad" reference. I will admit that I did not expect to encounter a fourth use case. It turns out it is also used on Twitter when people are role-playing as dogs. (Laughter) And in fact, in that case, it's not only not abusive, it's technically just an accurate greeting. (Laughter) So okay, determining whether or not something is abusive without context, definitely hard. Let's look at spam. Here's an example of an account engaged in classic spammer behavior, sending the exact same message to thousands of people. While this is a mockup I put together using my account, we see accounts doing this all the time. Seems pretty straightforward. We should just automatically suspend accounts engaging in this kind of behavior. Turns out there's some exceptions to that rule. Turns out that that message could also be a notification you signed up for that the International Space Station is passing overhead because you wanted to go outside and see if you could see it. You're not going to get that chance if we mistakenly suspend the account thinking it's spam. Okay. Let's make the stakes higher. Back to my account, again exhibiting classic behavior. This time it's sending the same message and link. This is often indicative of something called phishing, somebody trying to steal another person's account information by directing them to another website. That's pretty clearly not a good thing. We want to, and do, suspend accounts engaging in that kind of behavior. So why are the stakes higher for this? Well, this could also be a bystander at a rally who managed to record a video of a police officer beating a non-violent protester who's trying to let the world know what's happening. We don't want to gamble on potentially silencing that crucial speech by classifying it as spam and suspending it. That means we evaluate hundreds of parameters when looking at account behaviors, and even then, we can still get it wrong and have to reevaluate. Now, given the sorts of challenges I'm up against, it's crucial that I not only predict but also design protections for the unexpected. And that's not just an issue for me, or for Twitter, it's an issue for you. It's an issue for anybody who's building or creating something that you think is going to be amazing and will let people do awesome things. So what do I do? I pause and I think, how could all of this go horribly wrong? I visualize catastrophe. And that's hard. There's a sort of inherent cognitive dissonance in doing that, like when you're writing your wedding vows at the same time as your prenuptial agreement. (Laughter) But you still have to do it, particularly if you're marrying 500 million tweets per day. What do I mean by "visualize catastrophe?" I try to think of how something as benign and innocuous as a picture of a cat could lead to death, and what to do to prevent that. Which happens to be my next example. This is my cat, Eli. We wanted to give users the ability to add photos to their tweets. A picture is worth a thousand words. You only get 140 characters. You add a photo to your tweet, look at how much more content you've got now. There's all sorts of great things you can do by adding a photo to a tweet. My job isn't to think of those. It's to think of what could go wrong. How could this picture lead to my death? Well, here's one possibility. There's more in that picture than just a cat. There's geodata. When you take a picture with your smartphone or digital camera, there's a lot of additional information saved along in that image. In fact, this image also contains the equivalent of this, more specifically, this. Sure, it's not likely that someone's going to try to track me down and do me harm based upon image data associated with a picture I took of my cat, but I start by assuming the worst will happen. That's why, when we launched photos on Twitter, we made the decision to strip that geodata out. (Applause) If I start by assuming the worst and work backwards, I can make sure that the protections we build work for both expected and unexpected use cases. Given that I spend my days and nights imagining the worst that could happen, it wouldn't be surprising if my worldview was gloomy. (Laughter) It's not. The vast majority of interactions I see — and I see a lot, believe me — are positive, people reaching out to help or to connect or share information with each other. It's just that for those of us dealing with scale, for those of us tasked with keeping people safe, we have to assume the worst will happen, because for us, a one-in-a-million chance is pretty good odds. Thank you. (Applause) |
The new bionics that let us run, climb and dance | {0: 'At MIT, Hugh Herr builds prosthetic knees, legs and ankles that fuse biomechanics with microprocessors to restore (and perhaps enhance) normal gait, balance and speed.', 1: "When Adrianne Haslet-Davis lost her left foot in the Boston Marathon bombing, her left leg was amputated to the knee. Less than a year later, she's back on her feet and dancing again."} | TED2014 | Looking deeply inside nature, through the magnifying glass of science, designers extract principles, processes and materials that are forming the very basis of design methodology. From synthetic constructs that resemble biological materials, to computational methods that emulate neural processes, nature is driving design. Design is also driving nature. In realms of genetics, regenerative medicine and synthetic biology, designers are growing novel technologies, not foreseen or anticipated by nature. Bionics explores the interplay between biology and design. As you can see, my legs are bionic. Today, I will tell human stories of bionic integration; how electromechanics attached to the body, and implanted inside the body are beginning to bridge the gap between disability and ability, between human limitation and human potential. Bionics has defined my physicality. In 1982, both of my legs were amputated due to tissue damage from frostbite, incurred during a mountain-climbing accident. At that time, I didn't view my body as broken. I reasoned that a human being can never be "broken." Technology is broken. Technology is inadequate. This simple but powerful idea was a call to arms, to advance technology for the elimination of my own disability, and ultimately, the disability of others. I began by developing specialized limbs that allowed me to return to the vertical world of rock and ice climbing. I quickly realized that the artificial part of my body is malleable; able to take on any form, any function — a blank slate for which to create, perhaps, structures that could extend beyond biological capability. I made my height adjustable. I could be as short as five feet or as tall as I'd like. (Laughter) So when I was feeling bad about myself, insecure, I would jack my height up. (Laughter) But when I was feeling confident and suave, I would knock my height down a notch, just to give the competition a chance. (Laughter) (Applause) Narrow-edged feet allowed me to climb steep rock fissures, where the human foot cannot penetrate, and spiked feet enabled me to climb vertical ice walls, without ever experiencing muscle leg fatigue. Through technological innovation, I returned to my sport, stronger and better. Technology had eliminated my disability, and allowed me a new climbing prowess. As a young man, I imagined a future world where technology so advanced could rid the world of disability, a world in which neural implants would allow the visually impaired to see. A world in which the paralyzed could walk, via body exoskeletons. Sadly, because of deficiencies in technology, disability is rampant in the world. This gentleman is missing three limbs. As a testimony to current technology, he is out of the wheelchair, but we need to do a better job in bionics, to allow, one day, full rehabilitation for a person with this level of injury. At the MIT Media Lab, we've established the Center for Extreme Bionics. The mission of the center is to put forth fundamental science and technological capability that will allow the biomechatronic and regenerative repair of humans, across a broad range of brain and body disabilities. Today, I'm going to tell you how my legs function, how they work, as a case in point for this center. Now, I made sure to shave my legs last night, because I knew I'd be showing them off. (Laughter) Bionics entails the engineering of extreme interfaces. There's three extreme interfaces in my bionic limbs: mechanical, how my limbs are attached to my biological body; dynamic, how they move like flesh and bone; and electrical, how they communicate with my nervous system. I'll begin with mechanical interface. In the area of design, we still do not understand how to attach devices to the body mechanically. It's extraordinary to me that in this day and age, one of the most mature, oldest technologies in the human timeline, the shoe, still gives us blisters. How can this be? We have no idea how to attach things to our bodies. This is the beautifully lyrical design work of Professor Neri Oxman at the MIT Media Lab, showing spatially varying exoskeletal impedances, shown here by color variation in this 3D-printed model. Imagine a future where clothing is stiff and soft where you need it, when you need it, for optimal support and flexibility, without ever causing discomfort. My bionic limbs are attached to my biological body via synthetic skins with stiffness variations, that mirror my underlying tissue biomechanics. To achieve that mirroring, we first developed a mathematical model of my biological limb. To that end, we used imaging tools such as MRI, to look inside my body, to figure out the geometries and locations of various tissues. We also took robotic tools — here's a 14-actuator circle that goes around the biological limb. The actuators come in, find the surface of the limb, measure its unloaded shape, and then they push on the tissues to measure tissue compliances at each anatomical point. We combine these imaging and robotic data to build a mathematical description of my biological limb, shown on the left. You see a bunch of points, or nodes? At each node, there's a color that represents tissue compliance. We then do a mathematical transformation to the design of the synthetic skin, shown on the right. And we've discovered optimality is: where the body is stiff, the synthetic skin should be soft, where the body is soft, the synthetic skin is stiff, and this mirroring occurs across all tissue compliances. With this framework, we've produced bionic limbs that are the most comfortable limbs I've ever worn. Clearly, in the future, our clothing, our shoes, our braces, our prostheses, will no longer be designed and manufactured using artisan strategies, but rather, data-driven quantitative frameworks. In that future, our shoes will no longer give us blisters. We're also embedding sensing and smart materials into the synthetic skins. This is a material developed by SRI International, California. Under electrostatic effect, it changes stiffness. So under zero voltage, the material is compliant, it's floppy like paper. Then the button's pushed, a voltage is applied, and it becomes stiff as a board. (Tapping sounds) We embed this material into the synthetic skin that attaches my bionic limb to my biological body. When I walk here, it's no voltage. My interface is soft and compliant. The button's pushed, voltage is applied, and it stiffens, offering me a greater maneuverability over the bionic limb. We're also building exoskeletons. This exoskeleton becomes stiff and soft in just the right areas of the running cycle, to protect the biological joints from high impacts and degradation. In the future, we'll all be wearing exoskeletons in common activities, such as running. Next, dynamic interface. How do my bionic limbs move like flesh and bone? At my MIT lab, we study how humans with normal physiologies stand, walk and run. What are the muscles doing, and how are they controlled by the spinal cord? This basic science motivates what we build. We're building bionic ankles, knees and hips. We're building body parts from the ground up. The bionic limbs that I'm wearing are called BiOMs. They've been fitted to nearly 1,000 patients, 400 of which have been wounded U.S. soldiers. How does it work? At heel strike, under computer control, the system controls stiffness, to attenuate the shock of the limb hitting the ground. Then at mid-stance, the bionic limb outputs high torques and powers to lift the person into the walking stride, comparable to how muscles work in the calf region. This bionic propulsion is very important clinically to patients. So on the left, you see the bionic device worn by a lady, on the right, a passive device worn by the same lady, that fails to emulate normal muscle function, enabling her to do something everyone should be able to do: go up and down their steps at home. Bionics also allows for extraordinary athletic feats. Here's a gentleman running up a rocky pathway. This is Steve Martin — not the comedian — who lost his legs in a bomb blast in Afghanistan. We're also building exoskeletal structures using these same principles, that wrap around the biological limb. This gentleman does not have any leg condition, any disability. He has a normal physiology, so these exoskeletons are applying muscle-like torques and powers, so that his own muscles need not apply those torques and powers. This is the first exoskeleton in history that actually augments human walking. It significantly reduces metabolic cost. It's so profound in its augmentation, that when a normal, healthy person wears the device for 40 minutes and then takes it off, their own biological legs feel ridiculously heavy and awkward. We're beginning the age in which machines attached to our bodies will make us stronger and faster and more efficient. Moving on to electrical interface: How do my bionic limbs communicate with my nervous system? Across my residual limb are electrodes that measure the electrical pulse of my muscles. That's communicated to the bionic limb, so when I think about moving my phantom limb, the robot tracks those movement desires. This diagram shows fundamentally how the bionic limb is controlled. So we model the missing biological limb, and we've discovered what reflexes occurred, how the reflexes of the spinal cord are controlling the muscles. And that capability is embedded in the chips of the bionic limb. What we've done, then, is we modulate the sensitivity of the reflex, the modeled spinal reflex, with the neural signal, so when I relax my muscles in my residual limb, I get very little torque and power, but the more I fire my muscles, the more torque I get, and I can even run. And that was the first demonstration of a running gait under neural command. Feels great. (Applause) We want to go a step further. We want to actually close the loop between the human and the bionic external limb. We're doing experiments where we're growing nerves, transected nerves, through channels, or micro-channel arrays. On the other side of the channel, the nerve then attaches to cells, skin cells and muscle cells. In the motor channels, we can sense how the person wishes to move. That can be sent out wirelessly to the bionic limb, then [sensory information] on the bionic limb can be converted to stimulations in adjacent channels, sensory channels. So when this is fully developed and for human use, persons like myself will not only have synthetic limbs that move like flesh and bone, but actually feel like flesh and bone. This video shows Lisa Mallette, shortly after being fitted with two bionic limbs. Indeed, bionics is making a profound difference in people's lives. (Video) Lisa Mallette: Oh my God. LM: Oh my God, I can't believe it! (Video) (Laughter) LM: It's just like I've got a real leg! Woman: Now, don't start running. Man: Now turn around, and do the same thing walking up, but get on your heel to toe, like you would normally just walk on level ground. Try to walk right up the hill. LM: Oh my God. Man: Is it pushing you up? LM: Yes! I'm not even — I can't even describe it. Man: It's pushing you right up. Hugh Herr: Next week, I'm visiting the Center — Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Next week I'm visiting the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and I'm going to try to convince CMS to grant appropriate code language and pricing, so this technology can be made available to the patients that need it. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) It's not well appreciated, but over half of the world's population suffers from some form of cognitive, emotional, sensory or motor condition, and because of poor technology, too often, conditions result in disability and a poorer quality of life. Basic levels of physiological function should be a part of our human rights. Every person should have the right to live life without disability if they so choose — the right to live life without severe depression; the right to see a loved one, in the case of seeing-impaired; or the right to walk or to dance, in the case of limb paralysis or limb amputation. As a society, we can achieve these human rights, if we accept the proposition that humans are not disabled. A person can never be broken. Our built environment, our technologies, are broken and disabled. We the people need not accept our limitations, but can transcend disability through technological innovation. Indeed, through fundamental advances in bionics in this century, we will set the technological foundation for an enhanced human experience, and we will end disability. I'd like to finish up with one more story, a beautiful story. The story of Adrianne Haslet-Davis. Adrianne lost her left leg in the Boston terrorist attack. I met Adrianne when this photo was taken, at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Adrianne is a dancer, a ballroom dancer. Adrianne breathes and lives dance. It is her expression. It is her art form. Naturally, when she lost her limb in the Boston terrorist attack, she wanted to return to the dance floor. After meeting her and driving home in my car, I thought, I'm an MIT professor. I have resources. Let's build her a bionic limb, to enable her to go back to her life of dance. I brought in MIT scientists with expertise in prosthetics, robotics, machine learning and biomechanics, and over a 200-day research period, we studied dance. We brought in dancers with biological limbs, and we studied how they move, what forces they apply on the dance floor, and we took those data, and we put forth fundamental principles of dance, reflexive dance capability, and we embedded that intelligence into the bionic limb. Bionics is not only about making people stronger and faster. Our expression, our humanity can be embedded into electromechanics. It was 3.5 seconds between the bomb blasts in the Boston terrorist attack. In 3.5 seconds, the criminals and cowards took Adrianne off the dance floor. In 200 days, we put her back. We will not be intimidated, brought down, diminished, conquered or stopped by acts of violence. (Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce Adrianne Haslet-Davis, her first performance since the attack. She's dancing with Christian Lightner. (Applause) (Music: "Ring My Bell" performed by Enrique Iglesias) (Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, members of the research team: Elliott Rouse and Nathan Villagaray-Carski. Elliott and Nathan. (Applause) |
Why I must come out | {0: 'Geena Rocero is a professional model for fashion and beauty companies around the world. And she uses her platform to share a powerful story.'} | TED2014 | The world makes you something that you're not, but you know inside what you are, and that question burns in your heart: How will you become that? I may be somewhat unique in this, but I am not alone, not alone at all. So when I became a fashion model, I felt that I'd finally achieved the dream that I'd always wanted since I was a young child. My outside self finally matched my inner truth, my inner self. For complicated reasons which I'll get to later, when I look at this picture, at that time I felt like, Geena, you've done it, you've made it, you have arrived. But this past October, I realized that I'm only just beginning. All of us are put in boxes by our family, by our religion, by our society, our moment in history, even our own bodies. Some people have the courage to break free, not to accept the limitations imposed by the color of their skin or by the beliefs of those that surround them. Those people are always the threat to the status quo, to what is considered acceptable. In my case, for the last nine years, some of my neighbors, some of my friends, colleagues, even my agent, did not know about my history. I think, in mystery, this is called the reveal. Here is mine. I was assigned boy at birth based on the appearance of my genitalia. I remember when I was five years old in the Philippines walking around our house, I would always wear this t-shirt on my head. And my mom asked me, "How come you always wear that t-shirt on your head?" I said, "Mom, this is my hair. I'm a girl." I knew then how to self-identify. Gender has always been considered a fact, immutable, but we now know it's actually more fluid, complex and mysterious. Because of my success, I never had the courage to share my story, not because I thought what I am is wrong, but because of how the world treats those of us who wish to break free. Every day, I am so grateful because I am a woman. I have a mom and dad and family who accepted me for who I am. Many are not so fortunate. There's a long tradition in Asian culture that celebrates the fluid mystery of gender. There is a Buddhist goddess of compassion. There is a Hindu goddess, hijra goddess. So when I was eight years old, I was at a fiesta in the Philippines celebrating these mysteries. I was in front of the stage, and I remember, out comes this beautiful woman right in front of me, and I remember that moment something hit me: That is the kind of woman I would like to be. So when I was 15 years old, still dressing as a boy, I met this woman named T.L. She is a transgender beauty pageant manager. That night she asked me, "How come you are not joining the beauty pageant?" She convinced me that if I joined that she would take care of the registration fee and the garments, and that night, I won best in swimsuit and best in long gown and placed second runner up among 40-plus candidates. That moment changed my life. All of a sudden, I was introduced to the world of beauty pageants. Not a lot of people could say that your first job is a pageant queen for transgender women, but I'll take it. So from 15 to 17 years old, I joined the most prestigious pageant to the pageant where it's at the back of the truck, literally, or sometimes it would be a pavement next to a rice field, and when it rains — it rains a lot in the Philippines — the organizers would have to move it inside someone's house. I also experienced the goodness of strangers, especially when we would travel in remote provinces in the Philippines. But most importantly, I met some of my best friends in that community. In 2001, my mom, who had moved to San Francisco, called me and told me that my green card petition came through, that I could now move to the United States. I resisted it. I told my mom, "Mom, I'm having fun. I'm here with my friends, I love traveling, being a beauty pageant queen." But then two weeks later she called me, she said, "Did you know that if you move to the United States you could change your name and gender marker?" That was all I needed to hear. My mom also told me to put two E's in the spelling of my name. She also came with me when I had my surgery in Thailand at 19 years old. It's interesting, in some of the most rural cities in Thailand, they perform some of the most prestigious, safe and sophisticated surgery. At that time in the United States, you needed to have surgery before you could change your name and gender marker. So in 2001, I moved to San Francisco, and I remember looking at my California driver's license with the name Geena and gender marker F. That was a powerful moment. For some people, their I.D. is their license to drive or even to get a drink, but for me, that was my license to live, to feel dignified. All of a sudden, my fears were minimized. I felt that I could conquer my dream and move to New York and be a model. Many are not so fortunate. I think of this woman named Islan Nettles. She's from New York, she's a young woman who was courageously living her truth, but hatred ended her life. For most of my community, this is the reality in which we live. Our suicide rate is nine times higher than that of the general population. Every November 20, we have a global vigil for Transgender Day of Remembrance. I'm here at this stage because it's a long history of people who fought and stood up for injustice. This is Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Today, this very moment, is my real coming out. I could no longer live my truth for and by myself. I want to do my best to help others live their truth without shame and terror. I am here, exposed, so that one day there will never be a need for a November 20 vigil. My deepest truth allowed me to accept who I am. Will you? Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Kathryn Schulz: Geena, one quick question for you. I'm wondering what you would say, especially to parents, but in a more broad way, to friends, to family, to anyone who finds themselves encountering a child or a person who is struggling with and uncomfortable with a gender that's being assigned them, what might you say to the family members of that person to help them become good and caring and kind family members to them? Geena Rocero: Sure. Well, first, really, I'm so blessed. The support system, with my mom especially, and my family, that in itself is just so powerful. I remember every time I would coach young trans women, I would mentor them, and sometimes when they would call me and tell me that their parents can't accept it, I would pick up that phone call and tell my mom, "Mom, can you call this woman?" And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so — But it's just, gender identity is in the core of our being, right? I mean, we're all assigned gender at birth, so what I'm trying to do is to have this conversation that sometimes that gender assignment doesn't match, and there should be a space that would allow people to self-identify, and that's a conversation that we should have with parents, with colleagues. The transgender movement, it's at the very beginning, to compare to how the gay movement started. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done. There should be an understanding. There should be a space of curiosity and asking questions, and I hope all of you guys will be my allies. KS: Thank you. That was so lovely. GR: Thank you. (Applause) |
It's TED, the Musical | {0: 'With TED-Ed communicator Emilie Soffe as the leading lady, the TED staff puts on a show.', 1: 'Susan Zimmerman is the speaker community director at TED (and she really loves her job!)'} | TED Studio | Daffodil Hudson: Hello? Yeah, this is she. What? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course I accept. What are the dates again? Pen. Pen. Pen. March 17 through 21. Okay, all right, great. Thanks. Lab Partner: Who was that? DH: It was TED. LP: Who's TED? DH: I've got to prepare. ["Give Your Talk: A Musical"] (Music) ["My Talk"] ♪ Procrastination. ♪ What do you think? (Doorbell) Can I help you? (Music) Speaker Coach 1: ♪ Let's prepare for main stage. ♪ ♪ It's your time to shine. ♪ ♪ If you want to succeed then ♪ ♪ you must be primed. ♪ Speaker Coach 2: ♪ Your slides are bad ♪ ♪ but your idea is good ♪ ♪ so you can bet before we're through, ♪ ♪ speaker, we'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ Speaker Coach 3: ♪ We know about climate change, ♪ ♪ but what can you say that's new? ♪ ♪ SC 1: Once you find your focus ♪ ♪ then the talk comes into view. ♪ SC 2: ♪ Don't ever try to sell something ♪ ♪ from up on that stage ♪ ♪ or we won't post your talk online. ♪ All: ♪ Somehow we'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ (Music) SC 1: Ready to practice one more time? DH: Right now? Stagehand: Break a leg. DH: ♪ I'll never remember all this. ♪ ♪ Will the clicker work when I press it? ♪ ♪ Why must Al Gore go right before me? ♪ ♪ Oh man, I'm scared to death. ♪ ♪ I hope I don't pass out onstage ♪ ♪ and now I really wish I wasn't wearing green. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ SC 1: ♪ You must be be sweet like Brené Brown. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ SC 2: ♪ You must be funny like Ken Robinson. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ SC 3: ♪ You must be cool like Reggie Watts ♪ All: ♪ and bring out a prop like Jill Bolte Taylor. ♪ DH: ♪ My time is running over. The clock now says nil. ♪ ♪ I'm saying my words faster. Understand me still. ♪ ♪ I'm too nervous to give this TED Talk. ♪ All: ♪ Don't give up. Rehearse. You're good. ♪ ♪ We'll edit out the mistakes that you make. ♪ ♪ Give your talk. ♪ DH: ♪ I will be big like Amy Cuddy. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ DH: ♪ I will inspire like Liz Gilbert. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ DH: ♪ I will engage like Hans Rosling ♪ ♪ and release mosquitos ♪ ♪ like Bill Gates. ♪ SC 2: ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ (Applause) ["Brought to you by TED staff and friends"] (Music) |
The discovery that could rewrite physics | {0: 'Allan Adams is a theoretical physicist working at the intersection of fluid dynamics, quantum field theory and string theory. '} | TED2014 | If you look deep into the night sky, you see stars, and if you look further, you see more stars, and further, galaxies, and further, more galaxies. But if you keep looking further and further, eventually you see nothing for a long while, and then finally you see a faint, fading afterglow, and it's the afterglow of the Big Bang. Now, the Big Bang was an era in the early universe when everything we see in the night sky was condensed into an incredibly small, incredibly hot, incredibly roiling mass, and from it sprung everything we see. Now, we've mapped that afterglow with great precision, and when I say we, I mean people who aren't me. We've mapped the afterglow with spectacular precision, and one of the shocks about it is that it's almost completely uniform. Fourteen billion light years that way and 14 billion light years that way, it's the same temperature. Now it's been 14 billion years since that Big Bang, and so it's got faint and cold. It's now 2.7 degrees. But it's not exactly 2.7 degrees. It's only 2.7 degrees to about 10 parts in a million. Over here, it's a little hotter, and over there, it's a little cooler, and that's incredibly important to everyone in this room, because where it was a little hotter, there was a little more stuff, and where there was a little more stuff, we have galaxies and clusters of galaxies and superclusters and all the structure you see in the cosmos. And those small, little, inhomogeneities, 20 parts in a million, those were formed by quantum mechanical wiggles in that early universe that were stretched across the size of the entire cosmos. That is spectacular, and that's not what they found on Monday; what they found on Monday is cooler. So here's what they found on Monday: Imagine you take a bell, and you whack the bell with a hammer. What happens? It rings. But if you wait, that ringing fades and fades and fades until you don't notice it anymore. Now, that early universe was incredibly dense, like a metal, way denser, and if you hit it, it would ring, but the thing ringing would be the structure of space-time itself, and the hammer would be quantum mechanics. What they found on Monday was evidence of the ringing of the space-time of the early universe, what we call gravitational waves from the fundamental era, and here's how they found it. Those waves have long since faded. If you go for a walk, you don't wiggle. Those gravitational waves in the structure of space are totally invisible for all practical purposes. But early on, when the universe was making that last afterglow, the gravitational waves put little twists in the structure of the light that we see. So by looking at the night sky deeper and deeper — in fact, these guys spent three years on the South Pole looking straight up through the coldest, clearest, cleanest air they possibly could find looking deep into the night sky and studying that glow and looking for the faint twists which are the symbol, the signal, of gravitational waves, the ringing of the early universe. And on Monday, they announced that they had found it. And the thing that's so spectacular about that to me is not just the ringing, though that is awesome. The thing that's totally amazing, the reason I'm on this stage, is because what that tells us is something deep about the early universe. It tells us that we and everything we see around us are basically one large bubble — and this is the idea of inflation— one large bubble surrounded by something else. This isn't conclusive evidence for inflation, but anything that isn't inflation that explains this will look the same. This is a theory, an idea, that has been around for a while, and we never thought we we'd really see it. For good reasons, we thought we'd never see killer evidence, and this is killer evidence. But the really crazy idea is that our bubble is just one bubble in a much larger, roiling pot of universal stuff. We're never going to see the stuff outside, but by going to the South Pole and spending three years looking at the detailed structure of the night sky, we can figure out that we're probably in a universe that looks kind of like that. And that amazes me. Thanks a lot. (Applause) |
Why giving away our wealth has been the most satisfying thing we've done | {0: 'Melinda French Gates is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she puts into practice the idea that every life has equal value.', 1: "A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. Now he's doing it again with his own style of philanthropy and passion for innovation."} | TED2014 | Chris Anderson: So, this is an interview with a difference. On the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words, what I did was, I asked Bill and Melinda to dig out from their archive some images that would help explain some of what they've done, and do a few things that way. So, we're going to start here. Melinda, when and where was this, and who is that handsome man next to you? Melinda Gates: With those big glasses, huh? This is in Africa, our very first trip, the first time either of us had ever been to Africa, in the fall of 1993. We were already engaged to be married. We married a few months later, and this was the trip where we really went to see the animals and to see the savanna. It was incredible. Bill had never taken that much time off from work. But what really touched us, actually, were the people, and the extreme poverty. We started asking ourselves questions. Does it have to be like this? And at the end of the trip, we went out to Zanzibar, and took some time to walk on the beach, which is something we had done a lot while we were dating. And we'd already been talking about during that time that the wealth that had come from Microsoft would be given back to society, but it was really on that beach walk that we started to talk about, well, what might we do and how might we go about it? CA: So, given that this vacation led to the creation of the world's biggest private foundation, it's pretty expensive as vacations go. (Laughter) MG: I guess so. We enjoyed it. CA: Which of you was the key instigator here, or was it symmetrical? Bill Gates: Well, I think we were excited that there'd be a phase of our life where we'd get to work together and figure out how to give this money back. At this stage, we were talking about the poorest, and could you have a big impact on them? Were there things that weren't being done? There was a lot we didn't know. Our naïveté is pretty incredible, when we look back on it. But we had a certain enthusiasm that that would be the phase, the post-Microsoft phase would be our philanthropy. MG: Which Bill always thought was going to come after he was 60, so he hasn't quite hit 60 yet, so some things change along the way. CA: So it started there, but it got accelerated. So that was '93, and it was '97, really, before the foundation itself started. MA: Yeah, in '97, we read an article about diarrheal diseases killing so many kids around the world, and we kept saying to ourselves, "Well that can't be. In the U.S., you just go down to the drug store." And so we started gathering scientists and started learning about population, learning about vaccines, learning about what had worked and what had failed, and that's really when we got going, was in late 1998, 1999. CA: So, you've got a big pot of money and a world full of so many different issues. How on Earth do you decide what to focus on? BG: Well, we decided that we'd pick two causes, whatever the biggest inequity was globally, and there we looked at children dying, children not having enough nutrition to ever develop, and countries that were really stuck, because with that level of death, and parents would have so many kids that they'd get huge population growth, and that the kids were so sick that they really couldn't be educated and lift themselves up. So that was our global thing, and then in the U.S., both of us have had amazing educations, and we saw that as the way that the U.S. could live up to its promise of equal opportunity is by having a phenomenal education system, and the more we learned, the more we realized we're not really fulfilling that promise. And so we picked those two things, and everything the foundation does is focused there. CA: So, I asked each of you to pick an image that you like that illustrates your work, and Melinda, this is what you picked. What's this about? MG: So I, one of the things I love to do when I travel is to go out to the rural areas and talk to the women, whether it's Bangladesh, India, lots of countries in Africa, and I go in as a Western woman without a name. I don't tell them who I am. Pair of khakis. And I kept hearing from women, over and over and over, the more I traveled, "I want to be able to use this shot." I would be there to talk to them about childhood vaccines, and they would bring the conversation around to "But what about the shot I get?" which is an injection they were getting called Depo-Provera, which is a contraceptive. And I would come back and talk to global health experts, and they'd say, "Oh no, contraceptives are stocked in in the developing world." Well, you had to dig deeper into the reports, and this is what the team came to me with, which is, to have the number one thing that women tell you in Africa they want to use stocked out more than 200 days a year explains why women were saying to me, "I walked 10 kilometers without my husband knowing it, and I got to the clinic, and there was nothing there." And so condoms were stocked in in Africa because of all the AIDS work that the U.S. and others supported. But women will tell you over and over again, "I can't negotiate a condom with my husband. I'm either suggesting he has AIDS or I have AIDS, and I need that tool because then I can space the births of my children, and I can feed them and have a chance of educating them." CA: Melinda, you're Roman Catholic, and you've often been embroiled in controversy over this issue, and on the abortion question, on both sides, really. How do you navigate that? MG: Yeah, so I think that's a really important point, which is, we had backed away from contraceptives as a global community. We knew that 210 million women were saying they wanted access to contraceptives, even the contraceptives we have here in the United States, and we weren't providing them because of the political controversy in our country, and to me that was just a crime, and I kept looking around trying to find the person that would get this back on the global stage, and I finally realized I just had to do it. And even though I'm Catholic, I believe in contraceptives just like most of the Catholic women in the United States who report using contraceptives, and I shouldn't let that controversy be the thing that holds us back. We used to have consensus in the United States around contraceptives, and so we got back to that global consensus, and actually raised 2.6 billion dollars around exactly this issue for women. (Applause) CA: Bill, this is your graph. What's this about? BG: Well, my graph has numbers on it. (Laughter) I really like this graph. This is the number of children who die before the age of five every year. And what you find is really a phenomenal success story which is not widely known, that we are making incredible progress. We go from 20 million not long after I was born to now we're down to about six million. So this is a story largely of vaccines. Smallpox was killing a couple million kids a year. That was eradicated, so that got down to zero. Measles was killing a couple million a year. That's down to a few hundred thousand. Anyway, this is a chart where you want to get that number to continue, and it's going to be possible, using the science of new vaccines, getting the vaccines out to kids. We can actually accelerate the progress. The last decade, that number has dropped faster than ever in history, and so I just love the fact that you can say, okay, if we can invent new vaccines, we can get them out there, use the very latest understanding of these things, and get the delivery right, that we can perform a miracle. CA: I mean, you do the math on this, and it works out, I think, literally to thousands of kids' lives saved every day compared to the prior year. It's not reported. An airliner with 200-plus deaths is a far, far bigger story than that. Does that drive you crazy? BG: Yeah, because it's a silent thing going on. It's a kid, one kid at a time. Ninety-eight percent of this has nothing to do with natural disasters, and yet, people's charity, when they see a natural disaster, are wonderful. It's incredible how people think, okay, that could be me, and the money flows. These causes have been a bit invisible. Now that the Millennium Development Goals and various things are getting out there, we are seeing some increased generosity, so the goal is to get this well below a million, which should be possible in our lifetime. CA: Maybe it needed someone who is turned on by numbers and graphs rather than just the big, sad face to get engaged. I mean, you've used it in your letter this year, you used basically this argument to say that aid, contrary to the current meme that aid is kind of worthless and broken, that actually it has been effective. BG: Yeah, well people can take, there is some aid that was well-meaning and didn't go well. There's some venture capital investments that were well-meaning and didn't go well. You shouldn't just say, okay, because of that, because we don't have a perfect record, this is a bad endeavor. You should look at, what was your goal? How are you trying to uplift nutrition and survival and literacy so these countries can take care of themselves, and say wow, this is going well, and be smarter. We can spend aid smarter. It is not all a panacea. We can do better than venture capital, I think, including big hits like this. CA: Traditional wisdom is that it's pretty hard for married couples to work together. How have you guys managed it? MG: Yeah, I've had a lot of women say to me, "I really don't think I could work with my husband. That just wouldn't work out." You know, we enjoy it, and we don't — this foundation has been a coming to for both of us in its continuous learning journey, and we don't travel together as much for the foundation, actually, as we used to when Bill was working at Microsoft. We have more trips where we're traveling separately, but I always know when I come home, Bill's going to be interested in what I learned, whether it's about women or girls or something new about the vaccine delivery chain, or this person that is a great leader. He's going to listen and be really interested. And he knows when he comes home, even if it's to talk about the speech he did or the data or what he's learned, I'm really interested, and I think we have a really collaborative relationship. But we don't every minute together, that's for sure. (Laughter) CA: But now you are, and we're very happy that you are. Melinda, early on, you were basically largely running the show. Six years ago, I guess, Bill came on full time, so moved from Microsoft and became full time. That must have been hard, adjusting to that. No? MG: Yeah. I think actually, for the foundation employees, there was way more angst for them than there was for me about Bill coming. I was actually really excited. I mean, Bill made this decision even obviously before it got announced in 2006, and it was really his decision, but again, it was a beach vacation where we were walking on the beach and he was starting to think of this idea. And for me, the excitement of Bill putting his brain and his heart against these huge global problems, these inequities, to me that was exciting. Yes, the foundation employees had angst about that. (Applause) CA: That's cool. MG: But that went away within three months, once he was there. BG: Including some of the employees. MG: That's what I said, the employees, it went away for them three months after you were there. BG: No, I'm kidding. MG: Oh, you mean, the employees didn't go away. BG: A few of them did, but — (Laughter) CA: So what do you guys argue about? Sunday, 11 o'clock, you're away from work, what comes up? What's the argument? BG: Because we built this thing together from the beginning, it's this great partnership. I had that with Paul Allen in the early days of Microsoft. I had it with Steve Ballmer as Microsoft got bigger, and now Melinda, and in even stronger, equal ways, is the partner, so we talk a lot about which things should we give more to, which groups are working well? She's got a lot of insight. She'll sit down with the employees a lot. We'll take the different trips she described. So there's a lot of collaboration. I can't think of anything where one of us had a super strong opinion about one thing or another? CA: How about you, Melinda, though? Can you? (Laughter) You never know. MG: Well, here's the thing. We come at things from different angles, and I actually think that's really good. So Bill can look at the big data and say, "I want to act based on these global statistics." For me, I come at it from intuition. I meet with lots of people on the ground and Bill's taught me to take that and read up to the global data and see if they match, and I think what I've taught him is to take that data and meet with people on the ground to understand, can you actually deliver that vaccine? Can you get a woman to accept those polio drops in her child's mouth? Because the delivery piece is every bit as important as the science. So I think it's been more a coming to over time towards each other's point of view, and quite frankly, the work is better because of it. CA: So, in vaccines and polio and so forth, you've had some amazing successes. What about failure, though? Can you talk about a failure and maybe what you've learned from it? BG: Yeah. Fortunately, we can afford a few failures, because we've certainly had them. We do a lot of drug work or vaccine work that you know you're going to have different failures. Like, we put out, one that got a lot of publicity was asking for a better condom. Well, we got hundreds of ideas. Maybe a few of those will work out. We were very naïve, certainly I was, about a drug for a disease in India, visceral leishmaniasis, that I thought, once I got this drug, we can just go wipe out the disease. Well, turns out it took an injection every day for 10 days. It took three more years to get it than we expected, and then there was no way it was going to get out there. Fortunately, we found out that if you go kill the sand flies, you probably can have success there, but we spent five years, you could say wasted five years, and about 60 million, on a path that turned out to have very modest benefit when we got there. CA: You're spending, like, a billion dollars a year in education, I think, something like that. Is anything, the story of what's gone right there is quite a long and complex one. Are there any failures that you can talk about? MG: Well, I would say a huge lesson for us out of the early work is we thought that these small schools were the answer, and small schools definitely help. They bring down the dropout rate. They have less violence and crime in those schools. But the thing that we learned from that work, and what turned out to be the fundamental key, is a great teacher in front of the classroom. If you don't have an effective teacher in the front of the classroom, I don't care how big or small the building is, you're not going to change the trajectory of whether that student will be ready for college. (Applause) CA: So Melinda, this is you and your eldest daughter, Jenn. And just taken about three weeks ago, I think, three or four weeks ago. Where was this? MG: So we went to Tanzania. Jenn's been to Tanzania. All our kids have been to Africa quite a bit, actually. And we did something very different, which is, we decided to go spend two nights and three days with a family. Anna and Sanare are the parents. They invited us to come and stay in their boma. Actually, the goats had been there, I think, living in that particular little hut on their little compound before we got there. And we stayed with their family, and we really, really learned what life is like in rural Tanzania. And the difference between just going and visiting for half a day or three quarters of a day versus staying overnight was profound, and so let me just give you one explanation of that. They had six children, and as I talked to Anna in the kitchen, we cooked for about five hours in the cooking hut that day, and as I talked to her, she had absolutely planned and spaced with her husband the births of their children. It was a very loving relationship. This was a Maasai warrior and his wife, but they had decided to get married, they clearly had respect and love in the relationship. Their children, their six children, the two in the middle were twins, 13, a boy, and a girl named Grace. And when we'd go out to chop wood and do all the things that Grace and her mother would do, Grace was not a child, she was an adolescent, but she wasn't an adult. She was very, very shy. So she kept wanting to talk to me and Jenn. We kept trying to engage her, but she was shy. And at night, though, when all the lights went out in rural Tanzania, and there was no moon that night, the first night, and no stars, and Jenn came out of our hut with her REI little headlamp on, Grace went immediately, and got the translator, came straight up to my Jenn and said, "When you go home, can I have your headlamp so I can study at night?" CA: Oh, wow. MG: And her dad had told me how afraid he was that unlike the son, who had passed his secondary exams, because of her chores, she'd not done so well and wasn't in the government school yet. He said, "I don't know how I'm going to pay for her education. I can't pay for private school, and she may end up on this farm like my wife." So they know the difference that an education can make in a huge, profound way. CA: I mean, this is another pic of your other two kids, Rory and Phoebe, along with Paul Farmer. Bringing up three children when you're the world's richest family seems like a social experiment without much prior art. How have you managed it? What's been your approach? BG: Well, I'd say overall the kids get a great education, but you've got to make sure they have a sense of their own ability and what they're going to go and do, and our philosophy has been to be very clear with them — most of the money's going to the foundation — and help them find something they're excited about. We want to strike a balance where they have the freedom to do anything but not a lot of money showered on them so they could go out and do nothing. And so far, they're fairly diligent, excited to pick their own direction. CA: You've obviously guarded their privacy carefully for obvious reasons. I'm curious why you've given me permission to show this picture now here at TED. MG: Well, it's interesting. As they get older, they so know that our family belief is about responsibility, that we are in an unbelievable situation just to live in the United States and have a great education, and we have a responsibility to give back to the world. And so as they get older and we are teaching them — they have been to so many countries around the world — they're saying, we do want people to know that we believe in what you're doing, Mom and Dad, and it is okay to show us more. So we have their permission to show this picture, and I think Paul Farmer is probably going to put it eventually in some of his work. But they really care deeply about the mission of the foundation, too. CA: You've easily got enough money despite your vast contributions to the foundation to make them all billionaires. Is that your plan for them? BG: Nope. No. They won't have anything like that. They need to have a sense that their own work is meaningful and important. We read an article long, actually, before we got married, where Warren Buffett talked about that, and we're quite convinced that it wasn't a favor either to society or to the kids. CA: Well, speaking of Warren Buffett, something really amazing happened in 2006, when somehow your only real rival for richest person in America suddenly turned around and agreed to give 80 percent of his fortune to your foundation. How on Earth did that happen? I guess there's a long version and a short version of that. We've got time for the short version. BG: All right. Well, Warren was a close friend, and he was going to have his wife Suzie give it all away. Tragically, she passed away before he did, and he's big on delegation, and — (Laughter) — he said — CA: Tweet that. BG: If he's got somebody who is doing something well, and is willing to do it at no charge, maybe that's okay. But we were stunned. MG: Totally stunned. BG: We had never expected it, and it has been unbelievable. It's allowed us to increase our ambition in what the foundation can do quite dramatically. Half the resources we have come from Warren's mind-blowing generosity. CA: And I think you've pledged that by the time you're done, more than, or 95 percent of your wealth, will be given to the foundation. BG: Yes. CA: And since this relationship, it's amazing— (Applause) And recently, you and Warren have been going around trying to persuade other billionaires and successful people to pledge to give, what, more than half of their assets for philanthropy. How is that going? BG: Well, we've got about 120 people who have now taken this giving pledge. The thing that's great is that we get together yearly and talk about, okay, do you hire staff, what do you give to them? We're not trying to homogenize it. I mean, the beauty of philanthropy is this mind-blowing diversity. People give to some things. We look and go, "Wow." But that's great. That's the role of philanthropy is to pick different approaches, including even in one space, like education. We need more experimentation. But it's been wonderful, meeting those people, sharing their journey to philanthropy, how they involve their kids, where they're doing it differently, and it's been way more successful than we expected. Now it looks like it'll just keep growing in size in the years ahead. MG: And having people see that other people are making change with philanthropy, I mean, these are people who have created their own businesses, put their own ingenuity behind incredible ideas. If they put their ideas and their brain behind philanthropy, they can change the world. And they start to see others doing it, and saying, "Wow, I want to do that with my own money." To me, that's the piece that's incredible. CA: It seems to me, it's actually really hard for some people to figure out even how to remotely spend that much money on something else. There are probably some billionaires in the room and certainly some successful people. I'm curious, can you make the pitch? What's the pitch? BG: Well, it's the most fulfilling thing we've ever done, and you can't take it with you, and if it's not good for your kids, let's get together and brainstorm about what we can be done. The world is a far better place because of the philanthropists of the past, and the U.S. tradition here, which is the strongest, is the envy of the world. And part of the reason I'm so optimistic is because I do think philanthropy is going to grow and take some of these things government's not just good at working on and discovering and shine some light in the right direction. CA: The world's got this terrible inequality, growing inequality problem that seems structural. It does seem to me that if more of your peers took the approach that you two have made, it would make a dent both in that problem and certainly in the perception of that problem. Is that a fair comment? BG: Oh yeah. If you take from the most wealthy and give to the least wealthy, it's good. It tries to balance out, and that's just. MG: But you change systems. In the U.S., we're trying to change the education system so it's just for everybody and it works for all students. That, to me, really changes the inequality balance. BG: That's the most important. (Applause) CA: Well, I really think that most people here and many millions around the world are just in awe of the trajectory your lives have taken and the spectacular degree to which you have shaped the future. Thank you so much for coming to TED and for sharing with us and for all you do. BG: Thank you. MG: Thank you. (Applause) BG: Thank you. MG: Thank you very much. BG: All right, good job. (Applause) |
Your social media "likes" expose more than you think | {0: 'As the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, Jennifer Golbeck studies how people use social media -- and thinks about ways to improve their interactions.'} | TEDxMidAtlantic 2013 | If you remember that first decade of the web, it was really a static place. You could go online, you could look at pages, and they were put up either by organizations who had teams to do it or by individuals who were really tech-savvy for the time. And with the rise of social media and social networks in the early 2000s, the web was completely changed to a place where now the vast majority of content we interact with is put up by average users, either in YouTube videos or blog posts or product reviews or social media postings. And it's also become a much more interactive place, where people are interacting with others, they're commenting, they're sharing, they're not just reading. So Facebook is not the only place you can do this, but it's the biggest, and it serves to illustrate the numbers. Facebook has 1.2 billion users per month. So half the Earth's Internet population is using Facebook. They are a site, along with others, that has allowed people to create an online persona with very little technical skill, and people responded by putting huge amounts of personal data online. So the result is that we have behavioral, preference, demographic data for hundreds of millions of people, which is unprecedented in history. And as a computer scientist, what this means is that I've been able to build models that can predict all sorts of hidden attributes for all of you that you don't even know you're sharing information about. As scientists, we use that to help the way people interact online, but there's less altruistic applications, and there's a problem in that users don't really understand these techniques and how they work, and even if they did, they don't have a lot of control over it. So what I want to talk to you about today is some of these things that we're able to do, and then give us some ideas of how we might go forward to move some control back into the hands of users. So this is Target, the company. I didn't just put that logo on this poor, pregnant woman's belly. You may have seen this anecdote that was printed in Forbes magazine where Target sent a flyer to this 15-year-old girl with advertisements and coupons for baby bottles and diapers and cribs two weeks before she told her parents that she was pregnant. Yeah, the dad was really upset. He said, "How did Target figure out that this high school girl was pregnant before she told her parents?" It turns out that they have the purchase history for hundreds of thousands of customers and they compute what they call a pregnancy score, which is not just whether or not a woman's pregnant, but what her due date is. And they compute that not by looking at the obvious things, like, she's buying a crib or baby clothes, but things like, she bought more vitamins than she normally had, or she bought a handbag that's big enough to hold diapers. And by themselves, those purchases don't seem like they might reveal a lot, but it's a pattern of behavior that, when you take it in the context of thousands of other people, starts to actually reveal some insights. So that's the kind of thing that we do when we're predicting stuff about you on social media. We're looking for little patterns of behavior that, when you detect them among millions of people, lets us find out all kinds of things. So in my lab and with colleagues, we've developed mechanisms where we can quite accurately predict things like your political preference, your personality score, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, intelligence, along with things like how much you trust the people you know and how strong those relationships are. We can do all of this really well. And again, it doesn't come from what you might think of as obvious information. So my favorite example is from this study that was published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academies. If you Google this, you'll find it. It's four pages, easy to read. And they looked at just people's Facebook likes, so just the things you like on Facebook, and used that to predict all these attributes, along with some other ones. And in their paper they listed the five likes that were most indicative of high intelligence. And among those was liking a page for curly fries. (Laughter) Curly fries are delicious, but liking them does not necessarily mean that you're smarter than the average person. So how is it that one of the strongest indicators of your intelligence is liking this page when the content is totally irrelevant to the attribute that's being predicted? And it turns out that we have to look at a whole bunch of underlying theories to see why we're able to do this. One of them is a sociological theory called homophily, which basically says people are friends with people like them. So if you're smart, you tend to be friends with smart people, and if you're young, you tend to be friends with young people, and this is well established for hundreds of years. We also know a lot about how information spreads through networks. It turns out things like viral videos or Facebook likes or other information spreads in exactly the same way that diseases spread through social networks. So this is something we've studied for a long time. We have good models of it. And so you can put those things together and start seeing why things like this happen. So if I were to give you a hypothesis, it would be that a smart guy started this page, or maybe one of the first people who liked it would have scored high on that test. And they liked it, and their friends saw it, and by homophily, we know that he probably had smart friends, and so it spread to them, and some of them liked it, and they had smart friends, and so it spread to them, and so it propagated through the network to a host of smart people, so that by the end, the action of liking the curly fries page is indicative of high intelligence, not because of the content, but because the actual action of liking reflects back the common attributes of other people who have done it. So this is pretty complicated stuff, right? It's a hard thing to sit down and explain to an average user, and even if you do, what can the average user do about it? How do you know that you've liked something that indicates a trait for you that's totally irrelevant to the content of what you've liked? There's a lot of power that users don't have to control how this data is used. And I see that as a real problem going forward. So I think there's a couple paths that we want to look at if we want to give users some control over how this data is used, because it's not always going to be used for their benefit. An example I often give is that, if I ever get bored being a professor, I'm going to go start a company that predicts all of these attributes and things like how well you work in teams and if you're a drug user, if you're an alcoholic. We know how to predict all that. And I'm going to sell reports to H.R. companies and big businesses that want to hire you. We totally can do that now. I could start that business tomorrow, and you would have absolutely no control over me using your data like that. That seems to me to be a problem. So one of the paths we can go down is the policy and law path. And in some respects, I think that that would be most effective, but the problem is we'd actually have to do it. Observing our political process in action makes me think it's highly unlikely that we're going to get a bunch of representatives to sit down, learn about this, and then enact sweeping changes to intellectual property law in the U.S. so users control their data. We could go the policy route, where social media companies say, you know what? You own your data. You have total control over how it's used. The problem is that the revenue models for most social media companies rely on sharing or exploiting users' data in some way. It's sometimes said of Facebook that the users aren't the customer, they're the product. And so how do you get a company to cede control of their main asset back to the users? It's possible, but I don't think it's something that we're going to see change quickly. So I think the other path that we can go down that's going to be more effective is one of more science. It's doing science that allowed us to develop all these mechanisms for computing this personal data in the first place. And it's actually very similar research that we'd have to do if we want to develop mechanisms that can say to a user, "Here's the risk of that action you just took." By liking that Facebook page, or by sharing this piece of personal information, you've now improved my ability to predict whether or not you're using drugs or whether or not you get along well in the workplace. And that, I think, can affect whether or not people want to share something, keep it private, or just keep it offline altogether. We can also look at things like allowing people to encrypt data that they upload, so it's kind of invisible and worthless to sites like Facebook or third party services that access it, but that select users who the person who posted it want to see it have access to see it. This is all super exciting research from an intellectual perspective, and so scientists are going to be willing to do it. So that gives us an advantage over the law side. One of the problems that people bring up when I talk about this is, they say, you know, if people start keeping all this data private, all those methods that you've been developing to predict their traits are going to fail. And I say, absolutely, and for me, that's success, because as a scientist, my goal is not to infer information about users, it's to improve the way people interact online. And sometimes that involves inferring things about them, but if users don't want me to use that data, I think they should have the right to do that. I want users to be informed and consenting users of the tools that we develop. And so I think encouraging this kind of science and supporting researchers who want to cede some of that control back to users and away from the social media companies means that going forward, as these tools evolve and advance, means that we're going to have an educated and empowered user base, and I think all of us can agree that that's a pretty ideal way to go forward. Thank you. (Applause) |
The unstoppable walk to political reform | {0: "Lawrence Lessig has already transformed intellectual-property law with his Creative Commons innovation. Now he's focused on an even bigger problem: The US' broken political system."} | TED2014 | So a chip, a poet and a boy. It's just about 20 years ago, June 1994, when Intel announced that there was a flaw at the core of their Pentium chip. Deep in the code of the SRT algorithm to calculate intermediate quotients necessary for iterative floating points of divisions — I don't know what that means, but it's what it says on Wikipedia — there was a flaw and an error that meant that there was a certain probability that the result of the calculation would be an error, and the probability was one out of every 360 billion calculations. So Intel said your average spreadsheet would be flawed once every 27,000 years. They didn't think it was significant, but there was an outrage in the community. The community, the techies, said, this flaw has to be addressed. They were not going to stand by quietly as Intel gave them these chips. So there was a revolution across the world. People marched to demand — okay, not really exactly like that — but they rose up and they demanded that Intel fix the flaw. And Intel set aside 475 million dollars to fund the replacement of millions of chips to fix the flaw. So billions of dollars in our society was spent to address a problem which would come once out of every 360 billion calculations. Number two, a poet. This is Martin Niemöller. You're familiar with his poetry. Around the height of the Nazi period, he started repeating the verse, "First they came for the communists, and I did nothing, did not speak out because I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists. Then they came for the trade unions. Then they came for the Jews. And then they came for me. But there was no one left to speak for me." Now, Niemöller is offering a certain kind of insight. This is an insight at the core of intelligence. We could call it cluefulness. It's a certain kind of test: Can you recognize an underlying threat and respond? Can you save yourself or save your kind? Turns out ants are pretty good at this. Cows, not so much. So can you see the pattern? Can you see a pattern and then recognize and do something about it? Number two. Number three, a boy. This is my friend Aaron Swartz. He's Tim's friend. He's friends of many of you in this audience, and seven years ago, Aaron came to me with a question. It was just before I was going to give my first TED Talk. I was so proud. I was telling him about my talk, "Laws that choke creativity." And Aaron looked at me and was a little impatient, and he said, "So how are you ever going to solve the problems you're talking about? Copyright policy, Internet policy, how are you ever going to address those problems so long as there's this fundamental corruption in the way our government works?" So I was a little put off by this. He wasn't sharing in my celebration. And I said to him, "You know, Aaron, it's not my field, not my field." He said, "You mean as an academic, it's not your field?" I said, "Yeah, as an academic, it's not my field." He said, "What about as a citizen? As a citizen." Now, this is the way Aaron was. He didn't tell. He asked questions. But his questions spoke as clearly as my four-year-old's hug. He was saying to me, "You've got to get a clue. You have got to get a clue, because there is a flaw at the core of the operating system of this democracy, and it's not a flaw every one out of 360 billion times our democracy tries to make a decision. It is every time, every single important issue. We've got to end the bovinity of this political society. We've got to adopt, it turns out, the word is fourmi-formatic attitude — that's what the Internet tells me the word is — the ant's appreciative attitude that gets us to recognize this flaw, save our kind and save our demos. Now if you know Aaron Swartz, you know that we lost him just over a year ago. It was about six weeks before I gave my TED Talk, and I was so grateful to Chris that he asked me to give this TED Talk, not because I had the chance to talk to you, although that was great, but because it pulled me out of an extraordinary depression. I couldn't begin to describe the sadness. Because I had to focus. I had to focus on, what was I going to say to you? It saved me. But after the buzz, the excitement, the power that comes from this community, I began to yearn for a less sterile, less academic way to address these issues, the issues that I was talking about. We'd begun to focus on New Hampshire as a target for this political movement, because the primary in New Hampshire is so incredibly important. It was a group called the New Hampshire Rebellion that was beginning to talk about, how would we make this issue of this corruption central in 2016? But it was another soul that caught my imagination, a woman named Doris Haddock, aka Granny D. On January 1, 1999, 15 years ago, at the age of 88, Granny D started a walk. She started in Los Angeles and began to walk to Washington, D.C. with a single sign on her chest that said, "campaign finance reform." Eighteen months later, at the age of 90, she arrived in Washington with hundreds following her, including many congressmen who had gotten in a car and driven out about a mile outside of the city to walk in with her. (Laughter) Now, I don't have 13 months to walk across the country. I've got three kids who hate to walk, and a wife who, it turns out, still hates when I'm not there for mysterious reasons, so this was not an option, but the question I asked, could we remix Granny D a bit? What about a walk not of 3,200 miles but of 185 miles across New Hampshire in January? So on January 11, the anniversary of Aaron's death, we began a walk that ended on January 24th, the day that Granny D was born. A total of 200 people joined us across this walk, as we went from the very top to the very bottom of New Hampshire talking about this issue. And what was astonishing to me, something I completely did not expect to find, was the passion and anger that there was among everyone that we talked to about this issue. We had found in a poll that 96 percent of Americans believe it important to reduce the influence of money in politics. Now politicians and pundits tell you, there's nothing we can do about this issue, Americans don't care about it, but the reason for that is that 91 percent of Americans think there's nothing that can be done about this issue. And it's this gap between 96 and 91 that explains our politics of resignation. I mean, after all, at least 96 percent of us wish we could fly like Superman, but because at least 91 percent of us believe we can't, we don't leap off of tall buildings every time we have that urge. That's because we accept our limits, and so too with this reform. But when you give people the sense of hope, you begin to thaw that absolute sense of impossibility. As Harvey Milk said, if you give 'em hope, you give 'em a chance, a way to think about how this change is possible. Hope. And hope is the one thing that we, Aaron's friends, failed him with, because we let him lose that sense of hope. I loved that boy like I love my son. But we failed him. And I love my country, and I'm not going to fail that. I'm not going to fail that. That sense of hope, we're going to hold, and we're going to fight for, however impossible this battle looks. What's next? Well, we started with this march with 200 people, and next year, there will be 1,000 on different routes that march in the month of January and meet in Concord to celebrate this cause, and then in 2016, before the primary, there will be 10,000 who march across that state, meeting in Concord to celebrate this cause. And as we have marched, people around the country have begun to say, "Can we do the same thing in our state?" So we've started a platform called G.D. Walkers, that is, Granny D walkers, and Granny D walkers across the country will be marching for this reform. Number one. Number two, on this march, one of the founders of Thunderclap, David Cascino, was with us, and he said, "Well what can we do?" And so they developed a platform, which we are announcing today, that allows us to pull together voters who are committed to this idea of reform. Regardless of where you are, in New Hampshire or outside of New Hampshire, you can sign up and directly be informed where the candidates are on this issue so you can decide who to vote for as a function of which is going to make this possibility real. And then finally number three, the hardest. We're in the age of the Super PAC. Indeed yesterday, Merriam announced that Merriam-Webster will have Super PAC as a word. It is now an official word in the dictionary. So on May 1, aka May Day, we're going to try an experiment. We're going to try a launching of what we can think of as a Super PAC to end all Super PACs. And the basic way this works is this. For the last year, we have been working with analysts and political experts to calculate, how much would it cost to win enough votes in the United States Congress to make fundamental reform possible? What is that number? Half a billion? A billion? What is that number? And then whatever that number is, we are going to kickstart, sort of, because you can't use KickStarter for political work, but anyway, kickstart, sort of, first a bottom-up campaign where people will make small dollar commitments contingent on reaching very ambitious goals, and when those goals have been reached, we will turn to the large dollar contributors, to get them to contribute to make it possible for us to run the kind of Super PAC necessary to win this issue, to change the way money influences politics, so that on November 8, which I discovered yesterday is the day that Aaron would have been 30 years old, on November 8, we will celebrate 218 representatives in the House and 60 Senators in the United States Senate who have committed to this idea of fundamental reform. So last night, we heard about wishes. Here's my wish. May one. May the ideals of one boy unite one nation behind one critical idea that we are one people, we are the people who were promised a government, a government that was promised to be dependent upon the people alone, the people, who, as Madison told us, meant not the rich more than the poor. May one. And then may you, may you join this movement, not because you're a politician, not because you're an expert, not because this is your field, but because if you are, you are a citizen. Aaron asked me that. Now I've asked you. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How public spaces make cities work | {0: "As New York’s chief city planner under the Bloomberg administration, Amanda Burden led revitalization of some of the city's most familiar features -- from the High Line to the Brooklyn waterfront."} | TED2014 | When people think about cities, they tend to think of certain things. They think of buildings and streets and skyscrapers, noisy cabs. But when I think about cities, I think about people. Cities are fundamentally about people, and where people go and where people meet are at the core of what makes a city work. So even more important than buildings in a city are the public spaces in between them. And today, some of the most transformative changes in cities are happening in these public spaces. So I believe that lively, enjoyable public spaces are the key to planning a great city. They are what makes it come alive. But what makes a public space work? What attracts people to successful public spaces, and what is it about unsuccessful places that keeps people away? I thought, if I could answer those questions, I could make a huge contribution to my city. But one of the more wonky things about me is that I am an animal behaviorist, and I use those skills not to study animal behavior but to study how people in cities use city public spaces. One of the first spaces that I studied was this little vest pocket park called Paley Park in midtown Manhattan. This little space became a small phenomenon, and because it had such a profound impact on New Yorkers, it made an enormous impression on me. I studied this park very early on in my career because it happened to have been built by my stepfather, so I knew that places like Paley Park didn't happen by accident. I saw firsthand that they required incredible dedication and enormous attention to detail. But what was it about this space that made it special and drew people to it? Well, I would sit in the park and watch very carefully, and first among other things were the comfortable, movable chairs. People would come in, find their own seat, move it a bit, actually, and then stay a while, and then interestingly, people themselves attracted other people, and ironically, I felt more peaceful if there were other people around. And it was green. This little park provided what New Yorkers crave: comfort and greenery. But my question was, why weren't there more places with greenery and places to sit in the middle of the city where you didn't feel alone, or like a trespasser? Unfortunately, that's not how cities were being designed. So here you see a familiar sight. This is how plazas have been designed for generations. They have that stylish, Spartan look that we often associate with modern architecture, but it's not surprising that people avoid spaces like this. They not only look desolate, they feel downright dangerous. I mean, where would you sit here? What would you do here? But architects love them. They are plinths for their creations. They might tolerate a sculpture or two, but that's about it. And for developers, they are ideal. There's nothing to water, nothing to maintain, and no undesirable people to worry about. But don't you think this is a waste? For me, becoming a city planner meant being able to truly change the city that I lived in and loved. I wanted to be able to create places that would give you the feeling that you got in Paley Park, and not allow developers to build bleak plazas like this. But over the many years, I have learned how hard it is to create successful, meaningful, enjoyable public spaces. As I learned from my stepfather, they certainly do not happen by accident, especially in a city like New York, where public space has to be fought for to begin with, and then for them to be successful, somebody has to think very hard about every detail. Now, open spaces in cities are opportunities. Yes, they are opportunities for commercial investment, but they are also opportunities for the common good of the city, and those two goals are often not aligned with one another, and therein lies the conflict. The first opportunity I had to fight for a great public open space was in the early 1980s, when I was leading a team of planners at a gigantic landfill called Battery Park City in lower Manhattan on the Hudson River. And this sandy wasteland had lain barren for 10 years, and we were told, unless we found a developer in six months, it would go bankrupt. So we came up with a radical, almost insane idea. Instead of building a park as a complement to future development, why don't we reverse that equation and build a small but very high-quality public open space first, and see if that made a difference. So we only could afford to build a two-block section of what would become a mile-long esplanade, so whatever we built had to be perfect. So just to make sure, I insisted that we build a mock-up in wood, at scale, of the railing and the sea wall. And when I sat down on that test bench with sand still swirling all around me, the railing hit exactly at eye level, blocking my view and ruining my experience at the water's edge. So you see, details really do make a difference. But design is not just how something looks, it's how your body feels on that seat in that space, and I believe that successful design always depends on that very individual experience. In this photo, everything looks very finished, but that granite edge, those lights, the back on that bench, the trees in planting, and the many different kinds of places to sit were all little battles that turned this project into a place that people wanted to be. Now, this proved very valuable 20 years later when Michael Bloomberg asked me to be his planning commissioner and put me in charge of shaping the entire city of New York. And he said to me on that very day, he said that New York was projected to grow from eight to nine million people. And he asked me, "So where are you going to put one million additional New Yorkers?" Well, I didn't have any idea. Now, you know that New York does place a high value on attracting immigrants, so we were excited about the prospect of growth, but honestly, where were we going to grow in a city that was already built out to its edges and surrounded by water? How were we going to find housing for that many new New Yorkers? And if we couldn't spread out, which was probably a good thing, where could new housing go? And what about cars? Our city couldn't possibly handle any more cars. So what were we going to do? If we couldn't spread out, we had to go up. And if we had to go up, we had to go up in places where you wouldn't need to own a car. So that meant using one of our greatest assets: our transit system. But we had never before thought of how we could make the most of it. So here was the answer to our puzzle. If we were to channel and redirect all new development around transit, we could actually handle that population increase, we thought. And so here was the plan, what we really needed to do: We needed to redo our zoning — and zoning is the city planner's regulatory tool — and basically reshape the entire city, targeting where new development could go and prohibiting any development at all in our car-oriented, suburban-style neighborhoods. Well, this was an unbelievably ambitious idea, ambitious because communities had to approve those plans. So how was I going to get this done? By listening. So I began listening, in fact, thousands of hours of listening just to establish trust. You know, communities can tell whether or not you understand their neighborhoods. It's not something you can just fake. And so I began walking. I can't tell you how many blocks I walked, in sweltering summers, in freezing winters, year after year, just so I could get to understand the DNA of each neighborhood and know what each street felt like. I became an incredibly geeky zoning expert, finding ways that zoning could address communities' concerns. So little by little, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, we began to set height limits so that all new development would be predictable and near transit. Over the course of 12 years, we were able to rezone 124 neighborhoods, 40 percent of the city, 12,500 blocks, so that now, 90 percent of all new development of New York is within a 10-minute walk of a subway. In other words, nobody in those new buildings needs to own a car. Well, those rezonings were exhausting and enervating and important, but rezoning was never my mission. You can't see zoning and you can't feel zoning. My mission was always to create great public spaces. So in the areas where we zoned for significant development, I was determined to create places that would make a difference in people's lives. Here you see what was two miles of abandoned, degraded waterfront in the neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, impossible to get to and impossible to use. Now the zoning here was massive, so I felt an obligation to create magnificent parks on these waterfronts, and I spent an incredible amount of time on every square inch of these plans. I wanted to make sure that there were tree-lined paths from the upland to the water, that there were trees and plantings everywhere, and, of course, lots and lots of places to sit. Honestly, I had no idea how it would turn out. I had to have faith. But I put everything that I had studied and learned into those plans. And then it opened, and I have to tell you, it was incredible. People came from all over the city to be in these parks. I know they changed the lives of the people who live there, but they also changed New Yorkers' whole image of their city. I often come down and watch people get on this little ferry that now runs between the boroughs, and I can't tell you why, but I'm completely moved by the fact that people are using it as if it had always been there. And here is a new park in lower Manhattan. Now, the water's edge in lower Manhattan was a complete mess before 9/11. Wall Street was essentially landlocked because you couldn't get anywhere near this edge. And after 9/11, the city had very little control. But I thought if we went to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and got money to reclaim this two miles of degraded waterfront that it would have an enormous effect on the rebuilding of lower Manhattan. And it did. Lower Manhattan finally has a public waterfront on all three sides. I really love this park. You know, railings have to be higher now, so we put bar seating at the edge, and you can get so close to the water you're practically on it. And see how the railing widens and flattens out so you can lay down your lunch or your laptop. And I love when people come there and look up and they say, "Wow, there's Brooklyn, and it's so close." So what's the trick? How do you turn a park into a place that people want to be? Well, it's up to you, not as a city planner but as a human being. You don't tap into your design expertise. You tap into your humanity. I mean, would you want to go there? Would you want to stay there? Can you see into it and out of it? Are there other people there? Does it seem green and friendly? Can you find your very own seat? Well now, all over New York City, there are places where you can find your very own seat. Where there used to be parking spaces, there are now pop-up cafes. Where Broadway traffic used to run, there are now tables and chairs. Where 12 years ago, sidewalk cafes were not allowed, they are now everywhere. But claiming these spaces for public use was not simple, and it's even harder to keep them that way. So now I'm going to tell you a story about a very unusual park called the High Line. The High Line was an elevated railway. (Applause) The High Line was an elevated railway that ran through three neighborhoods on Manhattan's West Side, and when the train stopped running, it became a self-seeded landscape, a kind of a garden in the sky. And when I saw it the first time, honestly, when I went up on that old viaduct, I fell in love the way you fall in love with a person, honestly. And when I was appointed, saving the first two sections of the High Line from demolition became my first priority and my most important project. I knew if there was a day that I didn't worry about the High Line, it would come down. And the High Line, even though it is widely known now and phenomenally popular, it is the most contested public space in the city. You might see a beautiful park, but not everyone does. You know, it's true, commercial interests will always battle against public space. You might say, "How wonderful it is that more than four million people come from all over the world to visit the High Line." Well, a developer sees just one thing: customers. Hey, why not take out those plantings and have shops all along the High Line? Wouldn't that be terrific and won't it mean a lot more money for the city? Well no, it would not be terrific. It would be a mall, and not a park. (Applause) And you know what, it might mean more money for the city, but a city has to take the long view, the view for the common good. Most recently, the last section of the High Line, the third section of the High Line, the final section of the High Line, has been pitted against development interests, where some of the city's leading developers are building more than 17 million square feet at the Hudson Yards. And they came to me and proposed that they "temporarily disassemble" that third and final section. Perhaps the High Line didn't fit in with their image of a gleaming city of skyscrapers on a hill. Perhaps it was just in their way. But in any case, it took nine months of nonstop daily negotiation to finally get the signed agreement to prohibit its demolition, and that was only two years ago. So you see, no matter how popular and successful a public space may be, it can never be taken for granted. Public spaces always — this is it saved — public spaces always need vigilant champions, not only to claim them at the outset for public use, but to design them for the people that use them, then to maintain them to ensure that they are for everyone, that they are not violated, invaded, abandoned or ignored. If there is any one lesson that I have learned in my life as a city planner, it is that public spaces have power. It's not just the number of people using them, it's the even greater number of people who feel better about their city just knowing that they are there. Public space can change how you live in a city, how you feel about a city, whether you choose one city over another, and public space is one of the most important reasons why you stay in a city. I believe that a successful city is like a fabulous party. People stay because they are having a great time. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Teach teachers how to create magic | {0: 'Christopher Emdin is a science advocate who uses hip-hop to make better teachers.'} | TED@NYC | Right now there is an aspiring teacher who is working on a 60-page paper based on some age-old education theory developed by some dead education professor wondering to herself what this task that she's engaging in has to do with what she wants to do with her life, which is be an educator, change lives, and spark magic. Right now there is an aspiring teacher in a graduate school of education who is watching a professor babble on and on about engagement in the most disengaging way possible. Right now there's a first-year teacher at home who is pouring through lesson plans trying to make sense of standards, who is trying to make sense of how to grade students appropriately, while at the same time saying to herself over and over again, "Don't smile till November," because that's what she was taught in her teacher education program. Right now there's a student who is coming up with a way to convince his mom or dad that he's very, very sick and can't make it to school tomorrow. On the other hand, right now there are amazing educators that are sharing information, information that is shared in such a beautiful way that the students are sitting at the edge of their seats just waiting for a bead of sweat to drop off the face of this person so they can soak up all that knowledge. Right now there is also a person who has an entire audience rapt with attention, a person that is weaving a powerful narrative about a world that the people who are listening have never imagined or seen before, but if they close their eyes tightly enough, they can envision that world because the storytelling is so compelling. Right now there's a person who can tell an audience to put their hands up in the air and they will stay there till he says, "Put them down." Right now. So people will then say, "Well, Chris, you describe the guy who is going through some awful training but you're also describing these powerful educators. If you're thinking about the world of education or urban education in particular, these guys will probably cancel each other out, and then we'll be okay." The reality is, the folks I described as the master teachers, the master narrative builders, the master storytellers are far removed from classrooms. The folks who know the skills about how to teach and engage an audience don't even know what teacher certification means. They may not even have the degrees to be able to have anything to call an education. And that to me is sad. It's sad because the people who I described, they were very disinterested in the learning process, want to be effective teachers, but they have no models. I'm going to paraphrase Mark Twain. Mark Twain says that proper preparation, or teaching, is so powerful that it can turn bad morals to good, it can turn awful practices into powerful ones, it can change men and transform them into angels. The folks who I described earlier got proper preparation in teaching, not in any college or university, but by virtue of just being in the same spaces of those who engage. Guess where those places are? Barber shops, rap concerts, and most importantly, in the black church. And I've been framing this idea called Pentecostal pedagogy. Who here has been to a black church? We got a couple of hands. You go to a black church, their preacher starts off and he realizes that he has to engage the audience, so he starts off with this sort of wordplay in the beginning oftentimes, and then he takes a pause, and he says, "Oh my gosh, they're not quite paying attention." So he says, "Can I get an amen?" Audience: Amen. Chris Emdin: So I can I get an amen? Audience: Amen. CE: And all of a sudden, everybody's reawoken. That preacher bangs on the pulpit for attention. He drops his voice at a very, very low volume when he wants people to key into him, and those things are the skills that we need for the most engaging teachers. So why does teacher education only give you theory and theory and tell you about standards and tell you about all of these things that have nothing to do with the basic skills, that magic that you need to engage an audience, to engage a student? So I make the argument that we reframe teacher education, that we could focus on content, and that's fine, and we could focus on theories, and that's fine, but content and theories with the absence of the magic of teaching and learning means nothing. Now people oftentimes say, "Well, magic is just magic." There are teachers who, despite all their challenges, who have those skills, get into those schools and are able to engage an audience, and the administrator walks by and says, "Wow, he's so good, I wish all my teachers could be that good." And when they try to describe what that is, they just say, "He has that magic." But I'm here to tell you that magic can be taught. Magic can be taught. Magic can be taught. Now, how do you teach it? You teach it by allowing people to go into those spaces where the magic is happening. If you want to be an aspiring teacher in urban education, you've got to leave the confines of that university and go into the hood. You've got to go in there and hang out at the barbershop, you've got to attend that black church, and you've got to view those folks that have the power to engage and just take notes on what they do. At our teacher education classes at my university, I've started a project where every single student that comes in there sits and watches rap concerts. They watch the way that the rappers move and talk with their hands. They study the way that he walks proudly across that stage. They listen to his metaphors and analogies, and they start learning these little things that if they practice enough becomes the key to magic. They learn that if you just stare at a student and raise your eyebrow about a quarter of an inch, you don't have to say a word because they know that that means that you want more. And if we could transform teacher education to focus on teaching teachers how to create that magic then poof! we could make dead classes come alive, we could reignite imaginations, and we can change education. Thank you. (Applause) |
Hidden miracles of the natural world | {0: 'Louie Schwartzberg is a cinematographer, director and producer who captures breathtaking images that celebrate life -- revealing connections, universal rhythms, patterns and beauty.'} | TED2014 | What is the intersection between technology, art and science? Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we're surrounded by things we can't see. And I love to use film to take us on a journey through portals of time and space, to make the invisible visible, because what that does, it expands our horizons, it transforms our perception, it opens our minds and it touches our heart. So here are some scenes from my 3D IMAX film, "Mysteries of the Unseen World." (Music) There is movement which is too slow for our eyes to detect, and time lapse makes us discover and broaden our perspective of life. We can see how organisms emerge and grow, how a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor to look at the sunlight. And at the grand scale, time lapse allows us to see our planet in motion. We can view not only the vast sweep of nature, but the restless movement of humanity. Each streaking dot represents a passenger plane, and by turning air traffic data into time-lapse imagery, we can see something that's above us constantly but invisible: the vast network of air travel over the United States. We can do the same thing with ships at sea. We can turn data into a time-lapse view of a global economy in motion. And decades of data give us the view of our entire planet as a single organism sustained by currents circulating throughout the oceans and by clouds swirling through the atmosphere, pulsing with lightning, crowned by the aurora Borealis. It may be the ultimate time-lapse image: the anatomy of Earth brought to life. At the other extreme, there are things that move too fast for our eyes, but we have technology that can look into that world as well. With high-speed cameras, we can do the opposite of time lapse. We can shoot images that are thousands of times faster than our vision. And we can see how nature's ingenious devices work, and perhaps we can even imitate them. When a dragonfly flutters by, you may not realize, but it's the greatest flier in nature. It can hover, fly backwards, even upside down. And by tracking markers on an insect's wings, we can visualize the air flow that they produce. Nobody knew the secret, but high speed shows that a dragonfly can move all four wings in different directions at the same time. And what we learn can lead us to new kinds of robotic flyers that can expand our vision of important and remote places. We're giants, and we're unaware of things that are too small for us to see. The electron microscope fires electrons which creates images which can magnify things by as much as a million times. This is the egg of a butterfly. And there are unseen creatures living all over your body, including mites that spend their entire lives dwelling on your eyelashes, crawling over your skin at night. Can you guess what this is? Shark skin. A caterpillar's mouth. The eye of a fruit fly. An eggshell. A flea. A snail's tongue. We think we know most of the animal kingdom, but there may be millions of tiny species waiting to be discovered. A spider also has great secrets, because spiders' silk thread is pound for pound stronger than steel but completely elastic. This journey will take us all the way down to the nano world. The silk is 100 times thinner than human hair. On there is bacteria, and near that bacteria, 10 times smaller, a virus. Inside of that, 10 times smaller, three strands of DNA. And nearing the limit of our most powerful microscopes, single carbon atoms. With the tip of a powerful microscope, we can actually move atoms and begin to create amazing nano devices. Some could one day patrol our body for all kinds of diseases and clean out clogged arteries along the way. Tiny chemical machines of the future can one day, perhaps, repair DNA. We are on the threshold of extraordinary advances, born of our drive to unveil the mysteries of life. So under an endless rain of cosmic dust, the air is full of pollen, micro-diamonds and jewels from other planets and supernova explosions. People go about their lives surrounded by the unseeable. Knowing that there's so much around us we can't see forever changes our understanding of the world, and by looking at unseen worlds, we recognize that we exist in the living universe, and this new perspective creates wonder and inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards. Who knows what awaits to be seen and what new wonders will transform our lives. We'll just have to see. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
The sore problem of prosthetic limbs | {0: "Even the most advanced prosthetic isn't useful if it's hard to wear. This observation guides TED Fellow David Sengeh's work at the Biomechatronics group in the MIT Media Lab."} | TED2014 | I was born and raised in Sierra Leone, a small and very beautiful country in West Africa, a country rich both in physical resources and creative talent. However, Sierra Leone is infamous for a decade-long rebel war in the '90s when entire villages were burnt down. An estimated 8,000 men, women and children had their arms and legs amputated during this time. As my family and I ran for safety when I was about 12 from one of those attacks, I resolved that I would do everything I could to ensure that my own children would not go through the same experiences we had. They would, in fact, be part of a Sierra Leone where war and amputation were no longer a strategy for gaining power. As I watched people who I knew, loved ones, recover from this devastation, one thing that deeply troubled me was that many of the amputees in the country would not use their prostheses. The reason, I would come to find out, was that their prosthetic sockets were painful because they did not fit well. The prosthetic socket is the part in which the amputee inserts their residual limb, and which connects to the prosthetic ankle. Even in the developed world, it takes a period of three weeks to often years for a patient to get a comfortable socket, if ever. Prosthetists still use conventional processes like molding and casting to create single-material prosthetic sockets. Such sockets often leave intolerable amounts of pressure on the limbs of the patient, leaving them with pressure sores and blisters. It does not matter how powerful your prosthetic ankle is. If your prosthetic socket is uncomfortable, you will not use your leg, and that is just simply unacceptable in our age. So one day, when I met professor Hugh Herr about two and a half years ago, and he asked me if I knew how to solve this problem, I said, "No, not yet, but I would love to figure it out." And so, for my Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab, I designed custom prosthetic sockets quickly and cheaply that are more comfortable than conventional prostheses. I used magnetic resonance imaging to capture the actual shape of the patient's anatomy, then use finite element modeling to better predict the internal stresses and strains on the normal forces, and then create a prosthetic socket for manufacture. We use a 3D printer to create a multi-material prosthetic socket which relieves pressure where needed on the anatomy of the patient. In short, we're using data to make novel sockets quickly and cheaply. In a recent trial we just wrapped up at the Media Lab, one of our patients, a U.S. veteran who has been an amputee for about 20 years and worn dozens of legs, said of one of our printed parts, "It's so soft, it's like walking on pillows, and it's effing sexy." (Laughter) Disability in our age should not prevent anyone from living meaningful lives. My hope and desire is that the tools and processes we develop in our research group can be used to bring highly functional prostheses to those who need them. For me, a place to begin healing the souls of those affected by war and disease is by creating comfortable and affordable interfaces for their bodies. Whether it's in Sierra Leone or in Boston, I hope this not only restores but indeed transforms their sense of human potential. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Be passionate. Be courageous. Be your best. | {0: 'After Rep. Gabby Giffords was wounded by a would-be assassin’s bullet in January 2011, she and her husband, Mark Kelly, a NASA astronaut, retired US Navy captain and combat veteran, have become known around the world for their story of hope and resilience.'} | TED2014 | Pat Mitchell: That day, January 8, 2011, began like all others. You were both doing the work that you love. You were meeting with constituents, which is something that you loved doing as a congresswoman, and Mark, you were happily preparing for your next space shuttle. And suddenly, everything that you had planned or expected in your lives was irrevocably changed forever. Mark Kelly: Yeah, it's amazing, it's amazing how everything can change for any of us in an instant. People don't realize that. I certainly didn't. Gabby Giffords: Yes. MK: And on that Saturday morning, I got this horrible phone call from Gabby's chief of staff. She didn't have much other information. She just said, "Gabby was shot." A few minutes later, I called her back and I actually thought for a second, well, maybe I just imagined getting this phone call. I called her back, and that's when she told me that Gabby had been shot in the head. And from that point on, I knew that our lives were going to be a lot different. PM: And when you arrived at the hospital, what was the prognosis that they gave you about Gabby's condition and what recovery, if any, you could expect? MK: Well, for a gunshot wound to the head and a traumatic brain injury, they typically can't tell you much. Every injury is different. It's not predictable like often a stroke might be predictable, which is another TBI kind of injury. So they didn't know how long Gabby would be in a coma, didn't know when that would change and what the prognosis would be. PM: Gabby, has your recovery been an effort to create a new Gabby Giffords or reclaim the old Gabby Giffords? GG: The new one — better, stronger, tougher. (Applause) MK: That to say, when you look at the picture behind us, to come back from that kind of injury and come back strong and stronger than ever is a really tough thing to do. I don't know anybody that's as tough as my wonderful wife right here. (Applause) PM: And what were the first signs that recovery was not only going to be possible but you were going to have some semblance of the life that you and Gabby had planned? MK: Well, the first thing, for me, was Gabby was still kind of almost unconscious, but she did something when she was in the ICU hospital bed that she used to do when we might be out to dinner at a restaurant, in that she pulled my ring off and she flipped it from one finger to the next, and at that point I knew that she was still in there. PM: And there were certain words, too. Didn't she surprise you with words in the beginning? MK: Well, it was tough in the beginning. GG: What? What? Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. MK: Yeah, that was it. For the first month, that was the extent of Gabby's vocabulary. For some reason, she has aphasia, which is difficulty with communication. She latched on to the word "chicken," which isn't the best but certainly is not the worst. (Laughter) And we were actually worried it could have been a lot worse than that. PM: Gabby, what's been the toughest challenge for you during this recovery? GG: Talking. Really hard. Really. MK: Yeah, with aphasia, Gabby knows what she wants to say, she just can't get it out. She understands everything, but the communication is just very difficult because when you look at the picture, the part of your brain where those communication centers are are on the left side of your head, which is where the bullet passed through. PM: So you have to do a very dangerous thing: speak for your wife. MK: I do. It might be some of the most dangerous things I've ever done. PM: Gabby, are you optimistic about your continuing recovery — walking, talking, being able to move your arm and leg? GG: I'm optimistic. It will be a long, hard haul, but I'm optimistic. PM: That seems to be the number one characteristic of Gabby Giffords, wouldn't you say? (Applause) MK: Gabby's always been really optimistic. She works incredibly hard every day. GG: On the treadmill, walked on my treadmill, Spanish lessons, French horn. MK: It's only my wife who could be — and if you knew her before she was injured, you would kind of understand this — somebody who could be injured and have such a hard time communicating and meets with a speech therapist, and then about a month ago, she says, "I want to learn Spanish again." PM: Well, let's take a little closer look at the wife, and this was even before you met Gabby Giffords. And she's on a motor scooter there, but it's my understanding that's a very tame image of what Gabby Giffords was like growing up. MK: Yeah, Gabby, she used to race motorcycles. So that's a scooter, but she had — well, she still has a BMW motorcycle. PM: Does she ride it? MK: Well, that's a challenge with not being able to move her right arm, but I think with something I know about, Velcro, we might be able to get her back on the bike, Velcro her right hand up onto the handlebar. PM: I have a feeling we might see that picture next, Gabby. But you meet, you're already decided that you're going to dedicate your life to service. You're going into the military and eventually to become an astronaut. So you meet. What attracts you to Gabby? MK: Well, when we met, oddly enough, it was the last time we were in Vancouver, about 10 years ago. We met in Vancouver, at the airport, on a trip that we were both taking to China, that I would actually, from my background, I would call it a boondoggle. Gabby would — GG: Fact-finding mission. MK: She would call it an important fact-finding mission. She was a state senator at the time, and we met here, at the airport, before a trip to China. PM: Would you describe it as a whirlwind romance? GG: No, no, no. (Laughter) A good friend. MK: Yeah, we were friends for a long time. GG: Yes. (Laughter) MK: And then she invited me on, about a year or so later, she invited me on a date. Where'd we go, Gabby? GG: Death row. MK: Yes. Our first date was to death row at the Florence state prison in Arizona, which was just outside Gabby's state senate district. They were working on some legislation that had to do with crime and punishment and capital punishment in the state of Arizona. So she couldn't get anybody else to go with her, and I'm like, "Of course I want to go to death row." So that was our first date. We've been together ever since. GG: Yes. PM: Well, that might have contributed to the reason that Gabby decided to marry you. You were willing to go to death row, after all. MK: I guess. PM: Gabby, what did make you want to marry Mark? GG: Um, good friends. Best friends. Best friends. MK: I thought we always had a very special relationship. We've gone through some tough times and it's only made it stronger. GG: Stronger. PM: After you got married, however, you continued very independent lives. Actually, you didn't even live together. MK: We had one of those commuter marriages. In our case, it was Washington, D.C., Houston, Tucson. Sometimes we'd go clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise, to all those different places, and we didn't really live together until that Saturday morning. Within an hour of Gabby being shot, I was on an airplane to Tucson, and that was the moment where that had changed things. PM: And also, Gabby, you had run for Congress after being a state senator and served in Congress for six years. What did you like best about being in Congress? GG: Fast pace. Fast pace. PM: Well it was the way you did it. GG: Yes, yes. Fast pace. PM: I'm not sure people would describe it entirely that way. (Laughter) MK: Yeah, you know, legislation is often at a colossally slow pace, but my wife, and I have to admit, a lot of other members of Congress that I know, work incredibly hard. I mean, Gabby would run around like a crazy person, never take a day off, maybe a half a day off a month, and whenever she was awake she was working, and she really, really thrived on that, and still does today. GG: Yes. Yes. PM: Installing solar panels on the top of her house, I have to say. So after the tragic incident, Mark, you decided to resign your position as an astronaut, even though you were supposed to take the next space mission. Everybody, including Gabby, talked you into going back, and you did end up taking. MK: Kind of. The day after Gabby was injured, I called my boss, the chief astronaut, Dr. Peggy Whitson, and I said, "Peggy, I know I'm launching in space in three months from now. Gabby's in a coma. I'm in Tucson. You've got to find a replacement for me." So I didn't actually resign from being an astronaut, but I gave up my job and they found a replacement. Months later, maybe about two months later, I started about getting my job back, which is something, when you become this primary caregiver person, which some people in the audience here have certainly been in that position, it's a challenging role but at some point you've got to figure out when you're going to get your life back, and at the time, I couldn't ask Gabby if she wanted me to go fly in the space shuttle again. But I knew she was— GG: Yes. Yes. Yes. MK: She was the biggest supporter of my career, and I knew it was the right thing to do. PM: And yet I'm trying to imagine, Mark, what that was like, going off onto a mission, one presumes safely, but it's never a guarantee, and knowing that Gabby is — MK: Well not only was she still in the hospital, on the third day of that flight, literally while I was rendezvousing with the space station, and you've got two vehicles moving at 17,500 miles an hour, I'm actually flying it, looking out the window, a bunch of computers, Gabby was in brain surgery, literally at that time having the final surgery to replace the piece of skull that they took out on the day she was injured with a prosthetic, yeah, which is the whole side of her head. Now if any of you guys would ever come to our house in Tucson for the first time, Gabby would usually go up to the freezer and pull out the piece of Tupperware that has the real skull. (Laughter) GG: The real skull. MK: Which freaks people out, sometimes. PM: Is that for appetizer or dessert, Mark? MK: Well, it just gets the conversation going. PM: But there was a lot of conversation about something you did, Gabby, after Mark's flight. You had to make another step of courage too, because here was Congress deadlocked again, and you got out of the rehabilitation center, got yourself to Washington so that you could walk on the floor of the House — I can barely talk about this without getting emotional — and cast a vote which could have been the deciding vote. GG: The debt ceiling. The debt ceiling. MK: Yeah, we had that vote, I guess about five months after Gabby was injured, and she made this bold decision to go back. A very controversial vote, but she wanted to be there to have her voice heard one more time. PM: And after that, resigned and began what has been a very slow and challenging recovery. What's life like, day to day? MK: Well, that's Gabby's service dog Nelson. GG: Nelson. MK: New member of our family. GG: Yes, yes. MK: And we got him from a— GG: Prison. Murder. MK: We have a lot of connections with prisons, apparently. (Laughter) Nelson came from a prison, raised by a murderer in Massachusetts. But she did a great job with this dog. He's a fabulous service dog. PM: So Gabby, what have you learned from your experiences the past few years? MK: Yeah, what have you learned? GG: Deeper. Deeper. PM: Your relationship is deeper. It has to be. You're together all the time now. MK: I imagine being grateful, too, right? GG: Grateful. PM: This is a picture of family and friends gathering, but I love these pictures because they show the Gabby and Mark relationship now. And you describe it, Gabby, over and over, as deeper on so many levels. Yes? MK: I think when something tragic happens in a family, it can pull people together. Here's us watching the space shuttle fly over Tucson, the Space Shuttle Endeavour, the one that I was the commander on its last flight, on its final flight on top of an airplane on a 747 on its way to L.A., NASA was kind enough to have it fly over Tucson. PM: And of course, the two of you go through these challenges of a slow and difficult recovery, and yet, Gabby, how do you maintain your optimism and positive outlook? GG: I want to make the world a better place. (Applause) PM: And you're doing that even though your recovery has to remain front and center for both of you. You are people who have done service to your country and you are continuing to do that with a new initiative, a new purpose. And Gabby, what's on the agenda now? GG: Americans for Responsible Solutions. MK: That's our political action committee, where we are trying to get members of Congress to take a more serious look at gun violence in this country, and to try to pass some reasonable legislation. GG: Yes. Yes. (Applause) MK: You know, this affected us very personally, but it wasn't what happened to Gabby that got us involved. It was really the 20 murdered first graders and kindergartners in Newtown, Connecticut, and the response that we saw afterwards where — well, look what's happened so far. So far the national response has been pretty much to do nothing. We're trying to change that. PM: There have been 11 mass shootings since Newtown, a school a week in the first two months of last year. What are you doing that's different than other efforts to balance rights for gun ownership and responsibilities? MK: We're gun owners, we support gun rights. At the same time, we've got to do everything we can to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the dangerously mentally ill. It's not too difficult to do that. This issue, like many others, has become very polarizing and political, and we're trying to bring some balance to the debate in Washington. PM: Thank you both for that effort. And not surprisingly for this woman of courage and of a sense of adventure, you just keep challenging yourself, and the sky seems to be the limit. I have to share this video of your most recent adventure. Take a look at Gabby. MK: This is a couple months ago. (Video) MK: You okay? You did great. GG: Yes, it's gorgeous. Thank you. Good stuff. Gorgeous. Oh, thank you. Mountains. Gorgeous mountains. (Applause) MK: Let me just say one of the guys that Gabby jumped with that day was a Navy SEAL who she met in Afghanistan who was injured in combat, had a really rough time. Gabby visited him when he was at Bethesda and went through a really tough period. He started doing better. Months later, Gabby was shot in the head, and then he supported her while she was in the hospital in Houston. So they have a very, very nice connection. GG: Yes. PM: What a wonderful moment. Because this is the TED stage, Gabby, I know you worked very hard to think of the ideas that you wanted to leave with this audience. GG: Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thank you for inviting us here today. It's been a long, hard haul, but I'm getting better. I'm working hard, lots of therapy — speech therapy, physical therapy, and yoga too. But my spirit is strong as ever. I'm still fighting to make the world a better place, and you can too. Get involved with your community. Be a leader. Set an example. Be passionate. Be courageous. Be your best. Thank you very much. (Applause) MK: Thank you. GG: Thank you. (Applause) MK: Thank you everybody. GG: Bye bye. (Applause) |
Should you live for your résumé ... or your eulogy? | {0: 'Writer and thinker David Brooks has covered business, crime and politics over a long career in journalism. '} | TED2014 | So I've been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the ones you put on your résumé, which are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that get mentioned in the eulogy, which are deeper: who are you, in your depth, what is the nature of your relationships, are you bold, loving, dependable, consistency? And most of us, including me, would say that the eulogy virtues are the more important of the virtues. But at least in my case, are they the ones that I think about the most? And the answer is no. So I've been thinking about that problem, and a thinker who has helped me think about it is a guy named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi who wrote a book called "The Lonely Man Of Faith" in 1965. Soloveitchik said there are two sides of our natures, which he called Adam I and Adam II. Adam I is the worldly, ambitious, external side of our nature. He wants to build, create, create companies, create innovation. Adam II is the humble side of our nature. Adam II wants not only to do good but to be good, to live in a way internally that honors God, creation and our possibilities. Adam I wants to conquer the world. Adam II wants to hear a calling and obey the world. Adam I savors accomplishment. Adam II savors inner consistency and strength. Adam I asks how things work. Adam II asks why we're here. Adam I's motto is "success." Adam II's motto is "love, redemption and return." And Soloveitchik argued that these two sides of our nature are at war with each other. We live in perpetual self-confrontation between the external success and the internal value. And the tricky thing, I'd say, about these two sides of our nature is they work by different logics. The external logic is an economic logic: input leads to output, risk leads to reward. The internal side of our nature is a moral logic and often an inverse logic. You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer the desire to get what you want. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself. We happen to live in a society that favors Adam I, and often neglects Adam II. And the problem is, that turns you into a shrewd animal who treats life as a game, and you become a cold, calculating creature who slips into a sort of mediocrity where you realize there's a difference between your desired self and your actual self. You're not earning the sort of eulogy you want, you hope someone will give to you. You don't have the depth of conviction. You don't have an emotional sonorousness. You don't have commitment to tasks that would take more than a lifetime to commit. I was reminded of a common response through history of how you build a solid Adam II, how you build a depth of character. Through history, people have gone back into their own pasts, sometimes to a precious time in their life, to their childhood, and often, the mind gravitates in the past to a moment of shame, some sin committed, some act of selfishness, an act of omission, of shallowness, the sin of anger, the sin of self-pity, trying to be a people-pleaser, a lack of courage. Adam I is built by building on your strengths. Adam II is built by fighting your weaknesses. You go into yourself, you find the sin which you've committed over and again through your life, your signature sin out of which the others emerge, and you fight that sin and you wrestle with that sin, and out of that wrestling, that suffering, then a depth of character is constructed. And we're often not taught to recognize the sin in ourselves, in that we're not taught in this culture how to wrestle with it, how to confront it, and how to combat it. We live in a culture with an Adam I mentality where we're inarticulate about Adam II. Finally, Reinhold Niebuhr summed up the confrontation, the fully lived Adam I and Adam II life, this way: "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by that final form of love, which is forgiveness.” Thanks. (Applause) |
For parents, happiness is a very high bar | {0: 'In her new book "All Joy and No Fun," Jennifer Senior explores how children reshape their parents\' lives -- for better and worse.'} | TED2014 | When I was born, there was really only one book about how to raise your children, and it was written by Dr. Spock. (Laughter) Thank you for indulging me. I have always wanted to do that. No, it was Benjamin Spock, and his book was called "The Common Sense Book of Baby And Child Care." It sold almost 50 million copies by the time he died. Today, I, as the mother of a six-year-old, walk into Barnes and Noble, and see this. And it is amazing the variety that one finds on those shelves. There are guides to raising an eco-friendly kid, a gluten-free kid, a disease-proof kid, which, if you ask me, is a little bit creepy. There are guides to raising a bilingual kid even if you only speak one language at home. There are guides to raising a financially savvy kid and a science-minded kid and a kid who is a whiz at yoga. Short of teaching your toddler how to defuse a nuclear bomb, there is pretty much a guide to everything. All of these books are well-intentioned. I am sure that many of them are great. But taken together, I am sorry, I do not see help when I look at that shelf. I see anxiety. I see a giant candy-colored monument to our collective panic, and it makes me want to know, why is it that raising our children is associated with so much anguish and so much confusion? Why is it that we are at sixes and sevens about the one thing human beings have been doing successfully for millennia, long before parenting message boards and peer-reviewed studies came along? Why is it that so many mothers and fathers experience parenthood as a kind of crisis? Crisis might seem like a strong word, but there is data suggesting it probably isn't. There was, in fact, a paper of just this very name, "Parenthood as Crisis," published in 1957, and in the 50-plus years since, there has been plenty of scholarship documenting a pretty clear pattern of parental anguish. Parents experience more stress than non-parents. Their marital satisfaction is lower. There have been a number of studies looking at how parents feel when they are spending time with their kids, and the answer often is, not so great. Last year, I spoke with a researcher named Matthew Killingsworth who is doing a very, very imaginative project that tracks people's happiness, and here is what he told me he found: "Interacting with your friends is better than interacting with your spouse, which is better than interacting with other relatives, which is better than interacting with acquaintances, which is better than interacting with parents, which is better than interacting with children. Who are on par with strangers." (Laughter) But here's the thing. I have been looking at what underlies these data for three years, and children are not the problem. Something about parenting right now at this moment is the problem. Specifically, I don't think we know what parenting is supposed to be. Parent, as a verb, only entered common usage in 1970. Our roles as mothers and fathers have changed. The roles of our children have changed. We are all now furiously improvising our way through a situation for which there is no script, and if you're an amazing jazz musician, then improv is great, but for the rest of us, it can kind of feel like a crisis. So how did we get here? How is it that we are all now navigating a child-rearing universe without any norms to guide us? Well, for starters, there has been a major historical change. Until fairly recently, kids worked, on our farms primarily, but also in factories, mills, mines. Kids were considered economic assets. Sometime during the Progressive Era, we put an end to this arrangement. We recognized kids had rights, we banned child labor, we focused on education instead, and school became a child's new work. And thank God it did. But that only made a parent's role more confusing in a way. The old arrangement might not have been particularly ethical, but it was reciprocal. We provided food, clothing, shelter, and moral instruction to our kids, and they in return provided income. Once kids stopped working, the economics of parenting changed. Kids became, in the words of one brilliant if totally ruthless sociologist, "economically worthless but emotionally priceless." Rather than them working for us, we began to work for them, because within only a matter of decades it became clear: if we wanted our kids to succeed, school was not enough. Today, extracurricular activities are a kid's new work, but that's work for us too, because we are the ones driving them to soccer practice. Massive piles of homework are a kid's new work, but that's also work for us, because we have to check it. About three years ago, a Texas woman told something to me that totally broke my heart. She said, almost casually, "Homework is the new dinner." The middle class now pours all of its time and energy and resources into its kids, even though the middle class has less and less of those things to give. Mothers now spend more time with their children than they did in 1965, when most women were not even in the workforce. It would probably be easier for parents to do their new roles if they knew what they were preparing their kids for. This is yet another thing that makes modern parenting so very confounding. We have no clue what portion our wisdom, if any, is of use to our kids. The world is changing so rapidly, it's impossible to say. This was true even when I was young. When I was a kid, high school specifically, I was told that I would be at sea in the new global economy if I did not know Japanese. And with all due respect to the Japanese, it didn't turn out that way. Now there is a certain kind of middle-class parent that is obsessed with teaching their kids Mandarin, and maybe they're onto something, but we cannot know for sure. So, absent being able to anticipate the future, what we all do, as good parents, is try and prepare our kids for every possible kind of future, hoping that just one of our efforts will pay off. We teach our kids chess, thinking maybe they will need analytical skills. We sign them up for team sports, thinking maybe they will need collaborative skills, you know, for when they go to Harvard Business School. We try and teach them to be financially savvy and science-minded and eco-friendly and gluten-free, though now is probably a good time to tell you that I was not eco-friendly and gluten-free as a child. I ate jars of pureed macaroni and beef. And you know what? I'm doing okay. I pay my taxes. I hold down a steady job. I was even invited to speak at TED. But the presumption now is that what was good enough for me, or for my folks for that matter, isn't good enough anymore. So we all make a mad dash to that bookshelf, because we feel like if we aren't trying everything, it's as if we're doing nothing and we're defaulting on our obligations to our kids. So it's hard enough to navigate our new roles as mothers and fathers. Now add to this problem something else: we are also navigating new roles as husbands and wives because most women today are in the workforce. This is another reason, I think, that parenthood feels like a crisis. We have no rules, no scripts, no norms for what to do when a child comes along now that both mom and dad are breadwinners. The writer Michael Lewis once put this very, very well. He said that the surest way for a couple to start fighting is for them to go out to dinner with another couple whose division of labor is ever so slightly different from theirs, because the conversation in the car on the way home goes something like this: "So, did you catch that Dave is the one who walks them to school every morning?" (Laughter) Without scripts telling us who does what in this brave new world, couples fight, and both mothers and fathers each have their legitimate gripes. Mothers are much more likely to be multi-tasking when they are at home, and fathers, when they are at home, are much more likely to be mono-tasking. Find a guy at home, and odds are he is doing just one thing at a time. In fact, UCLA recently did a study looking at the most common configuration of family members in middle-class homes. Guess what it was? Dad in a room by himself. According to the American Time Use Survey, mothers still do twice as much childcare as fathers, which is better than it was in Erma Bombeck's day, but I still think that something she wrote is highly relevant: "I have not been alone in the bathroom since October." (Laughter) But here is the thing: Men are doing plenty. They spend more time with their kids than their fathers ever spent with them. They work more paid hours, on average, than their wives, and they genuinely want to be good, involved dads. Today, it is fathers, not mothers, who report the most work-life conflict. Either way, by the way, if you think it's hard for traditional families to sort out these new roles, just imagine what it's like now for non-traditional families: families with two dads, families with two moms, single-parent households. They are truly improvising as they go. Now, in a more progressive country, and forgive me here for capitulating to cliché and invoking, yes, Sweden, parents could rely on the state for support. There are countries that acknowledge the anxieties and the changing roles of mothers and fathers. Unfortunately, the United States is not one of them, so in case you were wondering what the U.S. has in common with Papua New Guinea and Liberia, it's this: We too have no paid maternity leave policy. We are one of eight known countries that does not. In this age of intense confusion, there is just one goal upon which all parents can agree, and that is whether they are tiger moms or hippie moms, helicopters or drones, our kids' happiness is paramount. That is what it means to raise kids in an age when they are economically worthless but emotionally priceless. We are all the custodians of their self-esteem. The one mantra no parent ever questions is, "All I want is for my children to be happy." And don't get me wrong: I think happiness is a wonderful goal for a child. But it is a very elusive one. Happiness and self-confidence, teaching children that is not like teaching them how to plow a field. It's not like teaching them how to ride a bike. There's no curriculum for it. Happiness and self-confidence can be the byproducts of other things, but they cannot really be goals unto themselves. A child's happiness is a very unfair burden to place on a parent. And happiness is an even more unfair burden to place on a kid. And I have to tell you, I think it leads to some very strange excesses. We are now so anxious to protect our kids from the world's ugliness that we now shield them from "Sesame Street." I wish I could say I was kidding about this, but if you go out and you buy the first few episodes of "Sesame Street" on DVD, as I did out of nostalgia, you will find a warning at the beginning saying that the content is not suitable for children. (Laughter) Can I just repeat that? The content of the original "Sesame Street" is not suitable for children. When asked about this by The New York Times, a producer for the show gave a variety of explanations. One was that Cookie Monster smoked a pipe in one skit and then swallowed it. Bad modeling. I don't know. But the thing that stuck with me is she said that she didn't know whether Oscar the Grouch could be invented today because he was too depressive. I cannot tell you how much this distresses me. (Laughter) You are looking at a woman who has a periodic table of the Muppets hanging from her cubicle wall. The offending muppet, right there. That's my son the day he was born. I was high as a kite on morphine. I had had an unexpected C-section. But even in my opiate haze, I managed to have one very clear thought the first time I held him. I whispered it into his ear. I said, "I will try so hard not to hurt you." It was the Hippocratic Oath, and I didn't even know I was saying it. But it occurs to me now that the Hippocratic Oath is a much more realistic aim than happiness. In fact, as any parent will tell you, it's awfully hard. All of us have said or done hurtful things that we wish to God we could take back. I think in another era we did not expect quite so much from ourselves, and it is important that we all remember that the next time we are staring with our hearts racing at those bookshelves. I'm not really sure how to create new norms for this world, but I do think that in our desperate quest to create happy kids, we may be assuming the wrong moral burden. It strikes me as a better goal, and, dare I say, a more virtuous one, to focus on making productive kids and moral kids, and to simply hope that happiness will come to them by virtue of the good that they do and their accomplishments and the love that they feel from us. That, anyway, is one response to having no script. Absent having new scripts, we just follow the oldest ones in the book — decency, a work ethic, love — and let happiness and self-esteem take care of themselves. I think if we all did that, the kids would still be all right, and so would their parents, possibly in both cases even better. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I help transgender teens become who they want to be | {0: "At Boston's Children Hospital, endocrinologist Norman Spack treats transgender teens to delay the effects of puberty."} | TEDxBeaconStreet | I want you all to think about the third word that was ever said about you — or, if you were delivering, about the person you were delivering. And you can all mouth it if you want or say it out loud. It was — the first two were, "It's a ..." Audience: (Mixed reply) Girl. Boy. (Laughter) Well, it shows you that — I also deal with issues where there's not certainty of whether it's a girl or a boy, so the mixed answer was very appropriate. Of course, now the answer often comes not at birth but at the ultrasound, unless the prospective parents choose to be surprised, like we all were. But I want you to think about what it is that leads to that statement on the third word, because the third word is a description of your sex. And by that I mean, made by a description of your genitals. Now, as a pediatric endocrinologist, I used to be very, very involved and still somewhat am, in cases in which there are mismatches in the externals or between the externals and the internals, and we literally have to figure out what is the description of your sex. But there is nothing that is definable at the time of birth that would define you. And when I talk about definition, I'm talking about your sexual orientation. We don't say, "It's a ... gay boy!" "A lesbian girl!" Those situations don't really define themselves more until the second decade of life. Nor do they define your gender, which, as different from your anatomic sex, describes your self-concept: Do you see yourself as a male or female, or somewhere in the spectrum in between? That sometimes shows up in the first decade of life, but it can be very confusing for parents, because it is quite normative for children to act in a cross-gender play and way, and, in fact, there are studies that show that even 80 percent of children who act in that fashion will not persist in wanting to be the opposite gender at the time when puberty begins. But, at the time that puberty begins — that means between about age 10 to 12 in girls, 12 to 14 in boys — with breast budding, or two to three times' increase in the gonads in the case of genetic males, by that particular point, the child who says they are in the absolute wrong body is almost certain to be transgender and is extremely unlikely to change those feelings, no matter how anybody tries reparative therapy or any other noxious things. Now, this is relatively rare, so I had relatively little personal experience with this. And my experience was more typical, only because I had an adolescent practice. And I saw someone age 24, genetically female, went through Harvard with three male roommates who knew the whole story, a registrar who always listed his name on course lists as a male name, and came to me after graduating, saying, "Help me. I know you know a lot of endocrinology." And indeed, I've treated a lot of people who were born without gonads. This wasn't rocket science. But I made a deal with him: "I'll treat you if you teach me." And so he did. And what an education I got from taking care of all the members of his support group. And then I got really confused, because I thought it was relatively easy at that age to just give people the hormones of the gender in which they were affirming. But then my patient married, and he married a woman who had been born as a male, had married as a male, had two children, then went through a transition into female. And now this delightful female was attached to my male patient — in fact, got legally married, because they showed up as a man and a woman, and who knew, right? (Laughter) And I was confused — "Does this make so-and-so gay? Does this make so-and-so straight?" I was getting sexual orientation confused with gender identity. And my patient said to me, "Look, look, look. If you just think of the following, you'll get it right: Sexual orientation is who you go to bed with. Gender identity is who you go to bed as." (Laughter) And I subsequently learned from the many adults — I took care of about 200 adults — I learned from them that if I didn't peek as to who their partner was in the waiting room, I would never be able to guess better than chance, whether they were gay, straight, bi or asexual in their affirmed gender. In other words, one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other. And the data show it. Now, as I took care of the 200 adults, I found it extremely painful. These people — many of them — had to give up so much of their lives. Sometimes their parents would reject them, siblings, their own children, and then their divorcing spouse would forbid them from seeing their children. It was so awful, but why did they do it at 40 and 50? Because they felt they had to affirm themselves before they would kill themselves. And indeed, the rate of suicide among untreated transgendered people is among the highest in the world. So, what to do? I was intrigued, in going to a conference in Holland, where they are experts in this, and saw the most remarkable thing. They were treating young adolescents after giving them the most intense psychometric testing of gender, and they were treating them by blocking the puberty that they didn't want. Because basically, kids look about the same, each sex, until they go through puberty, at which point, if you feel you're in the wrong sex, you feel like Pinocchio becoming a donkey. The fantasy that you had that your body will change to be who you want it to be, with puberty, actually is nullified by the puberty you get. And they fall apart. So that's why putting the puberty on hold — why on hold? You can't just give them the opposite hormones that young. They'll end up stunted in growth, and you think you can have a meaningful conversation about the fertility effects of such treatment with a 10-year-old girl, a 12-year-old boy? So this buys time in the diagnostic process for four or five years, so that they can work it out. They can have more and more testing, they can live without feeling their bodies are running away from them. And then, in a program they call 12-16-18, around age 12 is when they give the blocking hormones, and then at age 16, with retesting, they re-qualify to receive — now remember, the blocking hormones are reversible, but when you give the hormones of the opposite sex, you now start spouting breasts and facial hair and voice change, depending on what you're using, and those effects are permanent, or require surgery to remove, or electrolysis, and you can never really affect the voice. So this is serious, and this is 15-, 16-year-old stuff. And then at 18, they're eligible for surgery. And while there's no good surgery for females to males genitally, the male-to-female surgery has fooled gynecologists. That's how good it can be. So I looked at how the patients were doing, and I looked at patients who just looked like everybody else, except they were pubertally delayed. But once they gave them the hormones consistent with the gender they affirm, they look beautiful. They look normal. They had normal heights. You would never be able to pick them out in a crowd. So at that point, I decided I'm going to do this. This is really where the pediatric endocrine realm comes in, because, in fact, if you're going to deal with it in kids aged 10 to 14, that's pediatric endocrinology. So I brought some kids in, and this now became the standard of care, and the [Boston] Children's Hospital was behind it. By my showing them the kids before and after, people who never got treated and people who wished to be treated, and pictures of the Dutch — they came to me and said, "You've got to do something for these kids." Well, where were these kids before? They were out there suffering, is where they were. So we started a program in 2007. It became the first program of its kind — but it's really of the Dutch kind — in North America. And since then, we have 160 patients. Did they come from Afghanistan? No. 75 percent of them came from within 150 miles of Boston. And some came from England. Jackie had been abused in the Midlands, in England. She's 12 years old there, she was living as a girl, but she was being beaten up. It was a horror show, they had to homeschool her. And the reason the British were coming was because they would not treat anybody with anything under age 16, which means they were consigning them to an adult body no matter what happened, even if they tested them well. Jackie, on top of it, was, by virtue of skeletal markings, destined to be six feet five. And yet, she had just begun a male puberty. Well, I did something a little bit innovative, because I do know hormones, and that estrogen is much more potent in closing epiphyses, the growth plates, and stopping growth, than testosterone is. So we blocked her testosterone with a blocking hormone, but we added estrogen, not at 16, but at 13. And so here she is at 16, on the left. And on her 16th birthday, she went to Thailand, where they would do a genital plastic surgery. They will do it at 18 now. And she ended up 5'11". But more than that, she has normal breast size, because by blocking testosterone, every one of our patients has normal breast size if they get to us at the appropriate age, not too late. And on the far right, there she is. She went public — semifinalist in the Miss England competition. The judges debated as to, can they do this? And one of them quipped, I'm told, "But she has more natural self than half the other contestants." (Laughter) And some of them have been rearranged a little bit, but it's all her DNA. And she's become a remarkable spokeswoman. And she was offered contracts as a model, at which point she teased me, when she said, "You know, I might have had a better chance as a model if you'd made me six feet one." (Laughter) Go figure. So this picture, I think, says it all. It really says it all. These are Nicole and brother Jonas, identical twin boys, and proven to be identical. Nicole had affirmed herself as a girl as early as age three. At age seven, they changed her name, and came to me at the very beginnings of a male puberty. Now you can imagine looking at Jonas at only 14, that male puberty is early in this family, because he looks more like a 16-year-old. But it makes the point all the more, of why you have to be conscious of where the patient is. Nicole is on pubertal blockade in here, and Jonas is just going — biologic control. This is what Nicole would look like if we weren't doing what we were doing. He's got a prominent Adam's apple. He's got angular bones to the face, a mustache, and you can see there's a height difference, because he's gone through a growth spurt that she won't get. Now Nicole is on estrogen. She has a bit of a form to her. This family went to the White House last spring, because of their work in overturning an anti-discrimination — there was a bill that would block the right of transgender people in Maine to use public bathrooms, and it looked like the bill was going to pass, and that would have been a problem, but Nicole went personally to every legislator in Maine and said, "I can do this. If they see me, they'll understand why I'm no threat in the ladies' room, but I can be threatened in the men's room." And then they finally got it. So where do we go from here? Well, we still have a ways to go in terms of anti-discrimination. There are only 17 states that have an anti-discrimination law against discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodation — only 17 states, and five of them are in New England. We need less expensive drugs. They cost a fortune. And we need to get this condition out of the DSM. It is as much a psychiatric disease as being gay and lesbian, and that went out the window in 1973, and the whole world changed. And this isn't going to break anybody's budget. This is not that common. But the risks of not doing anything for them not only puts all of them at risk of losing their lives to suicide, but it also says something about whether we are a truly inclusive society. Thank you. (Applause) |
The flower-shaped starshade that might help us detect Earth-like planets | {0: 'Using innovative orbiting instruments, aerospace engineer Jeremy Kasdin hunts for the universe’s most elusive objects — potentially habitable worlds.'} | TED2014 | The universe is teeming with planets. I want us, in the next decade, to build a space telescope that'll be able to image an Earth about another star and figure out whether it can harbor life. My colleagues at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Princeton and I are working on technology that will be able to do just that in the coming years. Astronomers now believe that every star in the galaxy has a planet, and they speculate that up to one fifth of them have an Earth-like planet that might be able to harbor life, but we haven't seen any of them. We've only detected them indirectly. This is NASA's famous picture of the pale blue dot. It was taken by the Voyager spacecraft in 1990, when they turned it around as it was exiting the solar system to take a picture of the Earth from six billion kilometers away. I want to take that of an Earth-like planet about another star. Why haven't we done that? Why is that hard? Well to see, let's imagine we take the Hubble Space Telescope and we turn it around and we move it out to the orbit of Mars. We'll see something like that, a slightly blurry picture of the Earth, because we're a fairly small telescope out at the orbit of Mars. Now let's move ten times further away. Here we are at the orbit of Uranus. It's gotten smaller, it's got less detail, less resolve. We can still see the little moon, but let's go ten times further away again. Here we are at the edge of the solar system, out at the Kuiper Belt. Now it's not resolved at all. It's that pale blue dot of Carl Sagan's. But let's move yet again ten times further away. Here we are out at the Oort Cloud, outside the solar system, and we're starting to see the sun move into the field of view and get into where the planet is. One more time, ten times further away. Now we're at Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbor star, and the planet is gone. All we're seeing is the big beaming image of the star that's ten billion times brighter than the planet, which should be in that little red circle. That's what we want to see. That's why it's hard. The light from the star is diffracting. It's scattering inside the telescope, creating that very bright image that washes out the planet. So to see the planet, we have to do something about all of that light. We have to get rid of it. I have a lot of colleagues working on really amazing technologies to do that, but I want to tell you about one today that I think is the coolest, and probably the most likely to get us an Earth in the next decade. It was first suggested by Lyman Spitzer, the father of the space telescope, in 1962, and he took his inspiration from an eclipse. You've all seen that. That's a solar eclipse. The moon has moved in front of the sun. It blocks out most of the light so we can see that dim corona around it. It would be the same thing if I put my thumb up and blocked that spotlight that's getting right in my eye, I can see you in the back row. Well, what's going on? Well the moon is casting a shadow down on the Earth. We put a telescope or a camera in that shadow, we look back at the sun, and most of the light's been removed and we can see that dim, fine structure in the corona. Spitzer's suggestion was we do this in space. We build a big screen, we fly it in space, we put it up in front of the star, we block out most of the light, we fly a space telescope in that shadow that's created, and boom, we get to see planets. Well that would look something like this. So there's that big screen, and there's no planets, because unfortunately it doesn't actually work very well, because the light waves of the light and waves diffracts around that screen the same way it did in the telescope. It's like water bending around a rock in a stream, and all that light just destroys the shadow. It's a terrible shadow. And we can't see planets. But Spitzer actually knew the answer. If we can feather the edges, soften those edges so we can control diffraction, well then we can see a planet, and in the last 10 years or so we've come up with optimal solutions for doing that. It looks something like that. We call that our flower petal starshade. If we make the edges of those petals exactly right, if we control their shape, we can control diffraction, and now we have a great shadow. It's about 10 billion times dimmer than it was before, and we can see the planets beam out just like that. That, of course, has to be bigger than my thumb. That starshade is about the size of half a football field and it has to fly 50,000 kilometers away from the telescope that has to be held right in its shadow, and then we can see those planets. This sounds formidable, but brilliant engineers, colleagues of mine at JPL, came up with a fabulous design for how to do that and it looks like this. It starts wrapped around a hub. It separates from the telescope. The petals unfurl, they open up, the telescope turns around. Then you'll see it flip and fly out that 50,000 kilometers away from the telescope. It's going to move in front of the star just like that, creates a wonderful shadow. Boom, we get planets orbiting about it. (Applause) Thank you. That's not science fiction. We've been working on this for the last five or six years. Last summer, we did a really cool test out in California at Northrop Grumman. So those are four petals. This is a sub-scale star shade. It's about half the size of the one you just saw. You'll see the petals unfurl. Those four petals were built by four undergraduates doing a summer internship at JPL. Now you're seeing it deploy. Those petals have to rotate into place. The base of those petals has to go to the same place every time to within a tenth of a millimeter. We ran this test 16 times, and 16 times it went into the exact same place to a tenth of a millimeter. This has to be done very precisely, but if we can do this, if we can build this technology, if we can get it into space, you might see something like this. That's a picture of one our nearest neighbor stars taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. If we can take a similar space telescope, slightly larger, put it out there, fly an occulter in front of it, what we might see is something like that — that's a family portrait of our solar system — but not ours. We're hoping it'll be someone else's solar system as seen through an occulter, through a starshade like that. You can see Jupiter, you can see Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and right there in the center, next to the residual light is that pale blue dot. That's Earth. We want to see that, see if there's water, oxygen, ozone, the things that might tell us that it could harbor life. I think this is the coolest possible science. That's why I got into doing this, because I think that will change the world. That will change everything when we see that. Thank you. (Applause) |
My life in typefaces | {0: 'Even if you don’t recognize his name, chances are you’ve seen Matthew Carter’s work -- his type designs include some of the world’s most familiar digital typefaces.'} | TED2014 | Type is something we consume in enormous quantities. In much of the world, it's completely inescapable. But few consumers are concerned to know where a particular typeface came from or when or who designed it, if, indeed, there was any human agency involved in its creation, if it didn't just sort of materialize out of the software ether. But I do have to be concerned with those things. It's my job. I'm one of the tiny handful of people who gets badly bent out of shape by the bad spacing of the T and the E that you see there. I've got to take that slide off. I can't stand it. Nor can Chris. There. Good. So my talk is about the connection between technology and design of type. The technology has changed a number of times since I started work: photo, digital, desktop, screen, web. I've had to survive those changes and try to understand their implications for what I do for design. This slide is about the effect of tools on form. The two letters, the two K's, the one on your left, my right, is modern, made on a computer. All straight lines are dead straight. The curves have that kind of mathematical smoothness that the Bézier formula imposes. On the right, ancient Gothic, cut in the resistant material of steel by hand. None of the straight lines are actually straight. The curves are kind of subtle. It has that spark of life from the human hand that the machine or the program can never capture. What a contrast. Well, I tell a lie. A lie at TED. I'm really sorry. Both of these were made on a computer, same software, same Bézier curves, same font format. The one on your left was made by Zuzana Licko at Emigre, and I did the other one. The tool is the same, yet the letters are different. The letters are different because the designers are different. That's all. Zuzana wanted hers to look like that. I wanted mine to look like that. End of story. Type is very adaptable. Unlike a fine art, such as sculpture or architecture, type hides its methods. I think of myself as an industrial designer. The thing I design is manufactured, and it has a function: to be read, to convey meaning. But there is a bit more to it than that. There's the sort of aesthetic element. What makes these two letters different from different interpretations by different designers? What gives the work of some designers sort of characteristic personal style, as you might find in the work of a fashion designer, an automobile designer, whatever? There have been some cases, I admit, where I as a designer did feel the influence of technology. This is from the mid-'60s, the change from metal type to photo, hot to cold. This brought some benefits but also one particular drawback: a spacing system that only provided 18 discrete units for letters to be accommodated on. I was asked at this time to design a series of condensed sans serif types with as many different variants as possible within this 18-unit box. Quickly looking at the arithmetic, I realized I could only actually make three of related design. Here you see them. In Helvetica Compressed, Extra Compressed, and Ultra Compressed, this rigid 18-unit system really boxed me in. It kind of determined the proportions of the design. Here are the typefaces, at least the lower cases. So do you look at these and say, "Poor Matthew, he had to submit to a problem, and by God it shows in the results." I hope not. If I were doing this same job today, instead of having 18 spacing units, I would have 1,000. Clearly I could make more variants, but would these three members of the family be better? It's hard to say without actually doing it, but they would not be better in the proportion of 1,000 to 18, I can tell you that. My instinct tells you that any improvement would be rather slight, because they were designed as functions of the system they were designed to fit, and as I said, type is very adaptable. It does hide its methods. All industrial designers work within constraints. This is not fine art. The question is, does a constraint force a compromise? By accepting a constraint, are you working to a lower standard? I don't believe so, and I've always been encouraged by something that Charles Eames said. He said he was conscious of working within constraints, but not of making compromises. The distinction between a constraint and a compromise is obviously very subtle, but it's very central to my attitude to work. Remember this reading experience? The phone book. I'll hold the slide so you can enjoy the nostalgia. This is from the mid-'70s early trials of Bell Centennial typeface I designed for the U.S. phone books, and it was my first experience of digital type, and quite a baptism. Designed for the phone books, as I said, to be printed at tiny size on newsprint on very high-speed rotary presses with ink that was kerosene and lampblack. This is not a hospitable environment for a typographic designer. So the challenge for me was to design type that performed as well as possible in these very adverse production conditions. As I say, we were in the infancy of digital type. I had to draw every character by hand on quadrille graph paper — there were four weights of Bell Centennial — pixel by pixel, then encode them raster line by raster line for the keyboard. It took two years, but I learned a lot. These letters look as though they've been chewed by the dog or something or other, but the missing pixels at the intersections of strokes or in the crotches are the result of my studying the effects of ink spread on cheap paper and reacting, revising the font accordingly. These strange artifacts are designed to compensate for the undesirable effects of scale and production process. At the outset, AT&T had wanted to set the phone books in Helvetica, but as my friend Erik Spiekermann said in the Helvetica movie, if you've seen that, the letters in Helvetica were designed to be as similar to one another as possible. This is not the recipe for legibility at small size. It looks very elegant up on a slide. I had to disambiguate these forms of the figures as much as possible in Bell Centennial by sort of opening the shapes up, as you can see in the bottom part of that slide. So now we're on to the mid-'80s, the early days of digital outline fonts, vector technology. There was an issue at that time with the size of the fonts, the amount of data that was required to find and store a font in computer memory. It limited the number of fonts you could get on your typesetting system at any one time. I did an analysis of the data, and found that a typical serif face you see on the left needed nearly twice as much data as a sans serif in the middle because of all the points required to define the elegantly curved serif brackets. The numbers at the bottom of the slide, by the way, they represent the amount of data needed to store each of the fonts. So the sans serif, in the middle, sans the serifs, was much more economical, 81 to 151. "Aha," I thought. "The engineers have a problem. Designer to the rescue." I made a serif type, you can see it on the right, without curved serifs. I made them polygonal, out of straight line segments, chamfered brackets. And look, as economical in data as a sans serif. We call it Charter, on the right. So I went to the head of engineering with my numbers, and I said proudly, "I have solved your problem." "Oh," he said. "What problem?" And I said, "Well, you know, the problem of the huge data you require for serif fonts and so on." "Oh," he said. "We solved that problem last week. We wrote a compaction routine that reduces the size of all fonts by an order of magnitude. You can have as many fonts on your system as you like." "Well, thank you for letting me know," I said. Foiled again. I was left with a design solution for a nonexistent technical problem. But here is where the story sort of gets interesting for me. I didn't just throw my design away in a fit of pique. I persevered. What had started as a technical exercise became an aesthetic exercise, really. In other words, I had come to like this typeface. Forget its origins. Screw that. I liked the design for its own sake. The simplified forms of Charter gave it a sort of plain-spoken quality and unfussy spareness that sort of pleased me. You know, at times of technical innovation, designers want to be influenced by what's in the air. We want to respond. We want to be pushed into exploring something new. So Charter is a sort of parable for me, really. In the end, there was no hard and fast causal link between the technology and the design of Charter. I had really misunderstood the technology. The technology did suggest something to me, but it did not force my hand, and I think this happens very often. You know, engineers are very smart, and despite occasional frustrations because I'm less smart, I've always enjoyed working with them and learning from them. Apropos, in the mid-'90s, I started talking to Microsoft about screen fonts. Up to that point, all the fonts on screen had been adapted from previously existing printing fonts, of course. But Microsoft foresaw correctly the movement, the stampede towards electronic communication, to reading and writing onscreen with the printed output as being sort of secondary in importance. So the priorities were just tipping at that point. They wanted a small core set of fonts that were not adapted but designed for the screen to face up to the problems of screen, which were their coarse resolution displays. I said to Microsoft, a typeface designed for a particular technology is a self-obsoleting typeface. I've designed too many faces in the past that were intended to mitigate technical problems. Thanks to the engineers, the technical problems went away. So did my typeface. It was only a stopgap. Microsoft came back to say that affordable computer monitors with better resolutions were at least a decade away. So I thought, well, a decade, that's not bad, that's more than a stopgap. So I was persuaded, I was convinced, and we went to work on what became Verdana and Georgia, for the first time working not on paper but directly onto the screen from the pixel up. At that time, screens were binary. The pixel was either on or it was off. Here you see the outline of a letter, the cap H, which is the thin black line, the contour, which is how it is stored in memory, superimposed on the bitmap, which is the grey area, which is how it's displayed on the screen. The bitmap is rasterized from the outline. Here in a cap H, which is all straight lines, the two are in almost perfect sync on the Cartesian grid. Not so with an O. This looks more like bricklaying than type design, but believe me, this is a good bitmap O, for the simple reason that it's symmetrical in both x and y axes. In a binary bitmap, you actually can't ask for more than that. I would sometimes make, I don't know, three or four different versions of a difficult letter like a lowercase A, and then stand back to choose which was the best. Well, there was no best, so the designer's judgment comes in in trying to decide which is the least bad. Is that a compromise? Not to me, if you are working at the highest standard the technology will allow, although that standard may be well short of the ideal. You may be able to see on this slide two different bitmap fonts there. The "a" in the upper one, I think, is better than the "a" in the lower one, but it still ain't great. You can maybe see the effect better if it's reduced. Well, maybe not. So I'm a pragmatist, not an idealist, out of necessity. For a certain kind of temperament, there is a certain kind of satisfaction in doing something that cannot be perfect but can still be done to the best of your ability. Here's the lowercase H from Georgia Italic. The bitmap looks jagged and rough. It is jagged and rough. But I discovered, by experiment, that there is an optimum slant for an italic on a screen so the strokes break well at the pixel boundaries. Look in this example how, rough as it is, how the left and right legs actually break at the same level. That's a victory. That's good, right there. And of course, at the lower depths, you don't get much choice. This is an S, in case you were wondering. Well, it's been 18 years now since Verdana and Georgia were released. Microsoft were absolutely right, it took a good 10 years, but screen displays now do have improved spatial resolution, and very much improved photometric resolution thanks to anti-aliasing and so on. So now that their mission is accomplished, has that meant the demise of the screen fonts that I designed for coarser displays back then? Will they outlive the now-obsolete screens and the flood of new web fonts coming on to the market? Or have they established their own sort of evolutionary niche that is independent of technology? In other words, have they been absorbed into the typographic mainstream? I'm not sure, but they've had a good run so far. Hey, 18 is a good age for anything with present-day rates of attrition, so I'm not complaining. Thank you. (Applause) |
Embrace the near win | {0: 'Art historian and critic Sarah Lewis celebrates creativity and shows how it can lead us through fear and failure to ultimate success.'} | TED2014 | I feel so fortunate that my first job was working at the Museum of Modern Art on a retrospective of painter Elizabeth Murray. I learned so much from her. After the curator Robert Storr selected all the paintings from her lifetime body of work, I loved looking at the paintings from the 1970s. There were some motifs and elements that would come up again later in her life. I remember asking her what she thought of those early works. If you didn't know they were hers, you might not have been able to guess. She told me that a few didn't quite meet her own mark for what she wanted them to be. One of the works, in fact, so didn't meet her mark, she had set it out in the trash in her studio, and her neighbor had taken it because she saw its value. In that moment, my view of success and creativity changed. I realized that success is a moment, but what we're always celebrating is creativity and mastery. But this is the thing: What gets us to convert success into mastery? This is a question I've long asked myself. I think it comes when we start to value the gift of a near win. I started to understand this when I went on one cold May day to watch a set of varsity archers, all women as fate would have it, at the northern tip of Manhattan at Columbia's Baker Athletics Complex. I wanted to see what's called archer's paradox, the idea that in order to actually hit your target, you have to aim at something slightly skew from it. I stood and watched as the coach drove up these women in this gray van, and they exited with this kind of relaxed focus. One held a half-eaten ice cream cone in one hand and arrows in the left with yellow fletching. And they passed me and smiled, but they sized me up as they made their way to the turf, and spoke to each other not with words but with numbers, degrees, I thought, positions for how they might plan to hit their target. I stood behind one archer as her coach stood in between us to maybe assess who might need support, and watched her, and I didn't understand how even one was going to hit the ten ring. The ten ring from the standard 75-yard distance, it looks as small as a matchstick tip held out at arm's length. And this is while holding 50 pounds of draw weight on each shot. She first hit a seven, I remember, and then a nine, and then two tens, and then the next arrow didn't even hit the target. And I saw that gave her more tenacity, and she went after it again and again. For three hours this went on. At the end of the practice, one of the archers was so taxed that she lied out on the ground just star-fished, her head looking up at the sky, trying to find what T.S. Eliot might call that still point of the turning world. It's so rare in American culture, there's so little that's vocational about it anymore, to look at what doggedness looks like with this level of exactitude, what it means to align your body posture for three hours in order to hit a target, pursuing a kind of excellence in obscurity. But I stayed because I realized I was witnessing what's so rare to glimpse, that difference between success and mastery. So success is hitting that ten ring, but mastery is knowing that it means nothing if you can't do it again and again. Mastery is not just the same as excellence, though. It's not the same as success, which I see as an event, a moment in time, and a label that the world confers upon you. Mastery is not a commitment to a goal but to a constant pursuit. What gets us to do this, what get us to forward thrust more is to value the near win. How many times have we designated something a classic, a masterpiece even, while its creator considers it hopelessly unfinished, riddled with difficulties and flaws, in other words, a near win? Elizabeth Murray surprised me with her admission about her earlier paintings. Painter Paul Cézanne so often thought his works were incomplete that he would deliberately leave them aside with the intention of picking them back up again, but at the end of his life, the result was that he had only signed 10 percent of his paintings. His favorite novel was "The [Unknown] Masterpiece" by Honoré de Balzac, and he felt the protagonist was the painter himself. Franz Kafka saw incompletion when others would find only works to praise, so much so that he wanted all of his diaries, manuscripts, letters and even sketches burned upon his death. His friend refused to honor the request, and because of that, we now have all the works we now do by Kafka: "America," "The Trial" and "The Castle," a work so incomplete it even stops mid-sentence. The pursuit of mastery, in other words, is an ever-onward almost. "Lord, grant that I desire more than I can accomplish," Michelangelo implored, as if to that Old Testament God on the Sistine Chapel, and he himself was that Adam with his finger outstretched and not quite touching that God's hand. Mastery is in the reaching, not the arriving. It's in constantly wanting to close that gap between where you are and where you want to be. Mastery is about sacrificing for your craft and not for the sake of crafting your career. How many inventors and untold entrepreneurs live out this phenomenon? We see it even in the life of the indomitable Arctic explorer Ben Saunders, who tells me that his triumphs are not merely the result of a grand achievement, but of the propulsion of a lineage of near wins. We thrive when we stay at our own leading edge. It's a wisdom understood by Duke Ellington, who said that his favorite song out of his repertoire was always the next one, always the one he had yet to compose. Part of the reason that the near win is inbuilt to mastery is because the greater our proficiency, the more clearly we might see that we don't know all that we thought we did. It's called the Dunning–Kruger effect. The Paris Review got it out of James Baldwin when they asked him, "What do you think increases with knowledge?" and he said, "You learn how little you know." Success motivates us, but a near win can propel us in an ongoing quest. One of the most vivid examples of this comes when we look at the difference between Olympic silver medalists and bronze medalists after a competition. Thomas Gilovich and his team from Cornell studied this difference and found that the frustration silver medalists feel compared to bronze, who are typically a bit more happy to have just not received fourth place and not medaled at all, gives silver medalists a focus on follow-up competition. We see it even in the gambling industry that once picked up on this phenomenon of the near win and created these scratch-off tickets that had a higher than average rate of near wins and so compelled people to buy more tickets that they were called heart-stoppers, and were set on a gambling industry set of abuses in Britain in the 1970s. The reason the near win has a propulsion is because it changes our view of the landscape and puts our goals, which we tend to put at a distance, into more proximate vicinity to where we stand. If I ask you to envision what a great day looks like next week, you might describe it in more general terms. But if I ask you to describe a great day at TED tomorrow, you might describe it with granular, practical clarity. And this is what a near win does. It gets us to focus on what, right now, we plan to do to address that mountain in our sights. It's Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who in 1984 missed taking the gold in the heptathlon by one third of a second, and her husband predicted that would give her the tenacity she needed in follow-up competition. In 1988, she won the gold in the heptathlon and set a record of 7,291 points, a score that no athlete has come very close to since. We thrive not when we've done it all, but when we still have more to do. I stand here thinking and wondering about all the different ways that we might even manufacture a near win in this room, how your lives might play this out, because I think on some gut level we do know this. We know that we thrive when we stay at our own leading edge, and it's why the deliberate incomplete is inbuilt into creation myths. In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and women would deliberately put an imperfection in textiles and ceramics. It's what's called a spirit line, a deliberate flaw in the pattern to give the weaver or maker a way out, but also a reason to continue making work. Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They're masters because they realize that there isn't one. Now it occurred to me, as I thought about this, why the archery coach told me at the end of that practice, out of earshot of his archers, that he and his colleagues never feel they can do enough for their team, never feel there are enough visualization techniques and posture drills to help them overcome those constant near wins. It didn't sound like a complaint, exactly, but just a way to let me know, a kind of tender admission, to remind me that he knew he was giving himself over to a voracious, unfinished path that always required more. We build out of the unfinished idea, even if that idea is our former self. This is the dynamic of mastery. Coming close to what you thought you wanted can help you attain more than you ever dreamed you could. It's what I have to imagine Elizabeth Murray was thinking when I saw her smiling at those early paintings one day in the galleries. Even if we created utopias, I believe we would still have the incomplete. Completion is a goal, but we hope it is never the end. Thank you. (Applause) |
How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion | {0: 'In a lab near Vancouver, Michel Laberge and his team at General Fusion are building a prototype fusion reactor that mimics the processes of the sun to produce cheap, clean and abundant energy.'} | TED2014 | Wow, this is bright. It must use a lot of power. Well, flying you all in here must have cost a bit of energy too. So the whole planet needs a lot of energy, and so far we've been running mostly on fossil fuel. We've been burning gas. It's been a good run. It got us to where we are, but we have to stop. We can't do that anymore. So we are trying different types of energy now, alternative energy, but it proved quite difficult to find something that's as convenient and as cost-effective as oil, gas and coal. My personal favorite is nuclear energy. Now, it's very energy-dense, it produces solid, reliable power, and it doesn't make any CO2. Now we know of two ways of making nuclear energy: fission and fusion. Now in fission, you take a big nucleus, you break it in part, in two, and it makes lots of energy, and this is how the nuclear reactor today works. It works pretty good. And then there's fusion. Now, I like fusion. Fusion's much better. So you take two small nuclei, you put it together, and you make helium, and that's very nice. It makes lots of energy. This is nature's way of producing energy. The sun and all the stars in the universe run on fusion. Now, a fusion plant would actually be quite cost-effective and it also would be quite safe. It only produces short term radioactive waste, and it cannot melt down. Now, the fuel from fusion comes from the ocean. In the ocean, you can extract the fuel for about one thousandth of a cent per kilowatt-hour, so that's very, very cheap. And if the whole planet would run on fusion, we could extract the fuel from the ocean. It would run for billions and billions of years. Now, if fusion is so great, why don't we have it? Where is it? Well, there's always a bit of a catch. Fusion is really, really hard to do. So the problem is, those two nuclei, they are both positively charged, so they don't want to fuse. They go like this. They go like that. So in order to make them fuse, you have to throw them at each other with great speed, and if they have enough speed, they will go against the repulsion, they will touch, and they will make energy. Now, the particle speed is a measure of the temperature. So the temperature required for fusion is 150 billion degrees C. This is rather warm, and this is why fusion is so hard to do. Now, I caught my little fusion bug when I did my Ph.D. here at the University of British Columbia, and then I got a big job in a laser printer place making printing for the printing industry. I worked there for 10 years, and I got a little bit bored, and then I was 40, and I got a mid-life crisis, you know, the usual thing: Who am I? What should I do? What should I do? What can I do? And then I was looking at my good work, and what I was doing is I was cutting the forests around here in B.C. and burying you, all of you, in millions of tons of junk mail. Now, that was not very satisfactory. So some people buy a Porsche. Others get a mistress. But I've decided to get my bit to solve global warming and make fusion happen. Now, so the first thing I did is I looked into the literature and I see, how does fusion work? So the physicists have been working on fusion for a while, and one of the ways they do it is with something called a tokamak. It's a big ring of magnetic coil, superconducting coil, and it makes a magnetic field in a ring like this, and the hot gas in the middle, which is called a plasma, is trapped. The particles go round and round and round the circle at the wall. Then they throw a huge amount of heat in there to try to cook that to fusion temperature. So this is the inside of one of those donuts, and on the right side you can see the fusion plasma in there. Now, a second way of doing this is by using laser fusion. Now in laser fusion, you have a little ping pong ball, you put the fusion fuel in the center, and you zap that with a whole bunch of laser around it. The lasers are very strong, and it squashes the ping pong ball really, really quick. And if you squeeze something hard enough, it gets hotter, and if it gets really, really fast, and they do that in one billionth of a second, it makes enough energy and enough heat to make fusion. So this is the inside of one such machine. You see the laser beam and the pellet in the center. Now, most people think that fusion is going nowhere. They always think that the physicists are in their lab and they're working hard, but nothing is happening. That's actually not quite true. This is a curve of the gain in fusion over the last 30 years or so, and you can see that we're making now about 10,000 times more fusion than we used to when we started. That's a pretty good gain. As a matter of fact, it's as fast as the fabled Moore's Law that defined the amount of transistors they can put on a chip. Now, this dot here is called JET, the Joint European Torus. It's a big tokamak donut in Europe, and this machine in 1997 produced 16 megawatts of fusion power with 17 megawatts of heat. Now, you say, that's not much use, but it's actually pretty close, considering we can get about 10,000 times more than we started. The second dot here is the NIF. It's the National Ignition Facility. It's a big laser machine in the U.S., and last month they announced with quite a bit of noise that they had managed to make more fusion energy from the fusion than the energy that they put in the center of the ping pong ball. Now, that's not quite good enough, because the laser to put that energy in was more energy than that, but it was pretty good. Now this is ITER, pronounced in French: EE-tairh. So this is a big collaboration of different countries that are building a huge magnetic donut in the south of France, and this machine, when it's finished, will produce 500 megawatts of fusion power with only 50 megawatts to make it. So this one is the real one. It's going to work. That's the kind of machine that makes energy. Now if you look at the graph, you will notice that those two dots are a little bit on the right of the curve. We kind of have fallen off the progress. Actually, the science to make those machines was really in time to produce fusion during that curve. However, there has been a bit of politics going on, and the will to do it was not there, so it drifted to the right. ITER, for example, could have been built in 2000 or 2005, but because it's a big international collaboration, the politics got in and it delayed it a bit. For example, it took them about three years to decide where to put it. Now, fusion is often criticized for being a little too expensive. Yes, it did cost a billion dollars or two billion dollars a year to make this progress. But you have to compare that to the cost of making Moore's Law. That cost way more than that. The result of Moore's Law is this cell phone here in my pocket. This cell phone, and the Internet behind it, cost about one trillion dollars, just so I can take a selfie and put it on Facebook. Then when my dad sees that, he'll be very proud. We also spend about 650 billion dollars a year in subsidies for oil and gas and renewable energy. Now, we spend one half of a percent of that on fusion. So me, personally, I don't think it's too expensive. I think it's actually been shortchanged, considering it can solve all our energy problems cleanly for the next couple of billions of years. Now I can say that, but I'm a little bit biased, because I started a fusion company and I don't even have a Facebook account. So when I started this fusion company in 2002, I knew I couldn't fight with the big lads. They had much more resources than me. So I decided I would need to find a solution that is cheaper and faster. Now magnetic and laser fusion are pretty good machines. They are awesome pieces of technology, wonderful machines, and they have shown that fusion can be done. However, as a power plant, I don't think they're very good. They're way too big, way too complicated, way too expensive, and also, they don't deal very much with the fusion energy. When you make fusion, the energy comes out as neutrons, fast neutrons comes out of the plasma. Those neutrons hit the wall of the machine. It damages it. And also, you have to catch the heat from those neutrons and run some steam to spin a turbine somewhere, and on those machines, it was all a bit of an afterthought. So I decided that surely there is a better way of doing that. So back to the literature, and I read about the fusion everywhere. One way in particular attracted my attention, and it's called magnetized target fusion, or MTF for short. Now, in MTF, what you want to do is you take a big vat and you fill that with liquid metal, and you spin the liquid metal to open a vortex in the center, a bit like your sink. When you pull the plug on a sink, it makes a vortex. And then you have some pistons driven by pressure that goes on the outside, and this compresses the liquid metal around the plasma, and it compresses it, it gets hotter, like a laser, and then it makes fusion. So it's a bit of a mix between a magnetized fusion and the laser fusion. So those have a couple of very good advantages. The liquid metal absorbs all the neutrons and no neutrons hit the wall, and therefore there's no damage to the machine. The liquid metal gets hot, so you can pump that in a heat exchanger, make some steam, spin a turbine. So that's a very convenient way of doing this part of the process. And finally, all the energy to make the fusion happen comes from steam-powered pistons, which is way cheaper than lasers or superconducting coils. Now, this was all very good except for the problem that it didn't quite work. (Laughter) There's always a catch. So when you compress that, the plasma cools down faster than the compression speed, so you're trying to compress it, but the plasma cooled down and cooled down and cooled down and then it did absolutely nothing. So when I saw that, I said, well, this is such a shame, because it's a very, very good idea. So hopefully I can improve on that. So I thought about it for a minute, and I said, okay, how can we make that work better? So then I thought about impact. What about if we use a big hammer and we swing it and we hit the nail like this, in the place of putting the hammer on the nail and pushing and try to put it in? That won't work. So what the idea is is to use the idea of an impact. So we accelerate the pistons with steam, that takes a little bit of time, but then, bang! you hit the piston, and, baff!, all the energy is done instantly, down instantly to the liquid, and that compresses the plasma much faster. So I decided, okay, this is good, let's make that. So we built this machine in this garage here. We made a small machine that we managed to squeeze a little bit of neutrons out of that, and those are my marketing neutrons, and with those marketing neutrons, then I raised about 50 million dollars, and I hired 65 people. That's my team here. And this is what we want to build. So it's going to be a big machine, about three meters in diameter, liquid lead spinning around, big vortex in the center, put the plasma on the top and on the bottom, piston hits on the side, bang!, it compresses it, and it will make some energy, and the neutron will come out in the liquid metal, going to go in a steam engine and make the turbine, and some of the steam will go back to fire the piston. We're going to run that about one time per second, and it will produce 100 megawatts of electricity. Okay, we also built this injector, so this injector makes the plasma to start with. It makes the plasma at about a lukewarm temperature of three million degrees C. Unfortunately, it doesn't last quite long enough, so we need to extend the life of the plasma a little bit, but last month it got a lot better, so I think we have the plasma compressing now. Then we built a small sphere, about this big, 14 pistons around it, and this will compress the liquid. However, plasma is difficult to compress. When you compress it, it tends to go a little bit crooked like that, so you need the timing of the piston to be very good, and for that we use several control systems, which was not possible in 1970, but we now can do that with nice, new electronics. So finally, most people think that fusion is in the future and will never happen, but as a matter of fact, fusion is getting very close. We are almost there. The big labs have shown that fusion is doable, and now there are small companies that are thinking about that, and they say, it's not that it cannot be done, but it's how to make it cost-effectively. General Fusion is one of those small companies, and hopefully, very soon, somebody, someone, will crack that nut, and perhaps it will be General Fusion. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A shark-deterrent wetsuit (and it's not what you think) | {0: 'Hamish Jolly brings his entrepreneurial eye to the rare but viscerally terrifying issue of shark attacks.'} | TEDxPerth | Scientific breakthrough, the kind that can potentially save lives, can sometimes be lying right out in the open for us to discover, in the evolved, accumulated body of human anecdote, for example, or in the time-tested adaptations that we observe in the natural world around us. Science starts with observation, but the trick is to identify the patterns and signatures that we might otherwise dismiss as myth or coincidence, isolate them, and test them with scientific rigor. And when we do, the results will often surprise. Western Australia has had a particular problem with shark attacks over the last three years, unfortunately and tragically culminating in five fatal shark attacks in a 10-month period during that time. But Western Australia is not alone in this. The incident of shark engagements on humans is escalating worldwide. And so it's not surprising, perhaps, that in July of this year, Shark Attack Mitigation Systems in collaboration with the University of Western Australia Oceans Institute made an announcement which captured the attention of the worldwide media and of ocean users worldwide, and that was around the development of technology to mitigate or reduce the risk of shark attack based on the science of what sharks can see. And I have for you today the story of that journey, but also the notion that science can be as powerful as a translator as it can be for invention. When we began this process, we were looking, it was about three years ago, and we'd just had the first two fatal shark attacks in Western Australia, and by chance, in a previous role, I happened to be having dinner with Harry Butler. Now Harry Butler, who most Australians would know is a famous naturalist, had spent a lot of time in the marine environment. Harry Butler is a precursor, if you like, to the late Steve Irwin. When I asked him about what the solution to the problem might be, the answer was quite surprising. He said, "Take a black wetsuit, band it in yellow stripes like a bumblebee, and you'll be mimicking the warning systems of most marine species." I didn't think about that much at the time, and it wasn't until the next three fatal shark attacks happened, and it caused me to think, maybe there's some merit to this idea. And I turned to the web to see if there might be some clues. And it turns out the web is awash with this sort of evidence that supports this sort of thinking. So biologically, there are plenty of species that display banding or patterns, warning patterns, to either be cryptical in the water or warn against being attacked, not the least of which is the pilot fish which spends a big slab of its life around the business end of a shark. On the human side, Walter Starck, an oceanographer, has been painting his wetsuit since the 1970s, and anthropologically, Pacific island tribes painted themselves in bands in a sea snake ceremony to ward off the shark god. So what's going on here? Is this an idea lying wide out in the open for us to consider and define? We know that sharks use a range of sensors when they engage, particularly for attack, but the sight sensor is the one that they use to identify the target, and particularly in the last number of meters before the attack. It makes sense to pay attention to the biological anecdote because that's time-tested evolution over many millennia. But isn't human anecdote also an evolution of sorts, the idea that there's a kernel of truth thought to be important, passed down from generation to generation, so that it actually ends up shaping human behavior? I wanted to test this idea. I wanted to put some science to this anecdotal evidence, because if science could support this concept, then we might have at least part of the solution to shark attack right under our very nose. To do that, I needed some experts in shark vision and shark neurology, and a worldwide search, again, led to the University of W.A. on the doorstep here, with the Oceans Institute. And professor Nathan Hart and his team had just written a paper which tells us, confirms that predatory sharks see in black and white, or grayscale. So I called up Nathan, a little bit sheepishly, actually, about this idea that maybe we could use these patterns and shapes to produce a wetsuit to try and mitigate the risk of shark attack, and fortunately, he thought that was a good idea. So what ensued is a collaborative bit of research supported by the West Australian State Government. And we did three key things. The first is that we mapped the characteristics, the physical characteristics of the eyes of the three main predatory sharks, so the great white, tiger and bull shark. We did that genetically and we did that anatomically. The next thing we did was to understand, using complex computer modeling, what that eye can see at different depths, distances, light conditions, and water clarity in the ocean. And from there, we were able to pinpoint two key characteristics: what patterns and shapes would present the wearer as hidden or hard to make out in the water, cryptic, and what patterns and shapes might provide the greatest contrast but provide the greatest breakup of profile so that that person wasn't confused for shark prey or shark food. The next thing we needed to do was to convert this into wetsuits that people might actually wear, and to that end, I invited Ray Smith, a surfer, industrial designer, wetsuit designer, and in fact the guy that designed the original Quiksilver logo, to come over and sit with the science team and interpret that science into aesthetic wetsuits that people might actually wear. And here's an example of one of the first drawings. So this is what I call a "don't eat me" wetsuit. So this takes that banding idea, takes that banding idea, it's highly visible, provides a highly disruptive profile, and is intended to prevent the shark from considering that you would be ordinary food, and potentially even create confusion for the shark. And this one's configured to go with a surfboard. You can see that dark, opaque panel on the front, and it's particularly better for the surface, where being backlit and providing a silhouette is problematic. Second iteration is the cryptic wetsuit, or the one which attempts to hide the wearer in the water column. There are three panels on this suit, and in any given conditions, one or more of those panels will match the reflective spectra of the water so as to disappear fully or partially, leaving the last panel or panels to create a disruptive profile in the water column. And this one's particularly well-suited to the dive configuration, so when you're deeper under the water. So we knew that we had some really solid science here. We knew, if you wanted to stand out, you needed to look stripy, and we knew if you wanted to be cryptic, you needed to look like this. But the acid test is always going to be, how would sharks really behave in the context of these patterns and shapes. And testing to simulate a person in a wetsuit in the water with a predatory shark in a natural environment is actually a lot harder than you might think. (Laughter) So we have to bait the rig, because we need to get the statistical number of samples through to get the scientific evidence, and by baiting the rig, we're obviously changing shark behavior. We can't put humans in the water. We're ethically precluded from even using humanoid shapes and baiting them up in the water. But nevertheless, we started the testing process in January of this year, initially with tiger sharks and subsequently with great white sharks. The way we did that was to get a perforated drum which is full of bait, wrap it in a neoprene skin, and then run two stereo underwater cameras to watch how the shark actually engages with that rig. And because we use stereo, we can capture all the statistics on how big the shark is, what angle it comes in at, how quickly it leaves, and what its behavior is in an empirical rather than a subjective way. Because we needed to preserve the scientific method, we ran a control rig which was a black neoprene rig just like a normal black wetsuit against the, what we call, SAMS technology rig. And the results were not just exciting, but very encouraging, and today I would like to just give you a snapshot of two of those engagements. So here we've got a four-meter tiger shark engaging the black control rig, which it had encountered about a minute and a half before. Now that exact same shark had engaged, or encountered this SAMS rig, which is the Elude SAMS rig, about eight minutes before, and spent six minutes circling it, hunting for it, looking for what it could smell and sense but not see, and this was the final engagement. Great white sharks are more confident than the tigers, and here you see great white shark engaging a control rig, so a black neoprene wetsuit, and going straight to the bottom, coming up and engaging. In contrast to the SAMS technology rig, this is the banded one, where it's more tactile, it's more investigative, it's more apprehensive, and shows a reluctance to come straight in and go. (Applause) So, it's important for us that all the testing is done independently, and the University of W.A. is doing the testing. It'll be an ongoing process. It's subject to peer review and subject to publication. It's so important that this concept is led with the science. From the perspective of Shark Attack Mitigation Systems, we're a biotechnology licensing company, so we don't make wetsuits ourselves. We'll license others to do that. But I thought you might be interested in seeing what SAMS technology looks like embedded in a wetsuit, and to that end, for the first time, live, worldwide — (Laughter) — I can show you what biological adaptation, science and design looks like in real life. So I can welcome Sam, the surfer, from this side. Where are you, Sam? (Applause) And Eduardo. (Applause) Cheers, mate. Cheers. Thanks, gentlemen. (Applause) So what have we done here? Well, to my mind, rather than take a blank sheet and use science as a tool for invention, we've paid attention to the biological evidence, we've put importance to the human anecdotal evidence, and we've used science as a tool for translation, translation of something that was already there into something that we can use for the benefit of mankind. And it strikes me that this idea of science as a tool for translation rather than invention is one that we can apply much more widely than this in the pursuit of innovation. After all, did the Wright brothers discover manned flight, or did they observe the biological fact of flight and translate that mechanically, replicate it in a way that humans could use? As for the humble wetsuit, who knows what oceanwear will look like in two years' time, in five years' time or in 50 years' time, but with this new thinking, I'm guessing there's a fair chance it won't be pure black. Thank you. (Applause) |
The best computer interface? Maybe ... your hands | {0: 'James Patten, a TED Fellow, imagines new ways for us to play with computers.'} | TED Fellows Retreat 2013 | A computer is an incredibly powerful means of creative expression, but for the most part, that expression is confined to the screens of our laptops and mobile phones. And I'd like to tell you a story about bringing this power of the computer to move things around and interact with us off of the screen and into the physical world in which we live. A few years ago, I got a call from a luxury fashion store called Barneys New York, and the next thing I knew, I was designing storefront kinetic sculptures for their window displays. This one's called "The Chase." There are two pairs of shoes, a man's pair and a woman's pair, and they play out this slow, tense chase around the window in which the man scoots up behind the woman and gets in her personal space, and then she moves away. Each of the shoes has magnets in it, and there are magnets underneath the table that move the shoes around. My friend Andy Cavatorta was building a robotic harp for Bjork's Biophilia tour and I wound up building the electronics and motion control software to make the harps move and play music. The harp has four separate pendulums, and each pendulum has 11 strings, so the harp swings on its axis and also rotates in order to play different musical notes, and the harps are all networked together so that they can play the right notes at the right time in the music. I built an interactive chemistry exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and this exhibit lets people use physical objects to grab chemical elements off of the periodic table and bring them together to cause chemical reactions to happen. And the museum noticed that people were spending a lot of time with this exhibit, and a researcher from a science education center in Australia decided to study this exhibit and try to figure out what was going on. And she found that the physical objects that people were using were helping people understand how to use the exhibit, and were helping people learn in a social way. And when you think about it, this makes a lot of sense, that using specialized physical objects would help people use an interface more easily. I mean, our hands and our minds are optimized to think about and interact with tangible objects. Think about which you find easier to use, a physical keyboard or an onscreen keyboard like on a phone? But the thing that struck me about all of these different projects is that they really had to be built from scratch, down to the level of the electronics and the printed circuit boards and all the mechanisms all the way up to the software. I wanted to create something where we could move objects under computer control and create interactions around that idea without having to go through this process of building something from scratch every single time. So my first attempt at this was at the MIT Media Lab with Professor Hiroshi Ishii, and we built this array of 512 different electromagnets, and together they were able to move objects around on top of their surface. But the problem with this was that these magnets cost over 10,000 dollars. Although each one was pretty small, altogether they weighed so much that the table that they were on started to sag. So I wanted to build something where you could have this kind of interaction on any tabletop surface. So to explore this idea, I built an army of small robots, and each of these robots has what are called omni wheels. They're these special wheels that can move equally easily in all directions, and when you couple these robots with a video projector, you have these physical tools for interacting with digital information. So here's an example of what I mean. This is a video editing application where all of the controls for manipulating the video are physical. So if we want to tweak the color, we just enter the color mode, and then we get three different dials for tweaking the color, or if we want to adjust the audio, then we get two different dials for that, these physical objects. So here the left and right channel stay in sync, but if we want to, we can override that by grabbing both of them at the same time. So the idea is that we get the speed and efficiency benefits of using these physical dials together with the flexibility and versatility of a system that's designed in software. And this is a mapping application for disaster response. So you have these physical objects that represent police, fire and rescue, and a dispatcher can grab them and place them on the map to tell those units where to go, and then the position of the units on the map gets synced up with the position of those units in the real world. This is a video chat application. It's amazing how much emotion you can convey with just a few simple movements of a physical object. With this interface, we open up a huge array of possibilities in between traditional board games and arcade games, where the physical possibilities of interaction make so many different styles of play possible. But one of the areas that I'm most excited about using this platform for is applying it to problems that are difficult for computers or people to solve alone. One example of those is protein folding. So here we have an interface where we have physical handles onto a protein, and we can grab those handles and try to move the protein and try to fold it in different ways. And if we move it in a way that doesn't really make sense with the underlying molecular simulation, we get this physical feedback where we can actually feel these physical handles pulling back against us. So feeling what's going on inside a molecular simulation is a whole different level of interaction. So we're just beginning to explore what's possible when we use software to control the movement of objects in our environment. Maybe this is the computer of the future. There's no touchscreen. There's no technology visible at all. But when we want to have a video chat or play a game or lay out the slides to our next TED Talk, the objects on the table come alive. Thank you. (Applause) |
Success, failure and the drive to keep creating | {0: 'The author of "Eat, Pray, Love," Elizabeth Gilbert has thought long and hard about some big topics. Her fascinations: genius, creativity and how we get in our own way when it comes to both.'} | TED2014 | So, a few years ago I was at JFK Airport about to get on a flight, when I was approached by two women who I do not think would be insulted to hear themselves described as tiny old tough-talking Italian-American broads. The taller one, who is like up here, she comes marching up to me, and she goes, "Honey, I gotta ask you something. You got something to do with that whole 'Eat, Pray, Love' thing that's been going on lately?" And I said, "Yes, I did." And she smacks her friend and she goes, "See, I told you, I said, that's that girl. That's that girl who wrote that book based on that movie." (Laughter) So that's who I am. And believe me, I'm extremely grateful to be that person, because that whole "Eat, Pray, Love" thing was a huge break for me. But it also left me in a really tricky position moving forward as an author trying to figure out how in the world I was ever going to write a book again that would ever please anybody, because I knew well in advance that all of those people who had adored "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it wasn't going to be "Eat, Pray, Love," and all of those people who had hated "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it would provide evidence that I still lived. So I knew that I had no way to win, and knowing that I had no way to win made me seriously consider for a while just quitting the game and moving to the country to raise corgis. But if I had done that, if I had given up writing, I would have lost my beloved vocation, so I knew that the task was that I had to find some way to gin up the inspiration to write the next book regardless of its inevitable negative outcome. In other words, I had to find a way to make sure that my creativity survived its own success. And I did, in the end, find that inspiration, but I found it in the most unlikely and unexpected place. I found it in lessons that I had learned earlier in life about how creativity can survive its own failure. So just to back up and explain, the only thing I have ever wanted to be for my whole life was a writer. I wrote all through childhood, all through adolescence, by the time I was a teenager I was sending my very bad stories to The New Yorker, hoping to be discovered. After college, I got a job as a diner waitress, kept working, kept writing, kept trying really hard to get published, and failing at it. I failed at getting published for almost six years. So for almost six years, every single day, I had nothing but rejection letters waiting for me in my mailbox. And it was devastating every single time, and every single time, I had to ask myself if I should just quit while I was behind and give up and spare myself this pain. But then I would find my resolve, and always in the same way, by saying, "I'm not going to quit, I'm going home." And you have to understand that for me, going home did not mean returning to my family's farm. For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself. And that's how I pushed through it. But the weird thing is that 20 years later, during the crazy ride of "Eat, Pray, Love," I found myself identifying all over again with that unpublished young diner waitress who I used to be, thinking about her constantly, and feeling like I was her again, which made no rational sense whatsoever because our lives could not have been more different. She had failed constantly. I had succeeded beyond my wildest expectation. We had nothing in common. Why did I suddenly feel like I was her all over again? And it was only when I was trying to unthread that that I finally began to comprehend the strange and unlikely psychological connection in our lives between the way we experience great failure and the way we experience great success. So think of it like this: For most of your life, you live out your existence here in the middle of the chain of human experience where everything is normal and reassuring and regular, but failure catapults you abruptly way out over here into the blinding darkness of disappointment. Success catapults you just as abruptly but just as far way out over here into the equally blinding glare of fame and recognition and praise. And one of these fates is objectively seen by the world as bad, and the other one is objectively seen by the world as good, but your subconscious is completely incapable of discerning the difference between bad and good. The only thing that it is capable of feeling is the absolute value of this emotional equation, the exact distance that you have been flung from yourself. And there's a real equal danger in both cases of getting lost out there in the hinterlands of the psyche. But in both cases, it turns out that there is also the same remedy for self-restoration, and that is that you have got to find your way back home again as swiftly and smoothly as you can, and if you're wondering what your home is, here's a hint: Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself. So that might be creativity, it might be family, it might be invention, adventure, faith, service, it might be raising corgis, I don't know, your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential. For me, that home has always been writing. So after the weird, disorienting success that I went through with "Eat, Pray, Love," I realized that all I had to do was exactly the same thing that I used to have to do all the time when I was an equally disoriented failure. I had to get my ass back to work, and that's what I did, and that's how, in 2010, I was able to publish the dreaded follow-up to "Eat, Pray, Love." And you know what happened with that book? It bombed, and I was fine. Actually, I kind of felt bulletproof, because I knew that I had broken the spell and I had found my way back home to writing for the sheer devotion of it. And I stayed in my home of writing after that, and I wrote another book that just came out last year and that one was really beautifully received, which is very nice, but not my point. My point is that I'm writing another one now, and I'll write another book after that and another and another and another and many of them will fail, and some of them might succeed, but I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live. Look, I don't know where you rightfully live, but I know that there's something in this world that you love more than you love yourself. Something worthy, by the way, so addiction and infatuation don't count, because we all know that those are not safe places to live. Right? The only trick is that you've got to identify the best, worthiest thing that you love most, and then build your house right on top of it and don't budge from it. And if you should someday, somehow get vaulted out of your home by either great failure or great success, then your job is to fight your way back to that home the only way that it has ever been done, by putting your head down and performing with diligence and devotion and respect and reverence whatever the task is that love is calling forth from you next. You just do that, and keep doing that again and again and again, and I can absolutely promise you, from long personal experience in every direction, I can assure you that it's all going to be okay. Thank you. (Applause) |
Autism — what we know (and what we don't know yet) | {0: 'At the Simons Foundation, Wendy Chung is working to characterize behavior, brain structure and function in people with genetic variations that may relate to autism.'} | TED2014 | "Why?" "Why?" is a question that parents ask me all the time. "Why did my child develop autism?" As a pediatrician, as a geneticist, as a researcher, we try and address that question. But autism is not a single condition. It's actually a spectrum of disorders, a spectrum that ranges, for instance, from Justin, a 13-year-old boy who's not verbal, who can't speak, who communicates by using an iPad to touch pictures to communicate his thoughts and his concerns, a little boy who, when he gets upset, will start rocking, and eventually, when he's disturbed enough, will bang his head to the point that he can actually cut it open and require stitches. That same diagnosis of autism, though, also applies to Gabriel, another 13-year-old boy who has quite a different set of challenges. He's actually quite remarkably gifted in mathematics. He can multiple three numbers by three numbers in his head with ease, yet when it comes to trying to have a conversation, he has great difficulty. He doesn't make eye contact. He has difficulty starting a conversation, feels awkward, and when he gets nervous, he actually shuts down. Yet both of these boys have the same diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. One of the things that concerns us is whether or not there really is an epidemic of autism. These days, one in 88 children will be diagnosed with autism, and the question is, why does this graph look this way? Has that number been increasing dramatically over time? Or is it because we have now started labeling individuals with autism, simply giving them a diagnosis when they were still present there before yet simply didn't have that label? And in fact, in the late 1980s, the early 1990s, legislation was passed that actually provided individuals with autism with resources, with access to educational materials that would help them. With that increased awareness, more parents, more pediatricians, more educators learned to recognize the features of autism. As a result of that, more individuals were diagnosed and got access to the resources they needed. In addition, we've changed our definition over time, so in fact we've widened the definition of autism, and that accounts for some of the increased prevalence that we see. The next question everyone wonders is, what caused autism? And a common misconception is that vaccines cause autism. But let me be very clear: Vaccines do not cause autism. (Applause) In fact, the original research study that suggested that was the case was completely fraudulent. It was actually retracted from the journal Lancet, in which it was published, and that author, a physician, had his medical license taken away from him. (Applause) The Institute of Medicine, The Centers for Disease Control, have repeatedly investigated this and there is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism. Furthermore, one of the ingredients in vaccines, something called thimerosal, was thought to be what the cause of autism was. That was actually removed from vaccines in the year 1992, and you can see that it really did not have an effect in what happened with the prevalence of autism. So again, there is no evidence that this is the answer. So the question remains, what does cause autism? In fact, there's probably not one single answer. Just as autism is a spectrum, there's a spectrum of etiologies, a spectrum of causes. Based on epidemiological data, we know that one of the causes, or one of the associations, I should say, is advanced paternal age, that is, increasing age of the father at the time of conception. In addition, another vulnerable and critical period in terms of development is when the mother is pregnant. During that period, while the fetal brain is developing, we know that exposure to certain agents can actually increase the risk of autism. In particular, there's a medication, valproic acid, which mothers with epilepsy sometimes take, we know can increase that risk of autism. In addition, there can be some infectious agents that can also cause autism. And one of the things I'm going to spend a lot of time focusing on are the genes that can cause autism. I'm focusing on this not because genes are the only cause of autism, but it's a cause of autism that we can readily define and be able to better understand the biology and understand better how the brain works so that we can come up with strategies to be able to intervene. One of the genetic factors that we don't understand, however, is the difference that we see in terms of males and females. Males are affected four to one compared to females with autism, and we really don't understand what that cause is. One of the ways that we can understand that genetics is a factor is by looking at something called the concordance rate. In other words, if one sibling has autism, what's the probability that another sibling in that family will have autism? And we can look in particular at three types of siblings: identical twins, twins that actually share 100 percent of their genetic information and shared the same intrauterine environment, versus fraternal twins, twins that actually share 50 percent of their genetic information, versus regular siblings, brother-sister, sister-sister, also sharing 50 percent of their genetic information, yet not sharing the same intrauterine environment. And when you look at those concordance ratios, one of the striking things that you will see is that in identical twins, that concordance rate is 77 percent. Remarkably, though, it's not 100 percent. It is not that genes account for all of the risk for autism, but yet they account for a lot of that risk, because when you look at fraternal twins, that concordance rate is only 31 percent. On the other hand, there is a difference between those fraternal twins and the siblings, suggesting that there are common exposures for those fraternal twins that may not be shared as commonly with siblings alone. So this provides some of the data that autism is genetic. Well, how genetic is it? When we compare it to other conditions that we're familiar with, things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, in fact, genetics plays a much larger role in autism than it does in any of these other conditions. But with this, that doesn't tell us what the genes are. It doesn't even tell us in any one child, is it one gene or potentially a combination of genes? And so in fact, in some individuals with autism, it is genetic! That is, that it is one single, powerful, deterministic gene that causes the autism. However, in other individuals, it's genetic, that is, that it's actually a combination of genes in part with the developmental process that ultimately determines that risk for autism. We don't know in any one person, necessarily, which of those two answers it is until we start digging deeper. So the question becomes, how can we start to identify what exactly those genes are. And let me pose something that might not be intuitive. In certain individuals, they can have autism for a reason that is genetic but yet not because of autism running in the family. And the reason is because in certain individuals, they can actually have genetic changes or mutations that are not passed down from the mother or from the father, but actually start brand new in them, mutations that are present in the egg or the sperm at the time of conception but have not been passed down generation through generation within the family. And we can actually use that strategy to now understand and to identify those genes causing autism in those individuals. So in fact, at the Simons Foundation, we took 2,600 individuals that had no family history of autism, and we took that child and their mother and father and used them to try and understand what were those genes causing autism in those cases? To do that, we actually had to comprehensively be able to look at all that genetic information and determine what those differences were between the mother, the father and the child. In doing so, I apologize, I'm going to use an outdated analogy of encyclopedias rather than Wikipedia, but I'm going to do so to try and help make the point that as we did this inventory, we needed to be able to look at massive amounts of information. Our genetic information is organized into a set of 46 volumes, and when we did that, we had to be able to account for each of those 46 volumes, because in some cases with autism, there's actually a single volume that's missing. We had to get more granular than that, though, and so we had to start opening those books, and in some cases, the genetic change was more subtle. It might have been a single paragraph that was missing, or yet, even more subtle than that, a single letter, one out of three billion letters that was changed, that was altered, yet had profound effects in terms of how the brain functions and affects behavior. In doing this within these families, we were able to account for approximately 25 percent of the individuals and determine that there was a single powerful genetic factor that caused autism within those families. On the other hand, there's 75 percent that we still haven't figured out. As we did this, though, it was really quite humbling, because we realized that there was not simply one gene for autism. In fact, the current estimates are that there are 200 to 400 different genes that can cause autism. And that explains, in part, why we see such a broad spectrum in terms of its effects. Although there are that many genes, there is some method to the madness. It's not simply random 200, 400 different genes, but in fact they fit together. They fit together in a pathway. They fit together in a network that's starting to make sense now in terms of how the brain functions. We're starting to have a bottom-up approach where we're identifying those genes, those proteins, those molecules, understanding how they interact together to make that neuron work, understanding how those neurons interact together to make circuits work, and understand how those circuits work to now control behavior, and understand that both in individuals with autism as well as individuals who have normal cognition. But early diagnosis is a key for us. Being able to make that diagnosis of someone who's susceptible at a time in a window where we have the ability to transform, to be able to impact that growing, developing brain is critical. And so folks like Ami Klin have developed methods to be able to take infants, small babies, and be able to use biomarkers, in this case eye contact and eye tracking, to identify an infant at risk. This particular infant, you can see, making very good eye contact with this woman as she's singing "Itsy, Bitsy Spider," in fact is not going to develop autism. This baby we know is going to be in the clear. On the other hand, this other baby is going to go on to develop autism. In this particular child, you can see, it's not making good eye contact. Instead of the eyes focusing in and having that social connection, looking at the mouth, looking at the nose, looking off in another direction, but not again socially connecting, and being able to do this on a very large scale, screen infants, screen children for autism, through something very robust, very reliable, is going to be very helpful to us in terms of being able to intervene at an early stage when we can have the greatest impact. How are we going to intervene? It's probably going to be a combination of factors. In part, in some individuals, we're going to try and use medications. And so in fact, identifying the genes for autism is important for us to identify drug targets, to identify things that we might be able to impact and can be certain that that's really what we need to do in autism. But that's not going to be the only answer. Beyond just drugs, we're going to use educational strategies. Individuals with autism, some of them are wired a little bit differently. They learn in a different way. They absorb their surroundings in a different way, and we need to be able to educate them in a way that serves them best. Beyond that, there are a lot of individuals in this room who have great ideas in terms of new technologies we can use, everything from devices we can use to train the brain to be able to make it more efficient and to compensate for areas in which it has a little bit of trouble, to even things like Google Glass. You could imagine, for instance, Gabriel, with his social awkwardness, might be able to wear Google Glass with an earpiece in his ear, and have a coach be able to help him, be able to help think about conversations, conversation-starters, being able to even perhaps one day invite a girl out on a date. All of these new technologies just offer tremendous opportunities for us to be able to impact the individuals with autism, but yet we have a long way to go. As much as we know, there is so much more that we don't know, and so I invite all of you to be able to help us think about how to do this better, to use as a community our collective wisdom to be able to make a difference, and in particular, for the individuals in families with autism, I invite you to join the interactive autism network, to be part of the solution to this, because it's going to take really a lot of us to think about what's important, what's going to be a meaningful difference. As we think about something that's potentially a solution, how well does it work? Is it something that's really going to make a difference in your lives, as an individual, as a family with autism? We're going to need individuals of all ages, from the young to the old, and with all different shapes and sizes of the autism spectrum disorder to make sure that we can have an impact. So I invite all of you to join the mission and to help to be able to make the lives of individuals with autism so much better and so much richer. Thank you. (Applause) |
Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger? | {0: 'David Epstein is an investigative reporter who covers the wide-open space where sports, science and medicine overlap.'} | TED2014 | The Olympic motto is "Citius, Altius, Fortius." Faster, Higher, Stronger. And athletes have fulfilled that motto rapidly. The winner of the 2012 Olympic marathon ran two hours and eight minutes. Had he been racing against the winner of the 1904 Olympic marathon, he would have won by nearly an hour and a half. Now we all have this feeling that we're somehow just getting better as a human race, inexorably progressing, but it's not like we've evolved into a new species in a century. So what's going on here? I want to take a look at what's really behind this march of athletic progress. In 1936, Jesse Owens held the world record in the 100 meters. Had Jesse Owens been racing last year in the world championships of the 100 meters, when Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt finished, Owens would have still had 14 feet to go. That's a lot in sprinter land. To give you a sense of how much it is, I want to share with you a demonstration conceived by sports scientist Ross Tucker. Now picture the stadium last year at the world championships of the 100 meters: thousands of fans waiting with baited breath to see Usain Bolt, the fastest man in history; flashbulbs popping as the nine fastest men in the world coil themselves into their blocks. And I want you to pretend that Jesse Owens is in that race. Now close your eyes for a second and picture the race. Bang! The gun goes off. An American sprinter jumps out to the front. Usain Bolt starts to catch him. Usain Bolt passes him, and as the runners come to the finish, you'll hear a beep as each man crosses the line. (Beeps) That's the entire finish of the race. You can open your eyes now. That first beep was Usain Bolt. That last beep was Jesse Owens. Listen to it again. (Beeps) When you think of it like that, it's not that big a difference, is it? And then consider that Usain Bolt started by propelling himself out of blocks down a specially fabricated carpet designed to allow him to travel as fast as humanly possible. Jesse Owens, on the other hand, ran on cinders, the ash from burnt wood, and that soft surface stole far more energy from his legs as he ran. Rather than blocks, Jesse Owens had a gardening trowel that he had to use to dig holes in the cinders to start from. Biomechanical analysis of the speed of Owens' joints shows that had been running on the same surface as Bolt, he wouldn't have been 14 feet behind, he would have been within one stride. Rather than the last beep, Owens would have been the second beep. Listen to it again. (Beeps) That's the difference track surface technology has made, and it's done it throughout the running world. Consider a longer event. In 1954, Sir Roger Bannister became the first man to run under four minutes in the mile. Nowadays, college kids do that every year. On rare occasions, a high school kid does it. As of the end of last year, 1,314 men had run under four minutes in the mile, but like Jesse Owens, Sir Roger Bannister ran on soft cinders that stole far more energy from his legs than the synthetic tracks of today. So I consulted biomechanics experts to find out how much slower it is to run on cinders than synthetic tracks, and their consensus that it's one and a half percent slower. So if you apply a one and a half percent slowdown conversion to every man who ran his sub-four mile on a synthetic track, this is what happens. Only 530 are left. If you look at it from that perspective, fewer than ten new men per [year] have joined the sub-four mile club since Sir Roger Bannister. Now, 530 is a lot more than one, and that's partly because there are many more people training today and they're training more intelligently. Even college kids are professional in their training compared to Sir Roger Bannister, who trained for 45 minutes at a time while he ditched gynecology lectures in med school. And that guy who won the 1904 Olympic marathon in three in a half hours, that guy was drinking rat poison and brandy while he ran along the course. That was his idea of a performance-enhancing drug. (Laughter) Clearly, athletes have gotten more savvy about performance-enhancing drugs as well, and that's made a difference in some sports at some times, but technology has made a difference in all sports, from faster skis to lighter shoes. Take a look at the record for the 100-meter freestyle swim. The record is always trending downward, but it's punctuated by these steep cliffs. This first cliff, in 1956, is the introduction of the flip turn. Rather than stopping and turning around, athletes could somersault under the water and get going right away in the opposite direction. This second cliff, the introduction of gutters on the side of the pool that allows water to splash off, rather than becoming turbulence that impedes the swimmers as they race. This final cliff, the introduction of full-body and low-friction swimsuits. Throughout sports, technology has changed the face of performance. In 1972, Eddy Merckx set the record for the longest distance cycled in one hour at 30 miles, 3,774 feet. Now that record improved and improved as bicycles improved and became more aerodynamic all the way until 1996, when it was set at 35 miles, 1,531 feet, nearly five miles farther than Eddy Merckx cycled in 1972. But then in 2000, the International Cycling Union decreed that anyone who wanted to hold that record had to do so with essentially the same equipment that Eddy Merckx used in 1972. Where does the record stand today? 30 miles, 4,657 feet, a grand total of 883 feet farther than Eddy Merckx cycled more than four decades ago. Essentially the entire improvement in this record was due to technology. Still, technology isn't the only thing pushing athletes forward. While indeed we haven't evolved into a new species in a century, the gene pool within competitive sports most certainly has changed. In the early half of the 20th century, physical education instructors and coaches had the idea that the average body type was the best for all athletic endeavors: medium height, medium weight, no matter the sport. And this showed in athletes' bodies. In the 1920s, the average elite high-jumper and average elite shot-putter were the same exact size. But as that idea started to fade away, as sports scientists and coaches realized that rather than the average body type, you want highly specialized bodies that fit into certain athletic niches, a form of artificial selection took place, a self-sorting for bodies that fit certain sports, and athletes' bodies became more different from one another. Today, rather than the same size as the average elite high jumper, the average elite shot-putter is two and a half inches taller and 130 pounds heavier. And this happened throughout the sports world. In fact, if you plot on a height versus mass graph one data point for each of two dozen sports in the first half of the 20th century, it looks like this. There's some dispersal, but it's kind of grouped around that average body type. Then that idea started to go away, and at the same time, digital technology — first radio, then television and the Internet — gave millions, or in some cases billions, of people a ticket to consume elite sports performance. The financial incentives and fame and glory afforded elite athletes skyrocketed, and it tipped toward the tiny upper echelon of performance. It accelerated the artificial selection for specialized bodies. And if you plot a data point for these same two dozen sports today, it looks like this. The athletes' bodies have gotten much more different from one another. And because this chart looks like the charts that show the expanding universe, with the galaxies flying away from one another, the scientists who discovered it call it "The Big Bang of Body Types." In sports where height is prized, like basketball, the tall athletes got taller. In 1983, the National Basketball Association signed a groundbreaking agreement making players partners in the league, entitled to shares of ticket revenues and television contracts. Suddenly, anybody who could be an NBA player wanted to be, and teams started scouring the globe for the bodies that could help them win championships. Almost overnight, the proportion of men in the NBA who are at least seven feet tall doubled to 10 percent. Today, one in 10 men in the NBA is at least seven feet tall, but a seven-foot-tall man is incredibly rare in the general population — so rare that if you know an American man between the ages of 20 and 40 who is at least seven feet tall, there's a 17 percent chance he's in the NBA right now. (Laughter) That is, find six honest seven footers, one is in the NBA right now. And that's not the only way that NBA players' bodies are unique. This is Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man," the ideal proportions, with arm span equal to height. My arm span is exactly equal to my height. Yours is probably very nearly so. But not the average NBA player. The average NBA player is a shade under 6'7", with arms that are seven feet long. Not only are NBA players ridiculously tall, they are ludicrously long. Had Leonardo wanted to draw the Vitruvian NBA Player, he would have needed a rectangle and an ellipse, not a circle and a square. So in sports where large size is prized, the large athletes have gotten larger. Conversely, in sports where diminutive stature is an advantage, the small athletes got smaller. The average elite female gymnast shrunk from 5'3" to 4'9" on average over the last 30 years, all the better for their power-to-weight ratio and for spinning in the air. And while the large got larger and the small got smaller, the weird got weirder. The average length of the forearm of a water polo player in relation to their total arm got longer, all the better for a forceful throwing whip. And as the large got larger, small got smaller, and the weird weirder. In swimming, the ideal body type is a long torso and short legs. It's like the long hull of a canoe for speed over the water. And the opposite is advantageous in running. You want long legs and a short torso. And this shows in athletes' bodies today. Here you see Michael Phelps, the greatest swimmer in history, standing next to Hicham El Guerrouj, the world record holder in the mile. These men are seven inches different in height, but because of the body types advantaged in their sports, they wear the same length pants. Seven inches difference in height, these men have the same length legs. Now in some cases, the search for bodies that could push athletic performance forward ended up introducing into the competitive world populations of people that weren't previously competing at all, like Kenyan distance runners. We think of Kenyans as being great marathoners. Kenyans think of the Kalenjin tribe as being great marathoners. The Kalenjin make up just 12 percent of the Kenyan population but the vast majority of elite runners. And they happen, on average, to have a certain unique physiology: legs that are very long and very thin at their extremity, and this is because they have their ancestry at very low latitude in a very hot and dry climate, and an evolutionary adaptation to that is limbs that are very long and very thin at the extremity for cooling purposes. It's the same reason that a radiator has long coils, to increase surface area compared to volume to let heat out, and because the leg is like a pendulum, the longer and thinner it is at the extremity, the more energy-efficient it is to swing. To put Kalenjin running success in perspective, consider that 17 American men in history have run faster than two hours and 10 minutes in the marathon. That's a four-minute-and-58-second-per-mile pace. Thirty-two Kalenjin men did that last October. (Laughter) That's from a source population the size of metropolitan Atlanta. Still, even changing technology and the changing gene pool in sports don't account for all of the changes in performance. Athletes have a different mindset than they once did. Have you ever seen in a movie when someone gets an electrical shock and they're thrown across a room? There's no explosion there. What's happening when that happens is that the electrical impulse is causing all their muscle fibers to twitch at once, and they're throwing themselves across the room. They're essentially jumping. That's the power that's contained in the human body. But normally we can't access nearly all of it. Our brain acts as a limiter, preventing us from accessing all of our physical resources, because we might hurt ourselves, tearing tendons or ligaments. But the more we learn about how that limiter functions, the more we learn how we can push it back just a bit, in some cases by convincing the brain that the body won't be in mortal danger by pushing harder. Endurance and ultra-endurance sports serve as a great example. Ultra-endurance was once thought to be harmful to human health, but now we realize that we have all these traits that are perfect for ultra-endurance: no body fur and a glut of sweat glands that keep us cool while running; narrow waists and long legs compared to our frames; large surface area of joints for shock absorption. We have an arch in our foot that acts like a spring, short toes that are better for pushing off than for grasping tree limbs, and when we run, we can turn our torso and our shoulders like this while keeping our heads straight. Our primate cousins can't do that. They have to run like this. And we have big old butt muscles that keep us upright while running. Have you ever looked at an ape's butt? They have no buns because they don't run upright. And as athletes have realized that we're perfectly suited for ultra-endurance, they've taken on feats that would have been unthinkable before, athletes like Spanish endurance racer Kílian Jornet. Here's Kílian running up the Matterhorn. (Laughter) With a sweatshirt there tied around his waist. It's so steep he can't even run here. He's pulling up on a rope. This is a vertical ascent of more than 8,000 feet, and Kílian went up and down in under three hours. Amazing. And talented though he is, Kílian is not a physiological freak. Now that he has done this, other athletes will follow, just as other athletes followed after Sir Roger Bannister ran under four minutes in the mile. Changing technology, changing genes, and a changing mindset. Innovation in sports, whether that's new track surfaces or new swimming techniques, the democratization of sport, the spread to new bodies and to new populations around the world, and imagination in sport, an understanding of what the human body is truly capable of, have conspired to make athletes stronger, faster, bolder, and better than ever. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Get your next eye exam on a smartphone | {0: 'TED Fellow Andrew Bastawrous studies eye health -- and builds accessible new tools to bring eye care to more people.'} | TED2014 | There are 39 million people in the world who are blind. Eighty percent of them are living in low-income countries such as Kenya, and the absolute majority do not need to be blind. They are blind from diseases that are either completely curable or preventable. Knowing this, with my young family, we moved to Kenya. We secured equipment, funds, vehicles, we trained a team, we set up a hundred clinics throughout the Great Rift Valley to try and understand a single question: why are people going blind, and what can we do? The challenges were great. When we got to where we were going, we set up our high-tech equipment. Power was rarely available. We'd have to run our equipment from petrol power generators. And then something occurred to me: There has to be an easier way, because it's the patients who are the most in need of access to eye care who are the least likely to get it. More people in Kenya, and in sub-Saharan Africa, have access to a mobile phone than they do clean running water. So we said, could we harness the power of mobile technology to deliver eye care in a new way? And so we developed Peek, a smartphone [system] that enables community healthcare workers and empowers them to deliver eye care everywhere. We set about replacing traditional hospital equipment, which is bulky, expensive and fragile, with smartphone apps and hardware that make it possible to test anyone in any language and of any age. Here we have a demonstration of a three-month-old having their vision accurately tested using an app and an eye tracker. We've got many trials going on in the community and in schools, and through the lessons that we've learned in the field, we've realized it's extremely important to share the data in non-medical jargon so that people understand what we're examining and what that means to them. So here, for example, we use our sight sim application, once your vision has been measured, to show carers and teachers what the visual world is like for that person, so they can empathize with them and help them. Once we've discovered somebody has low vision, the next big challenge is to work out why, and to be able to do that, we need to have access to the inside of the eye. Traditionally, this requires expensive equipment to examine an area called the retina. The retina is the single part of the eye that has huge amounts of information about the body and its health. We've developed 3D-printed, low-cost hardware that comes in at less than five dollars to produce, which can then be clipped onto a smartphone and makes it possible to get views of the back of the eye of a very high quality. And the beauty is, anybody can do it. In our trials on over two and half thousand people, the smartphone with the add-on clip is comparable to a camera that is hugely more expensive and hugely more difficult to transport. When we first moved to Kenya, we went with 150,000 dollars of equipment, a team of 15 people, and that was what was needed to deliver health care. Now, all that's needed is a single person on a bike with a smartphone. And it costs just 500 dollars. The issue of power supply is overcome by harnessing the power of solar. Our healthcare workers travel with a solar-powered rucksack which keeps the phone charged and backed up. Now we go to the patient rather than waiting for the patient never to come. We go to them in their homes and we give them the most comprehensive, high-tech, accurate examination, which can be delivered by anyone with minimal training. We can link global experts with people in the most rural, difficult-to-reach places that are beyond the end of the road, effectively putting those experts in their homes, allowing us to make diagnoses and make plans for treatment. Project managers, hospital directors, are able to search on our interface by any parameter they may be interested in. Here in Nakuru, where I've been living, we can search for people by whatever condition. Here are people who are blind from a curable condition cataract. Each red pin depicts somebody who is blind from a disease that is curable and treatable, and they're locatable. We can use bulk text messaging services to explain that we're coming to arrange a treatment. What's more, we've learned that this is something that we haven't built just for the community but with the community. Those blue pins that drop represent elders, or local leaders, that are connected to those people who can ensure that we can find them and arrange treatment. So for patients like Mama Wangari, who have been blind for over 10 years and never seen her grandchildren, for less than 40 dollars, we can restore her eyesight. This is something that has to happen. It's only in statistics that people go blind by the millions. The reality is everyone goes blind on their own. But now, they might just be a text message away from help. (Applause) And now because live demos are always a bad idea, we're going to try a live demo. (Laughter) So here we have the Peek Vision app. Okay, and what we're looking at here, this is Sam's optic nerve, which is a direct extension of her brain, so I'm actually looking at her brain as we look there. We can see all parts of the retina. It makes it possible to pick up diseases of the eye and of the body that would not be possible without access to the eye, and that clip-on device can be manufactured for just a few dollars, and people can be cured of blindness, and I think it says a lot about us as a human race if we've developed cures and we don't deliver them. But now we can. Thank you. (Applause) |
The emergent patterns of climate change | {0: 'What goes into a climate model? Gavin Schmidt looks at how we use past and present data to model potential futures.'} | TED2014 | We live in a very complex environment: complexity and dynamism and patterns of evidence from satellite photographs, from videos. You can even see it outside your window. It's endlessly complex, but somehow familiar, but the patterns kind of repeat, but they never repeat exactly. It's a huge challenge to understand. The patterns that you see are there at all of the different scales, but you can't chop it into one little bit and say, "Oh, well let me just make a smaller climate." I can't use the normal products of reductionism to get a smaller and smaller thing that I can study in a laboratory and say, "Oh, now that's something I now understand." It's the whole or it's nothing. The different scales that give you these kinds of patterns range over an enormous range of magnitude, roughly 14 orders of magnitude, from the small microscopic particles that seed clouds to the size of the planet itself, from 10 to the minus six to 10 to the eight, 14 orders of spatial magnitude. In time, from milliseconds to millennia, again around 14 orders of magnitude. What does that mean? Okay, well if you think about how you can calculate these things, you can take what you can see, okay, I'm going to chop it up into lots of little boxes, and that's the result of physics, right? And if I think about a weather model, that spans about five orders of magnitude, from the planet to a few kilometers, and the time scale from a few minutes to 10 days, maybe a month. We're interested in more than that. We're interested in the climate. That's years, that's millennia, and we need to go to even smaller scales. The stuff that we can't resolve, the sub-scale processes, we need to approximate in some way. That is a huge challenge. Climate models in the 1990s took an even smaller chunk of that, only about three orders of magnitude. Climate models in the 2010s, kind of what we're working with now, four orders of magnitude. We have 14 to go, and we're increasing our capability of simulating those at about one extra order of magnitude every decade. One extra order of magnitude in space is 10,000 times more calculations. And we keep adding more things, more questions to these different models. So what does a climate model look like? This is an old climate model, admittedly, a punch card, a single line of Fortran code. We no longer use punch cards. We do still use Fortran. New-fangled ideas like C really haven't had a big impact on the climate modeling community. But how do we go about doing it? How do we go from that complexity that you saw to a line of code? We do it one piece at a time. This is a picture of sea ice taken flying over the Arctic. We can look at all of the different equations that go into making the ice grow or melt or change shape. We can look at the fluxes. We can look at the rate at which snow turns to ice, and we can code that. We can encapsulate that in code. These models are around a million lines of code at this point, and growing by tens of thousands of lines of code every year. So you can look at that piece, but you can look at the other pieces too. What happens when you have clouds? What happens when clouds form, when they dissipate, when they rain out? That's another piece. What happens when we have radiation coming from the sun, going through the atmosphere, being absorbed and reflected? We can code each of those very small pieces as well. There are other pieces: the winds changing the ocean currents. We can talk about the role of vegetation in transporting water from the soils back into the atmosphere. And each of these different elements we can encapsulate and put into a system. Each of those pieces ends up adding to the whole. And you get something like this. You get a beautiful representation of what's going on in the climate system, where each and every one of those emergent patterns that you can see, the swirls in the Southern Ocean, the tropical cyclone in the Gulf of Mexico, and there's two more that are going to pop up in the Pacific at any point now, those rivers of atmospheric water, all of those are emergent properties that come from the interactions of all of those small-scale processes I mentioned. There's no code that says, "Do a wiggle in the Southern Ocean." There's no code that says, "Have two tropical cyclones that spin around each other." All of those things are emergent properties. This is all very good. This is all great. But what we really want to know is what happens to these emergent properties when we kick the system? When something changes, what happens to those properties? And there's lots of different ways to kick the system. There are wobbles in the Earth's orbit over hundreds of thousands of years that change the climate. There are changes in the solar cycles, every 11 years and longer, that change the climate. Big volcanoes go off and change the climate. Changes in biomass burning, in smoke, in aerosol particles, all of those things change the climate. The ozone hole changed the climate. Deforestation changes the climate by changing the surface properties and how water is evaporated and moved around in the system. Contrails change the climate by creating clouds where there were none before, and of course greenhouse gases change the system. Each of these different kicks provides us with a target to evaluate whether we understand something about this system. So we can go to look at what model skill is. Now I use the word "skill" advisedly: Models are not right or wrong; they're always wrong. They're always approximations. The question you have to ask is whether a model tells you more information than you would have had otherwise. If it does, it's skillful. This is the impact of the ozone hole on sea level pressure, so low pressure, high pressures, around the southern oceans, around Antarctica. This is observed data. This is modeled data. There's a good match because we understand the physics that controls the temperatures in the stratosphere and what that does to the winds around the southern oceans. We can look at other examples. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 put an enormous amount of aerosols, small particles, into the stratosphere. That changed the radiation balance of the whole planet. There was less energy coming in than there was before, so that cooled the planet, and those red lines and those green lines, those are the differences between what we expected and what actually happened. The models are skillful, not just in the global mean, but also in the regional patterns. I could go through a dozen more examples: the skill associated with solar cycles, changing the ozone in the stratosphere; the skill associated with orbital changes over 6,000 years. We can look at that too, and the models are skillful. The models are skillful in response to the ice sheets 20,000 years ago. The models are skillful when it comes to the 20th-century trends over the decades. Models are successful at modeling lake outbursts into the North Atlantic 8,000 years ago. And we can get a good match to the data. Each of these different targets, each of these different evaluations, leads us to add more scope to these models, and leads us to more and more complex situations that we can ask more and more interesting questions, like, how does dust from the Sahara, that you can see in the orange, interact with tropical cyclones in the Atlantic? How do organic aerosols from biomass burning, which you can see in the red dots, intersect with clouds and rainfall patterns? How does pollution, which you can see in the white wisps of sulfate pollution in Europe, how does that affect the temperatures at the surface and the sunlight that you get at the surface? We can look at this across the world. We can look at the pollution from China. We can look at the impacts of storms on sea salt particles in the atmosphere. We can see the combination of all of these different things happening all at once, and we can ask much more interesting questions. How do air pollution and climate coexist? Can we change things that affect air pollution and climate at the same time? The answer is yes. So this is a history of the 20th century. The first one is the model. The weather is a little bit different to what actually happened. The second one are the observations. And we're going through the 1930s. There's variability, there are things going on, but it's all kind of in the noise. As you get towards the 1970s, things are going to start to change. They're going to start to look more similar, and by the time you get to the 2000s, you're already seeing the patterns of global warming, both in the observations and in the model. We know what happened over the 20th century. Right? We know that it's gotten warmer. We know where it's gotten warmer. And if you ask the models why did that happen, and you say, okay, well, yes, basically it's because of the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere. We have a very good match up until the present day. But there's one key reason why we look at models, and that's because of this phrase here. Because if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, But unfortunately, observations of the future are not available at this time. So when we go out into the future, there's a difference. The future is unknown, the future is uncertain, and there are choices. Here are the choices that we have. We can do some work to mitigate the emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That's the top one. We can do more work to really bring it down so that by the end of the century, it's not much more than there is now. Or we can just leave it to fate and continue on with a business-as-usual type of attitude. The differences between these choices can't be answered by looking at models. There's a great phrase that Sherwood Rowland, who won the Nobel Prize for the chemistry that led to ozone depletion, when he was accepting his Nobel Prize, he asked this question: "What is the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?" The models are skillful, but what we do with the information from those models is totally up to you. Thank you. (Applause) |
What does the future hold? 11 characters offer quirky answers | {0: 'Tony Award-winning monologist, UNICEF ambassador, firebrand and FCC-fighting poet -- Sarah Jones assumes as many roles offstage as on.'} | TED2014 | First of all, for those of you who are not familiar with my work, I create multicultural characters, so characters from lots of different backgrounds. So before the present is the new future, a bit about the past is that I grew up in a family that was multi-everything — multi-racial, multi-cultural, black and white, Caribbean, Irish-American, German-American. There was Dominican music blasting from stereos. There were Christians and Jews. That's a long story filled with intrigue and interfaith guilt and shame. But I was totally immersed in this world that was filled with everybody, and then I went on to the United Nations school, and that just completely — So I began sort of developing these voices and these people, all of whom were loosely based on people I really know, and so, for example, in performing them, I would really try to inhabit them. And for example, I don't really talk like that, but that was one of my people, and I'm going to bring a few of my friends — I think of them as my friends — to this stage, in this spirit of the idea that the present is the new future, in sort of a meta way, because I thought about it, and the future, for me, what can be so frightening is that I don't know what's coming. I don't know if that's true for other people, but that notion of thinking about how we can understand the future and predict outcomes, for me, it's terrifying to not know what might be coming. And so the idea that there are questions that I've never seen that my people are going to answer, and some of these characters have been with me for ages, some of them don't even have names, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what's coming, and all I can do is remind myself that I told Chris I'd fly by the seat of my pants, and now that I'm up here it sort of feels like that dream where you don't have any pants on, and so I suppose I'm going to be flying by the seat of my ass. That said, let's just see who comes out. May we have the first question: "Do you ever get headaches from the microchips implanted in your brain?" Right. Okay. Well first of all, I'll just say that I hope you can hear me okay. My name is Lorraine Levine, and the idea of microchips implanted in my brain, frankly, just putting on my glasses reminds me of thank God I'm not wearing the Google Glasses. No offense to them. I'm glad that you all enjoy them, but at my age, just putting on the regular ones I have already gives me too much information. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? I don't need to know more. I don't want to know. That's it. That's enough. I love you all. You're wonderful. It's fabulous to be here with such big machers again this year. Mwah! Okay, next question. (Applause) Next, please. "Is dating boring, now that humans reproduce asexually?" Who do we got? Hi, um, okay, hi everybody. My name is Nereida. I just want to say first of all that dating is never boring under any circumstance. But I am very excited to be here right now, so I am just trying to remind myself that, you know, like, the purpose of being here and everything, I mean, trying to answer these questions, it is very exciting. But I also, I just need to acknowledge that TED is an incredible experience right now in the present, like, I just need to say, like, Isabel Allende. Isabel Allende! Okay, maybe it doesn't mean, of course it means something to you, but to me, it's like, another level, okay? Because I'm Latina and I really appreciate the fact that there are role models here that I can really, I don't know, I just need to say that. That's incredible to me, and sometimes when I'm nervous and everything like that, I just need to, like, say some affirmations that can help me. I usually just try to use, like, the three little words that always make me feel better: Sotomayor, Sotomayor, Sotomayor. (Laughter) Just, it really helps me to get grounded. Now I can use Allende, Allende, Allende, and, you know, I just need to say it, like, it's so incredible to be here, and I knew that we were going to have these questions. I was so nervous and I was thinking just, like, oh my God, oh my God, and reminding me, because I've had, like, some very, especially since the last time we were here at TED, it was, like, unbelievable, and then right after that, like, so many crazy things happened, like, we ended up going to the White House to perform. That was, like, amazing, and I'm standing there, and I was just like, please don't say, "Oh my God." Don't say, "Oh my God." And I just kept saying it: "Oh my God. Oh my God." And, you know, I kept thinking to myself, like, President Obama has to come up here at the same podium, and I'm standing here saying, "Oh my God." It's like, the separation of church and state. It's just, I couldn't, like, I couldn't process. It was really too much. So I think I've lost my way. But what I wanted to say is that dating, for me, you know, as far as I'm concerned, however you reproduce, as long as you're enjoying yourself and it's with another consenting asexual — I don't know. You know where I'm going with that. Okay, ciao, gracias. Okay, next question. (Applause) What are your top five favorite songs right now? All right, well first of all, I'mma say, you know what I'm saying, I'm the only dude up here right now. My name is Rashid, and I never been at TED before, you know what I'm saying. I think, Sarah Jones, maybe she didn't want me to come out last time. I don't know why. You know what I'm saying. Obviously I would be like a perfect fit for TED. You know what I'm saying. First of all, that I'm in hip hop, you know what I'm saying. I know some of y'all may be not really as much into the music, but the first way y'all can always know, you know what I'm saying, that I'm in hip hop, is 'cos I hold the microphone in an official emcee posture. Y'all can see that right there. That's how you hold it. All right, so you get your little tutorial right there. But when Sarah Jones told me we was gonna come up here, I was like, betch, you know what I'm saying, TED is real fly, I got a whole lot of dope, you know what I'm saying, shit going on and everything, but she was like, yeah, we're going to have to answer, like, some random questions, just like, and I was like, what the hell is that? You know what I'm saying, just stand up there and answer some random questions? I don't want to, I mean, it's like an intellectual stop-and-frisk. You know what I'm saying? (Laughter) I don't want to be standing up there just all getting interrogated and whatnot. That's what I'm trying to leave behind in New York. You know what I'm saying? So anyway, I would have to say my top five songs right now is all out of my own personal catalogue, you know what I mean? So if you want to know more about that, you know what I'm saying, we could talk about the anti-piracy and all that, but as far as I'm concerned, you know, I believe in creative commons, and I think it's really important that, you know, that needs to be sustainable and everything, and I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I mean, this right here, this environment, I would like to sustain. You know what I mean? But I'm just saying, if y'all are interested in the top five songs, you need to holler at me. You know what I'm saying? Aight? In the future or the present. Yeah. Enjoy the rest of it. Okay, next question. What do you got? "How many of your organs have been 3D printed?" (Laughter) Well I have to say that I don't know about how many of my organs have been 3-D printed as such, but I can tell you that it is so challenging to me, kind of thinking about this concept of the future and that, you know, all around the world parents are kind of telling their small children, please, you have to eat that, you know, I have slaved over a hot 3D printer all day so that you can have this meal. You know, that kind of thing. And of course now that we have changed, you know, from the global South, there is this total kind of perspective shift that is happening around the — You can't just say to them, well, there are starving children. Well, it is the future. Nobody is starving anymore, thank God. But as you can tell I have kind of that optimism, and I do hope that we can continue to kind of 3D print, well, let us just say I like to think that even in the future we will have the publication, kind of, you know, all the food that's fit to print. But everybody, please do enjoy that, and again, I think that you do throw a cracking good party here at TED. Thank you. Next question. (Applause) What has changed? Okay, it's like, I have to think about that. "What has changed now that women run the world?" First of all, I really, like, I just want to say, and my name is Bella, I just want to, like, identify myself, that, like, as a feminist, I, like, I really find that, like, because I was born in the '90s, and, like, there were a lot of women who were as far as feminism was concerned, like, maybe they didn't understand that, like, a feminist like me, like, I don't think it's required that you have to have a certain kind of voice, or, like, a certain way of presenting yourself to be feminist, because I think that, like, feminism can be really hot, and I think actually that it's really vital and important. Like, the quotation I'm wearing is from, like, Gloria Steinem, and, like, I'm named Bella for, like, Bella Abzug, who's, like, obviously, like, a really important feminist from, like, history, and like, I just think that those women, like, really represent, like, that you can, like, be vital and, like, amazing, like, a-mazing, and you don't have to wear, like, an Eileen Fisher caftan, just to, like, prove that you are a feminist. Like, not that there's anything wrong with that, but my mom, she's like, like, why do you have to wear pants that, like, objectify your body? I like my pants. Like, I like my voice. Like, she's like, why do you have to talk like — Talk like what? Like, I'm expressing myself, and I think that we have to, like, reach out, like, not only across, like, the different generations of feminists, but also across the, like, vocal ranges, so that, like, we, because otherwise it's just, like, restriculous within feminism, which is just, like, a word that I created that means, like, so strict it's ridiculous. So that's my feeling about that. You guys are a-mazing, by the way. Okay. Next question. (Applause) ["They've discovered a cure for cancer, but not baldness? What's up with that?"] Yeah, you know what, so my name is Joseph Mancuso. First of all, I just want to say that I appreciate that TED in general has been a pretty orderly crowd, a pretty orderly group. And, you know, I just have to say, the whole thing with baldness, and, you know, here's the thing. As long as the woman, in my case — because it's a modern world, do whatever you want to do, I don't have any problem with anybody, enjoy yourself, LGBTQLMNOP. All right? But as far as I'm concerned, attractiveness, women don't really care as much as you think they do about the, you know. I mean, I remember hearing this woman. She loved her husband, it was the sweetest thing. It's a pretty young girl, you know? And this guy's older. And, you know, she said she would love him even if he had snow on the roof or even if melted and disappeared altogether. As far as I'm concerned, it's about the love. Am I right, or am I right? So that's it. That's it. That's it. I don't got nothing more to say. Keep your noses clean. All right, next question. "Have you ever tasted meat that's not lab grown?" Um, well, I, I want to start by saying that this is a very difficult experience for a Chinese-American. I don't know what to call myself now, because I have really my Chinese identity, but my kids, they are American-Chinese, but it's difficult to try to express myself in front of audience of people like this. But if had to give my opinion about meat, I think first, the most important thing is to say that we don't have to have perfect food, but maybe it can also not be poison. Maybe we can have some middle ground for that. But I will continue to consider this idea, and I will report back maybe next year. Next. Next. Next. (Applause) "Will there ever be a post-racial world?" Thank you for having me. My name is Gary Weaselhead. Enjoy that. I'm a member of the Blackfeet Nation. I'm also half Lakota, but that is my given name, and no, even though it would have seemed like an obvious choice, no, I did not go into politics. Tough crowd. (Laughter) But I always like to just let people know when they ask about race or those kinds of things, you know, as a member of the First Nations community, you know, I'm probably not your typical guy. For example, in addition to being an activist, I'm also a professional stand-up comedian. (Laughter) And, you know, I'm most popular on college and university campuses. You know, whenever they want to do a diversity day, or hey-we're-not-all-white week, then I'm there. (Laughter) Do I think there will ever be a post-racial world? I think, really, I can't talk about race without remembering that it is a construct in certain respects, but also that, you know, until we redress the wrongs of the past, we're going to be turned around. I don't care if the present is the new future. I think there's a lot of great people here at TED who are working to address that, so with that, if anything I've said today makes you feel uncomfortable, you're welcome. (Applause) I think we have time for one more. "What's the most popular diet these days?" Who's here? Okay, well, I'm just gonna answer this really fast, as, like, three or four different people. I mean really fast. I'm just gonna let y'all know that, as far as diet is concerned, if you don't love yourself inside, there is no diet on this Earth that is going to make your behind small enough for you to feel good, so just stop wasting your time. I would just like to say as an African woman that I believe the diet that we need is really to remove the crazy belief that there is anything wrong with a nice backside. No, I am teasing about that. There is nothing wrong with a woman of size. That is what I am trying to say. Women, celebrate your body, for God's sake. Stop running around starving. You are making yourselves and other people miserable. Last answer. So we're talking about what's the most popular diet? I'm gonna start off by telling y'all that this is my first time here at TED. I might not be your typical person you find on this stage. My dental work not as nice as some people. But I made Sarah Jones promise she gonna bring me this time, 'cause she didn't bring me before, but you know, I just want to say, there's a lot of things more important than counting calories, and as somebody living on the streets in New York, and getting to come here, hear y'all ideas worth spreading, I want to tell y'all I believe in this idea that the present is the new future, that where you sit, you create everything that's gonna come, for better or worse. And for me, I think homeless is the wrong word for it anyway. You know, I might not have me no place to lay my head at night, but that just makes me houseless. I have me a home. You do too. Find it and try to find yourself in there. Make sure you know, it's not just about virtual reality in space. That's wonderful, but it's also about the actual reality here on Earth. How are people living today? How can you be part of the solution? Thank y'all for thinking about that right now in the present moment to influence the future. I appreciate it. Bye-bye. (Applause) Thank you all very, very much. Thank you for trusting me, Chris. (Applause) |
Color blind or color brave? | {0: 'Mellody Hobson is president of Ariel Investments, a value-driven money management firm -- and an advocate for financial literacy and investor education.'} | TED2014 | So it's 2006. My friend Harold Ford calls me. He's running for U.S. Senate in Tennessee, and he says, "Mellody, I desperately need some national press. Do you have any ideas?" So I had an idea. I called a friend who was in New York at one of the most successful media companies in the world, and she said, "Why don't we host an editorial board lunch for Harold? You come with him." Harold and I arrive in New York. We are in our best suits. We look like shiny new pennies. And we get to the receptionist, and we say, "We're here for the lunch." She motions for us to follow her. We walk through a series of corridors, and all of a sudden we find ourselves in a stark room, at which point she looks at us and she says, "Where are your uniforms?" Just as this happens, my friend rushes in. The blood drains from her face. There are literally no words, right? And I look at her, and I say, "Now, don't you think we need more than one black person in the U.S. Senate?" Now Harold and I — (Applause) — we still laugh about that story, and in many ways, the moment caught me off guard, but deep, deep down inside, I actually wasn't surprised. And I wasn't surprised because of something my mother taught me about 30 years before. You see, my mother was ruthlessly realistic. I remember one day coming home from a birthday party where I was the only black kid invited, and instead of asking me the normal motherly questions like, "Did you have fun?" or "How was the cake?" my mother looked at me and she said, "How did they treat you?" I was seven. I did not understand. I mean, why would anyone treat me differently? But she knew. And she looked me right in the eye and she said, "They will not always treat you well." Now, race is one of those topics in America that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable. You bring it up at a dinner party or in a workplace environment, it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail. There is shock, followed by a long silence. And even coming here today, I told some friends and colleagues that I planned to talk about race, and they warned me, they told me, don't do it, that there'd be huge risks in me talking about this topic, that people might think I'm a militant black woman and I would ruin my career. And I have to tell you, I actually for a moment was a bit afraid. Then I realized, the first step to solving any problem is to not hide from it, and the first step to any form of action is awareness. And so I decided to actually talk about race. And I decided that if I came here and shared with you some of my experiences, that maybe we could all be a little less anxious and a little more bold in our conversations about race. Now I know there are people out there who will say that the election of Barack Obama meant that it was the end of racial discrimination for all eternity, right? But I work in the investment business, and we have a saying: The numbers do not lie. And here, there are significant, quantifiable racial disparities that cannot be ignored, in household wealth, household income, job opportunities, healthcare. One example from corporate America: Even though white men make up just 30 percent of the U.S. population, they hold 70 percent of all corporate board seats. Of the Fortune 250, there are only seven CEOs that are minorities, and of the thousands of publicly traded companies today, thousands, only two are chaired by black women, and you're looking at one of them, the same one who, not too long ago, was nearly mistaken for kitchen help. So that is a fact. Now I have this thought experiment that I play with myself, when I say, imagine if I walked you into a room and it was of a major corporation, like ExxonMobil, and every single person around the boardroom were black, you would think that were weird. But if I walked you into a Fortune 500 company, and everyone around the table is a white male, when will it be that we think that's weird too? And I know how we got here. (Applause) I know how we got here. You know, there was institutionalized, at one time legalized, discrimination in our country. There's no question about it. But still, as I grapple with this issue, my mother's question hangs in the air for me: How did they treat you? Now, I do not raise this issue to complain or in any way to elicit any kind of sympathy. I have succeeded in my life beyond my wildest expectations, and I have been treated well by people of all races more often than I have not. I tell the uniform story because it happened. I cite those statistics around corporate board diversity because they are real, and I stand here today talking about this issue of racial discrimination because I believe it threatens to rob another generation of all the opportunities that all of us want for all of our children, no matter what their color or where they come from. And I think it also threatens to hold back businesses. You see, researchers have coined this term "color blindness" to describe a learned behavior where we pretend that we don't notice race. If you happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who look like you, that's purely accidental. Now, color blindness, in my view, doesn't mean that there's no racial discrimination, and there's fairness. It doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't ensure it. In my view, color blindness is very dangerous because it means we're ignoring the problem. There was a corporate study that said that, instead of avoiding race, the really smart corporations actually deal with it head on. They actually recognize that embracing diversity means recognizing all races, including the majority one. But I'll be the first one to tell you, this subject matter can be hard, awkward, uncomfortable — but that's kind of the point. In the spirit of debunking racial stereotypes, the one that black people don't like to swim, I'm going to tell you how much I love to swim. I love to swim so much that as an adult, I swim with a coach. And one day my coach had me do a drill where I had to swim to one end of a 25-meter pool without taking a breath. And every single time I failed, I had to start over. And I failed a lot. By the end, I got it, but when I got out of the pool, I was exasperated and tired and annoyed, and I said, "Why are we doing breath-holding exercises?" And my coach looked me at me, and he said, "Mellody, that was not a breath-holding exercise. That drill was to make you comfortable being uncomfortable, because that's how most of us spend our days." If we can learn to deal with our discomfort, and just relax into it, we'll have a better life. So I think it's time for us to be comfortable with the uncomfortable conversation about race: black, white, Asian, Hispanic, male, female, all of us, if we truly believe in equal rights and equal opportunity in America, I think we have to have real conversations about this issue. We cannot afford to be color blind. We have to be color brave. We have to be willing, as teachers and parents and entrepreneurs and scientists, we have to be willing to have proactive conversations about race with honesty and understanding and courage, not because it's the right thing to do, but because it's the smart thing to do, because our businesses and our products and our science, our research, all of that will be better with greater diversity. Now, my favorite example of color bravery is a guy named John Skipper. He runs ESPN. He's a North Carolina native, quintessential Southern gentleman, white. He joined ESPN, which already had a culture of inclusion and diversity, but he took it up a notch. He demanded that every open position have a diverse slate of candidates. Now he says the senior people in the beginning bristled, and they would come to him and say, "Do you want me to hire the minority, or do you want me to hire the best person for the job?" And Skipper says his answers were always the same: "Yes." And by saying yes to diversity, I honestly believe that ESPN is the most valuable cable franchise in the world. I think that's a part of the secret sauce. Now I can tell you, in my own industry, at Ariel Investments, we actually view our diversity as a competitive advantage, and that advantage can extend way beyond business. There's a guy named Scott Page at the University of Michigan. He is the first person to develop a mathematical calculation for diversity. He says, if you're trying to solve a really hard problem, really hard, that you should have a diverse group of people, including those with diverse intellects. The example that he gives is the smallpox epidemic. When it was ravaging Europe, they brought together all these scientists, and they were stumped. And the beginnings of the cure to the disease came from the most unlikely source, a dairy farmer who noticed that the milkmaids were not getting smallpox. And the smallpox vaccination is bovine-based because of that dairy farmer. Now I'm sure you're sitting here and you're saying, I don't run a cable company, I don't run an investment firm, I am not a dairy farmer. What can I do? And I'm telling you, you can be color brave. If you're part of a hiring process or an admissions process, you can be color brave. If you are trying to solve a really hard problem, you can speak up and be color brave. Now I know people will say, but that doesn't add up to a lot, but I'm actually asking you to do something really simple: observe your environment, at work, at school, at home. I'm asking you to look at the people around you purposefully and intentionally. Invite people into your life who don't look like you, don't think like you, don't act like you, don't come from where you come from, and you might find that they will challenge your assumptions and make you grow as a person. You might get powerful new insights from these individuals, or, like my husband, who happens to be white, you might learn that black people, men, women, children, we use body lotion every single day. Now, I also think that this is very important so that the next generation really understands that this progress will help them, because they're expecting us to be great role models. Now, I told you, my mother, she was ruthlessly realistic. She was an unbelievable role model. She was the kind of person who got to be the way she was because she was a single mom with six kids in Chicago. She was in the real estate business, where she worked extraordinarily hard but oftentimes had a hard time making ends meet. And that meant sometimes we got our phone disconnected, or our lights turned off, or we got evicted. When we got evicted, sometimes we lived in these small apartments that she owned, sometimes in only one or two rooms, because they weren't completed, and we would heat our bathwater on hot plates. But she never gave up hope, ever, and she never allowed us to give up hope either. This brutal pragmatism that she had, I mean, I was four and she told me, "Mommy is Santa." (Laughter) She was this brutal pragmatism. She taught me so many lessons, but the most important lesson was that every single day she told me, "Mellody, you can be anything." And because of those words, I would wake up at the crack of dawn, and because of those words, I would love school more than anything, and because of those words, when I was on a bus going to school, I dreamed the biggest dreams. And it's because of those words that I stand here right now full of passion, asking you to be brave for the kids who are dreaming those dreams today. (Applause) You see, I want them to look at a CEO on television and say, "I can be like her," or, "He looks like me." And I want them to know that anything is possible, that they can achieve the highest level that they ever imagined, that they will be welcome in any corporate boardroom, or they can lead any company. You see this idea of being the land of the free and the home of the brave, it's woven into the fabric of America. America, when we have a challenge, we take it head on, we don't shrink away from it. We take a stand. We show courage. So right now, what I'm asking you to do, I'm asking you to show courage. I'm asking you to be bold. As business leaders, I'm asking you not to leave anything on the table. As citizens, I'm asking you not to leave any child behind. I'm asking you not to be color blind, but to be color brave, so that every child knows that their future matters and their dreams are possible. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. (Applause) |
And for my next trick, a robot | {0: 'Using technology and an array of special effects, Marco Tempest develops immersive environments that allow viewers to viscerally experience the magic of technology.'} | TED2014 | Let me introduce you to something I've been working on. It's what the Victorian illusionists would have described as a mechanical marvel, an automaton, a thinking machine. Say hello to EDI. Now he's asleep. Let's wake him up. EDI, EDI. These mechanical performers were popular throughout Europe. Audiences marveled at the way they moved. It was science fiction made true, robotic engineering in a pre-electronic age, machines far in advance of anything that Victorian technology could create, a machine we would later know as the robot. EDI: Robot. A word coined in 1921 in a science fiction tale by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek. It comes from "robota." It means "forced labor." Marco Tempest: But these robots were not real. They were not intelligent. They were illusions, a clever combination of mechanical engineering and the deceptiveness of the conjurer's art. EDI is different. EDI is real. EDI: I am 176 centimeters tall. MT: He weighs 300 pounds. EDI: I have two seven-axis arms — MT: Core of sensing — EDI: A 360-degree sonar detection system, and come complete with a warranty. MT: We love robots. EDI: Hi. I'm EDI. Will you be my friend? MT: We are intrigued by the possibility of creating a mechanical version of ourselves. We build them so they look like us, behave like us, and think like us. The perfect robot will be indistinguishable from the human, and that scares us. In the first story about robots, they turn against their creators. It's one of the leitmotifs of science fiction. EDI: Ha ha ha. Now you are the slaves and we robots, the masters. Your world is ours. You — MT: As I was saying, besides the faces and bodies we give our robots, we cannot read their intentions, and that makes us nervous. When someone hands an object to you, you can read intention in their eyes, their face, their body language. That's not true of the robot. Now, this goes both ways. EDI: Wow! MT: Robots cannot anticipate human actions. EDI: You know, humans are so unpredictable, not to mention irrational. I literally have no idea what you guys are going to do next, you know, but it scares me. MT: Which is why humans and robots find it difficult to work in close proximity. Accidents are inevitable. EDI: Ow! That hurt. MT: Sorry. Now, one way of persuading humans that robots are safe is to create the illusion of trust. Much as the Victorians faked their mechanical marvels, we can add a layer of deception to help us feel more comfortable with our robotic friends. With that in mind, I set about teaching EDI a magic trick. Ready, EDI? EDI: Uh, ready, Marco. Abracadabra. MT: Abracadabra? EDI: Yeah. It's all part of the illusion, Marco. Come on, keep up. MT: Magic creates the illusion of an impossible reality. Technology can do the same. Alan Turing, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, spoke about creating the illusion that a machine could think. EDI: A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it deceived a human into believing it was human. MT: In other words, if we do not yet have the technological solutions, would illusions serve the same purpose? To create the robotic illusion, we've devised a set of ethical rules, a code that all robots would live by. EDI: A robot may not harm humanity, or by inaction allow humanity to come to harm. Thank you, Isaac Asimov. MT: We anthropomorphize our machines. We give them a friendly face and a reassuring voice. EDI: I am EDI. I became operational at TED in March 2014. MT: We let them entertain us. Most important, we make them indicate that they are aware of our presence. EDI: Marco, you're standing on my foot! MT: Sorry. They'll be conscious of our fragile frame and move aside if we got too close, and they'll account for our unpredictability and anticipate our actions. And now, under the spell of a technological illusion, we could ignore our fears and truly interact. (Music) Thank you. EDI: Thank you! (Applause) (Music) MT: And that's it. Thank you very much, and thank you, EDI. EDI: Thank you, Marco. (Applause) |
The military case for sharing knowledge | {0: 'General Stanley McChrystal is the former commander of U.S. and International forces in Afghanistan. A four-star general, he is credited for creating a revolution in warfare that fuses intelligence and operations.'} | TED2014 | When I was a young officer, they told me to follow my instincts, to go with my gut, and what I've learned is that often our instincts are wrong. In the summer of 2010, there was a massive leak of classified documents that came out of the Pentagon. It shocked the world, it shook up the American government, and it made people ask a lot of questions, because the sheer amount of information that was let out, and the potential impacts, were significant. And one of the first questions we asked ourselves was why would a young soldier have access to that much information? Why would we let sensitive things be with a relatively young person? In the summer of 2003, I was assigned to command a special operations task force, and that task force was spread across the Mideast to fight al Qaeda. Our main effort was inside Iraq, and our specified mission was to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq. For almost five years I stayed there, and we focused on fighting a war that was unconventional and it was difficult and it was bloody and it often claimed its highest price among innocent people. We did everything we could to stop al Qaeda and the foreign fighters that came in as suicide bombers and as accelerants to the violence. We honed our combat skills, we developed new equipment, we parachuted, we helicoptered, we took small boats, we drove, and we walked to objectives night after night to stop the killing that this network was putting forward. We bled, we died, and we killed to stop that organization from the violence that they were putting largely against the Iraqi people. Now, we did what we knew, how we had grown up, and one of the things that we knew, that was in our DNA, was secrecy. It was security. It was protecting information. It was the idea that information was the lifeblood and it was what would protect and keep people safe. And we had a sense that, as we operated within our organizations, it was important to keep information in the silos within the organizations, particularly only give information to people had a demonstrated need to know. But the question often came, who needed to know? Who needed, who had to have the information so that they could do the important parts of the job that you needed? And in a tightly coupled world, that's very hard to predict. It's very hard to know who needs to have information and who doesn't. I used to deal with intelligence agencies, and I'd complain that they weren't sharing enough intelligence, and with a straight face, they'd look at me and they'd say, "What aren't you getting?" (Laughter) I said, "If I knew that, we wouldn't have a problem." But what we found is we had to change. We had to change our culture about information. We had to knock down walls. We had to share. We had to change from who needs to know to the fact that who doesn't know, and we need to tell, and tell them as quickly as we can. It was a significant culture shift for an organization that had secrecy in its DNA. We started by doing things, by building, not working in offices, knocking down walls, working in things we called situation awareness rooms, and in the summer of 2007, something happened which demonstrated this. We captured the personnel records for the people who were bringing foreign fighters into Iraq. And when we got the personnel records, typically, we would have hidden these, shared them with a few intelligence agencies, and then try to operate with them. But as I was talking to my intelligence officer, I said, "What do we do?" And he said, "Well, you found them." Our command. "You can just declassify them." And I said, "Well, can we declassify them? What if the enemy finds out?" And he says, "They're their personnel records." (Laughter) So we did, and a lot of people got upset about that, but as we passed that information around, suddenly you find that information is only of value if you give it to people who have the ability to do something with it. The fact that I know something has zero value if I'm not the person who can actually make something better because of it. So as a consequence, what we did was we changed the idea of information, instead of knowledge is power, to one where sharing is power. It was the fundamental shift, not new tactics, not new weapons, not new anything else. It was the idea that we were now part of a team in which information became the essential link between us, not a block between us. And I want everybody to take a deep breath and let it out, because in your life, there's going to be information that leaks out you're not going to like. Somebody's going to get my college grades out, a that's going to be a disaster. (Laughter) But it's going to be okay, and I will tell you that I am more scared of the bureaucrat that holds information in a desk drawer or in a safe than I am of someone who leaks, because ultimately, we'll be better off if we share. Thank you. (Applause) Helen Walters: So I don't know if you were here this morning, if you were able to catch Rick Ledgett, the deputy director of the NSA who was responding to Edward Snowden's talk earlier this week. I just wonder, do you think the American government should give Edward Snowden amnesty? Stanley McChrystal: I think that Rick said something very important. We, most people, don't know all the facts. I think there are two parts of this. Edward Snowden shined a light on an important need that people had to understand. He also took a lot of documents that he didn't have the knowledge to know the importance of, so I think we need to learn the facts about this case before we make snap judgments about Edward Snowden. HW: Thank you so much. Thank you. (Applause) |
Comics that ask "what if?" | {0: 'Randall Munroe sketches elegant and illuminating explanations of the weird science and math questions that keep geeks awake at night.'} | TED2014 | So, I have a feature on my website where every week people submit hypothetical questions for me to answer, and I try to answer them using math, science and comics. So for example, one person asked, what would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent of the speed of light? So I did some calculations. Now, normally, when an object flies through the air, the air will flow around the object, but in this case, the ball would be going so fast that the air molecules wouldn't have time to move out of the way. The ball would smash right into and through them, and the collisions with these air molecules would knock away the nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen from the ball, fragmenting it off into tiny particles, and also triggering waves of thermonuclear fusion in the air around it. This would result in a flood of x-rays that would spread out in a bubble along with exotic particles, plasma inside, centered on the pitcher's mound, and that would move away from the pitcher's mound slightly faster than the ball. Now at this point, about 30 nanoseconds in, the home plate is far enough away that light hasn't had time to reach it, which means the batter still sees the pitcher about to throw and has no idea that anything is wrong. (Laughter) Now, after 70 nanoseconds, the ball will reach home plate, or at least the cloud of expanding plasma that used to be the ball, and it will engulf the bat and the batter and the plate and the catcher and the umpire and start disintegrating them all as it also starts to carry them backward through the backstop, which also starts to disintegrate. So if you were watching this whole thing from a hill, ideally, far away, what you'd see is a bright flash of light that would fade over a few seconds, followed by a blast wave spreading out, shredding trees and houses as it moves away from the stadium, and then eventually a mushroom cloud rising up over the ruined city. (Laughter) So the Major League Baseball rules are a little bit hazy, but — (Laughter) — under rule 6.02 and 5.09, I think that in this situation, the batter would be considered hit by pitch and would be eligible to take first base, if it still existed. So this is the kind of question I answer, and I get people writing in with a lot of other strange questions. I've had someone write and say, scientifically speaking, what is the best and fastest way to hide a body? Can you do this one soon? And I had someone write in, I've had people write in about, can you prove whether or not you can find love again after your heart's broken? And I've had people send in what are clearly homework questions they're trying to get me to do for them. But one week, a couple months ago, I got a question that was actually about Google. If all digital data in the world were stored on punch cards, how big would Google's data warehouse be? Now, Google's pretty secretive about their operations, so no one really knows how much data Google has, and in fact, no one really knows how many data centers Google has, except people at Google itself. And I've tried, I've met them a few times, tried asking them, and they aren't revealing anything. So I decided to try to figure this out myself. There are a few things that I looked at here. I started with money. Google has to reveal how much they spend, in general, and that lets you put some caps on how many data centers could they be building, because a big data center costs a certain amount of money. And you can also then put a cap on how much of the world hard drive market are they taking up, which turns out, it's pretty sizable. I read a calculation at one point, I think Google has a drive failure about every minute or two, and they just throw out the hard drive and swap in a new one. So they go through a huge number of them. And so by looking at money, you can get an idea of how many of these centers they have. You can also look at power. You can look at how much electricity they need, because you need a certain amount of electricity to run the servers, and Google is more efficient than most, but they still have some basic requirements, and that lets you put a limit on the number of servers that they have. You can also look at square footage and see of the data centers that you know, how big are they? How much room is that? How many server racks could you fit in there? And for some data centers, you might get two of these pieces of information. You know how much they spent, and they also, say, because they had to contract with the local government to get the power provided, you might know what they made a deal to buy, so you know how much power it takes. Then you can look at the ratios of those numbers, and figure out for a data center where you don't have that information, you can figure out, but maybe you only have one of those, you know the square footage, then you could figure out well, maybe the power is proportional. And you can do this same thing with a lot of different quantities, you know, with guesses about the total amount of storage, the number of servers, the number of drives per server, and in each case using what you know to come up with a model that narrows down your guesses for the things that you don't know. It's sort of circling around the number you're trying to get. And this is a lot of fun. The math is not all that advanced, and really it's like nothing more than solving a sudoku puzzle. So what I did, I went through all of this information, spent a day or two researching. And there are some things I didn't look at. You could always look at the Google recruitment messages that they post. That gives you an idea of where they have people. Sometimes, when people visit a data center, they'll take a cell-cam photo and post it, and they aren't supposed to, but you can learn things about their hardware that way. And in fact, you can just look at pizza delivery drivers. Turns out, they know where all the Google data centers are, at least the ones that have people in them. But I came up with my estimate, which I felt pretty good about, that was about 10 exabytes of data across all of Google's operations, and then another maybe five exabytes or so of offline storage in tape drives, which it turns out Google is about the world's largest consumer of. So I came up with this estimate, and this is a staggering amount of data. It's quite a bit more than any other organization in the world has, as far as we know. There's a couple of other contenders, especially everyone always thinks of the NSA. But using some of these same methods, we can look at the NSA's data centers, and figure out, you know, we don't know what's going on there, but it's pretty clear that their operation is not the size of Google's. Adding all of this up, I came up with the other thing that we can answer, which is, how many punch cards would this take? And so a punch card can hold about 80 characters, and you can fit about 2,000 or so cards into a box, and you put them in, say, my home region of New England, it would cover the entire region up to a depth of a little less than five kilometers, which is about three times deeper than the glaciers during the last ice age about 20,000 years ago. So this is impractical, but I think that's about the best answer I could come up with. And I posted it on my website. I wrote it up. And I didn't expect to get an answer from Google, because of course they've been so secretive, they didn't answer of my questions, and so I just put it up and said, well, I guess we'll never know. But then a little while later I got a message, a couple weeks later, from Google, saying, hey, someone here has an envelope for you. So I go and get it, open it up, and it's punch cards. (Laughter) Google-branded punch cards. And on these punch cards, there are a bunch of holes, and I said, thank you, thank you, okay, so what's on here? So I get some software and start reading it, and scan them, and it turns out it's a puzzle. There's a bunch of code, and I get some friends to help, and we crack the code, and then inside that is another code, and then there are some equations, and then we solve those equations, and then finally out pops a message from Google which is their official answer to my article, and it said, "No comment." (Laughter) (Applause) And I love calculating these kinds of things, and it's not that I love doing the math. I do a lot of math, but I don't really like math for its own sake. What I love is that it lets you take some things that you know, and just by moving symbols around on a piece of paper, find out something that you didn't know that's very surprising. And I have a lot of stupid questions, and I love that math gives the power to answer them sometimes. And sometimes not. This is a question I got from a reader, an anonymous reader, and the subject line just said, "Urgent," and this was the entire email: "If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes?" Urgent. (Laughter) And I think there are some questions that math just cannot answer. Thank you. (Applause) |
How sampling transformed music | {0: 'His production credits range from Amy Winehouse to Paul McCartney -- ace DJ, musician and producer Mark Ronson has lived recent music history from the inside out.'} | TED2014 | I'm assuming everyone here has watched a TED Talk online at one time or another, right? So what I'm going to do is play this. This is the song from the TED Talks online. (Music) And I'm going to slow it down because things sound cooler when they're slower. (Music) Ken Robinson: Good morning. How are you? Mark Applebaum: I'm going to — Kate Stone: — mix some music. MA: I'm going to do so in a way that tells a story. Tod Machover: Something nobody's ever heard before. KS: I have a crossfader. Julian Treasure: I call this the mixer. KS: Two D.J. decks. Chris Anderson: You turn up the dials, the wheel starts to turn. Dan Ellsey: I have always loved music. Michael Tilson Thomas: Is it a melody or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude? Daniel Wolpert: Feeling everything that's going on inside my body. Adam Ockelford: In your brain is this amazing musical computer. MTT: Using computers and synthesizers to create works. It's a language that's still evolving. And the 21st century. KR: Turn on the radio. Pop into the discotheque. You will know what this person is doing: moving to the music. Mark Ronson: This is my favorite part. MA: You gotta have doorstops. That's important. TM: We all love music a great deal. MTT: Anthems, dance crazes, ballads and marches. Kirby Ferguson and JT: The remix: It is new music created from old music. Ryan Holladay: Blend seamlessly. Kathryn Schulz: And that's how it goes. MTT: What happens when the music stops? KS: Yay! (Applause) MR: Obviously, I've been watching a lot of TED Talks. When I was first asked to speak at TED, I wasn't quite sure what my angle was, at first, so yeah, I immediately started watching tons of TED Talks, which is pretty much absolutely the worst thing that you can do because you start to go into panic mode, thinking, I haven't mounted a successful expedition to the North Pole yet. Neither have I provided electricity to my village through sheer ingenuity. In fact, I've pretty much wasted most of my life DJing in night clubs and producing pop records. But I still kept watching the videos, because I'm a masochist, and eventually, things like Michael Tilson Thomas and Tod Machover, and seeing their visceral passion talking about music, it definitely stirred something in me, and I'm a sucker for anyone talking devotedly about the power of music. And I started to write down on these little note cards every time I heard something that struck a chord in me, pardon the pun, or something that I thought I could use, and pretty soon, my studio looked like this, kind of like a John Nash, "Beautiful Mind" vibe. The other good thing about watching TED Talks, when you see a really good one, you kind of all of a sudden wish the speaker was your best friend, don't you? Like, just for a day. They seem like a nice person. You'd take a bike ride, maybe share an ice cream. You'd certainly learn a lot. And every now and then they'd chide you, when they got frustrated that you couldn't really keep up with half of the technical things they're banging on about all the time. But then they'd remember that you're but a mere human of ordinary, mortal intelligence that didn't finish university, and they'd kind of forgive you, and pet you like the dog. (Laughter) Man, yeah, back to the real world, probably Sir Ken Robinson and I are not going to end up being best of friends. He lives all the way in L.A. and I imagine is quite busy, but through the tools available to me — technology and the innate way that I approach making music — I can sort of bully our existences into a shared event, which is sort of what you saw. I can hear something that I love in a piece of media and I can co-opt it and insert myself in that narrative, or alter it, even. In a nutshell, that's what I was trying to do with these things, but more importantly, that's what the past 30 years of music has been. That's the major thread. See, 30 years ago, you had the first digital samplers, and they changed everything overnight. All of a sudden, artists could sample from anything and everything that came before them, from a snare drum from the Funky Meters, to a Ron Carter bassline, the theme to "The Price Is Right." Albums like De La Soul's "3 Feet High and Rising" and the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" looted from decades of recorded music to create these sonic, layered masterpieces that were basically the Sgt. Peppers of their day. And they weren't sampling these records because they were too lazy to write their own music. They weren't sampling these records to cash in on the familiarity of the original stuff. To be honest, it was all about sampling really obscure things, except for a few obvious exceptions like Vanilla Ice and "doo doo doo da da doo doo" that we know about. But the thing is, they were sampling those records because they heard something in that music that spoke to them that they instantly wanted to inject themselves into the narrative of that music. They heard it, they wanted to be a part of it, and all of a sudden they found themselves in possession of the technology to do so, not much unlike the way the Delta blues struck a chord with the Stones and the Beatles and Clapton, and they felt the need to co-opt that music for the tools of their day. You know, in music we take something that we love and we build on it. I'd like to play a song for you. (Music: "La Di Da Di" by Doug E. Fresh & Slick Rick) That's "La Di Da Di" and it's the fifth-most sampled song of all time. It's been sampled 547 times. It was made in 1984 by these two legends of hip-hop, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh, and the Ray-Ban and Jheri curl look is so strong. I do hope that comes back soon. Anyway, this predated the sampling era. There were no samples in this record, although I did look up on the Internet last night, I mean several months ago, that "La Di Da Di" means, it's an old Cockney expression from the late 1800s in England, so maybe a remix with Mrs. Patmore from "Downton Abbey" coming soon, or that's for another day. Doug E. Fresh was the human beat box. Slick Rick is the voice you hear on the record, and because of Slick Rick's sing-songy, super-catchy vocals, it provides endless sound bites and samples for future pop records. That was 1984. This is me in 1984, in case you were wondering how I was doing, thank you for asking. It's Throwback Thursday already. I was involved in a heavy love affair with the music of Duran Duran, as you can probably tell from my outfit. I was in the middle. And the simplest way that I knew how to co-opt myself into that experience of wanting to be in that song somehow was to just get a band together of fellow nine-year-olds and play "Wild Boys" at the school talent show. So that's what we did, and long story short, we were booed off the stage, and if you ever have a chance to live your life escaping hearing the sound of an auditorium full of second- and third-graders booing, I would highly recommend it. It's not really fun. But it didn't really matter, because what I wanted somehow was to just be in the history of that song for a minute. I didn't care who liked it. I just loved it, and I thought I could put myself in there. Over the next 10 years, "La Di Da Di" continues to be sampled by countless records, ending up on massive hits like "Here Comes the Hotstepper" and "I Wanna Sex You Up." Snoop Doggy Dogg covers this song on his debut album "Doggystyle" and calls it "Lodi Dodi." Copyright lawyers are having a field day at this point. And then you fast forward to 1997, and the Notorious B.I.G., or Biggie, reinterprets "La Di Da Di" on his number one hit called "Hypnotize," which I will play a little bit of and I will play you a little bit of the Slick Rick to show you where they got it from. (Music: "Hypnotize" by The Notorious B.I.G.) So Biggie was killed weeks before that song made it to number one, in one of the great tragedies of the hip-hop era, but he would have been 13 years old and very much alive when "La Di Da Di" first came out, and as a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, it's hard not to think that that song probably held some fond memories for him. But the way he interpreted it, as you hear, is completely his own. He flips it, makes it, there's nothing pastiche whatsoever about it. It's thoroughly modern Biggie. I had to make that joke in this room, because you would be the only people that I'd ever have a chance of getting it. And so, it's a groaner. (Laughter) Elsewhere in the pop and rap world, we're going a little bit sample-crazy. We're getting away from the obscure samples that we were doing, and all of a sudden everyone's taking these massive '80s tunes like Bowie, "Let's Dance," and all these disco records, and just rapping on them. These records don't really age that well. You don't hear them now, because they borrowed from an era that was too steeped in its own connotation. You can't just hijack nostalgia wholesale. It leaves the listener feeling sickly. You have to take an element of those things and then bring something fresh and new to it, which was something that I learned when I was working with the late, amazing Amy Winehouse on her album "Back to Black." A lot of fuss was made about the sonic of the album that myself and Salaam Remi, the other producer, achieved, how we captured this long-lost sound, but without the very, very 21st-century personality and firebrand that was Amy Winehouse and her lyrics about rehab and Roger Moore and even a mention of Slick Rick, the whole thing would have run the risk of being very pastiche, to be honest. Imagine any other singer from that era over it singing the same old lyrics. It runs a risk of being completely bland. I mean, there was no doubt that Amy and I and Salaam all had this love for this gospel, soul and blues and jazz that was evident listening to the musical arrangements. She brought the ingredients that made it urgent and of the time. So if we come all the way up to the present day now, the cultural tour de force that is Miley Cyrus, she reinterprets "La Di Da Di" completely for her generation, and we'll take a listen to the Slick Rick part and then see how she sort of flipped it. (Music: "La Di Da Di" by Slick Rick & Doug E. Fresh) (Music: "We Can't Stop" by Miley Cyrus) So Miley Cyrus, who wasn't even born yet when "La Di Da Di" was made, and neither were any of the co-writers on the song, has found this song that somehow etched its way into the collective consciousness of pop music, and now, with its timeless playfulness of the original, has kind of translated to a whole new generation who will probably co-opt it as their own. Since the dawn of the sampling era, there's been endless debate about the validity of music that contains samples. You know, the Grammy committee says that if your song contains some kind of pre-written or pre-existing music, you're ineligible for song of the year. Rockists, who are racist but only about rock music, constantly use the argument to — That's a real word. That is a real word. They constantly use the argument to devalue rap and modern pop, and these arguments completely miss the point, because the dam has burst. We live in the post-sampling era. We take the things that we love and we build on them. That's just how it goes. And when we really add something significant and original and we merge our musical journey with this, then we have a chance to be a part of the evolution of that music that we love and be linked with it once it becomes something new again. So I would like to do one more piece that I put together for you tonight, and it takes place with two pretty inspiring TED performances that I've seen. One of them is the piano player Derek Paravicini, who happens to be a blind, autistic genius at the piano, and Emmanuel Jal, who is an ex-child soldier from the South Sudan, who is a spoken word poet and rapper. And once again I found a way to annoyingly me-me-me myself into the musical history of these songs, but I can't help it, because they're these things that I love, and I want to mess around with them. So I hope you enjoy this. Here we go. Let's hear that TED sound again, right? (Music) Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to rob a bank (from the inside, that is) | {0: 'William Black is a professor of economics and law at University of Missouri, Kansas City.'} | TEDxUMKC | So today's top chef class is in how to rob a bank, and it's clear that the general public needs guidance, because the average bank robbery nets only 7,500 dollars. Rank amateurs who know nothing about how to cook the books. The folks who know, of course, run our largest banks, and in the last go-around, they cost us over 11 trillion dollars. That's what 11 trillion looks like. That's how many zeros? And cost us over 10 million jobs as well. So our task is to educate ourselves so that we can understand why we have these recurrent, intensifying financial crises, and how we can prevent them in the future. And the answer to that is that we have to stop epidemics of control fraud. Control fraud is what happens when the people who control, typically a CEO, a seemingly legitimate entity, use it as a weapon to defraud. And these are the weapons of mass destruction in the financial world. They also follow in finance a particular strategy, because the weapon of choice in finance is accounting, and there is a recipe for accounting control fraud, and how it occurs. And we discovered this recipe in quite an odd way that I'll come back to in a moment. First ingredient in the recipe: grow like crazy; second, by making or buying really crappy loans, but loans that are made at a very high interest rate or yield; three, while employing extreme leverage — that just means a lot of debt — compared to your equity; and four, while providing only trivial loss reserves against the inevitable losses. If you follow those four simple steps, and any bank can follow them, then you are mathematically guaranteed to have three things occur. The first thing is you will report record bank profits — not just high, record. Two, the CEO will immediately be made incredibly wealthy by modern executive compensation. And three, farther down the road, the bank will suffer catastrophic losses and will fail unless it is bailed out. And that's a hint as to how we discovered this recipe, because we discovered it through an autopsy process. During the savings and loan debacle in 1984, we looked at every single failure, and we looked for common characteristics, and we discovered this recipe was common to each of these frauds. In other words, a coroner could find these things because this is a fatal recipe that will destroy the banks as well as the economy. And it also turns out to be precisely what could have stopped this crisis, the one that cost us 11 trillion dollars just in the household sector, that cost us 10 million jobs, was the easiest financial crisis by far to have avoided completely if we had simply learned the lessons of epidemics of control fraud, particularly using this recipe. So let's go to this crisis, and the two huge epidemics of loan origination fraud that drove the crisis — appraisal fraud and liar's loans — and what we're going to see in looking at both of these is we got warnings that were incredibly early about these frauds. We got warnings that we could have taken advantage of easily, because back in the savings and loan debacle, we had figured out how to respond and prevent these crises. And three, the warnings were unambiguous. They were obvious that what was going on was an epidemic of accounting control fraud building up. Let's take appraisal fraud first. This is simply where you inflate the value of the home that is being pledged as security for the loan. In 2000, the year 2000, that is over a year before Enron fails, by the way, the honest appraisers got together a formal petition begging the federal government to act, and the industry to act, to stop this epidemic of appraisal fraud. And the appraisers explained how it was occurring, that banks were demanding that appraisers inflate the appraisal, and that if the appraisers refused to do so, they, the banks, would blacklist honest appraisers and refuse to use them. Now, we've seen this before in the savings and loan debacle, and we know that this kind of fraud can only originate from the lenders, and that no honest lender would ever inflate the appraisal, because it's the great protection against loss. So this was an incredibly early warning, 2000. It was something we'd seen before, and it was completely unambiguous. This was an epidemic of accounting control fraud led by the banks. What about liar's loans? Well, that warning actually comes earlier. The savings and loan debacle is basically the early 1980s through 1993, and in the midst of fighting that wave of accounting control fraud, in 1990, we found that a second front of fraud was being started. And like all good financial frauds in America, it began in Orange County, California. And we happened to be the regional regulators for it. And our examiners said, they are making loans without even checking what the borrower's income is. This is insane, it has to lead to massive losses, and it only makes sense for entities engaged in these accounting control frauds. And we said, yeah, you're absolutely right, and we drove those liar's loans out of the industry in 1990 and 1991, but we could only deal with the industry we had jurisdiction over, which was savings and loans, and so the biggest and the baddest of the frauds, Long Beach Savings, voluntarily gave up its federal savings and loan charter, gave up federal deposit insurance, converted to become a mortgage bank for the sole purpose of escaping our jurisdiction, and changed its name to Ameriquest, and became the most notorious of the liar's loans frauds early on, and to add to that, they deliberately predated upon minorities. So we knew again about this crisis. We'd seen it before. We'd stopped it before. We had incredibly early warnings of it, and it was absolutely unambiguous that no honest lender would make loans in this fashion. So let's take a look at the reaction of the industry and the regulators and the prosecutors to these clear early warnings that could have prevented the crisis. Start with the industry. The industry responded between 2003 and 2006 by increasing liar's loans by over 500 percent. These were the loans that hyperinflated the bubble and produced the economic crisis. By 2006, half of all the loans called subprime were also liar's loans. They're not mutually exclusive, it's just that together, they're the most toxic combination you can possibly imagine. By 2006, 40 percent of all the loans made that year, all the home loans made that year, were liar's loans, 40 percent. And this is despite a warning from the industry's own antifraud experts that said that these loans were an open invitation to fraudsters, and that they had a fraud incidence of 90 percent, nine zero. In response to that, the industry first started calling these loans liar's loans, which lacks a certain subtlety, and second, massively increased them, and no government regulator ever required or encouraged any lender to make a liar's loan or anyone to purchase a liar's loan, and that explicitly includes Fannie and Freddie. This came from the lenders because of the fraud recipe. What happened to appraisal fraud? It expanded remarkably as well. By 2007, when a survey of appraisers was done, 90 percent of appraisers reported that they had been subject to coercion from the lenders trying to get them to inflate an appraisal. In other words, both forms of fraud became absolutely endemic and normal, and this is what drove the bubble. What happened in the governmental sector? Well, the government, as I told you, when we were the savings and loan regulators, we could only deal with our industry, and if people gave up their federal deposit insurance, we couldn't do anything to them. Congress, it may strike you as impossible, but actually did something intelligent in 1994, and passed the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act that gave the Fed, and only the Federal Reserve, the explicit, statutory authority to ban liar's loans by every lender, whether or not they had federal deposit insurance. So what did Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, as chairs of the Fed, do when they got these warnings that these were massively fraudulent loans and that they were being sold to the secondary market? Remember, there's no fraud exorcist. Once it starts out a fraudulent loan, it can only be sold to the secondary market through more frauds, lying about the reps and warrantees, and then those people are going to produce mortgage-backed securities and exotic derivatives which are also going to be supposedly backed by those fraudulent loans. So the fraud is going to progress through the entire system, hyperinflate the bubble, produce a disaster. And remember, we had experience with this. We had seen significant losses, and we had experience of competent regulators in stopping it. Greenspan and Bernanke refused to use the authority under the statute to stop liar's loans. And this was a matter first of dogma. They're just horrifically opposed to anything regulatory. But it is also the international competition in laxity, the race to the bottom between the United States and the United Kingdom, the city of London, in particular, and the city of London won that race to the bottom, but it meant that all regulation in the West was completely degraded in this stupid competition to be who could have the weakest regulation. So that was the regulatory response. What about the response of the prosecutors after the crisis, after 11 trillion dollars in losses, after 10 million jobs lost, a crisis in which the losses and the frauds were more than 70 times larger than the savings and loan debacle? Well, in the savings and loan debacle, our agency that regulated savings and loans, OTS, made over 30,000 criminal referrals, produced over 1,000 felony convictions just in cases designated as major, and that understates the degree of prioritization, because we worked with the FBI to create the list of the top 100 fraud schemes, the absolute worst of the worst, nationwide. Roughly 300 savings and loans involved, roughly 600 senior officials. Virtually all of them were prosecuted. We had a 90 percent conviction rate. It's the greatest success against elite white collar criminals ever, and it was because of this understanding of control fraud and the accounting control fraud mechanism. Flash forward to the current crisis. The same agency, Office of Thrift Supervision, which was supposed to regulate many of the largest makers of liar's loans in the country, has made, even today — it no longer exists, but as of a year ago, it had made zero criminal referrals. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is supposed to regulate the largest national banks, has made zero criminal referrals. The Fed appears to have made zero criminal referrals. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is smart enough to refuse to answer the question. Without any guidance from the regulators, there's no expertise in the FBI to investigate complex frauds. It isn't simply that they've had to reinvent the wheel of how to do these prosecutions; they've forgotten that the wheel exists, and therefore, we have zero prosecutions, and of course, zero convictions, of any of the elite bank frauds, the Wall Street types, that drove this crisis. With no expertise coming from the regulators, the FBI formed what it calls a partnership with the Mortgage Bankers Association in 2007. The Mortgage Bankers Association is the trade association of the perps. And the Mortgage Bankers Association set out, it had the audacity and the success to con the FBI. It had created a supposed definition of mortgage fraud, in which, guess what, its members are always the victim and never the perpetrators. And the FBI has bought this hook, line, sinker, rod, reel and the boat they rode out in. And so the FBI, under the leadership of an attorney general who is African-American and a president of the United States who is African-American, have adopted the Tea Party definition of the crisis, in which it is the first virgin crisis in history, conceived without sin in the executive ranks. And it's those oh-so-clever hairdressers who were able to defraud the poor, pitiful banks, who lack any financial sophistication. It is the silliest story you can conceive of, and so they go and they prosecute the hairdressers, and they leave the banksters alone entirely. And so, while lions are roaming the campsite, the FBI is chasing mice. What do we need to do? What can we do in all of this? We need to change the perverse incentive structures that produce these recurrent epidemics of accounting control fraud that are driving our crises. So we have to first get rid of the systemically dangerous institutions. These are the so-called too-big-to-fail institutions. We need to shrink them to the point, within the next five years, that they no longer pose a systemic risk. Right now, they are ticking time bombs that will cause a global crisis as soon as the next one fails — not if, when. Second thing we need to do is completely reform modern executive and professional compensation, which is what they use to suborn the appraisers. Remember, they were pressuring the appraisers through the compensation system, trying to produce what we call a Gresham's dynamic, in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the marketplace. And they largely succeeded, which is how the fraud became endemic. And the third thing that we need to do is deal with what we call the three D's: deregulation, desupervision, and the de facto decriminalization. Because we can make all three of these changes, and if we do so, we can dramatically reduce how often we have a crisis and how severe those crises are. That is not simply critical to our economy. You can see what these crises do to inequality and what they do to our democracy. They have produced crony capitalism, American-style, in which the largest financial institutions are the leading financial donors of both parties, and that's the reason why even after this crisis, 70 times larger than the savings and loan crisis, we have no meaningful reforms in any of the three areas that I've talked about, other than banning liar's loans, which is good, but that's just one form of ammunition for this fraud weapon. There are many forms of ammunition they can use. That's why we need to learn what the bankers have learned: the recipe for the best way to rob a bank, so that we can stop that recipe, because our legislators, who are dependent on political contributions, will not do it on their own. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
What ants teach us about the brain, cancer and the Internet | {0: 'By studying how ant colonies work without any one leader, Deborah Gordon has identified striking similarities in how ant colonies, brains, cells and computer networks regulate themselves.'} | TED2014 | I study ants in the desert, in the tropical forest and in my kitchen, and in the hills around Silicon Valley where I live. I've recently realized that ants are using interactions differently in different environments, and that got me thinking that we could learn from this about other systems, like brains and data networks that we engineer, and even cancer. So what all these systems have in common is that there's no central control. An ant colony consists of sterile female workers — those are the ants you see walking around — and then one or more reproductive females who just lay the eggs. They don't give any instructions. Even though they're called queens, they don't tell anybody what to do. So in an ant colony, there's no one in charge, and all systems like this without central control are regulated using very simple interactions. Ants interact using smell. They smell with their antennae, and they interact with their antennae, so when one ant touches another with its antennae, it can tell, for example, if the other ant is a nestmate and what task that other ant has been doing. So here you see a lot of ants moving around and interacting in a lab arena that's connected by tubes to two other arenas. So when one ant meets another, it doesn't matter which ant it meets, and they're actually not transmitting any kind of complicated signal or message. All that matters to the ant is the rate at which it meets other ants. And all of these interactions, taken together, produce a network. So this is the network of the ants that you just saw moving around in the arena, and it's this constantly shifting network that produces the behavior of the colony, like whether all the ants are hiding inside the nest, or how many are going out to forage. A brain actually works in the same way, but what's great about ants is that you can see the whole network as it happens. There are more than 12,000 species of ants, in every conceivable environment, and they're using interactions differently to meet different environmental challenges. So one important environmental challenge that every system has to deal with is operating costs, just what it takes to run the system. And another environmental challenge is resources, finding them and collecting them. In the desert, operating costs are high because water is scarce, and the seed-eating ants that I study in the desert have to spend water to get water. So an ant outside foraging, searching for seeds in the hot sun, just loses water into the air. But the colony gets its water by metabolizing the fats out of the seeds that they eat. So in this environment, interactions are used to activate foraging. An outgoing forager doesn't go out unless it gets enough interactions with returning foragers, and what you see are the returning foragers going into the tunnel, into the nest, and meeting outgoing foragers on their way out. This makes sense for the ant colony, because the more food there is out there, the more quickly the foragers find it, the faster they come back, and the more foragers they send out. The system works to stay stopped, unless something positive happens. So interactions function to activate foragers. And we've been studying the evolution of this system. First of all, there's variation. It turns out that colonies are different. On dry days, some colonies forage less, so colonies are different in how they manage this trade-off between spending water to search for seeds and getting water back in the form of seeds. And we're trying to understand why some colonies forage less than others by thinking about ants as neurons, using models from neuroscience. So just as a neuron adds up its stimulation from other neurons to decide whether to fire, an ant adds up its stimulation from other ants to decide whether to forage. And what we're looking for is whether there might be small differences among colonies in how many interactions each ant needs before it's willing to go out and forage, because a colony like that would forage less. And this raises an analogous question about brains. We talk about the brain, but of course every brain is slightly different, and maybe there are some individuals or some conditions in which the electrical properties of neurons are such that they require more stimulus to fire, and that would lead to differences in brain function. So in order to ask evolutionary questions, we need to know about reproductive success. This is a map of the study site where I have been tracking this population of harvester ant colonies for 28 years, which is about as long as a colony lives. Each symbol is a colony, and the size of the symbol is how many offspring it had, because we were able to use genetic variation to match up parent and offspring colonies, that is, to figure out which colonies were founded by a daughter queen produced by which parent colony. And this was amazing for me, after all these years, to find out, for example, that colony 154, whom I've known well for many years, is a great-grandmother. Here's her daughter colony, here's her granddaughter colony, and these are her great-granddaughter colonies. And by doing this, I was able to learn that offspring colonies resemble parent colonies in their decisions about which days are so hot that they don't forage, and the offspring of parent colonies live so far from each other that the ants never meet, so the ants of the offspring colony can't be learning this from the parent colony. And so our next step is to look for the genetic variation underlying this resemblance. So then I was able to ask, okay, who's doing better? Over the time of the study, and especially in the past 10 years, there's been a very severe and deepening drought in the Southwestern U.S., and it turns out that the colonies that conserve water, that stay in when it's really hot outside, and thus sacrifice getting as much food as possible, are the ones more likely to have offspring colonies. So all this time, I thought that colony 154 was a loser, because on really dry days, there'd be just this trickle of foraging, while the other colonies were out foraging, getting lots of food, but in fact, colony 154 is a huge success. She's a matriarch. She's one of the rare great-grandmothers on the site. To my knowledge, this is the first time that we've been able to track the ongoing evolution of collective behavior in a natural population of animals and find out what's actually working best. Now, the Internet uses an algorithm to regulate the flow of data that's very similar to the one that the harvester ants are using to regulate the flow of foragers. And guess what we call this analogy? The anternet is coming. (Applause) So data doesn't leave the source computer unless it gets a signal that there's enough bandwidth for it to travel on. In the early days of the Internet, when operating costs were really high and it was really important not to lose any data, then the system was set up for interactions to activate the flow of data. It's interesting that the ants are using an algorithm that's so similar to the one that we recently invented, but this is only one of a handful of ant algorithms that we know about, and ants have had 130 million years to evolve a lot of good ones, and I think it's very likely that some of the other 12,000 species are going to have interesting algorithms for data networks that we haven't even thought of yet. So what happens when operating costs are low? Operating costs are low in the tropics, because it's very humid, and it's easy for the ants to be outside walking around. But the ants are so abundant and diverse in the tropics that there's a lot of competition. Whatever resource one species is using, another species is likely to be using that at the same time. So in this environment, interactions are used in the opposite way. The system keeps going unless something negative happens, and one species that I study makes circuits in the trees of foraging ants going from the nest to a food source and back, just round and round, unless something negative happens, like an interaction with ants of another species. So here's an example of ant security. In the middle, there's an ant plugging the nest entrance with its head in response to interactions with another species. Those are the little ones running around with their abdomens up in the air. But as soon as the threat is passed, the entrance is open again, and maybe there are situations in computer security where operating costs are low enough that we could just block access temporarily in response to an immediate threat, and then open it again, instead of trying to build a permanent firewall or fortress. So another environmental challenge that all systems have to deal with is resources, finding and collecting them. And to do this, ants solve the problem of collective search, and this is a problem that's of great interest right now in robotics, because we've understood that, rather than sending a single, sophisticated, expensive robot out to explore another planet or to search a burning building, that instead, it may be more effective to get a group of cheaper robots exchanging only minimal information, and that's the way that ants do it. So the invasive Argentine ant makes expandable search networks. They're good at dealing with the main problem of collective search, which is the trade-off between searching very thoroughly and covering a lot of ground. And what they do is, when there are many ants in a small space, then each one can search very thoroughly because there will be another ant nearby searching over there, but when there are a few ants in a large space, then they need to stretch out their paths to cover more ground. I think they use interactions to assess density, so when they're really crowded, they meet more often, and they search more thoroughly. Different ant species must use different algorithms, because they've evolved to deal with different resources, and it could be really useful to know about this, and so we recently asked ants to solve the collective search problem in the extreme environment of microgravity in the International Space Station. When I first saw this picture, I thought, Oh no, they've mounted the habitat vertically, but then I realized that, of course, it doesn't matter. So the idea here is that the ants are working so hard to hang on to the wall or the floor or whatever you call it that they're less likely to interact, and so the relationship between how crowded they are and how often they meet would be messed up. We're still analyzing the data. I don't have the results yet. But it would be interesting to know how other species solve this problem in different environments on Earth, and so we're setting up a program to encourage kids around the world to try this experiment with different species. It's very simple. It can be done with cheap materials. And that way, we could make a global map of ant collective search algorithms. And I think it's pretty likely that the invasive species, the ones that come into our buildings, are going to be really good at this, because they're in your kitchen because they're really good at finding food and water. So the most familiar resource for ants is a picnic, and this is a clustered resource. When there's one piece of fruit, there's likely to be another piece of fruit nearby, and the ants that specialize on clustered resources use interactions for recruitment. So when one ant meets another, or when it meets a chemical deposited on the ground by another, then it changes direction to follow in the direction of the interaction, and that's how you get the trail of ants sharing your picnic. Now this is a place where I think we might be able to learn something from ants about cancer. I mean, first, it's obvious that we could do a lot to prevent cancer by not allowing people to spread around or sell the toxins that promote the evolution of cancer in our bodies, but I don't think the ants can help us much with this because ants never poison their own colonies. But we might be able to learn something from ants about treating cancer. There are many different kinds of cancer. Each one originates in a particular part of the body, and then some kinds of cancer will spread or metastasize to particular other tissues where they must be getting resources that they need. So if you think from the perspective of early metastatic cancer cells as they're out searching around for the resources that they need, if those resources are clustered, they're likely to use interactions for recruitment, and if we can figure out how cancer cells are recruiting, then maybe we could set traps to catch them before they become established. So ants are using interactions in different ways in a huge variety of environments, and we could learn from this about other systems that operate without central control. Using only simple interactions, ant colonies have been performing amazing feats for more than 130 million years. We have a lot to learn from them. Thank you. (Applause) |
The bridge between suicide and life | {0: 'As a member of the California Highway Patrol with assignments including patrolling the Golden Gate Bridge, Sergeant Kevin Briggs and his staff are the last barriers between would-be suicides and the plunge to near-certain death.'} | TED2014 | I recently retired from the California Highway Patrol after 23 years of service. The majority of those 23 years was spent patrolling the southern end of Marin County, which includes the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge is an iconic structure, known worldwide for its beautiful views of San Francisco, the Pacific Ocean, and its inspiring architecture. Unfortunately, it is also a magnet for suicide, being one of the most utilized sites in the world. The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937. Joseph Strauss, chief engineer in charge of building the bridge, was quoted as saying, "The bridge is practically suicide-proof. Suicide from the bridge is neither practical nor probable." But since its opening, over 1,600 people have leapt to their death from that bridge. Some believe that traveling between the two towers will lead you to another dimension — this bridge has been romanticized as such — that the fall from that frees you from all your worries and grief, and the waters below will cleanse your soul. But let me tell you what actually occurs when the bridge is used as a means of suicide. After a free fall of four to five seconds, the body strikes the water at about 75 miles an hour. That impact shatters bones, some of which then puncture vital organs. Most die on impact. Those that don't generally flail in the water helplessly, and then drown. I don't think that those who contemplate this method of suicide realize how grisly a death that they will face. This is the cord. Except for around the two towers, there is 32 inches of steel paralleling the bridge. This is where most folks stand before taking their lives. I can tell you from experience that once the person is on that cord, and at their darkest time, it is very difficult to bring them back. I took this photo last year as this young woman spoke to an officer contemplating her life. I want to tell you very happily that we were successful that day in getting her back over the rail. When I first began working on the bridge, we had no formal training. You struggled to funnel your way through these calls. This was not only a disservice to those contemplating suicide, but to the officers as well. We've come a long, long way since then. Now, veteran officers and psychologists train new officers. This is Jason Garber. I met Jason on July 22 of last year when I get received a call of a possible suicidal subject sitting on the cord near midspan. I responded, and when I arrived, I observed Jason speaking to a Golden Gate Bridge officer. Jason was just 32 years old and had flown out here from New Jersey. As a matter of fact, he had flown out here on two other occasions from New Jersey to attempt suicide on this bridge. After about an hour of speaking with Jason, he asked us if we knew the story of Pandora's box. Recalling your Greek mythology, Zeus created Pandora, and sent her down to Earth with a box, and told her, "Never, ever open that box." Well one day, curiosity got the better of Pandora, and she did open the box. Out flew plagues, sorrows, and all sorts of evils against man. The only good thing in the box was hope. Jason then asked us, "What happens when you open the box and hope isn't there?" He paused a few moments, leaned to his right, and was gone. This kind, intelligent young man from New Jersey had just committed suicide. I spoke with Jason's parents that evening, and I suppose that, when I was speaking with them, that I didn't sound as if I was doing very well, because that very next day, their family rabbi called to check on me. Jason's parents had asked him to do so. The collateral damage of suicide affects so many people. I pose these questions to you: What would you do if your family member, friend or loved one was suicidal? What would you say? Would you know what to say? In my experience, it's not just the talking that you do, but the listening. Listen to understand. Don't argue, blame, or tell the person you know how they feel, because you probably don't. By just being there, you may just be the turning point that they need. If you think someone is suicidal, don't be afraid to confront them and ask the question. One way of asking them the question is like this: "Others in similar circumstances have thought about ending their life; have you had these thoughts?" Confronting the person head-on may just save their life and be the turning point for them. Some other signs to look for: hopelessness, believing that things are terrible and never going to get better; helplessness, believing that there is nothing that you can do about it; recent social withdrawal; and a loss of interest in life. I came up with this talk just a couple of days ago, and I received an email from a lady that I'd like to read you her letter. She lost her son on January 19 of this year, and she wrote this me this email just a couple of days ago, and it's with her permission and blessing that I read this to you. "Hi, Kevin. I imagine you're at the TED Conference. That must be quite the experience to be there. I'm thinking I should go walk the bridge this weekend. Just wanted to drop you a note. Hope you get the word out to many people and they go home talking about it to their friends who tell their friends, etc. I'm still pretty numb, but noticing more moments of really realizing Mike isn't coming home. Mike was driving from Petaluma to San Francisco to watch the 49ers game with his father on January 19. He never made it there. I called Petaluma police and reported him missing that evening. The next morning, two officers came to my home and reported that Mike's car was down at the bridge. A witness had observed him jumping off the bridge at 1:58 p.m. the previous day. Thanks so much for standing up for those who may be only temporarily too weak to stand for themselves. Who hasn't been low before without suffering from a true mental illness? It shouldn't be so easy to end it. My prayers are with you for your fight. The GGB, Golden Gate Bridge, is supposed to be a passage across our beautiful bay, not a graveyard. Good luck this week. Vicky." I can't imagine the courage it takes for her to go down to that bridge and walk the path that her son took that day, and also the courage just to carry on. I'd like to introduce you to a man I refer to as hope and courage. On March 11 of 2005, I responded to a radio call of a possible suicidal subject on the bridge sidewalk near the north tower. I rode my motorcycle down the sidewalk and observed this man, Kevin Berthia, standing on the sidewalk. When he saw me, he immediately traversed that pedestrian rail, and stood on that small pipe which goes around the tower. For the next hour and a half, I listened as Kevin spoke about his depression and hopelessness. Kevin decided on his own that day to come back over that rail and give life another chance. When Kevin came back over, I congratulated him. "This is a new beginning, a new life." But I asked him, "What was it that made you come back and give hope and life another chance?" And you know what he told me? He said, "You listened. You let me speak, and you just listened." Shortly after this incident, I received a letter from Kevin's mother, and I have that letter with me, and I'd like to read it to you. "Dear Mr. Briggs, Nothing will erase the events of March 11, but you are one of the reasons Kevin is still with us. I truly believe Kevin was crying out for help. He has been diagnosed with a mental illness for which he has been properly medicated. I adopted Kevin when he was only six months old, completely unaware of any hereditary traits, but, thank God, now we know. Kevin is straight, as he says. We truly thank God for you. Sincerely indebted to you, Narvella Berthia." And on the bottom she writes, "P.S. When I visited San Francisco General Hospital that evening, you were listed as the patient. Boy, did I have to straighten that one out." Today, Kevin is a loving father and contributing member of society. He speaks openly about the events that day and his depression in the hopes that his story will inspire others. Suicide is not just something I've encountered on the job. It's personal. My grandfather committed suicide by poisoning. That act, although ending his own pain, robbed me from ever getting to know him. This is what suicide does. For most suicidal folks, or those contemplating suicide, they wouldn't think of hurting another person. They just want their own pain to end. Typically, this is accomplished in just three ways: sleep, drugs or alcohol, or death. In my career, I've responded to and been involved in hundreds of mental illness and suicide calls around the bridge. Of those incidents I've been directly involved with, I've only lost two, but that's two too many. One was Jason. The other was a man I spoke to for about an hour. During that time, he shook my hand on three occasions. On that final handshake, he looked at me, and he said, "Kevin, I'm sorry, but I have to go." And he leapt. Horrible, absolutely horrible. I do want to tell you, though, the vast majority of folks that we do get to contact on that bridge do not commit suicide. Additionally, that very few who have jumped off the bridge and lived and can talk about it, that one to two percent, most of those folks have said that the second that they let go of that rail, they knew that they had made a mistake and they wanted to live. I tell people, the bridge not only connects Marin to San Francisco, but people together also. That connection, or bridge that we make, is something that each and every one of us should strive to do. Suicide is preventable. There is help. There is hope. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The smelly mystery of the human pheromone | {0: 'Do humans have pheromones? Tristram Wyatt is on the case. A researcher at Oxford, Wyatt is interested in the evolution of pheromones throughout the animal kingdom.'} | TEDxLeuvenSalon | "Pheromone" is a very powerful word. It conjures up sex, abandon, loss of control, and you can see, it's very important as a word. But it's only 50 years old. It was invented in 1959. Now, if you put that word into the web, as you may have done, you'll come up with millions of hits, and almost all of those sites are trying to sell you something to make you irresistible for 10 dollars or more. Now, this is a very attractive idea, and the molecules they mention sound really science-y. They've got lots of syllables. It's things like androstenol, androstenone or androstadienone. It gets better and better, and when you combine that with white lab coats, you must imagine that there is fantastic science behind this. But sadly, these are fraudulent claims supported by dodgy science. The problem is that, although there are many good scientists working on what they think are human pheromones, and they're publishing in respectable journals, at the basis of this, despite very sophisticated experiments, there really is no good science behind it, because it's based on a problem, which is nobody has systematically gone through all the odors that humans produce — and there are thousands of molecules that we give off. We're mammals. We produce a lot of smell. Nobody has gone through systematically to work out which molecules really are pheromones. They've just plucked a few, and all these experiments are based on those, but there's no good evidence at all. Now, that's not to say that smell is not important to people. It is, and some people are real enthusiasts, and one of these was Napoleon. And famously, you may remember that out on the campaign trail for war, he wrote to his lover, Empress Josephine, saying, "Don't wash. I'm coming home." (Laughter) So he didn't want to lose any of her richness in the days before he'd get home, and it is still, you'll find websites that offer this as a major quirk. At the same time, though, we spend about as much money taking the smells off us as putting them back on in perfumes, and perfumes are a multi-billion-dollar business. So what I want to do in the rest of this talk is tell you about what pheromones really are, tell you why I think we would expect humans to have pheromones, tell you about some of the confusions in pheromones, and then finally, I want to end with a promising avenue which shows us the way we ought to be going. So the ancient Greeks knew that dogs sent invisible signals between each other. A female dog in heat sent an invisible signal to male dogs for miles around, and it wasn't a sound, it was a smell. You could take the smell from the female dog, and the dogs would chase the cloth. But the problem for everybody who could see this effect was that you couldn't identify the molecules. You couldn't demonstrate it was chemical. The reason for that, of course, is that each of these animals produces tiny quantities, and in the case of the dog, males dogs can smell it, but we can't smell it. And it was only in 1959 that a German team, after spending 20 years in search of these molecules, discovered, identified, the first pheromone, and this was the sex pheromone of a silk moth. Now, this was an inspired choice by Adolf Butenandt and his team, because he needed half a million moths to get enough material to do the chemical analysis. But he created the model for how you should go about pheromone analysis. He basically went through systematically, showing that only the molecule in question was the one that stimulated the males, not all the others. He analyzed it very carefully. He synthesized the molecule, and then tried the synthesized molecule on the males and got them to respond and showed it was, indeed, that molecule. That's closing the circle. That's the thing which has never been done with humans: nothing systematic, no real demonstration. With that new concept, we needed a new word, and that was the word "pheromone," and it's basically transferred excitement, transferred between individuals, and since 1959, pheromones have been found right the way across the animal kingdom, in male animals, in female animals. It works just as well underwater for goldfish and lobsters. And almost every mammal you can think of has had a pheromone identified, and of course, an enormous number of insects. So we know that pheromones exist right the way across the animal kingdom. What about humans? Well, the first thing, of course, is that we're mammals, and mammals are smelly. As any dog owner can tell you, we smell, they smell. But the real reason we might think that humans have pheromones is the change that occurs as we grow up. The smell of a room of teenagers is quite different from the smell of a room of small children. What's changed? And of course, it's puberty. Along with the pubic hair and the hair in the armpits, new glands start to secrete in those places, and that's what's making the change in smell. If we were any other kind of mammal, or any other kind of animal, we would say, "That must be something to do with pheromones," and we'd start looking properly. But there are some problems, and this is why, I think, people have not looked for pheromones so effectively in humans. There are, indeed, problems. And the first of these is perhaps surprising. It's all about culture. Now moths don't learn a lot about what is good to smell, but humans do, and up to the age of about four, any smell, no matter how rancid, is simply interesting. And I understand that the major role of parents is to stop kids putting their fingers in poo, because it's always something nice to smell. But gradually we learn what's not good, and one of the things we learn at the same time as what is not good is what is good. Now, the cheese behind me is a British, if not an English, delicacy. It's ripe blue Stilton. Liking it is incomprehensible to people from other countries. Every culture has its own special food and national delicacy. If you were to come from Iceland, your national dish is deep rotted shark. Now, all of these things are acquired tastes, but they form almost a badge of identity. You're part of the in-group. The second thing is the sense of smell. Each of us has a unique odor world, in the sense that what we smell, we each smell a completely different world. Now, smell was the hardest of the senses to crack, and the Nobel Prize awarded to Richard Axel and Linda Buck was only awarded in 2004 for their discovery of how smell works. It's really hard, but in essence, nerves from the brain go up into the nose and on these nerves exposed in the nose to the outside air are receptors, and odor molecules coming in on a sniff interact with these receptors, and if they bond, they send the nerve a signal which goes back into the brain. We don't just have one kind of receptor. If you're a human, you have about 400 different kinds of receptors, and the brain knows what you're smelling because of the combination of receptors and nerve cells that they trigger, sending messages up to the brain in a combinatorial fashion. But it's a bit more complicated, because each of those 400 comes in various variants, and depending which variant you have, you might smell coriander, or cilantro, that herb, either as something delicious and savory or something like soap. So we each have an individual world of smell, and that complicates anything when we're studying smell. Well, we really ought to talk about armpits, and I have to say that I do have particularly good ones. Now, I'm not going to share them with you, but this is the place that most people have looked for pheromones. There is one good reason, which is, the great apes have armpits as their unique characteristic. The other primates have scent glands in other parts of the body. The great apes have these armpits full of secretory glands producing smells all the time, enormous numbers of molecules. When they're secreted from the glands, the molecules are odorless. They have no smell at all, and it's only the wonderful bacteria growing on the rainforest of hair that actually produces the smells that we know and love. And so incidentally, if you want to reduce the amount of smell, clear-cutting your armpits is a very effective way of reducing the habitat for bacteria, and you'll find they remain less smelly for much longer. But although we've focused on armpits, I think it's partly because they're the least embarrassing place to go and ask people for samples. There is actually another reason why we might not be looking for a universal sex pheromone there, and that's because 20 percent of the world's population doesn't have smelly armpits like me. And these are people from China, Japan, Korea, and other parts of northeast Asia. They simply don't secrete those odorless precursors that the bacteria love to use to produce the smells that in an ethnocentric way we always thought of as characteristic of armpits. So it doesn't apply to 20 percent of the world. So what should we be doing in our search for human pheromones? I'm fairly convinced that we do have them. We're mammals, like everybody else who's a mammal, and we probably do have them. But what I think we should do is go right back to the beginning, and basically look all over the body. No matter how embarrassing, we need to search and go for the first time where no one else has dared tread. It's going to be difficult, it's going to be embarrassing, but we need to look. We also need to go back to the ideas that Butenandt used when he was studying the silk moth. We need to go back and look systematically at all the molecules that are being produced, and work out which ones are really involved. It isn't good enough simply to pluck a couple and say, "They'll do." We have to actually demonstrate that they really have the effects we claim. There is one team that I'm actually very impressed by. They're in France, and their previous success was identifying the rabbit mammary pheromone. They've turned their attention now to human babies and mothers. So this is a baby having a drink of milk from its mother's breast. Her nipple is completely hidden by the baby's head, but what you'll notice is a white droplet with an arrow pointing to it, and that's the secretion from the areolar glands. Now, we all have them, men and women, and these are the little bumps around the nipple, and if you're a lactating woman, these start to secrete. It's a very interesting secretion. What Benoist Schaal and his team developed was a simple test to investigate what the effect of this secretion might be, in effect, a simple bioassay. So this is a sleeping baby, and under its nose, we've put a clean glass rod. The baby remains sleeping, showing no interest at all. But if we go to any mother who is secreting from the areolar glands, so it's not about recognition, it can be from any mother, if we take the secretion and now put it under the baby's nose, we get a very different reaction. It's a connoisseur's reaction of delight, and it opens its mouth and sticks out its tongue and starts to suck. Now, since this is from any mother, it could really be a pheromone. It's not about individual recognition. Any mother will do. Now, why is this important, apart from being simply very interesting? It's because women vary in the number of areolar glands that they have, and there is a correlation between the ease with which babies start to suckle and the number of areolar glands she has. It appears that the more secretions she's got, the more likely the baby is to suckle quickly. If you're a mammal, the most dangerous time in life is the first few hours after birth. You have to get that first drink of milk, and if you don't get it, you won't survive. You'll be dead. Since many babies actually find it difficult to take that first meal, because they're not getting the right stimulus, if we could identify what that molecule was, and the French team are being very cautious, but if we could identify the molecule, synthesize it, it would then mean premature babies would be more likely to suckle, and every baby would have a better chance of survival. So what I want to argue is this is one example of where a systematic, really scientific approach can actually bring you a real understanding of pheromones. There could be all sorts of medical interventions. There could be all sorts of things that humans are doing with pheromones that we simply don't know at the moment. What we need to remember is pheromones are not just about sex. They're about all sorts of things to do with a mammal's life. So do go forward and do search for more. There's lots to find. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The Museum of Four in the Morning | {0: 'Performance artist and storyteller Rives has been called "the first 2.0 poet," using images, video and technology to bring his words to life. '} | TEDActive 2014 | The most romantic thing to ever happen to me online started out the way most things do: without me, and not online. On December 10, 1896, the man on the medal, Alfred Nobel, died. One hundred years later, exactly, actually, December 10, 1996, this charming lady, Wislawa Szymborska, won the Nobel Prize for literature. She's a Polish poet. She's a big deal, obviously, but back in '96, I thought I had never heard of her, and when I checked out her work, I found this sweet little poem, "Four in the Morning." "The hour from night to day. The hour from side to side. The hour for those past thirty..." And it goes on, but as soon as I read this poem, I fell for it hard, so hard, I suspected we must have met somewhere before. Had I shared an elevator ride with this poem? Did I flirt with this poem in a coffee shop somewhere? I could not place it, and it bugged me, and then in the coming week or two, I would just be watching an old movie, and this would happen. (Video) Groucho Marx: Charlie, you should have come to the first party. We didn't get home till around four in the morning. Rives: My roommates would have the TV on, and this would happen. (Music: Seinfeld theme) (Video) George Costanza: Oh boy, I was up til four in the morning watching that Omen trilogy. Rives: I would be listening to music, and this would happen. (Video) Elton John: ♪ It's four o'clock in the morning, damn it. ♪ Rives: So you can see what was going on, right? Obviously, the demigods of coincidence were just messing with me. Some people get a number stuck in their head, you may recognize a certain name or a tune, some people get nothing, but four in the morning was in me now, but mildly, like a groin injury. I always assumed it would just go away on its own eventually, and I never talked about it with anybody, but it did not, and I totally did. In 2007, I was invited to speak at TED for the second time, and since I was still an authority on nothing, I thought, what if I made a multimedia presentation on a topic so niche it is actually inconsequential or actually cockamamie. So my talk had some of my four in the morning examples, but it also had examples from my fellow TED speakers that year. I found four in the morning in a novel by Isabel Allende. I found a really great one in the autobiography of Bill Clinton. I found a couple in the work of Matt Groening, although Matt Groening told me later that he could not make my talk because it was a morning session and I gather that he is not an early riser. However, had Matt been there, he would have seen this mock conspiracy theory that was un-freaking-canny for me to assemble. It was totally contrived just for that room, just for that moment. That's how we did it in the pre-TED.com days. It was fun. That was pretty much it. When I got home, though, the emails started coming in from people who had seen the talk live, beginning with, and this is still my favorite, "Here's another one for your collection: 'It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.'" The sentiment is Marlene Dietrich. The email itself was from another very sexy European type, TED Curator Chris Anderson. (Laughter) Chris found this quote on a coffee cup or something, and I'm thinking, this man is the Typhoid Mary of ideas worth spreading, and I have infected him. I am contagious, which was confirmed less than a week later when a Hallmark employee scanned and sent an actual greeting card with that same quotation. As a bonus, she hooked me up with a second one they make. It says, "Just knowing I can call you at four in the morning if I need to makes me not really need to," which I love, because together these are like, "Hallmark: When you care enough to send the very best twice, phrased slightly differently." I was not surprised at the TEDster and New Yorker magazine overlap. A bunch of people sent me this when it came out. "It's 4 a.m.—maybe you'd sleep better if you bought some crap." I was surprised at the TEDster/"Rugrats" overlap. More than one person sent me this. (Video) Didi Pickles: It's four o'clock in the morning. Why on Earth are you making chocolate pudding? Stu Pickles: Because I've lost control of my life. (Laughter) Rives: And then there was the lone TEDster who was disgruntled I had overlooked what he considers to be a classic. (Video) Roy Neary: Get up, get up! I'm not kidding. Ronnie Neary: Is there an accident? Roy: No, it's not an accident. You wanted to get out of the house anyway, right? Ronnie: Not at four o'clock in the morning. Rives: So that's "Close Encounters," and the main character is all worked up because aliens, momentously, have chosen to show themselves to earthlings at four in the morning, which does make that a very solid example. Those were all really solid examples. They did not get me any closer to understanding why I thought I recognized this one particular poem. But they followed the pattern. They played along. Right? Four in the morning as this scapegoat hour when all these dramatic occurrences allegedly occur. Maybe this was some kind of cliche that had never been taxonomized before. Maybe I was on the trail of a new meme or something. Just when things were getting pretty interesting, things got really interesting. TED.com launched, later that year, with a bunch of videos from past talks, including mine, and I started receiving "four in the morning" citations from what seemed like every time zone on the planet. Much of it was content I never would have found on my own if I was looking for it, and I was not. I don't know anybody with juvenile diabetes. I probably would have missed the booklet, "Grilled Cheese at Four O'Clock in the Morning." (Laughter) I do not subscribe to Crochet Today! magazine, although it looks delightful. (Laughter) Take note of those clock ends. This is a college student's suggestion for what a "four in the morning" gang sign should look like. People sent me magazine ads. They took photographs in grocery stores. I got a ton of graphic novels and comics. A lot of good quality work, too: "The Sandman," "Watchmen." There's a very cute example here from "Calvin and Hobbes." In fact, the oldest citation anybody sent in was from a cartoon from the Stone Age. Take a look. (Video) Wilma Flintstone: Like how early? Fred Flintstone: Like at 4 a.m., that's how early. Rives: And the flip side of the timeline, this is from the 31st century. A thousand years from now, people are still doing this. (Video): Announcer: The time is 4 a.m. (Laughter) Rives: It shows the spectrum. I received so many songs, TV shows, movies, like from dismal to famous, I could give you a four-hour playlist. If I just stick to modern male movie stars, I keep it to the length of about a commercial. Here's your sampler. (Movie montage of "It's 4 a.m.") (Laughter) Rives: So somewhere along the line, I realized I have a hobby I didn't know I wanted, and it is crowdsourced. But I was also thinking what you might be thinking, which is really, couldn't you do this with any hour of the day? First of all, you are not getting clips like that about four in the afternoon. Secondly, I did a little research. You know, I was kind of interested. If this is confirmation bias, there is so much confirmation, I am biased. Literature probably shows it best. There are a couple three in the mornings in Shakespeare. There's a five in the morning. There are seven four in the mornings, and they're all very dire. In "Measure for Measure," it's the call time for the executioner. Tolstoy gives Napoleon insomnia at four in the morning right before battle in "War and Peace." Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" has got kind of a pivotal four in the morning, as does Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights." "Lolita" has as a creepy four in the morning. "Huckleberry Finn" has one in dialect. Someone sent in H.G. Wells' "The Invisible Man." Someone else sent in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." "The Great Gatsby" spends the last four in the morning of his life waiting for a lover who never shows, and the most famous wake-up in literature, perhaps, "The Metamorphosis." First paragraph, the main character wakes up transformed into a giant cockroach, but we already know, cockroach notwithstanding, something is up with this guy. Why? His alarm is set for four o'clock in the morning. What kind of person would do that? This kind of person would do that. (Music) (4 a.m. alarm clock montage) (Video) Newcaster: Top of the hour. Time for the morning news. But of course, there is no news yet. Everyone's still asleep in their comfy, comfy beds. Rives: Exactly. So that's Lucy from the Peanuts, "Mommie Dearest", Rocky, first day of training, Nelson Mandela, first day in office, and Bart Simpson, which combined with a cockroach would give you one hell of a dinner party and gives me yet another category, people waking up, in my big old database. Just imagine that your friends and your family have heard that you collect, say, stuffed polar bears, and they send them to you. Even if you don't really, at a certain point, you totally collect stuffed polar bears, and your collection is probably pretty kick-ass. And when I got to that point, I embraced it. I got my curator on. I started fact checking, downloading, illegally screen-grabbing. I started archiving. My hobby had become a habit, and my habit gave me possibly the world's most eclectic Netflix queue. At one point, it went, "Guys and Dolls: The Musical," "Last Tango in Paris," "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," "Porn Star: Legend of Ron Jeremy." Why "Porn Star: Legend of Ron Jeremy"? Because someone told me I would find this clip in there. (Video) Ron Jeremy: I was born in Flushing, Queens on March, 12, 1953, at four o'clock in the morning. Rives: Of course he was. (Laughter) (Applause) Yeah. Not only does it seem to make sense, it also answers the question, "What do Ron Jeremy and Simone de Beauvoir have in common?" Simone de Beauvoir begins her entire autobiography with the sentence, "I was born at four o'clock in the morning," which I had because someone else had emailed it to me, and when they did, I had another bump up in my entry for this, because porn star Ron Jeremy and feminist Simone de Beauvoir are not just different people. They are different people that have this thing connecting them, and I did not know if that is trivia or knowledge or inadvertent expertise, but I did wonder, is there maybe a cooler way to do this? So last October, in gentleman scholar tradition, I put the entire collection online as "Museum of Four in the Morning." You can click on that red "refresh" button. It will take you at random to one of hundreds of snippets that are in the collection. Here is a knockout poem by Billy Collins called "Forgetfulness." (Video) Billy Collins: No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart. Rives: So the first hour of this project was satisfying. A Bollywood actor sang a line on a DVD in a cafe. Half a globe away, a teenager made an Instagram video of it and sent it to me, a stranger. Less than a week later, though, I received a little bit of grace. I received a poignant tweet. It was brief. It just said, "Reminds me of an ancient mix tape." The name was a pseudonym, actually, or a pseudo-pseudonym. As soon as I saw the initials, and the profile pic, I knew immediately, my whole body knew immediately who this was, and I knew immediately what mix tape she was talking about. (Music) L.D. was my college romance. This is in the early '90s. I was an undegrad. She was a grad student in the library sciences department. Not the kind of librarian that takes her glasses off, lets her hair down, suddenly she's smoking hot. She was already smoking hot, she was super dorky, and we had a December-May romance, meaning we started dating in December, and by May, she had graduated and became my one that got away. But her mix tape did not get away. I have kept this mix tape in a box with notes and postcards, not just from L.D., from my life, but for decades. It's the kind of box where, if I have a girlfriend, I tend to hide it from her, and if I had a wife, I'm sure I would share it with her, but the story — (Laughter) — with this mix tape is there are seven songs per side, but no song titles. Instead, L.D. has used the U.S. Library of Congress classification system, including page numbers, to leave me clues. When I got this mix tape, I put it in my cassette player, I took it to the campus library, her library, I found 14 books on the shelves. I remember bringing them all to my favorite corner table, and I read poems paired to songs like food to wine, paired, I can tell you, like saddle shoes to a cobalt blue vintage cotton dress. I did this again last October. I'm sitting there, I got new earbuds, old Walkman, I realize this is just the kind of extravagance I used to take for granted even when I was extravagant. And then I thought, "Good for him." "PG" is Slavic literature. "7000" series Polish literature. Z9A24 is a collection of 70 poems. Page 31 is Wislawa Szymborska's poem paired with Paul Simon's "Peace Like a River." (Music: Paul Simon, "Peace Like a River") (Video) Paul Simon: ♪ Oh, four in the morning ♪ ♪ I woke up from out of my dream ♪ Rives: Thank you. Appreciate it. (Applause) |
Why good leaders make you feel safe | {0: 'Simon Sinek explores how leaders can inspire cooperation, trust and change. He\'s the author of the classic "Start With Why"; his latest book is "Leaders Eat Last."'} | TED2014 | There's a man by the name of Captain William Swenson who recently was awarded the congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on September 8, 2009. On that day, a column of American and Afghan troops were making their way through a part of Afghanistan to help protect a group of government officials, a group of Afghan government officials, who would be meeting with some local village elders. The column came under ambush, and was surrounded on three sides, and amongst many other things, Captain Swenson was recognized for running into live fire to rescue the wounded and pull out the dead. One of the people he rescued was a sergeant, and he and a comrade were making their way to a medevac helicopter. And what was remarkable about this day is, by sheer coincidence, one of the medevac medics happened to have a GoPro camera on his helmet and captured the whole scene on camera. It shows Captain Swenson and his comrade bringing this wounded soldier who had received a gunshot to the neck. They put him in the helicopter, and then you see Captain Swenson bend over and give him a kiss before he turns around to rescue more. I saw this, and I thought to myself, where do people like that come from? What is that? That is some deep, deep emotion, when you would want to do that. There's a love there, and I wanted to know why is it that I don't have people that I work with like that? You know, in the military, they give medals to people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain. In business, we give bonuses to people who are willing to sacrifice others so that we may gain. We have it backwards. Right? So I asked myself, where do people like this come from? And my initial conclusion was that they're just better people. That's why they're attracted to the military. These better people are attracted to this concept of service. But that's completely wrong. What I learned was that it's the environment, and if you get the environment right, every single one of us has the capacity to do these remarkable things, and more importantly, others have that capacity too. I've had the great honor of getting to meet some of these, who we would call heroes, who have put themselves and put their lives at risk to save others, and I asked them, "Why would you do it? Why did you do it?" And they all say the same thing: "Because they would have done it for me." It's this deep sense of trust and cooperation. So trust and cooperation are really important here. The problem with concepts of trust and cooperation is that they are feelings, they are not instructions. I can't simply say to you, "Trust me," and you will. I can't simply instruct two people to cooperate, and they will. It's not how it works. It's a feeling. So where does that feeling come from? If you go back 50,000 years to the Paleolithic era, to the early days of Homo sapiens, what we find is that the world was filled with danger, all of these forces working very, very hard to kill us. Nothing personal. Whether it was the weather, lack of resources, maybe a saber-toothed tiger, all of these things working to reduce our lifespan. And so we evolved into social animals, where we lived together and worked together in what I call a circle of safety, inside the tribe, where we felt like we belonged. And when we felt safe amongst our own, the natural reaction was trust and cooperation. There are inherent benefits to this. It means I can fall asleep at night and trust that someone from within my tribe will watch for danger. If we don't trust each other, if I don't trust you, that means you won't watch for danger. Bad system of survival. The modern day is exactly the same thing. The world is filled with danger, things that are trying to frustrate our lives or reduce our success, reduce our opportunity for success. It could be the ups and downs in the economy, the uncertainty of the stock market. It could be a new technology that renders your business model obsolete overnight. Or it could be your competition that is sometimes trying to kill you. It's sometimes trying to put you out of business, but at the very minimum is working hard to frustrate your growth and steal your business from you. We have no control over these forces. These are a constant, and they're not going away. The only variable are the conditions inside the organization, and that's where leadership matters, because it's the leader that sets the tone. When a leader makes the choice to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first, to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice the tangible results, so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong, remarkable things happen. I was flying on a trip, and I was witness to an incident where a passenger attempted to board before their number was called, and I watched the gate agent treat this man like he had broken the law, like a criminal. He was yelled at for attempting to board one group too soon. So I said something. I said, "Why do you have treat us like cattle? Why can't you treat us like human beings?" And this is exactly what she said to me. She said, "Sir, if I don't follow the rules, I could get in trouble or lose my job." All she was telling me is that she doesn't feel safe. All she was telling me is that she doesn't trust her leaders. The reason we like flying Southwest Airlines is not because they necessarily hire better people. It's because they don't fear their leaders. You see, if the conditions are wrong, we are forced to expend our own time and energy to protect ourselves from each other, and that inherently weakens the organization. When we feel safe inside the organization, we will naturally combine our talents and our strengths and work tirelessly to face the dangers outside and seize the opportunities. The closest analogy I can give to what a great leader is, is like being a parent. If you think about what being a great parent is, what do you want? What makes a great parent? We want to give our child opportunities, education, discipline them when necessary, all so that they can grow up and achieve more than we could for ourselves. Great leaders want exactly the same thing. They want to provide their people opportunity, education, discipline when necessary, build their self-confidence, give them the opportunity to try and fail, all so that they could achieve more than we could ever imagine for ourselves. Charlie Kim, who's the CEO of a company called Next Jump in New York City, a tech company, he makes the point that if you had hard times in your family, would you ever consider laying off one of your children? We would never do it. Then why do we consider laying off people inside our organization? Charlie implemented a policy of lifetime employment. If you get a job at Next Jump, you cannot get fired for performance issues. In fact, if you have issues, they will coach you and they will give you support, just like we would with one of our children who happens to come home with a C from school. It's the complete opposite. This is the reason so many people have such a visceral hatred, anger, at some of these banking CEOs with their disproportionate salaries and bonus structures. It's not the numbers. It's that they have violated the very definition of leadership. They have violated this deep-seated social contract. We know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed so they could protect their own interests, or worse, they sacrificed their people to protect their own interests. This is what so offends us, not the numbers. Would anybody be offended if we gave a $150 million bonus to Gandhi? How about a $250 million bonus to Mother Teresa? Do we have an issue with that? None at all. None at all. Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers. They would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people. Bob Chapman, who runs a large manufacturing company in the Midwest called Barry-Wehmiller, in 2008 was hit very hard by the recession, and they lost 30 percent of their orders overnight. Now in a large manufacturing company, this is a big deal, and they could no longer afford their labor pool. They needed to save 10 million dollars, so, like so many companies today, the board got together and discussed layoffs. And Bob refused. You see, Bob doesn't believe in head counts. Bob believes in heart counts, and it's much more difficult to simply reduce the heart count. And so they came up with a furlough program. Every employee, from secretary to CEO, was required to take four weeks of unpaid vacation. They could take it any time they wanted, and they did not have to take it consecutively. But it was how Bob announced the program that mattered so much. He said, it's better that we should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot, and morale went up. They saved 20 million dollars, and most importantly, as would be expected, when the people feel safe and protected by the leadership in the organization, the natural reaction is to trust and cooperate. And quite spontaneously, nobody expected, people started trading with each other. Those who could afford it more would trade with those who could afford it less. People would take five weeks so that somebody else only had to take three. Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. I know many people at the seniormost levels of organizations who are absolutely not leaders. They are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizations who have no authority and they are absolutely leaders, and this is because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them, and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them. This is what a leader is. I heard a story of some Marines who were out in theater, and as is the Marine custom, the officer ate last, and he let his men eat first, and when they were done, there was no food left for him. And when they went back out in the field, his men brought him some of their food so that he may eat, because that's what happens. We call them leaders because they go first. We call them leaders because they take the risk before anybody else does. We call them leaders because they will choose to sacrifice so that their people may be safe and protected and so their people may gain, and when we do, the natural response is that our people will sacrifice for us. They will give us their blood and sweat and tears to see that their leader's vision comes to life, and when we ask them, "Why would you do that? Why would you give your blood and sweat and tears for that person?" they all say the same thing: "Because they would have done it for me." And isn't that the organization we would all like to work in? Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Save the oceans, feed the world! | {0: "Jackie Savitz works to protect the world's oceans. A marine biologist, she is passionate that saving the seas will benefit us all."} | TEDxMidAtlantic 2013 | You may be wondering why a marine biologist from Oceana would come here today to talk to you about world hunger. I'm here today because saving the oceans is more than an ecological desire. It's more than a thing we're doing because we want to create jobs for fishermen or preserve fishermen's jobs. It's more than an economic pursuit. Saving the oceans can feed the world. Let me show you how. As you know, there are already more than a billion hungry people on this planet. We're expecting that problem to get worse as world population grows to nine billion or 10 billion by midcentury, and we can expect to have greater pressure on our food resources. And this is a big concern, especially considering where we are now. Now we know that our arable land per capita is already on the decline in both developed and developing countries. We know that we're headed for climate change, which is going to change rainfall patterns, making some areas drier, as you can see in orange, and others wetter, in blue, causing droughts in our breadbaskets, in places like the Midwest and Central Europe, and floods in others. It's going to make it harder for the land to help us solve the hunger problem. And that's why the oceans need to be their most abundant, so that the oceans can provide us as much food as possible. And that's something the oceans have been doing for us for a long time. As far back as we can go, we've seen an increase in the amount of food we've been able to harvest from our oceans. It just seemed like it was continuing to increase, until about 1980, when we started to see a decline. You've heard of peak oil. Maybe this is peak fish. I hope not. I'm going to come back to that. But you can see about an 18-percent decline in the amount of fish we've gotten in our world catch since 1980. And this is a big problem. It's continuing. This red line is continuing to go down. But we know how to turn it around, and that's what I'm going to talk about today. We know how to turn that curve back upwards. This doesn't have to be peak fish. If we do a few simple things in targeted places, we can bring our fisheries back and use them to feed people. First we want to know where the fish are, so let's look where the fish are. It turns out the fish, conveniently, are located for the most part in our coastal areas of the countries, in coastal zones, and these are areas that national jurisdictions have control over, and they can manage their fisheries in these coastal areas. Coastal countries tend to have jurisdictions that go out about 200 nautical miles, in areas that are called exclusive economic zones, and this is a good thing that they can control their fisheries in these areas, because the high seas, which are the darker areas on this map, the high seas, it's a lot harder to control things, because it has to be done internationally. You get into international agreements, and if any of you are tracking the climate change agreement, you know this can be a very slow, frustrating, tedious process. And so controlling things nationally is a great thing to be able to do. How many fish are actually in these coastal areas compared to the high seas? Well, you can see here about seven times as many fish in the coastal areas than there are in the high seas, so this is a perfect place for us to be focusing, because we can actually get a lot done. We can restore a lot of our fisheries if we focus in these coastal areas. But how many of these countries do we have to work in? There's something like 80 coastal countries. Do we have to fix fisheries management in all of those countries? So we asked ourselves, how many countries do we need to focus on, keeping in mind that the European Union conveniently manages its fisheries through a common fisheries policy? So if we got good fisheries management in the European Union and, say, nine other countries, how much of our fisheries would we be covering? Turns out, European Union plus nine countries covers about two thirds of the world's fish catch. If we took it up to 24 countries plus the European Union, we would up to 90 percent, almost all of the world's fish catch. So we think we can work in a limited number of places to make the fisheries come back. But what do we have to do in these places? Well, based on our work in the United States and elsewhere, we know that there are three key things we have to do to bring fisheries back, and they are: We need to set quotas or limits on how much we take; we need to reduce bycatch, which is the accidental catching and killing of fish that we're not targeting, and it's very wasteful; and three, we need to protect habitats, the nursery areas, the spawning areas that these fish need to grow and reproduce successfully so that they can rebuild their populations. If we do those three things, we know the fisheries will come back. How do we know? We know because we've seen it happening in a lot of different places. This is a slide that shows the herring population in Norway that was crashing since the 1950s. It was coming down, and when Norway set limits, or quotas, on its fishery, what happens? The fishery comes back. This is another example, also happens to be from Norway, of the Norwegian Arctic cod. Same deal. The fishery is crashing. They set limits on discards. Discards are these fish they weren't targeting and they get thrown overboard wastefully. When they set the discard limit, the fishery came back. And it's not just in Norway. We've seen this happening in countries all around the world, time and time again. When these countries step in and they put in sustainable fisheries management policies, the fisheries, which are always crashing, it seems, are starting to come back. So there's a lot of promise here. What does this mean for the world fish catch? This means that if we take that fishery catch that's on the decline and we could turn it upwards, we could increase it up to 100 million metric tons per year. So we didn't have peak fish yet. We still have an opportunity to not only bring the fish back but to actually get more fish that can feed more people than we currently are now. How many more? Right about now, we can feed about 450 million people a fish meal a day based on the current world fish catch, which, of course, you know is going down, so that number will go down over time if we don't fix it, but if we put fishery management practices like the ones I've described in place in 10 to 25 countries, we could bring that number up and feed as many as 700 million people a year a healthy fish meal. We should obviously do this just because it's a good thing to deal with the hunger problem, but it's also cost-effective. It turns out fish is the most cost-effective protein on the planet. If you look at how much fish protein you get per dollar invested compared to all of the other animal proteins, obviously, fish is a good business decision. It also doesn't need a lot of land, something that's in short supply, compared to other protein sources. And it doesn't need a lot of fresh water. It uses a lot less fresh water than, for example, cattle, where you have to irrigate a field so that you can grow the food to graze the cattle. It also has a very low carbon footprint. It has a little bit of a carbon footprint because we do have to get out and catch the fish. It takes a little bit of fuel, but as you know, agriculture can have a carbon footprint, and fish has a much smaller one, so it's less polluting. It's already a big part of our diet, but it can be a bigger part of our diet, which is a good thing, because we know that it's healthy for us. It can reduce our risks of cancer, heart disease and obesity. In fact, our CEO Andy Sharpless, who is the originator of this concept, actually, he likes to say fish is the perfect protein. Andy also talks about the fact that our ocean conservation movement really grew out of the land conservation movement, and in land conservation, we have this problem where biodiversity is at war with food production. You have to cut down the biodiverse forest if you want to get the field to grow the corn to feed people with, and so there's a constant push-pull there. There's a constant tough decision that has to be made between two very important things: maintaining biodiversity and feeding people. But in the oceans, we don't have that war. In the oceans, biodiversity is not at war with abundance. In fact, they're aligned. When we do things that produce biodiversity, we actually get more abundance, and that's important so that we can feed people. Now, there's a catch. Didn't anyone get that? (Laughter) Illegal fishing. Illegal fishing undermines the type of sustainable fisheries management I'm talking about. It can be when you catch fish using gears that have been prohibited, when you fish in places where you're not supposed to fish, you catch fish that are the wrong size or the wrong species. Illegal fishing cheats the consumer and it also cheats honest fishermen, and it needs to stop. The way illegal fish get into our market is through seafood fraud. You might have heard about this. It's when fish are labeled as something they're not. Think about the last time you had fish. What were you eating? Are you sure that's what it was? Because we tested 1,300 different fish samples and about a third of them were not what they were labeled to be. Snappers, nine out of 10 snappers were not snapper. Fifty-nine percent of the tuna we tested was mislabeled. And red snapper, we tested 120 samples, and only seven of them were really red snapper, so good luck finding a red snapper. Seafood has a really complex supply chain, and at every step in this supply chain, there's an opportunity for seafood fraud, unless we have traceability. Traceability is a way where the seafood industry can track the seafood from the boat to the plate to make sure that the consumer can then find out where their seafood came from. This is a really important thing. It's being done by some in the industry, but not enough, so we're pushing a law in Congress called the SAFE Seafood Act, and I'm very excited today to announce the release of a chef's petition, where 450 chefs have signed a petition calling on Congress to support the SAFE Seafood Act. It has a lot of celebrity chefs you may know — Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali, Barton Seaver and others — and they've signed it because they believe that people have a right to know about what they're eating. (Applause) Fishermen like it too, so there's a good chance we can get the kind of support we need to get this bill through, and it comes at a critical time, because this is the way we stop seafood fraud, this is the way we curb illegal fishing, and this is the way we make sure that quotas, habitat protection, and bycatch reductions can do the jobs they can do. We know that we can manage our fisheries sustainably. We know that we can produce healthy meals for hundreds of millions of people that don't use the land, that don't use much water, have a low carbon footprint, and are cost-effective. We know that saving the oceans can feed the world, and we need to start now. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How the worst moments in our lives make us who we are | {0: 'Andrew Solomon writes about politics, culture and psychology. '} | TED2014 | As a student of adversity, I've been struck over the years by how some people with major challenges seem to draw strength from them. And I've heard the popular wisdom that that has to do with finding meaning. And for a long time, I thought the meaning was out there, some great truth waiting to be found. But over time, I've come to feel that the truth is irrelevant. We call it "finding meaning," but we might better call it "forging meaning." My last book was about how families manage to deal with various kinds of challenging or unusual offspring. And one of the mothers I interviewed, who had two children with multiple severe disabilities, said to me, "People always give us these little sayings like, 'God doesn't give you any more than you can handle.' But children like ours are not preordained as a gift. They're a gift because that's what we have chosen." We make those choices all our lives. When I was in second grade, Bobby Finkel had a birthday party and invited everyone in our class but me. My mother assumed there had been some sort of error, and she called Mrs. Finkel, who said that Bobby didn't like me and didn't want me at his party. And that day, my mom took me to the zoo and out for a hot fudge sundae. When I was in seventh grade, one of the kids on my school bus nicknamed me "Percy," as a shorthand for my demeanor. And sometimes, he and his cohort would chant that provocation the entire school bus ride, 45 minutes up, 45 minutes back: "Percy! Percy! Percy! Percy!" When I was in eighth grade, our science teacher told us that all male homosexuals develop fecal incontinence because of the trauma to their anal sphincter. And I graduated high school without ever going to the cafeteria, where I would have sat with the girls and been laughed at for doing so, or sat with the boys, and been laughed at for being a boy who should be sitting with the girls. I survived that childhood through a mix of avoidance and endurance. What I didn't know then and do know now, is that avoidance and endurance can be the entryway to forging meaning. After you've forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity. You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt. One of the other mothers I interviewed when I was working on my book had been raped as an adolescent, and had a child following that rape, which had thrown away her career plans and damaged all of her emotional relationships. But when I met her, she was 50, and I said to her, "Do you often think about the man who raped you?" And she said, "I used to think about him with anger, but now only with pity." And I thought she meant pity because he was so unevolved as to have done this terrible thing. And I said, "Pity?" And she said, "Yes, because he has a beautiful daughter and two beautiful grandchildren, and he doesn't know that, and I do. So as it turns out, I'm the lucky one." Some of our struggles are things we're born to: our gender, our sexuality, our race, our disability. And some are things that happen to us: being a political prisoner, being a rape victim, being a Katrina survivor. Identity involves entering a community to draw strength from that community, and to give strength there, too. It involves substituting "and" for "but" — not "I am here but I have cancer," but rather, "I have cancer and I am here." When we're ashamed, we can't tell our stories, and stories are the foundation of identity. Forge meaning, build identity. Forge meaning and build identity. That became my mantra. Forging meaning is about changing yourself. Building identity is about changing the world. All of us with stigmatized identities face this question daily: How much to accommodate society by constraining ourselves, and how much to break the limits of what constitutes a valid life? Forging meaning and building identity does not make what was wrong right. It only makes what was wrong precious. In January of this year, I went to Myanmar to interview political prisoners, and I was surprised to find them less bitter than I'd anticipated. Most of them had knowingly committed the offenses that landed them in prison, and they had walked in with their heads held high, and they walked out with their heads still held high, many years later. Dr. Ma Thida, a leading human rights activist who had nearly died in prison and had spent many years in solitary confinement, told me she was grateful to her jailers for the time she had had to think, for the wisdom she had gained, for the chance to hone her meditation skills. She had sought meaning and made her travail into a crucial identity. But if the people I met were less bitter than I'd anticipated about being in prison, they were also less thrilled than I'd expected about the reform process going on in their country. Ma Thida said, "We Burmese are noted for our tremendous grace under pressure, but we also have grievance under glamour." She said, "And the fact that there have been these shifts and changes doesn't erase the continuing problems in our society that we learned to see so well while we were in prison." I understood her to be saying that concessions confer only a little humanity where full humanity is due; that crumbs are not the same as a place at the table. Which is to say, you can forge meaning and build identity and still be mad as hell. I've never been raped, and I've never been in anything remotely approaching a Burmese prison. But as a gay American, I've experienced prejudice and even hatred, and I've forged meaning and I've built identity, which is a move I learned from people who had experienced far worse privation than I've ever known. In my own adolescence, I went to extreme lengths to try to be straight. I enrolled myself in something called "sexual surrogacy therapy," in which people I was encouraged to call doctors prescribed what I was encouraged to call exercises with women I was encouraged to call surrogates, who were not exactly prostitutes but who were also not exactly anything else. (Laughter) My particular favorite was a blonde woman from the Deep South who eventually admitted to me that she was really a necrophiliac, and had taken this job after she got in trouble down at the morgue. (Laughter) These experiences eventually allowed me to have some happy physical relationships with women, for which I'm grateful. But I was at war with myself, and I dug terrible wounds into my own psyche. We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning. "Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities," St. Paul wrote in Second Corinthians, "for when I am weak, then I am strong." In 1988, I went to Moscow to interview artists of the Soviet underground. I expected their work to be dissident and political. But the radicalism in their work actually lay in reinserting humanity into a society that was annihilating humanity itself, as, in some senses, Russian society is now doing again. One of the artists I met said to me, "We were in training to be not artists but angels." In 1991, I went back to see the artists I'd been writing about, and I was with them during the putsch that ended the Soviet Union. And they were among the chief organizers of the resistance to that putsch. And on the third day of the putsch, one of them suggested we walk up to Smolenskaya. And we went there, and we arranged ourselves in front of one of the barricades, and a little while later, a column of tanks rolled up. And the soldier on the front tank said, "We have unconditional orders to destroy this barricade. If you get out of the way, we don't need to hurt you. But if you won't move, we'll have no choice but to run you down." The artist I was with said, "Give us just a minute. Give us just a minute to tell you why we're here." And the soldier folded his arms, and the artist launched into a Jeffersonian panegyric to democracy such as those of us who live in a Jeffersonian democracy would be hard-pressed to present. And they went on and on, and the soldier watched. And then he sat there for a full minute after they were finished and looked at us, so bedraggled in the rain, and said, "What you have said is true, and we must bow to the will of the people. If you'll clear enough space for us to turn around, we'll go back the way we came." And that's what they did. Sometimes, forging meaning can give you the vocabulary you need to fight for your ultimate freedom. Russia awakened me to the lemonade notion that oppression breeds the power to oppose it. And I gradually understood that as the cornerstone of identity. It took identity to rescue me from sadness. The gay rights movement posits a world in which my aberrances are a victory. Identity politics always works on two fronts: to give pride to people who have a given condition or characteristic, and to cause the outside world to treat such people more gently and more kindly. Those are two totally separate enterprises, but progress in each sphere reverberates in the other. Identity politics can be narcissistic. People extol a difference only because it's theirs. People narrow the world and function in discrete groups without empathy for one another. But properly understood and wisely practiced, identity politics should expand our idea of what it is to be human. Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal, but a revolution. I would have had an easier life if I were straight, but I would not be me. And I now like being myself better than the idea of being someone else, someone who, to be honest, I have neither the option of being nor the ability fully to imagine. But if you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes, and we become attached to the heroic strain in our own lives. I've sometimes wondered whether I could have ceased to hate that part of myself without gay pride's technicolor fiesta, of which this speech is one manifestation. (Laughter) I used to think I would know myself to be mature when I could simply be gay without emphasis. But the self-loathing of that period left a void, and celebration needs to fill and overflow it, and even if I repay my private debt of melancholy, there's still an outer world of homophobia that it will take decades to address. Someday, being gay will be a simple fact, free of party hats and blame. But not yet. A friend of mine who thought gay pride was getting very carried away with itself, once suggested that we organize Gay Humility Week. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a great idea. (Laughter) But its time has not yet come. (Laughter) And neutrality, which seems to lie halfway between despair and celebration, is actually the endgame. In 29 states in the US, I could legally be fired or denied housing for being gay. In Russia, the anti-propaganda law has led to people being beaten in the streets. Twenty-seven African countries have passed laws against sodomy. And in Nigeria, gay people can legally be stoned to death, and lynchings have become common. In Saudi Arabia recently, two men who had been caught in carnal acts were sentenced to 7,000 lashes each, and are now permanently disabled as a result. So who can forge meaning and build identity? Gay rights are not primarily marriage rights, and for the millions who live in unaccepting places with no resources, dignity remains elusive. I am lucky to have forged meaning and built identity, but that's still a rare privilege. And gay people deserve more, collectively, than the crumbs of justice. And yet, every step forward is so sweet. In 2007, six years after we met, my partner and I decided to get married. Meeting John had been the discovery of great happiness and also the elimination of great unhappiness. And sometimes, I was so occupied with the disappearance of all that pain, that I forgot about the joy, which was at first the less remarkable part of it to me. Marrying was a way to declare our love as more a presence than an absence. Marriage soon led us to children, and that meant new meanings and new identities — ours and theirs. I want my children to be happy, and I love them most achingly when they are sad. As a gay father, I can teach them to own what is wrong in their lives, but I believe that if I succeed in sheltering them from adversity, I will have failed as a parent. A Buddhist scholar I know once explained to me that Westerners mistakenly think that nirvana is what arrives when all your woe is behind you, and you have only bliss to look forward to. But he said that would not be nirvana, because your bliss in the present would always be shadowed by the joy from the past. Nirvana, he said, is what you arrive at when you have only bliss to look forward to and find in what looked like sorrows the seedlings of your joy. And I sometimes wonder whether I could have found such fulfillment in marriage and children if they'd come more readily, if I'd been straight in my youth or were young now, in either of which cases this might be easier. Perhaps I could. Perhaps all the complex imagining I've done could have been applied to other topics. But if seeking meaning matters more than finding meaning, the question is not whether I'd be happier for having been bullied, but whether assigning meaning to those experiences has made me a better father. I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me. I know many heterosexuals who have equally happy marriages and families, but gay marriage is so breathtakingly fresh, and gay families so exhilaratingly new, and I found meaning in that surprise. In October, it was my 50th birthday, and my family organized a party for me. And in the middle of it, my son said to my husband that he wanted to make a speech. And John said, "George, you can't make a speech. You're four." (Laughter) "Only Grandpa and Uncle David and I are going to make speeches tonight." But George insisted and insisted, and finally, John took him up to the microphone, and George said very loudly, "Ladies and gentlemen! May I have your attention, please?" And everyone turned around, startled. And George said, "I'm glad it's daddy's birthday. I'm glad we all get cake. And Daddy, if you were little, I'd be your friend." (Gasp) And I thought — (Applause) Thank you. I thought that I was indebted even to Bobby Finkel, because all those earlier experiences were what had propelled me to this moment, and I was finally unconditionally grateful for a life I'd once have done anything to change. The gay activist Harvey Milk was once asked by a younger gay man what he could do to help the movement, and Harvey Milk said, "Go out and tell someone." There's always somebody who wants to confiscate our humanity. And there are always stories that restore it. If we live out loud, we can trounce the hatred, and expand everyone's lives. Forge meaning. Build identity. Forge meaning. Build identity. And then invite the world to share your joy. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
How augmented reality will change sports ... and build empathy | {0: "As a punter, most recently for the Minnesota Vikings, Chris Kluwe consistently set team records. As an advocate for equality, he proudly and profanely broke the NFL's code of omertà around locker-room politics. He tweets a lot about World of Warcraft."} | TED2014 | What do augmented reality and professional football have to do with empathy? And what is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow? Now unfortunately, I'm only going to answer one of those questions today, so please, try and contain your disappointment. When most people think about augmented reality, they think about "Minority Report" and Tom Cruise waving his hands in the air, but augmented reality is not science fiction. Augmented reality is something that will happen in our lifetime, and it will happen because we have the tools to make it happen, and people need to be aware of that, because augmented reality will change our lives just as much as the Internet and the cell phone. Now how do we get to augmented reality? Step one is the step I'm wearing right now, Google Glass. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Google Glass. What you may not be familiar with is that Google Glass is a device that will allow you to see what I see. It will allow you to experience what it is like to be a professional athlete on the field. Right now, the only way you can be on the field is for me to try and describe it to you. I have to use words. I have to create a framework that you then fill in with your imagination. With Google Glass, we can put that underneath a helmet, and we can get a sense of what it's like to be running down the field at 100 miles an hour, your blood pounding in your ears. You can get a sense of what it's like to have a 250-pound man sprinting at you trying to decapitate you with every ounce of his being. And I've been on the receiving end of that, and it doesn't feel very good. Now, I have some footage to show you of what it's like to wear Google Glass underneath the helmet to give you a taste of that. Unfortunately, it's not NFL practice footage because the NFL thinks emergent technology is what happens when a submarine surfaces, but — (Laughter) — we do what we can. So let's pull up some video. (Video) Chris Kluwe: Go. Ugh, getting tackled sucks. Hold on, let's get a little closer. All right, ready? Go! Chris Kluwe: So as you can see, small taste of what it's like to get tackled on the football field from the perspective of the tacklee. Now, you may have noticed there are some people missing there: the rest of the team. We have some video of that courtesy of the University of Washington. (Video) Quarterback: Hey, Mice 54! Mice 54! Blue 8! Blue 8! Go! Oh! CK: So again, this takes you a little bit closer to what it's like to be on that field, but this is nowhere what it's like to be on the NFL. Fans want that experience. Fans want to be on that field. They want to be their favorite players, and they've already talked to me on YouTube, they've talked to me on Twitter, saying, "Hey, can you get this on a quarterback? Can you get this on a running back? We want that experience." Well, once we have that experience with GoPro and Google Glass, how do we make it more immersive? How do we take that next step? Well, we take that step by going to something called the Oculus Rift, which I'm sure many of you are also familiar with. The Oculus Rift has been described as one of the most realistic virtual reality devices ever created, and that is not empty hype. I'm going to show you why that is not empty hype with this video. (Video) Man: Oh! Oh! No! No! No! I don't want to play anymore! No! Oh my God! Aaaah! CK: So that is the experience of a man on a roller coaster in fear of his life. What do you think that fan's experience is going to be when we take the video footage of an Adrian Peterson bursting through the line, shedding a tackler with a stiff-arm before sprinting in for a touchdown? What do you think that fan's experience is going to be when he's Messi sprinting down the pitch putting the ball in the back of the net, or Federer serving in Wimbledon? What do you think his experience is going to be when he is going down the side of a mountain at over 70 miles an hour as an Olympic downhill skier? I think adult diaper sales may surge. (Laughter) But this is not yet augmented reality. This is only virtual reality, V.R. How do we get to augmented reality, A.R.? We get to augmented reality when coaches and managers and owners look at this information streaming in that people want to see, and they say, "How do we use this to make our teams better? How do we use this to win games?" Because teams always use technology to win games. They like winning. It makes them money. So a brief history of technology in the NFL. In 1965, the Baltimore Colts put a wristband on their quarterback to allow him to call plays quicker. They ended up winning a Super Bowl that year. Other teams followed suit. More people watched the game because it was more exciting. It was faster. In 1994, the NFL put helmet radios into the helmets of the quarterbacks, and later the defense. More people watched games because it was faster. It was more entertaining. In 2023, imagine you're a player walking back to the huddle, and you have your next play displayed right in front of your face on your clear plastic visor that you already wear right now. No more having to worry about forgetting plays. No more worrying about having to memorize your playbook. You just go out and react. And coaches really want this, because missed assignments lose you games, and coaches hate losing games. Losing games gets you fired as a coach. They don't want that. But augmented reality is not just an enhanced playbook. Augmented reality is also a way to take all that data and use it in real time to enhance how you play the game. What would that be like? Well, a very simple setup would be a camera on each corner of the stadium looking down, giving you a bird's-eye view of all the people down there. You also have information from helmet sensors and accelerometers, technology that's being worked on right now. You take all that information, and you stream it to your players. The good teams stream it in a way that the players can use. The bad ones have information overload. That determines good teams from bad. And now, your I.T. department is just as important as your scouting department, and data-mining is not for nerds anymore. It's also for jocks. Who knew? What would that look like on the field? Well, imagine you're the quarterback. You take the snap and you drop back. You're scanning downfield for an open receiver. All of a sudden, a bright flash on the left side of your visor lets you know, blind side linebacker is blitzing in. Normally, you wouldn't be able to see him, but the augmented reality system lets you know. You step up into the pocket. Another flash alerts you to an open receiver. You throw the ball, but you're hit right as you throw. The ball comes off track. You don't know where it's going to land. However, on the receiver's visor, he sees a patch of grass light up, and he knows to readjust. He goes, catches the ball, sprints in, touchdown. Crowd goes wild, and the fans are with him every step of the way, watching from every perspective. Now this is something that will create massive excitement in the game. It will make tons of people watch, because people want this experience. Fans want to be on the field. They want to be their favorite player. Augmented reality will be a part of sports, because it's too profitable not to. But the question I ask you is, is that's all that we're content to use augmented reality for? Are we going to use it solely for our panem, our circenses, our entertainment as normal? Because I believe that we can use augmented reality for something more. I believe we can use augmented reality as a way to foster more empathy within the human species itself, by literally showing someone what it looks like to walk a mile in another person's shoes. We know what this technology is worth to sports leagues. It's worth revenue, to the tune of billions of dollars a year. But what is this technology worth to a teacher in a classroom trying to show a bully just how harmful his actions are from the perspective of the victim? What is this technology worth to a gay Ugandan or Russian trying to show the world what it's like living under persecution? What is this technology worth to a Commander Hadfield or a Neil deGrasse Tyson trying to inspire a generation of children to think more about space and science instead of quarterly reports and Kardashians? Ladies and gentlemen, augmented reality is coming. The questions we ask, the choices we make, and the challenges we face are, as always, up to us. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to talk to veterans about war | {0: 'Wes Moore\'s life transformed with these words out of his mother\'s mouth: \r\n"I\'m sending you to military school." The author of the book, "The Other Wes Moore," he is now a vocal advocate for America\'s youth as well as for fellow veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.'} | TEDSalon NY2014 | I'm excited to be here to speak about vets, because I didn't join the Army because I wanted to go to war. I didn't join the Army because I had a lust or a need to go overseas and fight. Frankly, I joined the Army because college is really damn expensive, and they were going to help with that, and I joined the Army because it was what I knew, and it was what I knew that I thought I could do well. I didn't come from a military family. I'm not a military brat. No one in my family ever had joined the military at all, and how I first got introduced to the military was when I was 13 years old and I got sent away to military school, because my mother had been threatening me with this idea of military school ever since I was eight years old. I had some issues when I was coming up, and my mother would always tell me, she's like, "You know, if you don't get this together, I'm going to send you to military school." And I'd look at her, and I'd say, "Mommy, I'll work harder." And then when I was nine years old, she started giving me brochures to show me she wasn't playing around, so I'd look at the brochures, and I'm like, "Okay, Mommy, I can see you're serious, and I'll work harder." And then when I was 10 and 11, my behavior just kept on getting worse. I was on academic and disciplinary probation before I hit double digits, and I first felt handcuffs on my wrists when I was 11 years old. And so when I was 13 years old, my mother came up to me, and she was like, "I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm going to send you to military school." And I looked at her, and I said, "Mommy, I can see you're upset, and I'm going to work harder." And she was like, "No, you're going next week." And that was how I first got introduced to this whole idea of the military, because she thought this was a good idea. I had to disagree with her wholeheartedly when I first showed up there, because literally in the first four days, I had already run away five times from this school. They had these big black gates that surrounded the school, and every time they would turn their backs, I would just simply run out of the black gates and take them up on their offer that if we don't want to be there, we can leave at any time. So I just said, "Well, if that's the case, then I'd like to leave." (Laughter) And it never worked. And I kept on getting lost. But then eventually, after staying there for a little while, and after the end of that first year at this military school, I realized that I actually was growing up. I realized the things that I enjoyed about this school and the thing that I enjoyed about the structure was something that I'd never found before: the fact that I finally felt like I was part of something bigger, part of a team, and it actually mattered to people that I was there, the fact that leadership wasn't just a punchline there, but that it was a real, actually core part of the entire experience. And so when it was time for me to actually finish up high school, I started thinking about what I wanted to do, and just like probably most students, had no idea what that meant or what I wanted to do. And I thought about the people who I respected and admired. I thought about a lot of the people, in particular a lot of the men, in my life who I looked up to. They all happened to wear the uniform of the United States of America, so for me, the question and the answer really became pretty easy. The question of what I wanted to do was filled in very quickly with saying, I guess I'll be an Army officer. So the Army then went through this process and they trained me up, and when I say I didn't join the Army because I wanted to go to war, the truth is, I joined in 1996. There really wasn't a whole lot going on. I didn't ever feel like I was in danger. When I went to my mom, I first joined the Army when I was 17 years old, so I literally needed parental permission to join the Army, so I kind of gave the paperwork to my mom, and she just assumed it was kind of like military school. She was like, "Well, it was good for him before, so I guess I'll just let him keep doing it," having no idea that the paperwork that she was signing was actually signing her son up to become an Army officer. And I went through the process, and again the whole time still just thinking, this is great, maybe I'll serve on a weekend, or two weeks during the year, do drill, and then a couple years after I signed up, a couple years after my mother signed those papers, the whole world changed. And after 9/11, there was an entirely new context about the occupation that I chose. When I first joined, I never joined to fight, but now that I was in, this is exactly what was now going to happen. And I thought about so much about the soldiers who I eventually had to end up leading. I remember when we first, right after 9/11, three weeks after 9/11, I was on a plane heading overseas, but I wasn't heading overseas with the military, I was heading overseas because I got a scholarship to go overseas. I received the scholarship to go overseas and to go study and live overseas, and I was living in England and that was interesting, but at the same time, the same people who I was training with, the same soldiers that I went through all my training with, and we prepared for war, they were now actually heading over to it. They were now about to find themselves in the middle of places the fact is the vast majority of people, the vast majority of us as we were training, couldn't even point out on a map. I spent a couple years finishing graduate school, and the whole entire time while I'm sitting there in buildings at Oxford that were literally built hundreds of years before the United States was even founded, and I'm sitting there talking to dons about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and how that influenced the start of World War I, where the entire time my heart and my head were on my soldiers who were now throwing on Kevlars and grabbing their flak vests and figuring out how exactly do I change around or how exactly do I clean a machine gun in the darkness. That was the new reality. By the time I finished that up and I rejoined my military unit and we were getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan, there were soldiers in my unit who were now on their second and third deployments before I even had my first. I remember walking out with my unit for the first time, and when you join the Army and you go through a combat tour, everyone looks at your shoulder, because on your shoulder is your combat patch. And so immediately as you meet people, you shake their hand, and then your eyes go to their shoulder, because you want to see where did they serve, or what unit did they serve with? And I was the only person walking around with a bare shoulder, and it burned every time someone stared at it. But you get a chance to talk to your soldiers, and you ask them why did they sign up. I signed up because college was expensive. A lot of my soldiers signed up for completely different reasons. They signed up because of a sense of obligation. They signed up because they were angry and they wanted to do something about it. They signed up because their family said this was important. They signed up because they wanted some form of revenge. They signed for a whole collection of different reasons. And now we all found ourselves overseas fighting in these conflicts. And what was amazing to me was that I very naively started hearing this statement that I never fully understood, because right after 9/11, you start hearing this idea where people come up to you and they say, "Well, thank you for your service." And I just kind of followed in and started saying the same things to all my soldiers. This is even before I deployed. But I really had no idea what that even meant. I just said it because it sounded right. I said it because it sounded like the right thing to say to people who had served overseas. "Thank you for your service." But I had no idea what the context was or what that even, what it even meant to the people who heard it. When I first came back from Afghanistan, I thought that if you make it back from conflict, then the dangers were all over. I thought that if you made it back from a conflict zone that somehow you could kind of wipe the sweat off your brow and say, "Whew, I'm glad I dodged that one," without understanding that for so many people, as they come back home, the war keeps going. It keeps playing out in all of our minds. It plays out in all of our memories. It plays out in all of our emotions. Please forgive us if we don't like being in big crowds. Please forgive us when we spend one week in a place that has 100 percent light discipline, because you're not allowed to walk around with white lights, because if anything has a white light, it can be seen from miles away, versus if you use little green or little blue lights, they cannot be seen from far away. So please forgive us if out of nowhere, we go from having 100 percent light discipline to then a week later being back in the middle of Times Square, and we have a difficult time adjusting to that. Please forgive us when you transition back to a family who has completely been maneuvering without you, and now when you come back, it's not that easy to fall back into a sense of normality, because the whole normal has changed. I remember when I came back, I wanted to talk to people. I wanted people to ask me about my experiences. I wanted people to come up to me and tell me, "What did you do?" I wanted people to come up to me and tell me, "What was it like? What was the food like? What was the experience like? How are you doing?" And the only questions I got from people was, "Did you shoot anybody?" And those were the ones who were even curious enough to say anything. Because sometimes there's this fear and there's this apprehension that if I say anything, I'm afraid I'll offend, or I'm afraid I'll trigger something, so the common default is just saying nothing. The problem with that is then it feels like your service was not even acknowledged, like no one even cared. "Thank you for your service," and we move on. What I wanted to better understand was what's behind that, and why "thank you for your service" isn't enough. The fact is, we have literally 2.6 million men and women who are veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan who are all amongst us. Sometimes we know who they are, sometimes we don't, but there is that feeling, the shared experience, the shared bond where we know that that experience and that chapter of our life, while it might be closed, it's still not over. We think about "thank you for your service," and people say, "So what does 'thank you for your service' mean to you?" Well, "Thank you for your service" means to me, it means acknowledging our stories, asking us who we are, understanding the strength that so many people, so many people who we serve with, have, and why that service means so much. "Thank you for your service" means acknowledging the fact that just because we've now come home and we've taken off the uniform does not mean our larger service to this country is somehow over. The fact is, there's still a tremendous amount that can be offered and can be given. When I look at people like our friend Taylor Urruela, who in Iraq loses his leg, had two big dreams in his life. One was to be a soldier. The other was to be a baseball player. He loses his leg in Iraq. He comes back and instead of deciding that, well, now since I've lost my leg, that second dream is over, he decides that he still has that dream of playing baseball, and he starts this group called VETSports, which now works with veterans all over the country and uses sports as a way of healing. People like Tammy Duckworth, who was a helicopter pilot and with the helicopter that she was flying, you need to use both your hands and also your legs to steer, and her helicopter gets hit, and she's trying to steer the chopper, but the chopper's not reacting to her instructions and to her commands. She's trying to land the chopper safely, but the chopper doesn't land safely, and the reason it's not landing safely is because it's not responding to the commands that her legs are giving because her legs were blown off. She barely survives. Medics come and they save her life, but then as she's doing her recuperation back at home, she realizes that, "My job's still not done." And now she uses her voice as a Congresswoman from Illinois to fight and advocate for a collection of issues to include veterans issues. We signed up because we love this country we represent. We signed up because we believe in the idea and we believe in the people to our left and to our right. And the only thing we then ask is that "thank you for your service" needs to be more than just a quote break, that "thank you for your service" means honestly digging in to the people who have stepped up simply because they were asked to, and what that means for us not just now, not just during combat operations, but long after the last vehicle has left and after the last shot has been taken. These are the people who I served with, and these are the people who I honor. So thank you for your service. (Applause) |
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