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Why veterans miss war | {0: 'The author of "The Perfect Storm" and the director of the documentaries "Restrepo" and "Korengal," Sebastian Junger tells non-fiction stories with grit and emotion.'} | TEDSalon NY2014 | I'm going to ask and try to answer, in some ways, kind of an uncomfortable question. Both civilians, obviously, and soldiers suffer in war; I don't think any civilian has ever missed the war that they were subjected to. I've been covering wars for almost 20 years, and one of the remarkable things for me is how many soldiers find themselves missing it. How is it someone can go through the worst experience imaginable, and come home, back to their home, and their family, their country, and miss the war? How does that work? What does it mean? We have to answer that question, because if we don't, it'll be impossible to bring soldiers back to a place in society where they belong, and I think it'll also be impossible to stop war, if we don't understand how that mechanism works. The problem is that war does not have a simple, neat truth, one simple, neat truth. Any sane person hates war, hates the idea of war, wouldn't want to have anything to do with it, doesn't want to be near it, doesn't want to know about it. That's a sane response to war. But if I asked all of you in this room, who here has paid money to go to a cinema and be entertained by a Hollywood war movie, most of you would probably raise your hands. That's what's so complicated about war. And trust me, if a room full of peace-loving people finds something compelling about war, so do 20-year-old soldiers who have been trained in it, I promise you. That's the thing that has to be understood. I've covered war for about 20 years, as I said, but my most intense experiences in combat were with American soldiers in Afghanistan. I've been in Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan in the '90s, but it was with American soldiers in 2007, 2008, that I was confronted with very intense combat. I was in a small valley called the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan. It was six miles long. There were 150 men of Battle Company in that valley, and for a while, while I was there, almost 20 percent of all the combat in all of Afghanistan was happening in those six miles. A hundred and fifty men were absorbing almost a fifth of the combat for all of NATO forces in the country, for a couple months. It was very intense. I spent most of my time at a small outpost called Restrepo. It was named after the platoon medic that had been killed about two months into the deployment. It was a few plywood B-huts clinging to a side of a ridge, and sandbags, bunkers, gun positions, and there were 20 men up there of Second Platoon, Battle Company. I spent most of my time up there. There was no running water. There was no way to bathe. The guys were up there for a month at a time. They never even got out of their clothes. They fought. The worked. They slept in the same clothes. They never took them off, and at the end of the month, they went back down to the company headquarters, and by then, their clothes were unwearable. They burned them and got a new set. There was no Internet. There was no phone. There was no communication with the outside world up there. There was no cooked food. There was nothing up there that young men typically like: no cars, no girls, no television, nothing except combat. Combat they did learn to like. I remember one day, it was a very hot day in the spring, and we hadn't been in a fight in a couple of weeks, maybe. Usually, the outpost was attacked, and we hadn't seen any combat in a couple of weeks, and everyone was just stunned with boredom and heat. And I remember the lieutenant walking past me sort of stripped to the waist. It was incredibly hot. Stripped to the waist, walked past me muttering, "Oh God, please someone attack us today." That's how bored they were. That's war too, is a lieutenant saying, "Please make something happen because we're going crazy." To understand that, you have to, for a moment, think about combat not morally — that's an important job to do — but for a moment, don't think about it morally, think about it neurologically. Let's think about what happens in your brain when you're in combat. First of all, the experience is very bizarre, it's a very bizarre one. It's not what I had expected. Usually, you're not scared. I've been very scared in combat, but most of the time when I was out there, I wasn't scared. I was very scared beforehand and incredibly scared afterwards, and that fear that comes afterwards can last years. I haven't been shot at in six years, and I was woken up very abruptly this morning by a nightmare that I was being strafed by aircraft, six years later. I've never even been strafed by aircraft, and I was having nightmares about it. Time slows down. You get this weird tunnel vision. You notice some details very, very, very accurately and other things drop out. It's almost a slightly altered state of mind. What's happening in your brain is you're getting an enormous amount of adrenaline pumped through your system. Young men will go to great lengths to have that experience. It's wired into us. It's hormonally supported. The mortality rate for young men in society is six times what it is for young women from violence and from accidents, just the stupid stuff that young men do: jumping off of things they shouldn't jump off of, lighting things on fire they shouldn't light on fire, I mean, you know what I'm talking about. They die at six times the rate that young women do. Statistically, you are safer as a teenage boy, you would be safer in the fire department or the police department in most American cities than just walking around the streets of your hometown looking for something to do, statistically. You can imagine how that plays out in combat. At Restrepo, every guy up there was almost killed, including me, including my good friend Tim Hetherington, who was later killed in Libya. There were guys walking around with bullet holes in their uniforms, rounds that had cut through the fabric and didn't touch their bodies. I was leaning against some sandbags one morning, not much going on, sort of spacing out, and some sand was kicked into the side of, sort of hit the side of my face. Something hit the side of my face, and I didn't know what it was. You have to understand about bullets that they go a lot faster than sound, so if someone shoots at you from a few hundred meters, the bullet goes by you, or hits you obviously, half a second or so before the sound catches up to it. So I had some sand sprayed in the side of my face. Half a second later, I heard dut-dut-dut-dut-duh. It was machine gun fire. It was the first round, the first burst of an hour-long firefight. What had happened was the bullet hit, a bullet hit three or four inches from the side of my head. Imagine, just think about it, because I certainly did, think about the angle of deviation that saved my life. At 400 meters, it missed me by three inches. Just think about the math on that. Every guy up there had some experience like that, at least once, if not many times. The boys are up there for a year. They got back. Some of them got out of the Army and had tremendous psychological problems when they got home. Some of them stayed in the Army and were more or less okay, psychologically. I was particularly close to a guy named Brendan O'Byrne. I'm still very good friends with him. He came back to the States. He got out of the Army. I had a dinner party one night. I invited him, and he started talking with a woman, one of my friends, and she knew how bad it had been out there, and she said, "Brendan, is there anything at all that you miss about being out in Afghanistan, about the war?" And he thought about it quite a long time, and finally he said, "Ma'am, I miss almost all of it." And he's one of the most traumatized people I've seen from that war. "Ma'am, I miss almost all of it." What is he talking about? He's not a psychopath. He doesn't miss killing people. He's not crazy. He doesn't miss getting shot at and seeing his friends get killed. What is it that he misses? We have to answer that. If we're going to stop war, we have to answer that question. I think what he missed is brotherhood. He missed, in some ways, the opposite of killing. What he missed was connection to the other men he was with. Now, brotherhood is different from friendship. Friendship happens in society, obviously. The more you like someone, the more you'd be willing to do for them. Brotherhood has nothing to do with how you feel about the other person. It's a mutual agreement in a group that you will put the welfare of the group, you will put the safety of everyone in the group above your own. In effect, you're saying, "I love these other people more than I love myself." Brendan was a team leader in command of three men, and the worst day in Afghanistan — He was almost killed so many times. It didn't bother him. The worst thing that happened to him in Afghanistan was one of his men was hit in the head with a bullet in the helmet, knocked him over. They thought he was dead. It was in the middle of a huge firefight. No one could deal with it, and a minute later, Kyle Steiner sat back up from the dead, as it were, because he'd come back to consciousness. The bullet had just knocked him out. It glanced off the helmet. He remembers people saying, as he was sort of half-conscious, he remembers people saying, "Steiner's been hit in the head. Steiner's dead." And he was thinking, "I'm not dead." And he sat up. And Brendan realized after that that he could not protect his men, and that was the only time he cried in Afghanistan, was realizing that. That's brotherhood. This wasn't invented recently. Many of you have probably read "The Iliad." Achilles surely would have risked his life or given his life to save his friend Patroclus. In World War II, there were many stories of soldiers who were wounded, were brought to a rear base hospital, who went AWOL, crawled out of windows, slipped out doors, went AWOL, wounded, to make their way back to the front lines to rejoin their brothers out there. So you think about Brendan, you think about all these soldiers having an experience like that, a bond like that, in a small group, where they loved 20 other people in some ways more than they loved themselves, you think about how good that would feel, imagine it, and they are blessed with that experience for a year, and then they come home, and they are just back in society like the rest of us are, not knowing who they can count on, not knowing who loves them, who they can love, not knowing exactly what anyone they know would do for them if it came down to it. That is terrifying. Compared to that, war, psychologically, in some ways, is easy, compared to that kind of alienation. That's why they miss it, and that's what we have to understand and in some ways fix in our society. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How the teddy bear taught us compassion | {0: 'Jon Mooallem is the author of "Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America."'} | TED2014 | So it was the fall of 1902, and President Theodore Roosevelt needed a little break from the White House, so he took a train to Mississippi to do a little black bear hunting outside of a town called Smedes. The first day of the hunt, they didn't see a single bear, so it was a big bummer for everyone, but the second day, the dogs cornered one after a really long chase, but by that point, the president had given up and gone back to camp for lunch, so his hunting guide cracked the animal on the top of the head with the butt of his rifle, and then tied it up to a tree and started tooting away on his bugle to call Roosevelt back so he could have the honor of shooting it. The bear was a female. It was dazed, injured, severely underweight, a little mangy-looking, and when Roosevelt saw this animal tied up to the tree, he just couldn't bring himself to fire at it. He felt like that would go against his code as a sportsman. A few days later, the scene was memorialized in a political cartoon back in Washington. It was called "Drawing a Line in Mississippi," and it showed Roosevelt with his gun down and his arm out, sparing the bear's life, and the bear was sitting on its hind legs with these two big, frightened, wide eyes and little ears pricked up at the top of its head. It looked really helpless, like you just wanted to sweep it up into your arms and reassure it. It wouldn't have looked familiar at the time, but if you go looking for the cartoon now, you recognize the animal right away: It's a teddy bear. And this is how the teddy bear was born. Essentially, toymakers took the bear from the cartoon, turned it into a plush toy, and then named it after President Roosevelt — Teddy's bear. And I do feel a little ridiculous that I'm up here on this stage and I'm choosing to use my time to tell you about a 100-year-old story about the invention of a squishy kid's toy, but I'd argue that the invention of the teddy bear, inside that story is a more important story, a story about how dramatically our ideas about nature can change, and also about how, on the planet right now, the stories that we tell are dramatically changing nature. Because think about the teddy bear. For us, in retrospect, it feels like an obvious fit, because bears are so cute and cuddly, and who wouldn't want to give one to their kids to play with, but the truth is that in 1902, bears weren't cute and cuddly. I mean, they looked the same, but no one thought of them that way. In 1902, bears were monsters. Bears were something that frickin' terrified kids. For generations at that point, the bear had been a shorthand for all the danger that people were encountering on the frontier, and the federal government was actually systematically exterminating bears and lots of other predators too, like coyotes and wolves. These animals, they were being demonized. They were called murderers because they killed people's livestock. One government biologist, he explained this war on animals like the bear by saying that they no longer had a place in our advancing civilization, and so we were just clearing them out of the way. In one 10-year period, close to half a million wolves had been slaughtered. The grizzly would soon be wiped out from 95 percent of its original territory, and whereas once there had been 30 million bison moving across the plains, and you would have these stories of trains having to stop for four or five hours so that these thick, living rivers of the animals could pour over the tracks, now, by 1902, there were maybe less than 100 left in the wild. And so what I'm saying is, the teddy bear was born into the middle of this great spasm of extermination, and you can see it as a sign that maybe some people deep down were starting to feel conflicted about all that killing. America still hated the bear and feared it, but all of a sudden, America also wanted to give the bear a great big hug. So this is something that I've been really curious about in the last few years. How do we imagine animals, how do we think and feel about them, and how do their reputations get written and then rewritten in our minds? We're here living in the eye of a great storm of extinction where half the species on the planet could be gone by the end of the century, and so why is it that we come to care about some of those species and not others? Well, there's a new field, a relatively new field of social science that started looking at these questions and trying to unpack the powerful and sometimes pretty schizophrenic relationships that we have to animals, and I spent a lot of time looking through their academic journals, and all I can really say is that their findings are astonishingly wide-ranging. So some of my favorites include that the more television a person watches in Upstate New York, the more he or she is afraid of being attacked by a black bear. If you show a tiger to an American, they're much more likely to assume that it's female and not male. In a study where a fake snake and a fake turtle were put on the side of the road, drivers hit the snake much more often than the turtle, and about three percent of drivers who hit the fake animals seemed to do it on purpose. Women are more likely than men to get a "magical feeling" when they see dolphins in the surf. Sixty-eight percent of mothers with "high feelings of entitlement and self-esteem" identified with the dancing cats in a commercial for Purina. (Laughter) Americans consider lobsters more important than pigeons but also much, much stupider. Wild turkeys are seen as only slightly more dangerous than sea otters, and pandas are twice as lovable as ladybugs. So some of this is physical, right? We tend to sympathize more with animals that look like us, and especially that resemble human babies, so with big, forward-facing eyes and circular faces, kind of a roly-poly posture. This is why, if you get a Christmas card from, like, your great aunt in Minnesota, there's usually a fuzzy penguin chick on it, and not something like a Glacier Bay wolf spider. But it's not all physical, right? There's a cultural dimension to how we think about animals, and we're telling stories about these animals, and like all stories, they are shaped by the times and the places in which we're telling them. So think about that moment back in 1902 again where a ferocious bear became a teddy bear. What was the context? Well, America was urbanizing. For the first time, nearly a majority of people lived in cities, so there was a growing distance between us and nature. There was a safe space where we could reconsider the bear and romanticize it. Nature could only start to seem this pure and adorable because we didn't have to be afraid of it anymore. And you can see that cycle playing out again and again with all kinds of animals. It seems like we're always stuck between demonizing a species and wanting to wipe it out, and then when we get very close to doing that, empathizing with it as an underdog and wanting to show it compassion. So we exert our power, but then we're unsettled by how powerful we are. So for example, this is one of probably thousands of letters and drawings that kids sent to the Bush administration, begging it to protect the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, and these were sent back in the mid-2000s, when awareness of climate change was suddenly surging. We kept seeing that image of a polar bear stranded on a little ice floe looking really morose. I spent days looking through these files. I really love them. This one's my favorite. If you can see, it's a polar bear that's drowning and then it's also being eaten simultaneously by a lobster and a shark. This one came from a kid named Fritz, and he's actually got a solution to climate change. He's got it all worked out to an ethanol-based solution. He says, "I feel bad about the polar bears. I like polar bears. Everyone can use corn juice for cars. From Fritz." So 200 years ago, you would have Arctic explorers writing about polar bears leaping into their boats and trying to devour them, even if they lit the bear on fire, but these kids don't see the polar bear that way, and actually they don't even see the polar bear the way that I did back in the '80s. I mean, we thought of these animals as mysterious and terrifying lords of the Arctic. But look now how quickly that climate change has flipped the image of the animal in our minds. It's gone from that bloodthirsty man-killer to this delicate, drowning victim, and when you think about it, that's kind of the conclusion to the story that the teddy bear started telling back in 1902, because back then, America had more or less conquered its share of the continent. We were just getting around to polishing off these last wild predators. Now, society's reach has expanded all the way to the top of the world, and it's made even these, the most remote, the most powerful bears on the planet, seem like adorable and blameless victims. But you know, there's also a postscript to the teddy bear story that not a lot of people talk about. We're going to talk about it, because even though it didn't really take long after Roosevelt's hunt in 1902 for the toy to become a full-blown craze, most people figured it was a fad, it was a sort of silly political novelty item and it would go away once the president left office, and so by 1909, when Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, was getting ready to be inaugurated, the toy industry was on the hunt for the next big thing. They didn't do too well. That January, Taft was the guest of honor at a banquet in Atlanta, and for days in advance, the big news was the menu. They were going to be serving him a Southern specialty, a delicacy, really, called possum and taters. So you would have a whole opossum roasted on a bed of sweet potatoes, and then sometimes they'd leave the big tail on it like a big, meaty noodle. The one brought to Taft's table weighed 18 pounds. So after dinner, the orchestra started to play, and the guests burst into song, and all of a sudden, Taft was surprised with the presentation of a gift from a group of local supporters, and this was a stuffed opossum toy, all beady-eyed and bald-eared, and it was a new product they were putting forward to be the William Taft presidency's answer to Teddy Roosevelt's teddy bear. They were calling it the "billy possum." Within 24 hours, the Georgia Billy Possum Company was up and running, brokering deals for these things nationwide, and the Los Angeles Times announced, very confidently, "The teddy bear has been relegated to a seat in the rear, and for four years, possibly eight, the children of the United States will play with billy possum." So from that point, there was a fit of opossum fever. There were billy possum postcards, billy possum pins, billy possum pitchers for your cream at coffee time. There were smaller billy possums on a stick that kids could wave around like flags. But even with all this marketing, the life of the billy possum turned out to be just pathetically brief. The toy was an absolute flop, and it was almost completely forgotten by the end of the year, and what that means is that the billy possum didn't even make it to Christmastime, which when you think about it is a special sort of tragedy for a toy. So we can explain that failure two ways. The first, well, it's pretty obvious. I'm going to go ahead and say it out loud anyway: Opossums are hideous. (Laughter) But maybe more importantly is that the story of the billy possum was all wrong, especially compared to the backstory of the teddy bear. Think about it: for most of human's evolutionary history, what's made bears impressive to us has been their complete independence from us. It's that they live these parallel lives as menaces and competitors. By the time Roosevelt went hunting in Mississippi, that stature was being crushed, and the animal that he had roped to a tree really was a symbol for all bears. Whether those animals lived or died now was entirely up to the compassion or the indifference of people. That said something really ominous about the future of bears, but it also said something very unsettling about who we'd become, if the survival of even an animal like that was up to us now. So now, a century later, if you're at all paying attention to what's happening in the environment, you feel that discomfort so much more intensely. We're living now in an age of what scientists have started to call "conservation reliance," and what that term means is that we've disrupted so much that nature can't possibly stand on its own anymore, and most endangered species are only going to survive if we stay out there in the landscape riggging the world around them in their favor. So we've gone hands-on and we can't ever take our hands off, and that's a hell of a lot of work. Right now, we're training condors not to perch on power lines. We teach whooping cranes to migrate south for the winter behind little ultra-light airplanes. We're out there feeding plague vaccine to ferrets. We monitor pygmy rabbits with drones. So we've gone from annihilating species to micromanaging the survival of a lot of species indefinitely, and which ones? Well, the ones that we've told compelling stories about, the ones we've decided ought to stick around. The line between conservation and domestication is blurred. So what I've been saying is that the stories that we tell about wild animals are so subjective they can be irrational or romanticized or sensationalized. Sometimes they just have nothing to do with the facts. But in a world of conservation reliance, those stories have very real consequences, because now, how we feel about an animal affects its survival more than anything that you read about in ecology textbooks. Storytelling matters now. Emotion matters. Our imagination has become an ecological force. And so maybe the teddy bear worked in part because the legend of Roosevelt and that bear in Mississippi was kind of like an allegory of this great responsibility that society was just beginning to face up to back then. It would be another 71 years before the Endangered Species Act was passed, but really, here's its whole ethos boiled down into something like a scene you'd see in a stained glass window. The bear is a helpless victim tied to a tree, and the president of the United States decided to show it some mercy. Thank you. (Applause) [Illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton] |
A glimpse of life on the road | {0: 'Kitra Cahana is a Canadian photographer who blurs the line between anthropologist and journalist.'} | TED2014 | As a little girl, I always imagined I would one day run away. From the age of six on, I kept a packed bag with some clothes and cans of food tucked away in the back of a closet. There was a deep restlessness in me, a primal fear that I would fall prey to a life of routine and boredom. And so, many of my early memories involved intricate daydreams where I would walk across borders, forage for berries, and meet all kinds of strange people living unconventional lives on the road. Years have passed, but many of the adventures I fantasized about as a child — traveling and weaving my way between worlds other than my own — have become realities through my work as a documentary photographer. But no other experience has felt as true to my childhood dreams as living amongst and documenting the lives of fellow wanderers across the United States. This is the nomadic dream, a different kind of American dream lived by young hobos, travelers, hitchhikers, vagrants and tramps. In most of our minds, the vagabond is a creature from the past. The word "hobo" conjures up an old black and white image of a weathered old man covered in coal, legs dangling out of a boxcar, but these photographs are in color, and they portray a community swirling across the country, fiercely alive and creatively free, seeing sides of America that no one else gets to see. Like their predecessors, today's nomads travel the steel and asphalt arteries of the United States. By day, they hop freight trains, stick out their thumbs, and ride the highways with anyone from truckers to soccer moms. By night, they sleep beneath the stars, huddled together with their packs of dogs, cats and pet rats between their bodies. Some travelers take to the road by choice, renouncing materialism, traditional jobs and university degrees in exchange for a glimmer of adventure. Others come from the underbelly of society, never given a chance to mobilize upwards: foster care dropouts, teenage runaways escaping abuse and unforgiving homes. Where others see stories of privation and economic failure, travelers view their own existence through the prism of liberation and freedom. They'd rather live off of the excess of what they view as a wasteful consumer society than slave away at an unrealistic chance at the traditional American dream. They take advantage of the fact that in the United States, up to 40 percent of all food ends up in the garbage by scavenging for perfectly good produce in dumpsters and trash cans. They sacrifice material comforts in exchange for the space and the time to explore a creative interior, to dream, to read, to work on music, art and writing. But there are many aspects to this life that are far from idyllic. No one loses their inner demons by taking to the road. Addiction is real, the elements are real, freight trains maim and kill, and anyone who has lived on the streets can attest to the exhaustive list of laws that criminalize homeless existence. Who here knows that in many cities across the United States it is now illegal to sit on the sidewalk, to wrap oneself in a blanket, to sleep in your own car, to offer food to a stranger? I know about these laws because I've watched as friends and other travelers were hauled off to jail or received citations for committing these so-called crimes. Many of you might be wondering why anyone would choose a life like this, under the thumb of discriminatory laws, eating out of trash cans, sleeping under bridges, picking up seasonal jobs here and there. The answer to such a question is as varied as the people that take to the road, but travelers often respond with a single word: freedom. Until we live in a society where every human is assured dignity in their labor so that they can work to live well, not only work to survive, there will always be an element of those who seek the open road as a means of escape, of liberation and, of course, of rebellion. Thank you. (Applause) |
The hunt for "unexpected genetic heroes" | {0: 'Inspired by open-source software models, Sage Bionetworks co-founder Stephen Friend builds tools that facilitate research sharing on a massive and revolutionary scale.'} | TED2014 | Approximately 30 years ago, when I was in oncology at the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, a father and a son walked into my office and they both had their right eye missing, and as I took the history, it became apparent that the father and the son had a rare form of inherited eye tumor, retinoblastoma, and the father knew that he had passed that fate on to his son. That moment changed my life. It propelled me to go on and to co-lead a team that discovered the first cancer susceptibility gene, and in the intervening decades since then, there has been literally a seismic shift in our understanding of what goes on, what genetic variations are sitting behind various diseases. In fact, for thousands of human traits, a molecular basis that's known for that, and for thousands of people, every day, there's information that they gain about the risk of going on to get this disease or that disease. At the same time, if you ask, "Has that impacted the efficiency, how we've been able to develop drugs?" the answer is not really. If you look at the cost of developing drugs, how that's done, it basically hasn't budged that. And so it's as if we have the power to diagnose yet not the power to fully treat. And there are two commonly given reasons for why that happens. One of them is it's early days. We're just learning the words, the fragments, the letters in the genetic code. We don't know how to read the sentences. We don't know how to follow the narrative. The other reason given is that most of those changes are a loss of function, and it's actually really hard to develop drugs that restore function. But today, I want us to step back and ask a more fundamental question, and ask, "What happens if we're thinking about this maybe in the wrong context?" We do a lot of studying of those who are sick and building up long lists of altered components. But maybe, if what we're trying to do is to develop therapies for prevention, maybe what we should be doing is studying those who don't get sick. Maybe we should be studying those that are well. A vast majority of those people are not necessarily carrying a particular genetic load or risk factor. They're not going to help us. There are going to be those individuals who are carrying a potential future risk, they're going to go on to get some symptom. That's not what we're looking for. What we're asking and looking for is, are there a very few set of individuals who are actually walking around with the risk that normally would cause a disease, but something in them, something hidden in them is actually protective and keeping them from exhibiting those symptoms? If you're going to do a study like that, you can imagine you'd like to look at lots and lots of people. We'd have to go and have a pretty wide study, and we realized that actually one way to think of this is, let us look at adults who are over 40 years of age, and let's make sure that we look at those who were healthy as kids. They might have had individuals in their families who had had a childhood disease, but not necessarily. And let's go and then screen those to find those who are carrying genes for childhood diseases. Now, some of you, I can see you putting your hands up going, "Uh, a little odd. What's your evidence that this could be feasible?" I want to give you two examples. The first comes from San Francisco. It comes from the 1980s and the 1990s, and you may know the story where there were individuals who had very high levels of the virus HIV. They went on to get AIDS. But there was a very small set of individuals who also had very high levels of HIV. They didn't get AIDS. And astute clinicians tracked that down, and what they found was they were carrying mutations. Notice, they were carrying mutations from birth that were protective, that were protecting them from going on to get AIDS. You may also know that actually a line of therapy has been coming along based on that fact. Second example, more recent, is elegant work done by Helen Hobbs, who said, "I'm going to look at individuals who have very high lipid levels, and I'm going to try to find those people with high lipid levels who don't go on to get heart disease." And again, what she found was some of those individuals had mutations that were protective from birth that kept them, even though they had high lipid levels, and you can see this is an interesting way of thinking about how you could develop preventive therapies. The project that we're working on is called "The Resilience Project: A Search for Unexpected Heroes," because what we are interested in doing is saying, can we find those rare individuals who might have these hidden protective factors? And in some ways, think of it as a decoder ring, a sort of resilience decoder ring that we're going to try to build. We've realized that we should do this in a systematic way, so we've said, let's take every single childhood inherited disease. Let's take them all, and let's pull them back a little bit by those that are known to have severe symptoms, where the parents, the child, those around them would know that they'd gotten sick, and let's go ahead and then frame them again by those parts of the genes where we know that there is a particular alteration that is known to be highly penetrant to cause that disease. Where are we going to look? Well, we could look locally. That makes sense. But we began to think, maybe we should look all over the world. Maybe we should look not just here but in remote places where their might be a distinct genetic context, there might be environmental factors that protect people. And let's look at a million individuals. Now the reason why we think it's a good time to do that now is, in the last couple of years, there's been a remarkable plummeting in the cost to do this type of analysis, this type of data generation, to where it actually costs less to do the data generation and analysis than it does to do the sample processing and the collection. The other reason is that in the last five years, there have been awesome tools, things about network biology, systems biology, that have come up that allow us to think that maybe we could decipher those positive outliers. And as we went around talking to researchers and institutions and telling them about our story, something happened. They started saying, "This is interesting. I would be glad to join your effort. I would be willing to participate." And they didn't say, "Where's the MTA?" They didn't say, "Where is my authorship?" They didn't say, "Is this data going to be mine? Am I going to own it?" They basically said, "Let's work on this in an open, crowd-sourced, team way to do this decoding." Six months ago, we locked down the screening key for this decoder. My co-lead, a brilliant scientist, Eric Schadt at the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and his team, locked in that decoder key ring, and we began looking for samples, because what we realized is, maybe we could just go and look at some existing samples to get some sense of feasibility. Maybe we could take two, three percent of the project on, and see if it was there. And so we started asking people such as Hakon at the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. We asked Leif up in Finland. We talked to Anne Wojcicki at 23andMe, and Wang Jun at BGI, and again, something remarkable happened. They said, "Huh, not only do we have samples, but often we've analyzed them, and we would be glad to go into our anonymized samples and see if we could find those that you're looking for." And instead of being 20,000 or 30,000, last month we passed one half million samples that we've already analyzed. So you must be going, "Huh, did you find any unexpected heroes?" And the answer is, we didn't find one or two. We found dozens of these strong candidate unexpected heroes. So we think that the time is now to launch the beta phase of this project and actually start getting prospective individuals. Basically all we need is information. We need a swab of DNA and a willingness to say, "What's inside me? I'm willing to be re-contacted." Most of us spend our lives, when it comes to health and disease, acting as if we're voyeurs. We delegate the responsibility for the understanding of our disease, for the treatment of our disease, to anointed experts. In order for us to get this project to work, we need individuals to step up in a different role and to be engaged, to realize this dream, this open crowd-sourced project, to find those unexpected heroes, to evolve from the current concepts of resources and constraints, to design those preventive therapies, and to extend it beyond childhood diseases, to go all the way up to ways that we could look at Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, we're going to need us to be looking inside ourselves and asking, "What are our roles? What are our genes?" and looking within ourselves for information we used to say we should go to the outside, to experts, and to be willing to share that with others. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How I started writing songs again | {0: 'He’s sold more than 100 million albums and earned 16 Grammy Awards, yet Sting continues to surprise. His fourteenth solo album, <em>The Last Ship,</em> features songs from his Broadway-bound musical of the same name.'} | TED2014 | (Music) ♪ It's all there in gospels ♪ ♪A Magdalene girl comes to pay her respects ♪ ♪ But her mind is awhirl ♪ ♪ When she finds the tomb empty ♪ ♪ Straw had been rolled ♪ ♪ Not a sign of a corpse ♪ ♪ In the dark and the cold ♪ ♪ When she reaches the door ♪ ♪ Sees an unholy sight ♪ ♪ There's a solitary figure and a halo of light ♪ ♪ He just carries on floating past Calvary Hill ♪ ♪ In an Almighty hurry ♪ ♪ Aye, but she might catch him still ♪ ♪ Tell me where are you gone, Lord ♪ ♪ And why in such haste? ♪ ♪ Oh don't hinder me, woman ♪ ♪ I've no time to waste ♪ ♪ For they're launching a boat on the morrow at noon ♪ ♪ And I have to be there before daybreak ♪ ♪ Oh I cannot be missing ♪ ♪ The lads'll expect me ♪ ♪ Why else would the Good Lord Himself resurrect me? ♪ ♪ For nothing'll stop me. I have to prevail ♪ ♪ Through the teeth of this tempest ♪ ♪ In the mouth of a gale ♪ ♪ May the angels protect me ♪ ♪ If all else should fail ♪ ♪ And the last ship sails ♪ ♪ Oh the roar of the chains ♪ ♪ And the cracking of timbers ♪ ♪ The noise at the end of the world in your ears ♪ ♪ As a mountain of steel makes its way to the sea ♪ ♪ And the last ship sails ♪ So I was born and raised in the shadow of a shipyard in a little town on the northeast coast of England. Some of my earliest memories are of giant ships blocking the end of my street, as well as the sun, for a lot of the year. Every morning as a child, I'd watch thousands of men walk down that hill to work in the shipyard. I'd watch those same men walking back home every night. It has to be said, the shipyard was not the most pleasant place to live next door to, or indeed work in. The shipyard was noisy, dangerous, highly toxic, with an appalling health and safety record. Despite that, the men and women who worked on those ships were extraordinarily proud of the work they did, and justifiably so. Some of the largest vessels ever constructed on planet Earth were built right at the end of my street. My grandfather had been a shipwright, and as a child, as there were few other jobs in the town, I would wonder with some anxiety whether that would be my destiny too. I was fairly determined that it wouldn't be. I had other dreams, not necessarily practical ones, but at the age of eight, I was bequeathed a guitar. It was a battered old thing with five rusty strings, and was out of tune, but quickly I learned to play it and realized that I'd found a friend for life, an accomplice, a co-conspirator in my plan to escape from this surreal industrial landscape. Well, they say if you dream something hard enough, it will come to pass. Either that, or I was extremely lucky, but this was my dream. I dreamt I would leave this town, and just like those ships, once they were launched, I'd never come back. I dreamt I'd become a writer of songs, that I would sing those songs to vast numbers of people all over the world, that I would be paid extravagant amounts of money, that I'd become famous, that I'd marry a beautiful woman, have children, raise a family, buy a big house in the country, keep dogs, grow wine, have rooms full of Grammy Awards, platinum discs, and what have you. So far, so good, right? (Laughter) And then one day, the songs stopped coming, and while you've suffered from periods of writer's block before, albeit briefly, this is something chronic. Day after day, you face a blank page, and nothing's coming. And those days turned to weeks, and weeks to months, and pretty soon those months have turned into years with very little to show for your efforts. No songs. So you start asking yourself questions. What have I done to offend the gods that they would abandon me so? Is the gift of songwriting taken away as easily as it seems to have been bestowed? Or perhaps there's a more — a deeper psychological reason. It was always a Faustian pact anyway. You're rewarded for revealing your innermost thoughts, your private emotions on the page for the entertainment of others, for the analysis, the scrutiny of others, and perhaps you've given enough of your privacy away. And yet, if you look at your work, could it be argued that your best work wasn't about you at all, it was about somebody else? Did your best work occur when you sidestepped your own ego and you stopped telling your story, but told someone else's story, someone perhaps without a voice, where empathetically, you stood in his shoes for a while or saw the world through his eyes? Well they say, write what you know. If you can't write about yourself anymore, then who do you write about? So it's ironic that the landscape I'd worked so hard to escape from, and the community that I'd more or less abandoned and exiled myself from should be the very landscape, the very community I would have to return to to find my missing muse. And as soon as I did that, as soon as I decided to honor the community I came from and tell their story, that the songs started to come thick and fast. I've described it as a kind of projectile vomiting, a torrent of ideas, of characters, of voices, of verses, couplets, entire songs almost formed whole, materialized in front of me as if they'd been bottled up inside me for many, many years. One of the first things I wrote was just a list of names of people I'd known, and they become characters in a kind of three-dimensional drama, where they explain who they are, what they do, their hopes and their fears for the future. This is Jackie White. He's the foreman of the shipyard. My name is Jackie White, and I'm foreman of the yard, and you don't mess with Jackie on this quayside. I'm as hard as iron plate, woe betide you if you're late when we have to push a boat out on the spring tide. Now you can die and hope for heaven, but you need to work your shift, and I'd expect you all to back us to the hilt, for if St. Peter at his gate were to ask you why you're late, why, you tell him that you had to get a ship built. We build battleships and cruisers for Her Majesty the Queen, supertankers for Onassis, and all the classes in between, We built the greatest ship in tonnage what the world has ever seen ♪ And the only life worth knowing is in the shipyard ♪ ♪ Steel in the stockyard, iron in the soul ♪ ♪ Would conjure up a ship ♪ ♪ Where there used to be a hull ♪ ♪ And we don't know what we'll do ♪ ♪ If this yard gets sold ♪ ♪ For the only life worth knowing is in the shipyard ♪ (Applause) So having decided to write about other people instead of myself, a further irony is that sometimes you reveal more about yourself than you'd ever intended. This song is called "Dead Man's Boots," which is an expression which describes how difficult it is to get a job; in other words, you'd only get a job in the shipyard if somebody else died. Or perhaps your father could finagle you an apprenticeship at the age of 15. But sometimes a father's love can be misconstrued as controlling, and conversely, the scope of his son's ambition can seem like some pie-in-the-sky fantasy. (Music) ♪ You see these work boots in my hands ♪ ♪ They'll probably fit you now, my son ♪ ♪ Take them, they're a gift from me ♪ ♪ Why don't you try them on? ♪ ♪ It would do your old man good to see ♪ ♪ You walking in these boots one day ♪ ♪ And take your place among the men ♪ ♪ Who work upon the slipway ♪ ♪ These dead man's boots, though they're old and curled ♪ ♪ When a fellow needs a job and a place in the world ♪ ♪ And it's time for a man to put down roots ♪ ♪ And walk to the river in his old man's boots ♪ ♪ He said, "I'm dying, son, and asking ♪ ♪ That you do one final thing for me ♪ ♪ You're barely but a sapling, and you think that you're a tree ♪ ♪ If you need a seed to prosper ♪ ♪ You must first put down some roots ♪ ♪ Just one foot then the other in ♪ ♪ These dead man's boots" ♪ ♪ These dead man's boots, though they're old and curled ♪ ♪ When a fellow needs a job and a place in the world ♪ ♪ And it's time for a man to put down roots ♪ ♪ And walk to the river in his old man's boots ♪ ♪ I said, "Why in the hell would I do that? ♪ ♪ Why would I agree?" ♪ ♪ When his hand was all that I'd received ♪ ♪ As far as I remember ♪ ♪ It's not as if he'd spoiled me with his kindness ♪ ♪ Up to then, you see ♪ ♪ I'd a plan of my own and I'd quit this place ♪ ♪ When I came of age September ♪ ♪ These dead man's boots know their way down the hill ♪ ♪ They could walk there themselves, and they probably will ♪ ♪ I've plenty of choices, I've plenty other routes ♪ ♪ And you'll never see me walking in these dead man's boots ♪ ♪ What was it made him think ♪ ♪ I'd be happy ending up like him ♪ ♪ When he'd hardly got two halfpennies left ♪ ♪ Or a broken pot to piss in? ♪ ♪ He wanted this same thing for me ♪ ♪ Was that his final wish? ♪ ♪ He said, "What the hell are you gonna do?" ♪ ♪ I said, "Anything but this!" ♪ ♪ These dead man's boots know their way down the hill ♪ ♪ They can walk there themselves and they probably will ♪ ♪ But they won't walk with me ‘cause I'm off the other way ♪ ♪ I've had it up to here, I'm gonna have my say ♪ ♪ When all you've got left is that cross on the wall ♪ ♪ I want nothing from you, I want nothing at all ♪ ♪ Not a pension, nor a pittance, when your whole life is through ♪ ♪ Get this through your head, I'm nothing like you ♪ ♪ I'm done with all the arguments, there'll be no more disputes ♪ ♪ And you'll die before you see me in your dead man's boots ♪ (Applause) Thank you. So whenever they'd launch a big ship, they would invite some dignitary up from London on the train to make a speech, break a bottle of champagne over the bows, launch it down the slipway into the river and out to sea. Occasionally on a really important ship, they'd get a member of the royal family to come, Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Anne or somebody. And you have to remember, it wasn't that long ago that the royal family in England were considered to have magical healing powers. Sick children were held up in crowds to try and touch the cloak of the king or the queen to cure them of some terrible disease. It wasn't like that in my day, but we still got very excited. So it's a launch day, it's a Saturday, and my mother has dressed me up in my Sunday best. I'm not very happy with her. All the kids are out in the street, and we have little Union Jacks to wave, and at the top of the hill, there's a motorcycle cortege appears. In the middle of the motorcycles, there's a big, black Rolls-Royce. Inside the Rolls-Royce is the Queen Mother. This is a big deal. So the procession is moving at a stately pace down my street, and as it approaches my house, I start to wave my flag vigorously, and there is the Queen Mother. I see her, and she seems to see me. She acknowledges me. She waves, and she smiles. And I wave my flag even more vigorously. We're having a moment, me and the Queen Mother. She's acknowledged me. And then she's gone. Well, I wasn't cured of anything. It was the opposite, actually. I was infected. I was infected with an idea. I don't belong in this street. I don't want to live in that house. I don't want to end up in that shipyard. I want to be in that car. (Laughter) I want a bigger life. I want a life beyond this town. I want a life that's out of the ordinary. It's my right. It's my right as much as hers. And so here I am at TED, I suppose to tell that story, and I think it's appropriate to say the obvious that there's a symbiotic and intrinsic link between storytelling and community, between community and art, between community and science and technology, between community and economics. It's my belief that abstract economic theory that denies the needs of community or denies the contribution that community makes to economy is shortsighted, cruel and untenable. (Applause) The fact is, whether you're a rock star or whether you're a welder in a shipyard, or a tribesman in the upper Amazon, or the queen of England, at the end of the day, we're all in the same boat. ♪ Aye, the footmen are frantic in their indignation ♪ ♪ You see the queen's took a taxi herself to the station ♪ ♪ Where the porters, surprised by her lack of royal baggage ♪ ♪ Bustle her and three corgis to the rear of the carriage ♪ ♪ For the train it is crammed with all Europe's nobility ♪ ♪ And there's none of them famous for their compatibility ♪ ♪ There's a fight over seats ♪ ♪ "I beg pardon, Your Grace ♪ ♪ But you'll find that one's mine, so get back in your place!" ♪ ♪ "Aye, but where are they going?" ♪ ♪ All the porters debate ♪ ♪ "Why they're going to Newcastle and they daren't be late ♪ ♪ For they're launching a boat on the Tyne at high tide ♪ ♪ And they've come from all over, from far and from wide" ♪ ♪ There's the old Dalai Lama ♪ ♪ And the pontiff of Rome ♪ ♪ Every palace in Europe, and there's nay bugger home ♪ ♪ There's the Duchess of Cornwall and the loyal Prince of Wales ♪ ♪ Looking crushed and uncomfortable in his top hat and tails ♪ ♪ Well, they haven't got tickets ♪ ♪ Come now, it's just a detail ♪ ♪ There was no time to purchase and one simply has to prevail ♪ ♪ For we'll get to the shipyards or we'll end up in jail! ♪ ♪ When the last ship sails ♪ ♪ Oh the roar of the chains ♪ ♪ And the cracking of timbers ♪ ♪ The noise at the end of the world in your ears ♪ ♪ As a mountain of steel makes its way to the sea ♪ ♪ And the last ship sails ♪ ♪ And whatever you'd promised ♪ ♪ Whatever you've done ♪ ♪ And whatever the station in life you've become ♪ ♪ In the name of the Father, in the name of the Son ♪ ♪ And no matter the weave of this life that you've spun ♪ ♪ On the Earth or in Heaven or under the Sun ♪ ♪ When the last ship sails ♪ ♪ Oh the roar of the chains ♪ ♪ And the cracking of timbers ♪ ♪ The noise at the end of the world in your ears ♪ ♪ As a mountain of steel makes its way to the sea ♪ ♪ And the last ship sails ♪ Thanks very much for listening to my song. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Okay, you have to join in if you know it. (Music) (Applause) ♪ Just a castaway ♪ ♪ An island lost at sea, oh ♪ ♪ Another lonely day ♪ ♪ With no one here but me, oh ♪ ♪ More loneliness than any man could bear ♪ ♪ Rescue me before I fall into despair ♪ ♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪ ♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ A year has passed since I wrote my note ♪ ♪ I should have known this right from the start ♪ ♪ Only hope can keep me together ♪ ♪ Love can mend your life ♪ ♪ but love can break your heart ♪ ♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪ ♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Walked out this morning ♪ ♪ I don't believe what I saw ♪ ♪ A hundred billion bottles ♪ ♪ Washed up on the shore ♪ ♪ Seems I'm not alone in being alone ♪ ♪ A hundred billion castaways ♪ ♪ Looking for a home ♪ ♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪ ♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ So I'm going to ask you to sing after me, okay, the next part. It's very easy. Sing in unison. Here we go. ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Come on now. Audience: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Sting: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Audience: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Sting: ♪ I'm sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Audience: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Sting: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Audience: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Sting: ♪ Sending out ♪ ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ ♪ Yoooooooo ♪ Thank you, TED. Goodnight. (Applause) |
Get ready for hybrid thinking | {0: "Ray Kurzweil is an engineer who has radically advanced the fields of speech, text and audio technology. He's revered for his dizzying -- yet convincing -- writing on the advance of technology, the limits of biology and the future of the human species."} | TED2014 | Let me tell you a story. It goes back 200 million years. It's a story of the neocortex, which means "new rind." So in these early mammals, because only mammals have a neocortex, rodent-like creatures. It was the size of a postage stamp and just as thin, and was a thin covering around their walnut-sized brain, but it was capable of a new type of thinking. Rather than the fixed behaviors that non-mammalian animals have, it could invent new behaviors. So a mouse is escaping a predator, its path is blocked, it'll try to invent a new solution. That may work, it may not, but if it does, it will remember that and have a new behavior, and that can actually spread virally through the rest of the community. Another mouse watching this could say, "Hey, that was pretty clever, going around that rock," and it could adopt a new behavior as well. Non-mammalian animals couldn't do any of those things. They had fixed behaviors. Now they could learn a new behavior but not in the course of one lifetime. In the course of maybe a thousand lifetimes, it could evolve a new fixed behavior. That was perfectly okay 200 million years ago. The environment changed very slowly. It could take 10,000 years for there to be a significant environmental change, and during that period of time it would evolve a new behavior. Now that went along fine, but then something happened. Sixty-five million years ago, there was a sudden, violent change to the environment. We call it the Cretaceous extinction event. That's when the dinosaurs went extinct, that's when 75 percent of the animal and plant species went extinct, and that's when mammals overtook their ecological niche, and to anthropomorphize, biological evolution said, "Hmm, this neocortex is pretty good stuff," and it began to grow it. And mammals got bigger, their brains got bigger at an even faster pace, and the neocortex got bigger even faster than that and developed these distinctive ridges and folds basically to increase its surface area. If you took the human neocortex and stretched it out, it's about the size of a table napkin, and it's still a thin structure. It's about the thickness of a table napkin. But it has so many convolutions and ridges it's now 80 percent of our brain, and that's where we do our thinking, and it's the great sublimator. We still have that old brain that provides our basic drives and motivations, but I may have a drive for conquest, and that'll be sublimated by the neocortex into writing a poem or inventing an app or giving a TED Talk, and it's really the neocortex that's where the action is. Fifty years ago, I wrote a paper describing how I thought the brain worked, and I described it as a series of modules. Each module could do things with a pattern. It could learn a pattern. It could remember a pattern. It could implement a pattern. And these modules were organized in hierarchies, and we created that hierarchy with our own thinking. And there was actually very little to go on 50 years ago. It led me to meet President Johnson. I've been thinking about this for 50 years, and a year and a half ago I came out with the book "How To Create A Mind," which has the same thesis, but now there's a plethora of evidence. The amount of data we're getting about the brain from neuroscience is doubling every year. Spatial resolution of brainscanning of all types is doubling every year. We can now see inside a living brain and see individual interneural connections connecting in real time, firing in real time. We can see your brain create your thoughts. We can see your thoughts create your brain, which is really key to how it works. So let me describe briefly how it works. I've actually counted these modules. We have about 300 million of them, and we create them in these hierarchies. I'll give you a simple example. I've got a bunch of modules that can recognize the crossbar to a capital A, and that's all they care about. A beautiful song can play, a pretty girl could walk by, they don't care, but they see a crossbar to a capital A, they get very excited and they say "crossbar," and they put out a high probability on their output axon. That goes to the next level, and these layers are organized in conceptual levels. Each is more abstract than the next one, so the next one might say "capital A." That goes up to a higher level that might say "Apple." Information flows down also. If the apple recognizer has seen A-P-P-L, it'll think to itself, "Hmm, I think an E is probably likely," and it'll send a signal down to all the E recognizers saying, "Be on the lookout for an E, I think one might be coming." The E recognizers will lower their threshold and they see some sloppy thing, could be an E. Ordinarily you wouldn't think so, but we're expecting an E, it's good enough, and yeah, I've seen an E, and then apple says, "Yeah, I've seen an Apple." Go up another five levels, and you're now at a pretty high level of this hierarchy, and stretch down into the different senses, and you may have a module that sees a certain fabric, hears a certain voice quality, smells a certain perfume, and will say, "My wife has entered the room." Go up another 10 levels, and now you're at a very high level. You're probably in the frontal cortex, and you'll have modules that say, "That was ironic. That's funny. She's pretty." You might think that those are more sophisticated, but actually what's more complicated is the hierarchy beneath them. There was a 16-year-old girl, she had brain surgery, and she was conscious because the surgeons wanted to talk to her. You can do that because there's no pain receptors in the brain. And whenever they stimulated particular, very small points on her neocortex, shown here in red, she would laugh. So at first they thought they were triggering some kind of laugh reflex, but no, they quickly realized they had found the points in her neocortex that detect humor, and she just found everything hilarious whenever they stimulated these points. "You guys are so funny just standing around," was the typical comment, and they weren't funny, not while doing surgery. So how are we doing today? Well, computers are actually beginning to master human language with techniques that are similar to the neocortex. I actually described the algorithm, which is similar to something called a hierarchical hidden Markov model, something I've worked on since the '90s. "Jeopardy" is a very broad natural language game, and Watson got a higher score than the best two players combined. It got this query correct: "A long, tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie topping," and it quickly responded, "What is a meringue harangue?" And Jennings and the other guy didn't get that. It's a pretty sophisticated example of computers actually understanding human language, and it actually got its knowledge by reading Wikipedia and several other encyclopedias. Five to 10 years from now, search engines will actually be based on not just looking for combinations of words and links but actually understanding, reading for understanding the billions of pages on the web and in books. So you'll be walking along, and Google will pop up and say, "You know, Mary, you expressed concern to me a month ago that your glutathione supplement wasn't getting past the blood-brain barrier. Well, new research just came out 13 seconds ago that shows a whole new approach to that and a new way to take glutathione. Let me summarize it for you." Twenty years from now, we'll have nanobots, because another exponential trend is the shrinking of technology. They'll go into our brain through the capillaries and basically connect our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud providing an extension of our neocortex. Now today, I mean, you have a computer in your phone, but if you need 10,000 computers for a few seconds to do a complex search, you can access that for a second or two in the cloud. In the 2030s, if you need some extra neocortex, you'll be able to connect to that in the cloud directly from your brain. So I'm walking along and I say, "Oh, there's Chris Anderson. He's coming my way. I'd better think of something clever to say. I've got three seconds. My 300 million modules in my neocortex isn't going to cut it. I need a billion more." I'll be able to access that in the cloud. And our thinking, then, will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking, but the non-biological portion is subject to my law of accelerating returns. It will grow exponentially. And remember what happens the last time we expanded our neocortex? That was two million years ago when we became humanoids and developed these large foreheads. Other primates have a slanted brow. They don't have the frontal cortex. But the frontal cortex is not really qualitatively different. It's a quantitative expansion of neocortex, but that additional quantity of thinking was the enabling factor for us to take a qualitative leap and invent language and art and science and technology and TED conferences. No other species has done that. And so, over the next few decades, we're going to do it again. We're going to again expand our neocortex, only this time we won't be limited by a fixed architecture of enclosure. It'll be expanded without limit. That additional quantity will again be the enabling factor for another qualitative leap in culture and technology. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The psychology of your future self | {0: 'Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, <em>Stumbling on Happiness.</em>'} | TED2014 | At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we're going to become, and then when we become those people, we're not always thrilled with the decisions we made. So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. On and on and on. The question is, as a psychologist, that fascinates me is, why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret? Now, I think one of the reasons — I'll try to convince you today — is that we have a fundamental misconception about the power of time. Every one of you knows that the rate of change slows over the human lifespan, that your children seem to change by the minute but your parents seem to change by the year. But what is the name of this magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl? Is it teenage years? Is it middle age? Is it old age? The answer, it turns out, for most people, is now, wherever now happens to be. What I want to convince you today is that all of us are walking around with an illusion, an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives. Let me give you some data to back up that claim. So here's a study of change in people's personal values over time. Here's three values. Everybody here holds all of them, but you probably know that as you grow, as you age, the balance of these values shifts. So how does it do so? Well, we asked thousands of people. We asked half of them to predict for us how much their values would change in the next 10 years, and the others to tell us how much their values had changed in the last 10 years. And this enabled us to do a really interesting kind of analysis, because it allowed us to compare the predictions of people, say, 18 years old, to the reports of people who were 28, and to do that kind of analysis throughout the lifespan. Here's what we found. First of all, you are right, change does slow down as we age, but second, you're wrong, because it doesn't slow nearly as much as we think. At every age, from 18 to 68 in our data set, people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years. We call this the "end of history" illusion. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect, you can connect these two lines, and what you see here is that 18-year-olds anticipate changing only as much as 50-year-olds actually do. Now it's not just values. It's all sorts of other things. For example, personality. Many of you know that psychologists now claim that there are five fundamental dimensions of personality: neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness. Again, we asked people how much they expected to change over the next 10 years, and also how much they had changed over the last 10 years, and what we found, well, you're going to get used to seeing this diagram over and over, because once again the rate of change does slow as we age, but at every age, people underestimate how much their personalities will change in the next decade. And it isn't just ephemeral things like values and personality. You can ask people about their likes and dislikes, their basic preferences. For example, name your best friend, your favorite kind of vacation, what's your favorite hobby, what's your favorite kind of music. People can name these things. We ask half of them to tell us, "Do you think that that will change over the next 10 years?" and half of them to tell us, "Did that change over the last 10 years?" And what we find, well, you've seen it twice now, and here it is again: people predict that the friend they have now is the friend they'll have in 10 years, the vacation they most enjoy now is the one they'll enjoy in 10 years, and yet, people who are 10 years older all say, "Eh, you know, that's really changed." Does any of this matter? Is this just a form of mis-prediction that doesn't have consequences? No, it matters quite a bit, and I'll give you an example of why. It bedevils our decision-making in important ways. Bring to mind right now for yourself your favorite musician today and your favorite musician 10 years ago. I put mine up on the screen to help you along. Now we asked people to predict for us, to tell us how much money they would pay right now to see their current favorite musician perform in concert 10 years from now, and on average, people said they would pay 129 dollars for that ticket. And yet, when we asked them how much they would pay to see the person who was their favorite 10 years ago perform today, they say only 80 dollars. Now, in a perfectly rational world, these should be the same number, but we overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability. Why does this happen? We're not entirely sure, but it probably has to do with the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining. Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we're going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it's hard to imagine, it's not likely to happen. Sorry, when people say "I can't imagine that," they're usually talking about their own lack of imagination, and not about the unlikelihood of the event that they're describing. The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It's as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It's a watershed on the timeline. It's the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our life is change. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why people need poetry | {0: 'In his influential poetry criticism, Stephen Burt links the contemporary with the classical, pinpoints new poetry movements, and promotes outstanding little-known poets.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | I read poetry all the time and write about it frequently and take poems apart to see how they work because I'm a word person. I understand the world best, most fully, in words rather than, say, pictures or numbers, and when I have a new experience or a new feeling, I'm a little frustrated until I can try to put it into words. I think I've always been that way. I devoured science fiction as a child. I still do. And I found poems by Andrew Marvell and Matthew Arnold and Emily Dickinson and William Butler Yeats because they were quoted in science fiction, and I loved their sounds and I went on to read about ottava rima and medial caesuras and enjambment and all that other technical stuff that you care about if you already care about poems, because poems already made me happier and sadder and more alive. And I became a poetry critic because I wanted to know how and why. Now, poetry isn't one thing that serves one purpose any more than music or computer programming serve one purpose. The greek word poem, it just means "a made thing," and poetry is a set of techniques, ways of making patterns that put emotions into words. The more techniques you know, the more things you can make, and the more patterns you can recognize in things you might already like or love. That said, poetry does seem to be especially good at certain things. For example, we are all going to die. Poetry can help us live with that. Poems are made of words, nothing but words. The particulars in poems are like the particularities, the personalities, that distinguish people from one another. Poems are easy to share, easy to pass on, and when you read a poem, you can imagine someone's speaking to you or for you, maybe even someone far away or someone made up or someone deceased. That's why we can go to poems when we want to remember something or someone, to celebrate or to look beyond death or to say goodbye, and that's one reason poems can seem important, even to people who aren't me, who don't so much live in a world of words. The poet Frank O'Hara said, "If you don't need poetry, bully for you," but he also said when he didn't want to be alive anymore, the thought that he wouldn't write any more poems had stopped him. Poetry helps me want to be alive, and I want to show you why by showing you how, how a couple of poems react to the fact that we're alive in one place at one time in one culture, and in another we won't be alive at all. So here's one of the first poems I memorized. It could address a child or an adult. "From far, from eve and morning From yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither; here am I. Now — for a breath I tarry Nor yet disperse apart — Take my hand quick and tell me, What have you in your heart. Speak now, and I will answer; How shall I help you, say; Ere to the wind's twelve quarters I take my endless way." [A. E. Housman] Now, this poem has appealed to science fiction writers. It's furnished at least three science fiction titles, I think because it says poems can brings us news from the future or the past or across the world, because their patterns can seem to tell you what's in somebody's heart. It says poems can bring people together temporarily, which I think is true, and it sticks in my head not just because it rhymes but for how it rhymes, cleanly and simply on the two and four, "say" and "way," with anticipatory hints on the one and three, "answer" and "quarters," as if the poem itself were coming together. It plays up the fact that we die by exaggerating the speed of our lives. A few years on Earth become one speech, one breath. It's a poem about loneliness — the "I" in the poem feels no connection will last — and it might look like a plea for help 'til you get to the word "help," where this "I" facing you, taking your hand, is more like a teacher or a genie, or at least that's what he wants to believe. It would not be the first time a poet had written the poem that he wanted to hear. Now, this next poem really changed what I liked and what I read and what I felt I could read as an adult. It might not make any sense to you if you haven't seen it before. "The Garden" "Oleander: coral from lipstick ads in the 50's. Fruit of the tree of such knowledge To smack (thin air) meaning kiss or hit. It appears in the guise of outworn usages because we are bad? Big masculine threat, insinuating and slangy." [Rae Armantrout] Now, I found this poem in an anthology of almost equally confusing poems in 1989. I just heard that there were these scandalous writers called Language poets who didn't make any sense, and I wanted to go and see for myself what they were like, and some of them didn't do much for me, but this writer, Rae Armantrout, did an awful lot, and I kept reading her until I felt I knew what was going on, as I do with this poem. It's about the Garden of Eden and the Fall and the Biblical story of the Fall, in which sex as we know it and death and guilt come into the world at the same time. It's also about how appearances deceive, how our culture can sweep us along into doing and saying things we didn't intend or don't like, and Armantrout's style is trying to help us stop or slow down. "Smack" can mean "kiss" as in air kisses, as in lip-smacking, but that can lead to "smack" as in "hit" as in domestic abuse, because sexual attraction can seem threatening. The red that means fertility can also mean poison. Oleander is poisonous. And outworn usages like "smack" for "kiss" or "hit" can help us see how our unacknowledged assumptions can make us believe we are bad, either because sex is sinful or because we tolerate so much sexism. We let guys tell women what to do. The poem reacts to old lipstick ads, and its edginess about statement, its reversals and halts, have everything to do with resisting the language of ads that want to tell us so easily what to want, what to do, what to think. That resistance is a lot of the point of the poem, which shows me, Armantrout shows me what it's like to hear grave threats and mortal dishonesty in the language of everyday life, and once she's done that, I think she can show other people, women and men, what it's like to feel that way and say to other people, women and men who feel so alienated or so threatened that they're not alone. Now, how do I know that I'm right about this somewhat confusing poem? Well in this case, I emailed the poet a draft of my talk and she said, "Yeah, yeah, that's about it." Yeah. (Laughter) (Applause) But usually, you can't know. You never know. You can't be sure, and that's okay. All we can do we is listen to poems and look at poems and guess and see if they can bring us what we need, and if you're wrong about some part of a poem, nothing bad will happen. Now, this next poem is older than Armantrout's, but a little younger than A. E. Housman's. "The Brave Man" "The sun, that brave man, Comes through boughs that lie in wait, That brave man. Green and gloomy eyes In dark forms of the grass Run away. The good stars, Pale helms and spiky spurs, Run away. Fears of my bed, Fears of life and fears of death, Run away. That brave man comes up From below and walks without meditation, That brave man." [Wallace Stevens] Now, the sun in this poem, in Wallace Stevens' poem, seems so grave because the person in the poem is so afraid. The sun comes up in the morning through branches, dispels the dew, the eyes, on the grass, and defeats stars envisioned as armies. "Brave" has its old sense of showy as well as its modern sense, courage. This sun is not afraid to show his face. But the person in the poem is afraid. He might have been up all night. That is the reveal Stevens saves for that fourth stanza, where run away has become a refrain. This person might want to run away too, but fortified by the sun's example, he might just rise. Stevens saves that sonically odd word "meditation" for the end. Unlike the sun, human beings think. We meditate on past and future, life and death, above and below. And it can make us afraid. Poems, the patterns in poems, show us not just what somebody thought or what someone did or what happened but what it was like to be a person like that, to be so anxious, so lonely, so inquisitive, so goofy, so preposterous, so brave. That's why poems can seem at once so durable, so personal, and so ephemeral, like something inside and outside you at once. The Scottish poet Denise Riley compares poetry to a needle, a sliver of outside I cradle inside, and the American poet Terrance Hayes wrote six poems called "Wind in a Box." One of them asks, "Tell me, what am I going to do when I'm dead?" And the answer is that he'll stay with us or won't stay with us inside us as wind, as air, as words. It is easier than ever to find poems that might stay inside you, that might stay with you, from long, long ago, or from right this minute, from far away or from right close to where you live, almost no matter where you live. Poems can help you say, help you show how you're feeling, but they can also introduce you to feelings, ways of being in the world, people, very much unlike you, maybe even people from long, long ago. Some poems even tell you that that is what they can do. That's what John Keats is doing in his most mysterious, perhaps, poem. It's mysterious because it's probably unfinished, he probably left it unfinished, and because it might be meant for a character in a play, but it might just be Keats' thinking about what his own writing, his handwriting, could do, and in it I hear, at least I hear, mortality, and I hear the power of older poetic techniques, and I have the feeling, you might have the feeling, of meeting even for an instant, almost becoming, someone else from long ago, someone quite memorable. "This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d — see here it is — I hold it towards you." Thanks. (Applause) |
The secrets of nature's grossest creatures, channeled into robots | {0: "Robert Full studies cockroach legs and gecko feet. His research is helping build tomorrow's robots, based on evolution's ancient engineering."} | TED2014 | Even nature's most disgusting creatures have important secrets, but who would want a swarm of cockroaches coming towards them? Yet one of the greatest differences between natural and human technologies relates to robustness. Robust systems are stable in complex and new environments. Remarkably, cockroaches can self-stabilize running over rough terrain. When we put a jet pack on them, or give them a perturbation like an earthquake, we discovered that their wonderfully tuned legs allow them to self-stabilize without using any of their brainpower. They can go over complex terrain like grass, no problem, and not get destabilized. We discovered a new behavior where, because of their shape, they actually roll automatically to their side to go through this artificial test bit of grass. Robust systems can perform multiple tasks with the same structure. Here's a new behavior we've discovered. The animals rapidly invert and disappear in less than 150 milliseconds — you never see them — using the same structures that they use to run, their legs. They can run upside down very rapidly on rods, branches and wires, and if you perturb one of those branches, they can do this. They can perform gymnastic maneuvers like no robot we have yet. And they have nearly unlimited maneuverability with that same structure and unprecedented access to a variety of different areas. They have wings for flying when they get warm, but they use those same wings to flip over if they get destabilized. Very effective. Robust systems are also fault tolerant and fail-safe. This is the foot of a cockroach. It has spines, gluey pads and claws, but if you take off those feet, they can still go over rough terrain, like the bottom video that you see, without hardly slowing down. Extraordinary. They can run up mesh without their feet. Here's an animal using a normal, alternating tripod: three legs, three legs, three legs, but in nature, the insects often have lost their legs. Here's one moving with two middle legs gone. It can even lose three legs, in a tripod, and adopt a new gait, a hopping gait. And I point out that all of these videos are slowed down 20 times, so they're actually really fast, when you see this. Robust systems are also damage resistant. Here's an animal climbing up a wall. It looks like a rapid, smooth, vertical climb, but when you slow it down, you see something very different. Here's what they do. They intentionally have a head-on collision with the wall so they don't slow down and can transition up it in 75 milliseconds. And they can do this in part because they have extraordinary exoskeletons. And they're really just made up of compliant joints that are tubes and plates connected to one another. Here's a dissection of an abdomen of a cockroach. You see these plates, and you see the compliant membrane. My engineering colleague at Berkeley designed with his students a novel manufacturing technique where you essentially origami the exoskeleton, you laser cut it, laminate it, and you fold it up into a robot. And you can do that now in less than 15 minutes. These robots, called DASH, for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, are highly compliant robots, and they're remarkably robust as a result of these features. They're certainly incredibly damage resistant. (Laughter) They even have some of the behaviors of the cockroaches. So they can use their smart, compliant body to transition up a wall in a very simple way. They even have some of the beginnings of the rapid inversion behavior where they disappear. Now we want to know why they can go anywhere. We discovered that they can go through three-millimeter gaps, the height of two pennies, two stacked pennies, and when they do this, they can actually run through those confined spaces at high speeds, although you never see it. To understand it better, we did a CT scan of the exoskeleton and showed that they can compress their body by over 40 percent. We put them in a materials testing machine to look at the stress strain analysis and showed that they can withstand forces 800 times their body weight, and after this they can fly and run absolutely normally. So you never know where curiosity-based research will lead, and someday you may want a swarm of cockroach-inspired robots to come at you. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
What the gay rights movement learned from the civil rights movement | {0: 'In her documentary films, Yoruba Richen unites African-American, feminist and LGBTQ voices in a renewed cry for civil rights for all.'} | TED2014 | Election night 2008 was a night that tore me in half. It was the night that Barack Obama was elected. [One hundred and forty-three] years after the end of slavery, and [43] years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, an African-American was elected president. Many of us never thought that this was possible until the moment that it happened. And in many ways, it was the climax of the black civil rights movement in the United States. I was in California that night, which was ground zero at the time for another movement: the marriage equality movement. Gay marriage was on the ballot in the form of Proposition 8, and as the election returns started to come in, it became clear that the right for same sex couples to marry, which had recently been granted by the California courts, was going to be taken away. So on the same night that Barack Obama won his historic presidency, the lesbian and gay community suffered one of our most painful defeats. And then it got even worse. Pretty much immediately, African-Americans started to be blamed for the passage of Proposition 8. This was largely due to an incorrect poll that said that blacks had voted for the measure by something like 70 percent. This turned out not to be true, but this idea of pervasive black homophobia set in, and was grabbed on by the media. I couldn't tear myself away from the coverage. I listened to some gay commentator say that the African-American community was notoriously homophobic, and now that civil rights had been achieved for us, we wanted to take away other people's rights. There were even reports of racist epithets being thrown at some of the participants of the gay rights rallies that took place after the election. And on the other side, some African-Americans dismissed or ignored homophobia that was indeed real in our community. And others resented this comparison between gay rights and civil rights, and once again, the sinking feeling that two minority groups of which I'm both a part of were competing with each other instead of supporting each other overwhelmed and, frankly, pissed me off. Now, I'm a documentary filmmaker, so after going through my pissed off stage and yelling at the television and radio, my next instinct was to make a movie. And what guided me in making this film was, how was this happening? How was it that the gay rights movement was being pitted against the civil rights movement? And this wasn't just an abstract question. I'm a beneficiary of both movements, so this was actually personal. But then something else happened after that election in 2008. The march towards gay equality accelerated at a pace that surprised and shocked everyone, and is still reshaping our laws and our policies, our institutions and our entire country. And so it started to become increasingly clear to me that this pitting of the two movements against each other actually didn't make sense, and that they were in fact much, much more interconnected, and that, in fact, some of the way that the gay rights movement has been able to make such incredible gains so quickly is that it's used some of the same tactics and strategies that were first laid down by the civil rights movement. Let's just look at a few of these strategies. First off, it's really interesting to see, to actually visually see, how quick the gay rights movement has made its gains, if you look at a few of the major events on a timeline of both freedom movements. Now, there are tons of milestones in the civil rights movement, but the first one we're going to start with is the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. This was a protest campaign against Montgomery, Alabama's segregation on their public transit system, and it began when a woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person. The campaign lasted a year, and it galvanized the civil rights movement like nothing had before it. And I call this strategy the "I'm tired of your foot on my neck" strategy. So gays and lesbians have been in society since societies began, but up until the mid-20th century, homosexual acts were still illegal in most states. So just 14 years after the Montgomery bus boycott, a group of LGBT folks took that same strategy. It's known as Stonewall, in 1969, and it's where a group of LGBT patrons fought back against police beatings at a Greenwich Village bar that sparked three days of rioting. Incidentally, black and latino LGBT folks were at the forefront of this rebellion, and it's a really interesting example of the intersection of our struggles against racism, homophobia, gender identity and police brutality. After Stonewall happened, gay liberation groups sprang up all over the country, and the modern gay rights movement as we know it took off. So the next moment to look at on the timeline is the 1963 March on Washington. This was a seminal event in the civil rights movement and it's where African-Americans called for both civil and economic justice. And it's of course where Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech, but what's actually less known is that this march was organized by a man named Bayard Rustin. Bayard was an out gay man, and he's considered one of the most brilliant strategists of the civil rights movement. He later in his life became a fierce advocate of LGBT rights as well, and his life is testament to the intersection of the struggles. The March on Washington is one of the high points of the movement, and it's where there was a fervent belief that African-Americans too could be a part of American democracy. I call this strategy the "We are visible and many in numbers" strategy. Some early gay activists were actually directly inspired by the march, and some had taken part. Gay pioneer Jack Nichols said, "We marched with Martin Luther King, seven of us from the Mattachine Society" — which was an early gay rights organization — "and from that moment on, we had our own dream about a gay rights march of similar proportions." Several years later, a series of marches took place, each one gaining the momentum of the gay freedom struggle. The first one was in 1979, and the second one took place in 1987. The third one was held in 1993. Almost a million people showed up, and people were so energized and excited by what had taken place, they went back to their own communities and started their own political and social organizations, further increasing the visibility of the movement. The day of that march, October 11, was then declared National Coming Out Day, and is still celebrated all over the world. These marches set the groundwork for the historic changes that we see happening today in the United States. And lastly, the "Loving" strategy. The name speaks for itself. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia, and invalidated all laws that prohibited interracial marriage. This is considered one of the Supreme Court's landmark civil rights cases. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, and that made the federal government only have to recognize marriages between a man and a woman. In United States v. Windsor, a 79-year-old lesbian named Edith Windsor sued the federal government when she was forced to pay estate taxes on her deceased wife's property, something that heterosexual couples don't have to do. And as the case wound its way through the lower courts, the Loving case was repeatedly cited as precedent. When it got to the Supreme Court in 2013, the Supreme Court agreed, and DOMA was thrown out. It was incredible. But the gay marriage movement has been making gains for years now. To date, 17 states have passed laws allowing marriage equality. It's become the de facto battle for gay equality, and it seems like daily, laws prohibiting it are being challenged in the courts, even in places like Texas and Utah, which no one saw coming. So a lot has changed since that night in 2008 when I felt torn in half. I did go on to make that film. It's a documentary film, and it's called "The New Black," and it looks at how the African-American community is grappling with the gay rights issue in light of the gay marriage movement and this fight over the meaning of civil rights. And I wanted to capture some of this incredible change that was happening, and as luck or politics would have it, another marriage battle started gearing up, this time in Maryland, where African-Americans make up 30 percent of the electorate. So this tension between gay rights and civil rights started to bubble up once again, and I was lucky enough to capture how some people were making the connection between the movements this time. This is a clip of Karess Taylor-Hughes and Samantha Masters, two characters in the film, as they hit the streets of Baltimore and try to convince potential voters. (Video) Samantha Masters: That's what's up, man, this is a righteous man over here. Okay, are you registered to vote? Man: No. Karess Taylor-Hughes: Okay. How old are you? Man: 21. KTH: 21? You gotta get registered to vote. We got to get you registered to vote. Man: I ain't voting on no gay shit. SM: Okay, why? What's up? Man: I ain't with that. SM: That's not cool. Man: What made you be gay? SM: So what made you be straight? So what made you be straight? Man 2: You can't answer that question. (Laughter) KSM: I used to not have the same rights as you, but I know that because a black man like yourself stood up for a woman like me, I know that I've got the same opportunities. So you, as a black man, have the opportunity to stand up for somebody else. Whether you're gay or not, these are your brothers and sisters out here, and they need you to represent. Man 2: Who is you to tell somebody who they can't have sex with, who they can't be with? They ain't got that power. Nobody has that power to say, you can't marry that young lady. Who has that power? Nobody. SM: But you know what? Our state has put the power in your hands, and so what we need you to do is vote for, you gonna vote for 6. Man 2: I got you. SM: Vote for 6, okay? Man 2: I got you. KSM: All right, do y'all need community service hours? You do? All right, you can always volunteer with us to get community service hours. Y'all want to do that? We feed you. We bring you pizza. (Laughter) (Applause) Yoruba Richen: Thank you. What's amazing to me about that clip that we just captured as we were filming is, it really shows how Karess understands the history of the civil rights movement, but she's not restricted by it. She doesn't just limit it to black people. She sees it as a blueprint for expanding rights to gays and lesbians. Maybe because she's younger, she's like 25, she's able to do this a little bit more easily, but the fact is that Maryland voters did pass that marriage equality amendment, and in fact it was the first time that marriage equality was directly voted on and passed by the voters. African-Americans supported it at a higher level than had ever been recorded. It was a complete turnaround from that night in 2008 when Proposition 8 was passed. It was, and feels, monumental. We in the LGBT community have gone from being a pathologized and reviled and criminalized group to being seen as part of the great human quest for dignity and equality. We've gone from having to hide our sexuality in order to maintain our jobs and our families to literally getting a place at the table with the president and a shout out at his second inauguration. I just want to read what he said at that inauguration: "We the people declare today that the most evident of truths, that all of us are created equal. It is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall." Now we know that everything is not perfect, especially when you look at what's happening with the LGBT rights issue internationally, but it says something about how far we've come when our president puts the gay freedom struggle in the context of the other great freedom struggles of our time: the women's rights movement and the civil rights movement. His statement demonstrates not only the interconnectedness of those movements, but how each one borrowed and was inspired by the other. So just as Martin Luther King learned from and borrowed from Gandhi's tactics of civil disobedience and nonviolence, which became a bedrock of the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement saw what worked in the civil rights movement, and they used some of those same strategies and tactics to make gains at an even quicker pace. Maybe one more other reason for the relative quick progress of the gay rights movement. Whereas a lot of us continue to still live in racially segregated spaces, LGBT folks, we are everywhere. We are in urban communities and rural communities, communities of color, immigrant communities, churches and mosques and synagogues. We are your mothers and brothers and sisters and sons. And when someone that you love or a family member comes out, it may be easier to support their quest for equality. And in fact, the gay rights movement asks us to support justice and equality from a space of love. That may be the biggest, greatest gift that the movement has given us. It calls on us to access that which is most universal and most intimate: a love of our brother and our sister and our neighbor. I just want to end with a quote by one of our greatest freedom fighters who's no longer with us, Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Nelson Mandela led South Africa after the dark and brutal days of Apartheid, and out of the ashes of that legalized racial discrimination, he led South Africa to become the first country in the world to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation within its constitution. Mandela said, "For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." So as these movements continue on, and as freedom struggles around the world continue on, let's remember that not only are they interconnected, but they must support and enhance each other for us to be truly victorious. Thank you. (Applause) |
I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much | {0: 'Writer, comedian and advocate Stella Young was the editor of Ramp Up, an online space for news, discussion and opinion about disability in Australia.'} | TEDxSydney | I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria. I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing. I went to school, I hung out with my friends, I fought with my younger sisters. It was all very normal. And when I was 15, a member of my local community approached my parents and wanted to nominate me for a community achievement award. And my parents said, "Hm, that's really nice, but there's kind of one glaring problem with that. She hasn't actually achieved anything." (Laughter) And they were right, you know. I went to school, I got good marks, I had a very low-key after school job in my mum's hairdressing salon, and I spent a lot of time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek." Yeah, I know. What a contradiction. But they were right, you know. I wasn't doing anything that was out of the ordinary at all. I wasn't doing anything that could be considered an achievement if you took disability out of the equation. Years later, I was on my second teaching round in a Melbourne high school, and I was about 20 minutes into a year 11 legal studies class when this boy put up his hand and said, "Hey miss, when are you going to start doing your speech?" And I said, "What speech?" You know, I'd been talking them about defamation law for a good 20 minutes. And he said, "You know, like, your motivational speaking. You know, when people in wheelchairs come to school, they usually say, like, inspirational stuff?" (Laughter) "It's usually in the big hall." And that's when it dawned on me: This kid had only ever experienced disabled people as objects of inspiration. We are not, to this kid — and it's not his fault, I mean, that's true for many of us. For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. We're not real people. We are there to inspire. And in fact, I am sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair, and you are probably kind of expecting me to inspire you. Right? (Laughter) Yeah. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically. I am not here to inspire you. I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. Yeah, we've been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. It's a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional. And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude." Or this one: "Your excuse is invalid." Indeed. Or this one: "Before you quit, try!" These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn. (Laughter) And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person." But what if you are that person? I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile. They were just kind of congratulating me for managing to get up in the morning and remember my own name. (Laughter) And it is objectifying. These images, those images objectify disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. They are there so that you can look at them and think that things aren't so bad for you, to put your worries into perspective. And life as a disabled person is actually somewhat difficult. We do overcome some things. But the things that we're overcoming are not the things that you think they are. They are not things to do with our bodies. I use the term "disabled people" quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses. So I have lived in this body a long time. I'm quite fond of it. It does the things that I need it to do, and I've learned to use it to the best of its capacity just as you have, and that's the thing about those kids in those pictures as well. They're not doing anything out of the ordinary. They are just using their bodies to the best of their capacity. So is it really fair to objectify them in the way that we do, to share those images? People, when they say, "You're an inspiration," they mean it as a compliment. And I know why it happens. It's because of the lie, it's because we've been sold this lie that disability makes you exceptional. And it honestly doesn't. And I know what you're thinking. You know, I'm up here bagging out inspiration, and you're thinking, "Jeez, Stella, aren't you inspired sometimes by some things?" And the thing is, I am. I learn from other disabled people all the time. I'm learning not that I am luckier than them, though. I am learning that it's a genius idea to use a pair of barbecue tongs to pick up things that you dropped. (Laughter) I'm learning that nifty trick where you can charge your mobile phone battery from your chair battery. Genius. We are learning from each others' strength and endurance, not against our bodies and our diagnoses, but against a world that exceptionalizes and objectifies us. I really think that this lie that we've been sold about disability is the greatest injustice. It makes life hard for us. And that quote, "The only disability in life is a bad attitude," the reason that that's bullshit is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never. (Laughter) (Applause) Smiling at a television screen isn't going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. It's just not going to happen. I really want to live in a world where disability is not the exception, but the norm. I want to live in a world where a 15-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" isn't referred to as achieving anything because she's doing it sitting down. I want to live in a world where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning. I want to live in a world where we value genuine achievement for disabled people, and I want to live in a world where a kid in year 11 in a Melbourne high school is not one bit surprised that his new teacher is a wheelchair user. Disability doesn't make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does. Thank you. (Applause) |
Hackers: the Internet's immune system | {0: 'Keren Elazari charts the transformation of hackers from cyberpunk protagonists to powerful hacktivists, lone rangers and digital robin hoods who are the unsung heroes of the digital frontier.'} | TED2014 | Four years ago, a security researcher, or, as most people would call it, a hacker, found a way to literally make ATMs throw money at him. His name was Barnaby Jack, and this technique was later called "jackpotting" in his honor. I'm here today because I think we actually need hackers. Barnaby Jack could have easily turned into a career criminal or James Bond villain with his knowledge, but he chose to show the world his research instead. He believed that sometimes you have to demo a threat to spark a solution. And I feel the same way. That's why I'm here today. We are often terrified and fascinated by the power hackers now have. They scare us. But the choices they make have dramatic outcomes that influence us all. So I am here today because I think we need hackers, and in fact, they just might be the immune system for the information age. Sometimes they make us sick, but they also find those hidden threats in our world, and they make us fix it. I knew that I might get hacked for giving this talk, so let me save you the effort. In true TED fashion, here is my most embarrassing picture. But it would be difficult for you to find me in it, because I'm the one who looks like a boy standing to the side. I was such a nerd back then that even the boys on the Dungeons and Dragons team wouldn't let me join. This is who I was, but this is who I wanted to be: Angelina Jolie. She portrayed Acid Burn in the '95 film "Hackers." She was pretty and she could rollerblade, but being a hacker, that made her powerful. And I wanted to be just like her, so I started spending a lot of time on hacker chat rooms and online forums. I remember one late night I found a bit of PHP code. I didn't really know what it did, but I copy-pasted it and used it anyway to get into a password-protected site like that. Open Sesame. It was a simple trick, and I was just a script kiddie back then, but to me, that trick, it felt like this, like I had discovered limitless potential at my fingertips. This is the rush of power that hackers feel. It's geeks just like me discovering they have access to superpower, one that requires the skill and tenacity of their intellect, but thankfully no radioactive spiders. But with great power comes great responsibility, and you all like to think that if we had such powers, we would only use them for good. But what if you could read your ex's emails, or add a couple zeros to your bank account. What would you do then? Indeed, many hackers do not resist those temptations, and so they are responsible in one way or another to billions of dollars lost each year to fraud, malware or plain old identity theft, which is a serious issue. But there are other hackers, hackers who just like to break things, and it is precisely those hackers that can find the weaker elements in our world and make us fix it. This is what happened last year when another security researcher called Kyle Lovett discovered a gaping hole in the design of certain wireless routers like you might have in your home or office. He learned that anyone could remotely connect to these devices over the Internet and download documents from hard drives attached to those routers, no password needed. He reported it to the company, of course, but they ignored his report. Perhaps they thought universal access was a feature, not a bug, until two months ago when a group of hackers used it to get into people's files. But they didn't steal anything. They left a note: Your router and your documents can be accessed by anyone in the world. Here's what you should do to fix it. We hope we helped. By getting into people's files like that, yeah, they broke the law, but they also forced that company to fix their product. Making vulnerabilities known to the public is a practice called full disclosure in the hacker community, and it is controversial, but it does make me think of how hackers have an evolving effect on technologies we use every day. This is what Khalil did. Khalil is a Palestinian hacker from the West Bank, and he found a serious privacy flaw on Facebook which he attempted to report through the company's bug bounty program. These are usually great arrangements for companies to reward hackers disclosing vulnerabilities they find in their code. Unfortunately, due to some miscommunications, his report was not acknowledged. Frustrated with the exchange, he took to use his own discovery to post on Mark Zuckerberg's wall. This got their attention, all right, and they fixed the bug, but because he hadn't reported it properly, he was denied the bounty usually paid out for such discoveries. Thankfully for Khalil, a group of hackers were watching out for him. In fact, they raised more than 13,000 dollars to reward him for this discovery, raising a vital discussion in the technology industry about how we come up with incentives for hackers to do the right thing. But I think there's a greater story here still. Even companies founded by hackers, like Facebook was, still have a complicated relationship when it comes to hackers. And so for more conservative organizations, it is going to take time and adapting in order to embrace hacker culture and the creative chaos that it brings with it. But I think it's worth the effort, because the alternative, to blindly fight all hackers, is to go against the power you cannot control at the cost of stifling innovation and regulating knowledge. These are things that will come back and bite you. It is even more true if we go after hackers that are willing to risk their own freedom for ideals like the freedom of the web, especially in times like this, like today even, as governments and corporates fight to control the Internet. I find it astounding that someone from the shadowy corners of cyberspace can become its voice of opposition, its last line of defense even, perhaps someone like Anonymous, the leading brand of global hacktivism. This universal hacker movement needs no introduction today, but six years ago they were not much more than an Internet subculture dedicated to sharing silly pictures of funny cats and Internet trolling campaigns. Their moment of transformation was in early 2008 when the Church of Scientology attempted to remove certain leaked videos from appearing on certain websites. This is when Anonymous was forged out of the seemingly random collection of Internet dwellers. It turns out, the Internet doesn't like it when you try to remove things from it, and it will react with cyberattacks and elaborate pranks and with a series of organized protests all around the world, from my hometown of Tel Aviv to Adelaide, Australia. This proved that Anonymous and this idea can rally the masses from the keyboards to the streets, and it laid the foundations for dozens of future operations against perceived injustices to their online and offline world. Since then, they've gone after many targets. They've uncovered corruption, abuse. They've hacked popes and politicians, and I think their effect is larger than simple denial of service attacks that take down websites or even leak sensitive documents. I think that, like Robin Hood, they are in the business of redistribution, but what they are after isn't your money. It's not your documents. It's your attention. They grab the spotlight for causes they support, forcing us to take note, acting as a global magnifying glass for issues that we are not as aware of but perhaps we should be. They have been called many names from criminals to terrorists, and I cannot justify their illegal means, but the ideas they fight for are ones that matter to us all. The reality is, hackers can do a lot more than break things. They can bring people together. And if the Internet doesn't like it when you try to remove things from it, just watch what happens when you try to shut the Internet down. This took place in Egypt in January 2011, and as President Hosni Mubarak attempted a desperate move to quash the rising revolution on the streets of Cairo, he sent his personal troops down to Egypt's Internet service providers and had them physically kill the switch on the country's connection to the world overnight. For a government to do a thing like that was unprecedented, and for hackers, it made it personal. Hackers like the Telecomix group were already active on the ground, helping Egyptians bypass censorship using clever workarounds like Morse code and ham radio. It was high season for low tech, which the government couldn't block, but when the Net went completely down, Telecomix brought in the big guns. They found European service providers that still had 20-year-old analog dial-up access infrastructure. They opened up 300 of those lines for Egyptians to use, serving slow but sweet Internet connection for Egyptians. This worked. It worked so well, in fact, one guy even used it to download an episode of "How I Met Your Mother." But while Egypt's future is still uncertain, when the same thing happened in Syria just one year later, Telecomix were prepared with those Internet lines, and Anonymous, they were perhaps the first international group to officially denounce the actions of the Syrian military by defacing their website. But with this sort of power, it really depends on where you stand, because one man's hero can be another's villain, and so the Syrian Electronic Army is a pro-Assad group of hackers who support his contentious regime. They've taken down multiple high-profile targets in the past few years, including the Associated Press's Twitter account, in which they posted a message about an attack on the White House injuring President Obama. This tweet was fake, of course, but the resulting drop in the Dow Jones index that day was most certainly not, and a lot of people lost a lot of money. This sort of thing is happening all over the world right now. In conflicts from the Crimean Peninsula to Latin America, from Europe to the United States, hackers are a force for social, political and military influence. As individuals or in groups, volunteers or military conflicts, there are hackers everywhere. They come from all walks of life, ethnicities, ideologies and genders, I might add. They are now shaping the world's stage. Hackers represent an exceptional force for change in the 21st century. This is because access to information is a critical currency of power, one which governments would like to control, a thing they attempt to do by setting up all-you-can-eat surveillance programs, a thing they need hackers for, by the way. And so the establishment has long had a love-hate relationship when it comes to hackers, because the same people who demonize hacking also utilize it at large. Two years ago, I saw General Keith Alexander. He's the NSA director and U.S. cyber commander, but instead of his four star general uniform, he was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. This was at DEF CON, the world's largest hacker conference. Perhaps like me, General Alexander didn't see 12,000 criminals that day in Vegas. I think he saw untapped potential. In fact, he was there to give a hiring pitch. "In this room right here," he said, "is the talent our nation needs." Well, hackers in the back row replied, "Then stop arresting us." (Applause) Indeed, for years, hackers have been on the wrong side of the fence, but in light of what we know now, who is more watchful of our online world? The rules of the game are not that clear anymore, but hackers are perhaps the only ones still capable of challenging overreaching governments and data-hoarding corporates on their own playing field. To me, that represents hope. For the past three decades, hackers have done a lot of things, but they have also impacted civil liberties, innovation and Internet freedom, so I think it's time we take a good look at how we choose to portray them, because if we keep expecting them to be the bad guys, how can they be the heroes too? My years in the hacker world have made me realize both the problem and the beauty about hackers: They just can't see something broken in the world and leave it be. They are compelled to either exploit it or try and change it, and so they find the vulnerable aspects in our rapidly changing world. They make us, they force us to fix things or demand something better, and I think we need them to do just that, because after all, it is not information that wants to be free, it's us. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) Hack the planet! |
The shocking move to criminalize nonviolent protest | {0: 'Award-winning journalist and author, Will Potter focuses on the animal rights and environmental movements, and civil liberties in the post-9/11 era.'} | TED2014 | It was less than a year after September 11, and I was at the Chicago Tribune writing about shootings and murders, and it was leaving me feeling pretty dark and depressed. I had done some activism in college, so I decided to help a local group hang door knockers against animal testing. I thought it would be a safe way to do something positive, but of course I have the absolute worst luck ever, and we were all arrested. Police took this blurry photo of me holding leaflets as evidence. My charges were dismissed, but a few weeks later, two FBI agents knocked on my door, and they told me that unless I helped them by spying on protest groups, they would put me on a domestic terrorist list. I'd love to tell you that I didn't flinch, but I was terrified, and when my fear subsided, I became obsessed with finding out how this happened, how animal rights and environmental activists who have never injured anyone could become the FBI's number one domestic terrorism threat. A few years later, I was invited to testify before Congress about my reporting, and I told lawmakers that, while everybody is talking about going green, some people are risking their lives to defend forests and to stop oil pipelines. They're physically putting their bodies on the line between the whalers' harpoons and the whales. These are everyday people, like these protesters in Italy who spontaneously climbed over barbed wire fences to rescue beagles from animal testing. And these movements have been incredibly effective and popular, so in 1985, their opponents made up a new word, eco-terrorist, to shift how we view them. They just made it up. Now these companies have backed new laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which turns activism into terrorism if it causes a loss of profits. Now most people never even heard about this law, including members of Congress. Less than one percent were in the room when it passed the House. The rest were outside at a new memorial. They were praising Dr. King as his style of activism was branded as terrorism if done in the name of animals or the environment. Supporters say laws like this are needed for the extremists: the vandals, the arsonists, the radicals. But right now, companies like TransCanada are briefing police in presentations like this one about how to prosecute nonviolent protesters as terrorists. The FBI's training documents on eco-terrorism are not about violence, they're about public relations. Today, in multiple countries, corporations are pushing new laws that make it illegal to photograph animal cruelty on their farms. The latest was in Idaho just two weeks ago, and today we released a lawsuit challenging it as unconstitutional as a threat to journalism. The first of these ag-gag prosecutions, as they're called, was a young woman named Amy Meyer, and Amy saw a sick cow being moved by a bulldozer outside of a slaughterhouse as she was on the public street. And Amy did what any of us would: She filmed it. When I found out about her story, I wrote about it, and within 24 hours, it created such an uproar that the prosecutors just dropped all the charges. But apparently, even exposing stuff like that is a threat. Through the Freedom of Information Act, I learned that the counter-terrorism unit has been monitoring my articles and speeches like this one. They even included this nice little write-up of my book. They described it as "compelling and well-written." (Applause) Blurb on the next book, right? The point of all of this is to make us afraid, but as a journalist, I have an unwavering faith in the power of education. Our best weapon is sunlight. Dostoevsky wrote that the whole work of man is to prove he's a man and not a piano key. Over and over throughout history, people in power have used fear to silence the truth and to silence dissent. It's time we strike a new note. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why science demands a leap into the unknown | {0: 'Uri Alon studies how cells work, using an array of tools (including improv theater) to understand the biological circuits that perform the functions of life.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | In the middle of my Ph.D., I was hopelessly stuck. Every research direction that I tried led to a dead end. It seemed like my basic assumptions just stopped working. I felt like a pilot flying through the mist, and I lost all sense of direction. I stopped shaving. I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I felt unworthy of stepping across the gates of the university, because I wasn't like Einstein or Newton or any other scientist whose results I had learned about, because in science, we just learn about the results, not the process. And so obviously, I couldn't be a scientist. But I had enough support and I made it through and discovered something new about nature. This is an amazing feeling of calmness, being the only person in the world who knows a new law of nature. And I started the second project in my Ph.D, and it happened again. I got stuck and I made it through. And I started thinking, maybe there's a pattern here. I asked the other graduate students, and they said, "Yeah, that's exactly what happened to us, except nobody told us about it." We'd all studied science as if it's a series of logical steps between question and answer, but doing research is nothing like that. At the same time, I was also studying to be an improvisation theater actor. So physics by day, and by night, laughing, jumping, singing, playing my guitar. Improvisation theater, just like science, goes into the unknown, because you have to make a scene onstage without a director, without a script, without having any idea what you'll portray or what the other characters will do. But unlike science, in improvisation theater, they tell you from day one what's going to happen to you when you get onstage. You're going to fail miserably. You're going to get stuck. And we would practice staying creative inside that stuck place. For example, we had an exercise where we all stood in a circle, and each person had to do the world's worst tap dance, and everybody else applauded and cheered you on, supporting you onstage. When I became a professor and had to guide my own students through their research projects, I realized again, I don't know what to do. I'd studied thousands of hours of physics, biology, chemistry, but not one hour, not one concept on how to mentor, how to guide someone to go together into the unknown, about motivation. So I turned to improvisation theater, and I told my students from day one what's going to happen when you start research, and this has to do with our mental schema of what research will be like. Because you see, whenever people do anything, for example if I want to touch this blackboard, my brain first builds up a schema, a prediction of exactly what my muscles will do before I even start moving my hand, and if I get blocked, if my schema doesn't match reality, that causes extra stress called cognitive dissonance. That's why your schemas had better match reality. But if you believe the way science is taught, and if you believe textbooks, you're liable to have the following schema of research. If A is the question, and B is the answer, then research is a direct path. The problem is that if an experiment doesn't work, or a student gets depressed, it's perceived as something utterly wrong and causes tremendous stress. And that's why I teach my students a more realistic schema. Here's an example where things don't match your schema. (Laughter) (Applause) So I teach my students a different schema. If A is the question, B is the answer, stay creative in the cloud, and you start going, and experiments don't work, experiments don't work, experiments don't work, experiments don't work, until you reach a place linked with negative emotions where it seems like your basic assumptions have stopped making sense, like somebody yanked the carpet beneath your feet. And I call this place the cloud. Now you can be lost in the cloud for a day, a week, a month, a year, a whole career, but sometimes, if you're lucky enough and you have enough support, you can see in the materials at hand, or perhaps meditating on the shape of the cloud, a new answer, C, and you decide to go for it. And experiments don't work, experiments don't work, but you get there, and then you tell everyone about it by publishing a paper that reads A arrow C, which is a great way to communicate, but as long as you don't forget the path that brought you there. Now this cloud is an inherent part of research, an inherent part of our craft, because the cloud stands guard at the boundary. It stands guard at the boundary between the known and the unknown, because in order to discover something truly new, at least one of your basic assumptions has to change, and that means that in science, we do something quite heroic. Every day, we try to bring ourselves to the boundary between the known and the unknown and face the cloud. Now notice that I put B in the land of the known, because we knew about it in the beginning, but C is always more interesting and more important than B. So B is essential in order to get going, but C is much more profound, and that's the amazing thing about resesarch. Now just knowing that word, the cloud, has been transformational in my research group, because students come to me and say, "Uri, I'm in the cloud," and I say, "Great, you must be feeling miserable." (Laughter) But I'm kind of happy, because we might be close to the boundary between the known and the unknown, and we stand a chance of discovering something truly new, since the way our mind works, it's just knowing that the cloud is normal, it's essential, and in fact beautiful, we can join the Cloud Appreciation Society, and it detoxifies the feeling that something is deeply wrong with me. And as a mentor, I know what to do, which is to step up my support for the student, because research in psychology shows that if you're feeling fear and despair, your mind narrows down to very safe and conservative ways of thinking. If you'd like to explore the risky paths needed to get out of the cloud, you need other emotions — solidarity, support, hope — that come with your connection from somebody else, so like in improvisation theater, in science, it's best to walk into the unknown together. So knowing about the cloud, you also learn from improvisation theater a very effective way to have conversations inside the cloud. It's based on the central principle of improvisation theater, so here improvisation theater came to my help again. It's called saying "Yes, and" to the offers made by other actors. That means accepting the offers and building on them, saying, "Yes, and." For example, if one actor says, "Here is a pool of water," and the other actor says, "No, that's just a stage," the improvisation is over. It's dead, and everybody feels frustrated. That's called blocking. If you're not mindful of communications, scientific conversations can have a lot of blocking. Saying "Yes, and" sounds like this. "Here is a pool of water." "Yeah, let's jump in." "Look, there's a whale! Let's grab it by its tail. It's pulling us to the moon!" So saying "Yes, and" bypasses our inner critic. We all have an inner critic that kind of guards what we say, so people don't think that we're obscene or crazy or unoriginal, and science is full of the fear of appearing unoriginal. Saying "Yes, and" bypasses the critic and unlocks hidden voices of creativity you didn't even know that you had, and they often carry the answer about the cloud. So you see, knowing about the cloud and about saying "Yes, and" made my lab very creative. Students started playing off of each others' ideas, and we made surprising discoveries in the interface between physics and biology. For example, we were stuck for a year trying to understand the intricate biochemical networks inside our cells, and we said, "We are deeply in the cloud," and we had a playful conversation where my student Shai Shen Orr said, "Let's just draw this on a piece of paper, this network," and instead of saying, "But we've done that so many times and it doesn't work," I said, "Yes, and let's use a very big piece of paper," and then Ron Milo said, "Let's use a gigantic architect's blueprint kind of paper, and I know where to print it," and we printed out the network and looked at it, and that's where we made our most important discovery, that this complicated network is just made of a handful of simple, repeating interaction patterns like motifs in a stained glass window. We call them network motifs, and they're the elementary circuits that help us understand the logic of the way cells make decisions in all organisms, including our body. Soon enough, after this, I started being invited to give talks to thousands of scientists across the world, but the knowledge about the cloud and saying "Yes, and" just stayed within my own lab, because you see, in science, we don't talk about the process, anything subjective or emotional. We talk about the results. So there was no way to talk about it in conferences. That was unthinkable. And I saw scientists in other groups get stuck without even having a word to describe what they're seeing, and their ways of thinking narrowed down to very safe paths, their science didn't reach its full potential, and they were miserable. I thought, that's the way it is. I'll try to make my lab as creative as possible, and if everybody else does the same, science will eventually become more and more better and better. That way of thinking got turned on its head when by chance I went to hear Evelyn Fox Keller give a talk about her experiences as a woman in science. And she asked, "Why is it that we don't talk about the subjective and emotional aspects of doing science? It's not by chance. It's a matter of values." You see, science seeks knowledge that's objective and rational. That's the beautiful thing about science. But we also have a cultural myth that the doing of science, what we do every day to get that knowledge, is also only objective and rational, like Mr. Spock. And when you label something as objective and rational, automatically, the other side, the subjective and emotional, become labeled as non-science or anti-science or threatening to science, and we just don't talk about it. And when I heard that, that science has a culture, everything clicked into place for me, because if science has a culture, culture can be changed, and I can be a change agent working to change the culture of science wherever I could. And so the very next lecture I gave in a conference, I talked about my science, and then I talked about the importance of the subjective and emotional aspects of doing science and how we should talk about them, and I looked at the audience, and they were cold. They couldn't hear what I was saying in the context of a 10 back-to-back PowerPoint presentation conference. And I tried again and again, conference after conference, but I wasn't getting through. I was in the cloud. And eventually I managed to get out the cloud using improvisation and music. Since then, every conference I go to, I give a science talk and a second, special talk called "Love and fear in the lab," and I start it off by doing a song about scientists' greatest fear, which is that we work hard, we discover something new, and somebody else publishes it before we do. We call it being scooped, and being scooped feels horrible. It makes us afraid to talk to each other, which is no fun, because we came to science to share our ideas and to learn from each other, and so I do a blues song, which — (Applause) — called "Scooped Again," and I ask the audience to be my backup singers, and I tell them, "Your text is 'Scoop, Scoop.'" It sounds like this: "Scoop, scoop!" Sounds like this. ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ And then we go for it. ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ ♪ Oh mama, can't you feel my pain ♪ ♪ Heavens help me, I've been scooped again ♪ (Applause) Thank you. Thank you for your backup singing. So everybody starts laughing, starts breathing, notices that there's other scientists around them with shared issues, and we start talking about the emotional and subjective things that go on in research. It feels like a huge taboo has been lifted. Finally, we can talk about this in a scientific conference. And scientists have gone on to form peer groups where they meet regularly and create a space to talk about the emotional and subjective things that happen as they're mentoring, as they're going into the unknown, and even started courses about the process of doing science, about going into the unknown together, and many other things. So my vision is that, just like every scientist knows the word "atom," that matter is made out of atoms, every scientist would know the words like "the cloud," saying "Yes, and," and science will become much more creative, make many, many more unexpected discoveries for the benefit of us all, and would also be much more playful. And what I might ask you to remember from this talk is that next time you face a problem you can't solve in work or in life, there's a word for what you're going to see: the cloud. And you can go through the cloud not alone but together with someone who is your source of support to say "Yes, and" to your ideas, to help you say "Yes, and" to your own ideas, to increase the chance that, through the wisps of the cloud, you'll find that moment of calmness where you get your first glimpse of your unexpected discovery, your C. Thank you. (Applause) |
The world's largest family reunion ... we're all invited! | {0: "Immersing himself in alternate lifestyles and hilarious experiments (usually with himself as the guinea pig), writer A.J. Jacobs tests the limits of behavior, customs, culture -- and reports back on the wisdom and practical knowledge he's gained."} | TEDActive 2014 | Six months ago, I got an email from a man in Israel who had read one of my books, and the email said, "You don't know me, but I'm your 12th cousin." And it said, "I have a family tree with 80,000 people on it, including you, Karl Marx, and several European aristocrats." Now I did not know what to make of this. Part of me was like, okay, when's he going to ask me to wire 10,000 dollars to his Nigerian bank, right? I also thought, 80,000 relatives, do I want that? I have enough trouble with some of the ones I have already. And I won't name names, but you know who you are. But another part of me said, this is remarkable. Here I am alone in my office, but I'm not alone at all. I'm connected to 80,000 people around the world, and that's four Madison Square Gardens full of cousins. And some of them are going to be great, and some of them are going to be irritating, but they're all related to me. So this email inspired me to dive into genealogy, which I always thought was a very staid and proper field, but it turns out it's going through a fascinating revolution, and a controversial one. Partly, this is because of DNA and genetic testing, but partly, it's because of the Internet. There are sites that now take the Wikipedia approach to family trees, collaboration and crowdsourcing, and what you do is, you load your family tree on, and then these sites search to see if the A.J. Jacobs in your tree is the same as the A.J. Jacobs in another tree, and if it is, then you can combine, and then you combine and combine and combine until you get these massive, mega-family trees with thousands of people on them, or even millions. I'm on something on Geni called the world family tree, which has no less than a jaw-dropping 75 million people. So that's 75 million people connected by blood or marriage, sometimes both. (Laughter) It's in all seven continents, including Antarctica. I'm on it. Many of you are on it, whether you know it or not, and you can see the links. Here's my cousin Gwyneth Paltrow. She has no idea I exist, but we are officially cousins. We have just 17 links between us. And there's my cousin Barack Obama. (Laughter) And he is my aunt's fifth great-aunt's husband's father's wife's seventh great-nephew, so practically my old brother. And my cousin, of course, the actor Kevin Bacon — (Laughter) — who is my first cousin's twice removed's wife's niece's husband's first cousin once removed's niece's husband. So six degrees of Kevin Bacon, plus or minus several degrees. Now, I'm not boasting, because all of you have famous people and historical figures in your tree, because we are all connected, and 75 million may seem like a lot, but in a few years, it's quite likely we will have a family tree with all, almost all, seven billion people on Earth. But does it really matter? What's the importance? And I do think it is important, and I'll give you five reasons why, really quickly. First, it's got scientific value. This is an unprecedented history of the human race, and it's giving us valuable data about how diseases are inherited, how people migrate, and there's a team of scientists at MIT right now studying the world family tree. Number two, it brings history alive. I found out I'm connected to Albert Einstein, so I told my seven-year-old son that, and he was totally engaged. Now Albert Einstein is not some dead white guy with weird hair. He's Uncle Albert. (Laughter) And my son wanted to know, "What did he say? What is E = MC squared?" Also, it's not all good news. I found a link to Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer, but I will say that's on my wife's side. (Laughter) (Applause) So I want to make that clear. Sorry, honey. Number three, interconnectedness. We all come from the same ancestor, and you don't have to believe the literal Bible version, but scientists talk about Y chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve, and these were about 100,000 to 300,000 years ago. We all have a bit of their DNA in us. They are our great-great-great-great-great-great — continue that for about 7,000 times — grandparents, and so that means we literally all are biological cousins as well, and estimates vary, but probably the farthest cousin you have on Earth is about a 50th cousin. Now, it's not just ancestors we share, descendants. If you have kids, and they have kids, look how quickly the descendants accumulate. So in 10, 12 generations, you're going to have thousands of offspring, and millions of offspring. Number four, a kinder world. Now, I know that there are family feuds. I have three sons, so I see how they fight. But I think that there's also a human bias to treat your family a little better than strangers. I think this tree is going to be bad news for bigots, because they're going to have to realize that they are cousins with thousands of people in whatever ethnic group they happen to have issues with, and I think you look back at history, and a lot of the terrible things we've done to each other is because one group thinks another group is sub-human, and you can't do that anymore. We're not just part of the same species. We're part of the same family. We share 99.9 percent of our DNA. Now the final one is number five, a democratizing effect. Some genealogy has an elitist strain, like people say, "Oh, I'm descended from Mary Queen of Scots and you're not, so you cannot join my country club." But that's really going to be hard to do now, because everyone is related. I'm descended from Mary Queen of Scots — by marriage, but still. So it's really a fascinating time in the history of family, because it's changing so fast. There is gay marriage and sperm donors and there's intermarriage on an unprecedented scale, and this makes some of my more conservative cousins a little nervous, but I actually think it's a good thing. I think the more inclusive the idea of family is, the better, because then you have more potential caretakers, and as my aunt's eighth cousin twice removed Hillary Clinton says — (Laughter) — it takes a village. So I have all these hundreds and thousands, millions of new cousins. I thought, what can I do with this information? And that's when I decided, why not throw a party? So that's what I'm doing. And you're all invited. Next year, next summer, I will be hosting what I hope is the biggest and best family reunion in history. (Applause) Thank you. I want you there. I want you there. It's going to be at the New York Hall of Science, which is a great venue, but it's also on the site of the former World's Fair, which is, I think, very appropriate, because I see this as a family reunion meets a world's fair. There's going to be exhibits and food, music. Paul McCartney is 11 steps away, so I'm hoping he brings his guitar. He hasn't RSVP'd yet, but fingers crossed. And there is going to be a day of speakers, of fascinating cousins. It's early, but I've already, I've got some lined up. Cass Sunstein, my cousin who is perhaps the most brilliant legal scholar, will be talking. He was a former member of the Obama administration. And on the other side of the political spectrum, George H.W. Bush, number 41, the father, he has agreed to participate, and Nick Kroll, the comedian, and Dr. Oz, and many more to come. And, of course, the most important is that you, I want you guys there, and I invite you to go to GlobalFamilyReunion.org and figure out how you're on the family tree, because these are big issues, family and tribe, and I don't know all the answers, but I have a lot of smart relatives, including you guys, so together, I think we can figure it out. Only together can we solve these big problems. So from cousin to cousin, I thank you. I can't wait to see you. Goodbye. (Applause) |
Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question) | {0: 'Kwame Anthony Appiah is a philosopher, cultural theorist and novelist. His latest book is "The Honor Code," exploring moral revolutions.'} | TEDSalon NY2014 | People say things about religion all the time. (Laughter) The late, great Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called "God Is Not Great" whose subtitle was, "Religion Poisons Everything." (Laughter) But last month, in Time magazine, Rabbi David Wolpe, who I gather is referred to as America's rabbi, said, to balance that against that negative characterization, that no important form of social change can be brought about except through organized religion. Now, remarks of this sort on the negative and the positive side are very old. I have one in my pocket here from the first century BCE by Lucretius, the author of "On the Nature of Things," who said, "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum" — I should have been able to learn that by heart — which is, that's how much religion is able to persuade people to do evil, and he was talking about the fact of Agamemnon's decision to place his daughter Iphigenia on an altar of sacrifice in order to preserve the prospects of his army. So there have been these long debates over the centuries, in that case, actually, we can say over the millennia, about religion. People have talked about it a lot, and they've said good and bad and indifferent things about it. What I want to persuade you of today is of a very simple claim, which is that these debates are in a certain sense preposterous, because there is no such thing as religion about which to make these claims. There isn't a thing called religion, and so it can't be good or bad. It can't even be indifferent. And if you think about claims about the nonexistence of things, one obvious way to try and establish the nonexistence of a purported thing would be to offer a definition of that thing and then to see whether anything satisfied it. I'm going to start out on that little route to begin with. So if you look in the dictionaries and if you think about it, one very natural definition of religion is that it involves belief in gods or in spiritual beings. As I say, this is in many dictionaries, but you'll also find it actually in the work of Sir Edward Tylor, who was the first professor of anthropology at Oxford, one of the first modern anthropologists. In his book on primitive culture, he says the heart of religion is what he called animism, that is, the belief in spiritual agency, belief in spirits. The first problem for that definition is from a recent novel by Paul Beatty called "Tuff." There's a guy talking to a rabbi. The rabbi says he doesn't believe in God. The guy says, "You're a rabbi, how can you not believe in God?" And the reply is, "It's what's so great about being Jewish. You don't have to believe in a God per se, just in being Jewish." (Laughter) So if this guy is a rabbi, and a Jewish rabbi, and if you have to believe in God in order to be religious, then we have the rather counterintuitive conclusion that since it's possible to be a Jewish rabbi without believing in God, Judaism isn't a religion. That seems like a pretty counterintuitive thought. Here's another argument against this view. A friend of mine, an Indian friend of mine, went to his grandfather when he was very young, a child, and said to him, "I want to talk to you about religion," and his grandfather said, "You're too young. Come back when you're a teenager." So he came back when he was a teenager, and he said to his grandfather, "It may be a bit late now because I've discovered that I don't believe in the gods." And his grandfather, who was a wise man, said, "Oh, so you belong to the atheist branch of the Hindu tradition." (Laughter) And finally, there's this guy, who famously doesn't believe in God. His name is the Dalai Lama. He often jokes that he's one of the world's leading atheists. But it's true, because the Dalai Lama's religion does not involve belief in God. Now you might think this just shows that I've given you the wrong definition and that I should come up with some other definition and test it against these cases and try and find something that captures atheistic Judaism, atheistic Hinduism, and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity, but I actually think that that's a bad idea, and the reason I think it's a bad idea is that I don't think that's how our concept of religion works. I think the way our concept of religion works is that we actually have, we have a list of paradigm religions and their sub-parts, right, and if something new comes along that purports to be a religion, what we ask is, "Well, is it like one of these?" Right? And I think that's not only how we think about religion, and that's, as it were, so from our point of view, anything on that list had better be a religion, which is why I don't think an account of religion that excludes Buddhism and Judaism has a chance of being a good starter, because they're on our list. But why do we have such a list? What's going on? How did it come about that we have this list? I think the answer is a pretty simple one and therefore crude and contentious. I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with it, but here's my story, and true or not, it's a story that I think gives you a good sense of how the list might have come about, and therefore helps you to think about what use the list might be. I think the answer is, European travelers, starting roughly about the time of Columbus, started going around the world. They came from a Christian culture, and when they arrived in a new place, they noticed that some people didn't have Christianity, and so they asked themselves the following question: what have they got instead of Christianity? And that list was essentially constructed. It consists of the things that other people had instead of Christianity. Now there's a difficulty with proceeding in that way, which is that Christianity is extremely, even on that list, it's an extremely specific tradition. It has all kinds of things in it that are very, very particular that are the results of the specifics of Christian history, and one thing that's at the heart of it, one thing that's at the heart of most understandings of Christianity, which is the result of the specific history of Christianity, is that it's an extremely creedal religion. It's a religion in which people are really concerned about whether you believe the right things. The history of Christianity, the internal history of Christianity, is largely the history of people killing each other because they believed the wrong thing, and it's also involved in struggles with other religions, obviously starting in the Middle Ages, a struggle with Islam, in which, again, it was the infidelity, the fact that they didn't believe the right things, that seemed so offensive to the Christian world. Now that's a very specific and particular history that Christianity has, and not everywhere is everything that has ever been put on this sort of list like it. Here's another problem, I think. A very specific thing happened. It was actually adverted to earlier, but a very specific thing happened in the history of the kind of Christianity that we see around us mostly in the United States today, and it happened in the late 19th century, and that specific thing that happened in the late 19th century was a kind of deal that was cut between science, this new way of organizing intellectual authority, and religion. If you think about the 18th century, say, if you think about intellectual life before the late 19th century, anything you did, anything you thought about, whether it was the physical world, the human world, the natural world apart from the human world, or morality, anything you did would have been framed against the background of a set of assumptions that were religious, Christian assumptions. You couldn't give an account of the natural world that didn't say something about its relationship, for example, to the creation story in the Abrahamic tradition, the creation story in the first book of the Torah. So everything was framed in that way. But this changes in the late 19th century, and for the first time, it's possible for people to develop serious intellectual careers as natural historians like Darwin. Darwin worried about the relationship between what he said and the truths of religion, but he could proceed, he could write books about his subject without having to say what the relationship was to the religious claims, and similarly, geologists increasingly could talk about it. In the early 19th century, if you were a geologist and made a claim about the age of the Earth, you had to explain whether that was consistent or how it was or wasn't consistent with the age of the Earth implied by the account in Genesis. By the end of the 19th century, you can just write a geology textbook in which you make arguments about how old the Earth is. So there's a big change, and that division, that intellectual division of labor occurs as I say, I think, and it sort of solidifies so that by the end of the 19th century in Europe, there's a real intellectual division of labor, and you can do all sorts of serious things, including, increasingly, even philosophy, without being constrained by the thought, "Well, what I have to say has to be consistent with the deep truths that are given to me by our religious tradition." So imagine someone who's coming out of that world, that late-19th-century world, coming into the country that I grew up in, Ghana, the society that I grew up in, Asante, coming into that world at the turn of the 20th century with this question that made the list: what have they got instead of Christianity? Well, here's one thing he would have noticed, and by the way, there was a person who actually did this. His name was Captain Rattray, he was sent as the British government anthropologist, and he wrote a book about Asante religion. This is a soul disc. There are many of them in the British Museum. I could give you an interesting, different history of how it comes about that many of the things from my society ended up in the British Museum, but we don't have time for that. So this object is a soul disc. What is a soul disc? It was worn around the necks of the soul-washers of the Asante king. What was their job? To wash the king's soul. It would take a long while to explain how a soul could be the kind of thing that could be washed, but Rattray knew that this was religion because souls were in play. And similarly, there were many other things, many other practices. For example, every time anybody had a drink, more or less, they poured a little bit on the ground in what's called the libation, and they gave some to the ancestors. My father did this. Every time he opened a bottle of whiskey, which I'm glad to say was very often, he would take the top off and pour off just a little on the ground, and he would talk to, he would say to Akroma-Ampim, the founder of our line, or Yao Antony, my great uncle, he would talk to them, offer them a little bit of this. And finally, there were these huge public ceremonials. This is an early-19th-century drawing by another British military officer of such a ceremonial, where the king was involved, and the king's job, one of the large parts of his job, apart from organizing warfare and things like that, was to look after the tombs of his ancestors, and when a king died, the stool that he sat on was blackened and put in the royal ancestral temple, and every 40 days, the King of Asante has to go and do cult for his ancestors. That's a large part of his job, and people think that if he doesn't do it, things will fall apart. So he's a religious figure, as Rattray would have said, as well as a political figure. So all this would count as religion for Rattray, but my point is that when you look into the lives of those people, you also find that every time they do anything, they're conscious of the ancestors. Every morning at breakfast, you can go outside the front of the house and make an offering to the god tree, the nyame dua outside your house, and again, you'll talk to the gods and the high gods and the low gods and the ancestors and so on. This is not a world in which the separation between religion and science has occurred. Religion has not being separated from any other areas of life, and in particular, what's crucial to understand about this world is that it's a world in which the job that science does for us is done by what Rattray is going to call religion, because if they want an explanation of something, if they want to know why the crop just failed, if they want to know why it's raining or not raining, if they need rain, if they want to know why their grandfather has died, they are going to appeal to the very same entities, the very same language, talk to the very same gods about that. This great separation, in other words, between religion and science hasn't happened. Now, this would be a mere historical curiosity, except that in large parts of the world, this is still the truth. I had the privilege of going to a wedding the other day in northern Namibia, 20 miles or so south of the Angolan border in a village of 200 people. These were modern people. We had with us Oona Chaplin, who some of you may have heard of, and one of the people from this village came up to her, and said, "I've seen you in 'Game of Thrones.'" So these were not people who were isolated from our world, but nevertheless, for them, the gods and the spirits are still very much there, and when we were on the bus going back and forth to the various parts of the [ceremony], they prayed not just in a generic way but for the safety of the journey, and they meant it, and when they said to me that my mother, the bridegroom's [grandmother], was with us, they didn't mean it figuratively. They meant, even though she was a dead person, they meant that she was still around. So in large parts of the world today, that separation between science and religion hasn't occurred in large parts of the world today, and as I say, these are not — This guy used to work for Chase and at the World Bank. These are fellow citizens of the world with you, but they come from a place in which religion is occupying a very different role. So what I want you to think about next time somebody wants to make some vast generalization about religion is that maybe there isn't such a thing as a religion, such a thing as religion, and that therefore what they say cannot possibly be true. (Applause) |
What makes a word "real"? | {0: 'English professor Anne Curzan actually encourages her students to use slang in class. A language historian, she is fascinated by how people use words—and by how this changes.\r\n'} | TEDxUofM | I need to start by telling you a little bit about my social life, which I know may not seem relevant, but it is. When people meet me at parties and they find out that I'm an English professor who specializes in language, they generally have one of two reactions. One set of people look frightened. (Laughter) They often say something like, "Oh, I'd better be careful what I say. I'm sure you'll hear every mistake I make." And then they stop talking. (Laughter) And they wait for me to go away and talk to someone else. The other set of people, their eyes light up, and they say, "You are just the person I want to talk to." And then they tell me about whatever it is they think is going wrong with the English language. (Laughter) A couple of weeks ago, I was at a dinner party and the man to my right started telling me about all the ways that the Internet is degrading the English language. He brought up Facebook, and he said, "To defriend? I mean, is that even a real word?" I want to pause on that question: What makes a word real? My dinner companion and I both know what the verb "defriend" means, so when does a new word like "defriend" become real? Who has the authority to make those kinds of official decisions about words, anyway? Those are the questions I want to talk about today. I think most people, when they say a word isn't real, what they mean is, it doesn't appear in a standard dictionary. That, of course, raises a host of other questions, including, who writes dictionaries? Before I go any further, let me clarify my role in all of this. I do not write dictionaries. I do, however, collect new words much the way dictionary editors do, and the great thing about being a historian of the English language is that I get to call this "research." When I teach the history of the English language, I require that students teach me two new slang words before I will begin class. Over the years, I have learned some great new slang this way, including "hangry," which — (Applause) — which is when you are cranky or angry because you are hungry, and "adorkable," which is when you are adorable in kind of a dorky way, clearly, terrific words that fill important gaps in the English language. (Laughter) But how real are they if we use them primarily as slang and they don't yet appear in a dictionary? With that, let's turn to dictionaries. I'm going to do this as a show of hands: How many of you still regularly refer to a dictionary, either print or online? Okay, so that looks like most of you. Now, a second question. Again, a show of hands: How many of you have ever looked to see who edited the dictionary you are using? Okay, many fewer. At some level, we know that there are human hands behind dictionaries, but we're really not sure who those hands belong to. I'm actually fascinated by this. Even the most critical people out there tend not to be very critical about dictionaries, not distinguishing among them and not asking a whole lot of questions about who edited them. Just think about the phrase "Look it up in the dictionary," which suggests that all dictionaries are exactly the same. Consider the library here on campus, where you go into the reading room, and there is a large, unabridged dictionary up on a pedestal in this place of honor and respect lying open so we can go stand before it to get answers. Now, don't get me wrong, dictionaries are fantastic resources, but they are human and they are not timeless. I'm struck as a teacher that we tell students to critically question every text they read, every website they visit, except dictionaries, which we tend to treat as un-authored, as if they came from nowhere to give us answers about what words really mean. Here's the thing: If you ask dictionary editors, what they'll tell you is they're just trying to keep up with us as we change the language. They're watching what we say and what we write and trying to figure out what's going to stick and what's not going to stick. They have to gamble, because they want to appear cutting edge and catch the words that are going to make it, such as LOL, but they don't want to appear faddish and include the words that aren't going to make it, and I think a word that they're watching right now is YOLO, you only live once. Now I get to hang out with dictionary editors, and you might be surprised by one of the places where we hang out. Every January, we go to the American Dialect Society annual meeting, where among other things, we vote on the word of the year. There are about 200 or 300 people who come, some of the best known linguists in the United States. To give you a sense of the flavor of the meeting, it occurs right before happy hour. Anyone who comes can vote. The most important rule is that you can vote with only one hand. In the past, some of the winners have been "tweet" in 2009 and "hashtag" in 2012. "Chad" was the word of the year in the year 2000, because who knew what a chad was before 2000, and "WMD" in 2002. Now, we have other categories in which we vote too, and my favorite category is most creative word of the year. Past winners in this category have included "recombobulation area," which is at the Milwaukee Airport after security, where you can recombobulate. (Laughter) You can put your belt back on, put your computer back in your bag. And then my all-time favorite word at this vote, which is "multi-slacking." (Laughter) And multi-slacking is the act of having multiple windows up on your screen so it looks like you're working when you're actually goofing around on the web. (Laughter) (Applause) Will all of these words stick? Absolutely not. And we have made some questionable choices, for example in 2006 when the word of the year was "Plutoed," to mean demoted. (Laughter) But some of the past winners now seem completely unremarkable, such as "app" and "e" as a prefix, and "google" as a verb. Now, a few weeks before our vote, Lake Superior State University issues its list of banished words for the year. What is striking about this is that there's actually often quite a lot of overlap between their list and the list that we are considering for words of the year, and this is because we're noticing the same thing. We're noticing words that are coming into prominence. It's really a question of attitude. Are you bothered by language fads and language change, or do you find it fun, interesting, something worthy of study as part of a living language? The list by Lake Superior State University continues a fairly long tradition in English of complaints about new words. So here is Dean Henry Alford in 1875, who was very concerned that "desirability" is really a terrible word. In 1760, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to David Hume giving up the word "colonize" as bad. Over the years, we've also seen worries about new pronunciations. Here is Samuel Rogers in 1855 who is concerned about some fashionable pronunciations that he finds offensive, and he says "as if contemplate were not bad enough, balcony makes me sick." (Laughter) The word is borrowed in from Italian and it was pronounced bal-COE-nee. These complaints now strike us as quaint, if not downright adorkable — (Laughter) — but here's the thing: we still get quite worked up about language change. I have an entire file in my office of newspaper articles which express concern about illegitimate words that should not have been included in the dictionary, including "LOL" when it got into the Oxford English Dictionary and "defriend" when it got into the Oxford American Dictionary. I also have articles expressing concern about "invite" as a noun, "impact" as a verb, because only teeth can be impacted, and "incentivize" is described as "boorish, bureaucratic misspeak." Now, it's not that dictionary editors ignore these kinds of attitudes about language. They try to provide us some guidance about words that are considered slang or informal or offensive, often through usage labels, but they're in something of a bind, because they're trying to describe what we do, and they know that we often go to dictionaries to get information about how we should use a word well or appropriately. In response, the American Heritage Dictionaries include usage notes. Usage notes tend to occur with words that are troublesome in one way, and one of the ways that they can be troublesome is that they're changing meaning. Now usage notes involve very human decisions, and I think, as dictionary users, we're often not as aware of those human decisions as we should be. To show you what I mean, we'll look at an example, but before we do, I want to explain what the dictionary editors are trying to deal with in this usage note. Think about the word "peruse" and how you use that word. I would guess many of you are thinking of skim, scan, reading quickly. Some of you may even have some walking involved, because you're perusing grocery store shelves, or something like that. You might be surprised to learn that if you look in most standard dictionaries, the first definition will be to read carefully, or pore over. American Heritage has that as the first definition. They then have, as the second definition, skim, and next to that, they say "usage problem." (Laughter) And then they include a usage note, which is worth looking at. So here's the usage note: "Peruse has long meant 'to read thoroughly'... But the word is often used more loosely, to mean simply 'to read.'... Further extension of the word to mean 'to glance over, skim,' has traditionally been considered an error, but our ballot results suggest that it is becoming somewhat more acceptable. When asked about the sentence, 'I only had a moment to peruse the manual quickly,' 66 percent of the [Usage] Panel found it unacceptable in 1988, 58 percent in 1999, and 48 percent in 2011." Ah, the Usage Panel, that trusted body of language authorities who is getting more lenient about this. Now, what I hope you're thinking right now is, "Wait, who's on the Usage Panel? And what should I do with their pronouncements?" If you look in the front matter of American Heritage Dictionaries, you can actually find the names of the people on the Usage Panel. But who looks at the front matter of dictionaries? There are about 200 people on the Usage Panel. They include academicians, journalists, creative writers. There's a Supreme Court justice on it and a few linguists. As of 2005, the list includes me. (Applause) Here's what we can do for you. We can give you a sense of the range of opinions about contested usage. That is and should be the extent of our authority. We are not a language academy. About once a year, I get a ballot that asks me about whether new uses, new pronunciations, new meanings, are acceptable. Now here's what I do to fill out the ballot. I listen to what other people are saying and writing. I do not listen to my own likes and dislikes about the English language. I will be honest with you: I do not like the word "impactful," but that is neither here nor there in terms of whether "impactful" is becoming common usage and becoming more acceptable in written prose. So to be responsible, what I do is go look at usage, which often involves going to look at online databases such as Google Books. Well, if you look for "impactful" in Google Books, here is what you find. Well, it sure looks like "impactful" is proving useful for a certain number of writers, and has become more and more useful over the last 20 years. Now, there are going to be changes that all of us don't like in the language. There are going to be changes where you think, "Really? Does the language have to change that way?" What I'm saying is, we should be less quick to decide that that change is terrible, we should be less quick to impose our likes and dislikes about words on other people, and we should be entirely reluctant to think that the English language is in trouble. It's not. It is rich and vibrant and filled with the creativity of the speakers who speak it. In retrospect, we think it's fascinating that the word "nice" used to mean silly, and that the word "decimate" used to mean to kill one in every 10. (Laughter) We think that Ben Franklin was being silly to worry about "notice" as a verb. Well, you know what? We're going to look pretty silly in a hundred years for worrying about "impact" as a verb and "invite" as a noun. The language is not going to change so fast that we can't keep up. Language just doesn't work that way. I hope that what you can do is find language change not worrisome but fun and fascinating, just the way dictionary editors do. I hope you can enjoy being part of the creativity that is continually remaking our language and keeping it robust. So how does a word get into a dictionary? It gets in because we use it and we keep using it, and dictionary editors are paying attention to us. If you're thinking, "But that lets all of us decide what words mean," I would say, "Yes it does, and it always has." Dictionaries are a wonderful guide and resource, but there is no objective dictionary authority out there that is the final arbiter about what words mean. If a community of speakers is using a word and knows what it means, it's real. That word might be slangy, that word might be informal, that word might be a word that you think is illogical or unnecessary, but that word that we're using, that word is real. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to make hard choices | {0: 'Ruth Chang asks why some choices are so hard —\xa0and what that means for the human condition. '} | TEDSalon NY2014 | Think of a hard choice you'll face in the near future. It might be between two careers — artist and accountant — or places to live — the city or the country — or even between two people to marry — you could marry Betty or you could marry Lolita. Or it might be a choice about whether to have children, to have an ailing parent move in with you, to raise your child in a religion that your partner lives by but leaves you cold. Or whether to donate your life savings to charity. Chances are, the hard choice you thought of was something big, something momentous, something that matters to you. Hard choices seem to be occasions for agonizing, hand-wringing, the gnashing of teeth. But I think we've misunderstood hard choices and the role they play in our lives. Understanding hard choices uncovers a hidden power each of us possesses. What makes a choice hard is the way the alternatives relate. In any easy choice, one alternative is better than the other. In a hard choice, one alternative is better in some ways, the other alternative is better in other ways, and neither is better than the other overall. You agonize over whether to stay in your current job in the city or uproot your life for more challenging work in the country, because staying is better in some ways, moving is better in others, and neither is better than the other overall. We shouldn't think that all hard choices are big. Let's say you're deciding what to have for breakfast. You could have high fiber bran cereal or a chocolate donut. Suppose what matters in the choice is tastiness and healthfulness. The cereal is better for you, the donut tastes way better, but neither is better than the other overall, a hard choice. Realizing that small choices can also be hard, may make big hard choices seem less intractable. After all, we manage to figure out what to have for breakfast, so maybe we can figure out whether to stay in the city or uproot for the new job in the country. We also shouldn't think that hard choices are hard because we are stupid. When I graduated from college, I couldn't decide between two careers, philosophy and law. I really loved philosophy. There are amazing things you can learn as a philosopher, and all from the comfort of an armchair. But I came from a modest immigrant family where my idea of luxury was having a pork tongue and jelly sandwich in my school lunchbox, so the thought of spending my whole life sitting around in armchairs just thinking ... Well, that struck me as the height of extravagance and frivolity. So I got out my yellow pad, I drew a line down the middle, and I tried my best to think of the reasons for and against each alternative. I remember thinking to myself, if only I knew what my life in each career would be like. If only God or Netflix would send me a DVD of my two possible future careers, I'd be set. I'd compare them side by side, I'd see that one was better, and the choice would be easy. But I got no DVD, and because I couldn't figure out which was better, I did what many of us do in hard choices: I took the safest option. Fear of being an unemployed philosopher led me to become a lawyer, and as I discovered, lawyering didn't quite fit. It wasn't who I was. So now I'm a philosopher, and I study hard choices, and I can tell you, that fear of the unknown, while a common motivational default in dealing with hard choices, rests on a misconception of them. It's a mistake to think that in hard choices, one alternative really is better than the other, but we're too stupid to know which, and since we don't know which, we might as well take the least risky option. Even taking two alternatives side by side with full information, a choice can still be hard. Hard choices are hard not because of us or our ignorance; they're hard because there is no best option. Now, if there's no best option, if the scales don't tip in favor of one alternative over another, then surely the alternatives must be equally good. So maybe the right thing to say in hard choices is that they're between equally good options. But that can't be right. If alternatives are equally good, you should just flip a coin between them, and it seems a mistake to think, here's how you should decide between careers, places to live, people to marry: Flip a coin. There's another reason for thinking that hard choices aren't choices between equally good options. Suppose you have a choice between two jobs: you could be an investment banker or a graphic artist. There are a variety of things that matter in such a choice, like the excitement of the work, achieving financial security, having time to raise a family, and so on. Maybe the artist's career puts you on the cutting edge of new forms of pictorial expression. Maybe the banking career puts you on the cutting edge of new forms of financial manipulation. (Laughter) Imagine the two jobs however you like, so that neither is better than the other. Now suppose we improve one of them, a bit. Suppose the bank, wooing you, adds 500 dollars a month to your salary. Does the extra money now make the banking job better than the artist one? Not necessarily. A higher salary makes the banking job better than it was before, but it might not be enough to make being a banker better than being an artist. But if an improvement in one of the jobs doesn't make it better than the other, then the two original jobs could not have been equally good. If you start with two things that are equally good, and you improve one of them, it now must be better than the other. That's not the case with options in hard choices. So now we've got a puzzle. We've got two jobs. Neither is better than the other, nor are they equally good. So how are we supposed to choose? Something seems to have gone wrong here. Maybe the choice itself is problematic, and comparison is impossible. But that can't be right. It's not like we're trying to choose between two things that can't be compared. We're weighing the merits of two jobs, after all, not the merits of the number nine and a plate of fried eggs. A comparison of the overall merits of two jobs is something we can make, and one we often do make. I think the puzzle arises because of an unreflective assumption we make about value. We unwittingly assume that values like justice, beauty, kindness, are akin to scientific quantities, like length, mass and weight. Take any comparative question not involving value, such as which of two suitcases is heavier. There are only three possibilities. The weight of one is greater, lesser or equal to the weight of the other. Properties like weight can be represented by real numbers — one, two, three and so on — and there are only three possible comparisons between any two real numbers. One number is greater, lesser, or equal to the other. Not so with values. As post-Enlightenment creatures, we tend to assume that scientific thinking holds the key to everything of importance in our world, but the world of value is different from the world of science. The stuff of the one world can be quantified by real numbers. The stuff of the other world can't. We shouldn't assume that the world of is, of lengths and weights, has the same structure as the world of ought, of what we should do. So if what matters to us — a child's delight, the love you have for your partner — can't be represented by real numbers, then there's no reason to believe that in choice, there are only three possibilities — that one alternative is better, worse or equal to the other. We need to introduce a new, fourth relation beyond being better, worse or equal, that describes what's going on in hard choices. I like to say that the alternatives are "on a par." When alternatives are on a par, it may matter very much which you choose, but one alternative isn't better than the other. Rather, the alternatives are in the same neighborhood of value, in the same league of value, while at the same time being very different in kind of value. That's why the choice is hard. Understanding hard choices in this way uncovers something about ourselves we didn't know. Each of us has the power to create reasons. Imagine a world in which every choice you face is an easy choice, that is, there's always a best alternative. If there's a best alternative, then that's the one you should choose, because part of being rational is doing the better thing rather than the worse thing, choosing what you have most reason to choose. In such a world, we'd have most reason to wear black socks instead of pink socks, to eat cereal instead of donuts, to live in the city rather than the country, to marry Betty instead of Lolita. A world full of only easy choices would enslave us to reasons. When you think about it, (Laughter) it's nuts to believe that the reasons given to you dictated that you had most reason to pursue the exact hobbies you do, to live in the exact house you do, to work at the exact job you do. Instead, you faced alternatives that were on a par — hard choices — and you made reasons for yourself to choose that hobby, that house and that job. When alternatives are on a par, the reasons given to us, the ones that determine whether we're making a mistake, are silent as to what to do. It's here, in the space of hard choices, that we get to exercise our normative power — the power to create reasons for yourself, to make yourself into the kind of person for whom country living is preferable to the urban life. When we choose between options that are on a par, we can do something really rather remarkable. We can put our very selves behind an option. Here's where I stand. Here's who I am, I am for banking. I am for chocolate donuts. (Laughter) This response in hard choices is a rational response, but it's not dictated by reasons given to us. Rather, it's supported by reasons created by us. When we create reasons for ourselves to become this kind of person rather than that, we wholeheartedly become the people that we are. You might say that we become the authors of our own lives. So when we face hard choices, we shouldn't beat our head against a wall trying to figure out which alternative is better. There is no best alternative. Instead of looking for reasons out there, we should be looking for reasons in here: Who am I to be? You might decide to be a pink sock-wearing, cereal-loving, country-living banker, and I might decide to be a black sock-wearing, urban, donut-loving artist. What we do in hard choices is very much up to each of us. Now, people who don't exercise their normative powers in hard choices are drifters. We all know people like that. I drifted into being a lawyer. I didn't put my agency behind lawyering. I wasn't for lawyering. Drifters allow the world to write the story of their lives. They let mechanisms of reward and punishment — pats on the head, fear, the easiness of an option — to determine what they do. So the lesson of hard choices: reflect on what you can put your agency behind, on what you can be for, and through hard choices, become that person. Far from being sources of agony and dread, hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition, that the reasons that govern our choices as correct or incorrect sometimes run out, and it is here, in the space of hard choices, that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people that we are. And that's why hard choices are not a curse but a godsend. Thank you. (Applause) |
3 ways to speak English | {0: 'Jamila Lyiscott weaves words about language, education and the African Diaspora.'} | TEDSalon NY2014 | Today, a baffled lady observed the shell where my soul dwells And announced that I'm "articulate" Which means that when it comes to enunciation and diction I don't even think of it ‘Cause I’m "articulate" So when my professor asks a question And my answer is tainted with a connotation of urbanized suggestion There’s no misdirected intention Pay attention ‘Cause I’m “articulate” So when my father asks, “Wha’ kinda ting is dis?” My “articulate” answer never goes amiss I say “father, this is the impending problem at hand” And when I’m on the block I switch it up just because I can So when my boy says, “What’s good with you son?” I just say, “I jus’ fall out wit dem people but I done!” And sometimes in class I might pause the intellectual sounding flow to ask “Yo! Why dese books neva be about my peoples” Yes, I have decided to treat all three of my languages as equals Because I’m “articulate” But who controls articulation? Because the English language is a multifaceted oration Subject to indefinite transformation Now you may think that it is ignorant to speak broken English But I’m here to tell you that even “articulate” Americans sound foolish to the British So when my Professor comes on the block and says, “Hello” I stop him and say “Noooo … You’re being inarticulate … the proper way is to say ‘what’s good’” Now you may think that’s too hood, that’s not cool But I’m here to tell you that even our language has rules So when Mommy mocks me and says “ya’ll-be-madd-going-to-the-store” I say “Mommy, no, that sentence is not following the law Never does the word "madd" go before a present participle That’s simply the principle of this English” If I had the vocal capacity I would sing this from every mountaintop, From every suburbia, and every hood ‘Cause the only God of language is the one recorded in the Genesis Of this world saying “it is good" So I may not always come before you with excellency of speech But do not judge me by my language and assume That I’m too ignorant to teach ‘Cause I speak three tongues One for each: Home, school and friends I’m a tri-lingual orator Sometimes I’m consistent with my language now Then switch it up so I don’t bore later Sometimes I fight back two tongues While I use the other one in the classroom And when I mistakenly mix them up I feel crazy like … I’m cooking in the bathroom I know that I had to borrow your language because mines was stolen But you can’t expect me to speak your history wholly while mines is broken These words are spoken By someone who is simply fed up with the Eurocentric ideals of this season And the reason I speak a composite version of your language Is because mines was raped away along with my history I speak broken English so the profusing gashes can remind us That our current state is not a mystery I’m so tired of the negative images that are driving my people mad So unless you’ve seen it rob a bank stop calling my hair bad I’m so sick of this nonsensical racial disparity So don’t call it good unless your hair is known for donating to charity As much as has been raped away from our people How can you expect me to treat their imprint on your language As anything less than equal Let there be no confusion Let there be no hesitation This is not a promotion of ignorance This is a linguistic celebration That’s why I put "tri-lingual" on my last job application I can help to diversify your consumer market is all I wanted them to know And when they call me for the interview I’ll be more than happy to show that I can say: “What’s good” “Whatagwan” And of course …“Hello” Because I’m “articulate” Thank you. (Applause) |
Two poems about what dogs think (probably) | {0: 'A two-term U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins captures readers with his understated wit, profound insight -- and a sense of being "hospitable."'} | TED2014 | I don't know if you've noticed, but there's been a spate of books that have come out lately contemplating or speculating on the cognition and emotional life of dogs. Do they think, do they feel and, if so, how? So this afternoon, in my limited time, I wanted to take the guesswork out of a lot of that by introducing you to two dogs, both of whom have taken the command "speak" quite literally. The first dog is the first to go, and he is contemplating an aspect of his relationship to his owner, and the title is "A Dog on His Master." "As young as I look, I am growing older faster than he. Seven to one is the ratio, they tend to say. Whatever the number, I will pass him one day and take the lead, the way I do on our walks in the woods, and if this ever manages to cross his mind, it would be the sweetest shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass." (Applause) Thank you. And our next dog speaks in something called the revenant, which means a spirit that comes back to visit you. "I am the dog you put to sleep, as you like to call the needle of oblivion, come back to tell you this simple thing: I never liked you." (Laughter) "When I licked your face, I thought of biting off your nose. When I watched you toweling yourself dry, I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap. I resented the way you moved, your lack of animal grace, the way you would sit in a chair to eat, a napkin on your lap, a knife in your hand. I would have run away but I was too weak, a trick you taught me while I was learning to sit and heel and, greatest of insults, shake hands without a hand. I admit the sight of the leash would excite me, but only because it meant I was about to smell things you had never touched. You do not want to believe this, but I have no reason to lie: I hated the car, hated the rubber toys, disliked your friends, and worse, your relatives. The jingling of my tags drove me mad. You always scratched me in the wrong place." (Laughter) "All I ever wanted from you was food and water in my bowls. While you slept, I watched you breathe as the moon rose in the sky. It took all of my strength not to raise my head and howl. Now, I am free of the collar, free of the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater, the absurdity of your lawn, and that is all you need to know about this place, except what you already supposed and are glad it did not happen sooner, that everyone here can read and write, the dogs in poetry, the cats and all the others in prose." Thank you. (Applause) |
Why your worst deeds don’t define you | {0: 'Using literature as a lifeline, Shaka Senghor escaped a cycle of prison and desperation. Now his story kindles hope in those who have little.'} | TED2014 | Twenty-three years ago, at the age of 19, I shot and killed a man. I was a young drug dealer with a quick temper and a semi-automatic pistol. But that wasn't the end of my story. In fact, it was beginning, and the 23 years since is a story of acknowledgment, apology and atonement. But it didn't happen in the way that you might imagine or think. These things occurred in my life in a way that was surprising, especially to me. See, like many of you, growing up, I was an honor roll student, a scholarship student, with dreams of becoming a doctor. But things went dramatically wrong when my parents separated and eventually divorced. The actual events are pretty straightforward. At the age of 17, I got shot three times standing on the corner of my block in Detroit. My friend rushed me to the hospital. Doctors pulled the bullets out, patched me up, and sent me back to the same neighborhood where I got shot. Throughout this ordeal, no one hugged me, no one counseled me, no one told me I would be okay. No one told me that I would live in fear, that I would become paranoid, or that I would react hyper-violently to being shot. No one told me that one day, I would become the person behind the trigger. Fourteen months later, at 2 a.m., I fired the shots that caused a man's death. When I entered prison, I was bitter, I was angry, I was hurt. I didn't want to take responsibility. I blamed everybody from my parents to the system. I rationalized my decision to shoot because in the hood where I come from, it's better to be the shooter than the person getting shot. As I sat in my cold cell, I felt helpless, unloved and abandoned. I felt like nobody cared, and I reacted with hostility to my confinement. And I found myself getting deeper and deeper into trouble. I ran black market stores, I loan sharked, and I sold drugs that were illegally smuggled into the prison. I had in fact become what the warden of the Michigan Reformatory called "the worst of the worst." And because of my activity, I landed in solitary confinement for seven and a half years out of my incarceration. Now as I see it, solitary confinement is one of the most inhumane and barbaric places you can find yourself, but find myself I did. One day, I was pacing my cell, when an officer came and delivered mail. I looked at a couple of letters before I looked at the letter that had my son's squiggly handwriting on it. And anytime I would get a letter from my son, it was like a ray of light in the darkest place you can imagine. And on this particular day, I opened this letter, and in capital letters, he wrote, "My mama told me why you was in prison: murder." He said, "Dad, don't kill. Jesus watches what you do. Pray to Him." Now, I wasn't religious at that time, nor am I religious now, but it was something so profound about my son's words. They made me examine things about my life that I hadn't considered. It was the first time in my life that I had actually thought about the fact that my son would see me as a murderer. I sat back on my bunk and I reflected on something I had read in [Plato], where Socrates stated in "Apology" that the unexamined life isn't worth living. At that point is when the transformation began. But it didn't come easy. One of the things I realized, which was part of the transformation, was that there were four key things. The first thing was, I had great mentors. Now, I know some of you all are probably thinking, how did you find a great mentor in prison? But in my case, some of my mentors who are serving life sentences were some of the best people to ever come into my life, because they forced me to look at my life honestly, and they forced me to challenge myself about my decision making. The second thing was literature. Prior to going to prison, I didn't know that there were so many brilliant black poets, authors and philosophers, and then I had the great fortune of encountering Malcolm X's autobiography, and it shattered every stereotype I had about myself. The third thing was family. For 19 years, my father stood by my side with an unshakable faith, because he believed that I had what it took to turn my life around. I also met an amazing woman who is now the mother of my two-year-old son Sekou, and she taught me how to love myself in a healthy way. The final thing was writing. When I got that letter from my son, I began to write a journal about things I had experienced in my childhood and in prison, and what it did is it opened up my mind to the idea of atonement. Earlier in my incarceration, I had received a letter from one of the relatives of my victim, and in that letter, she told me she forgave me, because she realized I was a young child who had been abused and had been through some hardships and just made a series of poor decisions. It was the first time in my life that I ever felt open to forgiving myself. One of the things that happened after that experience is that I thought about the other men who were incarcerated alongside of me, and how much I wanted to share this with them. And so I started talking to them about some of their experiences, and I was devastated to realize that most of them came from the same abusive environments, And most of them wanted help and they wanted to turn it around, but unfortunately the system that currently holds 2.5 million people in prison is designed to warehouse as opposed to rehabilitate or transform. So I made it up in my mind that if I was ever released from prison that I would do everything in my power to help change that. In 2010, I walked out of prison for the first time after two decades. Now imagine, if you will, Fred Flintstone walking into an episode of "The Jetsons." That was pretty much what my life was like. For the first time, I was exposed to the Internet, social media, cars that talk like KITT from "Knight Rider." But the thing that fascinated me the most was phone technology. See, when I went to prison, our car phones were this big and required two people to carry them. So imagine what it was like when I first grabbed my little Blackberry and I started learning how to text. But the thing is, the people around me, they didn't realize that I had no idea what all these abbreviated texts meant, like LOL, OMG, LMAO, until one day I was having a conversation with one of my friends via text, and I asked him to do something, and he responded back, "K." And I was like, "What is K?" And he was like, "K is okay." So in my head, I was like, "Well what the hell is wrong with K?" And so I text him a question mark. And he said, "K = okay." And so I tap back, "FU." (Laughter) And then he texts back, and he asks me why was I cussing him out. And I said, "LOL FU," as in, I finally understand. (Laughter) And so fast forward three years, I'm doing relatively good. I have a fellowship at MIT Media Lab, I work for an amazing company called BMe, I teach at the University of Michigan, but it's been a struggle because I realize that there are more men and women coming home who are not going to be afforded those opportunities. I've been blessed to work with some amazing men and women, helping others reenter society, and one of them is my friend named Calvin Evans. He served 24 years for a crime he didn't commit. He's 45 years old. He's currently enrolled in college. And one of the things that we talked about is the three things that I found important in my personal transformation, the first being acknowledgment. I had to acknowledge that I had hurt others. I also had to acknowledge that I had been hurt. The second thing was apologizing. I had to apologize to the people I had hurt. Even though I had no expectations of them accepting it, it was important to do because it was the right thing. But I also had to apologize to myself. The third thing was atoning. For me, atoning meant going back into my community and working with at-risk youth who were on the same path, but also becoming at one with myself. Through my experience of being locked up, one of the things I discovered is this: the majority of men and women who are incarcerated are redeemable, and the fact is, 90 percent of the men and women who are incarcerated will at some point return to the community, and we have a role in determining what kind of men and women return to our community. My wish today is that we will embrace a more empathetic approach toward how we deal with mass incarceration, that we will do away with the lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key mentality, because it's proven it doesn't work. My journey is a unique journey, but it doesn't have to be that way. Anybody can have a transformation if we create the space for that to happen. So what I'm asking today is that you envision a world where men and women aren't held hostage to their pasts, where misdeeds and mistakes don't define you for the rest of your life. I think collectively, we can create that reality, and I hope you do too. Thank you. (Applause) |
What’s wrong with your pa$$w0rd? | {0: 'At Carnegie Mellon University, Lorrie Faith Cranor studies online privacy, usable security, phishing, spam and other research around keeping us safe online.'} | TEDxCMU | I am a computer science and engineering professor here at Carnegie Mellon, and my research focuses on usable privacy and security, and so my friends like to give me examples of their frustrations with computing systems, especially frustrations related to unusable privacy and security. So passwords are something that I hear a lot about. A lot of people are frustrated with passwords, and it's bad enough when you have to have one really good password that you can remember but nobody else is going to be able to guess. But what do you do when you have accounts on a hundred different systems and you're supposed to have a unique password for each of these systems? It's tough. At Carnegie Mellon, they used to make it actually pretty easy for us to remember our passwords. The password requirement up through 2009 was just that you had to have a password with at least one character. Pretty easy. But then they changed things, and at the end of 2009, they announced that we were going to have a new policy, and this new policy required passwords that were at least eight characters long, with an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, a digit, a symbol, you couldn't use the same character more than three times, and it wasn't allowed to be in a dictionary. Now, when they implemented this new policy, a lot of people, my colleagues and friends, came up to me and they said, "Wow, now that's really unusable. Why are they doing this to us, and why didn't you stop them?" And I said, "Well, you know what? They didn't ask me." But I got curious, and I decided to go talk to the people in charge of our computer systems and find out what led them to introduce this new policy, and they said that the university had joined a consortium of universities, and one of the requirements of membership was that we had to have stronger passwords that complied with some new requirements, and these requirements were that our passwords had to have a lot of entropy. Now entropy is a complicated term, but basically it measures the strength of passwords. But the thing is, there isn't actually a standard measure of entropy. Now, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a set of guidelines which have some rules of thumb for measuring entropy, but they don't have anything too specific, and the reason they only have rules of thumb is it turns out they don't actually have any good data on passwords. In fact, their report states, "Unfortunately, we do not have much data on the passwords users choose under particular rules. NIST would like to obtain more data on the passwords users actually choose, but system administrators are understandably reluctant to reveal password data to others." So this is a problem, but our research group looked at it as an opportunity. We said, "Well, there's a need for good password data. Maybe we can collect some good password data and actually advance the state of the art here. So the first thing we did is, we got a bag of candy bars and we walked around campus and talked to students, faculty and staff, and asked them for information about their passwords. Now we didn't say, "Give us your password." No, we just asked them about their password. How long is it? Does it have a digit? Does it have a symbol? And were you annoyed at having to create a new one last week? So we got results from 470 students, faculty and staff, and indeed we confirmed that the new policy was very annoying, but we also found that people said they felt more secure with these new passwords. We found that most people knew they were not supposed to write their password down, and only 13 percent of them did, but disturbingly, 80 percent of people said they were reusing their password. Now, this is actually more dangerous than writing your password down, because it makes you much more susceptible to attackers. So if you have to, write your passwords down, but don't reuse them. We also found some interesting things about the symbols people use in passwords. So CMU allows 32 possible symbols, but as you can see, there's only a small number that most people are using, so we're not actually getting very much strength from the symbols in our passwords. So this was a really interesting study, and now we had data from 470 people, but in the scheme of things, that's really not very much password data, and so we looked around to see where could we find additional password data? So it turns out there are a lot of people going around stealing passwords, and they often go and post these passwords on the Internet. So we were able to get access to some of these stolen password sets. This is still not really ideal for research, though, because it's not entirely clear where all of these passwords came from, or exactly what policies were in effect when people created these passwords. So we wanted to find some better source of data. So we decided that one thing we could do is we could do a study and have people actually create passwords for our study. So we used a service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, and this is a service where you can post a small job online that takes a minute, a few minutes, an hour, and pay people, a penny, ten cents, a few dollars, to do a task for you, and then you pay them through Amazon.com. So we paid people about 50 cents to create a password following our rules and answering a survey, and then we paid them again to come back two days later and log in using their password and answering another survey. So we did this, and we collected 5,000 passwords, and we gave people a bunch of different policies to create passwords with. So some people had a pretty easy policy, we call it Basic8, and here the only rule was that your password had to have at least eight characters. Then some people had a much harder policy, and this was very similar to the CMU policy, that it had to have eight characters including uppercase, lowercase, digit, symbol, and pass a dictionary check. And one of the other policies we tried, and there were a whole bunch more, but one of the ones we tried was called Basic16, and the only requirement here was that your password had to have at least 16 characters. All right, so now we had 5,000 passwords, and so we had much more detailed information. Again we see that there's only a small number of symbols that people are actually using in their passwords. We also wanted to get an idea of how strong the passwords were that people were creating, but as you may recall, there isn't a good measure of password strength. So what we decided to do was to see how long it would take to crack these passwords using the best cracking tools that the bad guys are using, or that we could find information about in the research literature. So to give you an idea of how bad guys go about cracking passwords, they will steal a password file that will have all of the passwords in kind of a scrambled form, called a hash, and so what they'll do is they'll make a guess as to what a password is, run it through a hashing function, and see whether it matches the passwords they have on their stolen password list. So a dumb attacker will try every password in order. They'll start with AAAAA and move on to AAAAB, and this is going to take a really long time before they get any passwords that people are really likely to actually have. A smart attacker, on the other hand, does something much more clever. They look at the passwords that are known to be popular from these stolen password sets, and they guess those first. So they're going to start by guessing "password," and then they'll guess "I love you," and "monkey," and "12345678," because these are the passwords that are most likely for people to have. In fact, some of you probably have these passwords. So what we found by running all of these 5,000 passwords we collected through these tests to see how strong they were, we found that the long passwords were actually pretty strong, and the complex passwords were pretty strong too. However, when we looked at the survey data, we saw that people were really frustrated by the very complex passwords, and the long passwords were a lot more usable, and in some cases, they were actually even stronger than the complex passwords. So this suggests that, instead of telling people that they need to put all these symbols and numbers and crazy things into their passwords, we might be better off just telling people to have long passwords. Now here's the problem, though: Some people had long passwords that actually weren't very strong. You can make long passwords that are still the sort of thing that an attacker could easily guess. So we need to do more than just say long passwords. There has to be some additional requirements, and some of our ongoing research is looking at what additional requirements we should add to make for stronger passwords that also are going to be easy for people to remember and type. Another approach to getting people to have stronger passwords is to use a password meter. Here are some examples. You may have seen these on the Internet when you were creating passwords. We decided to do a study to find out whether these password meters actually work. Do they actually help people have stronger passwords, and if so, which ones are better? So we tested password meters that were different sizes, shapes, colors, different words next to them, and we even tested one that was a dancing bunny. As you type a better password, the bunny dances faster and faster. So this was pretty fun. What we found was that password meters do work. (Laughter) Most of the password meters were actually effective, and the dancing bunny was very effective too, but the password meters that were the most effective were the ones that made you work harder before they gave you that thumbs up and said you were doing a good job, and in fact we found that most of the password meters on the Internet today are too soft. They tell you you're doing a good job too early, and if they would just wait a little bit before giving you that positive feedback, you probably would have better passwords. Now another approach to better passwords, perhaps, is to use pass phrases instead of passwords. So this was an xkcd cartoon from a couple of years ago, and the cartoonist suggests that we should all use pass phrases, and if you look at the second row of this cartoon, you can see the cartoonist is suggesting that the pass phrase "correct horse battery staple" would be a very strong pass phrase and something really easy to remember. He says, in fact, you've already remembered it. And so we decided to do a research study to find out whether this was true or not. In fact, everybody who I talk to, who I mention I'm doing password research, they point out this cartoon. "Oh, have you seen it? That xkcd. Correct horse battery staple." So we did the research study to see what would actually happen. So in our study, we used Mechanical Turk again, and we had the computer pick the random words in the pass phrase. Now the reason we did this is that humans are not very good at picking random words. If we asked a human to do it, they would pick things that were not very random. So we tried a few different conditions. In one condition, the computer picked from a dictionary of the very common words in the English language, and so you'd get pass phrases like "try there three come." And we looked at that, and we said, "Well, that doesn't really seem very memorable." So then we tried picking words that came from specific parts of speech, so how about noun-verb-adjective-noun. That comes up with something that's sort of sentence-like. So you can get a pass phrase like "plan builds sure power" or "end determines red drug." And these seemed a little bit more memorable, and maybe people would like those a little bit better. We wanted to compare them with passwords, and so we had the computer pick random passwords, and these were nice and short, but as you can see, they don't really look very memorable. And then we decided to try something called a pronounceable password. So here the computer picks random syllables and puts them together so you have something sort of pronounceable, like "tufritvi" and "vadasabi." That one kind of rolls off your tongue. So these were random passwords that were generated by our computer. So what we found in this study was that, surprisingly, pass phrases were not actually all that good. People were not really better at remembering the pass phrases than these random passwords, and because the pass phrases are longer, they took longer to type and people made more errors while typing them in. So it's not really a clear win for pass phrases. Sorry, all of you xkcd fans. On the other hand, we did find that pronounceable passwords worked surprisingly well, and so we actually are doing some more research to see if we can make that approach work even better. So one of the problems with some of the studies that we've done is that because they're all done using Mechanical Turk, these are not people's real passwords. They're the passwords that they created or the computer created for them for our study. And we wanted to know whether people would actually behave the same way with their real passwords. So we talked to the information security office at Carnegie Mellon and asked them if we could have everybody's real passwords. Not surprisingly, they were a little bit reluctant to share them with us, but we were actually able to work out a system with them where they put all of the real passwords for 25,000 CMU students, faculty and staff, into a locked computer in a locked room, not connected to the Internet, and they ran code on it that we wrote to analyze these passwords. They audited our code. They ran the code. And so we never actually saw anybody's password. We got some interesting results, and those of you Tepper students in the back will be very interested in this. So we found that the passwords created by people affiliated with the school of computer science were actually 1.8 times stronger than those affiliated with the business school. We have lots of other really interesting demographic information as well. The other interesting thing that we found is that when we compared the Carnegie Mellon passwords to the Mechanical Turk-generated passwords, there was actually a lot of similarities, and so this helped validate our research method and show that actually, collecting passwords using these Mechanical Turk studies is actually a valid way to study passwords. So that was good news. Okay, I want to close by talking about some insights I gained while on sabbatical last year in the Carnegie Mellon art school. One of the things that I did is I made a number of quilts, and I made this quilt here. It's called "Security Blanket." (Laughter) And this quilt has the 1,000 most frequent passwords stolen from the RockYou website. And the size of the passwords is proportional to how frequently they appeared in the stolen dataset. And what I did is I created this word cloud, and I went through all 1,000 words, and I categorized them into loose thematic categories. And it was, in some cases, it was kind of difficult to figure out what category they should be in, and then I color-coded them. So here are some examples of the difficulty. So "justin." Is that the name of the user, their boyfriend, their son? Maybe they're a Justin Bieber fan. Or "princess." Is that a nickname? Are they Disney princess fans? Or maybe that's the name of their cat. "Iloveyou" appears many times in many different languages. There's a lot of love in these passwords. If you look carefully, you'll see there's also some profanity, but it was really interesting to me to see that there's a lot more love than hate in these passwords. And there are animals, a lot of animals, and "monkey" is the most common animal and the 14th most popular password overall. And this was really curious to me, and I wondered, "Why are monkeys so popular?" And so in our last password study, any time we detected somebody creating a password with the word "monkey" in it, we asked them why they had a monkey in their password. And what we found out — we found 17 people so far, I think, who have the word "monkey" — We found out about a third of them said they have a pet named "monkey" or a friend whose nickname is "monkey," and about a third of them said that they just like monkeys and monkeys are really cute. And that guy is really cute. So it seems that at the end of the day, when we make passwords, we either make something that's really easy to type, a common pattern, or things that remind us of the word password or the account that we've created the password for, or whatever. Or we think about things that make us happy, and we create our password based on things that make us happy. And while this makes typing and remembering your password more fun, it also makes it a lot easier to guess your password. So I know a lot of these TED Talks are inspirational and they make you think about nice, happy things, but when you're creating your password, try to think about something else. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why we should trust scientists | {0: 'Naomi Oreskes is a historian of science who uses reason to fight climate change denial.'} | TEDSalon NY2014 | Every day we face issues like climate change or the safety of vaccines where we have to answer questions whose answers rely heavily on scientific information. Scientists tell us that the world is warming. Scientists tell us that vaccines are safe. But how do we know if they are right? Why should be believe the science? The fact is, many of us actually don't believe the science. Public opinion polls consistently show that significant proportions of the American people don't believe the climate is warming due to human activities, don't think that there is evolution by natural selection, and aren't persuaded by the safety of vaccines. So why should we believe the science? Well, scientists don't like talking about science as a matter of belief. In fact, they would contrast science with faith, and they would say belief is the domain of faith. And faith is a separate thing apart and distinct from science. Indeed they would say religion is based on faith or maybe the calculus of Pascal's wager. Blaise Pascal was a 17th-century mathematician who tried to bring scientific reasoning to the question of whether or not he should believe in God, and his wager went like this: Well, if God doesn't exist but I decide to believe in him nothing much is really lost. Maybe a few hours on Sunday. (Laughter) But if he does exist and I don't believe in him, then I'm in deep trouble. And so Pascal said, we'd better believe in God. Or as one of my college professors said, "He clutched for the handrail of faith." He made that leap of faith leaving science and rationalism behind. Now the fact is though, for most of us, most scientific claims are a leap of faith. We can't really judge scientific claims for ourselves in most cases. And indeed this is actually true for most scientists as well outside of their own specialties. So if you think about it, a geologist can't tell you whether a vaccine is safe. Most chemists are not experts in evolutionary theory. A physicist cannot tell you, despite the claims of some of them, whether or not tobacco causes cancer. So, if even scientists themselves have to make a leap of faith outside their own fields, then why do they accept the claims of other scientists? Why do they believe each other's claims? And should we believe those claims? So what I'd like to argue is yes, we should, but not for the reason that most of us think. Most of us were taught in school that the reason we should believe in science is because of the scientific method. We were taught that scientists follow a method and that this method guarantees the truth of their claims. The method that most of us were taught in school, we can call it the textbook method, is the hypothetical deductive method. According to the standard model, the textbook model, scientists develop hypotheses, they deduce the consequences of those hypotheses, and then they go out into the world and they say, "Okay, well are those consequences true?" Can we observe them taking place in the natural world? And if they are true, then the scientists say, "Great, we know the hypothesis is correct." So there are many famous examples in the history of science of scientists doing exactly this. One of the most famous examples comes from the work of Albert Einstein. When Einstein developed the theory of general relativity, one of the consequences of his theory was that space-time wasn't just an empty void but that it actually had a fabric. And that that fabric was bent in the presence of massive objects like the sun. So if this theory were true then it meant that light as it passed the sun should actually be bent around it. That was a pretty startling prediction and it took a few years before scientists were able to test it but they did test it in 1919, and lo and behold it turned out to be true. Starlight actually does bend as it travels around the sun. This was a huge confirmation of the theory. It was considered proof of the truth of this radical new idea, and it was written up in many newspapers around the globe. Now, sometimes this theory or this model is referred to as the deductive-nomological model, mainly because academics like to make things complicated. But also because in the ideal case, it's about laws. So nomological means having to do with laws. And in the ideal case, the hypothesis isn't just an idea: ideally, it is a law of nature. Why does it matter that it is a law of nature? Because if it is a law, it can't be broken. If it's a law then it will always be true in all times and all places no matter what the circumstances are. And all of you know of at least one example of a famous law: Einstein's famous equation, E=MC2, which tells us what the relationship is between energy and mass. And that relationship is true no matter what. Now, it turns out, though, that there are several problems with this model. The main problem is that it's wrong. It's just not true. (Laughter) And I'm going to talk about three reasons why it's wrong. So the first reason is a logical reason. It's the problem of the fallacy of affirming the consequent. So that's another fancy, academic way of saying that false theories can make true predictions. So just because the prediction comes true doesn't actually logically prove that the theory is correct. And I have a good example of that too, again from the history of science. This is a picture of the Ptolemaic universe with the Earth at the center of the universe and the sun and the planets going around it. The Ptolemaic model was believed by many very smart people for many centuries. Well, why? Well the answer is because it made lots of predictions that came true. The Ptolemaic system enabled astronomers to make accurate predictions of the motions of the planet, in fact more accurate predictions at first than the Copernican theory which we now would say is true. So that's one problem with the textbook model. A second problem is a practical problem, and it's the problem of auxiliary hypotheses. Auxiliary hypotheses are assumptions that scientists are making that they may or may not even be aware that they're making. So an important example of this comes from the Copernican model, which ultimately replaced the Ptolemaic system. So when Nicolaus Copernicus said, actually the Earth is not the center of the universe, the sun is the center of the solar system, the Earth moves around the sun. Scientists said, well okay, Nicolaus, if that's true we ought to be able to detect the motion of the Earth around the sun. And so this slide here illustrates a concept known as stellar parallax. And astronomers said, if the Earth is moving and we look at a prominent star, let's say, Sirius — well I know I'm in Manhattan so you guys can't see the stars, but imagine you're out in the country, imagine you chose that rural life — and we look at a star in December, we see that star against the backdrop of distant stars. If we now make the same observation six months later when the Earth has moved to this position in June, we look at that same star and we see it against a different backdrop. That difference, that angular difference, is the stellar parallax. So this is a prediction that the Copernican model makes. Astronomers looked for the stellar parallax and they found nothing, nothing at all. And many people argued that this proved that the Copernican model was false. So what happened? Well, in hindsight we can say that astronomers were making two auxiliary hypotheses, both of which we would now say were incorrect. The first was an assumption about the size of the Earth's orbit. Astronomers were assuming that the Earth's orbit was large relative to the distance to the stars. Today we would draw the picture more like this, this comes from NASA, and you see the Earth's orbit is actually quite small. In fact, it's actually much smaller even than shown here. The stellar parallax therefore, is very small and actually very hard to detect. And that leads to the second reason why the prediction didn't work, because scientists were also assuming that the telescopes they had were sensitive enough to detect the parallax. And that turned out not to be true. It wasn't until the 19th century that scientists were able to detect the stellar parallax. So, there's a third problem as well. The third problem is simply a factual problem, that a lot of science doesn't fit the textbook model. A lot of science isn't deductive at all, it's actually inductive. And by that we mean that scientists don't necessarily start with theories and hypotheses, often they just start with observations of stuff going on in the world. And the most famous example of that is one of the most famous scientists who ever lived, Charles Darwin. When Darwin went out as a young man on the voyage of the Beagle, he didn't have a hypothesis, he didn't have a theory. He just knew that he wanted to have a career as a scientist and he started to collect data. Mainly he knew that he hated medicine because the sight of blood made him sick so he had to have an alternative career path. So he started collecting data. And he collected many things, including his famous finches. When he collected these finches, he threw them in a bag and he had no idea what they meant. Many years later back in London, Darwin looked at his data again and began to develop an explanation, and that explanation was the theory of natural selection. Besides inductive science, scientists also often participate in modeling. One of the things scientists want to do in life is to explain the causes of things. And how do we do that? Well, one way you can do it is to build a model that tests an idea. So this is a picture of Henry Cadell, who was a Scottish geologist in the 19th century. You can tell he's Scottish because he's wearing a deerstalker cap and Wellington boots. (Laughter) And Cadell wanted to answer the question, how are mountains formed? And one of the things he had observed is that if you look at mountains like the Appalachians, you often find that the rocks in them are folded, and they're folded in a particular way, which suggested to him that they were actually being compressed from the side. And this idea would later play a major role in discussions of continental drift. So he built this model, this crazy contraption with levers and wood, and here's his wheelbarrow, buckets, a big sledgehammer. I don't know why he's got the Wellington boots. Maybe it's going to rain. And he created this physical model in order to demonstrate that you could, in fact, create patterns in rocks, or at least, in this case, in mud, that looked a lot like mountains if you compressed them from the side. So it was an argument about the cause of mountains. Nowadays, most scientists prefer to work inside, so they don't build physical models so much as to make computer simulations. But a computer simulation is a kind of a model. It's a model that's made with mathematics, and like the physical models of the 19th century, it's very important for thinking about causes. So one of the big questions to do with climate change, we have tremendous amounts of evidence that the Earth is warming up. This slide here, the black line shows the measurements that scientists have taken for the last 150 years showing that the Earth's temperature has steadily increased, and you can see in particular that in the last 50 years there's been this dramatic increase of nearly one degree centigrade, or almost two degrees Fahrenheit. So what, though, is driving that change? How can we know what's causing the observed warming? Well, scientists can model it using a computer simulation. So this diagram illustrates a computer simulation that has looked at all the different factors that we know can influence the Earth's climate, so sulfate particles from air pollution, volcanic dust from volcanic eruptions, changes in solar radiation, and, of course, greenhouse gases. And they asked the question, what set of variables put into a model will reproduce what we actually see in real life? So here is the real life in black. Here's the model in this light gray, and the answer is a model that includes, it's the answer E on that SAT, all of the above. The only way you can reproduce the observed temperature measurements is with all of these things put together, including greenhouse gases, and in particular you can see that the increase in greenhouse gases tracks this very dramatic increase in temperature over the last 50 years. And so this is why climate scientists say it's not just that we know that climate change is happening, we know that greenhouse gases are a major part of the reason why. So now because there all these different things that scientists do, the philosopher Paul Feyerabend famously said, "The only principle in science that doesn't inhibit progress is: anything goes." Now this quotation has often been taken out of context, because Feyerabend was not actually saying that in science anything goes. What he was saying was, actually the full quotation is, "If you press me to say what is the method of science, I would have to say: anything goes." What he was trying to say is that scientists do a lot of different things. Scientists are creative. But then this pushes the question back: If scientists don't use a single method, then how do they decide what's right and what's wrong? And who judges? And the answer is, scientists judge, and they judge by judging evidence. Scientists collect evidence in many different ways, but however they collect it, they have to subject it to scrutiny. And this led the sociologist Robert Merton to focus on this question of how scientists scrutinize data and evidence, and he said they do it in a way he called "organized skepticism." And by that he meant it's organized because they do it collectively, they do it as a group, and skepticism, because they do it from a position of distrust. That is to say, the burden of proof is on the person with a novel claim. And in this sense, science is intrinsically conservative. It's quite hard to persuade the scientific community to say, "Yes, we know something, this is true." So despite the popularity of the concept of paradigm shifts, what we find is that actually, really major changes in scientific thinking are relatively rare in the history of science. So finally that brings us to one more idea: If scientists judge evidence collectively, this has led historians to focus on the question of consensus, and to say that at the end of the day, what science is, what scientific knowledge is, is the consensus of the scientific experts who through this process of organized scrutiny, collective scrutiny, have judged the evidence and come to a conclusion about it, either yea or nay. So we can think of scientific knowledge as a consensus of experts. We can also think of science as being a kind of a jury, except it's a very special kind of jury. It's not a jury of your peers, it's a jury of geeks. It's a jury of men and women with Ph.D.s, and unlike a conventional jury, which has only two choices, guilty or not guilty, the scientific jury actually has a number of choices. Scientists can say yes, something's true. Scientists can say no, it's false. Or, they can say, well it might be true but we need to work more and collect more evidence. Or, they can say it might be true, but we don't know how to answer the question and we're going to put it aside and maybe we'll come back to it later. That's what scientists call "intractable." But this leads us to one final problem: If science is what scientists say it is, then isn't that just an appeal to authority? And weren't we all taught in school that the appeal to authority is a logical fallacy? Well, here's the paradox of modern science, the paradox of the conclusion I think historians and philosophers and sociologists have come to, that actually science is the appeal to authority, but it's not the authority of the individual, no matter how smart that individual is, like Plato or Socrates or Einstein. It's the authority of the collective community. You can think of it is a kind of wisdom of the crowd, but a very special kind of crowd. Science does appeal to authority, but it's not based on any individual, no matter how smart that individual may be. It's based on the collective wisdom, the collective knowledge, the collective work, of all of the scientists who have worked on a particular problem. Scientists have a kind of culture of collective distrust, this "show me" culture, illustrated by this nice woman here showing her colleagues her evidence. Of course, these people don't really look like scientists, because they're much too happy. (Laughter) Okay, so that brings me to my final point. Most of us get up in the morning. Most of us trust our cars. Well, see, now I'm thinking, I'm in Manhattan, this is a bad analogy, but most Americans who don't live in Manhattan get up in the morning and get in their cars and turn on that ignition, and their cars work, and they work incredibly well. The modern automobile hardly ever breaks down. So why is that? Why do cars work so well? It's not because of the genius of Henry Ford or Karl Benz or even Elon Musk. It's because the modern automobile is the product of more than 100 years of work by hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of people. The modern automobile is the product of the collected work and wisdom and experience of every man and woman who has ever worked on a car, and the reliability of the technology is the result of that accumulated effort. We benefit not just from the genius of Benz and Ford and Musk but from the collective intelligence and hard work of all of the people who have worked on the modern car. And the same is true of science, only science is even older. Our basis for trust in science is actually the same as our basis in trust in technology, and the same as our basis for trust in anything, namely, experience. But it shouldn't be blind trust any more than we would have blind trust in anything. Our trust in science, like science itself, should be based on evidence, and that means that scientists have to become better communicators. They have to explain to us not just what they know but how they know it, and it means that we have to become better listeners. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The DIY orchestra of the future | {0: 'Both a musician and a computer scientist, Ge Wang turns ordinary MacBooks and iPhones into complex instruments.'} | TEDxStanford | I want to talk to you about one thing and just one thing only, and this has to do with when people ask me, what do you do? To which I usually respond, I do computer music. Now, a number of people just stop talking to me right then and there, and the rest who are left usually have this blank look in their eye, as if to say, what does that mean? And I feel like I'm actually depriving them of information by telling them this, at which point I usually panic and spit out the first thing that comes to my mind, which is, I have no idea what I'm doing. Which is true. That's usually followed by a second thought, which is, whatever it is that I'm doing, I love it. And today, I want to, well, share with you something I love, and also why. And I think we'll begin with just this question: What is computer music? And I'm going to try to do my best to provide a definition, maybe by telling you a story that goes through some of the stuff I've been working on. And the first thing, I think, in our story is going to be something called ChucK. Now, ChucK is a programming language for music, and it's open-source, it's freely available, and I like to think that it crashes equally well on all modern operating systems. And instead of telling you more about it, I'm just going to give you a demo. By the way, I'm just going to nerd out for just a few minutes here, so I would say, don't freak out. In fact, I would invite all of you to join me in just geeking out. If you've never written a line of code before in your life, do not worry. I'll bet you'll be able to come along on this. First thing I'm going to do is to make a sine wave oscillator, and we're going to called the sine wave generator "Ge." And then we're going to connect "Ge" to the DAC. Now this is kind of the abstraction for the sound output on my computer. Okay? So I've connected myself into the speaker. Next, I'm going to say my frequency is 440 hertz, and I'm going to let time advance by two seconds through this operation. All right, so if I were to play this — (Tone) — you would hear a sine wave at 440 hertz for two seconds. Okay, great. Now I'm going to copy and paste this, and then just change some of these numbers, 220.5, 440 I shall leave it as that, and .5 and 880. By doubling the frequency, we're actually going up in successive octaves, and then we have this sequence — (Tones) — of tones. Okay, great, now I can imagine creating all kinds of really horrible single sine wave pieces of music with this, but I'm going to do something that computers are really good at, which is repetition. I'm going to put this all in a while loop, and you actually don't need to indent, but this is purely for aesthetic reasons. It's good practice. And when we do this — (Tones) — that's going to go on for a while. In fact, it's probably not going to stop until this computer disintegrates. And I can't really empirically prove that to you, but I hope you'll believe me when I say that. Next, I'm going to replace this 220 by math.random2f. I'm going to generate a random number between 30 and 1,000 and send that to the frequency of me. And I'm going to do this every half a second. (Tones) Let's do this every 200 milliseconds. (Tones) One hundred. (Tones) All right. At this point, we've reached something that I would like to think of as the canonical computer music. This is, to me, the sound that mainframes are supposed to be making when they're thinking really hard. It's this sound, it's like, the square root of five million. So is this computer music? Yeah, I guess by definition, it's kind of computer music. It's probably not the kind of music you would listen to cruising down the highway, but it's a foundation of computer-generated music, and using ChucK, we've actually been building instruments in the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, based right here at Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Now the Laptop Orchestra is an ensemble of laptops, humans and special hemispherical speaker arrays. Now the reason we have these is so that for the instruments that we create out of the laptop, we want the sound to come out of somewhere near the instrument and the performer, kind of much like a traditional, acoustic instrument. Like, if I were to play a violin here, the sound would naturally not come out of the P.A. system, but from the artifact itself. So these speakers are meant to emulate that. In fact, I'm going to show you how we actually built them. The first step is to go to IKEA and buy a salad bowl. This is an 11-inch Blanda Matt. That's the actual name, and I actually use one of these to make salad at home as well, I kid you not. And the first step is you turn it upside down, and then you drill holes in them, six holes per hemi, and then make a base plate, put car speaker drivers in them along with amplifiers in the enclosure, and you put that all together and you have these hemispherical speaker arrays. Add people, add laptops, you have a laptop orchestra. And what might a laptop orchestra sound like? Well, let me give you a demonstration of about 200 instruments we've created so far for the Laptop Orchestra. And what I'm going to do is actually come over to this thing. This thing I have in front of me actually used to be a commodity gaming controller called a Gametrak. This thing actually has a glove you can put on your hands. It's tethered to the base, and this will track the position of your hands in real time. It was originally designed as a golfing controller to detect the motion of your swing. That turned out to be a rather large commercial non-success, at which point they slashed prices to 10 dollars, at which point computer music researchers said, "This is awesome! We can prototype instruments out of this." So let me show you one instrument we've created, one of many, and this instrument is called "Twilight," and it's meant to go with this metaphor of pulling a sound out of the ground. So let me see if this will work. (Music) And put it back. And then if you go to the left, right, it sounds like an elephant in pain. This is a slightly metallic sound. Turn it just a bit. (Music) It's like a hovering car. Okay. This third one is a ratchet-like interaction, so let me turn it up. (Music) So it's a slightly different interaction. The fourth one is a drone. (Music) And finally, let's see, this is a totally different interaction, and I think you have to imagine that there's this giant invisible drum sitting right here on stage, and I'm going to bang it. (Drum) (Laughter) So there we go, so that's one of many instruments in the Laptop Orchestra. (Applause) Thank you. And when you put that together, you get something that sounds like this. (Music) Okay, and so, I think from the experience of building a lot of instruments for the Laptop Orchestra, and I think from the curiosity of wondering, what if we took these hopefully expressive instruments and we brought it to a lot of people, plus then a healthy bout of insanity — put those three things together — led to me actually co-founding a startup company in 2008 called Smule. Now Smule's mission is to create expressive, mobile music things, and one of the first musical instruments we created is called Ocarina. And I'm going to just demo this for you real quick. So Ocarina — (Music) — is based on this ancient flute-like instrument called the ocarina, and this one is the four-hole English pendant configuration, and you're literally blowing into the microphone to make the sound. And there's actually a little ChucK script running in here that's detecting the strength of your blowing and also synthesizing the sound. (Music) And vibrato is mapped to the accelerometer, so you can get — (Music) All right. So let me play a little ditty for you, a little Bach. And here, you'll hear a little accompaniment with the melody. The accompaniment actually follows the melody, not the other way around. (Music) And this was designed to let you take your time and figure out where your expressive space is, and you can just hang out here for a while, for a really dramatic effect, if you want, and whenever you're ready — (Music) And on these longer notes, I'm going to use more vibrato towards the end of the notes to give it a little bit more of an expressive quality. (Music) Huh, that's a nice chord to end this excerpt on. (Applause) Thank you. So I think a good question to ask about Ocarina is, is this a toy or it an instrument? Maybe it's both, but for me, I think the more important question is, is it expressive? And at the same time, I think creating these types of instruments asks a question about the role of technology, and its place for how we make music. Apparently, for example, not that long ago, like only a hundred years ago — that's not that long in the course of human history — families back then used to make music together as a common form of entertainment. I don't think that's really happening that much anymore. You know, this is before radio, before recording. In the last hundred years, with all this technology, we now have more access to music as listeners and consumers, but somehow, I think we're making less music than ever before. I'm not sure why that would be. Maybe it's because it's too easy just to hit play. And while listening to music is wonderful, there's a special joy to making music that's all its own. And I think that's one part of the goal of why I do what I do is kind of to take us back to the past a little bit. Right? Now, if that's one goal, the other goal is to look to the future and think about what kind of new musical things can we make that we don't perhaps yet have names for that's enabled by technology, but ultimately might change the way that humans make music. And I'll just give you one example here, and this is Ocarina's other feature. This is a globe, and here you're actually listening to other users of Ocarina blow into their iPhones to play something. This is "G.I.R." from Texas, "R.I.K." I don't know why it's these three-letter names today, Los Angeles. They're all playing pretty, somewhat minimal music here. (Music) And the idea with this is that, well, technology should not be foregrounded here, and — (Laughter) — we've actually opened this up. The first thought is that, hey, you know there's somebody somewhere out there playing some music, and this is a small but I think important human connection to make that perhaps the technology affords. As a final example, and perhaps my favorite example, is that in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, a woman reached out in one of our singing apps to try to get people to join in to sing with her on a version of "Lean on Me." Now, in these apps, there's this thing that allows any user to add their voice to an existing performance by any other user or group of users, so in some sense, she's created this kind of global ad hoc corral of strangers, and within weeks, thousands of people joined in on this, and you can kind of see people coming from all around the world and all these lines converging on the origin where the first rendition of the song was sung, and that's in Tokyo. And this is what it sounds like when there's 1,000 people. This is 1,000 voices. (Recording) ♪ Sometimes in our lives ♪ ♪ We all have pain, we all have sorrow ♪ ♪ But if we are wise ♪ ♪ We know that there's always tomorrow ♪ ♪ Lean on me ♪ ♪ When you're not strong ♪ ♪ And I'll be your friend ♪ ♪ I'll help you carry on ♪ ♪ For it won't be long ♪ ♪ Till I'm gonna need ♪ ♪ Somebody to lean on ♪ ♪ Just lean on — ♪ Is this computer music? (Applause) Was that computer music? Yeah, I guess so; it's something that you really couldn't have done without computers. But at the same time, it's also just human, and I think what I've essentially answered so far is maybe why I do the stuff that I do, and let's just finally return to the first question: What is computer music? And I think that the catch here is that, at least to me, computer music isn't really about computers. It is about people. It's about how we can use technology to change the way we think and do and make music, and maybe even add to how we can connect with each other through music. And with that, I want to say, this is computer music, and thank you for listening. (Applause) |
How to speak so that people want to listen | {0: 'Julian Treasure studies sound and advises businesses on how best to use it.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say "I love you." And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them. And why is that? How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world? What I'd like to suggest, there are a number of habits that we need to move away from. I've assembled for your pleasure here seven deadly sins of speaking. I'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list, but these seven, I think, are pretty large habits that we can all fall into. First, gossip. Speaking ill of somebody who's not present. Not a nice habit, and we know perfectly well the person gossiping, five minutes later, will be gossiping about us. Second, judging. We know people who are like this in conversation, and it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time. Third, negativity. You can fall into this. My mother, in the last years of her life, became very negative, and it's hard to listen. I remember one day, I said to her, "It's October 1 today," and she said, "I know, isn't it dreadful?" (Laughter) It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative. (Laughter) And another form of negativity, complaining. Well, this is the national art of the U.K. It's our national sport. We complain about the weather, sport, about politics, about everything, but actually, complaining is viral misery. It's not spreading sunshine and lightness in the world. Excuses. We've all met this guy. Maybe we've all been this guy. Some people have a blamethrower. They just pass it on to everybody else and don't take responsibility for their actions, and again, hard to listen to somebody who is being like that. Penultimate, the sixth of the seven, embroidery, exaggeration. It demeans our language, actually, sometimes. For example, if I see something that really is awesome, what do I call it? (Laughter) And then, of course, this exaggeration becomes lying, and we don't want to listen to people we know are lying to us. And finally, dogmatism. The confusion of facts with opinions. When those two things get conflated, you're listening into the wind. You know, somebody is bombarding you with their opinions as if they were true. It's difficult to listen to that. So here they are, seven deadly sins of speaking. These are things I think we need to avoid. But is there a positive way to think about this? Yes, there is. I'd like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones, foundations, that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world. Fortunately, these things spell a word. The word is "hail," and it has a great definition as well. I'm not talking about the stuff that falls from the sky and hits you on the head. I'm talking about this definition, to greet or acclaim enthusiastically, which is how I think our words will be received if we stand on these four things. So what do they stand for? See if you can guess. The H, honesty, of course, being true in what you say, being straight and clear. The A is authenticity, just being yourself. A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth, which I think is a lovely way to put it. The I is integrity, being your word, actually doing what you say, and being somebody people can trust. And the L is love. I don't mean romantic love, but I do mean wishing people well, for two reasons. First of all, I think absolute honesty may not be what we want. I mean, my goodness, you look ugly this morning. Perhaps that's not necessary. Tempered with love, of course, honesty is a great thing. But also, if you're really wishing somebody well, it's very hard to judge them at the same time. I'm not even sure you can do those two things simultaneously. So hail. Also, now that's what you say, and it's like the old song, it is what you say, it's also the way that you say it. You have an amazing toolbox. This instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened. I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with, which will increase the power of your speaking. Register, for example. Now, falsetto register may not be very useful most of the time, but there's a register in between. I'm not going to get very technical about this for any of you who are voice coaches. You can locate your voice, however. So if I talk up here in my nose, you can hear the difference. If I go down here in my throat, which is where most of us speak from most of the time. But if you want weight, you need to go down here to the chest. You hear the difference? We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority. That's register. Then we have timbre. It's the way your voice feels. Again, the research shows that we prefer voices which are rich, smooth, warm, like hot chocolate. Well if that's not you, that's not the end of the world, because you can train. Go and get a voice coach. And there are amazing things you can do with breathing, with posture, and with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice. Then prosody. I love prosody. This is the sing-song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. It's root one for meaning in conversation. People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they don't have any prosody at all. That's where the word "monotonic" comes from, or monotonous, monotone. Also, we have repetitive prosody now coming in, where every sentence ends as if it were a question when it's actually not a question, it's a statement? (Laughter) And if you repeat that one, it's actually restricting your ability to communicate through prosody, which I think is a shame, so let's try and break that habit. Pace. I can get very excited by saying something really quickly, or I can slow right down to emphasize, and at the end of that, of course, is our old friend silence. There's nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk, is there? We don't have to fill it with ums and ahs. It can be very powerful. Of course, pitch often goes along with pace to indicate arousal, but you can do it just with pitch. Where did you leave my keys? (Higher pitch) Where did you leave my keys? So, slightly different meaning in those two deliveries. And finally, volume. (Loud) I can get really excited by using volume. Sorry about that, if I startled anybody. Or, I can have you really pay attention by getting very quiet. Some people broadcast the whole time. Try not to do that. That's called sodcasting, (Laughter) Imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately. Not nice. Of course, where this all comes into play most of all is when you've got something really important to do. It might be standing on a stage like this and giving a talk to people. It might be proposing marriage, asking for a raise, a wedding speech. Whatever it is, if it's really important, you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it's going to work on, and no engine works well without being warmed up. Warm up your voice. Actually, let me show you how to do that. Would you all like to stand up for a moment? I'm going to show you the six vocal warm-up exercises that I do before every talk I ever do. Any time you're going to talk to anybody important, do these. First, arms up, deep breath in, and sigh out, ahhhhh, like that. One more time. Ahhhh, very good. Now we're going to warm up our lips, and we're going to go Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba. Very good. And now, brrrrrrrrrr, just like when you were a kid. Brrrr. Now your lips should be coming alive. We're going to do the tongue next with exaggerated la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. Beautiful. You're getting really good at this. And then, roll an R. Rrrrrrr. That's like champagne for the tongue. Finally, and if I can only do one, the pros call this the siren. It's really good. It starts with "we" and goes to "aw." The "we" is high, the "aw" is low. So you go, weeeaawww, weeeaawww. Fantastic. Give yourselves a round of applause. Take a seat, thank you. (Applause) Next time you speak, do those in advance. Now let me just put this in context to close. This is a serious point here. This is where we are now, right? We speak not very well to people who simply aren't listening in an environment that's all about noise and bad acoustics. I have talked about that on this stage in different phases. What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose? Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound? That would be a world that does sound beautiful, and one where understanding would be the norm, and that is an idea worth spreading. Thank you. (Applause) |
The 1s and 0s behind cyber warfare | {0: 'Chris Domas is an embedded systems engineer and cybersecurity researcher.'} | TEDxColumbus | This is a lot of ones and zeros. It's what we call binary information. This is how computers talk. It's how they store information. It's how computers think. It's how computers do everything it is that computers do. I'm a cybersecurity researcher, which means my job is to sit down with this information and try to make sense of it, to try to understand what all the ones and zeroes mean. Unfortunately for me, we're not just talking about the ones and zeros I have on the screen here. We're not just talking about a few pages of ones and zeros. We're talking about billions and billions of ones and zeros, more than anyone could possibly comprehend. Now, as exciting as that sounds, when I first started doing cyber — (Laughter) — when I first started doing cyber, I wasn't sure that sifting through ones and zeros was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, because in my mind, cyber was keeping viruses off of my grandma's computer, it was keeping people's Myspace pages from being hacked, and maybe, maybe on my most glorious day, it was keeping someone's credit card information from being stolen. Those are important things, but that's not how I wanted to spend my life. But after 30 minutes of work as a defense contractor, I soon found out that my idea of cyber was a little bit off. In fact, in terms of national security, keeping viruses off of my grandma's computer was surprisingly low on their priority list. And the reason for that is cyber is so much bigger than any one of those things. Cyber is an integral part of all of our lives, because computers are an integral part of all of our lives, even if you don't own a computer. Computers control everything in your car, from your GPS to your airbags. They control your phone. They're the reason you can call 911 and get someone on the other line. They control our nation's entire infrastructure. They're the reason you have electricity, heat, clean water, food. Computers control our military equipment, everything from missile silos to satellites to nuclear defense networks. All of these things are made possible because of computers, and therefore because of cyber, and when something goes wrong, cyber can make all of these things impossible. But that's where I step in. A big part of my job is defending all of these things, keeping them working, but once in a while, part of my job is to break one of these things, because cyber isn't just about defense, it's also about offense. We're entering an age where we talk about cyberweapons. In fact, so great is the potential for cyber offense that cyber is considered a new domain of warfare. Warfare. It's not necessarily a bad thing. On the one hand, it means we have whole new front on which we need to defend ourselves, but on the other hand, it means we have a whole new way to attack, a whole new way to stop evil people from doing evil things. So let's consider an example of this that's completely theoretical. Suppose a terrorist wants to blow up a building, and he wants to do this again and again in the future. So he doesn't want to be in that building when it explodes. He's going to use a cell phone as a remote detonator. Now, it used to be the only way we had to stop this terrorist was with a hail of bullets and a car chase, but that's not necessarily true anymore. We're entering an age where we can stop him with the press of a button from 1,000 miles away, because whether he knew it or not, as soon as he decided to use his cell phone, he stepped into the realm of cyber. A well-crafted cyber attack could break into his phone, disable the overvoltage protections on his battery, drastically overload the circuit, cause the battery to overheat, and explode. No more phone, no more detonator, maybe no more terrorist, all with the press of a button from a thousand miles away. So how does this work? It all comes back to those ones and zeros. Binary information makes your phone work, and used correctly, it can make your phone explode. So when you start to look at cyber from this perspective, spending your life sifting through binary information starts to seem kind of exciting. But here's the catch: This is hard, really, really hard, and here's why. Think about everything you have on your cell phone. You've got the pictures you've taken. You've got the music you listen to. You've got your contacts list, your email, and probably 500 apps you've never used in your entire life, and behind all of this is the software, the code, that controls your phone, and somewhere, buried inside of that code, is a tiny piece that controls your battery, and that's what I'm really after, but all of this, just a bunch of ones and zeros, and it's all just mixed together. In cyber, we call this finding a needle in a stack of needles, because everything pretty much looks alike. I'm looking for one key piece, but it just blends in with everything else. So let's step back from this theoretical situation of making a terrorist's phone explode, and look at something that actually happened to me. Pretty much no matter what I do, my job always starts with sitting down with a whole bunch of binary information, and I'm always looking for one key piece to do something specific. In this case, I was looking for a very advanced, very high-tech piece of code that I knew I could hack, but it was somewhere buried inside of a billion ones and zeroes. Unfortunately for me, I didn't know quite what I was looking for. I didn't know quite what it would look like, which makes finding it really, really hard. When I have to do that, what I have to do is basically look at various pieces of this binary information, try to decipher each piece, and see if it might be what I'm after. So after a while, I thought I had found the piece I was looking for. I thought maybe this was it. It seemed to be about right, but I couldn't quite tell. I couldn't tell what those ones and zeros represented. So I spent some time trying to put this together, but wasn't having a whole lot of luck, and finally I decided, I'm going to get through this, I'm going to come in on a weekend, and I'm not going to leave until I figure out what this represents. So that's what I did. I came in on a Saturday morning, and about 10 hours in, I sort of had all the pieces to the puzzle. I just didn't know how they fit together. I didn't know what these ones and zeros meant. At the 15-hour mark, I started to get a better picture of what was there, but I had a creeping suspicion that what I was looking at was not at all related to what I was looking for. By 20 hours, the pieces started to come together very slowly — (Laughter) — and I was pretty sure I was going down the wrong path at this point, but I wasn't going to give up. After 30 hours in the lab, I figured out exactly what I was looking at, and I was right, it wasn't what I was looking for. I spent 30 hours piecing together the ones and zeros that formed a picture of a kitten. (Laughter) I wasted 30 hours of my life searching for this kitten that had nothing at all to do with what I was trying to accomplish. So I was frustrated, I was exhausted. After 30 hours in the lab, I probably smelled horrible. But instead of just going home and calling it quits, I took a step back and asked myself, what went wrong here? How could I make such a stupid mistake? I'm really pretty good at this. I do this for a living. So what happened? Well I thought, when you're looking at information at this level, it's so easy to lose track of what you're doing. It's easy to not see the forest through the trees. It's easy to go down the wrong rabbit hole and waste a tremendous amount of time doing the wrong thing. But I had this epiphany. We were looking at the data completely incorrectly since day one. This is how computers think, ones and zeros. It's not how people think, but we've been trying to adapt our minds to think more like computers so that we can understand this information. Instead of trying to make our minds fit the problem, we should have been making the problem fit our minds, because our brains have a tremendous potential for analyzing huge amounts of information, just not like this. So what if we could unlock that potential just by translating this to the right kind of information? So with these ideas in mind, I sprinted out of my basement lab at work to my basement lab at home, which looked pretty much the same. The main difference is, at work, I'm surrounded by cyber materials, and cyber seemed to be the problem in this situation. At home, I'm surrounded by everything else I've ever learned. So I poured through every book I could find, every idea I'd ever encountered, to see how could we translate a problem from one domain to something completely different? The biggest question was, what do we want to translate it to? What do our brains do perfectly naturally that we could exploit? My answer was vision. We have a tremendous capability to analyze visual information. We can combine color gradients, depth cues, all sorts of these different signals into one coherent picture of the world around us. That's incredible. So if we could find a way to translate these binary patterns to visual signals, we could really unlock the power of our brains to process this stuff. So I started looking at the binary information, and I asked myself, what do I do when I first encounter something like this? And the very first thing I want to do, the very first question I want to answer, is what is this? I don't care what it does, how it works. All I want to know is, what is this? And the way I can figure that out is by looking at chunks, sequential chunks of binary information, and I look at the relationships between those chunks. When I gather up enough of these sequences, I begin to get an idea of exactly what this information must be. So let's go back to that blow up the terrorist's phone situation. This is what English text looks like at a binary level. This is what your contacts list would look like if I were examining it. It's really hard to analyze this at this level, but if we take those same binary chunks that I would be trying to find, and instead translate that to a visual representation, translate those relationships, this is what we get. This is what English text looks like from a visual abstraction perspective. All of a sudden, it shows us all the same information that was in the ones and zeros, but show us it in an entirely different way, a way that we can immediately comprehend. We can instantly see all of the patterns here. It takes me seconds to pick out patterns here, but hours, days, to pick them out in ones and zeros. It takes minutes for anybody to learn what these patterns represent here, but years of experience in cyber to learn what those same patterns represent in ones and zeros. So this piece is caused by lower case letters followed by lower case letters inside of that contact list. This is upper case by upper case, upper case by lower case, lower case by upper case. This is caused by spaces. This is caused by carriage returns. We can go through every little detail of the binary information in seconds, as opposed to weeks, months, at this level. This is what an image looks like from your cell phone. But this is what it looks like in a visual abstraction. This is what your music looks like, but here's its visual abstraction. Most importantly for me, this is what the code on your cell phone looks like. This is what I'm after in the end, but this is its visual abstraction. If I can find this, I can't make the phone explode. I could spend weeks trying to find this in ones and zeros, but it takes me seconds to pick out a visual abstraction like this. One of those most remarkable parts about all of this is it gives us an entirely new way to understand new information, stuff that we haven't seen before. So I know what English looks like at a binary level, and I know what its visual abstraction looks like, but I've never seen Russian binary in my entire life. It would take me weeks just to figure out what I was looking at from raw ones and zeros, but because our brains can instantly pick up and recognize these subtle patterns inside of these visual abstractions, we can unconsciously apply those in new situations. So this is what Russian looks like in a visual abstraction. Because I know what one language looks like, I can recognize other languages even when I'm not familiar with them. This is what a photograph looks like, but this is what clip art looks like. This is what the code on your phone looks like, but this is what the code on your computer looks like. Our brains can pick up on these patterns in ways that we never could have from looking at raw ones and zeros. But we've really only scratched the surface of what we can do with this approach. We've only begun to unlock the capabilities of our minds to process visual information. If we take those same concepts and translate them into three dimensions instead, we find entirely new ways of making sense of information. In seconds, we can pick out every pattern here. we can see the cross associated with code. We can see cubes associated with text. We can even pick up the tiniest visual artifacts. Things that would take us weeks, months to find in ones and zeroes, are immediately apparent in some sort of visual abstraction, and as we continue to go through this and throw more and more information at it, what we find is that we're capable of processing billions of ones and zeros in a matter of seconds just by using our brain's built-in ability to analyze patterns. So this is really nice and helpful, but all this tells me is what I'm looking at. So at this point, based on visual patterns, I can find the code on the phone. But that's not enough to blow up a battery. The next thing I need to find is the code that controls the battery, but we're back to the needle in a stack of needles problem. That code looks pretty much like all the other code on that system. So I might not be able to find the code that controls the battery, but there's a lot of things that are very similar to that. You have code that controls your screen, that controls your buttons, that controls your microphones, so even if I can't find the code for the battery, I bet I can find one of those things. So the next step in my binary analysis process is to look at pieces of information that are similar to each other. It's really, really hard to do at a binary level, but if we translate those similarities to a visual abstraction instead, I don't even have to sift through the raw data. All I have to do is wait for the image to light up to see when I'm at similar pieces. I follow these strands of similarity like a trail of bread crumbs to find exactly what I'm looking for. So at this point in the process, I've located the code responsible for controlling your battery, but that's still not enough to blow up a phone. The last piece of the puzzle is understanding how that code controls your battery. For this, I need to identify very subtle, very detailed relationships within that binary information, another very hard thing to do when looking at ones and zeros. But if we translate that information into a physical representation, we can sit back and let our visual cortex do all the hard work. It can find all the detailed patterns, all the important pieces, for us. It can find out exactly how the pieces of that code work together to control that battery. All of this can be done in a matter of hours, whereas the same process would have taken months in the past. This is all well and good in a theoretical blow up a terrorist's phone situation. I wanted to find out if this would really work in the work I do every day. So I was playing around with these same concepts with some of the data I've looked at in the past, and yet again, I was trying to find a very detailed, specific piece of code inside of a massive piece of binary information. So I looked at it at this level, thinking I was looking at the right thing, only to see this doesn't have the connectivity I would have expected for the code I was looking for. In fact, I'm not really sure what this is, but when I stepped back a level and looked at the similarities within the code I saw, this doesn't have similarities like any code that exists out there. I can't even be looking at code. In fact, from this perspective, I could tell, this isn't code. This is an image of some sort. And from here, I can see, it's not just an image, this is a photograph. Now that I know it's a photograph, I've got dozens of other binary translation techniques to visualize and understand that information, so in a matter of seconds, we can take this information, shove it through a dozen other visual translation techniques in order to find out exactly what we were looking at. I saw — (Laughter) — it was that darn kitten again. All this is enabled because we were able to find a way to translate a very hard problem to something our brains do very naturally. So what does this mean? Well, for kittens, it means no more hiding in ones and zeros. For me, it means no more wasted weekends. For cyber, it means we have a radical new way to tackle the most impossible problems. It means we have a new weapon in the evolving theater of cyber warfare, but for all of us, it means that cyber engineers now have the ability to become first responders in emergency situations. When seconds count, we've unlocked the means to stop the bad guys. Thank you. (Applause) |
The loves and lies of fireflies | {0: 'Evolutionary ecologist Sara Lewis digs deep into firefly mating rituals to uncover a world of secret languages and strange gifts in these silent sparks.'} | TED2014 | As a scientist, and also as a human being, I've been trying to make myself susceptible to wonder. I think Jason Webley last night called it "conspiring to be part of the magic." So it's fortunate that my career as a biologist lets me dive deeply into the lives of some truly wondrous creatures that share our planet: fireflies. Now, for many of you, I know that fireflies might conjure up some really great memories: childhood, summertime, even other TED Talks. Maybe something like this. My seduction into the world of fireflies began when I was back in graduate school. One evening, I was sitting out in my backyard in North Carolina, and suddenly, these silent sparks rose up all around me, and I began to wonder: How do these creatures make light, and what's with all this flashing? Are they talking to one another? And what happens after the lights go out? I've been lucky enough to answer some of these questions as I've explored this nocturnal world. Now if you've ever seen or even heard about fireflies, then you'll know how magically they can transform our everyday landscape into something ethereal and otherworldly, and this happens around the globe, like this hillside in the Smoky Mountains that I saw transformed into a living cascade of light by the eerie glows of these blue ghost fireflies, or a roadside river that I visited in Japan as it was giving birth to the slow, floating flashes of these Genji fireflies, or in Malaysia, the mangrove trees that I watched blossom nightly not with flowers but with the lights of a thousand — (Bleep! Bleep!) — fireflies, all blinking together in stunning synchrony. These luminous landscapes still fill me with wonder, and they keep me connected to the magic of the natural world. And I find it amazing that they're created by these tiny insects. In person, fireflies are charming. They're charismatic. They've been celebrated in art and in poetry for centuries. As I've traveled around the world, I've met many thoughtful people who have told me that God put fireflies on Earth for humans to enjoy. Other creatures can enjoy them too. I think these graceful insects are truly miraculous because they so beautifully illuminate the creative improvisation of evolution. They've been shaped by two powerful evolutionary forces: natural selection, the struggle for survival, and sexual selection, the struggle for reproductive opportunity. As a firefly junkie, the past 20 years have been quite an exciting ride. Together with my students at Tufts University and other colleagues, we've made lots of new discoveries about fireflies: their courtship and sex lives, their treachery and murder. So today I'd like to share with you just a couple of tales that we've brought back from our collective adventures into this hidden world. Fireflies belong to a very beautiful and diverse group of insects, the beetles. Worldwide, there are more than 2,000 firefly species, and these have evolved remarkably diverse courtship signals, that is, different ways to find and attract mates. Around 150 million years ago, the very first fireflies probably looked like this. They flew during the daytime and they didn't light up. Instead, males used their fantastic antennae to sniff out perfumes given off by their females. In other fireflies, it's only the females who light up. They are attractively plump and wingless, so every night, they climb up onto perches and they glow brightly for hours to attract their flying but unlit males. In still other fireflies, both sexes use quick, bright flashes to find their mates. Here in North America, we have more than 100 different kinds of firefly that have the remarkable ability to shine energy out from their bodies in the form of light. How do they do that? It seems totally magical, but these bioluminescent signals arise from carefully orchestrated chemical reactions that happen inside the firefly lantern. The main star is an enzyme called luciferase, which in the course of evolution has figured out a way to wrap its tiny arms around an even smaller molecule called luciferin, in the process getting it so excited that it actually gives off light. Incredible. But how could these bright lights have benefited some proto-firefly? To answer this question, we need to flip back in the family album to some baby pictures. Fireflies completely reinvent their bodies as they grow. They spend the vast majority of their lifetime, up to two years, in this larval form. Their main goal here, like my teenagers, is to eat and grow. And firefly light first originated in these juveniles. Every single firefly larva can light up, even when their adults can't. But what's the point to being so conspicuous? Well, we know that these juveniles make nasty-tasting chemicals that help them survive their extended childhood, so we think these lights first evolved as a warning, a neon sign that says, "Toxic! Stay away!" to any would-be predators. It took many millions of years before these bright lights evolved into a smart communication tool that could be used not just to ward off potential predators but to bring in potential mates. Driven now by sexual selection, some adult fireflies like this proud male evolved a shiny new glow-in-the-dark lantern that would let them take courtship to a whole new level. These adults only live a few weeks, and now they're single-mindedly focused on sex, that is, on propelling their genes into the next firefly generation. So we can follow this male out into the field as he joins hundreds of other males who are all showing off their new courtship signals. It's amazing to think that the luminous displays we admire here and in fact everywhere around the world are actually the silent love songs of male fireflies. They're flying and flashing their hearts out. I still find it very romantic. But meanwhile, where are all the females? Well, they're lounging down below surveying their options. They have plenty of males to choose from, and these females turn out to be very picky. When a female sees a flash from an especially attractive male, she'll aim her lantern in his direction, and give him a flash back. It's her "come hither" sign. So he flies closer and he flashes again. If she still likes him, they'll strike up a conversation. These creatures speak their love in the language of light. So what exactly do these females consider sexy? We decided to conduct some firefly opinion polls to find out. When we tested females using blinking LED lights, we discovered they prefer males who give longer-lasting flashes. (Laughter) (Applause) I know you're wondering, what gives these males their sex appeal? Now we get to see what happens when the lights go out. The first thing we discovered is that once a male and female hook up like this, they stay together all night long, and when we looked inside to see what might be happening, we discovered a surprising new twist to firefly sex. While they're mating, the male is busy giving the female not just his sperm but also a nutrient-filled package called a nuptial gift. We can zoom in to look more closely inside this mating pair. We can actually see the gift — it's shown here in red — as it's being passed from the male to the female. What makes this gift so valuable is that it's packed with protein that the female will use to provision her eggs. So females are keeping their eyes on this prize as they size up potential mates. We discovered that females use male flash signals to try to predict which males have the biggest gifts to offer, because this bling helps the female lay more eggs and ultimately launch more of her own offspring into the next generation. So it's not all sweetness and light. Firefly romance is risky. For the most part, these adult fireflies don't get eaten because like their juveniles they can manufacture toxins that are repellent to birds and other insectivores, but somewhere along the line, one particular group of fireflies somehow lost the metabolic machinery needed to make their own protective toxins. This evolutionary flaw, which was discovered by my colleague Tom Eisner, has driven these fireflies to take their bright lights out into the night with treacherous intent. Dubbed "femme fatales" by Jim Lloyd, another colleague, these females have figured out how to target the males of other firefly species. So the hunt begins with the predator — she's shown here in the lower left — where she's sitting quietly and eavesdropping on the courtship conversation of her intended prey, and here's how it might go. First the prey male flashes, "Do you love me?" His own female responds, "Maybe." So then he flashes again. But this time, the predator sneaks in a reply that cleverly mimics exactly what the other female just said. She's not looking for love: she's looking for toxins. If she's good, she can lure this male close enough to reach out and grab him, and he's not just a light snack. Over the next hour, she slowly exsanguinates this male leaving behind just some gory remains. Unable to make their own toxins, these females resort to drinking the blood of other fireflies to get these protective chemicals. So a firefly vampire, brought to you by natural selection. We still have a lot to learn about fireflies, but it looks like many stories will remain untold, because around the world, firefly populations are blinking out. The main culprit: habitat loss. Pretty much everywhere, the fields and forests, the mangroves and meadows that fireflies need to survive, are giving way to development and to sprawl. Here's another problem: we've conquered darkness, but in the process, we spill so much extra light out into the night that it disrupts the lives of other creatures, and fireflies are especially sensitive to light pollution because it obscures the signals that they use to find their mates. Do we really need fireflies? After all, they're just one tiny bit of Earth's biodiversity. Yet every time a species is lost, it's like extinguishing a room full of candles one by one. You might not notice when the first few flames flicker out, but in the end, you're left sitting in darkness. As we work together to craft a planetary future, I hope we can find a way to keep these bright lights shining. Thank you. (Applause) |
Which country does the most good for the world? | {0: 'After 20 years working with the presidents and prime ministers of 54 countries, Simon Anholt has a plan to make the world work better.'} | TEDSalon Berlin 2014 | I've been thinking a lot about the world recently and how it's changed over the last 20, 30, 40 years. Twenty or 30 years ago, if a chicken caught a cold and sneezed and died in a remote village in East Asia, it would have been a tragedy for the chicken and its closest relatives, but I don't think there was much possibility of us fearing a global pandemic and the deaths of millions. Twenty or 30 years ago, if a bank in North America lent too much money to some people who couldn't afford to pay it back and the bank went bust, that was bad for the lender and bad for the borrower, but we didn't imagine it would bring the global economic system to its knees for nearly a decade. This is globalization. This is the miracle that has enabled us to transship our bodies and our minds and our words and our pictures and our ideas and our teaching and our learning around the planet ever faster and ever cheaper. It's brought a lot of bad stuff, like the stuff that I just described, but it's also brought a lot of good stuff. A lot of us are not aware of the extraordinary successes of the Millennium Development Goals, several of which have achieved their targets long before the due date. That proves that this species of humanity is capable of achieving extraordinary progress if it really acts together and it really tries hard. But if I had to put it in a nutshell these days, I sort of feel that globalization has taken us by surprise, and we've been slow to respond to it. If you look at the downside of globalization, it really does seem to be sometimes overwhelming. All of the grand challenges that we face today, like climate change and human rights and demographics and terrorism and pandemics and narco-trafficking and human slavery and species loss, I could go on, we're not making an awful lot of progress against an awful lot of those challenges. So in a nutshell, that's the challenge that we all face today at this interesting point in history. That's clearly what we've got to do next. We've somehow got to get our act together and we've got to figure out how to globalize the solutions better so that we don't simply become a species which is the victim of the globalization of problems. Why are we so slow at achieving these advances? What's the reason for it? Well, there are, of course, a number of reasons, but perhaps the primary reason is because we're still organized as a species in the same way that we were organized 200 or 300 years ago. There's one superpower left on the planet and that is the seven billion people, the seven billion of us who cause all these problems, the same seven billion, by the way, who will resolve them all. But how are those seven billion organized? They're still organized in 200 or so nation-states, and the nations have governments that make rules and cause us to behave in certain ways. And that's a pretty efficient system, but the problem is that the way that those laws are made and the way those governments think is absolutely wrong for the solution of global problems, because it all looks inwards. The politicians that we elect and the politicians we don't elect, on the whole, have minds that microscope. They don't have minds that telescope. They look in. They pretend, they behave, as if they believed that every country was an island that existed quite happily, independently of all the others on its own little planet in its own little solar system. This is the problem: countries competing against each other, countries fighting against each other. This week, as any week you care to look at, you'll find people actually trying to kill each other from country to country, but even when that's not going on, there's competition between countries, each one trying to shaft the next. This is clearly not a good arrangement. We clearly need to change it. We clearly need to find ways of encouraging countries to start working together a little bit better. And why won't they do that? Why is it that our leaders still persist in looking inwards? Well, the first and most obvious reason is because that's what we ask them to do. That's what we tell them to do. When we elect governments or when we tolerate unelected governments, we're effectively telling them that what we want is for them to deliver us in our country a certain number of things. We want them to deliver prosperity, growth, competitiveness, transparency, justice and all of those things. So unless we start asking our governments to think outside a little bit, to consider the global problems that will finish us all if we don't start considering them, then we can hardly blame them if what they carry on doing is looking inwards, if they still have minds that microscope rather than minds that telescope. That's the first reason why things tend not to change. The second reason is that these governments, just like all the rest of us, are cultural psychopaths. I don't mean to be rude, but you know what a psychopath is. A psychopath is a person who, unfortunately for him or her, lacks the ability to really empathize with other human beings. When they look around, they don't see other human beings with deep, rich, three-dimensional personal lives and aims and ambitions. What they see is cardboard cutouts, and it's very sad and it's very lonely, and it's very rare, fortunately. But actually, aren't most of us not really so very good at empathy? Oh sure, we're very good at empathy when it's a question of dealing with people who kind of look like us and kind of walk and talk and eat and pray and wear like us, but when it comes to people who don't do that, who don't quite dress like us and don't quite pray like us and don't quite talk like us, do we not also have a tendency to see them ever so slightly as cardboard cutouts too? And this is a question we need to ask ourselves. I think constantly we have to monitor it. Are we and our politicians to a degree cultural psychopaths? The third reason is hardly worth mentioning because it's so silly, but there's a belief amongst governments that the domestic agenda and the international agenda are incompatible and always will be. This is just nonsense. In my day job, I'm a policy adviser. I've spent the last 15 years or so advising governments around the world, and in all of that time I have never once seen a single domestic policy issue that could not be more imaginatively, effectively and rapidly resolved than by treating it as an international problem, looking at the international context, comparing what others have done, bringing in others, working externally instead of working internally. And so you may say, well, given all of that, why then doesn't it work? Why can we not make our politicians change? Why can't we demand them? Well I, like a lot of us, spend a lot of time complaining about how hard it is to make people change, and I don't think we should fuss about it. I think we should just accept that we are an inherently conservative species. We don't like to change. It exists for very sensible evolutionary reasons. We probably wouldn't still be here today if we weren't so resistant to change. It's very simple: Many thousands of years ago, we discovered that if we carried on doing the same things, we wouldn't die, because the things that we've done before by definition didn't kill us, and therefore as long as we carry on doing them, we'll be okay, and it's very sensible not to do anything new, because it might kill you. But of course, there are exceptions to that. Otherwise, we'd never get anywhere. And one of the exceptions, the interesting exception, is when you can show to people that there might be some self-interest in them making that leap of faith and changing a little bit. So I've spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years trying to find out what could be that self-interest that would encourage not just politicians but also businesses and general populations, all of us, to start to think a little more outwardly, to think in a bigger picture, not always to look inwards, sometimes to look outwards. And this is where I discovered something quite important. In 2005, I launched a study called the Nation Brands Index. What it is, it's a very large-scale study that polls a very large sample of the world's population, a sample that represents about 70 percent of the planet's population, and I started asking them a series of questions about how they perceive other countries. And the Nation Brands Index over the years has grown to be a very, very large database. It's about 200 billion data points tracking what ordinary people think about other countries and why. Why did I do this? Well, because the governments that I advise are very, very keen on knowing how they are regarded. They've known, partly because I've encouraged them to realize it, that countries depend enormously on their reputations in order to survive and prosper in the world. If a country has a great, positive image, like Germany has or Sweden or Switzerland, everything is easy and everything is cheap. You get more tourists. You get more investors. You sell your products more expensively. If, on the other hand, you have a country with a very weak or a very negative image, everything is difficult and everything is expensive. So governments care desperately about the image of their country, because it makes a direct difference to how much money they can make, and that's what they've promised their populations they're going to deliver. So a couple of years ago, I thought I would take some time out and speak to that gigantic database and ask it, why do some people prefer one country more than another? And the answer that the database gave me completely staggered me. It was 6.8. I haven't got time to explain in detail. Basically what it told me was — (Laughter) (Applause) — the kinds of countries we prefer are good countries. We don't admire countries primarily because they're rich, because they're powerful, because they're successful, because they're modern, because they're technologically advanced. We primarily admire countries that are good. What do we mean by good? We mean countries that seem to contribute something to the world in which we live, countries that actually make the world safer or better or richer or fairer. Those are the countries we like. This is a discovery of significant importance — you see where I'm going — because it squares the circle. I can now say, and often do, to any government, in order to do well, you need to do good. If you want to sell more products, if you want to get more investment, if you want to become more competitive, then you need to start behaving, because that's why people will respect you and do business with you, and therefore, the more you collaborate, the more competitive you become. This is quite an important discovery, and as soon as I discovered this, I felt another index coming on. I swear that as I get older, my ideas become simpler and more and more childish. This one is called the Good Country Index, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. It measures, or at least it tries to measure, exactly how much each country on Earth contributes not to its own population but to the rest of humanity. Bizarrely, nobody had ever thought of measuring this before. So my colleague Dr. Robert Govers and I have spent the best part of the last two years, with the help of a large number of very serious and clever people, cramming together all the reliable data in the world we could find about what countries give to the world. And you're waiting for me to tell you which one comes top. And I'm going to tell you, but first of all I want to tell you precisely what I mean when I say a good country. I do not mean morally good. When I say that Country X is the goodest country on Earth, and I mean goodest, I don't mean best. Best is something different. When you're talking about a good country, you can be good, gooder and goodest. It's not the same thing as good, better and best. This is a country which simply gives more to humanity than any other country. I don't talk about how they behave at home because that's measured elsewhere. And the winner is Ireland. (Applause) According to the data here, no country on Earth, per head of population, per dollar of GDP, contributes more to the world that we live in than Ireland. What does this mean? This means that as we go to sleep at night, all of us in the last 15 seconds before we drift off to sleep, our final thought should be, godammit, I'm glad that Ireland exists. (Laughter) And that — (Applause) — In the depths of a very severe economic recession, I think that there's a really important lesson there, that if you can remember your international obligations whilst you are trying to rebuild your own economy, that's really something. Finland ranks pretty much the same. The only reason why it's below Ireland is because its lowest score is lower than Ireland's lowest score. Now the other thing you'll notice about the top 10 there is, of course, they're all, apart from New Zealand, Western European nations. They're also all rich. This depressed me, because one of the things that I did not want to discover with this index is that it's purely the province of rich countries to help poor countries. This is not what it's all about. And indeed, if you look further down the list, I don't have the slide here, you will see something that made me very happy indeed, that Kenya is in the top 30, and that demonstrates one very, very important thing. This is not about money. This is about attitude. This is about culture. This is about a government and a people that care about the rest of the world and have the imagination and the courage to think outwards instead of only thinking selfishly. I'm going to whip through the other slides just so you can see some of the lower-lying countries. There's Germany at 13th, the U.S. comes 21st, Mexico comes 66th, and then we have some of the big developing countries, like Russia at 95th, China at 107th. Countries like China and Russia and India, which is down in the same part of the index, well, in some ways, it's not surprising. They've spent a great deal of time over the last decades building their own economy, building their own society and their own polity, but it is to be hoped that the second phase of their growth will be somewhat more outward-looking than the first phase has been so far. And then you can break down each country in terms of the actual datasets that build into it. I'll allow you to do that. From midnight tonight it's going to be on goodcountry.org, and you can look at the country. You can look right down to the level of the individual datasets. Now that's the Good Country Index. What's it there for? Well, it's there really because I want to try to introduce this word, or reintroduce this word, into the discourse. I've had enough hearing about competitive countries. I've had enough hearing about prosperous, wealthy, fast-growing countries. I've even had enough hearing about happy countries because in the end that's still selfish. That's still about us, and if we carry on thinking about us, we are in deep, deep trouble. I think we all know what it is that we want to hear about. We want to hear about good countries, and so I want to ask you all a favor. I'm not asking a lot. It's something that you might find easy to do and you might even find enjoyable and even helpful to do, and that's simply to start using the word "good" in this context. When you think about your own country, when you think about other people's countries, when you think about companies, when you talk about the world that we live in today, start using that word in the way that I've talked about this evening. Not good, the opposite of bad, because that's an argument that never finishes. Good, the opposite of selfish, good being a country that thinks about all of us. That's what I would like you to do, and I'd like you to use it as a stick with which to beat your politicians. When you elect them, when you reelect them, when you vote for them, when you listen to what they're offering you, use that word, "good," and ask yourself, "Is that what a good country would do?" And if the answer is no, be very suspicious. Ask yourself, is that the behavior of my country? Do I want to come from a country where the government, in my name, is doing things like that? Or do I, on the other hand, prefer the idea of walking around the world with my head held high thinking, "Yeah, I'm proud to come from a good country"? And everybody will welcome you. And everybody in the last 15 seconds before they drift off to sleep at night will say, "Gosh, I'm glad that person's country exists." Ultimately, that, I think, is what will make the change. That word, "good," and the number 6.8 and the discovery that's behind it have changed my life. I think they can change your life, and I think we can use it to change the way that our politicians and our companies behave, and in doing so, we can change the world. I've started thinking very differently about my own country since I've been thinking about these things. I used to think that I wanted to live in a rich country, and then I started thinking I wanted to live in a happy country, but I began to realize, it's not enough. I don't want to live in a rich country. I don't want to live in a fast-growing or competitive country. I want to live in a good country, and I so, so hope that you do too. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can prejudice ever be a good thing? | {0: 'Paul Bloom explores some of the most puzzling aspects of human nature, including pleasure, religion, and morality.'} | TEDSalon NY2014 | When we think about prejudice and bias, we tend to think about stupid and evil people doing stupid and evil things. And this idea is nicely summarized by the British critic William Hazlitt, who wrote, "Prejudice is the child of ignorance." I want to try to convince you here that this is mistaken. I want to try to convince you that prejudice and bias are natural, they're often rational, and they're often even moral, and I think that once we understand this, we're in a better position to make sense of them when they go wrong, when they have horrible consequences, and we're in a better position to know what to do when this happens. So, start with stereotypes. You look at me, you know my name, you know certain facts about me, and you could make certain judgments. You could make guesses about my ethnicity, my political affiliation, my religious beliefs. And the thing is, these judgments tend to be accurate. We're very good at this sort of thing. And we're very good at this sort of thing because our ability to stereotype people is not some sort of arbitrary quirk of the mind, but rather it's a specific instance of a more general process, which is that we have experience with things and people in the world that fall into categories, and we can use our experience to make generalizations about novel instances of these categories. So everybody here has a lot of experience with chairs and apples and dogs, and based on this, you could see unfamiliar examples and you could guess, you could sit on the chair, you could eat the apple, the dog will bark. Now we might be wrong. The chair could collapse if you sit on it, the apple might be poison, the dog might not bark, and in fact, this is my dog Tessie, who doesn't bark. But for the most part, we're good at this. For the most part, we make good guesses both in the social domain and the non-social domain, and if we weren't able to do so, if we weren't able to make guesses about new instances that we encounter, we wouldn't survive. And in fact, Hazlitt later on in his wonderful essay concedes this. He writes, "Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way my across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life." Or take bias. Now sometimes, we break the world up into us versus them, into in-group versus out-group, and sometimes when we do this, we know we're doing something wrong, and we're kind of ashamed of it. But other times we're proud of it. We openly acknowledge it. And my favorite example of this is a question that came from the audience in a Republican debate prior to the last election. (Video) Anderson Cooper: Gets to your question, the question in the hall, on foreign aid? Yes, ma'am. Woman: The American people are suffering in our country right now. Why do we continue to send foreign aid to other countries when we need all the help we can get for ourselves? AC: Governor Perry, what about that? (Applause) Rick Perry: Absolutely, I think it's— Paul Bloom: Each of the people onstage agreed with the premise of her question, which is as Americans, we should care more about Americans than about other people. And in fact, in general, people are often swayed by feelings of solidarity, loyalty, pride, patriotism, towards their country or towards their ethnic group. Regardless of your politics, many people feel proud to be American, and they favor Americans over other countries. Residents of other countries feel the same about their nation, and we feel the same about our ethnicities. Now some of you may reject this. Some of you may be so cosmopolitan that you think that ethnicity and nationality should hold no moral sway. But even you sophisticates accept that there should be some pull towards the in-group in the domain of friends and family, of people you're close to, and so even you make a distinction between us versus them. Now, this distinction is natural enough and often moral enough, but it can go awry, and this was part of the research of the great social psychologist Henri Tajfel. Tajfel was born in Poland in 1919. He left to go to university in France, because as a Jew, he couldn't go to university in Poland, and then he enlisted in the French military in World War II. He was captured and ended up in a prisoner of war camp, and it was a terrifying time for him, because if it was discovered that he was a Jew, he could have been moved to a concentration camp, where he most likely would not have survived. And in fact, when the war ended and he was released, most of his friends and family were dead. He got involved in different pursuits. He helped out the war orphans. But he had a long-lasting interest in the science of prejudice, and so when a prestigious British scholarship on stereotypes opened up, he applied for it, and he won it, and then he began this amazing career. And what started his career is an insight that the way most people were thinking about the Holocaust was wrong. Many people, most people at the time, viewed the Holocaust as sort of representing some tragic flaw on the part of the Germans, some genetic taint, some authoritarian personality. And Tajfel rejected this. Tajfel said what we see in the Holocaust is just an exaggeration of normal psychological processes that exist in every one of us. And to explore this, he did a series of classic studies with British adolescents. And in one of his studies, what he did was he asked the British adolescents all sorts of questions, and then based on their answers, he said, "I've looked at your answers, and based on the answers, I have determined that you are either" — he told half of them — "a Kandinsky lover, you love the work of Kandinsky, or a Klee lover, you love the work of Klee." It was entirely bogus. Their answers had nothing to do with Kandinsky or Klee. They probably hadn't heard of the artists. He just arbitrarily divided them up. But what he found was, these categories mattered, so when he later gave the subjects money, they would prefer to give the money to members of their own group than members of the other group. Worse, they were actually most interested in establishing a difference between their group and other groups, so they would give up money for their own group if by doing so they could give the other group even less. This bias seems to show up very early. So my colleague and wife, Karen Wynn, at Yale has done a series of studies with babies where she exposes babies to puppets, and the puppets have certain food preferences. So one of the puppets might like green beans. The other puppet might like graham crackers. They test the babies own food preferences, and babies typically prefer the graham crackers. But the question is, does this matter to babies in how they treat the puppets? And it matters a lot. They tend to prefer the puppet who has the same food tastes that they have, and worse, they actually prefer puppets who punish the puppet with the different food taste. (Laughter) We see this sort of in-group, out-group psychology all the time. We see it in political clashes within groups with different ideologies. We see it in its extreme in cases of war, where the out-group isn't merely given less, but dehumanized, as in the Nazi perspective of Jews as vermin or lice, or the American perspective of Japanese as rats. Stereotypes can also go awry. So often they're rational and useful, but sometimes they're irrational, they give the wrong answers, and other times they lead to plainly immoral consequences. And the case that's been most studied is the case of race. There was a fascinating study prior to the 2008 election where social psychologists looked at the extent to which the candidates were associated with America, as in an unconscious association with the American flag. And in one of their studies they compared Obama and McCain, and they found McCain is thought of as more American than Obama, and to some extent, people aren't that surprised by hearing that. McCain is a celebrated war hero, and many people would explicitly say he has more of an American story than Obama. But they also compared Obama to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and they found that Blair was also thought of as more American than Obama, even though subjects explicitly understood that he's not American at all. But they were responding, of course, to the color of his skin. These stereotypes and biases have real-world consequences, both subtle and very important. In one recent study, researchers put ads on eBay for the sale of baseball cards. Some of them were held by white hands, others by black hands. They were the same baseball cards. The ones held by black hands got substantially smaller bids than the ones held by white hands. In research done at Stanford, psychologists explored the case of people sentenced for the murder of a white person. It turns out, holding everything else constant, you are considerably more likely to be executed if you look like the man on the right than the man on the left, and this is in large part because the man on the right looks more prototypically black, more prototypically African-American, and this apparently influences people's decisions over what to do about him. So now that we know about this, how do we combat it? And there are different avenues. One avenue is to appeal to people's emotional responses, to appeal to people's empathy, and we often do that through stories. So if you are a liberal parent and you want to encourage your children to believe in the merits of nontraditional families, you might give them a book like this. ["Heather Has Two Mommies"] If you are conservative and have a different attitude, you might give them a book like this. (Laughter) ["Help! Mom! There Are Liberals under My Bed!"] But in general, stories can turn anonymous strangers into people who matter, and the idea that we care about people when we focus on them as individuals is an idea which has shown up across history. So Stalin apocryphally said, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," and Mother Teresa said, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." Psychologists have explored this. For instance, in one study, people were given a list of facts about a crisis, and it was seen how much they would donate to solve this crisis, and another group was given no facts at all but they were told of an individual and given a name and given a face, and it turns out that they gave far more. None of this I think is a secret to the people who are engaged in charity work. People don't tend to deluge people with facts and statistics. Rather, you show them faces, you show them people. It's possible that by extending our sympathies to an individual, they can spread to the group that the individual belongs to. This is Harriet Beecher Stowe. The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that President Lincoln invited her to the White House in the middle of the Civil War and said to her, "So you're the little lady who started this great war." And he was talking about "Uncle Tom's Cabin." "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is not a great book of philosophy or of theology or perhaps not even literature, but it does a great job of getting people to put themselves in the shoes of people they wouldn't otherwise be in the shoes of, put themselves in the shoes of slaves. And that could well have been a catalyst for great social change. More recently, looking at America in the last several decades, there's some reason to believe that shows like "The Cosby Show" radically changed American attitudes towards African-Americans, while shows like "Will and Grace" and "Modern Family" changed American attitudes towards gay men and women. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the major catalyst in America for moral change has been a situation comedy. But it's not all emotions, and I want to end by appealing to the power of reason. At some point in his wonderful book "The Better Angels of Our Nature," Steven Pinker says, the Old Testament says love thy neighbor, and the New Testament says love thy enemy, but I don't love either one of them, not really, but I don't want to kill them. I know I have obligations to them, but my moral feelings to them, my moral beliefs about how I should behave towards them, aren't grounded in love. What they're grounded in is the understanding of human rights, a belief that their life is as valuable to them as my life is to me, and to support this, he tells a story by the great philosopher Adam Smith, and I want to tell this story too, though I'm going to modify it a little bit for modern times. So Adam Smith starts by asking you to imagine the death of thousands of people, and imagine that the thousands of people are in a country you are not familiar with. It could be China or India or a country in Africa. And Smith says, how would you respond? And you would say, well that's too bad, and you'd go on to the rest of your life. If you were to open up The New York Times online or something, and discover this, and in fact this happens to us all the time, we go about our lives. But imagine instead, Smith says, you were to learn that tomorrow you were to have your little finger chopped off. Smith says, that would matter a lot. You would not sleep that night wondering about that. So this raises the question: Would you sacrifice thousands of lives to save your little finger? Now answer this in the privacy of your own head, but Smith says, absolutely not, what a horrid thought. And so this raises the question, and so, as Smith puts it, "When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?" And Smith's answer is, "It is reason, principle, conscience. [This] calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it." And this last part is what is often described as the principle of impartiality. And this principle of impartiality manifests itself in all of the world's religions, in all of the different versions of the golden rule, and in all of the world's moral philosophies, which differ in many ways but share the presupposition that we should judge morality from sort of an impartial point of view. The best articulation of this view is actually, for me, it's not from a theologian or from a philosopher, but from Humphrey Bogart at the end of "Casablanca." So, spoiler alert, he's telling his lover that they have to separate for the more general good, and he says to her, and I won't do the accent, but he says to her, "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." Our reason could cause us to override our passions. Our reason could motivate us to extend our empathy, could motivate us to write a book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or read a book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and our reason can motivate us to create customs and taboos and laws that will constrain us from acting upon our impulses when, as rational beings, we feel we should be constrained. This is what a constitution is. A constitution is something which was set up in the past that applies now in the present, and what it says is, no matter how much we might to reelect a popular president for a third term, no matter how much white Americans might choose to feel that they want to reinstate the institution of slavery, we can't. We have bound ourselves. And we bind ourselves in other ways as well. We know that when it comes to choosing somebody for a job, for an award, we are strongly biased by their race, we are biased by their gender, we are biased by how attractive they are, and sometimes we might say, "Well fine, that's the way it should be." But other times we say, "This is wrong." And so to combat this, we don't just try harder, but rather what we do is we set up situations where these other sources of information can't bias us, which is why many orchestras audition musicians behind screens, so the only information they have is the information they believe should matter. I think prejudice and bias illustrate a fundamental duality of human nature. We have gut feelings, instincts, emotions, and they affect our judgments and our actions for good and for evil, but we are also capable of rational deliberation and intelligent planning, and we can use these to, in some cases, accelerate and nourish our emotions, and in other cases staunch them. And it's in this way that reason helps us create a better world. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I love a country that once betrayed me | {0: 'The beloved Mr. Sulu from the original Star Trek, George Takei is an activist for human rights (and a master of Facebook memes). '} | TEDxKyoto | I'm a veteran of the starship Enterprise. I soared through the galaxy driving a huge starship with a crew made up of people from all over this world, many different races, many different cultures, many different heritages, all working together, and our mission was to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. Well — (Applause) — I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there. I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria. Japanese-Americans, American citizens of Japanese ancestry, were looked on with suspicion and fear and with outright hatred simply because we happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor. And the hysteria grew and grew until in February 1942, the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ordered all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast of America to be summarily rounded up with no charges, with no trial, with no due process. Due process, this is a core pillar of our justice system. That all disappeared. We were to be rounded up and imprisoned in 10 barbed-wire prison camps in some of the most desolate places in America: the blistering hot desert of Arizona, the sultry swamps of Arkansas, the wastelands of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and two of the most desolate places in California. On April 20th, I celebrated my fifth birthday, and just a few weeks after my birthday, my parents got my younger brother, my baby sister and me up very early one morning, and they dressed us hurriedly. My brother and I were in the living room looking out the front window, and we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway. They carried bayonets on their rifles. They stomped up the front porch and banged on the door. My father answered it, and the soldiers ordered us out of our home. My father gave my brother and me small luggages to carry, and we walked out and stood on the driveway waiting for our mother to come out, and when my mother finally came out, she had our baby sister in one arm, a huge duffel bag in the other, and tears were streaming down both her cheeks. I will never be able to forget that scene. It is burned into my memory. We were taken from our home and loaded on to train cars with other Japanese-American families. There were guards stationed at both ends of each car, as if we were criminals. We were taken two thirds of the way across the country, rocking on that train for four days and three nights, to the swamps of Arkansas. I still remember the barbed wire fence that confined me. I remember the tall sentry tower with the machine guns pointed at us. I remember the searchlight that followed me when I made the night runs from my barrack to the latrine. But to five-year-old me, I thought it was kind of nice that they'd lit the way for me to pee. I was a child, too young to understand the circumstances of my being there. Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower. Being in a prison, a barbed-wire prison camp, became my normality. When the war ended, we were released, and given a one-way ticket to anywhere in the United States. My parents decided to go back home to Los Angeles, but Los Angeles was not a welcoming place. We were penniless. Everything had been taken from us, and the hostility was intense. Our first home was on Skid Row in the lowest part of our city, living with derelicts, drunkards and crazy people, the stench of urine all over, on the street, in the alley, in the hallway. It was a horrible experience, and for us kids, it was terrorizing. I remember once a drunkard came staggering down, fell down right in front of us, and threw up. My baby sister said, "Mama, let's go back home," because behind barbed wires was for us home. My parents worked hard to get back on their feet. We had lost everything. They were at the middle of their lives and starting all over. They worked their fingers to the bone, and ultimately they were able to get the capital together to buy a three-bedroom home in a nice neighborhood. And I was a teenager, and I became very curious about my childhood imprisonment. I had read civics books that told me about the ideals of American democracy. All men are created equal, we have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and I couldn't quite make that fit with what I knew to be my childhood imprisonment. I read history books, and I couldn't find anything about it. And so I engaged my father after dinner in long, sometimes heated conversations. We had many, many conversations like that, and what I got from them was my father's wisdom. He was the one that suffered the most under those conditions of imprisonment, and yet he understood American democracy. He told me that our democracy is a people's democracy, and it can be as great as the people can be, but it is also as fallible as people are. He told me that American democracy is vitally dependent on good people who cherish the ideals of our system and actively engage in the process of making our democracy work. And he took me to a campaign headquarters — the governor of Illinois was running for the presidency — and introduced me to American electoral politics. And he also told me about young Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service, and categorized as enemy non-alien. It was outrageous to be called an enemy when you're volunteering to fight for your country, but that was compounded with the word "non-alien," which is a word that means "citizen" in the negative. They even took the word "citizen" away from us, and imprisoned them for a whole year. And then the government realized that there's a wartime manpower shortage, and as suddenly as they'd rounded us up, they opened up the military for service by young Japanese-Americans. It was totally irrational, but the amazing thing, the astounding thing, is that thousands of young Japanese-American men and women again went from behind those barbed-wire fences, put on the same uniform as that of our guards, leaving their families in imprisonment, to fight for this country. They said that they were going to fight not only to get their families out from behind those barbed-wire fences, but because they cherished the very ideal of what our government stands for, should stand for, and that was being abrogated by what was being done. All men are created equal. And they went to fight for this country. They were put into a segregated all Japanese-American unit and sent to the battlefields of Europe, and they threw themselves into it. They fought with amazing, incredible courage and valor. They were sent out on the most dangerous missions and they sustained the highest combat casualty rate of any unit proportionally. There is one battle that illustrates that. It was a battle for the Gothic Line. The Germans were embedded in this mountain hillside, rocky hillside, in impregnable caves, and three allied battalions had been pounding away at it for six months, and they were stalemated. The 442nd was called in to add to the fight, but the men of the 442nd came up with a unique but dangerous idea: The backside of the mountain was a sheer rock cliff. The Germans thought an attack from the backside would be impossible. The men of the 442nd decided to do the impossible. On a dark, moonless night, they began scaling that rock wall, a drop of more than 1,000 feet, in full combat gear. They climbed all night long on that sheer cliff. In the darkness, some lost their handhold or their footing and they fell to their deaths in the ravine below. They all fell silently. Not a single one cried out, so as not to give their position away. The men climbed for eight hours straight, and those who made it to the top stayed there until the first break of light, and as soon as light broke, they attacked. The Germans were surprised, and they took the hill and broke the Gothic Line. A six-month stalemate was broken by the 442nd in 32 minutes. It was an amazing act, and when the war ended, the 442nd returned to the United States as the most decorated unit of the entire Second World War. They were greeted back on the White House Lawn by President Truman, who said to them, "You fought not only the enemy but prejudice, and you won." They are my heroes. They clung to their belief in the shining ideals of this country, and they proved that being an American is not just for some people, that race is not how we define being an American. They expanded what it means to be an American, including Japanese-Americans that were feared and suspected and hated. They were change agents, and they left for me a legacy. They are my heroes and my father is my hero, who understood democracy and guided me through it. They gave me a legacy, and with that legacy comes a responsibility, and I am dedicated to making my country an even better America, to making our government an even truer democracy, and because of the heroes that I have and the struggles that we've gone through, I can stand before you as a gay Japanese-American, but even more than that, I am a proud American. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Want to innovate? Become a "now-ist" | {0: 'Joi Ito is the former director of the MIT Media Lab.'} | TED2014 | On March 10, 2011, I was in Cambridge at the MIT Media Lab meeting with faculty, students and staff, and we were trying to figure out whether I should be the next director. That night, at midnight, a magnitude 9 earthquake hit off of the Pacific coast of Japan. My wife and family were in Japan, and as the news started to come in, I was panicking. I was looking at the news streams and listening to the press conferences of the government officials and the Tokyo Power Company, and hearing about this explosion at the nuclear reactors and this cloud of fallout that was headed towards our house which was only about 200 kilometers away. And the people on TV weren't telling us anything that we wanted to hear. I wanted to know what was going on with the reactor, what was going on with the radiation, whether my family was in danger. So I did what instinctively felt like the right thing, which was to go onto the Internet and try to figure out if I could take matters into my own hands. On the Net, I found there were a lot of other people like me trying to figure out what was going on, and together we sort of loosely formed a group and we called it Safecast, and we decided we were going to try to measure the radiation and get the data out to everybody else, because it was clear that the government wasn't going to be doing this for us. Three years later, we have 16 million data points, we have designed our own Geiger counters that you can download the designs and plug it into the network. We have an app that shows you most of the radiation in Japan and other parts of the world. We are arguably one of the most successful citizen science projects in the world, and we have created the largest open dataset of radiation measurements. And the interesting thing here is how did — (Applause) — Thank you. How did a bunch of amateurs who really didn't know what we were doing somehow come together and do what NGOs and the government were completely incapable of doing? And I would suggest that this has something to do with the Internet. It's not a fluke. It wasn't luck, and it wasn't because it was us. It helped that it was an event that pulled everybody together, but it was a new way of doing things that was enabled by the Internet and a lot of the other things that were going on, and I want to talk a little bit about what those new principles are. So remember before the Internet? (Laughter) I call this B.I. Okay? So, in B.I., life was simple. Things were Euclidian, Newtonian, somewhat predictable. People actually tried to predict the future, even the economists. And then the Internet happened, and the world became extremely complex, extremely low-cost, extremely fast, and those Newtonian laws that we so dearly cherished turned out to be just local ordinances, and what we found was that in this completely unpredictable world that most of the people who were surviving were working with sort of a different set of principles, and I want to talk a little bit about that. Before the Internet, if you remember, when we tried to create services, what you would do is you'd create the hardware layer and the network layer and the software and it would cost millions of dollars to do anything that was substantial. So when it costs millions of dollars to do something substantial, what you would do is you'd get an MBA who would write a plan and get the money from V.C.s or big companies, and then you'd hire the designers and the engineers, and they'd build the thing. This is the Before Internet, B.I., innovation model. What happened after the Internet was the cost of innovation went down so much because the cost of collaboration, the cost of distribution, the cost of communication, and Moore's Law made it so that the cost of trying a new thing became nearly zero, and so you would have Google, Facebook, Yahoo, students that didn't have permission — permissionless innovation — didn't have permission, didn't have PowerPoints, they just built the thing, then they raised the money, and then they sort of figured out a business plan and maybe later on they hired some MBAs. So the Internet caused innovation, at least in software and services, to go from an MBA-driven innovation model to a designer-engineer-driven innovation model, and it pushed innovation to the edges, to the dorm rooms, to the startups, away from the large institutions, the stodgy old institutions that had the power and the money and the authority. And we all know this. We all know this happened on the Internet. It turns out it's happening in other things, too. Let me give you some examples. So at the Media Lab, we don't just do hardware. We do all kinds of things. We do biology, we do hardware, and Nicholas Negroponte famously said, "Demo or die," as opposed to "Publish or perish," which was the traditional academic way of thinking. And he often said, the demo only has to work once, because the primary mode of us impacting the world was through large companies being inspired by us and creating products like the Kindle or Lego Mindstorms. But today, with the ability to deploy things into the real world at such low cost, I'm changing the motto now, and this is the official public statement. I'm officially saying, "Deploy or die." You have to get the stuff into the real world for it to really count, and sometimes it will be large companies, and Nicholas can talk about satellites. (Applause) Thank you. But we should be getting out there ourselves and not depending on large institutions to do it for us. So last year, we sent a bunch of students to Shenzhen, and they sat on the factory floors with the innovators in Shenzhen, and it was amazing. What was happening there was you would have these manufacturing devices, and they weren't making prototypes or PowerPoints. They were fiddling with the manufacturing equipment and innovating right on the manufacturing equipment. The factory was in the designer, and the designer was literally in the factory. And so what you would do is, you'd go down to the stalls and you would see these cell phones. So instead of starting little websites like the kids in Palo Alto do, the kids in Shenzhen make new cell phones. They make new cell phones like kids in Palo Alto make websites, and so there's a rainforest of innovation going on in the cell phone. What they do is, they make a cell phone, go down to the stall, they sell some, they look at the other kids' stuff, go up, make a couple thousand more, go down. Doesn't this sound like a software thing? It sounds like agile software development, A/B testing and iteration, and what we thought you could only do with software kids in Shenzhen are doing this in hardware. My next fellow, I hope, is going to be one of these innovators from Shenzhen. And so what you see is that is pushing innovation to the edges. We talk about 3D printers and stuff like that, and that's great, but this is Limor. She is one of our favorite graduates, and she is standing in front of a Samsung Techwin Pick and Place Machine. This thing can put 23,000 components per hour onto an electronics board. This is a factory in a box. So what used to take a factory full of workers working by hand in this little box in New York, she's able to have effectively — She doesn't actually have to go to Shenzhen to do this manufacturing. She can buy this box and she can manufacture it. So manufacturing, the cost of innovation, the cost of prototyping, distribution, manufacturing, hardware, is getting so low that innovation is being pushed to the edges and students and startups are being able to build it. This is a recent thing, but this will happen and this will change just like it did with software. Sorona is a DuPont process that uses a genetically engineered microbe to turn corn sugar into polyester. It's 30 percent more efficient than the fossil fuel method, and it's much better for the environment. Genetic engineering and bioengineering are creating a whole bunch of great new opportunities for chemistry, for computation, for memory. We will probably be doing a lot, obviously doing health things, but we will probably be growing chairs and buildings soon. The problem is, Sorona costs about 400 million dollars and took seven years to build. It kind of reminds you of the old mainframe days. The thing is, the cost of innovation in bioengineering is also going down. This is desktop gene sequencer. It used to cost millions and millions of dollars to sequence genes. Now you can do it on a desktop like this, and kids can do this in dorm rooms. This is Gen9 gene assembler, and so right now when you try to print a gene, what you do is somebody in a factory with pipettes puts the thing together by hand, you have one error per 100 base pairs, and it takes a long time and costs a lot of money. This new device assembles genes on a chip, and instead of one error per 100 base pairs, it's one error per 10,000 base pairs. In this lab, we will have the world's capacity of gene printing within a year, 200 million base pairs a year. This is kind of like when we went from transistor radios wrapped by hand to the Pentium. This is going to become the Pentium of bioengineering, pushing bioengineering into the hands of dorm rooms and startup companies. So it's happening in software and in hardware and bioengineering, and so this is a fundamental new way of thinking about innovation. It's a bottom-up innovation, it's democratic, it's chaotic, it's hard to control. It's not bad, but it's very different, and I think that the traditional rules that we have for institutions don't work anymore, and most of us here operate with a different set of principles. One of my favorite principles is the power of pull, which is the idea of pulling resources from the network as you need them rather than stocking them in the center and controlling everything. So in the case of the Safecast story, I didn't know anything when the earthquake happened, but I was able to find Sean who was the hackerspace community organizer, and Peter, the analog hardware hacker who made our first Geiger counter, and Dan, who built the Three Mile Island monitoring system after the Three Mile Island meltdown. And these people I wouldn't have been able to find beforehand and probably were better that I found them just in time from the network. I'm a three-time college dropout, so learning over education is very near and dear to my heart, but to me, education is what people do to you and learning is what you do to yourself. (Applause) And it feels like, and I'm biased, it feels like they're trying to make you memorize the whole encyclopedia before they let you go out and play, and to me, I've got Wikipedia on my cell phone, and it feels like they assume you're going to be on top of some mountain all by yourself with a number 2 pencil trying to figure out what to do when in fact you're always going to be connected, you're always going to have friends, and you can pull Wikipedia up whenever you need it, and what you need to learn is how to learn. In the case of Safecast, a bunch of amateurs when we started three years ago, I would argue that we probably as a group know more than any other organization about how to collect data and publish data and do citizen science. Compass over maps. So this one, the idea is that the cost of writing a plan or mapping something is getting so expensive and it's not very accurate or useful. So in the Safecast story, we knew we needed to collect data, we knew we wanted to publish the data, and instead of trying to come up with the exact plan, we first said, oh, let's get Geiger counters. Oh, they've run out. Let's build them. There aren't enough sensors. Okay, then we can make a mobile Geiger counter. We can drive around. We can get volunteers. We don't have enough money. Let's Kickstarter it. We could not have planned this whole thing, but by having a very strong compass, we eventually got to where we were going, and to me it's very similar to agile software development, but this idea of compasses is very important. So I think the good news is that even though the world is extremely complex, what you need to do is very simple. I think it's about stopping this notion that you need to plan everything, you need to stock everything, and you need to be so prepared, and focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware, and super present. So I don't like the word "futurist." I think we should be now-ists, like we are right now. Thank you. (Applause) |
A 30-year history of the future | {0: "The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world. "} | TED2014 | (Video) Nicholas Negroponte: Can we switch to the video disc, which is in play mode? I'm really interested in how you put people and computers together. We will be using the TV screens or their equivalents for electronic books of the future. (Music, crosstalk) Very interested in touch-sensitive displays, high-tech, high-touch, not having to pick up your fingers to use them. There is another way where computers touch people: wearing, physically wearing. Suddenly on September 11th, the world got bigger. NN: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. When I was asked to do this, I was also asked to look at all 14 TED Talks that I had given, chronologically. The first one was actually two hours. The second one was an hour, and then they became half hours, and all I noticed was my bald spot getting bigger. (Laughter) Imagine seeing your life, 30 years of it, go by, and it was, to say the least, for me, quite a shocking experience. So what I'm going to do in my time is try and share with you what happened during the 30 years, and then also make a prediction, and then tell you a little bit about what I'm doing next. And I put on a slide where TED 1 happened in my life. And it's rather important because I had done 15 years of research before it, so I had a backlog, so it was easy. It's not that I was Fidel Castro and I could talk for two hours, or Bucky Fuller. I had 15 years of stuff, and the Media Lab was about to start. So that was easy. But there are a couple of things about that period and about what happened that are really quite important. One is that it was a period when computers weren't yet for people. And the other thing that sort of happened during that time is that we were considered sissy computer scientists. We weren't considered the real thing. So what I'm going to show you is, in retrospect, a lot more interesting and a lot more accepted than it was at the time. So I'm going to characterize the years and I'm even going to go back to some very early work of mine, and this was the kind of stuff I was doing in the '60s: very direct manipulation, very influenced as I studied architecture by the architect Moshe Safdie, and you can see that we even built robotic things that could build habitat-like structures. And this for me was not yet the Media Lab, but was the beginning of what I'll call sensory computing, and I pick fingers partly because everybody thought it was ridiculous. Papers were published about how stupid it was to use fingers. Three reasons: One was they were low-resolution. The other is your hand would occlude what you wanted to see, and the third, which was the winner, was that your fingers would get the screen dirty, and hence, fingers would never be a device that you'd use. And this was a device we built in the '70s, which has never even been picked up. It's not just touch sensitive, it's pressure sensitive. (Video) Voice: Put a yellow circle there. NN: Later work, and again this was before TED 1 — (Video) Voice: Move that west of the diamond. Create a large green circle there. Man: Aw, shit. NN: — was to sort of do interface concurrently, so when you talked and you pointed and you had, if you will, multiple channels. Entebbe happened. 1976, Air France was hijacked, taken to Entebbe, and the Israelis not only did an extraordinary rescue, they did it partly because they had practiced on a physical model of the airport, because they had built the airport, so they built a model in the desert, and when they arrived at Entebbe, they knew where to go because they had actually been there. The U.S. government asked some of us, '76, if we could replicate that computationally, and of course somebody like myself says yes. Immediately, you get a contract, Department of Defense, and we built this truck and this rig. We did sort of a simulation, because you had video discs, and again, this is '76. And then many years later, you get this truck, and so you have Google Maps. Still people thought, no, that was not serious computer science, and it was a man named Jerry Wiesner, who happened to be the president of MIT, who did think it was computer science. And one of the keys for anybody who wants to start something in life: Make sure your president is part of it. So when I was doing the Media Lab, it was like having a gorilla in the front seat. If you were stopped for speeding and the officer looked in the window and saw who was in the passenger seat, then, "Oh, continue on, sir." And so we were able, and this is a cute, actually, device, parenthetically. This was a lenticular photograph of Jerry Wiesner where the only thing that changed in the photograph were the lips. So when you oscillated that little piece of lenticular sheet with his photograph, it would be in lip sync with zero bandwidth. It was a zero-bandwidth teleconferencing system at the time. So this was the Media Lab's — this is what we said we'd do, that the world of computers, publishing, and so on would come together. Again, not generally accepted, but very much part of TED in the early days. And this is really where we were headed. And that created the Media Lab. One of the things about age is that I can tell you with great confidence, I've been to the future. I've been there, actually, many times. And the reason I say that is, how many times in my life have I said, "Oh, in 10 years, this will happen," and then 10 years comes. And then you say, "Oh, in five years, this will happen." And then five years comes. So I say this a little bit with having felt that I'd been there a number of times, and one of the things that is most quoted that I've ever said is that computing is not about computers, and that didn't quite get enough traction, and then it started to. It started to because people caught on that the medium wasn't the message. And the reason I show this car in actually a rather ugly slide is just again to tell you the kind of story that characterized a little bit of my life. This is a student of mine who had done a Ph.D. called "Backseat Driver." It was in the early days of GPS, the car knew where it was, and it would give audio instructions to the driver, when to turn right, when to turn left and so on. Turns out, there are a lot of things in those instructions that back in that period were pretty challenging, like what does it mean, take the next right? Well, if you're coming up on a street, the next right's probably the one after, and there are lots of issues, and the student did a wonderful thesis, and the MIT patent office said "Don't patent it. It'll never be accepted. The liabilities are too large. There will be insurance issues. Don't patent it." So we didn't, but it shows you how people, again, at times, don't really look at what's happening. Some work, and I'll just go through these very quickly, a lot of sensory stuff. You might recognize a young Yo-Yo Ma and tracking his body for playing the cello or the hypercello. These fellows literally walked around like that at the time. It's now a little bit more discreet and more commonplace. And then there are at least three heroes I want to quickly mention. Marvin Minsky, who taught me a lot about common sense, and I will talk briefly about Muriel Cooper, who was very important to Ricky Wurman and to TED, and in fact, when she got onstage, she said, the first thing she said was, "I introduced Ricky to Nicky." And nobody calls me Nicky and nobody calls Richard Ricky, so nobody knew who she was talking about. And then, of course, Seymour Papert, who is the person who said, "You can't think about thinking unless you think about thinking about something." And that's actually — you can unpack that later. It's a pretty profound statement. I'm showing some slides that were from TED 2, a little silly as slides, perhaps. Then I felt television really was about displays. Again, now we're past TED 1, but just around the time of TED 2, and what I'd like to mention here is, even though you could imagine intelligence in the device, I look today at some of the work being done about the Internet of Things, and I think it's kind of tragically pathetic, because what has happened is people take the oven panel and put it on your cell phone, or the door key onto your cell phone, just taking it and bringing it to you, and in fact that's actually what you don't want. You want to put a chicken in the oven, and the oven says, "Aha, it's a chicken," and it cooks the chicken. "Oh, it's cooking the chicken for Nicholas, and he likes it this way and that way." So the intelligence, instead of being in the device, we have started today to move it back onto the cell phone or closer to the user, not a particularly enlightened view of the Internet of Things. Television, again, television what I said today, that was back in 1990, and the television of tomorrow would look something like that. Again, people, but they laughed cynically, they didn't laugh with much appreciation. Telecommunications in the 1990s, George Gilder decided that he would call this diagram the Negroponte switch. I'm probably much less famous than George, so when he called it the Negroponte switch, it stuck, but the idea of things that came in the ground would go in the air and stuff in the air would go into the ground has played itself out. That is the original slide from that year, and it has worked in lockstep obedience. We started Wired magazine. Some people, I remember we shared the reception desk periodically, and some parent called up irate that his son had given up Sports Illustrated to subscribe for Wired, and he said, "Are you some porno magazine or something?" and couldn't understand why his son would be interested in Wired, at any rate. I will go through this a little quicker. This is my favorite, 1995, back page of Newsweek magazine. Okay. Read it. (Laughter) ["Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure." —Clifford Stoll, Newsweek, 1995] You must admit that gives you, at least it gives me pleasure when somebody says how dead wrong you are. "Being Digital" came out. For me, it gave me an opportunity to be more in the trade press and get this out to the public, and it also allowed us to build the new Media Lab, which if you haven't been to, visit, because it's a beautiful piece of architecture aside from being a wonderful place to work. So these are the things we were saying in those TEDs. [Today, multimedia is a desktop or living room experience, because the apparatus is so clunky. This will change dramatically with small, bright, thin, high-resolution displays. — 1995] We came to them. I looked forward to it every year. It was the party that Ricky Wurman never had in the sense that he invited many of his old friends, including myself. And then something for me changed pretty profoundly. I became more involved with computers and learning and influenced by Seymour, but particularly looking at learning as something that is best approximated by computer programming. When you write a computer program, you've got to not just list things out and sort of take an algorithm and translate it into a set of instructions, but when there's a bug, and all programs have bugs, you've got to de-bug it. You've got to go in, change it, and then re-execute, and you iterate, and that iteration is really a very, very good approximation of learning. So that led to my own work with Seymour in places like Cambodia and the starting of One Laptop per Child. Enough TED Talks on One Laptop per Child, so I'll go through it very fast, but it did give us the chance to do something at a relatively large scale in the area of learning, development and computing. Very few people know that One Laptop per Child was a $1 billion project, and it was, at least over the seven years I ran it, but even more important, the World Bank contributed zero, USAID zero. It was mostly the countries using their own treasuries, which is very interesting, at least to me it was very interesting in terms of what I plan to do next. So these are the various places it happened. I then tried an experiment, and the experiment happened in Ethiopia. And here's the experiment. The experiment is, can learning happen where there are no schools. And we dropped off tablets with no instructions and let the children figure it out. And in a short period of time, they not only turned them on and were using 50 apps per child within five days, they were singing "ABC" songs within two weeks, but they hacked Android within six months. And so that seemed sufficiently interesting. This is perhaps the best picture I have. The kid on your right has sort of nominated himself as teacher. Look at the kid on the left, and so on. There are no adults involved in this at all. So I said, well can we do this at a larger scale? And what is it that's missing? The kids are giving a press conference at this point, and sort of writing in the dirt. And the answer is, what is missing? And I'm going to skip over my prediction, actually, because I'm running out of time, and here's the question, is what's going to happen? I think the challenge is to connect the last billion people, and connecting the last billion is very different than connecting the next billion, and the reason it's different is that the next billion are sort of low-hanging fruit, but the last billion are rural. Being rural and being poor are very different. Poverty tends to be created by our society, and the people in that community are not poor in the same way at all. They may be primitive, but the way to approach it and to connect them, the history of One Laptop per Child, and the experiment in Ethiopia, lead me to believe that we can in fact do this in a very short period of time. And so my plan, and unfortunately I haven't been able to get my partners at this point to let me announce them, but is to do this with a stationary satellite. There are many reasons that stationary satellites aren't the best things, but there are a lot of reasons why they are, and for two billion dollars, you can connect a lot more than 100 million people, but the reason I picked two, and I will leave this as my last slide, is two billion dollars is what we were spending in Afghanistan every week. So surely if we can connect Africa and the last billion people for numbers like that, we should be doing it. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Stay up there. Stay up there. NN: You're going to give me extra time? CA: No. That was wickedly clever, wickedly clever. You gamed it beautifully. Nicholas, what is your prediction? (Laughter) NN: Thank you for asking. I'll tell you what my prediction is, and my prediction, and this is a prediction, because it'll be 30 years. I won't be here. But one of the things about learning how to read, we have been doing a lot of consuming of information going through our eyes, and so that may be a very inefficient channel. So my prediction is that we are going to ingest information You're going to swallow a pill and know English. You're going to swallow a pill and know Shakespeare. And the way to do it is through the bloodstream. So once it's in your bloodstream, it basically goes through it and gets into the brain, and when it knows that it's in the brain in the different pieces, it deposits it in the right places. So it's ingesting. CA: Have you been hanging out with Ray Kurzweil by any chance? NN: No, but I've been hanging around with Ed Boyden and hanging around with one of the speakers who is here, Hugh Herr, and there are a number of people. This isn't quite as far-fetched, so 30 years from now. CA: We will check it out. We're going to be back and we're going to play this clip 30 years from now, and then all eat the red pill. Well thank you for that. Nicholas Negroponte. NN: Thank you. (Applause) |
Our unhealthy obsession with choice | {0: 'Sociologist and philosopher Renata Salecl scrutinizes our individual and societal neuroses, and suggests ways out of our current paralysis.'} | TEDGlobal 2013 | When I was preparing for this talk, I went to search for a couple of quotes that I can share with you. Good news: I found three that I particularly liked, the first by Samuel Johnson, who said, "When making your choice in life, do not forget to live," the second by Aeschylus, who reminded us that "happiness is a choice that requires effort," and the third is one by Groucho Marx who said, "I wouldn't want to choose to belong to any club that would have me as a member." Now, bad news: I didn't know which one of these quotes to choose and share with you. The sweet anxiety of choice. In today's times of post-industrial capitalism, choice, together with individual freedom and the idea of self-making, has been elevated to an ideal. Now, together with this, we also have a belief in endless progress. But the underside of this ideology has been an increase of anxiety, feelings of guilt, feelings of being inadequate, feeling that we are failing in our choices. Sadly, this ideology of individual choice has prevented us from thinking about social changes. It appears that this ideology was actually very efficient in pacifying us as political and social thinkers. Instead of making social critiques, we are more and more engaging in self-critique, sometimes to the point of self-destruction. Now, how come that ideology of choice is still so powerful, even among people who have not many things to choose among? How come that even people who are poor very much still identify with the idea of choice, the kind of rational idea of choice which we embrace? Now, the ideology of choice is very successful in opening for us a space to think about some imagined future. Let me give you an example. My friend Manya, when she was a student at university in California, was earning money by working for a car dealer. Now, Manya, when she encountered the typical customer, would debate with him about his lifestyle, how much he wants to spend, how many children he has, what does he need the car for? They would usually come to a good conclusion what would be a perfect car. Now, before Manya's customer would go home and think things through, she would say to him, "The car that you are buying now is perfect, but in a few year's time, when your kids will be already out of the house, when you will have a little bit more money, that other car will be ideal. But what you are buying now is great." Now, the majority of Manya's customers who came back the next day bought that other car, the car they did not need, the car that cost far too much money. Now, Manya became so successful in selling cars that soon she moved on to selling airplanes. (Laughter) And knowing so much about the psychology of people prepared her well for her current job, which is that of a psychoanalyst. Now, why were Manya's customers so irrational? Manya's success was that she was able to open in their heads an image of an idealized future, an image of themselves when they are already more successful, freer, and for them, choosing that other car was as if they are coming closer to this ideal in which it was as if Manya already saw them. Now, we rarely make really totally rational choices. Choices are influenced by our unconscious, by our community. We're often choosing by guessing, what would other people think about our choice? Also we are choosing by looking at what others are choosing. We're also guessing what is socially acceptable choice. Now, because of this, we actually even after we have already chosen, like bought a car, endlessly read reviews about cars, as if we still want to convince ourselves that we made the right choice. Now, choices are anxiety-provoking. They are linked to risks, losses. They are highly unpredictable. Now, because of this, people have now more and more problems that they are not choosing anything. Not long ago, I was at a wedding reception, and I met a young, beautiful woman who immediately started telling me about her anxiety over choice. She said to me, "I needed one month to decide which dress to wear." Then she said, "For weeks I was researching which hotel to stay for this one night. And now, I need to choose a sperm donor." (Laughter) I looked at this woman in shock. "Sperm donor? What's the rush?" She said, "I'm turning 40 at the end of this year, and I've been so bad in choosing men in my life." Now choice, because it's linked to risk, is anxiety-provoking, and it was already the famous Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who pointed out that anxiety is linked to the possibility of possibility. Now, we think today that we can prevent these risks. We have endless market analysis, projections of the future earnings. Even with market, which is about chance, randomness, we think we can predict rationally where it's going. Now, chance is actually becoming very traumatic. Last year, my friend Bernard Harcourt at the University of Chicago organized an event, a conference on the idea of chance. He and I were together on the panel, and just before delivering our papers — we didn't know each other's papers — we decided to take chance seriously. So we informed our audience that what they will just now hear will be a random paper, a mixture of the two papers which we didn't know what each was writing. Now, we delivered the conference in such a way. Bernard read his first paragraph, I read my first paragraph, Bernard read his second paragraph, I read my second paragraph, in this way towards the end of our papers. Now, you will be surprised that a majority of our audience did not think that what they'd just listened to was a completely random paper. They couldn't believe that speaking from the position of authority like two professors we were, we would take chance seriously. They thought we prepared the papers together and were just joking that it's random. Now, we live in times with a lot of information, big data, a lot of knowledge about the insides of our bodies. We decoded our genome. We know about our brains more than before. But surprisingly, people are more and more turning a blind eye in front of this knowledge. Ignorance and denial are on the rise. Now, in regard to the current economic crisis, we think that we will just wake up again and everything will be the same as before, and no political or social changes are needed. In regard to ecological crisis, we think nothing needs to be done just now, or others need to act before us. Or even when ecological crisis already happens, like a catastrophe in Fukushima, often we have people living in the same environment with the same amount of information, and half of them will be anxious about radiation and half of them will ignore it. Now, psychoanalysts know very well that people surprisingly don't have passion for knowledge but passion for ignorance. Now, what does that mean? Let's say when we are facing a life-threatening illness, a lot of people don't want to know that. They'd rather prefer denying the illness, which is why it's not so wise to inform them if they don't ask. Surprisingly, research shows that sometimes people who deny their illness live longer than those who are rationally choosing the best treatment. Now, this ignorance, however, is not very helpful on the level of the social. When we are ignorant about where we are heading, a lot of social damage can be caused. Now, on top of facing ignorance, we are also facing today some kind of an obviousness. Now, it was French philosopher Louis Althusser who pointed out that ideology functions in such a way that it creates a veil of obviousness. Before we do any social critique, it is necessary really to lift that veil of obviousness and to think through a little bit differently. If we go back to this ideology of individual, rational choice we often embrace, it's necessary precisely here to lift this obviousness and to think a little bit differently. Now for me, a question often is why we still embrace this idea of a self-made man on which capitalism relied from its beginning? Why do we think that we are really such masters of our lives that we can rationally make the best ideal choices, that we don't accept losses and risks? And for me, it's very shocking to see sometimes very poor people, for example, not supporting the idea of the rich being taxed more. Quite often here they still identify with a certain kind of a lottery mentality. Okay, maybe they don't think that they will make it in the future, but maybe they think, my son might become the next Bill Gates. And who would want to tax one's son? Or, a question for me is also, why would people who have no health insurance not embrace universal healthcare? Sometimes they don't embrace it, again identifying with the idea of choice, but they have nothing to choose from. Now, Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is nothing like a society. Society doesn't exist, it is only individuals and their families. Sadly, this ideology still functions very well, which is why people who are poor might feel ashamed for their poverty. We might endlessly feel guilty that we are not making the right choices, and that's why we didn't succeed. We are anxious that we are not good enough. That's why we work very hard, long hours at the workplace and equally long hours on remaking ourselves. Now, when we are anxious over choices, sometimes we easily give our power of choice away. We identify with the guru who tells us what to do, self-help therapist, or we embrace a totalitarian leader who appears to have no doubts about choices, who sort of knows. Now, often people ask me, "What did you learn by studying choice?" And there is an important message that I did learn. When thinking about choices, I stopped taking choices too seriously, personally. First, I realized a lot of choice I make is not rational. It's linked to my unconscious, my guesses of what others are choosing, or what is a socially embraced choice. I also embrace the idea that we should go beyond thinking about individual choices, that it's very important to rethink social choices, since this ideology of individual choice has pacified us. It really prevented us to think about social change. We spend so much time choosing things for ourselves and barely reflect on communal choices we can make. Now, we should not forget that choice is always linked to change. We can make individual changes, but we can make social changes. We can choose to have more wolves. We can choose to change our environment to have more bees. We can choose to have different rating agencies. We can choose to control corporations instead of allowing corporations to control us. We have a possibility to make changes. Now, I started with a quote from Samuel Johnson, who said that when we make choice in life, we shouldn't forget to live. Finally, you can see I did have a choice to choose one of the three quotes with which I wanted to start my lecture. I did have a choice, such as nations, as people, we have choices too to rethink in what kind of society we want to live in the future. Thank you. (Applause) |
When people of Muslim heritage challenge fundamentalism | {0: "Karima Bennoune's new book introduces the world to people who speak out against fundamentalist terrorism."} | TEDxExeter | Could I protect my father from the Armed Islamic Group with a paring knife? That was the question I faced one Tuesday morning in June of 1993, when I was a law student. I woke up early that morning in Dad's apartment on the outskirts of Algiers, Algeria, to an unrelenting pounding on the front door. It was a season as described by a local paper when every Tuesday a scholar fell to the bullets of fundamentalist assassins. My father's university teaching of Darwin had already provoked a classroom visit from the head of the so-called Islamic Salvation Front, who denounced Dad as an advocate of biologism before Dad had ejected the man, and now whoever was outside would neither identify himself nor go away. So my father tried to get the police on the phone, but perhaps terrified by the rising tide of armed extremism that had already claimed the lives of so many Algerian officers, they didn't even answer. And that was when I went to the kitchen, got out a paring knife, and took up a position inside the entryway. It was a ridiculous thing to do, really, but I couldn't think of anything else, and so there I stood. When I look back now, I think that that was the moment that set me on the path was to writing a book called "Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism." The title comes from a Pakistani play. I think it was actually that moment that sent me on the journey to interview 300 people of Muslim heritage from nearly 30 countries, from Afghanistan to Mali, to find out how they fought fundamentalism peacefully like my father did, and how they coped with the attendant risks. Luckily, back in June of 1993, our unidentified visitor went away, but other families were so much less lucky, and that was the thought that motivated my research. In any case, someone would return a few months later and leave a note on Dad's kitchen table, which simply said, "Consider yourself dead." Subsequently, Algeria's fundamentalist armed groups would murder as many as 200,000 civilians in what came to be known as the dark decade of the 1990s, including every single one of the women that you see here. In its harsh counterterrorist response, the state resorted to torture and to forced disappearances, and as terrible as all of these events became, the international community largely ignored them. Finally, my father, an Algerian peasant's son turned professor, was forced to stop teaching at the university and to flee his apartment, but what I will never forget about Mahfoud Bennoune, my dad, was that like so many other Algerian intellectuals, he refused to leave the country and he continued to publish pointed criticisms, both of the fundamentalists and sometimes of the government they battled. For example, in a November 1994 series in the newspaper El Watan entitled "How Fundamentalism Produced a Terrorism without Precedent," he denounced what he called the terrorists' radical break with the true Islam as it was lived by our ancestors. These were words that could get you killed. My father's country taught me in that dark decade of the 1990s that the popular struggle against Muslim fundamentalism is one of the most important and overlooked human rights struggles in the world. This remains true today, nearly 20 years later. You see, in every country where you hear about armed jihadis targeting civilians, there are also unarmed people defying those militants that you don't hear about, and those people need our support to succeed. In the West, it's often assumed that Muslims generally condone terrorism. Some on the right think this because they view Muslim culture as inherently violent, and some on the left imagine this because they view Muslim violence, fundamentalist violence, solely as a product of legitimate grievances. But both views are dead wrong. In fact, many people of Muslim heritage around the world are staunch opponents both of fundamentalism and of terrorism, and often for very good reason. You see, they're much more likely to be victims of this violence than its perpetrators. Let me just give you one example. According to a 2009 survey of Arabic language media resources, between 2004 and 2008, no more than 15 percent of al Qaeda's victims were Westerners. That's a terrible toll, but the vast majority were people of Muslim heritage, killed by Muslim fundamentalists. Now I've been talking for the last five minutes about fundamentalism, and you have a right to know exactly what I mean. I cite the definition given by the Algerian sociologist Marieme Helie Lucas, and she says that fundamentalisms, note the "s," so within all of the world's great religious traditions, "fundamentalisms are political movements of the extreme right which in a context of globalization manipulate religion in order to achieve their political aims." Sadia Abbas has called this the radical politicization of theology. Now I want to avoid projecting the notion that there's sort of a monolith out there called Muslim fundamentalism that is the same everywhere, because these movements also have their diversities. Some use and advocate violence. Some do not, though they're often interrelated. They take different forms. Some may be non-governmental organizations, even here in Britain like Cageprisoners. Some may become political parties, like the Muslim Brotherhood, and some may be openly armed groups like the Taliban. But in any case, these are all radical projects. They're not conservative or traditional approaches. They're most often about changing people's relationship with Islam rather than preserving it. What I am talking about is the Muslim extreme right, and the fact that its adherents are or purport to be Muslim makes them no less offensive than the extreme right anywhere else. So in my view, if we consider ourselves liberal or left-wing, human rights-loving or feminist, we must oppose these movements and support their grassroots opponents. Now let me be clear that I support an effective struggle against fundamentalism, but also a struggle that must itself respect international law, so nothing I am saying should be taken as a justification for refusals to democratize, and here I send out a shout-out of support to the pro-democracy movement in Algeria today, Barakat. Nor should anything I say be taken as a justification of violations of human rights, like the mass death sentences handed out in Egypt earlier this week. But what I am saying is that we must challenge these Muslim fundamentalist movements because they threaten human rights across Muslim-majority contexts, and they do this in a range of ways, most obviously with the direct attacks on civilians by the armed groups that carry those out. But that violence is just the tip of the iceberg. These movements as a whole purvey discrimination against religious minorities and sexual minorities. They seek to curtail the freedom of religion of everyone who either practices in a different way or chooses not to practice. And most definingly, they lead an all-out war on the rights of women. Now, faced with these movements in recent years, Western discourse has most often offered two flawed responses. The first that one sometimes finds on the right suggests that most Muslims are fundamentalist or something about Islam is inherently fundamentalist, and this is just offensive and wrong, but unfortunately on the left one sometimes encounters a discourse that is too politically correct to acknowledge the problem of Muslim fundamentalism at all or, even worse, apologizes for it, and this is unacceptable as well. So what I'm seeking is a new way of talking about this all together, which is grounded in the lived experiences and the hope of the people on the front lines. I'm painfully aware that there has been an increase in discrimination against Muslims in recent years in countries like the U.K. and the U.S., and that too is a matter of grave concern, but I firmly believe that telling these counter-stereotypical stories of people of Muslim heritage who have confronted the fundamentalists and been their primary victims is also a great way of countering that discrimination. So now let me introduce you to four people whose stories I had the great honor of telling. Faizan Peerzada and the Rafi Peer Theatre workshop named for his father have for years promoted the performing arts in Pakistan. With the rise of jihadist violence, they began to receive threats to call off their events, which they refused to heed. And so a bomber struck their 2008 eighth world performing arts festival in Lahore, producing rain of glass that fell into the venue injuring nine people, and later that same night, the Peerzadas made a very difficult decision: they announced that their festival would continue as planned the next day. As Faizan said at the time, if we bow down to the Islamists, we'll just be sitting in a dark corner. But they didn't know what would happen. Would anyone come? In fact, thousands of people came out the next day to support the performing arts in Lahore, and this simultaneously thrilled and terrified Faizan, and he ran up to a woman who had come in with her two small children, and he said, "You do know there was a bomb here yesterday, and you do know there's a threat here today." And she said, "I know that, but I came to your festival with my mother when I was their age, and I still have those images in my mind. We have to be here." With stalwart audiences like this, the Peerzadas were able to conclude their festival on schedule. And then the next year, they lost all of their sponsors due to the security risk. So when I met them in 2010, they were in the middle of the first subsequent event that they were able to have in the same venue, and this was the ninth youth performing arts festival held in Lahore in a year when that city had already experienced 44 terror attacks. This was a time when the Pakistani Taliban had commenced their systematic targeting of girls' schools that would culminate in the attack on Malala Yousafzai. What did the Peerzadas do in that environment? They staged girls' school theater. So I had the privilege of watching "Naang Wal," which was a musical in the Punjabi language, and the girls of Lahore Grammar School played all the parts. They sang and danced, they played the mice and the water buffalo, and I held my breath, wondering, would we get to the end of this amazing show? And when we did, the whole audience collectively exhaled, and a few people actually wept, and then they filled the auditorium with the peaceful boom of their applause. And I remember thinking in that moment that the bombers made headlines here two years before but this night and these people are as important a story. Maria Bashir is the first and only woman chief prosecutor in Afghanistan. She's been in the post since 2008 and actually opened an office to investigate cases of violence against women, which she says is the most important area in her mandate. When I meet her in her office in Herat, she enters surrounded by four large men with four huge guns. In fact, she now has 23 bodyguards, because she has weathered bomb attacks that nearly killed her kids, and it took the leg off of one of her guards. Why does she continue? She says with a smile that that is the question that everyone asks— as she puts it, "Why you risk not living?" And it is simply that for her, a better future for all the Maria Bashirs to come is worth the risk, and she knows that if people like her do not take the risk, there will be no better future. Later on in our interview, Prosecutor Bashir tells me how worried she is about the possible outcome of government negotiations with the Taliban, the people who have been trying to kill her. "If we give them a place in the government," she asks, "Who will protect women's rights?" And she urges the international community not to forget its promise about women because now they want peace with Taliban. A few weeks after I leave Afghanistan, I see a headline on the Internet. An Afghan prosecutor has been assassinated. I google desperately, and thankfully that day I find out that Maria was not the victim, though sadly, another Afghan prosecutor was gunned down on his way to work. And when I hear headlines like that now, I think that as international troops leave Afghanistan this year and beyond, we must continue to care about what happens to people there, to all of the Maria Bashirs. Sometimes I still hear her voice in my head saying, with no bravado whatsoever, "The situation of the women of Afghanistan will be better someday. We should prepare the ground for this, even if we are killed." There are no words adequate to denounce the al Shabaab terrorists who attacked the Westgate Mall in Nairobi on the same day as a children's cooking competition in September of 2013. They killed 67, including poets and pregnant women. Far away in the American Midwest, I had the good fortune of meeting Somali-Americans who were working to counter the efforts of al Shabaab to recruit a small number of young people from their city of Minneapolis to take part in atrocities like Westgate. Abdirizak Bihi's studious 17-year-old nephew Burhan Hassan was recruited here in 2008, spirited to Somalia, and then killed when he tried to come home. Since that time, Mr. Bihi, who directs the no-budget Somali Education and Advocacy Center, has been vocally denouncing the recruitment and the failures of government and Somali-American institutions like the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center where he believes his nephew was radicalized during a youth program. But he doesn't just criticize the mosque. He also takes on the government for its failure to do more to prevent poverty in his community. Given his own lack of financial resources, Mr. Bihi has had to be creative. To counter the efforts of al Shabaab to sway more disaffected youth, in the wake of the group's 2010 attack on World Cup viewers in Uganda, he organized a Ramadan basketball tournament in Minneapolis in response. Scores of Somali-American kids came out to embrace sport despite the fatwa against it. They played basketball as Burhan Hassan never would again. For his efforts, Mr. Bihi has been ostracized by the leadership of the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, with which he used to have good relations. He told me, "One day we saw the imam on TV calling us infidels and saying, 'These families are trying to destroy the mosque.'" This is at complete odds with how Abdirizak Bihi understands what he is trying to do by exposing al Shabaab recruitment, which is to save the religion I love from a small number of extremists. Now I want to tell one last story, that of a 22-year-old law student in Algeria named Amel Zenoune-Zouani who had the same dreams of a legal career that I did back in the '90s. She refused to give up her studies, despite the fact that the fundamentalists battling the Algerian state back then threatened all who continued their education. On January 26, 1997, Amel boarded the bus in Algiers where she was studying to go home and spend a Ramadan evening with her family, and would never finish law school. When the bus reached the outskirts of her hometown, it was stopped at a checkpoint manned by men from the Armed Islamic Group. Carrying her schoolbag, Amel was taken off the bus and killed in the street. The men who cut her throat then told everyone else, "If you go to university, the day will come when we will kill all of you just like this." Amel died at exactly 5:17 p.m., which we know because when she fell in the street, her watch broke. Her mother showed me the watch with the second hand still aimed optimistically upward towards a 5:18 that would never come. Shortly before her death, Amel had said to her mother of herself and her sisters, "Nothing will happen to us, Inshallah, God willing, but if something happens, you must know that we are dead for knowledge. You and father must keep your heads held high." The loss of such a young woman is unfathomable, and so as I did my research I found myself searching for Amel's hope again and her name even means "hope" in Arabic. I think I found it in two places. The first is in the strength of her family and all the other families to continue telling their stories and to go on with their lives despite the terrorism. In fact, Amel's sister Lamia overcame her grief, went to law school, and practices as a lawyer in Algiers today, something which is only possible because the armed fundamentalists were largely defeated in the country. And the second place I found Amel's hope was everywhere that women and men continue to defy the jihadis. We must support all of those in honor of Amel who continue this human rights struggle today, like the Network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws. It is not enough, as the victims rights advocate Cherifa Kheddar told me in Algiers, it is not enough just to battle terrorism. We must also challenge fundamentalism, because fundamentalism is the ideology that makes the bed of this terrorism. Why is it that people like her, like all of them are not more well known? Why is it that everyone knows who Osama bin Laden was and so few know of all of those standing up to the bin Ladens in their own contexts. We must change that, and so I ask you to please help share these stories through your networks. Look again at Amel Zenoune's watch, forever frozen, and now please look at your own watch and decide this is the moment that you commit to supporting people like Amel. We don't have the right to be silent about them because it is easier or because Western policy is flawed as well, because 5:17 is still coming to too many Amel Zenounes in places like northern Nigeria, where jihadis still kill students. The time to speak up in support of all of those who peacefully challenge fundamentalism and terrorism in their own communities is now. Thank you. (Applause) |
Two nerdy obsessions meet -- and it's magic | {0: 'David Kwong creates illusions for films and TV, and makes verbal magic as a crossword puzzle maker for the New York Times.'} | TED2014 | Puzzles and magic. I work in what most people think are two distinct fields, but I believe they are the same. I am both a magician and a New York Times crossword puzzle constructor, which basically means I've taken the world's two nerdiest hobbies and combined them into one career. And I believe that magic and puzzles are the same because they both key into one of the most important human drives: the urge to solve. Human beings are wired to solve, to make order out of chaos. It's certainly true for me. I've been solving my whole life. High school consisted of epic Scrabble matches in the cafeteria and not really talking to girls, and then at about that time I started learning magic tricks and definitely not talking to girls. There's nothing like starting a conversation with, "Hey, did you know that 'prestidigitation' is worth 20 points in Scrabble?" But back then, I noticed an intersection between puzzles and illusion. When you do the crossword puzzle or when you watch a magic show, you become a solver, and your goal is to try to find the order in the chaos, the chaos of, say, a black-and-white puzzle grid, a mixed-up bag of Scrabble tiles, or a shuffled pack of playing cards. And today, as a cruciverbalist — 23 points — and an illusion designer, I create that chaos. I test your ability to solve. Now, it turns out research tells us that solving is as primal as eating and sleeping. From birth, we are wired to solve. In one UCLA study, newborns still in the hospital were shown patterns, patterns like this: circle, cross, circle, cross. And then the pattern was changed: triangle, square. And by tracking an infant's gaze, we know that newborns as young as a day old can notice and respond to disruptions in order. It's remarkable. So from infancy through old age, the urge to solve unites us all, and I even found this photo on Instagram of pop star Katy Perry solving a crossword puzzle with her morning coffee. Like. (Laughter) Now, solving exists across all cultures. The American invention is the crossword puzzle, and this year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the crossword puzzle, first published in The New York World. But many other cultures have their signature puzzles as well. China gives us tangrams, which would test solvers' abilities to form shapes from the jumbled pieces. Chaos. Order. Order. And order. That one's my favorite, let's hear it again. Okay. And how about this puzzle invented in 18th-century England: the jigsaw puzzle. Is this not making order out of chaos? So as you can see, we are always solving. We are always trying to decode our world. It's an eternal quest. It's just like the one Cervantes wrote about in "Don Quixote," which by the way is the root of the word "quixotry," the highest-scoring Scrabble word of all time, 365 points. But anyway, "Don Quixote" is an important book. You guys have read "Don Quixote," yes? I'm seeing some heads nod. Come on guys, really? Who's read "Don Quixote?" Let's do this. Raise your hands if you've read "Don Quixote." There we go. Smart audience. Who's read "Don Quixote?" Get them up. Okay, good, because I need somebody smart here because now I'm going to demonstrate with the help of one of you just how deeply rooted your urge to solve is, just how wired to solve all of you really are, so I'm going to come into the audience and find somebody to help me. Let's see. Everybody's looking away all of a sudden. Can I? Would you? What is your name? Gwen. I'm not a mind reader, I can see your name tag. Come with me, Gwen. Everyone give her a round of applause, make her feel welcome. Gwen, after you. (Applause) Are you so excited? Did you know that your name is worth eight points in Scrabble? Okay, stand right here, Gwen, right here. Now, Gwen, before we begin, I'd like to point out a piece of the puzzle, which is here in this envelope, and I will not go near it. Okay? And over here we have a drawing of some farm animals. You can see we have an owl, we have a horse, a donkey, a rooster, an ox, and a sheep, and then here, Gwen, we have some fancy art store markers, colors like, can you see that word right there? Gwen: Cobalt. David Kwong: Cobalt, yes. Cobalt. But we have a silver, a red, an emerald, and an amber marker, and Gwen, you are going to color this drawing just like you were five years old, one marker at a time. It's going to be a lot of fun. But I'm going to go over here. I don't want to see what you're doing. Okay, so don't start yet. Wait for me to get over here and close my eyes. Now Gwen, are you ready? Pick up just one marker, pick up just one marker, and why don't you color in the horse for me? Color in the horse — big, big, big scribbles, broad strokes, don't worry about staying in the lines. All right. Great. And why don't you take that marker and recap it and place it on the table for me. Okay, and pick up another marker out of the cup and take off the cap and color in the donkey for me, color in the donkey. Big scribbles. Okay, cool, and re-cap that marker and place it on the table. And pick up another marker for me and take off the cap. Isn't this fun? And color in the owl for me. Color in the owl. Okay, and recap that marker and pick up another marker out of the cup and color in the rooster for me, color in the rooster. Good, good, good, good, good. Big, big, big strokes. Good, good. Pick up another marker out of the cup and color in the ox for me. Color in the ox. Okay, good. A lot of color on that, and recap, and place it on the table, and pick up another marker out of the cup. Oh, I'm out? Okay, I'm going to turn around. Did I forget? Oh, I forgot my purple marker. This is still going to work, though. I think this is still going to work, mostly. So Gwen, I'm going to hand you this envelope. Don't open it yet. Do not open it yet, but I am going to write down your choices so that everybody can see the choices that you made. Okay, great. So we have a cobalt horse, amber owl, a silver ox, yes, okay, a red donkey, and what was the emerald color? A rooster. An emerald rooster. Okay. Now for the moment of truth, Gwen, we're going to take a look in that envelope. Why don't you open it up and remove the one piece of paper from inside and hand it to me, and we will see if it matches your choices. Yes, I think it does. We have a cobalt horse, we have a red donkey, we have an amber owl, we have an emerald rooster, a silver ox, I forgot my purple marker so we have a blank sheep, but that's a pretty amazing coincidence, don't you think? Gwen, well done. That's beautiful. (Applause) I'll take that back from you. So ladies and gentlemen, how is this possible? How is this possible? Well, could it be that Gwen's brain is so wired to solve that she decoded hidden messages? Well this is the puzzle I present to you. Could there be order in the chaos that I created? Let's take a closer look. Do you recall when I showed you these puzzle pieces? What image did it ultimately become? A cobalt horse. The plot thickens. And then we played a game of tangrams with an emerald rooster. That one's my favorite. And then we had an experiment with a silver ox. And Katy Perry drinks her morning coffee out of an amber owl. Thank you, Katy, for taking that photo for me. Oh, and there's one more, there's one more. I believe you colored a red donkey, Gwen. Ladies and gentlemen, could you raise your hands for me if you've read "Don Quixote?" Who's read "Don Quixote?" (Laughter) But wait, but wait, wait, wait, wait, there's more. There's more. Gwen, I was so confident that you were going to make these choices that I made another prediction, and I put it in an even more indelible place, and it's right here. Ladies and gentlemen, we have today's New York Times. The date is March 18th, 2014. Many of you in the first couple of rows have it underneath your seats as well. Really dig. We hid them under there. See if you can fish out the newspaper and open up to the arts section and you will find the crossword puzzle, and the crossword puzzle today was written by yours truly. You can see my name above the grid. I'm going to give this to you, Gwen, to take a look. And I will also put it up on the screen. Now let's take a look at another piece of the puzzle. If you look at the first clue for 1-across, it starts with the letter C, for corrupt, and just below that we have an O, for outfielder, and if you keep reading the first letters of the clues down, you get cobalt horse, amber owl, silver ox, red donkey, and emerald rooster. (Applause) That's pretty cool, right? It's The New York Times. But wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait. Oh, Gwen, do you recall how I forgot my purple marker, and you were unable to color the sheep? Well, if you keep reading starting with 25-down, it says, "Oh, by the way, the sheep can be left blank." (Laughter) (Applause) But wait, wait, wait, there's one more thing, there's one more thing, there's one final piece of the puzzle. Gwen, I am so grateful for your choices because if we take a look at the first letters of your combinations, we get "C-H-A-O-S" for chaos and "O-R-D-E-R" for order. That's chaos and order. We've all made order out of chaos. So ladies and gentlemen, the next time you find yourself with a puzzle, whether it's in your life or in your work, or maybe it's at the Sunday morning breakfast table with The New York Times, remember, you are all wired to solve. Thank you. (Applause) |
How do you explain consciousness? | {0: 'In his work, David Chalmers explores the “hard problem of consciousness" -- the quest to explain our subjective experience.'} | TED2014 | Right now you have a movie playing inside your head. It's an amazing multi-track movie. It has 3D vision and surround sound for what you're seeing and hearing right now, but that's just the start of it. Your movie has smell and taste and touch. It has a sense of your body, pain, hunger, orgasms. It has emotions, anger and happiness. It has memories, like scenes from your childhood playing before you. And it has this constant voiceover narrative in your stream of conscious thinking. At the heart of this movie is you experiencing all this directly. This movie is your stream of consciousness, the subject of experience of the mind and the world. Consciousness is one of the fundamental facts of human existence. Each of us is conscious. We all have our own inner movie, you and you and you. There's nothing we know about more directly. At least, I know about my consciousness directly. I can't be certain that you guys are conscious. Consciousness also is what makes life worth living. If we weren't conscious, nothing in our lives would have meaning or value. But at the same time, it's the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe. Why are we conscious? Why do we have these inner movies? Why aren't we just robots who process all this input, produce all that output, without experiencing the inner movie at all? Right now, nobody knows the answers to those questions. I'm going to suggest that to integrate consciousness into science, some radical ideas may be needed. Some people say a science of consciousness is impossible. Science, by its nature, is objective. Consciousness, by its nature, is subjective. So there can never be a science of consciousness. For much of the 20th century, that view held sway. Psychologists studied behavior objectively, neuroscientists studied the brain objectively, and nobody even mentioned consciousness. Even 30 years ago, when TED got started, there was very little scientific work on consciousness. Now, about 20 years ago, all that began to change. Neuroscientists like Francis Crick and physicists like Roger Penrose said now is the time for science to attack consciousness. And since then, there's been a real explosion, a flowering of scientific work on consciousness. And this work has been wonderful. It's been great. But it also has some fundamental limitations so far. The centerpiece of the science of consciousness in recent years has been the search for correlations, correlations between certain areas of the brain and certain states of consciousness. We saw some of this kind of work from Nancy Kanwisher and the wonderful work she presented just a few minutes ago. Now we understand much better, for example, the kinds of brain areas that go along with the conscious experience of seeing faces or of feeling pain or of feeling happy. But this is still a science of correlations. It's not a science of explanations. We know that these brain areas go along with certain kinds of conscious experience, but we don't know why they do. I like to put this by saying that this kind of work from neuroscience is answering some of the questions we want answered about consciousness, the questions about what certain brain areas do and what they correlate with. But in a certain sense, those are the easy problems. No knock on the neuroscientists. There are no truly easy problems with consciousness. But it doesn't address the real mystery at the core of this subject: why is it that all that physical processing in a brain should be accompanied by consciousness at all? Why is there this inner subjective movie? Right now, we don't really have a bead on that. And you might say, let's just give neuroscience a few years. It'll turn out to be another emergent phenomenon like traffic jams, like hurricanes, like life, and we'll figure it out. The classical cases of emergence are all cases of emergent behavior, how a traffic jam behaves, how a hurricane functions, how a living organism reproduces and adapts and metabolizes, all questions about objective functioning. You could apply that to the human brain in explaining some of the behaviors and the functions of the human brain as emergent phenomena: how we walk, how we talk, how we play chess, all these questions about behavior. But when it comes to consciousness, questions about behavior are among the easy problems. When it comes to the hard problem, that's the question of why is it that all this behavior is accompanied by subjective experience? And here, the standard paradigm of emergence, even the standard paradigms of neuroscience, don't really, so far, have that much to say. Now, I'm a scientific materialist at heart. I want a scientific theory of consciousness that works, and for a long time, I banged my head against the wall looking for a theory of consciousness in purely physical terms that would work. But I eventually came to the conclusion that that just didn't work for systematic reasons. It's a long story, but the core idea is just that what you get from purely reductionist explanations in physical terms, in brain-based terms, is stories about the functioning of a system, its structure, its dynamics, the behavior it produces, great for solving the easy problems — how we behave, how we function — but when it comes to subjective experience — why does all this feel like something from the inside? — that's something fundamentally new, and it's always a further question. So I think we're at a kind of impasse here. We've got this wonderful, great chain of explanation, we're used to it, where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology. But consciousness doesn't seem to fit into this picture. On the one hand, it's a datum that we're conscious. On the other hand, we don't know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world. So I think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly, one that we need to integrate into our view of the world, but we don't yet see how. Faced with an anomaly like this, radical ideas may be needed, and I think that we may need one or two ideas that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically. Now, there are a few candidates for what those crazy ideas might be. My friend Dan Dennett, who's here today, has one. His crazy idea is that there is no hard problem of consciousness. The whole idea of the inner subjective movie involves a kind of illusion or confusion. Actually, all we've got to do is explain the objective functions, the behaviors of the brain, and then we've explained everything that needs to be explained. Well I say, more power to him. That's the kind of radical idea that we need to explore if you want to have a purely reductionist brain-based theory of consciousness. At the same time, for me and for many other people, that view is a bit too close to simply denying the datum of consciousness to be satisfactory. So I go in a different direction. In the time remaining, I want to explore two crazy ideas that I think may have some promise. The first crazy idea is that consciousness is fundamental. Physicists sometimes take some aspects of the universe as fundamental building blocks: space and time and mass. They postulate fundamental laws governing them, like the laws of gravity or of quantum mechanics. These fundamental properties and laws aren't explained in terms of anything more basic. Rather, they're taken as primitive, and you build up the world from there. Now sometimes, the list of fundamentals expands. In the 19th century, Maxwell figured out that you can't explain electromagnetic phenomena in terms of the existing fundamentals — space, time, mass, Newton's laws — so he postulated fundamental laws of electromagnetism and postulated electric charge as a fundamental element that those laws govern. I think that's the situation we're in with consciousness. If you can't explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals — space, time, mass, charge — then as a matter of logic, you need to expand the list. The natural thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as something fundamental, a fundamental building block of nature. This doesn't mean you suddenly can't do science with it. This opens up the way for you to do science with it. What we then need is to study the fundamental laws governing consciousness, the laws that connect consciousness to other fundamentals: space, time, mass, physical processes. Physicists sometimes say that we want fundamental laws so simple that we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. Well I think something like that is the situation we're in with consciousness. We want to find fundamental laws so simple we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. We don't know what those laws are yet, but that's what we're after. The second crazy idea is that consciousness might be universal. Every system might have some degree of consciousness. This view is sometimes called panpsychism: pan for all, psych for mind, every system is conscious, not just humans, dogs, mice, flies, but even Rob Knight's microbes, elementary particles. Even a photon has some degree of consciousness. The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking. It's not that a photon is wracked with angst because it's thinking, "Aww, I'm always buzzing around near the speed of light. I never get to slow down and smell the roses." No, not like that. But the thought is maybe photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness. This may sound a bit kooky to you. I mean, why would anyone think such a crazy thing? Some motivation comes from the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental. If it's fundamental, like space and time and mass, it's natural to suppose that it might be universal too, the way they are. It's also worth noting that although the idea seems counterintuitive to us, it's much less counterintuitive to people from different cultures, where the human mind is seen as much more continuous with nature. A deeper motivation comes from the idea that perhaps the most simple and powerful way to find fundamental laws connecting consciousness to physical processing is to link consciousness to information. Wherever there's information processing, there's consciousness. Complex information processing, like in a human, complex consciousness. Simple information processing, simple consciousness. A really exciting thing is in recent years a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi, has taken this kind of theory and developed it rigorously with a mathematical theory. He has a mathematical measure of information integration which he calls phi, measuring the amount of information integrated in a system. And he supposes that phi goes along with consciousness. So in a human brain, incredibly large amount of information integration, high degree of phi, a whole lot of consciousness. In a mouse, medium degree of information integration, still pretty significant, pretty serious amount of consciousness. But as you go down to worms, microbes, particles, the amount of phi falls off. The amount of information integration falls off, but it's still non-zero. On Tononi's theory, there's still going to be a non-zero degree of consciousness. In effect, he's proposing a fundamental law of consciousness: high phi, high consciousness. Now, I don't know if this theory is right, but it's actually perhaps the leading theory right now in the science of consciousness, and it's been used to integrate a whole range of scientific data, and it does have a nice property that it is in fact simple enough you can write it on the front of a t-shirt. Another final motivation is that panpsychism might help us to integrate consciousness into the physical world. Physicists and philosophers have often observed that physics is curiously abstract. It describes the structure of reality using a bunch of equations, but it doesn't tell us about the reality that underlies it. As Stephen Hawking puts it, what puts the fire into the equations? Well, on the panpsychist view, you can leave the equations of physics as they are, but you can take them to be describing the flux of consciousness. That's what physics really is ultimately doing, describing the flux of consciousness. On this view, it's consciousness that puts the fire into the equations. On that view, consciousness doesn't dangle outside the physical world as some kind of extra. It's there right at its heart. This view, I think, the panpsychist view, has the potential to transfigure our relationship to nature, and it may have some pretty serious social and ethical consequences. Some of these may be counterintuitive. I used to think I shouldn't eat anything which is conscious, so therefore I should be vegetarian. Now, if you're a panpsychist and you take that view, you're going to go very hungry. So I think when you think about it, this tends to transfigure your views, whereas what matters for ethical purposes and moral considerations, not so much the fact of consciousness, but the degree and the complexity of consciousness. It's also natural to ask about consciousness in other systems, like computers. What about the artificially intelligent system in the movie "Her," Samantha? Is she conscious? Well, if you take the informational, panpsychist view, she certainly has complicated information processing and integration, so the answer is very likely yes, she is conscious. If that's right, it raises pretty serious ethical issues about both the ethics of developing intelligent computer systems and the ethics of turning them off. Finally, you might ask about the consciousness of whole groups, the planet. Does Canada have its own consciousness? Or at a more local level, does an integrated group like the audience at a TED conference, are we right now having a collective TED consciousness, an inner movie for this collective TED group which is distinct from the inner movies of each of our parts? I don't know the answer to that question, but I think it's at least one worth taking seriously. Okay, so this panpsychist vision, it is a radical one, and I don't know that it's correct. I'm actually more confident about the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental, than about the second one, that it's universal. I mean, the view raises any number of questions, has any number of challenges, like how do those little bits of consciousness add up to the kind of complex consciousness we know and love. If we can answer those questions, then I think we're going to be well on our way to a serious theory of consciousness. If not, well, this is the hardest problem perhaps in science and philosophy. We can't expect to solve it overnight. But I do think we're going to figure it out eventually. Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think, both to understanding the universe and to understanding ourselves. It may just take the right crazy idea. Thank you. (Applause) |
A tool to fix one of the most dangerous moments in surgery | {0: 'Nikolai Begg is a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering whose passion is rethinking medical devices.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | The first time I stood in the operating room and watched a real surgery, I had no idea what to expect. I was a college student in engineering. I thought it was going to be like on TV. Ominous music playing in the background, beads of sweat pouring down the surgeon's face. But it wasn't like that at all. There was music playing on this day, I think it was Madonna's greatest hits. (Laughter) And there was plenty of conversation, not just about the patient's heart rate, but about sports and weekend plans. And since then, the more surgeries I watched, the more I realized this is how it is. In some weird way, it's just another day at the office. But every so often the music gets turned down, everyone stops talking, and stares at exactly the same thing. And that's when you know that something absolutely critical and dangerous is happening. The first time I saw that I was watching a type of surgery called laparoscopic surgery And for those of you who are unfamiliar, laparoscopic surgery, instead of the large open incision you might be used to with surgery, a laparoscopic surgery is where the surgeon creates these three or more small incisions in the patient. And then inserts these long, thin instruments and a camera, and actually does the procedure inside the patient. This is great because there's much less risk of infection, much less pain, shorter recovery time. But there is a trade-off, because these incisions are created with a long, pointed device called a trocar. And the way the surgeon uses this device is that he takes it and he presses it into the abdomen until it punctures through. And now the reason why everyone in the operating room was staring at that device on that day was because he had to be absolutely careful not to plunge it through and puncture it into the organs and blood vessels below. But this problem should seem pretty familiar to all of you because I'm pretty sure you've seen it somewhere else. (Laughter) Remember this? (Applause) You knew that at any second that straw was going to plunge through, and you didn't know if it was going to go out the other side and straight into your hand, or if you were going to get juice everywhere, but you were terrified. Right? Every single time you did this, you experienced the same fundamental physics that I was watching in the operating room that day. And it turns out it really is a problem. In 2003, the FDA actually came out and said that trocar incisions might be the most dangerous step in minimally invasive surgery. Again in 2009, we see a paper that says that trocars account for over half of all major complications in laparoscopic surgery. And, oh by the way, this hasn't changed for 25 years. So when I got to graduate school, this is what I wanted to work on. I was trying to explain to a friend of mine what exactly I was spending my time doing, and I said, "It's like when you're drilling through a wall to hang something in your apartment. There's that moment when the drill first punctures through the wall and there's this plunge. Right? And he looked at me and he said, "You mean like when they drill into people's brains?" And I said, "Excuse me?" (Laughter) And then I looked it up and they do drill into people's brains. A lot of neurosurgical procedures actually start with a drill incision through the skull. And if the surgeon isn't careful, he can plunge directly into the brain. So this is the moment when I started thinking, okay, cranial drilling, laparoscopic surgery, why not other areas of medicine? Because think about it, when was the last time you went to the doctor and you didn't get stuck with something? Right? So the truth is in medicine puncture is everywhere. And here are just a couple of the procedures that I've found that involve some tissue puncture step. And if we take just three of them — laparoscopic surgery, epidurals, and cranial drilling — these procedures account for over 30,000 complications every year in this country alone. I call that a problem worth solving. So let's take a look at some of the devices that are used in these types of procedures. I mentioned epidurals. This is an epidural needle. It's used to puncture through the ligaments in the spine and deliver anesthesia during childbirth. Here's a set of bone marrow biopsy tools. These are actually used to burrow into the bone and collect bone marrow or sample bone lesions. Here's a bayonette from the Civil War. (Laughter) If I had told you it was a medical puncture device you probably would have believed me. Because what's the difference? So, the more I did this research the more I thought there has to be a better way to do this. And for me the key to this problem is that all these different puncture devices share a common set of fundamental physics. So what are those physics? Let's go back to drilling through a wall. So you're applying a force on a drill towards the wall. And Newton says the wall is going to apply force back, equal and opposite. So, as you drill through the wall, those forces balance. But then there's that moment when the drill first punctures through the other side of the wall, and right at that moment the wall can't push back anymore. But your brain hasn't reacted to that change in force. So for that millisecond, or however long it takes you to react, you're still pushing, and that unbalanced force causes an acceleration, and that is the plunge. But what if right at the moment of puncture you could pull that tip back, actually oppose the forward acceleration? That's what I set out to do. So imagine you have a device and it's got some kind of sharp tip to cut through tissue. What's the simplest way you could pull that tip back? I chose a spring. So when you extend that spring, you extend that tip out so it's ready to puncture tissue, the spring wants to pull the tip back. How do you keep the tip in place until the moment of puncture? I used this mechanism. When the tip of the device is pressed against tissue, the mechanism expands outwards and wedges in place against the wall. And the friction that's generated locks it in place and prevents the spring from retracting the tip. But right at the moment of puncture, the tissue can't push back on the tip anymore. So the mechanism unlocks and the spring retracts the tip. Let me show you that happening in slow motion. This is about 2,000 frames a second, and I'd like you to notice the tip that's right there on the bottom, about to puncture through tissue. And you'll see that right at the moment of puncture, right there, the mechanism unlocks and retracts that tip back. I want to show it to you again, a little closer up. You're going to see the sharp bladed tip, and right when it punctures that rubber membrane it's going to disappear into this white blunt sheath. Right there. That happens within four 100ths of a second after puncture. And because this device is designed to address the physics of puncture and not the specifics of cranial drilling or laparoscopic surgery, or another procedure, it's applicable across these different medical disciplines and across different length scales. But it didn't always look like this. This was my first prototype. Yes, those are popsicle sticks, and there's a rubber band at the top. It took about 30 minutes to do this, but it worked. And it proved to me that my idea worked and it justified the next couple years of work on this project. I worked on this because this problem really fascinated me. It kept me up at night. But I think it should fascinate you too, because I said puncture is everywhere. That means at some point it's going to be your problem too. That first day in the operating room I never expected to find myself on the other end of a trocar. But last year, I got appendicitis when I was visiting Greece. So I was in the hospital in Athens, and the surgeon was telling me he was going to perform a laparoscopic surgery. He was going to remove my appendix through these tiny incisions, and he was talking about what I could expect for the recovery, and what was going to happen. He said, "Do you have any questions?" And I said, "Just one, doc. What kind of trocar do you use?" So my favorite quote about laparoscopic surgery comes from a Doctor H. C. Jacobaeus: "It is puncture itself that causes risk." That's my favorite quote because H.C. Jacobaeus was the first person to ever perform laparoscopic surgery on humans, and he wrote that in 1912. This is a problem that's been injuring and even killing people for over 100 years. So it's easy to think that for every major problem out there there's some team of experts working around the clock to solve it. The truth is that's not always the case. We have to be better at finding those problems and finding ways to solve them. So if you come across a problem that grabs you, let it keep you up at night. Allow yourself to be fascinated, because there are so many lives to save. (Applause) |
Sculptures that’d be at home in the deep sea | {0: 'Shih Chieh Huang doesn’t make art that’s meant to be admired from afar. He dissects and disassembles the detritus of our lives—household appliances, lights, computer parts, toys—and transforms them into surreal experiences.'} | TED2014 | I was born in Taiwan. I grew up surrounded by different types of hardware stores, and I like going to night markets. I love the energy of the night markets, the colors, the lights, the toys, and all the unexpected things I find every time I go, things like watermelon with straw antennas or puppies with mohawks. When I was growing up, I liked taking toys apart, any kind of toys I'd find around the house, like my brother's BB gun when he's not home. I also liked to make environments for people to explore and play. In these early installations, I would take plastic sheets, plastic bags, and things I would find in the hardware store or around the house. I would take things like highlighter pen, mix it with water, pump it through plastic tubing, creating these glowing circulatory systems for people to walk through and enjoy. I like these materials because of the way they look, the way they feel, and they're very affordable. I also liked to make devices that work with body parts. I would take camera LED lights and a bungee cord and strap it on my waist and I would videotape my belly button, get a different perspective, and see what it does. (Laughter) I also like to modify household appliances. This is an automatic night light. Some of you might have them at home. I would cut out the light sensor, add an extension line, and use modeling clay, stick it onto the television, and then I would videotape my eye, and using the dark part of my eye tricking the sensor into thinking it's night time, so you turn on the lightbulb. The white of the eye and the eyelid will trick the sensor into thinking it's daytime, and it will shut off the light. I wanted to collect more different types of eyes, so I built this device using bicycle helmets, some lightbulbs and television sets. It would be easier for other people to wear the helmet and record their eyes. This device allows me to symbolically extract other people's eyes, so I have a diversity of eyes to use for my other sculptures. This sculpture has four eyes. Each eye is controlling a different device. This eye is turning itself around in a television. This eye is inflating a plastic tube. This eye is watching a video of another piece being made. And these two eyes are activating glowing water. Many of these pieces are later on shown in museums, biennials, triennial exhibitions around the world. I love science and biology. In 2007, I was doing a research fellowship at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum looking at bioluminous organisms in the oean. I love these creatures. I love the way they look, the way they feel. They're soft, they're slimy, and I was fascinated by the way they use light in their environment, either to attract mates, for self-defense, or to attract food. This research inspired my work in many different ways, things like movement or different light patterns. So I started gathering a lot of different types of material in my studio and just experimenting and trying this out, trying that out, and seeing what types of creatures I can come up with. I used a lot of computer cooling fans and just kind of put them together and see what happens. This is an 8,000-square-foot installation composed of many different creatures, some hanging from the ceiling and some resting on the floor. From afar, they look alien-like, but when you look closer, they're all made out of black garbage bags or Tupperware containers. I'd like to share with you how ordinary things can become something magical and wondrous. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
What humans can learn from semi-intelligent slime | {0: 'Heather Barnett creates art with slime mold -- a material used in diverse areas of scientific research, including biological computing, robotics and structural design.'} | TEDSalon Berlin 2014 | I'd like to introduce you to an organism: a slime mold, Physarum polycephalum. It's a mold with an identity crisis, because it's not a mold, so let's get that straight to start with. It is one of 700 known slime molds belonging to the kingdom of the amoeba. It is a single-celled organism, a cell, that joins together with other cells to form a mass super-cell to maximize its resources. So within a slime mold you might find thousands or millions of nuclei, all sharing a cell wall, all operating as one entity. In its natural habitat, you might find the slime mold foraging in woodlands, eating rotting vegetation, but you might equally find it in research laboratories, classrooms, and even artists' studios. I first came across the slime mold about five years ago. A microbiologist friend of mine gave me a petri dish with a little yellow blob in it and told me to go home and play with it. The only instructions I was given, that it likes it dark and damp and its favorite food is porridge oats. I'm an artist who's worked for many years with biology, with scientific processes, so living material is not uncommon for me. I've worked with plants, bacteria, cuttlefish, fruit flies. So I was keen to get my new collaborator home to see what it could do. So I took it home and I watched. I fed it a varied diet. I observed as it networked. It formed a connection between food sources. I watched it leave a trail behind it, indicating where it had been. And I noticed that when it was fed up with one petri dish, it would escape and find a better home. I captured my observations through time-lapse photography. Slime mold grows at about one centimeter an hour, so it's not really ideal for live viewing unless there's some form of really extreme meditation, but through the time lapse, I could observe some really interesting behaviors. For instance, having fed on a nice pile of oats, the slime mold goes off to explore new territories in different directions simultaneously. When it meets itself, it knows it's already there, it recognizes it's there, and instead retreats back and grows in other directions. I was quite impressed by this feat, at how what was essentially just a bag of cellular slime could somehow map its territory, know itself, and move with seeming intention. I found countless scientific studies, research papers, journal articles, all citing incredible work with this one organism, and I'm going to share a few of those with you. For example, a team in Hokkaido University in Japan filled a maze with slime mold. It joined together and formed a mass cell. They introduced food at two points, oats of course, and it formed a connection between the food. It retracted from empty areas and dead ends. There are four possible routes through this maze, yet time and time again, the slime mold established the shortest and the most efficient route. Quite clever. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold had a primitive form of intelligence. Another study exposed cold air at regular intervals to the slime mold. It didn't like it. It doesn't like it cold. It doesn't like it dry. They did this at repeat intervals, and each time, the slime mold slowed down its growth in response. However, at the next interval, the researchers didn't put the cold air on, yet the slime mold slowed down in anticipation of it happening. It somehow knew that it was about the time for the cold air that it didn't like. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold was able to learn. A third experiment: the slime mold was invited to explore a territory covered in oats. It fans out in a branching pattern. As it goes, each food node it finds, it forms a network, a connection to, and keeps foraging. After 26 hours, it established quite a firm network between the different oats. Now there's nothing remarkable in this until you learn that the center oat that it started from represents the city of Tokyo, and the surrounding oats are suburban railway stations. The slime mold had replicated the Tokyo transport network — (Laughter) — a complex system developed over time by community dwellings, civil engineering, urban planning. What had taken us well over 100 years took the slime mold just over a day. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold can form efficient networks and solve the traveling salesman problem. It is a biological computer. As such, it has been mathematically modeled, algorithmically analyzed. It's been sonified, replicated, simulated. World over, teams of researchers are decoding its biological principles to understand its computational rules and applying that learning to the fields of electronics, programming and robotics. So the question is, how does this thing work? It doesn't have a central nervous system. It doesn't have a brain, yet it can perform behaviors that we associate with brain function. It can learn, it can remember, it can solve problems, it can make decisions. So where does that intelligence lie? So this is a microscopy, a video I shot, and it's about 100 times magnification, sped up about 20 times, and inside the slime mold, there is a rhythmic pulsing flow, a vein-like structure carrying cellular material, nutrients and chemical information through the cell, streaming first in one direction and then back in another. And it is this continuous, synchronous oscillation within the cell that allows it to form quite a complex understanding of its environment, but without any large-scale control center. This is where its intelligence lies. So it's not just academic researchers in universities that are interested in this organism. A few years ago, I set up SliMoCo, the Slime Mould Collective. It's an online, open, democratic network for slime mold researchers and enthusiasts to share knowledge and experimentation across disciplinary divides and across academic divides. The Slime Mould Collective membership is self-selecting. People have found the collective as the slime mold finds the oats. And it comprises of scientists and computer scientists and researchers but also artists like me, architects, designers, writers, activists, you name it. It's a very interesting, eclectic membership. Just a few examples: an artist who paints with fluorescent Physarum; a collaborative team who are combining biological and electronic design with 3D printing technologies in a workshop; another artist who is using the slime mold as a way of engaging a community to map their area. Here, the slime mold is being used directly as a biological tool, but metaphorically as a symbol for ways of talking about social cohesion, communication and cooperation. Other public engagement activities, I run lots of slime mold workshops, a creative way of engaging with the organism. So people are invited to come and learn about what amazing things it can do, and they design their own petri dish experiment, an environment for the slime mold to navigate so they can test its properties. Everybody takes home a new pet and is invited to post their results on the Slime Mould Collective. And the collective has enabled me to form collaborations with a whole array of interesting people. I've been working with filmmakers on a feature-length slime mold documentary, and I stress feature-length, which is in the final stages of edit and will be hitting your cinema screens very soon. (Laughter) It's also enabled me to conduct what I think is the world's first human slime mold experiment. This is part of an exhibition in Rotterdam last year. We invited people to become slime mold for half an hour. So we essentially tied people together so they were a giant cell, and invited them to follow slime mold rules. You have to communicate through oscillations, no speaking. You have to operate as one entity, one mass cell, no egos, and the motivation for moving and then exploring the environment is in search of food. So a chaotic shuffle ensued as this bunch of strangers tied together with yellow ropes wearing "Being Slime Mold" t-shirts wandered through the museum park. When they met trees, they had to reshape their connections and reform as a mass cell through not speaking. This is a ludicrous experiment in many, many ways. This isn't hypothesis-driven. We're not trying to prove, demonstrate anything. But what it did provide us was a way of engaging a broad section of the public with ideas of intelligence, agency, autonomy, and provide a playful platform for discussions about the things that ensued. One of the most exciting things about this experiment was the conversation that happened afterwards. An entirely spontaneous symposium happened in the park. People talked about the human psychology, of how difficult it was to let go of their individual personalities and egos. Other people talked about bacterial communication. Each person brought in their own individual interpretation, and our conclusion from this experiment was that the people of Rotterdam were highly cooperative, especially when given beer. We didn't just give them oats. We gave them beer as well. But they weren't as efficient as the slime mold, and the slime mold, for me, is a fascinating subject matter. It's biologically fascinating, it's computationally interesting, but it's also a symbol, a way of engaging with ideas of community, collective behavior, cooperation. A lot of my work draws on the scientific research, so this pays homage to the maze experiment but in a different way. And the slime mold is also my working material. It's a coproducer of photographs, prints, animations, participatory events. Whilst the slime mold doesn't choose to work with me, exactly, it is a collaboration of sorts. I can predict certain behaviors by understanding how it operates, but I can't control it. The slime mold has the final say in the creative process. And after all, it has its own internal aesthetics. These branching patterns that we see we see across all forms, scales of nature, from river deltas to lightning strikes, from our own blood vessels to neural networks. There's clearly significant rules at play in this simple yet complex organism, and no matter what our disciplinary perspective or our mode of inquiry, there's a great deal that we can learn from observing and engaging with this beautiful, brainless blob. I give you Physarum polycephalum. Thank you. (Applause) |
Are you human? | {0: 'Ze Frank has been involved in online comedy, web toys and virtually shared experiences for the past 20 years as an influencer, performer, executive and mischief maker.'} | TED2014 | (Music) This is the human test, a test to see if you are a human. Please raise your hand if something applies to you. Are we agreed? Yes? Then let's begin. Have you ever eaten a booger long past your childhood? (Laughter) It's okay, it's safe here. Have you ever made a small, weird sound when you remembered something embarrassing? Have you ever purposely lowercased the first letter of a text in order to come across as sad or disappointed? (Laughter) Okay. Have you ever ended a text with a period as a sign of aggression? Okay. Period. Have you ever laughed or smiled when someone said something shitty to you and then spent the rest of the day wondering why you reacted that way? Yes. Have you ever seemed to lose your airplane ticket a thousand times as you walked from the check-in to the gate? Yes. Have you ever put on a pair of pants and then much later realized that there was a loose sock smushed up against your thigh? (Laughter) Good. Have you ever tried to guess someone else's password so many times that it locked their account? Mmm. Have you ever had a nagging feeling that one day you will be discovered as a fraud? Yes, it's safe here. Have you ever hoped that there was some ability you hadn't discovered yet that you were just naturally great at? Mmm. Have you ever broken something in real life, and then found yourself looking for an "undo" button in real life? Have you ever misplaced your TED badge and then immediately started imagining what a three-day Vancouver vacation might look like? Have you ever marveled at how someone you thought was so ordinary could suddenly become so beautiful? Have you ever stared at your phone smiling like an idiot while texting with someone? Have you ever subsequently texted that person the phrase "I'm staring at the phone smiling like an idiot"? Have you ever been tempted to, and then gave in to the temptation, of looking through someone else's phone? Have you ever had a conversation with yourself and then suddenly realized you're a real asshole to yourself? (Laughter) Has your phone ever run out of battery in the middle of an argument, and it sort of felt like the phone was breaking up with both of you? Have you ever thought that working on an issue between you was futile because it should just be easier than this, or this is supposed to happen just naturally? Have you ever realized that very little, in the long run, just happens naturally? Have you ever woken up blissfully and suddenly been flooded by the awful remembrance that someone had left you? Have you ever lost the ability to imagine a future without a person that no longer was in your life? Have you ever looked back on that event with the sad smile of autumn and the realization that futures will happen regardless? Congratulations. You have now completed the test. You are all human. (Applause) |
An ultra-low-cost college degree | {0: 'Shai Reshef wants to democratize higher education.'} | TED2014 | I would like to share with you a new model of higher education, a model that, once expanded, can enhance the collective intelligence of millions of creative and motivated individuals that otherwise would be left behind. Look at the world. Pick a place and focus on it. You will find humans chasing higher education. Let's meet some of them. Patrick. Patrick was born in Liberia to a family of 20 children. During the civil war, he and his family were forced to flee to Nigeria. There, in spite of his situation, he graduated high school with nearly perfect grades. He wanted to continue to higher education, but due to his family living on the poverty line, he was soon sent to South Africa to work and send back money to feed his family. Patrick never gave up his dream of higher education. Late at night, after work, he surfed the net, looking for ways to study. Meet Debbie. Debbie is from Florida. Her parents didn't go to college, and neither did any of her siblings. Debbie has worked all her life, pays taxes, supports herself month to month, proud of the American dream, a dream that just won't be complete without higher education. But Debbie doesn't have the savings for higher education. She can't pay the tuition. Neither could she leave work. Meet Wael. Wael is from Syria. He's experiencing firsthand the misery, fear and failure imposed on his country. He's a big believer in education. He knew that if he could find an opportunity for higher education, an opportunity to get ahead of the rest, he has a better chance to survive in a world turned upside down. The higher education system failed Patrick, Debbie and Wael, exactly as it is failing millions of potential students — millions that graduate high school, millions that are qualified for higher education, millions that want to study yet cannot access it for various reasons. First: financial. Universities are expensive; we all know it. In large parts of the world, higher education is unattainable for an average citizen. This is probably the biggest problem facing our society. Higher education stopped being a right for all and became a privilege for the few. Second: cultural. Students who are qualified for higher education can afford — want to study — cannot, because it is not decent, it is not a place for a woman. This is the story of countless women in Africa, for example, prevented from higher education because of cultural barriers. And here comes the third reason: UNESCO stated that in 2025, 100 million students will be deprived of higher education, simply because there will not be enough seats to accommodate them, to meet the demand. They will take a placement test, they will pass it, but they still won't have access, because there are no places available. These are the reasons I founded University of the People, a nonprofit, tuition-free, degree-granting university to give an alternative, to create an alternative, to those who have no other; an alternative that will be affordable and scalable, an alternative that will disrupt the current education system, and open the gates to higher education for every qualified student regardless of what they earn, where they live, or what society says about them. Patrick, Debbie and Wael are only three examples out of the 1,700 accepted students from 143 countries. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) We didn't need to reinvent the wheel. We just looked at what wasn't working and used the amazing power of the Internet to get around it. We set out to build a model that will cut down almost entirely the cost of higher education. And that's how we did it. First, bricks and mortar cost money. Universities have expenses that virtual universities don't. We don't need to pass these expenses on to our students. They don't exist. We also don't need to worry about capacity. There are no limits of seats in virtual university. Actually, nobody needs to stand at the back of the lecture hall. Textbooks are also something our students don't need to buy. By using open educational resources and the generosity of professors who are putting their material up free and accessible, we don't need to send our students to buy textbooks. All of our materials come free. Even professors, the most expensive line in any university balance sheet, come free to our students. Over 3,000 of them, including presidents, vice chancellors, professors and academic advisers from top universities such as NYU, Yale, Berkeley and Oxford, came on board to help our students. Finally, is our belief in peer-to-peer learning. We use this sound pedagogical model to encourage our students from all over the world to interact and study together, and also to reduce the time our professors need to labor over class assignments. If the Internet has made us a global village, this model can develop its future leadership. Look how we do it. We only offer two programs: business administration and computer science, the two programs most in demand worldwide, the two programs that are likeliest to help our students find a job. When our students are accepted, they are placed in a small classroom of 20 to 30 students, to ensure that those who need personalized attention get it. Moreover, for every nine-week course, they meet a new peer, a whole new set of students from all over the world. Every week, when they go into the classroom, they find the lecture notes of the week, the reading assignment, the homework assignment, and the discussion question, which is the core of our studies. Every week, every student must contribute to the class discussion, and also must comment on the contribution of others. This way, we open our students' minds, we develop a positive shift in attitude toward different cultures. By the end of each week, the students take a quiz, hand in their homework, which are assessed by their peers under the supervision of the instructors, get a grade, move to the next week. By the end of the course, they take the final exam, get a grade, and follow to the next course. We open the gates for higher education for every qualified student. Every student with a high school diploma, sufficient English and Internet connection can study with us. We don't use audio, we don't use video. Broadband is not necessary. Any student from any part of the world with any Internet connection can study with us. We are tuition free. All we ask our students to cover is the cost of their exams, 100 dollars per exam. A full-time bachelor's degree student taking 40 courses will pay 1,000 dollars a year, 4,000 dollars for the entire degree. And for those who cannot afford even this, we offer them a variety of scholarships. It is our mission that nobody will be left behind for financial reasons. With 5,000 students in 2016, this model is financially sustainable. Five years ago, it was a vision. Today, it is a reality. Last month, we got the ultimate academic endorsement to our model. University of the People is now fully accredited. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) With this accreditation, it's our time now to scale up. We have demonstrated that our model works. I invite universities and, even more important, developing countries' governments, to replicate this model to ensure that the gates of higher education will open widely. A new era is coming — an era that will witness the disruption of the higher education model as we know it today, from being a privilege for the few to becoming a basic right, affordable and accessible for all. Thank you. (Applause) |
How giant websites design for you (and a billion others, too) | {0: "At Facebook (and previously at YouTube), Margaret Gould Stewart designs experiences that touch the lives of a large percentage of the world's population."} | TED2014 | What do you think of when I say the word "design"? You probably think of things like this, finely crafted objects that you can hold in your hand, or maybe logos and posters and maps that visually explain things, classic icons of timeless design. But I'm not here to talk about that kind of design. I want to talk about the kind that you probably use every day and may not give much thought to, designs that change all the time and that live inside your pocket. I'm talking about the design of digital experiences and specifically the design of systems that are so big that their scale can be hard to comprehend. Consider the fact that Google processes over one billion search queries every day, that every minute, over 100 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube. That's more in a single day than all three major U.S. networks broadcast in the last five years combined. And Facebook transmitting the photos, messages and stories of over 1.23 billion people. That's almost half of the Internet population, and a sixth of humanity. These are some of the products that I've helped design over the course of my career, and their scale is so massive that they've produced unprecedented design challenges. But what is really hard about designing at scale is this: It's hard in part because it requires a combination of two things, audacity and humility — audacity to believe that the thing that you're making is something that the entire world wants and needs, and humility to understand that as a designer, it's not about you or your portfolio, it's about the people that you're designing for, and how your work just might help them live better lives. Now, unfortunately, there's no school that offers the course Designing for Humanity 101. I and the other designers who work on these kinds of products have had to invent it as we go along, and we are teaching ourselves the emerging best practices of designing at scale, and today I'd like share some of the things that we've learned over the years. Now, the first thing that you need to know about designing at scale is that the little things really matter. Here's a really good example of how a very tiny design element can make a big impact. The team at Facebook that manages the Facebook "Like" button decided that it needed to be redesigned. The button had kind of gotten out of sync with the evolution of our brand and it needed to be modernized. Now you might think, well, it's a tiny little button, it probably is a pretty straightforward, easy design assignment, but it wasn't. Turns out, there were all kinds of constraints for the design of this button. You had to work within specific height and width parameters. You had to be careful to make it work in a bunch of different languages, and be careful about using fancy gradients or borders because it has to degrade gracefully in old web browsers. The truth is, designing this tiny little button was a huge pain in the butt. Now, this is the new version of the button, and the designer who led this project estimates that he spent over 280 hours redesigning this button over the course of months. Now, why would we spend so much time on something so small? It's because when you're designing at scale, there's no such thing as a small detail. This innocent little button is seen on average 22 billion times a day and on over 7.5 million websites. It's one of the single most viewed design elements ever created. Now that's a lot of pressure for a little button and the designer behind it, but with these kinds of products, you need to get even the tiny things right. Now, the next thing that you need to understand is how to design with data. Now, when you're working on products like this, you have incredible amounts of information about how people are using your product that you can then use to influence your design decisions, but it's not just as simple as following the numbers. Let me give you an example so that you can understand what I mean. Facebook has had a tool for a long time that allowed people to report photos that may be in violation of our community standards, things like spam and abuse. And there were a ton of photos reported, but as it turns out, only a small percentage were actually in violation of those community standards. Most of them were just your typical party photo. Now, to give you a specific hypothetical example, let's say my friend Laura hypothetically uploads a picture of me from a drunken night of karaoke. This is purely hypothetical, I can assure you. (Laughter) Now, incidentally, you know how some people are kind of worried that their boss or employee is going to discover embarrassing photos of them on Facebook? Do you know how hard that is to avoid when you actually work at Facebook? So anyway, there are lots of these photos being erroneously reported as spam and abuse, and one of the engineers on the team had a hunch. He really thought there was something else going on and he was right, because when he looked through a bunch of the cases, he found that most of them were from people who were requesting the takedown of a photo of themselves. Now this was a scenario that the team never even took into account before. So they added a new feature that allowed people to message their friend to ask them to take the photo down. But it didn't work. Only 20 percent of people sent the message to their friend. So the team went back at it. They consulted with experts in conflict resolution. They even studied the universal principles of polite language, which I didn't even actually know existed until this research happened. And they found something really interesting. They had to go beyond just helping people ask their friend to take the photo down. They had to help people express to their friend how the photo made them feel. Here's how the experience works today. So I find this hypothetical photo of myself, and it's not spam, it's not abuse, but I really wish it weren't on the site. So I report it and I say, "I'm in this photo and I don't like it," and then we dig deeper. Why don't you like this photo of yourself? And I select "It's embarrassing." And then I'm encouraged to message my friend, but here's the critical difference. I'm provided specific suggested language that helps me communicate to Laura how the photo makes me feel. Now the team found that this relatively small change had a huge impact. Before, only 20 percent of people were sending the message, and now 60 percent were, and surveys showed that people on both sides of the conversation felt better as a result. That same survey showed that 90 percent of your friends want to know if they've done something to upset you. Now I don't know who the other 10 percent are, but maybe that's where our "Unfriend" feature can come in handy. So as you can see, these decisions are highly nuanced. Of course we use a lot of data to inform our decisions, but we also rely very heavily on iteration, research, testing, intuition, human empathy. It's both art and science. Now, sometimes the designers who work on these products are called "data-driven," which is a term that totally drives us bonkers. The fact is, it would be irresponsible of us not to rigorously test our designs when so many people are counting on us to get it right, but data analytics will never be a substitute for design intuition. Data can help you make a good design great, but it will never made a bad design good. The next thing that you need to understand as a principle is that when you introduce change, you need to do it extraordinarily carefully. Now I often have joked that I spend almost as much time designing the introduction of change as I do the change itself, and I'm sure that we can all relate to that when something that we use a lot changes and then we have to adjust. The fact is, people can become very efficient at using bad design, and so even if the change is good for them in the long run, it's still incredibly frustrating when it happens, and this is particularly true with user-generated content platforms, because people can rightfully claim a sense of ownership. It is, after all, their content. Now, years ago, when I was working at YouTube, we were looking for ways to encourage more people to rate videos, and it was interesting because when we looked into the data, we found that almost everyone was exclusively using the highest five-star rating, a handful of people were using the lowest one-star, and virtually no one was using two, three or four stars. So we decided to simplify into an up-down kind of voting binary model. It's going to be much easier for people to engage with. But people were very attached to the five-star rating system. Video creators really loved their ratings. Millions and millions of people were accustomed to the old design. So in order to help people prepare themselves for change and acclimate to the new design more quickly, we actually published the data graph sharing with the community the rationale for what we were going to do, and it even engaged the larger industry in a conversation, which resulted in my favorite TechCrunch headline of all time: "YouTube Comes to a 5-Star Realization: Its Ratings Are Useless." Now, it's impossible to completely avoid change aversion when you're making changes to products that so many people use. Even though we tried to do all the right things, we still received our customary flood of video protests and angry emails and even a package that had to be scanned by security, but we have to remember people care intensely about this stuff, and it's because these products, this work, really, really matters to them. Now, we know that we have to be careful about paying attention to the details, we have to be cognizant about how we use data in our design process, and we have to introduce change very, very carefully. Now, these things are all really useful. They're good best practices for designing at scale. But they don't mean anything if you don't understand something much more fundamental. You have to understand who you are designing for. Now, when you set a goal to design for the entire human race, and you start to engage in that goal in earnest, at some point you run into the walls of the bubble that you're living in. Now, in San Francisco, we get a little miffed when we hit a dead cell zone because we can't use our phones to navigate to the new hipster coffee shop. But what if you had to drive four hours to charge your phone because you had no reliable source of electricity? What if you had no access to public libraries? What if your country had no free press? What would these products start to mean to you? This is what Google, YouTube and Facebook look like to most of the world, and it's what they'll look like to most of the next five billion people to come online. Designing for low-end cell phones is not glamorous design work, but if you want to design for the whole world, you have to design for where people are, and not where you are. So how do we keep this big, big picture in mind? We try to travel outside of our bubble to see, hear and understand the people we're designing for. We use our products in non-English languages to make sure that they work just as well. And we try to use one of these phones from time to time to keep in touch with their reality. So what does it mean to design at a global scale? It means difficult and sometimes exasperating work to try to improve and evolve products. Finding the audacity and the humility to do right by them can be pretty exhausting, and the humility part, it's a little tough on the design ego. Because these products are always changing, everything that I've designed in my career is pretty much gone, and everything that I will design will fade away. But here's what remains: the never-ending thrill of being a part of something that is so big, you can hardly get your head around it, and the promise that it just might change the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
The dark secrets of a surveillance state | {0: 'Hubertus Knabe studies the history of torture, oppression and surveillance in former East Germany.'} | TEDSalon Berlin 2014 | This year, Germany is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the peaceful revolution in East Germany. In 1989, the Communist regime was moved away, the Berlin Wall came down, and one year later, the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, in the East was unified with the Federal Republic of Germany in the West to found today's Germany. Among many other things, Germany inherited the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi. Only two years after its dissolution, its documents were opened to the public, and historians such as me started to study these documents to learn more about how the GDR surveillance state functioned. Perhaps you have watched the movie "The Lives of Others." This movie made the Stasi known worldwide, and as we live in an age where words such as "surveillance" or "wiretapping" are on the front pages of newspapers, I would like to speak about how the Stasi really worked. At the beginning, let's have a short look at the history of the Stasi, because it's really important for understanding its self-conception. Its origins are located in Russia. In 1917, the Russian Communists founded the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, shortly Cheka. It was led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. The Cheka was an instrument of the Communists to establish their regime by terrorizing the population and executing their enemies. It evolved later into the well-known KGB. The Cheka was the idol of the Stasi officers. They called themselves Chekists, and even the emblem was very similar, as you can see here. In fact, the secret police of Russia was the creator and instructor of the Stasi. When the Red Army occupied East Germany in 1945, it immediately expanded there, and soon it started to train the German Communists to build up their own secret police. By the way, in this hall where we are now, the ruling party of the GDR was founded in 1946. Five years later, the Stasi was established, and step by step, the dirty job of oppression was handed over to it. For instance, the central jail for political prisoners, which was established by the Russians, was taken over by the Stasi and used until the end of Communism. You see it here. At the beginning, every important step took place under the attendance of the Russians. But the Germans are known to be very effective, so the Stasi grew very quickly, and already in 1953, it had more employees than the Gestapo had, the secret police of Nazi Germany. The number doubled in each decade. In 1989, more than 90,000 employees worked for the Stasi. This meant that one employee was responsible for 180 inhabitants, which was really unique in the world. At the top of this tremendous apparatus, there was one man, Erich Mielke. He ruled the Ministry of State Security for more than 30 years. He was a scrupulous functionary — in his past, he killed two policemen not far away from here — who in fact personalized the Stasi. But what was so exceptional about the Stasi? Foremost, it was its enormous power, because it united different functions in one organization. First of all, the Stasi was an intelligence service. It used all the imaginable instruments for getting information secretly, such as informers, or tapping phones, as you can see it on the picture here. And it was not only active in East Germany, but all over the world. Secondly, the Stasi was a secret police. It could stop people on the street and arrest them in its own prisons. Thirdly, the Stasi worked as a kind of public prosecutor. It had the right to open preliminary investigations and to interrogate people officially. Last but not least, the Stasi had its own armed forces. More than 11,000 soldiers were serving in its so-called Guards Regiment. It was founded to crash down protests and uprisings. Due to this concentration of power, the Stasi was called a state in the state. But let's look in more and more detail at the tools of the Stasi. Please keep in mind that at that time the web and smartphones were not yet invented. Of course, the Stasi used all kinds of technical instruments to survey people. Telephones were wiretapped, including the phone of the German chancellor in the West, and often also the apartments. Every day, 90,000 letters were being opened by these machines. The Stasi also shadowed tens of thousands of people using specially trained agents and secret cameras to document every step one took. In this picture, you can see me as a young man just in front of this building where we are now, photographed by a Stasi agent. The Stasi even collected the smell of people. It stored samples of it in closed jars which were found after the peaceful revolution. For all these tasks, highly specialized departments were responsible. The one which was tapping phone calls was completely separated from the one which controlled the letters, for good reasons, because if one agent quit the Stasi, his knowledge was very small. Contrast that with Snowden, for example. But the vertical specialization was also important to prevent all kinds of empathy with the object of observation. The agent who shadowed me didn't know who I was or why I was surveyed. In fact, I smuggled forbidden books from West to East Germany. But what was even more typical for the Stasi was the use of human intelligence, people who reported secretly to the Stasi. For the Minister of State Security, these so-called unofficial employees were the most important tools. From 1975 on, nearly 200,000 people collaborated constantly with the Stasi, more than one percent of the population. And in a way, the minister was right, because technical instruments can only register what people are doing, but agents and spies can also report what people are planning to do and what they are thinking. Therefore, the Stasi recruited so many informants. The system of how to get them and how to educate them, as it was called, was very sophisticated. The Stasi had its own university, not far away from here, where the methods were explored and taught to the officers. This guideline gave a detailed description of every step you have to take if you want to convince human beings to betray their fellow citizens. Sometimes it's said that informants were pressured to becoming one, but that's mostly not true, because a forced informant is a bad informant. Only someone who wants to give you the information you need is an effective whistleblower. The main reasons why people cooperated with the Stasi were political conviction and material benefits. The officers also tried to create a personal bond between themselves and the informant, and to be honest, the example of the Stasi shows that it's not so difficult to win someone in order to betray others. Even some of the top dissidents in East Germany collaborated with the Stasi, as for instance Ibrahim Böhme. In 1989, he was the leader of the peaceful revolution and he nearly became the first freely elected Prime Minister of the GDR until it came out that he was an informant. The net of spies was really broad. In nearly every institution, even in the churches or in West Germany, there were many of them. I remember telling a leading Stasi officer, "If you had sent an informant to me, I would surely have recognized him." His answer was, "We didn't send anyone. We took those who were around you." And in fact, two of my best friends reported about me to the Stasi. Not only in my case, informers were very close. For example, Vera Lengsfeld, another leading dissident, in her case it was her husband who spied on her. A famous writer was betrayed by his brother. This reminds me of the novel "1984" by George Orwell, where the only apparently trustable person was an informer. But why did the Stasi collect all this information in its archives? The main purpose was to control the society. In nearly every speech, the Stasi minister gave the order to find out who is who, which meant who thinks what. He didn't want to wait until somebody tried to act against the regime. He wanted to know in advance what people were thinking and planning. The East Germans knew, of course, that they were surrounded by informers, in a totalitarian regime that created mistrust and a state of widespread fear, the most important tools to oppress people in any dictatorship. That's why not many East Germans tried to fight against the Communist regime. If yes, the Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it's described in another guideline. The word is difficult to translate because it means originally "biodegradation." But actually, it's a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions. Detaining someone was used only as a last resort. For this, the Stasi owned 17 remand prisons, one in every district. Here, the Stasi also developed quite modern methods of detention. Normally, the interrogation officer didn't torture the prisoner. Instead, he used a sophisticated system of psychological pressure in which strict isolation was central. Nearly no prisoner resisted without giving a testimony. If you have the occasion, do visit the former Stasi prison in Berlin and attend a guided tour with a former political prisoner who will explain to you how this worked. One more question needs to be answered: If the Stasi were so well organized, why did the Communist regime collapse? First, in 1989, the leadership in East Germany was uncertain what to do against the growing protest of people. It was especially confused because in the mother country of socialism, the Soviet Union, a more liberal policy took place. In addition, the regime was dependent on the loans from the West. Therefore, no order to crash down the uprising was given to the Stasi. Secondly, in the Communist ideology, there's no place for criticism. Instead, the leadership stuck to the belief that socialism is a perfect system, and the Stasi had to confirm that, of course. The consequence was that despite all the information, the regime couldn't analyze its real problems, and therefore it couldn't solve them. In the end, the Stasi died because of the structures that it was charged with protecting. The ending of the Stasi was something tragic, because these officers were kept busy during the peaceful revolution with only one thing: to destroy the documents they had produced during decades. Fortunately, they had been stopped by human rights activists. That's why today we can use the files to get a better understanding of how a surveillance state functions. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Thank you very much. So Hubertus, I want to ask you a couple of questions because I have here Der Spiegel from last week. "Mein Nachbar NSA." My neighbor, the NSA. And you just told us about my neighbor, the spies and the informant from East Germany. So there is a direct link between these two stories or there isn't? What's your reaction as a historian when you see this? Hubertus Knabe: I think there are several aspects to mention. At first, I think there's a difference of why you are collecting this data. Are you doing that for protecting your people against terrorist attacks, or are you doing that for oppressing your people? So that makes a fundamental difference. But on the other hand, also in a democracy, these instruments can be abused, and that is something where we really have to be aware to stop that, and that also the intelligence services are respecting the rules we have. The third point, probably, we really can be happy that we live in a democracy, because you can be sure that Russia and China are doing the same, but nobody speaks about that because nobody could do that. (Applause) BG: When the story came out first, last July, last year, you filed a criminal complaint with a German tribunal. Why? HK: Yeah, I did so because of the second point I mentioned, that I think especially in a democracy, the rules are for everybody. They are made for everybody, so it's not allowed that any institution doesn't respect the rules. In the criminal code of Germany, it's written that it's not allowed to tap somebody without the permission of the judge. Fortunately, it's written in the criminal code of Germany, so if it's not respected, then I think an investigation is necessary, and it took a very long time that the public prosecutor of Germany started this, and he started it only in the case of Angela Merkel, and not in the case of all the other people living in Germany. BG: That doesn't surprise me because — (Applause) — because of the story you told. Seen from the outside, I live outside of Germany, and I expected the Germans to react much more strongly, immediately. And instead, the reaction really came only when Chancellor Merkel was revealed as being wiretapped. Why so? HK: I take it as a good sign, because people feel secure in this democracy. They aren't afraid that they will be arrested, and if you leave this hall after the conference, nobody has to be afraid that the secret police is standing out and is arresting you. So that's a good sign, I think. People are not really scared, as they could be. But of course, I think, the institutions are responsible to stop illegal actions in Germany or wherever they happen. BG: A personal question, and this is the last one. There has been a debate in Germany about granting asylum to Edward Snowden. Would you be in favor or against? HK: Oh, that's a difficult question, but if you ask me, and if I answer honestly, I would give him the asylum, because I think it was really brave what he did, and he destroyed his whole life and his family and everything. So I think, for these people, we should do something, and especially if you see the German history, where so many people had to escape and they asked for asylum in other countries and they didn't get it, so it would be a good sign to give him asylum. (Applause) BG: Hubertus, thank you very much. |
How animations can help scientists test a hypothesis | {0: "Janet Iwasa's colorful, action-packed 3D animations bring scientific hypotheses to life."} | TED2014 | Take a look at this drawing. Can you tell what it is? I'm a molecular biologist by training, and I've seen a lot of these kinds of drawings. They're usually referred to as a model figure, a drawing that shows how we think a cellular or molecular process occurs. This particular drawing is of a process called clathrin-mediated endocytosis. It's a process by which a molecule can get from the outside of the cell to the inside by getting captured in a bubble or a vesicle that then gets internalized by the cell. There's a problem with this drawing, though, and it's mainly in what it doesn't show. From lots of experiments, from lots of different scientists, we know a lot about what these molecules look like, how they move around in the cell, and that this is all taking place in an incredibly dynamic environment. So in collaboration with a clathrin expert Tomas Kirchhausen, we decided to create a new kind of model figure that showed all of that. So we start outside of the cell. Now we're looking inside. Clathrin are these three-legged molecules that can self-assemble into soccer-ball-like shapes. Through connections with a membrane, clathrin is able to deform the membrane and form this sort of a cup that forms this sort of a bubble, or a vesicle, that's now capturing some of the proteins that were outside of the cell. Proteins are coming in now that basically pinch off this vesicle, making it separate from the rest of the membrane, and now clathrin is basically done with its job, and so proteins are coming in now — we've covered them yellow and orange — that are responsible for taking apart this clathrin cage. And so all of these proteins can get basically recycled and used all over again. These processes are too small to be seen directly, even with the best microscopes, so animations like this provide a really powerful way of visualizing a hypothesis. Here's another illustration, and this is a drawing of how a researcher might think that the HIV virus gets into and out of cells. And again, this is a vast oversimplification and doesn't begin to show what we actually know about these processes. You might be surprised to know that these simple drawings are the only way that most biologists visualize their molecular hypotheses. Why? Because creating movies of processes as we think they actually occur is really hard. I spent months in Hollywood learning 3D animation software, and I spend months on each animation, and that's just time that most researchers can't afford. The payoffs can be huge, though. Molecular animations are unparalleled in their ability to convey a great deal of information to broad audiences with extreme accuracy. And I'm working on a new project now called "The Science of HIV" where I'll be animating the entire life cycle of the HIV virus as accurately as possible and all in molecular detail. The animation will feature data from thousands of researchers collected over decades, data on what this virus looks like, how it's able to infect cells in our body, and how therapeutics are helping to combat infection. Over the years, I found that animations aren't just useful for communicating an idea, but they're also really useful for exploring a hypothesis. Biologists for the most part are still using a paper and pencil to visualize the processes they study, and with the data we have now, that's just not good enough anymore. The process of creating an animation can act as a catalyst that allows researchers to crystalize and refine their own ideas. One researcher I worked with who works on the molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases came up with experiments that were related directly to the animation that she and I worked on together, and in this way, animation can feed back into the research process. I believe that animation can change biology. It can change the way that we communicate with one another, how we explore our data and how we teach our students. But for that change to happen, we need more researchers creating animations, and toward that end, I brought together a team of biologists, animators and programmers to create a new, free, open-source software — we call it Molecular Flipbook — that's created just for biologists just to create molecular animations. From our testing, we've found that it only takes 15 minutes for a biologist who has never touched animation software before to create her first molecular animation of her own hypothesis. We're also building an online database where anyone can view, download and contribute their own animations. We're really excited to announce that the beta version of the molecular animation software toolkit will be available for download today. We are really excited to see what biologists will create with it and what new insights they're able to gain from finally being able to animate their own model figures. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why I live in mortal dread of public speaking | {0: 'Megan Washington has won two ARIA Awards, the Australian equivalent of the Grammys. A popular singer/songwriter, she has recently come clean with a secret—that she has a speech impediment.\r\n'} | TEDxSydney | I didn't know when I agreed to do this whether I was expected to talk or to sing. But when I was told that the topic was language, I felt that I had to speak about something for a moment. I have a problem. It's not the worst thing in the world. I'm fine. I'm not on fire. I know that other people in the world have far worse things to deal with, but for me, language and music are inextricably linked through this one thing. And the thing is that I have a stutter. It might seem curious given that I spend a lot of my life on the stage. One would assume that I'm comfortable in the public sphere and comfortable here, speaking to you guys. But the truth is that I've spent my life up until this point and including this point, living in mortal dread of public speaking. Public singing, whole different thing. (Laughter) But we'll get to that in a moment. I've never really talked about it before so explicitly. I think that that's because I've always lived in hope that when I was a grown-up, I wouldn't have one. I sort of lived with this idea that when I'm grown, I'll have learned to speak French, and when I'm grown, I'll learn how to manage my money, and when I'm grown, I won't have a stutter, and then I'll be able to public speak and maybe be the prime minister and anything's possible and, you know. (Laughter) So I can talk about it now because I've reached this point, where — I mean, I'm 28. I'm pretty sure that I'm grown now. (Laughter) And I'm an adult woman who spends her life as a performer, with a speech impediment. So, I might as well come clean about it. There are some interesting angles to having a stutter. For me, the worst thing that can happen is meeting another stutterer. (Laughter) This happened to me in Hamburg, when this guy, we met and he said, "Hello, m-m-m-my name is Joe," and I said, "Oh, hello, m-m-m-my name is Meg." Imagine my horror when I realized he thought I was making fun of him. (Laughter) People think I'm drunk all the time. (Laughter) People think that I've forgotten their name when I hesitate before saying it. And it is a very weird thing, because proper nouns are the worst. If I'm going to use the word "Wednesday" in a sentence, and I'm coming up to the word, and I can feel that I'm going to stutter or something, I can change the word to "tomorrow," or "the day after Tuesday," or something else. It's clunky, but you can get away with it, because over time I've developed this loophole method of using speech where right at the last minute you change the thing and you trick your brain. But with people's names, you can't change them. (Laughter) When I was singing a lot of jazz, I worked a lot with a pianist whose name was Steve. As you can probably gather, S's and T's, together or independently, are my kryptonite. But I would have to introduce the band over this rolling vamp, and when I got around to Steve, I'd often find myself stuck on the "St." And it was a bit awkward and uncomfortable and it totally kills the vibe. So after a few instances of this, Steve happily became "Seve," and we got through it that way. (Laughter) I've had a lot of therapy, and a common form of treatment is to use this technique that's called smooth speech, which is where you almost sing everything that you say. You kind of join everything together in this very singsong, kindergarten teacher way, and it makes you sound very serene, like you've had lots of Valium, and everything is calm. (Laughter) That's not actually me. And I do use that. I do. I use it when I have to be on panel shows, or when I have to do radio interviews, when the economy of airtime is paramount. (Laughter) I get through it that way for my job. But as an artist who feels that their work is based solely on a platform of honesty and being real, that feels often like cheating. Which is why before I sing, I wanted to tell you what singing means to me. It's more than making nice sounds, and it's more than making nice songs. It's more than feeling known, or understood. It's more than making you feel the things that I feel. It's not about mythology, or mythologizing myself to you. Somehow, through some miraculous synaptic function of the human brain, it's impossible to stutter when you sing. And when I was younger, that was a method of treatment that worked very well for me, singing, so I did it a lot. And that's why I'm here today. (Applause) Thank you. Singing for me is sweet relief. It is the only time when I feel fluent. It is the only time when what comes out of my mouth is comprehensively exactly what I intended. (Laughter) So I know that this is a TED Talk, but now i'm going to TED sing. This is a song that I wrote last year. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) (Piano) ♪ I would be a beauty ♪ ♪ but my nose ♪ ♪ is slightly too big ♪ ♪ for my face ♪ ♪ And I would be a dreamer ♪ ♪ but my dream ♪ ♪ is slightly too big ♪ ♪ for this space ♪ ♪ And I would be an angel ♪ ♪ but my halo ♪ ♪ it pales in the glow ♪ ♪ of your grace ♪ ♪ And I would be a joker ♪ ♪ but that card looks silly when you play ♪ ♪ your ace ♪ ♪ I'd like to know ♪ ♪ Are there stars in hell? ♪ ♪ And I'd like to know ♪ ♪ know if you can tell ♪ ♪ that you make me lose everything I know ♪ ♪ That I cannot choose to or not let go ♪ ♪ And I'd stay forever ♪ ♪ but my home ♪ ♪ is slightly too far ♪ ♪ from this place ♪ ♪ And I swear I tried to ♪ ♪ slow it down ♪ ♪ when I am walking at your pace ♪ ♪ But all I could think ♪ ♪ idling through the cities ♪ ♪ do I look pretty in the rain? ♪ ♪ And I don't know how someone ♪ ♪ quite so lovely ♪ ♪ makes me feel ugly ♪ ♪ So much shame ♪ ♪ And I'd like to know ♪ ♪ Are there stars in hell? ♪ ♪ And I'd like to know ♪ ♪ know if you can tell ♪ ♪ that you make me lose everything I know ♪ ♪ that I cannot choose to or not let go ♪ Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Own your body's data | {0: 'Talithia Williams builds statistical models that study the spatial and temporal structure of data.'} | TEDxClaremontColleges | As a kid I always loved information that I could get from data and the stories that could be told with numbers. I remember, growing up, I'd be frustrated at how my own parents would lie to me using numbers. "Talithia, if I've told you once I've told you a thousand times." No dad, you've only told me 17 times and twice it wasn't my fault. (Laughter) I think that is one of the reasons I got a Ph.D. in statistics. I always wanted to know, what are people trying to hide with numbers? As a statistician, I want people to show me the data so I can decide for myself. Donald and I were pregnant with our third child and we were at about 41 and a half weeks, what some of you may refer to as being overdue. Statisticians, we call that being within the 95 percent confidence interval. (Laughter) And at this point in the process we had to come in every couple of days to do a stress test on the baby, and this is just routine, it tests whether or not the baby is feeling any type of undue stress. And you are rarely, if ever, seen by your actual doctor, just whoever happens to be working at the hospital that day. So we go in for a stress test and after 20 minutes the doctor comes out and he says, "Your baby is under stress, we need to induce you." Now, as a statistician, what's my response? Show me the data! So then he proceeds to tell us the baby's heart rate trace went from 18 minutes, the baby's heart rate was in the normal zone and for two minutes it was in what appeared to be my heart rate zone and I said, "Is it possible that maybe this was my heart rate? I was moving around a little bit, it's hard to lay still on your back, 41 weeks pregnant for 20 minutes. Maybe it was shifting around." He said, "Well, we don't want to take any chances." I said okay. I said, "What if I was at 36 weeks with this same data? Would your decision be to induce?" "Well, no, I would wait until you were at least 38 weeks, but you are almost 42, there is no reason to leave that baby inside, let's get you a room." I said, "Well, why don't we just do it again? We can collect more data. I can try to be really still for 20 minutes. We can average the two and see what that means. (Laughter) And he goes, "Ma'am, I just don't want you to have a miscarriage." That makes three of us. And then he says, "Your chances of having a miscarriage double when you go past your due date. Let's get you a room." Wow. So now as a statistician, what's my response? Show me the data! Dude, you're talking chances, I do chances all day long, tell me all about chances. Let's talk chances. (Laughter) Let's talk chances. So I say, "Okay, great. Do I go from a 30-percent chance to a 60-percent chance? Where are we here with this miscarriage thing? And he goes, "Not quite, but it doubles, and we really just want what's best for the baby." Undaunted, I try a different angle. I said, "Okay, out of 1,000 full-term pregnant women, how many of them are going to miscarry just before their due date? And then he looks at me and looks at Donald, and he goes, about one in 1,000. I said, "Okay, so of those 1,000 women, how many are going to miscarry just after their due date?" "About two." (Laughter) I said, "Okay, so you are telling me that my chances go from a 0.1-percent chance to a 0.2-percent chance." Okay, so at this point the data is not convincing us that we need to be induced, and so then we proceed to have a conversation about how inductions lead to a higher rate of Cesarean sections, and if at all possible we'd like to avoid that. And then I said, "And I really don't think my due date is accurate." (Laughter) And so this really stunned him and he looked sort of puzzled and I said, "You may not know this, but pregnancy due dates are calculated assuming that you have a standard 28-day cycle, and my cycle ranges — sometimes it's 27, sometimes it's up to 38 — and I have been collecting the data to prove it. (Laughter) And so we ended up leaving the hospital that day without being induced. We actually had to sign a waiver to walk out of the hospital. And I'm not advocating that you not listen to your doctors, because even with our first child, we were induced at 38 weeks; cervical fluid was low. I'm not anti-medical intervention. But why were confident to leave that day? Well, we had data that told a different story. We had been collecting data for six years. I had this temperature data, and it told a different story. In fact, we could probably pretty accurately estimate conception. Yeah, that's a story you want to tell at your kid's wedding reception. (Laughter) I remember like it was yesterday. My temperature was a sizzling 97.8 degrees as I stared into your father's eyes. (Laughter) Oh, yeah. Twenty-two more years, we're telling that story. But we were confident to leave because we had been collecting data. Now, what does that data look like? Here's a standard chart of a woman's waking body temperature during the course of a cycle. So from the beginning of the menstrual cycle till the beginning of the next. You'll see that the temperature is not random. Clearly there is a low pattern at the beginning of her cycle and then you see this jump and then a higher set of temperatures at the end of her cycle. So what's happening here? What is that data telling you? Well, ladies, at the beginning of our cycle, the hormone estrogen is dominant and that estrogen causes a suppression of your body temperature. And at ovulation, your body releases an egg and progesterone takes over, pro-gestation. And so your body heats up in anticipation of housing this new little fertilized egg. So why this temperature jump? Well, think about when a bird sits on her eggs. Why is she sitting on them? She wants to keep them warm, protect them and keep them warm. Ladies, this is exactly what our bodies do every month, they heat up in anticipation of keeping a new little life warm. And if nothing happens, if you are not pregnant, then estrogen takes back over and that cycle starts all over again. But if you do get pregnant, sometimes you actually see another shift in your temperatures and it stays elevated for those whole nine months. That's why you see those pregnant women just sweating and hot, because their temperatures are high. Here's a chart that we had about three or four years ago. We were really very excited about this chart. You'll see the low temperature level and then a shift and for about five days, that's about the time it takes for the egg to travel down the fallopian tube and implant, and then you see those temperatures start to go up a little bit. And in fact, we had a second temperature shift, confirmed with a pregnancy test that were indeed pregnant with our first child, very exciting. Until a couple of days later I saw some spotting and then I noticed heavy blood flow, and we had in fact had an early stage miscarriage. Had I not been taking my temperature I really would have just thought my period was late that month, but we actually had data to show that we had miscarried this baby, and even though this data revealed a really unfortunate event in our lives, it was information that we could then take to our doctor. So if there was a fertility issue or some problem, I had data to show: Look, we got pregnant, our temperature shifted, we somehow lost this baby. What is it that we can do to help prevent this problem? And it's not just about temperatures and it's not just about fertility; we can use data about our bodies to tell us a lot of things. For instance, did you know that taking your temperature can tell you a lot about the condition of your thyroid? So, your thyroid works a lot like the thermostat in your house. There is an optimal temperature that you want in your house; you set your thermostat. When it gets too cold in the house, your thermostat kicks in and says, "Hey, we need to blow some heat around." Or if it gets too hot, your thermostat registers, "Turn the A.C. on. Cool us off." That's exactly how your thyroid works in your body. Your thyroid tries to keep an optimal temperature for your body. If it gets too cold, your thyroid says, "Hey, we need to heat up." If it gets too hot, your thyroid cools you down. But what happens when your thyroid is not functioning well? When it doesn't function, then it shows up in your body temperatures, they tend to be lower than normal or very erratic. And so by collecting this data you can find out information about your thyroid. Now, what is it, if you had a thyroid problem and you went to the doctor, your doctor would actually test the amount of thyroid stimulating hormone in your blood. Fine. But the problem with that test is it doesn't tell you how active the hormone is in your body. So you might have a lot of hormone present, but it might not be actively working to regulate your body temperature. So just by collecting your temperature every day, you get information about the condition of your thyroid. So, what if you don't want to take your temperature every day? I advocate that you do, but there are tons of other things you could take. You could take your blood pressure, you could take your weight — yeah, who's excited about taking their weight every day? (Laughter) Early on in our marriage, Donald had a stuffy nose and he had been taking a slew of medications to try to relieve his stuffy nose, to no avail. And so, that night he comes and he wakes me up and he says, "Honey, I can't breath out of my nose." And I roll over and I look, and I said, "Well, can you breath out of your mouth?" (Laughter) And he goes, "Yes, but I can't breath out of my nose!" And so like any good wife, I rush him to the emergency room at 2 o'clock in the morning. And the whole time I'm driving and I'm thinking, you can't die on me now. We just got married, people will think I killed you! (Laughter) And so, we get to the emergency room, and the nurse sees us, and he can't breath out of his nose, and so she brings us to the back and the doctor says, "What seems to be the problem?" and he goes, "I can't breath out of my nose." And he said, "You can't breath out of your nose? No, but he can breath out of his mouth. (Laughter) He takes a step back and he looks at both of us and he says "Sir, I think I know the problem. You're having a heart attack. I'm going to order an EKG and a CAT scan for you immediately." And we are thinking, no, no, no. It's not a heart attack. He can breathe, just out of his mouth. No, no, no, no, no. And so we go back and forth with this doctor because we think this is the incorrect diagnosis, and he's like, "No really, it'll be fine, just calm down." And I'm thinking, how do you calm down? But I don't think he's having a heart attack. And so fortunately for us, this doctor was at the end of the shift. So this new doctor comes in, he sees us clearly distraught, with a husband who can't breath out of his nose. (Laughter) And he starts asking us questions. He says, "Well, do you two exercise?" We ride our bikes, we go to the gym occasionally. (Laughter) We move around. And he says, "What were you doing just before you came here?" I'm thinking, I was sleeping, honestly. But okay, what was Donald doing just before? So Donald goes into this slew of medications he was taking. He lists, "I took this decongestant and then I took this nasal spray," and then all of a sudden a lightbulb goes off and he says, "Oh! You should never mix this decongestant with this nasal spray. Clogs you up every time. Here, take this one instead." He gives us a prescription. We're looking at each other, and I looked at the doctor, and I said, "Why is it that it seems like you were able to accurately diagnose his condition, but this previous doctor wanted to order an EKG and a CAT scan?" And he looks at us and says, "Well, when a 350-pound man walks in the emergency room and says he can't breath, you assume he's having a heart attack and you ask questions later." Now, emergency room doctors are trained to make decisions quickly, but not always accurately. And so had we had some information about our heart health to share with him, maybe we would have gotten a better diagnosis the first time. I want you to consider the following chart, of systolic blood pressure measurements from October 2010 to July 2012. You'll see that these measurements start in the prehypertension/hypertension zone, but over about the course of a year and a half they move into the normal zone. This is about the heart rate of a healthy 16-year-old. What story is this data telling you? Obviously it's the data from someone who's made a drastic transformation, and fortunately for us, that person happens to be here today. So that 350-pound guy that walked into the emergency room with me is now an even sexier and healthier 225-pound guy, and that's his blood pressure trace. So over the course of that year and a half Donald's eating changed and our exercise regimen changed, and his heart rate responded, his blood pressure responded to that change that he made in his body. So what's the take-home message that I want you to leave with today? By taking ownership of your data just like we've done, just by taking this daily measurements about yourself, you become the expert on your body. You become the authority. It's not hard to do. You don't have to have a Ph.D. in statistics to be an expert in yourself. You don't have to have a medical degree to be your body's expert. Medical doctors, they're experts on the population, but you are the expert on yourself. And so when two of you come together, when two experts come together, the two of you are able to make a better decision than just your doctor alone. Now that you understand the power of information that you can get through personal data collection, I'd like you all to stand and raise your right hand. (Laughter) Yes, get it up. I challenge you to take ownership of your data. And today, I hereby confer upon you a TEDx associate's degree in elementary statistics with a concentration in time-dependent data analysis with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto. And so the next time you are in your doctor's office, as newly inducted statisticians, what should always be your response? Audience: Show me the data! Talithia Williams: I can't hear you! Audience: Show me the data! TW: One more time! Audience: Show me the data! TW: Show me the data. Thank you. (Applause) |
Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming | {0: 'Nick Hanauer is one of the world’s most provocative thinkers about our society’s growing inequality and the dire consequences it creates for our democracies.'} | TEDSalon NY2014 | You probably don't know me, but I am one of those .01 percenters that you hear about and read about, and I am by any reasonable definition a plutocrat. And tonight, what I would like to do is speak directly to other plutocrats, to my people, because it feels like it's time for us all to have a chat. Like most plutocrats, I too am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. I was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. My friends and I, we own a bank. I tell you this — (Laughter) — unbelievable, right? I tell you this to show that my life is like most plutocrats. I have a broad perspective on capitalism and business, and I have been rewarded obscenely for that with a life that most of you all can't even imagine: multiple homes, a yacht, my own plane, etc., etc., etc. But let's be honest: I am not the smartest person you've ever met. I am certainly not the hardest working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all. I can't write a word of code. Truly, my success is the consequence of spectacular luck, of birth, of circumstance and of timing. But I am actually pretty good at a couple of things. One, I have an unusually high tolerance for risk, and the other is I have a good sense, a good intuition about what will happen in the future, and I think that that intuition about the future is the essence of good entrepreneurship. So what do I see in our future today, you ask? I see pitchforks, as in angry mobs with pitchforks, because while people like us plutocrats are living beyond the dreams of avarice, the other 99 percent of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind. In 1980, the top one percent of Americans shared about eight percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans shared 18 percent. Thirty years later, today, the top one percent shares over 20 percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans share 12 or 13. If the trend continues, the top one percent will share over 30 percent of national [income] in another 30 years, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans will share just six. You see, the problem isn't that we have some inequality. Some inequality is necessary for a high-functioning capitalist democracy. The problem is that inequality is at historic highs today and it's getting worse every day. And if wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks. So I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. The pitchforks will come for us if we do not address this. It's not a matter of if, it's when. And it will be terrible when they come for everyone, but particularly for people like us plutocrats. I know I must sound like some liberal do-gooder. I'm not. I'm not making a moral argument that economic inequality is wrong. What I am arguing is that rising economic inequality is stupid and ultimately self-defeating. Rising inequality doesn't just increase our risks from pitchforks, but it's also terrible for business too. So the model for us rich guys should be Henry Ford. When Ford famously introduced the $5 day, which was twice the prevailing wage at the time, he didn't just increase the productivity of his factories, he converted exploited autoworkers who were poor into a thriving middle class who could now afford to buy the products that they made. Ford intuited what we now know is true, that an economy is best understood as an ecosystem and characterized by the same kinds of feedback loops you find in a natural ecosystem, a feedback loop between customers and businesses. Raising wages increases demand, which increases hiring, which in turn increases wages and demand and profits, and that virtuous cycle of increasing prosperity is precisely what is missing from today's economic recovery. And this is why we need to put behind us the trickle-down policies that so dominate both political parties and embrace something I call middle-out economics. Middle-out economics rejects the neoclassical economic idea that economies are efficient, linear, mechanistic, that they tend towards equilibrium and fairness, and instead embraces the 21st-century idea that economies are complex, adaptive, ecosystemic, that they tend away from equilibrium and toward inequality, that they're not efficient at all but are effective if well managed. This 21st-century perspective allows you to clearly see that capitalism does not work by [efficiently] allocating existing resources. It works by [efficiently] creating new solutions to human problems. The genius of capitalism is that it is an evolutionary solution-finding system. It rewards people for solving other people's problems. The difference between a poor society and a rich society, obviously, is the degree to which that society has generated solutions in the form of products for its citizens. The sum of the solutions that we have in our society really is our prosperity, and this explains why companies like Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Apple and the entrepreneurs who created those companies have contributed so much to our nation's prosperity. This 21st-century perspective also makes clear that what we think of as economic growth is best understood as the rate at which we solve problems. But that rate is totally dependent upon how many problem solvers — diverse, able problem solvers — we have, and thus how many of our fellow citizens actively participate, both as entrepreneurs who can offer solutions, and as customers who consume them. But this maximizing participation thing doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't happen by itself. It requires effort and investment, which is why all highly prosperous capitalist democracies are characterized by massive investments in the middle class and the infrastructure that they depend on. We plutocrats need to get this trickle-down economics thing behind us, this idea that the better we do, the better everyone else will do. It's not true. How could it be? I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I? I actually bought two pairs of these pants, what my partner Mike calls my manager pants. I could have bought 2,000 pairs, but what would I do with them? (Laughter) How many haircuts can I get? How often can I go out to dinner? No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that. There's nothing to be done, my plutocrat friends might say. Henry Ford was in a different time. Maybe we can't do some things. Maybe we can do some things. June 19, 2013, Bloomberg published an article I wrote called "The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage." The good people at Forbes magazine, among my biggest admirers, called it "Nick Hanauer's near-insane proposal." And yet, just 350 days after that article was published, Seattle's Mayor Ed Murray signed into law an ordinance raising the minimum wage in Seattle to 15 dollars an hour, more than double what the prevailing federal $7.25 rate is. How did this happen, reasonable people might ask. It happened because a group of us reminded the middle class that they are the source of growth and prosperity in capitalist economies. We reminded them that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers, and need more employees. We reminded them that when businesses pay workers a living wage, taxpayers are relieved of the burden of funding the poverty programs like food stamps and medical assistance and rent assistance that those workers need. We reminded them that low-wage workers make terrible taxpayers, and that when you raise the minimum wage for all businesses, all businesses benefit yet all can compete. Now the orthodox reaction, of course, is raising the minimum wage costs jobs. Right? Your politician's always echoing that trickle-down idea by saying things like, "Well, if you raise the price of employment, guess what happens? You get less of it." Are you sure? Because there's some contravening evidence. Since 1980, the wages of CEOs in our country have gone from about 30 times the median wage to 500 times. That's raising the price of employment. And yet, to my knowledge, I have never seen a company outsource its CEO's job, automate their job, export the job to China. In fact, we appear to be employing more CEOs and senior managers than ever before. So too for technology workers and financial services workers, who earn multiples of the median wage and yet we employ more and more of them, so clearly you can raise the price of employment and get more of it. I know that most people think that the $15 minimum wage is this insane, risky economic experiment. We disagree. We believe that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is actually the continuation of a logical economic policy. It is allowing our city to kick your city's ass. Because, you see, Washington state already has the highest minimum wage of any state in the nation. We pay all workers $9.32, which is almost 30 percent more than the federal minimum of 7.25, but crucially, 427 percent more than the federal tipped minimum of 2.13. If trickle-down thinkers were right, then Washington state should have massive unemployment. Seattle should be sliding into the ocean. And yet, Seattle is the fastest-growing big city in the country. Washington state is generating small business jobs at a higher rate than any other major state in the nation. The restaurant business in Seattle? Booming. Why? Because the fundamental law of capitalism is, when workers have more money, businesses have more customers and need more workers. When restaurants pay restaurant workers enough so that even they can afford to eat in restaurants, that's not bad for the restaurant business. That's good for it, despite what some restaurateurs may tell you. Is it more complicated than I'm making out? Of course it is. There are a lot of dynamics at play. But can we please stop insisting that if low-wage workers earn a little bit more, unemployment will skyrocket and the economy will collapse? There is no evidence for it. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense. So can we please dispense with this rhetoric that says that rich guys like me and my plutocrat friends made our country? We plutocrats know, even if we don't like to admit it in public, that if we had been born somewhere else, not here in the United States, we might very well be just some dude standing barefoot by the side of a dirt road selling fruit. It's not that they don't have good entrepreneurs in other places, even very, very poor places. It's just that that's all that those entrepreneurs' customers can afford. So here's an idea for a new kind of economics, a new kind of politics that I call new capitalism. Let's acknowledge that capitalism beats the alternatives, but also that the more people we include, both as entrepreneurs and as customers, the better it works. Let's by all means shrink the size of government, but not by slashing the poverty programs, but by ensuring that workers are paid enough so that they actually don't need those programs. Let's invest enough in the middle class to make our economy fairer and more inclusive, and by fairer, more truly competitive, and by more truly competitive, more able to generate the solutions to human problems that are the true drivers of growth and prosperity. Capitalism is the greatest social technology ever invented for creating prosperity in human societies, if it is well managed, but capitalism, because of the fundamental multiplicative dynamics of complex systems, tends towards, inexorably, inequality, concentration and collapse. The work of democracies is to maximize the inclusion of the many in order to create prosperity, not to enable the few to accumulate money. Government does create prosperity and growth, by creating the conditions that allow both entrepreneurs and their customers to thrive. Balancing the power of capitalists like me and workers isn't bad for capitalism. It's essential to it. Programs like a reasonable minimum wage, affordable healthcare, paid sick leave, and the progressive taxation necessary to pay for the important infrastructure necessary for the middle class like education, R and D, these are indispensable tools shrewd capitalists should embrace to drive growth, because no one benefits from it like us. Many economists would have you believe that their field is an objective science. I disagree, and I think that it is equally a tool that humans use to enforce and encode our social and moral preferences and prejudices about status and power, which is why plutocrats like me have always needed to find persuasive stories to tell everyone else about why our relative positions are morally righteous and good for everyone: like, we are indispensable, the job creators, and you are not; like, tax cuts for us create growth, but investments in you will balloon our debt and bankrupt our great country; that we matter; that you don't. For thousands of years, these stories were called divine right. Today, we have trickle-down economics. How obviously, transparently self-serving all of this is. We plutocrats need to see that the United States of America made us, not the other way around; that a thriving middle class is the source of prosperity in capitalist economies, not a consequence of it. And we should never forget that even the best of us in the worst of circumstances are barefoot by the side of a dirt road selling fruit. Fellow plutocrats, I think it may be time for us to recommit to our country, to commit to a new kind of capitalism which is both more inclusive and more effective, a capitalism that will ensure that America's economy remains the most dynamic and prosperous in the world. Let's secure the future for ourselves, our children and their children. Or alternatively, we could do nothing, hide in our gated communities and private schools, enjoy our planes and yachts — they're fun — and wait for the pitchforks. Thank you. (Applause) |
How prisons can help inmates live meaningful lives | {0: 'Dan Pacholke aims to keep the Washington State Department of Corrections on the front edge of innovation by rethinking the design of prisons, the training of officers and the education opportunities made available to inmates. '} | TEDxMonroeCorrectionalComplex | We're seen as the organization that is the bucket for failed social policy. I can't define who comes to us or how long they stay. We get the people for whom nothing else has worked, people who have fallen through all of the other social safety nets. They can't contain them, so we must. That's our job: contain them, control them. Over the years, as a prison system, as a nation, and as a society, we've become very good at that, but that shouldn't make you happy. Today we incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world. We have more black men in prison today than were under slavery in 1850. We house the parents of almost three million of our community's children, and we've become the new asylum, the largest mental health provider in this nation. When we lock someone up, that is no small thing. And yet, we are called the Department of Corrections. Today I want to talk about changing the way we think about corrections. I believe, and my experience tells me, that when we change the way we think, we create new possibilities, or futures, and prisons need a different future. I've spent my entire career in corrections, over 30 years. I followed my dad into this field. He was a Vietnam veteran. Corrections suited him. He was strong, steady, disciplined. I was not so much any of those things, and I'm sure that worried him about me. Eventually I decided, if I was going to end up in prison, I'd better end up on the right side of the bars, so I thought I'd check it out, take a tour of the place my dad worked, the McNeil Island Penitentiary. Now this was the early '80s, and prisons weren't quite what you see on TV or in the movies. In many ways, it was worse. I walked into a cell house that was five tiers high. There were eight men to a cell. there were 550 men in that living unit. And just in case you wondered, they shared one toilet in those small confines. An officer put a key in a lockbox, and hundreds of men streamed out of their cells. Hundreds of men streamed out of their cells. I walked away as fast as I could. Eventually I went back and I started as an officer there. My job was to run one of those cell blocks and to control those hundreds of men. When I went to work at our receptions center, I could actually hear the inmates roiling from the parking lot, shaking cell doors, yelling, tearing up their cells. Take hundreds of volatile people and lock them up, and what you get is chaos. Contain and control — that was our job. One way we learned to do this more effectively was a new type of housing unit called the Intensive Management Unit, IMU, a modern version of a "hole." We put inmates in cells behind solid steel doors with cuff ports so we could restrain them and feed them. Guess what? It got quieter. Disturbances died down in the general population. Places became safer because those inmates who were most violent or disruptive could now be isolated. But isolation isn't good. Deprive people of social contact and they deteriorate. It was hard getting them out of IMU, for them and for us. Even in prison, it's no small thing to lock someone up. My next assignment was to one of the state's deep-end prisons where some of our more violent or disruptive inmates are housed. By then, the industry had advanced a lot, and we had different tools and techniques to manage disruptive behavior. We had beanbag guns and pepper spray and plexiglass shields, flash bangs, emergency response teams. We met violence with force and chaos with chaos. We were pretty good at putting out fires. While I was there, I met two experienced correctional workers who were also researchers, an anthropologist and a sociologist. One day, one of them commented to me and said, "You know, you're pretty good at putting out fires. Have you ever thought about how to prevent them?" I was patient with them, explaining our brute force approach to making prisons safer. They were patient with me. Out of those conversations grew some new ideas and we started some small experiments. First, we started training our officers in teams rather than sending them one or two at a time to the state training academy. Instead of four weeks of training, we gave them 10. Then we experimented with an apprenticeship model where we paired new staff with veteran staff. They both got better at the work. Second, we added verbal de-escalation skills into the training continuum and made it part of the use of force continuum. It was the non-force use of force. And then we did something even more radical. We trained the inmates on those same skills. We changed the skill set, reducing violence, not just responding to it. Third, when we expanded our facility, we tried a new type of design. Now the biggest and most controversial component of this design, of course, was the toilet. There were no toilets. Now that might not sound significant to you here today, but at the time, it was huge. No one had ever heard of a cell without a toilet. We all thought it was dangerous and crazy. Even eight men to a cell had a toilet. That small detail changed the way we worked. Inmates and staff started interacting more often and openly and developing a rapport. It was easier to detect conflict and intervene before it escalated. The unit was cleaner, quieter, safer and more humane. This was more effective at keeping the peace than any intimidation technique I'd seen to that point. Interacting changes the way you behave, both for the officer and the inmate. We changed the environment and we changed the behavior. Now, just in case I hadn't learned this lesson, they assigned me to headquarters next, and that's where I ran straight up against system change. Now, many things work against system change: politics and politicians, bills and laws, courts and lawsuits, internal politics. System change is difficult and slow, and oftentimes it doesn't take you where you want to go. It's no small thing to change a prison system. So what I did do is I reflected on my earlier experiences and I remembered that when we interacted with offenders, the heat went down. When we changed the environment, the behavior changed. And these were not huge system changes. These were small changes, and these changes created new possibilities. So next, I got reassigned as superintendent of a small prison. And at the same time, I was working on my degree at the Evergreen State College. I interacted with a lot of people who were not like me, people who had different ideas and came from different backgrounds. One of them was a rainforest ecologist. She looked at my small prison and what she saw was a laboratory. We talked and discovered how prisons and inmates could actually help advance science by helping them complete projects they couldn't complete on their own, like repopulating endangered species: frogs, butterflies, endangered prairie plants. At the same time, we found ways to make our operation more efficient through the addition of solar power, rainwater catchment, organic gardening, recycling. This initiative has led to many projects that have had huge system-wide impact, not just in our system, but in other state systems as well, small experiments making a big difference to science, to the community. The way we think about our work changes our work. The project just made my job more interesting and exciting. I was excited. Staff were excited. Officers were excited. Inmates were excited. They were inspired. Everybody wanted to be part of this. They were making a contribution, a difference, one they thought was meaningful and important. Let me be clear on what's going on here, though. Inmates are highly adaptive. They have to be. Oftentimes, they know more about our own systems than the people who run them. And they're here for a reason. I don't see my job as to punish them or forgive them, but I do think they can have decent and meaningful lives even in prison. So that was the question: Could inmates live decent and meaningful lives, and if so, what difference would that make? So I took that question back to the deep end, where some of our most violent offenders are housed. Remember, IMUs are for punishment. You don't get perks there, like programming. That was how we thought. But then we started to realize that if any inmates needed programming, it was these particular inmates. In fact, they needed intensive programming. So we changed our thinking 180 degrees, and we started looking for new possibilities. What we found was a new kind of chair. Instead of using the chair for punishment, we put it in classrooms. Okay, we didn't forget our responsibility to control, but now inmates could interact safely, face-to-face with other inmates and staff, and because control was no longer an issue, everybody could focus on other things, like learning. Behavior changed. We changed our thinking, and we changed what was possible, and this gives me hope. Now, I can't tell you that any of this stuff will work. What I can tell you, though, it is working. Our prisons are getting safer for both staff and inmates, and when our prisons are safe, we can put our energies into a lot more than just controlling. Reducing recidivism may be our ultimate goal, but it's not our only goal. To be honest with you, preventing crime takes so much more from so many more people and institutions. If we rely on just prisons to reduce crime, I'm afraid we'll never get there. But prisons can do some things we never thought they could do. Prisons can be the source of innovation and sustainability, repopulating endangered species and environmental restoration. Inmates can be scientists and beekeepers, dog rescuers. Prisons can be the source of meaningful work and opportunity for staff and the inmates who live there. We can contain and control and provide humane environments. These are not opposing qualities. We can't wait 10 to 20 years to find out if this is worth doing. Our strategy is not massive system change. Our strategy is hundreds of small changes that take place in days or months, not years. We need more small pilots where we learn as we go, pilots that change the range of possibility. We need new and better ways to measure impacts on engagement, on interaction, on safe environments. We need more opportunities to participate in and contribute to our communities, your communities. Prisons need to be secure, yes, safe, yes. We can do that. Prisons need to provide humane environments where people can participate, contribute, and learn meaningful lives. We're learning how to do that. That's why I'm hopeful. We don't have to stay stuck in old ideas about prison. We can define that. We can create that. And when we do that thoughtfully and with humanity, prisons can be more than the bucket for failed social policy. Maybe finally, we will earn our title: a department of corrections. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why ordinary people need to understand power | {0: 'As CEO of Citizen University, Eric Liu is working to spark a civic revival in the US and beyond.'} | TEDCity2.0 | I'm a teacher and a practitioner of civics in America. Now, I will kindly ask those of you who have just fallen asleep to please wake up. (Laughter) Why is it that the very word "civics" has such a soporific, even a narcoleptic effect on us? I think it's because the very word signifies something exceedingly virtuous, exceedingly important, and exceedingly boring. Well, I think it's the responsibility of people like us, people who show up for gatherings like this in person or online, in any way we can, to make civics sexy again, as sexy as it was during the American Revolution, as sexy as it was during the Civil Rights Movement. And I believe the way we make civics sexy again is to make explicitly about the teaching of power. The way we do that, I believe, is at the level of the city. This is what I want to talk about today, and I want to start by defining some terms and then I want to describe the scale of the problem I think we face and then suggest the ways that I believe cities can be the seat of the solution. So let me start with some definitions. By civics, I simply mean the art of being a pro-social, problem-solving contributor in a self-governing community. Civics is the art of citizenship, what Bill Gates Sr. calls simply showing up for life, and it encompasses three things: a foundation of values, an understanding of the systems that make the world go round, and a set of skills that allow you to pursue goals and to have others join in that pursuit. And that brings me to my definition of power, which is simply this: the capacity to make others do what you would have them do. It sounds menacing, doesn't it? We don't like to talk about power. We find it scary. We find it somehow evil. We feel uncomfortable naming it. In the culture and mythology of democracy, power resides with the people. Period. End of story. Any further inquiry not necessary and not really that welcome. Power has a negative moral valence. It sounds Machiavellian inherently. It seems inherently evil. But in fact power is no more inherently good or evil than fire or physics. It just is. And power governs how any form of government operates, whether a democracy or a dictatorship. And the problem we face today, here in America in particular, but all around the world, is that far too many people are profoundly illiterate in power — what it is, who has it, how it operates, how it flows, what part of it is visible, what part of it is not, why some people have it, why that's compounded. And as a result of this illiteracy, those few who do understand how power operates in civic life, those who understand how a bill becomes a law, yes, but also how a friendship becomes a subsidy, or how a bias becomes a policy, or how a slogan becomes a movement, the people who understand those things wield disproportionate influence, and they're perfectly happy to fill the vacuum created by the ignorance of the great majority. This is why it is so fundamental for us right now to grab hold of this idea of power and to democratize it. One of the things that is so profoundly exciting and challenging about this moment is that as a result of this power illiteracy that is so pervasive, there is a concentration of knowledge, of understanding, of clout. I mean, think about it: How does a friendship become a subsidy? Seamlessly, when a senior government official decides to leave government and become a lobbyist for a private interest and convert his or her relationships into capital for their new masters. How does a bias become a policy? Insidiously, just the way that stop-and-frisk, for instance, became over time a bureaucratic numbers game. How does a slogan become a movement? Virally, in the way that the Tea Party, for instance, was able to take the "Don't Tread on Me" flag from the American Revolution, or how, on the other side, a band of activists could take a magazine headline, "Occupy Wall Street," and turn that into a global meme and movement. The thing is, though, most people aren't looking for and don't want to see these realities. So much of this ignorance, this civic illiteracy, is willful. There are some millennials, for instance, who think the whole business is just sordid. They don't want to have anything to do with politics. They'd rather just opt out and engage in volunteerism. There are some techies out there who believe that the cure-all for any power imbalance or power abuse is simply more data, more transparency. There are some on the left who think power resides only with corporations, and some on the right who think power resides only with government, each side blinded by their selective outrage. There are the naive who believe that good things just happen and the cynical who believe that bad things just happen, the fortunate and unfortunate alike who think that their lot is simply what they deserve rather than the eminently alterable result of a prior arrangement, an inherited allocation, of power. As a result of all of this creeping fatalism in public life, we here, particularly in America today, have depressingly low levels of civic knowledge, civic engagement, participation, awareness. The whole business of politics has been effectively subcontracted out to a band of professionals, money people, outreach people, message people, research people. The rest of us are meant to feel like amateurs in the sense of suckers. We become demotivated to learn more about how things work. We begin to opt out. Well, this problem, this challenge, is a thing that we must now confront, and I believe that when you have this kind of disengagement, this willful ignorance, it becomes both a cause and a consequence of this concentration of opportunity of wealth and clout that I was describing a moment ago, this profound civic inequality. This is why it is so important in our time right now to reimagine civics as the teaching of power. Perhaps it's never been more important at any time in our lifetimes. If people don't learn power, people don't wake up, and if they don't wake up, they get left out. Now, part of the art of practicing power means being awake and having a voice, but it also is about having an arena where you can plausibly practice deciding. All of civics boils down to the simple question of who decides, and you have to play that out in a place, in an arena. And this brings me to the third point that I want to make today, which is simply that there is no better arena in our time for the practicing of power than the city. Think about the city where you live, where you're from. Think about a problem in the common life of your city. It can be something small, like where a street lamp should go, or something medium like which library should have its hours extended or cut, or maybe something bigger, like whether a dilapidated waterfront should be turned into a highway or a greenway, or whether all the businesses in your town should be required to pay a living wage. Think about the change that you want in your city, and then think about how you would get it, how you would make it happen. Take an inventory of all the forms of power that are at play in your city's situation: money, of course, people, yes, ideas, information, misinformation, the threat of force, the force of norms. All of these form of power are at play. Now think about how you would activate or perhaps neutralize these various forms of power. This is not some Game of Thrones empire-level set of questions. These are questions that play out in every single place on the planet. I'll just tell you quickly about two stories drawn from recent headlines. In Boulder, Colorado, voters not too long ago approved a process to replace the private power company, literally the power company, the electric company Xcel, with a publicly owned utility that would forego profits and attend far more to climate change. Well, Xcel fought back, and Xcel has now put in play a ballot measure that would undermine or undo this municipalization. And so the citizen activists in Boulder who have been pushing this now literally have to fight the power in order to fight for power. In Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama, there's an organization on campus called, kind of menacingly, the Machine, and it draws from largely white sororities and fraternities on campus, and for decades, the Machine has dominated student government elections. Well now, recently, the Machine has started to get involved in actual city politics, and they've engineered the election of a former Machine member, a young, pro-business recent graduate to the Tuscaloosa city school board. Now, as I say, these are just two examples drawn almost at random from the headlines. Every day, there are thousands more like them. And you may like or dislike the efforts I'm describing here in Boulder or in Tuscaloosa, but you cannot help but admire the power literacy of the players involved, their skill. You cannot help but reckon with and recognize the command they have of the elemental questions of civic power — what objective, what strategy, what tactics, what is the terrain, who are your enemies, who are your allies? Now I want you to return to thinking about that problem or that opportunity or that challenge in your city, and the thing it was that you want to fix or create in your city, and ask yourself, do you have command of these elemental questions of power? Could you put into practice effectively what it is that you know? This is the challenge and the opportunity for us. We live in a time right now where in spite of globalization or perhaps because of globalization, all citizenship is ever more resonantly, powerfully local. Indeed, power in our time is flowing ever faster to the city. Here in the United States, the national government has tied itself up in partisan knots. Civic imagination and innovation and creativity are emerging from local ecosystems now and radiating outward, and this great innovation, this great wave of localism that's now arriving, and you see it in how people eat and work and share and buy and move and live their everyday lives, this isn't some precious parochialism, this isn't some retreat into insularity, no. This is emergent. The localism of our time is networked powerfully. And so, for instance, consider the ways that strategies for making cities more bike-friendly have spread so rapidly from Copenhagen to New York to Austin to Boston to Seattle. Think about how experiments in participatory budgeting, where everyday citizens get a chance to allocate and decide upon the allocation of city funds. Those experiments have spread from Porto Alegre, Brazil to here in New York City, to the wards of Chicago. Migrant workers from Rome to Los Angeles and many cities between are now organizing to stage strikes to remind the people who live in their cities what a day without immigrants would look like. In China, all across that country, members of the New Citizens' Movement are beginning to activate and organize to fight official corruption and graft, and they're drawing the ire of officials there, but they're also drawing the attention of anti-corruption activists all around the world. In Seattle, where I'm from, we've become part of a great global array of cities that are now working together bypassing government altogether, national government altogether, in order to try to meet the carbon reduction goals of the Kyoto Protocol. All of these citizens, united, are forming a web, a great archipelago of power that allows us to bypass brokenness and monopolies of control. And our task now is to accelerate this work. Our task now is to bring more and more people into the fold of this work. That's why my organization, Citizen University, has undertaken a project now to create an everyman's curriculum in civic power. And this curriculum starts with this triad that I described earlier of values, systems and skills. And what I'd like to do is to invite all of you to help create this curriculum with the stories and the experiences and the challenges that each of you lives and faces, to create something powerfully collective. And I want to invite you in particular to try a simple exercise drawn from the early frameworks of this curriculum. I want you to write a narrative, a narrative from the future of your city, and you can date it, set it out one year from now, five years from now, a decade from now, a generation from now, and write it as a case study looking back, looking back at the change that you wanted in your city, looking back at the cause that you were championing, and describing the ways that that change and that cause came, in fact, to succeed. Describe the values of your fellow citizens that you activated, and the sense of moral purpose that you were able to stir. Recount all the different ways that you engaged the systems of government, of the marketplace, of social institutions, of faith organizations, of the media. Catalog all the skills you had to deploy, how to negotiate, how to advocate, how to frame issues, how to navigate diversity in conflict, all those skills that enabled you to bring folks on board and to overcome resistance. What you'll be doing when you write that narrative is you'll be discovering how to read power, and in the process, how to write power. So share what you write, do you what you write, and then share what you do. I invite you to literally share the narratives that you create on our Facebook page for Citizen University. But even beyond that, it's in the conversations that we have today all around the world in the simultaneous gatherings that are happening on this topic at this moment, and to think about how we can become one another's teachers and students in power. If we do that, then together we can make civics sexy again. Together, we can democratize democracy and make it safe again for amateurs. Together, we can create a great network of city that will be the most powerful collective laboratory for self-government this planet has ever seen. We have the power to do that. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The danger of silence | {0: "Clint Smith's work blends art and activism."} | TED@NYC | Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a 1968 speech where he reflects upon the Civil Rights Movement, states, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends." As a teacher, I've internalized this message. Every day, all around us, we see the consequences of silence manifest themselves in the form of discrimination, violence, genocide and war. In the classroom, I challenge my students to explore the silences in their own lives through poetry. We work together to fill those spaces, to recognize them, to name them, to understand that they don't have to be sources of shame. In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth. And I find myself thinking a lot about that last point, tell your truth. And I realized that if I was going to ask my students to speak up, I was going to have to tell my truth and be honest with them about the times where I failed to do so. So I tell them that growing up, as a kid in a Catholic family in New Orleans, during Lent I was always taught that the most meaningful thing one could do was to give something up, sacrifice something you typically indulge in to prove to God you understand his sanctity. I've given up soda, McDonald's, French fries, French kisses, and everything in between. But one year, I gave up speaking. I figured the most valuable thing I could sacrifice was my own voice, but it was like I hadn't realized that I had given that up a long time ago. I spent so much of my life telling people the things they wanted to hear instead of the things they needed to, told myself I wasn't meant to be anyone's conscience because I still had to figure out being my own, so sometimes I just wouldn't say anything, appeasing ignorance with my silence, unaware that validation doesn't need words to endorse its existence. When Christian was beat up for being gay, I put my hands in my pocket and walked with my head down as if I didn't even notice. I couldn't use my locker for weeks because the bolt on the lock reminded me of the one I had put on my lips when the homeless man on the corner looked at me with eyes up merely searching for an affirmation that he was worth seeing. I was more concerned with touching the screen on my Apple than actually feeding him one. When the woman at the fundraising gala said "I'm so proud of you. It must be so hard teaching those poor, unintelligent kids," I bit my lip, because apparently we needed her money more than my students needed their dignity. We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't. Silence is the residue of fear. It is feeling your flaws gut-wrench guillotine your tongue. It is the air retreating from your chest because it doesn't feel safe in your lungs. Silence is Rwandan genocide. Silence is Katrina. It is what you hear when there aren't enough body bags left. It is the sound after the noose is already tied. It is charring. It is chains. It is privilege. It is pain. There is no time to pick your battles when your battles have already picked you. I will not let silence wrap itself around my indecision. I will tell Christian that he is a lion, a sanctuary of bravery and brilliance. I will ask that homeless man what his name is and how his day was, because sometimes all people want to be is human. I will tell that woman that my students can talk about transcendentalism like their last name was Thoreau, and just because you watched one episode of "The Wire" doesn't mean you know anything about my kids. So this year, instead of giving something up, I will live every day as if there were a microphone tucked under my tongue, a stage on the underside of my inhibition. Because who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice? Thank you. (Applause) |
A Magna Carta for the web | {0: "Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He leads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), overseeing the Web's standards and development."} | TED2014 | TED is 30. The world wide web is celebrating this month its 25th anniversary. So I've got a question for you. Let's talk about the journey, mainly about the future. Let's talk about the state. Let's talk about what sort of a web we want. So 25 years ago, then, I was working at CERN. I got permission in the end after about a year to basically do it as a side project. I wrote the code. I was I suppose the first user. There was a lot of concern that people didn't want to pick it up because it would be too complicated. A lot of persuasion, a lot of wonderful collaboration with other people, and bit by bit, it worked. It took off. It was pretty cool. And in fact, a few years later in 2000, five percent of the world population were using the world wide web. In 2007, seven years later, 17 percent. In 2008, we formed the World Wide Web Foundation partly to look at that and worry about that figure. And now here we are in 2014, and 40 percent of the world are using the world wide web, and counting. Obviously it's increasing. I want you to think about both sides of that. Okay, obviously to anybody here at TED, the first question you ask is, what can we do to get the other 60 percent on board as quickly as possible? Lots of important things. Obviously it's going to be around mobile. But also, I want you to think about the 40 percent, because if you're sitting there yourself sort of with a web-enabled life, you don't remember things anymore, you just look them up, then you may feel that it's been a success and we can all sit back. But in fact, yeah, it's been a success, there's lots of things, Khan Academy for crying out loud, there's Wikipedia, there's a huge number of free e-books that you can read online, lots of wonderful things for education, things in many areas. Online commerce has in some cases completely turned upside down the way commerce works altogether, made types of commerce available which weren't available at all before. Commerce has been almost universally affected. Government, not universally affected, but very affected, and on a good day, lots of open data, lots of e-government, so lots of things which are visible happening on the web. Also, lots of things which are less visible. The healthcare, late at night when they're worried about what sort of cancer somebody they care about might have, when they just talk across the Internet to somebody who they care about very much in another country. Those sorts of things are not, they're not out there, and in fact they've acquired a certain amount of privacy. So we cannot assume that part of the web, part of the deal with the web, is when I use the web, it's just a transparent, neutral medium. I can talk to you over it without worrying about what we in fact now know is happening, without worrying about the fact that not only will surveillance be happening but it'll be done by people who may abuse the data. So in fact, something we realized, we can't just use the web, we have to worry about what the underlying infrastructure of the whole thing, is it in fact of a quality that we need? We revel in the fact that we have this wonderful free speech. We can tweet, and oh, lots and lots of people can see our tweets, except when they can't, except when actually Twitter is blocked from their country, or in some way the way we try to express ourselves has put some information about the state of ourselves, the state of the country we live in, which isn't available to anybody else. So we must protest and make sure that censorship is cut down, that the web is opened up where there is censorship. We love the fact that the web is open. It allows us to talk. Anybody can talk to anybody. It doesn't matter who we are. And then we join these big social networking companies which are in fact effectively built as silos, so that it's much easier to talk to somebody in the same social network than it is to talk to somebody in a different one, so in fact we're sometimes limiting ourselves. And we also have, if you've read the book about the filter bubble, the filter bubble phenomenon is that we love to use machines which help us find stuff we like. So we love it when we're bathed in what things we like to click on, and so the machine automatically feeds us the stuff that we like and we end up with this rose-colored spectacles view of the world called a filter bubble. So here are some of the things which maybe threaten the social web we have. What sort of web do you want? I want one which is not fragmented into lots of pieces, as some countries have been suggesting they should do in reaction to recent surveillance. I want a web which has got, for example, is a really good basis for democracy. I want a web where I can use healthcare with privacy and where there's a lot of health data, clinical data is available to scientists to do research. I want a web where the other 60 percent get on board as fast as possible. I want a web which is such a powerful basis for innovation that when something nasty happens, some disaster strikes, that we can respond by building stuff to respond to it very quickly. So this is just some of the things that I want, from a big list, obviously it's longer. You have your list. I want us to use this 25th anniversary to think about what sort of a web we want. You can go to webat25.org and find some links. There are lots of sites where people have started to put together a Magna Carta, a bill of rights for the web. How about we do that? How about we decide, these are, in a way, becoming fundamental rights, the right to communicate with whom I want. What would be on your list for that Magna Carta? Let's crowdsource a Magna Carta for the web. Let's do that this year. Let's use the energy from the 25th anniversary to crowdsource a Magna Carta to the web. (Applause) Thank you. And do me a favor, will you? Fight for it for me. Okay? Thanks. (Applause) |
How I brought a river, and my city, back to life | {0: 'Aziza Chaouni focuses on projects that integrate architecture and landscape, and that ultimately give back to their communities. For years, she has worked to revive the Fez River, which runs through her hometown of Fez, Morocco.'} | TED2014 | I would like to share with you today a project that has changed how I approach and practice architecture: the Fez River Rehabilitation Project. My hometown of Fez, Morocco, boasts one of the largest walled medieval cities in the world, called the medina, nestled in a river valley. The entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since the 1950s, as the population of the medina grew, basic urban infrastructure such as green open spaces and sewage quickly changed and got highly stressed. One of the biggest casualties of the situation was the Fez River, which bisects the medina in its middle and has been considered for many centuries as the city's very soul. In fact, one can witness the presence of the river's extensive water network all throughout the city, in places such as private and public fountains. Unfortunately, because of the pollution of the river, it has been covered little by little by concrete slabs since 1952. This process of erasure was coupled with the destruction of many houses along the river banks to be able to make machineries enter the narrow pedestrian network of the medina. Those urban voids quickly became illegal parking or trash yards. Actually, the state of the river before entering the medina is pretty healthy. Then pollution takes its toll, mainly due to untreated sewage and chemical dumping from crafts such as tanning. At some point, I couldn't bear the desecration of the river, such an important part of my city, and I decided to take action, especially after I heard that the city received a grant to divert sewage water and to treat it. With clean water, suddenly the uncovering of the river became possible, and with luck and actually a lot of pushing, my partner Takako Tajima and I were commissioned by the city to work with a team of engineers to uncover the river. However, we were sneaky, and we proposed more: to convert riverbanks into pedestrian pathways, and then to connect these pathways back to the city fabric, and finally to convert the urban voids along the riverbanks into public spaces that are lacking in the Medina of Fez. I will show you briefly now two of these public spaces. The first one is the Rcif Plaza, which sits actually right on top of the river, which you can see here in dotted lines. This plaza used to be a chaotic transportation hub that actually compromised the urban integrity of the medina, that has the largest pedestrian network in the world. And right beyond the historic bridge that you can see here, right next to the plaza, you can see that the river looked like a river of trash. Instead, what we proposed is to make the plaza entirely pedestrian, to cover it with recycled leather canopies, and to connect it to the banks of the river. The second site of intervention is also an urban void along the river banks, and it used to be an illegal parking, and we proposed to transform it into the first playground in the medina. The playground is constructed using recycled tires and also is coupled with a constructed wetland that not only cleans the water of the river but also retains it when floods occur. As the project progressed and received several design awards, new stakeholders intervened and changed the project goals and design. The only way for us to be able to bring the main goals of the project ahead was for us to do something very unusual that usually architects don't do. It was for us to take our design ego and our sense of authorship and put it in the backseat and to focus mainly on being activists and on trying to coalesce all of the agendas of stakeholders and focus on the main goals of the project: that is, to uncover the river, treat its water, and provide public spaces for all. We were actually very lucky, and many of those goals happened or are in the process of happening. Like, you can see here in the Rcif Plaza. This is how it looked like about six years ago. This is how it looks like today. It's still under construction, but actually it is heavily used by the local population. And finally, this is how the Rcif Plaza will look like when the project is completed. This is the river, covered, used as a trash yard. Then after many years of work, the river with clean water, uncovered. And finally, you can see here the river when the project will be completed. So for sure, the Fez River Rehabilitation will keep on changing and adapting to the sociopolitical landscape of the city, but we strongly believe that by reimagining the role and the agency of the architect, we have set up the core idea of the project into motion; that is, to transform the river from sewage to public space for all, thereby making sure that the city of Fez will remain a living city for its inhabitants rather than a mummified heritage. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Why lunch ladies are heroes | {0: "Jarrett J. Krosoczka is the author/illustrator of countless children's books and graphic novels, including <em>Good Night, Monkey Boy</em>, <em>Baghead</em> and the <em>Lunch Lady</em> series."} | TED@NYC | When my first children's book was published in 2001, I returned to my old elementary school to talk to the students about being an author and an illustrator, and when I was setting up my slide projector in the cafetorium, I looked across the room, and there she was: my old lunch lady. She was still there at the school and she was busily preparing lunches for the day. So I approached her to say hello, and I said, "Hi, Jeannie! How are you?" And she looked at me, and I could tell that she recognized me, but she couldn't quite place me, and she looked at me and she said, "Stephen Krosoczka?" And I was amazed that she knew I was a Krosoczka, but Stephen is my uncle who is 20 years older than I am, and she had been his lunch lady when he was a kid. And she started telling me about her grandkids, and that blew my mind. My lunch lady had grandkids, and therefore kids, and therefore left school at the end of the day? I thought she lived in the cafeteria with the serving spoons. I had never thought about any of that before. Well, that chance encounter inspired my imagination, and I created the Lunch Lady graphic novel series, a series of comics about a lunch lady who uses her fish stick nunchucks to fight off evil cyborg substitutes, a school bus monster, and mutant mathletes, and the end of every book, they get the bad guy with their hairnet, and they proclaim, "Justice is served!" (Laughter) (Applause) And it's been amazing, because the series was so welcomed into the reading lives of children, and they sent me the most amazing letters and cards and artwork. And I would notice as I would visit schools, the lunch staff would be involved in the programming in a very meaningful way. And coast to coast, all of the lunch ladies told me the same thing: "Thank you for making a superhero in our likeness." Because the lunch lady has not been treated very kindly in popular culture over time. But it meant the most to Jeannie. When the books were first published, I invited her to the book launch party, and in front of everyone there, everyone she had fed over the years, I gave her a piece of artwork and some books. And two years after this photo was taken, she passed away, and I attended her wake, and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there, because next to her casket was this painting, and her husband told me it meant so much to her that I had acknowledged her hard work, I had validated what she did. And that inspired me to create a day where we could recreate that feeling in cafeterias across the country: School Lunch Hero Day, a day where kids can make creative projects for their lunch staff. And I partnered with the School Nutrition Association, and did you know that a little over 30 million kids participate in school lunch programs every day. That equals up to a little over five billion lunches made every school year. And the stories of heroism go well beyond just a kid getting a few extra chicken nuggets on their lunch tray. There is Ms. Brenda in California, who keeps a close eye on every student that comes through her line and then reports back to the guidance counselor if anything is amiss. There are the lunch ladies in Kentucky who realized that 67 percent of their students relied on those meals every day, and they were going without food over the summer, so they retrofitted a school bus to create a mobile feeding unit, and they traveled around the neighborhoods feedings 500 kids a day during the summer. And kids made the most amazing projects. I knew they would. Kids made hamburger cards that were made out of construction paper. They took photos of their lunch lady's head and plastered it onto my cartoon lunch lady and fixed that to a milk carton and presented them with flowers. And they made their own comics, starring the cartoon lunch lady alongside their actual lunch ladies. And they made thank you pizzas, where every kid signed a different topping of a construction paper pizza. For me, I was so moved by the response that came from the lunch ladies, because one woman said to me, she said, "Before this day, I felt like I was at the end of the planet at this school. I didn't think that anyone noticed us down here." Another woman said to me, "You know, what I got out of this is that what I do is important." And of course what she does is important. What they all do is important. They're feeding our children every single day, and before a child can learn, their belly needs to be full, and these women and men are working on the front lines to create an educated society. So I hope that you don't wait for School Lunch Hero Day to say thank you to your lunch staff, and I hope that you remember how powerful a thank you can be. A thank you can change a life. It changes the life of the person who receives it, and it changes the life of the person who expresses it. Thank you. (Applause) |
Depressed dogs, cats with OCD — what animal madness means for us humans | {0: 'Laurel Braitman is a bestselling author and the director of writing and storytelling at the Stanford University School of Medicine.\r\n'} | TEDSalon NY2014 | Oliver was an extremely dashing, handsome, charming and largely unstable male that I completely lost my heart to. (Laughter) He was a Bernese mountain dog, and my ex-husband and I adopted him, and about six months in, we realized that he was a mess. He had such paralyzing separation anxiety that we couldn't leave him alone. Once, he jumped out of our third floor apartment. He ate fabric. He ate things, recyclables. He hunted flies that didn't exist. He suffered from hallucinations. He was diagnosed with a canine compulsive disorder and that's really just the tip of the iceberg. But like with humans, sometimes it's six months in before you realize that the person that you love has some issues. (Laughter) And most of us do not take the person we're dating back to the bar where we met them or give them back to the friend that introduced us, or sign them back up on Match.com. (Laughter) We love them anyway, and we stick to it, and that is what I did with my dog. And I was a — I'd studied biology. I have a Ph.D. in history of science from MIT, and had you asked me 10 years ago if a dog I loved, or just dogs generally, had emotions, I would have said yes, but I'm not sure that I would have told you that they can also wind up with an anxiety disorder, a Prozac prescription and a therapist. But then, I fell in love, and I realized that they can, and actually trying to help my own dog overcome his panic and his anxiety, it just changed my life. It cracked open my world. And I spent the last seven years, actually, looking into this topic of mental illness in other animals. Can they be mentally ill like people, and if so, what does it mean about us? And what I discovered is that I do believe they can suffer from mental illness, and actually looking and trying to identify mental illness in them often helps us be better friends to them and also can help us better understand ourselves. So let's talk about diagnosis for a minute. Many of us think that we can't know what another animal is thinking, and that is true, but any of you in relationships — at least this is my case — just because you ask someone that you're with or your parent or your child how they feel doesn't mean that they can tell you. They may not have words to explain what it is that they're feeling, and they may not know. It's actually a pretty recent phenomenon that we feel that we have to talk to someone to understand their emotional distress. Before the early 20th century, physicians often diagnosed emotional distress in their patients just by observation. It also turns out that thinking about mental illness in other animals isn't actually that much of a stretch. Most mental disorders in the United States are fear and anxiety disorders, and when you think about it, fear and anxiety are actually really extremely helpful animal emotions. Usually we feel fear and anxiety in situations that are dangerous, and once we feel them, we then are motivated to move away from whatever is dangerous. The problem is when we begin to feel fear and anxiety in situations that don't call for it. Mood disorders, too, may actually just be the unfortunate downside of being a feeling animal, and obsessive compulsive disorders also are often manifestations of a really healthy animal thing which is keeping yourself clean and groomed. This tips into the territory of mental illness when you do things like compulsively over-wash your hands or paws, or you develop a ritual that's so extreme that you can't sit down to a bowl of food unless you engage in that ritual. So for humans, we have the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual," which is basically an atlas of the currently agreed-upon mental disorders. In other animals, we have YouTube. (Laughter) This is just one search I did for "OCD dog" but I encourage all of you to look at "OCD cat." You will be shocked by what you see. I'm going to show you just a couple examples. This is an example of shadow-chasing. I know, and it's funny and in some ways it's cute. The issue, though, is that dogs can develop compulsions like this that they then engage in all day. So they won't go for a walk, they won't hang out with their friends, they won't eat. They'll develop fixations like chasing their tails compulsively. Here's an example of a cat named Gizmo. He looks like he's on a stakeout but he does this for many, many, many hours a day. He just sits there and he will paw and paw and paw at the screen. This is another example of what's considered a stereotypic behavior. This is a sun bear at the Oakland Zoo named Ting Ting. And if you just sort of happened upon this scene, you might think that Ting Ting is just playing with a stick, but Ting Ting does this all day, and if you pay close attention and if I showed you guys the full half-hour of this clip, you'd see that he does the exact same thing in the exact same order, and he spins the stick in the exact same way every time. Other super common behaviors that you may see, particularly in captive animals, are pacing stereotypies or swaying stereotypies, and actually, humans do this too, and in us, we'll sway, we'll move from side to side. Many of us do this, and sometimes it's an effort to soothe ourselves, and I think in other animals that is often the case too. But it's not just stereotypic behaviors that other animals engage in. This is Gigi. She's a gorilla that lives at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston. She actually has a Harvard psychiatrist, and she's been treated for a mood disorder among other things. Many animals develop mood disorders. Lots of creatures — this horse is just one example — develop self-destructive behaviors. They'll gnaw on things or do other things that may also soothe them, even if they're self-destructive, which could be considered similar to the ways that some humans cut themselves. Plucking. Turns out, if you have fur or feathers or skin, you can pluck yourself compulsively, and some parrots actually have been studied to better understand trichotillomania, or compulsive plucking in humans, something that affects 20 million Americans right now. Lab rats pluck themselves too. In them, it's called barbering. Canine veterans of conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan are coming back with what's considered canine PTSD, and they're having a hard time reentering civilian life when they come back from deployments. They can be too scared to approach men with beards or to hop into cars. I want to be careful and be clear, though. I do not think that canine PTSD is the same as human PTSD. But I also do not think that my PTSD is like your PTSD, or that my anxiety or that my sadness is like yours. We are all different. We also all have very different susceptibilities. So two dogs, raised in the same household, exposed to the very same things, one may develop, say, a debilitating fear of motorcycles, or a phobia of the beep of the microwave, and another one is going to be just fine. So one thing that people ask me pretty frequently: Is this just an instance of humans driving other animals crazy? Or, is animal mental illness just a result of mistreatment or abuse? And it turns out we're actually so much more complicated than that. So one great thing that has happened to me is recently I published a book on this, and every day now that I open my email or when I go to a reading or even when I go to a cocktail party, people tell me their stories of the animals that they have met. And recently, I did a reading in California, and a woman raised her hand after the talk and she said, "Dr. Braitman, I think my cat has PTSD." And I said, "Well, why? Tell me a little bit about it." So, Ping is her cat. She was a rescue, and she used to live with an elderly man, and one day the man was vacuuming and he suffered a heart attack, and he died. A week later, Ping was discovered in the apartment alongside the body of her owner, and the vacuum had been running the entire time. For many months, up to I think two years after that incident, she was so scared she couldn't be in the house when anyone was cleaning. She was quite literally a scaredy cat. She would hide in the closet. She was un-self-confident and shaky, but with the loving support of her family, a lot of a time, and their patience, now, three years later, she's actually a happy, confident cat. Another story of trauma and recovery that I came across was actually a few years ago. I was in Thailand to do some research. I met a monkey named Boonlua, and when Boonlua was a baby, he was attacked by a pack of dogs, and they ripped off both of his legs and one arm, and Boonlua dragged himself to a monastery, where the monks took him in. They called in a veterinarian, who treated his wounds. Eventually, Boonlua wound up at an elephant facility, and the keepers really decided to take him under their wing, and they figured out what he liked, which, it turned out, was mint Mentos and Rhinoceros beetles and eggs. But they worried, because he was social, that he was lonely, and they didn't want to put him in with another monkey, because they thought with just one arm, he wouldn't be able to defend himself or even play. And so they gave him a rabbit, and Boonlua was immediately a different monkey. He was extremely happy to be with this rabbit. They groomed each other, they become close friends, and then the rabbit had bunnies, and Boonlua was even happier than he was before, and it had in a way given him a reason to wake up in the morning, and in fact it gave him such a reason to wake up that he decided not to sleep. He became extremely protective of these bunnies, and he stopped sleeping, and he would sort of nod off while trying to take care of them. In fact, he was so protective and so affectionate with these babies that the sanctuary eventually had to take them away from him because he was so protective, he was worried that their mother might hurt them. So after they were taken away, the sanctuary staff worried that he would fall into a depression, and so to avoid that, they gave him another rabbit friend. (Laughter) My official opinion is that he does not look depressed. (Laughter) So one thing that I would really like people to feel is that you really should feel empowered to make some assumptions about the creatures that you know well. So when it comes to your dog or your cat or maybe your one-armed monkey that you happen to know, if you think that they are traumatized or depressed, you're probably right. This is extremely anthropomorphic, or the assignation of human characteristics onto non-human animals or things. I don't think, though, that that's a problem. I don't think that we can not anthropomorphize. It's not as if you can take your human brain out of your head and put it in a jar and then use it to think about another animal thinking. We will always be one animal wondering about the emotional experience of another animal. So then the choice becomes, how do you anthropomorphize well? Or do you anthropomorphize poorly? And anthropomorphizing poorly is all too common. (Laughter) It may include dressing your corgis up and throwing them a wedding, or getting too close to exotic wildlife because you believe that you had a spiritual connection. There's all manner of things. Anthropomorphizing well, however, I believe is based on accepting our animal similarities with other species and using them to make assumptions that are informed about other animals' minds and experiences, and there's actually an entire industry that is in some ways based on anthropomorphizing well, and that is the psychopharmaceutical industry. One in five Americans is currently taking a psychopharmaceutical drug, from the antidepressants and antianxiety medications to the antipsychotics. It turns out that we owe this entire psychopharmaceutical arsenal to other animals. These drugs were tested in non-human animals first, and not just for toxicity but for behavioral effects. The very popular antipsychotic Thorazine first relaxed rats before it relaxed people. The antianxiety medication Librium was given to cats selected for their meanness in the 1950s and made them into peaceable felines. And even antidepressants were first tested in rabbits. Today, however, we are not just giving these drugs to other animals as test subjects, but they're giving them these drugs as patients, both in ethical and much less ethical ways. SeaWorld gives mother orcas antianxiety medications when their calves are taken away. Many zoo gorillas have been given antipsychotics and antianxiety medications. But dogs like my own Oliver are given antidepressants and some antianxiety medications to keep them from jumping out of buildings or jumping into traffic. Just recently, actually, a study came out in "Science" that showed that even crawdads responded to antianxiety medication. It made them braver, less skittish, and more likely to explore their environment. It's hard to know how many animals are on these drugs, but I can tell you that the animal pharmaceutical industry is immense and growing, from seven billion dollars in 2011 to a projected 9.25 billion by the year 2015. Some animals are on these drugs indefinitely. Others, like one bonobo who lives in Milwaukee at the zoo there was on them until he started to save his Paxil prescription and then distribute it among the other bonobos. (Laughter) (Applause) More than psychopharmaceuticals, though, there are many, many, many other therapeutic interventions that help other creatures. And here is a place where I think actually that veterinary medicine can teach something to human medicine, which is, if you take your dog, who is, say, compulsively chasing his tail, into the veterinary behaviorist, their first action isn't to reach for the prescription pad; it's to ask you about your dog's life. They want to know how often your dog gets outside. They want to know how much exercise your dog is getting. They want to know how much social time with other dogs and other humans. They want to talk to you about what sorts of therapies, largely behavior therapies, you've tried with that animal. Those are the things that often tend to help the most, especially when combined with psychopharmaceuticals. The thing, though, I believe, that helps the most, particularly with social animals, is time with other social animals. In many ways, I feel like I became a service animal to my own dog, and I have seen parrots do it for people and people do it for parrots and dogs do it for elephants and elephants do it for other elephants. I don't know about you; I get a lot of Internet forwards of unlikely animal friendships. I also think it's a huge part of Facebook, the monkey that adopts the cat or the great dane who adopted the orphaned fawn, or the cow that makes friends with the pig, and had you asked me eight, nine years ago, about these, I would have told you that they were hopelessly sentimental and maybe too anthropomorphic in the wrong way and maybe even staged, and what I can tell you now is that there is actually something to this. This is legit. In fact, some interesting studies have pointed to oxytocin levels, which are a kind of bonding hormone that we release when we're having sex or nursing or around someone that we care for extremely, oxytocin levels raising in both humans and dogs who care about each other or who enjoy each other's company, and beyond that, other studies show that oxytocin raised even in other pairs of animals, so, say, in goats and dogs who were friends and played with each other, their levels spiked afterwards. I have a friend who really showed me that mental health is in fact a two-way street. His name is Lonnie Hodge, and he's a veteran of Vietnam. When he returned, he started working with survivors of genocide and a lot of people who had gone through war trauma. And he had PTSD and also a fear of heights, because in Vietnam, he had been rappelling backwards out of helicopters over the skids, and he was givena service dog named Gander, a labradoodle, to help him with PTSD and his fear of heights. This is them actually on the first day that they met, which is amazing, and since then, they've spent a lot of time together visiting with other veterans suffering from similar issues. But what's so interesting to me about Lonnie and Gander's relationship is about a few months in, Gander actually developed a fear of heights, probably because he was watching Lonnie so closely. What's pretty great about this, though, is that he's still a fantastic service dog, because now, when they're both at a great height, Lonnie is so concerned with Gander's well-being that he forgets to be scared of the heights himself. Since I've spent so much time with these stories, digging into archives, I literally spent years doing this research, and it's changed me. I no longer look at animals at the species level. I look at them as individuals, and I think about them as creatures with their own individual weather systems guiding their behavior and informing how they respond to the world. And I really believe that this has made me a more curious and a more empathetic person, both to the animals that share my bed and occasionally wind up on my plate, but also to the people that I know who are suffering from anxiety and from phobias and all manner of other things, and I really do believe that even though you can't know exactly what's going on in the mind of a pig or your pug or your partner, that that shouldn't stop you from empathizing with them. The best thing that we could do for our loved ones is, perhaps, to anthropomorphize them. Charles Darwin's father once told him that everybody could lose their mind at some point. Thankfully, we can often find them again, but only with each other's help. Thank you. (Applause) |
Everyday objects, tragic histories | {0: 'To help him come to terms with the tragedy of his own homeland, Bosnian photographer Ziyah Gafić turns his camera on the aftermath of conflict, showing his images in galleries, in books and on Instagram.\r\n'} | TED2014 | These are simple objects: clocks, keys, combs, glasses. They are the things the victims of genocide in Bosnia carried with them on their final journey. We are all familiar with these mundane, everyday objects. The fact that some of the victims carried personal items such as toothpaste and a toothbrush is a clear sign they had no idea what was about to happen to them. Usually, they were told that they were going to be exchanged for prisoners of war. These items have been recovered from numerous mass graves across my homeland, and as we speak, forensics are exhuming bodies from newly discovered mass graves, 20 years after the war. And it is quite possibly the largest ever discovered. During the four years of conflict that devastated the Bosnian nation in the early '90s, approximately 30,000 citizens, mainly civilians, went missing, presumed killed, and another 100,000 were killed during combat operations. Most of them were killed either in the early days of the war or towards the end of the hostilities, when U.N. safe zones like Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Serb army. The international criminal tribunal delivered a number of sentences for crimes against humanity and genocide. Genocide is a systematic and deliberate destruction of a racial, political, religious or ethnic group. As much as genocide is about killing. It is also about destroying their property, their cultural heritage, and ultimately the very notion that they ever existed. Genocide is not only about the killing; it is about the denied identity. There are always traces — no such thing as a perfect crime. There are always remnants of the perished ones that are more durable than their fragile bodies and our selective and fading memory of them. These items are recovered from numerous mass graves, and the main goal of this collection of the items is a unique process of identifying those who disappeared in the killings, the first act of genocide on European soil since the Holocaust. Not a single body should remain undiscovered or unidentified. Once recovered, these items that the victims carried with them on their way to execution are carefully cleaned, analyzed, catalogued and stored. Thousands of artifacts are packed in white plastic bags just like the ones you see on CSI. These objects are used as a forensic tool in visual identification of the victims, but they are also used as very valuable forensic evidence in the ongoing war crimes trials. Survivors are occasionally called to try to identify these items physically, but physical browsing is extremely difficult, an ineffective and painful process. Once the forensics and doctors and lawyers are done with these objects, they become orphans of the narrative. Many of them get destroyed, believe it or not, or they get simply shelved, out of sight and out of mind. I decided a few years ago to photograph every single exhumed item in order to create a visual archive that survivors could easily browse. As a storyteller, I like to give back to the community. I like to move beyond raising awareness. And in this case, someone may recognize these items or at least their photographs will remain as a permanent, unbiased and accurate reminder of what happened. Photography is about empathy, and the familiarity of these items guarantee empathy. In this case, I am merely a tool, a forensic, if you like, and the result is a photography that is as close as possible of being a document. Once all the missing persons are identified, only decaying bodies in their graves and these everyday items will remain. In all their simplicity, these items are the last testament to the identity of the victims, the last permanent reminder that these people ever existed. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Can we prevent the end of the world? | {0: "Lord Martin Rees, one of the world's most eminent astronomers, is an emeritus professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and the UK's Astronomer Royal. He is one of our key thinkers on the future of humanity in the cosmos."} | TED2014 | Ten years ago, I wrote a book which I entitled "Our Final Century?" Question mark. My publishers cut out the question mark. (Laughter) The American publishers changed our title to "Our Final Hour." Americans like instant gratification and the reverse. (Laughter) And my theme was this: Our Earth has existed for 45 million centuries, but this one is special — it's the first where one species, ours, has the planet's future in its hands. Over nearly all of Earth's history, threats have come from nature — disease, earthquakes, asteroids and so forth — but from now on, the worst dangers come from us. And it's now not just the nuclear threat; in our interconnected world, network breakdowns can cascade globally; air travel can spread pandemics worldwide within days; and social media can spread panic and rumor literally at the speed of light. We fret too much about minor hazards — improbable air crashes, carcinogens in food, low radiation doses, and so forth — but we and our political masters are in denial about catastrophic scenarios. The worst have thankfully not yet happened. Indeed, they probably won't. But if an event is potentially devastating, it's worth paying a substantial premium to safeguard against it, even if it's unlikely, just as we take out fire insurance on our house. And as science offers greater power and promise, the downside gets scarier too. We get ever more vulnerable. Within a few decades, millions will have the capability to misuse rapidly advancing biotech, just as they misuse cybertech today. Freeman Dyson, in a TED Talk, foresaw that children will design and create new organisms just as routinely as his generation played with chemistry sets. Well, this may be on the science fiction fringe, but were even part of his scenario to come about, our ecology and even our species would surely not survive long unscathed. For instance, there are some eco-extremists who think that it would be better for the planet, for Gaia, if there were far fewer humans. What happens when such people have mastered synthetic biology techniques that will be widespread by 2050? And by then, other science fiction nightmares may transition to reality: dumb robots going rogue, or a network that develops a mind of its own threatens us all. Well, can we guard against such risks by regulation? We must surely try, but these enterprises are so competitive, so globalized, and so driven by commercial pressure, that anything that can be done will be done somewhere, whatever the regulations say. It's like the drug laws — we try to regulate, but can't. And the global village will have its village idiots, and they'll have a global range. So as I said in my book, we'll have a bumpy ride through this century. There may be setbacks to our society — indeed, a 50 percent chance of a severe setback. But are there conceivable events that could be even worse, events that could snuff out all life? When a new particle accelerator came online, some people anxiously asked, could it destroy the Earth or, even worse, rip apart the fabric of space? Well luckily, reassurance could be offered. I and others pointed out that nature has done the same experiments zillions of times already, via cosmic ray collisions. But scientists should surely be precautionary about experiments that generate conditions without precedent in the natural world. Biologists should avoid release of potentially devastating genetically modified pathogens. And by the way, our special aversion to the risk of truly existential disasters depends on a philosophical and ethical question, and it's this: Consider two scenarios. Scenario A wipes out 90 percent of humanity. Scenario B wipes out 100 percent. How much worse is B than A? Some would say 10 percent worse. The body count is 10 percent higher. But I claim that B is incomparably worse. As an astronomer, I can't believe that humans are the end of the story. It is five billion years before the sun flares up, and the universe may go on forever, so post-human evolution, here on Earth and far beyond, could be as prolonged as the Darwinian process that's led to us, and even more wonderful. And indeed, future evolution will happen much faster, on a technological timescale, not a natural selection timescale. So we surely, in view of those immense stakes, shouldn't accept even a one in a billion risk that human extinction would foreclose this immense potential. Some scenarios that have been envisaged may indeed be science fiction, but others may be disquietingly real. It's an important maxim that the unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable, and in fact, that's why we at Cambridge University are setting up a center to study how to mitigate these existential risks. It seems it's worthwhile just for a few people to think about these potential disasters. And we need all the help we can get from others, because we are stewards of a precious pale blue dot in a vast cosmos, a planet with 50 million centuries ahead of it. And so let's not jeopardize that future. And I'd like to finish with a quote from a great scientist called Peter Medawar. I quote, "The bells that toll for mankind are like the bells of Alpine cattle. They are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a tuneful and melodious sound." Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Crop insurance, an idea worth seeding | {0: 'Rose Goslinga isn’t your typical insurance salesperson. Through the Syngenta Foundation, her team developed insurance solutions to assist small-scale farmers in Africa, to safeguard their crops in case of droughts.'} | TEDSalon Berlin 2014 | In Kenya, 1984 is known as the year of the cup, or the goro goro. The goro goro is a cup used to measure two kilograms of maize flower on the market, and the maize flower is used to make ugali, a polenta-like cake that is eaten together with vegetables. Both the maize and the vegetables are grown on most Kenyan farms, which means that most families can feed themselves from their own farm. One goro goro can feed three meals for an average family, and in 1984, the whole harvest could fit in one goro goro. It was and still is one of the worst droughts in living memory. Now today, I insure farmers against droughts like those in the year of the cup, or to be more specific, I insure the rains. I come from a family of missionaries who built hospitals in Indonesia, and my father built a psychiatric hospital in Tanzania. This is me, age five, in front of that hospital. I don't think they thought I'd grow up to sell insurance. (Laughter) So let me tell you how that happened. In 2008, I was working for the Ministry of Agriculture of Rwanda, and my boss had just been promoted to become the minister. She launched an ambitious plan to start a green revolution in her country, and before we knew it, we were importing tons of fertilizer and seed and telling farmers how to apply that fertilizer and plant. A couple of weeks later, the International Monetary Fund visited us, and asked my minister, "Minister, it's great that you want to help farmers reach food security, but what if it doesn't rain?" My minister answered proudly and somewhat defiantly, "I am going to pray for rain." That ended the discussion. On the way back to the ministry in the car, she turned around to me and said, "Rose, you've always been interested in finance. Go find us some insurance." It's been six years since, and last year I was fortunate enough to be part of a team that insured over 185,000 farmers in Kenya and Rwanda against drought. They owned an average of half an acre and paid on average two Euros in premium. It's microinsurance. Now, traditional insurance doesn't work with two to three Euros of premium, because traditional insurance relies on farm visits. A farmer here in Germany would be visited for the start of the season, halfway through, and at the end, and again if there was a loss, to estimate the damages. For a small-scale farmer in the middle of Africa, the maths of doing those visits simply don't add up. So instead, we rely on technology and data. This satellite measures whether there were clouds or not, because think about it: If there are clouds, then you might have some rain, but if there are no clouds, then it's actually impossible for it to rain. These images show the onset of the rains this season in Kenya. You see that around March 6, the clouds move in and then disappear, and then around the March 11, the clouds really move in. That, and those clouds, were the onset of the rains this year. This satellite covers the whole of Africa and goes back as far as 1984, and that's important, because if you know how many times a place has had a drought in the last 30 years, you can make a pretty good estimate what the chances are of drought in the future, and that means that you can put a price tag on the risk of drought. The data alone isn't enough. We devise agronomic algorithms which tell us how much rainfall a crop needs and when. For example, for maize at planting, you need to have two days of rain for farmers to plant, and then it needs to rain once every two weeks for the crop to properly germinate. After that, you need rain every three weeks for the crop to form its leaves, whereas at flowering, you need it to rain more frequently, about once every 10 days for the crop to form its cob. At the end of the season, you actually don't want it to rain, because rains then can damage the crop. Devising such a cover is difficult, but it turned out the real challenge was selling insurance. We set ourselves a modest target of 500 farmers insured after our first season. After a couple of months' intense marketing, we had signed up the grand total of 185 farmers. I was disappointed and confounded. Everybody kept telling me that farmers wanted insurance, but our prime customers simply weren't buying. They were waiting to see what would happen, didn't trust insurance companies, or thought, "I've managed for so many years. Why would I buy insurance now?" Now many of you know microcredit, the method of providing small loans to poor people pioneered by Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Grameen Bank. Turns out, selling microcredit isn't the same as selling insurance. For credit, a farmer needs to earn the trust of a bank, and if it succeeds, the bank will advance him money. That's an attractive proposition. For insurance, the farmer needs to trust the insurance company, and needs to advance the insurance company money. It's a very different value proposition. And so the uptick of insurance has been slow, with so far only 4.4 percent of Africans taking up insurance in 2012, and half of that number is in one country, South Africa. We tried for some years selling insurance directly to farmers, with very high marketing cost and very limited success. Then we realized that there were many organizations working with farmers: seed companies, microfinance institutions, mobile phone companies, government agencies. They were all providing loans to farmers, and often, just before they'd finalize the loan, the farmer would say, "But what if it doesn't rain? How do you expect me to repay my loan?" Many of these organizations were taking on the risk themselves, simply hoping that that year, the worst wouldn't happen. Most of the organizations, however, were limiting their growth in agriculture. They couldn't take on this kind of risk. These organizations became our customers, and when combining credit and insurance, interesting things can happen. Let me tell you one more story. At the start of February 2012 in western Kenya, the rains started, and they started early, and when rains start early, farmers are encouraged, because it usually means that the season is going to be good. So they took out loans and planted. For the next three weeks, there wasn't a single drop of rain, and the crops that had germinated so well shriveled and died. We'd insured the loans of a microfinance institution that had provided those loans to about 6,000 farmers in that area, and we called them up and said, "Look, we know about the drought. We've got you. We'll give you 200,000 Euros at the end of the season." They said, "Wow, that's great, but that'll be late. Could you give us the money now? Then these farmers can still replant and can get a harvest this season." So we convinced our insurance partners, and later that April, these farmers replanted. We took the idea of replanting to a seed company and convinced them to price the cost of insurance into every bag of seed, and in every bag, we packed a card that had a number on it, and when the farmers would open the card, they'd text in that number, and that number would actually help us to locate the farmer and allocate them to a satellite pixel. A satellite would then measure the rainfall for the next three weeks, and if it didn't rain, we'd replace their seed. One of the first — (Applause) — Hold on, I'm not there! One of the first beneficiaries of this replanting guarantee was Bosco Mwinyi. We visited his farm later that August, and I wish I could show you the smile on his face when he showed us his harvest, because it warmed my heart and it made me realize why selling insurance can be a good thing. But you know, he insisted that we get his whole harvest in the picture, so we had to zoom out a lot. Insurance secured his harvest that season, and I believe that today, we have all the tools to enable African farmers to take control of their own destiny. No more years of the cup. Instead, I am looking forward to, at least somehow, the year of the insurance, or the year of the great harvest. Thank you. (Applause) |
Find your voice against gender violence | {0: 'By using citizen journalism platforms, Meera Vijayann explores creative ways that young women can participate in politics and community matters. '} | TEDxHousesOfParliament | Talking about empowerment is odd, because when we talk about empowerment, what affects us most are the stories. So I want to begin with an everyday story. What is it really like to be a young woman in India? Now, I've spent the last 27 years of my life in India, lived in three small towns, two major cities, and I've had several experiences. When I was seven, a private tutor who used to come home to teach me mathematics molested me. He would put his hand up my skirt. He put his hand up my skirt and told me he knew how to make me feel good. At 17, a boy from my high school circulated an email detailing all the sexually aggressive things he could do to me because I didn't pay attention to him. At 19, I helped a friend whose parents had forcefully married her to an older man escape an abusive marriage. At 21, when my friend and I were walking down the road one afternoon, a man pulled down his pants and masturbated in front of us. We called people for help, and nobody came. At 25, when I was walking home one evening, two men on a motorcycle attacked me. I spent two nights in the hospital recovering from trauma and injuries. So throughout my life, I've seen women — family, friends, colleagues — live through these experiences, and they seldom talk about it. So in simple words, life in India is not easy. But today I'm not going to talk to you about this fear. I'm going to talk to you about an interesting path of learning that this fear took me on. So, what happened one night in December 2012 changed my life. So a young girl, a 23-year-old student, boarded a bus in Delhi with her male friend. There were six men on the bus, young men who you might encounter every day in India, and the chilling account of what followed was played over and over again in the Indian and international media. This girl was raped repeatedly, forcefully penetrated with a blunt rod, beaten, bitten, and left to die. Her friend was gagged, attacked, and knocked unconscious. She died on the 29th of December. And at a time when most of us here were preparing to welcome the new year, India plunged into darkness. For the first time in our history, men and women in Indian cities woke up to the horrific truth about the true state of women in the country. Now, like many other young women, I was absolutely terrified. I couldn't believe that something like this could happen in a national capital. I was angry and I was frustrated, but most of all, I felt utterly, completely helpless. But really, what do you do, right? Some write blogs, some ignore it, some join protests. I did all of it. In fact, that was what everyone was doing two years ago. So the media was filled with stories about all the horrific deeds that Indian men are capable of. They were compared to animals, sexually repressed beasts. In fact, so alien and unthinkable was this event in an Indian mind that the response from the Indian media, public and politicians proved one point: No one knew what to do. And no one wanted to be responsible for it. In fact, these were a few insensitive comments which were made in the media by prominent people in response to sexual violence against women in general. So the first one is made by a member of parliament, the second one is made by a spiritual leader, and the third one was actually the defendants' lawyer when the girl was fighting for her life and she passed away. Now, as a woman watching this day after day, I was tired. So as a writer and gender activist, I have written extensively on women, but this time, I realized it was different, because a part of me realized I was a part of that young woman too, and I decided I wanted to change this. So I did something spontaneous, hasty. I logged on to a citizen journalism platform called iReport, and I recorded a video talking about what the scene was like in Bangalore. I talked about how I felt, I talked about the ground realities, and I talked about the frustrations of living in India. In a few hours, the blog was shared widely, and comments and thoughts poured in from across the world. In that moment, a few things occurred to me. One, technology was always at hand for many young women like me. Two, like me, most young women hardly use it to express their views. Three, I realized for the first time that my voice mattered. So in the months that followed, I covered a trail of events in Bangalore which had no space in the mainstream news. In Cubbon Park, which is a big park in Bangalore, I gathered with over 100 others when groups of young men came forward to wear skirts to prove that clothing does not invite rape. When I reported about these events, I felt I had charge, I felt like I had a channel to release all the emotions I had inside me. I attended the town hall march when students held up signs saying "Kill them, hang them." "You wouldn't do this to your mothers or sisters." I went to a candlelight vigil where citizens gathered together to talk about the issue of sexual violence openly, and I recorded a lot of blogs in response to how worrying the situation was in India at that point. ["I am born with sisters and cousin who now live in cities and abroad but they never talk to me or complain about their daily difficulties like you say"] Now, the reactions confused me. While supportive comments poured in from across the world, as did vicious ones. So some called me a hypocrite. Some called me a victim, a rape apologist. Some even said I had a political motive. But this one comment kind of describes what we are discussing here today. But I was soon to learn that this was not all. As empowered as I felt with the new liberty that this citizen journalism channel gave me, I found myself in an unfamiliar situation. So sometime last August, I logged onto Facebook and I was looking through my news feed, and I noticed there was a link that was being shared by my friends. I clicked on the link; it led me back to a report uploaded by an American girl called Michaela Cross. The report was titled, "India: The story you never wanted to hear." And in this report, she recounted her firsthand account of facing sexual harassment in India. She wrote, "There is no way to prepare for the eyes, the eyes that every day stared with such entitlement at my body, with no change of expression whether I met their gaze or not. Walking to the fruit seller's or the tailor's, I got stares so sharp that they sliced away bits of me piece by piece." She called India a traveler's heaven and a woman's hell. She said she was stalked, groped, and masturbated at. Now, late that evening, the report went viral. It was on news channels across the world. Everyone was discussing it. It had over a million views, a thousand comments and shares, and I found myself witnessing a very similar thing. The media was caught in this vicious cycle of opinion and outburst and no outcome whatsoever. So that night, as I sat wondering how I should respond, I found myself filled with doubt. You see, as a writer, I approached this issue as an observer, as an Indian, I felt embarrassment and disbelief, and as an activist, I looked at it as a defender of rights, but as a citizen journalist, I suddenly felt very vulnerable. I mean, here she was, a young woman who was using a channel to talk about her experience just as I was, and yet I felt unsettled. You see, no one ever tells you that true empowerment comes from giving yourself the permission to think and act. Empowerment is often made to sound as if it's an ideal, it's a wonderful outcome. When we talk about empowerment, we often talk about giving people access to materials, giving them access to tools. But the thing is, empowerment is an emotion. It's a feeling. The first step to empowerment is to give yourself the authority, the key to independent will, and for women everywhere, no matter who we are or where we come from, that is the most difficult step. We fear the sound of our own voice, for it means admission, but it is this that gives us the power to change our environment. Now in this situation where I was faced with so many different kinds of realities, I was unsure how to judge, because I didn't know what it would mean for me. I feared to judge because I didn't know what it would be if I didn't support the same view as this girl. I didn't know what it would mean for me if I was challenging someone else's truth. But yet, it was simple. I had to make a decision: Should I speak up or should I stay quiet? So after a lot of thought, I recorded a video blog in response, and I told Michaela, well, there are different sides to India, and I also tried to explain that things would be okay and I expressed my regret for what she had faced. And a few days later, I was invited to talk on air with her, and for the first time, I reached out to this girl who I had never met, who was so far away, but yet I felt so close to. Since this report came to light, more young people than ever were discussing sexual harassment on the campus, and the university that Michaela belonged to gave her the assistance she needed. The university even took measures to train its students to equip them with the skills that they need to confront challenges such as harassment, and for the first the time, I felt I wasn't alone. You see, if there's anything that I've learned as an active citizen journalist over the past few years, it is our dire lack as a society to actively find avenues where our voices can be heard. We don't realize that when we are standing up, we are not just standing up as individuals, we are standing up for our communities, our friends, our peers. Most of us say that women are denied their rights, but the truth is, oftentimes, women deny themselves these rights. In a recent survey in India, 95 percent of the women who work in I.T., aviation, hospitality and call centers, said they didn't feel safe returning home alone after work in the late hours or in the evening. In Bangalore, where I come from, this number is 85 percent. In rural areas in India, if anything is to go by the recent gang rapes in Badaun and acid attacks in Odisha and Aligarh are supposed to go by, we need to act really soon. Don't get me wrong, the challenges that women will face in telling their stories is real, but we need to start pursuing and trying to identify mediums to participate in our system and not just pursue the media blindly. Today, more women than ever are standing up and questioning the government in India, and this is a result of that courage. There is a sixfold increase in women reporting harassment, and the government passed the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act in 2013 to protect women against sexual assault. As I end this talk, I just want to say that I know a lot of us in this room have our secrets, but let us speak up. Let us fight the shame and talk about it. It could be a platform, a community, your loved one, whoever or whatever you choose, but let us speak up. The truth is, the end to this problem begins with us. Thank you. (Applause) |
Don't like clickbait? Don't click | {0: 'Sally Kohn searches for common ground among political foes by focusing on the compassion and humanity in everyone.\r\n'} | TED@NYC | So recently, some white guys and some black women swapped Twitter avatars, or pictures online. They didn't change their content, they kept tweeting the same as usual, but suddenly, the white guys noticed they were getting called the n-word all the time and they were getting the worst kind of online abuse, whereas the black women all of a sudden noticed things got a lot more pleasant for them. Now, if you're my five-year-old, your Internet consists mostly of puppies and fairies and occasionally fairies riding puppies. That's a thing. Google it. But the rest of us know that the Internet can be a really ugly place. I'm not talking about the kind of colorful debates that I think are healthy for our democracy. I'm talking about nasty personal attacks. Maybe it's happened to you, but it's at least twice as likely to happen, and be worse, if you're a woman, a person of color, or gay, or more than one at the same time. In fact, just as I was writing this talk, I found a Twitter account called @SallyKohnSucks. The bio says that I'm a "man-hater and a bull dyke and the only thing I've ever accomplished with my career is spreading my perverse sexuality." Which, incidentally, is only a third correct. I mean, lies! (Laughter) But seriously, we all say we hate this crap. The question is whether you're willing to make a personal sacrifice to change it. I don't mean giving up the Internet. I mean changing the way you click, because clicking is a public act. It's no longer the case that a few powerful elites control all the media and the rest of us are just passive receivers. Increasingly, we're all the media. I used to think, oh, okay, I get dressed up, I put on a lot of makeup, I go on television, I talk about the news. That is a public act of making media. And then I go home and I browse the web and I'm reading Twitter, and that's a private act of consuming media. I mean, of course it is. I'm in my pajamas. Wrong. Everything we blog, everything we Tweet, and everything we click is a public act of making media. We are the new editors. We decide what gets attention based on what we give our attention to. That's how the media works now. There's all these hidden algorithms that decide what you see more of and what we all see more of based on what you click on, and that in turn shapes our whole culture. Over three out of five Americans think we have a major incivility problem in our country right now, but I'm going to guess that at least three out of five Americans are clicking on the same insult-oriented, rumor-mongering trash that feeds the nastiest impulses in our society. In an increasingly noisy media landscape, the incentive is to make more noise to be heard, and that tyranny of the loud encourages the tyranny of the nasty. It does not have to be that way. It does not. We can change the incentive. For starters, there are two things we can all do. First, don't just stand by the sidelines when you see someone getting hurt. If someone is being abused online, do something. Be a hero. This is your chance. Speak up. Speak out. Be a good person. Drown out the negative with the positive. And second, we've got to stop clicking on the lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeding linkbait. If you don't like the 24/7 all Kardashian all the time programming, you've got to stop clicking on the stories about Kim Kardashian's sideboob. I know you do it. (Applause) You too, apparently. I mean, really, same example: if you don't like politicians calling each other names, stop clicking on the stories about what one guy in one party called the other guy in the other party. Clicking on a train wreck just pours gasoline on it. It makes it worse, the fire spreads. Our whole culture gets burned. If what gets the most clicks wins, then we have to start shaping the world we want with our clicks, because clicking is a public act. So click responsibly. Thank you. (Applause) |
Please, please, people. Let's put the 'awe' back in 'awesome' | {0: 'Jill Shargaa is a woman of multiple talents. A seasoned comedian, she founded the all-female comedy revue, Evening of Estrogen. She is also an illustrator and designer who brings a pulp sensibility to her work.'} | TED@NYC | How many times have you used the word "awesome" today? Once? Twice? Seventeen times? Do you remember what you were describing when you used the word? No, I didn't think so, because it's come down to this, people: You're using the word incorrectly, and tonight I hope to show you how to put the "awe" back in "awesome." Recently, I was dining at an outdoor cafe, and the server came up to our table, and asked us if we had dined there before, and I said, "Yes, yes, we have." And she said, "Awesome." And I thought, "Really? Awesome or just merely good that we decided to visit your restaurant again?" The other day, one of my coworkers asked me if I could save that file as a PDF, and I said, "Well, of course," and he said, "Awesome." Seriously, can saving anything as a PDF be awesome? Sadly, the frequent overuse of the word "awesome" has now replaced words like "great" and "thank you." So Webster's dictionary defines the word "awesome" as fear mingled with admiration or reverence, a feeling produced by something majestic. Now, with that in mind, was your Quiznos sandwich awesome? How about that parking space? Was that awesome? Or that game the other day? Was that awesome? The answer is no, no and no. A sandwich can be delicious, that parking space can be nearby, and that game can be a blowout, but not everything can be awesome. (Laughter) So when you use the word "awesome" to describe the most mundane of things, you're taking away the very power of the word. This author says, "Snowy days or finding money in your pants is awesome." (Laughter) Um, no, it is not, and we need to raise the bar for this poor schmuck. (Laughter) So in other words, if you have everything, you value nothing. It's a lot like drinking from a firehose like this jackass right here. There's no dynamic, there's no highs or lows, if everything is awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, here are 10 things that are truly awesome. Imagine, if you will, having to schlep everything on your back. Wouldn't this be easier for me if I could roll this home? Yes, so I think I'll invent the wheel. The wheel, ladies and gentlemen. Is the wheel awesome? Say it with me. Yes, the wheel is awesome! The Great Pyramids were the tallest man-made structure in the world for 4,000 years. Pharaoh had his slaves move millions of blocks just to this site to erect a big freaking headstone. Were the Great Pyramids awesome? Yes, the pyramids were awesome. The Grand Canyon. Come on. It's almost 80 million years old. Is the Grand Canyon awesome? Yes, the Grand Canyon is. Louis Daguerre invented photography in 1829, and earlier today, when you whipped out your smartphone and you took a shot of your awesome sandwich, and you know who you are — (Laughter) — wasn't that easier than exposing the image to copper plates coated with iodized silver? I mean, come on. Is photography awesome? Yes, photography is awesome. D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy, the largest amphibious invasion in world history. Was D-Day awesome? Yes, it was awesome. Did you eat food today? Did you eat? Then you can thank the honeybee, that's the one, because if crops aren't pollinated, we can't grow food, and then we're all going to die. It's just like that. But it's not like a flower can just get up and have sex with another flower, although that would be awesome. (Laughter) Bees are awesome. Are you kidding me? Landing on the moon! Come on! Apollo 11. Are you kidding me? Sixty-six years after the Wright Brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Neil Armstrong was 240,000 miles away. That's like from here to the moon. (Laughter) That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for awesome! You're damn right, it was. Woodstock, 1969: Rolling Stone Magazine said this changed the history of rock and roll. Tickets were only 24 dollars back then. You can't even buy a freaking t-shirt for that now. Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was the most iconic. Was Woodstock awesome? Yes, it was awesome. Sharks! They're at the top of the food chain. Sharks have multiple rows of teeth that grow in their jaw and they move forward like a conveyor belt. Some sharks can lose 30,000 teeth in their lifetime. Does awesome inspire fear? Oh, hell yeah, sharks are awesome! The Internet was born in 1982 and it instantly took over global communication, and later tonight, when all these PowerPoints are uplifted to the Internet so that a guy in Siberia can get drunk and watch this crap, the Internet is awesome. And finally, finally some of you can't wait to come up and tell me how awesome my PowerPoint was. I will save you the time. It was not awesome, but it was true, and I hope it was entertaining, and out of all the audiences I've ever had, y'all are the most recent. Thank you and good night. (Applause) |
Why does the universe exist? | {0: 'Why is there something rather than nothing? In his book "Why Does the World Exist?" Jim Holt dares to ask.'} | TED2014 | Why does the universe exist? Why is there — Okay. Okay. (Laughter) This is a cosmic mystery. Be solemn. Why is there a world, why are we in it, and why is there something rather than nothing at all? I mean, this is the super ultimate "why" question? So I'm going to talk about the mystery of existence, the puzzle of existence, where we are now in addressing it, and why you should care, and I hope you do care. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that those who don't wonder about the contingency of their existence, of the contingency of the world's existence, are mentally deficient. That's a little harsh, but still. (Laughter) So this has been called the most sublime and awesome mystery, the deepest and most far-reaching question man can pose. It's obsessed great thinkers. Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, was astonished that there should be a world at all. He wrote in his "Tractatus," Proposition 4.66, "It is not how things are in the world that is the mystical, it's that the world exists." And if you don't like taking your epigrams from a philosopher, try a scientist. John Archibald Wheeler, one of the great physicists of the 20th century, the teacher of Richard Feynman, the coiner of the term "black hole," he said, "I want to know how come the quantum, how come the universe, how come existence?" And my friend Martin Amis — sorry that I'll be doing a lot of name-dropping in this talk, so get used to it — my dear friend Martin Amis once said that we're about five Einsteins away from answering the mystery of where the universe came from. And I've no doubt there are five Einsteins in the audience tonight. Any Einsteins? Show of hands? No? No? No? No Einsteins? Okay. So this question, why is there something rather than nothing, this sublime question, was posed rather late in intellectual history. It was towards the end of the 17th century, the philosopher Leibniz who asked it, a very smart guy, Leibniz, who invented the calculus independently of Isaac Newton, at about the same time, but for Leibniz, who asked why is there something rather than nothing, this was not a great mystery. He either was or pretended to be an Orthodox Christian in his metaphysical outlook, and he said it's obvious why the world exists: because God created it. And God created, indeed, out of nothing at all. That's how powerful God is. He doesn't need any preexisting materials to fashion a world out of. He can make it out of sheer nothingness, creation ex nihilo. And by the way, this is what most Americans today believe. There is no mystery of existence for them. God made it. So let's put this in an equation. I don't have any slides so I'm going to mime my visuals, so use your imaginations. So it's God + nothing = the world. Okay? Now that's the equation. And so maybe you don't believe in God. Maybe you're a scientific atheist or an unscientific atheist, and you don't believe in God, and you're not happy with it. By the way, even if we have this equation, God + nothing = the world, there's already a problem: Why does God exist? God doesn't exist by logic alone unless you believe the ontological argument, and I hope you don't, because it's not a good argument. So it's conceivable, if God were to exist, he might wonder, I'm eternal, I'm all-powerful, but where did I come from? (Laughter) Whence then am I? God speaks in a more formal English. (Laughter) And so one theory is that God was so bored with pondering the puzzle of His own existence that He created the world just to distract himself. But anyway, let's forget about God. Take God out of the equation: We have ________ + nothing = the world. Now, if you're a Buddhist, you might want to stop right there, because essentially what you've got is nothing = the world, and by symmetry of identity, that means the world = nothing. Okay? And to a Buddhist, the world is just a whole lot of nothing. It's just a big cosmic vacuity. And we think there's a lot of something out there but that's because we're enslaved by our desires. If we let our desires melt away, we'll see the world for what it truly is, a vacuity, nothingness, and we'll slip into this happy state of nirvana which has been defined as having just enough life to enjoy being dead. (Laughter) So that's the Buddhist thinking. But I'm a Westerner, and I'm still concerned with the puzzle of existence, so I've got ________ + — this is going to get serious in a minute, so — ________ + nothing = the world. What are we going to put in that blank? Well, how about science? Science is our best guide to the nature of reality, and the most fundamental science is physics. That tells us what naked reality really is, that reveals what I call TAUFOTU, the True And Ultimate Furniture Of The Universe. So maybe physics can fill this blank, and indeed, since about the late 1960s or around 1970, physicists have purported to give a purely scientific explanation of how a universe like ours could have popped into existence out of sheer nothingness, a quantum fluctuation out of the void. Stephen Hawking is one of these physicists, more recently Alex Vilenkin, and the whole thing has been popularized by another very fine physicist and friend of mine, Lawrence Krauss, who wrote a book called "A Universe from Nothing," and Lawrence thinks that he's given — he's a militant atheist, by the way, so he's gotten God out of the picture. The laws of quantum field theory, the state-of-the-art physics, can show how out of sheer nothingness, no space, no time, no matter, nothing, a little nugget of false vacuum can fluctuate into existence, and then, by the miracle of inflation, blow up into this huge and variegated cosmos we see around us. Okay, this is a really ingenious scenario. It's very speculative. It's fascinating. But I've got a big problem with it, and the problem is this: It's a pseudo-religious point of view. Now, Lawrence thinks he's an atheist, but he's still in thrall to a religious worldview. He sees physical laws as being like divine commands. The laws of quantum field theory for him are like fiat lux, "Let there be light." The laws have some sort of ontological power or clout that they can form the abyss, that it's pregnant with being. They can call a world into existence out of nothing. But that's a very primitive view of what a physical law is, right? We know that physical laws are actually generalized descriptions of patterns and regularities in the world. They don't exist outside the world. They don't have any ontic cloud of their own. They can't call a world into existence out of nothingness. That's a very primitive view of what a scientific law is. And if you don't believe me on this, listen to Stephen Hawking, who himself put forward a model of the cosmos that was self-contained, didn't require any outside cause, any creator, and after proposing this, Hawking admitted that he was still puzzled. He said, this model is just equations. What breathes fire into the equations and creates a world for them to describe? He was puzzled by this, so equations themselves can't do the magic, can't resolve the puzzle of existence. And besides, even if the laws could do that, why this set of laws? Why quantum field theory that describes a universe with a certain number of forces and particles and so forth? Why not a completely different set of laws? There are many, many mathematically consistent sets of laws. Why not no laws at all? Why not sheer nothingness? So this is a problem, believe it or not, that reflective physicists really think a lot about, and at this point they tend to go metaphysical, say, well, maybe the set of laws that describes our universe, it's just one set of laws and it describes one part of reality, but maybe every consistent set of laws describes another part of reality, and in fact all possible physical worlds really exist, they're all out there. We just see a little tiny part of reality that's described by the laws of quantum field theory, but there are many, many other worlds, parts of reality that are described by vastly different theories that are different from ours in ways we can't imagine, that are inconceivably exotic. Steven Weinberg, the father of the standard model of particle physics, has actually flirted with this idea himself, that all possible realities actually exist. Also, a younger physicist, Max Tegmark, who believes that all mathematical structures exist, and mathematical existence is the same thing as physical existence, so we have this vastly rich multiverse that encompasses every logical possibility. Now, in taking this metaphysical way out, these physicists and also philosophers are actually reaching back to a very old idea that goes back to Plato. It's the principle of plenitude or fecundity, or the great chain of being, that reality is actually as full as possible. It's as far removed from nothingness as it could possibly be. So we have these two extremes now. We have sheer nothingness on one side, and we have this vision of a reality that encompasses every conceivable world at the other extreme: the fullest possible reality, nothingness, the simplest possible reality. Now what's in between these two extremes? There are all kinds of intermediate realities that include some things and leave out others. So one of these intermediate realities is, say, the most mathematically elegant reality, that leaves out the inelegant bits, the ugly asymmetries and so forth. Now, there are some physicists who will tell you that we're actually living in the most elegant reality. I think that Brian Greene is in the audience, and he has written a book called "The Elegant Universe." He claims that the universe we live in mathematically is very elegant. Don't believe him. (Laughter) It's a pious hope, I wish it were true, but I think the other day he admitted to me it's really an ugly universe. It's stupidly constructed, it's got way too many arbitrary coupling constants and mass ratios and superfluous families of elementary particles, and what the hell is dark energy? It's a stick and bubble gum contraption. It's not an elegant universe. (Laughter) And then there's the best of all possible worlds in an ethical sense. You should get solemn now, because a world in which sentient beings don't suffer needlessly, in which there aren't things like childhood cancer or the Holocaust. This is an ethical conception. Anyway, so between nothingness and the fullest possible reality, various special realities. Nothingness is special. It's the simplest. Then there's the most elegant possible reality. That's special. The fullest possible reality, that's special. But what are we leaving out here? There's also just the crummy, generic realities that aren't special in any way, that are sort of random. They're infinitely removed from nothingness, but they fall infinitely short of complete fullness. They're a mixture of chaos and order, of mathematical elegance and ugliness. So I would describe these realities as an infinite, mediocre, incomplete mess, a generic reality, a kind of cosmic junk shot. And these realities, is there a deity in any of these realities? Maybe, but the deity isn't perfect like the Judeo-Christian deity. The deity isn't all-good and all-powerful. It might be instead 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective, which pretty much describes the world we see around us, I think. (Laughter) So I would like to propose that the resolution to the mystery of existence is that the reality we exist in is one of these generic realities. Reality has to turn out some way. It can either turn out to be nothing or everything or something in between. So if it has some special feature, like being really elegant or really full or really simple, like nothingness, that would require an explanation. But if it's just one of these random, generic realities, there's no further explanation for it. And indeed, I would say that's the reality we live in. That's what science is telling us. At the beginning of the week, we got the exciting information that the theory of inflation, which predicts a big, infinite, messy, arbitrary, pointless reality, it's like a big frothing champagne coming out of a bottle endlessly, a vast universe, mostly a wasteland with little pockets of charm and order and peace, this has been confirmed, this inflationary scenario, by the observations made by radio telescopes in Antarctica that looked at the signature of the gravitational waves from just before the Big Bang. I'm sure you all know about this. So anyway, I think there's some evidence that this really is the reality that we're stuck with. Now, why should you care? Well — (Laughter) — the question, "Why does the world exist?" that's the cosmic question, it sort of rhymes with a more intimate question: Why do I exist? Why do you exist? you know, our existence would seem to be amazingly improbable, because there's an enormous number of genetically possible humans, if you can compute it by looking at the number of the genes and the number of alleles and so forth, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation will tell you there are about 10 to the 10,000th possible humans, genetically. That's between a googol and a googolplex. And the number of the actual humans that have existed is 100 billion, maybe 50 billion, an infinitesimal fraction, so all of us, we've won this amazing cosmic lottery. We're here. Okay. So what kind of reality do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a special reality? What if we were living in the most elegant possible reality? Imagine the existential pressure on us to live up to that, to be elegant, not to pull down the tone of it. Or, what if we were living in the fullest possible reality? Well then our existence would be guaranteed, because every possible thing exists in that reality, but our choices would be meaningless. If I really struggle morally and agonize and I decide to do the right thing, what difference does it make, because there are an infinite number of versions of me also doing the right thing and an infinite number doing the wrong thing. So my choices are meaningless. So we don't want to live in that special reality. And as for the special reality of nothingness, we wouldn't be having this conversation. So I think living in a generic reality that's mediocre, there are nasty bits and nice bits and we could make the nice bits bigger and the nasty bits smaller and that gives us a kind of purpose in life. The universe is absurd, but we can still construct a purpose, and that's a pretty good one, and the overall mediocrity of reality kind of resonates nicely with the mediocrity we all feel in the core of our being. And I know you feel it. I know you're all special, but you're still kind of secretly mediocre, don't you think? (Laughter) (Applause) So anyway, you may say, this puzzle, the mystery of existence, it's just silly mystery-mongering. You're not astonished at the existence of the universe and you're in good company. Bertrand Russell said, "I should say the universe is just there, and that's all." Just a brute fact. And my professor at Columbia, Sidney Morgenbesser, a great philosophical wag, when I said to him, "Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?" And he said, "Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn't be satisfied." So — (Laughter) — okay. So you're not astonished. I don't care. But I will tell you something to conclude that I guarantee you will astonish you, because it's astonished all of the brilliant, wonderful people I've met at this TED conference, when I've told them, and it's this: Never in my life have I had a cell phone. Thank you. (Laughter) (Applause) |
How to live passionately—no matter your age | {0: 'Isabel Allende writes stories of passion. Her novels and memoirs, including <em>The House of the Spirits</em> and <em>Eva Luna</em>, tell the stories of women and men who live with passionate commitment -- to love, to their world, to an ideal. '} | TED2014 | Hi, kids. (Laughter) I'm 71. (Applause) My husband is 76. My parents are in their late 90s, and Olivia, the dog, is 16. So let's talk about aging. Let me tell you how I feel when I see my wrinkles in the mirror and I realize that some parts of me have dropped and I can't find them down there. (Laughter) Mary Oliver says in one of her poems, "Tell me, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Me, I intend to live passionately. When do we start aging? Society decides when we are old, usually around 65, when we get Medicare, but we really start aging at birth. We are aging right now, and we all experience it differently. We all feel younger than our real age, because the spirit never ages. I am still 17. Sophia Loren. Look at her. She says that everything you see she owes to spaghetti. I tried it and gained 10 pounds in the wrong places. But attitude, aging is also attitude and health. But my real mentor in this journey of aging is Olga Murray. This California girl at 60 started working in Nepal to save young girls from domestic bondage. At 88, she has saved 12,000 girls, and she has changed the culture in the country. (Applause) Now it is illegal for fathers to sell their daughters into servitude. She has also founded orphanages and nutritional clinics. She is always happy and eternally young. What have I lost in the last decades? People, of course, places, and the boundless energy of my youth, and I'm beginning to lose independence, and that scares me. Ram Dass says that dependency hurts, but if you accept it, there is less suffering. After a very bad stroke, his ageless soul watches the changes in the body with tenderness, and he is grateful to the people who help him. What have I gained? Freedom: I don't have to prove anything anymore. I'm not stuck in the idea of who I was, who I want to be, or what other people expect me to be. I don't have to please men anymore, only animals. I keep telling my superego to back off and let me enjoy what I still have. My body may be falling apart, but my brain is not, yet. I love my brain. I feel lighter. I don't carry grudges, ambition, vanity, none of the deadly sins that are not even worth the trouble. It's great to let go. I should have started sooner. And I also feel softer because I'm not scared of being vulnerable. I don't see it as weakness anymore. And I've gained spirituality. I'm aware that before, death was in the neighborhood. Now, it's next door, or in my house. I try to live mindfully and be present in the moment. By the way, the Dalai Lama is someone who has aged beautifully, but who wants to be vegetarian and celibate? (Laughter) Meditation helps. (Video) Child: Ommm. Ommm. Ommm. Isabel Allende: Ommm. Ommm. There it is. And it's good to start early. You know, for a vain female like myself, it's very hard to age in this culture. Inside, I feel good, I feel charming, seductive, sexy. Nobody else sees that. (Laughter) I'm invisible. I want to be the center of attention. I hate to be invisible. (Laughter) (Applause) This is Grace Dammann. She has been in a wheelchair for six years after a terrible car accident. She says that there is nothing more sensual than a hot shower, that every drop of water is a blessing to the senses. She doesn't see herself as disabled. In her mind, she's still surfing in the ocean. Ethel Seiderman, a feisty, beloved activist in the place where I live in California. She wears red patent shoes, and her mantra is that one scarf is nice but two is better. She has been a widow for nine years, but she's not looking for another mate. She says that there is only a limited number of ways you can screw — well, she says it in another way — and she has tried them all. (Laughter) I, on the other hand, I still have erotic fantasies with Antonio Banderas — (Laughter) — and my poor husband has to put up with it. So how can I stay passionate? I cannot will myself to be passionate at 71. I have been training for some time, and when I feel flat and bored, I fake it. Attitude, attitude. How do I train? I train by saying yes to whatever comes my way: drama, comedy, tragedy, love, death, losses. Yes to life. And I train by trying to stay in love. It doesn't always work, but you cannot blame me for trying. And, on a final note, retirement in Spanish is jubilación. Jubilation. Celebration. We have paid our dues. We have contributed to society. Now it's our time, and it's a great time. Unless you are ill or very poor, you have choices. I have chosen to stay passionate, engaged with an open heart. I am working on it every day. Want to join me? Thank you. (Applause) June Cohen: So Isabel — IA: Thank you. JC: First of all, I never like to presume to speak for the TED community, but I would like to tell you that I have a feeling we can all agree that you are still charming, seductive and sexy. Yes? IA: Aww, thank you. (Applause) JC: Hands down. IA: No, it's makeup. Moderator: Now, would it be awkward if I asked you a follow-up question about your erotic fantasies? IA: Oh, of course. About what? (Laughter) Moderator: About your erotic fantasies. IA: With Antonio Banderas. Moderator: I was just wondering if you have anything more to share. IA: Well, one of them is that — (Laughter) One of them is that I place a naked Antonio Banderas on a Mexican tortilla, I slather him with guacamole and salsa, I roll him up, and I eat him. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
An engineer's vision for tiny forests, everywhere | {0: 'Shubhendu Sharma creates afforestation methods that make it easy to plant maintenance-free, wild and biodiverse forests.'} | TED2014 | I'm an industrial engineer. The goal in my life has always been to make more and more products in the least amount of time and resources. While working at Toyota, all I knew was how to make cars until I met Dr. Akira Miyawaki, who came to our factory to make a forest in it in order to make it carbon-neutral. I was so fascinated that I decided to learn this methodology by joining his team as a volunteer. Soon, I started making a forest in the backyard of my own house, and this is how it looks after three years. These forests, compared to a conventional plantation, grow 10 times faster, they're 30 times more dense, and 100 times more biodiverse. Within two years of having this forest in our backyard, I could observe that the groundwater didn't dry during summers, the number of bird species I spotted in this area doubled. Quality of air became better, and we started harvesting seasonal fruits growing effortlessly right in the backyard of our house. I wanted to make more of these forests. I was so moved by these results that I wanted to make these forests with the same acumen with which we make cars or write software or do any mainstream business, so I founded a company which is an end-to-end service provider to create these native natural forests. But to make afforestation as a mainstream business or an industry, we had to standardize the process of forest-making. So we benchmarked the Toyota Production System known for its quality and efficiency for the process of forest-making. For an example, the core of TPS, Toyota Production System, lies in heijunka, which is making manufacturing of different models of cars on a single assembly line. We replaced these cars with trees, using which now we can make multi-layered forests. These forests utilize 100 percent vertical space. They are so dense that one can't even walk into them. For an example, we can make a 300-tree forest in an area as small as the parking spaces of six cars. In order to reduce cost and our own carbon footprint, we started utilizing local biomass as soil amender and fertilizers. For example, coconut shells crushed in a machine mixed with rice straw, powder of rice husk mixed with organic manure is finally dumped in soil on which our forest is planted. Once planted, we use grass or rice straw to cover the soil so that all the water which goes into irrigation doesn't get evaporated back into the atmosphere. And using these simple improvisations, today we can make a forest for a cost as low as the cost of an iPhone. Today, we are making forests in houses, in schools, even in factories with the corporates. But that's not enough. There is a huge number of people who want to take matters into their own hands. So we let it happen. Today, we are working on an Internet-based platform where we are going to share our methodology on an open source using which anyone and everyone can make their own forest without our physical presence being there, using our methodology. At the click of a button, they can get to know all the native species of their place. By installing a small hardware probe on site, we can do remote soil testing, using which we can give step-by-step instructions on forest-making remotely. Also we can monitor the growth of this forest without being on site. This methodology, I believe, has a potential. By sharing, we can actually bring back our native forests. Now, when you go back home, if you see a barren piece of land, do remember that it can be a potential forest. Thank you very much. Thanks. (Applause) |
How our stories cross over | {0: 'Colin Grant is an author and historian whose works focus on larger-than-life figures of the African diaspora.'} | TEDxBrighton | This is a photograph of a man whom for many years I plotted to kill. This is my father, Clinton George "Bageye" Grant. He's called Bageye because he has permanent bags under his eyes. As a 10-year-old, along with my siblings, I dreamt of scraping off the poison from fly-killer paper into his coffee, grounded down glass and sprinkling it over his breakfast, loosening the carpet on the stairs so he would trip and break his neck. But come the day, he would always skip that loose step, he would always bow out of the house without so much as a swig of coffee or a bite to eat. And so for many years, I feared that my father would die before I had a chance to kill him. (Laughter) Up until our mother asked him to leave and not come back, Bageye had been a terrifying ogre. He teetered permanently on the verge of rage, rather like me, as you see. He worked nights at Vauxhall Motors in Luton and demanded total silence throughout the house, so that when we came home from school at 3:30 in the afternoon, we would huddle beside the TV, and rather like safe-crackers, we would twiddle with the volume control knob on the TV so it was almost inaudible. And at times, when we were like this, so much "Shhh," so much "Shhh" going on in the house that I imagined us to be like the German crew of a U-boat creeping along the edge of the ocean whilst up above, on the surface, HMS Bageye patrolled ready to drop death charges at the first sound of any disturbance. So that lesson was the lesson that "Do not draw attention to yourself either in the home or outside of the home." Maybe it's a migrant lesson. We were to be below the radar, so there was no communication, really, between Bageye and us and us and Bageye, and the sound that we most looked forward to, you know when you're a child and you want your father to come home and it's all going to be happy and you're waiting for that sound of the door opening. Well the sound that we looked forward to was the click of the door closing, which meant he'd gone and would not come back. So for three decades, I never laid eyes on my father, nor he on me. We never spoke to each other for three decades, and then a couple of years ago, I decided to turn the spotlight on him. "You are being watched. Actually, you are. You are being watched." That was his mantra to us, his children. Time and time again he would say this to us. And this was the 1970s, it was Luton, where he worked at Vauxhall Motors, and he was a Jamaican. And what he meant was, you as a child of a Jamaican immigrant are being watched to see which way you turn, to see whether you conform to the host nation's stereotype of you, of being feckless, work-shy, destined for a life of crime. You are being watched, so confound their expectations of you. To that end, Bageye and his friends, mostly Jamaican, exhibited a kind of Jamaican bella figura: Turn your best side to the world, show your best face to the world. If you have seen some of the images of the Caribbean people arriving in the '40s and '50s, you might have noticed that a lot of the men wear trilbies. Now, there was no tradition of wearing trilbies in Jamaica. They invented that tradition for their arrival here. They wanted to project themselves in a way that they wanted to be perceived, so that the way they looked and the names that they gave themselves defined them. So Bageye is bald and has baggy eyes. Tidy Boots is very fussy about his footwear. Anxious is always anxious. Clock has one arm longer than the other. (Laughter) And my all-time favorite was the guy they called Summerwear. When Summerwear came to this country from Jamaica in the early '60s, he insisted on wearing light summer suits, no matter the weather, and in the course of researching their lives, I asked my mom, "Whatever became of Summerwear?" And she said, "He caught a cold and died." (Laughter) But men like Summerwear taught us the importance of style. Maybe they exaggerated their style because they thought that they were not considered to be quite civilized, and they transferred that generational attitude or anxiety onto us, the next generation, so much so that when I was growing up, if ever on the television news or radio a report came up about a black person committing some crime — a mugging, a murder, a burglary — we winced along with our parents, because they were letting the side down. You did not just represent yourself. You represented the group, and it was a terrifying thing to come to terms with, in a way, that maybe you were going to be perceived in the same light. So that was what needed to be challenged. Our father and many of his colleagues exhibited a kind of transmission but not receiving. They were built to transmit but not receive. We were to keep quiet. When our father did speak to us, it was from the pulpit of his mind. They clung to certainty in the belief that doubt would undermine them. But when I am working in my house and writing, after a day's writing, I rush downstairs and I'm very excited to talk about Marcus Garvey or Bob Marley and words are tripping out of my mouth like butterflies and I'm so excited that my children stop me, and they say, "Dad, nobody cares." (Laughter) But they do care, actually. They cross over. Somehow they find their way to you. They shape their lives according to the narrative of your life, as I did with my father and my mother, perhaps, and maybe Bageye did with his father. And that was clearer to me in the course of looking at his life and understanding, as they say, the Native Americans say, "Do not criticize the man until you can walk in his moccasins." But in conjuring his life, it was okay and very straightforward to portray a Caribbean life in England in the 1970s with bowls of plastic fruit, polystyrene ceiling tiles, settees permanently sheathed in their transparent covers that they were delivered in. But what's more difficult to navigate is the emotional landscape between the generations, and the old adage that with age comes wisdom is not true. With age comes the veneer of respectability and a veneer of uncomfortable truths. But what was true was that my parents, my mother, and my father went along with it, did not trust the state to educate me. So listen to how I sound. They determined that they would send me to a private school, but my father worked at Vauxhall Motors. It's quite difficult to fund a private school education and feed his army of children. I remember going on to the school for the entrance exam, and my father said to the priest — it was a Catholic school — he wanted a better "heducation" for the boy, but also, he, my father, never even managed to pass worms, never mind entrance exams. But in order to fund my education, he was going to have to do some dodgy stuff, so my father would fund my education by trading in illicit goods from the back of his car, and that was made even more tricky because my father, that's not his car by the way. My father aspired to have a car like that, but my father had a beaten-up Mini, and he never, being a Jamaican coming to this country, he never had a driving license, he never had any insurance or road tax or MOT. He thought, "I know how to drive; why do I need the state's validation?" But it became a little tricky when we were stopped by the police, and we were stopped a lot by the police, and I was impressed by the way that my father dealt with the police. He would promote the policeman immediately, so that P.C. Bloggs became Detective Inspector Bloggs in the course of the conversation and wave us on merrily. So my father was exhibiting what we in Jamaica called "playing fool to catch wise." But it lent also an idea that actually he was being diminished or belittled by the policeman — as a 10-year-old boy, I saw that — but also there was an ambivalence towards authority. So on the one hand, there was a mocking of authority, but on the other hand, there was a deference towards authority, and these Caribbean people had an overbearing obedience towards authority, which is very striking, very strange in a way, because migrants are very courageous people. They leave their homes. My father and my mother left Jamaica and they traveled 4,000 miles, and yet they were infantilized by travel. They were timid, and somewhere along the line, the natural order was reversed. The children became the parents to the parent. The Caribbean people came to this country with a five-year plan: they would work, some money, and then go back, but the five years became 10, the 10 became 15, and before you know it, you're changing the wallpaper, and at that point, you know you're here to stay. Although there's still the kind of temporariness that our parents felt about being here, but we children knew that the game was up. I think there was a feeling that they would not be able to continue with the ideals of the life that they expected. The reality was very much different. And also, that was true of the reality of trying to educate me. Having started the process, my father did not continue. It was left to my mother to educate me, and as George Lamming would say, it was my mother who fathered me. Even in his absence, that old mantra remained: You are being watched. But such ardent watchfulness can lead to anxiety, so much so that years later, when I was investigating why so many young black men were diagnosed with schizophrenia, six times more than they ought to be, I was not surprised to hear the psychiatrist say, "Black people are schooled in paranoia." And I wonder what Bageye would make of that. Now I also had a 10-year-old son, and turned my attention to Bageye and I went in search of him. He was back in Luton, he was now 82, and I hadn't seen him for 30-odd years, and when he opened the door, I saw this tiny little man with lambent, smiling eyes, and he was smiling, and I'd never seen him smile. I was very disconcerted by that. But we sat down, and he had a Caribbean friend with him, talking some old time talk, and my father would look at me, and he looked at me as if I would miraculously disappear as I had arisen. And he turned to his friend, and he said, "This boy and me have a deep, deep connection, deep, deep connection." But I never felt that connection. If there was a pulse, it was very weak or hardly at all. And I almost felt in the course of that reunion that I was auditioning to be my father's son. When the book came out, it had fair reviews in the national papers, but the paper of choice in Luton is not The Guardian, it's the Luton News, and the Luton News ran the headline about the book, "The Book That May Heal a 32-Year-Old Rift." And I understood that could also represent the rift between one generation and the next, between people like me and my father's generation, but there's no tradition in Caribbean life of memoirs or biographies. It was a tradition that you didn't chat about your business in public. But I welcomed that title, and I thought actually, yes, there is a possibility that this will open up conversations that we'd never had before. This will close the generation gap, perhaps. This could be an instrument of repair. And I even began to feel that this book may be perceived by my father as an act of filial devotion. Poor, deluded fool. Bageye was stung by what he perceived to be the public airing of his shortcomings. He was stung by my betrayal, and he went to the newspapers the next day and demanded a right of reply, and he got it with the headline "Bageye Bites Back." And it was a coruscating account of my betrayal. I was no son of his. He recognized in his mind that his colors had been dragged through the mud, and he couldn't allow that. He had to restore his dignity, and he did so, and initially, although I was disappointed, I grew to admire that stance. There was still fire bubbling through his veins, even though he was 82 years old. And if it meant that we would now return to 30 years of silence, my father would say, "If it's so, then it's so." Jamaicans will tell you that there's no such thing as facts, there are only versions. We all tell ourselves the versions of the story that we can best live with. Each generation builds up an edifice which they are reluctant or sometimes unable to disassemble, but in the writing, my version of the story began to change, and it was detached from me. I lost my hatred of my father. I did no longer want him to die or to murder him, and I felt free, much freer than I'd ever felt before. And I wonder whether that freedness could be transferred to him. In that initial reunion, I was struck by an idea that I had very few photographs of myself as a young child. This is a photograph of me, nine months old. In the original photograph, I'm being held up by my father, Bageye, but when my parents separated, my mother excised him from all aspects of our lives. She took a pair of scissors and cut him out of every photograph, and for years, I told myself the truth of this photograph was that you are alone, you are unsupported. But there's another way of looking at this photograph. This is a photograph that has the potential for a reunion, a potential to be reunited with my father, and in my yearning to be held up by my father, I held him up to the light. In that first reunion, it was very awkward and tense moments, and to lessen the tension, we decided to go for a walk. And as we walked, I was struck that I had reverted to being the child even though I was now towering above my father. I was almost a foot taller than my father. He was still the big man, and I tried to match his step. And I realized that he was walking as if he was still under observation, but I admired his walk. He walked like a man on the losing side of the F.A. Cup Final mounting the steps to collect his condolence medal. There was dignity in defeat. Thank you. (Applause) |
I am the son of a terrorist. Here's how I chose peace. | {0: "Groomed for terror, Zak Ebrahim chose a different life. The author of The Terrorist's Son, he hopes his story will inspire others to reject a path of violence."} | TED2014 | On November 5th, 1990, a man named El-Sayyid Nosair walked into a hotel in Manhattan and assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense League. Nosair was initially found not guilty of the murder, but while serving time on lesser charges, he and other men began planning attacks on a dozen New York City landmarks, including tunnels, synagogues and the United Nations headquarters. Thankfully, those plans were foiled by an FBI informant. Sadly, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was not. Nosair would eventually be convicted for his involvement in the plot. El-Sayyid Nosair is my father. I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1983 to him, an Egyptian engineer, and a loving American mother and grade school teacher, who together tried their best to create a happy childhood for me. It wasn't until I was seven years old that our family dynamic started to change. My father exposed me to a side of Islam that few people, including the majority of Muslims, get to see. It's been my experience that when people take the time to interact with one another, it doesn't take long to realize that for the most part, we all want the same things out of life. However, in every religion, in every population, you'll find a small percentage of people who hold so fervently to their beliefs that they feel they must use any means necessary to make others live as they do. A few months prior to his arrest, he sat me down and explained that for the past few weekends, he and some friends had been going to a shooting range on Long Island for target practice. He told me I'd be going with him the next morning. We arrived at Calverton Shooting Range, which unbeknownst to our group was being watched by the FBI. When it was my turn to shoot, my father helped me hold the rifle to my shoulder and explained how to aim at the target about 30 yards off. That day, the last bullet I shot hit the small orange light that sat on top of the target and to everyone's surprise, especially mine, the entire target burst into flames. My uncle turned to the other men, and in Arabic said, "Ibn abuh." Like father, like son. They all seemed to get a really big laugh out of that comment, but it wasn't until a few years later that I fully understood what they thought was so funny. They thought they saw in me the same destruction my father was capable of. Those men would eventually be convicted of placing a van filled with 1,500 pounds of explosives into the sub-level parking lot of the World Trade Center's North Tower, causing an explosion that killed six people and injured over 1,000 others. These were the men I looked up to. These were the men I called ammu, which means uncle. By the time I turned 19, I had already moved 20 times in my life, and that instability during my childhood didn't really provide an opportunity to make many friends. Each time I would begin to feel comfortable around someone, it was time to pack up and move to the next town. Being the perpetual new face in class, I was frequently the target of bullies. I kept my identity a secret from my classmates to avoid being targeted, but as it turns out, being the quiet, chubby new kid in class was more than enough ammunition. So for the most part, I spent my time at home reading books and watching TV or playing video games. For those reasons, my social skills were lacking, to say the least, and growing up in a bigoted household, I wasn't prepared for the real world. I'd been raised to judge people based on arbitrary measurements, like a person's race or religion. So what opened my eyes? One of my first experiences that challenged this way of thinking was during the 2000 presidential elections. Through a college prep program, I was able to take part in the National Youth Convention in Philadelphia. My particular group's focus was on youth violence, and having been the victim of bullying for most of my life, this was a subject in which I felt particularly passionate. The members of our group came from many different walks of life. One day toward the end of the convention, I found out that one of the kids I had befriended was Jewish. Now, it had taken several days for this detail to come to light, and I realized that there was no natural animosity between the two of us. I had never had a Jewish friend before, and frankly I felt a sense of pride in having been able to overcome a barrier that for most of my life I had been led to believe was insurmountable. Another major turning point came when I found a summer job at Busch Gardens, an amusement park. There, I was exposed to people from all sorts of faiths and cultures, and that experience proved to be fundamental to the development of my character. Most of my life, I'd been taught that homosexuality was a sin, and by extension, that all gay people were a negative influence. As chance would have it, I had the opportunity to work with some of the gay performers at a show there, and soon found that many were the kindest, least judgmental people I had ever met. Being bullied as a kid created a sense of empathy in me toward the suffering of others, and it comes very unnaturally to me to treat people who are kind in any other way than how I would want to be treated. Because of that feeling, I was able to contrast the stereotypes I'd been taught as a child with real life experience and interaction. I don't know what it's like to be gay, but I'm well acquainted with being judged for something that's beyond my control. Then there was "The Daily Show." On a nightly basis, Jon Stewart forced me to be intellectually honest with myself about my own bigotry and helped me to realize that a person's race, religion or sexual orientation had nothing to do with the quality of one's character. He was in many ways a father figure to me when I was in desperate need of one. Inspiration can often come from an unexpected place, and the fact that a Jewish comedian had done more to positively influence my worldview than my own extremist father is not lost on me. One day, I had a conversation with my mother about how my worldview was starting to change, and she said something to me that I will hold dear to my heart for as long as I live. She looked at me with the weary eyes of someone who had experienced enough dogmatism to last a lifetime, and said, "I'm tired of hating people." In that instant, I realized how much negative energy it takes to hold that hatred inside of you. Zak Ebrahim is not my real name. I changed it when my family decided to end our connection with my father and start a new life. So why would I out myself and potentially put myself in danger? Well, that's simple. I do it in the hopes that perhaps someone someday who is compelled to use violence may hear my story and realize that there is a better way, that although I had been subjected to this violent, intolerant ideology, that I did not become fanaticized. Instead, I choose to use my experience to fight back against terrorism, against the bigotry. I do it for the victims of terrorism and their loved ones, for the terrible pain and loss that terrorism has forced upon their lives. For the victims of terrorism, I will speak out against these senseless acts and condemn my father's actions. And with that simple fact, I stand here as proof that violence isn't inherent in one's religion or race, and the son does not have to follow the ways of his father. I am not my father. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, everybody. (Applause) Thank you all. (Applause) Thanks a lot. (Applause) |
A park underneath the hustle and bustle of New York City | {0: 'Dan Barasch’s grandmother grew up in New York’s Lower East Side. Now, he’s building an underground park in her old neighborhood, where greenspace is limited.\r\n'} | TED@NYC | My dream is to build the world's first underground park in New York City. Now, why would someone want to build an underground park, and why in New York City? These three tough little buggers are, on the left, my grandmother, age five, and then her sister and brother, ages 11 and nine. This photo was taken just before they left from Italy to immigrate to the United States, just about a century ago. And like many immigrants at the time, they arrived on the Lower East Side in New York City and they encountered a crazy melting pot. What was amazing about their generation was that they were not only building new lives in this new, unfamiliar area, but they were also literally building the city. I've always been fascinated by those decades and by that history, and I would often beg my grandmother to tell me as many stories as possible about the old New York. But she would often just shrug it off, tell me to eat more meatballs, more pasta, and so I very rarely got any of the history that I wanted to hear about. The New York City that I encountered felt pretty built up. I always knew as a kid that I wanted to make a difference, and to somehow make the world more beautiful, more interesting and more just. I just didn't really know how. At first, I thought I wanted to go work abroad, so I took a job with UNICEF in Kenya. But it felt weird to me that I knew more about local Kenyan politics than the politics of my own hometown. I took a job with the City of New York, but very quickly felt frustrated with the slowness of government bureaucracy. I even took a job at Google, where very fast I drank the Kool-Aid and believed almost wholeheartedly that technology could solve all social problems. But I still didn't feel like I was making the world a better place. It was in 2009 that my friend and now business partner James Ramsey alerted me to the location of a pretty spectacular site, which is this. This is the former trolley terminal that was the depot for passengers traveling over the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and it was open between 1908 and 1948, just around the time when my grandparents were living right in the area. And we learned also that the site was entirely abandoned in 1948. Fascinated by this discovery, we begged the authorities to draw us into the space, and we finally got a tour, and this is what we saw. Now, this photo doesn't really do it justice. It's kind of hard to imagine the unbelievably magical feeling that you have when you get in this space. It's a football field of unused land immediately below a very crowded area of the city, and it almost feels like you're Indiana Jones on an archaeological dig, and all the details are all still there. It's really pretty remarkable. Now, the site itself is located at the very heart of the Lower East Side, and today it still remains one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the city. New York City has two thirds the green space per resident as other big cities, and this neighborhood as one tenth the green space. So we immediately started thinking about how we could take this site and turn it into something that could be used for the public, but also could potentially even be green. Our plan, in a nutshell, is to draw natural sunlight underground using a simple system that harvests sunlight above the street, directs it below the city sidewalks, and would allow plants and trees to grow with the light that's directed underneath. With this approach, you could take a site that looks like this today and transform it into something that looks like this. In 2011, we first released some of these images, and what was funny was, a lot of people said to us, "Oh, it kind of looks like the High Line underground." And so what our nickname ended up becoming, and what ended up sticking, was the Lowline, so the Lowline was born. What was also clear was that people really wanted to know a lot more about how the technology would look and feel, and that there was really much more interest in this than we had ever thought possible. So, like a crazy person, I decided to quit my job and focus entirely on this project. Here is us with our team putting together a technology demonstration in a warehouse. Here's the underbelly of this solar canopy which we built to show the technology. You can see the six solar collectors at the center there. And here's the full exhibit all put together in this warehouse. You can see the solar canopy overhead, the light streaming in, and this entirely live green space below. So in the course of just a few weeks, tens of thousands of people came to see our exhibit, and since that time, we've grown our numbers of supporters both locally and among design enthusiasts all over the world. Here's a rendering of the neighborhood just immediately above the Line's site, and a rendering of how it will look after major redevelopment that is coming over the course of the next 10 years. Notice how crowded the neighborhood still feels and how there's really a lack of green space. So what we're proposing is really something that will add one football field of green space underneath this neighborhood, but more importantly will introduce a really community-driven focus in a rapidly gentrifying area. And right now, we're focusing very closely on how we engage with the City of New York on really transforming the overall ecosystem in an integrated way. Here's our rendering of how we would actually invite people into the space itself. So here you see this iconic entrance in which we would literally peel up the street and reveal the historical layers of the city, and invite people into this warm underground space. In the middle of winter, when it's absolutely freezing outside, the last place you'd want to go would be an outdoor space or outdoor park. The Lowline would really be a four-season space and a respite for the city. So I like to think that the Lowline actually brings my own family's story full circle. If my grandparents and my parents were really focused on building the city up and out, I think my generation is focused on reclaiming the spaces that we already have, rediscovering our shared history, and reimagining how we can make our communities more interesting, more beautiful and more just. Thanks. (Applause) |
How not to be ignorant about the world | {0: 'In Hans Rosling’s hands, data sings. Global trends in health and economics come to vivid life. And the big picture of global development -- with some surprisingly good news -- snaps into sharp focus.', 1: 'Ola Rosling is the director and co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation. Previously, he was the Google Public Data product manager.'} | TEDSalon Berlin 2014 | Hans Rosling: I'm going to ask you three multiple choice questions. Use this device. Use this device to answer. The first question is, how did the number of deaths per year from natural disaster, how did that change during the last century? Did it more than double, did it remain about the same in the world as a whole, or did it decrease to less than half? Please answer A, B or C. I see lots of answers. This is much faster than I do it at universities. They are so slow. They keep thinking, thinking, thinking. Oh, very, very good. And we go to the next question. So how long did women 30 years old in the world go to school: seven years, five years or three years? A, B or C? Please answer. And we go to the next question. In the last 20 years, how did the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty change? Extreme poverty — not having enough food for the day. Did it almost double, did it remain more or less the same, or did it halve? A, B or C? Now, answers. You see, deaths from natural disasters in the world, you can see it from this graph here, from 1900 to 2000. In 1900, there was about half a million people who died every year from natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruption, whatever, droughts. And then, how did that change? Gapminder asked the public in Sweden. This is how they answered. The Swedish public answered like this: Fifty percent thought it had doubled, 38 percent said it's more or less the same, 12 said it had halved. This is the best data from the disaster researchers, and it goes up and down, and it goes to the Second World War, and after that it starts to fall and it keeps falling and it's down to much less than half. The world has been much, much more capable as the decades go by to protect people from this, you know. So only 12 percent of the Swedes know this. So I went to the zoo and I asked the chimps. (Laughter) (Applause) The chimps don't watch the evening news, so the chimps, they choose by random, so the Swedes answer worse than random. Now how did you do? That's you. You were beaten by the chimps. (Laughter) But it was close. You were three times better than the Swedes, but that's not enough. You shouldn't compare yourself to Swedes. You must have higher ambitions in the world. Let's look at the next answer here: women in school. Here, you can see men went eight years. How long did women go to school? Well, we asked the Swedes like this, and that gives you a hint, doesn't it? The right answer is probably the one the fewest Swedes picked, isn't it? (Laughter) Let's see, let's see. Here we come. Yes, yes, yes, women have almost caught up. This is the U.S. public. And this is you. Here you come. Ooh. Well, congratulations, you're twice as good as the Swedes, but you don't need me — So how come? I think it's like this, that everyone is aware that there are countries and there are areas where girls have great difficulties. They are stopped when they go to school, and it's disgusting. But in the majority of the world, where most people in the world live, most countries, girls today go to school as long as boys, more or less. That doesn't mean that gender equity is achieved, not at all. They still are confined to terrible, terrible limitations, but schooling is there in the world today. Now, we miss the majority. When you answer, you answer according to the worst places, and there you are right, but you miss the majority. What about poverty? Well, it's very clear that poverty here was almost halved, and in U.S., when we asked the public, only five percent got it right. And you? Ah, you almost made it to the chimps. (Laughter) (Applause) That little, just a few of you! There must be preconceived ideas, you know. And many in the rich countries, they think that oh, we can never end extreme poverty. Of course they think so, because they don't even know what has happened. The first thing to think about the future is to know about the present. These questions were a few of the first ones in the pilot phase of the Ignorance Project in Gapminder Foundation that we run, and it was started, this project, last year by my boss, and also my son, Ola Rosling. (Laughter) He's cofounder and director, and he wanted, Ola told me we have to be more systematic when we fight devastating ignorance. So already the pilots reveal this, that so many in the public score worse than random, so we have to think about preconceived ideas, and one of the main preconceived ideas is about world income distribution. Look here. This is how it was in 1975. It's the number of people on each income, from one dollar a day — (Applause) See, there was one hump here, around one dollar a day, and then there was one hump here somewhere between 10 and 100 dollars. The world was two groups. It was a camel world, like a camel with two humps, the poor ones and the rich ones, and there were fewer in between. But look how this has changed: As I go forward, what has changed, the world population has grown, and the humps start to merge. The lower humps merged with the upper hump, and the camel dies and we have a dromedary world with one hump only. The percent in poverty has decreased. Still it's appalling that so many remain in extreme poverty. We still have this group, almost a billion, over there, but that can be ended now. The challenge we have now is to get away from that, understand where the majority is, and that is very clearly shown in this question. We asked, what is the percentage of the world's one-year-old children who have got those basic vaccines against measles and other things that we have had for many years: 20, 50 or 80 percent? Now, this is what the U.S. public and the Swedish answered. Look at the Swedish result: you know what the right answer is. (Laughter) Who the heck is a professor of global health in that country? Well, it's me. It's me. (Laughter) It's very difficult, this. It's very difficult. (Applause) However, Ola's approach to really measure what we know made headlines, and CNN published these results on their web and they had the questions there, millions answered, and I think there were about 2,000 comments, and this was one of the comments. "I bet no member of the media passed the test," he said. So Ola told me, "Take these devices. You are invited to media conferences. Give it to them and measure what the media know." And ladies and gentlemen, for the first time, the informal results from a conference with U.S. media. And then, lately, from the European Union media. (Laughter) You see, the problem is not that people don't read and listen to the media. The problem is that the media doesn't know themselves. What shall we do about this, Ola? Do we have any ideas? (Applause) Ola Rosling: Yes, I have an idea, but first, I'm so sorry that you were beaten by the chimps. Fortunately, I will be able to comfort you by showing why it was not your fault, actually. Then, I will equip you with some tricks for beating the chimps in the future. That's basically what I will do. But first, let's look at why are we so ignorant, and it all starts in this place. It's Hudiksvall. It's a city in northern Sweden. It's a neighborhood where I grew up, and it's a neighborhood with a large problem. Actually, it has exactly the same problem which existed in all the neighborhoods where you grew up as well. It was not representative. Okay? It gave me a very biased view of how life is on this planet. So this is the first piece of the ignorance puzzle. We have a personal bias. We have all different experiences from communities and people we meet, and on top of this, we start school, and we add the next problem. Well, I like schools, but teachers tend to teach outdated worldviews, because they learned something when they went to school, and now they describe this world to the students without any bad intentions, and those books, of course, that are printed are outdated in a world that changes. And there is really no practice to keep the teaching material up to date. So that's what we are focusing on. So we have these outdated facts added on top of our personal bias. What happens next is news, okay? An excellent journalist knows how to pick the story that will make headlines, and people will read it because it's sensational. Unusual events are more interesting, no? And they are exaggerated, and especially things we're afraid of. A shark attack on a Swedish person will get headlines for weeks in Sweden. So these three skewed sources of information were really hard to get away from. They kind of bombard us and equip our mind with a lot of strange ideas, and on top of it we put the very thing that makes us humans, our human intuition. It was good in evolution. It helped us generalize and jump to conclusions very, very fast. It helped us exaggerate what we were afraid of, and we seek causality where there is none, and we then get an illusion of confidence where we believe that we are the best car drivers, above the average. Everybody answered that question, "Yeah, I drive cars better." Okay, this was good evolutionarily, but now when it comes to the worldview, it is the exact reason why it's upside down. The trends that are increasing are instead falling, and the other way around, and in this case, the chimps use our intuition against us, and it becomes our weakness instead of our strength. It was supposed to be our strength, wasn't it? So how do we solve such problems? First, we need to measure it, and then we need to cure it. So by measuring it we can understand what is the pattern of ignorance. We started the pilot last year, and now we're pretty sure that we will encounter a lot of ignorance across the whole world, and the idea is really to scale it up to all domains or dimensions of global development, such as climate, endangered species, human rights, gender equality, energy, finance. All different sectors have facts, and there are organizations trying to spread awareness about these facts. So I've started actually contacting some of them, like WWF and Amnesty International and UNICEF, and asking them, what are your favorite facts which you think the public doesn't know? Okay, I gather those facts. Imagine a long list with, say, 250 facts. And then we poll the public and see where they score worst. So we get a shorter list with the terrible results, like some few examples from Hans, and we have no problem finding these kinds of terrible results. Okay, this little shortlist, what are we going to do with it? Well, we turn it into a knowledge certificate, a global knowledge certificate, which you can use, if you're a large organization, a school, a university, or maybe a news agency, to certify yourself as globally knowledgeable. Basically meaning, we don't hire people who score like chimpanzees. Of course you shouldn't. So maybe 10 years from now, if this project succeeds, you will be sitting in an interview having to fill out this crazy global knowledge. So now we come to the practical tricks. How are you going to succeed? There is, of course, one way, which is to sit down late nights and learn all the facts by heart by reading all these reports. That will never happen, actually. Not even Hans thinks that's going to happen. People don't have that time. People like shortcuts, and here are the shortcuts. We need to turn our intuition into strength again. We need to be able to generalize. So now I'm going to show you some tricks where the misconceptions are turned around into rules of thumb. Let's start with the first misconception. This is very widespread. Everything is getting worse. You heard it. You thought it yourself. The other way to think is, most things improve. So you're sitting with a question in front of you and you're unsure. You should guess "improve." Okay? Don't go for the worse. That will help you score better on our tests. (Applause) That was the first one. There are rich and poor and the gap is increasing. It's a terrible inequality. Yeah, it's an unequal world, but when you look at the data, it's one hump. Okay? If you feel unsure, go for "the most people are in the middle." That's going to help you get the answer right. Now, the next preconceived idea is first countries and people need to be very, very rich to get the social development like girls in school and be ready for natural disasters. No, no, no. That's wrong. Look: that huge hump in the middle already have girls in school. So if you are unsure, go for the "the majority already have this," like electricity and girls in school, these kinds of things. They're only rules of thumb, so of course they don't apply to everything, but this is how you can generalize. Let's look at the last one. If something, yes, this is a good one, sharks are dangerous. No — well, yes, but they are not so important in the global statistics, that is what I'm saying. I actually, I'm very afraid of sharks. So as soon as I see a question about things I'm afraid of, which might be earthquakes, other religions, maybe I'm afraid of terrorists or sharks, anything that makes me feel, assume you're going to exaggerate the problem. That's a rule of thumb. Of course there are dangerous things that are also great. Sharks kill very, very few. That's how you should think. With these four rules of thumb, you could probably answer better than the chimps, because the chimps cannot do this. They cannot generalize these kinds of rules. And hopefully we can turn your world around and we're going to beat the chimps. Okay? (Applause) That's a systematic approach. Now the question, is this important? Yeah, it's important to understand poverty, extreme poverty and how to fight it, and how to bring girls in school. When we realize that actually it's succeeding, we can understand it. But is it important for everyone else who cares about the rich end of this scale? I would say yes, extremely important, for the same reason. If you have a fact-based worldview of today, you might have a chance to understand what's coming next in the future. We're going back to these two humps in 1975. That's when I was born, and I selected the West. That's the current EU countries and North America. Let's now see how the rest and the West compares in terms of how rich you are. These are the people who can afford to fly abroad with an airplane for a vacation. In 1975, only 30 percent of them lived outside EU and North America. But this has changed, okay? So first, let's look at the change up till today, 2014. Today it's 50/50. The Western domination is over, as of today. That's nice. So what's going to happen next? Do you see the big hump? Did you see how it moved? I did a little experiment. I went to the IMF, International Monetary Fund, website. They have a forecast for the next five years of GDP per capita. So I can use that to go five years into the future, assuming the income inequality of each country is the same. I did that, but I went even further. I used those five years for the next 20 years with the same speed, just as an experiment what might actually happen. Let's move into the future. In 2020, it's 57 percent in the rest. In 2025, 63 percent. 2030, 68. And in 2035, the West is outnumbered in the rich consumer market. These are just projections of GDP per capita into the future. Seventy-three percent of the rich consumers are going to live outside North America and Europe. So yes, I think it's a good idea for a company to use this certificate to make sure to make fact- based decisions in the future. Thank you very much. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Hans and Ola Rosling! |
Wry photos that turn stereotypes upside down | {0: 'TED Fellow Uldus Bakhtiozina creates photo stories and video installations that challenge stereotypes and create diversity, involving all types of people from fashion models to ordinary people. She presents the world with humor and thoughtfulness.'} | TED2014 | Good afternoon. My name is Uldus. I am a photo-based artist from Russia. I started my way around six years ago with ironic self-portraits to lay open so many stereotypes about nationalities, genders, and social issues — ["I am Russian. I sell drugs, guns, porno with kids!"] ["Vodka = water. I love vodka!"] (Laughter) — using photography as my tool to send a message. ["Marry me, I need a visa."] Today, I am still performing in front of the camera and trying to be brave like Wonder Woman. I focus on balancing meaningful message, aesthetic, beauty, composition, some irony, and artifacts. Today, I'm going to tell you about my project, which is named Desperate Romantics. They're my artifacts, or paintings from pre-Raphaelites Brotherhood England mid-19th century. I took the painting and gifted new, contemporary meaning talking about issues which are surrounding me in Russia, capturing people who are non-models but have an interesting story. This boy is a professional dancer, only 12 years old, but at secondary school, he hides his dancing classes and is wearing the mask of brutality, trying to be united with the rest of his classmates like a storm trooper has no personality. But this boy has goals and dreams but hides it to be socially accepted, because being different isn't easy, especially in Russia. Next portrait interpretation is metaphoric. And this is Nikita, a security guard from one of the bars in St. Petersburg. He likes to say, "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry," quoting Hulk from the movie, but I've never seen him angry. He hides his sensitivities and romantic side, because in Russia, among guys, that's not cool to be romantic, but it's cool to be surrounded with women and look like an aggressive hulk. (Laughter) Sometimes, in my project, I would take the painting and give it new meaning and new temptation about it. Sometimes, I would compare facial features and playing with words: irony, Iron Man, ironing man. (Laughter) Through the artifacts, I bring social issues which surround me in Russia into the conversation. Interesting fact about marriage in Russia, that most of the 18, 19-year-old girls are already ready, and dream to get married. We're taught from childhood, successful marriage means successful life, so most of the girls kind of fight to get a good husband. And what about me? I'm 27 years old. For Russian society, I'm an old maid and hopeless to ever get married. That's why you see me in a Mexican fighter mask, in the wedding dress, all desperate in my garden. But remember, irony is the key, and this is actually to motivate girls to fight for goals, for dreams, and change stereotypes. Be brave. Be ironic — it helps. Be funny and create some magic. (Applause) |
What makes us get sick? Look upstream | {0: 'Rishi Manchanda is an "upstreamist." A physician and public health innovator, he aims to reinvigorate primary care by teaching doctors to think about—and treat—the social and environmental conditions that often underly sickness.'} | TEDSalon NY2014 | For over a decade as a doctor, I've cared for homeless veterans, for working-class families. I've cared for people who live and work in conditions that can be hard, if not harsh, and that work has led me to believe that we need a fundamentally different way of looking at healthcare. We simply need a healthcare system that moves beyond just looking at the symptoms that bring people into clinics, but instead actually is able to look and improve health where it begins. And where health begins is not in the four walls of a doctor's office, but where we live and where we work, where we eat, sleep, learn and play, where we spend the majority of our lives. So what does this different approach to healthcare look like, an approach that can improve health where it begins? To illustrate this, I'll tell you about Veronica. Veronica was the 17th patient out of my 26-patient day at that clinic in South Central Los Angeles. She came into our clinic with a chronic headache. This headache had been going on for a number of years, and this particular episode was very, very troubling. In fact, three weeks before she came to visit us for the first time, she went to an emergency room in Los Angeles. The emergency room doctors said, "We've run some tests, Veronica. The results are normal, so here's some pain medication, and follow up with a primary care doctor, but if the pain persists or if it worsens, then come on back." Veronica followed those standard instructions and she went back. She went back not just once, but twice more. In the three weeks before Veronica met us, she went to the emergency room three times. She went back and forth, in and out of hospitals and clinics, just like she had done in years past, trying to seek relief but still coming up short. Veronica came to our clinic, and despite all these encounters with healthcare professionals, Veronica was still sick. When she came to our clinic, though, we tried a different approach. Our approach started with our medical assistant, someone who had a GED-level training but knew the community. Our medical assistant asked some routine questions. She asked, "What's your chief complaint?" "Headache." "Let's get your vital signs" — measure your blood pressure and your heart rate, but let's also ask something equally as vital to Veronica and a lot of patients like her in South Los Angeles. "Veronica, can you tell me about where you live? Specifically, about your housing conditions? Do you have mold? Do you have water leaks? Do you have roaches in your home?" Turns out, Veronica said yes to three of those things: roaches, water leaks, mold. I received that chart in hand, reviewed it, and I turned the handle on the door and I entered the room. You should understand that Veronica, like a lot of patients that I have the privilege of caring for, is a dignified person, a formidable presence, a personality that's larger than life, but here she was doubled over in pain sitting on my exam table. Her head, clearly throbbing, was resting in her hands. She lifted her head up, and I saw her face, said hello, and then I immediately noticed something across the bridge of her nose, a crease in her skin. In medicine, we call that crease the allergic salute. It's usually seen among children who have chronic allergies. It comes from chronically rubbing one's nose up and down, trying to get rid of those allergy symptoms, and yet, here was Veronica, a grown woman, with the same telltale sign of allergies. A few minutes later, in asking Veronica some questions, and examining her and listening to her, I said, "Veronica, I think I know what you have. I think you have chronic allergies, and I think you have migraine headaches and some sinus congestion, and I think all of those are related to where you live." She looked a little bit relieved, because for the first time, she had a diagnosis, but I said, "Veronica, now let's talk about your treatment. We're going to order some medications for your symptoms, but I also want to refer you to a specialist, if that's okay." Now, specialists are a little hard to find in South Central Los Angeles, so she gave me this look, like, "Really?" And I said, "Veronica, actually, the specialist I'm talking about is someone I call a community health worker, someone who, if it's okay with you, can come to your home and try to understand what's going on with those water leaks and that mold, trying to help you manage those conditions in your housing that I think are causing your symptoms, and if required, that specialist might refer you to another specialist that we call a public interest lawyer, because it might be that your landlord isn't making the fixes he's required to make." Veronica came back in a few months later. She agreed to all of those treatment plans. She told us that her symptoms had improved by 90 percent. She was spending more time at work and with her family and less time shuttling back and forth between the emergency rooms of Los Angeles. Veronica had improved remarkably. Her sons, one of whom had asthma, were no longer as sick as they used to be. She had gotten better, and not coincidentally, Veronica's home was better too. What was it about this different approach we tried that led to better care, fewer visits to the E.R., better health? Well, quite simply, it started with that question: "Veronica, where do you live?" But more importantly, it was that we put in place a system that allowed us to routinely ask questions to Veronica and hundreds more like her about the conditions that mattered in her community, about where health, and unfortunately sometimes illness, do begin in places like South L.A. In that community, substandard housing and food insecurity are the major conditions that we as a clinic had to be aware of, but in other communities it could be transportation barriers, obesity, access to parks, gun violence. The important thing is, we put in place a system that worked, and it's an approach that I call an upstream approach. It's a term many of you are familiar with. It comes from a parable that's very common in the public health community. This is a parable of three friends. Imagine that you're one of these three friends who come to a river. It's a beautiful scene, but it's shattered by the cries of a child, and actually several children, in need of rescue in the water. So you do hopefully what everybody would do. You jump right in along with your friends. The first friend says, I'm going to rescue those who are about to drown, those at most risk of falling over the waterfall. The second friends says, I'm going to build a raft. I'm going to make sure that fewer people need to end up at the waterfall's edge. Let's usher more people to safety by building this raft, coordinating those branches together. Over time, they're successful, but not really, as much as they want to be. More people slip through, and they finally look up and they see that their third friend is nowhere to be seen. They finally spot her. She's in the water. She's swimming away from them upstream, rescuing children as she goes, and they shout to her, "Where are you going? There are children here to save." And she says back, "I'm going to find out who or what is throwing these children in the water." In healthcare, we have that first friend — we have the specialist, we have the trauma surgeon, the ICU nurse, the E.R. doctors. We have those people that are vital rescuers, people you want to be there when you're in dire straits. We also know that we have the second friend — we have that raft-builder. That's the primary care clinician, people on the care team who are there to manage your chronic conditions, your diabetes, your hypertension, there to give you your annual checkups, there to make sure your vaccines are up to date, but also there to make sure that you have a raft to sit on and usher yourself to safety. But while that's also vital and very necessary, what we're missing is that third friend. We don't have enough of that upstreamist. The upstreamists are the health care professionals who know that health does begin where we live and work and play, but beyond that awareness, is able to mobilize the resources to create the system in their clinics and in their hospitals that really does start to approach that, to connect people to the resources they need outside the four walls of the clinic. Now you might ask, and it's a very obvious question that a lot of colleagues in medicine ask: "Doctors and nurses thinking about transportation and housing? Shouldn't we just provide pills and procedures and just make sure we focus on the task at hand?" Certainly, rescuing people at the water's edge is important enough work. Who has the time? I would argue, though, that if we were to use science as our guide, that we would find an upstream approach is absolutely necessary. Scientists now know that the living and working conditions that we all are part of have more than twice the impact on our health than does our genetic code, and living and working conditions, the structures of our environments, the ways in which our social fabric is woven together, and the impact those have on our behaviors, all together, those have more than five times the impact on our health than do all the pills and procedures administered by doctors and hospitals combined. All together, living and working conditions account for 60 percent of preventable death. Let me give you an example of what this feels like. Let's say there was a company, a tech startup that came to you and said, "We have a great product. It's going to lower your risk of death from heart disease." Now, you might be likely to invest if that product was a drug or a device, but what if that product was a park? A study in the U.K., a landmark study that reviewed the records of over 40 million residents in the U.K., looked at several variables, controlled for a lot of factors, and found that when trying to adjust the risk of heart disease, one's exposure to green space was a powerful influence. The closer you were to green space, to parks and trees, the lower your chance of heart disease, and that stayed true for rich and for poor. That study illustrates what my friends in public health often say these days: that one's zip code matters more than your genetic code. We're also learning that zip code is actually shaping our genetic code. The science of epigenetics looks at those molecular mechanisms, those intricate ways in which our DNA is literally shaped, genes turned on and off based on the exposures to the environment, to where we live and to where we work. So it's clear that these factors, these upstream issues, do matter. They matter to our health, and therefore our healthcare professionals should do something about it. And yet, Veronica asked me perhaps the most compelling question I've been asked in a long time. In that follow-up visit, she said, "Why did none of my doctors ask about my home before? In those visits to the emergency room, I had two CAT scans, I had a needle placed in the lower part of my back to collect spinal fluid, I had nearly a dozen blood tests. I went back and forth, I saw all sorts of people in healthcare, and no one asked about my home." The honest answer is that in healthcare, we often treat symptoms without addressing the conditions that make you sick in the first place. And there are many reasons for that, but the big three are first, we don't pay for that. In healthcare, we often pay for volume and not value. We pay doctors and hospitals usually for the number of services they provide, but not necessarily on how healthy they make you. That leads to a second phenomenon that I call the "don't ask, don't tell" approach to upstream issues in healthcare. We don't ask about where you live and where you work, because if there's a problem there, we don't know what to tell you. It's not that doctors don't know these are important issues. In a recent survey done in the U.S. among physicians, over 1,000 physicians, 80 percent of them actually said that they know that their patients' upstream problems are as important as their health issues, as their medical problems, and yet despite that widespread awareness of the importance of upstream issues, only one in five doctors said they had any sense of confidence to address those issues, to improve health where it begins. There's this gap between knowing that patients' lives, the context of where they live and work, matters, and the ability to do something about it in the systems in which we work. This is a huge problem right now, because it leads them to this next question, which is, whose responsibility is it? And that brings me to that third point, that third answer to Veronica's compelling question. Part of the reason that we have this conundrum is because there are not nearly enough upstreamists in the healthcare system. There are not nearly enough of that third friend, that person who is going to find out who or what is throwing those kids in the water. Now, there are many upstreamists, and I've had the privilege of meeting many of them, in Los Angeles and in other parts of the country and around the world, and it's important to note that upstreamists sometimes are doctors, but they need not be. They can be nurses, other clinicians, care managers, social workers. It's not so important what specific degree upstreamists have at the end of their name. What's more important is that they all seem to share the same ability to implement a process that transforms their assistance, transforms the way they practice medicine. That process is a quite simple process. It's one, two and three. First, they sit down and they say, let's identify the clinical problem among a certain set of patients. Let's say, for instance, let's try to help children who are bouncing in and out of the hospital with asthma. After identifying the problem, they then move on to that second step, and they say, let's identify the root cause. Now, a root cause analysis, in healthcare, usually says, well, let's look at your genes, let's look at how you're behaving. Maybe you're not eating healthy enough. Eat healthier. It's a pretty simplistic approach to root cause analyses. It turns out, it doesn't really work when we just limit ourselves that worldview. The root cause analysis that an upstreamist brings to the table is to say, let's look at the living and the working conditions in your life. Perhaps, for children with asthma, it's what's happening in their home, or perhaps they live close to a freeway with major air pollution that triggers their asthma. And perhaps that's what we should mobilize our resources to address, because that third element, that third part of the process, is that next critical part of what upstreamists do. They mobilize the resources to create a solution, both within the clinical system, and then by bringing in people from public health, from other sectors, lawyers, whoever is willing to play ball, let's bring in to create a solution that makes sense, to take those patients who actually have clinical problems and address their root causes together by linking them to the resources you need. It's clear to me that there are so many stories of upstreamists who are doing remarkable things. The problem is that there's just not nearly enough of them out there. By some estimates, we need one upstreamist for every 20 to 30 clinicians in the healthcare system. In the U.S., for instance, that would mean that we need 25,000 upstreamists by the year 2020. But we only have a few thousand upstreamists out there right now, by all accounts, and that's why, a few years ago, my colleagues and I said, you know what, we need to train and make more upstreamists. So we decided to start an organization called Health Begins, and Health Begins simply does that: We train upstreamists. And there are a lot of measures that we use for our success, but the main thing that we're interested in is making sure that we're changing the sense of confidence, that "don't ask, don't tell" metric among clinicians. We're trying to make sure that clinicians, and therefore their systems that they work in have the ability, the confidence to address the problems in the living and working conditions in our lives. We're seeing nearly a tripling of that confidence in our work. It's remarkable, but I'll tell you the most compelling part of what it means to be working with upstreamists to gather them together. What is most compelling is that every day, every week, I hear stories just like Veronica's. There are stories out there of Veronica and many more like her, people who are coming to the healthcare system and getting a glimpse of what it feels like to be part of something that works, a health care system that stops bouncing you back and forth but actually improves your health, listens to you who you are, addresses the context of your life, whether you're rich or poor or middle class. These stories are compelling because not only do they tell us that we're this close to getting the healthcare system that we want, but that there's something that we can all do to get there. Doctors and nurses can get better at asking about the context of patients' lives, not simply because it's better bedside manner, but frankly, because it's a better standard of care. Healthcare systems and payers can start to bring in public health agencies and departments and say, let's look at our data together. Let's see if we can discover some patterns in our data about our patients' lives and see if we can identify an upstream cause, and then, as importantly, can we align the resources to be able to address them? Medical schools, nursing schools, all sorts of health professional education programs can help by training the next generation of upstreamists. We can also make sure that these schools certify a backbone of the upstream approach, and that's the community health worker. We need many more of them in the healthcare system if we're truly going to have it be effective, to move from a sickcare system to a healthcare system. But finally, and perhaps most importantly, what do we do? What do we do as patients? We can start by simply going to our doctors and our nurses, to our clinics, and asking, "Is there something in where I live and where I work that I should be aware of?" Are there barriers to health that I'm just not aware of, and more importantly, if there are barriers that I'm surfacing, if I'm coming to you and I'm saying I think have a problem with my apartment or at my workplace or I don't have access to transportation, or there's a park that's way too far, so sorry doctor, I can't take your advice to go and jog, if those problems exist, then doctor, are you willing to listen? And what can we do together to improve my health where it begins? If we're all able to do this work, doctors and healthcare systems, payers, and all of us together, we'll realize something about health. Health is not just a personal responsibility or phenomenon. Health is a common good. It comes from our personal investment in knowing that our lives matter, the context of where we live and where we work, eat, and sleep, matter, and that what we do for ourselves, we also should do for those whose living and working conditions again, can be hard, if not harsh. We can all invest in making sure that we improve the allocation of resources upstream, but at the same time work together and show that we can move healthcare upstream. We can improve health where it begins. Thank you. (Applause) |
What's the next window into our universe? | {0: 'Andrew Connolly is helping to build the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope -- as well as tools to handle the massive datasets it will send our way.'} | TED2014 | So in 1781, an English composer, technologist and astronomer called William Herschel noticed an object on the sky that didn't quite move the way the rest of the stars did. And Herschel's recognition that something was different, that something wasn't quite right, was the discovery of a planet, the planet Uranus, a name that has entertained countless generations of children, but a planet that overnight doubled the size of our known solar system. Just last month, NASA announced the discovery of 517 new planets in orbit around nearby stars, almost doubling overnight the number of planets we know about within our galaxy. So astronomy is constantly being transformed by this capacity to collect data, and with data almost doubling every year, within the next two decades, me may even reach the point for the first time in history where we've discovered the majority of the galaxies within the universe. But as we enter this era of big data, what we're beginning to find is there's a difference between more data being just better and more data being different, capable of changing the questions we want to ask, and this difference is not about how much data we collect, it's whether those data open new windows into our universe, whether they change the way we view the sky. So what is the next window into our universe? What is the next chapter for astronomy? Well, I'm going to show you some of the tools and the technologies that we're going to develop over the next decade, and how these technologies, together with the smart use of data, may once again transform astronomy by opening up a window into our universe, the window of time. Why time? Well, time is about origins, and it's about evolution. The origins of our solar system, how our solar system came into being, is it unusual or special in any way? About the evolution of our universe. Why our universe is continuing to expand, and what is this mysterious dark energy that drives that expansion? But first, I want to show you how technology is going to change the way we view the sky. So imagine if you were sitting in the mountains of northern Chile looking out to the west towards the Pacific Ocean a few hours before sunrise. This is the view of the night sky that you would see, and it's a beautiful view, with the Milky Way just peeking out over the horizon. but it's also a static view, and in many ways, this is the way we think of our universe: eternal and unchanging. But the universe is anything but static. It constantly changes on timescales of seconds to billions of years. Galaxies merge, they collide at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. Stars are born, they die, they explode in these extravagant displays. In fact, if we could go back to our tranquil skies above Chile, and we allow time to move forward to see how the sky might change over the next year, the pulsations that you see are supernovae, the final remnants of a dying star exploding, brightening and then fading from view, each one of these supernovae five billion times the brightness of our sun, so we can see them to great distances but only for a short amount of time. Ten supernova per second explode somewhere in our universe. If we could hear it, it would be popping like a bag of popcorn. Now, if we fade out the supernovae, it's not just brightness that changes. Our sky is in constant motion. This swarm of objects you see streaming across the sky are asteroids as they orbit our sun, and it's these changes and the motion and it's the dynamics of the system that allow us to build our models for our universe, to predict its future and to explain its past. But the telescopes we've used over the last decade are not designed to capture the data at this scale. The Hubble Space Telescope: for the last 25 years it's been producing some of the most detailed views of our distant universe, but if you tried to use the Hubble to create an image of the sky, it would take 13 million individual images, about 120 years to do this just once. So this is driving us to new technologies and new telescopes, telescopes that can go faint to look at the distant universe but also telescopes that can go wide to capture the sky as rapidly as possible, telescopes like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or the LSST, possibly the most boring name ever for one of the most fascinating experiments in the history of astronomy, in fact proof, if you should need it, that you should never allow a scientist or an engineer to name anything, not even your children. (Laughter) We're building the LSST. We expect it to start taking data by the end of this decade. I'm going to show you how we think it's going to transform our views of the universe, because one image from the LSST is equivalent to 3,000 images from the Hubble Space Telescope, each image three and a half degrees on the sky, seven times the width of the full moon. Well, how do you capture an image at this scale? Well, you build the largest digital camera in history, using the same technology you find in the cameras in your cell phone or in the digital cameras you can buy in the High Street, but now at a scale that is five and a half feet across, about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, where one image is three billion pixels. So if you wanted to look at an image in its full resolution, just a single LSST image, it would take about 1,500 high-definition TV screens. And this camera will image the sky, taking a new picture every 20 seconds, constantly scanning the sky so every three nights, we'll get a completely new view of the skies above Chile. Over the mission lifetime of this telescope, it will detect 40 billion stars and galaxies, and that will be for the first time we'll have detected more objects in our universe than people on the Earth. Now, we can talk about this in terms of terabytes and petabytes and billions of objects, but a way to get a sense of the amount of data that will come off this camera is that it's like playing every TED Talk ever recorded simultaneously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 10 years. And to process this data means searching through all of those talks for every new idea and every new concept, looking at each part of the video to see how one frame may have changed from the next. And this is changing the way that we do science, changing the way that we do astronomy, to a place where software and algorithms have to mine through this data, where the software is as critical to the science as the telescopes and the cameras that we've built. Now, thousands of discoveries will come from this project, but I'm just going to tell you about two of the ideas about origins and evolution that may be transformed by our access to data at this scale. In the last five years, NASA has discovered over 1,000 planetary systems around nearby stars, but the systems we're finding aren't much like our own solar system, and one of the questions we face is is it just that we haven't been looking hard enough or is there something special or unusual about how our solar system formed? And if we want to answer that question, we have to know and understand the history of our solar system in detail, and it's the details that are crucial. So now, if we look back at the sky, at our asteroids that were streaming across the sky, these asteroids are like the debris of our solar system. The positions of the asteroids are like a fingerprint of an earlier time when the orbits of Neptune and Jupiter were much closer to the sun, and as these giant planets migrated through our solar system, they were scattering the asteroids in their wake. So studying the asteroids is like performing forensics, performing forensics on our solar system, but to do this, we need distance, and we get the distance from the motion, and we get the motion because of our access to time. So what does this tell us? Well, if you look at the little yellow asteroids flitting across the screen, these are the asteroids that are moving fastest, because they're closest to us, closest to Earth. These are the asteroids we may one day send spacecraft to, to mine them for minerals, but they're also the asteroids that may one day impact the Earth, like happened 60 million years ago with the extinction of the dinosaurs, or just at the beginning of the last century, when an asteroid wiped out almost 1,000 square miles of Siberian forest, or even just last year, as one burnt up over Russia, releasing the energy of a small nuclear bomb. So studying the forensics of our solar system doesn't just tell us about the past, it can also predict the future, including our future. Now when we get distance, we get to see the asteroids in their natural habitat, in orbit around the sun. So every point in this visualization that you can see is a real asteroid. Its orbit has been calculated from its motion across the sky. The colors reflect the composition of these asteroids, dry and stony in the center, water-rich and primitive towards the edge, water-rich asteroids which may have seeded the oceans and the seas that we find on our planet when they bombarded the Earth at an earlier time. Because the LSST will be able to go faint and not just wide, we will be able to see these asteroids far beyond the inner part of our solar system, to asteroids beyond the orbits of Neptune and Mars, to comets and asteroids that may exist almost a light year from our sun. And as we increase the detail of this picture, increasing the detail by factors of 10 to 100, we will be able to answer questions such as, is there evidence for planets outside the orbit of Neptune, to find Earth-impacting asteroids long before they're a danger, and to find out whether, maybe, our sun formed on its own or in a cluster of stars, and maybe it's this sun's stellar siblings that influenced the formation of our solar system, and maybe that's one of the reasons why solar systems like ours seem to be so rare. Now, distance and changes in our universe — distance equates to time, as well as changes on the sky. Every foot of distance you look away, or every foot of distance an object is away, you're looking back about a billionth of a second in time, and this idea or this notion of looking back in time has revolutionized our ideas about the universe, not once but multiple times. The first time was in 1929, when an astronomer called Edwin Hubble showed that the universe was expanding, leading to the ideas of the Big Bang. And the observations were simple: just 24 galaxies and a hand-drawn picture. But just the idea that the more distant a galaxy, the faster it was receding, was enough to give rise to modern cosmology. A second revolution happened 70 years later, when two groups of astronomers showed that the universe wasn't just expanding, it was accelerating, a surprise like throwing up a ball into the sky and finding out the higher that it gets, the faster it moves away. And they showed this by measuring the brightness of supernovae, and how the brightness of the supernovae got fainter with distance. And these observations were more complex. They required new technologies and new telescopes, because the supernovae were in galaxies that were 2,000 times more distant than the ones used by Hubble. And it took three years to find just 42 supernovae, because a supernova only explodes once every hundred years within a galaxy. Three years to find 42 supernovae by searching through tens of thousands of galaxies. And once they'd collected their data, this is what they found. Now, this may not look impressive, but this is what a revolution in physics looks like: a line predicting the brightness of a supernova 11 billion light years away, and a handful of points that don't quite fit that line. Small changes give rise to big consequences. Small changes allow us to make discoveries, like the planet found by Herschel. Small changes turn our understanding of the universe on its head. So 42 supernovae, slightly too faint, meaning slightly further away, requiring that a universe must not just be expanding, but this expansion must be accelerating, revealing a component of our universe which we now call dark energy, a component that drives this expansion and makes up 68 percent of the energy budget of our universe today. So what is the next revolution likely to be? Well, what is dark energy and why does it exist? Each of these lines shows a different model for what dark energy might be, showing the properties of dark energy. They all are consistent with the 42 points, but the ideas behind these lines are dramatically different. Some people think about a dark energy that changes with time, or whether the properties of the dark energy are different depending on where you look on the sky. Others make differences and changes to the physics at the sub-atomic level. Or, they look at large scales and change how gravity and general relativity work, or they say our universe is just one of many, part of this mysterious multiverse, but all of these ideas, all of these theories, amazing and admittedly some of them a little crazy, but all of them consistent with our 42 points. So how can we hope to make sense of this over the next decade? Well, imagine if I gave you a pair of dice, and I said you wanted to see whether those dice were loaded or fair. One roll of the dice would tell you very little, but the more times you rolled them, the more data you collected, the more confident you would become, not just whether they're loaded or fair, but by how much, and in what way. It took three years to find just 42 supernovae because the telescopes that we built could only survey a small part of the sky. With the LSST, we get a completely new view of the skies above Chile every three nights. In its first night of operation, it will find 10 times the number of supernovae used in the discovery of dark energy. This will increase by 1,000 within the first four months: 1.5 million supernovae by the end of its survey, each supernova a roll of the dice, each supernova testing which theories of dark energy are consistent, and which ones are not. And so, by combining these supernova data with other measures of cosmology, we'll progressively rule out the different ideas and theories of dark energy until hopefully at the end of this survey around 2030, we would expect to hopefully see a theory for our universe, a fundamental theory for the physics of our universe, to gradually emerge. Now, in many ways, the questions that I posed are in reality the simplest of questions. We may not know the answers, but we at least know how to ask the questions. But if looking through tens of thousands of galaxies revealed 42 supernovae that turned our understanding of the universe on its head, when we're working with billions of galaxies, how many more times are we going to find 42 points that don't quite match what we expect? Like the planet found by Herschel or dark energy or quantum mechanics or general relativity, all ideas that came because the data didn't quite match what we expected. What's so exciting about the next decade of data in astronomy is, we don't even know how many answers are out there waiting, answers about our origins and our evolution. How many answers are out there that we don't even know the questions that we want to ask? Thank you. (Applause) |
Why a good book is a secret door | {0: 'Mac Barnett is a bestselling author of books for children.'} | TEDxSonomaCounty | Hi everybody. So my name is Mac. My job is that I lie to children, but they're honest lies. I write children's books, and there's a quote from Pablo Picasso, "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth or at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies." I first heard this when I was a kid, and I loved it, but I had no idea what it meant. (Laughter) So I thought, you know what, it's what I'm here to talk to you today about, though, truth and lies, fiction and reality. So how could I untangle this knotted bunch of sentences? And I said, I've got PowerPoint. Let's do a Venn diagram. ["Truth. Lies."] (Laughter) So there it is, right there, boom. We've got truth and lies and then there's this little space, the edge, in the middle. That liminal space, that's art. All right. Venn diagram. (Laughter) (Applause) But that's actually not very helpful either. The thing that made me understand that quote and really kind of what art, at least the art of fiction, was, was working with kids. I used to be a summer camp counselor. I would do it on my summers off from college, and I loved it. It was a sports summer camp for four- to six-year-olds. I was in charge of the four-year-olds, which is good, because four-year-olds can't play sports, and neither can I. (Laughter) I play sports at a four-year-old level, so what would happen is the kids would dribble around some cones, and then got hot, and then they would go sit underneath the tree where I was already sitting — (Laughter) — and I would just make up stories and tell them to them and I would tell them stories about my life. I would tell them about how, on the weekends, I would go home and I would spy for the Queen of England. And soon, other kids who weren't even in my group of kids, they would come up to me, and they would say, "You're Mac Barnett, right? You're the guy who spies for the Queen of England." And I had been waiting my whole life for strangers to come up and ask me that question. In my fantasy, they were svelte Russian women, but, you know, four-year-olds — you take what you can get in Berkeley, California. And I realized that the stories that I was telling were real in this way that was familiar to me and really exciting. I think the pinnacle of this for me — I'll never forget this — there was this little girl named Riley. She was tiny, and she used to always take out her lunch every day and she would throw out her fruit. She would just take her fruit, her mom packed her a melon every day, and she would just throw it in the ivy and then she would eat fruit snacks and pudding cups, and I was like, "Riley, you can't do that, you have to eat the fruit." And she was like, "Why?" And I was like, "Well, when you throw the fruit in the ivy, pretty soon, it's going to be overgrown with melons," which is why I think I ended up telling stories to children and not being a nutritionist for children. And so Riley was like, "That will never happen. That's not going to happen." And so, on the last day of camp, I got up early and I got a big cantaloupe from the grocery store and I hid it in the ivy, and then at lunchtime, I was like, "Riley, why don't you go over there and see what you've done." And — (Laughter) — she went trudging through the ivy, and then her eyes just got so wide, and she pointed out this melon that was bigger than her head, and then all the kids ran over there and rushed around her, and one of the kids was like, "Hey, why is there a sticker on this?" (Laughter) And I was like, "That is also why I say do not throw your stickers in the ivy. Put them in the trash can. It ruins nature when you do this." And Riley carried that melon around with her all day, and she was so proud. And Riley knew she didn't grow a melon in seven days, but she also knew that she did, and it's a weird place, but it's not just a place that kids can get to. It's anything. Art can get us to that place. She was right in that place in the middle, that place which you could call art or fiction. I'm going to call it wonder. It's what Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief or poetic faith, for those moments where a story, no matter how strange, has some semblance of the truth, and then you're able to believe it. It's not just kids who can get there. Adults can too, and we get there when we read. It's why in two days, people will be descending on Dublin to take the walking tour of Bloomsday and see everything that happened in "Ulysses," even though none of that happened. Or people go to London and they visit Baker Street to see Sherlock Holmes' apartment, even though 221B is just a number that was painted on a building that never actually had that address. We know these characters aren't real, but we have real feelings about them, and we're able to do that. We know these characters aren't real, and yet we also know that they are. Kids can get there a lot more easily than adults can, and that's why I love writing for kids. I think kids are the best audience for serious literary fiction. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with secret door novels, things like "Narnia," where you would open a wardrobe and go through to a magical land. And I was convinced that secret doors really did exist and I would look for them and try to go through them. I wanted to live and cross over into that fictional world, which is — I would always just open people's closet doors. (Laughter) I would just go through my mom's boyfriend's closet, and there was not a secret magical land there. There was some other weird stuff that I think my mom should know about. (Laughter) And I was happy to tell her all about it. After college, my first job was working behind one of these secret doors. This is a place called 826 Valencia. It's at 826 Valencia Street in the Mission in San Francisco, and when I worked there, there was a publishing company headquartered there called McSweeney's, a nonprofit writing center called 826 Valencia, but then the front of it was a strange shop. You see, this place was zoned retail, and in San Francisco, they were not going to give us a variance, and so the writer who founded it, a writer named Dave Eggers, to come into compliance with code, he said, "Fine, I'm just going to build a pirate supply store." And that's what he did. (Laughter) And it's beautiful. It's all wood. There's drawers you can pull out and get citrus so you don't get scurvy. They have eyepatches in lots of colors, because when it's springtime, pirates want to go wild. You don't know. Black is boring. Pastel. Or eyes, also in lots of colors, just glass eyes, depending on how you want to deal with that situation. And the store, strangely, people came to them and bought things, and they ended up paying the rent for our tutoring center, which was behind it, but to me, more important was the fact that I think the quality of work you do, kids would come and get instruction in writing, and when you have to walk this weird, liminal, fictional space like this to go do your writing, it's going to affect the kind of work that you make. It's a secret door that you can walk through. So I ran the 826 in Los Angeles, and it was my job to build the store down there. So we have The Echo Park Time Travel Mart. That's our motto: "Whenever you are, we're already then." (Laughter) And it's on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Our friendly staff is ready to help you. They're from all eras, including just the 1980s, that guy on the end, he's from the very recent past. There's our Employees of the Month, including Genghis Khan, Charles Dickens. Some great people have come up through our ranks. This is our kind of pharmacy section. We have some patent medicines, Canopic jars for your organs, communist soap that says, "This is your soap for the year." (Laughter) Our slushy machine broke on the opening night and we didn't know what to do. Our architect was covered in red syrup. It looked like he had just murdered somebody, which it was not out of the question for this particular architect, and we didn't know what to do. It was going to be the highlight of our store. So we just put that sign on it that said, "Out of order. Come back yesterday." (Laughter) And that ended up being a better joke than slushies, so we just left it there forever. Mammoth Chunks. These things weigh, like, seven pounds each. Barbarian repellent. It's full of salad and potpourri — things that barbarians hate. Dead languages. (Laughter) Leeches, nature's tiny doctors. And Viking Odorant, which comes in lots of great scents: toenails, sweat and rotten vegetables, pyre ash. Because we believe that Axe Body Spray is something that you should only find on the battlefield, not under your arms. (Laughter) And these are robot emotion chips, so robots can feel love or fear. Our biggest seller is Schadenfreude, which we did not expect. (Laughter) We did not think that was going to happen. But there's a nonprofit behind it, and kids go through a door that says "Employees Only" and they end up in this space where they do homework and write stories and make films and this is a book release party where kids will read. There's a quarterly that's published with just writing that's done by the kids who come every day after school, and we have release parties and they eat cake and read for their parents and drink milk out of champagne glasses. And it's a very special space, because it's this weird space in the front. The joke isn't a joke. You can't find the seams on the fiction, and I love that. It's this little bit of fiction that's colonized the real world. I see it as kind of a book in three dimensions. There's a term called metafiction, and that's just stories about stories, and meta's having a moment now. Its last big moment was probably in the 1960s with novelists like John Barth and William Gaddis, but it's been around. It's almost as old as storytelling itself. And one metafictive technique is breaking the fourth wall. Right? It's when an actor will turn to the audience and say, "I am an actor, these are just rafters." And even that supposedly honest moment, I would argue, is in service of the lie, but it's supposed to foreground the artificiality of the fiction. For me, I kind of prefer the opposite. If I'm going to break down the fourth wall, I want fiction to escape and come into the real world. I want a book to be a secret door that opens and lets the stories out into reality. And so I try to do this in my books. And here's just one example. This is the first book that I ever made. It's called "Billy Twitters and his Blue Whale Problem." And it's about a kid who gets a blue whale as a pet but it's a punishment and it ruins his life. So it's delivered overnight by FedUp. (Laughter) And he has to take it to school with him. He lives in San Francisco — very tough city to own a blue whale in. A lot of hills, real estate is at a premium. This market's crazy, everybody. But underneath the jacket is this case, and that's the cover underneath the book, the jacket, and there's an ad that offers a free 30-day risk-free trial for a blue whale. And you can just send in a self-addressed stamped envelope and we'll send you a whale. And kids do write in. So here's a letter. It says, "Dear people, I bet you 10 bucks you won't send me a blue whale. Eliot Gannon (age 6)." (Laughter) (Applause) So what Eliot and the other kids who send these in get back is a letter in very small print from a Norwegian law firm — (Laughter) — that says that due to a change in customs laws, their whale has been held up in Sognefjord, which is a very lovely fjord, and then it just kind of talks about Sognefjord and Norwegian food for a little while. It digresses. (Laughter) But it finishes off by saying that your whale would love to hear from you. He's got a phone number, and you can call and leave him a message. And when you call and leave him a message, you just, on the outgoing message, it's just whale sounds and then a beep, which actually sounds a lot like a whale sound. And they get a picture of their whale too. So this is Randolph, and Randolph belongs to a kid named Nico who was one of the first kids to ever call in, and I'll play you some of Nico's message. This is the first message I ever got from Nico. (Audio) Nico: Hello, this is Nico. I am your owner, Randolph. Hello. So this is the first time I can ever talk to you, and I might talk to you soon another day. Bye. Mac Barnett: So Nico called back, like, an hour later. (Laughter) And here's another one of Nico's messages. (Audio) Nico: Hello, Randolph, this is Nico. I haven't talked to you for a long time, but I talked to you on Saturday or Sunday, yeah, Saturday or Sunday, so now I'm calling you again to say hello and I wonder what you're doing right now, and I'm going to probably call you again tomorrow or today, so I'll talk to you later. Bye. MB: So he did, he called back that day again. He's left over 25 messages for Randolph over four years. You find out all about him and the grandma that he loves and the grandma that he likes a little bit less — (Laughter) — and the crossword puzzles that he does, and this is — I'll play you one more message from Nico. This is the Christmas message from Nico. [Beep] (Audio) Nico: Hello, Randolph, sorry I haven't talked to you in a long time. It's just that I've been so busy because school started, as you might not know, probably, since you're a whale, you don't know, and I'm calling you to just say, to wish you a merry Christmas. So have a nice Christmas, and bye-bye, Randolph. Goodbye. MB: I actually got Nico, I hadn't heard from in 18 months, and he just left a message two days ago. His voice is completely different, but he put his babysitter on the phone, and she was very nice to Randolph as well. But Nico's the best reader I could hope for. I would want anyone I was writing for to be in that place emotionally with the things that I create. I feel lucky. Kids like Nico are the best readers, and they deserve the best stories we can give them. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
What's next in 3D printing | {0: 'At XponentialWorks, Avi Reichental is helping to imagine a future where 3D scanning-and-printing is an everyday act -- where food, clothing and objects are routinely output at home.'} | TED2014 | My grandfather was a cobbler. Back in the day, he made custom-made shoes. I never got to meet him. He perished in the Holocaust. But I did inherit his love for making, except that it doesn't exist that much anymore. You see, while the Industrial Revolution did a great deal to improve humanity, it eradicated the very skill that my grandfather loved, and it atrophied craftsmanship as we know it. But all of that is about to change with 3D printing, and it all started with this, the very first part that was ever printed. It's a little older than TED. It was printed in 1983 by Chuck Hull, who invented 3D printing. But the thing that I want to talk to you about today, the big idea that I want to discuss with you, is not that 3D printing is going to catapult us into the future, but rather that it's actually going to connect us with our heritage, and it's going to usher in a new era of localized, distributed manufacturing that is actually based on digital fabrication. So think about useful things. You all know your shoe size. How many of you know the size of the bridge of your nose or the distance between your temples? Anybody? Wouldn't it be awesome if you could, for the first time, get eyewear that actually fits you perfectly and doesn't require any hinge assembly, so chances are, the hinges are not going to break? But the implications of 3D printing go well beyond the tips of our noses. When I met Amanda for the first time, she could already stand up and walk a little bit even though she was paralyzed from the waist down, but she complained to me that her suit was uncomfortable. It was a beautiful robotic suit made by Ekso Bionics, but it wasn't inspired by her body. It wasn't made to measure. So she challenged me to make her something that was a little bit more feminine, a little bit more elegant, and lightweight, and like good tailors, we thought that we would measure her digitally. And we did. We built her an amazing suit. The incredible part about what I learned from Amanda is a lot of us are looking at 3D printing and we say to ourselves, it's going to replace traditional methods. Amanda looked at it and she said, it's an opportunity for me to reclaim my symmetry and to embrace my authenticity. And you know what? She's not standing still. She now wants to walk in high heels. It doesn't stop there. 3D printing is changing personalized medical devices as we know them, from new, beautiful, conformal, ventilated scoliosis braces to millions of dental restorations and to beautiful bracings for amputees, another opportunity to emotionally reconnect with your symmetry. And as we sit here today, you can go wireless on your braces with clear aligners, or your dental restorations. Millions of in-the-ear hearing aids are already 3D printed today. Millions of people are served today from these devices. What about full knee replacements, from your data, made to measure, where all of the tools and guides are 3D printed? G.E. is using 3D printing to make the next generation LEAP engine that will save fuel to the tune of about 15 percent and cost for an airline of about 14 million dollars. Good for G.E., right? And their customers and the environment. But, you know, the even better news is that this technology is no longer reserved for deep-pocketed corporations. Planetary Resources, a startup for space explorations is going to put out its first space probe later this year. It was a fraction of a NASA spaceship, it costs a fraction of its cost, and it's made with less than a dozen moving parts, and it's going to be out in space later this year. Google is taking on this very audacious project of making the block phone, the Ara. It's only possible because of the development of high-speed 3D printing that for the first time will make functional, usable modules that will go into it. A real moonshot, powered by 3D printing. How about food? What if we could, for the first time, make incredible delectables like this beautiful TED Teddy here, that are edible? What if we could completely change the experience, like you see with that absinthe serving that is completely 3D printed? And what if we could begin to put ingredients and colors and flavors in every taste, which means not only delicious foods but the promise of personalized nutrition around the corner? And that gets me to one of the biggest deals about 3D printing. With 3D printing, complexity is free. The printer doesn't care if it makes the most rudimentary shape or the most complex shape, and that is completely turning design and manufacturing on its head as we know it. Many people think that 3D printing will be the end of manufacturing as we know it. I think that it's the opportunity to put tomorrow's technology in the hands of youngsters that will create endless abundance of job opportunities, and with that, everybody can become an expert maker and an expert manufacturer. That will take new tools. Not everybody knows how to use CAD, so we're developing haptics, perceptual devices that will allow you to touch and feel your designs as if you play with digital clay. When you do things like that, and we also developed things that take physical photographs that are instantly printable, it will make it easier to create content, but with all of the unimagined, we will also have the unintended, like democratized counterfeiting and ubiquitous illegal possession. So many people ask me, will we have a 3D printer in every home? I think it's the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is, how will 3D printing change my life? Or, in other words, what room in my house will 3D printing fit in? So everything that you see here has been 3D printed, including these shoes at the Amsterdam fashion show. Now, these are not my grandfather's shoes. These are shoes that represent the continuation of his passion for hyper-local manufacturing. My grandfather didn't get to see Nike printing cleats for the recent Super Bowl, and my father didn't get to see me standing in my hybridized 3D printed shoes. He passed away three years ago. But Chuck Hull, the man that invented it all, is right here in the house today, and thanks to him, I can say, thanks to his invention, I can say that I am a cobbler too, and by standing in these shoes I am honoring my past while manufacturing the future. Thank you. (Applause) |
The magic of the Amazon: A river that flows invisibly all around us | {0: 'Antonio Donato Nobre researches the “ingenious systems” of the Amazon. His work illustrates the beautiful complexity of this region, as well as its fragility against a backdrop of climate change. '} | TEDxAmazonia | What do you guys think? For those who watched Sir Ken's memorable TED Talk, I am a typical example of what he describes as "the body as a form of transport for the head," a university professor. You might think it was not fair that I've been lined up to speak after these first two talks to speak about science. I can't move my body to the beat, and after a scientist who became a philosopher, I have to talk about hard science. It could be a very dry subject. Yet, I feel honored. Never in my career, and it's been a long career, have I had the opportunity to start a talk feeling so inspired, like this one. Usually, talking about science is like exercising in a dry place. However, I've had the pleasure of being invited to come here to talk about water. The words "water" and "dry" do not match, right? It is even better to talk about water in the Amazon, which is the splendid cradle of life. Fresh life. So this is what inspired me. That's why I'm here, although I'm carrying my head over here. I am trying, or will try to convey this inspiration. I hope this story will inspire you and that you'll spread the word. We know that there is controversy. The Amazon is the "lung of the world," because of its massive power to have vital gases exchanged between the forest and the atmosphere. We also hear about the storehouse of biodiversity. While many believe it, few know it. If you go out there, in this marsh, you'll be amazed at the — You can barely see the animals. The Indians say, "The forest has more eyes than leaves." That is true, and I will try to show you something. But today, I'm going to use a different approach, one that is inspired by these two initiatives here, a harmonic one and a philosophical one. I'll try to use an approach that's slightly materialistic, but it also attempts to convey that, in nature, there is extraordinary philosophy and harmony. There'll be no music in my presentation, but I hope you'll all notice the music of the reality I'm going to show you. I'm going to talk about physiology — not about lungs, but other analogies with human physiology, especially the heart. We'll start by thinking that water is like blood. The circulation in our body distributes fresh blood, which feeds, nurtures and supports us, and brings the used blood back to be renewed. In the Amazon, things happen similarly. We'll start by talking about the power of all these processes. This is an image of rain in motion. What you see there is the years passing in seconds. Rains all over the world. What do you see? The equatorial region, in general, and the Amazon specifically, is extremely important for the world's climate. It's a powerful engine. There is a frantic evaporation taking place here. If we take a look at this other image, which shows the water vapor flow, you have dry air in black, moist air in gray, and clouds in white. What you see there is an extraordinary resurgence in the Amazon. What phenomenon — if it's not a desert, what phenomenon makes water gush from the ground into the atmosphere with such power that it can be seen from space? What phenomenon is this? It could be a geyser. A geyser is underground water heated by magma, exploding into the atmosphere and transferring this water into the atmosphere. There are no geysers in the Amazon, unless I am wrong. I don't know of any. But we have something that plays the same role, with much more elegance though: the trees, our good old friends that, like geysers, can transfer an enormous amount of water from the ground into the atmosphere. There are 600 billion trees in the Amazon forest, 600 billion geysers. That is done with an extraordinary sophistication. They don't need the heat of magma. They use sunlight to do this process. So, in a typical sunny day in the Amazon, a big tree manages to transfer 1,000 liters of water through its transpiration — 1,000 liters. If we take all the Amazon, which is a very large area, and add it up to all that water that is released by transpiration, which is the sweat of the forest, we'll get to an incredible number: 20 billion metric tons of water. In one day. Do you know how much that is? The Amazon River, the largest river on Earth, one fifth of all the fresh water that leaves the continents of the whole world and ends up in the oceans, dumps 17 billion metric tons of water a day in the Atlantic Ocean. This river of vapor that comes up from the forest and goes into the atmosphere is greater than the Amazon River. Just to give you an idea. If we could take a gigantic kettle, the kind you could plug into a power socket, an electric one, and put those 20 billion metric tons of water in it, how much power would you need to have this water evaporated? Any idea? A really big kettle. A gigantic kettle, right? 50 thousand Itaipus. Itaipu is still the largest hydroelectric plant in the world. and Brazil is very proud of it because it provides more than 30 percent of the power that is consumed in Brazil. And the Amazon is here, doing this for free. It's a vivid and extremely powerful plant, providing environmental services. Related to this subject, we are going to talk about what I call the paradox of chance, which is curious. If you look at the world map — it's easy to see this — you'll see that there are forests in the equatorial zone, and deserts are organized at 30 degrees north latitude, 30 degrees south latitude, aligned. Look over there, in the southern hemisphere, the Atacama; Namibia and Kalahari in Africa; the Australian desert. In the northern hemisphere, the Sahara, Sonoran, etc. There is an exception, and it's curious: It's the quadrangle that ranges from Cuiabá to Buenos Aires, and from São Paulo to the Andes. This quadrangle was supposed to be a desert. It's on the line of deserts. Why isn't it? That's why I call it the paradox of chance. What do we have in South America that is different? If we could use the analogy of the blood circulating in our bodies, like the water circulating in the landscape, we see that rivers are veins, they drain the landscape, they drain the tissue of nature. Where are the arteries? Any guess? What takes — How does water get to irrigate the tissues of nature and bring everything back through rivers? There is a new type of river, which originates in the blue sea, which flows through the green ocean — it not only flows, but it is also pumped by the green ocean — and then it falls on our land. All our economy, that quadrangle, 70 percent of South America's GDP comes from that area. It depends on this river. This river flows invisibly above us. We are floating here on this floating hotel, on one of the largest rivers on Earth, the Negro River. It's a bit dry and rough, but we are floating here, and there is this invisible river running above us. This river has a pulse. Here it is, pulsing. That's why we also talk about the heart. You can see the different seasons there. There's the rainy season. In the Amazon, we used to have two seasons, the humid season and the even more humid season. Now we have a dry season. You can see the river covering that region which, otherwise, would be a desert. And it is not. We, scientists — You see that I'm struggling here to move my head from one side to the other. Scientists study how it works, why, etc. and these studies are generating a series of discoveries, which are absolutely fabulous, to raise our awareness of the wealth, the complexity, and the wonder that we have, the symphony we have in this process. One of them is: How is rain formed? Above the Amazon, there is clean air, as there is clean air above the ocean. The blue sea has clean air above it and forms pretty few clouds; there's almost no rain there. The green ocean has the same clean air, but forms a lot of rain. What is happening here that is different? The forest emits smells, and these smells are condensation nuclei, which form drops in the atmosphere. Then, clouds are formed and there is torrential rain. The sprinkler of the Garden of Eden. This relation between a living thing, which is the forest, and a nonliving thing, which is the atmosphere, is ingenious in the Amazon, because the forest provides water and seeds, and the atmosphere forms the rain and gives water back, guaranteeing the forest's survival. There are other factors as well. We've talked a little about the heart, and let's now talk about another function: the liver! When humid air, high humidity and radiation are combined with these organic compounds, which I call exogenous vitamin C, generous vitamin C in the form of gas, the plants release antioxidants which react with pollutants. You can rest assured that you are breathing the purest air on Earth, here in the Amazon, because the plants take care of this characteristic as well. This benefits the very way plants work, which is another ingenious cycle. Speaking of fractals, and their relation with the way we work, we can establish other comparisons. As in the upper airways of our lungs, the air in the Amazon gets cleaned up from the excess of dust. The dust in the air that we breathe is cleaned by our airways. This keeps the excess of dust from affecting the rainfall. When there are fires in the Amazon, the smoke stops the rain, it stops raining, the forest dries up and catches fire. There is another fractal analogy. Like in the veins and arteries, the rain water is a feedback. It returns to the atmosphere. Like endocrinal glands and hormones, there are those gases which I told you about before, that are formed and released into the atmosphere, like hormones, which help in the formation of rain. Like the liver and the kidneys, as I've said, cleaning the air. And, finally, like the heart: pumping water from outside, from the sea, into the forest. We call it the biotic moisture pump, a new theory that is explained in a very simple way. If there is a desert in the continent with a nearby sea, evaporation's greater on the sea, and it sucks the air above the desert. The desert is trapped in this condition. It will always be dry. If you have the opposite situation, a forest, the evaporation, as we showed, is much greater, because of the trees, and this relation is reversed. The air above the sea is sucked into the continent and humidity is imported. This satellite image was taken one month ago — that's Manaus down there, we're down there — and it shows this process. It's not a common little river that flows into a canal. It's a mighty river that irrigates South America, among other things. This image shows those paths, all the hurricanes that have been recorded. You can see that, in the red square, there hardly are any hurricanes. That is no accident. This pump that sucks the moisture into the continent also speeds up the air above the sea, and this prevents hurricane formations. To close this part and sum up, I'd like to talk about something a little different. I have several colleagues who worked in the development of these theories. They think, and so do I, that we can save planet Earth. I'm not talking only about the Amazon. The Amazon teaches us a lesson on how pristine nature works. We didn't understand these processes before because the rest of the world is messed up. We could understand it here, though. These colleagues propose that, yes, we can save other areas, including deserts. If we could establish forests in those other areas, we can reverse climate change, including global warming. I have a dear colleague in India, whose name is Suprabha Seshan, and she has a motto. Her motto is, "Gardening back the biosphere," "Reajardinando a biosfera" in Portuguese. She does a wonderful job rebuilding ecosystems. We need to do this. Having closed this quick introduction, we see the reality that we have out here, which is drought, this climate change, things that we already knew. I'd like to tell you a short story. Once, about four years ago, I attended a declamation, of a text by Davi Kopenawa, a wise representative of the Yanomami people, and it went more or less like this: "Doesn't the white man know that, if he destroys the forest, there will be no more rain? And that, if there's no more rain, there'll be nothing to drink, or to eat?" I heard that, and my eyes welled up and I went, "Oh, my! I've been studying this for 20 years, with a super computer, dozens, thousands of scientists, and we are starting to get to this conclusion, which he already knows!" A critical point is the Yanomami have never deforested. How could they know the rain would end? This bugged me and I was befuddled. How could he know that? Some months later, I met him at another event and said, "Davi, how did you know that if the forest was destroyed, there'd be no more rain?" He replied: "The spirit of the forest told us." For me, this was a game changer, a radical change. I said, "Gosh! Why am I doing all this science to get to a conclusion that he already knows?" Then, something absolutely critical hit me, which is, seeing is believing. Out of sight, out of mind. This is a need the previous speaker pointed out: We need to see things — I mean, we, Western society, which is becoming global, civilized — we need to see. If we don't see, we don't register the information. We live in ignorance. So, I propose the following — of course, the astronomer wouldn't like the idea — but let's turn the Hubble telescope upside down. And let's make it look down here, rather than to the far reaches of the universe. The universe is wonderful, but we have a practical reality, which is we live in an unknown cosmos, and we're ignorant about it. We're trampling on this wonderful cosmos that shelters us and houses us. Talk to any astrophysicist. The Earth is a statistical improbability. The stability and comfort that we enjoy, despite the droughts of the Negro River, and all the heat and cold and typhoons, etc., there is nothing like it in the universe, that we know of. Then, let's turn Hubble in our direction, and let's look at the Earth. Let's start with the Amazon! Let's dive, let's reach out the reality we live in every day, and look carefully at it, since that's what we need. Davi Kopenawa doesn't need this. He has something already that I think I missed. I was educated by television. I think that I missed this, an ancestral record, a valuation of what I don't know, what I haven't seen. He is not a doubting Thomas. He believes, with veneration and reverence, in what his ancestors and the spirits taught him. We can't do it, so let's look into the forest. Even with Hubble up there — this is a bird's-eye view, right? Even when this happens, we also see something that we don't know. The Spanish called it the green inferno. If you go out there into the bushes and get lost, and, let's say, if you head west, it's 900 kilometers to Colombia, and another 1,000 to somewhere else. So, you can figure out why they called it the green inferno. But go and look at what is in there. It is a live carpet. Each color you see is a tree species. Each tree, each tree top, has up to 10,000 species of insects in it, let alone the millions of species of fungi, bacteria, etc. All invisible. All of it is an even stranger cosmos to us than the galaxies billions of light years away from the Earth, which Hubble brings to our newspapers everyday. I'm going to end my talk here — I have a few seconds left — by showing you this wonderful being. When we see the morpho butterfly in the forest, we feel like someone's left open the door to heaven, and this creature escaped from there, because it's so beautiful. However, I cannot finish without showing you a tech side. We are tech-arrogant. We deprive nature of its technology. A robotic hand is technological, mine is biological, and we don't think about it anymore. Let's then look at the morpho butterfly, an example of an invisible technological competence of life, which is at the very heart of our possibility of surviving on this planet, and let's zoom in on it. Again, Hubble is there. Let's get into the butterfly's wings. Scholars have tried to explain: Why is it blue? Let's zoom in on it. What you see is that the architecture of the invisible humiliates the best architects in the world. All of this on a tiny scale. Besides its beauty and functioning, there is another side to it. In nature, all that is organized in extraordinary structures has a function. This function of the morpho butterfly — it is not blue; it does not have blue pigments. It has photonic crystals on its surface, according to people who studied it, which are extremely sophisticated crystals. Our technology had nothing like that at the time. Hitachi has now made a monitor that uses this technology, and it is used in optical fibers to transmit — Janine Benyus, who's been here several times, talks about it: biomimetics. My time's up. Then, I'll wrap it up with what is at the base of this capacity, of this competence of biodiversity, producing all these wonderful services: the living cell. It is a structure with a few microns, which is an internal wonder. There are TED Talks about it. I won't talk much longer, but each person in this room, including myself, has 100 trillion of these micromachines in their body, so that we can enjoy well-being. Imagine what is out there in the Amazon forest: 100 trillion. This is greater than the number of stars in the sky. And we are not aware of it. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
The state of the climate — and what we might do about it | {0: 'Lord Nicholas Stern studies the economics of climate change. He is a co-author of the position paper presented to the UN\'s 2014 Climate Summit, called "The New Climate Economy."'} | TED@Unilever | We are at a remarkable moment in time. We face over the next two decades two fundamental transformations that will determine whether the next 100 years is the best of centuries or the worst of centuries. Let me illustrate with an example. I first visited Beijing 25 years ago to teach at the People's University of China. China was getting serious about market economics and about university education, so they decided to call in the foreign experts. Like most other people, I moved around Beijing by bicycle. Apart from dodging the occasional vehicle, it was a safe and easy way to get around. Cycling in Beijing now is a completely different prospect. The roads are jammed by cars and trucks. The air is dangerously polluted from the burning of coal and diesel. When I was there last in the spring, there was an advisory for people of my age — over 65 — to stay indoors and not move much. How did this come about? It came from the way in which Beijing has grown as a city. It's doubled over those 25 years, more than doubled, from 10 million to 20 million. It's become a sprawling urban area dependent on dirty fuel, dirty energy, particularly coal. China burns half the world's coal each year, and that's why, it is a key reason why, it is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. At the same time, we have to recognize that in that period China has grown remarkably. It has become the world's second largest economy. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. That's really important. But at the same time, the people of China are asking the question: What's the value of this growth if our cities are unlivable? They've analyzed, diagnosed that this is an unsustainable path of growth and development. China's planning to scale back coal. It's looking to build its cities in different ways. Now, the growth of China is part of a dramatic change, fundamental change, in the structure of the world economy. Just 25 years ago, the developing countries, the poorer countries of the world, were, notwithstanding being the vast majority of the people, they accounted for only about a third of the world's output. Now it's more than half; 25 years from now, it will probably be two thirds from the countries that we saw 25 years ago as developing. That's a remarkable change. It means that most countries around the world, rich or poor, are going to be facing the two fundamental transformations that I want to talk about and highlight. Now, the first of these transformations is the basic structural change of the economies and societies that I've already begun to illustrate through the description of Beijing. Fifty percent now in urban areas. That's going to go to 70 percent in 2050. Over the next two decades, we'll see the demand for energy rise by 40 percent, and the growth in the economy and in the population is putting increasing pressure on our land, on our water and on our forests. This is profound structural change. If we manage it in a negligent or a shortsighted way, we will create waste, pollution, congestion, destruction of land and forests. If we think of those three areas that I have illustrated with my numbers — cities, energy, land — if we manage all that badly, then the outlook for the lives and livelihoods of the people around the world would be poor and damaged. And more than that, the emissions of greenhouse gases would rise, with immense risks to our climate. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are already higher than they've been for millions of years. If we go on increasing those concentrations, we risk temperatures over the next century or so that we have not seen on this planet for tens of millions of years. We've been around as Homo sapiens — that's a rather generous definition, sapiens — for perhaps a quarter of a million years, a quarter of a million. We risk temperatures we haven't seen for tens of millions of years over a century. That would transform the relationship between human beings and the planet. It would lead to changing deserts, changing rivers, changing patterns of hurricanes, changing sea levels, hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions of people who would have to move, and if we've learned anything from history, that means severe and extended conflict. And we couldn't just turn it off. You can't make a peace treaty with the planet. You can't negotiate with the laws of physics. You're in there. You're stuck. Those are the stakes we're playing for, and that's why we have to make this second transformation, the climate transformation, and move to a low-carbon economy. Now, the first of these transformations is going to happen anyway. We have to decide whether to do it well or badly, the economic, or structural, transformation. But the second of the transformations, the climate transformations, we have to decide to do. Those two transformations face us in the next two decades. The next two decades are decisive for what we have to do. Now, the more I've thought about this, the two transformations coming together, the more I've come to realize that this is an enormous opportunity. It's an opportunity which we can use or it's an opportunity which we can lose. And let me explain through those three key areas that I've identified: cities, energy and land. And let me start with cities. I've already described the problems of Beijing: pollution, congestion, waste and so on. Surely we recognize that in many of our cities around the world. Now, with cities, like life but particularly cities, you have to think ahead. The cities that are going to be built — and there are many, and many big ones — we have to think of how to design them in a compact way so we can save travel time and we can save energy. The cities that already are there, well established, we have to think about renewal and investment in them so that we can connect ourselves much better within those cities, and make it easier, encourage more people, to live closer to the center. We've got examples building around the world of the kinds of ways in which we can do that. The bus rapid transport system in Bogotá in Colombia is a very important case of how to move around safely and quickly in a non-polluting way in a city: very frequent buses, strongly protected routes, the same service, really, as an underground railway system, but much, much cheaper and can be done much more quickly, a brilliant idea in many more cities around the world that's developing. Now, some things in cities do take time. Some things in cities can happen much more quickly. Take my hometown, London. In 1952, smog in London killed 4,000 people and badly damaged the lives of many, many more. And it happened all the time. For those of you live outside London in the U.K. will remember it used to be called The Smoke. That's the way London was. By regulating coal, within a few years the problems of smog were rapidly reduced. I remember the smogs well. When the visibility dropped to [less] than a few meters, they stopped the buses and I had to walk. This was the 1950s. I had to walk home three miles from school. Again, breathing was a hazardous activity. But it was changed. It was changed by a decision. Good decisions can bring good results, striking results, quickly. We've seen more: In London, we've introduced the congestion charge, actually quite quickly and effectively, and we've seen great improvements in the bus system, and cleaned up the bus system. You can see that the two transformations I've described, the structural and the climate, come very much together. But we have to invest. We have to invest in our cities, and we have to invest wisely, and if we do, we'll see cleaner cities, quieter cities, safer cities, more attractive cities, more productive cities, and stronger community in those cities — public transport, recycling, reusing, all sorts of things that bring communities together. We can do that, but we have to think, we have to invest, we have to plan. Let me turn to energy. Now, energy over the last 25 years has increased by about 50 percent. Eighty percent of that comes from fossil fuels. Over the next 20 years, perhaps it will increase by another 40 percent or so. We have to invest strongly in energy, we have to use it much more efficiently, and we have to make it clean. We can see how to do that. Take the example of California. It would be in the top 10 countries in the world if it was independent. I don't want to start any — (Laughter) California's a big place. (Laughter) In the next five or six years, they will likely move from around 20 percent in renewables — wind, solar and so on — to over 33 percent, and that would bring California back to greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 to where they were in 1990, a period when the economy in California would more or less have doubled. That's a striking achievement. It shows what can be done. Not just California — the incoming government of India is planning to get solar technology to light up the homes of 400 million people who don't have electricity in India. They've set themselves a target of five years. I think they've got a good chance of doing that. We'll see, but what you're seeing now is people moving much more quickly. Four hundred million, more than the population of the United States. Those are the kinds of ambitions now people are setting themselves in terms of rapidity of change. Again, you can see good decisions can bring quick results, and those two transformations, the economy and the structure and the climate and the low carbon, are intimately intertwined. Do the first one well, the structural, the second one on the climate becomes much easier. Look at land, land and particularly forests. Forests are the hosts to valuable plant and animal species. They hold water in the soil and they take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, fundamental to the tackling of climate change. But we're losing our forests. In the last decade, we've lost a forest area the size of Portugal, and much more has been degraded. But we're already seeing that we can do so much about that. We can recognize the problem, but we can also understand how to tackle it. In Brazil, the rate of deforestation has been reduced by 70 percent over the last 10 years. How? By involving local communities, investing in their agriculture and their economies, by monitoring more carefully, by enforcing the law more strictly. And it's not just stopping deforestation. That's of course of first and fundamental importance, but it's also regrading degraded land, regenerating, rehabilitating degraded land. I first went to Ethiopia in 1967. It was desperately poor. In the following years, it suffered devastating famines and profoundly destructive social conflict. Over the last few years, actually more than a few, Ethiopia has been growing much more rapidly. It has ambitions to be a middle-income country 15 years from now and to be carbon neutral. Again, I think it's a strong ambition but it is a plausible one. You're seeing that commitment there. You're seeing what can be done. Ethiopia is investing in clean energy. It's working in the rehabilitation of land. In Humbo, in southwest Ethiopia, a wonderful project to plant trees on degraded land and work with local communities on sustainable forest management has led to big increases in living standards. So we can see, from Beijing to London, from California to India, from Brazil to Ethiopia, we do understand how to manage those two transformations, the structural and the climate. We do understand how to manage those well. And technology is changing very rapidly. I don't have to list all those things to an audience like this, but you can see the electric cars, you can see the batteries using new materials. You can see that we can manage remotely now our household appliances on our mobile phones when we're away. You can see better insulation. And there's much more coming. But, and it's a big but, the world as a whole is moving far too slowly. We're not cutting emissions in the way we should. We're not managing those structural transformations as we can. The depth of understanding of the immense risks of climate change are not there yet. The depth of understanding of the attractiveness of what we can do is not there yet. We need political pressure to build. We need leaders to step up. We can have better growth, better climate, a better world. We can make, by managing those two transformations well, the next 100 years the best of centuries. If we make a mess of it, we, you and me, if we make a mess of it, if we don't manage those transformations properly, it will be, the next 100 years will be the worst of centuries. That's the major conclusion of the report on the economy and climate chaired by ex-President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, and I co-chaired that with him, and we handed that report yesterday here in New York, in the United Nations Building to the Secretary-General of the U.N., Ban Ki-moon. We know that we can do this. Now, two weeks ago, I became a grandfather for the fourth time. Our daughter — (Baby cries) (Laughter) (Applause) — Our daughter gave birth to Rosa here in New York two weeks ago. Here are Helen and Rosa. (Applause) Two weeks old. Are we going to look our grandchildren in the eye and tell them that we understood the issues, that we recognized the dangers and the opportunities, and still we failed to act? Surely not. Let's make the next 100 years the best of centuries. (Applause) |
Big data is better data | {0: 'Kenneth Cukier is the Data Editor of The Economist. From 2007 to 2012 he was the Tokyo correspondent, and before that, the paper’s technology correspondent in London, where his work focused on innovation, intellectual property and Internet governance. Kenneth is also the co-author of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger in 2013, which was a New York Times Bestseller and translated into 16 languages.'} | TEDSalon Berlin 2014 | America's favorite pie is? Audience: Apple. Kenneth Cukier: Apple. Of course it is. How do we know it? Because of data. You look at supermarket sales. You look at supermarket sales of 30-centimeter pies that are frozen, and apple wins, no contest. The majority of the sales are apple. But then supermarkets started selling smaller, 11-centimeter pies, and suddenly, apple fell to fourth or fifth place. Why? What happened? Okay, think about it. When you buy a 30-centimeter pie, the whole family has to agree, and apple is everyone's second favorite. (Laughter) But when you buy an individual 11-centimeter pie, you can buy the one that you want. You can get your first choice. You have more data. You can see something that you couldn't see when you only had smaller amounts of it. Now, the point here is that more data doesn't just let us see more, more of the same thing we were looking at. More data allows us to see new. It allows us to see better. It allows us to see different. In this case, it allows us to see what America's favorite pie is: not apple. Now, you probably all have heard the term big data. In fact, you're probably sick of hearing the term big data. It is true that there is a lot of hype around the term, and that is very unfortunate, because big data is an extremely important tool by which society is going to advance. In the past, we used to look at small data and think about what it would mean to try to understand the world, and now we have a lot more of it, more than we ever could before. What we find is that when we have a large body of data, we can fundamentally do things that we couldn't do when we only had smaller amounts. Big data is important, and big data is new, and when you think about it, the only way this planet is going to deal with its global challenges — to feed people, supply them with medical care, supply them with energy, electricity, and to make sure they're not burnt to a crisp because of global warming — is because of the effective use of data. So what is new about big data? What is the big deal? Well, to answer that question, let's think about what information looked like, physically looked like in the past. In 1908, on the island of Crete, archaeologists discovered a clay disc. They dated it from 2000 B.C., so it's 4,000 years old. Now, there's inscriptions on this disc, but we actually don't know what it means. It's a complete mystery, but the point is that this is what information used to look like 4,000 years ago. This is how society stored and transmitted information. Now, society hasn't advanced all that much. We still store information on discs, but now we can store a lot more information, more than ever before. Searching it is easier. Copying it easier. Sharing it is easier. Processing it is easier. And what we can do is we can reuse this information for uses that we never even imagined when we first collected the data. In this respect, the data has gone from a stock to a flow, from something that is stationary and static to something that is fluid and dynamic. There is, if you will, a liquidity to information. The disc that was discovered off of Crete that's 4,000 years old, is heavy, it doesn't store a lot of information, and that information is unchangeable. By contrast, all of the files that Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency in the United States fits on a memory stick the size of a fingernail, and it can be shared at the speed of light. More data. More. Now, one reason why we have so much data in the world today is we are collecting things that we've always collected information on, but another reason why is we're taking things that have always been informational but have never been rendered into a data format and we are putting it into data. Think, for example, the question of location. Take, for example, Martin Luther. If we wanted to know in the 1500s where Martin Luther was, we would have to follow him at all times, maybe with a feathery quill and an inkwell, and record it, but now think about what it looks like today. You know that somewhere, probably in a telecommunications carrier's database, there is a spreadsheet or at least a database entry that records your information of where you've been at all times. If you have a cell phone, and that cell phone has GPS, but even if it doesn't have GPS, it can record your information. In this respect, location has been datafied. Now think, for example, of the issue of posture, the way that you are all sitting right now, the way that you sit, the way that you sit, the way that you sit. It's all different, and it's a function of your leg length and your back and the contours of your back, and if I were to put sensors, maybe 100 sensors into all of your chairs right now, I could create an index that's fairly unique to you, sort of like a fingerprint, but it's not your finger. So what could we do with this? Researchers in Tokyo are using it as a potential anti-theft device in cars. The idea is that the carjacker sits behind the wheel, tries to stream off, but the car recognizes that a non-approved driver is behind the wheel, and maybe the engine just stops, unless you type in a password into the dashboard to say, "Hey, I have authorization to drive." Great. What if every single car in Europe had this technology in it? What could we do then? Maybe, if we aggregated the data, maybe we could identify telltale signs that best predict that a car accident is going to take place in the next five seconds. And then what we will have datafied is driver fatigue, and the service would be when the car senses that the person slumps into that position, automatically knows, hey, set an internal alarm that would vibrate the steering wheel, honk inside to say, "Hey, wake up, pay more attention to the road." These are the sorts of things we can do when we datafy more aspects of our lives. So what is the value of big data? Well, think about it. You have more information. You can do things that you couldn't do before. One of the most impressive areas where this concept is taking place is in the area of machine learning. Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence, which itself is a branch of computer science. The general idea is that instead of instructing a computer what do do, we are going to simply throw data at the problem and tell the computer to figure it out for itself. And it will help you understand it by seeing its origins. In the 1950s, a computer scientist at IBM named Arthur Samuel liked to play checkers, so he wrote a computer program so he could play against the computer. He played. He won. He played. He won. He played. He won, because the computer only knew what a legal move was. Arthur Samuel knew something else. Arthur Samuel knew strategy. So he wrote a small sub-program alongside it operating in the background, and all it did was score the probability that a given board configuration would likely lead to a winning board versus a losing board after every move. He plays the computer. He wins. He plays the computer. He wins. He plays the computer. He wins. And then Arthur Samuel leaves the computer to play itself. It plays itself. It collects more data. It collects more data. It increases the accuracy of its prediction. And then Arthur Samuel goes back to the computer and he plays it, and he loses, and he plays it, and he loses, and he plays it, and he loses, and Arthur Samuel has created a machine that surpasses his ability in a task that he taught it. And this idea of machine learning is going everywhere. How do you think we have self-driving cars? Are we any better off as a society enshrining all the rules of the road into software? No. Memory is cheaper. No. Algorithms are faster. No. Processors are better. No. All of those things matter, but that's not why. It's because we changed the nature of the problem. We changed the nature of the problem from one in which we tried to overtly and explicitly explain to the computer how to drive to one in which we say, "Here's a lot of data around the vehicle. You figure it out. You figure it out that that is a traffic light, that that traffic light is red and not green, that that means that you need to stop and not go forward." Machine learning is at the basis of many of the things that we do online: search engines, Amazon's personalization algorithm, computer translation, voice recognition systems. Researchers recently have looked at the question of biopsies, cancerous biopsies, and they've asked the computer to identify by looking at the data and survival rates to determine whether cells are actually cancerous or not, and sure enough, when you throw the data at it, through a machine-learning algorithm, the machine was able to identify the 12 telltale signs that best predict that this biopsy of the breast cancer cells are indeed cancerous. The problem: The medical literature only knew nine of them. Three of the traits were ones that people didn't need to look for, but that the machine spotted. Now, there are dark sides to big data as well. It will improve our lives, but there are problems that we need to be conscious of, and the first one is the idea that we may be punished for predictions, that the police may use big data for their purposes, a little bit like "Minority Report." Now, it's a term called predictive policing, or algorithmic criminology, and the idea is that if we take a lot of data, for example where past crimes have been, we know where to send the patrols. That makes sense, but the problem, of course, is that it's not simply going to stop on location data, it's going to go down to the level of the individual. Why don't we use data about the person's high school transcript? Maybe we should use the fact that they're unemployed or not, their credit score, their web-surfing behavior, whether they're up late at night. Their Fitbit, when it's able to identify biochemistries, will show that they have aggressive thoughts. We may have algorithms that are likely to predict what we are about to do, and we may be held accountable before we've actually acted. Privacy was the central challenge in a small data era. In the big data age, the challenge will be safeguarding free will, moral choice, human volition, human agency. There is another problem: Big data is going to steal our jobs. Big data and algorithms are going to challenge white collar, professional knowledge work in the 21st century in the same way that factory automation and the assembly line challenged blue collar labor in the 20th century. Think about a lab technician who is looking through a microscope at a cancer biopsy and determining whether it's cancerous or not. The person went to university. The person buys property. He or she votes. He or she is a stakeholder in society. And that person's job, as well as an entire fleet of professionals like that person, is going to find that their jobs are radically changed or actually completely eliminated. Now, we like to think that technology creates jobs over a period of time after a short, temporary period of dislocation, and that is true for the frame of reference with which we all live, the Industrial Revolution, because that's precisely what happened. But we forget something in that analysis: There are some categories of jobs that simply get eliminated and never come back. The Industrial Revolution wasn't very good if you were a horse. So we're going to need to be careful and take big data and adjust it for our needs, our very human needs. We have to be the master of this technology, not its servant. We are just at the outset of the big data era, and honestly, we are not very good at handling all the data that we can now collect. It's not just a problem for the National Security Agency. Businesses collect lots of data, and they misuse it too, and we need to get better at this, and this will take time. It's a little bit like the challenge that was faced by primitive man and fire. This is a tool, but this is a tool that, unless we're careful, will burn us. Big data is going to transform how we live, how we work and how we think. It is going to help us manage our careers and lead lives of satisfaction and hope and happiness and health, but in the past, we've often looked at information technology and our eyes have only seen the T, the technology, the hardware, because that's what was physical. We now need to recast our gaze at the I, the information, which is less apparent, but in some ways a lot more important. Humanity can finally learn from the information that it can collect, as part of our timeless quest to understand the world and our place in it, and that's why big data is a big deal. (Applause) |
The courage to tell a hidden story | {0: 'Eman Mohammed is a Palestinian photojournalist.'} | TED2014 | When I turned 19, I started my career as the first female photojournalist in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. My work as a woman photographer was considered a serious insult to local traditions, and created a lasting stigma for me and my family. The male-dominated field made my presence unwelcome by all possible means. They made clear that a woman must not do a man's job. Photo agencies in Gaza refused to train me because of my gender. The "No" sign was pretty clear. Three of my colleagues went as far as to drive me to an open air strike area where the explosion sounds were the only thing I could hear. Dust was flying in the air, and the ground was shaking like a swing beneath me. I only realized we weren't there to document the event when the three of them got back into the armored Jeep and drove away, waving and laughing, leaving me behind in the open air strike zone. For a moment, I felt terrified, humiliated, and sorry for myself. My colleagues' action was not the only death threat I have received, but it was the most dangerous one. The perception of women's life in Gaza is passive. Until a recent time, a lot of women were not allowed to work or pursue education. At times of such doubled war including both social restrictions on women and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, women's dark and bright stories were fading away. To men, women's stories were seen as inconsequential. I started paying closer attention to women's lives in Gaza. Because of my gender, I had access to worlds where my colleagues were forbidden. Beyond the obvious pain and struggle, there was a healthy dose of laughter and accomplishments. In front of a police compound in Gaza City during the first war in Gaza, an Israeli air raid managed to destroy the compound and break my nose. For a moment, all I saw was white, bright white, like these lights. I thought to myself I either got blind or I was in heaven. By the time I managed to open my eyes, I had documented this moment. Mohammed Khader, a Palestinian worker who spent two decades in Israel, as his retirement plan, he decided to build a four-floor house, only by the first field operation at his neighborhood, the house was flattened to the ground. Nothing was left but the pigeons he raised and a jacuzzi, a bathtub that he got from Tel Aviv. Mohammed got the bathtub on the top of the rubble and started giving his kids an every morning bubble bath. My work is not meant to hide the scars of war, but to show the full frame of unseen stories of Gazans. As a Palestinian female photographer, the journey of struggle, survival and everyday life has inspired me to overcome the community taboo and see a different side of war and its aftermath. I became a witness with a choice: to run away or stand still. Thank you. (Applause) |
“Am I dying?” The honest answer. | {0: 'Matthew O’Reilly is a veteran emergency medical technician on Long Island, New York.'} | TED@NYC | I've been a critical care EMT for the past seven years in Suffolk County, New York. I've been a first responder in a number of incidents ranging from car accidents to Hurricane Sandy. If you are like most people, death might be one of your greatest fears. Some of us will see it coming. Some of us won't. There is a little-known documented medical term called impending doom. It's almost a symptom. As a medical provider, I'm trained to respond to this symptom like any other, so when a patient having a heart attack looks at me and says, "I'm going to die today," we are trained to reevaluate the patient's condition. Throughout my career, I have responded to a number of incidents where the patient had minutes left to live and there was nothing I could do for them. With this, I was faced with a dilemma: Do I tell the dying that they are about to face death, or do I lie to them to comfort them? Early in my career, I faced this dilemma by simply lying. I was afraid. I was afraid if I told them the truth, that they would die in terror, in fear, just grasping for those last moments of life. That all changed with one incident. Five years ago, I responded to a motorcycle accident. The rider had suffered critical, critical injuries. As I assessed him, I realized that there was nothing that could be done for him, and like so many other cases, he looked me in the eye and asked that question: "Am I going to die?" In that moment, I decided to do something different. I decided to tell him the truth. I decided to tell him that he was going to die and that there was nothing I could do for him. His reaction shocked me to this day. He simply laid back and had a look of acceptance on his face. He was not met with that terror or fear that I thought he would be. He simply laid there, and as I looked into his eyes, I saw inner peace and acceptance. From that moment forward, I decided it was not my place to comfort the dying with my lies. Having responded to many cases since then where patients were in their last moments and there was nothing I could do for them, in almost every case, they have all had the same reaction to the truth, of inner peace and acceptance. In fact, there are three patterns I have observed in all these cases. The first pattern always kind of shocked me. Regardless of religious belief or cultural background, there's a need for forgiveness. Whether they call it sin or they simply say they have a regret, their guilt is universal. I had once cared for an elderly gentleman who was having a massive heart attack. As I prepared myself and my equipment for his imminent cardiac arrest, I began to tell the patient of his imminent demise. He already knew by my tone of voice and body language. As I placed the defibrillator pads on his chest, prepping for what was going to happen, he looked me in the eye and said, "I wish I had spent more time with my children and grandchildren instead of being selfish with my time." Faced with imminent death, all he wanted was forgiveness. The second pattern I observe is the need for remembrance. Whether it was to be remembered in my thoughts or their loved ones', they needed to feel that they would be living on. There's a need for immortality within the hearts and thoughts of their loved ones, myself, my crew, or anyone around. Countless times, I have had a patient look me in the eyes and say, "Will you remember me?" The final pattern I observe always touched me the deepest, to the soul. The dying need to know that their life had meaning. They need to know that they did not waste their life on meaningless tasks. This came to me very, very early in my career. I had responded to a call. There was a female in her late 50s severely pinned within a vehicle. She had been t-boned at a high rate of speed, critical, critical condition. As the fire department worked to remove her from the car, I climbed in to begin to render care. As we talked, she had said to me, "There was so much more I wanted to do with my life." She had felt she had not left her mark on this Earth. As we talked further, it would turn out that she was a mother of two adopted children who were both on their way to medical school. Because of her, two children had a chance they never would have had otherwise and would go on to save lives in the medical field as medical doctors. It would end up taking 45 minutes to free her from the vehicle. However, she perished prior to freeing her. I believed what you saw in the movies: when you're in those last moments that it's strictly terror, fear. I have come to realize, regardless of the circumstance, it's generally met with peace and acceptance, that it's the littlest things, the littlest moments, the littlest things you brought into the world that give you peace in those final moments. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to reinvent the apartment building | {0: "Moshe Safdie's buildings -- from grand libraries to intimate apartment complexes -- explore the qualities of light and the nature of private and public space."} | TED2014 | When, in 1960, still a student, I got a traveling fellowship to study housing in North America. We traveled the country. We saw public housing high-rise buildings in all major cities: New York, Philadelphia. Those who have no choice lived there. And then we traveled from suburb to suburb, and I came back thinking, we've got to reinvent the apartment building. There has to be another way of doing this. We can't sustain suburbs, so let's design a building which gives the qualities of a house to each unit. Habitat would be all about gardens, contact with nature, streets instead of corridors. We prefabricated it so we would achieve economy, and there it is almost 50 years later. It's a very desirable place to live in. It's now a heritage building, but it did not proliferate. In 1973, I made my first trip to China. It was the Cultural Revolution. We traveled the country, met with architects and planners. This is Beijing then, not a single high rise building in Beijing or Shanghai. Shenzhen didn't even exist as a city. There were hardly any cars. Thirty years later, this is Beijing today. This is Hong Kong. If you're wealthy, you live there, if you're poor, you live there, but high density it is, and it's not just Asia. São Paulo, you can travel in a helicopter 45 minutes seeing those high-rise buildings consume the 19th-century low-rise environment. And with it, comes congestion, and we lose mobility, and so on and so forth. So a few years ago, we decided to go back and rethink Habitat. Could we make it more affordable? Could we actually achieve this quality of life in the densities that are prevailing today? And we realized, it's basically about light, it's about sun, it's about nature, it's about fractalization. Can we open up the surface of the building so that it has more contact with the exterior? We came up with a number of models: economy models, cheaper to build and more compact; membranes of housing where people could design their own house and create their own gardens. And then we decided to take New York as a test case, and we looked at Lower Manhattan. And we mapped all the building area in Manhattan. On the left is Manhattan today: blue for housing, red for office buildings, retail. On the right, we reconfigured it: the office buildings form the base, and then rising 75 stories above, are apartments. There's a street in the air on the 25th level, a community street. It's permeable. There are gardens and open spaces for the community, almost every unit with its own private garden, and community space all around. And most important, permeable, open. It does not form a wall or an obstruction in the city, and light permeates everywhere. And in the last two or three years, we've actually been, for the first time, realizing the quality of life of Habitat in real-life projects across Asia. This in Qinhuangdao in China: middle-income housing, where there is a bylaw that every apartment must receive three hours of sunlight. That's measured in the winter solstice. And under construction in Singapore, again middle-income housing, gardens, community streets and parks and so on and so forth. And Colombo. And I want to touch on one more issue, which is the design of the public realm. A hundred years after we've begun building with tall buildings, we are yet to understand how the tall high-rise building becomes a building block in making a city, in creating the public realm. In Singapore, we had an opportunity: 10 million square feet, extremely high density. Taking the concept of outdoor and indoor, promenades and parks integrated with intense urban life. So they are outdoor spaces and indoor spaces, and you move from one to the other, and there is contact with nature, and most relevantly, at every level of the structure, public gardens and open space: on the roof of the podium, climbing up the towers, and finally on the roof, the sky park, two and a half acres, jogging paths, restaurants, and the world's longest swimming pool. And that's all I can tell you in five minutes. Thank you. (Applause) |
Sanitation is a basic human right | {0: 'Francis de los Reyes works with cutting-edge microbiological techniques in environmental biotech. But his passion, both professionally and personally, is helping to improve the plight of the world’s 2.5 billion people living without adequate sanitation. Reyes is a TED Fellow.'} | TED Fellows Retreat 2013 | I am an engineering professor, and for the past 14 years I've been teaching crap. (Laughter) Not that I'm a bad teacher, but I've been studying and teaching about human waste and how waste is conveyed through these wastewater treatment plants, and how we engineer and design these treatment plants so that we can protect surface water like rivers. I've based my scientific career on using leading-edge molecular techniques, DNA- and RNA-based methods to look at microbial populations in biological reactors, and again to optimize these systems. And over the years, I have developed an unhealthy obsession with toilets, and I've been known to sneak into toilets and take my camera phone all over the world. But along the way, I've learned that it's not just the technical side, but there's also this thing called the culture of crap. So for example, how many of you are washers and how many of you are wipers? (Laughter) If, well, I guess you know what I mean. If you're a washer, then you use water for anal cleansing. That's the technical term. And if you're a wiper, then you use toilet paper or, in some regions of the world where it's not available, newspaper or rags or corncobs. And this is not just a piece of trivia, but it's really important to understand and solve the sanitation problem. And it is a big problem: There are 2.5 billion people in the world who don't have access to adequate sanitation. For them, there's no modern toilet. And there are 1.1 billion people whose toilets are the streets or river banks or open spaces, and again, the technical term for that is open defecation, but that is really simply shitting in the open. And if you're living in fecal material and it's surrounding you, you're going to get sick. It's going to get into your drinking water, into your food, into your immediate surroundings. So the United Nations estimates that every year, there are 1.5 million child deaths because of inadequate sanitation. That's one preventable death every 20 seconds, 171 every hour, 4,100 every day. And so, to avoid open defecation, municipalities and cities build infrastructure, for example, like pit latrines, in peri-urban and rural areas. For example, in KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, they've built tens of thousands of these pit latrines. But there's a problem when you scale up to tens of thousands, and the problem is, what happens when the pits are full? This is what happens. People defecate around the toilet. In schools, children defecate on the floors and then leave a trail outside the building and start defecating around the building, and these pits have to be cleaned and manually emptied. And who does the emptying? You've got these workers who have to sometimes go down into the pits and manually remove the contents. It's a dirty and dangerous business. As you can see, there's no protective equipment, no protective clothing. There's one worker down there. I hope you can see him. He's got a face mask on, but no shirt. And in some countries, like India, the lower castes are condemned to empty the pits, and they're further condemned by society. So you ask yourself, how can we solve this and why don't we just build Western-style flush toilets for these two and a half billion? And the answer is, it's just not possible. In some of these areas, there's not enough water, there's no energy, it's going to cost tens of trillions of dollars to lay out the sewer lines and to build the facilities and to operate and maintain these systems, and if you don't build it right, you're going to have flush toilets that basically go straight into the river, just like what's happening in many cities in the developing world. And is this really the solution? Because essentially, what you're doing is you're using clean water and you're using it to flush your toilet, convey it to a wastewater treatment plant which then discharges to a river, and that river, again, is a drinking water source. So we've got to rethink sanitation, and we've got to reinvent the sanitation infrastructure, and I'm going to argue that to do this, you have to employ systems thinking. We have to look at the whole sanitation chain. We start with a human interface, and then we have to think about how feces are collected and stored, transported, treated and reused — and not just disposal but reuse. So let's start with the human user interface. I say, it doesn't matter if you're a washer or a wiper, a sitter or a squatter, the human user interface should be clean and easy to use, because after all, taking a dump should be pleasurable. (Laughter) And when we open the possibilities to understanding this sanitation chain, then the back-end technology, the collection to the reuse, should not really matter, and then we can apply locally adoptable and context-sensitive solutions. So we can open ourselves to possibilities like, for example, this urine-diverting toilet, and there's two holes in this toilet. There's the front and the back, and the front collects the urine, and the back collects the fecal material. And so what you're doing is you're separating the urine, which has 80 percent of the nitrogen and 50 percent of the phosphorus, and then that can then be treated and precipitated to form things like struvite, which is a high-value fertilizer, and then the fecal material can then be disinfected and again converted to high-value end products. Or, for example, in some of our research, you can reuse the water by treating it in on-site sanitation systems like planter boxes or constructed wetlands. So we can open up all these possibilities if we take away the old paradigm of flush toilets and treatment plants. So you might be asking, who's going to pay? Well, I'm going to argue that governments should fund sanitation infrastructure. NGOs and donor organizations, they can do their best, but it's not going to be enough. Governments should fund sanitation the same way they fund roads and schools and hospitals and other infrastructure like bridges, because we know, and the WHO has done this study, that for every dollar that we invest in sanitation infrastructure, we get something like three to 34 dollars back. Let's go back to the problem of pit emptying. So at North Carolina State University, we challenged our students to come up with a simple solution, and this is what they came up with: a simple, modified screw auger that can move the waste up from the pit and into a collecting drum, and now the pit worker doesn't have to go down into the pit. We tested it in South Africa, and it works. We need to make it more robust, and we're going to do more testing in Malawi and South Africa this coming year. And our idea is to make this a professionalized pit-emptying service so that we can create a small business out of it, create profits and jobs, and the hope is that, as we are rethinking sanitation, we are extending the life of these pits so that we don't have to resort to quick solutions that don't really make sense. I believe that access to adequate sanitation is a basic human right. We need to stop the practice of lower castes and lower-status people going down and being condemned to empty pits. It is our moral, it is our social and our environmental obligation. Thank you. (Applause) |
The career advice you probably didn’t get | {0: 'Susan Colantuono is the CEO and founder of Leading Women.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | Women represent 50 percent of middle management and professional positions, but the percentages of women at the top of organizations represent not even a third of that number. So some people hear that statistic and they ask, why do we have so few women leaders? But I look at that statistic and, if you, like me, believe that leadership manifests at every level, you would see that there's a tremendous, awesome resource of leaders who are leading in middle management, which raises a different question: Why are there so many women mired in the middle and what has to happen to take them to the top? So some of you might be some of those women who are in middle management and seeking to move up in your organization. Well, Tonya is a great example of one of these women. I met her two years ago. She was a vice president in a Fortune 50 company, and she said to me with a sense of deep frustration, "I've worked really hard to improve my confidence and my assertiveness and develop a great brand, I get terrific performance evals from my boss, my 360s in the organization let me know that my teams love working for me, I've taken every management course that I can here, I am working with a terrific mentor, and yet I've been passed over twice for advancement opportunities, even when my manager knows that I'm committed to moving up and even interested in an international assignment. I don't understand why I'm being passed over." So what Tonya doesn't realize is that there's a missing 33 percent of the career success equation for women, and it's understanding what this missing 33 percent is that's required to close the gender gap at the top. In order to move up in organizations, you have to be known for your leadership skills, and this would apply to any of you, women or men. It means that you have to be recognized for using the greatness in you to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others. Put in other language, it means you have to use your skills and talents and abilities to help the organization achieve its strategic financial goals and do that by working effectively with others inside of the organization and outside. And although all three of these elements of leadership are important, when it comes to moving up in organizations, they aren't equally important. So pay attention to the green box as I move forward. In seeking and identifying employees with high potential, the potential to go to the top of organizations, the skills and competencies that relate to that green box are rated twice as heavily as those in the other two elements of leadership. These skills and competencies can be summarized as business, strategic, and financial acumen. In other words, this skill set has to do with understanding where the organization is going, what its strategy is, what financial targets it has in place, and understanding your role in moving the organization forward. This is that missing 33 percent of the career success equation for women, not because it's missing in our capabilities or abilities, but because it's missing in the advice that we're given. Here's what I mean by that. Five years ago, I was asked to moderate a panel of executives, and the topic for the evening was "What do you look for in high-potential employees?" So think about the three elements of leadership as I summarize for you what they told me. They said, "We look for people who are smart and hard working and committed and trustworthy and resilient." So which element of leadership does that relate to? Personal greatness. They said, "We look for employees who are great with our customers, who empower their teams, who negotiate effectively, who are able to manage conflict well, and are overall great communicators." Which element of leadership does that equate to? Engaging the greatness in others. And then they pretty much stopped. So I asked, "Well, what about people who understand your business, where it's going, and their role in taking it there? And what about people who are able to scan the external environment, identify risks and opportunities, make strategy or make strategic recommendations? And what about people who are able to look at the financials of your business, understand the story that the financials tell, and either take appropriate action or make appropriate recommendations?" And to a man, they said, "That's a given." So I turned to the audience of 150 women and I asked, "How many of you have ever been told that the door-opener for career advancement is your business, strategic and financial acumen, and that all the other important stuff is what differentiates you in the talent pool?" Three women raised their hand, and I've asked this question of women all around the globe in the five years since, and the percentage is never much different. So this is obvious, right? But how can it be? Well, there are primarily three reasons that there's this missing 33 percent in the career success advice given to women? When organizations direct women toward resources that focus on the conventional advice that we've been hearing for over 40 years, there's a notable absence of advice that relates to business, strategic and financial acumen. Much of the advice is emphasizing personal actions that we need to take, like become more assertive, become more confident, develop your personal brand, things that Tonya's been working on, and advice about working with other people, things like learn to self-promote, get a mentor, enhance your network, and virtually nothing said about the importance of business, strategic and financial acumen. This doesn't mean that this advice is unimportant. What it means is that this is advice that's absolutely essential for breaking through from career start to middle management, but it's not the advice that gets women to break through from the middle, where we're 50 percent, to senior and executive positions. And this is why conventional advice to women in 40 years hasn't closed the gender gap at the top and won't close it. Now, the second reason relates to Tonya's comments about having had excellent performance evals, great feedback from her teams, and having taken every management training program she can lay her hands on. So you would think that she's getting messages from her organization through the talent development systems and performance management systems that let her know how important it is to develop business, strategic and financial acumen, but here again, that green square is quite small. On average, talent and performance management systems in the organizations that I've worked with focus three to one on the other two elements of leadership compared to the importance of business, strategic and financial acumen, which is why typical talent and performance systems haven't closed and won't close the gender gap at the top. Now, Tonya also talked about working with a mentor, and this is really important to talk about, because if organizations, talent and performance systems aren't giving people in general information about the importance of business, strategic and financial acumen, how are men getting to the top? Well, there are primarily two ways. One is because of the positions they're guided into, and the other is because of informal mentoring and sponsorship. So what's women's experience as it relates to mentoring? Well, this comment from an executive that I worked with recently illustrates that experience. He was very proud of the fact that last year, he had two protégés: a man and a woman. And he said, "I helped the woman build confidence, I helped the man learn the business, and I didn't realize that I was treating them any differently." And he was sincere about that. So what this illustrates is that as managers, whether we're women or men, we have mindsets about women and men, about careers in leadership, and these unexamined mindsets won't close the gender gap at the top. So how do we take this idea of the missing 33 percent and turn it into action? Well, for women, the answer is obvious: we have to begin to focus more on developing and demonstrating the skills we have that show that we're people who understand our businesses, where they're headed, and our role in taking it there. That's what enables that breakthrough from middle management to leadership at the top. But you don't have to be a middle manager to do this. One young scientist that works in a biotech firm used her insight about the missing 33 percent to weave financial impact data into a project update she did and got tremendous positive feedback from the managers in the room. So we don't want to put 100 percent of the responsibility on women's shoulders, nor would it be wise to do so, and here's why: In order for companies to achieve their strategic financial goals, executives understand that they have to have everyone pulling in the same direction. In other words, the term we use in business is, we have to have strategic alignment. And executives know this very well, and yet only 37 percent, according to a recent Conference Board report, believe that they have that strategic alignment in place. So for 63 percent of organizations, achieving their strategic financial goals is questionable. And if you think about what I've just shared, that you have situations where at least 50 percent of your middle managers haven't received clear messaging that they have to become focused on the business, where it's headed, and their role in taking it there, it's not surprising that that percentage of executives who are confident about alignment is so low, which is why there are other people who have a role to play in this. It's important for directors on boards to expect from their executives proportional pools of women when they sit down once a year for their succession discussions. Why? Because if they aren't seeing that, it could be a red flag that their organization isn't as aligned as it could potentially be. It's important for CEOs to also expect these proportional pools, and if they hear comments like, "Well, she doesn't have enough business experience," ask the question, "What are we going to do about that?" It's important for H.R. executives to make sure that the missing 33 percent is appropriately emphasized, and it's important for women and men who are in management positions to examine the mindsets we hold about women and men, about careers and success, to make sure we are creating a level playing field for everybody. So let me close with the latest chapter in Tonya's story. Tonya emailed me two months ago, and she said that she had been interviewed for a new position, and during the interview, they probed about her business acumen and her strategic insights into the industry, and she said that she was so happy to report that now she has a new position reporting directly to the chief information officer at her company. So for some of you, the missing 33 percent is an idea for you to put into action, and I hope that for all of you, you will see it as an idea worth spreading in order to help organizations be more effective, to help women create careers that soar, and to help close the gender gap at the top. Thank you. (Applause) |
Where to train the world's doctors? Cuba. | {0: 'American journalist and Havana resident Gail Reed spotlights a Cuban medical school that trains doctors from low-income countries who pledge to serve communities like their own.'} | TEDMED 2014 | I want to tell you how 20,000 remarkable young people from over 100 countries ended up in Cuba and are transforming health in their communities. Ninety percent of them would never have left home at all if it weren't for a scholarship to study medicine in Cuba and a commitment to go back to places like the ones they'd come from — remote farmlands, mountains, ghettos — to become doctors for people like themselves, to walk the walk. Havana's Latin American Medical School: It's the largest medical school in the world, graduating 23,000 young doctors since its first class of 2005, with nearly 10,000 more in the pipeline. Its mission, to train physicians for the people who need them the most: the over one billion who have never seen a doctor, the people who live and die under every poverty line ever invented. Its students defy all norms. They're the school's biggest risk and also its best bet. They're recruited from the poorest, most broken places on our planet by a school that believes they can become not just the good but the excellent physicians their communities desperately need, that they will practice where most doctors don't, in places not only poor but oftentimes dangerous, carrying venom antidotes in their backpacks or navigating neighborhoods riddled by drugs, gangs and bullets, their home ground. The hope is that they will help transform access to care, the health picture in impoverished areas, and even the way medicine itself is learned and practiced, and that they will become pioneers in our global reach for universal health coverage, surely a tall order. Two big storms and this notion of "walk the walk" prompted creation of ELAM back in 1998. The Hurricanes Georges and Mitch had ripped through the Caribbean and Central America, leaving 30,000 dead and two and a half million homeless. Hundreds of Cuban doctors volunteered for disaster response, but when they got there, they found a bigger disaster: whole communities with no healthcare, doors bolted shut on rural hospitals for lack of staff, and just too many babies dying before their first birthday. What would happen when these Cuban doctors left? New doctors were needed to make care sustainable, but where would they come from? Where would they train? In Havana, the campus of a former naval academy was turned over to the Cuban Health Ministry to become the Latin American Medical School, ELAM. Tuition, room and board, and a small stipend were offered to hundreds of students from the countries hardest hit by the storms. As a journalist in Havana, I watched the first 97 Nicaraguans arrive in March 1999, settling into dorms barely refurbished and helping their professors not only sweep out the classrooms but move in the desks and the chairs and the microscopes. Over the next few years, governments throughout the Americas requested scholarships for their own students, and the Congressional Black Caucus asked for and received hundreds of scholarships for young people from the USA. Today, among the 23,000 are graduates from 83 countries in the Americas, Africa and Asia, and enrollment has grown to 123 nations. More than half the students are young women. They come from 100 ethnic groups, speak 50 different languages. WHO Director Margaret Chan said, "For once, if you are poor, female, or from an indigenous population, you have a distinct advantage, an ethic that makes this medical school unique." Luther Castillo comes from San Pedro de Tocamacho on the Atlantic coast of Honduras. There's no running water, no electricity there, and to reach the village, you have to walk for hours or take your chances in a pickup truck like I did skirting the waves of the Atlantic. Luther was one of 40 Tocamacho children who started grammar school, the sons and daughters of a black indigenous people known as the Garífuna, 20 percent of the Honduran population. The nearest healthcare was fatal miles away. Luther had to walk three hours every day to middle school. Only 17 made that trip. Only five went on to high school, and only one to university: Luther, to ELAM, among the first crop of Garífuna graduates. Just two Garífuna doctors had preceded them in all of Honduran history. Now there are 69, thanks to ELAM. Big problems need big solutions, sparked by big ideas, imagination and audacity, but also solutions that work. ELAM's faculty had no handy evidence base to guide them, so they learned the hard way, by doing and correcting course as they went. Even the brightest students from these poor communities weren't academically prepared for six years of medical training, so a bridging course was set up in sciences. Then came language: these were Mapuche, Quechuas, Guaraní, Garífuna, indigenous peoples who learned Spanish as a second language, or Haitians who spoke Creole. So Spanish became part of the pre-pre-med curriculum. Even so, in Cuba, the music, the food, the smells, just about everything was different, so faculty became family, ELAM home. Religions ranged from indigenous beliefs to Yoruba, Muslim and Christian evangelical. Embracing diversity became a way of life. Why have so many countries asked for these scholarships? First, they just don't have enough doctors, and where they do, their distribution is skewed against the poor, because our global health crisis is fed by a crisis in human resources. We are short four to seven million health workers just to meet basic needs, and the problem is everywhere. Doctors are concentrated in the cities, where only half the world's people live, and within cities, not in the shantytowns or South L.A. Here in the United States, where we have healthcare reform, we don't have the professionals we need. By 2020, we will be short 45,000 primary care physicians. And we're also part of the problem. The United States is the number one importer of doctors from developing countries. The second reasons students flock to Cuba is the island's own health report card, relying on strong primary care. A commission from The Lancet rates Cuba among the best performing middle-income countries in health. Save the Children ranks Cuba the best country in Latin America to become a mother. Cuba has similar life expectancy and lower infant mortality than the United States, with fewer disparities, while spending per person one 20th of what we do on health here in the USA. Academically, ELAM is tough, but 80 percent of its students graduate. The subjects are familiar — basic and clinical sciences — but there are major differences. First, training has moved out of the ivory tower and into clinic classrooms and neighborhoods, the kinds of places most of these grads will practice. Sure, they have lectures and hospital rotations too, but community-based learning starts on day one. Second, students treat the whole patient, mind and body, in the context of their families, their communities and their culture. Third, they learn public health: to assess their patients' drinking water, housing, social and economic conditions. Fourth, they are taught that a good patient interview and a thorough clinical exam provide most of the clues for diagnosis, saving costly technology for confirmation. And finally, they're taught over and over again the importance of prevention, especially as chronic diseases cripple health systems worldwide. Such an in-service learning also comes with a team approach, as much how to work in teams as how to lead them, with a dose of humility. Upon graduation, these doctors share their knowledge with nurse's aids, midwives, community health workers, to help them become better at what they do, not to replace them, to work with shamans and traditional healers. ELAM's graduates: Are they proving this audacious experiment right? Dozens of projects give us an inkling of what they're capable of doing. Take the Garífuna grads. They not only went to work back home, but they organized their communities to build Honduras' first indigenous hospital. With an architect's help, residents literally raised it from the ground up. The first patients walked through the doors in December 2007, and since then, the hospital has received nearly one million patient visits. And government is paying attention, upholding the hospital as a model of rural public health for Honduras. ELAM's graduates are smart, strong and also dedicated. Haiti, January 2010. The pain. People buried under 30 million tons of rubble. Overwhelming. Three hundred forty Cuban doctors were already on the ground long term. More were on their way. Many more were needed. At ELAM, students worked round the clock to contact 2,000 graduates. As a result, hundreds arrived in Haiti, 27 countries' worth, from Mali in the Sahara to St. Lucia, Bolivia, Chile and the USA. They spoke easily to each other in Spanish and listened to their patients in Creole thanks to Haitian medical students flown in from ELAM in Cuba. Many stayed for months, even through the cholera epidemic. Hundreds of Haitian graduates had to pick up the pieces, overcome their own heartbreak, and then pick up the burden of building a new public health system for Haiti. Today, with aid of organizations and governments from Norway to Cuba to Brazil, dozens of new health centers have been built, staffed, and in 35 cases, headed by ELAM graduates. Yet the Haitian story also illustrates some of the bigger problems faced in many countries. Take a look: 748 Haitian graduates by 2012, when cholera struck, nearly half working in the public health sector but one quarter unemployed, and 110 had left Haiti altogether. So in the best case scenarios, these graduates are staffing and thus strengthening public health systems, where often they're the only doctors around. In the worst cases, there are simply not enough jobs in the public health sector, where most poor people are treated, not enough political will, not enough resources, not enough anything — just too many patients with no care. The grads face pressure from their families too, desperate to make ends meet, so when there are no public sector jobs, these new MDs decamp into private practice, or go abroad to send money home. Worst of all, in some countries, medical societies influence accreditation bodies not to honor the ELAM degree, fearful these grads will take their jobs or reduce their patient loads and income. It's not a question of competencies. Here in the USA, the California Medical Board accredited the school after rigorous inspection, and the new physicians are making good on Cuba's big bet, passing their boards and accepted into highly respected residencies from New York to Chicago to New Mexico. Two hundred strong, they're coming back to the United States energized, and also dissatisfied. As one grad put it, in Cuba, "We are trained to provide quality care with minimal resources, so when I see all the resources we have here, and you tell me that's not possible, I know it's not true. Not only have I seen it work, I've done the work." ELAM's graduates, some from right here in D.C. and Baltimore, have come from the poorest of the poor to offer health, education and a voice to their communities. They've done the heavy lifting. Now we need to do our part to support the 23,000 and counting, All of us — foundations, residency directors, press, entrepreneurs, policymakers, people — need to step up. We need to do much more globally to give these new doctors the opportunity to prove their mettle. They need to be able to take their countries' licensing exams. They need jobs in the public health sector or in nonprofit health centers to put their training and commitment to work. They need the chance to be the doctors their patients need. To move forward, we may have to find our way back to that pediatrician who would knock on my family's door on the South Side of Chicago when I was a kid, who made house calls, who was a public servant. These aren't such new ideas of what medicine should be. What's new is the scaling up and the faces of the doctors themselves: an ELAM graduate is more likely to be a she than a he; In the Amazon, Peru or Guatemala, an indigenous doctor; in the USA, a doctor of color who speaks fluent Spanish. She is well trained, can be counted on, and shares the face and culture of her patients, and she deserves our support surely, because whether by subway, mule, or canoe, she is teaching us to walk the walk. Thank you. (Applause) |
A neural portrait of the human mind | {0: 'Using fMRI imaging to watch the human brain at work, Nancy Kanwisher’s team has discovered cortical regions responsible for some surprisingly specific elements of cognition.'} | TED2014 | Today I want to tell you about a project being carried out by scientists all over the world to paint a neural portrait of the human mind. And the central idea of this work is that the human mind and brain is not a single, general-purpose processor, but a collection of highly specialized components, each solving a different specific problem, and yet collectively making up who we are as human beings and thinkers. To give you a feel for this idea, imagine the following scenario: You walk into your child's day care center. As usual, there's a dozen kids there waiting to get picked up, but this time, the children's faces look weirdly similar, and you can't figure out which child is yours. Do you need new glasses? Are you losing your mind? You run through a quick mental checklist. No, you seem to be thinking clearly, and your vision is perfectly sharp. And everything looks normal except the children's faces. You can see the faces, but they don't look distinctive, and none of them looks familiar, and it's only by spotting an orange hair ribbon that you find your daughter. This sudden loss of the ability to recognize faces actually happens to people. It's called prosopagnosia, and it results from damage to a particular part of the brain. The striking thing about it is that only face recognition is impaired; everything else is just fine. Prosopagnosia is one of many surprisingly specific mental deficits that can happen after brain damage. These syndromes collectively have suggested for a long time that the mind is divvied up into distinct components, but the effort to discover those components has jumped to warp speed with the invention of brain imaging technology, especially MRI. So MRI enables you to see internal anatomy at high resolution, so I'm going to show you in a second a set of MRI cross-sectional images through a familiar object, and we're going to fly through them and you're going to try to figure out what the object is. Here we go. It's not that easy. It's an artichoke. Okay, let's try another one, starting from the bottom and going through the top. Broccoli! It's a head of broccoli. Isn't it beautiful? I love that. Okay, here's another one. It's a brain, of course. In fact, it's my brain. We're going through slices through my head like that. That's my nose over on the right, and now we're going over here, right there. So this picture's nice, if I do say so myself, but it shows only anatomy. The really cool advance with functional imaging happened when scientists figured out how to make pictures that show not just anatomy but activity, that is, where neurons are firing. So here's how this works. Brains are like muscles. When they get active, they need increased blood flow to supply that activity, and lucky for us, blood flow control to the brain is local, so if a bunch of neurons, say, right there get active and start firing, then blood flow increases just right there. So functional MRI picks up on that blood flow increase, producing a higher MRI response where neural activity goes up. So to give you a concrete feel for how a functional MRI experiment goes and what you can learn from it and what you can't, let me describe one of the first studies I ever did. We wanted to know if there was a special part of the brain for recognizing faces, and there was already reason to think there might be such a thing based on this phenomenon of prosopagnosia that I described a moment ago, but nobody had ever seen that part of the brain in a normal person, so we set out to look for it. So I was the first subject. I went into the scanner, I lay on my back, I held my head as still as I could while staring at pictures of faces like these and objects like these and faces and objects for hours. So as somebody who has pretty close to the world record of total number of hours spent inside an MRI scanner, I can tell you that one of the skills that's really important for MRI research is bladder control. (Laughter) When I got out of the scanner, I did a quick analysis of the data, looking for any parts of my brain that produced a higher response when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects, and here's what I saw. Now this image looks just awful by today's standards, but at the time I thought it was beautiful. What it shows is that region right there, that little blob, it's about the size of an olive and it's on the bottom surface of my brain about an inch straight in from right there. And what that part of my brain is doing is producing a higher MRI response, that is, higher neural activity, when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects. So that's pretty cool, but how do we know this isn't a fluke? Well, the easiest way is to just do the experiment again. So I got back in the scanner, I looked at more faces and I looked at more objects and I got a similar blob, and then I did it again and I did it again and again and again, and around about then I decided to believe it was for real. But still, maybe this is something weird about my brain and no one else has one of these things in there, so to find out, we scanned a bunch of other people and found that pretty much everyone has that little face-processing region in a similar neighborhood of the brain. So the next question was, what does this thing really do? Is it really specialized just for face recognition? Well, maybe not, right? Maybe it responds not only to faces but to any body part. Maybe it responds to anything human or anything alive or anything round. The only way to be really sure that that region is specialized for face recognition is to rule out all of those hypotheses. So we spent much of the next couple of years scanning subjects while they looked at lots of different kinds of images, and we showed that that part of the brain responds strongly when you look at any images that are faces of any kind, and it responds much less strongly to any image you show that isn't a face, like some of these. So have we finally nailed the case that this region is necessary for face recognition? No, we haven't. Brain imaging can never tell you if a region is necessary for anything. All you can do with brain imaging is watch regions turn on and off as people think different thoughts. To tell if a part of the brain is necessary for a mental function, you need to mess with it and see what happens, and normally we don't get to do that. But an amazing opportunity came about very recently when a couple of colleagues of mine tested this man who has epilepsy and who is shown here in his hospital bed where he's just had electrodes placed on the surface of his brain to identify the source of his seizures. So it turned out by total chance that two of the electrodes happened to be right on top of his face area. So with the patient's consent, the doctors asked him what happened when they electrically stimulated that part of his brain. Now, the patient doesn't know where those electrodes are, and he's never heard of the face area. So let's watch what happens. It's going to start with a control condition that will say "Sham" nearly invisibly in red in the lower left, when no current is delivered, and you'll hear the neurologist speaking to the patient first. So let's watch. (Video) Neurologist: Okay, just look at my face and tell me what happens when I do this. All right? Patient: Okay. Neurologist: One, two, three. Patient: Nothing. Neurologist: Nothing? Okay. I'm going to do it one more time. Look at my face. One, two, three. Patient: You just turned into somebody else. Your face metamorphosed. Your nose got saggy, it went to the left. You almost looked like somebody I'd seen before, but somebody different. That was a trip. (Laughter) Nancy Kanwisher: So this experiment — (Applause) — this experiment finally nails the case that this region of the brain is not only selectively responsive to faces but causally involved in face perception. So I went through all of these details about the face region to show you what it takes to really establish that a part of the brain is selectively involved in a specific mental process. Next, I'll go through much more quickly some of the other specialized regions of the brain that we and others have found. So to do this, I've spent a lot of time in the scanner over the last month so I can show you these things in my brain. So let's get started. Here's my right hemisphere. So we're oriented like that. You're looking at my head this way. Imagine taking the skull off and looking at the surface of the brain like that. Okay, now as you can see, the surface of the brain is all folded up. So that's not good. Stuff could be hidden in there. We want to see the whole thing, so let's inflate it so we can see the whole thing. Next, let's find that face area I've been talking about that responds to images like these. To see that, let's turn the brain around and look on the inside surface on the bottom, and there it is, that's my face area. Just to the right of that is another region that is shown in purple that responds when you process color information, and near those regions are other regions that are involved in perceiving places, like right now, I'm seeing this layout of space around me and these regions in green right there are really active. There's another one out on the outside surface again where there's a couple more face regions as well. Also in this vicinity is a region that's selectively involved in processing visual motion, like these moving dots here, and that's in yellow at the bottom of the brain, and near that is a region that responds when you look at images of bodies and body parts like these, and that region is shown in lime green at the bottom of the brain. Now all these regions I've shown you so far are involved in specific aspects of visual perception. Do we also have specialized brain regions for other senses, like hearing? Yes, we do. So if we turn the brain around a little bit, here's a region in dark blue that we reported just a couple of months ago, and this region responds strongly when you hear sounds with pitch, like these. (Sirens) (Cello music) (Doorbell) In contrast, that same region does not respond strongly when you hear perfectly familiar sounds that don't have a clear pitch, like these. (Chomping) (Drum roll) (Toilet flushing) Okay. Next to the pitch region is another set of regions that are selectively responsive when you hear the sounds of speech. Okay, now let's look at these same regions. In my left hemisphere, there's a similar arrangement — not identical, but similar — and most of the same regions are in here, albeit sometimes different in size. Now, everything I've shown you so far are regions that are involved in different aspects of perception, vision and hearing. Do we also have specialized brain regions for really fancy, complicated mental processes? Yes, we do. So here in pink are my language regions. So it's been known for a very long time that that general vicinity of the brain is involved in processing language, but we showed very recently that these pink regions respond extremely selectively. They respond when you understand the meaning of a sentence, but not when you do other complex mental things, like mental arithmetic or holding information in memory or appreciating the complex structure in a piece of music. The most amazing region that's been found yet is this one right here in turquoise. This region responds when you think about what another person is thinking. So that may seem crazy, but actually, we humans do this all the time. You're doing this when you realize that your partner is going to be worried if you don't call home to say you're running late. I'm doing this with that region of my brain right now when I realize that you guys are probably now wondering about all that gray, uncharted territory in the brain, and what's up with that? Well, I'm wondering about that too, and we're running a bunch of experiments in my lab right now to try to find a number of other possible specializations in the brain for other very specific mental functions. But importantly, I don't think we have specializations in the brain for every important mental function, even mental functions that may be critical for survival. In fact, a few years ago, there was a scientist in my lab who became quite convinced that he'd found a brain region for detecting food, and it responded really strongly in the scanner when people looked at images like this. And further, he found a similar response in more or less the same location in 10 out of 12 subjects. So he was pretty stoked, and he was running around the lab telling everyone that he was going to go on "Oprah" with his big discovery. But then he devised the critical test: He showed subjects images of food like this and compared them to images with very similar color and shape, but that weren't food, like these. And his region responded the same to both sets of images. So it wasn't a food area, it was just a region that liked colors and shapes. So much for "Oprah." But then the question, of course, is, how do we process all this other stuff that we don't have specialized brain regions for? Well, I think the answer is that in addition to these highly specialized components that I've been describing, we also have a lot of very general- purpose machinery in our heads that enables us to tackle whatever problem comes along. In fact, we've shown recently that these regions here in white respond whenever you do any difficult mental task at all — well, of the seven that we've tested. So each of the brain regions that I've described to you today is present in approximately the same location in every normal subject. I could take any of you, pop you in the scanner, and find each of those regions in your brain, and it would look a lot like my brain, although the regions would be slightly different in their exact location and in their size. What's important to me about this work is not the particular locations of these brain regions, but the simple fact that we have selective, specific components of mind and brain in the first place. I mean, it could have been otherwise. The brain could have been a single, general-purpose processor, more like a kitchen knife than a Swiss Army knife. Instead, what brain imaging has delivered is this rich and interesting picture of the human mind. So we have this picture of very general-purpose machinery in our heads in addition to this surprising array of very specialized components. It's early days in this enterprise. We've painted only the first brushstrokes in our neural portrait of the human mind. The most fundamental questions remain unanswered. So for example, what does each of these regions do exactly? Why do we need three face areas and three place areas, and what's the division of labor between them? Second, how are all these things connected in the brain? With diffusion imaging, you can trace bundles of neurons that connect to different parts of the brain, and with this method shown here, you can trace the connections of individual neurons in the brain, potentially someday giving us a wiring diagram of the entire human brain. Third, how does all of this very systematic structure get built, both over development in childhood and over the evolution of our species? To address questions like that, scientists are now scanning other species of animals, and they're also scanning human infants. Many people justify the high cost of neuroscience research by pointing out that it may help us someday to treat brain disorders like Alzheimer's and autism. That's a hugely important goal, and I'd be thrilled if any of my work contributed to it, but fixing things that are broken in the world is not the only thing that's worth doing. The effort to understand the human mind and brain is worthwhile even if it never led to the treatment of a single disease. What could be more thrilling than to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underlie human experience, to understand, in essence, who we are? This is, I think, the greatest scientific quest of all time. (Applause) |
Why I take the piano on the road ... and in the air | {0: 'Daria van den Bercken has played piano with major Dutch orchestras, and performed many a recital in her country’s famed concert halls. But her larger vision is to bring classical music to the masses.'} | TEDSalon Berlin 2014 | Recently, I flew over a crowd of thousands of people in Brazil playing music by George Frideric Handel. I also drove along the streets of Amsterdam, again playing music by this same composer. Let's take a look. (Music: George Frideric Handel, "Allegro." Performed by Daria van den Bercken.) (Video) Daria van den Bercken: I live there on the third floor. (In Dutch) I live there on the corner. I actually live there, around the corner. and you'd be really welcome. Man: (In Dutch) Does that sound like fun? Child: (In Dutch) Yes! [(In Dutch) "Handel house concert"] (Applause) Daria van den Bercken: All this was a real magical experience for hundreds of reasons. Now you may ask, why have I done these things? They're not really typical for a musician's day-to-day life. Well, I did it because I fell in love with the music and I wanted to share it with as many people as possible. It started a couple of years ago. I was sitting at home on the couch with the flu and browsing the Internet a little, when I found out that Handel had written works for the keyboard. Well, I was surprised. I did not know this. So I downloaded the sheet music and started playing. And what happened next was that I entered this state of pure, unprejudiced amazement. It was an experience of being totally in awe of the music, and I had not felt that in a long time. It might be easier to relate to this when you hear it. The first piece that I played through started like this. (Music) Well this sounds very melancholic, doesn't it? And I turned the page and what came next was this. (Music) Well, this sounds very energetic, doesn't it? So within a couple of minutes, and the piece isn't even finished yet, I experienced two very contrasting characters: beautiful melancholy and sheer energy. And I consider these two elements to be vital human expressions. And the purity of the music makes you hear it very effectively. I've given a lot of children's concerts for children of seven and eight years old, and whatever I play, whether it's Bach, Beethoven, even Stockhausen, or some jazzy music, they are open to hear it, really willing to listen, and they are comfortable doing so. And when classes come in with children who are just a few years older, 11, 12, I felt that I sometimes already had trouble in reaching them like that. The complexity of the music does become an issue, and actually the opinions of others — parents, friends, media — they start to count. But the young ones, they don't question their own opinion. They are in this constant state of wonder, and I do firmly believe that we can keep listening like these seven-year-old children, even when growing up. And that is why I have played not only in the concert hall but also on the street, online, in the air: to feel that state of wonder, to truly listen, and to listen without prejudice. And I would like to invite you to do so now. (Music: George Frideric Handel, "Chaconne in G Major." Performed by Daria van den Bercken.) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
New thoughts on capital in the twenty-first century | {0: 'Thomas Piketty is an economist and professor at the Paris School of Economics. His 2014 book, "Capital in the Twenty-first Century," caused a sensation upon publication.'} | TEDSalon Berlin 2014 | It's very nice to be here tonight. So I've been working on the history of income and wealth distribution for the past 15 years, and one of the interesting lessons coming from this historical evidence is indeed that, in the long run, there is a tendency for the rate of return of capital to exceed the economy's growth rate, and this tends to lead to high concentration of wealth. Not infinite concentration of wealth, but the higher the gap between r and g, the higher the level of inequality of wealth towards which society tends to converge. So this is a key force that I'm going to talk about today, but let me say right away that this is not the only important force in the dynamics of income and wealth distribution, and there are many other forces that play an important role in the long-run dynamics of income and wealth distribution. Also there is a lot of data that still needs to be collected. We know a little bit more today than we used to know, but we still know too little, and certainly there are many different processes — economic, social, political — that need to be studied more. And so I'm going to focus today on this simple force, but that doesn't mean that other important forces do not exist. So most of the data I'm going to present comes from this database that's available online: the World Top Incomes Database. So this is the largest existing historical database on inequality, and this comes from the effort of over 30 scholars from several dozen countries. So let me show you a couple of facts coming from this database, and then we'll return to r bigger than g. So fact number one is that there has been a big reversal in the ordering of income inequality between the United States and Europe over the past century. So back in 1900, 1910, income inequality was actually much higher in Europe than in the United States, whereas today, it is a lot higher in the United States. So let me be very clear: The main explanation for this is not r bigger than g. It has more to do with changing supply and demand for skill, the race between education and technology, globalization, probably more unequal access to skills in the U.S., where you have very good, very top universities but where the bottom part of the educational system is not as good, so very unequal access to skills, and also an unprecedented rise of top managerial compensation of the United States, which is difficult to account for just on the basis of education. So there is more going on here, but I'm not going to talk too much about this today, because I want to focus on wealth inequality. So let me just show you a very simple indicator about the income inequality part. So this is the share of total income going to the top 10 percent. So you can see that one century ago, it was between 45 and 50 percent in Europe and a little bit above 40 percent in the U.S., so there was more inequality in Europe. Then there was a sharp decline during the first half of the 20th century, and in the recent decade, you can see that the U.S. has become more unequal than Europe, and this is the first fact I just talked about. Now, the second fact is more about wealth inequality, and here the central fact is that wealth inequality is always a lot higher than income inequality, and also that wealth inequality, although it has also increased in recent decades, is still less extreme today than what it was a century ago, although the total quantity of wealth relative to income has now recovered from the very large shocks caused by World War I, the Great Depression, World War II. So let me show you two graphs illustrating fact number two and fact number three. So first, if you look at the level of wealth inequality, this is the share of total wealth going to the top 10 percent of wealth holders, so you can see the same kind of reversal between the U.S. and Europe that we had before for income inequality. So wealth concentration was higher in Europe than in the U.S. a century ago, and now it is the opposite. But you can also show two things: First, the general level of wealth inequality is always higher than income inequality. So remember, for income inequality, the share going to the top 10 percent was between 30 and 50 percent of total income, whereas for wealth, the share is always between 60 and 90 percent. Okay, so that's fact number one, and that's very important for what follows. Wealth concentration is always a lot higher than income concentration. Fact number two is that the rise in wealth inequality in recent decades is still not enough to get us back to 1910. So the big difference today, wealth inequality is still very large, with 60, 70 percent of total wealth for the top 10, but the good news is that it's actually better than one century ago, where you had 90 percent in Europe going to the top 10. So today what you have is what I call the middle 40 percent, the people who are not in the top 10 and who are not in the bottom 50, and what you can view as the wealth middle class that owns 20 to 30 percent of total wealth, national wealth, whereas they used to be poor, a century ago, when there was basically no wealth middle class. So this is an important change, and it's interesting to see that wealth inequality has not fully recovered to pre-World War I levels, although the total quantity of wealth has recovered. Okay? So this is the total value of wealth relative to income, and you can see that in particular in Europe, we are almost back to the pre-World War I level. So there are really two different parts of the story here. One has to do with the total quantity of wealth that we accumulate, and there is nothing bad per se, of course, in accumulating a lot of wealth, and in particular if it is more diffuse and less concentrated. So what we really want to focus on is the long-run evolution of wealth inequality, and what's going to happen in the future. How can we account for the fact that until World War I, wealth inequality was so high and, if anything, was rising to even higher levels, and how can we think about the future? So let me come to some of the explanations and speculations about the future. Let me first say that probably the best model to explain why wealth is so much more concentrated than income is a dynamic, dynastic model where individuals have a long horizon and accumulate wealth for all sorts of reasons. If people were accumulating wealth only for life cycle reasons, you know, to be able to consume when they are old, then the level of wealth inequality should be more or less in line with the level of income inequality. But it will be very difficult to explain why you have so much more wealth inequality than income inequality with a pure life cycle model, so you need a story where people also care about wealth accumulation for other reasons. So typically, they want to transmit wealth to the next generation, to their children, or sometimes they want to accumulate wealth because of the prestige, the power that goes with wealth. So there must be other reasons for accumulating wealth than just life cycle to explain what we see in the data. Now, in a large class of dynamic models of wealth accumulation with such dynastic motive for accumulating wealth, you will have all sorts of random, multiplicative shocks. So for instance, some families have a very large number of children, so the wealth will be divided. Some families have fewer children. You also have shocks to rates of return. Some families make huge capital gains. Some made bad investments. So you will always have some mobility in the wealth process. Some people will move up, some people will move down. The important point is that, in any such model, for a given variance of such shocks, the equilibrium level of wealth inequality will be a steeply rising function of r minus g. And intuitively, the reason why the difference between the rate of return to wealth and the growth rate is important is that initial wealth inequalities will be amplified at a faster pace with a bigger r minus g. So take a simple example, with r equals five percent and g equals one percent, wealth holders only need to reinvest one fifth of their capital income to ensure that their wealth rises as fast as the size of the economy. So this makes it easier to build and perpetuate large fortunes because you can consume four fifths, assuming zero tax, and you can just reinvest one fifth. So of course some families will consume more than that, some will consume less, so there will be some mobility in the distribution, but on average, they only need to reinvest one fifth, so this allows high wealth inequalities to be sustained. Now, you should not be surprised by the statement that r can be bigger than g forever, because, in fact, this is what happened during most of the history of mankind. And this was in a way very obvious to everybody for a simple reason, which is that growth was close to zero percent during most of the history of mankind. Growth was maybe 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 percent, but very slow growth of population and output per capita, whereas the rate of return on capital of course was not zero percent. It was, for land assets, which was the traditional form of assets in preindustrial societies, it was typically five percent. Any reader of Jane Austen would know that. If you want an annual income of 1,000 pounds, you should have a capital value of 20,000 pounds so that five percent of 20,000 is 1,000. And in a way, this was the very foundation of society, because r bigger than g was what allowed holders of wealth and assets to live off their capital income and to do something else in life than just to care about their own survival. Now, one important conclusion of my historical research is that modern industrial growth did not change this basic fact as much as one might have expected. Of course, the growth rate following the Industrial Revolution rose, typically from zero to one to two percent, but at the same time, the rate of return to capital also rose so that the gap between the two did not really change. So during the 20th century, you had a very unique combination of events. First, a very low rate of return due to the 1914 and 1945 war shocks, destruction of wealth, inflation, bankruptcy during the Great Depression, and all of this reduced the private rate of return to wealth to unusually low levels between 1914 and 1945. And then, in the postwar period, you had unusually high growth rate, partly due to the reconstruction. You know, in Germany, in France, in Japan, you had five percent growth rate between 1950 and 1980 largely due to reconstruction, and also due to very large demographic growth, the Baby Boom Cohort effect. Now, apparently that's not going to last for very long, or at least the population growth is supposed to decline in the future, and the best projections we have is that the long-run growth is going to be closer to one to two percent rather than four to five percent. So if you look at this, these are the best estimates we have of world GDP growth and rate of return on capital, average rates of return on capital, so you can see that during most of the history of mankind, the growth rate was very small, much lower than the rate of return, and then during the 20th century, it is really the population growth, very high in the postwar period, and the reconstruction process that brought growth to a smaller gap with the rate of return. Here I use the United Nations population projections, so of course they are uncertain. It could be that we all start having a lot of children in the future, and the growth rates are going to be higher, but from now on, these are the best projections we have, and this will make global growth decline and the gap between the rate of return go up. Now, the other unusual event during the 20th century was, as I said, destruction, taxation of capital, so this is the pre-tax rate of return. This is the after-tax rate of return, and after destruction, and this is what brought the average rate of return after tax, after destruction, below the growth rate during a long time period. But without the destruction, without the taxation, this would not have happened. So let me say that the balance between returns on capital and growth depends on many different factors that are very difficult to predict: technology and the development of capital-intensive techniques. So right now, the most capital-intensive sectors in the economy are the real estate sector, housing, the energy sector, but it could be in the future that we have a lot more robots in a number of sectors and that this would be a bigger share of the total capital stock that it is today. Well, we are very far from this, and from now, what's going on in the real estate sector, the energy sector, is much more important for the total capital stock and capital share. The other important issue is that there are scale effects in portfolio management, together with financial complexity, financial deregulation, that make it easier to get higher rates of return for a large portfolio, and this seems to be particularly strong for billionaires, large capital endowments. Just to give you one example, this comes from the Forbes billionaire rankings over the 1987-2013 period, and you can see the very top wealth holders have been going up at six, seven percent per year in real terms above inflation, whereas average income in the world, average wealth in the world, have increased at only two percent per year. And you find the same for large university endowments — the bigger the initial endowments, the bigger the rate of return. Now, what could be done? The first thing is that I think we need more financial transparency. We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information. We need a global registry of financial assets, more coordination on wealth taxation, and even wealth tax with a small tax rate will be a way to produce information so that then we can adapt our policies to whatever we observe. And to some extent, the fight against tax havens and automatic transmission of information is pushing us in this direction. Now, there are other ways to redistribute wealth, which it can be tempting to use. Inflation: it's much easier to print money than to write a tax code, so that's very tempting, but sometimes you don't know what you do with the money. This is a problem. Expropriation is very tempting. Just when you feel some people get too wealthy, you just expropriate them. But this is not a very efficient way to organize a regulation of wealth dynamics. So war is an even less efficient way, so I tend to prefer progressive taxation, but of course, history — (Laughter) — history will invent its own best ways, and it will probably involve a combination of all of these. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thomas Piketty. Thank you. Thomas, I want to ask you two or three questions, because it's impressive how you're in command of your data, of course, but basically what you suggest is growing wealth concentration is kind of a natural tendency of capitalism, and if we leave it to its own devices, it may threaten the system itself, so you're suggesting that we need to act to implement policies that redistribute wealth, including the ones we just saw: progressive taxation, etc. In the current political context, how realistic are those? How likely do you think that it is that they will be implemented? Thomas Piketty: Well, you know, I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen. I think one century ago, many people would have said that progressive income taxation would never happen and then it happened. And even five years ago, many people would have said that bank secrecy will be with us forever in Switzerland, that Switzerland was too powerful for the rest of the world, and then suddenly it took a few U.S. sanctions against Swiss banks for a big change to happen, and now we are moving toward more financial transparency. So I think it's not that difficult to better coordinate politically. We are going to have a treaty with half of the world GDP around the table with the U.S. and the European Union, so if half of the world GDP is not enough to make progress on financial transparency and minimal tax for multinational corporate profits, what does it take? So I think these are not technical difficulties. I think we can make progress if we have a more pragmatic approach to these questions and we have the proper sanctions on those who benefit from financial opacity. BG: One of the arguments against your point of view is that economic inequality is not only a feature of capitalism but is actually one of its engines. So we take measures to lower inequality, and at the same time we lower growth, potentially. What do you answer to that? TP: Yeah, I think inequality is not a problem per se. I think inequality up to a point can actually be useful for innovation and growth. The problem is, it's a question of degree. When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility. And for instance, the kind of wealth concentrations that we had in the 19th century and pretty much until World War I in every European country was, I think, not useful for growth. This was destroyed by a combination of tragic events and policy changes, and this did not prevent growth from happening. And also, extreme inequality can be bad for our democratic institutions if it creates very unequal access to political voice, and the influence of private money in U.S. politics, I think, is a matter of concern right now. So we don't want to return to that kind of extreme, pre-World War I inequality. Having a decent share of the national wealth for the middle class is not bad for growth. It is actually useful both for equity and efficiency reasons. BG: I said at the beginning that your book has been criticized. Some of your data has been criticized. Some of your choice of data sets has been criticized. You have been accused of cherry-picking data to make your case. What do you answer to that? TP: Well, I answer that I am very happy that this book is stimulating debate. This is part of what it is intended for. Look, the reason why I put all the data online with all of the detailed computation is so that we can have an open and transparent debate about this. So I have responded point by point to every concern. Let me say that if I was to rewrite the book today, I would actually conclude that the rise in wealth inequality, particularly in the United States, has been actually higher than what I report in my book. There is a recent study by Saez and Zucman showing, with new data which I didn't have at the time of the book, that wealth concentration in the U.S. has risen even more than what I report. And there will be other data in the future. Some of it will go in different directions. Look, we put online almost every week new, updated series on the World Top Income Database and we will keep doing so in the future, in particular in emerging countries, and I welcome all of those who want to contribute to this data collection process. In fact, I certainly agree that there is not enough transparency about wealth dynamics, and a good way to have better data would be to have a wealth tax with a small tax rate to begin with so that we can all agree about this important evolution and adapt our policies to whatever we observe. So taxation is a source of knowledge, and that's what we need the most right now. BG: Thomas Piketty, merci beaucoup. Thank you. TP: Thank you. (Applause) |
Why thinking you're ugly is bad for you | {0: 'Meaghan Ramsey believes in business growth that stems from real social change.'} | TED@Unilever | This is my niece, Stella. She's just turned one and started to walk. And she's walking in that really cool way that one-year-olds do, a kind of teetering, my-body's-moving- too-fast-for-my-legs kind of way. It is absolutely gorgeous. And one of her favorite things to do at the moment is to stare at herself in the mirror. She absolutely loves her reflection. She giggles and squeals, and gives herself these big, wet kisses. It is beautiful. Apparently, all of her friends do this and my mom tells me that I used to do this, and it got me thinking: When did I stop doing this? When is it suddenly not okay to love the way that we look? Because apparently we don't. Ten thousand people every month google, "Am I ugly?" This is Faye. Faye is 13 and she lives in Denver. And like any teenager, she just wants to be liked and to fit in. It's Sunday night. She's getting ready for the week ahead at school. And she's slightly dreading it, and she's a bit confused because despite her mom telling her all the time that she's beautiful, every day at school, someone tells her that she's ugly. Because of the difference between what her mom tells her and what her friends at school, or her peers at school are telling her, she doesn't know who to believe. So, she takes a video of herself. She posts it to YouTube and she asks people to please leave a comment: "Am I pretty or am I ugly?" Well, so far, Faye has received over 13,000 comments. Some of them are so nasty, they don't bear thinking about. This is an average, healthy-looking teenage girl receiving this feedback at one of the most emotionally vulnerable times in her life. Thousands of people are posting videos like this, mostly teenage girls, reaching out in this way. But what's leading them to do this? Well, today's teenagers are rarely alone. They're under pressure to be online and available at all times, talking, messaging, liking, commenting, sharing, posting — it never ends. Never before have we been so connected, so continuously, so instantaneously, so young. And as one mom told me, it's like there's a party in their bedroom every night. There's simply no privacy. And the social pressures that go along with that are relentless. This always-on environment is training our kids to value themselves based on the number of likes they get and the types of comments that they receive. There's no separation between online and offline life. What's real or what isn't is really hard to tell the difference between. And it's also really hard to tell the difference between what's authentic and what's digitally manipulated. What's a highlight in someone's life versus what's normal in the context of everyday. And where are they looking to for inspiration? Well, you can see the kinds of images that are covering the newsfeeds of girls today. Size zero models still dominate our catwalks. Airbrushing is now routine. And trends like #thinspiration, #thighgap, #bikinibridge and #proana. For those who don't know, #proana means pro-anorexia. These trends are teamed with the stereotyping and flagrant objectification of women in today's popular culture. It is not hard to see what girls are benchmarking themselves against. But boys are not immune to this either. Aspiring to the chiseled jaw lines and ripped six packs of superhero-like sports stars and playboy music artists. But, what's the problem with all of this? Well, surely we want our kids to grow up as healthy, well balanced individuals. But in an image-obsessed culture, we are training our kids to spend more time and mental effort on their appearance at the expense of all of the other aspects of their identities. So, things like their relationships, the development of their physical abilities, and their studies and so on begin to suffer. Six out of 10 girls are now choosing not to do something because they don't think they look good enough. These are not trivial activities. These are fundamental activities to their development as humans and as contributors to society and to the workforce. Thirty-one percent, nearly one in three teenagers, are withdrawing from classroom debate. They're failing to engage in classroom debate because they don't want to draw attention to the way that they look. One in five are not showing up to class at all on days when they don't feel good about it. And when it comes to exams, if you don't think you look good enough, specifically if you don't think you are thin enough, you will score a lower grade point average than your peers who are not concerned with this. And this is consistent across Finland, the U.S. and China, and is true regardless of how much you actually weigh. So to be super clear, we're talking about the way you think you look, not how you actually look. Low body confidence is undermining academic achievement. But it's also damaging health. Teenagers with low body confidence do less physical activity, eat less fruits and vegetables, partake in more unhealthy weight control practices that can lead to eating disorders. They have lower self-esteem. They're more easily influenced by people around them and they're at greater risk of depression. And we think it's for all of these reasons that they take more risks with things like alcohol and drug use; crash dieting; cosmetic surgery; unprotected, earlier sex; and self-harm. The pursuit of the perfect body is putting pressure on our healthcare systems and costing our governments billions of dollars every year. And we don't grow out of it. Women who think they're overweight — again, regardless of whether they are or are not — have higher rates of absenteeism. Seventeen percent of women would not show up to a job interview on a day when they weren't feeling confident about the way that they look. Have a think about what this is doing to our economy. If we could overcome this, what that opportunity looks like. Unlocking this potential is in the interest of every single one of us. But how do we do that? Well, talking, on its own, only gets you so far. It's not enough by itself. If you actually want to make a difference, you have to do something. And we've learned there are three key ways: The first is we have to educate for body confidence. We have to help our teenagers develop strategies to overcome image-related pressures and build their self-esteem. Now, the good news is that there are many programs out there available to do this. The bad news is that most of them don't work. I was shocked to learn that many well-meaning programs are inadvertently actually making the situation worse. So we need to make damn sure that the programs that our kids are receiving are not only having a positive impact, but having a lasting impact as well. And the research shows that the best programs address six key areas: The first is the influence of family, friends and relationships. The second is media and celebrity culture, then how to handle teasing and bullying, the way we compete and compare with one another based on looks, talking about appearance — some people call this "body talk" or "fat talk" — and finally, the foundations of respecting and looking after yourself. These six things are crucial starting points for anyone serious about delivering body-confidence education that works. An education is critical, but tackling this problem is going to require each and everyone of us to step up and be better role models for the women and girls in our own lives. Challenging the status quo of how women are seen and talked about in our own circles. It is not okay that we judge the contribution of our politicians by their haircuts or the size of their breasts, or to infer that the determination or the success of an Olympian is down to her not being a looker. We need to start judging people by what they do, not what they look like. We can all start by taking responsibility for the types of pictures and comments that we post on our own social networks. We can compliment people based on their effort and their actions and not on their appearance. And let me ask you, when was the last time that you kissed a mirror? Ultimately, we need to work together as communities, as governments and as businesses to really change this culture of ours so that our kids grow up valuing their whole selves, valuing individuality, diversity, inclusion. We need to put the people that are making a real difference on our pedestals, making a difference in the real world. Giving them the airtime, because only then will we create a different world. A world where our kids are free to become the best versions of themselves, where the way they think they look never holds them back from being who they are or achieving what they want in life. Think about what this might mean for someone in your life. Who have you got in mind? Is it your wife? Your sister? Your daughter? Your niece? Your friend? It could just be the woman a couple of seats away from you today. What would it mean for her if she were freed from that voice of her inner critic, nagging her to have longer legs, thinner thighs, smaller stomach, shorter feet? What could it mean for her if we overcame this and unlocked her potential in that way? Right now, our culture's obsession with image is holding us all back. But let's show our kids the truth. Let's show them that the way you look is just one part of your identity and that the truth is we love them for who they are and what they do and how they make us feel. Let's build self-esteem into our school curriculums. Let's each and every one of us change the way we talk and compare ourselves to other people. And let's work together as communities, from grassroots to governments, so that the happy little one-year-olds of today become the confident changemakers of tomorrow. Let's do this. (Applause) |
How to upgrade democracy for the Internet era | {0: 'Using software to inspire public debate and enable voter engagement, Pia Mancini hopes to upgrade modern democracy in Argentina and beyond.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | I have the feeling that we can all agree that we're moving towards a new model of the state and society. But, we're absolutely clueless as to what this is or what it should be. It seems like we need to have a conversation about democracy in our day and age. Let's think about it this way: We are 21st-century citizens, doing our very, very best to interact with 19th century-designed institutions that are based on an information technology of the 15th century. Let's have a look at some of the characteristics of this system. First of all, it's designed for an information technology that's over 500 years old. And the best possible system that could be designed for it is one where the few make daily decisions in the name of the many. And the many get to vote once every couple of years. In the second place, the costs of participating in this system are incredibly high. You either have to have a fair bit of money and influence, or you have to devote your entire life to politics. You have to become a party member and slowly start working up the ranks until maybe, one day, you'll get to sit at a table where a decision is being made. And last but not least, the language of the system — it's incredibly cryptic. It's done for lawyers, by lawyers, and no one else can understand. So, it's a system where we can choose our authorities, but we are completely left out on how those authorities reach their decisions. So, in a day where a new information technology allows us to participate globally in any conversation, our barriers of information are completely lowered and we can, more than ever before, express our desires and our concerns. Our political system remains the same for the past 200 years and expects us to be contented with being simply passive recipients of a monologue. So, it's really not surprising that this kind of system is only able to produce two kinds of results: silence or noise. Silence, in terms of citizens not engaging, simply not wanting to participate. There's this commonplace [idea] that I truly, truly dislike, and it's this idea that we citizens are naturally apathetic. That we shun commitment. But, can you really blame us for not jumping at the opportunity of going to the middle of the city in the middle of a working day to attend, physically, a public hearing that has no impact whatsoever? Conflict is bound to happen between a system that no longer represents, nor has any dialogue capacity, and citizens that are increasingly used to representing themselves. And, then we find noise: Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico Italy, France, Spain, the United States, they're all democracies. Their citizens have access to the ballot boxes. But they still feel the need, they need to take to the streets in order to be heard. To me, it seems like the 18th-century slogan that was the basis for the formation of our modern democracies, "No taxation without representation," can now be updated to "No representation without a conversation." We want our seat at the table. And rightly so. But in order to be part of this conversation, we need to know what we want to do next, because political action is being able to move from agitation to construction. My generation has been incredibly good at using new networks and technologies to organize protests, protests that were able to successfully impose agendas, roll back extremely pernicious legislation, and even overthrow authoritarian governments. And we should be immensely proud of this. But, we also must admit that we haven't been good at using those same networks and technologies to successfully articulate an alternative to what we're seeing and find the consensus and build the alliances that are needed to make it happen. And so the risk that we face is that we can create these huge power vacuums that will very quickly get filled up by de facto powers, like the military or highly motivated and already organized groups that generally lie on the extremes. But our democracy is neither just a matter of voting once every couple of years. But it's not either the ability to bring millions onto the streets. So the question I'd like to raise here, and I do believe it's the most important question we need to answer, is this one: If Internet is the new printing press, then what is democracy for the Internet era? What institutions do we want to build for the 21st-century society? I don't have the answer, just in case. I don't think anyone does. But I truly believe we can't afford to ignore this question anymore. So, I'd like to share our experience and what we've learned so far and hopefully contribute two cents to this conversation. Two years ago, with a group of friends from Argentina, we started thinking, "how can we get our representatives, our elected representatives, to represent us?" Marshall McLuhan once said that politics is solving today's problems with yesterday's tools. So the question that motivated us was, can we try and solve some of today's problems with the tools that we use every single day of our lives? Our first approach was to design and develop a piece of software called DemocracyOS. DemocracyOS is an open-source web application that is designed to become a bridge between citizens and their elected representatives to make it easier for us to participate from our everyday lives. So first of all, you can get informed so every new project that gets introduced in Congress gets immediately translated and explained in plain language on this platform. But we all know that social change is not going to come from just knowing more information, but from doing something with it. So better access to information should lead to a conversation about what we're going to do next, and DemocracyOS allows for that. Because we believe that democracy is not just a matter of stacking up preferences, one on top of each other, but that our healthy and robust public debate should be, once again, one of its fundamental values. So DemocracyOS is about persuading and being persuaded. It's about reaching a consensus as much as finding a proper way of channeling our disagreement. And finally, you can vote how you would like your elected representative to vote. And if you do not feel comfortable voting on a certain issue, you can always delegate your vote to someone else, allowing for a dynamic and emerging social leadership. It suddenly became very easy for us to simply compare these results with how our representatives were voting in Congress. But, it also became very evident that technology was not going to do the trick. What we needed to do to was to find actors that were able to grab this distributed knowledge in society and use it to make better and more fair decisions. So we reached out to traditional political parties and we offered them DemocracyOS. We said, "Look, here you have a platform that you can use to build a two-way conversation with your constituencies." And yes, we failed. We failed big time. We were sent to play outside like little kids. Amongst other things, we were called naive. And I must be honest: I think, in hindsight, we were. Because the challenges that we face, they're not technological, they're cultural. Political parties were never willing to change the way they make their decisions. So it suddenly became a bit obvious that if we wanted to move forward with this idea, we needed to do it ourselves. And so we took quite a leap of faith, and in August last year, we founded our own political party, El Partido de la Red, or the Net Party, in the city of Buenos Aires. And taking an even bigger leap of faith, we ran for elections in October last year with this idea: if we want a seat in Congress, our candidate, our representatives were always going to vote according to what citizens decided on DemocracyOS. Every single project that got introduced in Congress, we were going vote according to what citizens decided on an online platform. It was our way of hacking the political system. We understood that if we wanted to become part of the conversation, to have a seat at the table, we needed to become valid stakeholders, and the only way of doing it is to play by the system rules. But we were hacking it in the sense that we were radically changing the way a political party makes its decisions. For the first time, we were making our decisions together with those who we were affecting directly by those decisions. It was a very, very bold move for a two-month-old party in the city of Buenos Aires. But it got attention. We got 22,000 votes, that's 1.2 percent of the votes, and we came in second for the local options. So, even if that wasn't enough to win a seat in Congress, it was enough for us to become part of the conversation, to the extent that next month, Congress, as an institution, is launching for the first time in Argentina's history, a DemocracyOS to discuss, with the citizens, three pieces of legislation: two on urban transportation and one on the use of public space. Of course, our elected representatives are not saying, "Yes, we're going to vote according to what citizens decide," but they're willing to try. They're willing to open up a new space for citizen engagement and hopefully they'll be willing to listen as well. Our political system can be transformed, and not by subverting it, by destroying it, but by rewiring it with the tools that Internet affords us now. But a real challenge is to find, to design to create, to empower those connectors that are able to innovate, to transform noise and silence into signal and finally bring our democracies to the 21st century. I'm not saying it's easy. But in our experience, we actually stand a chance of making it work. And in my heart, it's most definitely worth trying. Thank you. (Applause) |
The hidden force in global economics: sending money home | {0: 'Economist Dilip Ratha was the first to analyze the global significance of remittances -- money sent from foreign workers to their families back home.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | I live in Washington, D.C., but I grew up in Sindhekela, a village in Orissa, in India. My father was a government worker. My mother could not read or write, but she would say to me, "A king is worshipped only in his own kingdom. A poet is respected everywhere." So I wanted to be a poet when I grew up. But I almost didn't go to college until an aunt offered financial help. I went to study in Sambalpur, the largest town in the region, where, already in college, I saw a television for the first time. I had dreams of going to the United States for higher studies. When the opportunity came, I crossed two oceans, with borrowed money for airfare and only a $20 bill in my pocket. In the U.S., I worked in a research center, part-time, while taking graduate classes in economics. And with the little I earned, I would finance myself and then I would send money home to my brother and my father. My story is not unique. There are millions of people who migrate each year. With the help of the family, they cross oceans, they cross deserts, they cross rivers, they cross mountains. They risk their lives to realize a dream, and that dream is as simple as having a decent job somewhere so they can send money home and help the family, which has helped them before. There are 232 million international migrants in the world. These are people who live in a country other than their country of birth. If there was a country made up of only international migrants, that would be larger, in population, than Brazil. That would be larger, in its size of the economy, than France. Some 180 million of them, from poor countries, send money home regularly. Those sums of money are called remittances. Here is a fact that might surprise you: 413 billion dollars, 413 billion dollars was the amount of remittances sent last year by migrants to developing countries. Migrants from developing countries, money sent to developing countries — 413 billion dollars. That's a remarkable number because that is three times the size of the total of development aid money. And yet, you and I, my colleagues in Washington, we endlessly debate and discuss about development aid, while we ignore remittances as small change. True, people send 200 dollars per month, on average. But, repeated month after month, by millions of people, these sums of money add up to rivers of foreign currency. So India, last year, received 72 billion dollars, larger than its IT exports. In Egypt remittances are three times the size of revenues from the Suez Canal. In Tajikistan, remittances are 42 percent of GDP. And in poorer countries, smaller countries, fragile countries, conflict-afflicted countries, remittances are a lifeline, as in Somalia or in Haiti. No wonder these flows have huge impacts on economies and on poor people. Remittances, unlike private investment money, they don't flow back at the first sign of trouble in the country. They actually act like an insurance. When the family is in trouble, facing hardship, facing hard times, remittances increase, they act like an insurance. Migrants send more money then. Unlike development aid money, that must go through official agencies, through governments, remittances directly reach the poor, reach the family, and often with business advice. So in Nepal, the share of poor people was 42 percent in 1995, the share of poor people in the population. By 2005, a decade later, at a time of political crisis, economic crisis, the share of poor people went down to 31 percent. That decline in poverty, most of it, about half of it, is believed to be because of remittances from India, another poor country. In El Salvador, the school dropout rate among children is lower in families that receive remittances. In Mexico and Sri Lanka, the birth weight of children is higher among families that receive remittances. Remittances are dollars wrapped with care. Migrants send money home for food, for buying necessities, for building houses, for funding education, for funding healthcare for the elderly, for business investments for friends and family. Migrants send even more money home for special occasions like a surgery or a wedding. And migrants also send money, perhaps far too many times, for unexpected funerals that they cannot attend. Much as these flows do all that good, there are barriers to these flows of remittances, these 400 billion dollars of remittances. Foremost among them is the exorbitant cost of sending money home. Money transfer companies structure their fees to milk the poor. They will say, "Up to 500 dollars if you want to send, we will charge you 30 dollars fixed." If you are poor and if you have only 200 dollars to send, you have to pay that $30 fee. The global average cost of sending money is eight percent. That means you send 100 dollars, the family on the other side receives only 92 dollars. To send money to Africa, the cost is even higher: 12 percent. To send money within Africa, the cost is even higher: over 20 percent. For example, sending money from Benin to Nigeria. And then there is the case of Venezuela, where, because of exchange controls, you send 100 dollars and you are lucky if the family on the other side receives even 10 dollars. Of course, nobody sends money to Venezuela through the official channel. It all goes in suitcases. Whereever costs are high, money goes underground. And what is worse, many developing countries actually have a blanket ban on sending money out of the country. Many rich nations also have a blanket ban on sending money to specific countries. So, is it that there are no options, no better options, cheaper options, to send money? There are. M-Pesa in Kenya enables people to send money and receive money at a fixed cost of only 60 cents per transaction. U.S. Fed started a program with Mexico to enable money service businesses to send money to Mexico for a fixed cost of only 67 cents per transaction. And yet, these faster, cheaper, better options can't be applied internationally because of the fear of money laundering, even though there is little data to support any connection, any significant connection between money laundering and these small remittance transactions. Many international banks now are wary of hosting bank accounts of money service businesses, especially those serving Somalia. Somalia, a country where the per capita income is only 250 dollars per year. Monthly remittances, on average, to Somalia is larger than that amount. Remittances are the lifeblood of Somalia. And yet, this is an example of the right hand giving a lot of aid, while the left hand is cutting the lifeblood to that economy, through regulations. Then there is the case of poor people from villages, like me. In the villages, the only place where you can get money is through the post office. Most of the governments in the world have allowed their post offices to have exclusive partnerships with money transfer companies. So, if I have to send money to my father in the village, I must send money through that particular money transfer company, even if the cost is high. I cannot go to a cheaper option. This has to go. So, what can international organizations and social entrepreneurs do to reduce the cost of sending money home? First, relax regulations on small remittances under 1,000 dollars. Governments should recognize that small remittances are not money laundering. Second, governments should abolish exclusive partnerships between their post office and the money transfer company. For that matter, between the post office and any national banking system that has a large network that serves the poor. In fact, they should promote competition, open up the partnership so that we will bring down costs like we did, like they did, in the telecommunications industry. You have seen what has happened there. Third, large nonprofit philanthropic organizations should create a remittance platform on a nonprofit basis. They should create a nonprofit remittance platform to serve the money transfer companies so that they can send money at a low cost, while complying with all the complex regulations all over the world. The development community should set a goal of reducing remittance costs to one percent from the current eight percent. If we reduce costs to one percent, that would release a saving of 30 billion dollars per year. Thirty billion dollars, that's larger than the entire bilateral aid budget going to Africa per year. That is larger than, or almost similar to, the total aid budget of the United States government, the largest donor on the planet. Actually, the savings would be larger than that 30 billion because remittance channels are also used for aid, trade and investment purposes. Another major impediment to the flow of remittances reaching the family is the large and exorbitant and illegal cost of recruitment, fees that migrants pay, migrant workers pay to laborers who found them the job. I was in Dubai a few years ago. I visited a camp for workers. It was 8 in the evening, dark, hot, humid. Workers were coming back from their grueling day of work, and I struck a conversation with a Bangladeshi construction worker. He was preoccupied that he is sending money home, he has been sending money home for a few months now, and the money is mostly going to the recruitment agent, to the labor agent who found him that job. And in my mind, I could picture the wife waiting for the monthly remittance. The remittance arrives. She takes the money and hands it over to the recruitment agent, while the children are looking on. This has to stop. It is not only construction workers from Bangladesh, it is all the workers. There are millions of migrant workers who suffer from this problem. A construction worker from Bangladesh, on an average, pays about 4,000 dollars in recruitment fees for a job that gives him only 2,000 dollars per year in income. That means that for the two years or three years of his life, he is basically sending money to pay for the recruitment fees. The family doesn't get to see any of it. It is not only Dubai, it is the dark underbelly of every major city in the world. It is not only Bangladeshi construction workers, it is workers from all over the world. It is not only men. Women are especially vulnerable to recruitment malpractices. One of the most exciting and newest thing happening in the area of remittances is how to mobilize, through innovation, diaspora saving and diaspora giving. Migrants send money home, but they also save a large amount of money where they live. Annually, migrant savings are estimated to be 500 billion dollars. Most of that money is parked in bank deposits that give you zero percent interest rate. If a country were to come and offer a three percent or four percent interest rate, and then say that the money would be used for building schools, roads, airports, train systems in the country of origin, a lot of migrants would be interested in parting with their money because it's not only financial gains that give them an opportunity to stay engaged with their country's development. Remittance channels can be used to sell these bonds to migrants because when they come on a monthly basis to send remittances, that's when you can actually sell it to them. You can also do the same for mobilizing diaspora giving. I would love to invest in a bullet train system in India and I would love to contribute to efforts to fight malaria in my village. Remittances are a great way of sharing prosperity between places in a targeted way that benefits those who need them most. Remittances empower people. We must do all we can to make remittances and recruitment safer and cheaper. And it can be done. As for myself, I have been away from India for two decades now. My wife is a Venezuelan. My children are Americans. Increasingly, I feel like a global citizen. And yet, I am growing nostalgic about my country of birth. I want to be in India and in the U.S. at the same time. My parents are not there anymore. My brothers and sisters have moved on. There is no real urgency for me to send money home. And yet, from time to time, I send money home to friends, to relatives, to the village, to be there, to stay engaged — that's part of my identity. And, I'm still striving to be a poet for the hardworking migrants and their struggle to break free of the cycle of poverty. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why privacy matters | {0: 'Glenn Greenwald is the journalist who has done the most to expose and explain the Edward Snowden files.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | There is an entire genre of YouTube videos devoted to an experience which I am certain that everyone in this room has had. It entails an individual who, thinking they're alone, engages in some expressive behavior — wild singing, gyrating dancing, some mild sexual activity — only to discover that, in fact, they are not alone, that there is a person watching and lurking, the discovery of which causes them to immediately cease what they were doing in horror. The sense of shame and humiliation in their face is palpable. It's the sense of, "This is something I'm willing to do only if no one else is watching." This is the crux of the work on which I have been singularly focused for the last 16 months, the question of why privacy matters, a question that has arisen in the context of a global debate, enabled by the revelations of Edward Snowden that the United States and its partners, unbeknownst to the entire world, has converted the Internet, once heralded as an unprecedented tool of liberation and democratization, into an unprecedented zone of mass, indiscriminate surveillance. There is a very common sentiment that arises in this debate, even among people who are uncomfortable with mass surveillance, which says that there is no real harm that comes from this large-scale invasion because only people who are engaged in bad acts have a reason to want to hide and to care about their privacy. This worldview is implicitly grounded in the proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world, good people and bad people. Bad people are those who plot terrorist attacks or who engage in violent criminality and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they're doing, have reasons to care about their privacy. But by contrast, good people are people who go to work, come home, raise their children, watch television. They use the Internet not to plot bombing attacks but to read the news or exchange recipes or to plan their kids' Little League games, and those people are doing nothing wrong and therefore have nothing to hide and no reason to fear the government monitoring them. The people who are actually saying that are engaged in a very extreme act of self-deprecation. What they're really saying is, "I have agreed to make myself such a harmless and unthreatening and uninteresting person that I actually don't fear having the government know what it is that I'm doing." This mindset has found what I think is its purest expression in a 2009 interview with the longtime CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who, when asked about all the different ways his company is causing invasions of privacy for hundreds of millions of people around the world, said this: He said, "If you're doing something that you don't want other people to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Now, there's all kinds of things to say about that mentality, the first of which is that the people who say that, who say that privacy isn't really important, they don't actually believe it, and the way you know that they don't actually believe it is that while they say with their words that privacy doesn't matter, with their actions, they take all kinds of steps to safeguard their privacy. They put passwords on their email and their social media accounts, they put locks on their bedroom and bathroom doors, all steps designed to prevent other people from entering what they consider their private realm and knowing what it is that they don't want other people to know. The very same Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, ordered his employees at Google to cease speaking with the online Internet magazine CNET after CNET published an article full of personal, private information about Eric Schmidt, which it obtained exclusively through Google searches and using other Google products. (Laughter) This same division can be seen with the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who in an infamous interview in 2010 pronounced that privacy is no longer a "social norm." Last year, Mark Zuckerberg and his new wife purchased not only their own house but also all four adjacent houses in Palo Alto for a total of 30 million dollars in order to ensure that they enjoyed a zone of privacy that prevented other people from monitoring what they do in their personal lives. Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world, every single time somebody has said to me, "I don't really worry about invasions of privacy because I don't have anything to hide." I always say the same thing to them. I get out a pen, I write down my email address. I say, "Here's my email address. What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just troll through what it is you're doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you're not a bad person, if you're doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide." Not a single person has taken me up on that offer. I check and — (Applause) I check that email account religiously all the time. It's a very desolate place. And there's a reason for that, which is that we as human beings, even those of us who in words disclaim the importance of our own privacy, instinctively understand the profound importance of it. It is true that as human beings, we're social animals, which means we have a need for other people to know what we're doing and saying and thinking, which is why we voluntarily publish information about ourselves online. But equally essential to what it means to be a free and fulfilled human being is to have a place that we can go and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people. There's a reason why we seek that out, and our reason is that all of us — not just terrorists and criminals, all of us — have things to hide. There are all sorts of things that we do and think that we're willing to tell our physician or our lawyer or our psychologist or our spouse or our best friend that we would be mortified for the rest of the world to learn. We make judgments every single day about the kinds of things that we say and think and do that we're willing to have other people know, and the kinds of things that we say and think and do that we don't want anyone else to know about. People can very easily in words claim that they don't value their privacy, but their actions negate the authenticity of that belief. Now, there's a reason why privacy is so craved universally and instinctively. It isn't just a reflexive movement like breathing air or drinking water. The reason is that when we're in a state where we can be monitored, where we can be watched, our behavior changes dramatically. The range of behavioral options that we consider when we think we're being watched severely reduce. This is just a fact of human nature that has been recognized in social science and in literature and in religion and in virtually every field of discipline. There are dozens of psychological studies that prove that when somebody knows that they might be watched, the behavior they engage in is vastly more conformist and compliant. Human shame is a very powerful motivator, as is the desire to avoid it, and that's the reason why people, when they're in a state of being watched, make decisions not that are the byproduct of their own agency but that are about the expectations that others have of them or the mandates of societal orthodoxy. This realization was exploited most powerfully for pragmatic ends by the 18th- century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who set out to resolve an important problem ushered in by the industrial age, where, for the first time, institutions had become so large and centralized that they were no longer able to monitor and therefore control each one of their individual members, and the solution that he devised was an architectural design originally intended to be implemented in prisons that he called the panopticon, the primary attribute of which was the construction of an enormous tower in the center of the institution where whoever controlled the institution could at any moment watch any of the inmates, although they couldn't watch all of them at all times. And crucial to this design was that the inmates could not actually see into the panopticon, into the tower, and so they never knew if they were being watched or even when. And what made him so excited about this discovery was that that would mean that the prisoners would have to assume that they were being watched at any given moment, which would be the ultimate enforcer for obedience and compliance. The 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault realized that that model could be used not just for prisons but for every institution that seeks to control human behavior: schools, hospitals, factories, workplaces. And what he said was that this mindset, this framework discovered by Bentham, was the key means of societal control for modern, Western societies, which no longer need the overt weapons of tyranny — punishing or imprisoning or killing dissidents, or legally compelling loyalty to a particular party — because mass surveillance creates a prison in the mind that is a much more subtle though much more effective means of fostering compliance with social norms or with social orthodoxy, much more effective than brute force could ever be. The most iconic work of literature about surveillance and privacy is the George Orwell novel "1984," which we all learn in school, and therefore it's almost become a cliche. In fact, whenever you bring it up in a debate about surveillance, people instantaneously dismiss it as inapplicable, and what they say is, "Oh, well in '1984,' there were monitors in people's homes, they were being watched at every given moment, and that has nothing to do with the surveillance state that we face." That is an actual fundamental misapprehension of the warnings that Orwell issued in "1984." The warning that he was issuing was about a surveillance state not that monitored everybody at all times, but where people were aware that they could be monitored at any given moment. Here is how Orwell's narrator, Winston Smith, described the surveillance system that they faced: "There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment." He went on to say, "At any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live, did live, from habit that became instinct, in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard and except in darkness every movement scrutinized." The Abrahamic religions similarly posit that there's an invisible, all-knowing authority who, because of its omniscience, always watches whatever you're doing, which means you never have a private moment, the ultimate enforcer for obedience to its dictates. What all of these seemingly disparate works recognize, the conclusion that they all reach, is that a society in which people can be monitored at all times is a society that breeds conformity and obedience and submission, which is why every tyrant, the most overt to the most subtle, craves that system. Conversely, even more importantly, it is a realm of privacy, the ability to go somewhere where we can think and reason and interact and speak without the judgmental eyes of others being cast upon us, in which creativity and exploration and dissent exclusively reside, and that is the reason why, when we allow a society to exist in which we're subject to constant monitoring, we allow the essence of human freedom to be severely crippled. The last point I want to observe about this mindset, the idea that only people who are doing something wrong have things to hide and therefore reasons to care about privacy, is that it entrenches two very destructive messages, two destructive lessons, the first of which is that the only people who care about privacy, the only people who will seek out privacy, are by definition bad people. This is a conclusion that we should have all kinds of reasons for avoiding, the most important of which is that when you say, "somebody who is doing bad things," you probably mean things like plotting a terrorist attack or engaging in violent criminality, a much narrower conception of what people who wield power mean when they say, "doing bad things." For them, "doing bad things" typically means doing something that poses meaningful challenges to the exercise of our own power. The other really destructive and, I think, even more insidious lesson that comes from accepting this mindset is there's an implicit bargain that people who accept this mindset have accepted, and that bargain is this: If you're willing to render yourself sufficiently harmless, sufficiently unthreatening to those who wield political power, then and only then can you be free of the dangers of surveillance. It's only those who are dissidents, who challenge power, who have something to worry about. There are all kinds of reasons why we should want to avoid that lesson as well. You may be a person who, right now, doesn't want to engage in that behavior, but at some point in the future you might. Even if you're somebody who decides that you never want to, the fact that there are other people who are willing to and able to resist and be adversarial to those in power — dissidents and journalists and activists and a whole range of others — is something that brings us all collective good that we should want to preserve. Equally critical is that the measure of how free a society is is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens, but how it treats its dissidents and those who resist orthodoxy. But the most important reason is that a system of mass surveillance suppresses our own freedom in all sorts of ways. It renders off-limits all kinds of behavioral choices without our even knowing that it's happened. The renowned socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg once said, "He who does not move does not notice his chains." We can try and render the chains of mass surveillance invisible or undetectable, but the constraints that it imposes on us do not become any less potent. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Glenn, thank you. The case is rather convincing, I have to say, but I want to bring you back to the last 16 months and to Edward Snowden for a few questions, if you don't mind. The first one is personal to you. We have all read about the arrest of your partner, David Miranda in London, and other difficulties, but I assume that in terms of personal engagement and risk, that the pressure on you is not that easy to take on the biggest sovereign organizations in the world. Tell us a little bit about that. Glenn Greenwald: You know, I think one of the things that happens is that people's courage in this regard gets contagious, and so although I and the other journalists with whom I was working were certainly aware of the risk — the United States continues to be the most powerful country in the world and doesn't appreciate it when you disclose thousands of their secrets on the Internet at will — seeing somebody who is a 29-year-old ordinary person who grew up in a very ordinary environment exercise the degree of principled courage that Edward Snowden risked, knowing that he was going to go to prison for the rest of his life or that his life would unravel, inspired me and inspired other journalists and inspired, I think, people around the world, including future whistleblowers, to realize that they can engage in that kind of behavior as well. BG: I'm curious about your relationship with Ed Snowden, because you have spoken with him a lot, and you certainly continue doing so, but in your book, you never call him Edward, nor Ed, you say "Snowden." How come? GG: You know, I'm sure that's something for a team of psychologists to examine. (Laughter) I don't really know. The reason I think that, one of the important objectives that he actually had, one of his, I think, most important tactics, was that he knew that one of the ways to distract attention from the substance of the revelations would be to try and personalize the focus on him, and for that reason, he stayed out of the media. He tried not to ever have his personal life subject to examination, and so I think calling him Snowden is a way of just identifying him as this important historical actor rather than trying to personalize him in a way that might distract attention from the substance. Moderator: So his revelations, your analysis, the work of other journalists, have really developed the debate, and many governments, for example, have reacted, including in Brazil, with projects and programs to reshape a little bit the design of the Internet, etc. There are a lot of things going on in that sense. But I'm wondering, for you personally, what is the endgame? At what point will you think, well, actually, we've succeeded in moving the dial? GG: Well, I mean, the endgame for me as a journalist is very simple, which is to make sure that every single document that's newsworthy and that ought to be disclosed ends up being disclosed, and that secrets that should never have been kept in the first place end up uncovered. To me, that's the essence of journalism and that's what I'm committed to doing. As somebody who finds mass surveillance odious for all the reasons I just talked about and a lot more, I mean, I look at this as work that will never end until governments around the world are no longer able to subject entire populations to monitoring and surveillance unless they convince some court or some entity that the person they've targeted has actually done something wrong. To me, that's the way that privacy can be rejuvenated. BG: So Snowden is very, as we've seen at TED, is very articulate in presenting and portraying himself as a defender of democratic values and democratic principles. But then, many people really find it difficult to believe that those are his only motivations. They find it difficult to believe that there was no money involved, that he didn't sell some of those secrets, even to China and to Russia, which are clearly not the best friends of the United States right now. And I'm sure many people in the room are wondering the same question. Do you consider it possible there is that part of Snowden we've not seen yet? GG: No, I consider that absurd and idiotic. (Laughter) If you wanted to, and I know you're just playing devil's advocate, but if you wanted to sell secrets to another country, which he could have done and become extremely rich doing so, the last thing you would do is take those secrets and give them to journalists and ask journalists to publish them, because it makes those secrets worthless. People who want to enrich themselves do it secretly by selling secrets to the government, but I think there's one important point worth making, which is, that accusation comes from people in the U.S. government, from people in the media who are loyalists to these various governments, and I think a lot of times when people make accusations like that about other people — "Oh, he can't really be doing this for principled reasons, he must have some corrupt, nefarious reason" — they're saying a lot more about themselves than they are the target of their accusations, because — (Applause) — those people, the ones who make that accusation, they themselves never act for any reason other than corrupt reasons, so they assume that everybody else is plagued by the same disease of soullessness as they are, and so that's the assumption. (Applause) BG: Glenn, thank you very much. GG: Thank you very much. BG: Glenn Greenwald. (Applause) |
One more reason to get a good night's sleep | {0: 'Jeff Iliff is a neuroscientist who explores the unique functions of the brain.'} | TEDMED 2014 | Sleep. It's something we spend about a third of our lives doing, but do any of us really understand what it's all about? Two thousand years ago, Galen, one of the most prominent medical researchers of the ancient world, proposed that while we're awake, our brain's motive force, its juice, would flow out to all the other parts of the body, animating them but leaving the brain all dried up, and he thought that when we sleep, all this moisture that filled the rest of the body would come rushing back, rehydrating the brain and refreshing the mind. Now, that sounds completely ridiculous to us now, but Galen was simply trying to explain something about sleep that we all deal with every day. See, we all know based on our own experience that when you sleep, it clears your mind, and when you don't sleep, it leaves your mind murky. But while we know a great deal more about sleep now than when Galen was around, we still haven't understood why it is that sleep, of all of our activities, has this incredible restorative function for the mind. So today I want to tell you about some recent research that may shed new light on this question. We've found that sleep may actually be a kind of elegant design solution to some of the brain's most basic needs, a unique way that the brain meets the high demands and the narrow margins that set it apart from all the other organs of the body. So almost all the biology that we observe can be thought of as a series of problems and their corresponding solutions, and the first problem that every organ must solve is a continuous supply of nutrients to fuel all those cells of the body. In the brain, that is especially critical; its intense electrical activity uses up a quarter of the body's entire energy supply, even though the brain accounts for only about two percent of the body's mass. So the circulatory system solves the nutrient delivery problem by sending blood vessels to supply nutrients and oxygen to every corner of our body. You can actually see it in this video here. Here, we're imaging blood vessels in the brain of a living mouse. The blood vessels form a complex network that fills the entire brain volume. They start at the surface of the brain, and then they dive down into the tissue itself, and as they spread out, they supply nutrients and oxygen to each and every cell in the brain. Now, just as every cell requires nutrients to fuel it, every cell also produces waste as a byproduct, and the clearance of that waste is the second basic problem that each organ has to solve. This diagram shows the body's lymphatic system, which has evolved to meet this need. It's a second parallel network of vessels that extends throughout the body. It takes up proteins and other waste from the spaces between the cells, it collects them, and then dumps them into the blood so they can be disposed of. But if you look really closely at this diagram, you'll see something that doesn't make a lot of sense. So if we were to zoom into this guy's head, one of the things that you would see there is that there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain. But that doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? I mean, the brain is this intensely active organ that produces a correspondingly large amount of waste that must be efficiently cleared. And yet, it lacks lymphatic vessels, which means that the approach that the rest of the body takes to clearing away its waste won't work in the brain. So how, then, does the brain solve its waste clearance problem? Well, that seemingly mundane question is where our group first jumped into this story, and what we found as we dove down into the brain, down among the neurons and the blood vessels, was that the brain's solution to the problem of waste clearance, it was really unexpected. It was ingenious, but it was also beautiful. Let me tell you about what we found. So the brain has this large pool of clean, clear fluid called cerebrospinal fluid. We call it the CSF. The CSF fills the space that surrounds the brain, and wastes from inside the brain make their way out to the CSF, which gets dumped, along with the waste, into the blood. So in that way, it sounds a lot like the lymphatic system, doesn't it? But what's interesting is that the fluid and the waste from inside the brain, they don't just percolate their way randomly out to these pools of CSF. Instead, there is a specialized network of plumbing that organizes and facilitates this process. You can see that in these videos. Here, we're again imaging into the brain of living mice. The frame on your left shows what's happening at the brain's surface, and the frame on your right shows what's happening down below the surface of the brain within the tissue itself. We've labeled the blood vessels in red, and the CSF that's surrounding the brain will be in green. Now, what was surprising to us was that the fluid on the outside of the brain, it didn't stay on the outside. Instead, the CSF was pumped back into and through the brain along the outsides of the blood vessels, and as it flushed down into the brain along the outsides of these vessels, it was actually helping to clear away, to clean the waste from the spaces between the brain's cells. If you think about it, using the outsides of these blood vessels like this is a really clever design solution, because the brain is enclosed in a rigid skull and it's packed full of cells, so there is no extra space inside it for a whole second set of vessels like the lymphatic system. Yet the blood vessels, they extend from the surface of the brain down to reach every single cell in the brain, which means that fluid that's traveling along the outsides of these vessels can gain easy access to the entire brain's volume, so it's actually this really clever way to repurpose one set of vessels, the blood vessels, to take over and replace the function of a second set of vessels, the lymphatic vessels, to make it so you don't need them. And what's amazing is that no other organ takes quite this approach to clearing away the waste from between its cells. This is a solution that is entirely unique to the brain. But our most surprising finding was that all of this, everything I just told you about, with all this fluid rushing through the brain, it's only happening in the sleeping brain. Here, the video on the left shows how much of the CSF is moving through the brain of a living mouse while it's awake. It's almost nothing. Yet in the same animal, if we wait just a little while until it's gone to sleep, what we see is that the CSF is rushing through the brain, and we discovered that at the same time when the brain goes to sleep, the brain cells themselves seem to shrink, opening up spaces in between them, allowing fluid to rush through and allowing waste to be cleared out. So it seems that Galen may actually have been sort of on the right track when he wrote about fluid rushing through the brain when sleep came on. Our own research, now it's 2,000 years later, suggests that what's happening is that when the brain is awake and is at its most busy, it puts off clearing away the waste from the spaces between its cells until later, and then, when it goes to sleep and doesn't have to be as busy, it shifts into a kind of cleaning mode to clear away the waste from the spaces between its cells, the waste that's accumulated throughout the day. So it's actually a little bit like how you or I, we put off our household chores during the work week when we don't have time to get to it, and then we play catch up on all the cleaning that we have to do when the weekend rolls around. Now, I've just talked a lot about waste clearance, but I haven't been very specific about the kinds of waste that the brain needs to be clearing during sleep in order to stay healthy. The waste product that these recent studies focused most on is amyloid-beta, which is a protein that's made in the brain all the time. My brain's making amyloid-beta right now, and so is yours. But in patients with Alzheimer's disease, amyloid-beta builds up and aggregates in the spaces between the brain's cells, instead of being cleared away like it's supposed to be, and it's this buildup of amyloid-beta that's thought to be one of the key steps in the development of that terrible disease. So we measured how fast amyloid-beta is cleared from the brain when it's awake versus when it's asleep, and we found that indeed, the clearance of amyloid-beta is much more rapid from the sleeping brain. So if sleep, then, is part of the brain's solution to the problem of waste clearance, then this may dramatically change how we think about the relationship between sleep, amyloid-beta, and Alzheimer's disease. A series of recent clinical studies suggest that among patients who haven't yet developed Alzheimer's disease, worsening sleep quality and sleep duration are associated with a greater amount of amyloid-beta building up in the brain, and while it's important to point out that these studies don't prove that lack of sleep or poor sleep cause Alzheimer's disease, they do suggest that the failure of the brain to keep its house clean by clearing away waste like amyloid-beta may contribute to the development of conditions like Alzheimer's. So what this new research tells us, then, is that the one thing that all of you already knew about sleep, that even Galen understood about sleep, that it refreshes and clears the mind, may actually be a big part of what sleep is all about. See, you and I, we go to sleep every single night, but our brains, they never rest. While our body is still and our mind is off walking in dreams somewhere, the elegant machinery of the brain is quietly hard at work cleaning and maintaining this unimaginably complex machine. Like our housework, it's a dirty and a thankless job, but it's also important. In your house, if you stop cleaning your kitchen for a month, your home will become completely unlivable very quickly. But in the brain, the consequences of falling behind may be much greater than the embarrassment of dirty countertops, because when it comes to cleaning the brain, it is the very health and function of the mind and the body that's at stake, which is why understanding these very basic housekeeping functions of the brain today may be critical for preventing and treating diseases of the mind tomorrow. Thank you. (Applause) |
The simple power of hand-washing | {0: 'Dr. Myriam Sidibe promotes hand-washing with soap, setting up partnerships with governments, companies and communities to promote this simple, cheap, powerful disease-fighting tactic.'} | TED@Unilever | So imagine that a plane is about to crash with 250 children and babies, and if you knew how to stop that, would you? Now imagine that 60 planes full of babies under five crash every single day. That's the number of kids that never make it to their fifth birthday. 6.6 million children never make it to their fifth birthday. Most of these deaths are preventable, and that doesn't just make me sad, it makes me angry, and it makes me determined. Diarrhea and pneumonia are among the top two killers of children under five, and what we can do to prevent these diseases isn't some smart, new technological innovations. It's one of the world's oldest inventions: a bar of soap. Washing hands with soap, a habit we all take for granted, can reduce diarrhea by half, can reduce respiratory infections by one third. Handwashing with soap can have an impact on reducing flu, trachoma, SARS, and most recently in the case of cholera and Ebola outbreak, one of the key interventions is handwashing with soap. Handwashing with soap keeps kids in school. It stops babies from dying. Handwashing with soap is one of the most cost-effective ways of saving children's lives. It can save over 600,000 children every year. That's the equivalent of stopping 10 jumbo jets full of babies and children from crashing every single day. I think you'll agree with me that that's a pretty useful public health intervention. So now just take a minute. I think you need to get to know the person next to you. Why don't you just shake their hands. Please shake their hands. All right, get to know each other. They look really pretty. All right. So what if I told you that the person whose hands you just shook actually didn't wash their hands when they were coming out of the toilet? (Laughter) They don't look so pretty anymore, right? Pretty yucky, you would agree with me. Well, statistics are actually showing that four people out of five don't wash their hands when they come out of the toilet, globally. And the same way, we don't do it when we've got fancy toilets, running water, and soap available, it's the same thing in the countries where child mortality is really high. What is it? Is there no soap? Actually, soap is available. In 90 percent of households in India, 94 percent of households in Kenya, you will find soap. Even in countries where soap is the lowest, like Ethiopia, we are at 50 percent. So why is it? Why aren't people washing their hands? Why is it that Mayank, this young boy that I met in India, isn't washing his hands? Well, in Mayank's family, soap is used for bathing, soap is used for laundry, soap is used for washing dishes. His parents think sometimes it's a precious commodity, so they'll keep it in a cupboard. They'll keep it away from him so he doesn't waste it. On average, in Mayank's family, they will use soap for washing hands once a day at the very best, and sometimes even once a week for washing hands with soap. What's the result of that? Children pick up disease in the place that's supposed to love them and protect them the most, in their homes. Think about where you learned to wash your hands. Did you learn to wash your hands at home? Did you learn to wash your hands in school? I think behavioral scientists will tell you that it's very difficult to change the habits that you have had early in life. However, we all copy what everyone else does, and local cultural norms are something that shape how we change our behavior, and this is where the private sector comes in. Every second in Asia and Africa, 111 mothers will buy this bar to protect their family. Many women in India will tell you they learned all about hygiene, diseases, from this bar of soap from Lifebuoy brand. Iconic brands like this one have a responsibility to do good in the places where they sell their products. It's that belief, plus the scale of Unilever, that allows us to keep talking about handwashing with soap and hygiene to these mothers. Big businesses and brands can change and shift those social norms and make a difference for those habits that are so stubborn. Think about it: Marketeers spend all their time making us switch from one brand to the other. And actually, they know how to transform science and facts into compelling messages. Just for a minute, imagine when they put all their forces behind a message as powerful as handwashing with soap. The profit motive is transforming health outcomes in this world. But it's been happening for centuries: the Lifebuoy brand was launched in 1894 in Victorian England to actually combat cholera. Last week, I was in Ghana with the minister of health, because if you don't know, there's a cholera outbreak in Ghana at the moment. A hundred and eighteen years later, the solution is exactly the same: It's about ensuring that they have access to this bar of soap, and that they're using it, because that's the number one way to actually stop cholera from spreading. I think this drive for profit is extremely powerful, sometimes more powerful than the most committed charity or government. Government is doing what they can, especially in terms of the pandemics and epidemics such as cholera, or Ebola at the moment, but with competing priorities. The budget is not always there. And when you think about this, you think about what is required to make handwashing a daily habit, it requires sustained funding to refine this behavior. In short, those that fight for public health are actually dependent upon the soap companies to keep promoting handwashing with soap. We have friends like USAID, the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Plan, WaterAid, that all believe for a win-win-win partnership. Win for the public sector, because we help them reach their targets. Win for the private sector, because we build new generations of future handwashers. And most importantly, win for the most vulnerable. On October 15, we will celebrate Global Handwashing Day. Schools, communities, our friends in the public sector and our friends in the private sector — yes, on that day even our competitors, we all join hands to celebrate the world's most important public health intervention. What's required, and again where the private sector can make a huge difference, is coming up with this big, creative thinking that drives advocacy. If you take our Help a Child Reach 5 campaign, we've created great films that bring the message of handwashing with soap to the everyday person in a way that can relate to them. We've had over 30 million views. Most of these discussions are still happening online. I urge you to take five minutes and look at those films. I come from Mali, one of the world's poorest countries. I grew up in a family where every dinner conversation was around social justice. I trained in Europe's premier school of public health. I think I'm probably one of the only women in my country with this high degree in health, and the only one with a doctorate in handwashing with soap. (Laughter) (Applause) Nine years ago, I decided, with a successful public health career in the making, that I could make the biggest impact coming, selling and promoting the world's best invention in public health: soap. We run today the world's largest handwashing program by any public health standards. We've reached over 183 million people in 16 countries. My team and I have the ambition to reach one billion by 2020. Over the last four years, business has grown double digits, whilst child mortality has reduced in all the places where soap use has increased. It may be uncomfortable for some to hear — business growth and lives saved somehow equated in the same sentence — but it is that business growth that allows us to keep doing more. Without it, and without talking about it, we cannot achieve the change that we need. Last week, my team and I spent time visiting mothers that have all experienced the same thing: the death of a newborn. I'm a mom. I can't imagine anything more powerful and more painful. This one is from Myanmar. She had the most beautiful smile, the smile, I think, that life gives you when you've had a second chance. Her son, Myo, is her second one. She had a daughter who passed away at three weeks, and we know that the majority of children that actually die die in the first month of their life, and we know that if we give a bar of soap to every skilled birth attendant, and that if soap is used before touching the babies, we can reduce and make a change in terms of those numbers. And that's what inspires me, inspires me to continue in this mission, to know that I can equip her with what's needed so that she can do the most beautiful job in the world: nurturing her newborn. And next time you think of a gift for a new mom and her family, don't look far: buy her soap. It's the most beautiful invention in public health. I hope you will join us and make handwashing part of your daily lives and our daily lives and help more children like Myo reach their fifth birthday. Thank you. (Applause) |
The future of early cancer detection? | {0: 'Jorge Soto is helping develop a simple, noninvasive test that identifies cancer.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | Almost a year ago, my aunt started suffering back pains. She went to see the doctor and they told her it was a normal injury for someone who had been playing tennis for almost 30 years. They recommended that she do some therapy, but after a while she wasn't feeling better, so the doctors decided to do further tests. They did an x-ray and discovered an injury in her lungs, and at the time they thought that the injury was a strain in the muscles and tendons between her ribs, but after a few weeks of treatment, again her health wasn't getting any better. So finally, they decided to do a biopsy, and two weeks later, the results of the biopsy came back. It was stage 3 lung cancer. Her lifestyle was almost free of risk. She never smoked a cigarette, she never drank alcohol, and she had been playing sports for almost half her life. Perhaps, that is why it took them almost six months to get her properly diagnosed. My story might be, unfortunately, familiar to most of you. One out of three people sitting in this audience will be diagnosed with some type of cancer, and one out of four will die because of it. Not only did that cancer diagnosis change the life of our family, but that process of going back and forth with new tests, different doctors describing symptoms, discarding diseases over and over, was stressful and frustrating, especially for my aunt. And that is the way cancer diagnosis has been done since the beginning of history. We have 21st-century medical treatments and drugs to treat cancer, but we still have 20th-century procedures and processes for diagnosis, if any. Today, most of us have to wait for symptoms to indicate that something is wrong. Today, the majority of people still don't have access to early cancer detection methods, even though we know that catching cancer early is basically the closest thing we have to a silver bullet cure against it. We know that we can change this in our lifetime, and that is why my team and I have decided to begin this journey, this journey to try to make cancer detection at the early stages and monitoring the appropriate response at the molecular level easier, cheaper, smarter and more accessible than ever before. The context, of course, is that we're living at a time where technology is disrupting our present at exponential rates, and the biological realm is no exception. It is said today that biotech is advancing at least six times faster than the growth rate of the processing power of computers. But progress in biotech is not only being accelerated, it is also being democratized. Just as personal computers or the Internet or smartphones leveled the playing field for entrepreneurship, politics or education, recent advances have leveled it up for biotech progress as well, and that is allowing multidisciplinary teams like ours to try to tackle and look at these problems with new approaches. We are a team of scientists and technologists from Chile, Panama, Mexico, Israel and Greece, and based on recent scientific discoveries, we believe that we have found a reliable and accurate way of detecting several types of cancer at the very early stages through a blood sample. We do it by detecting a set of very small molecules that circulate freely in our blood called microRNAs. To explain what microRNAs are and their important role in cancer, I need to start with proteins, because when cancer is present in our body, protein modification is observed in all cancerous cells. As you might know, proteins are large biological molecules that perform different functions within our body, like catalyzing metabolic reactions or responding to stimuli or replicating DNA, but before a protein is expressed or produced, relevant parts of its genetic code present in the DNA are copied into the messenger RNA, so this messenger RNA has instructions on how to build a specific protein, and potentially it can build hundreds of proteins, but the one that tells them when to build them and how many to build are microRNAs. So microRNAs are small molecules that regulate gene expression. Unlike DNA, which is mainly fixed, microRNAs can vary depending on internal and environmental conditions at any given time, telling us which genes are actively expressed at that particular moment. And that is what makes microRNAs such a promising biomarker for cancer, because as you know, cancer is a disease of altered gene expression. It is the uncontrolled regulation of genes. Another important thing to consider is that no two cancers are the same, but at the microRNA level, there are patterns. Several scientific studies have shown that abnormal microRNA expression levels varies and creates a unique, specific pattern for each type of cancer, even at the early stages, reflecting the progression of the disease, and whether it's responding to medication or in remission, making microRNAs a perfect, highly sensitive biomarker. However, the problem with microRNAs is that we cannot use existing DNA-based technology to detect them in a reliable way, because they are very short sequences of nucleotides, much smaller than DNA. And also, all microRNAs are very similar to each other, with just tiny differences. So imagine trying to differentiate two molecules, extremely similar, extremely small. We believe that we have found a way to do so, and this is the first time that we've shown it in public. Let me do a demonstration. Imagine that next time you go to your doctor and do your next standard blood test, a lab technician extracts a total RNA, which is quite simple today, and puts it in a standard 96-well plate like this one. Each well of these plates has specific biochemistry that we assign, that is looking for a specific microRNA, acting like a trap that closes only when the microRNA is present in the sample, and when it does, it will shine with green color. To run the reaction, you put the plate inside a device like this one, and then you can put your smartphone on top of it. If we can have a camera here so you can see my screen. A smartphone is a connected computer and it's also a camera, good enough for our purpose. The smartphone is taking pictures, and when the reaction is over, it will send the pictures to our online database for processing and interpretation. This entire process lasts around 60 minutes, but when the process is over, wells that shine are matched with the specific microRNAs and analyzed in terms of how much and how fast they shine. And then, when this entire process is over, this is what happens. This chart is showing the specific microRNAs present in this sample and how they reacted over time. Then, if we take this specific pattern of microRNA of this person's samples and compare it with existing scientific documentation that correlates microRNA patterns with a specific presence of a disease, this is how pancreatic cancer looks like. This inside is a real sample where we just detected pancreatic cancer. (Applause) Another important aspect of this approach is the gathering and mining of data in the cloud, so we can get results in real time and analyze them with our contextual information. If we want to better understand and decode diseases like cancer, we need to stop treating them as acute, isolated episodes, and consider and measure everything that affects our health on a permanent basis. This entire platform is a working prototype. It uses state-of-the-art molecular biology, a low-cost, 3D-printed device, and data science to try to tackle one of humanity's toughest challenges. Since we believe early cancer detection should really be democratized, this entire solution costs at least 50 times less than current available methods, and we know that the community can help us accelerate this even more, so we're making the design of the device open-source. (Applause) Let me say very clearly that we are at the very early stages, but so far, we have been able to successfully identify the microRNA pattern of pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer and hepatic cancer. And currently, we're doing a clinical trial in collaboration with the German Cancer Research Center with 200 women for breast cancer. (Applause) This is the single non-invasive, accurate and affordable test that has the potential to dramatically change how cancer procedures and diagnostics have been done. Since we're looking for the microRNA patterns in your blood at any given time, you don't need to know which cancer you're looking for. You don't need to have any symptoms. You only need one milliliter of blood and a relatively simple array of tools. Today, cancer detection happens mainly when symptoms appear. That is, at stage 3 or 4, and I believe that is too late. It is too expensive for our families. It is too expensive for humanity. We cannot lose the war against cancer. It not only costs us billions of dollars, but it also costs us the people we love. Today, my aunt, she's fighting bravely and going through this process with a very positive attitude. However, I want fights like this to become very rare. I want to see the day when cancer is treated easily because it can be routinely diagnosed at the very early stages, and I'm certain that in the very near future, because of this and other breakthroughs that we are seeing every day in the life sciences, the way we see cancer will radically change. It will give us the chance of detecting it early, understanding it better, and finding a cure. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Let's help refugees thrive, not just survive | {0: 'Melissa Fleming sheds light on their devastating plight and remarkable resilience of refugees.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | So I started working with refugees because I wanted to make a difference, and making a difference starts with telling their stories. So when I meet refugees, I always ask them questions. Who bombed your house? Who killed your son? Did the rest of your family make it out alive? How are you coping in your life in exile? But there's one question that always seems to me to be most revealing, and that is: What did you take? What was that most important thing that you had to take with you when the bombs were exploding in your town, and the armed gangs were approaching your house? A Syrian refugee boy I know told me that he didn't hesitate when his life was in imminent danger. He took his high school diploma, and later he told me why. He said, "I took my high school diploma because my life depended on it." And he would risk his life to get that diploma. On his way to school, he would dodge snipers. His classroom sometimes shook with the sound of bombs and shelling, and his mother told me, "Every day, I would say to him every morning, 'Honey, please don't go to school.'" And when he insisted, she said, "I would hug him as if it were for the last time." But he said to his mother, "We're all afraid, but our determination to graduate is stronger than our fear." But one day, the family got terrible news. Hany's aunt, his uncle and his cousin were murdered in their homes for refusing to leave their house. Their throats were slit. It was time to flee. They left that day, right away, in their car, Hany hidden in the back because they were facing checkpoints of menacing soldiers. And they would cross the border into Lebanon, where they would find peace. But they would begin a life of grueling hardship and monotony. They had no choice but to build a shack on the side of a muddy field, and this is Hany's brother Ashraf, who plays outside. And that day, they joined the biggest population of refugees in the world, in a country, Lebanon, that is tiny. It only has four million citizens, and there are one million Syrian refugees living there. There's not a town, a city or a village that is not host to Syrian refugees. This is generosity and humanity that is remarkable. Think about it this way, proportionately. It would be as if the entire population of Germany, 80 million people, would flee to the United States in just three years. Half of the entire population of Syria is now uprooted, most of them inside the country. Six and a half million people have fled for their lives. Over and well over three million people have crossed the borders and have found sanctuary in the neighboring countries, and only a small proportion, as you see, have moved on to Europe. What I find most worrying is that half of all Syrian refugees are children. I took this picture of this little girl. It was just two hours after she had arrived after a long trek from Syria into Jordan. And most troubling of all is that only 20 percent of Syrian refugee children are in school in Lebanon. And yet, Syrian refugee children, all refugee children tell us education is the most important thing in their lives. Why? Because it allows them to think of their future rather than the nightmare of their past. It allows them to think of hope rather than hatred. I'm reminded of a recent visit I took to a Syrian refugee camp in northern Iraq, and I met this girl, and I thought, "She's beautiful," and I went up to her and asked her, "Can I take your picture?" And she said yes, but she refused to smile. I think she couldn't, because I think she must realize that she represents a lost generation of Syrian refugee children, a generation isolated and frustrated. And yet, look at what they fled: utter destruction, buildings, industries, schools, roads, homes. Hany's home was also destroyed. This will need to be rebuilt by architects, by engineers, by electricians. Communities will need teachers and lawyers and politicians interested in reconciliation and not revenge. Shouldn't this be rebuilt by the people with the largest stake, the societies in exile, the refugees? Refugees have a lot of time to prepare for their return. You might imagine that being a refugee is just a temporary state. Well far from it. With wars going on and on, the average time a refugee will spend in exile is 17 years. Hany was into his second year in limbo when I went to visit him recently, and we conducted our entire conversation in English, which he confessed to me he learned from reading all of Dan Brown's novels and from listening to American rap. We also spent some nice moments of laughter and fun with his beloved brother Ashraf. But I'll never forget what he told me when we ended our conversation that day. He said to me, "If I am not a student, I am nothing." Hany is one of 50 million people uprooted in this world today. Never since World War II have so many people been forcibly displaced. So while we're making sweeping progress in human health, in technology, in education and design, we are doing dangerously little to help the victims and we are doing far too little to stop and prevent the wars that are driving them from their homes. And there are more and more victims. Every day, on average, by the end of this day, 32,000 people will be forcibly displaced from their homes — 32,000 people. They flee across borders like this one. We captured this on the Syrian border to Jordan, and this is a typical day. Or they flee on unseaworthy and overcrowded boats, risking their lives in this case just to reach safety in Europe. This Syrian young man survived one of these boats that capsized — most of the people drowned — and he told us, "Syrians are just looking for a quiet place where nobody hurts you, where nobody humiliates you, and where nobody kills you." Well, I think that should be the minimum. How about a place of healing, of learning, and even opportunity? Americans and Europeans have the impression that proportionally huge numbers of refugees are coming to their country, but the reality is that 86 percent, the vast majority of refugees, are living in the developing world, in countries struggling with their own insecurity, with their own issues of helping their own populations and poverty. So wealthy countries in the world should recognize the humanity and the generosity of the countries that are hosting so many refugees. And all countries should make sure that no one fleeing war and persecution arrives at a closed border. (Applause) Thank you. But there is something more that we can do than just simply helping refugees survive. We can help them thrive. We should think of refugee camps and communities as more than just temporary population centers where people languish waiting for the war to end. Rather, as centers of excellence, where refugees can triumph over their trauma and train for the day that they can go home as agents of positive change and social transformation. It makes so much sense, but I'm reminded of the terrible war in Somalia that has been raging on for 22 years. And imagine living in this camp. I visited this camp. It's in Djibouti, neighboring Somalia, and it was so remote that we had to take a helicopter to fly there. It was dusty and it was terribly hot. And we went to visit a school and started talking to the children, and then I saw this girl across the room who looked to me to be the same age as my own daughter, and I went up and talked to her. And I asked her the questions that grown-ups ask kids, like, "What is your favorite subject?" and, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And this is when her face turned blank, and she said to me, "I have no future. My schooling days are over." And I thought, there must be some misunderstanding, so I turned to my colleague and she confirmed to me there is no funding for secondary education in this camp. And how I wished at that moment that I could say to her, "We will build you a school." And I also thought, what a waste. She should be and she is the future of Somalia. A boy named Jacob Atem had a different chance, but not before he experienced terribly tragedy. He watched — this is in Sudan — as his village — he was only seven years old — burned to the ground, and he learned that his mother and his father and his entire family were killed that day. Only his cousin survived, and the two of them walked for seven months — this is boys like him — chased and pursued by wild animals and armed gangs, and they finally made it to refugee camps where they found safety, and he would spend the next seven years in Kenya in a refugee camp. But his life changed when he got the chance to be resettled to the United States, and he found love in a foster family and he was able to go to school, and he wanted me to share with you this proud moment when he graduated from university. (Applause) I spoke to him on Skype the other day, and he was in his new university in Florida pursuing his Ph.D. in public health, and he proudly told me how he was able to raise enough funds from the American public to establish a health clinic back in his village back home. So I want to take you back to Hany. When I told him I was going to have the chance to speak to you here on the TED stage, he allowed me to read you a poem that he sent in an email to me. He wrote: "I miss myself, my friends, times of reading novels or writing poems, birds and tea in the morning. My room, my books, myself, and everything that was making me smile. Oh, oh, I had so many dreams that were about to be realized." So here is my point: Not investing in refugees is a huge missed opportunity. Leave them abandoned, and they risk exploitation and abuse, and leave them unskilled and uneducated, and delay by years the return to peace and prosperity in their countries. I believe how we treat the uprooted will shape the future of our world. The victims of war can hold the keys to lasting peace, and it's the refugees who can stop the cycle of violence. Hany is at a tipping point. We would love to help him go to university and to become an engineer, but our funds are prioritized for the basics in life: tents and blankets and mattresses and kitchen sets, food rations and a bit of medicine. University is a luxury. But leave him to languish in this muddy field, and he will become a member of a lost generation. Hany's story is a tragedy, but it doesn't have to end that way. Thank you. (Applause) |
My father, locked in his body but soaring free | {0: 'Kitra Cahana is a Canadian photographer who blurs the line between anthropologist and journalist.'} | TEDMED 2014 | I know a man who soars above the city every night. In his dreams, he twirls and swirls with his toes kissing the Earth. Everything has motion, he claims, even a body as paralyzed as his own. This man is my father. Three years ago, when I found out that my father had suffered a severe stroke in his brain stem, I walked into his room in the ICU at the Montreal Neurological Institute and found him lying deathly still, tethered to a breathing machine. Paralysis had closed over his body slowly, beginning in his toes, then legs, torso, fingers and arms. It made its way up his neck, cutting off his ability to breathe, and stopped just beneath the eyes. He never lost consciousness. Rather, he watched from within as his body shut down, limb by limb, muscle by muscle. In that ICU room, I walked up to my father's body, and with a quivering voice and through tears, I began reciting the alphabet. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K. At K, he blinked his eyes. I began again. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I. He blinked again at the letter I, then at T, then at R, and A: Kitra. He said "Kitra, my beauty, don't cry. This is a blessing." There was no audible voice, but my father called out my name powerfully. Just 72 hours after his stroke, he had already embraced the totality of his condition. Despite his extreme physical state, he was completely present with me, guiding, nurturing, and being my father as much if not more than ever before. Locked-in syndrome is many people's worst nightmare. In French, it's sometimes called "maladie de l'emmuré vivant." Literally, "walled-in-alive disease." For many people, perhaps most, paralysis is an unspeakable horror, but my father's experience losing every system of his body was not an experience of feeling trapped, but rather of turning the psyche inwards, dimming down the external chatter, facing the recesses of his own mind, and in that place, falling in love with life and body anew. As a rabbi and spiritual man dangling between mind and body, life and death, the paralysis opened up a new awareness for him. He realized he no longer needed to look beyond the corporeal world in order to find the divine. "Paradise is in this body. It's in this world," he said. I slept by my father's side for the first four months, tending as much as I could to his every discomfort, understanding the deep human psychological fear of not being able to call out for help. My mother, sisters, brother and I, we surrounded him in a cocoon of healing. We became his mouthpiece, spending hours each day reciting the alphabet as he whispered back sermons and poetry with blinks of his eye. His room, it became our temple of healing. His bedside became a site for those seeking advice and spiritual counsel, and through us, my father was able to speak and uplift, letter by letter, blink by blink. Everything in our world became slow and tender as the din, drama and death of the hospital ward faded into the background. I want to read to you one of the first things that we transcribed in the week following the stroke. He composed a letter, addressing his synagogue congregation, and ended it with the following lines: "When my nape exploded, I entered another dimension: inchoate, sub-planetary, protozoan. Universes are opened and closed continually. There are many when low, who stop growing. Last week, I was brought so low, but I felt the hand of my father around me, and my father brought me back." When we weren't his voice, we were his legs and arms. I moved them like I know I would have wanted my own arms and legs to be moved were they still for all the hours of the day. I remember I'd hold his fingers near my face, bending each joint to keep it soft and limber. I'd ask him again and again to visualize the motion, to watch from within as the finger curled and extended, and to move along with it in his mind. Then, one day, from the corner of my eye, I saw his body slither like a snake, an involuntary spasm passing through the course of his limbs. At first, I thought it was my own hallucination, having spent so much time tending to this one body, so desperate to see anything react on its own. But he told me he felt tingles, sparks of electricity flickering on and off just beneath the surface of the skin. The following week, he began ever so slightly to show muscle resistance. Connections were being made. Body was slowly and gently reawakening, limb by limb, muscle by muscle, twitch by twitch. As a documentary photographer, I felt the need to photograph each of his first movements like a mother with her newborn. I photographed him taking his first unaided breath, the celebratory moment after he showed muscle resistance for the very first time, the new adapted technologies that allowed him to gain more and more independence. I photographed the care and the love that surrounded him. But my photographs only told the outside story of a man lying in a hospital bed attached to a breathing machine. I wasn't able to portray his story from within, and so I began to search for a new visual language, one which strived to express the ephemeral quality of his spiritual experience. Finally, I want to share with you a video from a series that I've been working on that tries to express the slow, in-between existence that my father has experienced. As he began to regain his ability to breathe, I started recording his thoughts, and so the voice that you hear in this video is his voice. (Video) Ronnie Cahana: You have to believe you're paralyzed to play the part of a quadriplegic. I don't. In my mind, and in my dreams every night I Chagall-man float over the city twirl and swirl with my toes kissing the floor. I know nothing about the statement of man without motion. Everything has motion. The heart pumps. The body heaves. The mouth moves. We never stagnate. Life triumphs up and down. Kitra Cahana: For most of us, our muscles begin to twitch and move long before we are conscious, but my father tells me his privilege is living on the far periphery of the human experience. Like an astronaut who sees a perspective that very few of us will ever get to share, he wonders and watches as he takes his first breaths and dreams about crawling back home. So begins life at 57, he says. A toddler has no attitude in its being, but a man insists on his world every day. Few of us will ever have to face physical limitations to the degree that my father has, but we will all have moments of paralysis in our lives. I know I frequently confront walls that feel completely unscalable, but my father insists that there are no dead ends. Instead, he invites me into his space of co-healing to give the very best of myself, and for him to give the very best of himself to me. Paralysis was an opening for him. It was an opportunity to emerge, to rekindle life force, to sit still long enough with himself so as to fall in love with the full continuum of creation. Today, my father is no longer locked in. He moves his neck with ease, has had his feeding peg removed, breathes with his own lungs, speaks slowly with his own quiet voice, and works every day to gain more movement in his paralyzed body. But the work will never be finished. As he says, "I'm living in a broken world, and there is holy work to do." Thank you. (Applause) |
What do we do with all this big data? | {0: 'Susan Etlinger promotes the smart, well-considered and ethical use of data.'} | TED@IBM | Technology has brought us so much: the moon landing, the Internet, the ability to sequence the human genome. But it also taps into a lot of our deepest fears, and about 30 years ago, the culture critic Neil Postman wrote a book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death," which lays this out really brilliantly. And here's what he said, comparing the dystopian visions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. He said, Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us, and Huxley feared we would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. In a nutshell, it's a choice between Big Brother watching you and you watching Big Brother. (Laughter) But it doesn't have to be this way. We are not passive consumers of data and technology. We shape the role it plays in our lives and the way we make meaning from it, but to do that, we have to pay as much attention to how we think as how we code. We have to ask questions, and hard questions, to move past counting things to understanding them. We're constantly bombarded with stories about how much data there is in the world, but when it comes to big data and the challenges of interpreting it, size isn't everything. There's also the speed at which it moves, and the many varieties of data types, and here are just a few examples: images, text, video, audio. And what unites this disparate types of data is that they're created by people and they require context. Now, there's a group of data scientists out of the University of Illinois-Chicago, and they're called the Health Media Collaboratory, and they've been working with the Centers for Disease Control to better understand how people talk about quitting smoking, how they talk about electronic cigarettes, and what they can do collectively to help them quit. The interesting thing is, if you want to understand how people talk about smoking, first you have to understand what they mean when they say "smoking." And on Twitter, there are four main categories: number one, smoking cigarettes; number two, smoking marijuana; number three, smoking ribs; and number four, smoking hot women. (Laughter) So then you have to think about, well, how do people talk about electronic cigarettes? And there are so many different ways that people do this, and you can see from the slide it's a complex kind of a query. And what it reminds us is that language is created by people, and people are messy and we're complex and we use metaphors and slang and jargon and we do this 24/7 in many, many languages, and then as soon as we figure it out, we change it up. So did these ads that the CDC put on, these television ads that featured a woman with a hole in her throat and that were very graphic and very disturbing, did they actually have an impact on whether people quit? And the Health Media Collaboratory respected the limits of their data, but they were able to conclude that those advertisements — and you may have seen them — that they had the effect of jolting people into a thought process that may have an impact on future behavior. And what I admire and appreciate about this project, aside from the fact, including the fact that it's based on real human need, is that it's a fantastic example of courage in the face of a sea of irrelevance. And so it's not just big data that causes challenges of interpretation, because let's face it, we human beings have a very rich history of taking any amount of data, no matter how small, and screwing it up. So many years ago, you may remember that former President Ronald Reagan was very criticized for making a statement that facts are stupid things. And it was a slip of the tongue, let's be fair. He actually meant to quote John Adams' defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials that facts are stubborn things. But I actually think there's a bit of accidental wisdom in what he said, because facts are stubborn things, but sometimes they're stupid, too. I want to tell you a personal story about why this matters a lot to me. I need to take a breath. My son Isaac, when he was two, was diagnosed with autism, and he was this happy, hilarious, loving, affectionate little guy, but the metrics on his developmental evaluations, which looked at things like the number of words — at that point, none — communicative gestures and minimal eye contact, put his developmental level at that of a nine-month-old baby. And the diagnosis was factually correct, but it didn't tell the whole story. And about a year and a half later, when he was almost four, I found him in front of the computer one day running a Google image search on women, spelled "w-i-m-e-n." And I did what any obsessed parent would do, which is immediately started hitting the "back" button to see what else he'd been searching for. And they were, in order: men, school, bus and computer. And I was stunned, because we didn't know that he could spell, much less read, and so I asked him, "Isaac, how did you do this?" And he looked at me very seriously and said, "Typed in the box." He was teaching himself to communicate, but we were looking in the wrong place, and this is what happens when assessments and analytics overvalue one metric — in this case, verbal communication — and undervalue others, such as creative problem-solving. Communication was hard for Isaac, and so he found a workaround to find out what he needed to know. And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, because forming a question is a really complex process, but he could get himself a lot of the way there by putting a word in a search box. And so this little moment had a really profound impact on me and our family because it helped us change our frame of reference for what was going on with him, and worry a little bit less and appreciate his resourcefulness more. Facts are stupid things. And they're vulnerable to misuse, willful or otherwise. I have a friend, Emily Willingham, who's a scientist, and she wrote a piece for Forbes not long ago entitled "The 10 Weirdest Things Ever Linked to Autism." It's quite a list. The Internet, blamed for everything, right? And of course mothers, because. And actually, wait, there's more, there's a whole bunch in the "mother" category here. And you can see it's a pretty rich and interesting list. I'm a big fan of being pregnant near freeways, personally. The final one is interesting, because the term "refrigerator mother" was actually the original hypothesis for the cause of autism, and that meant somebody who was cold and unloving. And at this point, you might be thinking, "Okay, Susan, we get it, you can take data, you can make it mean anything." And this is true, it's absolutely true, but the challenge is that we have this opportunity to try to make meaning out of it ourselves, because frankly, data doesn't create meaning. We do. So as businesspeople, as consumers, as patients, as citizens, we have a responsibility, I think, to spend more time focusing on our critical thinking skills. Why? Because at this point in our history, as we've heard many times over, we can process exabytes of data at lightning speed, and we have the potential to make bad decisions far more quickly, efficiently, and with far greater impact than we did in the past. Great, right? And so what we need to do instead is spend a little bit more time on things like the humanities and sociology, and the social sciences, rhetoric, philosophy, ethics, because they give us context that is so important for big data, and because they help us become better critical thinkers. Because after all, if I can spot a problem in an argument, it doesn't much matter whether it's expressed in words or in numbers. And this means teaching ourselves to find those confirmation biases and false correlations and being able to spot a naked emotional appeal from 30 yards, because something that happens after something doesn't mean it happened because of it, necessarily, and if you'll let me geek out on you for a second, the Romans called this "post hoc ergo propter hoc," after which therefore because of which. And it means questioning disciplines like demographics. Why? Because they're based on assumptions about who we all are based on our gender and our age and where we live as opposed to data on what we actually think and do. And since we have this data, we need to treat it with appropriate privacy controls and consumer opt-in, and beyond that, we need to be clear about our hypotheses, the methodologies that we use, and our confidence in the result. As my high school algebra teacher used to say, show your math, because if I don't know what steps you took, I don't know what steps you didn't take, and if I don't know what questions you asked, I don't know what questions you didn't ask. And it means asking ourselves, really, the hardest question of all: Did the data really show us this, or does the result make us feel more successful and more comfortable? So the Health Media Collaboratory, at the end of their project, they were able to find that 87 percent of tweets about those very graphic and disturbing anti-smoking ads expressed fear, but did they conclude that they actually made people stop smoking? No. It's science, not magic. So if we are to unlock the power of data, we don't have to go blindly into Orwell's vision of a totalitarian future, or Huxley's vision of a trivial one, or some horrible cocktail of both. What we have to do is treat critical thinking with respect and be inspired by examples like the Health Media Collaboratory, and as they say in the superhero movies, let's use our powers for good. Thank you. (Applause) |
The leaders who ruined Africa, and the generation who can fix it | {0: 'Ghanaian Fred Swaniker founded a school and a leadership network to educate and support the next generation of Africa’s leaders.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | I experienced my first coup d'état at the age of four. Because of the coup d'état, my family had to leave my native home of Ghana and move to the Gambia. As luck would have it, six months after we arrived, they too had a military coup. I vividly remember being woken up in the middle of the night and gathering the few belongings we could and walking for about two hours to a safe house. For a week, we slept under our beds because we were worried that bullets might fly through the window. Then, at the age of eight, we moved to Botswana. This time, it was different. There were no coups. Everything worked. Great education. They had such good infrastructure that even at the time they had a fiber-optic telephone system, long before it had reached Western countries. The only thing they didn't have is that they didn't have their own national television station, and so I remember watching TV from neighboring South Africa, and watching Nelson Mandela in jail being offered a chance to come out if he would give up the apartheid struggle. But he didn't. He refused to do that until he actually achieved his objective of freeing South Africa from apartheid. And I remember feeling how just one good leader could make such a big difference in Africa. Then at the age of 12, my family sent me to high school in Zimbabwe. Initially, this too was amazing: growing economy, excellent infrastructure, and it seemed like it was a model for economic development in Africa. I graduated from high school in Zimbabwe and I went off to college. Six years later, I returned to the country. Everything was different. It had shattered into pieces. Millions of people had emigrated, the economy was in a shambles, and it seemed all of a sudden that 30 years of development had been wiped out. How could a country go so bad so fast? Most people would agree that it's all because of leadership. One man, President Robert Mugabe, is almost single-handedly responsible for having destroyed this country. Now, all these experiences of living in different parts of Africa growing up did two things to me. The first is it made me fall in love with Africa. Everywhere I went, I experienced the wonderful beauty of our continent and saw the resilience and the spirit of our people, and at the time, I realized that I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life to making this continent great. But I also realized that making Africa great would require addressing this issue of leadership. You see, all these countries I lived in, the coups d'état and the corruption I'd seen in Ghana and Gambia and in Zimbabwe, contrasted with the wonderful examples I had seen in Botswana and in South Africa of good leadership. It made me realize that Africa would rise or fall because of the quality of our leaders. Now, one might think, of course, leadership matters everywhere. But if there's one thing you take away from my talk today, it is this: In Africa, more than anywhere else in the world, the difference that just one good leader can make is much greater than anywhere else, and here's why. It's because in Africa, we have weak institutions, like the judiciary, the constitution, civil society and so forth. So here's a general rule of thumb that I believe in: When societies have strong institutions, the difference that one good leader can make is limited, but when you have weak institutions, then just one good leader can make or break that country. Let me make it a bit more concrete. You become the president of the United States. You think, "Wow, I've arrived. I'm the most powerful man in the world." So you decide, perhaps let me pass a law. All of a sudden, Congress taps you on the shoulder and says, "No, no, no, no, no, you can't do that." You say, "Let me try this way." The Senate comes and says, "Uh-uh, we don't think you can do that." You say, perhaps, "Let me print some money. I think the economy needs a stimulus." The central bank governor will think you're crazy. You might get impeached for that. But if you become the president of Zimbabwe, and you say, "You know, I really like this job. I think I'd like to stay in it forever." (Laughter) Well, you just can. You decide you want to print money. You call the central bank governor and you say, "Please double the money supply." He'll say, "Okay, yes, sir, is there anything else I can do for you?" This is the power that African leaders have, and this is why they make the most difference on the continent. The good news is that the quality of leadership in Africa has been improving. We've had three generations of leaders, in my mind. Generation one are those who appeared in the '50s and '60s. These are people like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. The legacy they left is that they brought independence to Africa. They freed us from colonialism, and let's give them credit for that. They were followed by generation two. These are people that brought nothing but havoc to Africa. Think warfare, corruption, human rights abuses. This is the stereotype of the typical African leader that we typically think of: Mobutu Sese Seko from Zaire, Sani Abacha from Nigeria. The good news is that most of these leaders have moved on, and they were replaced by generation three. These are people like the late Nelson Mandela and most of the leaders that we see in Africa today, like Paul Kagame and so forth. Now these leaders are by no means perfect, but the one thing they have done is that they have cleaned up much of the mess of generation two. They've stopped the fighting, and I call them the stabilizer generation. They're much more accountable to their people, they've improved macroeconomic policies, and we are seeing for the first time Africa's growing, and in fact it's the second fastest growing economic region in the world. So these leaders are by no means perfect, but they are by and large the best leaders we've seen in the last 50 years. So where to from here? I believe that the next generation to come after this, generation four, has a unique opportunity to transform the continent. Specifically, they can do two things that previous generations have not done. The first thing they need to do is they need to create prosperity for the continent. Why is prosperity so important? Because none of the previous generations have been able to tackle this issue of poverty. Africa today has the fastest growing population in the world, but also is the poorest. By 2030, Africa will have a larger workforce than China, and by 2050, it will have the largest workforce in the world. One billion people will need jobs in Africa, so if we don't grow our economies fast enough, we're sitting on a ticking time bomb, not just for Africa but for the entire world. Let me show you an example of one person who is living up to this legacy of creating prosperity: Laetitia. Laetitia's a young woman from Kenya who at the age of 13 had to drop out of school because her family couldn't afford to pay fees for her. So she started her own business rearing rabbits, which happen to be a delicacy in this part of Kenya that she's from. This business did so well that within a year, she was employing 15 women and was able to generate enough income that she was able to send herself to school, and through these women fund another 65 children to go to school. The profits that she generated, she used that to build a school, and today she educates 400 children in her community. And she's just turned 18. (Applause) Another example is Erick Rajaonary. Erick comes from the island of Madagascar. Now, Erick realized that agriculture would be the key to creating jobs in the rural areas of Madagascar, but he also realized that fertilizer was a very expensive input for most farmers in Madagascar. Madagascar has these very special bats that produce these droppings that are very high in nutrients. In 2006, Erick quit his job as a chartered accountant and started a company to manufacture fertilizer from the bat droppings. Today, Erick has built a business that generates several million dollars of revenue, and he employs 70 people full time and another 800 people during the season when the bats drop their droppings the most. Now, what I like about this story is that it shows that opportunities to create prosperity can be found almost anywhere. Erick is known as the Batman. (Laughter) And who would have thought that you would have been able to build a multimillion-dollar business employing so many people just from bat poo? The second thing that this generation needs to do is to create our institutions. They need to build these institutions such that we are never held to ransom again by a few individuals like Robert Mugabe. Now, all of this sounds great, but where are we going to get this generation four from? Do we just sit and hope that they emerge by chance, or that God gives them to us? No, I don't think so. It's too important an issue for us to leave it to chance. I believe that we need to create African institutions, home-grown, that will identify and develop these leaders in a systematic, practical way. We've been doing this for the last 10 years through the African Leadership Academy. Laetitia is one of our young leaders. Today, we have 700 of them that are being groomed for the African continent, and over the next 50 years, we expect to create 6,000 of them. But one thing has been troubling me. We would get about 4,000 applications a year for 100 young leaders that we could take into this academy, and so I saw the tremendous hunger that existed for this leadership training that we're offering. But we couldn't satisfy it. So today, I'm announcing for the first time in public an extension to this vision for the African Leadership Academy. We're building 25 brand new universities in Africa that are going to cultivate this next generation of African leaders. Each campus will have 10,000 leaders at a time so we'll be educating and developing 250,000 leaders at any given time. (Applause) Over the next 50 years, this institution will create three million transformative leaders for the continent. My hope is that half of them will become the entrepreneurs that we need, who will create these jobs that we need, and the other half will go into government and the nonprofit sector, and they will build the institutions that we need. But they won't just learn academics. They will also learn how to become leaders, and they will develop their skills as entrepreneurs. So think of this as Africa's Ivy League, but instead of getting admitted because of your SAT scores or because of how much money you have or which family you come from, the main criteria for getting into this university will be what is the potential that you have for transforming Africa? But what we're doing is just one group of institutions. We cannot transform Africa by ourselves. My hope is that many, many other home-grown African institutions will blossom, and these institutions will all come together with a common vision of developing this next generation of African leaders, generation four, and they will teach them this common message: create jobs, build our institutions. Nelson Mandela once said, "Every now and then, a generation is called upon to be great. You can be that great generation." I believe that if we carefully identify and cultivate the next generation of African leaders, then this generation four that is coming up will be the greatest generation that Africa and indeed the entire world has ever seen. Thank you. (Applause) |
Should you donate differently? | {0: 'TED Fellow Joy Sun helped to launch a rare type of charity. GiveDirectly lets donors transfer money directly into the hands of impoverished people — empowering them to set their own goals and priorities.'} | TED@NYC | I suspect that every aid worker in Africa comes to a time in her career when she wants to take all the money for her project — maybe it's a school or a training program — pack it in a suitcase, get on a plane flying over the poorest villages in the country, and start throwing that money out the window. Because to a veteran aid worker, the idea of putting cold, hard cash into the hands of the poorest people on Earth doesn't sound crazy, it sounds really satisfying. I had that moment right about the 10-year mark, and luckily, that's also when I learned that this idea actually exists, and it might be just what the aid system needs. Economists call it an unconditional cash transfer, and it's exactly that: It's cash given with no strings attached. Governments in developing countries have been doing this for decades, and it's only now, with more evidence and new technology that it's possible to make this a model for delivering aid. It's a pretty simple idea, right? Well, why did I spend a decade doing other stuff for the poor? Honestly, I believed that I could do more good with money for the poor than the poor could do for themselves. I held two assumptions: One, that poor people are poor in part because they're uneducated and don't make good choices; two is that we then need people like me to figure out what they need and get it to them. It turns out, the evidence says otherwise. In recent years, researchers have been studying what happens when we give poor people cash. Dozens of studies show across the board that people use cash transfers to improve their own lives. Pregnant women in Uruguay buy better food and give birth to healthier babies. Sri Lankan men invest in their businesses. Researchers who studied our work in Kenya found that people invested in a range of assets, from livestock to equipment to home improvements, and they saw increases in income from business and farming one year after the cash was sent. None of these studies found that people spend more on drinking or smoking or that people work less. In fact, they work more. Now, these are all material needs. In Vietnam, elderly recipients used their cash transfers to pay for coffins. As someone who wonders if Maslow got it wrong, I find this choice to prioritize spiritual needs deeply humbling. I don't know if I would have chosen to give food or equipment or coffins, which begs the question: How good are we at allocating resources on behalf of the poor? Are we worth the cost? Again, we can look at empirical evidence on what happens when we give people stuff of our choosing. One very telling study looked at a program in India that gives livestock to the so-called ultra-poor, and they found that 30 percent of recipients had turned around and sold the livestock they had been given for cash. The real irony is, for every 100 dollars worth of assets this program gave someone, they spent another 99 dollars to do it. What if, instead, we use technology to put cash, whether from aid agencies or from any one of us directly into a poor person's hands. Today, three in four Kenyans use mobile money, which is basically a bank account that can run on any cell phone. A sender can pay a 1.6 percent fee and with the click of a button send money directly to a recipient's account with no intermediaries. Like the technologies that are disrupting industries in our own lives, payments technology in poor countries could disrupt aid. It's spreading so quickly that it's possible to imagine reaching billions of the world's poor this way. That's what we've started to do at GiveDirectly. We're the first organization dedicated to providing cash transfers to the poor. We've sent cash to 35,000 people across rural Kenya and Uganda in one-time payments of 1,000 dollars per family. So far, we've looked for the poorest people in the poorest villages, and in this part of the world, they're the ones living in homes made of mud and thatch, not cement and iron. So let's say that's your family. We show up at your door with an Android phone. We'll get your name, take your photo and a photo of your hut and grab the GPS coordinates. That night, we send all the data to the cloud, and each piece gets checked by an independent team using, for one example, satellite images. Then, we'll come back, we'll sell you a basic cell phone if you don't have one already, and a few weeks later, we send money to it. Something that five years ago would have seemed impossible we can now do efficiently and free of corruption. The more cash we give to the poor, and the more evidence we have that it works, the more we have to reconsider everything else we give. Today, the logic behind aid is too often, well, we do at least some good. When we're complacent with that as our bar, when we tell ourselves that giving aid is better than no aid at all, we tend to invest inefficiently, in our own ideas that strike us as innovative, on writing reports, on plane tickets and SUVs. What if the logic was, will we do better than cash given directly? Organizations would have to prove that they're doing more good for the poor than the poor can do for themselves. Of course, giving cash won't create public goods like eradicating disease or building strong institutions, but it could set a higher bar for how we help individual families improve their lives. I believe in aid. I believe most aid is better than just throwing money out of a plane. I am also absolutely certain that a lot of aid today isn't better than giving directly to the poor. I hope that one day, it will be. Thank you. (Applause) |
What I learned from spending 31 days underwater | {0: 'Fabien Cousteau spent 31 days underwater to research how climate change and pollution are affecting the oceans.'} | TEDGlobal 2014 | I have a confession to make. I am addicted to adventure, and as a young boy, I would rather look outside the window at the birds in the trees and the sky than looking at that two-dimensional chalky blackboard where time stands still and even sometimes dies. My teachers thought there was something wrong with me because I wasn't paying attention in class. They didn't find anything specifically wrong with me, other than being slightly dyslexic because I'm a lefty. But they didn't test for curiosity. Curiosity, to me, is about our connection with the world, with the universe. It's about seeing what's around that next coral head or what's around that next tree, and learning more not only about our environment but about ourselves. Now, my dream of dreams, I want to go explore the oceans of Mars, but until we can go there, I think the oceans still hold quite a few secrets. As a matter of fact, if you take our planet as the oasis in space that it is and dissect it into a living space, the ocean represents over 3.4 billion cubic kilometers of volume, within which we've explored less than five percent. And I look at this, and I go, well, there are tools to go deeper, longer and further: submarines, ROVs, even Scuba diving. But if we're going to explore the final frontier on this planet, we need to live there. We need to build a log cabin, if you will, at the bottom of the sea. And so there was a great curiosity in my soul when I went to go visit a TED [Prize winner] by the name of Dr. Sylvia Earle. Maybe you've heard of her. Two years ago, she was staked out at the last undersea marine laboratory to try and save it, to try and petition for us not to scrap it and bring it back on land. We've only had about a dozen or so scientific labs at the bottom of the sea. There's only one left in the world: it's nine miles offshore and 65 feet down. It's called Aquarius. Aquarius, in some fashion, is a dinosaur, an ancient robot chained to the bottom, this Leviathan. In other ways, it's a legacy. And so with that visit, I realized that my time is short if I wanted to experience what it was like to become an aquanaut. When we swam towards this after many moons of torture and two years of preparation, this habitat waiting to invite us was like a new home. And the point of going down to and living at this habitat was not to stay inside. It wasn't about living at something the size of a school bus. It was about giving us the luxury of time outside to wander, to explore, to understand more about this oceanic final frontier. We had megafauna come and visit us. This spotted eagle ray is a fairly common sight in the oceans. But why this is so important, why this picture is up, is because this particular animal brought his friends around, and instead of being the pelagic animals that they were, they started getting curious about us, these new strangers that were moving into the neighborhood, doing things with plankton. We were studying all sorts of animals and critters, and they got closer and closer to us, and because of the luxury of time, these animals, these residents of the coral reef, were starting to get used to us, and these pelagics that normal travel through stopped. This particular animal actually circled for 31 full days during our mission. So mission 31 wasn't so much about breaking records. It was about that human-ocean connection. Because of the luxury of time, we were able to study animals such as sharks and grouper in aggregations that we've never seen before. It's like seeing dogs and cats behaving well together. Even being able to commune with animals that are much larger than us, such as this endangered goliath grouper who only still resides in the Florida Keys. Of course, just like any neighbor, after a while, if they get tired, the goliath grouper barks at us, and this bark is so powerful that it actually stuns its prey before it aspirates it all within a split second. For us, it's just telling us to go back into the habitat and leave them alone. Now, this wasn't just about adventure. There was actually a serious note to it. We did a lot of science, and again, because of the luxury of time, we were able to do over three years of science in 31 days. In this particular case, we were using a PAM, or, let me just see if I can get this straight, a Pulse Amplitude Modulated Fluorometer. And our scientists from FIU, MIT, and from Northeastern were able to get a gauge for what coral reefs do when we're not around. The Pulse Amplitude Modulated Fluorometer, or PAM, gauges the fluorescence of corals as it pertains to pollutants in the water as well as climate change-related issues. We used all sorts of other cutting-edge tools, such as this sonde, or what I like to call the sponge proctologist, whereby the sonde itself tests for metabolism rates in what in this particular case is a barrel sponge, or the redwoods of the [ocean]. And this gives us a much better gauge of what's happening underwater with regard to climate change-related issues, and how the dynamics of that affect us here on land. And finally, we looked at predator-prey behavior. And predator-prey behavior is an interesting thing, because as we take away some of the predators on these coral reefs around the world, the prey, or the forage fish, act very differently. What we realized is not only do they stop taking care of the reef, darting in, grabbing a little bit of algae and going back into their homes, they start spreading out and disappearing from those particular coral reefs. Well, within that 31 days, we were able to generate over 10 scientific papers on each one of these topics. But the point of adventure is not only to learn, it's to be able to share that knowledge with the world, and with that, thanks to a couple of engineers at MIT, we were able to use a prototype camera called the Edgertronic to capture slow-motion video, up to 20,000 frames per second in a little box that's worth 3,000 dollars. It's available to every one of us. And that particular camera gives us an insight into what fairly common animals do but we can't even see it in the blink of an eye. Let me show you a quick video of what this camera does. You can see the silky bubble come out of our hard hats. It gives us an insight into some of the animals that we were sitting right next to for 31 days and never normally would have paid attention to, such as hermit crabs. Now, using a cutting-edge piece of technology that's not really meant for the oceans is not always easy. We sometimes had to put the camera upside down, cordon it back to the lab, and actually man the trigger from the lab itself. But what this gives us is the foresight to look at and analyze in scientific and engineering terms some of the most amazing behavior that the human eye just can't pick up, such as this manta shrimp trying to catch its prey, within about .3 seconds. That punch is as strong as a .22 caliber bullet, and if you ever try to catch a bullet in mid-flight with your eye, impossible. But now we can see things such as these Christmas tree worms pulling in and fanning out in a way that the eye just can't capture, or in this case, a fish throwing up grains of sand. This is an actual sailfin goby, and if you look at it in real time, it actually doesn't even show its fanning motion because it's so quick. One of the most precious gifts that we had underwater is that we had WiFi, and for 31 days straight we were able to connect with the world in real time from the bottom of the sea and share all of these experiences. Quite literally right there I am Skyping in the classroom with one of the six continents and some of the 70,000 students that we connected every single day to some of these experiences. As a matter of fact, I'm showing a picture that I took with my smartphone from underwater of a goliath grouper laying on the bottom. We had never seen that before. And I dream of the day that we have underwater cities, and maybe, just maybe, if we push the boundaries of adventure and knowledge, and we share that knowledge with others out there, we can solve all sorts of problems. My grandfather used to say, "People protect what they love." My father, "How can people protect what they don't understand?" And I've thought about this my whole life. Nothing is impossible. We need to dream, we need to be creative, and we all need to have an adventure in order to create miracles in the darkest of times. And whether it's about climate change or eradicating poverty or giving back to future generations what we've taken for granted, it's about adventure. And who knows, maybe there will be underwater cities, and maybe some of you will become the future aquanauts. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A science award that makes you laugh, then think | {0: 'Marc Abrahams writes about research that makes people laugh, and then think.'} | TEDMED 2014 | George and Charlotte Blonsky, who were a married couple living in the Bronx in New York City, invented something. They got a patent in 1965 for what they call, "a device to assist women in giving birth." This device consists of a large, round table and some machinery. When the woman is ready to deliver her child, she lies on her back, she is strapped down to the table, and the table is rotated at high speed. The child comes flying out through centrifugal force. If you look at their patent carefully, especially if you have any engineering background or talent, you may decide that you see one or two points where the design is not perfectly adequate. (Laughter) Doctor Ivan Schwab in California is one of the people, one of the main people, who helped answer the question, "Why don't woodpeckers get headaches?" And it turns out the answer to that is because their brains are packaged inside their skulls in a way different from the way our brains, we being human beings, true, have our brains packaged. They, the woodpeckers, typically will peck, they will bang their head on a piece of wood thousands of times every day. Every day! And as far as anyone knows, that doesn't bother them in the slightest. How does this happen? Their brain does not slosh around like ours does. Their brain is packed in very tightly, at least for blows coming right from the front. Not too many people paid attention to this research until the last few years when, in this country especially, people are becoming curious about what happens to the brains of football players who bang their heads repeatedly. And the woodpecker maybe relates to that. There was a paper published in the medical journal The Lancet in England a few years ago called " A man who pricked his finger and smelled putrid for 5 years." Dr. Caroline Mills and her team received this patient and didn't really know what to do about it. The man had cut his finger, he worked processing chickens, and then he started to smell really, really bad. So bad that when he got in a room with the doctors and the nurses, they couldn't stand being in the room with him. It was intolerable. They tried every drug, every other treatment they could think of. After a year, he still smelled putrid. After two years, still smelled putrid. Three years, four years, still smelled putrid. After five years, it went away on its own. It's a mystery. In New Zealand, Dr. Lianne Parkin and her team tested an old tradition in her city. They live in a city that has huge hills, San Francisco-grade hills. And in the winter there, it gets very cold and very icy. There are lots of injuries. The tradition that they tested, they tested by asking people who were on their way to work in the morning, to stop and try something out. Try one of two conditions. The tradition is that in the winter, in that city, you wear your socks on the outside of your boots. And what they discovered by experiment, and it was quite graphic when they saw it, was that it's true. That if you wear your socks on the outside rather than the inside, you're much more likely to survive and not slip and fall. Now, I hope you will agree with me that these things I've just described to you, each of them, deserves some kind of prize. (Laughter) And that's what they got, each of them got an Ig Nobel prize. In 1991, I, together with bunch of other people, started the Ig Nobel prize ceremony. Every year we give out 10 prizes. The prizes are based on just one criteria. It's very simple. It's that you've done something that makes people laugh and then think. What you've done makes people laugh and then think. Whatever it is, there's something about it that when people encounter it at first, their only possible reaction is to laugh. And then a week later, it's still rattling around in their heads and all they want to do is tell their friends about it. That's the quality we look for. Every year, we get in the neighborhood of 9,000 new nominations for the Ig Nobel prize. Of those, consistently between 10 percent and 20 percent of those nominations are people who nominate themselves. Those self-nominees almost never win. It's very difficult, numerically, to win a prize if you want to. Even if you don't want to, it's very difficult numerically. You should know that when we choose somebody to win an Ig Nobel prize, We get in touch with that person, very quietly. We offer them the chance to decline this great honor if they want to. Happily for us, almost everyone who's offered a prize decides to accept. What do you get if you win an Ig Nobel prize? Well, you get several things. You get an Ig Nobel prize. The design is different every year. These are always handmade from extremely cheap materials. You're looking at a picture of the prize we gave last year, 2013. Most prizes in the world also give their winners some cash, some money. We don't have any money, so we can't give them. In fact, the winners have to pay their own way to come to the Ig Nobel ceremony, which most of them do. Last year, though, we did manage to scrape up some money. Last year, each of the 10 Ig Nobel prize winners received from us 10 trillion dollars. A $10 trillion bill from Zimbabwe. (Laughter) You may remember that Zimbabwe had a little adventure for a few years there of inflation. They ended up printing bills that were in denominations as large as 100 trillion dollars. The man responsible, who runs the national bank there, by the way, won an Ig Nobel prize in mathematics. The other thing you win is an invitation to come to the ceremony, which happens at Harvard University. And when you get there, you come to Harvard's biggest meeting place and classroom. It fits 1,100 people, it's jammed to the gills, and up on the stage, waiting to shake your hand, waiting to hand you your Ig Nobel prize, are a bunch of Nobel prize winners. That's the heart of the ceremony. The winners are kept secret until that moment, even the Nobel laureates who will shake their hand don't know who they are until they're announced. I am going to tell you about just a very few of the other medical-related prizes we've given. Keep in mind, we've given 230 prizes. There are lots of these people who walk among you. Maybe you have one. A paper was published about 30 years ago called "Injuries due to Falling Coconuts." It was written by Dr. Peter Barss, who is Canadian. Dr. Barss came to the ceremony and explained that as a young doctor, he wanted to see the world. So he went to Papua New Guinea. When he got there, he went to work in a hospital, and he was curious what kinds of things happen to people that bring them to the hospital. He looked through the records, and he discovered that a surprisingly large number of people in that hospital were there because of injuries due to falling coconuts. One typical thing that happens is people will come from the highlands, where there are not many coconut trees, down to visit their relatives on the coast, where there are lots. And they'll think that a coconut tree is a fine place to stand and maybe lie down. A coconut tree that is 90 feet tall, and has coconuts that weigh two pounds that can drop off at any time. A team of doctors in Europe published a series of papers about colonoscopies. You're all familiar with colonoscopies, one way or another. Or in some cases, one way and another. They, in these papers, explained to their fellow doctors who perform colonoscopies, how to minimize the chance that when you perform a colonoscopy, your patient will explode. (Laughter) Dr. Emmanuel Ben-Soussan one of the authors, flew in from Paris to the ceremony, where he explained the history of this, that in the 1950s, when colonoscopies were becoming a common technique for the first time, people were figuring out how to do it well. And there were some difficulties at first. The basic problem, I'm sure you're familiar with, that you're looking inside a long, narrow, dark place. And so, you want to have a larger space. You add some gas to inflate it so you have room to look around. Now, that's added to the gas, the methane gas, that's already inside. The gas that they used at first, in many cases, was oxygen. So they added oxygen to methane gas. And then they wanted to be able to see, they needed light, so they'd put in a light source, which in the 1950s was very hot. So you had methane gas, which is flammable, oxygen and heat. They stopped using oxygen pretty quickly. (Laughter) Now it's rare that patients will explode, but it does still happen. The final thing that I want to tell you about is a prize we gave to Dr. Elena Bodnar. Dr. Elena Bodnar invented a brassiere that in an emergency can be quickly separated into a pair of protective face masks. One to save your life, one to save the life of some lucky bystander. (Laughter) Why would someone do this, you might wonder. Dr. Bodnar came to the ceremony and she explained that she grew up in Ukraine. She was one of the doctors who treated victims of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown. And they later discovered that a lot of the worst medical problems came from the particles people breathed in. So she was always thinking after that about could there be some simple mask that was available everywhere when the unexpected happens. Years later, she moved to America. She had a baby, One day she looked, and on the floor, her infant son had picked up her bra, and had her bra on his face. And that's where the idea came from. She came to the Ig Nobel ceremony with the first prototype of the bra and she demonstrated: (Laughter) (Applause) ["Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate (2008) in economics"] ["Wolfgang Ketterle, Nobel laureate (2001) in physics"] I myself own an emergency bra. (Laughter) It's my favorite bra, but I would be happy to share it with any of you, should the need arise. Thank you. (Applause) |
How I defend the rule of law | {0: "American lawyer Kimberley Motley is the only Western litigator in Afghanistan's courts; as her practice expands to other countries, she thinks deeply about how to build the capacity of rule of law globally."} | TEDGlobal 2014 | Let me tell you a story about a little girl named Naghma. Naghma lived in a refugee camp with her parents and her eight brothers and sisters. Every morning, her father would wake up in the hopes he'd be picked for construction work, and on a good month he would earn 50 dollars. The winter was very harsh, and unfortunately, Naghma's brother died and her mother became very ill. In desperation, her father went to a neighbor to borrow 2,500 dollars. After several months of waiting, the neighbor became very impatient, and he demanded that he be paid back. Unfortunately, Naghma's father didn't have the money, and so the two men agreed to a jirga. So simply put, a jirga is a form of mediation that's used in Afghanistan's informal justice system. It's usually presided over by religious leaders and village elders, and jirgas are often used in rural countries like Afghanistan, where there's deep-seated resentment against the formal system. At the jirga, the men sat together and they decided that the best way to satisfy the debt would be if Naghma married the neighbor's 21-year-old son. She was six. Now, stories like Naghma's unfortunately are all too common, and from the comforts of our home, we may look at these stories as another crushing blow to women's rights. And if you watched Afghanistan on the news, you may have this view that it's a failed state. However, Afghanistan does have a legal system, and while jirgas are built on long-standing tribal customs, even in jirgas, laws are supposed to be followed, and it goes without saying that giving a child to satisfy a debt is not only grossly immoral, it's illegal. In 2008, I went to Afghanistan for a justice funded program, and I went there originally on this nine-month program to train Afghan lawyers. In that nine months, I went around the country and I talked to hundreds of people that were locked up, and I talked to many businesses that were also operating in Afghanistan. And within these conversations, I started hearing the connections between the businesses and the people, and how laws that were meant to protect them were being underused, while gross and illegal punitive measures were overused. And so this put me on a quest for justness, and what justness means to me is using laws for their intended purpose, which is to protect. The role of laws is to protect. So as a result, I decided to open up a private practice, and I became the first foreigner to litigate in Afghan courts. Throughout this time, I also studied many laws, I talked to many people, I read up on many cases, and I found that the lack of justness is not just a problem in Afghanistan, but it's a global problem. And while I originally shied away from representing human rights cases because I was really concerned about how it would affect me both professionally and personally, I decided that the need for justness was so great that I couldn't continue to ignore it. And so I started representing people like Naghma pro bono also. Now, since I've been in Afghanistan and since I've been an attorney for over 10 years, I've represented from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to ambassadors to little girls like Naghma, and with much success. And the reason for my success is very simple: I work the system from the inside out and use the laws in the ways that they're intended to be used. I find that achieving justness in places like Afghanistan is difficult, and there's three reasons. The first reason is that simply put, people are very uneducated as to what their legal rights were, and I find that this is a global problem. The second issue is that even with laws on the books, it's often superseded or ignored by tribal customs, like in the first jirga that sold Naghma off. And the third problem with achieving justness is that even with good, existing laws on the books, there aren't people or lawyers that are willing to fight for those laws. And that's what I do: I use existing laws, often unused laws, and I work those to the benefits of my clients. We all need to create a global culture of human rights and be investors in a global human rights economy, and by working in this mindset, we can significantly improve justice globally. Now let's get back to Naghma. Several people heard about this story, and so they contacted me because they wanted to pay the $2,500 debt. And it's not just that simple; you can't just throw money at this problem and think that it's going to disappear. That's not how it works in Afghanistan. So I told them I'd get involved, but in order to get involved, what needed to happen is a second jirga needed to be called, a jirga of appeals. And so in order for that to happen, we needed to get the village elders together, we needed to get the tribal leaders together, the religious leaders. Naghma's father needed to agree, the neighbor needed to agree, and also his son needed to agree. And I thought, if I'm going to get involved in this thing, then they also need to agree that I preside over it. So, after hours of talking and tracking them down, and about 30 cups of tea, they finally agreed that we could sit down for a second jirga, and we did. And what was different about the second jirga is this time, we put the law at the center of it, and it was very important for me that they all understood that Naghma had a right to be protected. And at the end of this jirga, it was ordered by the judge that the first decision was erased, and that the $2,500 debt was satisfied, and we all signed a written order where all the men acknowledged that what they did was illegal, and if they did it again, that they would go to prison. Most — (Applause) Thanks. And most importantly, the engagement was terminated and Naghma was free. Protecting Naghma and her right to be free protects us. Now, with my job, there's above-average amount of risks that are involved. I've been temporarily detained. I've been accused of running a brothel, accused of being a spy. I've had a grenade thrown at my office. It didn't go off, though. But I find that with my job, that the rewards far outweigh the risks, and as many risks as I take, my clients take far greater risks, because they have a lot more to lose if their cases go unheard, or worse, if they're penalized for having me as their lawyer. With every case that I take, I realize that as much as I'm standing behind my clients, that they're also standing behind me, and that's what keeps me going. Law as a point of leverage is crucial in protecting all of us. Journalists are very vital in making sure that that information is given to the public. Too often, we receive information from journalists but we forget how that information was given. This picture is a picture of the British press corps in Afghanistan. It was taken a couple of years ago by my friend David Gill. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, since 2010, there have been thousands of journalists who have been threatened, injured, killed, detained. Too often, when we get this information, we forget who it affects or how that information is given to us. What many journalists do, both foreign and domestic, is very remarkable, especially in places like Afghanistan, and it's important that we never forget that, because what they're protecting is not only our right to receive that information but also the freedom of the press, which is vital to a democratic society. Matt Rosenberg is a journalist in Afghanistan. He works for The New York Times, and unfortunately, a few months ago he wrote an article that displeased people in the government. As a result, he was temporarily detained and he was illegally exiled out of the country. I represent Matt, and after dealing with the government, I was able to get legal acknowledgment that in fact he was illegally exiled, and that freedom of the press does exist in Afghanistan, and there's consequences if that's not followed. And I'm happy to say that as of a few days ago, the Afghan government formally invited him back into the country and they reversed their exile order of him. (Applause) If you censor one journalist, then it intimidates others, and soon nations are silenced. It's important that we protect our journalists and freedom of the press, because that makes governments more accountable to us and more transparent. Protecting journalists and our right to receive information protects us. Our world is changing. We live in a different world now, and what were once individual problems are really now global problems for all of us. Two weeks ago, Afghanistan had its first democratic transfer of power and elected president Ashraf Ghani, which is huge, and I'm very optimistic about him, and I'm hopeful that he'll give Afghanistan the changes that it needs, especially within the legal sector. We live in a different world. We live in a world where my eight-year-old daughter only knows a black president. There's a great possibility that our next president will be a woman, and as she gets older, she may question, can a white guy be president? (Laughter) (Applause) Our world is changing, and we need to change with it, and what were once individual problems are problems for all of us. According to UNICEF, there are currently over 280 million boys and girls who are married under the age of 15. Two hundred and eighty million. Child marriages prolong the vicious cycle of poverty, poor health, lack of education. At the age of 12, Sahar was married. She was forced into this marriage and sold by her brother. When she went to her in-laws' house, they forced her into prostitution. Because she refused, she was tortured. She was severely beaten with metal rods. They burned her body. They tied her up in a basement and starved her. They used pliers to take out her fingernails. At one point, she managed to escape from this torture chamber to a neighbor's house, and when she went there, instead of protecting her, they dragged her back to her husband's house, and she was tortured even worse. When I met first Sahar, thankfully, Women for Afghan Women gave her a safe haven to go to. As a lawyer, I try to be very strong for all my clients, because that's very important to me, but seeing her, how broken and very weak as she was, was very difficult. It took weeks for us to really get to what happened to her when she was in that house, but finally she started opening up to me, and when she opened up, what I heard was she didn't know what her rights were, but she did know she had a certain level of protection by her government that failed her, and so we were able to talk about what her legal options were. And so we decided to take this case to the Supreme Court. Now, this is extremely significant, because this is the first time that a victim of domestic violence in Afghanistan was being represented by a lawyer, a law that's been on the books for years and years, but until Sahar, had never been used. In addition to this, we also decided to sue for civil damages, again using a law that's never been used, but we used it for her case. So there we were at the Supreme Court arguing in front of 12 Afghan justices, me as an American female lawyer, and Sahar, a young woman who when I met her couldn't speak above a whisper. She stood up, she found her voice, and my girl told them that she wanted justice, and she got it. At the end of it all, the court unanimously agreed that her in-laws should be arrested for what they did to her, her fucking brother should also be arrested for selling her — (Applause) — and they agreed that she did have a right to civil compensation. What Sahar has shown us is that we can attack existing bad practices by using the laws in the ways that they're intended to be used, and by protecting Sahar, we are protecting ourselves. After having worked in Afghanistan for over six years now, a lot of my family and friends think that what I do looks like this. (Laughter) But in all actuality, what I do looks like this. Now, we can all do something. I'm not saying we should all buy a plane ticket and go to Afghanistan, but we can all be contributors to a global human rights economy. We can create a culture of transparency and accountability to the laws, and make governments more accountable to us, as we are to them. A few months ago, a South African lawyer visited me in my office and he said, "I wanted to meet you. I wanted to see what a crazy person looked like." The laws are ours, and no matter what your ethnicity, nationality, gender, race, they belong to us, and fighting for justice is not an act of insanity. Businesses also need to get with the program. A corporate investment in human rights is a capital gain on your businesses, and whether you're a business, an NGO, or a private citizen, rule of law benefits all of us. And by working together with a concerted mindset, through the people, public and private sector, we can create a global human rights economy and all become global investors in human rights. And by doing this, we can achieve justness together. Thank you. (Applause) |
A flying camera ... on a leash | {0: "Sergei Lupashin imagines new uses for flying robots. He's a 2014 TED Fellow."} | TEDSalon Berlin 2014 | I came here to show you the Fotokite. It's a tethered, flying camera. But before I do that, I want to tell you a bit about where it came from, what motivated it. So I was born in Russia, and three years ago, in 2011, there were the Russian federal elections. There were massive irregularities reported, and people came out to protest, which was very unlikely for Russia. And no one really knew how significant these protests were, because, for whatever reason, the world media largely ignored it. Now, there was a group of photographers who kind of flew flying cameras as a hobby — usually photographing things like the Sphinx, the Pyramids — who happened to be right around the corner, and they flew a camera and they took some snapshots, some panoramas of this demonstration. Just completely independent entity, completely random occurrence, and the image, when I saw it, it really struck me. Here's one of the panoramas. So in a single image, you can really see the scale of this event — just the number of people, the colors, the banners. You just can't consider this insignificant. All in a single image, which was really cool to me. And I think, in the future, journalism and many other professions, there are flying cameras already quite commonly out there, but I think, you wait a few months, a few years, and for many professions, it's really going to be a requirement. And it make sense. It's such a unique perspective. Nothing really communicates this scale, for example, in context, in a way that this does. But there are a few hurdles, and they are quite basic and quite fundamental. One is piloting. So for this image, they flew a camera, a five kilogram device with an SLR under it. It's quite heavy, lots of spinning, sharp things. It's a bit uncomfortable to fly, probably also for the operator. In fact, you can see that on the back of the pilot's shirt, it says, "No questions until landing" in Russian and in English, because people are curious, and they'll go tap you, and then you lose your focus and things happen. And these guys are great. They're professionals; they're really careful in what they do. So in the protests, maybe you noticed, they flew over the river so it was quite safe. But this doesn't necessarily apply to all people and all conditions, so we really have to make piloting easier. The other problem is regulations, or rather, the lack of good regulation. For many good reasons, it's just difficult to come up with common sense laws to regulate flying cameras. So we already have cameras. Everyone here, I'm sure, has a smartphone with a camera, right? There are more and more of them. You hear about people with Google Glass being attacked. You hear about, actually, a drone pilot, a hobbyist, was attacked two weeks ago because he was flying near a beach. Here's some personal input I didn't expect. Just yesterday, I was attacked by a guy who claimed that I was filming him. I was checking my email right here — easy way to get input for your talk. But I think there are better solutions. I think we have to defuse the situation. We have to come up with responsible solutions that address the privacy issues and the safety, accountability issues but still give us that perspective. And this is one potential solution. So this is the Fotokite. Well, let me see, it's a quadrocopter, but what's kind of special about it is there's a leash. It's literally a dog leash. It's very convenient. And the neat thing about it is, to fly it, there's no joysticks, nothing like this. You just turn it on and you point in the direction that you want to fly. You give it a little twist. That's kind of the way you communicate. And there it goes. (Applause) So the interaction is super simple. It's like a personal flying pet. It just always maintains a certain angle to you, and if I move around with it, it'll actually follow me naturally. And of course, we can build on top of this. So this leash has some additional electronics. You can turn it on. And now, it's like telling your dog to fly lower, if you have such a dog. So, I can press a button and manipulate it rather easily. So I just shifted its position. And it's really safe. I don't know about you guys in the front row — (Laughter) — but at least in principle, you have to agree that you feel safer because there is a physical connection. Live demos are hard, right? Things go wrong all the time. But no matter what, this thing will actually prevent this thing from going into you. What's more, it tells you immediately that I am the one responsible for this device. You don't have to look for someone controlling it. Now, I can tell you that it's easy a lot, but I think a really good way to prove that is to grab a second one and launch it. And if I can do this on stage live, then I can show each and every one of you in five minutes how to operate one of these devices. So now we have two eyes in the sky. (Applause) And now the trick is getting them back. (Laughter) So my question now to you is, well, it's a nice solution, it's very accessible, it's safe. What would you use it for? What would you use such a camera for in your life? Thank you. (Applause) |
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